Search Results: "evo"

30 November 2008

Christian Perrier: Bug kalachnikow party

Interestingly, the just finished Extremadura QA + ftpmaster + i18n meeting also turned into a quite strong Bug "Smashing" party. Several participants were digging around the list of RC bugs affecting both lenny and unstable. Most often, it turned out to many bug downgrades (for many of which I'll take the blame). It's "funny" to see how sometimes our bug reporters tend to inflate their reports, most often because they feel that "bug should absolutely be fixed", but completely forgetting about the definition of 'serious' or 'grave'. I also feel that, in some way, several maintainers begin to be quite demotivated by the length of the process (which I personnally consider as being caused by several factors: decreasing (wo)manpower, haircutting about freeness of every single byte on Debian CD's or even shyness wrt correct actions needed to deal with bugs). And several of these bugs just needed a very simple action by the maintainer. And, therefore, just because we were about 15 people with a lot of time to devote to Debian for 3 days, we ended up digging in that pile of mud....removing most of the dust and sometimes very debatable RC bug reports, and finally having that count of bugs affecting both lenny and unstable go down again. This comforts me in the feeling that an aggressive approach is a good key to bug squashing. After all, if I'm sometimes too aggressive and inappropriately downgrade an RC bug, I'm sure that someone will correct me (and, anyway, I'm not that mad: sometimes I seek for advices). Ah, and "aggressive" also sometimes mean proposing to tag some bugs "lenny-ignore" (and, that needs to be very convincing with our release managers, believe me). So, what about you? Have you already smashed an RC bug today? If not, do it. Kill those nasty beasts, they deserve it. No mercy.

27 November 2008

Russell Coker: Links November 2008

Netatia has an interesting series of articles about running a computer for two people [1]. It is a bit of a kludge, they have a single X server that covers both displays and then use Xephyr to divide it into two virtual screens. The positive aspecct of this is that it shuld allow a single wide monitor to be used by two sessions as displays are getting wider regardless of the wishes of manufacturers and consumers [2] this should be useful. It’s a pity that no-one has solved the problem of having multiple video cards, sound cards, and input devices to allow a single desktop system to be used for 6 or more people. It seems that the problems that need to be solved are only the support for multiple video cards, mouse-wheel support, and sound support. Paul Ewald gave an interesting TED talk about changing the conditions for diseases so that they evolve to be benign [3]. The first example is Cholera which if spread by water will benefit from being as toxic as possible (to cause the greatest amount of diorrhea - killing the host not being a problem), but if spread by human contact benefits from leaving it’s host well enough to walk around and meet people. This and the other examples he cites seem like strong reasons for universal health-care provided by the government. If clean water is provided to all the poor people then cholera will evolve to be less harmful, and if a rich person (such as myself) is unlucky enough to catch it then the results won’t be so bad. He also notes that less harmful bacteria will often result in the victim not seeking anti-biotics and therefore less pressure for the disease to evolve resistance to anti-biotics. Therefore the people who really need them (the elderly, the very young, and people who are already sick) will find them to be more effective. Paul Stamets gave a great TED talk about fungus [4]. One of his discoveries was that fungi can be used for breaking down petro-chemicals (they can eat oil). It would be interesting to see this tested on a large scale with one of the oil spils or with the polluted land around an ooil refinery. Also he has patented a method for using fungus to kill wood-eating ants (such as the ones that briefly infested his home). Robert Full gave an interesting TED talk on robot feet [5]. I found the bit about leg spikes particularly interesting (I had always wondered why insects have spikey legs). Alan Kay gave a very interesting presentation on using computers to teach young children about science [6]. An OLPC is referenced. It makes me want to buy an OLPC for everyone I know who has young children. The start of the talk is a little slow. Dan Barber gave a very interesting TED talk about organic and humane production of foie gras in Extramuda [7]. Apparently it tastes a lot better too. Incidentally I don’t list all the TED talks I watch, only the better ones. Less than half the TED talks that I see announced seem interesting enough to download, and of those less than half are good enough that I will recommend them. The ones that I don’t recommend don’t suck in any way, it’s just that I can’t write a paragraph about every talk. Of recent times my video watching has been divided about equally between “The Bill” and TED talks. Here’s an interesting article about Sarah Palin and “anti-elitism”: The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.[8] Sarah will be representing the Republican party in 2012, the desire for leaders of average intelligence (or less) will still be around then. It will be interesting to see how many votes she gets and amusing to see her interviewed. The proceedings of the “Old Bailey” - London’s Central Criminal Court have been published [9]. It’s interesting to read some of the historical information about the legal system at the time. It made me appreciate how civilised the UK (and other countries that I have visited) are now. Bruce Schneier writes about the feture of ephemeral communication [10]. He concludes with the point “until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers we aren’t fully an information age society“. Of course as he notes the rules are written by the older people, currently I don’t think that any candidate for high office (cabinet minister or above) anywhere in the world can have a good history on the Internet. During the course of a decade or more on the net it’s impossible not to write something that can be used against you and no reasonable person could avoid changing their views on some issues in such a time period. That’s enough to lose an election with the way things currently work.

26 November 2008

Russell Coker: Bill Joy

Some time ago Bill Joy (who is famous among other things for being a co-founder of Sun) [1] wrote an article for Wired magazine titled “Why the future doesn’t need us” [2]. He wrote many sensible things but unfortunately focussed on the negative issues and didn’t receive a good response. On reading it today I thought more highly of the article than I did in 2000 when it was printed, largely due to having done some background research on the topic. I’ve recently been reading Accelerating Future [3] which has a more positive approach. Now a talk by Bill Joy from 2006 has been published on the TED.com web site [4]. He starts by talking about “super empowered individuals” re-creating the 1918 flu. He also claims that “more technology super-empowers people more“. Such claims seem to be excessively hyped, I would be interested to see comments from someone who has a good knowledge of current bio-technology as to the merits of those claims. He talks briefly about politics and has some good points such as “the bargain that gives us civilisation is the bargain to not use power” and “we can’t give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat - which is what we seem to be doing“. He mentions Moore’s law and suggests that a computer costing $1000 then (2006) might cost $10 in 2020. He seems to be forgetting the cost of the keyboard and other mechanical parts. I can imagine a high-end CPU which cost about $800 a couple of years ago being replaced by a $2 CPU in 2020, but I don’t expect a decent keyboard to be that cheap any time before we get fully automated nano-factories (which is an entirely separate issue). Even the PSU (which has a significant amount of government regulations for safety reasons) will have a floor cost that is a good portion of $10. Incidentally the keyboard on my EeePC 701 sucks badly, I guess I’m spoiled by the series of Thinkpad keyboards that I keep getting under warranty (which would cost me a moderate amount of money if I had to pay every time I wore one out). I will make a specific prediction, that by 2015 one of the better keyboards will comprise a significant portion of the entire cost of a computer system (more than a low end computer unit) - such that in some reasonable configurations the keyboard will be the most expensive part. It would be good if PCs could be designed to use external PSUs (such as the Compaq Evo models that took laptop PSUs). Then the PSU, keyboard, and monitor would be optional extras thus giving a small base price. Given that well built PSUs and keyboards tend not to wear out as fast as people want to replace computers, it seems that financial savings could be provided to most customers by allowing them to purchase the computer unit without the extra parts. People like me who type enough to regularly wear out keyboards and who keep using computers for more than 5 years because they still work are in a small minority and would of course be able to buy the same bundle of computer, PSU, and keyboard that new users would get. In 2020 a device the size of an iPaQ H39xx with USB (for keyboard and mouse) and the new DisplayPort [5] digital display interface (that is used in recent Lenovo laptops [6]) would make a great PDA/desktop. You could dock a PDA the way some people dock laptops now and carry all your data around with you. Bill cites an example of running the Mac interface on an Apple ][ (does anyone know of a reference for this) as an example of older hardware being more effective with newer software. It's a pity that often new software needs such powerful hardware. EG it's only recently that hardware developments have overtaken the developments of OpenOffice to make it deliver decent performance. He has an interesting idea of using insurance companies to replace government regulation of food and drugs. The general concept is that if you can convince an insurance company that your new drug is not a great risk to them so that they charge a premium you can afford then you could sell it without any further testing. Normally I'm in favor of government regulation of such things, but given the abject failures of the US government this idea has some merit. Of course there's nothing stopping insurance companies from just taking a chance and running up debts that they could never hope to repay (in a similar manner to so many banks). Finally I think it's interesting to note the camera work that the TED people used. My experience of being in the audience for many lectures (including one of Bill Joy's lectures in the late 90's) is that a speaker who consults their notes as often as Bill does gives a negative impression to the audience. Note that I'm not criticising Bill in this regard, often a great talk requires some significant notes - very few people can deliver a talk in a convincing manner entirely from memory. It seems to me that the choices of camera angle are designed to give a better impression than someone who was seated in the audience might receive - there's no reason why a video of a talk should be spoiled by seeing the top of the speaker's head while they consult their notes!

20 November 2008

Gunnar Wolf: Remember, remember, the 20th of November...

This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I'll only have to give more background information.
This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners' minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that's only the major symptom - The Revolution had many, many other consequences. About one million (out of a 10 million population) people died. There was a very significative rearrangement of the society, a rearrangement that took about half a century to settle. But I won't write more background - You can always ask the wikipedia about our Revolution.
The reason I am posting this is that, as it usually happens in this time of year, several so-called analysts in the media have started asking, was the Revolution really worth it? Did it change anything at all? Did the Revolution in the end win, or was it defeated from within? Should we still celebrate it?
And there are, yes, reasons to doubt it. Renato Leduc, at the same time a great journalist and a delicious poet, says it as many - while at the same time, as nobody else: Tiempos en que era Dios omnipotente / y el se or Don Porfirio presidente / Tiempos, ay! tan iguales al presente, or ya se est n muriendo todos / Jes s qu desilusi n...! / se est volviendo gobierno / Ay dios...! La revoluci n.
Anyway... Our media overlords insist on us forgetting the struggles and the real changes that came from them, on rewriting the history... Probably they will push us later on to have the cristeros as the real fathers of the Nation?
Even if so many bits of reality didn't change after Porfirio Diaz's regime fell in 1910, I find it insulting to think that even 70 years of PRI -with very sharp differences between periods, with huge differences between the PRI-born governments- are comparable to 30 years of a one-man rule; even with brutal repressions such as the dirty war against so many subversive movements in the 50s-80s (as officially There Was No Armed Struggle Anymore, just some pesky communist subversives), it cannot be compared to the Porfirian Peace (ask Cananea and R o Blanco). Today we might have a shameful concentration of money and power in very few hands (including the world's richest man), but it certainly does not reach the point of 1910 where most of the Mexican soil was owned by less than 30 families, with latifundios as big as many states...
Anyway - So far, nothing new - just bits I heard here and there, and my reactions to them. But this morning, around 8:25, I tuned in to Noticias IMER, the news program of one of the few public, non-gubernamental, independent radio stations. An interview was under way, but I could not get the interviewed person's name (I guess, a historian - will write to ask for his data). His comments were very interesting, and very worth echoing. I'll try not to distort him.
The Revolution started off very organized, and with a very simple goal: Get Porfirio Diaz out, and call for real federal elections. Sufragio efectivo, no reelecci n. Of course, the fight was very short, and Madero became the president, with an overwhelming majority. Of course, also, the reactionary sectors set up a coup and killed Madero. Victoriano Huerta seized the power - and that's where the real revolution really began. Groups all over the country (some of which were at unrest since Madero, as they were not seeing the changes they needed - changes that would bring an end to the huge class differences and disrespect to the native Mexican population) rose in arms, and forced Huerta into exile. Then, they battled each other for many more years. It became known as la bola - When somebody joined the revolutionary forces, people said he went to fight with the crowd. But, inside the crowd, there were very different points of view. No, Carranza, Villa and Zapata (the foremost leaders in the hardest part of the fight) were not power-hungry barbarians - much to the contrary. They had very full, very complex views of the problem and possible solutions. I won't delve much into them, also, as I'm not an expert...
Villa and Zapata had the most compatible approaches, seeking an aggresive land redistribution, a communal property system (closest to most of the indigenous population's roots, what we would now call usos y costumbres). For the government, both favored going towards a Europe-like parliamentary system, where the parliament were the real force, and the president (or prime minister or whatever) would only be the designated person to implement the parliament's decision. Both Villa and Zapata feared the evil stemming from the unlimited power that the Presidential Chair symbolized (Fui soldado de Francisco Villa / de aquel hombre de fama mundial, / que aunque estuvo sentado en la silla / no envidiaba la presidencial). They met at the Aguascalientes convention, and were quite close to each other - but were defeated by the superior Venustiano Carranza (Constitucionalista) army.
Carranza, although vilified for his corruption (nowadays, carrancear is still a synonim for stealing), had an opposite view - also originating from a very deep analysis. Carranza saw that what brought down Madero was, in the end, the lack of power of the President to rule the country without support from the legislative power. So, he pushed a political program making the President the strongest man in Mexico. He and his people wrote and passed the 1917 Constitution, valid today. This constitution goes to great lengths pushing revolutionary ideals - Land and wealth redistribution, universal and free education, keeps a complete separation between state and church, ensures state control over strategic areas... The 1917 constitution is one of our history's greatest achievements.
But, of course, it is not perfect - it paved the way for a hegemonic party controlling the real power behind it all. PRI started as a very heterogeneous mixture of the whole revolutionary family, but slowly became a bureaucratic, stagnated monolith.
And in a somehow ironic twist of destiny, the forces that today push for deepest changes, and precisely in the same direction that Villa and Zapata wished, are... Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional (EZLN) and Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV). EZLN is far more successful and advanced in its social experiment. Again, I won't comment further in what I don't really understand.
As a last point, the commenter I'm quoting (and whose name I must get, to update this post!), said that practically in every country that has transited from any sort of dictatorship towards a more-or-less believable democracy (say, everywhere in South America, or Spain, or Eastern Europe, or...), one of the first steps has been to update or replace the constitution with a new one, preventing the mistakes overlooked by the previous one from being reinstated. In our country, we have long heard about the "Reforma del Estado", a very nice-sounding-term which nobody believes in. After the 2006 electoral mess (no matter who won in the end, everybody will agree it was a mess that should be prevented from happening again, we had high hopes of real changes being introduced. A parliamentary, or at least semi-presidentialist regime was strongly suggested as a way forward. Changing the electoral system towards having second-rounds if needed. _anything!_ But no, we were stuck with... The same as always.
So, did the Revolution win or lose? It is clear to me. It won, and it really shaped -for better- what would happen in the next 100 years. However, in a century, we have been able to twist the law to make it turn against itself. I have to agree with my EZLN-minded friends (I sympathize with EZLN's general goals, but don't think its way forward is the right way to go): Pushing the change from within the government is just wishful thinking, but a strong delusion. However, is there a way to push our country forward without repeating a violent cycle? I really hope so. Our current situation is simply pathetic.
I lack a good closing for this post... So I'll let good old Jefe Pluma Blanca, Renato Leduc, do it for me.
Tiempos de Pancho Villa
y de la guerra de mentadas y tiros en la sierra.
Tiempos de fe
no en Dios sino en la tierra Por el cerro de la Pila
fueron entrando a Torre n
mi general Pancho Villa
y atr s la revoluci n...
Ay jijos...! ya se nos hizo
cu nto diablo bigot n... Ya viene Toribio Ortega
subiendo y bajando cerros
y no te enredes ni enga es
que ah anda Pablito Se ez
haciendo ladrar los perros. Cu nto usurero barb n...!
Ay jijos... c mo les vuela
de la levita el fald n...!
Ay jijos... ya se nos hizo:
triunf la revoluci n...! Tenemos camino andado...
No hay que juntarse con rotos
siempre te juegan traici n
ya Madero est vengado
ya muri la usurpaci n. En su caballo retinto
lleg Emiliano Zapata
bonita su silla charra
y sus botones de plata
pero mucho m s bonito
su famoso Plan de Ayala... Este gallo es de navaja
y no es gallo de espol n
si quieres tierra trabaja
trabaja no seas huev n... Ya lleg don Venustiano
con sus anteojos oscuros
y Villa y Zapata gritan:
No s que tengo en los ojos...
porque ya en Pablo Gonz lez
se vislumbra la traici n
Ay reata no te revientes
que es el ltimo jal n...! ya se est n muriendo todos
Jes s qu desilusi n...!
se est volviendo gobierno
Ay dios...! La revoluci n.

15 November 2008

Stefano Zacchiroli: from Vim to Emacs - part 2

One month with Emacs and counting - Part 2
Other posts in the from Vim to Emacs series: part 1
A while ago I've blogged about my switch from Vim to Emacs, promising a blog post series, quite a mouthful :-) nevertheless, it's time to continue the series. The first part was about why I think that nowadays Emacs is ready to be switching to. This second part is about flawed Vim design choices which substantially contributed to my choice. (Of course all this post is under a IMO-/rant-disclaimer, it can't be otherwise, so take it cum grano salis) Flawed Vim design choices Vim started as a wonderful editor, following the path of Vi, which in turn has got right a good deal of design choices. One is the often debated modality. In spite of being a HCI PITA in general, modality is not a problem at all for software you are using every single day (and the editor is the 2nd program I use the most, with the terminal being the 1st), because you learn it as a habit. In the case of Vim, modality is good because it let you use powerful yet simple motions in command mode, which can be easily combined with operator-pending commands. This can be considered yet another incarnation of the UNIX philosophy, casted inside the editor itself. ... which brings us to the good old joke which describes Emacs as a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor. In fact, Vim is no longer the nice Unix philosophy player which it used to be, and Emacs plays much more nicely with external tools than Vim. As arguments, let's consider a few (not so) recent Vim evolutions: Well, I acknowledge that Emacs got this choice right, and that it's an important one: Emacs supports interaction with external processes, and plugin authors have been happy to exploit it to create really cool stuff (sticking to the UNIX philosophy). Please welcome: Flyspell, M-x grep (shameless smartass plug: same number of keystroke of :grep), Grand Unified Debugger, a sampling of language-specific major modes with top-level support. (But I recommend having a look at least once at the coolness of other stuff built-on top of external process support, like Flymake, mentioned by dancer not a long ago.) Even in this respect, I acknowledge that Emacs got this right. It has chosen a single, now full-fledged, programming language (Elisp), which is offered both to the final user (fact: the average Emacs user knows much better how to program her own editor than the average Vim user) and to extensions developer. The standard library of the language is organized with a consistent naming (even though not always intuitive) and documented in an organized manner. You might not like the language, but at least is has been taken seriously and managed as such. Finally, being a Lisp dialect, you might need what you learn with Elisp elsewhere. Vim script is too committing: it is useful only inside Vim. I believe that contributed significantly in its scarce diffusion among Vim users. The fact that Elisp was born together with Emacs and that it is also used internally for the editor implementation is not relevant here: I do care about what is offered to me as an user and as an extension developer. What I see on the Emacs side in this respect is much better that what I see on the Vim side. Moreover, from the point of view of the users, is the difference between what is inside the editor and what is outside (i.e., the extensions) that relevant? I think it is not, and that brings me to the final Vim choice which I consider flawed and which has the potential of seriously limit its future evolutions: Where to from here in this blog post series? For sure some tips on how to migrate for hard-core Vim users, then we'll see ... If you did enjoy the read please let me know commenting in the discussion page (as you did in the last post, thanks!).

14 November 2008

John Goerzen: Education

One of the speakers at OSCon this year — I forget which one — made a point that ran something like this, heavily paraphrased:
Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn’t about having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly, the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite — those that could afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of it.
What a powerful statement, and it rings true to me. I remember in high school, when people from the local liberal arts college would come and talk. They’d talk about the value throughout a lifetime of knowledge in a broad range of disciplines: English, history, political science, religion, science, and the arts. They’d talk about how their graduates went on to lead distinguished lives, how this broad core of knowledge serves a person well through life. I guess I didn’t believe them, because due to their lack of a computer science major, I went elsewhere. That local school may not have been the best choice for me for other reasons, but as I look back on it, I think they had a much stronger message than I realized back then. Here I am, just two math classes, one computer science class, and one biology class away from a degree. Yet I have had not one class covering the history of east Asia, not one class on different world cultures or religions, and only a very basic understanding of one foreign language (German). This hits me in the face almost every day. Yesterday I was wondering about the history of slavery and racism in Europe. Today I’m curious about China’s history as an economic powerhouse. Last week I was curious about Roman law and daily life. The fact is, everything from philosophy to calculus is screamingly relevant to daily, modern life. We hear talk of “an American revolution” in Washington, of a shift of power in the Senate. It seems we forget that the notion of a Senate is considerably older than the United States is — and that we have such a thing because our founders were aware of this. Macroeconomic theory is thrust in our faces on an almost daily basis these days, yet I’ve never had a class on economics at all. We might feel fear of terrorist attacks, or see our fellow citizens lash out at “the Arabs.” Our own short memories fail to remind us of the light in which we are seen, fail to put the really quite minor terrorist threat in context of what London or Dresden endured in World War II. We demand our government to make us safer, and our government responds by making us less safe but making us *feel* safer at airports. In my own field, I see some universities buckling to pressure from Business to turn out large numbers of mediocre programmers that know the Java or .NET standard library well, but have no sense of the theory behind computer science, and would be utterly lost if asked to, say, write a recursive QuickSort. I find myself almost completely baffled that some companies that want to hire the world’s best programmers are only looking for people that are already fluent in $LANGUAGE — not ones that are good programmers, and so well-versed in computer science that they can easily pick up any language. I think there is a lot to the argument that a good, broad, classical education can serve a person well in any career. I wish I had realized that a little earlier.

8 November 2008

Joerg Jaspert: Debian mirror scripts

With a small mail to our mirrors-announce list, I just opened the work of more than one month to the public. Even better, I strongly encourage every mirror admin to use my scripts, or at least scripts that follow a minimal set of rules I wrote down… Some long time (somewhere in April or May this year) I got added to the Debian mirroradm group. First it was only to get some problems with packages.debian.org solved, but later on I started doing more. This group is basically the one that handles the archvsync user on .debian.org machines and also manages the official Debian mirrors listing. As the archvsync user exists on multiple .debian.org machines, and many of them do mirror a copy of our archive for various reasons, all of them had some version of a mirroring script, and sometimes also a version of a pushmirror script. Unfortunately, as they all had been maintained mostly on their own per machine - they sometimes had evolved a bit different. Additionally all of them had a few problems which could leave us with a broken mirror behind, despite it looking all well. So on Sept. 26 I decided to trash it all and rewrite the script and put it all in a VCS (and selected git). For that I set myself a few goals, like (in no particular order) Now, 109 commits and more than a month later, I was finally able to open the scripts to the wide public. (Had multiple people test them before this, but thats always different than a real “release”). The scripts are in use on all .debian.org machines and some other mirrors already, so I’m fairly sure they work.
As I already wrote, Debian mirror admins are strongly encouraged to use this scriptset and not to invent their own. In case you miss a feature either send me a mail describing it, or better, a patch implementing it. I’m happy to implement as much as possible (and sensible :) ) And while it is discouraged to use own scripts, sometimes people have reasons to have their own, so there is now a minimal set of functionality that such a script MUST support. All of those requirements are easy to fulfill. Well, at least the MUST ones. The first one is basically a given, all scripts I know are doing this already. The second one sounds more complicated, but actually might just be about 4 lines of actual code changes. Just touch an extra file before you gain a lockfile (to avoid two scripts running at the same time) and then rerun rsync as long as that extra file is around. (It helps to rm this trigger file right before you call rsync :) ). The should directive is actually a little more work to implement correctly. I won’t show source here, read the ftpsync script if you want to see it, but I try some small explanation. Background: Debian mirror synchronisation is usually done by scripts that get started via ssh. As mirror operators (understandably) do not like their upstream mirror to be able to login, this is done using “ssh triggers”, a feature I wrote about earlier. Those are sshkeys using a forced command, so nothing else than this command will be run, ever. SSH, if used with such forced commands, has the helpful feature that it sets the environment variable SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND containing the original arguments. Which means that, if the mirror pushes you with “ssh yourhost -l mirror sleep 1” you will see *sleep 1 in that variable. It is what many mirror operators currently use when pushing their downstreams. Now, we can use that to tell the receiving end all things we want it to know. If you look in my script you will see that I defined a little more than the minimal arguments. But none of the additional ones are a requirement, they only make life much easier. My script currently understands, additional to the 3 minimal ones:
As if that wasn’t enough, I also had to rewrite the runmirrors script. The old 10-line one just didn’t cope with the more general approach. This script is used to “push” your downstream mirrors, telling them that they need to update. (Which is the only sane way to run a mirror. cron is just not made for mirrors that can update at random times!). One nice new feature of it is the ability to update multiple mirrors nearly at the same time. This is extremely helpful in case of DNS Round Robin entries like security.debian.org (multiple hosts offering the same archive under one hostname). You do not want to have such hosts out of sync. Not even for a minute, if you can avoid that. So we now push the mirrors with sync:stage1 as argument. Then we wait until all of them have finished the stage1 sync before we push them all again, this time with sync:stage2 as argument. This will erase any update delays thanks to network latency / low bandwidth one of the security mirrors might have, as the large transfers (all the binary and source packages) are done in stage1. They can take time, a normal user won’t notice it - the Package and Source indices are not transferred yet. They arevery small and as such transfered pretty fast whenever stage1 is done everywhere and we tell mirrors to do stage2.
All in all it was a pretty nice exercise writing those scripts. Comments: 0

7 November 2008

Andrew McMillan: Multiples of latency

Today someone asked me to take a look at an Evolution enhancement that's just begging to get into trunk. Since this is a Gnome program in a subversion repository I've commenced the process of cloning the repository so I can look at the issue against the current head. At the current rate I should have a copy of the repository by early tomorrow morning, in order to be able to start looking at it. Of course today is when I actually do have some time to spare, and I hope to be fast asleep at the time when I expect this to finish. Presumably subversion isn't this slow for everyone, but since my latency to their repository is 300mS I'm probably on the worst end the pain, with each commit seemingly taking around a second. It sure would be nice if subversion provided some kind of chunked compression of these five-year-old commits, so I could be bandwidth limited, rather than latency challenged. The addition of a day to the checkout of a software project must be a significant barrier to entry for anyone considering contributing. It makes it much less likely to be opportunistic. So far I'm up to r3600 in 75 minutes. That's 75 minutes that I could have spent actually looking at the code, but now it's time for me to go and vote for me...

6 November 2008

MJ Ray: Elections and SPI: Open Voting Foundation

So, as everyone knows by now, the party which is a lot like our Conservatives won the US elections (instead of the other party which is a lot like our Conservatives). I’m particularly touched by Aq’s comment:-
The mood in America has been likened to the one here in 97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn t mean yours necessarily won t
Oh well, at least it was better than drifting further to the right (in both cases). I’ll wait and see whether it lives up to the optimism. As you may know, SPI is associated with the Open Voting Foundation. That doesn’t sit well with me - while paper voting is imperfect, it seems more verifiable and scalable than machine voting. I’ve been assured that OVF seeks to replace current election machines, rather than spread machine voting to new places and it looks like my area is not under immediate threat (ORG latest news), so I’m not working on it just now. Broadly, I agree with Simon Rumble on Voting machines: a solution searching for a problem?
So without even going into the serious problems with voting machines, it seems they don’t actually solve any actual problems, and I suspect cost a lot more to operate
I’m currently finding out more about standing for election to The Cooperative Group committee and ThePhoneCoop board - I’m not sure yet, but I think both still use paper voting. Cooperatives-SW and TTLLP both use in-person voting. What’s the current thinking here? What’s best?

MJ Ray: Elections and SPI: Open Voting Foundation

So, as everyone knows by now, the party which is a lot like our Conservatives won the US elections (instead of the other party which is a lot like our Conservatives). I’m particularly touched by Aq’s comment:-
The mood in America has been likened to the one here in 97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn t mean yours necessarily won t
Oh well, at least it was better than drifting further to the right (in both cases). I’ll wait and see whether it lives up to the optimism. As you may know, SPI is associated with the Open Voting Foundation. That doesn’t sit well with me - while paper voting is imperfect, it seems more verifiable and scalable than machine voting. I’ve been assured that OVF seeks to replace current election machines, rather than spread machine voting to new places and it looks like my area is not under immediate threat (ORG latest news), so I’m not working on it just now. Broadly, I agree with Simon Rumble on Voting machines: a solution searching for a problem?
So without even going into the serious problems with voting machines, it seems they don’t actually solve any actual problems, and I suspect cost a lot more to operate
I’m currently finding out more about standing for election to The Cooperative Group committee and ThePhoneCoop board - I’m not sure yet, but I think both still use paper voting. Cooperatives-SW and TTLLP both use in-person voting. What’s the current thinking here? What’s best?

4 November 2008

Ross Burton: OfflineIMAP, ConsoleKit, GNOME Keyring

Over the weekend I finally got fed up with Evolution struggling to connect to work's "IMAP" server (Exchange 2007), and switched to using OfflineIMAP to sync the mail to a local Maildir. This as expected worked pretty well, and I'm now hidden from the nasty lag on the server. However, I've had to write my top secret Intel password into .offlineimaprc, which sucks. Then I had a cunning plan... GNOME Keyring will store passwords in a pretty secure manner, so somehow I need to fetch the password from there. A quick look at the OfflineIMAP manual revealed that I can write Python functions which return the password, so I should be abe to hook into the keyring from OfflineIMAP. This should be fairly simple: 
import gobject, gnomekeyring
# The keyring needs to know the application name
if gobject.get_application_name() is None:
  gobject.set_application_name("offlineimap")
def keyring(user, host):
  keys = gnomekeyring.find_network_password_sync(user=user, server=host, protocol="imap")
  # First one will do nicely thanks
  return keys[0]["password"]
...
remotepasseval = keyring("rburton", "imapmail.intel.com")
After writing a small tool to add the key to the keyring, to my surprise this worked first time. I bounced with glee, but ten minutes later I had error messages from OfflineIMAP running from cron in my inbox... GNOME Keyring uses an environment variable to find the daemon, which isn't set in a cron environment. GNOME Keyring will fall back to using DBus to find the daemon, but the DBus session bus environment variable isn't set. DBus will fall back to reading the session bus address from the X root window, but DISPLAY isn't set so that doesn't work either... EPIC FAIL. But, I thought, I upgraded to Network Manager 0.7 last week which bought in ConsoleKit. If I ask ConsoleKit for my sessions I should be able to find a session with has an X connection, then I can set DISPLAY appropriately and then the chain described above will work, and I'll have my password. Shockingly, this worked first time too: 
import dbus, os
if not os.getenv("DISPLAY"):
  # Get the ConsoleKit manager
  bus = dbus.SystemBus()
  manager_obj = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit', '/org/freedesktop/ConsoleKit/Manager')
  manager = dbus.Interface(manager_obj, 'org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager')
  
  # For each of my sessions..
  for ssid in manager.GetSessionsForUnixUser(os.getuid()):
    obj = bus.get_object('org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit', ssid)
    session = dbus.Interface(obj, 'org.freedesktop.ConsoleKit.Session')
    # Get the X11 display name
    dpy = session.GetX11Display()
    if dpy:
      # If we have a display, set the environment variable
      os.putenv("DISPLAY", dpy);
      break
(man, I really with python-dbus had a better syntax for getting objects with a specific interface) So there you go, integrating OfflineIMAP with the GNOME Keyring via ConsoleKit and DBus. Surprisingly this was pretty easy to do, thanks to DBus and the magic provided by ConsoleKit it is 100% hack free.

3 November 2008

Enrico Zini: rc-buggy packages sorted by popularity

rc-buggy packages sorted by popularity After doing a round of tag reviews so that we release lenny with the latest tag contributions, I still had a bit of spare time. Since people are urging to fix the last bugs I thought I could contribute a list of RC-buggy packages sorted by popularity: 
#!/usr/bin/python
import urllib2
import sys, re #, gzip
PKGRE = re.compile(r'<strong>Package: </strong><a href="[^"]+" name="([^"]+)">')
POPCONRE = re.compile(r'^(\d+)\s+(\S+)')
PKGMAPRE = re.compile(r'^([^(]+)\(([^)]+)')
COMMASPLIT = re.compile(r'\s*,\s*')
# Allow to download other package views
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    url = sys.argv[1]
else:
    url = "http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php"
def read_packages(url):
    "Download the list of rc-buggy packages"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    for line in fd:
        mo = PKGRE.search(line)
        if mo:
            yield mo.group(1)
# FIXME: this is a deprecated data source, but at the moment it is just what
#        is needed
def read_bintosrc(url = "http://qa.debian.org/data/ddpo/results/ddpo_packages"):
    "Download the binary to source package map"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    for line in fd:
        mo = PKGMAPRE.search(line)
        if mo:
            src = mo.group(1)
            bin = COMMASPLIT.split(mo.group(2))
            for p in bin:   
                yield p, src
def read_popcon(url = "http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst"):
    "Download popcon information"
    fd = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    # It doesn't work on urllib2 objects because it wants tell()
    #fd = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=fd, filename=url, mode="rb")
    for line in fd:
        mo = POPCONRE.match(line)
        if mo:
            yield mo.group(2), int(mo.group(1))
print "Reading mapping of binary packages to source packages..."
bin2src = dict(read_bintosrc())
print "Reading popcon scores..."
# We actually want the score of source packages, and for it we use the score of
# its binary package with the highest score
scores = dict()
for pkg, score in read_popcon():
    pkg = bin2src.get(pkg, pkg)
    if pkg not in scores:
        scores[pkg] = score
#scores = dict(read_popcon("http://popcon.debian.org/by_inst.gz"))
print "Reading list of rc-buggy packages..."
# The bug page has a mix of source and binary packages: convert all to source
# packages
packages = sorted(read_packages(url), key=lambda x:scores.get(bin2src.get(x,x), 0))
for p in packages:
    print scores.get(bin2src.get(p,p), 0), p
This can be run on people.debian.org as ~enrico/popzimmer (0 is the rank of packages that for some reason cannot be mapped to any rank): 
$ ~enrico/popzimmer 
Reading mapping of binary packages to source packages...
Reading popcon scores...
Reading list of rc-buggy packages...
0 roxen-fonts-iso8859-2
2 dpkg
11 pam
61 glibc
61 libc6
123 initramfs-tools
149 bind9
150 grub
180 portmap
213 nfs-common
279 libgl1-mesa-dri
298 libsnmp-base
298 snmpd
309 avahi
397 mysql-dfsg-5.0
408 xserver-xorg-input-wacom
409 xserver-xorg-video-vesa
428 docbook-xml
499 openoffice.org-core
567 xine-lib
600 evolution-data-server
669 eog
671 xserver-xorg-video-intel
691 epiphany-browser
691 epiphany-gecko
695 kdelibs4c2a
698 uswsusp
754 guile-1.6
959 gpm
964 cups
990 kdebase
1002 ghostscript
1069 giflib
1076 xulrunner-1.9
1177 libapache2-mod-perl2
1217 vlc-nox
1229 kernel-package
1311 kdeutils-dev
1520 libparted1.8-10
1767 wireshark
1785 selinux-policy-default
1908 dia
1943 htop
1983 boost
2140 cantlr
2145 transmission
2159 emacs22
2312 swfdec-mozilla
2449 eclipse
2449 libswt3.2-gtk-java
2728 lilo
2898 libnss-ldap
3013 java-access-bridge
3051 blender
3099 libtemplate-perl
3499 fglrx-atieventsd
3602 virtualbox-ose
3619 jfsutils
3806 anjuta
3962 kbuild
4076 libgnustep-gui0.14
4222 libwebkit-1.0-1
4332 rosegarden
4412 matplotlib
4412 python-matplotlib
4950 mail-notification-evolution
5195 nut-cgi
5273 sbcl
5538 ruby1.9
5679 kmymoney2
6076 websvn
6147 miro
6264 gnat-4.1
6431 gallery2
6478 gnome-chess
6512 joystick
6862 istanbul
6937 wordpress
7476 luatex
7635 csound
7635 python-csoundac
8257 libpam-mount
8471 wmcpuload
8631 nbsmtp
8642 oxine
8774 axiom
8949 libengine-pkcs11-openssl
9052 clamav-getfiles
9221 open-iscsi
9262 ptex-bin
9701 egroupware-core
10012 debian-cd
10127 libjogl-java
10453 libjson-xs-perl
10698 gcjwebplugin
10736 request-tracker3.6
11294 python-extclass
11518 rkward
11600 alevt
12929 otrs2
13205 bindgraph
13956 icecc-monitor
14223 netmaze
14505 cdebconf
14526 mumble
14687 fnonlinear
14724 recite
14789 jbidwatcher
15766 libnss-ldapd
15812 glpi
15905 lustre-source
15982 win32-loader
16232 ampache
17168 libghc6-missingh-dev
17311 acl2
17830 apertium
18462 emacspeak
18469 glassfish
19257 isight-firmware-tools
19719 libnagios-object-perl
20144 libwx-perl
20465 dns2tcp
21614 python-kinterbasdb-dbg
21690 hf
21902 libcobra-java
22365 tomcat6
22573 libphp-snoopy
23501 coco-java
23926 boxbackup-server
24009 libghc6-wash-dev
26323 libdesktop-notify-perl
26439 opendb
28426 adolc
28795 xorp
29986 libgdata-java
31262 libjboss-serialization-java
31472 pixelpost
31658 cournol
32939 mediamate
34365 gforge-plugin-scmcvs
34659 libgearman-client-async-perl
42233 libhamcrest-java
48076 mahara
55303 mxallowd
85881 roxen-fonts-iso8859-1
So, if you don't know from what package to start fixing bugs, "Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

Stefano Zacchiroli: camlbz2 bzip2 ocaml bindings

CamlBZ2: OCaml bindings for libbz2 Since the next building block for proper compression support in Batteries is bzip2 integration, I started from the basic ingredient: OCaml bindings for bzip2. It was not entirely missing: the old GZ project by Olivier Andrieu was in fact offering bzip2 bindings, but was doing that in tandem with gzip bindings (which already have a standard de facto implementation: Camlzip). Hence I contacted the author and together we decided to split away the two parts and releasing CamlBZ2 as a new project, devoted to bzip2 bindings alone. The old code has been ported to latest OCaml versions and a couple of bugs have been squashed in the interim. The project is now hosted on the OCaml forge, has its own homepage, and a Git repo (look ma, it looks like a serious project!). Today I've made the first alpha release: CamlBZ2 0.5.99 is now available. It is intended to be a test release ... so please test it :-) and report any issue you find using the tracker. Next steps for CamlBZ2:

2 November 2008

John Goerzen: Politics and the Church

My church is one in which politics are checked at the door. Some church members wear their politics on their yard, or on their blog -- and just about every opinion is represented in the church. But you rarely hear politics mentioned in church. When it is mentioned, it's issue-oriented rather than candidate-oriented or policy-oriented -- we'll hear updates on efforts to create a peace tax fund, for instance.

But today, hearing about politics is just about unavoidable.

The relationship between Christianity and government has been uneasy and troubled all the way back to the religion's founding. Many Christians, and I count myself in this, believe that our first loyalty is to Jesus, and on those grounds, refuse to say the pledge of allegiance. What, we wonder, would our word be worth if we were forced to disobey our government because of a law that was unjust or immoral? How could we even say the words "one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all" when those words were written at a time when the KKK was active, lynchings were common, and are said today at a time when people treat Muslims and immigrants with modern disdain?

In short, we believe we are called to be citizens of a different kingdom first.

So, today, our pastor deliberately picked a difficult scripture passage for us: Romans 13:1-7, which reads, in part:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities. . . The authorities that exist have been established by God. . . Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. . . Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also because of conscience.


What an extraordinary set of statements. This was written during the time of the Roman Empire, which could hardly be said to have been a just and benign government. It's hard for me to imagine the Roman Legion being established by God.

In more modern times, it would seem to denounce the American revolution as a rebellion against authority and therefore a rebellion against God. It would also seem to denounce the protests that we see all over the world -- striking workers in France, human rights seekers in Burma, war protesters in the United States. Would it even have condemned the protests in the 1960s over civil rights in this country, or the protests against war today?

One commentator notes that "Paul is not stating that this will always be true but is describing the proper, ideal function of rulers. When civil rulers overstep their proper function, the Christian is to obey God rather than human authorities" -- a theme Paul mentioned more than once in Acts.

What relevance does this have for us today? It seems that we are to help our rulers act in a just way, even if we disagree with them -- no matter who wins the election. It is also a reminder that a superficial reading of the Bible, taken out of context and without a deep understanding to understand the author's point, can potentially lead to very strange conclusions.

The American National Council of Churches has issued a non-partisan voting guide, which we found in our bulletin today. It is an interesting read, and probably not what you think; it begins with, "War is contrary to the will of God." Thought-provoking stuff.

I find it interesting that there are a lot of people out there that say that religion is responsible for a lot of ill in this country, then proceed to hold pretty much the same opinions I do for pretty much the same reasons. I just point out that the Bible is deeper than intolerance and submission.

Jonathan McDowell: Shrinking the keyring

Apparently I'm supposed to be blogging once a day, every day, for November. I missed yesterday and doubt I'll have something to say every day, but let's try...

Today I have been playing with the export-clean and import-clean options to gnupg, in particular in conjunction with the debian-keyring. The options result in only signatures that can be verified (ie that are from keys that exist in your keyring) being allowed, and remove signatures other than the revocation from revoked keys/uids.
Why is this interesting to me? Well, a number of reasons:There's an argument that this "weakens" the web of trust (after all, we're throwing away signatures from keys), but I'm not really convinced. The full keys can still be downloaded from the keyserver network and it's not like any of the Debian infrastructure scripts make use of web of trust; all that's important is that a key is present in the keyring. I've been asked about export-minimal (ie keys + self sigs only) in the past, but I prefer this method of keeping verifiable signatures as it provides some measure of checking key trust for people importing the keyrings locally or auditing the keyring.

(Note I haven't actually rolled any of this out, it's just something I've been playing with locally at present to get a feel for the savings/benefits to be had.)

29 October 2008

Benjamin Mako Hill: An Invisible Handful of Stretched Metaphors

The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their title: And, finally:

27 October 2008

Romain Beauxis: About democracy (revisited)

After my last post about the ongoing debate on the new process to accept and handle debian project members, Rapha l Hertzog proposed an alternative organisation which could be a solution, but misses the most important fact: how the people in charge of the process would be chosed and dismissed. Rapha l Hertzog wants that we consider a group of skilled and trustfull people in charge of giving and revoking powers to lower class of developers, on a per-event basis. Their procedure would be an internal vote amongst this group, and they would be called the "Debian Community Managers". Although it could be a good idea, it really misses the MOST IMPORTANT FACT: how they are chosed and to whom are they responsible. As a reply to my comment, Rapha l propose that they would be elected at first, and then nominated/revoked on the basis of the decision procedure mentioned above. Not only is it exactly what have been in place for the last years in the various core teams, but also it is a dangerous naive vision of how powers and regulations must happen. Before the Debian project started to consider these issues, the various ideas to build a system where the majority is ruled by a minority and the means to prevent the most important issues has already been studied, in the field of Law and how to write a Constitution for a democratic system. The goal of a democratic system is to put some higher power in the hand of several, but prevent as much as possible any issue. And preventing means act before shit happens, not after. Furthermore, power has to be divided into several domains, where the people in charge of these domains are strongly seperated and share as less common interest as possible. Hence, the goal of a constitution is to weaken power and put barreers, even if this leads to slow and frustrating reform processes. In the same idea, elections, which redraw the positions, are planed on a regular basis, and if the previously elected people were good, they are relected, not the opposite, in which if they aren't good they are dismissed. Again, we prevent issues, so the requirement to be responsible for what you did is implicit. And, last, it is well known that the less direct a decision process is, the less democratic it is. Hence, one should always prefer direct elections to indirect nominations. Now, coming back to Debian, we can have a very similar distinction in the various powers available: Now, the propositions, and all the various discussions are motivated by either the fact that there are issues with some developper's behaviour, which falls into the justice side and for which we already have a wide history of long debates before we act whatever the act is, or the executive power to give rights and introduce a new member in the project. Yes, we clearly miss a role in the project for applying rules and sanctions and deciding about these issues. However, we really ought to fix it the right way. In particular, never should we, in any way, give any justice power to someone in charge of any of the other power, in particular core teams. And the same for the right to appoint new members. For instance, to name an issue, the Frans vs. Sven issue would have been really different if there wasn't any kind of personal interest and power in the people in charge of the decisions. In real social systems, the right to apply a sanction or give new rights is a very dangerous power. It suppose a high level of separation between your personal interest, and the decision you have to make, as well as a high level of responsability against the people who trust you. We used to claim that Debian was not a democracy, but a meritocracy where technical skills are the ultimate ranking for deciding who's good or bad when giving reponsabilities. I have never been convinced by this approach, which I consider, just as anarchy, as valid for a small group of developers, but completely naive for a big group. Now, it is clear that the issues that we are dealing with in this situation have nothing to do with technical skills. In particular, the original proposition creates a class of non technical contributors, documentation writers, or translators etc... Furthermore, if you look back in the past, there have been a lot of situation where the issue, and its solution had nothing to do at all with technical issues, like issue mentioned above, or the Duck Tank or whatever it was called. We really should drop this naive idea that technicals skills are the only way to put on decision on the project. That is no longer how it works, nor a solution to the human issues that we face now.

24 October 2008

Biella Coleman: My Theory = Attention Whore

I think Karl hits on all the major points as to why Andrew Keen’s latest post about the demise of open source is wrong. I don’t have much to add except that I suspect that this Internet pundit, like many a pundit, is just seeking a little attention by being controversial as he has nothing of substance to really say. I know I am being sort of controversial here myself but I really do believe there is this strain of punditry whose existence is just to be controversial and garner attention. Hey but at least they keep things interesting right??

Sandro Tosi: Bits from the reportbug side of Debian

Things are evolving under the hood for reportbug, and we are preparing a version targetted for squeeze.

The version 3.99.0 has just been released to experimental; the main goals for this release are:
Other goals we'd like to archive for the 4.0 version (for which 3.99.x are the pre-releases) are:
Since this is a development version, you can experience some bugs/regressions, so please try it, stress it and "reportbug reportbug" if needed :) You're help is really appreciated! (and we have cookies ;) )

21 October 2008

Biella Coleman: Nerd Girls.

I am all for models and examples, and well, Nerd Girls, is such a web portal meant to celebrate “smart-girl individuality that???s revolutionizing our future.” And they “want to encourage other girls to change their world through Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, while embracing their feminine power.” That message is all good and fine but the profile page is just a little too homogeneous and “made up” and actually just looks fake as fake can be (and what is UP with those dumb glasses they are all wearing?!). Sorry to say this, but all those “chics” look like they are fake nerds and are really models for Seventeen magazine or soft-porn movies. Is Nerd Girls a joke? Or is it real and just not for Ugly (or regularly looking) Nerd Girls? update
[h0mee] lol
[h0mee] actually what it really reminds me of
[h0mee] are those inspirational posters you see in high school meant to inspire students to study harder
[biella] like this one update again (sorry, the comments on my irc channel are just too good to ignore: [Atala] lol one of my friends just said the site seems like a thought experiment on what would happen if MTV bought Bitch magazine.
[rex] EXACTLY

Next.

Previous.