A while ago, I thought: I seem to be less productive than I used to be. Why might that be? Do I spend more and more time with e-Mails? Or is it something else? I couldn t tell, so I needed a time tracking tool. There are a few of those for Linux that allow you, while working, specify what you are doing and then generate statistics about it. This approach has a few disadvantages:

• It is distracting (and I want to increase productivity).
• You can only record one kind of information. So either, you record what you are doing (writing e-Mails, surfing the web, programming), or why you are doing it (work, study, leisure). You can not easily record both.
• If you are lazy and don t keep updating it, the statistics will be useless.
• You won t be able to catch a little thing like quickly answering an e-Mail or looking for the weather report.

So I created arbtt, the Automatic Rule-Based Time Tracker. It comes with a background program that is started with your desktop session and will, each minute, record what windows are open, which one is active, what their titles and corresponding programs are. It also checks how long the user has been idle. No interaction required, no distraction possible. This information is stored in a log file. A separate tool allows the user to investigate this data. It is called rule-based because the mapping from the raw data to sensible tags that give information about the time sample is specified by a simple, but hopefully sufficiently powerful language.A simple example for a rule that indicates the currently used program would be:

tag Program:$current.program,

The prefix Program: is a category. Arbtt will ensure that for each time sample and category, at most one tag is specified. A more complex rule is

current window $title =~ m!(?:~ home/jojo)/projekte/(?:programming/(?:haskell/)?)?([^/)]*)!
  ==> tag Project:$1,

which makes use of the fact that both GVim and gnome-terminal display the full path to the currently edited file resp. to the working directory in the window title. This rule will track all my projects separately, and even automatically pick up new projects when they appear! You can see more rules in the example file.The statistics program then allows you to query the tags with some options:

Usage: arbtt-stats [OPTIONS...]
  -h, -?  --help  show this help
  -V  --version  show the version number
  -x TAG  --exclude=TAG  ignore samples containing this tag
  -o TAG  --only=TAG  only consider samples containing this tag
  --also-inactive  include samples with the tag "inactive"
  -m PERC  --min-percentage=PERC  do not show tags with a percentage lower than PERC% (default: 1)
  -i  --information  show general statistics about the data
  -t  --total-time  show total time for each tag
  -c CATEGORY  --category=CATEGORY  show statistics about category CATEGORY

For example, if I want to know what folders I have open while using evolution, I can run arbtt-stats -o Program:evolution -c Evo-Folder -m 3 to see this:

Statistics for category Evo-Folder
==================================
                                 Time Percentage
=========================++======================
      Evo-Folder:Eingang    22h20m00s      17.0%
     Evo-Folder:Bekannte    16h40m00s      12.7%
    Evo-Folder:d-haskell     9h40m00s       7.4%
       Evo-Folder:Itomig     8h20m00s       6.4%
   Evo-Folder:Verschickt     7h40m00s       5.8%
Evo-Folder:pkg-fso-maint     7h00m00s       5.3%
         Evo-Folder:Bugs     6h00m00s       4.6%
Evo-Folder:planet debian     4h00m00s       3.0%
    (60 entries omitted)     4h49m00s      36.7%
        (unmatched time)        8m00s       1.0%

One big advantage of this approach is that you do not need to know in advance what queries you are interested in. Since the rules are applied when you are evaluating your data, and not when recording it, you can add more tags and forgotten special cases later.At this point, a big warning is due: This program will record a lot of very sensitive information about you. Be aware of this before you start using arbtt, and make sure you protect your data. You can get rid of all logs by deleting ~/.arbtt/capture.log.I have published arbtt on hackage. If you have cabal-install installed, you can install it with cabal install arbtt. See the README file for more information about setting it up. Depending on the feedback I get I will also consider packaging it for Debian.If you want to contribute, you are very welcome. The code is available at the darcs repository http://darcs.nomeata.de/arbtt/ (DarcsWeb). See the README for some ideas what to implement and feel free to come up with new ideas.

The idea of breaking programs into functions was taught to some of us with the metaphor of "divide and conquer." That is, make several smaller problems and solve those instead. This approach is now so deeply ingrained that I can just think "partition and solve" which is of course a much more positive and accurate description. One might think of the "partition your program into functions" principal as "the divide and conquer" principal. But of course, they are both instance of the more general "partition and solve". I dare say that "partition your program into functions" is even a more pure and accurate instance of the principal. Evolution may also be an instance of the principal. Different species evolved to solve different problems, or to solve the same problem (survival) in different ways. Of course, when you partition a program into functions, you also define those functions' relationships to each-other. Just because you're partitioning doesn't mean that the problems are not related. When people see several competing projects in the "free software community" trying to solve the same problem, some might say, "Good. We have divided them, now we will conquer them!" In their marketing material (or more likely press-release ranting) they will say that a house divided against itself will not stand [1]. Such people are probably purposefully ignoring the "partition and solve" principal. They ignore the fact that different projects have chosen different paths to solve different problems. They ignore the relationships between the projects, and that we feed each-other much more often than we actually compete. But no good programmer will ignore the relationships between her functions. Even within the Debian project we have lots of different goals. A truly gifted project leader will hopefully not see Debian as a house divided, but rather a very ripe partitioning looking for someone to define the problem that we solve together. A leader should help to define, create, or encourage the relationships that make that solution happen. peace,
isaac
[1] Oh no, I've contradicted the Bible and praised evolution in the same essay! Well, not really. The fallacy is not with the Bible's assertion about the house divided against itself, it's in the interpretation of "the free software community" as a single house. And also, I believe God created evolution :)

It's been sitting in my browser for so long that I've forgotten where I got it from, but I've just finished reading The Rise and Fall of Wordperfect Corporation, written by W. E. "Pete" Peterson, one of the very early employees of the company, and one of the top people there for many years. It's a really interesting book, giving some insights into what it was like in the early days of "the microcomputer revolution", and with some solid observations of how to (and how not to) run a software company, and manage a very rapidly growing organisation. I'd recommend it to computer historians, software development managers, and business owners.

Some people seem to believe that the problem with copyright law is the inability of people on the free culture side of the debate to compete with the large amounts of money that are being spent but the RIAA et al. I think that a significant part of the problem is that many intelligent and well-meaning people are simply unaware of or unconvinced by the arguments. For example the Reid Report post titled Paul Porter speaks truth to Black radio [1] includes the quote Only the United States, North Korea and Iran don t pay royalties for performers on free AM/FM radio . This point actually sounds quite reasonable and will convince many intelligent and well-meaning people who have an interest in politics such as Ms Reid. Cory Doctorow has written an interesting article titled Internet rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers Stifle Progress [2]. He describes how the big entertainment companies are failing to properly represent their customers or the artists who produce the content, and in the process creating monopolies out of companies such as Apple and Google. Cory starts by raising the issue of cultural discourse, monopolies in the distribution of popular art will lead to control over the political process. Ironically the article that Ms Reid cited [3] mentions the issue of pay for play which led to a steady diet of misogyny, violence and drug culture on the airwaves. Brendan Scott has written about a similar issue in Australia where the music copyright holders are trying to get massive increases in license fees from restaurants and other small businesses [4]. The expected result of this is greater use of classical music (which is out of copyright) and more interest in purchasing licenses from small musicians who aren t affiliated with the music cartels. One of his main points is that playing music in public places (including public radio frequencies) is the major form of advertising for musicians. Michael Tiemann writes about a Brazilian band that has been quite profitable by skipping the recording industry, providing the fans what they want, and selling CDs direct to fans [5]. This is one of many examples to illustrate the fact that the current music factory system is not required for musicians to make a profit. Amanda Palmer has written an interesting blog post about how the Warner music group wasn t getting as much money from Youtube as they wanted so they demanded that HER music videos be removed [6] (among many others). So we have a music studio that doesn t even pay the artist (below a certain number of sales the artist gets no payment, selling 30,000 albums is not enough to get a cent) demanding that the music videos be made unavailable to fans when the artist wants them published. This is a travesty and if similar licensing schemes are implemented for radio stations then we can expect that some radio stations will be financially discouraged from playing music even when the artist would be happy to have it played for free! In Australia we have an organisation that secretly taxes all viewing of material that they think is under copyright with a suitable license (they give no detailed information on how they determine the copyright and license status they probably violate my license by taxing universities for copying posts from my blog). Educational institutions and other organisations that sign up get to pay them some money based on what they are deemed to have used. The money is then distributed to the creators in proportion to the amount of use their material received. The distribution rules state that any amount less than $50 per year for an Australian resident or $200 per year for a non-resident will be instead redistributed to other people [7]. Usually analysis of The Long Tail [8] comprises the majority of the sales if users are given enough opportunities to search for a product that is a good match for their requirements. This is the entire basis of businesses such as Amazon.com. The Australian Copyright Agency (Copyright Agency Limited CAL) seems to have a business model of taking all the revenue that might be earned by the creative people in the long tail and give it all to the top performers. If a similar system was implemented for the US music industry then it would be great for Michael Jackson s estate, but bad for the vast majority of musicians. It seems likely to me that the current situation with the music industry is fairly optimal for making a few very popular musicians very rich. The proposed changes for the US will make things even better/worse (depending if you are among the rich few or the majority of the population). One thing we need to ask ourselves is whether we want laws that will make a few people rich or laws that will give many people an adequate income for work they enjoy and which also enriches our culture. This correct decision seems obvious to me. Can anyone think of other good points that should be raised when discussing such issues with people who don t consider copyright to be a big issue?

• [1] http://blog.reidreport.com/2009/06/paul-porter-speaks-truth-to-black-radio.html
• [2] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=178058
• [3] http://ebonyjet.com/culture/index2.aspx?id=13434
• [4] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/artists-should-pay-cafes/
• [5] http://opensource.org/node/444
• [6] http://blog.amandapalmer.net/post/66586355/the-man-strikes-again-youtube-wars
• [7] http://www.copyright.com.au/assets/documents/distribution_rules_0809.pdf
• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail

To summarize some ideas and try and promote the work we ve done in the frame of Helios, we ve submitted a short paper (PDF) to the triplification challenge. Alas, others had better projects, and we didn t win, apparently. Still, we ll continue to work beyond these initial demonstrators, in order to try and push for a standard of interchange of facts / meta-data about bugs, for instance as RDF using the EvoOnt BOM ontology plus our extensions. The paper describes the 2 first demonstrators that we ve setup (and for which I previously blogged) : one for the triplification of bugzilla, and one for the triplification about Debian bugs, using UDD to do so.

Abstract: To interconnect bugtrackers, and especially the one used to manage free
software projects, one need tools to convert their custom format to a common interop-
erable form. We, in the context of the Helios project, are working on refining existing
ontologies to describe bugs from the most used bugtrackers in open source software. We
propose two prototypes for review, based on triplify and EvoOnt BOM, which export
bugs from bugzilla installations and Debian s UDD in the form of RDF triples.

Read the rest in Bugtrackers triplification (PDF)

Bruce Everiss has received two threatening letters from a NSW law firm representing the Chinese game company Evony. Here is the latest where they whinge about his publication of their first letter [1] (NB if threaten to sue a blogger you have to expect your letter to be published, it s not discourteous it s just the way things work). Here is the first letter from the law firm [2] Bruce has illustrated the post with one of the advertising pictures that Evony uses (apparently ripped from a lingerie catalog). I ve seen some of the Evony adverts on my blog, the ones with a provocatively dressed woman (lingerie advert?) and the title Come Play, my Lord . Ken has an amusing and insightful post on the issue [3] which also makes some amusing jokes about the Australian legal system. Bruce s blog has some good insights into the gaming industry and culture, I ve added his blog to my feed. It seems that Bruce will gain a lot of readers due to these legal threats, while Evony seems unlikely to gain anything other than bad PR.

• [1] http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/08/27/another-missive-from-warren-mckeon-dickson/
• [2] http://www.bruceongames.com/2009/08/25/evony-want-to-sue-me-for-telling-the-truth/
• [3] http://www.popehat.com/2009/08/25/evony-and-its-lawyers-rely-upon-act-like-boobs/

and Being a lot time without any post but finally I see the things more clear, I changed my $paid-job on March, I leave my sysadmin job on a midle-range local ISP, to go on a sort of similar job in another one, more big company, first I though that this will give me more spare time but I was wrong, at least for the first months, but at this time I m finally getting enough time to rest, but not enough time to devote to some Debian tasks(but things will change!!). but looks like everything is going better, I get my $paid-job permission to go to DebConf, and I will also attending just 2 days to ECSL; ECSL is Encuentro Centroamericano de Software Libre , it is actually the first gathering with people related to Free Software communities on this small area(Central America), we expect about 100 people from Central America, Mexico, and some other places, this is could be a nice opportunity to create efforts on a region that is having political and social efforts to integrate all countries in a political/social block. So, see you all at C ceres and Gunnar, see you on ECSL at Estel

Lately, it's being an active period for Reportbug, and I'm happy about that.

As you might have noticed, this is a quite busy period for me due to non-Debian stuff, so I had to freeze a lot of Debian activities. Due to this, also several projects for Reportbug enhancements have stopped.

In particular for SOAP BTS interrogation. It's a nice topic, and I'd like to guide it myself, but we'll talk about it from August/September ;)

In the meantime, Carl is flooding us with his stream of patches, and it's hard to keep up with that, and Luca is working on making Gtk+ backend more stable and usable and we're thrilled a big number of people tried it and reported bugs (damn, I keep forgetting to disable 'reportbug reportbug' !! ;) ).

So, have fun using reportbug, don't be scare to report bug on it, and if you have some time to devote to it and want to send use patches, you know you'll be welcome :)

UPDATE: I forgot to add that the total bugs count is now at the lower point since I entered reportbug team!

This is just a quick note for everyone who is interested: Yesterday we had a small meeting discussing the plan to bring Debconf 11 to Berlin, Germany. There will be an official meeting regarding this topic at this year s LinuxTag. The meeting will probably take place on Friday the 26th of June at a conference room. Everyone is invited to join the discussion. PS: I also have a shiny new key, the fingerprint is 8795 AF2E 4A1A 4EFB A068 A449 8E88 9544 D985 000D. The old key will be revoked in a couple of months.

In this post I will say some things about localization that I've never felt it was politic to say before. (It still isn't, but what the hey.) But I first want to mention that one of the reasons Christian Perrier is awesome is because he manages to steer projects in ways that avoid (most of) the problems below, and because he has managed to scale rather impressively far. But not far enough that these things haven't gotten under my skin. So, I hate localization. Hate, hate, hate. I wish it would die. I wish everyone spoke the same language. I hate that we have to be politically correct about it, to the point that even if everyone does speak English (hello, Denmark?), we still have to worry about localization into their native language. I especially hate that, after we waste time and resources doing that, everyone uses the software in English anyway (hello, most of Europe). I hate that the typical best effort localization of software is typically so incomplete that it's not actually usable by people who really do need the translation. Either because "best effort" == 80% translated, which is sometimes worse than 0%, or because the documentation doesn't get translated too. And that even with what we consider a complete translation, there are still all sorts of English bits that nobody would ever consider translating. Such as the names of commands, of command-line switches, of markup keywords and configuration files. I hate that translating software and documentation always involves bolting an enormous, nasty build system onto its side, and that the bulk of translations always greatly outweighs the size of the code. I hate that these systems constantly produce deltas that I have to avoid cluttering my commits with. I hate the expectation that every programmer somehow become an expert in internationalization, rather than letting them devote their time to something they're good at. But none of that is what really bothers me about localization. What really, really bothers me is that I often see the need to localize code inhibiting that code becoming better. Just two examples:

• Oh no, we worry, if we fix this a message, we will have to do 100 times more work to update the translations. Surely, then, anyone who wants to fix a bad message is an anglocentric who should be ignored.
• Rather than allow the computer to dynamically generate correct and expressive English on the fly, to actually talk to us, we have to reduce everything to gettextable static strings. The poster child for this disease is that it becomes easier to tack on "(s)" or reword entirely, than to deal with the cumulative complexity of plural forms in every language.

(PS, I also hate that we have to keep "l10n" and "i18n" straight, and that the words are so unwieldly in this f5g modern English that we represent them based on their length.)

An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded as mentally retarded by today s standards - finally we have an explanation for WW1! Two Dominos employees tarnish the brand s image with a prank video on Youtube [2]. The next obvious step is for activists to seek jobs at such companies for the purpose of influencing companies. The animal rights protesters outside KFC stores haven t achieved much, but if they worked for KFC and made some nasty videos they would really encourage a change of action. I predict that chain stores will be spending a lot more on security and background checks for their employees in the near future. Cory Doctorow has written an amusing article titled Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It s 1996 about how the entertainment industry is killing itself by conducting back-room negotiations about new copyright laws [3]. Nate Silver gave a TED talk about racism in elections [4]. The most interesting point was demonstrating statistically that people who don t meet people of other races tend to be more racist. It seems to me that the use of the X-Face: header in email and the use of HackerGotchi in Planets can help reduce the level of racism on the Internet. Cory Doctorow writes about his Geeky writing [5]. His idea for an organised system for donating books to libraries will hopefully be fully implemented soon - it should be easy to do and the incremental costs will decrease as the scope increases. Cory Doctorow writes about the perverse laws that protect criticism of copyright works but stifle praise [6]. In a similar note he has documented a plan for trademark and copyright holders to allow fans to create derivitive works while preserving the original rights AND sharing the profits [7]. So if Cory s idea became popular someone who wanted to create some art work based on a Coke bottle (which is trademarked) could pay the Coca-Cola company a reasonable rate, include an appropriate disclaimer, and things would work out well for everyone. Also this would allow small artists to develop new products that could be used by the large companies (I m sure that anyone who legally released an artwork that turned out to be an effective advert for Coke would receive a lucrative job offer). Bruce Schneier s blog has an interesting article about the poor quality of software used for breath alcohol detectors [8]. It s a great concern that innocent people are being punished due to bad software, but it s only a small part of the problems with the legal system. Mary Roach gave a TED talk 10 Things You Didn t Know About Orgasm [9]. Not as insightful as the usual TED talk, but strange and interesting.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html


• [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/media/16dominos.html


• [3] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=175415


• [4] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nate_silver_on_race_and_politics.html


• [5] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/05/cory-doctorow-extreme-geek.html


• [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/13/cory-doctorow-copyright


• [7] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=176353


• [8] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html


• [9] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm.html

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. - Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line

What a fun read. It s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line. He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at high speed . Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, bits in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor. Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago. He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon! Prospective station wagon buyer: I know what you say is true but er I don t know how to maintain a tank! Bullhorn: You don t know how to maintain a station wagon either! Buyer: But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music. Bullhorn: But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep! Buyer: Stay away from my house, you freak! Bullhorn: But Buyer: Can t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

That doesn t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don t want control in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional. He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . . Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a corpus of typesetting lore rather than a program. Or how about this one: Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch. The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: Debian s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or honoring diversity or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.

Russel, I agree that some porn sites are facing interesting technical challenges, but I wouldn't suggest using them as example for anything, just like a talk about the challenges of torture is always inappropriate in a human society.

Porn is, except for self made porn and some other corner cases, abuse and oppression. Simple as that.

And please, before you try to argue against that simple statement, read the lyrics of no answer for a dancer from one of my favorite bands, consolidated, and think for more than ten minutes. If we were living in really free societies, porn could be fun.

Which reminds me of a quote from Rebecca L. Eisenberg: "A truly radical view of pornography recognizes that we are what we consume -- and if we are going to alter the face of society, and destroy Victorian and religious notions like gender altogether -- as I believe we must -- we must be willing to evaluate and change every aspect of our lives, including the images we feed ourselves as we fuck, as terrifying as it sounds. Like it or not, revolution is a scary concept." The complete text where this quote is from can be found online on her webpage.

P.S: If you hear me playing "the internet is for porn" (this musicalsong) or remember me doing so - can you now see the great irony? I would have hoped you've seen it before. Or at least wondered, what the hell I was doing.

My copy of Charles Stross's The Revolution Business, (book 5/6 in the "Merchant Princes" saga) arrived today. I'm currently half way through Iron Sunrise. I will have to put one of them aside for a while, but which one...

As the occasional thinker about open-source development practices, communities, and issues, I have been wondering for a while: What are the largest open-source projects? What projects have the most code, the most users, and the most issues to deal with, and how do they cope?

The Debian archive should provide some insights into the first one or two questions, as it contains a very large portion of all available and relevant open-source software and exposes them in a fairly standard form. In the old days one might have gotten out grep-dctrl to create some puzzling statistics, but nowadays this information is actually available in an SQL database: the Ultimate Debian Database (UDD). (And it's in PostgreSQL. And it comes with a postgresql_autodoc-generated schema documentation. Excellent.)

So here is a first question. Well, the zeroth question would have been, which source packages have the largest unpacked orig tarball, but that information doesn't seem to be available, either via UDD or via apt. So the first question anyway is, which source packages produce the largest installation size across all their binary packages:

udd=> SELECT source, sum(installed_size)/1024 AS mib FROM packages WHERE distribution = 'debian' AND release = 'sid' AND component = 'main' AND architecture IN ('all', 'i386') AND section 
 'debug' GROUP BY source, version ORDER BY mib DESC LIMIT 30;                                                                                   
     source         mib                                                                                                                                   
------------------+------                                                                                                                                 
openoffice.org      1797                                                                                                                                  
kde-l10n             648                                                                                                                                  
gcj-4.4              544                                                                                                                                  
vtk                  465                                                                                                                                  
linux-2.6            404                                                                                                                                  
openclipart          353                                                                                                                                  
vegastrike-data      311                                                                                                                                  
ghc6                 308                                                                                                                                  
gclcvs               303                                                                                                                                  
wesnoth              300                                                                                                                                  
fpc                  269                                                                                                                                  
axiom                256                                                                                                                                  
webkit               255                                                                                                                                  
gcc-snapshot         255                                                                                                                                  
lazarus              241                                                                                                                                  
kdebase-workspace    226                                                                                                                                  
plt-scheme           221                                                                                                                                  
torcs-data-tracks    219                                                                                                                                  
scilab               213
openscenegraph       211
eclipse              210
sagemath             201
insighttoolkit       198
acl2                 195
kdebindings          181
atlas                165
gcl                  163
trilinos             153
paraview             153
asterisk             144
(30 rows)
This produces a few well-known packages, but also a number of obscure ones.  If you look closer, many of them appear to be themed around scientific, numerical, visualization, Scheme, Lisp, that sort of thing.  Hmm.

Here is another idea.  Take a package's installation footprint and multiply it by its popularity contest installation count.  So you get some kind of maintenance effort score, either because the package is large or because you have a lot of users or both.
SELECT rank() OVER (ORDER BY score DESC), source, sum(installed_size::numeric * insts) AS score FROM packages JOIN popcon USING (package) WHERE distribution = 'debian' AND release = 'sid' AND component = 'main' AND architecture IN ('all', 'i386') GROUP BY source, version ORDER BY score DESC LIMIT 30;
rank             source                 score
-----+-----------------------------+-------------
   1   openoffice.org                12638492332
   2   mysql-dfsg-5.0                 3411344560
   3   eglibc                         3371485240
   4   perl                           3019183024
   5   evolution                      2669948000
   6   samba                          2308923872
   7   mesa                           1853902860
   8   texlive-base                   1684245516
   9   gcj-4.3                        1610495484
  10   foomatic-db-engine             1608178104
  11   foomatic-db                    1423947704
  12   inkscape                       1413910080
  13   qt4-x11                        1258220636
  14   gcc-4.3                        1248741312
  15   kdelibs                        1021058256
  16   gnome-applets                   998434136
  17   xulrunner                       958232688
  18   coreutils                       954766896
  19   openssl                         877067672
  20   ncurses                         827679424
  21   python2.5                       815826384
  22   aptitude                        808161380
  23   gimp                            786015124
  24   gnome-utils                     781756328
  25   nautilus                        774319690
  26   openoffice.org-dictionaries     761075576
  27   eclipse                         756072380
  28   dpkg                            736626200
  29   openclipart                     731244240
  30   wine                            707967500
(30 rows)
(Yeah, they run this thing on PostgreSQL 8.4 beta 1.)

I noticed linux-2.6 is suspiciously absent because of a low popcon score (?!?).

I don't want to dump the entire database into this blog post, but if you try this yourself you can look at about the first 200 to 300 places to find reasonably large and complex projects before it gets a bit more obscure.  A few highlights:
  51   gnupg                           455660464
  59   php5                            386417572
  60   mutt                            381148176
  83   icu                             258602756
  84   xorg-server                     255186332
 101   exim4                           224857700
 107   openssh                         215792828
 113   tar                             201520400
 114   postgresql-8.3                  196844584
 115   libx11                          195856564
 116   ruby1.8                         194681656
 272   emacs22                          62047476
This is obviously still biased in a lot of ways, but it does show the major projects.

The UDD is also an interesting use case that shows how you can deploy a PostgreSQL database as a semi-public service with direct access.  A great tool, and a great tool to build other great tools on top of.

PyCon3 Italia ended yesterday. It was simply great! great talks, gorgeous speakers and so on.

Sadly, when I left these kind of confs there's always a bad taste in my month... I see so many great people that made it, that are satisfied, brilliant and accomplish great results.

Now I feel like I'm one of many, but I want to be one above many; one of Them. Ok, ok, sounds a little bit presumptuous and we all know I'll never be like them but why not trying? ;)

The same thing happened after PyCon2, and I decided I wanted to do more, to be more.

Since an year passed, I think I've done a bit of my proposal: I started using Python as much as I can, I get involved in some project python-related (to name some: reportbug, bts-link, matplotlib) and I'm about at the half of writing a book on matplotlib (that I was offered to write).

I can be a little satisfied by this, but of course, I want to do more! :)

Once the book will be done, I'll probably still be involved with matplotlib evolution, eventually with more important contributions, but I will also search for new challenges.

It might sound ambitious, but I have a strange feeling that python core "stuff" (being the interpreter, the stdlib or near) could be something I can have a look at ;) It could also come up as a too big project to work on in my spare time, but I'll rebase my plan once I've fight for it and lose, not before.

Would all the paranoid crypto-users please stop flooding Planet Debian with GPG output? And if you just cannot avoid it, please tag those posts meme, because that s what they are. If you really think there s a need for a new key, you re one step ahead of me, because so far, there s only a theoretical attack and the valid question of whether this is actually something to worry about in the context of GPG (or in the context of Git, for that matter). There is no practical exploit out there, and I don t expect one that would endanger your use of GPG any time soon. Of course, we ought to replace the current crypto infrastructure with a new one before the current one is compromised, but that should really be motivated by careful consideration and planning, not by lemming-like behaviour and the infamous tipping point. I ve long been meaning to clean up my key and may also switch to using a new one in the near future. However, I don t think there is an immediate need and I ll take time first to investigate the options RSA is hardly free from problems or an optimal choice. For instance, why would I want to use an RSA key, which is limited in GPG to 4096 bit keys? Do we really want to deal with signatures that are 4-10 times longer than their DSA counterparts? When RSA is broken, will we see a replay of this whole key-replacing frenzy? Wouldn t it make more sense to leverage the current situation and work on pushing/improving the DSA algorithm with larger keys, and to strive towards better algorithms in general, e.g. through SHA-3. If you still need to replace your key, revoke the old one, point at the new one in the revocation reason, and please refrain from abusing feed aggregators from letting the world know. If gpg cannot follow the trust chain after the revocation, please fix it. In the mean time, it is a good idea to use RIPEMD160 instead of SHA-1 for signing, with the following lines in ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf:

personal-digest-preferences SHA512 SHA384 SHA256 SHA224 RIPEMD160
default-preference-list [ ] H10 H9 H8 H11 H3 [ ]

and to set the preferences on your key accordingly:

% gpg --edit-key $KEYID
> setpref [ ] H10 H9 H8 H11 H3 [ ]
> save
% gpg --send-key

Then, make sure RIPEMD160 is being used:

% gpg --clearsign -a </dev/null   grep '^Hash:'

I ll end with a link to a decent write-up on the cryptographic basics of GPG.

With last attacks against SHA-1 digest algo, I create a new GPG key (following instructions from Daniel Kahn Gillmor):

pub  4096R/B8612B5D 2009-05-10
uid  Gregory Colpart <reg@gcolpart.com>
uid  Gregory Colpart (Evolix) <reg@evolix.fr>
uid  Gregory Colpart <reg@debian.org>
sub  4096R/7D40310B 2009-05-11

A good excuse for beer^Wkey exchange next weeks :-)

Because of the recently announced attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, I finally decided to move away from my old 1024-bit DSA OpenPGP key, landing to a shiny new 4096-bit RSA one. The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one. I would also like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. I'm attaching a file with
the complete text of the transition, clearsigned by both keys to certify the transition. You can find the transition statement also on http://www.hanskalabs.net/key-transition_20090509.txt . You can check the validity of the file with something like:

$ gpg --decrypt key-transition_20090509.txt   gpg --decrypt

If you need to transition your key too, and you're one of my signees, then let's please coordinate, so that we have the new keys cross-signed, without spurious signatures fromgoing-to-be-revoked keys Thank you for your help.

Attachment	Size
key-transition_20090509.txt	4.03 KB

Following to the recent announce of a serious possible attack against the SHA-1 digest algorithm, I have just generated new GPG keys. My personal key 9F71D449 will hence be progressively replaced by my new key: 290D20C5
Its fingerprint is: The old key will continue to be valid for some time (at least until the new one get signed by a Debian Developer, in order to be included in the DM keyring), but I prefer all future correspondence to come to the new one. Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://www.kirya.net/~julien/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt They key used for my personal package repository (FBABB737) has already been revoked and replaced by E435C74B, with the following fingerprint: You have to make apt-key aware of this change: Transition statement signed by both keys is available at: http://packages.kirya.net/GPG-key-transition_20090508.txt Also note I have generated the key with ID 90A9E71B and got it sent to public servers by mistake. I do not own the private key hence I cannot revoke it: make sure you do not use it!