My project the last few weeks has been to start exercising at a gym regularly. While I could stand to lose a few pounds, I'm more interested in feeling less lousy than I have lately -- among other things, I've been feeling tired and having trouble concentrating, and my back has been hurting again. I don't know for sure if getting into shape will fix these problems, but I figure being more healthy couldn't possibly make them worse.

In other news, I've finally done what all the cool kids were doing in 2002 and started a Flickr album. Right now it mainly contains cat pictures like this one:

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 16 days of "blitz l10n NMU". The re-introduction of debconf templates for viewvc with incomplete translations will lower the stats as of today...:-( I already notified its maintainer who is very l10n-aware so I'm confident we will fix this soon. However, that's kind of a disappointment for me, of course, as this will delay the day we will reach 100%. Yesterday, I worked on the oldest bugs mentioned on Thomas Huriaux dynamic status page:

• courier has been uploaded, unfortunately without the Swedish translation as the maintainer wrongly assumes this shouldn't be a target for Etch
• efingerd has been NMU'ed
• squidguard has been NMU'ed
• ssl-cert has been NMU'ed
• apt-proxy has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• defoma has been NMU'ed (man pages translations)
• qmail is ignored because of an obnoxious maintainer who is in my kill file
• gdm is ignored because #261086 is marked wontfix for reasons I don't want to dig into now (I'm pretty sure that something better could be done for that package, oh well)
• icedove is likely to be examined at some moment
• glide maintainer has been notified
• arb is ignored on request of its maintainer
• others are my targets for today..:)

PS: the title of this blog entry comes from a bug report from Joey Hess for ssl-cert. I didn't fix that because it certainly requires too invasive changes at this moment but these debconf templates are definitely not the best worded ever and the underlyign debconf code is pretty weak.

As I've talked about in this space in the past, I've been coming to some conclusions about free software (open source, or whatever you want to call it): the economics of it, like anything else, are rooted in scarcity, and if you don't have a bit of that scarcity yourself, you have a lot less leverage This line of thought comes from the age-old question "how to create free software and make money at it?". This is a very important question for me, because I enjoy hacking on free software very much, and would love nothing more than to spend my days doing so. Creating new things, though, rather than working as a "system integrator" and tying pieces together with the smallest amount of glue possible. It's obvious that there is plenty of money to be had for people who simply use free software for their own ends. But what are those ends? We live in a world of scarcity - not everyone can have a fancy car, the nicest house in town, or the fastest computer. Market economies work via the exchange of scarce goods and services. If you have nothing to trade, you have nothing. Now, free software is worth something. Worth a great deal - that is beyond the shadow of a doubt. But since anyone can make a copy, there is no scarcity - once it's out there, you can't trade for it. So... where does this leave our potential free software creator? Let's think about some of the ways around this problem.

• You could, as some have argued, decide that since software has aspects of a public good, and decide that it should be provisioned by the government. Computer users pay taxes and there is a ministry of software that pays people to work on infrastructure type projects like the Linux kernel, Apache web server, and the like. Whether you like this idea or not probably depends on what you think of governments, free markets and so on, and thus becomes a much broader debate, but suffice it to say that it's not going to happen soon, because free markets do provide software, so most governments aren't likely to fiddle with the system in radical ways.
• Work on contract to create custom systems for clients. This works, up to a point. Since the initial system doesn't exist, there is your source of scarcity. The client wants it, and won't get it - free or proprietary - unless they pay you. It's also worthwhile to think about the "chain" of trade in this case. Where does your client get their money? If you're writing free code that will simply become a cog in their proprietary system, the actual money comes from the scarcity they have created, so while you may be writing free software, in one sense, you're simply offloading the burden of creating scarcity to someone else, who is then able to pay you for your time. The other possibility is that your client works in the "real world" of scarcity directly - they sell books or beer or cars or something else where the product is, by its nature inherently scarse. In this case, they still have the leverage - you work to help their business, but they are the ones in the driver's seat. Your work isn't worth much without their scarcity-based business. And they're not very sensible if they pay you for things that aren't directly related to their business. So it's going to be harder to create something new and interesting from scratch.

I've alluded to it in the past, but consulting operations have several problems, especially when considered from the point of view of someone who wishes to create software:

• The more time you spend putting existing pieces together, the better you are doing financially, because you can finish the project quicker, in less time, and so have more of a margin. These sorts of business will tend towards system integration, rather than the creation of new things. That's not a bad thing, and I mean no disrespect to those who are in that business, but it's not really what I want to do, and it certainly doesn't answer the question of how to write new free software and get paid to do it.
• When you create a one off solution that is not completely tailored to one client, if you make something that's proprietary, and know you can sell it to a few more people, perhaps you can beat the free software guy on price, because you can afford to sell yours at a lower price, knowing you'll spread the costs of producing it over a few clients. If the free software guy manages to sell the same free thing to several clients, you have to ask how 'free' the software is in the sense that it is apparently controlled tightly enough that these other clients can't come into possession of it on their own. Once, again, scarcity.
• It's not a business that 'grows' as well as having a proprietary product, because it's very linear. To make more money, you have to add more people (of uncertain quality, I might add). With the proprietary product, on the other hand, you could likely sell 100, 1000 or 1000000 copies with a workforce of the same order of magnitude. This leaves you a bit more breathing room - if you're a consultant, the minute you take a break, be it a vacation, or even go to sleep, you're not making money because you're not engaged. That's sort of a scary prospect as one ages, and needs to dedicate time to other things in life. At 20, I could spend all day every in front of the computer. At 30+, now I have a wife. Maybe there will be kids some day. A successful product-based business would allow me time for those things that a billable-hours business might put more constraints on (of course, there are obviously no guarantees that any business will be successful, but for the sake of argument, we'll treat failure as failure and not worry about it more).

So, there you have it. In one way or the other, to make money at something in the long run, you are going to have to find and sell a product that people cannot effortlessly get for free.

Speeding up bzr info on the hpss with a good sized branch - samba 4.0 (which is > 200MB of bzr repository).

bzr info bzr+ssh://host/home/robertc/SAMBA_4_0
Location:
  branch root: bzr+ssh://host/home/robertc/SAMBA_4_0/
 Related branches:
  parent branch:
http://people.samba.org/bzr/jelmer/mirror/samba/branches/SAMBA_4_0/
 Format:
       control: bzr remote bzrdir
        branch: Remote BZR Branch
    repository: bzr remote repository
 Branch history:
     11316 revisions
      1035 days old
   first revision: Sun 2004-04-04 08:56:30 +0000
  latest revision: Wed 2007-01-24 12:23:42 +0000
 Revision store:
     11316 revisions
    111019 KiB

Before our latest optimisations:

real    14m21.769s
user    1m23.377s
sys     0m11.017s

After:

real    0m11.203s
user    0m0.632s
sys     0m0.104s

I say 'whoot' to the sprinters!

I am running through my post-SL TODO list, and I’m down to the item which reads “Write a report”. We’ve had a very good time meeting users, prospective users and fellow DDs, as always. There were 21 people planned to man the booth, which is an all time record so far, and 18 out of those 21 showed up, which is really quite good :-) I’m not going to list everybody here, first because the list has grown quite long now, and because all in all it’s the usual French team that has been at it for the past few years already. We had a couple of firsttimers though, including Pierre Habouzit and Yves-Alexis Perez. Everybody did great, thanks for helping out, guys! Day 0: unpacking sl2007-booth… setting up sl2007-booth… We had less hardware this year than we had the previous years, for a variety of reasons, so the booth setup actually went quite fast. There were no separations between the booths in the .Org Pavilion this year, so we put a bit of thought into that and figured that, oh well, it’d do anyway. Pierre arrived at 7:30pm on the booth with some hardware from Sven and 1500 Debian flyers paid for by Linbox. We went for dinner, then Pierre and I spent the night hacking on the Babelbox scripts to get the damn thing to work with the current debian-installer. At 3:30am, we got to the point where the Babelbox would pretty much work, and couldn’t figure out what was going wrong at that point. Day 1: Fixing the Babelbox, frying a graphics card We ended up fixing the last bit of the Babelbox on the booth in the morning, and preparing the demo system (Pierre’s shuttle) at the same time. It all went fine and we ended up with a dual-head demo system and a beamer-equiped Babelbox in the afternoon after Niv brought a beamer. We used the back of Fr d ric’s Debian banner as the screen for the beamer. We had a nice chat with the Linux+ magazine team in the afternoon, discussing the upcoming Debian release and a dedicated Linux+ issue. We’ll be helping them out tracking the Etch release in the next few weeks until the release. Back at Pierre’s place, we found out that his shuttle apparently wouldn’t boot. Turns out that only the graphics card died, good news. Day 2: Business as usual, Debian France meeting The second day was really business as usual. We saw more people than the previous day, but still there were less visitors than the previous years. The exhibition was smaller than the previous years too, I just hope it’s only a temporary thing and that it’ll be bigger again next year. This also was the “dinosaurs day”, the day all the old-timers pop by and discuss around the Debian booth. This is becoming a tradition or something :-) As Christian wrote already, we met HP people and talked about Linux support from HP on HP hardware. In the evening, we had the first formal Debian France meeting. Julien Cristau and Christian Perrier got elected to the board of directors, replacing C dric Delfosse and Laurent Fousse. The board got reelected, so I’m still the President, Pierre is still the Secretary and Aur lien G r me is still the Treasurer. Thanks to Tarsus for lending us a room for the meeting! Day 3: Packing up Small day… Quite a few visitors in the afternoon, we talked about Debian France a bit more than we did on the previous day, mainly with other people from the .Org Pavilion. Conclusion Overall, a very productive edition this year, we talked about Debian France a lot, about Etch, about quite a few projects involving Debian too. Now we have a lot of work to do to release Etch and develop Debian France to the point were it will actually be really useful for Debian. Hopefully we’ll have things to show in a couple of weeks.

There is a feature in kvm, or rather qemu, that enables users to resume from a known state.I was using kvm for a while and got irritated by having to watch Windows booting.By using 'savevm' and 'loadvm' feature, it is possible to skip that step and always start from the point where you can start working.The tip here is to create a COW image from the HDD image that 'savevm' was done, so that you can re-run from the same state how ever many times you want.It feels better to be in a running Windows session within 10 seconds.

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok.. Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.

Well, not really, but some people might think so, or feel intruded on... To back up a bit, and put that in context, I'm currently contemplating ways of making Stuff To Do, my web based todo list/time tracker/work organizer more able to track when a user is active. Currently, it marks you as active if you do anything at all in its web page. The reason I adopted this approach is that I want the program to help the user out, not make the user a slave to the program (ok, switching tasks, hit start..stop...stop stop start stop start start...bleagh!). However, even this approach relies on the user keeping the window open, and visiting it every now and then, which is less likely if you get 'in the zone' and are concentrating on your own work. A couple of methods for dealing with this come to mind:

• Platform specific binary that can be installed to keep track of when the user is active. This would be the most accurate way of determining that information, but also the most intrusive, and probably the least convenient for end users, who would have to install something on their machines.
• A reminder. Instead of tracking the user, try and get their attention to come back to the web page and let the app know they're still alive. Not very appealing, because the concept of "bug the user so they pay attention to me", which is not in keeping with the "be unobtrusive" philosophy of the system.
• A small pop-out window with "active?" javascript code embedded in it. On Linux (Gnome's window manager at least), you could even set this little window up to follow you around the desktop in order to register the fact that you're active. Advantages: web based, more accurate than the current system. Cons: annoying window following you is....well, annoying. Having a little window open all the time might be an annoyance as well.

Thoughts? Would you use any of these, or consider any or all of them too high a price to pay to keep track of your hours?

So we've been sprinting here in Amsterdam all week. So far we've:

• created a prototype of windows explorer integration for bzr-gtk
• overhauled the commit, branch, push gui commands
• enabled plugins to import other plugins as-needed, allowing code sharing between plugins
• improved the smart-server branches performance for revno ~900% - and potentially an unlimited improvement as it no longer needs to read the entire revision-history file
• made good strides towards push in bzr-svn
• worked on the shallow branches spec - checking out or branching from a repository without having to read ALL of history
• more that I can't remember :).

I spent most of the day yesterday travelling from Montreal to Portland for RecentChangesCamp 2007. I got a pretty decent last-minute ticket with flyer miles from Aeroplan, but the flight took me through Washington (D.C.) which was probably 2-3 hours out of my way. The first leg of the flight was great -- one of those nice puddle-jumpers with leather seats and lots of legroom. I got into Dulles and had time for an impressive (for airport food) pair of crabcakes at the Tidewater bar and restaurant. I shared a table with Mary Beth from Albany (New York), who was en route to Beijing to adopt a 1-year-old baby girl. We had a pretty good talk. The second leg was brutal, though. It was three big guys in a three-seat row on a crowded 6-hour flight. (Just before they closed the doors, the guy in the aisle seat scooted over to an open seat in the adjacent row. We all laughed at dodging the bullet of having to sit on top of each other... then the family who had those seats made a last-minute rush for the plane, and aisle-guy moved back to Elbonia with us. We sat in sullen silence for the rest of the flight. Gar.) I managed to distract myself by reading The Good Earth and watching Marie Antoinette (2006 film), which was actually really good. I'd heard about the soundtrack -- New Wave -- and thought it'd be an anachronistic distraction from the period, but it turned out to fit very well. Between the two I managed to keep myself from going insane. I got a nice Mazda 6 from Hertz at the airport and after missing the 84 turn-off and driving 20 miles out of my way (and back again) I got to my hotel for the weekend. The Jupiter Hotel is a remodeled cheap-o motel on Portland's hip East Side. The rooms have been stripped of their clown paintings, fly-specked wallpaper and floral-print bedspreads, and replaced with a spare, pleasant d cor reminiscent of a smart European DJ lounge or an Ikea catalog. Free Wi-Fi, full-length chalkboards on the doors for doodlers, organic soaps and shampoo. French press for morning coffee. Branded jimmy-hat with a big J on it next to the bed. Isn't that sweet? The place reminds me a bit of boutique hotels like the Hotel Palomar in San Francisco, but it doesn't quite have the full high-end feel. After all, if you look at it through squinty eyes, the room is a cinder-block motel cell, and the nice look doesn't quite hide that. But a regular room rate starting at $79/night is hard to beat. There's an outdoor fireplace, pleasant grounds, and lots of bare hewn logs around the lot. The adjacent Doug Fir Lounge has impressively medium-name music acts and a really nice post-modern ski-lodge look. I'm a bit worried about noise tonight (the complimentary earplugs in the bedstand have be concerned), but my room is waaaay in the back of the lot, away from the lounge, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The Doug Fir also has a restaurant, and I'm sitting there right now writing this entry. I just had a very tasty smoked-salmon eggs benedict (b n dictine, for you Montrealers out there), and once I finish this sentence and my surprisingly decent decaf, I'm off for RCC07. tags: RecentChangesCamp2007 portland dulles travel jupiter hotel doug fir lounge hotel

Following up the Contacts release earlier, I just rolled Dates 0.3. This mainly has a simple fix that means on the first start it enables a calendar, so you can do something useful with it. Again, N800 packages are already online, and I'm rolling packages for Debian now. 770 packages will be available when I've found a 770-compatible scratchbox!

"Guidelines for the Secure Operation of the Internet" (RFC1281)

Read it and weep.

Techblogging: DoSing spammers

I've done this in the past, by having a CGI rabbit-hole in a semi-hidden link near the start of the page which just generated 1000s of invalid email addresses. For bonus points, use addresses with MX servers which will never be online again, or maybe with a MX that tarpits and rejects all mail eventually. Get enough points and the spammer will either stop scanning your site or waste a lot of time on you.

Google scanned by spammers [Techblogging]

I don't use pingomatic, but a few of my pages are ranked high enough to attract spammers every time I update them. I think blog spammers probably are using subscription tools to find the most active/most syndicated sites to spam. Can we redesign the tools to defeat them?

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Ads help Google profits triple

But hey, why should Google care about spammers when their externalisation to date is making Google rich?

Techblogging: Web 2.0 security issues incoming

I dislike Web 2.0 so far because it is often inaccessible - this suggests it's often insecure too.

Software Patents Petition

Need more brains... come on, sign the petition, even if it has a bit of hyperbole/invective and a typo or two. Last I heard, it's behind adopting Spandau Ballet's Gold as national anthem, for crying out loud!

The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 06-07-06. Calculator dependence.

Parents, don't let your children grow up to be calculator junkies!

Zugschlusbeobachtungen: Which kind of software suspend?

I think I heard Matthew Garrett give an interview somewhere (LUG Radio?) which summarised the suspend situation as something like "it works well except when it doesn't." My computer usually software-suspends, but sometimes it crashes and sometimes is often enough to deter me from suspending it often. I really ought to debug it, but it's not a priority yet.

'Cheap and tacky' wedding email that went global - 19 Nov 2006 - National

"The marquee company's CEO, Klaus Jorgensen, said he had sacked the employee responsible - who turned out to be his wife"

NoDaddy.Com - Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names

"They didn't give me a chance to dispute or resolve the problem -- just a voicemail saying my domain was scheduled for suspension , followed up by a Domain Suspension Notice exactly 52 seconds later. Note that neither of these included a phone number for the abuse department or a reason for the shutdown."

The 'Ow' starts now / freedom bits / greve / Fellows / The Fellowship - Fellowship of FSFE

FSFE's Georg Greve won't be upgrading to Vista, which I saw called "Windows Fista" on the BBC's site - disgruntled journo, over-aggressive MS PR or typo?

BBC NEWS Have Your Say Will you be getting Microsoft Vista?

Nearly 2000 comments, most "No" AFAIS

Microsoft files for patent on "modular operating system"

Microsoft patents Linux?

Hacking gadflies: Marechal, A dystopian future''

Another comment on the MS patent.

BBC NEWS Technology Triple threat targets Word users

While I'm boggling at Microsoft, I hope all their customers saw this little Christmas present from 20 December.

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Sony CD compensation agreed

No Christmas for Sony, remember? They pay out a year or so late.

BBC Trust - On-demand Services' consultation

A remarkable consultation that includes a question "How important is it that the proposed seven-day catch-up service over the internet is available to consumers who are not using Microsoft software?", but the questionnaire doesn't work in all browsers. Do you think this biases the responses? Yes, yes or yes?

Digg - Pressure the BBC to embrace open standards, not just Microsoft technology!

Digg is the new slashdot. Just add hot grits.

BBC News Technology UK Edition: Vista has speech recognition hole

"for the flaw to be exploited the speech recognition feature would need to be activated and configured and both microphone and speakers would have to be switched on." Well, my speakers are embedded in the screen, my microphone doesn't have an on/off switch and I leave it switched on in the mixer so that I can answer the softphone quickly... I doubt I'm the only one who doesn't switch the mic off after every use. Are Microsoft living in the real world any more?

You might have read that several new DRMs were broken already. Given that cryptographers such as Bruce Schneier always said that DRM won't work the way it is supposed to be, unless taking all control over your computer away from you. Crypto-Gram: the futility of digital copy prevention Shortly after reports that the AACS copy protection scheme was broken, first HD-DVD movies started appearing on the net. I didn't verify that they aren't fake (my computer somehow doesn't play full HD resolution anyway: I couldn't playback the full quality version of the free movie Elephants Dream, and I don't want to download a dozen gigabytes either). And now I read that the DRM system in Vista was also bypassed, allowing you to copy full quality protected media in Vista. (BoingBoing: Vista DRM cracked) "Vista launched this week, and it's already broken." - nice headline.

Technology and science are, at times, part of some solution. But once unleashed in the world, they can also perpetuate problems and act as barriers. I just finished two articles that have addressed this conundrum in provocative ways and I recommend both to read just for the sake of reading as they are written stunningly well and if you teach a course related to science, technology, medicine and society, these two would make excellent introductions to the importance of critically dissecting science, technology, and medicine (and I think you could unpack them for hours and hours, which is very helpful if you are looking to fill up some time). One, Happy Meal is by the author of the immensely popular Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. In the article he starts with the simple suggestion of trashing most fast/junk/processed food in favor of whole foods, notably plants. But then he delves into the much more complicated topic of the science of nutrition, making a pretty sharp critique of the field, especially for 1) its reductionism 2) and the ways in which the food industry mobilizes nutrition data it is favor and often to the detriment of furthering the goals of real nutrition. After I posted the link on an IRC Debian channel, I had a pretty heated conversation with a number of Debian developers about the nature of science and how one goes about critique it (and mobilizing data to make counter-claims). As often is the case, we ended up arguing over the merit of his attack (though everyone agreed that his food suggestions were quite sound, and I find this disjuncture pretty interesting), as some felt like his attack on the science of nutrition went too far. I did not feel like his article was anti-science or alarmist but saw it as attacking a particular configuration of nutrition science (the reductionism, the inability to admit more complexity, and the turning away from common sense principles), which carry with it serious consequences in the so-called real world. He offers a critical edge that I think does not attack the principle of science generally (after all, he is using the techniques of skepticism and he marshals plenty of scientific data, like studies on omega 3s and 6 to make his point, though he does not only employ the rhetoric of science, which I think is key to understand his critique too) but just what is sees as a particularly problematic rendition of it that is especially problematic for nutrition (though I am sure many of his critiques are easily transfered to other domains). Here, for example, is an attack on reductionism:

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

And muses on the effects of this narrow path:

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

.
But you will see here that he reaches into scientific facts so that he is not throwing out the bathwater with the baby:

Eat less is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. Calorie restriction has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called Hara Hachi Bu : eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the eat less message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

There is no doubt that the article is advocating, very strongly, a point and he is not being all impassioned and neutral as may happen with a purely scientific rendition of the the topic. This will no doubt cause debate and reaction, which I am sure is what he was aiming for. And whether you end up agreeing or not with his critique, it makes for one fascinating read. Along with this piece is another engrossing, somewhat older one piece by Carl Elliot: A New Way to be Mad that examines the ethical complexities of what seems to be a relatively new phenomenon: Body Integration Identity Disorder (which he may have helped fuel a little via his very article and it is this issue of looping, first discussed by the philosopher of science, Ian Hacking that Carl Elliot nicely captures). Since the article is not available for free, here is another one, also by Carl Elliot, that addresses the same topic Unlike Pollan, Elliot does not have any clear cut answers or a really trenchant critique. More than anything he serves up a tasty meal that will in all likelihood be new to many readers, and the flavors he adds are those that make us confront the many interesting moral quandaries that this case presents.

Milton Country Park

This park near Cambridge is under threat, partly due to council mismanagement.

Climate change prompts Cabinet change in Canada - CNN.com

Carry on flying, says Blair - science will save the planet Special Reports Guardian Unlimited Politics

Weston and Worle News: Recycling Service Branded Rubbish

"A Weston resident has branded the town's recycling service rubbish and joined calls for it to be investigated.Carolyn Jones, who moved to Weston Village from south Gloucestershire 18 months ago,..." I've had to telephone and get Biffa to come back after they missed my collection every time since New Year. What's going on?

Linux Ecology-HOWTO

Nuclear Power?

Cycle Parking Farcility of the Month

CTC - Cyclist who refused to stay in the gutter wins

So you are allowed to cycle on the roads in Telford, despite what the police there think. More coverage:

Cyclist's conviction thrown out : Shropshire Star

BBC NEWS England Shropshire Cyclist wins road blocking appeal

Cycle-lanes - epetition reply

A relevant reminder from Tony Bliar's office that cyclists don't have to use useless cycle lanes.

Trains Swindon - Melksham - Westbury - SLASHED by the DfT and First

Campaign site about the government-enforced cuts to Great Western services in the Wiltshire/Somerset/Bristol area.

EDP24 - Dangerous driver in cyclist death jailed

BBC NEWS England Norfolk Tired motorist jailed over death

High-res plans of the TdF London stages

As far as I can tell, I was not getting any email from debian.org because master cached a bogus MX record for phonecoop.coop. Update 2: superstar DSAs stroked the right widget so email should start flowing again. I think I can't email anyone at debian.org or lists because debian uses sender verify. Update: It seems that debian.org's use of sender verify means debian will get blacklisted. An anonymous commenter posted:

"I'm arguing against Debian admins using Sender Verify because it's evil. Even uceprotect will list them if they caught a mail from them: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=10&s=0"

Update: Steinar H. Gunderson - Sender verify says we shouldn't care.

This has been a little overdue, but here it is. Lots of less than glamorous stuff has been going on in the XSF, and a few more exciting things are in the pipeline.

Among the less glamorous stuff, our resident release junkie/alpha porter, Steve Langasek, fixed #392500 which was our major RC bug on the alpha arch. Aside from that bug, there's been a whole host of bug triage by our newest team member, Brice Goglin. Brice has taken on the unenviable task of going through the massive list of bugs owned by the XSF. I've been traditionally less than responsible about handling bug reports like I should, and Brice is dealing with the mess I've left behind. Before he started, we were at over 2000 outstanding bugs, and as of this writing we're down to 1646 bugs, which is a huge amount of work. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making our little corner of the BTS usable for mere mortals. Aside from that, there's been an enormous amount of small cleanups and bug fixes by the whole team, most notably Julien Cristau (who's been doing more actual release management than yours truly), Thierry Redding, and Drew Parsons. Perhaps most important among these are miscellaneous last minute driver fixes that will enable a fair number of people to actually run Etch without backports. Michel D nzer has continued to be his usual awesome self, responding to the tough DRI bugs that the rest of us are terrified to approach.

Some of the more exciting stuff from a user perspective has been the various updates and new packaging going on. Thierry has taken on mesa, which is an incredibly daunting task, and he's done and incredible job of it so far. He and Julien cooperated on getting the newest mesa release, 6.5.2, in to experimental. That's a huge step on the way to getting the 7.2 release in to the archive. Thierry has also packaged up the newest compiz and some additional plugins ported from beryl, both of which are waiting in NEW right now for our overworked ftp masters to find time to have a look at them. Speaking of beryl, we also have that more or less complete and packaged. Our second-newest XSF member, Shawn Starr, has taken on beryl, and done a great job of getting the packages ready for experimental. They came back from review with a few minor comments, so he's busy getting those last issues resolved, so beryl should be winging its way over to NEW again for re-review soon. Finally, Josh Triplett and Jamie Sharp, who are both Debian and XCB developers, have put XCB in to experimental for you to test and play with. Expect to hear more about this when the Lenny development cycle starts.

The other huge thing that's been going on, and what I've been devoting most of my time to (aside from reading all the mail from Brice's bug triage), is transitioning the XSF over to git. Thierry has written major chunk of infrastructure to help move us over. I've done most of the conversion locally, and have been putting things up on git.debian.org as I go. As of now, we've got a very large chunk of X in git now, and using svn for those bits is officially closed. I'm hoping to complete the move in the next two weeks or so. If you want the above software that's not yet in the archive (beryl, compiz, compiz-extra, etc) you can clone it from the git repositories and build away. The other major thing that I've been doing is writing up a XSF git policy. This required a lot of input from the team, and we had to come up with a reasonable way of working the archive so that we could easily work with an upstream that was also using git, which as far as I know is a unique situation right now. It's in pretty good shape right now and we're just starting to put it in to real use. I've proposed a talk for Debconf on the XSF roadmap for Lenny, and I'll be sure to talk about our experiences using git if it gets accepted. In addition, we've all been learning the ins and outs of git, which is a whole other post in itself. I think that the XSF will end up being a really good resource for people in Debian who are looking to use git, as we'll have a lot of real world experience with a tool that relatively few people actually seem to know. Since I think git usage will only grow in the future, hopefully this will end up being valuable for Debian as a whole.

The housing situation for foreign students in Utrecht is far from optimal, but the most problematic is that there's no clear point where those students can go when they have an issue with their housing. Since most stay here only for periods ranging from one to twelve months, they're understandably not organising this themselves. I'm therefore delighted that after two years of talk, we've finally decided on a single point where Short Stay tennants can get help. USF Studentensteunpunt will welcome questions and issues from them, and our task is to make sure this point is well known by the foreign students, and to assist with any complaints that USF can't solve on its own. One wonders why this had to take so long, but we can finally start :-)

Friday was my birthday party, and is was a success. I got some nice presents even though I was unable to think up even one thing for my wish list beforehand. As an experiment I bought vegetarian bitterballs (a popular Dutch snack) to deep-fry, which were surprisingly well received. Stefan arrived at 03.00 so the party could then really commence. Saturday afternoon I spent with Matthijs tweaking some of our 1996 internet project, after which I went to visit Gerd-Jan's birthday party, who was born on the same day (and year) as myself, so I couldn't miss that. I was persuaded to join in on the current fad, poker, which left me with a whopping debt of five euros. Sunday marked the last day of the Winter Efteling season, which I visited with some Eftelist-moderators. I do not really like the WE, especially because it mostly lacks the green environment and real snow, but gains rain and cold, but it was interesting to study the Vogel Rok improvements. We closed the season off with some drinks in the Efteling Hotel bar, where I suddenly discovered it to be midnight. Not that I'm Cinderella, it rather meant that the last trains had already left. Jos and Ilona were kind enough to drop me off at Rotterdam Central station around 1:05, where I could take the 2:00 train. The night train takes this scenic route: Rotterdam, Delft, The Hague, Leiden, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, Utrecht; so it was 4:15 when I was home. Now for some rest.

The growth of new Open Content projects continues to amaze me. I really admire how the wiki technique makes it possible to combine the microcontributions of thousands or millions of people across the Internet and make high-quality, usable reference works for everyone to share and enjoy equally. What we'd normally think of as staggeringly audacious becomes manageable and realizable using wikis. I'm mostly waxing poetic here about a new project for creating a Free event calendar for the entire planet. Wikevent is built using the ubiquitous and reliable MediaWiki software, but with a ton of add-ons and features to make organizing an events calendar reasonable. There's a good mix of calendar-oriented interface, geographical interface, and a nice dose of Microformats thrown in for good measure. Wikevent is still in its early stages, but it doesn't take much imagining to envision a great future for it. Managing event calendars -- everything from the Beck concert in your city to the meeting of the local Interlingua club -- is a daunting task for local media. As its API and data feeds mature, it's reasonable -- nay, probable -- that Wikevent feeds could power the events calendars for local weekly newspapers, radio stations, TV, and community Web sites. I think it will make a good data source for community-oriented sites like Upcoming.org or Eventful. Wikevent plans to use a lot of metadata to allow slicing its database in different ways for different kinds of people. The entire database is available under the extremely liberal BSD-like Creative Commons Attribution license. Because it's such a nice complement to a travel guide, we've started adding Wikevent links to Wikitravel guide articles on our English version (and, soon, other versions too). There's more crossover, of course: the site's founder, Mark Jaroski, and community powerhouse Andrew Haggard, are both longtime Wikitravellers. I'm looking forward to seeing how this new Open Content project continues to develop. tags: wiki wikevent mediawiki mark jaroski andrew haggard cc event calendar

Jyte Speaking of cool new sites, I was glad to see in Scott Kveton's blog news of the new Jyte project. Jyte is a fascinating social network that uses the OpenID authentication system for the identity infrastructure. I think this is really interesting -- using OpenID for social networks is really a good idea, and opens up the process a lot. Another interesting point is that Jyte lets you make arbitrary assertions about yourself or, really, anything that has an URI. Other users can approve or disapprove the assertion, giving it more validity. For example, I've made an assertion that I'm the founder of Wikitravel: http://jyte.com/cl/evan.prodromou.name-is-the-founder-of-wikitravel That assertion has been backed up by 3 other people (so far), giving it a little bit more authority. Or, as Chris Dawson put it, http://jyte.com/cl/jyte-is-hot-or-not-for-nerds I think that the claims system is pretty intelligent -- a great way to make statements about yourself or others. It works like ClaimID, but with more latitude in what you can make claims about. tags: jyte openid claims assertions kveton janrain