1st of May is in most civilized countries a bank holiday (term that means “if you work for a bank, you dont have to go to work” and is closely similar to a standard holiday). Ireland prides itself for moving the holidays to the morning after, so you can enjoy a long weekend, and did we: rented a car, took off and visited the country side. Well, right after we exchanged seats, since apparently one cannot drive here on the left side of the car. The country is in much better state than the 10 years old Lonely Planet describes: good condition signaled roads and a B&B on every other corner. From Dublin we jumped to Kilkenny were we had a beer (guess which one) and enjoyed a concert on a pub, since they had some festival going on. It also meant we had to stay a bit far from the center. Moving south from Kilkenny we visited Waterford and from there we moved all the way to Cork, for a small visit. Lara lives there, and we had a great chocolate and some food after paying a visit to the cathedral. After deciding not to spend the night in the city we headed towards Old Head. That was a great plan. The view from the cliffs in there is impresive. Pity they have a golf course which will not allow you to reach the tip. One night over in Timoleague, after a beer in the local pub and we headed back to Dublin. A nice relaxing weekend away from the city. The best: sunny countryside, getting away for a while, B&Bs (mostly the second B). The weird: driving on the left, requires loads of concentration not to make mistakes and shifting gears with the left hand is not great. The worst: having to jump from B&B to another one looking for a bed. Also it made it interesting, since we never knew where we were going to end.

Done some interesting stuff in ikiwiki this evening.. Maybe you want to set up a mirror of a wiki. It's easy enough to do with an ikiwiki that's backed by git since you can just clone its repository and set up the mirror. But how to know when there's an update of the origin wiki, to update your mirror? I've added a plugin that allows you to edit a page on the origin wiki, and ask it to ping your wiki. And another plugin that your wiki can use to listen for pings and update itself, pulling down the changes from version control. Nice thing about this is that any ikiwiki wiki that publishes its revision control, and enables the pinger plugin, can then be mirrored by anyone, with no coordination needed with its admin. Even multilevel mirror networks are possible to set up. (The astute may notice that loops are also possible.. but they will will be broken after 1 cycle.) But this doesn't only allow mirroring. If you're using distributed version control, it also allows branching of a wiki. Just mirror as usual, but then make changes to the mirror, and don't send them back to the origin. Instant branch, that will be kept up-to-date with changes made to the origin. (Unless there's a conflict, that would need to be manually resolved, obviously.) Wouldn't it be nice if you could git clone git://wikipedia.org/ or git://wiki.debian.org/ and go off and make it into something you're really happy with? Only thing standing in the way is that neither site uses ikiwiki. For now, you'll have to settle with cloning and branching git://git.ikiwiki.info/ :-) Technical details here.

Surveillance, massive patent litigation, and toxic trails are just a few of the atrocities that are part and parcel of the global giant Monsanto. They do not just produce a lot of the worlds GE crops but some MAJOR FUD with real muscle as this disturbing in-depth article demonstrates . Whether it is their shadowy, relentless fight against American farmers to “protect” their patents or their fight to scare dairy farmers from labeling their milk BST free, they deploy an astonishing range of legal and extra-legal tactics to make sure they stay on top. Below is a smattering of some of their creepiest tactics, which kinda make the RIAA look angelic in comparison.

“To gather leads, the company maintains an 800 number and encourages farmers to inform on other farmers they think may be engaging in seed piracy. Once Pilot Grove had been targeted, Monsanto sent private investigators into the area. Over a period of months, Monsanto s investigators surreptitiously followed the co-op s employees and customers and videotaped them in fields and going about other activities. At least 17 such surveillance videos were made, according to court records

“Studies by health authorities consistently found elevated levels of PCBs in houses, yards, streams, fields, fish, and other wildlife and in people. In 2003, Monsanto and Solutia entered into a consent decree with the E.P.A. to clean up Anniston. Scores of houses and small businesses were to be razed, tons of contaminated soil dug up and carted off, and streambeds scooped of toxic residue. The cleanup is under way, and it will take years, but some doubt it will ever be completed the job is massive. To settle residents claims, Monsanto has also paid $550 million to 21,000 Anniston residents exposed to PCBs, but many of them continue to live with PCBs in their bodies. Once PCB is absorbed into human tissue, there it forever remains.”

The company contends that advertising by Kleinpeter and other dairies touting their no rBGH milk reflects adversely on Monsanto s product. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission in February 2007, Monsanto said that, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that there is no difference in the milk from cows treated with its product, milk processors persist in claiming on their labels and in advertisements that the use of rBST is somehow harmful, either to cows or to the people who consume milk from rBST-supplemented cows. Monsanto called on the commission to investigate what it called the deceptive advertising and labeling practices of milk processors such as Kleinpeter, accusing them of misleading consumers by falsely claiming that there are health and safety risks associated with milk from rBST-supplemented cows.

It is the end of the semester as well as the end of my first year of full time teaching. It has been quite a handful, mouthful, and especially mindful but I am happy to say that I like a lot more than I dislike it, which bodes well for the future. I would like to spend some time writing about teaching and what I enjoyed to teach (and what the students like) but for now I want to note what was my favorite book of the academic year, which unsurprisingly, was fiction (and thus nothing I taught). The book is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by MIT professor, Junot D az and I read it over my winter break. It is a heart breaking but deeply humorous story that I could barely put down and I can’t wait till his next novel and will gladly wait the 10 years it took him to write this one after his amazing book Drown. It is about the life, trials, and tribulations of an unlikely character, a Dominican SUPER NERD by the name of Oscar Wao who has more than a lot of trouble scoring with the ladies (a “lovesick ghetto nerd” in the words of the author. Or to put in Dominican speak, he is no “tigre”). In the process of his many failures and attempt at love and lust, you learn about the experiences of Dominican immigrants in the tri-state area, the brutal history of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic as well as a good dose of odd culture folklore (both geek and Dominican, if you can believe it!) and all of this is told in a style that manages to combine the rhythm and passion of a poetry slam with classic issues of tragedy common in Greek literature. It is books like these which make me a little down on purely academic ones which tend to lack the style, pizazz, rhythm, flow, narrative, and heart needed to make you fall in love with words on a page.

I usually don't like me too comments... But this is something that really disappoints me of my otherwise-favorite development framework. I must echo Matt Palmer's comment on Luke Kanies' entry:
Ruby. Has. A. Distribution. Problem.
Nice, good read. Sadly, many Rails pushers see distributability as something very minor, something that should not worry Rails developers right now, as there is too much other serious work to be done - Better UTF8, a clearer language, better performance... And besides, any programmer can live well with gems. (yes, that's all taken from a rant I had with a very convinced person)
My gripe is that... Rails is no longer a small, fringe project. Rails is an enterprise-grade development framework, with thousands of deployed production systems. And if they don't start to act responsably, if the Rails developers keep pushing said problems as low-priority, the Rails developers' (that is, their users) culture will become rigid - and will constitute a serious harm to Rails' future.
Distributability and packageability is not only for OS distributors. Not only we Debian zealots care about software being easily packageable. By using Ruby Gems, you dramatically increase entropy and harm your systems' security.
Read Luke's text for more details. It is quite worth the time.

I'll take part to PyCon2, the second italian Python Conference which will be held in Firenze (Florence) from the 9th to the 11th of May. I'll also give a talk about one of our last projects built on Zope 3 and all the issues we faced with while deploying and scaling it.

I've never been in Florence before, so I decided to bring my family with me to spend a few days before the conference visiting the city.

I'm looking forward to taking part to PyCon2 and meeting in person a lot of people I only know from the web, although I'll probably follow just a few talks and spend the rest of my time with my wife and the babies enjoying the city.

Tonight, I converted the XML-Security-C package from Stanford's internal Subversion repository to Git and packaged 1.4.0, but unfortunately I can't upload yet because Xalan needs to be updated to build against the latest Xerces-C. (I'd NMU, but I should not be taking on more things right now.) This is the first of the three current Shibboleth packages, and I hope to tackle OpenSAML and Shibboleth SP tomorrow or Wednesday. An Alioth project for Shibboleth packaging now exists and the pkg-shibboleth-devel mailing list is being created. I've requested Git space on git.debian.org, and as soon as that's set up, I'll push the three existing repositories. Shibboleth 2.0 packaging will add at least three more packages (OpenSAML 2.0, Shibboleth SP 2.0, and another XML support library), possibly four if we have to package log4shib, but I still hope to use the standard log4cpp. And then there will be another couple of packages once the group packages the Shibboleth IdP and WAYF, which I hope someone with more Java experience can tackle. One of the main goals for getting this set up is so that people other than me can do more of the work so that I can work on other things. Like, for example, krb5 packaging. Bastian Blank started using the Kerberos server packages and posted a whole flurry of bugs, a couple of which are (somewhat arguably) RC, and I'm trying to absorb that and fix the ones I can ASAP. OpenLDAP is in desperate need of attention, but I don't feel as much responsibility for that. I said going in that I'd only have time to work on it in fits and starts, and just because no one else has any time to work on it either doesn't change that. However, I do need to find time to post an RFH, since it really needs an active maintainer, and I'll at least find time to upload the upcoming 2.4.9 release before lenny freezes more, since the current version has a ton of bugs. Frank Lichtenheld has been doing a lot of the work on Lintian lately, which is wonderful, but I still have at least 10 bugs and patches that I want to deal with as soon as possible for it and get another upload out. We're well over my magic threshold of 100 bugs, and a lot of the stuff that's in the BTS just needs to be reviewed and committed. And then there's Policy, which is just about ready for an upload, and where I owe several responses on bugs and discussion threads. It's in the best shape right now of the stuff on my hot list, but there really should be a new upload in May, and preferrably in the first half. The current goal is to get the two other RC bugs against the Shibboleth packages dealt with in the next couple of days, then do a krb5 upload before the end of the week, and then Policy and Lintian are back at the top of the list, insofar as work lets me concentrate on anything else. BTW, I have to say, the more I use Git, the more I'm becoming a convert. I still think I'd rather use quilt if I have complex merges. Ironic, given that that's supposed to be Git's strength, but I have fifteen years of experience merging patches and I really understand how quilt works. That may mean I'll change my mind when I become even more familiar with Git. But for the typical package with a small number of divergences from upstream, I'm getting the hang of managing those on branches and I think I like it. I've yet to see a good reason to use rebase instead of merge, though, at least as part of a Debian packaging workflow. So either I'm still not getting something, or many of the people using Git are way more obsessive than I am about their branch merge graphs (which is weird, because I tend to be remarkably obsessive about things like that). I suppose if I ever get to using git bisect, that may change my mind.

It might happen that you (I mean you, gentle reader of this blog) being a Debian developer or maintainer, just receive one of my numerous "Intent to NMU to fix pending l10n bugs" or "Announce of the upcoming NMU of ". The first gives you 10 days to react....then I send the latter which opens an 8 days translation update round. In such case, as the carefully written template for these (pretty long) mails says, please DON'T immediately upload. Speak to /me instead so that we coordinate the translation update round. That will also allow me to send you possible QA enhancements I found in your packaging while trying to build your package *and* translators to send more material. Some (rare) maintainers just uploaded immediately after getting these mails and they're now getting what could be expected: they're receiving new translations...and are then likely to be catched pretty soon by the patrol, again..:-). The "intent to NMU" mails are sent to the i18n mailing list and some translators find this to be a good opportunity to send translations in their language (that's why Finnish, Galician are for instance climbing up pretty quickly in statistics). The main intent of these NMUs is to get updates done, not doing NMUs so, of course, I will welcome uploads...it is however more efficient to coordinate them.

Recently, we’ve been getting a lot of the following on our IRC channel: <intangir> well xmms could do it
<intangir> and now xmms is no longer being updated
<intangir> its just been taking out of new debian and ubuntu repos ;(
<intangir> so audacious is the only thing that is close
<intangir> it must fill the void! This is incorrect for a number of reasons, I am sorry if your distribution or the internet has made you believe that we are some magical successor to XMMS. This is not the case. Furthermore, calling us a “disgrace to open source” because we have no interest in being like XMMS (even the winamp2 skins are due to be leaving at some point), does not make us want to help you. Now, why do people think Audacious is not acceptable replacement to XMMS? Well, not all people do, it’s more of the 5% of people who have specific use cases not covered in Audacious. Clearly if Audacious was not suitable, a lot of people would be blogging about it. Instead, we only see a few people blogging about it. However, that said, I think Audacious’s focus is probably not the right focus for an “XMMS replacement” solution, and I have a plan for that (although once I finish writing it, someone else will likely be maintaining it, as I don’t really care enough). More on that later.

When I look at how people are using the net, I see a spectrum... At the low end, there are users who browse, and maybe post stuff to sites like flickr or youtube or wikipedia. When I hang out with these people, I'm struck by them being often quite smart, savvy, capable (and young), and wasting a lot of their time and inginuity fitting what they want to do into these narrow and (mostly) corporate-controlled and censored channels. And being limited by it in ways that they're not fully aware of. If you're in this group, please, please consider finding a way up the spectrum. At the high end are tecchies like me, we have at least one and often multiple servers, sometimes even in different countries/continents. We can write and run our own software with full control. This excellent advogato article calls it the "sovereign" level. We're not exactly kings when you look at who controls things from DNS to the internet backbone, but we're as close as it's practical to be without running your own wires. And we're statistically vanishingly few these days. So the middle is more and more interesting. For one thing, being king is expensive. So some of us move down a level, to virtual servers with xen or the like. Maybe we can't build our own kernel on our server anymore, but we don't have to worry about maintaining spinning disks and fans. And some people move up to this level too. One path is learning about running linux on a personal machine and then using an easy and cheap provider like slicehost. But still, users at this level are rare. The other interesting level (and the one I've not explored much myself) is a step up from the low end, where you have some form of inexpensive shared hosting, but can at least run your own code. This level seems quite a mess, there is no standardisation, everything has to be set up by hand, unless you use prepackaged control panel type things that probably take away most of the empowerment available at this level. A lot of people reach this level, but it's still fractions of a percent. So there seems quite a hump up from the lowest end of the empowerment spectrum to using shared hosting. How to encourage people over that hump is an interesting problem.

---

I've been playing with using some power tools from the top, sovereign level down in these murky shared hosting depths. Decided to see what kind of stuff I could accomplish for $5. Although it ended up costing only 2 cents for hosting so far. Amazon and google's hosting servives look interesting, but need things to be designed explcitly for them. And those companies are too big already. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is more flexible, funky, and has a cheap pay-as-you-go pricing that's ideal for little things that will only use a few dollars of bandwidth. So, I got ikiwiki working there (and documented how), along with a git backend, so my wiki's sources can be cloned to elsewhere for backups and development. Some things I hope to do later include:

• Allowing ikiwiki aggregation to be kicked off via the web. There's no cron jobs on these systems so you have to use something like webcron. (Which I dreamed up last night, but am happy to see someone else already implemented.)
• Implementing Madduck's idea to trigger ikiwiki mirrors via the web. So you can set up a cluster of mirrored wikis on disparate shared hosting.
• Using Amazon s3 to store wiki pages and handle file serving.

Next testing version of Gammu was just born. It brings only small amount of fixes, but most users of recent Nokia phones will be pleased that long outstanding bug with SMS decoding has been fixed. Full list of changes:

• Fixed decoding of Nokia messages (bug #527).

You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users can get packages from experimental.

On their "get the facts" site (as if), Microsoft recently posted a set of screencast demonstrating how much "easier" it is to install Perl and PHP on IIS than it is on Linux. Being bored, I had a look at these screencasts. The first covered installing stuff on Windows; in a 5 minute screencast, they first explain how you install ActivePerl, and have it handle perl scripts for a webserver through a CGI interface. This involves way too many steps to remember for me (including clicking through a wizard, going to the IIS management interface and enabling it, creating a directory and enabling that in the IIS interface as a CGI location, and more). Next, they do the same for PHP. Since they install PHP as a CGI binary rather than an ISAPI module, the setup isn't as complex—they conveniently reused many of the settings they'd done for perl—but it still required quite some steps. After having watched this screencast, I was wondering how they'd make it look harder on a Linux system. My guess was that they'd use Slackware and would compile apache, perl, and php from scratch or some such. That didn't turn out to be the case, however. They used ubuntu. To make the process look complicated, they refrained from using synaptic, instead opening an (almost full-screen) shell window, in which they use apt-get to install the libapache2-mod-php5 package. They conveniently also first installed the wrong version of apache, so that it would do all kinds of magical and confusing things. Really, however, after having installed this package, everything works—and they show that. The perl step should have been ignored. After installing apache on Debian or any of its derivatives, such as Ubuntu, support for Perl CGI scripts has already been installed and configured. Configuring that requires exactly zero steps. However, they still install libapache2-mod-perl, just to make it look a bit more confusing. It's not a very bad idea to do this, actually; installing mod_perl makes serving Perl scripts go quite a bit faster. But if you just want to have apache serve perl through CGI scripts, as they'd done on the IIS setup, all you need to do is install ubuntu, and make sure there's an apache installed. Period. But that's not all. They cheat. The installation of the perl and php modules on ubuntu includes the process of downloading the binaries and their dependencies; on the Windows screencast, the downloads have already been performed, and are placed on the desktop. This nicely avoids showing how you need to go to the ActivePerl and PHP websites, track down installers, download them, wait for your download to complete, and then manually start the installation process. To make things even more laughable, they install Perl and PHP as CGI handlers on Windows, but perform an installation of the same software through apache's C API. In other words, they told you how to install a fast and useful Linux system, and how to install a slow and less useful Windows installation (since a PHP setup that uses CGI will not support sessions or persistent database connections, amongst other things). And even with all that cheating and blundering, the Windows screencast still takes 5 minutes, as compared to the four for Ubuntu. I think Mahatma Gandhi forgot one line in his famous quote. It should have this:

Then they make complete and utter fools of themselves in a vain attempt to still look relevant

... right before the "then you win".

Apparently it is a political suicide in USA to make people think. Obama’s ex-preacher Jeremiah Wright is the most sane US preacher that I’ve ever heard. If you read or listen to his sermons in full length and go beyond the Fox News presented soundbites, he is 99% right. The US has long been doing extreme violence to countries around the world, so it is no wonder that such violence came back to US. Russia had the same problem with Afghanistan and Chechnya. If you try to put yourself up as ‘world police’, some people will disagree. Then he damned America’s _government_ for letting Americans down by not caring enough about the people. The only thing that I would smile and shake my head at was the statement that American government invented HIV. I doubt even they have such resources. Read this transcript for example, the sermon is just a great sermon that urges the people think for themselves. And what people put this sermon down for? Using a word ‘Negro’? Having an issue with some specific politicians? He is a pastor, pastors are meant to have a strong opinion a vision and to project that for the congregation to see. “I’m not going to stop thinking just because I love Jesus” is the summary of that sermon if you ask me. And that is the most positive religious message I’ve heard from that side of the pond for a long time. You can agree or disagree with rev. Wright, but you can still go to his sermons and enjoy it because he makes you think. I would talk to most racist bastard, serial killer or even Hitler himself if he could tell me something that would provoke my mind to think and thus improve myself. You don’t have to agree with people to benefit from speaking to them or from listening to what they have to say. Even if someone is 100% wrong and misguided, if his speeches can make you think of some good idea, it is worth it. And rev. Jeremiah Wright is not 100% wrong, from what I’ve heard he is on the money most of the time and only some of his statements I would disagree with. And he is a great speaker. If I would have not been an Obama supporter, I would become one because of Wright. Or because of the very accurate observation by Obama that in hard times people in rural USA cling to trusted values such as guns and religion. There is nothing wrong with that. I am amazed how such true statements can be so turned by US press and can actually reduce Obamas rating. I was starting to believe that not all is lost in the US, but if Obama does not get elected, well … it is all lost in the US. PS. How this related to Debian? Or software is the best choice for the society in the long term. However, that is only true if we assume that people behave rationally and use it, improve it and contribute back improvements for the public good. If the general population is made weary of rational thinking and starts thinking in soundbites and slogans, then there is a ceiling to free software expansion and the whole free software movement can eventually be crushed in the interests of homeland security with strong corporate commercial software backing. (Only government approved software is allowed to run with mandatory government approved back-doors and hardware verification to prevent cyber-terrorism or something, thus also forbidding any compilers and interpreters outside government controls.)

Ubuntu’s audio team has patched my code using a “new approach” to make audacious use Pulse by default! Great right Well, not really, because the way they do it is wrong and won’t work and is prone to breakage with future releases. Here’s the patch:

@DPATCH@
diff -urNad audacious-1.5.0~/src/audacious/main.c audacious-1.5.0/src/audacious/main.c
--- audacious-1.5.0~/src/audacious/main.c       2008-03-13 17:19:27.000000000 -0500
+++ audacious-1.5.0/src/audacious/main.c        2008-03-14 12:38:13.000000000 -0500
@@ -174,7 +174,7 @@
 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0,             /* equalizer bands */
0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 ,
1.2,                        /* GUI scale factor, hardcoded for testing purposes --majeru */
"/usr/share/audacious/Skins/Classic1.3",                       /* skin */
-    NULL,                       /* output plugin */
+    "/usr/lib/audacious/Output/pulse_audio.so (#0)",                       /* output plugin */
NULL,                       /* file selector path */
NULL,                       /* playlist path */

As you can see, this patch is wrong. Why? Because:

• It uses an absolute path, and an absolute plugin UUID.
• The value will probably be ignored on first run for most people anyway, resulting in it using ALSA.
• Obviously we can’t support this change upstream, where all of the Ubuntu users come to ask everything anyway.

I like that, as usual, upstream was not consulted or asked in any way about how to go about making it do what they want. While my first try was wrong, it’s actually wrong due to a bug in audacious; that is the way they should patch it, and they should switch back to my patch in 1.5.1, as the weighted plugin detection is fixed there*. *On my branch only. Which i will be pushing to proposed/audacious-1.5 soon enough. Update: apparently some people took this the wrong way and assumed I was flaming Ubuntu here. Why would I? No, I was ranting about the fact that this guy changed a bug and within minutes uploaded this hideous patch. There wasn’t even realistically time to reply to the bug, nor was the patch posted for any sort of public review before hand. Anyone familiar with audacious’s internals would have immediately recognized that the patch is bogus.

Physio:
I got to do cardio last Friday! Yay! For the first time it feels like I'm doing *real* exercise. 5 minutes on the elliptical and 10 on the bike. I've also gone from the yellow theraband to the red one on all my exercises. I've got another month at three times a week, and still every visit I'm coming away so much improved. The physio also mentioned that she's been going easy on me because until 8 weeks past the surgery, things aren't healed up enough to do real work. Well, we just passed 8 weeks, so I think tomorrow we'll be doing some actual weight training. We'll see how we go.

Techy stuff:
I'm hunting for something interesting to hack on. I've been digging a bit through the SoC lists, and I think I'm either going to just do a bunch of grunt janitor work on gcc, some hacking on eglibc to see if I can help make it small enough to seriously compete with uclibc, or I also emailed one of the Python folks who said that they were looking for an XMPP server written in Python 3.0. I got a cryptic reply of "Keep pinging me, I'll get some time eventually". So that might be a doomed project with people who don't actually care about the result. Too bad, I thought it might be a fun way to learn what's new in Py3k.

Other:
I've started going through and pruning back my friends list on Facebook. At first I friended pretty much anyone I'd ever met. I've come to use it to see how the people I care about in life are doing through their status updates, so I'm getting rid of people who's statuses I just don't care about. It seems kindof mean, but oh well. I'd really like the list to be made of people who, if they posted "I'm having a crappy day", I'd phone them up to chat with them and hear how things are going.

Leif's still cute. Angie's still sexy. Home life in that sense is pretty much the same as usual. We don't have people visiting us every weekend, but I'm well enough and we've gotten used to the shifted work loads that we're generally managing now. What we desperately need is a Roomba that will shampoo the carpets for around Leif's highchair. Ugh.

The local used bookstore actually has French kids books. Apparently the Barnes&Noble in Palo Alto also has a French section. So, we'll hopefully be able to teach Leif at least a little bit of French while we're on the opposite side of the continent. Yay!

Last week-end, I sent several calls for translation updates for some key packages which I maintain localization for: apt, menu, noticeably. Also sent a reminder for Debian Installer beta2 even if Otavio already did so. That will continue over next weeks, of course along with the running l10n NMUs for which the pace is now about 2 packages per day. It's also good to see many package maintainers send call for l10n updates now in debian-i18n. One enhancement for the next release cycle will be avoiding to concentrate these during the last weeks/months of the release. Translators are not super(wo)men...:)

JROBI, a chess blogger, on energy policy:

A large study in Europe concluded that it takes more gas and oil to produce a bottle of bio-fuel than it does to produce a bottle of gas. What does this mean? It means that Bio-Fuel is more damaging to the environment in the long run, and on top of that it is driving up the cost of basic food supplies. Millions and millions around the world in a number of countries are unable to afford the rising food costs for basic staples like Corn, and for what? If Bio-Fuel is not better for the environment, why are politicians and environmentalists getting behind this growing industry? I think it’s because it seems to be the “trendy” thing to do, and we all know what happens when the media promotes a new trend. We get tons of media coverage telling us why it’s a good thing, and hardly any coverage of the negative impacts. Already people from the Bio-Fuel industry are getting on television shouting out that there are many factors contributing to rising food prices, trying to deflect the fact that their destruction of food to fuel vehicles is the main culprit.

Actually, I suspect the emphasis on biofuels in the USA and Europe has to do with the fact that it’s the only alternative to fossil-based motor fuels proven to be sustainable and scalable:

The success of FFFVs, together with the mandatory use of E25 blend of gasoline throughout the country, allowed Brazil to get more than 40% of its automobile fuels from sugar cane-based ethanol in 2007.

I see no link to the European study in question, but previous studies have suffered from various faults; for example, the assumption that trucks transporting fuel cannot themselves shift to biofuels. I’m sure better analysis of the study is on its way. But that’s not the most interesting thing, to me. More interesting: my general impression that a lot of the climate-change hysteria is just that. If we hear what science seems to be telling us about the environment, and we think that something needs to be done, then we should do things that will actually work. One thing that really works is conservation: use less of the bad stuff we’re using. But we’ve done quite a bit on that front, only to hear that much, much more is required to make a difference. I’m not sure there’s much, much more benefit for us to realize in conservation, at least in the short term. So, to make a real difference, we have to make more radical changes. Can we change our motor fuel? Sure; starting with something that pollutes less, and that even absorbs some of that same pollutant in its production, sounds like a winner. JROBI, again:

It makes no sense whatsoever to create Bio-Fuel when there are much better options on the table - for instance Hydrogen vehicles. When was the last time you heard someone on the news talk about Hydrogen initiatives?

I hear it every so often. But most talk, today, focuses on the very real problems with hydrogen as a motor fuel. There are many; just look at the discussions of hydrogen fuel tank technology for a sample. But one of the biggest problems is that of developing an infrastructure for delivering fuel to the customer. No one talks about the problems of setting up an ethanol infrastructure. We already have it. Brazil has demonstrated that the current gasoline infrastructure can easily be adapted to deliver ethanol instead, and that there is a viable migration plan for gradually moving people off fossil fuels. Now, this isn’t to say that the world of ethanol is hunky-dory. It’s arguable that, while ethanol may be sustainable, the corn-based system the USA has adopted isn’t. Some people are talking about sensible tweaks that may solve the food problems while continuing to support biofuels–removing our silly tariff on Brazilian ethanol, for example, or developing alternative feedstocks for ethanol production. The problem is that hysteria seems to be breeding hysteria. Global warming is so severe, we are told, that we need solutions, and we need them immediately. So we develop solutions we can use immediately. But no! These solutions cost; we need something else, and we need it immediately, and we need it cost-free. Practically, this kind of insistence on perfection–that we deploy solutions with no drawbacks, only benefits–has the effect of dampening our enthusiasm for environmental solutions. We tried, our leaders will tell us, but nothing was good enough, so we gave up. And so, rather than do something that helps, or even something that lays the foundation for helping, we continue our use of fossil fuels. Perhaps ethanol is the wrong solution. But if it is, we should resign ourselves to the inevitability of the future, as foretold by science, or fervently hope that the global warming deniers are right, because other solutions will arrive too late to do much good.

Things have been strange lately. I've been taking an official indefinite vacation from Debian due to real life priorities making it impossible to participate in the project at the level that I want, which just led to frustration. Mainly, I just haven't had the time to work on X properly, so I'm leaving it to the rest of the XSF for a while. This makes me sad, but they've grown in to a fantastic team so I know they'll keep doing a killer job while I'm away.

I have had some time though, just not enough to follow two major projects like X.org and Debian, so I've been trying to leverage it in productive ways. Perhaps the most notable is that I've been spending most of my time coding Smalltalk using Squeak now that it's in Debian. Squeak has its flaws, but it's very fun to work with and Smalltalk is probably my favorite language at this point, displacing Ruby. This shouldn't be too big a surprise, since Ruby consciously inherits a lot from Smalltalk. Squeak is a good environment, but I don't feel too compelled to write desktop apps in it because they feel so displaced from the rest of the system. GNU Smalltalk will hopefully fix this in time. As a result though, I've been doing my first bit of web coding in a very long time. The main reason for this is the incredible Seaside framework built on Smalltalk. It's been a lot of fun to play with, and although it's very underdocumented, there's enough out there (especially with the new book) that I've used to get going. Right now I'm trying to learn AJAX techniques as well, which is something I never thought I'd be doing.

As a result of learning Smalltalk, combined with past experiences, I've been trying to learn emacs, and switch a lot of my text editing over there. I came to realize that the reasons I chose vim over emacs many years ago aren't really holding up any more, and now that I've got a lot more of both UNIX and coding under my belt that it's time to reevaluate the decision in a more intelligent way. Vim has been great to me over the years, but I found it constraining when trying to work on very large and difficult trees like the X server. I'm hoping that emacs will do a little better, since I like the way it handles multiple buffers better. Additionally, the purity of Smalltalk "all the way down" has made me appreciate the emacs architecture of lisp (almost) "all the way down" and I'm looking forward to making use of it. It's been a painful transition so far, given the years of muscle memory I'm trying to change. I've been avoiding viper mode to really try and learn emacs, which has made it even harder. I don't know if I'll end up using emacs after all is said and done, but at least I'll have a better idea of how the two major editors really compare for my own use.

With all these changes things have been a little strange lately. Debian was the rock that I've clung to over the past few years, and not being totally entrenched in it has felt unnerving. Combining that with very new and different ways of working has been a rather large change. One thing is for certain: it's been very good for me to take a break for a while and work on small things at my own pace rather than try to keep up with large projects. People burn out all the time in the free software community, and I think that disconnecting and working on small fun things is a great way to heal.

Every now and then, I want to understand a bit better English. Today, when Joeyh mentioned nettle soup, I had to ask Wikipedia what a nettle is. And Joey, no wonder it itches... It refers to around 45 species of genus Urtica in the family Urticaceae - In Spanish, of course, urtica is known as ortiga, or as blind person's herb, as even a blind person will quickly recognize it to touch - Touching it will cause the apt-named urticaria, which Joey seems to have discovered and learnt to fear. At least in Spanish, urticaria is generalized and used to call all kinds of skin diseases.
It happens to be a very common plant in the area I live and dwell in (the ecological reserve REPSA spans a good portion of the University, and limits my neighbourhood), a large extension of Southern Mexico City where the lava of the small Xitle volcano covered everything, rendering a good portion of the Mexico City valley unfertile, known as malpa s (badland, literally).
Anyway... I don't think I'll rush to cut some ortigas and make them into soup, as both Joeyh and Wikipedia (Spanish and English versions) suggest. But it is always an option, having so many fine specimens around.
This posting serves no other purpose than to show my appreciation to the Mexico City Area