You may remember, a while ago, Mark Shuttleworth announced that there would be a 100% free version of Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon :

Ubuntu 7.10 will feature a new flavour - as yet unnamed - which takes an ultra-orthodox view of licensing: no firmware, drivers, imagery, sounds, applications, or other content which do not include full source materials and come with full rights of modification, remixing and redistribution.

Later, we learned it would be named Gobuntu. Well, they didn’t quite follow their promise. Yes, Gobuntu includes Firefox, making it a pretty useless failed attempt. By the way, I’m still amazed so many people believe it was all about the trademarks. For them, I’ll quote something I wrote a year ago:

Trademark and copyright are different things. Mozilla has unnecessarily given a non-free license to clarify the trademark situation, but that is not required. To make it clear: Debian thinks the logos are not free because they are not free. Period.

I’m glad at least Mark Pilgrim got it right. Update: And as seen on Planet Mozilla, Robert Sayre obviously still hasn’t understood the issue.

It's been a while since I wanted to post about a project I started.
But today when I read Russell Coker's post about his SE Linux repository I decided it was time to blog about DeBaBaReTools.

---

So, what is/are DeBaBaReTools?
is: a project which tries to unify different packages-building systems (pbuilder, buildd, etc) and different repository tools (debarchiver, reprepro, etc) in a single system by providing an incoming/ system.

are: Debian Bash-Based Repository Tools.

Or in other words:
DeBaBaReTools handles new packages by:

• Verifying (signature, size, md5 sums)
  
• Building (packages are listed to be built under certain architectures and then an other set of scripts take care of building them, so different build systems and hosts can be used)
  
• Installing (by making use of a tool which handles the repository itself, e.g. reprepro)
  

DeBaBaReTools is NOT a rewrite of a repository tool (like reprepro, debpool or debarchiver), neither yet an other building tool (like buildd or pbuilder). It is rather a glue between those two kind of tools.

So, how does DeBaBaReTools work?
As already said, they are a set of scripts which do all the work.
These are some of the scripts (more might be written later, they are under development):

• checkSums: just like but doesn't allow the signatures check to be skipped (not really a feature), it uses gpgv and only uses the keyrings specified by KEYRING rather than using the debian-keyring keyring if installed. Available checks (in order): signature, size, md5sum
  
• processIncoming: it takes care of checking the files in pub/UploadQueue, moving them to accepted (and soon to rejected or new), and running the repository's commands to install the packages from incoming/. It also takes care of moving the source/packages to incoming/ when necessary. Packages are verified by checkSums before moving anything to accepted
  
• needsBuild: this script processes .changes and .dsc files in accepted/ and marks them to be built on the architectures supported by the repository.
  
• wannaBuild: processes the packages that need to be built and calls the given build system (pbuilder, buildd, etc), and installs (and soon upload) them to the UploadQueue so they are processed by processIncoming and then installed in the repository.
  
• wannaLock (not yet written): this script will take care of managing a distributed package building lock system
  
• wannaUpload (not yet written): this script will take care of uploading/installing the built packages to the UploadQueue directory of the repository (will use dput, and similar).
  
• needsReBuild (not yet written): will test all packages with edos-debcheck and mark the packages to be rebuilt when necessary. This feature will not be in needsBuild because of the long run it requires and also because of some checks performed by needsBuild.
  

Note that at the moment these are the only supported backends: gpgv, du, md5sums (all built in checkSums), pbuilder and reprepro.

Sounds interesting, doesn't it? :)

So, here's the magic:

The backends system
DeBaBaReTools doesn't try to re-invent the wheel, but it makes use of all the available tools so it works as less as possible.

This is where the backends take action. They are even more shell (even tough DeBaBaReTools clearly specifies they are Bash scripts they should work on any other POSIX-compatible shell) scripts which are loaded on demand and according to the user settings.

This opens a wide range of possible combinations of backends; making DeBaBaReTools work with almost anything.

The probe.sh script searches different directories for the specified backend (and will soon support user-hinted backends).

I think an example says more than a thousand words:
When needsBuild finds a package that needs to be built in a given architecture, the toBuild shell function is called. In order to provide the already said flexibility, needsBuild will at startup time call probeFile "buildQueue" which will then check several directories for the required backend (buildQueue in this case). Once it finds the given backend (backends/buildQueue/) it will check for any user hint (which will specify the real backend to be used) and then for a default one (default.sh which is a symlink to a real backend, plaintext.sh by default).

So, if somebody at some point wants to use a sqlite database to store all that information, that person would have to write a file called backends/buildQueue/sqlite.sh (or make it available in any of the include paths which can be extended via the EXTRA_PROBE_DIRS env variable) and either set a user hint or make default.sh point to it.
The sqlite.sh script can then call any external tools (or even more scripts) to insert the information in the database, read it and more.

I know this is a lot of blahblahblah but no single line of code is shown.
I've already requested an alioth project but it was denied because the package isn't already in the Debian archive.
If you are a DD and you think this sounds like a good project please contact the Alioth admins and convince them to create a project account for DeBaBaReTools.
Once created, many other people will be able to work on it and make it work with virtually any tool.

Any kind of feedback is very welcomed but I hope they are constructive ideas.

Why did I start this crazy project?
Because AFAIR only dak is able to do such job but I think dak is just too complex for a simple system to manage an a repository with an incoming system. And AFAIK there's no script which is able to do this job besides dak.

I hope this post makes sense because I don't want to review it again (I'm tired) :)

:bye: all

deb http://www.coker.com.au etch selinux The above sources.list line has all the i386 packages needed for running SE Linux with strict policy on Etch as well as a couple of packages that are not strictly needed but which are really convenient (to solve the executable stack issue). gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key F5C75256
gpg -a --export F5C75256 apt-key add - To use it without warnings you need to download and install my GPG key, the above two commands do this. You will of course have to verify my key in some way to make sure that it has not been replaced in a MITM attack. The only thing missing is a change to /etc/init.d/udev to have a new script called /sbin/start_udev used to replace the make_extra_nodes function (so that the make_extra_nodes functionality can run in a different context). Of course a hostile init script could always exploit this to take over the more privileged domain, but I believe that running the init scripts in a confined domain does produce some minor benefits against minor bugs (as opposed to having the init scripts entirely owned). I back-ported all the SE Linux libraries from unstable because the version in Etch doesn’t support removing roles from a user definition by the “semanage user -m” command (you can grant a user extra roles but not remove any roles). Trying to determine where in the libraries this bug occurred was too difficult. Does anyone know of a good document on how to create repositories with apt-ftparchive? My current attempts are gross hacks but I’ve gone live anyway as the package data is good and the apt configuration basically works.

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Now available from alioth: debtree 0.7.1. The main change is the addition of a fairly comprehensive man page. Reviews of the man page would be most welcome. Having the man page also finally allowed me to file an ITP. Funny that this will be my first actual package in the archive. All my uploads so far have been team maintained D-I components and some NMUs.

There are currently some adverts on Trams in Melbourne for some sort of community organisation. They have an amusing picture of an “Amazon” character from an RPG with statistics such as Self Esteem at zero. They have a web site at www.reachoutcentral.com.au which firstly tries to launch a popup window (did the web designers not notice that almost everyone blocks popups?) then uses a refresh for a redirect (with a message to click on an icon if it doesn’t work) and finally demands that Flash be installed. So someone who is in need of whatever counselling the Inspire Foundation (the organisation that registered the domain) offers is likely to be told that their computer is not adequate, I’m sure that they’ll appreciate that. As will the visually impaired people who will get even less out of the site. Is the web site offering a service that might tend to be needed by people who don’t have the latest computer gear and can’t run the latest version of Flash? It’s not only Linux users who are unwilling or unable to use Flash, older Windows installations also apparently have problems. Are people who can’t afford a broadband net connection likely to need the service in question? Dial-up network access is cheaper (and many people will be hesitant to visit a web site related to personal problems in a public place such as an Internet Cafe).

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I love traveling but I have to concede that having aKademy-es in my own city (and five minutes away from my home) is quite convenient It will be great to meet again with the Spanish KDE crew. As Albert said, we’ll have talks, coding and party, and as a local I’ll try to make sure the latter is properly taken care of See you here!

Note: red underlined links are clickable flickr photo page for this post

Note: red underlined links are clickable flickr photo page for this post

A common practice in the blog space is to write posts that ask a question in the hope that someone else will answer it via a comment or a post. This is known as a “Lazyweb Post”. It seems to me that the way of managing such posts could be improved with a little informal cooperation. From now on I plan to tag each Lazyweb post with a Lazyweb Tag, now any reader of my blog can with a single click see all the unanswered lazyweb posts that I have written (I will remove the tag once an adequate answer has been provided or I have discovered and documented the solution myself). Almost all bloggers want to get more traffic to their blogs, the question is how to get traffic of the nature that you desire. Links from blogs that you like are a preferred source of traffic. If a blogger that you would like to receive a link from has a lazyweb tag or category then it provides a good list of ideas for post topics that will get you the links you desire. Such lists would also be good for determining what information is not generally available and which therefore can be used for the topics of original posts. Such tags or categories should also be good for getting answers to lazyweb posts. I’ll start doing this and see how well it takes off.

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I currently follow a few Debian mailing lists by scanning the list archives instead of being subscribed. I find that makes it a lot easier to not read everything and to resist the temptation to reply. I've also started following the linux-kernel mailing list, which has anywhere between 100 and 600 posts per day (and next to no spam). First through the archives at lkml.org; later I tried subscribing but that resulted in drowning in mail and some issues with the "ignore/watch threads" option in kmail made me unsubscribe again after a few days. I ended up subscribing to the linux.kernel news group instead, which works well as it's quite easy to tag threads 'ignore' and filter out ignored threads. In both cases the problem was that sometimes you do want to reply to a post, but how to do that without breaking the thread? My news reader is not smart enough that I can tell it to use the original mail headers, and for the list archives a solution is even less obvious. So I wrote a little script that allows me to just paste the subject and headers of a post directly from the Debian list archives. For the kernel list I configured my news reader to display some of the original mail headers, so I can also just paste those. The script will then parse the pasted info and generate correct Subject, To, CC, In-reply-To and References headers. With a few extra lines of code it even generates correct replies to bug reports. After that the script just calls 'mail' with the correct options which asks me to type/paste the body of the mail. Problem solved. So, just in case D-I colleagues were wondering if maybe I'd resubscribed to the d-boot list, the answer is "no".

Why do we shop over the Internet? Why do we let ourselves be treated like cattle in ways? The other day, I won an eBay auction and was notified shortly afterwards by the seller ("smile_plus168") that the item was not in stock anymore. So why did you list it, you muppet? If I retract my bid on eBay, I get punished for it, but sellers can do what they like? It was the icing on the cake to then receive the following note from the seller:

Would you pls still give me a positive feedback to me .pls don't worry about yours ,once you given it to me ,my ebay system will give you the same by AUTO.

Are you out of your mind? Then I got a note from an Amazon seller ("e-bug.de"), filled with spelling and grammar errors and letting me know that

unfortunately, the number of articles in stock was not enough to ship one out to you.

I got refunded in both cases, but still feel let down. I find it unacceptable that such asymmetry exists. After all, clicking that "Yes, I agree" button is making a binding contract, just like putting an item up for sale. If you don't have the item, you can't sell it. Seems like standard merchandising 101. NP: Oceansize: Frames

It is clear to me that a “clearinghouse site” for complaints against Blue Cross Blue Shield would yield a lot of traffic. My post complaining about my problems with BCSJ Horizon of NJ has received constant comments with people posting their horror stories. I have not moved to create such a site yet, because I am hoping that the outcome of my appeal will be positive and that I can report that going through the appeal process as they set up can lead to fair and just outcome. But the frustrating thing is 3 emails and 2 phone calls placed this and last week to inquire simply about the status of my appeal has been met with a wall of silence. Frustrating…. I am going to try to contact them again this week and if not… I will have to file another complaint with the dept of Banking and Insurance over their inability to respond to me about the appeal process.

Well I somehow expected it will happen to me when I started to use Debian experimental distribution, but now it really happened. I noticed that last Gammu upload went to unstable instead of experimental just when today updating my other development machine and I was surprised that Gammu is going to be updated. Well the version is not that bad, but it is far from being stable. Anyway it is good for something - unstable users will do much more testing than experimental ones ;-).

A few days ago, I wrote about my recent purchase of an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter built in 1944. Terah and I were at an antique store, and it was $25 and sorta an impulse buy.

Since then, something unexpected has happened: I'm getting interested in using manual typewriters.

I've been busily tracking down ribbons (Nukote BW277 doesn't work on it, even though their website says it does), typing paper (business-supplies.com has it at a decent price with free overnight shipping on most orders over $50), and various tidbits of knowledge (such as: what does the lever numbered 0 to 6 beneath the right ribbon spool do?)

Today I went to a local office supply store. Not OfficeMax or OfficeDepot -- they do carry ribbons for typewriters of this era, but not the right ones for my particular machine. But the store that has been owned by the same family since it opened in 1899 on Main Street, where it remains.

And, surprise, they had the ribbon I need!

It seems that typewriters are experiencing a certain resurgence in popularity. People that have computers -- and perhaps never knew a world without them -- are buying typewriters. Because of interest, novelty, or even usefulness. There are quite a few typewriter repair shops that still exist, most of them happy to work on typewriters up to a century old.

So why am I excited about it?

Part of it is the fun of making a really old piece of technology work.

Perhaps part of it is knowing that I'll be typing at a machine that was built the same year as D-Day, the year when the first German city fell in World War II. Part of it is knowing that this 40-pound machine was built to last, in an era before planned obsolescence. And, to a certain extent, it has outlasted its manufacturer.

Part of it is curiosity: will I write differently on a typewriter than a computer? It seems that most people that have tried both say that their writing is different on a typewriter, and often better. Perhaps it is the difficulty of editing that forces more rigorous thought up front.

Christopher Watkins wrote:

[Manual typewriters] just plain shame me into working. As with any fine instrument, they're made to be used, their very design bespeaks this, and there's been many a night I've caught one of my typewriters glaring sternly at me from the shadows, implicating me in a grand failure to honor their structural destinies. Chagrined and challenged, I dutifully sit down to see what I can do to contribute to the machine-age legacy I've been called on to uphold. . .

When you sit down to write a song at the piano, you're going to write differently than if you have a banjo in your lap. And if one instrument isn't bringing the magic and the muse, maybe another will. Typewriters are the same; they make me write in a different fashion, and also provide an alternate trigger for inspiration. And as an electric guitar is different from an acoustic steel-string guitar is different from a nylon-string classical guitar is different from a national steel resonator guitar; so does each individual typewriter differ. My Underwood is different from my Royal is different from my Remington is different from my Corona is different from my Hermes. And if one isn't giving me the juice, another might.

Brian Drake added (emphasis mine):

Or you print out the document again because someone misplaced it. Misplaced it! When we were on typewriters, let me tell you, no one misplaced a hundred-page contract! That meant another two days of typing, and tying up at least two secretaries to get it done then. . .

Gore Vidal said he could tell when a book had been written on a word processor. I can, too. Sometimes I can see the cut-and-paste.

I've worked as a professional proofreader and copyeditor, and I can attest that the computer has not led to better writing. What it has led to is more writing, acres and acres of it. Books have grown fatter and fatter while their content grows slimmer and slimmer.

These seem to resonate well. More typewriter essays here.

And perhaps a typewritten blog post or two, once I try out my new ribbon.

Danny Angus writes about the potential threat posed by small storage devices with large capacity [1]. His post was prompted by a BBC article about Hitachi’s plans for new hard drives [2], they are aiming for 4TB of data on a single drive by 2011 and a 1TB laptop drive. One thing I noticed about the article is that they made the false claim that current drives are limited to 1TB, the storage capacity is determined by the total surface area which is proportional to the square of the radius and the height of the drive (AFAIK there are no practical limits to the number of platters apart from the height of the drive). So if a 5.25 inch hard drive was to be manufactured with today’s technology it should get a capacity equivalent to at least three times the capacity of the larger 3.5 inch drive. The reason that 5.25 inch drives are not manufactured is that for best performance you want multiple spindles so that multiple operations can be performed concurrently. Using 3.5 inch drives in servers allows the use of more disks for the same amount of space in the rack and the same amount of power. The latest trend is towards 2.5 inch (Small Form Factor AKA SFF) disks for servers to allow more drives for better performance. With 3.5 inch disks a 1U system was limited to 3 disks and a 2U system was often limited to 4 or 5 disks. But with 2.5 inch drives a 2U server can have 10 drives or more. I know of one hardware vendor that plans to entirely cease using 3.5 inch drives and claims that 2.5 inch disks will give better performance, capacity, and power use! In regard to Danny’s claim (which is entirely correct) about the threat posed by insiders. I don’t believe that a laptop with 1TB of capacity is the threat. In a server room people notice where laptops get connected and there are often strictly enforced policies about connecting machines that don’t belong to the company. I believe that the greatest threat is posed by USB flash devices. For example let’s consider a database with customer name (~20B), birth-date (10B), address (~80B), phone number (~12B), card type (1B), card number (16B), card expiry (5B), and card CVV code (3B). That’s ~155 bytes per record in CSV or TSV format. If you have data for a million customers that’s 155M uncompressed and probably about 50M when compressed with gzip or WinZip (depending on which platform is being ripped). No-one even sells a USB flash device that is smaller than 50M, I recently bought a 2G flash device that was physically very small and cheap (it was in the bargain bin). The next issue is, what data might be worth stealing that is large enough to not fit on a USB device? I guess that if you want to copy entire network file shares from a corporation then you would need more than the 16G that seems to be the maximum capacity of a USB device at the moment. Another theoretical possibility would be to copy the entire mail spool of a medium to large ISP. For the case of a corporate file server you could probably get the data at reasonable speed, 1TB of data would take 10,000 seconds or 2.8 hours to transfer at gigabit Ethernet speeds (if you max out a GigE link - it could be as much as five times that if the network is congested or if the server is slow). It’s doable, but it would be a rather tense three or more hours waiting by an illegally connected laptop. For the mail server of a large ISP there is often no chance of getting anywhere near line speed, it’s lots of small reads and seek performance is the bottleneck, such servers are usually running close to capacity (and trying to copy data fast would hurt performance and draw unwanted attention). Another possibility might be to copy the storage of an Intranet search device. If a company has a Google appliance or similar device indexing much of their secret data then copying the indexes would be very useful. It would allow offline searches of the corporate data to prepare a list of files to retrieve later. It would probably be more useful to get online access to the data from a remote site. I expect that an unethical person could sell remote access to someone who is out of range of extradition. All that would be required would be to intentionally leave a flaw in the security of the system. In most large corporations this could be done in a way that is impossible to prove. For example if management decrees that the Internet servers run some software that is known to be of low quality then a hostile insider could make configuration changes to increase the risk - it would look like an innocent mistake if the problem was ever discovered (the blame would entirely go to the buggy software and the person who recommended it). A large part of the solution to this problem is to hire good employees. The common checks performed grudgingly by financial companies are grossly inadequate for this. Checking whether a potential employee has a criminal record does not prevent hiring criminals, it merely prevents hiring unsuccessful criminals and people who have not yet been tempted enough! The best way to assess whether HR people are being smart about this is to ask them for an estimate of how many criminals are employed by the company. If you have a company that’s not incredibly small then it’s inevitable that some criminals will be employed. Anyone who thinks that it is possible to avoid hiring criminals simply isn’t thinking about the issues. I may write more about this issue in a future post. Another significant part of the solution to the problem is to grant minimum privileges to access data. Everyone should only be granted access to data that they need for their work so that the only people who can really compromise the company are senior managers and sys-admins, and for best security different departments or groups should have different sys-admin teams and separate server rooms. Of course this does increase the cost of doing business, and probably most managers would rather have it be cheap than secure.

• [1] http://blog.killerbees.co.uk/2007/10/all-your-data-are-belong-to-us.html


• [2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7044606.stm

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On 19th and 20th of October 2007 takes place “Les 9 mes Journ es Du Logiciel Libre” in Lyon, France, around the topics “Individual freedom and free software” and “Free Software for everyone”, the first of which will be analyzed from different point of views: legal, technical, historical, artistic, and others. The second will be addressed through different talks, covering many different aspects and areas of interests, including games. I’ve never been to Lyon before, I’ve been told it’s a really cute city, and I’m really looking forward to see you all, french guys, again there.

I just read a nutty post claiming that Neo-Conservatism is good for the environment [1]. The first bogus claim is that Saddam had WMD and war was required because he was a despot. The fact is that the Iraqi government was always repressive, there are many factions in Iraq that don’t like each other and a repressive government is the only way to keep such groups in a united country. The current civil war in Iraq and the effective secession of Kurdistan (which currently seems to be involved in an undeclared border war with Turkey) demonstrates this. Saddam was always a despot, but he did improve the living conditions of most Iraqis - the best way to avoid a revolution is to convince the majority of the population that things will get worse if there is change. I suggest reading the Wikipedia page about Saddam Hussein [2]. The best information on Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) seems to be on the conservative military analysis site Defense and the National Interest [7]. It covers all the issues related to invading other countries from a conservative point of view. Note that Neo-Conservatives are not Conservatives, the real Conservatives hate the Neo-Cons more than anyone else does. The amusing statement is made that “apologists claim it was one of the most advanced Arab nations” and then a link is provided to information on Saudi Arabian censorship. It’s worth reading the wikipedia page about the history of Saudi Arabia [3], among other interesting facts “the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry” (does the US army share responsibility for the censorship?). It’s widely regarded that if the US military support was removed then the Saudi government would be overthrown. Referring to Saudi Arabia hardly seems like something you want to do if trying to justify occupying other middle-eastern states. An unsubstantiated claim is made that under-developed countries produce excess pollution due to inefficient technology. Unlike some people I try to get some facts before posting so I looked up the wikipedia page on CO2 emissions per capita [4]. It seems that the highest ranking first-world country is Luxembourg at #4, the next is the US at #10. The countries on the list that rank higher than the US have a combined population of about 11,000,000 while the US population is 302,000,000 - some quite mental arithmetic suggests that the US produces about 20 times more CO2 than the top 9 countries on the list combined! It doesn’t seem that having the highest technology is helping the US protect the environment, I guess that they just use it to build bigger cars. The next thing I noticed is the countries that are at the bottom of the list - they are the world’s poorest countries. It seems that countries without much money just can’t afford to burn lots of oil, while countries with lots of money can. No real surprises there. The lowest ranking on the list for a country that is unlikely to be regarded as being in abject poverty is India at position #133. The next lowest is Turkey at position #98 followed by China at #91. As a final point of reference Switzerland is at position #69 a produces just under 27% the CO2 that the US does (on a per-capita basis). According to the CIA World Fact Book Switzerland has an infant mortality rate of 4.28/1000 and a life expectancy of 80.62 [5], while the US has an infant mortality rate of 6.37/1000 and a life expectancy of 78 [6]. I believe that the infant mortality rate and the life expectancy are the two factors that are most representative of quality of life as they are the easiest factors for measuring the overall health of the population. Being healthy is one of the most important factors in quality of life. It seems to me that by all objective measures the Swiss are doing better than the people of the US, yet they produce less pollution and never invade other countries. Probably the most ridiculous statement in the post is “see rapidly dwindling resources wasted on jihad and revolution“. A revolution (locals using force to create a new government) takes little resources and most actions that a more simple-minded analysis might call “jihad” takes almost none. Sending an invasion force to the other side of the world and supporting an occupying army for years does however use significant resources, consider that the Hummvee is the least fuel-efficient vehicle on American roads in terms of work done (trucks and buses use more fuel but carry large amounts of cargo or many people), but it’s also the most fuel-efficient vehicle used by the US army in Iraq. There is the possibility that Jaldhar was attempting satire. If so then I suggest that satire be kept separate from serious web content to avoid confusion about where the satire ends. But if you want some satire about oil then I suggest consulting theonion.com. Before someone accuses me of being impolite, over a year ago the best estimate for the death toll from the occupation of Iraq was 655,000 [8]. Current extrapolations from the previous medical research suggest that the death toll has now exceeded 1,000,000. Regardless of whether the original post was intended as satire or not, I’m not laughing and I don’t feel the need to be polite to someone who makes excuses for such loss of life. Finally as a positive suggestion towards the environment (and any other issue that you may want to discuss), I suggest analysing the issues before writing about them and not blindly trusting other people. When you write a post make objective claims with references to back them up. When you read a post consider the points that are made and the references that are cited. Do the references support the claims? Are there other interpretations of the evidence? Are the reference sites reputable?

• [1] http://www.braincells.com/debian/index.cgi/search/item=176


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


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


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita


• [5] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sz.html


• [6] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html


• [7] http://www.d-n-i.net/


• [8] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6040054.stm

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Next semester I am teaching one (yay one) course and it is a graduate course on digital media. This is the description I have so far and I will post the tentative syllabus in the next few week.

Computers, especially in their networked dimension, have sparked a series of ethical, political, and social debates that often revolve around a series of stark and connected dualities: control and freedom; pleasure and exploitation; creativity and constraint. In this course we will approach topics in digital media via an historical angle that squarely addresses these dualities. To this end, we will often cross-cut readings on similar topics and material whose conclusion about the nature of computing will often vary considerably. The goal, however, is not to determine the correct or right side of these dualities but have students come away with a firm understanding of the following: 1) the history of computing and networking in light of the ways the authors as well as technologists/inventors construct or understand these dualities; 2) the various sources technological, social, and political that may shape or drive any of these elements; 3) unpack the political and social relationships, if any, between them and the stakes involved in how these authors represent the nature of computing and networking. The course primarily concentrates on computers and networks and is roughly chronological, starting with the first digital computers and ending with our digital present. Particular topics we address are: cybernetics and liberalism; networks and the cold war; personal computers and online communities; hackers, the free software movement and intellectual property; labor, development, and computers; peer-to-peer knowledge production; computer gaming; and counter-globalization and computer networking.

This arises from upgrading a cross-built package where the prerm maintainer script wanted to use install-info and as Emdebian doesn't use info or man pages, the prerm script failed. I'd already removed the same from postinst but got this little comment from dpkg when I installed an upgraded package on the Balloon3 ARM board:
dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 127
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
dpkg: ... it looks like that went OK.

Nice trick!

Emdebian postinst patch.

This is the full apt output:

/ # apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
apt
The following packages will be upgraded:
busybox libreadline5 readline-common
3 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 563kB of archives.
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Get:1 http://buildd.emdebian.org unstable/main readline-common 5.2-3em3 [1882B]
Get:2 http://buildd.emdebian.org unstable/main libreadline5 5.2-3em3 [249kB]
Get:3 http://buildd.emdebian.org unstable/main busybox 1:1.1.3-5em2 [312kB]
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(Reading database ... 489 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace readline-common 5.2-3em2 (using .../readline-common_5.2-3em3_all.deb) ...
/var/lib/dpkg/info/readline-common.prerm: /var/lib/dpkg/info/readline-common.prerm: 3: install-info: not found
dpkg: warning - old pre-removal script returned error exit status 127
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
dpkg: ... it looks like that went OK.
Unpacking replacement readline-common ...
Preparing to replace libreadline5 5.2-3em2 (using .../libreadline5_5.2-3em3_arm.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement libreadline5 ...
Preparing to replace busybox 1:1.1.3-5em1 (using .../busybox_1%3a1.1.3-5em2_arm.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement busybox ...
Setting up readline-common (5.2-3em3) ...
Setting up libreadline5 (5.2-3em3) ...
Setting up busybox (1:1.1.3-5em2) ...

This is inside a chroot on the Balloon3 board using cross-built packages from the Emdebian target repository. The chroot was created with the 'emsandbox' utility from emdebian-tools 0.4.1 (due for upload to Emdebian tonight) and a little manual help. A few more tweaks to the relevant packages are needed before the chroot (and therefore a root filesystem for Emdebian) can be installed without assistance.

So, I finished graduate school at MIT. I presented some of my thesis work at Wikimania and I'll be posting information, code, and the thesis itself, in the next weeks as I find time. I've decided to focus, at least in the immediate future, on several important projects. Here's what I'm up to:

• I am a "Senior Researcher" at the MIT Sloan School of Management with the economist Eric von Hippel who I'm now working with regularly. I am working on issues around the production of free software, open technologies, and free culture.
• After working on the project for free over the last 3 years, I'm now doing contract work for OLPC. So far, I've rewritten the on-laptop content library software. I also plan to pursue the concept of "view source" on the laptop and to write an activity with a bunch of basic tools for doing science. Finally, OLPC is supporting me to continue my thesis work in the context of the laptop.
• I have taken a position as a Fellow at the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media. It's a great new project started by folks I worked with as a graduate student. I'll be using the center to bring forward Selectricity and to support some new projects as well.

This is, of course, in addition to my work with FSF, Debian, and Ubuntu which I'll be continuing. And talks. And writing. (Yikes!) I'll be keeping my office at MIT (yes, like RMS) for the time being and sticking around Cambridge at least until Mika finishes her degree at Harvard School of Public Health. I'll be in wrapping up projects modes for the next few weeks and months and will be posting about them here as I go.