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

I mostly stayed under a rock during the last weeks: exams season, some assingments plus one week of much needed [VAC]; ironically in the DebConf 8 secondary hotel. I'm in a very interesting course on operating systems' programming, it's a new optative course, and has generated a lot of expectatives: most of the systems-oriented undergrads in the computer science career are attending. The downside is that it's *intensive*: we're expected to build from scratch a minimal operating system, starting from the bootloader. So far my group has already done a bootloader that understands FAT, and the entry point for the OS, in which the basic stuff is setup: gate A20, interruptions, protected mode, GDT, etc. Also, each group is required to do a presentation of some systems research topic, and we choose Plan 9 from Bell Labs, that mostly unknown OS that was meant to be a better UNIX, but never gained popularity. So I spent many days playing with it, trying to grok quickly what it was about, and creating a small network of virtual hosts (in Qemu) that could show how it all fit togheter. Plan 9 has all the credentials: created in the same lab as UNIX, designed by the same people, which already learned from past mistakes. It was started in the late eighties, and it really feels like what the future was meant to be. Sadly, we're just starting to see a few of it's revolutionary ideas being applied to other systems: UTF-8, /proc, unionfs, fuse, clone(2), separate namespaces; all of these follow concepts first created in Plan 9, UTF-8 was designed by Ken Thompson "in front of my eyes, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner one night in September or so 1992", in Rob Pike's words. Not happy enough with reworking all the core concepts, they also recreated the visual environment. I have to admit, the user-facing ideas are so foreign that I still don't feel very comfortable using it. Surprisingly, the desktop is very mice-centric, it cannot be used at all without the mouse, and it's bothersome with less than three buttons. Anyway, the underlying workings are so attractive, that I cannot stop from wondering if a hybrid system could be built (Debian/kPlan9 anyone?). To illustrate, I'll reproduce here the same example that I showed yesterday and left some jaws hanging. I had booted a CPU server and a diskless terminal, called cpu-0 and term-0 respectively. This is a screenshot taken in the terminal, which is basically a telnet to my Debian box:
Nothing spectacular here, except for the weird syntax, it was seen like this in the Debian box:

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt   grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.30:39879         ESTABLISHED

But here comes the fun, I ran an import command, which is more or less a remote filesystem mount, with which I mount the remote machine's /net in the local namespace. It has to be noted that the /net path is by convention the entry point to anything network related, including all the networking API.
And the wornderful thing is that this works as it should (note the remote address):

martin@abraxas:~$ netstat -nt   grep :22
tcp        0      0 10.0.2.1:22             10.0.2.10:38158         ESTABLISHED

So, what happened? telnet wanted to create a TCP connection, and that is accomplished opening /net/tcp/clone, but then it found the imported filesystem. The open(2) request was then transferred to the remote machine, and there the networking code did the actual TCP/IP dance. Things like this make you realise that maybe the BSD sockets API is not that nice an abstraction; in Plan 9 there are no BSD sockets, it's only implemented in the POSIX compatibility libraries, which aren't used by any of the core tools. Neither there exists any threads support, you just call rfork(2) setting the appropiate flags, exactly what glibc does under the covers nowadays. They also decided to live without select(2) or poll(2), there are no non-blocking calls. If you want non-blocking, you rfork(). The only syncronisation primitive is rendezvous(2), and everything else is built on that. At this point, it should not surprise you that to kill a process you can type echo kill > /proc/$pid/ctl; and that there's no need for an equivalent to Xnest, as rio (the graphical interface) provides a modified /dev, you just type rio inside a window and there you go. Yes, I'm hooked. If you're interested, I compiled many links here (some Spanish there, but all the content is in English), as one of the weakest points in Plan 9 is the unorganised and missing documentation. Tags: Plan9, Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Facu

Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch). Here are some links about John McCain: Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1]. The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000. Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination. The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him. Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture - I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“. Here are some links about Sarah Palin: Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades - I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known. There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities - including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4]. Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports. The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell. The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9]. Update: Corrected URL [6].

• [1] http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-is-Your-Nation-on-Whi-by-Tim-Wise-080916-307.html


• [2] http://www.keatingeconomics.com/


• [3] http://www.truthout.org/article/palin-can-launch-us-back-time


• [4] http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/news/the-book-of-sarah/


• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ex=1239681600&en=b38b2d4387d4e3c4&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1


• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=palin%20patriotism&st=cse&oref=slogin


• [7] http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2024&Itemid=1


• [8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html


• [9] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4692408.ece


• [10] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

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Today is Blog Action Day about poverty. As a member of several cooperatives, I have a pretty strong hope that the responsible lending of credit unions can help people escape from poverty. The basic process of a credit union is that you save for a while, then when you’ve shown that you will put aside that amount of money regularly, you can borrow some multiple of it and repay at the same rate you were saving. In addition, you get a voice in controlling the credit union itself, although it is limited by financial services regulations and so on. At yesterday’s meeting of the Cooperatives-SW board in Taunton, some members expressed concern about a “social enterprise” called South-West Pound backed by a company called South West Community Banking Partnership. Although it’s called that, apparently it’s not a bank and also not a credit union: its members don’t manage it. It’s working with credit unions, but I’m very unclear on how it’s regulated. From the few details on their website, it looks to me like it could even be running a Farepak-style scheme which happens to hold deposits in credit unions instead of banks. Why is concealing member-controlled unions allowable as a “social enterprise”? Why would anyone go to a “community banking partnership” instead of direct to a credit union? (Coo, I’m getting a bit angry again, both at the lack of information and the hide-them-to-promote-them idea.) Tomorrow (Thu 16 Oct) is International Credit Union Day. If you’ve not already done so, please go open an account and help your local community to fund itself, then see if you can get involved in publicising them to communities who suffer financial exclusion.

We re all aware of the financial crisis due to credit default swaps shaking up the markets, media, politics, and what not. Some of us are feeling the pain, most of us aren t yet. A few days ago, politicians of the big, capitalist nations convened to agree on a way forward to stablise the financial market and set an end to the crisis. They are planning on doing this by throwing hundreds of billions at the market, buying all the subprime loan packages with the intention to create a new market for them, thus taking the weight off the shoulders of the countless barely-surviving banks and investors, who have written off billions in losses without an end in sight. Where does this money come from? Taxes and newly printed money. You may not yet feel the effects of this, but you will: taxes will rise, and inflation soar to even higher levels. Today is Blog Action Day with poverty as the focus, and it s a good occasion for me to state what s long been on my mind. The strategy by our political leaders to combat the credit crunch is short-sighted, and it fights symptoms, not causes. In fact, it s Robin Hood played in reverse: tax increases and inflation will hurt those most who cannot do anything against it: the poor. On the other side of things, those active in the financial markets will have their damages limited, and new CDS markets might even create more opportunities for those who can. I strongly oppose the way our politicians are handling the issue, even though I do have small amounts of funds invested in financial products myself, and have already seen the positive effects of their actions. Rather than throwing money at the markets, we really ought to put those away who have caused all this, those ruthless, greedy ones who have speculated way over their heads, underestimated the risks, and caused this crisis that killed many businesses, threatens to endanger entire countries, and hurts individuals who hardly ever had a choice. Think of it as a driver s licence, and that should be revoked for those who screwed up so royally bad and got us into this situation in the first place. Don t let them speculate again! Update: Andreas Metzeler notes that he is (rightfully) missing a what is to be done instead section in my blog post. I don t have anything to offer on that front, sadly. I also realise I should have phrased my opposition differently. Reading this interesting interview with Deutsche Bank ex-CEO Hilmar Kopper (German only) (thanks, Andreas!) helped me understand more that the politicians aren t saving banks, they are saving the system, and that they have little other choice. Another aspect I haven t previously seen as clearly as now is that the governments are purchasing (and willing to carry) risk for others, to relieve the markets. Risk by itself doesn t cost anything, so it might turn out that the billions they made available won t actually be spent though I always new that the governments might well come out of this with a profit even. The whole affair still stinks, and what I truly miss are the actions to prevent those responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place from doing so again. NP: This Will Destroy You: Young Mountain

Not much to say. Just that I am back, now with a mixed English-Spanish blog. I will try to keep entries written in Spanish out of syndicated feed on Planet Debian, but I won’t promise that some entry can slip. It has been long since I had no blog, so it will be a new challenge to try to update it somehow regularly. Regarding my Debian work, I have to admit that I have become mostly a ‘package and upload’ guy. I don’t have enough spare time to devote to other tasks, so I will mostly try to keep my packages as clean as I can.

Not much to say. Just that I am back, now with a mixed English-Spanish blog. I will try to keep entries written in Spanish out of syndicated feed on Planet Debian, but I won’t promise that some entry can slip. It has been long since I had no blog, so it will be a new challenge to try to update it somehow regularly. Regarding my Debian work, I have to admit that I have become mostly a ‘package and upload’ guy. I don’t have enough spare time to devote to other tasks, so I will mostly try to keep my packages as clean as I can.

A recent news item is the “hacking” of the Yahoo mailbox used by Sarah Palin (the Republican VP candidate) [1]. It seems most likely that it was a simple social-engineering attack on the password reset process of Yahoo (although we are unlikely to learn the details unless the case comes to trial). The email address in question had been used for some time to avoid government data-retention legislation but had only been “hacked” after she was listed as the VP candidate. The reason of course is that most people don’t care much about who is the governor of one of the least populous US states. Remote attack on a mailbox (which is what we presume happened) is only one possible problem. Another of course is that of the integrity of the staff at the ISP. While I know nothing about what happens inside Yahoo, I have observed instances of unethical actions by employees at some ISPs where I have previously worked, I have no doubt that such people would have read the email of a VP candidate without any thought if they had sufficient access to do so. If an ISP stores unencrypted passwords then the way things usually work is that the helpdesk people are granted read access to the password data so that they can login to customer accounts to reproduce problems - this is a benefit for the customers in terms of convenience. But that also means that they can read the email of any customer at any time. I believe that my account on Gmail (the only webmail service I use) is relatively safe. I’m sure that there are a huge number of people who are more important than me who use Gmail. But if I was ever considered to have a reasonable chance of becoming Prime Minister then I would avoid using a Gmail account as a precaution. There is a rumoured Chinese proverb and curse in three parts:
May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for [2] In terms of your email, everyone who has root access to the machine which stores it (which includes employees of the companies that provide warranty service to all the hardware in the server room) and every help-desk person who can login to your account to diagnose problems is in a position of authority. Being merely one of thousands of customers (or millions of customers for a larger service) is a measure of safety. As for the “interesting times” issue, the Republican party is trying to keep the issue focussed on the wars instead of on the economy. The problem with basing a campaign on wars is that many people will come to the conclusion that the election is not about people merely losing some money, but people dying. This could be sufficient to convince people that the right thing to do is not to abide by the usual standards for ethical behavior when dealing with private data, but to instead try and find something that can be used to affect the result of an election. Mail that is not encrypted (most mail isn’t) and which is not transferred with TLS (so few mail servers support TLS that it hardly seems worth the effort of implementing it) can be intercepted at many locations (the sending system and routers are two options). But the receiving system is the easiest location. A big advantage for a hostile party in getting mail from the receiving system is that it can be polled quickly (an external attacker could use an open wireless access-point and move on long before anyone could catch them) and that if it is polled from inside the company that runs the mail server there is almost never any useful audit trail (if a sysadmin logs in to a server 10 times a day for real work reasons, and 11th login to copy some files will not be noticed). One of the problems with leaks of secret data is that it is often impossible to know whether they have happened. While there is public evidence of one attack on Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account, there is no evidence that it was the first attack. If someone had obtained the password (through an insider in Yahoo, or through a compromised client machine) then they could have been copying all the mail for months without being noticed. It seems to me that your choice of ISP needs to be partly determined by how many hostile parties will want to access your mail and what resources they may be prepared to devote to it. For a significant political candidate using a government email address seems like the best option, with the alternative being to use a server owned and run by the political party in question, if you can have the staff fired for leaking your mail then your email will be a lot safer!

• [1] http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-email-account-hacked


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times

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Has anyone noticed how loosely APT is maintained since about...several years? Michael Vogt is currently the person doing uploads and work but, being committed to other things (IIRC in Ubuntu...or in real life), he certainly can't devote enough time for this. Otavio Salvador helped from time to time, either merging patches or doing some uploads. Daniel Burrows contributed in some bugs, as he's obviously directly interested in APT, being the maintainer of aptitude. And I'm doing l10n maintenance... That's *all*. So, I don't fear saying that one of our key tools is badly maintained and not in the best shape it could be. I wish that some really good and experienced Debian developers get interested in it and, maybe, mentor some non DD's currently in the NM queue, instead of folks beiong encouraged to ITP any piece of crap they can find on sourceforge (sometimes, ITPs look like this to me). Think about it if you are an experienced C/C++ programmer. Another idea could be to devote some GSOC slots, next year, to bug triaging/fixing in such packages. Summer 2009 could be a good opportunity as Lenny is probably released by then and we'll be quite far from squeeze freeze, so heavily changing key package can be done.

RAM is the new Disk [1] - interesting post about using a distributed network of servers with RAM for main storage. The concept is that RAM on another machine can be accessed faster than local disk and that disk performance for contiguous IO has been increasing steadily at a greater rate than random seek performance. So disks can be used in a similar manner to tape drives (backing up data) and RAM can be used as main storage (2RU machines with 1TB of RAM are predicted soon). It is interesting to contrast this with the Rubik’s Cube solver which uses disk as RAM [2]. Interesting Sun Blog post about how ZFS uses flash based SSD (Solid State Disk) for read caching [3]. Yahoo has released a Firefox plugin named Yslow to tell you why your web site is slow [4]. This complements the Yahoo Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site document [5]. Amsterdam now has cargo trams [6]. This reduces pollution and traffic congestion while allowing efficient transport of cargo. The cargo trams tend to follow passenger trams so they don’t provide any additional obstacle to traffic. Interesting article by Cory Doctorow about how the standard formats limit creative content [7]. He makes the unfortunate mistake of claiming that “no one tries to make sitcoms about stories that take five minutes to tell” and “no one tries to make feature films about subjects that take 30 seconds to elucidate” - I think that the majority of sitcom episodes can be described in considerably less than 5 minutes and a significant number of movies (EG every one that stars Jean-Claude Van Damme [8]) can have their plot described in less than 30 seconds.

• [1] http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/06/ram-is-disk


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/06/24/rubiks-cube-io-bandwidth/


• [3] http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/test


• [4] http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/


• [5] http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html


• [6] http://www.citycargo.nl/faq_eng.htm


• [7] http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=479&doc_id=164252&


• [8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_damme

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I have previously written about how I refused an offer of a free iPhone [1] (largely due to it’s closed architecture). The first Google Android phone has just been announced, the TechCrunch review is interesting - while the built-in keyboard is a nice feature the main thing that stands out is the open platform [2]. TechCrunch says “From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply“. What I want is a phone that I control, and although most people don’t understand the issues enough to say the same, I think that they will agree in practice. In the 80’s the Macintosh offered significant benefits over PCs, but utterly lost in the marketplace because it was closed (less available software and less freedom). Due to being used in Macs and similar machines the Motorolla 68000 CPU family also died out, and while it’s being used in games consoles and some other niche markets the PPC CPU family (the next CPU used by Apple) also has an uncertain future. The IBM PC architecture evolved along with it’s CPU from a 16bit system to a 64bit system and took over the market because it does what users want it to do. I predict that the iPhone will be just as successful as the Macintosh OS and for the same reasons. The Macintosh OS still has a good share of some markets (it has traditionally been well accepted for graphic design and has always provided good hardware and software support for such use), and is by far the most successful closed computer system, but it has a small part of the market. I predict that the iPhone will maintain only a small share of the market. There will be some very low-end phones that have the extremely closed design that currently dominates the market, and the bulk of the market will end up going with Android or some other open phone platform that allows users to choose how their phone works. One issue that I think will drive user demand for control over their own phones is the safety issues related to child use of phones (I’ve written about this previously [3]). Currently phone companies don’t care about such things - the safety of customers does not affect their profits. But programmable phones allows the potential for improvements to be made without involving the phone company - while with iPhone you have Apple as the roadblock. Now having a small share of the mobile phone market could be very profitable, just as the small share of the personal computer market is quite profitable for Apple. But it does mean that I can generally ignore them as they aren’t very relevant in the industry.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/16/mobile-ssh-client/


• [2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/23/touching-the-android-its-no-iphone-but-its-close/


• [3] http://doc.coker.com.au/safety/mobile-phone-safety/

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Some months ago I came across Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine is a website that offers a collection of pre-loaded corpora in several languages and the ability to automatically extract collocation information from them among other things. You can get a 30-day free trial account if you want to check it out, the point is that I thought it was really cool, but it was a bit pricy, 55 euros/year for an individual and 1080 euros/year for a site (up to 50 employees and students) and these were the academic licenses!!! And I don’t even have any real need for it So I thought it would be an interesting project to do something similar, albeit just focusing in the ‘word sketching’ part, as described in this paper. After a weekend I got it working although I didn’t devote any second to make it look good as you can appreciate: Collocations and other stuff. For now only the corpus of the state of the union addresses is loaded, with almost 400000 words. You can select that corpus, click on sketch and get the sketch of any word, for example, the ‘word sketch’ for problem. We can see that the adjective used more times with ‘problem’ is ’serious’, although if we look at the relative frequency it’s ‘complex’. The verb which has ‘problem’ as object more times is ’solve’ followed by ‘approach’, ‘address’ and ‘deal’. You can also click on the numbers to see the actual sentences in which these words appear, for example, ’serious problem’. So how does it work? First of all it does part of speech tagging using Apertium. Once the text is POS-tagged we apply a set of ‘regular expression’-like rules to identify the relation between words, such as:

*DUAL
=a_modifier/modifies
2:[tag=adj] [tag=n] 0,2 1:[tag=n] [tag!=n]
This rule expresses the relation between adjectives and the nouns they modify, matching sentences like ‘the red ball‘ and ‘the red football ball‘. Each relation is stored in the database with extra info about position in the text. Once the database is created accessing it to display the sketch and concordance information is really simple. The site and auxiliary tools were written in around 1400 lines of Python/Django. I am still not sure about what to do with this, if there is anyone interested on adding some corpora to it, continue development or anything else, please let me know.

Aaaaaargh Aaaaaargh It's Gandhi not Ghandi. -- Jaldhar (not Jhaldar) obRevolution: Capitalism has been the most successful revolution of our times because it allows the greatest number of people the possibility to make their own revolutions if they want. (Or not if they don't want—a possibility which is never taken into account by wild-eyed beret wearers.)

Amaya writes about the fact that the political process in many countries is extremely flawed and is failing their citizens [1] (although she doesn’t actually express it in that way). She asks how a revolution can be done right. If we look at the historical record, after the French Revolution came the Reign of Terror [2], after the English Civil War Oliver Cromwell [3] took power - his actions are widely regarded as genocidal, and as for the Chinese and Russian revolutions - it seems that the majority of the population didn’t benefit much (if at all) from them. Generally it seems that the only times that a revolution seems to give a good result is when the situation was really bad before AND when the government failed basic measures such as ensuring food supplies. The independence for the Indian sub-continent which derived from Ghandi’s work can be used as a counter-example. However the ongoing low-level warfare between India and Pakistan is due to a failure of the process. It seems to me that the required first step towards changing a rotten political system with a minimum of bloodshed is to improve communications. If the majority of the citizens know what is really happening in their own country, how their standards of living compare with those in other countries, and what deals are made between their government and the governments of other countries then they can attempt to work out the best way to improve things. The free software community is already doing a good job of facilitating communications. The key areas are to have computers that act on behalf of their users (not using proprietary implementations and Digital Restrictions Management to make them act on behalf of corporations and the state), to support strong encryption with public implementations, to be generally as secure as possible, and to run on the cheapest possible hardware so that everyone gets access.

• [1] http://amayita.livejournal.com/187581.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Cromwell

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I am often asked for advice about purchasing TVs and consumer electronics. Not that I am any great expert in those areas, but my general experience in specifying and purchasing electronics goods in related to my computer work does translate to other areas (and I know where to find advice on the net). As part of this I get to closely observe what happens when people install new home entertainment systems. I have not observed anyone who uses anywhere near the full function of their system, even using the bare minimum functionality in all areas is very rare. I believe that the first problem with this is the input devices. A remote control is designed around the idea of one button for each high-level command, this can be compared to languages such as Chinese and Japanese which have one character per word. In terms of language evolution it seems that the benefits of having multiple characters became apparent and widely accepted thousands of years ago. Now for a simple input device having one button for each high-level operation makes sense. For the basic functions of a VCR you have PLAY, STOP, Fast-Forward, Rewind, Record, and Eject - 6 buttons is quite reasonable. But then you want slightly advanced features such as “record from 8PM to 9PM on channel A and then record from 10PM to 11PM on channel B” and things become unreasonably difficult. More than 10 years ago I was recommending that people just buy 5 hour tapes and press record before leaving home, getting the full functionality out of a VCR was just too hard. Jokes are often made about people who leave their VCR flashing 12:00 (because it’s too difficult to set the time), I only set the time on a VCR to stop the flashing (flashing lights annoy me). Since programmable VCRs became popular things have only continued to develop. Now it’s not uncommon to have separate remote controls for the TV, VCR, DVD player, and the Cable TV box - a total of four remote controls! This is obviously a problem, and the solution that some people are adopting is to have a single more complex remote control - this is an example of problems not being solved by the same type of thinking that caused them. One of the attempts to solve this is to have everything controlled by a PVR [1]. This means that you have one device recording content (maybe from multiple sources or multiple channels), playing recorded content or live content, and maybe playing DVDs and CDs. Of course then you have a complex remote control for that device which just shifts the problem. To solve these problems we need to consider the entire problem space from a high-level. We start with the signal that is displayed by the TV, it can come from cable TV, digital TV, analogue TV, VCR, or DVD - these input sources have names such as “Composite”, “RCA1″, “RCA2″, “RCA3″, “DTV”, and “ATV”. Often people have written instructions near their TV to map these names to what they do. Obviously the TV needs to be able to be programmed with human friendly names, and as these names are not of much use on their own it should be possible to use compound names and abbreviations. If I want to watch ABC (the Australian Government sponsored TV channel) then I would rather type “ABC” on a keyboard and then have the entertainment system determine whether that maps to “cable:abc”, “dtv:abc”, or “atv:abc” depending on what options are available. The current process of choosing an input source (such as RCA1 mapping to cable TV) and then choosing a channel (102 mapping to ABC) means among other things that it is essentially impossible for a guest to control the TV. A further problem is the lack of available output. While it might seem that a large-screen HDTV has adequate output available, it’s often the case that you don’t want to stop watching one show while trying to find another. When something of wide interest is happening (another war or an election) it’s common for several people in one room to want to watch the news. Having everyone stop watching while someone goes through menus to find a different news channel is not well accepted. It seems to me that we need a separate output mechanism for controlling the entire system from that which is used for the main display. This of course requires integration between all parts of the entertainment system, which shouldn’t be that difficult given the complexity of all the components (every one of which has more compute power than a typical server of 20 years ago). It is currently quite common for PVRs and DVD players to support playing videos from USB and SD devices, so the next logical step is to get an Ethernet port in each device (and maybe have Ethernet switches built in to some of the high-end entertainment hardware). Then XML transferred over HTTP could be used for controlling the different components from a single web server which provides a web-based GUI. While a random guest would not get much functionality out of my TV configuration (or that of most homes where I have assisted in the configuration of new hardware), they shuold be able to use a web-based GUI with ease. For controlling the entire system a NetBook [2] computer such as the EeePC should do well. As high-end TVs cost over $5,000 an EeePC which costs $500 (list price - surely less in bulk) could easily be bundled without much impact on the overall price in the same way that companies selling computers in the $1,000,000 price range used to bundle $10,000 workstations to manage them. An EeePC has abut the same size and mass as four remote controls (so it wouldn’t be inconvenient to use). Also the built-in wifi could be used for the remote control (wires are inconvenient and Infra-Red has limited bandwidth so probably wouldn’t provide a good web based GUI). Also someone who wanted to save some money could instead choose to use an old laptop on a coffee table (any web browser would do). I have deployed Linux desktop machines for some people who had no trouble using it, but who then had trouble using TVs that I configured for them - so I conclude that a modern Linux distribution is significantly more user friendly than the equipment that you find in a modern lounge room. Cable TV companies all seem to be ISPs and often provide compelling value as an ISP service if you want to use the TV service. So it seems that the “Cable Modem” could be built in to the Cable TV box for added savings in hardware purchase and less boxes to manage in the home. This of course would increase the value of a NetBook [2] as a remote control as it could also be used for general Internet access at the same time. TV shows often promote their web sites to their customers and TV advertising also often includes a URL. If the URLs were distributed by VideoText then that would provide more information for the viewers, a better reach for advertisers and people who create the TV shows, and it when it became popular it would save us fom those stupid scrolling news tickers that appear on the bottom of most cable new shows! Some of these benefits are currently achieved by people running MythTV. The first problem with Myth is that it is still largely stuck to the bad old UI paradigm (which of course can be fixed as it’s free software). The next problem is that getting a result of comparable quality to the dedicated hardware is expensive, difficult, or both. A regular PC makes more noise than you desire in your lounge room and configuring a Myth machine for your choice of DTV hardware and the frequencies used in your location is a pain. You can buy a preconfigured machine which solves these problems, but it will be more expensive. For most lounge rooms the cheap Chinese hardware is what will be used. Ultimately I believe that TV will be killed by the Internet. The range of content on the net is increasing and the rate of acceleration is also increasing. TV seems to have not made any significant changes since the introduction of cable and satellite TV (both of which happened a long time ago and were not significant changes). But I don’t expect it to happen soon. I predict another 10 years of the current TV business model. I believe that better integration of home entertainment hardware so that it can obey simpler commands from the user in a more friendly manner while not getting in the way of the main purpose (displaying the TV picture) has the potential to extend the life of the current TV business model. Not that I care whether the TV industry dies sooner or later. I just want to escape from having to provide phone-support to people who can’t get their TV to work correctly!

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_video_recorder


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook

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I hearby now call for Revolution, that is how angry and radikal I have really become


Angry about things like the Russian bombings that Madduck blogged about, that so closely ressemble September 11 or Pearl Harbour.
Radikal about the greed that kills both the planet, and the people in it.




I think it is about time for another Weather Underground but, this time, well done [IMDB] [Wikipedia] [torrent].


That is where the question lies. How is a Revolution done right?

OK, it's still running Linpus Lite and yum but that's enough to get things like drivel and ssh installed. Add in xchat-gnome and it's quite usable. The whole machine bounces around quite insanely when I'm typing this blog entry on my lap, though.
pilot-qof and a bit of XSL from the data-freedom package from the same source, allows easy import of ICS calendar data and VCF contact data.
Aspire Mail is clearly based on evolution.
I'll live with Linpus (sounds freakishly similar to lupus - or maybe that is just my medical bias) for a month or so - I'll get Debian on this sometime before my return to Extremadura.

I apply (2007-07-26)
I am advocated (2007-07-26)
Mail from FD(myon) (2007-08-12)
I reply (2007-08-15)
FD(myon) says OK (2007-08-17)
AM assigned (2007-12-05)
First mails from my AM(white) (2007-12-06)
ID check done (2007-12-07)
P&P1 check done (2007-12-21)
P&P2 check done (2008-01-17)
T&S1 check done (2008-05-04)
T&S2 check done (2008-05-13)
AM report (2008-05-13)
FD(wouter) check done (2008-07-23)
DAM(myon) approval (2008-09-03)
Account created by DSA(weasel) (2008-09-08)
Debian Beer/Pastis Party in Marseille (2008-09-15) Thanks to all Debian people in particular opal, lmamane, white, madcoder, myon, wouter and weasel.

Continuing from yesterday's post, I beutified the script's code and made it able to take multiple files as input, and added support for Sources files. Additionally, I've added it to my misc-devscripts repository and pushed it.

---

So, the list of packages with most build (+ indep) dependencies for sid as of today:

openoffice.org:107 (no surprise)
jifty:107
vlc:72
gcj-4.3:59
xorg-server:59
gcc-snapshot:59
gcj-4.2:57
debian-installer:57
control-center:54
evolution:52
wine:51
mplayer:51
gnome-applets:51
totem:51
gpc-4.1:49
php5:48
gcc-4.3:48
gcc-4.1:46
gnat-4.1:46
libcatalyst-modules-perl:46

For those interested in the script, it can be downloaded from:

http://git.debian.org/?p=users/atomo64-guest/misc-devscripts.git;a=blob_plain;f=countPkgsDeps.pl;hb=HEAD

or the whole git repo can be cloned from: git://git.debian.org/git/users/atomo64-guest/misc-devscripts.git