I was considering to modify mpd, my favourite music player (using a daemon and multiple frontends, however I usually don't interact much with it anyway except the casual 'skip' button press). I wanted it to support DBus, so I could more easily add e.g. a "love" and a "hate" button, and start collecting data which songs I like. Seaching for "mpd dbus" quickly turned up a proposed freedesktop.org standard by VideoLan people and some discussion by for example the XMMS2 folks. I'm looking forward to that. Right now, my "Multimedia buttons" are bound to some shell scripts that try to find out which media player I'm running and trigger the appropriate command there.

I want a cell phone that runs Linux. I've been wanting one for a long time. Why should I care what OS it runs? Well, I have two main reasons: 1) because I want to support commercial ventures related to free software, and 2) I want to write applications for it, and I don't want to be beholden to some vendor to sell me a development kit, and tell me what I can and cannot write. I want to apt-get install the developer kit, write some code, and upload it to the phone. Rock. I've been paying only scant attention to the cell phone market since I got a Treo 600, which I like a lot. It is _not_ a Linux-based phone. It runs PalmOS, which is a pretty crufty OS, but I've been using it since 2001, so I have a lot of data in there. It should be pretty easy to get the data out, though, so I'm not worried. I really like the Treo's thumb-keyboard; It's qwerty, and I can type pretty fast on it. Numeric keypad based phones are lame. I hardly ever type in numbers anyway. Apple recently announced the iPhone, which I shouldn't even mention because it doesn't allow 3rd party applications, doesn't run on a free operating system, and is probably very buggy since they've never done anything like that before. Enough about Apple. As I poke around the intern-webs, I find that some stuff has been happening over the year when it comes to Linux-based phones, but I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what is happening. It's surprising how little information is out there. Despite this great list of starting places from linuxdevices.com, the rabbit trail never leads to a "buy this phone" button. Look! There's an open Linux-based phone platform called OpenMoko. At least, I think that's what I pieced together from the scant information available on their web site. Maybe OpenMoko is the phone and openembedded is the platform? I had a very nice conversation with some folks on freenode who explained a bit about this really cool project to me. It looks like they even have a phone that it sounds like is going to be released soon, and it's discussed on LinuxDevices.com. That phone looks pretty sweet. It has a GPS built in too. I like the touch-screen idea that I guess it has, based on the pictures, and it's not way too expensive. Maybe that's the phone I'll get. All it's missing is a "buy it now" button. Oh, and "apt-cache search openmoko" doesn't turn up anything. So on to the Green Phone by Trooktech. This looks pretty good, but not as a replacement for my Treo, since the primary interface is a numeric keypad instead of a qwerty keyboard. It looks like you can actually buy a development version of the phone, but it's not overly free; you cannot develop commercial applications on it without paying them a licensing fee. Lamers. According to some folks on freenode, this phone is just a prototype for vendors like this one. (But do you see a "buy this phone" button on that page?) There's a nice article that talks about several of these devices, including the Nokia N800, which is a Linux-based handheld computer / web appliance. I played with one the other day, and it's pretty sweet. Too bad it isn't a phone, or I'd buy one today. So it looks like there's no open, Linux-based, qwerty phone out there yet. If you know otherwise, let me know. Perhaps one is coming out next month. I think I can wait that long.

It's all about motivation and at the moment I'm not really motivated to seriously blog about my time at LCA, I'm simply too exhausted.

My talks about the debian-edu and live-package yesterday went well, it's just a pity the microphone died during the live-package talk, so that there won't be a video from it, as video without audio is quite useless :)

The only useful thing I could think of today, was to start to collect the slides of all talks I have been given (and will be giving) in a central location on my server, so you can easily find them. Currently only the LCA and FOMS slides are there, I will add the rest, when I'm ready ;-) That's also when I'll finish my report about the FOMS conference :-/

I guess I need a nap.

In short, Erich says that XML, plus the right editor, Just Works(tm). Well, yes. But when you are over a slow link, or when you are desperate with a b0rken system, you just don't have Eclipse at hand to edit a config file. Of course, you could use the half-existing XML support you talk about in vim (I have not tested it, cannot be sure of it), but it is still a PITA if your /usr is not working fine or if your termcap is too dumb to manage. Yes, there are each time less of those situations, but anyway...
I won't start ranting on how YAML is the right tool for every situation where XML is used - It's clearly not. XML is, after all, a standard. Some configurations can be done by XML, say, if you have any of those Java frameworks (I've only suffered^Whated^Wgot despaired^W^Wset up JBoss), but still... Configuration files, at least the important ones, should be editable by using a lightweight, easy and available tool like nvi, pico, or even cat sed.
Oh, and about YAML's site being valid YAML: Of course, it only looks like it. But cut and paste it - It works for me :) Of course, it is not meant to replace or work over HTML. I would never dream of using YAML as a web-services language or anything of that sort. There are better tools for that.
But please, leave config files hand-editable. With common, light and hard-to-break editors.

So so so so I am in the airport in Minneapolis, about 2/3 into my mega-trip from PR to Edmonton and decided to jump online since I have over 3 hrs in the airport. And today is the first day in about a month I have used high speed Internet access and it is, well, beautiful, at least compared to the dial-up I was using at home, which was pretty painful, especially because the slowness was compounded by the mosquitoes flying above me, reminding me of how annoying it was to be online. So I usually ditched the whole experience in favor of the more reliable meat world. Here and nw the speed almost feels magnified. It is like faster, better.. plainly hotter. It reminds me of the time that I quit coffee for months and then I started again. It was like drinking coffee and caffeine for the first time all over again. So I gues what I should try next is to quit coffee and high speed internet together for a few months and then start them together.

Debootstrap was very inspiring.There initially was knowledge about using debootstrap and creating chroots; but that was a bit crude.pbuilder was one effort which wouldn't have started without debootstrap.Debootstrap has been used in many different ways, but by centralizing debootstrap debugging and bug tracking on pbuilder, and running daily regression tests on debootstrapas pbuilder testsuite, quality is assured.I think in that sense, debootstrapchanged a significant portion of Debian and the way Debian project handles quality.6 years. Touches me. Sniff.

I started today the winter campaign of l10n NMUs, after a long and cool autumn campaign. This time, this is more a kind of BlitzKrieg:

• Spot a target
• Grab pending l10n bugs
• Check maintainer's activity:
  • If apparently inactive, build, upload, subscribe to PTS and request to unblock
  • If apparently alive, send a short delay notice and wait for 2 days
• Build
• Upload
• Send patch
• Subscribe to PTS
• Request unblock to the magic release team

No QA improvements this time, only pending debconf l10n stuff. Targets are chosen among pending French translations. After all, it's fair that the effort benefits the team I'm part of for years, right? So, fellow developers, if you have pending French l10n bugs, better watch your back...:-)

Gordon Haff: “Imagine, if you will, that it s the late Nineties. A certain software company based in Redmond, Washington has recently released Visual Studio 97 thereby bundling together many of its development tools for the first time. Now imagine that the company decided to release those tools for free. What do you think the general reaction would have been? Applause for Microsoft s generosity? Or widespread condemnation for using its market power to make such a transparently anti-competitive attack on other makers of development tools?” Thought provoking observations. Note, however, that “open source as competitive weapon” isn’t limited to large vendors—it works equally well (and, in many ways, better) for the upstarts (see Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, etc.). In fact, it works so well for the upstarts that even the upstarts have upstarts (see, e.g., Canonical). Can something that levels the playing field so dramatically be called predatory? Predatory has one-sided, unfair advantage connotations. In open source, it goes both ways. With Eclipse, it was IBM doing the disrupting; but with MySQL and JBoss, IBM is on the other end of it. At the end of the day, the real winner is all of us—after all, who can argue that the state of IDEs and middleware isn’t better today than it’s ever been?

I’ve been hired by the Ulteo project to work on packaging and releasing matters. I’m pretty excited

We have a list of 10 (famous) girl geeks from CNET and one from someone else.

The CNET list has Ada Byron, Grace Hopper, Mary Shelly, and Marie Curie. Mary Shelly isn't someone who I'd have listed, but it does seem appropriate now I think about it. Marie Curie is one of the top geeks of all time (killing yourself through science experiments has to score bonus geek points). I hope that there are better alternatives to items 4, 7, 9, and 10 on the Cnet list.

The list from someone else has 9 women I've never heard of. If we are going to ignore historical figures (as done in the second list) but want to actually list famous women then the list seems to be short. If we were to make a list of women who are known globally (which would mean excluding women who are locally famous in Australia, or in Debian for example). The only really famous female geek that I can think of is Pamela from Groklaw.

The process of listing the top female geeks might have been started as an attempt to give a positive list of the contributions made by women. Unfortunately it seems to highlight the fact that women are lacking from leadership positions. There seem to be no current women who are in positions comparable to Linus, Alan, RMS, ESR, Andrew Tanenbaum, or Rusty (note that I produced a list of 6 famous male geeks with little thought or effort).

Kirrily has written an interesting article on potential ways of changing this.

Sometime this month, debootstrap turns six years old. I was thinking about this last night as I tweaked a new xen instance that the hosting provider had installed Debian on using debootstrap, while in the other window using a debootstraped system to investigate a weird apt premissions problem. All very standard, and between this kind of thing, installing Debian with d-i, and building packages with pbuilder, a lot of us would be lost without debootstrap now. The story of exactly how it came about is interesting, though it's blurred by time in my memory. Maybe AJ will correct me, but I think it went something like this:

• Aeons ago, every Debian system was bootstrapped using a root filesystem tarball, which was built using the basedisks.sh script in the boot-floppies source. That ugly thing hardcoded a bootstrap sequence that managed to work most of the time, and had a lot of code to work around issues in various packages in bae. IIRC it needed a local mirror, and lots of babysitting to keep it working.
• When I suggested that boot-floppies be rewritten, and modularised, I'm fairly sure that I pointed to basedisks.sh as one thing that would make a useful standlone module, but I can't find proof of that.
• In late 2000, AJ posted to a thread about one of the first d-i demo systems with something he was calling "base-deb", that is a recognisable prototype of debootstrap. It downloaded debs from a mirror and built a chroot on the fly.
• After some back and forth over the next couple weeks regarding how it would work with d-i, AJ released the first version of debootstrap on January 30th.
• It's sorta hard to believe now, but there was a lot of push-back on the idea of bootstrapping Debian on the fly, rather than using the old tarball. Much of it was inertia; some of it was legitimate concerns about whether it would work robustly. IIRC these concerns kept coming up right through the release of woody in 2002, the first version of Debian to install using debootstrap. In fact, woody still included a basedebs.tar, although it was built using debootstrap.
• While various rough edges were filed off over the years, there were no really big changes after that to debootstrap until 2005 then debootstrap finally got smart enough to resolve dependencies, rather than using the hardcoded lists of what packages to install in what order, that it had inherited from the boot-floppies.

Debootstrap is one of my favorite examples of a tool that ends up being much more general purpose than was first envisioned (at least by me; AJ may have known all along). The collection of stuff that has grown up around it and the way it's changed how both Debian developers and users work is pretty impressive.

After two weeks of being operational, Stuff To Do has been a big success at work, because it lets people keep track of what they're doing with a minimum of hassle. Truth be told, I've never been that wild about "productivity" software, but I'm pretty happy with the system I've created. I really have attempted to make something that stays out of your way as much as possible. That has involved making some choices - for instance, instead of buttons to start or stop time tracking for a given task, Stuff To Do [aside: it would be much faster to write 'STD', but I think that might not be such a good idea in terms of marketing] uses some javascript to see if you've moused over (or blurred, or typed, or done anything, basically) to the window where it lives in the last 15 minutes. This will certainly reduce the accuracy a little bit, and if you get 'in the zone' and don't hit the browser for a while, it won't count your time, but all things considered, this is better than having to hit a stupid button every time you do anything, because you will invariably forget to hit the button, and leave it going overnight, and then have to go back and manually edit everything, and.... yuck. I also have some ideas about how to further improve the javascript in order to make it even easier to track whether you're active or not (with your consent, of course!). In any case, I've fixed up a number of small bugs, and added a few new features:

• You can now only drag tasks with their title so that you can cut and past text from the 'notes' section.
• The notes now use 'markdown' so that you can mark them up some.

Some other things I'm considering for the near future:

• Enable sending tasks via email with one or two clicks - this would make it so you could add a default email address (of a bug tracking system, for instance) and automatically submit the stuff you're working on.
• "Warp" a task to the top of the list of things to do via a link for each task. You can currently move a task around by clicking, holding, and them moving the mouse scroller, but that's kind of cumbersome.

In the process, I also happened upon Active Merchant, which is some cool code by the fine folks at jadedpixel.com, which was quite handy for integrating Paypal. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, I found a few things that I wanted to do just slightly differently, and sent in a patch.

Apparently it's a new year. I spent the first week of it in San Francisco, on honeymoon. I spent Christmas with my parents in NI. After ending up driving there (and getting the Holyhead/Dublin ferry) because I was flying home during the period when fog was affecting UK airports. FlyBE cancelled my flight from Norwich on the Thursday, but in their usual fashion it took them several hours after it was due to take off to do so. I hate that. They knew it was unlikely to take off when I was checking in, they cancelled all other flights around it but they kept the Dublin flight until the last minute. I think this is because it had the most people on it and they wanted to try to avoid having to refund people, but it would have been much easier for those of us supposed to be travelling on it if they'd just accepted their losses earlier. Not a lot happening so far this year aside from the trip to the US. I'm without car (Katherine brings it back tomorrow - we flew from Belfast to Heathrow to get the flight to San Francisco so the car got left at my parents'). I might have bought a 32" HD LCD TV, but more on that if it actually arrives. James Puderer sent me a patch for supporting the Dream Cheeky USB missile launcher as well as the M&S one already in usblauncher. Get version 0.0.3 here if you have one of these. A belated Happy New Year, folks.

Here it’s a top-10 list of really important things, created by M dicos Sin Fronteras in Spanish. directhex, from #debian-offtopic (thanks!), provided a grammar/spelling check on my original English translation.

1. Central African Republic: Resurgence of the conflict. In 2006, its civilian population was a victim of violence again. During these months, confrontations have taken place between government troops and rebel groups. Civilians, suspected of supporting one or the other, have stuck in the biddle. Around 100,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes. Several children, under 5 years old, have become ill of malaria, worms and serious respiratory infections.
2. Chechnya: Physical and psychologic scars. The consequences of a conflict that has lasted over 12 years so far are still present. Large numbers of Chechens that were displaced during the most serious phases of the crisis have already returned. However, the majority still lack housing and has to live in temporary shelters. Violence, kidnappings and abuses are still rampant. In the rural zones, medical infrastructure is almost nonexistent.
3. Sri Lanka: Civilians caught in the middle. Combat between government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have intensified since the summer, causing displacements of tens of thousands of people. Other are still imprisoned and cannot flee.
4. Democratic Republic of Congo: Violence and permanent deficiencies. Deprivation and violence suffered by millons of Congolese is still happening unnoticed by the rest of the planet. Eastern Congo is a battleground for fights between several armed groups, included government forces that use force against civilian populace, leading to brutal living conditions.
5. Somalia: War and natural catastrophes. Even though its current situation has temporarily attraced media attention, the terrible living conditions of the Somali population are still largely forgotten. The country has one of the worst levels of sanitation in the world, and a quarter of the infant population dies before reaching 5 years old.
6. Colombia: Living with fear. Massacres, executions and fear are a daily life of thousands of Colombians. So far, almost three million have fled their homes because of a conflict marked by the drug trafficking that involves government forces, paramilitary groups and armed guerrillas.
7. Haiti: Extreme urban violence. The violence and insecurity is a daily breakfast in its capital city, Port-au-Prince, with confrontations between armed groups, the Haitian police and the UN Stabilization Mission on Haiti. Since December 2004, more than 3,000 people have been registered with bullet wounds, including more than a thousand women and children.
8. India: 25 years of conflict. Confrontations between Maoist insurgents, government forces and anti-Maoist military services have caused the displacement of 50,000 civilans in several areas of the country. The population still lives with fear and violence, with little or no access to sanitary conditions.
9. Tuberculosis: Obsolete and insufficient treatments. Against popular opinion in the West, tuberculosis is not an “obsolete problem”. Each year, it causes the deaths of two million people, around nine million people contract the disease, and new multiresistants variants are appearing.
10. Undernourishment: Thousands of avoidable deaths. Whilst in Spain the Ministry of Health tries to fight one of the major problems of the decade, obesity, millions of children die of hunger around the world and more than 60 million people show signs of acute undernourishment.

I guess not everything around is a top ten contest on popularity of who’s the hottest, who’s the prettiest, who has the longest penis or the biggest breasts, or whose farts smell better, geek, eh?

Just as I was blogging about my trip to Prozac Land and how I got my health back, after working for a week and a half I started feeling sick again. Very sick.

I was having these ups and downs, one day I felt I could fly and the next I felt I was down in a hole. I was throwing up every morning and I had stopped eating anything but fruit already quite some time ago. I was smoking like a truck driver (Spanish saying) and drinking coffee like a mad hatter would drink tea in every Unbirthday Party.





My psychiatrist then withdrew all my medication at once, which was sweet and sour. This crap fucks up your brain chemistry, and on one hand, you feel like yourself again, but on the other hand, the down is scary. I have been dizzy, clumsy and sleepy at all times since I am off the happiness pill.

My endless doctor trips have not finished yet, but I made an unexpected stop in ER last Thursday. I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, delirious that I am going to loose my job because of my terrible health and, subsequently, lack of accountability, stressed as hell about it, and physically feeling like crap, I landed in ER Land, and stayed there for 6 hours. I felt frivolous taking this picture, my arm feeling numb and foreign from the Peripheral IV line, which is what I was first given upon arrival, it felt too tight, slightly painful, and I was terrified to move or bend my arm. It just lay there, beside me, as if it were no longer part of me, out of my control.

All kind of tests were performed on me, blood was taken to feed the lab vampires, I don't even want to think about the urine, x-rays documented my piercings locations, physical exploration, endless questions, talking to two different, unfriendly, tired and overworked, doctors, and nothing was found, all looked normal. All but me, I was despaired. If all is fine, and I am not dying from bladder cancer, why do I feel like this? I felt stupid, I was looked at as I was there wasting their scarce time. Nobody could tell me what is wrong with me.

It looks like Prozac played an important role in killing my health completely. My psychiatrist has been on the phone with me all weekend, calling me every couple of hours. Why is he so worried about me? Why doesn't he want me to sleep alone at my place and wants me to sleep at my parents? Is it because of people committing suicide closely related to Prozac? Why, if he is aware of this, which I do not know, did he give it to me? I am not suicidal, dear doctor. I am just feeling very sleepy, very clumsy, I can barely manage to press the right keys in Mutt, my email client of choice since 2000, which I know how to use by heart, my fingers just do their job, but not anymore. But how can I explain that to you?

My friends, again, are here, close to me, keeping an eye on me, calling me on the phone, feeding me, letting me take a nap in their couch.

Dear doctor, you have mentioned the latest groovy drug to replace Prozac with, I am sorry, it is not going to happen. I am going to deal with whatever is wrong with my brain, mind and body in a natural way, with therapy, and healthy living habits. I trust you and respect you, but I do not trust these drug makers, and they are already making enough money. If it is going to be painful, I want to feel it. Please do not numb me and then make feel it all at once like this. Let me deal with it the way I choose to.

I choose the hard way. Can we agree that I am strong enough?

I have Dreams I would be embarrassed to admit in public... that suddenly are not so embarrassing anymore!

I dream of winning 1 million Euros in the lottery, starting a Debian Foundation, buying a whole building in the best area of Madrid, making myself a nice home in the attic, with a huge terrace for Vi and Jazz, and having the Debian headquarters there. With that amount of money it would either be the Foundation or the building... So it really is wishful dreaming.

But sometimes I let this dreaming go on further, and I dream of winning more money, buying a whole island, starting a new country there, and calling it Debian Land, getting all DDs a Debian Passport, sponsoring their holidays with their families there, in the Debian Island, with great Internet connection, sun and wonderful beaches, so that they can gather, without waiting for Debconf, or just enjoy a break.

I learnt yesterday that The Micronation of Sealand is for sale and that the people behind The Pirate Bay want to buy it: With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizien.

So I guess I am not the only one who dreams of starting a country where one can be really free. And Sealand is so close to the Debian Developer Centre of Mass... it s so tempting...

They even have a Plan B: If we do not get enough money required to buy The Micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somewhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from USD 50.000). That s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it doesn t sound so stupid anymore.

I just need to be more constant in my lottery playing, and have some faith.

Partly in preparation for an upcoming baby, and partly by watching mid, I started thinking about cameras. I’ve decided that my little old Canon PowerShot S230 is getting a little worn out (its second battery can’t hold a charge that lasts longer than a few dozen photos). So, after a lot of advice from mid, I decided to get a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (also known as the EOS 400D). Also, partly on his advice and partly on the advice of a few Amazon reviews, I decided not to get the kit lens (EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6; not the one with the USM), and instead got another lens that sometimes is sold along with the XTi body (EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM). I also got a 2GB compact flash card. As someone who’s always had point-and-shoot cameras, this is a really awesome camera. Part of it is that all of my cameras up until now have been 3.2MP or less and this one is 10.1MP. But a lot of it is that I get to control things like shutter time, and that the lens has image stabilization (IS), so I don’t get nearly as many blurry pictures. But I’ve had the most fun playing with the aperture, which creates some really neat effects that just weren’t possible with my point-and-shoot. Pixel, however, was unimpressed: Anyway, I can see now why people spend so much money on cameras, and especially on lenses. And I can tell already that I’m going to want a tripod. Also, I understand now why mid has a 4GB CF. My 2GB CF holds about 200 RAW images, which would be plenty with a point-and-shoot. But with this camera, it goes quickly, since it’s so easy to take multiple pictures in quick succession. Thus far, I haven’t really run into any problems with the camera itself, other than feeling like I need or want more accessories.

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has gone on the offensive against the pro bono attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees. Although there is a lot to criticize in U.S. detainee policy, these attacks represent a new low:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. … The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.” In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases. Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Perhaps the worst part is the following statement, which as best I can tell has no basis in truth:

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Deval Patrick, the recently-elected governor of Massachusetts, endured similar attacks for his work representing criminal defendants. Fortunately, that strategy backfired and Patrick was elected in a landslide. Although others in the administration have attempted to distance themselves from Stimson’s comments (including the Attorney General), the suggestion that large corporate clients should boycott these attorneys as punishment for representing detainees remains disgusting. The right to counsel is not a political issue. You could hold the unlikely belief that each and every Guantánamo detainee is a confirmed terrorist and still advocate for fair treatment. These attacks represent a new brand of McCarthyism. I hope that this strategy is as unsuccessful nationally as it was in Massachusetts. It strikes me that attacking the partners of some of the largest firms in the country is also bad political strategy. These attorneys are the type of people who may be major campaign donors and well-connected in both parties. I would think twice before attempting to vilify them. They are unlikely to drop their representation (and might be ethically barred from doing so) in light of these statements. If anything, I suspect their determination to ensure the detainees are accorded due process will intensify. Update: abovethelaw.com speculates that this may be an intentional good cop/bad cop strategy.