When you live in NYC and have a demanding job, you tend to ignore the city (at least I do), that is until guests descend upon your place. And since a Large Family Clan has recently landed in my apt, I have spent the last few days trekking north, south, east, and west, across bridges, in parks, and memorials, eating, drinking, and passing out at night after the constant flurry of activity. Yesterday we headed pretty much as far north as you can go to pay a visit to the lovely Cloisters sitting high on a cliff. The Cloisters provides stellar views of the Hudson at the same time as it transports you back in time when a lot of energy was put into scribbling religious material on paper in really stunning and ornate ways. I have not paid a visit to the Cloisters since my undergraduate days and after yesterday’s stroll, I am sorry I waited until the frigid winter to do so. It is an *incredibly* serene place, especially the inner courtyard gardens, and if you need serenity (and I think anyone who lives in NYC, needs to counter the low-grade and high-grade exposure to constant noise with some noiseless environments), this is the place to go. We then made our way to the Columbia area to check out the campus, St. John the Divine (currently under renovation), and so I could pick up a book being held for me at the Book Culture bookstore (which I wish was a lot closer to me than it is)… It was nice to escape the blustering winter conditions and browse the rows of books in a warm and well lit environment. But after purchasing Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Digital Age, parts of which I am hoping to teach next semester, and flipping through the book, my new found serenity was replaced by some serious offense when the only index I could find was an author index. There was no subject index in sight, which at the time left me totally surprised!! Anyone who is in the business of using books as research tools knows the index is —-> indispensable. And a well indexed book is much appreciated (never mind what a non-existent index does). In fact, I felt like I stumbled on some rare object because I don’t think I have ever seen an academic book published in the last 30 years not sporting this useful tool and I wonder if 1) I have a bunk copy 2) The editors/authors forgot to include it and just pushed out the book anyway 3) This was a willful choice made for reasons hidden to the reader. I think I may have to contact Duke University Press and let me know they momentarily robbed me of my serenity

In a few years I want to organize a panel for the AAA called “The Liberalism of Anthropology and the Anthropologies of Liberalism” that opens the door to discussing the role of liberalism in the general anthropological project (notably in trying to breed tolerance) and how anthropological work, especially of the last twenty years (although really since its inception) has also worked to critically disturb the liberal project (in many ways, but including debunking the myth of the liberal subject and voicing the limits of liberal tolerance). I want to say more about the ways in which anthropologists have walked this line, but I have to read for tomorrow’s class and more than anything else I wanted to permanently jot this down so as to not forget my title.

Apparently some people worry that Gforge may be abandoned, or on the verge of being superseded with the proprietary "Gforge Advanced Server" rewrite. Let it be known that I for one have no plans to switch to Gforge AS, for all the reasons you'd expect from a free software user and advocate: I don't have access to the source code (it's made illegible by some sort of industrial PHP obfuscator), I can't hack it because the license doesn't allow me to, I can't audit it for security flaws, I can't adapt it to particular needs, etc. Since a significant part of my income comes from maintaining Gforge instances for clients, with local modifications for their particular needs, it's an economical necessity that Gforge stays free. And evolving. Right. Having said that, I guess I have to show concrete evolutions in addition to principles and ideals. So what changed recently?

• I believe the Gettext transition is now more or less complete. The initial bulk of it was done during the summer, but a few odds and ends were still dangling, such as plural forms here and there. The translations should now also be used in the appropriate place (no more receiving an email in Dutch even though you're French, simply because the person who clicked on the button that triggered the email was Dutch). I'm trying to bring the French translation to completion, but it's a long and boring task, so it'll happen gradually. As for other languages... "patches welcome".
• I've started using IPv6 at home, with a dual IPv4+IPv6 stack and hostnames that resolve to both kinds of addresses. The problem is that neither Gforge nor its packaging were designed with IPv6 in mind, so the Apache virtual host didn't listen on the IPv6 address, and even when it did, Gforge wouldn't understand IPv6 addresses in its session code. All that has been fixed, and you can now run Gforge on a dual-stack server.
• Lots of "undefined variable" PHP warnings have been fixed (not only by me, by the way). They probably weren't harmful by themselves, but they were signs of sloppy coding.
• The FCKeditor plugin now uses FCKeditor as provided by the Debian package, rather than its own (outdated and unmaintained) copy.

All this has committed and uploaded to Debian. As usual, please test and report failures. Plans for my foreseeable future include:

• Making the clean-and-working Mediawiki integration plugin public (the delay is not due to technical reasons).
• Using placeholders in SQL queries, to reduce the risk of SQL injections. This probably means a full audit of all the places in the code where queries are made, so it may take some time.
• Maybe a full audit for HTML injections and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, too. Probably a long and boring task too.
• Switching to ucf for management of config files.
• I'm still toying with the idea of switching to dbconfig-common, too. But since I'm not sure it's going to be good enough, that's not very high on my priority list.
• I'm pondering whether I should try to make a live-CD with an installed Gforge. Or maybe a fully automated installation with debian-installer and preseeding. That may debunk the misconception that Gforge is hard to install.

Places where help would be most welcome:

• Translations! I can do French, I fixed a few strings in Spanish and Japanese, maybe I can do some minor fixes in German too, but that's not good enough. Of course, translators should be aware this is not a small task: gforge.pot contains about 2200 strings. But even reading and fixing (or removing) the obviously incorrect translations would help.
• Packaging for RPM-based systems. I fear that aspect of Gforge has been all but abandoned, and I don't think there are any working RPMs around.
• Testing, testing, testing. Gforge is rather versatile, and a big piece of software. I don't use all the features myself, so bugs are likely to lurk in those places I don't see often enough.
• I know some of you out there have a locally patched Gforge installation. You know you'll have a hell of a time porting those patches to the next version when you upgrade. Why not share them, so everyone profits from them (and you can then profit from the patches from the other users)?

There. That was the news. Now for a bit of trivia: it's amazing how having a metric of one's productivity gives an incentive to increase it. I found mine on Ohloh, which provides code and license analyses and statistics on free software projects, as well as statistics on commits by contributors. They even have a shiny widget with a scrollable timeline showing commits over time, as well as comparative commit graphs. My obvious personal goal is to get up to the first position among the contributors, but of course I wouldn't complain if the current top committer stayed ahead by springing back into activity.

Russell Coker very effectively debunks hydrogen for fuel. In my opinion, the only reason the oil companies and various shall we say pro-oil governments are getting behind hydrogen is because they know it's completely untenable. They can say "but look over here, we're researching clean energy" knowing full well that it's years away (if at all). It's a diversion, that's all. Meanwhile, we've had perfectly viable electric cars in the mid-1990's, yet fast-forward ten years, and apparently it's only just become commercially viable to have hybrids. Talk about regression. Something's really wrong with the world.

The Age has published a remarkably stupid article about terrorism titled “It’s hard to prevent the hard to imagine” which contains some amusing statements such as “a plan to use liquid explosives hidden in soft-drink bottles and destroy commercial jets crossing the Atlantic. The scale of this plot, combined with the innovative bomb design, threatened to kill thousands of people and cause massive disruption to global commerce“. This however has been debunked by many chemists, here is one of the many expert analysis of the claims. Here’s another inane claim from The Age “So the perpetrators in the UK looked elsewhere and compiled a crude yet potentially deadly bomb from materials available in everyday life a mix of gas cylinders, petrol and nails. Finding a way to govern access to such otherwise mundane items will be expensive, and perhaps ultimately, impossible.“. It’s surprising that The Age editorial team were unable to find someone who knows the basics of chemistry or who has ever had a need to start a fire to review the article. Everyone should know that an oxidising agent is necessary for combustion - and a huge quantity of an oxidising agent is needed for an explosion. Petrol vapour won’t ignite if it’s too concentrated (it can displace enough oxygen to prevent combustion). When a gas cylinder is damaged and set alight you get a fireball surrounding it which may be several meters wide (the one occasion that I witnessed a damaged gas cylinder on fire the fire-ball was about 4 meters wide). But no explosion. To propell nails or other solid objects you need the combustion to be rapid and only on one side of the object. Combustion on all sides (IE a 4 meter wide fire-ball) will not propell nails. Here’s what a British Army bomb-disposal operator has to say about it in The Register. If you want to talk about dangerous items that are difficult to control how about cars? A terrorist who drove a 4WD along the footpath of Oxford St could potentially kill more people than the London bombings and would take almost no preparation. The article inevitably concludes with claims about the efforts that al Qaeda operatives are supposedly making to recruit people for terrorist missions. Naturally it ignores the best recruiting method of al Qaeda - the huge civilian death toll in Iraq since the US led invasion. The best available medical research (by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and published in The Lancet - the most reputable and prestigious medical journal) estimates that there were 655,000 “excess deaths” as a result of the invasion in the period up to July 2006. Over the last year the best available reports suggest that the violence in Iraq has got worse (among other things the number of US air-strikes is twice what it was last year). For more analysis of the fear-mongering being done by much of the media (including The Age) here’s another article from The Register. It’s interesting to read The Age’s article Truth first casualty of the internet?. Maybe they should publish an article titled Intelligence first casualty of print media?.

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I have seen buses used for tours that contain bunk beds. If one or more such buses were hired then a group of Linux people could go on a moving Linux conference. This would have to take place in an area with many reasonable size cities in a close area and where there is a good number of Linux people in such cities. Probably the EU is the only area.

A bus (or several buses depending on demand) would then take a group of Linux people through the major cities and have a conference in each one.

Currently there are conferences such as the Debian conference DebConf which receive sufficient sponsorship money to pay for many speakers to attend. Having a similar conference traveling around Europe shouldn't cost any more money and will give plenty of time for the people in the bus to do some coding along the way.

We already have the Geek Cruises, my idea is to do a similar thing but on the road. Also it isn't practical to transport an entire conference, so it would probably just be speakers on buses and the audiences would vary from city to city.

The Linux kernel project has seen major changes to its development and release strategy in the last few years, in particular since the first stable release of the 2.6 series in December 2003. This series was opened almost three years after the 2.4 series in January 2001, which many felt was too long. A problem that resulted from the long interval between major releases was that vendors had to back- and forward-port a lot of patches. Nowadays, major development happens on the 2.6 series and new releases are published every three to four months. This new development model has faced much controversy. While some people, in particular developers of the kernel, claim that the new model is working very well, some users are worried about the number of significant changes and lack of stability in the kernel. Andrew Morton, a lead developer, has expressed several times that he believes the kernel is getting buggier.

Version	Date	Months
1.0	1994-03-14
1.2	1995-03-07	12
2.0	1996-06-09	15
2.2	1999-01-25	31
2.4	2001-01-04	23
2.6	2003-12-17	35

Past problems

• Because of the long release cycle, many changes accumulated. It was hard to get the development stable and there were few testers.
• Features got out very slowly because of the long release cycle.
• Hardware support and crucial features had to be backported to the latest stable kernel.
• Vendors backported many features to their own releases. The code base from different vendors diverged a lot from each other and from the official development version.

Solutions

• New versions are now released every two or three months. There is a two week merge window after each release during which new features are accepted; subsequently, the focus is on stabilization.
• There is now a steady flow of code into production and many people get to test the new code.
• Features get out more quickly.
• Vendors can directly work with current releases and get their changes into official versions easily.

Outstanding problems

• There is no long-term stable version based on the 2.6 kernel. This is being addressed with Adrian Bunk's 2.6.16 long-term maintenance tree but whether it will have a big impact remains to be seen.
• Regressions between versions are introduced more frequently. Better control and tracking of regressions are needed.
• The Bugzilla bug tracker needs to be integrated better into the development process and it would be helpful to have a QA person. In January 2007, Google announced that they're looking for a kernel QA person who'd work together with Andrew Morton.

I've seen the Parcel Delivery Services email hoax twice in the last few weeks. Premium telephone services regulator ICSTIS issued a press release debunking it on 1 November 2006:

"This is in fact an urban myth. It is not possible for a GBP 15 charge to be made on connection."

I added a new tip about telephone number warnings to my email page.

Found at the Mexico City House Hash Harriers mailing list A man and a woman who had never met before, but were both married to other people, found themselves assigned to the same sleeping room on a transcontinental train. Though initially embarrassed and uneasy over sharing a room, they were both very tired and fell asleep quickly… he in the upper bunk and she in the lower. At 1:00 AM, the man leaned over and gently woke the woman saying, “Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but would you be willing to reach into the closet to get me a second blanket? I’m awfully cold.” “I have a better idea,” she replied. “Just for tonight, let’s pretend that we’re married.” “Wow! That’s a great idea!” he exclaimed. “Good,” she replied. “Get your own fucking blanket.” After a moment of silence, he farted.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to take laptops on planes following the supposed terror threat in the UK which has been debunked by The Register and other organizations. There is an interesting eWeek article about this that contains the interesting quote "The built-in locks don't yet meet TSA specifications because they cannot be opened using the TSA master key" when reviewing a laptop case. Creating a master key is not that difficult and is explained in this PDF file. Theft by baggage handlers is quite a common occurance (see this google search for details).

So baggage handlers can easily reverse-engineer the TSA master key, steal laptops from baggage, smuggle drugs, and put bombs in baggage if they are so inclined.

There have been a number of cases of laptops containing sensitive financial, medical, and military data being stolen. Now someone who wants to steal data merely needs to work as a baggage handler and copy the hard drives of laptops before loading them. Data is more valuable if no-one knows that it has been stolen.

It would be ironic if an airline employee had their laptop hard drive copied and sensitive information about airport security was lost because of this.

Speaker break-in tme myth or reality tries to debunk the myth of audio speakers needing time in orders of 30-50 hours to get to ther best audio properties after purhase.
I bought a new set of Sennheiser HD 215 a few weeks ago. I unpacked them and conected to my laptop. I was blown away by their performance, but something at how the bass frequencies were “muddy” and not clean confused me. Then I read in the manual that I should play some music on the headphones for at least 30 hours to break them in and only then they would get to their best audio characteristics. So I left the headphones on the laptop and left some music playing in them overnight and only came to them after at least 20 more hours of breaking-in. I put the same music on as I did the first time and I was not dissappointed - the bass was much more clean and instruments in the bass area were finally as distinct as they should be at this level of headphones. I did not listen to the music during the break-in time, so my brain did not adopt to the sound of these headphnes - they acctually sounded better.
I do not really care that a distinguised loudspeeker engineer can not find an explanation of how this break-in happens, but that does not change the fact - it exists.
Update - A few more links:

• Discussion - fun starts around page 10
• Pro-burnin article

In the end peple end up playing sine waves and measuring frequency response thus oversimplifying the problem. It is well possible that non-sinusiodal sound is needed for proper break-in (as in sound with multiple different frequencies at once, or sound with harmonics, …). It is well possible that the “sharpness” or “mddiness” that is reported by the audiphiles as the characteristic of a non-broken in sound system is not something that is measurable by frequency response - aharmonic dispositions, temporal dispositions and other distortions of the sound are easy to detect by a trained ear, but very hard measure with precision unless targeted. Also people ignore the real complexities of the materials that are used. We think that wood is simple and plain and understood material, but in reality wood is such a superior microcomposite material that it has properties that are still not nderstood by modern material science. And when we get cooperation of metalic parts, wood, chemicals and, most importantly, natural and complex vibration - predicting all effects of such vibration on the complex system, that is a simple speaker, is … well … complex. Audiophile ear can easily hear distortions that normal audio equipment simply can not measure with any confidence. Discarding phenomena that one simply does not know how to measure or explain is just blindfolding yourself. I was even more fascinated by the description of an simple non-scientific experiment showing break-in effect on audio cables. This was discarded outright as impossible, but it is acctually much easier to understand. Cable is simply a thin piece of metal through which a stream of electrons is flowing. It is not too hard to imagine that these electrons traveling at light speed could impact any impurities or defects in the cable. Any such impacts would distort the analog signal going through the cable. Also after multiple weeks of electron bonbardment it is not impossible to imagine such impurities or defects (or the material around them) being changed in a way to ease the flow of electros (like wind erosion of rocks) thus breaking-in the cables and improving their sound - making it more fluid. That is quite easy to see - why should not there be a set of similar efects working on a whole audiospeaker?

Nice to see that Cecil considers detox diets to be bunk. People, we have two kidneys and a liver for a reason. NP: Return Of The Boom Bap, KRS-One

The controversy over Apple's "photocast" extensions, and the strangeness of their iTunes RSS enhancements, is illustrative of the transition that software companies need to make as they become web-enabled. It's no longer enough to make your applications and hardware pretty and functional, but the guts that other people get to see must look good too. This is one reason that people prefer RELAX NG over XML Schema, for instance. Where markup is concerned, it turns out that the excuse "only computers will read it, and we'll provide tools to generate it" doesn't cut it. The web's had a view-source mentality since it started, and the aesthetics of markup matter a great deal. They matter not only because they're nice for geeks to look at, but also because well-structured and standards-compliant markup is simply more interoperable. The end user experience is ultimately improved. Microsoft now gets this, I think. It's not hard--you just need to have your engineers exposed to the web, not hidden in some blinkered bunker. It's a shame that Apple doesn't yet understand that the aesthetics of markup count. Even their new web tool, iWeb, lacks somewhat in this department. Apple do so well in the rest of the computing experience, these poor web efforts really stand out. It was rather sad to read the disappointment OS X-hugging web developers felt with the iPhoto RSS use. Will Apple "get" the web better someday? I hope so, because we'll all benefit.