I was reading the Lenovo blog “Inside The Box” post about the TrackPoint Ambassador [1] program. What happened was that a Lenovo sales guy (wearing a shirt with a Lenovo logo) spent a day in airports talking to people who use Thinkpads and telling them about Thinkpad features. He also gave away new button caps for the TrackPoint (the mouse device in the middle of a Thinkpad keyboard). One interesting thing he noted is the reaction of women who seemed to think he was trying to chat them up. Their reaction was so negative that by the end of the day he was only promoting Thinkpads to men. To make this clear, gifts of free hardware and advice on technical issues related to computers were provided only to men because the reaction of women was bad enough that it wasn’t worth the effort! I am certain that this is not an isolated incident. When I am at a conference I am unlikely to start a conversation with a woman who I don’t know because it really offends me when I receive the “I’ve got a boyfriend” type response. I expect that others have had similar experiences and react in a similar way. The Lenovo blog post proves that this is not just a free software community issue but a more widespread IT industry issue. As the majority of experts in the IT industry are male it seems that women will miss opportunities to learn because of this. Recently Waugh Partners [2] performed a survey of the Open Source industry, ZDnet article about the survey notes that “55 percent said they were part of a couple” [3]. Of the 45% who are single it seems reasonable to assume that some are gay and therefore the incidence of a random guy at a Linux event being interested in chatting up women would be less than 45% even if we don’t count the single straight guys who refrain from hitting on women at conferences. I’m not sure how the rest of the IT industry compares in this regard. While this is only a small part of the problem, it seems like something that needs to be improved and which appears not to have had much attention paid to it.

• [1] http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=135


• [2] http://waughpartners.com.au/


• [3] http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Open-source-Aussies-Not-poor-bearded-loners/0,130061733,339285610,00.htm

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We now have 30 complete languages in D-I: bg cs de eo es eu fi fr gl gu it ja ko lt lv nb nl nn pl pt pt_BR ro ru sk sl sv ta th vi zh_CN Some progress was made for others, but I doubt we reach my unofficial target of 40 languages by Thursday February 14th which is the deadline set by Otavio, D-I release manager. Incomplete languages:

 2 099% he
   099% hu
   099% pa      3
 3 098% be
   098% ca
   098% dz
   098% ml
   098% sq
   098% zh_TW   6
 4 097% bn
   097% ne      2
 5 094% ar      1
 6 093% bs
   093% da
   093% el
   093% et
   093% hi
   093% hr
   093% id
   093% ka
   093% km
   093% mk
   093% tl
   093% tr
   093% uk
   093% wo      14
 7 090% am      1
 8 088% ku      1

Translators, hurry up, please! We are in the process of *losing* translations for lenny if some of you don't wake up.

RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air 13e) have highlights of GP Costa degli Etruschi at 18:00-18:30 CET today (Saturday 9th). The CyclingNews start list (beware, results will appear higher up on that page) suggests it’s the first time for most of us to see some of the big names on TV this season, including a fairly strong Milram squad supporting Alessandro Petacchi, who’s looking for his fourth win in a row at this event.

As eddyp wrote on Planet Debian, there is indeed a tool to roll custom builds of source packages. However, as he also mentioned, it’s written in Haskell, and may be unmaintained. One of the most commonly heard complaints I have received about Debian (and Ubuntu) is that it does not allow for easily rebuilding source packages. So, I’m going to start writing a new debian package builder for this purpose soon. It’ll probably be a package similar to pbuilder, except aimed at end users instead of developers. Here’s my plan of action: Phase 1:

• Interface similar to apt. Creates a build lab based on the current operating system (using lsb_release or similar) using debootstrap if one does not exist, then caches that build lab. A weekly cronjob will be added to make sure the build lab is kept up-to-date. (This would be provided by ’srctool bootstrap’.)
• Installing and building packages; dependencies will be resolved using gdebi. (This is provided by the ’srctool install package’.)
• A configuration file allowing you to specify DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS and other parameters to influence the build.

Phase 2:

• Some sort of policy proposal to add a common debian/rules option for declaring features. So that users can easily rebuild without LDAP support if they don’t want it.
• General hook to note that a package was built with custom CFLAGS etc for reportbug.

Thoughts:

• Is this harmful to Debian? I don’t think it is. Here’s why: most end-users will continue to use aptitude/apt-get and binary packages because they don’t care about building it. The key point here is, most Debian users just want their computer to work. As such, they won’t use srctool.
• The main point for srctool is to allow for easily slipstreaming in patches and custom build options in an easy way. (Also maybe in the future, local bumps if they want newer upstream version than what Debian provides them.)

Anyway, that’s just a project I have planned on the side over the next few months.

(This blog post is in Latvian and is about a public discussion that the capital of Latvia, Riga is having about where to put new bicycle racks in the center of the city. In the post I point to an article describing where to send in suggestions, point out a few possible locations for such racks and suggest installing racks with build-in locks that would require inserting a refundable coin to remove the key locking a bike in place) R gas dome v c ierosin jumus par jaunu velost vvietu novietojumu R gas centr . Es tur nos t ju sekojo us ieteikumus, parosieties ar j s. Vislab k velovietnes b tu izvietot t d viet , kas b tu p rredzama no ce iem, pa kuriem iet daudz cilv ku un ar kur b tu novietotas dro bas nov ro anas kameras, lai minimiz tu z dz bu risku. Viena vietne var tu atrasties Str lnieku laukum vai t tuvum , jo tur ir viegla piek uve no Krasta ielas. Vieta starp RTU ku Ka u 1 un
Krasta ielu var tu b t oti piem rota. Tas ar ierosin s studentus lietot velotransportu pa ce am uz lekcij m Ka u iel . Alberta laukuma var tu atrasties vieta velosip du novieto anai - vieta ir viegli pieejama no Stacijas puses un ir tuvu vair k m viesn c m. Ja ir pl ni izveidot Pay&Ride autom tisko velosip du nomu, tad is var tu b t par vienu no vislab kajiem punktiem dai iecerei. Pils laukums ir viegli sasniedzams no P rdaugavas pa Van u tiltu. Ja tur izveidotu velost vvietu, tad tas iev rojami atvieglotu iesp ju atbraukt ar velosip du pa J rmalas veloceli u p ri Van u tiltam, nogriezties pa labi un uzreiz dro i noparkoties. T pat l dzu apv rt ideju pielietot velovietnes ar ieb v tu atsl gu, lai neb tu nepiecie ams vest l dzi savu sl dzeni. Katrai vietai var tu b t sava sl dzene (bieza un pietieko i gara cietmet la trose) un atsl ga. Atsl gu var tu iz emt no sl dzenes tikai tad, kad sl dzene ir aiztais ta un sl dzenes meh nism ir ielikta 1 Ls mon ta. Atsl dzot sl dzeni ar atsl gu mon ta tiktu atdota atpaka . Tas nodro in s pret vand lismu, kad vienk r i vis m sl dzen m tiktu iz emtas atsl gas un aizmestas prom. Ta u jebkur gad jum j b t vieglam veidam k aizvietot nozaud t s atsl gas gan gad jumos kad velosip da pa nieks to pieprasa (tas var aiz emt vair kas dienas un pras t 5-10 Ls un iesnieguma uzrakst anu) vai ar kad velosip ds ir pamests piesl gt st vokl . Jaunas atsl gas izgatavo anai nevajadz tu pras t vair k k 1 Ls no pils tas bud eta, tad tas 1 Ls sl dzen os izdevumus atmaks s.

Currently in the US the main political parties are deciding who will contest the next presidential election. Naturally this gets some commentary from all sides. Planet Debian has syndicated two blog posts commenting on these issues, it’s interesting to compare them: First John Goerzen writes a post about an issue he (and almost everyone in the Debian community) considers important - copyright law [1]. He quotes the Randall Munroe who is the author of www.xkcd.com (described by the author as “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language“) which is wildly popular in the free software community (I believe that there is a fan-club which has meetings). Randall’s commentary is quite interesting and I recommend reading it [2]. The most noteworthy fact is that Barak Obama has sought advice from Lawrence Lessig - who has done more for the free software community than any other lawyer. John’s post doesn’t contain much original content, but citing a lengthy post from a highly regarded source and quoting a particularly relevant paragraph make it very noteworthy. Next Jaldhar Vyas writes about “the war against Islamic terrorism” [3] and makes the claim “we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq“. To consider that claim it’s best to read some expert commentary. William S. Lind [4] is a widely respected conservative who is an expert on military strategy, his comments about stabilising Iraq are always interesting [5]. It’s sufficient to note that William has been predicting failure for the US occupation of Iraq right from the start and that events over the last five years have proven him correct. William S. Lind’s thoughts on Democracy are interesting too [8], I don’t agree with him in this regard (I generally disagree with him on most things other than military matters) but it’s an interesting thought. Jaldhar also claims that “Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws“, this seems to be a reference the the “liberal media” conspiracy theories. There seems no clear party association with bad IP legislation (both the Democrats and Republicans do silly things in this regard), and debunking the liberal media claims can be done simply by watching some TV (choose a couple of random news shows on different channels). Fox is not the only right-wing news outlet. Jaldhar also has a conspiracy theory about the Supreme Court and the “need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration“, not that the Democratic party is particularly “left” by whatever definition you might apply to the word. I prefer the www.politicalcompass.org analysis which shows that all the serious contenders in the Democratic primary are Authoritarian Right [6]. So the result of the next US presidential election will determine how authoritarian and right-wing the government will be, the fact that it will be authoritarian and right-wing is beyond doubt. That said it would be good if the authoritarian right-wing government that we (*) get at least has some decent policies in regard to IP law (which is the hope for Barak Obama). John Nichols has an interesting analysis of Ann Coulter’s support of Hillary Clinton over John McCain [7]. It would be interesting to see Jaldhar’s comments on this issue. (*) I use the term “we” when talking about US politics to acknowledge the fact that the Australian government will take orders from Washington. Some pundits predict that the Greens will be the second major party in Australian politics in a couple of elections time, so maybe in 8 years time we will have an Australian government that represents Australians instead of Americans. But for the entire duration in office of the next US president (be it 4 years or 8) they will be able to get the Australian government to do almost anything that they desire.

• [1] http://changelog.complete.org/posts/683-xkcd-author-endorses-Obama.html


• [2] http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/28/obama/


• [3] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=181


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Lind


• [5] http://dni2.wordpress.com/2008/01/23/on-war-247-crossing-the-channel/


• [6] http://www.politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008


• [7] http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?bid=1&pid=278859


• [8] http://dni2.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/on-war-248-my-masters-voice/

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The first phase of the Penny and Martin adventure has come to an end: after a few days of Wellington, we are now sitting on the ferry to Picton, beginning our week-long road trip of the South Island. We spent the first three days getting our PADI Open Water diving certification. After the obligatory pool session, in which we practiced certain basic skills, such as taking off and replacing the mask underwater and breathing from the partner s (buddy s) backup regulator, we were ready for the open water. Four dives at Kau Bay later, during which we played with sea horses^W ponies, captured and ate scallops (well, the others captured them ), and were chased by vicious jellyfish, we can now go diving whenever and wherever we want, down to 18 metres and intend to do so a few times during the coming week. Later on Tuesday, I accepted the invitation by the folks at the New Zealand Sea Adventures dive shop, Mike and Seamus, and joined them for another dive in the evening, with conditions even worse than the previous four descents. Together with my buddy Jess, a volcano researcher from London, I experienced close to zero visibility at about 12 metres of depth rain and strong winds made the water really murky. I can easily understand how one might get disoriented and uneasy in the pitch black, but with Jess keeping an excellent bearing, it was all hunky dory for me, tagging on to her side and swimming along. Later that night, accompanied by two popping ears, Penny and I joined two of her close friends, Lisa and Chris, for an evening of games, and was introduced to the card game 500 , which is rather similar to the Bavarian game Schafkopf . It thus didn t take me long to get a grasp and win! Wednesday was Waitangi day, the anniversary of the equinomial treaty, and Wellington celebrated it with the One Love festival. Our plans for the day eating breakfast in the tree, frolic at the festival, and chill on the beach started to fall apart when we found aforementioned tree to be trimmed beyond recognition (at least in terms of function). A whining, hung-over Chris in the backseat and a traffic jam then made us skip the festival in favour of breakfast at the Recovery Room (great name!), and general absence of summery temperatures caused us to settle in Penny s back yard for beers and the last rays of sun instead. A Thai dinner later, we slept. (This post is dedicated to Daren, lover of and then reports.)

I am 10 000 metres above sea level, on my way from Melbourne to Wellington. I am looking back at a very enjoyable week of conferencing, with LCA 2008 ending yesterday, followed by today s Open Day. The purpose of this final day is to invite the general public to learn about open-source. Individual projects present their work at booths and field questions by bypassers. Jacinta Richardson and the other organisers and helpers of the Open Day have done an amazing job. The place was buzzing and the selection of projects broad and interesting, even to me. Two talks and a series of lightning talks, as well as catered food for everyone rounded it off. I will try to have this event in mind as we organise a similar event in Buenos Aires after the forthcoming DebConf8 in Argentina. I had a splendid time at the conference and probably can t thank Donna Benjamin and her army of mignons enough for organising it. Compared to the other open-source conferences I previously attended, this one was the most professional. Good job, everyone!!! Here are the highlights:

• I opened the Debian mini-conf with the state of the project address.
• My second presentation on that day was on my packaging workflow (slides), including a live demonstration, which was received well even though I should have prepared it.
• At the keysigning, I (again) used my Transnational Republic identity card and reported on it in another post. I was pleased by the level of attention this got, and how many people approached me during the week to discuss the issue.
• I really enjoyed the talk by Adaora Oniya on communication challenges in Tuesday s LinuxChix mini-conf. Among other interesting points, she listed traits that are typical to males and females and stated how none is 100% on either side. Glancing over the adjectives, I started to wonder about my feminine nature.
• Later that afternoon, a bunch of us sat down to find similarities in packaging workflows of the Debian and Fedora projects.
• Bruce Schneier s keynote titled Reconceptualising Security didn t teach me anything new, but that was to be expected since I am a regular reader of his Cryptogram newsletter. He s a good speaker, but I think his talk would have benefitted from a few, simple slides to illustrate some of his points.
• A few of us met on Wednesday morning for a few games of the Asian board game Go. Paul Wayper and I played two non-competitive games, in which we talked about each others moves and strategies. I think I learnt quite a bit during that session.
• Jeff Waugh s mini-conf talk titled Disintermediating Distributions as well as Stormy Peters keynote Would you do it again for free? , as well as a few other sets of slides, taught me that I really need to work on my own presentation style and get rid of bullet points once and for all.
• The Penguin dinner, traditionally a catered event for conference attendees, took place at the Melbourne Night Market this year. Everyone got food tickets and went off to the dozens of stalls to get food and drinks. This was an excellent idea to deal with 600 people.
• I was very glad to have attended Jason White s presentation on braille and text-to-speech interfaces on Thursday.
• My presentation on [netconf](http://netconf.alioth.debian.org] was well attended and the audience had plenty of good questions. I was able to answer most of them with reference to the design of the netconf core, which is a good omen. The idea of on-demand dialing went into my notes. I screwed up once when I went off on a tangent while answering a question about firewalling and then forgot the original question, but my listeners showed mercy.
• Luke Kanies presentation of Puppet convinced me to allocate more time to this system administration tool. He did a very good job fielding questions and managing time, but he should try to slow down a bit.

Apart from the busy programme, I particularly enjoyed the hallway track , which is usually the reason why I attend these events. I really ought to practice remembering names and faces a bit better. I am not paying enough tribute to this week with this report, but I shall conclude it regardless. Unless something very unexpected comes up, I will attend next year s LCA in Tasmania. NP: Porcupine Tree: Futile

Ok, some interesting output from a build script of a nameless code I'm working on:

...
scanning lib[10].a ...
scanning lib[11].a ...
scanning lib[12].a ...
scanning lib[13].a ...
scanning lib[14].a ...
scanning lib[15].a ...
pgf90 -Wl,--start-group ./master.o -L. -l[1] -l[2] -l[3] -l[4] -l[5] -l[6] -l[7] -l[8] -l[9] -l[10] -l[11] -l[12] -l[13] -l[14] -l[15] -Wl,--end-group -llapack -lblas
./lib[2].a(cprep1.o)(.text+0x181d): In function  cprep1':
...

Next time, think of someone trying to find these interesting files. People using regexps, ok ? What do these 'libraries' contain, anyway ? Tags programming, bizarre, work

So, Christmas started at 4.30 AM this morning. After persuading the kids it was a false alarm (literally), we all managed to stay in bed again 'til 5. Then the chaos struck. Photos for the family available soon. But, its the children who turned out (surprise) to be less sleep deprived. Presents of new clothes and finger paints don't mix: who'd have thunk it? And in the afternoon, as the adults tried to sleep off the feasting, the kids notice that Santa is now at home asleep, not looking at who's naughty or nice ... Tags children, christmas, logic

On the 20th of January (8 days before the start of linux.conf.au) I advertised contest to write blog posts related to computer security for the conference Planet [1]. The aim of the contest was to encourage (by money prizes) people who had no prior experience in computer security to get involved by writing blog posts. The rules permitted security professionals to enter but only for an honourable mention, the money was reserved for people without prior experience. The money that I initially advertised was a fraction of what was reserved for prizes, the idea being that if the contest went well then the prize pool could be easily increased but that if it didn’t go well then there would only be one small prize for someone to win by default. At the time I considered a single entry winning by default to be the worst case scenario. The eventual result was that there was only one entry, this was from Martin Krafft on the point of keysigning [2]. Martin has prior experience in the computer security field which excludes him from a money prize, but he gets the only honourable mention. From a quick conversation with him it seems that his desire from entering the contest was to get his ideas about weaknesses in the keysigning process spread more widely, so this seems like a fairly ideal result for him. I agree with Martin that there are significant issues related to the keysigning process, but my ideas about them are a little different (I’ll blog about it later). His point about people merely checking that the picture matches on the ID and not verifying what the ID means is significant, the fact is that the vast majority of people are not capable of recognising ID from other countries. Other than requiring passports (which differ little between countries) I can’t think of a good solution to this problem. Congratulations Martin! It is a good post and a worthy entry. Now as to why the contest failed. I spoke to some people at the end of the conference about this. One delegate (who I know has the skills needed to produce a winning entry) said that I advertised it too soon before the conference and didn’t give delegates time to write entries. While I can’t dispute his own reasons for not entering I find it difficult to believe that more than a small proportion of delegates had that motivation. The LCA Planet had some lengthy posts by other delegates, and the guy who won second prize in the hack-fest spent something like 20 hours coding on his entry during the conference time (I suspect that my contest had the potential for a better ratio of work to prize money). Also the 8 days before the conference started was a good time to write entries for the contest. One suggestion was that I propose that the conference organisers run such a contest next year. The problem with this is that it’s difficult to say “I tried this and failed, could you please try it too”. If nothing else I would need some significant reasons to believe that the contest has the potential to be more successful before attempting it on a larger scale. If the contest had been backed by the LCA organisers then it might have been more successful, but that possibility seems unlikely (and there is scope for an event to be more successful than mine while still being a failure). The reason that I consider it unlikely that official support would make it more successful is that I first advertised the event on my blog (syndicated to the conference Planet). Everyone who has a blog and attends the conference can be expected to have read about it. I then advertised it on the conference mailing list which I believe had as subscribers a large portion of the people who have enough spare time to create a blog specifically for the purpose of entering such a contest. A blogging contest related to a conference but which had a wider scope (IE not limited to one field but instead covering anything related to the conference) might be successful. If someone wants to run such a contest next year then it’s probably worth doing. Of course I have not given up on the plan of getting more people involved in computer security, expect to see some blog posts from me in the near future with other approaches to this. Suggestions would be appreciated.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/01/20/lca-2008-security-blogging-contest/


• [2] http://madduck.net/blog/2008.01.28:on-the-point-of-keysigning/

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Public Service Announcement: The LinuxBIOS project, a Free Software project which intends to replace the proprietary BIOS found in most computers these days, has been renamed to coreboot. The old name has become quite a misnomer in recent years; the name LinuxBIOS created the impression that it's a drop-in BIOS-replacement and that it's using Linux or is Linux-specific in any way. Neither is the case.

• coreboot is not a BIOS in the sense that it provides the legacy BIOS callbacks / interrupt routines. Instead, coreboot is just a small hardware initialization firmware. It does some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many possible payloads. This can be a boot loader such as FILO (or GRUB2, which shall ultimately replace FILO) if you want to boot from disk, or Plan 9, or memtest86, or a Linux kernel, or OpenBIOS/OpenFirmware/SmartFirmware, or...
• coreboot is not Linux or Linux-specific. Yes, it can indeed use Linux kernels as payload (i.e., you put the Linux kernel in your flash ROM chip together with coreboot) or boot a Linux kernel indirectly using FILO/GRUB2. But as mentioned above it can also be used (together with the fitting payload) to boot other OSes or systems such as Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, and others.

The initial author and project leader of LinuxBIOS/coreboot, Ron Minnich, explains in more detail why the renaming was done in his original announcement on the coreboot mailing list.

Another day starting well: apparently Wine is a better alternative than Vista for gaming (admittedly, this guy only tested four different games, but Wine was the clear winner). Great ! As for me, I finally got Morrowind working under Wine, which is one of the reasons why I haven't been that active for Debian recently.

New Jersey is one of the states holding presidential primaries on this Super Tuesday and since you asked, I voted for John McCain. The chief reason for my vote is of course the war against Islamic terrorism. Now that we are finally gaining the upper hand in Iraq, we can't afford to elect someone who will fail to see victory through. Mind you this isn't necessarily a reason not to vote Democrat. The anti-war wing of that party has been thoroughly marginalized. Hillary atleast has a commendable reputation for viciousness. Even Obama has made some encouraging remarks (ok that was probably a red herring but I have the audacity to hope you see.) But while the Democrats do not take the anti-war crowd seriously, they do depend on them for a great deal of their funding. A Democratic president might feel the need to throw them some bones inadvertantly screwing up things in the process. On the Republican side, Huckabee might leave tactical planning to Jesus. Romney would toe the line but there is no sign that he has any original thoughts on the matter. While I continue to support the President, it must be admitted that this whole war is stretching out as long as it is because mistakes were made. We need options beyond "staying the course" and "cutting and running" and McCain a military hero and early supporter of the surge could be the one to find them. The other big issue is supreme court appointments. One, possibly two justices may need to be replaced in the next four years. We need to ensure that the court does not veer leftward again as it will inevitably do during a Democratic administration. Here there is a big split in the Conservative establishment. Ideologues consider McCain to be insufficiently pure and worry he will end up appointing another Souter or O'Connor (both appointed by Republicans it should be noted.) Pragmatists point out that McCain is viewed more favorably than Romney or Huckabee amongst the independent and moderate voters who will be crucial to victory and that even the slight chance of a bad choice is better than the certainty of a bad choice if Clinton or Obama get to make it. Social issues are important to many Republican voters and in this area too there is some grumbling about McCain being too liberal. Some have even suggested that if McCain beats Huckabee or Romney, a Democratic victory and four years out of power would be preferable in order to bring the GOP back to the straight and narrow. Although this contingent is loud I frankly don't think they have the influence people think (As evidenced by the actual performance of Huckabee or previous champion Fred Thompson.) When push comes to shove, they will rally behind the party candidate especially if McCain makes a bona fide social conservative (Huckabee himself?) his vice-president. On economic issues, the president's job is to not interfere and let business run itself. I don't see any of the Republican candidates being much different in this regard. Or the Democrats for that matter. [Careful readers will have noticed I have avoided mentioning Ron Paul. Paulestinians, consider this carte blanche to send me your long, rambling, incoherent screeds about how Dr. Paul has the answers to everything. Because God knows I haven't read enough of them lately.] Update: Kevin asks what I think about the candidates in terms of "geek" issues such as net neutrality, DMCA etc. IMO there is not a whole lot of difference between the major candidates on these issues. Republicans one would think would be more beholden to corporations in general. Democrats on the other hand have a closer association with the media who are behind many of the sillier IP laws. Overall, I don't think it ought to be much of a factor in choosing the president even for Free Software types. Rather we should focus on the legislative branch (in Congress as well as the states) which holds the real power here and in the court of public opinion.

I now have several tips on how not to move an iTunes library from a Windows machine to a Mac. The presmise is simple; firstly request iTunes consolidate the library on the source machine and then move the c:\Documents and Settings\username\My Music\iTunes folder to ~/Music/iTunes on the Mac. So, what I would reccommend not to do:

• Simply copy the iTunes directory from an NTFS partition to a FAT formatted media. Somewhere between there and OSX I found special and unicode characters in the filenames got lost. Theoretically maybe this should work, but it didn't.
• Attempt to be "unixy" and use a Windows tar utility to a FAT disk. FAT only supports files less than 4GiB.
• Re-format the external media as NTFS and then use a Windows tar utility. Untarring on OSX resulted in even more screwed up filenames.
• Moving via samba/NFS

What I would recommend is using the 7-Zip utility to create an uncompressed archive of the directory on a NTFS formatted disk (for large file sizes) and then unarchiving it on OSX at the other end. This reliably handled all the crazy file names and the migrated library works perfectly.

No Debian content here. Just like last year I decided to watch one of the largest sport events in the USA - the final game of the National Football League Super Bowl XLII (roman numerals are different for the sake of it ). I came to like the Japanese take on American football, so I watched the Superbowl last year and was appalled at the lack of any entertainment value in the game. I was told that it was one the worst Super bowls ever, so I gave it another try. Just like last year the American football looks to be very lawyer-friendly: bundles of complex rules and exceptions. The game could have been much simpler. Like for example, a lot of rues come from the fact that the game timer almost never stops. It is good for TV companies as they can plan their broadcast times better, but horrible for the stop-go game like the American football is. Just stopping the timer on every point the ball is stopped like they do in final seconds would cut out a lot of rules. Playclock and all. Rules on use of timeouts and stuff. Of course the game time would need to be adjusted down a bit. Now you have 4×15 minutes of ‘game’ where at most 20 minutes of that is in action. That game time is a lie - most of the time people are just standing around. Terminology irks me quite a lot. Why is it a “1st down” when there have been two “1st down”s just a few minutes ago? Something along the lines of “down counter reset” would be much clearer. And what is cryptic “1st & 10″ doing in the middle of the screen? It would have been much clearer if that info would be split: “Downs: 1/4″ and a measuring arrow between the ball and the yellow line with “10yd” written on it. And then there is an obscured “two in two” or “two for two” or “two in O” phrases which apparently means the same as “two 1st downs out of two tries” in the context. Can’t the commentators be a bit more elaborate and actually say the units of measurement? “Giants strength first tonight”? How about “in the lead”, English anyone? The camera placing editing is just horrible - the camera direction is switching all the time and that is confusing as hell. In normal football when professional camera teams are working, you always get all the shots from one side and even one general angle. If for clarity reasons a camera shot from other side is needed (usually in a replay) they always say that the image is from the reverse side in large letters on the screen. Here a lot of close-up shots were all over the place and even rotated around inside one shot! That might look fancy, but is just crappy camera work and editing. Then commentators start talking walls of numbers and walls of names. Unless you know by hearth who plays at what position, there is no way to understand what those people are saying. Than is just sloppy commentary. Is FOX incompetent in all possible ways? Then again the funky rules came into play just at the end of the first quarter - I have no idea why the ball was moved to the end line. Apparently the defender did or didn’t something. Did not see anything worth penalizing the team like that at all. They dropped the term ‘pass interference’ later on. Isn’t interfering with the pass the whole point of the defense play in this game??? Lawyer game, I’m telling you. And later on, pulling on guys arm while he is catching and being tackled apparently is just fine. And holding is illegal??? On the big penalty on the Giants the judge could have just said that the ball is out of bounds. Giving a 10yd penalty for such a minor thing is just ridiculous. The halftime show was kind of meh. Staged to extreme, but no soul nor sense. And what were all those people doing on the field? Isn’t that bad for the grass? And the commercials .. Average at best. Horrible at worst. For example a government commercial saying parents to protect their prescription medicine to .. help out your neighborhood drug dealer??? Oh and does anyone still doubt that media is controlled by republicans after that Coke commercial where the democrat is portrayed as bald and ugly and the republican is portrayed as the nice guy going for the compromise. And then they both Segway into the sunset? Brainwashing and prejudice embedded in a Coke commercial !?! WTF is going on in USA !? The 12-man-on-the-field penalty in the 3rd quarter is another legalese bullshit in the game. It is clear that the extra player had no effect on the game so it is just ridiculous for the judge to penalize the team for that. A couple small penalties were given for Patriots as well, judge bias was not as prevalent as last year. The camerawork stayed the same through the game - confusing, flashy and sloppy. Other cameras are in the shot line all the time. The game however did compensate for that all. The 4th quarter was very nice and exiting. I had no idea of the teams before the game, but I did like the Giants more - they just seemed to have more will and soul in their game. So I rooted for them since the 2nd quarter and it was very satisfying to see them win the game in the final seconds. Summary: good game, great final quarter, horrible coverage and crappy sideshows (adverts and halftime show).

In Edinburgh, a Debian Tartan was created. Many people ordered kilts in that tartan; but, knowing I'd never use a kilt anyway, I didn't feel like spending too much money on that. Instead, I ordered 5 yards of the raw material, and asked my mother to make pants out of them. They're not ready yet, but I had an initial fitting today, and it seems a perfect fit. Now I want one of these to go with it :-)

This year at Linux.Conf.Au there was a student party sponsored by Google. The party was held in a bar and lots of free drinks were provided. This was fine for the university students, but for school kids it was obviously lacking. Some people point out that it’s “quite legal” to run a party that excludes children, the point however is whether it’s desirable to exclude them. Also the concept of a state where laws dictate all aspects of your life to a degree such that obeying the law is the only possibility is fortunately restricted to science fiction. Another common fallacy is when people point out that we should be grateful for Google’s sponsorship. As far as I am aware Google doesn’t insist on any particular conditions for sponsoring a party. If the conference organisers were to request a party at a more child-friendly venue (for example a restaurant - which if licensed could serve alcohol to adults who desire it) then I doubt that Google would refuse. Being grateful for Google’s sponsorship is entirely unrelated to the issue of whether their sponsorship money was spent in the best possible manner. My interest in this topic started at LCA 2007 when I heard complaints from young delegates who were excluded from the Google party. This year the Google party (a different event from the “Google student party”) allowed everyone to attend and issued coloured wrist-bands to indicate whether the person had shown suitable ID to be served alcohol. The Google party was inviting for all and I believe that it was a significant improvement over last year (more attention was paid to serving food than alcohol). I have suggested that at future events some tables be reserved for people who aren’t drinking. As a general rule people enjoy being around people who have consumed a similar type and quantity of mind-altering substances (something I learned from my friends in Amsterdam). There is of course demand for serious drinking, and it seems impossible to satisfy people who want to do serious drinking at the same party as people who won’t or can’t drink at all. If there is not going to be an official party that is suitable for U18s then I’ll arrange it and pay for it myself. The consensus of opinion seems to be that less than six U18s are not worth catering for (one of the common objections to my suggestions is that there may be only four or five U18s). I can pay for a party for that many people which (in terms of food and non-alcoholic drinks) compares well with whatever Google might offer for the drinkers. The rough idea is that U18s will have free food and non-alcoholic drinks. The venue will be some suitable restaurant (is there a Pizza hut or similar near the next LCA?). The party will be open to parents and delegates who are >18 and don’t plan to drink (but I’m sorry I can’t afford to shout you). Opportunities to learn about cool Linux stuff will abound (I expect that a number of knowledgable Linux people who can teach some interesting things will be interested in attending). If I’m paying then children who aren’t delegates will also be welcome to attend, but their parents would have to pay for their food/drink. But this is merely a matter of budget, if it was to be an official event or there were other sponsors then this might not be the case. What I would like right now is expressions of interest from young people who plan to attend the conference and from parents (who plan to attend the conference or whose children will attend). If it looks like there will be a suitably large number of people interested in this then the conference organisers may decide to make it an official event. Also comments from adults who would prefer an alcohol free event (whether it be due to medical reasons, religion, or choice) would be of interest. It’s all about the number of people who will attend.

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