July 5^th, 2007 will be the 10^th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract. Also, on July 5^th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday. Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;) Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake ¹/₁₀ of them ;-) If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find. As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12^th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)

Debconf's over for another year - people have gone their separate ways, taking their newly-shared sense of purpose (and germs!) back home with them. Speaking for the organising team, I think we can justifiably be proud of ourselves - we seem to have pulled off a Debconf! Not everything worked perfectly or quite as we expected/wanted, but in the end I don't think we had any major issues. Fundamentally, it seems that all the attendees enjoyed themselves immensely and lots of productive work and socialising happened. That's the important bit! Thanks to all of you that turned up and helped us to make the conference a success this year, especially the volunteers who dived in to fetch, carry, man the front desk, run the cameras, organise the day trip, etc. And also (of course) to the sponsors who paid for the event - we love you all! The orga team still have some small bits to finish up before we declare things completely finished, though. We've still got some bits and pieces left in Edinburgh yet, waiting to be returned to their respective owners. And we're going to make a start on the post-conference report shortly. That's a place where conference attendees can help us again - we're looking for short write-ups of your experiences at the conference and a good selection of photos to give an impression of how things went. If you're able/willing to help, please mail the debconf-team list. Thank you and goodnight.

I came down with a serious case of Not Invented Here, and created a wiki of my own. Before you look, consider that:

• It doesn't have a lot of the features that I want.
• It may be broken (I didn't dedicate a lot of time to writing tests).
• Indeed, unless you're the kind of person who likes to hack on things, you'll probably seriously injure yourself if you so much as glance at it!

That said, I'd love to have a collaborator or two: DedaWiki It will eventually replace the wiki engine utilized over at http://www.leenooks.com, which is showing its age, and not as fun to work with as Rails at this point in time.

I am finally catching up with the remarkably thick goulash of email and blogs entries that comes from traveling for well over a month and today I read one in particular When is Open Source not Open Source? that captivated my interest for it compellingly addresses the dangers that follow from diluting, or one might say hijacking, the term open source. When people learn that I study “free software” one of the most common questions I get asked is: why did I chose free software over open source? The answer is quite simple: given that the bread and butter of my research covers ethics, freedom, and liberalism, free software is the obvious path to follow, yet I also feel like a lot of my work is still relevant to the open source camp because of the affinities between the two. I have long maintained that the ideological gulf between open source and free software is not so great nor impassable, but more modest. As most know, both share a certain strong commitment to access and in a strict technical sense they refer to the same set of licenses. Philosophically there is agreement that openness and, especially, non-discrimination are essential for the quality of software and often by close extension, the vibrancy of community responsible for the software. Of course, when pontificating the ramifications and implications of openness, they do part company and enter into different territories. Free software tends to flag rights and freedoms, while open source meanders into a discussion of markets, business, and competition and in this regard they do craft different visions of the social world and human behavior, etc. But the case that Karl Fogel writes about, where OSI is strongly opposing the use of the term open source for licenses that don’t adhere to the definition demonstrates where the two positions join. As Michael Tiemann from the OSI succinctly put it:

The FSF may have got the orthodoxy wrong, and the OSI may have got the interpretation wrong, but we both agree that prohibition of commercial use without special permission is antithetical to both positions.

There is a unmistakable kernel of agreement and it is great to see the OSI taking such a strong stance in this regard. Now, David Richard’s response, who seeks, I think, to essentially dilute the term open source, is as (or perhaps even more) fascinating for in a nut shell, and using a lot of florid religious imagery, it accuses the OSI of being too rigid! In his own words:

I believe the OSI has a wonderful opportunity to continue being relevant and helping to lead the movement forward. If, however, y’all choose to define your denomination of this religion in a way that we don’t fit in, that’s fine. No hard feelings. It’s your choice. You’ll ultimately be excluding a large congregation and we for one will continue trying to build a church made up of others like ourselves.

In response, I would say that the goal of F/OSS is not to be inclusive of anyone who wants to release bits of source code, but to create the conditions under which software, as it has been defined by the community, can be created. Join the church if you would like to make free/open source software as defined and you can go elsewhere (i.e., create a different term) if you are creating something different, even if it is only slightly different. Integrity matters. And again inclusiveness, if it comes at the expense of the main goal, is not a boon but a danger to F/OSS. The OSI will remain relevant by halting the dilution of the term OSI, not by expanding the definition so that it is left with no substance. And in contradistinction to what David Richard maintains, however, there is a great degree of flexibility within this domain but it does not lie in the strict definition of F/OSS but in the realm of interpretation. You are also free, as Mako and I have argued elsewhere to interpret the significance of F/OSS in multiple ways. And I think this is where the political strength of free software lies. There is interplay between a well-defined goal (in this case for creating free software) and a more flexible realm of interpreting the significance of these technical practice. And we wold lose and I might add, a lot if we became flexible about the strict definition of F/OSS and inflexible about its political significance. I get irked with folks like David Richards who would like to bend open source rules to meet their (often commercial) interests and I find it pretty na ve when folks say the political significance of F/OSS is just x (or worse should be x) for in reality its political significance lies in the fact that it has spawned multiple types of political and economic projects. And there is something almost playfully ironic, (or at least it makes me smile) in this fact. Though there is strict definition contained withing F/OSS, this strictness has, at least to some extent, encouraged by an extreme and very healthy form of political proliferation and promiscuity. More than anyone else I know, Mako has most passionately and thoughtfully argued for the importance of what I would call political clarity and integrity. That is, the importance of having a well articulated definition for social movements, for they act, as he says a rallying point to realize a social movement. Urging the Creative Commons to learn from F/OSS and dare to simultaneously narrow and more clearly define their goals, he states it quite nicely in the following terms:

Free software advocates have been able to use the free software definition as the rallying point for a powerful social movement. Free software, like the concept of freedom in any freedom movement, is something that one can demand, something that one can protest for, and something that one can work toward. Working toward these goals, free and open source software movements have created the GNU/Linux operating system and billions of lines of freely available computer code.

In essence, a definition that people can abide by, respect, and perhaps eventually cherish is the condition of possibility to make working political code. And given how hard it is to make social change happen (at least in comparison to build computer code), we should learn from what F/OSS has to offer. And at the same time there is another lesson embedded in F/OSS. The Free Software Definition is well defined; but it must be emphasized, narrowly so. It does not try to do everything and have everyone pledge allegiance to an inordinately complex set of commitments. Clarity, narrowness, and well-defined goals –> these three attributes have powered it far and wide and I hope it remains so. Now, since the term open source is not trademarked, we are left with the problem of how to challenge the current hijacking of the term. For the solution, I will leave you with Karl Fogel, who I think proposes a good solution:

Note that the OSI s objection is not to the Zimbra license per se. The objection is just to Zimbra s calling that license open source . They can use any license they want, but they shouldn t call it open source unless it actually is. Freedom is freedom, and no amount of spin will change that. So what should we do about this? The term open source isn t trademarked. Years ago, the OSI tried to register it, but it was apparently too generic. …But there is public opinion. What Danese and Michael are proposing doing is organizing a lot of open source developers (and I mean open source according to the traditional definition, the one the OSI and I and most other open source developers I know adhere to) to stand up and, basically, say All of us agree on what the definition of open source is, and we reject as non-open source any license that does not comply with the letter and spirit of the Open Source Definition.

Alex Hudson commented:

"Similar comments about another W3C WG: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1181118077&order=-1&count=1 W3C should be about authoring material for the web. It seems at the moment, they're more concerned with the stuff that happens after authoring - e.g., how stuff relates in "the semantic web". IMHO we still don't have any powerful tools for authoring either, so the idea that authoring tools will automate many of the "bolt on accessibility" tasks is pretty naive."

After implementing pingback, I have some respect for hixie. It's disappointing but not surprising to read those comments. Not sure what is meant by powerful authoring tools there. My tools are powerful, but I know they're not easy for new users. As I'm getting old and cynical, I'm not sure whether power tools can ever be correct and truly easy - just look at the pigswill spewing out of some Web 2.0 sites. niq sent me a link to the WCAG Samurai Errata and commented:

"The problem with WCAG 2, as with WCAG 1, is precisely that it's a Work of Committee, and seeks to represent too many irreconcilable viewpoints and egos. In some cases, even the ideas behind it are inconsistent. Many (myself included) regard accessibility as being about ensuring a reader with a physical disability can make use of a site (think Steven Hawking). That's also what HTML is designed to support. Others are concerned with the mentally impaired, also a worthy cause, but one that becomes counterproductive when its advocates fail to distinguish between a site that's inherently inaccessible because it presents a complex and challenging subject, and one that's unnecessarily difficult due to poor presentation. Add the two together, blend in some stupidity, and you get "accessible" sites full of classic "friendly" little illustrations like a "helpful" government booklet, and a horribly intrusive "alt" to explain each pointless "ethnic mummy and child" picture."

I think a Work of Committee could be useful, as long as you have the right committee. Thinking about that, I found the group membership list and I'm not sure that's the right committee. For example, I think the ex-Adobe Google-worker must surely have an irreconcilable conflict of interest (inappropriate use of Adobe's Flash and PDF formats and Google's Web Apps have done more than many to harm accessibility in the past IMO), yet is a leading light of WCAG 2.0 - maybe that's why it's gone so dark? Update: Thijs Kinkhorst comments:

"As I read in the draft, suggestions are still possible until the 29th, not the 27th of June."

I'm sure that's different to the email which started me writing this, but please go comment and see if we can make WCAG-2.0 useful.

Problems reported on ingdirect.es:

"I get a message in Firefox to the effect that the web page is NOT a secure site, even though the address bar shows the URL as https...??? THIS is the URL on the pop up. THIS is the URL of the bank's opening page. Access de clientes is the link to log in."

I didn't see the cause at a glance... anyone? Does this work with GNU/Linux or not? Also spotted a D+Cglug subscriber reporting problems on UK HSBCnet - anyone willing to confirm or reject that? Comment form at the bottom of the list.

I wrote this yesterday:

"Dear BBC Money Programme, I'm really surprised that BBC Two's Money Programme "How Green is Your High Street?" correctly mentions that the recent greenwashing of public listed companies is motivated by shareholder returns rather than ethics, yet doesn't mention that cooperative businesses are motivated by ethics. Nor does it mention that the UK's largest cooperative retailer, the Cooperative Group, has been at the forefront of moving its stores to renewable energy and developing friendlier food packaging across its whole range, from biodegradable onion nets to thin-but-tough whisky bottles. I think it's also the first high street retailer to commit to only selling A-rated electrical appliances in its stores. It does this because it is motivated by ethics as well as dividends. As a result, the Co-operative Group food stores are outperforming competitors in the IGD reports and winning awards such as the Queens Award for Enterprise in Sustainable Development. Why do you ignore this success of green and ethical principles in your report?"

and this morning Sam notes he's seen the Daily Mirror report that the co-operative food came top in the original research so will there be a nice present on the end of the TV show?

Guys.. meet Super Davem We did it again. After another *really* long session of super-tag-team play with Davem coding as hell and me testing like crazy we finally managed to do a full install of Linux (based on Debian/Ubuntu installer) on SUN's LDOM as guest host (similar to domU concept of Xen). There is still a lot of work to do and major problems to solve before we will able to call this "stable" for the generic user. David's blog has detailed instructions on how to install and a complete list of the issues. If you plan to try it, make sure to read David's blog! A net-boot gutsy installer image is available here and net-boot kernel here. The code published by David will hit the gutsy kernel as soon as we are satisfied with the overall situation. Most of the userland bits required to install are already in the archive and others will land soon after Tribe-2 release. STAY TUNED!

It's been a while since I've given a status update for my Google Summer of Code project to create a BitTorrent proxy for downloading packages using APT, so here it is. I've been working hard on integrating support for APT into the DebTorrent program. I've almost got it working perfectly, now it's just a matter of testing to make sure all is well. The functionality works like this:

• DebTorrent listens on a port for HTTP requests
• an http://localhost:port/mirror_name/debian/... entry is added to APT's sources.list file (similar to how apt-cacher works for proxying)
• an apt-get update will then send HTTP requests to the DebTorrent program
  • DebTorrent proxies these requests, downloading files it doesn't have and saving them in a cache before passing them on to APT
  • DebTorrent recognizes requests for Packages files, and also uses them to start the torrents for those files
• an apt-get install will send an HTTP request to DebTorrent for a package (.deb) file
  • rather than getting package files from the mirror, DebTorrent finds the file in one of its running torrents and enables it for download
  • the package file is downloaded (either from other peers, or using the backup HTTP downloader that gets it from the mirror if no peers can be found)
  • once the download is complete, DebTorrent passes the package file to APT

There are two things I really like about this. One of the best is the backup HTTP downloader. It insures that if you're an early adopter and there are no peers, or if the package you're requesting is rare and can't be found in any connected peers, the download will still occur in a reasonable amount of time (taking no more, or less, mirror bandwidth than if you had just been using APT directly). The other thing I like is that you get the BitTorrent-style peer-to-peer downloading, with simple HTTP proxying thrown in for free. You can run DebTorrent on a single computer on your network, and have the others connect to it to initiate downloads and request packages. I haven't done any serious time testing, but I estimate it currently only takes twice as long to use as a regular APT update and download from a mirror. Most of that slowdown is because it currently only processes a single request at a time from APT, which is not very efficient for BitTorrent systems where downloading from multiple peers is how the highest download speeds are achieved. I have been talking to the APT maintainer, Michael Vogt, about a better way to do this, probably by adding a new APT transport method for DebTorrent (i.e. debtorrent:// instead of http://). This will not only speed up the downloads, but also hopefully provide better feedback to the APT user, as currently it will seem nothing is happening until the download comes in all at once at the end. My work has unfortunately been slowed by other commitments, and bugs. I have two papers to submit to a conference by Monday, but after that I should be back full time on DebTorrent. I also spent a long time tracking down and fixing a bug in the underlying BitTornado code (which lead to much rejoicing at 3am), only to find it was fixed in upstream's CVS. (Doh!)

Despite their TV trailers and it being only 10 days away, there's still nothing on the itv sport site about the Tour de France coverage, but I can see the early stage details on tvtv now. The bulk of the coverage is on itv4 with some highlights repeated around midnight on itv1 and itv4. Unusually, the first stage is also on itv1, so terrestial analogue viewers can see what the fuss is really about, instead of the ceremonial final stage. Eurosport International is being good and covering everything live and in highlights, as ever. (Eurosport Analogue is free-to-air in English and German; Eurosport Digital is FTA in German.) The British Eurosport schedule seems something between the International and itv schedules described below. Strangely, it seems that the weekend afternoon live coverage is also on itv4, which doesn't usually start transmission until 18:00. I guess itv play or citv may be closing down early to make space. In detail: Presentation of the teams - Friday 6 July, live on itv4 from 18:30 (preceded by Liege-Bastogne-Liege highlights at 18:00), repeated on itv1 00:00, on itv4 00:30. Eurosport show it recorded 10:45-11:15 Saturday morning. Prologue - Saturday 7 July, live on itv4 14:45-19:00, live on Eurosport 15:00-18:30, highlights on itv4 00:30 Stage 1 - Sunday 8 July, live on itv4 from 10:30-16:10, live on itv1 10:50-11:50 and 15:15-16:00, live on Eurosport 10:00-16:00, highlights on itv4 19:00, repeated on itv4 00:30 As far as I can see so far, weekday stages look likely to be live on Eurosport from 13:00-16:30 (covering the start live at whatever time and maybe with highlights between that and the main live coverage) with highlights on itv4 19:00, repeated on itv4 after 23:30, highlights on Eurosport after 21:00. I expect most weekends to be a similar coverage pattern to the Prologue and the final stage to be covered like Stage 1, similar to last year's final stage. Also, France 2/3, ARD/ZDF (listings) and maybe RTBFSat will cover the race live too. Any other free-to-air satellite coverage?

As a result of commenting on some problems in CUBA's Jam Busting June site I was made aware of the Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 or the Not-Working Draft, as I think it could be called. If you want to comment on it yourself, you had until the end of 27 June 2007 (US EDT, I assume). Put simply, it's too confusing for both web developers and site managers. Even the Quick Reference is rather long for practical use. It's very indirect - it's not even clear whether xhtml over HTTP is preferred. I submitted a comment about that - also rather disappointing to find that W3C appear to fail to use stripslashes() when needed. I submitted another comment about the backwards step of allowing Javascript-required sites to be called accessible. Javascript is dangerous for accessibility and bad for power consumption. What the blue blazes is an AJAX-only webmail doing as one of the accessibility examples? I see that notable sites have already criticised WCAG 2.0. While I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, this is a very disappointing situation. Will WCAG 2 be rescued? Are accessible-friendly webmasters screwed if WCAG 1.0 is replaced by 2.0 in our national standards? It lets all the Flash-only cowboys claim WCAG-conformance as long as they note their site relies upon Flash. (Question: is a site still WCAG-2.0-accessible if it requires Flash to view the note that says it requires Flash?) Should we start looking towards MACCAWS, WHATWG, expanding IETF to cover the web, or starting another democratic/meritocratic standards body?

I usually don't foray into this topic but I'm unsure whether this is something that others simply haven't noticed or whether everyone else is just being nice to the new UK PM and the new deputy leader of the governing political party.

Gordon Brown: GB
Harriet Harmann: HH

Is it just me or doesn't that just lend itself to being shortened to: GBH ?
(Grevious Bodily Harm in UK court speak) - the repetition of harm in Harmann almost qualifies as a recursive acronym!

Not just back home but with a working internet connection too - at least within the constricted definition of "working" that apply to my ridiculous BT line. 1.1 miles from the exchange by car (I have to drive passed it twice a day), 5.2 miles line length. Ugh?

Initially, a (presumably) stale connection was giving me about 5kb every hour. (No kidding - it took 2 hours to load the ISP webpage in Lynx.) Really annoying because it would cause things like apt and ssh to just timeout every single time.

Still, after waiting on the line for 25minutes, the ISP tech support was able to identify the problem and cause the login to be reset.

Just completed the keysigning caff process (so lots of people are about to get lots of caff mail) and now I can actually get back to my packages. Yippee!

I’ve been gradually pushing on in my free time on gobject-introspection, so I can make the dbus-glib bindings decent. A couple of months ago back I started hacking up a code scanner to generate the introspection xml,using code from gtk-doc, but using perl regexps to parse C just made me feel dirty… Johan Dahlin pointed me at Sparse, a front-end parser for c developed by some of the kernel guys. The only problem is that it doesn’t have language bindings (or even, seemingly, a stable abi). So I’ve just submitted a patch to sparse that adds an executable ‘c2xml‘. c2xml will dump the parse tree of the input file as a simple xml structure, suitable for manipulation by some python or suchlike. That could then be used to, say, generate c api descriptions, documentation and language bindings or make code navigation or refactoring tools. I like it!

And before you know it, another week has passed… I arrived back home yesterday, sooner that I had expected. The flight, landing and taxiing went very quickly and smoothly; this is probably to compensate for the enormously slow and dramatic check-in and boarding. I had a great time meeting all the Debian people, getting to know each developer’s backgrounds, talking, discussing, eating, etc. In my opinion, the people at Debconf and especially the organisation team cannot be thanked enough for making this possible, so here we go: thank you very much everyone, for making Debconf 7 possible and fun. :-) See you in Argentina, I hope! My own photos containing some general impressions will follow shortly. Though, I left most of the Debconf photographing to people with real cameras and some of these photo have already been published on the Debconf 7 gallery.

Finally, Gordon Brown has eventually become the eleventh Prime Minister of Queen Elizabeth II, as expected for most of his ten years as finance minister. The opening of his first speech was drowned out on the BBC by helicopters, but it continued with

"This will be a new government with new priorities. [...] meeting the concerns and aspirations of our whole country. [...] I want the best of chances for everyone. That is my mission. If we can fulfil the potential and realise the talents of all our people then I am absolutely sure that Britain can be the great global success story of this century. [...] I will try to do my utmost" (full text from ePolitix)

but there are lots of questions left open about what his utmost will be. From whether we'll see more co-operative ministers, through environmental and free-software-related policies, to just how the "clunking fist" will deal with the "trojan tory" David Cameron leader of the opposition, it's all unknown just now. I think he's the first PM who could use a Stranglers track as his theme.

Below is a GNUPlot graph of ZCAV output from a 250G SATA disk. The disk has something wrong with it (other disks of the same brand in machines of the same configuration give more regular graphs). The expected graph will start high on the Y scale (MB/s) and steadily drop as the reads go to shorter tracks near the spindle. The ZCAV results page has some examples of the expected results. If you have any ideas as to what might cause this performance result then please make a comment on this blog post.

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Leiden Lammenschans
Tiel Passewaaij
Capelle Schollevaar
Hoorn Kersenboogerd
Houten Castellum

When I was 12 years old, I discovered free software. That discovery changed my life and I've never recovered. Over what is now more than half of my life, I have looked to the Free Software Foundation for vision, guidance, and an example of a free world and I have rarely been disappointed. The list of directors of the FSF -- Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig, Henri Poole, Jerry Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Geoffrey Knauth -- doubles as a list of some of my greatest heroes and role models. As such, I lack the words to describe how it feels that, just yesterday, I was elected to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. With Moglen having stepped down I have staggeringly large shoes to fill. I'm more than a little intimidated. At 26 years old, I suspect that I'll be the youngest person on the board by quite a bit. This means I'll have to try and make up with hard work and passion what I lack in experience and wisdom. It's a challenge I look forward to. With free software becoming increasingly successful and widespread, we've already begun to see push back. I suspect that in the next years, we'll see much more. We reaching the dangerous part of the, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression. I'll do what I can to defend freedom until we've won. In order to ensure that I have the time necessary, I'm going to be resigning from the board of Software Freedom International and will consider reducing and resigning some of my other commitments as well. If you want to support my work with the foundation, you can become an associate member.