Debian Karma: I Feel Good It has been a while since the last time I checked the debian Karma page (?snapshot took at the time of writing). I did it today though, and to my great surprise I found myself listed in the third position. My Karma is in a good shape then, that's probably why I feel good these days (or is it because I finished my thesis? ...) P.S. Dear Lazyweb, how am I supposed to link static .html pages from this blog post with ikiwiki? I've enabled the html plugin, but both trying to link to it with and without ".html" extension isn't working ... And yes, that's why the "snapshot" link above doesn't work.

The first installment of Mark C. Chu-Carroll's Haskell tutorial series went up last week.

It begins this way:

Before diving in and starting to explain Haskell, I thought it would be good to take a moment and answer the most important question before we start:

Why should you want to learn Haskell?

It's always surprised me how many people don't ask questions like that.

Farther down:

So what makes Haskell so wonderful? Or, to ask the question in a slightly better way: what is so great about the pure functional programming model as exemplified by Haskell?

The answer is simple: glue.

Languages like Haskell have absolutely amazing support for modular development.

An interesting and though-provoking article, even for someone that's been using Haskell for more than 2 years now. (Yikes, I had no idea it was that long)

You can also see all his posts on Haskell, which include a couple more installments.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

I've started playing around with DBus a little. It's somewhat cute, I was able to quickly write a script that monitors my wireless network connection going up and down, and after some searching for useful documentation, I'm now able to tell gaim to disconnect when my wireless goes down and reconnect when it comes back. All with just a few lines of Python. While searching for some docs on the Gaim API, I stumbled upon the Skype DBus API. But it's crap. Evil stuff. (And not working, from what I can tell; I read somewhere they're using a totally outdated DBus version, and to use it you have to downgrade and break lots of other stuff). They've totally bastardized DBus. First of all, the trace of a DBus API I've found is on a system level, not a user/session level. It should be per-session; you especially don't want others to mess with your Skype. Instead of offering an API with sane methods to invoke, they offer a single method, called "Invoke", and a single callback called "Notify". Ouch. With these methods you're expected to do a ascii protocol something like this:

-> NAME UltimateProgram
<- OK
-> PROTOCOL 5
<- PROTOCOL 5

Note that the name choice is up to the connecting application; so you can cloak yourself as a different application; it will be displayed to the user when asking for confirmation, apparently. Another example how crappy Skype dbus is: their "dbus example in C" links to the Python example and the other way round. The C example consists of 2.4 MB precompiled example and about 100k source code (the example of course is a graphical client). For comparison, this is a complete example on how to reconnect all your Gaim accounts via python-dbus:

import gobject, time, dbus, dbus.glib
# get DBus inteface
sesbus = dbus.SessionBus()
gaim_obj = sesbus.get_object("net.sf.gaim.GaimService", "/net/sf/gaim/GaimObject")
gaim = dbus.Interface(gaim_obj, "net.sf.gaim.GaimInterface")

for account in gaim.GaimAccountsGetAllActive(): gaim.GaimAccountDisconnect(account) time.sleep(5) for account in gaim.GaimAccountsGetAllActive(): gaim.GaimAccountConnect(account)

WTF IS THIS SHIT? Ok, that above would be what a newly-baptized “FOSS advocate-slash-zealot” would say upon seeing Federico Pascual Jr.’s PostScript regarding the FOSS bill. I suppose I could have said that myself a couple of lifetimes ago. But, there is more than meets the eye. While I would like to think of myself as a “FOSS veteran”–believe me, I have still so much to learn about it–I would like to step into the shoes of such a person when approaching an article as sensational as Mr. Pascual’s. Despite what seems to be a most interesting article on the mechanics of government software usage, it fails to address the one particular bit that is just as important as the proposed bill itself: the real Free and Open Source Software. Let me nitpick this article bit by bit:

FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!

Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry. Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.

The proposed law to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use. The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.

So? What’s wrong with these objectives? FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice. The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work. In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!! Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill? Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one. Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.

But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all maybe 95 percent? of the computers of the world.

Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy. The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community. I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.

[Absolutely nothing related in any way to Debian or Free Software here, so you can just skip ahead]

As some of you may be already aware of, I suffer from OCD, in a very mild form. If left untreated for long enough time, in my case it was years, it leads to depression. A good one. You can end up in Learned Helplessness Land, where your closest companion will be your inner voice, constantly criticising you, blaming you for anything that happens, I even used to believe I brought bad luck to the people I was with or met.

I strive for perfection, and the world is not perfect, not everything is under my control, and OCD is just a jail. In my case it is cleaning and re-arranging stuff. My perfectly shiny jail.

Some of my friends think it is so bourgeois that I have a person come clean my house every week. Maybe they do not understand that I can t clean, because I can t stop. The same way an ex-addict can t take $SUBSTANCE_OF_CHOICE. When I get stressed I tend to clean, and when I start cleaning I just don t stop. One stupid example of how ridiculous it can get: doing the laundry in an empty laundry machine so that it is clean inside. I can kill my plants by watering them too much, specially Cactus, dist-upgrading all my machines every morning, and then several more times a day, even if i know there will be no updates available at all.

And while I am doing it, I don t enjoy it. I can t stop, control it or decide anything. I follow very strict rituals, things have to be the right way, following a very complex set of rules that make sense to no one else but me. Well, not even me. But I have to, I don t choose to, and that is where the jail comes from.

I think it all comes from my childhood, in a very chaotic household, at a deeply disturbed family, with an abusive, alcoholic father and a very overwhelmed mother, the only thing I could control in my life was that my room was clean and arranged, as opposed to the rest of the house, and my homework perfect, as opposed to the rest of my life. The same way anorexics feel in control when they let themselves starve to death, because they control the food they eat, their hunger and their bodies.

My father also turned up to be psychotic, manic-depressive, and what not. When my mother finally forced^W helped him to stop drinking, I had this hope that things would be fine, but they didn t really improve. I was eleven. At the beginning it was the drinking, then the mental illness, then the aging, but my worst fear has always been to become him. To do onto others what was done to me. When I was 16 I already knew I would never have kids. I can t even bear to think that I could fuck up the way my family did. I can t even bear the thoughts of passing these genes onto an innocent baby. I specially hate the idea of bringing a new baby into this fucked up world, with so many kids out there so helpless, as myself as a kid, that nobody wants. I would definitely adopt a kid one day, if I was sure I would not repeat certain behaviours on him/her. If a doctor would put it in writing with his own blood.

In 2004, wanting to kill myself, even with a well thought plan and a written unofficial will (who gets my laptop, who gets my clothes, who gets my money, and so on) I went into treatment. Some of you might remember I was kind of MIA at the time. I was on Prozac, tranquilizers, and a year and a half therapy later, I was fine. I was even happy! That was by Debconf 5, after being fired from a job that was hurting me, giving up a 15 years relationship that had become unhealthy for both of us, the death of two very dear friends, and other looses not worth mentioning in this blog post that already gives too much away, I was finally happy. My life radically changed, my jail was almost gone, my fears were under control, I was finally free.

But, recently, a very dear friend of mine got sick, not any near what my father was or had ever been, but I saw myself in a mirror. My worst fears paralyzed me. My inner voice whispered I would end up being him. Again. And again. And some more. So I had to fight my I can do this alone pride, called my doctor and I am back on all the crap that will probably fuck my brain chemistry in the long run, and back on therapy, which is the only resource that will be really helpful for my life. I am not as bad as I once was, and it is going to be much easier this time, but I am scared as hell, because I though this was gone forever. But my friend got sick, and I had a stressful couple of months at work, and (yay!) I started cleaning again.

My physical health is also reflecting what I am going through. I am in a very acute UTI episode. The amount of pills I take in the morning is getting scary now. The pain and the burn are hardly bearable, and I have become unwillingly an early riser. I wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 am, and go to bed somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 pm. One of the side effects of the painkillers is I can t really focus my sight at the moment, so my computing is painful and limited.

Being unable to concentrate on the computer I engaged in compulsive house improvement.

* I changed every light switch and power outlet in the house without turning the power off. Dangerous? Sure. Am I proud of my new skill? You bet!

* I revamped a very old and crappy piece of furniture I found in the trash. When the lady that cleans for you has a better cell phone than you, and you can t afford new shoes for the winter, you start looking at the stuff other people throw away in a different way. In a very different way.

* I lost ten kilos, and the clothes I wore to Brazil fit again. I am fixing the broken bits, because I can t really afford to get clothes of my new size anymore either.

Some pics of my achievements (some work is still in progress):



You might have noticed my web server is down at the moment. I hope this post explains why I am timing out. My server is called aenima, latin for soul, and quite incidentally.

Does anybody know of some nice and clean way to send my information on songs played on my iPod (5.5G in my case) to Last.FM? It seems that most of the apps around require iTunes (like iSproggler), but I’d love to do it with a simple script run on a console (and the iTunesDB propietary binary files happens to be a PITA). Because of lack of time, if nothing exists on that at the moment, I’d be glad to offer a bounty for such app.

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:

• install the qemu package
• optionally install the kqemu module:
• install the kqemu-source package (from 'non-free')
  
• run 'module-assistant prepare'
• run 'module-assistant auto-build kqemu' (Daniel, in case you read this: This may be easier than running make-kpkg as suggested in the README.)
  
• install built package with 'dpkg -i kqemu-modules-[kernel version]'
• possibly change permisisons/ownership of '/dev/kqemu' to allow non-root users
  
• run 'depmod -a' and 'modprobe kqemu' to load module
  
• create a disk image (Using qcow means we are not using a sparse file, so compressing and decompressing does not inflate the file.): qemu-img create -f qcow hda_40GB_sarge.qcow 40G
• get a sarge install CD, e.g. 31r4 netinst
• install the initial sarge system:
• start qemu e.g. like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow -cdrom ./sarge-31r4-i386-netinst.iso -boot d
• start the installer and go through the normal motions
• restart qemu like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow
• finish the installation:
• select a mirror (Note that DNS is not setup - fix this or use IP addresses for repositories. Also, something like apt-proxy comes in quite handy.)
• choose 'manual package selection' in the installer
• update the packages as suggested by aptitude
• quit aptitude and finish the installation
• now would be a good time to take a copy of the fresh sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_pristine.qcow
• compress the copy (The uncompressed image is ~ 1GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 100MB.)
  
• install X:
• start aptitude, select 'x-window-system-core' and install
• leave all X config settings standard, except:
• mouse device: /dev/psaux
• mouse type: PS/2
• screen size: 1024x768 (or similar)
• install Gnome (That's just what I use, KDE or others are equally fine.):
• start aptitude and select the following packages and install:
  
• 'gnome-desktop-environment'
• 'xscreensaver'
• 'gdm'
• 'gdm-thmes'
• 'synaptic'
• 'menu'
• 'menu-xdg'
• quit aptitude
• restart gdm: invoke-rc.d gdm restart
• now might be a good time to take another copy of the sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_gnome.qcow
• compress the new copy (The uncompressed image is now ~ 2GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 540MB.)
  
• install other software as desired that you want test the upgrade with, e.g.:
• 'mondo'
• 'mondo-doc'
• perform the upgrade (following the preliminary Release Notes):
• get to the command line in the qemu system, e.g. by running 'invoke-rc.d gdm stop' in a gnome-terminal
• change apt source from sarge to etch
• run 'apt-get update'
• upgrade the kernel by running 'aptitude install linux-image-2.6-486' (This is not what the Release Notes say but it works for me.) (Say 'Yes' to removing the running kernel.)
• upgrade aptitude by running 'aptitude update aptitude'
• upgrade the system by running 'aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade'
• if applicable, rerun and keep rejecting offerings to resolve conflicts until the one upgrading mondo is offered (I'll have to look into this.)
• run 'aptitude -f --with-recommends install gnome-desktop-environment' to reinstall Gnome

All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article on Indias traditions of knowledge and how Open Source meshes with them. Now having met him at foss.in and knowing of his work, I am 100% convinced he is on the side of the angels and their is no malice in what he wrote. However, his interpretation (really not his, but the conventional wisdom amongst the Indian elite.) of Indian history and culture is so monumentally wrong it bears correction. While I admit my hackles were raised by the cultural and theological mistakes made, there are implications for Open Source advocacy in India and the world at large too. He starts by giving the example of Nalanda, supposedly "the first university in the world." but more accurately a Buddhist vihara (monastery.) Its' very name indicated sharing. I use the past tense because Nalanda doesn't exist anymore. In fact except in a few border areas influenced by Tibet or Burma, Buddhism itself is so thoroughly extinct in the land of its birth, the place where it flourished for over 1500 years, that the only reason people like Hariharan or myself only know that there ever was such a thing due to the work of 19th century Western Indologists. How could this be? One theory is that a resurgent Hinduism coopted or persecuted the Buddhists into oblivion. However this is unsatisfactory. It does not explain why Jainism (a religion as old as Buddhism and equally heretical for exactly the same reasons from the Hindu point of view) still survives to this day and it doesn't explain how it could have happened for even the most advanced genocidal regimes of the 20th century have been unable to "disappear" undesirables to the extent which Buddhism disappeared. A more plausible explanation revolves around the fact that, as I mentioned before, places like Nalanda were Viharas. This doesn't mean that they can't have university-like properties too; after all the great academic institutions of Europe also had religious foundations but the monastic nature of a vihara is salient. A monastery is not a place you go to engage the world, its a place you go to escape it. To mix metaphors a bit, the viharas were cathedrals not bazaars. While there may have been a lively intellectual life within its walls, there is no evidence that Nalanda and its denizens interacted much with the surrounding culture. An economically unproductive institution of such vast size (15,000 monks at its peak) could only survive by the patronage of kings and other rich people. When that patronage dried up as for example when the medieval Muslim invasions swept away the old royalty, Nalanda and its sisters couldn't survive. Just as when a proprietary software company dies, its "intellectual property" often dies with it, when centralized Buddhism died, Buddhist ideas died with it. (Luckily Buddhism had spread to other countries by then and developed new, less monolithic forms so it was not lost to the world altogether.) In contrast Hinduism (and for that matter Jainism) while having all due respect for monks were and are primarily lay movements. The pursuit of morality (Dharma), wealth (artha) and pleasure (kama) in this world are equally valid human goals alongside liberation from the world (moksha.) and this manifested as the much maligned institution of caste. Hariharan quotes the conventional view probably familiar to Westerners from Anthropology 101, a lock-step hierarchy of four classes (varna is the Sanskrt word) with fixed occupations, with knowledge and privilege on top and ignorance and oppression at the bottom. The thing is, this view bears no relationship whatsoever with social reality in India now or historically. There is another Sanskrit word, jati, which can be translated as caste. There are thousands of these jatis and while Indian thinkers have periodically attempted to try and shoehorn them into the varna framework, they have had little success and varna is for all practical purposes just a theory. And this is not just a fall from some putative golden age (Like the canard that once caste was flexible and merit based and only later became rigid.) but the state of affairs throughout recorded history.

A jati consists of people who share a common (or fictive) kinship, who have particular food and ritual choices, and marry endogamously. While many jatis are associated with a particular occupation, many others are not. This is what caste means to a typical Indian (it is also the social organization prevalent amongst Jains, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians even if they don't accept its theological basis.) Yes, hierarchy and concommitantly oppression, are in some cases a byproduct of casteist thinking but they are hardly its raison d'etre. A comparison can be made to the Western nuclear family system. Some people think it is superior to any other form of social organization. Most people wouldn't go that far but go along with it as "the way it is." Some of those of a liberal persuasion might want tweaks of certain aspects of it. A very small fringe think it is nothing more than a nefarious plot to spread patriarchy, subjugation and racism etc. They are mostly considered kooks by the other groups. (Unfortunately when India and caste are concerned, the kooks are ruling the roost.) The diversity of jatis like the diversity of open source creates a certain resistence to disruption that a monoculture cannot. Thus though Hinduism also suffered grievously from invasions, it was able to hold on where Indian Buddhism could not. Brahmin (sic. That's an English mispronounciation.) is also misinterpreted as one who knows Brahma (masculine noun. The Creator God.) instead of Brahman (neuter noun. The supreme spirit pervading the Universe.) though even then it would be wrong because Brahmin, Brahma, and Brahman all come from a common root word brhati (feminine noun. Sacred speech.) as any Sanskrit dictionary will attest. Hariharan cites the example of the sacred scriptures (Sic. He means the Vedas) and the notorious statement of the Manusmrti saying that an unqualified person who hears them should have molten lead poured into their ears as examples of the proprietarization of knowledge. Now the long-suffering untouchables may have been afraid of many things but having lead earplugs was not one of them. There is no historical evidence that any such action was ever attempted. You can criticize the Manusmrti for even saying such a thing but that is a far cry from using it as evidence of historical attitudes. You see, the Manusmrti is not even in the most orthodox conception Hindu Sharia and the Vedas are not "Sacred Scriptures" in the sense that the Bible or Koran are. Rather they are part of a wide range of significant literary works respected in Hinduism of which other important examples are the two Epics the Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavadgita), and the Ramayana, and the vast compendia of geneologies, philosophy, lore and legend called the Puranas. Hariharan actually missed a good chance to make his point here because while the Vedas are indeed "proprietary" the other works I mentioned are not and have in fact permeated all over India and even beyond its borders. Many Indian languages owe their literary existence to translation of the epics or Puranas. For instance one of the earliest monuments of Hindi literature is the Ramacharitamanasa, Saint Tulsidas's translation of the Ramayana. When he wrote it in the 16th century, he did face some opposition from those who didn't think such an august work should be rendered into a "vulgar" tongue, he also received encouragement from equally orthodox people (including those who believed the Vedas should be restricted to Brahmins) Today it is by many accounts the most popular Hindu holy book in existence. So really the whole idea that the Hindu canon shows a fall from open grace to rigidly controlled private property is just bogus. To those who have slogged their way though all this verbiage wondering what it has do with Linux and Open Source, let me assure you I am getting to the point :-) It's bad enough from my point of view as a devout Hindu that my religion would be misrepresented this way but from my point of view as a supporter of Free Software ideals, it is catastrophic. Linux and Open Source in India has spread, as in most parts of the world, primararily as a hobby amongst computer enthusiasts and for a hobby it's doing ok. However if you think of it as more than that, as a tool to enhance society and empower peoples lives, that is not nearly good enough. But how can one serve a society if one apparently has no clue about that societies history and mores? The developing world is littered with failed projects that were carried out with the purest of motives but no regard to what the putative clients actually wanted. Do we want Linux and Open Source deployments to go the same way? For a couple of years now I've been trying to get Indian and NRI programmers to get involved in localization in debian-installer and elsewhere but even with the small minority that are sympathetic to Open Source (a scandal in itself.) it is like pulling teeth. To their credit, Red Hat India pays people to work on such things but volunteerism is the heart of the Open Source movement as we all know so the apathy of Indian IT professionals is deeply troubling. Hariharan is trying to increase interest by appealing to the Indians' sense of cultural pride which is a good tactic--it has been successfuly applied by many non-western or minority cultures--but he is not going to be very successful if the vision of Indian culture he is presenting is as alien as Eskimo culture to the vast majority of the people. Western Open Source advocates also run into difficulties due to being tone-deaf in their understanding of how third-world cultures actually operate. When India declined to participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, some commentators on places like Slashdot were perplexed. Wouldn't a poor country want an inexpensive yet efficient pc using free software instead of high-priced imports? The thing they missed is that while people in India may be poor, thanks to a more-or-less democratic polity and more-or-less open communications, their frame of reference is no longer their village. Their trends are increasingly set in Mumbai, New York, Paris, and London. The forward-thinking amongst them know that computers are the key to the future. They also know Bill Gates is the richest man in the world thanks to something called "Windows" knowing which can get you a green card and your own chance of becoming rich. So if Linux comes along, presented as a cheap alternative which is "just as good", the fake Gucci handbag of IT if you will, it is not going to impress. Thinkpads and Dells appeal to the upwardly-mobile persons vanity, a third-world hand-cranked laptop does not. (This incidently is what is behind the "Nalanda university" meme too. Monasteries are yesterday. Universities are the in thing so we have to have some in our past and not just any but by golly, the first university in the world.) When they venture from pure technology into the realm of culture, Open Source advocates need to be a lot more sophisticated, not to mention accurate, in their arguments lest they fall on deaf ears. Platitudes and sentimentality about "spiritual" versus "material" culture aren't enough. There must be concrete demonstrations of the benefits of why the Open Source approach to knowledge is better. They must be more sensitive in their presentation to avoid needlessly antagonizing people who might otherwise be natural allies. I believe the Open Source ideal is good for India and the whole world, not just in software but for society at large and I wish Venkatesh Hariharan and all the others on the frontlines of the fight for openness the best of luck. But good intentions cannot excuse sloppy thinking.

In response to Home video hub on a shoestring, Justin asked, “Why not just stream the media over cifs/nfs/sshfs?” Why indeed? Well, as my fellow amateur Internet broadcaster Justin Zeigler (coincidentally of the same first name) observed, “some people mistake the unix way as doing things the oldest way possible.” There are niceties streaming video solutions provide that are much better suited to solving my particular problem. Streaming puts the burden of handling different codecs and providing material at a bitrate the client systems can handle on the server. Remember, I said my client system is underpowered and the network I’m delivering across is wireless B. These constraints make streaming video the ideal solution. Now, if I only wanted to stream the music videos and other material designed to deliver over the Internet, I’d be fine with a remote filesystem. But DVDs and mythtv recordings are too demanding on my little laptop’s resources to work at all. But, just to make sure, I tried both sshfs and nfs today. Sure enough, I could stream a Quicktime music video from sshfs just fine. However, neither sshfs nor nfs could deliver the material from a mythtv recording fast enough for the client to keep up. I tried both vlc and mplayer, and both were so stuttery they were unplayable. I gave mplayer a larger buffer (32K) which cleaned up the first few seconds of play while the player read from the buffer, but after that, it started stuttering again. And this was with only one floor of separation between the WAP and the laptop, to make sure I had a solid connection. Clearly, Videolan’s ability to transcode on the fly and stream over the network is a great convenience to me. I suppose I could do a file-to-file transcode and then read the resulting file from sshfs, but I don’t find that nearly as handy as the streaming solution. So I’m sticking with Videolan, as I find it the easiest to use, most elegant solution to delivering a broad range of video material from our powerful hub system to our less powerful client system.

If you ever feel a bit like Darth Vader or some Bond villain, you really need to check out Peter's Evil Overlord List.

It starts out with "My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones."

Edit: to be fair to the GCC crew, it seems the guy who closed me the bug to the face was not very representative of'em. Thanks to them to their very good compilation suite btw ! a bit of history I've been bitten today by a problem due to the fact that I use the gcc __attribute__((nonull(...))) as a hint in my C headers to say to the programmer that it's up to him to check if what it pass to my function is NULL, or not. I had written (erouneously) that bit of code:

/* in the .h */
__attribute__((nonnull(1)))
char *m_strrtrim(char *s);
/* in the .c */
char *m_strrtrim(char *s)
 
    ssize_t len = s ? strlen(s) : 0;
    while (len > 1 && isspace((unsigned char)s[len - 1]))
        len--;
    return s + len;
 

I've added the __attribute__((nonnull)) by mistake, and indeed sometimes used m_strrtrim on strings that I knew to be NULL. The point is, gcc is able to use the nonnull attribute to optimize code, and that's very legitimate. In my case, it optimized the s ? strlen(s) : 0 into strlen(s). And without surprise, it caused segfaults. I had a hard time finding that bug, because I've never thought that it could come from the header. As it could not come from the m_strrtrim function, I've looked very hard for stack overwrite and so on in the caller, but even valgrind did not catched anything interesting (except an invalid read size of 1 in strlen). It's when (in order to see if it was a gcc optimization bug) I've generated the preprocessed source that I saw the damn prototype in the preprocessor output, and that was suddently obvious to me why it segfaulted. the wishlist bug Since it was quite an unusual problem, that can make you loose a lot of time, because the bug lies very far from where it's revealed, I've opened a wishlist bug in gcc to ask for a warning when you test some pointer against NULL that you should already know to be non-NULL. like the warning about always true (or always false) comparisons for e.g.:

size_t len;
// ...
if (len >= 0)   ... // always true
if (len < 0)   ... // always false

That's gcc bug#30043. Or I should say was. My bugreport has indeed be closed a first time as INVALID, because the reader thought I said the gcc optimization was not legitimate (*sigh*). I reopened it explaining more precisely that I only begged for a warning, not for anything else, and that YES I DID READ THE DOC. The bug has just been closed as WONTFIX this time, with an explanation that still makes me stare at it with a blank look:

I don't think a warning is the right thing in this case because the developer should have read the documention [ ]

WTF !? If reading the documentation can make you a perfect programmer that never do any mistake, then god, I must be a super-mega-coder that always write perfect code ! Sadly, reading the doc do not prevent you to avoid cuts (aka segfaults) when you juggle with razorblades (aka code in C). I can understand that it's hard to do in the present state of GCC, and that's it's not an urgent feature, given how peculiar that request is. But I'm completely stunned to see that a guy that is in the compiler business just consider that a warning is useless, and that the documentation is the key answer. I use an over-long compilation line in my projects ^{[1] [2]} especially because a compiler is really better than me to catch many kind of errors. And it's vital to do so. I've seen too many people that only compile with gcc -g -O2 and optionnally with -Wall when they don't forget it. But from a guy in the compiler business, well, that's just yet-another-illusion that collapses.

Devil's Pie (someones favourite window manipulation tool) 0.19 is out. Just a fix for older systems here.

• Don't use wnck_window_set_geometry as it was introduced in GNOME 2.16 (#381233).

Downloads are in the usual place.

It’s now possible to dynamically link web data into Google spreadsheets. For example, stock information can be pulled in via the simple formula GoogleFinance(ticker, attribute), where attribute can be any number of metrics from market capitalization to P/E ratio. Not much to choose from yet—at this point, there’s only GoogleFinance and GoogleLookup, which seems more novelty than useful, and I’d love to see more than just the obvious metrics available for GoogleFinance, things like cash per share, revenue growth over the past m years, number of insider purchases over the past n months, etc. However, it’s a great start, and it’s pretty easy to see where they’re going with this—after all, most spreadsheets are inherently linked to external data sources, though I’d wager a majority of them are “linked” via copy and paste. I look forward to the day when you can pull in all manner of structured information into a spreadsheet via similar formulas. To me, this is the real value of “Office 2.0″. To compete, the office challengers have to go beyond just copying Microsoft Office on the web—success will come from exploiting the new platform, not cloning the old model. Pretty easy to see something like this grow into a platform all its own too. With a few more financial metrics, a slightly more powerful macro language, and the ability to connect to more arbitrary data sources (say, Google Base or the CSV files my bank makes available to me), I could track my finances on the web in a Google spreadsheet and give Quicken the boot (for what I want to do, Quicken is like driving a nail with a sledgehammer). Update: Google spreadsheets has an API now too.

... although I still wish it were called that fallacious ferret. =)

As an Ubuntu core-dev (although not on the Canonical Distro team, more like a community member who happens to work for Canonical on other things), I feel like I should run the latest distro on my machines. I tend to think this is doubly true since I hack on things like glibc. And if it's not good enough for me to run...

Usually, though, it's a bit of a rough slog. Even when I ran Debian unstable on my boxes, there usually wasn't transition after transition landing every day. Even the Gnome folks started to stage things in experimental and make sure they worked before doing the upload to unstable.

So it's a bit surprising that so far with feisty, I've had really good luck and am finding the experience nice and smooth: suspend even works on my laptop now. Further, I'm upgrading my belle's machine so that she can get the integrated sudoku into gnome-games and I'll probably also try out gnash for her.

Food has always been a source of contention for me when I am trying to lose weight. I never want to restrict the types of food - I've spent a long time working out what I like and dislike. One of the benefits of the Hacker's Diet isn't all that concerned with what food you eat, but simply that you get a certain amount of calories, it gives you a lot of choices for dining. The first time I was on it, I used ramen and rice to keep me fed. Those worked well because I was basically broke and the rice filled up the stomach just fine.

There are a lot of diets out there, and it's easy to try one or the other just to get completely fed up with the lack of diet-allowed food that you actually like to eat. I believe that this is a major reason that most diets fail, and why there are so many of them - after all, Atkins might work great for the people who don't have a jonesing for a bunch of fries every once in a while. If you're looking for a diet right now, think about the kinds of foods that you won't be willing to give up. There are diets out there for every type of favorite food nowadays, just walk down the fitness and health section of your local bookstore. I'm convinced that the final word is going to be a calorie deficiency. After all, what is dieting but controlled starvation?

This time dieting has been slightly different, but not very much. I've been trying to buy pre-packaged food more than normal, because it's easy to find calorie counts for them - right on the box. Lately I've been eating some TV-dinner like things, which clock in at about 400 calories a piece. This means that I'm eating 4-5 of them a day, which is like an extra bonus because eating more smaller meals is supposed to help keep the metabolism up. The maxx market economy of these meals is amazing - you can easily get 7-8 for $10, making my daily expense very low. They are also not completely horrible for you - most have some vegetables and protein and starch of some sort. There is also a decent variety, so it's hard to get bored of the same old stuff. I've also switched some of the eating out to a more healthy fast food sub place, which has the extra bonus of also being cheaper.

This Week (Nov 24 - Nov 30):
Minimum: 334.0 (-1.0) (Nov 29)
Maximum: 337.0 (-2.0) (Nov 26)
Average: 335.0 (-1.8) (135.0 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 3172 on 6 days
Average Calories per session: 528.9

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Podcasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms blogcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long podcast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

I don t have a TV here in Ghana (and I don t miss it at all), but some audio-visual content consumption from time to time is nice. Therefore, I started to subscribe to various Videocasts, using the comfortable Democracy Player. Here are my regulars , also see my list of German podcasts.BrickfilmsSome like lego. Some like stop motion animation. I like both. Therefore, I am a big fan of lego movies, and the brickfilms bodcast delivers the best ones directly to me. Unfortunately, does not get posted to very often.Olde EnglishMy sense of humer is not every one else s. Therefore, I guess not everyone will enjoy the sketches of the Olde English comedy group. I could try to list some of my favorites episodes, like One picture every day , but discover that for yourself.BSODInteresting, highly technical hour-long videocast covering interesting topics such as how the telefone system works (and what funny things you can do with it), bulding a infra-red remote control gun that will control your (or anyone s) TV from quite a distance and similar topics. It could cover a bit more software topics, and less Windows based things and personally, I think the Bastard Sons of Dial-Up put slightly too much emphasize on bad language and underground-activists-like appearance. But that might be genuine, and the content is of good quality, so it is worth watching.The Tech JunkiesOnly three episodes so far, but these two guy are doing great and funny things with electronics (such as testing what happens when you plug a speaker into the power outlet). They also have covered lock picking, and I especially enjoyed seeing a bump key in action, as so far I only read about that technique.Player 1 vs. Player 2A two-guy talk show about computer games. Slightly oriented towards old and console games, but still interesting for most gamers, I d say. They have not released a new episode for almost a year now, I hope that they will start sending again some day.

I did actually get around to upgrading the OpenID libraries on Wikitravel, so it's now possible to log into the site (Special:OpenIDLogin) using an i-name. Yes, those are all real things. I'm not making that up. As I mentioned before, I got gratis i-names to give away; try http://xri.net/@gratis . tags: openid inames wikitravel login

UN/LOCODE One of the difficult things on Wikitravel has been using public-domain lists of cities, states, and countries to automatically build a geographical hierarchy. There are some good lists out there, like the ones from geonames.org, but they have too much information -- every hill, bush and pond. Other sources of info have too little information -- just countries, like the CIA World Factbook, or just some major cities. The best list I've found so far is the UN/LOCODE list. It's built in a hierarchy -- country, sub-divisions, then cities -- and since it's principally for business applications, it only lists cities that have important businesses (for a fairly light definition of "important") or a transportation depot (like a bus stop, a train station, or an airport). These turn out to be just about the smallest types of cities that you'd want to write a travel guide about, so it's a pretty useful list. After a lot of hacking, testing, and review by Wikitravel users, I've now got a LOCODEbot adding LOCODE locations to our shared site (used by all the different language versions). It's going pretty slow and steady, but it should be done in a couple of days. tags: unlocode toponymy cia world factbook wikitravel

Parallel distribution, again, again So, Benjamin "Mako" Hill and James Grimmelman have done an excellent position paper on parallel distribution in the Creative Commons 3.0 licenses. I could try to describe the process, but I think they've done a great job with it. I heartily recommend this for anyone interested in DRM and Open Source and Open Content licenses. tags: cc mako james grimmelman parallel distribution drm

Too competitive So, I started watching my site creep up the Alexa listings of most popular personal sites in Montreal. Kind of sad, isn't it? tags: montreal alexa me