If a Debian General Resolution ballot asked me to choose between eat shit and die , I d vote for Further Discussion.

today: illegal graphology ; tomorrow: illegal facebook query Join two dots and obtain a line. The first dot. A few days ago, on the blog of an italian journalist I've found a reference to an old article about facebook originally from the guardian (even equipped with an italian translation, just in case ...). The article is quite long, but I found it a worthy read. (Well, at least it is one assuming you can skip over the initial rhetoric about "social networking = autistic geeks". Similar arguments were as annoying as untrue already 10 years ago about the Internet, and even more so 20 years ago about role playing games.) In the article you can find interesting facts about who are the creators of facebook and even more interesting ones about who has been more than happy to finance it more recently. All is topped with a fun re-reading of facebook's "privacy policy". The second dot. This late afternoon, speaking with Ralf in the lab, I got introduced to the practice of some companies to ask for an hand-written curriculum vitae as a regular practice to be considered as a candidate. Why so? Well, because they can then ask a graphologist to draw a psychological profile and take a more "informed decision" about whether to hire you or not (assuming you believe in graphology, of course). Sure, it's illegal. But still it seems to be common practice in Japan and a not yet completely vanished practice in specific employment fields in France. The line. Guess what? Tomorrow it will become easier (and already is for all the places where the facebook penetration is sky-rocketing): instead of paying a graphologist for a (possibly inaccurate) profile, you can just pay the faceboook guys to get a record of a lot of your private life wanderings, pictures, past relationships, ... Sure, it will be illegal. But still ..., and it will be way more efficient! I'm every passing day more and more proud of having closed my facebook account more than 1 year ago (and trust me: closing a facebook account ain't easy).

---

Now, anyone of you can drop by on my homepage, spot a shiny linkedin logo, and call me a cheap talker. I'd concur that in a sense every social networking has bad privacy implications, but that's trivial, we all know that. Still, I think linkedin is somehow better. Why? Because it is specifically geared toward professional information. While giving information to them, I'm usually thinking about my professional "figure" and I've high barriers that are likely to inhibit me to leak personal information, or at least make me think about that. On the contrary, with facebook you have low barriers and you are encouraged to provide personal information, and that's exactly the point of the facebook owners. (And here I'm even assuming you do have some barriers while providing information to facebook, which I'm convinced is not the case for most of its users.) I see a parallel with the early days of blogs, where the euphoria of blogging made a lot of people mistaking their public blog with their personal diary; stuff which will strike back. While experienced bloggers develop defenses against the initial foolish attitude, people do not develop similar defenses on facebook, because that defenses will defeat the purpose of the network.

The new Global 300 list has been released this week:-

the 300 top co-operatives are responsible for an aggregate turnover of 1.1 trillion USD which makes it the size of the 10th economy of the world nearly the size of the Spanish economy. The list also shows that co-operatives are growing in terms of turnover 14%

Also, the Good Fuel Co-operative (a consortium established early in 2008 by five UK biodiesel cooperatives: Goldenfuels, Sundance Renewables, Magpie Recycling, Bolton Alternative Fuels Co-operative and Biofuels.org.uk) has launched a share issue to raise 420,000 to fuel the growth of the biodiesel market. Finally, Cooperatives-SW board will meet in Exeter in January and the AGM will be in Plymouth in April - so if you d like me to let you know the dates when they re announced (for meeting up or otherwise), please leave a comment on this post and tick the Notify me of followup comments box. Thanks!

Hi, I’d like to send an email from a small domain that you’ve never heard of or from a big ISP that’s known for being slack about spam (*), I can’t send the mail to you because of your anti-spam measures. I think that this is unfair, it’s discrimination, and you are cutting off your nose to spite your face in rejecting my mail. So please reconfigure your mail server now and accept more spam in your inbox, my message is important enough to justify the extra time you will spend manually deleting mail and the risk of accidentally deleting legitimate mail while deleting heaps of spam (I am in fact more important than you). By not accepting my mail you are being an asshole. I only receive a dozen spam messages a day and I don’t mind it, without even knowing you or having bothered to do a web search to see how well your email address is known I’m sure that you don’t receive any more spam than me and therefore you too can turn off most anti-spam measures and manually sort through the spam. You don’t really have a problem with spam, you are just paranoid, I’m sure that you installed your anti-spam measures before receiving any spam and then never bothered to check the hit rates. My sys-admin knows that one of the DNSBLs has an old entry from when his server was broken, but he won’t request that it be removed - so you can change your server because my sys-admin doesn’t want to click on a URL that you sent him. The RFC-ignorant.org service is used and run by ignorant people - I know this without even reading their web site to discover how it works. The above is a summary of a number of complaints that I have received about my anti-spam measures. I’ve para-phrased them so that they make sense, I have not actually had someone directly say “I’m more important than you so you should just accept more spam”, but the implication is quite clear. Now there are some legitimate reasons for requesting that anti-spam measures be reduced. In the distant past almost everyone had working reverse DNS entries which matched the forward entries and it was common to reject mail from systems that didn’t have valid DNS. Nowadays there are many big ISPs that delegate IP address space without permitting reverse DNS entries, and there are companies that have one department in charge of IP addresses (who don’t have a clue about reverse DNS) and another department running mail servers (who are cluefull). So the environment has changed to make reverse DNS checks a non-viable anti-spam measure. Requesting that people remove such checks is reasonable. Anti-spam measures that attack innocent third parties are bad. Sending “warnings” about viruses has made no sense for many years as all modern viruses fake the sender address, an employee of one company once admitted to me that they were sending out anti-virus “warning” messages as a way of sending unsolicited advertising to random people (I reported them as a spam source). Some time ago on a routine upgrade of ClamAV I accidentally copied in a default configuration file that made it send such warnings - I was grateful when someone informed me of my mistake so that I could fix it. Challenge-response is another technology that causes harm to others. I think it makes a lot of sense for mailing lists (every modern list server will confirm subscription requests), while it does result in sending unwanted mail to innocent third parties (every time a new virus becomes prevalent I receive a number of confirmation messages from list servers), but it’s not something that I will use on a regular email account (but I am prepared to do paid work implementing CR for other people). Requesting that manually implemented blocks be removed is quite reasonable. Occasionally I find that mail from one of my servers is blocked because a previous owner of the IP address space did bad things. In such a situation it is quite reasonable to provide an assurance that the new owner takes abuse issues seriously and to request that the block be removed. Requesting that I make any change to my system without making a minimal effort to get your broken mail server fixed is totally unreasonable. If the system administrator is not prepared to click on a URL to get their system removed from a black-list or if the user is unwilling to report the problem to the sysadmin then I will probably be unwilling to make any change to my system. The only exceptions to this rule are for clients, colleagues, and for people who use mail services that are large and unresponsive to users (IE the users don’t directly pay). I recently made a white-list entry for a large European ISP that is used by a Debian Developer for their work, as the ISP is known to be unresponsive to requests and mail related to Debian work is important to me I added a white-list entry. One thing I am planning to do is to document my anti-spam measures and then allow people the opportunity of suggesting new anti-spam measures that I haven’t tried yet if they want me to turn off any of my current protections. (*) I’m not aware of any big ISP that takes strong measures against spamming customers and customers whose computers are trojaned. I am aware of one having done it in the past, but I suspect that they may have ceased doing so after their brush with bankruptcy. I suspect that many ISPs simply rate-limit their customers connections to the outbound mail relays and hope that they don’t get enough infected customers at any time to get themselves listed as a spam source.

I have not sat behind the helm of teaching for very long but I already have a few tricks up my sleeve. One of them is that I assign some of my favorite readings at the end of the semester so as to counter the downtrodden and tepid spirit and mood (not to mention attention) of my students, which drops precipitously with each passing day. Let’s face it post Thanksgiving, we are all a little tired and I try to find the readings, which uplift, intrigue, and challenge cherished assumptions about marriage and sex. So far it seems to pay off and I often can tell because the conversational pitch and excitement in class is high and the student writings are good, great, even exceptional, which, again, is hard to produce/induce this late in the semester. Readers of this blog would probably be most interested in one of these lively readings, Ben Nugent’s American Nerd (and it might be interesting to hear how the European Nerd story would diverge or converge with this one). One of my students, an audio geek and Free Culture President/Free Software junkie, by the name of John Randall produced a very nice little response (not research) paper on the Nugent reading as well as a short piece by Sarah Seltzer from Bitch Magazine
The(Girl) Geek Stands Alone (and thanks to Joe> for cluing me into this piece). Seltzer piece basically argues, in her own words, the following:

Imagine this scene from a comedy: a group of female friends sit around smoking a bowl and working on the Wikipedia page for Lord of the Rings. Their fashion sense is decidedly iconoclastic and several sport thick-rimmed glasses. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have a hilariously ribald discussion on the relative traits of elves and orcs.
Awesome as it is, you’ll never see this scene onscreen. No mainstream movie or TV series would dare group so many female nerds together, or celebrate them so unabashedly

So John’s whole response paper is here and here is the pdf. In the paper, he makes a number of excellent points but what I loved most about it was his very geeky move at the end of the paper to prove Sarah (somewhat wrong) by listing all the girl geeks that do and have appeared in mainstream (and not-so mainstream) entertainment venues/shows, etc. They are as follows and in his own words:

I will now showcase my own geekiness through my knowledge of geeky female characters. Why? Because I can. But also because I want to demonstrate that if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty. Moreover, if you pick the right ones, you can make them support your argument about gender relations, whatever that argument might be. Some of these charters and personalities are hardly gendered, some are hyper-sexual. Some are incredibly attractive but completely asexual. Some undergo a transformation into/out of geekiness, while others to not. Some are powerful, while some are powerless. Some (most?) celebrate their geekiness, others are tortured by it. They are all geeks take your pick: Aeon Flux, a sexy geek who’s technological gadgets give her super powers (Comic drawings then Charlize TheronAeon Flux) Wonder Woman, attractive pilot of an invisible plane Lara Croft, a female Indiana Jones in short shorts, wielding guns and cracking computer codes (CGI and then Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider) She-Ra, who was way smarter than He-Man (Masters of the Universe cartoons) Gadget Hackwrench, beautiful chipmonk technician for Chip and Dale (Rescue Rangers cartoon) Velma, featuring eyeglasses, awkwardness and brains (Scooby Doo), Hermonie Granger, a geek who is temporarily rejected because she is a geek, remains a geek, and finds love and happiness (Harry Potter) Barbarella, who, through comic strips and a 1968 film, helped introduce science fiction and sex to young women (Barbarella) La Femme Nikita, a skillful, savvy, and very feminine girl who doubles as a covert spy Kate Libby, aka ‘Acid Burn’, uber-sexualized hacker (played by Angelina Jolie in Hackers) Kathryn Janeway, smart and powerful captain of the USS Voyager (Star Trek Voyager) Starbuck (Battlestar Galactica), Dana Scully, FBI agent with encyclopedic media knowledge. The bizzare subtex of non-realized sexual tension was part of the magic The X-Files. Willow Rosenberg, geeky sidekick turned geeky supervillian (Alyson Hannigan in buffy the Vampire Slayer) Michelle Flaherty, hyper-sexual band geek (Alyson Hannigan in American Pie series) Dr Ellie Sattler, heroniene scientist (Jurrasic Park) Ellie, scientis hero (played by both Jenna Malone and Jodi Foster in Carl Sagan’s Contact) Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo in Welcome to the Dollhouse Enid and Rebecca (Thora Birch and Scarlett Johanson in Ghost World) just about every charater ever played by Jenna Malone (Donie Darko, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, The United States of Leland, Saved!, etc) half of the charaters played within the last decade by Jodi Foster (Panic Room, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Flightplan, The Addams Family half of the charaters played by Christina Ricci (Mermaids, The Addams Family, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ice Storm, Buffalo ‘66, Prozac Nation, Pumpkin, Speed Racer) half of the characters played by Natalie Portman (The Professional, Mars Attacks!, Star Wars, V for Vendette, The Darjeeling Limited, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Garden State) Molly Ringwald. characters played by Molly Ringwald. Rock musician Ani DiFranco and geeky Riot Grrls everywhere. Sarah Vowell, NPR commentator celebrating her geeky life. Voiceover for geeky cartoon characters. Rachel Maddow, for being Rachel Maddow.

First, awesome list, though he forgot a few (like one of my favorites, Bionic Woman and a more recent one, Juno) and it is nice to have it in one compact place. But, I have to say, I still agree to some degree with Sarah Setlzer, though I also agree with John. On the one hand there are representations and it is as important just to strut this stuff publicly as it is to claim that there is not enough female geeky representations in mainstream media. This is what John has done quite nicely. One the other hand, as he himself says ” if you look hard enough for representations of female geekyiness in pop culture, you will find plenty.” I think those words, “if you look hard enough” also speaks volumes of the continued disparity that does exist. One should not have to look “hard,” and the only blockbusters, so to speak, which feature a female geek, is Tomb Raider, which for being so hyper-sexualized is not so geeky to me, no matter how good she is with the gadgets. That said, what I find so important, and have emphasized in different contexts, is the need for what I think of simultaneous positive and negative form of critique, the former being about pointing to already exisitng examples to get people jazzed and excited and to put things in perspective. The later form of critique, negative critique, identifies a lack, a void to fill, just the type of excellent commentary in the Seltzer piece… But now for the most important question, who has John overlooked?

Travel plans:

7th December - 11th December - Boston. And Westford. Sob.
11th December - 15th December - New York
18th January - 25th January - Hobart (LCA)
25th January - 1st February - Melbourne, probably. But who really knows?
1st February - 4th February - San Francisco
6th February - 8th February - Brussels (FOSDEM)

And that's currently it. Anywhere else I should be? GUADEC's probably a given, but otherwise this is your opportunity to ensure that my bed lies cold and empty for large periods of the year.

After a brief look at the market, I decided to keep using my sturdy X40. Looking at what could be done to improve the 4 years old workhorse, three things came to mind:

* new battery (old one dies in 45min, new one lasts easily 5+h)
* replace the hard drive (preemptively before it breaks)
* more ram (from 512MB -> 1.5G)



The only one worth detailing is the hard drive upgrade, since I decided to go SSD. less moving parts, less heat, less power consumption. I followed the Thinkwiki CompactFlash boot howto. This basically involves getting a CF-IDE adapter (from ebay, around $5) and any CF card. The first CF-IDE adapter $2.99, but it didn't work. After some research it was concluded that the SMT soldering was bad. The second adapter bought worked fine, and as a bonus the dimensions match the X40 HD perfecty:

In order to minimize writing to flash:

* Make sure root filesystem is mounted noatime,nodiratime (see /etc/fstab)
* make /tmp a tmpfs partition
* disable swap
* more tips can been seen at Linux on Flash guide

Generally I'm very happy with the results of the upgrade. X40 is now most of the time completly silent, without the spinning and clicking HD. Fan turns on less often than previously. The cheapo compactflash is fast enough on reading, and the REALLY slow write speed is usually not a problem thanks to the loads of RAM. Ofcourse, the exception is when a application uses fsync() ... which leads to.

FIREFOX SUCKS GOAT BALLS WHEN RAN FROM A SLOW SSD

Seriously. It's like watching snail cross a tarpit. That's what happens when you fsync() a 30MB places.sqlite on a 6MB/s write speed flash media every fucking time a page has finished loading (and seeming every now and then too). Now here's a really simple workaround: make ~/.mozilla tmpfs and rsync it to/from a backup dir every time you log in/out.

* /etc/fstab: tmpfs /home/user/.mozilla tmpfs size=100m,user 0 0
* and two helper scripts:

aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-mount
#!/bin/sh
mount /home/$USER/.mozilla
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/ /home/$USER/.mozilla/
aardvark:~$ cat bin/mozilla-umount
#!/bin/sh
rsync -av /home/$USER/.mozilla/ /home/$USER/.mozilla-safe/
umount /home/$USER/.mozilla

It does what mozilla should be doing in the first place - write to temporary files when running and on exit synchronize to the real database and fsync(). With this hack, suddenly the web browser UI doesn't freeze every time a page has finished loading.

You'll also want to disable the urlclassifier anti-forgery tool, which can grow to a over 50MB sqlite database which also gets fsynced all the time...

Alex Gaynor writes about "timeline views" in Django. The abstract problem is to merge already-sorted lazily evaluated lists by some specified attribute. My solution is similar to Malcolm's suggestion in the comments and improves upon Alex's in that has superior space considerations, as well as supporting reverse ordering with the usual Django syntax:

It's been a long we've had snow around here this time of the year. Lately we've been lucky to get some snow somewhere in January. But yesterday it snowed a little and it was gone after an hour. Today it started snowing again and it actually looks like it might stay a few days. There is only like 2 cm so far. Some pictures:

Gnash 0.8.4 will be finally included in Lenny. There have been many improvements since 0.8.4, and it looks as though even more will be included in next release. Gnash current release cycle is 3 months, so next upstream release is planned for January 2009.

This might be a good message to write in Spanish... But then again, a long time ago I decided this is an English-posting site. So be it, I'll only have to give more background information.
This day marks the date when, 98 years ago, Francisco I. Madero started the Mexican Revolution - About a decade of unrest, civil war and ideologies. The revolution is what created the violent, uncivil image of the Mexican, which accompanied us for long years in many foreigners' minds. The revolution brought to an end 30 years of a single-man rule, the Porfiriato. But that's only the major symptom - The Revolution had many, many other consequences. About one million (out of a 10 million population) people died. There was a very significative rearrangement of the society, a rearrangement that took about half a century to settle. But I won't write more background - You can always ask the wikipedia about our Revolution.
The reason I am posting this is that, as it usually happens in this time of year, several so-called analysts in the media have started asking, was the Revolution really worth it? Did it change anything at all? Did the Revolution in the end win, or was it defeated from within? Should we still celebrate it?
And there are, yes, reasons to doubt it. Renato Leduc, at the same time a great journalist and a delicious poet, says it as many - while at the same time, as nobody else: Tiempos en que era Dios omnipotente / y el se or Don Porfirio presidente / Tiempos, ay! tan iguales al presente, or ya se est n muriendo todos / Jes s qu desilusi n...! / se est volviendo gobierno / Ay dios...! La revoluci n.
Anyway... Our media overlords insist on us forgetting the struggles and the real changes that came from them, on rewriting the history... Probably they will push us later on to have the cristeros as the real fathers of the Nation?
Even if so many bits of reality didn't change after Porfirio Diaz's regime fell in 1910, I find it insulting to think that even 70 years of PRI -with very sharp differences between periods, with huge differences between the PRI-born governments- are comparable to 30 years of a one-man rule; even with brutal repressions such as the dirty war against so many subversive movements in the 50s-80s (as officially There Was No Armed Struggle Anymore, just some pesky communist subversives), it cannot be compared to the Porfirian Peace (ask Cananea and R o Blanco). Today we might have a shameful concentration of money and power in very few hands (including the world's richest man), but it certainly does not reach the point of 1910 where most of the Mexican soil was owned by less than 30 families, with latifundios as big as many states...
Anyway - So far, nothing new - just bits I heard here and there, and my reactions to them. But this morning, around 8:25, I tuned in to Noticias IMER, the news program of one of the few public, non-gubernamental, independent radio stations. An interview was under way, but I could not get the interviewed person's name (I guess, a historian - will write to ask for his data). His comments were very interesting, and very worth echoing. I'll try not to distort him.
The Revolution started off very organized, and with a very simple goal: Get Porfirio Diaz out, and call for real federal elections. Sufragio efectivo, no reelecci n. Of course, the fight was very short, and Madero became the president, with an overwhelming majority. Of course, also, the reactionary sectors set up a coup and killed Madero. Victoriano Huerta seized the power - and that's where the real revolution really began. Groups all over the country (some of which were at unrest since Madero, as they were not seeing the changes they needed - changes that would bring an end to the huge class differences and disrespect to the native Mexican population) rose in arms, and forced Huerta into exile. Then, they battled each other for many more years. It became known as la bola - When somebody joined the revolutionary forces, people said he went to fight with the crowd. But, inside the crowd, there were very different points of view. No, Carranza, Villa and Zapata (the foremost leaders in the hardest part of the fight) were not power-hungry barbarians - much to the contrary. They had very full, very complex views of the problem and possible solutions. I won't delve much into them, also, as I'm not an expert...
Villa and Zapata had the most compatible approaches, seeking an aggresive land redistribution, a communal property system (closest to most of the indigenous population's roots, what we would now call usos y costumbres). For the government, both favored going towards a Europe-like parliamentary system, where the parliament were the real force, and the president (or prime minister or whatever) would only be the designated person to implement the parliament's decision. Both Villa and Zapata feared the evil stemming from the unlimited power that the Presidential Chair symbolized (Fui soldado de Francisco Villa / de aquel hombre de fama mundial, / que aunque estuvo sentado en la silla / no envidiaba la presidencial). They met at the Aguascalientes convention, and were quite close to each other - but were defeated by the superior Venustiano Carranza (Constitucionalista) army.
Carranza, although vilified for his corruption (nowadays, carrancear is still a synonim for stealing), had an opposite view - also originating from a very deep analysis. Carranza saw that what brought down Madero was, in the end, the lack of power of the President to rule the country without support from the legislative power. So, he pushed a political program making the President the strongest man in Mexico. He and his people wrote and passed the 1917 Constitution, valid today. This constitution goes to great lengths pushing revolutionary ideals - Land and wealth redistribution, universal and free education, keeps a complete separation between state and church, ensures state control over strategic areas... The 1917 constitution is one of our history's greatest achievements.
But, of course, it is not perfect - it paved the way for a hegemonic party controlling the real power behind it all. PRI started as a very heterogeneous mixture of the whole revolutionary family, but slowly became a bureaucratic, stagnated monolith.
And in a somehow ironic twist of destiny, the forces that today push for deepest changes, and precisely in the same direction that Villa and Zapata wished, are... Ej rcito Zapatista de Liberaci n Nacional (EZLN) and Frente Popular Francisco Villa (FPFV). EZLN is far more successful and advanced in its social experiment. Again, I won't comment further in what I don't really understand.
As a last point, the commenter I'm quoting (and whose name I must get, to update this post!), said that practically in every country that has transited from any sort of dictatorship towards a more-or-less believable democracy (say, everywhere in South America, or Spain, or Eastern Europe, or...), one of the first steps has been to update or replace the constitution with a new one, preventing the mistakes overlooked by the previous one from being reinstated. In our country, we have long heard about the "Reforma del Estado", a very nice-sounding-term which nobody believes in. After the 2006 electoral mess (no matter who won in the end, everybody will agree it was a mess that should be prevented from happening again, we had high hopes of real changes being introduced. A parliamentary, or at least semi-presidentialist regime was strongly suggested as a way forward. Changing the electoral system towards having second-rounds if needed. _anything!_ But no, we were stuck with... The same as always.
So, did the Revolution win or lose? It is clear to me. It won, and it really shaped -for better- what would happen in the next 100 years. However, in a century, we have been able to twist the law to make it turn against itself. I have to agree with my EZLN-minded friends (I sympathize with EZLN's general goals, but don't think its way forward is the right way to go): Pushing the change from within the government is just wishful thinking, but a strong delusion. However, is there a way to push our country forward without repeating a violent cycle? I really hope so. Our current situation is simply pathetic.
I lack a good closing for this post... So I'll let good old Jefe Pluma Blanca, Renato Leduc, do it for me.
Tiempos de Pancho Villa
y de la guerra de mentadas y tiros en la sierra.
Tiempos de fe
no en Dios sino en la tierra Por el cerro de la Pila
fueron entrando a Torre n
mi general Pancho Villa
y atr s la revoluci n...
Ay jijos...! ya se nos hizo
cu nto diablo bigot n... Ya viene Toribio Ortega
subiendo y bajando cerros
y no te enredes ni enga es
que ah anda Pablito Se ez
haciendo ladrar los perros. Cu nto usurero barb n...!
Ay jijos... c mo les vuela
de la levita el fald n...!
Ay jijos... ya se nos hizo:
triunf la revoluci n...! Tenemos camino andado...
No hay que juntarse con rotos
siempre te juegan traici n
ya Madero est vengado
ya muri la usurpaci n. En su caballo retinto
lleg Emiliano Zapata
bonita su silla charra
y sus botones de plata
pero mucho m s bonito
su famoso Plan de Ayala... Este gallo es de navaja
y no es gallo de espol n
si quieres tierra trabaja
trabaja no seas huev n... Ya lleg don Venustiano
con sus anteojos oscuros
y Villa y Zapata gritan:
No s que tengo en los ojos...
porque ya en Pablo Gonz lez
se vislumbra la traici n
Ay reata no te revientes
que es el ltimo jal n...! ya se est n muriendo todos
Jes s qu desilusi n...!
se est volviendo gobierno
Ay dios...! La revoluci n.

I'm somewhat known for triggering bugs nobody else hits. This was appreciated by several developers in good old days when I still used my Amiga as main machine (that's a decade ago in the meanwhile) where I was a betatester for some applications. But it seems I still got the talent to trigger strange bugs.

Today: Upgrading from kernel 2.6.26.2 to 2.6.27.6 breaks your OpenVPN tunnel for your DD-Wrt routers PPPoE session.

Yes, it's true. When using 2.6.27.6, DD-Wrt can't connect to the pppoe-server on my dedicated server anymore, instead it brings this kind of errors:

Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[513]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[495]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[486]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[369]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[1176]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:54 vpn daemon.err pppd[1399]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)
Jan 1 00:07:59 vpn daemon.err pppd[1384]: Invalid PPPoE tag length (12117)

The OpenVPN tunnel itself does work. I can see pppoe packets on both ends of the tunnel, alas the PPPoE session can't be started. When I reboot 2.6.26.2 again, everything works again.
Note: I booted into 2.6.27.6 because I wanted to try out if gphoto2 works better with a newer kernel because of maybe-fixed bugs in the USB stack.

Whee! Just another problem to deal with in the next days... ;-)

Dear Stefan ‘Frost’ Mueller, it was a great pleasure to know you. I’m really shocked, that such a nice and young man was pulled out of life out of the blue. Thanks for all the great things you have done for my family and me. Nothing more I can say at the moment other than ‘I hope we will see us again anytime wherever’.

Since September 2008, Alan Schmitt and I have decided to organize a new OCaml Meeting following the JFLA. This will be the second time of such an event. Last year we were 50 people -- after a very short period for organizing it (less than a month). This year we decided to prepare things earlier. As a matter of fact, the last year events has at least generated a peak in OCaml mailing list (602 message in January, 487 in february...) It also has given birth to several things like planet and forge. It has also help to start things like batteries. I hope this year events will help people to meet and exchange great ideas for OCaml promotion. Waiting to see a lot of "OCaml"ers at OCaml Meeting 2009.

I spent much of this week in Alicante. It was wonderful to have a few days away from the beginnings of Winter in Cambridge - Alicante's in South West Spain, right on the Mediterranean. It's a lovely city, although it was very quiet due to the time of year. I was invited down to Alicante by organisers of the Congr s de Programari Lliure, Comunitat Valenciana, to present a talk about Debian. That I did, and as always my slides and photos are available in case people are interested. I wasn't too sure about what level to aim the talk, so I deliberately went for a general introduction to Debian. That seems to have been the correct level - nobody threw anything at me, and nobody was visibly falling asleep. *grin* It's also the first time I've ever given a talk with official translators, which is a weird experience! The main topic for the conference was the new release of Lliurex, Valencia's own GNU/Linux distribution targeted primarily at use in schools. The conference was massive; I was told there were about 1500 attendees in all, most of whom were teachers who wanted to come and learn more about Free Software. There was a good spread of talks and workshops, covering topics from development through to deployment in the classroom. The level of enthusiasm for Free Software here was immense - lots of people were keen to learn more about it and get involved. I was told that out of the 15 regions/states of Spain, 11 of them have now started their own distributions to use in schools! Extremadura were the first region to experiment with Free Software like this, and their success with LinEx was a clear inspiration to their neighbours elsewhere in Spain. As well as the obvious cost advantages of moving from proprietary to Free Software, the local governments also love the freedom to use and modify their software however they like - including the ability to provide their own translations. I met up with a lot of cool people at the conference too. The local education minister (Alejandro Font de Mora) was keen to talk with all the speakers and very enthusiastic about the future of Free Software in his schools. As is increasingly common at FS events around the world, there were of course quite a few Debian people around too. Luciano and Miriam were also giving talks, and I bumped into Rene and Miguel and a whole bunch of others whose names I'm too crap to remember - sorry! I also spoke a lot with Kurt Gramlich, the mega-enthusiastic Skolelinux developer who was also happy to push Debian to everybody he spoke to *grin*. Jon "Maddog" Hall had some excellent ideas that I'm sure we'll all hear more about soon, and his talk was excellent. He did a very good job of explaining how Free Software makes such a difference, including how it helps people to make money. He also explained that due to travel he had missed Halloween at home and he wanted to share the experience of scary masks with the people at the conference: I had a great time in Alicante, and I'm very grateful for the invitation to go there. I wish that the UK was as far as advanced as Spain in the use of Free Software in education - they've done a huge amount of good work in this area and I'm glad we can help them.

If I made one of those work-site signs that tracked “Days since last incident”, and made one for “Days since last in-the-wild remote-root worm” for Windows and Linux, what would they each say? 0 and 7304 respectively? Update: while the post was tongue-in-cheek (everyone suffers when any large subset of computers is being attacked), I should lower the Linux days count to 2783 (for L10n on March 23, 2001, which is slightly newer than Ramen on January 17, 2001). Thanks for everyone’s comments. :)

From the NaNoWriMo TOS:

The Office of Letters and Light reserves the right to change the terms and conditions hereof without prior notice at any time and any such change shall be effective immediately upon posting the changed Agreement on NaNoWriMo.org. The effective date indicated at the top of this page will be updated to indicate that changes have been made. You should, as a condition of continuing to access NaNoWriMo.org and use its features, periodically review the terms of this Agreement and such continued access and/or use shall be deemed to be conclusive evidence of your agreement to be bound by any such changed Agreement.

No, I will not write the Office of Letter and Light a blank check.

A recent project was to install a Wordpress plugin that will announce new articles to Twitter. As you might guess, I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or any other closed-source Web 2.0 thing. I use a few social network things, but not Twitter at present because I don’t really want yet another login. So, I decided to solve a more general problem of status updates by using ping.fm and updating a wordpress plugin to work on PHP 4, as well as 5. I know PHP 4’s end-of-life is nigh but the target server still runs it for the forseeable future. While waiting for API key approval, on the same day as our server hiccough, GoDaddy broke ping.fm which broke the communication. Now, while I could set up two ping.fm-like update services to avoid the single point of failure at a closed service, but that would mean that any updates would appear twice. Alternatively, some of the Twitter-like services can be told to watch the Wordpress blogs for updates, but each one would need to be configured in a different way. Finally, there’s already a problem of redundancy and context with ping.fm which makes Adam Darowski and others hate it. Can we solve this? Can we get support for the NoseRub protocol into everything and make a social network network? Will good things come out of the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009 in Barcelona? Is the ultimate solution to junk all the closed social networks? I wish I knew. In the meantime, at least it keeps me in work, hacking plugins, connecting stuff together. It’s bloody annoying sometimes, though. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of having a carpet that’s too small for the room, so you never get the whole floor covered at once.

A recent project was to install a Wordpress plugin that will announce new articles to Twitter. As you might guess, I’m not a big fan of Twitter, or any other closed-source Web 2.0 thing. I use a few social network things, but not Twitter at present because I don’t really want yet another login. So, I decided to solve a more general problem of status updates by using ping.fm and updating a wordpress plugin to work on PHP 4, as well as 5. I know PHP 4’s end-of-life is nigh but the target server still runs it for the forseeable future. While waiting for API key approval, on the same day as our server hiccough, GoDaddy broke ping.fm which broke the communication. Now, while I could set up two ping.fm-like update services to avoid the single point of failure at a closed service, but that would mean that any updates would appear twice. Alternatively, some of the Twitter-like services can be told to watch the Wordpress blogs for updates, but each one would need to be configured in a different way. Finally, there’s already a problem of redundancy and context with ping.fm which makes Adam Darowski and others hate it. Can we solve this? Can we get support for the NoseRub protocol into everything and make a social network network? Will good things come out of the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking, 15-16 January 2009 in Barcelona? Is the ultimate solution to junk all the closed social networks? I wish I knew. In the meantime, at least it keeps me in work, hacking plugins, connecting stuff together. It’s bloody annoying sometimes, though. It seems like a Web 2.0 version of having a carpet that’s too small for the room, so you never get the whole floor covered at once.

Last Wednesday I went for the first time in many years to FES Iztacala, the UNAM faculty where I worked for four years (1999-2003) and where I have most learnt and advanced in my career so far. I have a very special spot in my heart for Iztacala :-)
But it was not just a nostalgy drive - In no small part, I had not visited Iztacala -despite several invitations- because... It is really far away, in Tlalnepantla, Northern Mexico City (while I live in the South, just by UNAM). It takes me approximately 1.5 hours to get there via public transportation, and I would not venture less than 1 hour travel time by car. So... Having nothing to lose, I decided to go by bike - you can look at my route to get there (OpenStreetMap, SportsTracker) and safely back home (OpenStreetMap, SportsTracker). Some people I have talked with think it was a crazy thing to do - No, I don't feel that, by a long shot. A 26Km ride in slightly under two hours, and back. People insist on thinking that biking in such a large and chaotic city as Mexico is unsafe, dangerous, suicidal... I deeply disagree. Cycling is fun and got me to my destination in almost the same time I would have made by bus. And no, I would not buy four liters of gasoline just to cross my city.
Anyway, I am also happy about the reason that actually got me to go to Iztacala - I submitted a talk+paper I prepared together with Alejandro Miranda to Congreso Internacional Software Libre y Democratizaci n del Conocimiento organized by Universidad Polit cnica Salesiana in Quito, Ecuador. This conference is quite different to those I am used to, as it is quite more formal and academic; it is mainly targetted at social scientists working on understanding our movement. We prepared a talk called Software Libre y la Construcci n Democr tica de la Sociedad - which was accepted, to my amazement.
Neither Alejandro nor I were unable to travel to Ecuador to give the talk, so we arranged to present it via a videoconference call - Which was based on Iztacala. A nice session, although quite different to what I am used to. Our presentation was on a panel setting, under the global Ethical and political dimensions in the Free Software culture, with 20 minutes to present the topic (I am used to preparing one- or two-hour talks), and it was frankly rushed... We "met" with some friends (or were able at least to greet them shortly after the talk) who attended live to the conference, and... Well, all in all, it was one of those good, interesting experiences I would surely repeat. And besides, I have several things pending to show off about my current work to my Iztacalan fellows ;-)