Okay, so firstly, I thought the whole David Hicks situation (mainly the fact that it was starting to become a bit of a political hot-potato near an election so they got his trial hurried up) was a bit fishy (particularly the bit about how he's gagged until after the next election), but this morning, I learned that there's legislation to close the electoral rolls at 8pm on the day the election is called. That stinks to high heaven! I mean how on earth could justify bringing out legislation like that? How does that improve anything? I'll be really disappointed if that just gets steamrolled through the Senate. All this reminds me that I need to re-enroll to vote.

I used to be a hardcore daily bike commuter. (By “hardcore,” I mean I commuted 20-30 miles roundtrip every day in Chicago in January.) Lately, I’ve gotten lazy, especially since I now live about thirty seconds by foot from a train station that takes me to a spot about thirty seconds by foot from my job. Also, since I’m now supporting two people (including my nearly two-year-old daughter), I’m a little more reluctant to get myself killed. I was reminded of the perils of biking in Boston this afternoon when a 22-year old bicyclist was killed by a dump truck in an area where I used to ride daily:

The bicyclist, a 22-year-old man from Halifax, was riding between two lanes of traffic on Huntington Avenue when he was clipped by a taxicab near Northeastern University at about 2:30 p.m., police said. After being clipped by the cab, the bicyclist was run over by a McCauley and Sons Co. dump truck, police said.

When I was a bike commuter, I was fairly cavalier about this sort of incident. I realize it’s still fairly rare and biking may not be any more dangerous than driving. But we still see these events in Boston fairly regularly. I don’t think it can be fixed fully by better driver education/behavior (or better bicyclist education/behavior). There are just too many streets that are poorly designed and naturally hazardous. On a related note, Nat mentioned this nasty run-in during a recent Critical Mass in San Francisco (the article is obviously from the driver’s point of view — there may be another angle on this):

Susan Ferrando, her husband, their two children and three preteens had come to San Francisco from Redwood City to celebrate the birthday of Ferrando’s 11-year-old daughter. They went to Japantown, where they enjoyed shopping and taking in the blooming cherry blossoms. Things took a turn for the worse at about 9 p.m., when the family was leaving Japantown — just as the party of about 3,000 bikers was winding down its monthly red-lights-be-damned ride through the city. Suddenly, Ferrando said, her car was surrounded by hundreds of cyclists. Not being from San Francisco, Ferrando thought she might have inadvertently crossed paths with a bicycle race and couldn’t figure out why the police, who she had just passed, hadn’t warned her. Confusion, however, quickly turned to terror, she said, when the swarming cyclists began wildly circling around and then running into the sides of her Toyota van. Filled with panic, Ferrando said, she started inching forward until coming to a stop at Post and Gough streets, where she was surrounded by bikers on all sides. A biker in front blocked her as another biker began pounding on the windshield. Another was pounding on her window. Another pounded the other side. “It seemed like they were using their bikes as weapons,” Ferrando said. One of the bikers then threw his bike — shattering the rear window and terrifying the young girls inside. All the while, Ferrando was screaming, “There are children in this car! There are children in this car!” …

Update 4/5/2007: the 22-year-old bicyclist had a myspace page.

Add to my Netflix Wishlist (that is, the list of features I wish Netflix had, not the list of movies I wish I had): links from IMDB entries to the respective Netflix page (or, better yet, “add to Netflix queue” directly from IMDB). Links back to IMDB from Netflix would also be nice. This seems like something that would be relatively easy to do with a Mozilla plugin. In general, Netflix would be a prime candidate for a developer/hobbyist ecology similar to that which has grown up around Amazon’s API. The only examples I could find were this Perl module and this Moveable-Type plugin. More development along these lines could be a key advantage for Netflix to preserve its now incumbent position in the market. (Does anyone have any local video stores left? Ours closed down about a year ago.) Update: James points to an impressive list of Greasemonkey/Netflix scripts, two of which seem to do the job: Netflix links in IMDB, IMDB links in Netflix. Another featuer I’ve been looking for: Netflix Ratings Granulizer (allows partial stars in ratings). Thanks, Lazyweb! (Note that these sorts of screen-scraping hacks inevitably break when the content provider modifies its presentation; an open API would obviously be preferable).

I see Brenda talking about wanting to use "Ruby", and trying to install "Rails". This conflating of the two terms annoys me. "Ruby on Rails" is a web development framework which is written in Ruby, and which uses Ruby for some customisation, but the primary learning curve in using it is to learn the framework. I installed it ("apt-get install rails", of course :-) and tried using it but found it frustrating, though that may be because the default Debian install was against MySQL. Ruby, on the other hand, is a language which is generally just as suited to writing off-line text processing scripts as it is to writing on-line scripts. It is also a language which has good database independence and GUI libraries. Two of the talks I went to at LCA this year which have had an impact on my coding were one about Puppet, a systems management application written in Ruby, and one about writing GTK programs in several languages. The GTK people didn't quite make it through their ambitious schedule so we only got to see them writing GTK in C and in Java (not in Python) but it did suggest how easy it all was. When I got back to NZ I put those two together and started writing (well, rewriting really) an application in Ruby/GTK, and I have found it a very nice language. It seems that every time I learn something new about Ruby my code gets shorter and provides more function in a clearer and more readable way. Fun.

My previous post generated a lot of useful comments. Some of them was about using the synaptics trackpad driver. Unfortunately it only works, as Itai Seggev says, on post July 2005 iBooks and my iBook seems to be from August 2004 (this fact took me a long time to realize). I found an adbsyn howto wich seems to have an solution. Using a kernel patch and a patch for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics you can get the ADB Trackpad to simulate a synaptics trackpad. So for the first time i a very long time I get to compile a kernel… After a very long time I get to reboot into my new patched kernel and, lo and behold, synaptics works. In the beginning i didn’t seem to work, I had a very low acceleration set but with some fiddling I got it ajusted to something useable. So for enabling synaptics on older ibooks, see: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~bigoi/howto.htm In the meantime I got glxgears turning smoothly. Now I can start compiz and see a wobly effect when I move windows around, but then compiz freezes the display. Most of the times I seem to be able to terminate the xserver, but i’ve reboted once. Steps to get OpenGL working:

• change Driver "fbdev" to Driver "radeon" in the Monitor section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• apt-get install libgl-mesa-dri

FISL and Sacix
I am warming up for the next FISL - Porto Alegre, Brazil. Actually working on Sacix next release - a.k.a Sagui. We will have 3 mini community telecenters there where you will see Sacix running. For those who have no idea what i'm talking about - Sacix is a custom Debian distribution for labs and community telecenters that can be used to provide a full GNOME desktop for thin-clients or fat-clients and since Sacix is a profile based CDD, it has a 'desktop' based that is nothing but the Debian Etch Desktop with minor add-ons. Actually our major failures are: lack of human resources, website written in portuguese only. Sacix Sagui will have support for at least english, portuguese and spanish and (hopefully) the website will start being translated soon.

After Etch release, I plan to start a new group dedicated to merge Sacix features back to Debian (for Lenny) and act as a glue between debian-desktop supergroup, pkg-ltsp and related groups/packages e.g: dhcp server, tftp and nfs - there's a lot that needs to be done in terms of preseed friendliness on these. The good news is that the feature merge is already happening, but I'm the only person handling it directly. I'm not sure about the group name yet, but it might be Debian Sacix since "Debian Thin-Client(s)" or something similar don't really fit.

Anyway, I would be glad to see a Lenny user downloading our first ISO being able to choose not only the default desktop environment we've today but being able to select it and also the 'thin/fat client server'. In the end his server should be able to provide Debian Desktop Lenny through the lan for the clients. With Etch you need to install the default desktop environment and after that ltsp-server-standalone package, configure stuff like dhcp, nfs and run ltsp-build-client.

Get involved sending me a message!

See you during debconf! I can't wait to work IRL with some of you to improve Debian as a whole. Don't hesitate to contact me through the IRC for a bug squashing session or write new stuff from scratch. I've some plans for Debian Sacix, Utnubu, Simple-CDD, Debian Live, Ltsp and gnome-tasksel related work.

I've started getting advertising enquiries, so this page explains my policy on advertising on my site, as far as I've worked it out so far. If you don't mind, please read the conditions and leave me a comment if you think I've missed something. [Yes, this is one of my now-rare folded posts.]

As I already wrote (it was the take 1), I'm working on packaging Hibernate (then Spring, then Jboss, then Jonas but dont' tell, it's the secret plan!). The first step has been done, #386100 (ITP: c3p0) is pending. I uploaded it to experimental because it needed a method in javax.management that is only in gcj experimental. The next step is to package cglib (#386101). I discover cglib embed asm in its jar and change the package name of the classes. The tool used to do that is called jarjar from Tonic Systems. So I have to package it first (#417591). I'm not sure it's a very good idea and I started a discussion in the cglib forum... and one of the developers already answered... FLOSS is too cool ;-). I'll try to see if it's possible to package both jars (one with asm, the other one without it). read more

So I hauled my ass to the Nintendo World Store in Rockefeller Center a couple of weeks ago to get myself a Nintendo Wii. I can see what all the fuss is about, the controls are just so amazing, it's really a much more fun and comfortable experience. I've also spent way to much time playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I have lost much sleep because of that game. I also bowled a 245 in Wii Bowling, which is so much better than I would bowl in real bowling it's not funny.

I'm starting to get antsy for the release. I'm scared to touch my packages now, which is no fun. I also want the shiny new software that will pour into unstable after the release is done.

Some more comments on AppArmor, since some people might see my previous post just as being disappointed by seeing it in Ubuntu, and not much work on SELinux. First of all, I should note that I don't have any SELinux systems I'm responsible for anymore. They still run SELinux in strict and are doing well, but I'm no longer responsible for them. So I'm actually pretty much out of SELinux development nowadays. I did some occasional policy merge to monitor policy development, and when I tried VMware, I even setup a SELinux system to check the current state. But I wouldn't call myself an active developer or even user. So I don't think I'm as biased as you might think I am. Some things why I don't trust the AppArmor people:

• their website is incredibly full of marketing blah-blah such as "AppArmor is the most effective and easy-to-use Linux application security system available today" (effective as in what?)
• their Wiki/FAQ states wildly inaccurate things about SELinux such as "To get the full power of SELinux, applications must be recompiled and linked against SELinux libraries." (no, you don't need to recompile and relink all your applications...) - and they even contradict themselves to some extend; on one hand they claim that you don't need to modify applications for use with AppArmor, on the other hand they highlight it as a feature that you can patch your apache for AppArmor to get some more security for embedded interpreters such as PHP. This is pretty much the same as with SELinux.
• they state such misleading things as "every user should give each system an afternoon's test to decide which is a better match for their needs." - sounds good at first sight, but how many admins are able to evaluate the security of a kernel-based security solution such as AppArmor or SELinux in one day? What this actually is, is an encouragement for admins to pick the security solution because of ease-of-use, not because of security considerations.

Instead they should be honest about what AppArmor can, and what it can not do. I don't doubt that it can be used to make exploits with specially crafted PDF files in evince and such simple viewer applications a lot harder, but their security is not as thorough and complete as SELinux. They are potentially vulnerable to some attacks caused by their path name based approach, or that they cannot do MAC for files with unpredictable names such as most of /proc (e.g. /proc/1234/cmdline), any kind of sockets or when file descriptors are passed from one application to another. They should also admit that since SELinux initially assigns file labels by very similar pathname/filename patterns as AppArmor uses, it maybe isn't that much harder to setup in this aspect... In fact, it's much easier in SELinux to add an additional location for font files, since all the application policies don't need to be modified or reloaded, just the new font directory needs to be relabeled. In AppArmor, you'd need to modify an 'abstraction', then reload any policy that depends on this abstraction (you probably can only reload all at the same time, so that's not too hard). To anyone with a tiny bit of computer science knowledge, it should also be obvious that the performance of reconstructing the file path and matching it against a large set of filename globs (AppArmor) necessarily is slower than just using the security label in to the files attributes (SELinux, where this globbing was done once when doing the relabeling); any performance difference that shows that SELinux is slower than AppArmor is probably caused by SELinux doing a lot more security checks than AppArmor. So even AppArmor could benefit from using labeled security... I'm cool with saying that AppArmor is easier to get started with than SELinux, but they need to be honest about the differences to SELinux and the problems with AppArmor.

Blogging this from the middle of the East Hill cemetary. I got my old 13 db wifi antenna hooked up and a network set up to down the street (245), and it seems to reach over a block in most directions. I'd get more if the antenna was mounted on my roof. Wish I could remember the name of the daemon that watches for new clients on an AP and logs or sends mail about them.

Gar. I had to go downtown today to sign some legal papers with our lawyer. He's taken a gig as the interim chief of staff for the president of Concordia University, but he's kept a few of his older clients, including us. Maj and I stopped at the bank beforehand to sign some mortgage papers, and then we went to the SAQ across the street to buy some wine. We then piled back in the car, drove downtown, and with a little time to spare we stopped at Zyng for lunch, walked around St. Catherine a little bit, did some furniture shopping, and then met our lawyer near his office. We had a good coffee together and saw the new engineering building there -- it's quite nice. When Maj and I got back to the car, I realized that I didn't have my remote starter for the car -- which also disables the car alarm. This little gadget has been a real pain for me since we got the car -- the thing that attaches it to the keychain almost instantly broke, so I've had to carry it around separate from my keys. And now it was gone, and I had no idea where it was. So we retraced steps -- another 45 minutes walking around to the noodle joint, the furniture store, the Concordia caf . Nothing. We looked around on the street for a while, then jumped in a cab and came home. Maj had her keys here, so I borrowed them, cabbed back to where the car was parked, and as I was getting into the car I saw this: That's the clicker, right under that SAQ brochure about Italian wines. DOH! Moral of the story: attach your car-alarm clicker very carefully to your keychain. Sure, not much of a moral, but it's what I learned today. tags: car alarm clicker montreal concordia zyng car

RSS validated So, after starting an RSS 1.0 feed for my blog, I was having some problems using it in different readers. A few Google searches later landed me at the [$$vote for http://validator.w3.org/feed/, which is totally cool. Why didn't I know about this before? It turned out that my Tag URI format was invalid. I was using tag URIs for RSS item identifiers, and I'd left off the all-important validity date. So I had to update those. It seems to be working pretty nice, now; the validator gives the all-good sign for both my RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 feeds. tags: rss validation w3c

Greek Wikitravel Expedition So, I'm going to be interviewed this week for Hellas Spectrum, a Greek-language television show here in Montreal focusing on the local Greek community and culture. (I know - wow!) Apparently the interview will be "mostly" in English, with "a little bit" of Greek. Uh-oh. I studied some Greek in college, and I spent a summer in Crete and made my way pretty nicely, but I definitely haven't used the language in years. So this should be fun. I'm pretty embarrassed that I'm so inept in my ancestral tongue, and I hope that Amita June learns more than I have. The whole thing has reminded me that we don't have a Wikitravel language version for Greek -- yet. So I started a Greek Wikitravel Expedition to try to collect a group of users to make the wiki work. I've asked already on Greek Wikipedia, and I hope to find some more centres of Greek Open Source/Open Content culture on the Web. Greek people are disproportionately represented in science, engineering, and technology, so I think there will be a lot of interest. So, question for the LazyWeb: where are the good Greek Open Source/Open Content community Web sites? Influential Greek bloggers? What's the Greek Barrapunto? How can I get more interest in this project in the Greek Internet community? Contact me and let me know. tags: greek wiki wikitravel

Totally unoriginal, but I thought it was amusing. I also get some strange search phrases: "My gas meter is making a clicking noise" - then stop using the computer and call your gas company! (In England, the contact number should be on a label on the meter, or in most phone books under "Gas".) "My computer is making loud ticking noise" - that's better. Open the case and listen to the fans and hard disks. One is probably broken. "How many cars are there on the roads today" - too damn many? "How to send an email so that everyone doesn t see the addresses" - put yourself in the To line and everyone else in the Bcc (blind carbon copy). See my email guide for other handy tips. "How do i say in an email that there is an attachment" - How about "There is an attachment"? "Samsung yp-u2 linux" - it works as long as you don't want to upgrade the firmware. More... "How to satellite aiming motor europa" - point it at the sky, not at europa. I'll add more instructions to my satellite page as I rebuild my system. "MJ bad" - at least there are 4 times as many "good" searches. "How do I get the software for the samsung ml-4500" and "Samsung ml-4500 xp drivers" - I have a Ghostscript driver patch. Does Ghostscript work as a printer driver on XP? "Cycle tracks near sandringham" - there's part of NCN1 alongside the A149, but most of the other cycle routes near Sandringham are along quiet roads (which is fine). "What does wag stand for regarding football?" - Wives And Girlfriends. BTW it's a stupid TLA IMO. "Wretton planning", "Wretton parish council", "business properties for sale in Wretton" and "properties for sale in field lane Wretton" - I've not been to Wretton in some time, let alone mentioned its planning or set up an estate agent there! "How to grow grapevine in a conservatory?" - damned if I know. I would think the temperature change each time you open a door would hurt it too much. "Hanging washing out over night" - it's a bad idea if it's going to freeze. "Why some people take so long to reply to emails" - we're busy trying to thaw the washing out. "Satellite frequency for ulster tv for sky plus box" - 10906MHz Vertical polarisation 22Msym/s, but can you record "other channels" on Sky Plus or should you buy a real DVR? "Where can i find a picture of st james swimming pool in kings lynn?" - try Norlink's Picture Norfolk section. "What happened to opensource.org?" - It was transferred from SPI to OSI. Strangely, the next search phrase listed was "simple example of unethical behaviour"... "What to do about death?" - be very still and start to rot? "bf uk cbhf" - I give up. Did 8 of you headbutt the keyboard? "I hate belkin" - Me too. "Interesting questions to ask someone" - no, not on this site. "Bar" - best idea yet. Cheers!

Ubuntu got AppArmor support. This is bad news. AppArmor is a weak design. IMHO it gives the users a false impression of security, while leaving too much open to bypass security. But the biggest problem IMHO is that noone at Ubuntu seems to be working on their SELinux support. All I've seen is Ubuntu users breaking their system to a point where they didn't know how to fix it in the attempt to install their SELinux packages. The packages are mostly a 1:1 copy of the Debian packages I guess, but for example their new 'upstart' init-replacement likely isn't capable of actually starting a SELinux enabled system. Oh, and Debian didn't include the relevant package in any 'stable' release, Ubuntu had it in 'universe' since 'warty'. Right now, feisty will include the package, though it reportedly can't be installed. In the example used in the blog, evince is maybe protected from exploits by bad PDF files, but if you do a cp /usr/bin/evince /tmp and run that copy, all the protection is gone. A symlink might already be sufficient! So AppArmor is heavily relying on the user playing nicely. You might want to read this Article at LWN about AppArmor and why it's having a hard time getting into Linux mainline and "Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control" in Joshua Brindle's "SecurityBlog" for a detailed article on the weaknesses in AppArmors approach. And their constant claim of being easier to use than SELinux isn't true either: the 'learning' mode itself will only generate you an incomplete policy. It's about as much as you can achieve in SELinux by transforming audit errors to allow rules using the "audit2allow" tool. Maybe even less; for example when an application accesses a font file, SELinux audit2allow will generate a rule that allows access to all font files (since they have the same type). This doesn't rely on any directory globbing magic, but because there is a type for font files. I expect that future versions of audit2allow will actually recommend which interfaces to add instead of just listing raw allow statements. AppArmors 'abstractions' seems to match what is called 'interfaces' in SELinux, except that interfaces in the SELinux reference policy are well documented and much more extensive. The 'abstractions' offered look like an early, incomplete version of the old NSA policy to me, before this was restructured to become the 'reference policy'. Interaction between processes also seems to be completely ignored by AppArmor. So it seems to me that "preventing evince from trashing your home directory when opening a malicious PDF file" is pretty much all you can do with AppArmor? But again, this isn't so much about bashing AppArmor or Ubuntu. I'm just disappointed that noone at Ubuntu seems to work on the more sound and solid SELinux. Most of SELinux is already in Ubuntu (inherited by their Debian roots), but it's lacking some integration work and such. Ubuntu is often said to be more agile than Debian and better at adopting new technologies, but in my experience, this often is limited to 'visual' stuff. If Debian were better at recruiting new people (for example in the SELinux section, we also seriously lack manpower), I'd probably be annoyed by Ubuntu 'trying to be first with all the pretty stuff' (yes, saying this would not be fair, that's why I'm putting it in quotes). Right now I'm mostly happy that they 'divert' many newbies off Debian and to their huge forums. Although it occasionally means I need to help an Ubuntu user to fix his system when he doesn't get any help there.

Launchpad, Ubuntus proprietary (!) bug tracker has received a facelift. I'm deliberately calling it a facelift, because I still don't understand it. It sure is a lot prettier than Debians bug tracking, and it likely has some really nifty features, too, but I'm totally lacking the basics: Have a look at this bug for example. It's about the Intel ipw3945 driver being unstable on systems with SMP and load when using WPA2 encrypted networks. Launchpad says "fix committed" for linux-source-2.6.17, but I still havn't found out in which revision of that package. Or how I could actually find out how they fixed the bug. Or how I could access that information. Nor have I found any way to access changelogs for the packages.

I know we are all geeks to the bones, that we start shacking while opening the package of our last super-techy toy, but nothing can give you enough satisfaction as watching your son laying on his stomach, sticking his "bottom" up in the air and start crawling around for his very first time. That made my day! :)

We had a good brunch today. Friends Heather, Damien, Niko, Karine, Sarven, Brigitte and John all came over for some quiche, roasted potatoes, green salad, bread, cheese, wine, beer, asparagus, coffee and papaya. All in all a good time. We'd hoped to walk over to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac with anyone who wanted to see it. The previous owner was packing the last of his stuff today, and we were supposed to pick up the keys this evening. But we hadn't heard from him by 7PM, so we packed everyone off to home and put the baby to bed. Then he called at 8PM, so I drove over to the new house and had a chat with him while picking up the keys. He had a couple of leftover Bor ale Cuivr es, so we drank them while he showed me around the house. I helped him take the last of his cleaning supplies out to his car, and then I went back inside, to our house. Wow. I just walked around for a little while, turning on and off the lights and looking through the windows and trying to imagine what our life there is going to be like. We're not going to move in for another 2 months, so it seems a little remote. The house felt nice, though. It's on a quiet street in a great neighborhood, and I could tell it was a good place to live. I'm excited to get started with it. tags: house 4690 rue Pontiac homeowner keys

Hey IBM Now that OS/2 has reached its end-of-life, it's time to release as much code as you can out of it under a liberal Open Source license. There are millions of lines of code in OS/2, and I doubt that much of the Microsoft code written in the 80s is still there. IBM talks a mean game about Linux and Open Source (see http://www.ibm.com/linux ), and to a large part they've been pretty true to their word. But having a huge codebase available that could very clearly benefit the Open Source world, and that's not being developed further, is a bad idea. Clear the rights, release the software. Abandonware is a terrible thing to waste. tags: os/2 ibm open source

Spring has arrived in many parts of North America. But in Edmonton, North America’s largest and most northernly city, spring has sort-of-come-but-not-really as it recedes fairly quickly. There will be a day of explosive warmth (you know, a balmy 45-55 F) and of course locals strip down to near nakedness, wearing shorts and, the more flamboyant will don an 80’s inspired cut-off tee. Hot. This sartorial statement says WE are SO ready for the long winter to leave … for good. Despite the collective sentiment, which is probably shared by 99.999999% of Edmonton’s inhabitants, the winter cold, snow, and breeze are indifferent to our deepest pleas and they come right back, making us sport at least a few layers of winter clothes. Within this dance between winter breeze and spring warmth, I have spent most of my time staring at my computer doing everything possible to transform half-baked ideas, hunches, sentiments, and theories into coherent words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters for my book. I am working on it full-force and am enjoying it more than I have in a year though from time to time I get fed-up, lost, sick of it, and my writing soul descends back, deep into one of Dante’s infernal rings, where I fester with my frustration, convinced that I should have become an organic flower farmer/acupuncturist that I almost became (well not really, but I have always fancied that combination as an ideal and fulfilling career path). Slowly I usually make my way back up, brush off the cobwebs of despair, and proceed anew. Within this highly secluded life of monastic-like repetition, thankfully, I have been enjoying some new things this spring. Once a week I head over to an University of Alberta off-site library facility to pour over archive material for a new project, which I am not going to talk about here (it is super-duper-top-secret) but it has been interesting working at an archive, especially one that is housed in an old Ikea. Since I am one of those right-brained people, I like to listen to music while I work, and lately I have also become pretty obsessed with house & electronic music, mainly thanks to a local DJ, David Stone whose weekly radio show on CJSR, BPM, is simply the bomb. He claims to bring the latest and greatest of electronic dance music from around the world and I think he is totally right. If you like this type of music, do catch his weekly show on Sat nights at 6 PM (MST). I sometimes get a little sad when I listen to some good music or see some stellar performance because it reminds me that what I may one day have to offer to the wider world an academic book and article here and there simply cannot bring the type of joy that musical performance and other creative expressions can bring. While you can listen to songs and over again, a book, if it is really superb, may attract a second or third reading. An academic book or article may at times light an inner light of joy, but let’s face it, it is usually a pretty cerebral light oh’ joy, leaving untouched those part of the brain, soul, heart, where more visceral, mysterious, yet fully self-enveloping feelings of joy reign high (but I am trying my hardest to stick a funny section or two in every chapter to leave a trace of laughter because if I can’t manage that with an ethnography on hackers, I will have failed miserably). Every track David Stone plays is something I want to listen to over and over again and thanks to mplayer stream dump function, I can. And funny enough, is that in the last month software believe it or not has brought me much joy as of late. I have been using free software since 1997 and I used to get A LOT more annoyed no make that a downright frustrated with programs (or lack of programs) than I do now. In fact, now, I am simply stunned whenever I upgrade to a version of a program. For example, Word Press 2.0 is like so much nicer in terms of usability and functionality than 1.5. The same goes for Open Office, the Gimp, and even Firefox, which has some bugs, but is so much better than its predecessors. I once described free software using the well-worn clich as “the gift that keeps on giving. And I think that this is becoming more and more true. And like wine, with the passing of time, these gifts usually get better and better. And like a unexpected present that arrives on your doorstep, these software packages induce some joy, because it is actually pretty neat to see these programs develop and grow into something stronger and more useful; so thanks to those who spend their time hacking away at making and improving this software and thanks to those (you know who you are) who helped with my recent WP upgrade!

If you have an hour to spare, I suggest watching this talk by astrophysicist David Dearborn entitled "The Use Of Nuclear Explosives To Disrupt or Divert Asteroids". It starts with a general introduction to the problem of NEOs (Near Earth Objects) and how, as the efficiency of our observation methods increased, we've come to realize that the inner solar system is literally packed with them — and that among them, quite a few large ones are bound to cross Earth's orbit in the near or distant future.

It then goes on to explain that even if you can detect an asteroid early, and observe it for a sufficient period of time (say 10 years) to calculate its orbit, you may not actually have any assurance that the object won't be a threat, because of non-gravitational forces:

• light bouncing off an object in space changes its trajectory, because photons carry momentum and exert a non-negligible force (an effect known as solar radiation pressure)
• more importantly, since the object also radiates heat, the emission of thermal photons modifies the object's orbit in non-predictable ways depending on its shape and composition (the Yarkovsky effect)

All this combines to make computations difficult, and as a result the time frame to react to a potential threat is a lot shorter than we would like (since of course, the more time you have, the better).

The meat of the talk is a presentation of two computer simulations: one where a nuclear device is used to heat an asteroid enough to change its trajectory and prevent a collision ("nudging"), and a second scenario where a nuclear explosive is used to blow the object into smaller chunks which can then simply burn in the atmosphere, or in the worst case cause less damage than a single collision (if they remain on a collision trajectory at all).

Overall, it makes a good case in favor of nuclear explosives as tools and nuclear technology as the most efficient method of transporting energy, beyond the other uses (military or civil) we already have for it. I find this very interesting.

Oh, and if you're not into astrophysics you might be interested in this talk by Mike Pinkerton on open-source and the early days of Mozilla instead; it's very good too.