The Government's equality chief Trevor Phillips recently said the fear that migrants are jumping council queues for homes is fuelling tensions.

Mr Phillips [chairman of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights] said tensions were driven by a widespread perception that newcomers often received unfair advantages. "Specifically, that white families are cheated out of their right to social housing by newly-arrived migrants," he told the [Local Government Association]. "I have never seen any reliable evidence to back up this claim. And there can be no doubt that much of the public feeling is driven by the careless media and racist parties."

Porte os greeted the new year by fleeing the city as fast as gridlocked roads could take them. January is the month Buenos Aires takes its summer vacation, and the destination of choice is Mar del Plata, a seaside resort I have never visited. Given my love for crowds, heat and strangers' children it sounds it would be my own personal Mordor. "You can't even see the sand for all the people! It's an absolute madhouse!" Argentine friends tell me in horror, as they pack up their cars to head down there.

Making Money - Terry Pratchett

This was a Christmas present and I quite enjoyed it and enjoyed the character but didn't really think it lived up to the laugh a minute Pratchett books that I remembered from the good old days.

The Lovely Bones - Alice Seebold

This is quite a weird concept for a book given that it's from the point of view of a dead girl in heaven but it seems to work. It's very well done and I enjoyed it.

Alex Rider series - Anthony Horowitz

I had seen Stormbreaker and wanted to read some more of these as light holiday reading. They work well for that. There's enough plot to keep me interested but not enough to make them at all hard to read. I read a couple of them in French when I was in France (in between traipsing between different bits of Paris since the m tro workers were on strike). I wish they'd been around when I was younger.

My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Ooh this is a really, really good book. I loved it except perhaps for the very end but I can forgive it that. The idea is that she's suing her parents for the rights to her own body because she was conceived as a donor for her sister to fight off her sister's leukaemia. It's a very thought provoking read with several interesting characters with their own stories woven together.

The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker

This book is fascinating to me. It takes ideas mainly from linguistics, evolution and psychology and explains a theory that seems to hold together and is well illustrated and explained. The central point is that we all are born with the ability to develop a universal grammar from an early age which can be adapted to any human language and which sticks around in the young child and then disappears. If you have any interest in language at all read this book.

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon

I found this a bit hard to get into as essentially it's about the normal lives of a family (albeit quite a special family). It doesn't really grab you. Towards the end though I was interested to find out how it would all unravel and was pleased with it.

The Mephisto Club - Tess Gerritsen

This is a nice, honest thriller that does what you expect. It keeps you flicking the pages wanting to know what happens next.

The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins

I quite enjoyed this and did find new arguments against religion but I don't think he's going to convert anyone with this book. Of course I'd recommend anyone read it because it raises lots of interesting points but it's polemic essentially.

The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins

I enjoyed this though it builds on previous work I'd read. I guess if you're just interested in evolution then read this and not the God Delusion.

The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

I was recommended this by a friend. It's very surreal possibly a bit too surreal for me but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K Dick

I hadn't read the book and saw it at a friend's and borrowed it. You probably all know what it's like. I'm glad I read it because of the references to it but it's not my normal reading material.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J K Rowling

I had to read this of course to finish off the series but I thought it was a lot better than some of the others. I think I enjoyed the first, the one with the tri-wizarding championship and this one the most.

Love in Idleness - Charlotte Mendelson

This is well written and you really get into the character that's painted for you. I really liked some of the descriptions of justifying things to yourself and coping with boredom.

Blood, Sweat & Tea - Tom Reynolds

This was an interesting look at the life of a paramedic and if you don't already read Random acts of reality then read the book first and start reading the blog.

Telling Lies - Paul Ekman

This came from my Blink/Tipping Point reading and I found it hard going. It was interesting but quite detailed and not really a book for late night reading. The theories in it are very interesting though and explain why you probably aren't as good at detecting things as you think you might be and how to look for factors that will help you.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks

I read this ages ago and it was fascinating. It's about a number of different cases of problems with the brain. Often physical defects in various areas of the brain that cause odd problems and how it sheds light on how things relate. I really enjoyed it.

As always, do please punt your own recommendations at me.

• [1] http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159067,00.html


• [2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/war_on_terror_o.html

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• it only runs on packages and their versions if no html output had been generated in the past
• Automatically removes html files of packages no longer in NEW
• It runs right after generating the NEW overview page, hourly. So it should be similar up-to-date (or outdated) as that page is.

2007-12-30  Joerg Jaspert  joerg@debian.org>
        * dak/dak.py (init): add show-new. This is based on a patch
        submitted by Thomas Viehmann in Bug #408318, but large parts of
        handling it are rewritten and show-new is done by me.
        * dak/queue_report.py (table_row): Add link to generated html page
        for NEW package.
        * dak/show_new.py: new file, generates html overview for NEW
        packages, similar to what we see with examine-package.
        * config/debian/cron.hourly: Add show-new call
        * config/debian/dak.conf: Add HTMLPath for Show-New
        * dak/examine_package.py (print_copyright): ignore stderr when
        finding copyright file.
        (main): add html option
        (html_escape): new function
        (escape_if_needed): ditto
        (headline): ditto
        (colour_output): ditto
        (print_escaped_text): ditto
        (print_formatted_text): ditto
        - use those functions everywhere where we generate output, as they
        easily know if we want html or not and just DTRT
        (do_lintian): new function
        (check_deb): use it
        (output_deb_info): Use print_escaped_text, not print_formatted_text.
        Also import daklib.queue, determine_new now lives there
        Also add a variable to see if we want html output. Default is
        disabled, show_new enables it for its use.
        Most of html, besides header/footer are in examine_package instead
        of show_new, as it makes it a whole lot easier to deal with it at
        the point the info is generated.
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): Moved out of here.
        (check_valid): Moved out of here.
        (get_type): Moved out of here.
        * daklib/queue.py (determine_new): Moved here.
        (check_valid): Moved here.
        (get_type): Moved here.
        * dak/init_db.py (do_section): Remove non-US code
        * dak/make_overrides.py (main): ditto
        * dak/process_new.py (determine_new): ditto
        * daklib/queue.py (Upload.in_override_p),
        (Upload.check_override): ditto
        * daklib/utils.py (extract_component_from_section):,
        (poolify): ditto
        * dak/import_archive.py (update_section): ditto
        * dak/symlink_dists.py (fix_component_section): ditto
        * scripts/debian/mkmaintainers: ditto
        * scripts/debian/update-mirrorlists (masterlist): ditto
        * config/debian-non-US/*: Remove subdir
        * scripts/debian/update-readmenonus: Removed.

• Fixing daks handling of keys that have expired subkeys together with non-expired subkeys (or non-expired “master” key). That created silent rejects (only sent to ftpmaster, not to the maintainer) in the past. Now it works, iff the signature is valid. (We check other reject reasons like unknown or revoked key, badsig and some other things that can go wrong before that).
• Internal for the NEW queue I adjusted the lintian call to also show what lintian warnings/errors maintainers try to override - and to have its display in color. lintian now also runs on the .dsc file, not only on the individual changes, which also helps me to spot some more errors in NEW which I previously may have missed
• The script to look at the packages in NEW also had a bug that disallowed to look at copyright files from packages using bzip2 compression in their binary tarballs. It did use some ar p tar xz pipeline, which I changed to using dpkg-deb -x and —fsys-tarfile.
• I removed a check for a dpkg pre-depends for bzip2 using binaries, as the dpkg version from sarge knows how to deal with them.

test java-2  
   java java.util.Hashtable ht
   set hasht [ht -new  ]
   $hasht put foo "bar"
   $hasht get foo
   bar 

• Static methods are called like this:

  java java.lang.System sys
  sys gc
  

  Which calls System.gc().
• Static fields, for now, are called like this, although once again, I'm still thinking about the syntax:

  sys -field err
  

  Which is of course System.err
• In addition to -new, when you instantiate an object, you can pass in things like -text "foo", and that will attempt to call setText("foo"). This is a convenient way, in Android, at least, of setting up an object from within Hecl, without requiring the use of the XML layout files.
• Furthermore, in order to deal with constants in a convenient way, something that's reasonably common in certain types of API's (like Android), the following pieces of code are equivalent:

  layout.setOrientation(LinearLayout.VERTICAL);
  $layout setorientation VERTICAL
  

  What's happening in the Hecl code is that VERTICAL is looked up in the context of the class that's calling it, so as to avoid having to do [layout -field VERTICAL] to fetch the value. This won't work everywhere, and I suppose it could be criticized as too much 'magic'. Naturally, these sorts of things will evolve as the code does, and survive if they're useful and don't create problems, or die out if they cause bugs and aren't utilized.

• I like the API for already instantiated objects, but I'm not 100% wedded to the idea of -new for instantiation. The fact that it takes a list is also a bit tricky, because if you want to do something like construct an argument to be passed in, you might end up with something like this:

  callback -new [list [list SelectDemo $spinner]]
  

  which I don't find all that pleasant. You can't just do -new [list SelectDemo $spinner] because then it thinks it's got two arguments, when it really only has one, which happens to be a list.
• The APIs created like this tend to follow Java pretty closely, for obvious reasons, and can be a bit verbose at times. I'm still thinking about this. One idea might be to provide Hecl wrappers that make common operations easier.

Private and public life in the age of Facebook One of the things I find interesting about life on the Internet is the distinction between public and private life. So much of our lives are on-line today; for many of us, the Web is where we make our living, make our friends, enjoy our social life, and plan our off-line activities. But what about those personal activities that don't jibe with our intended professional image? If we have out-of-the-mainstream political or religious views, or unorthodox social activities, how do we keep them to ourselves? How do you talk about things on-line with friends that maybe you don't want your parents or other family to know about -- or vice versa? How do we preserve our reputation in more than one sphere, in situations where those spheres are very different? I think there are a number of strategies for doing this.

1. Be discreet. In other words, just don't put personal stuff on the Web. Keep up your professional image at all times, and don't use Web sites or tools to make connections in more private ways. This is probably the safest strategy, and the one that most privacy groups and media recommend. But there are some downsides, too. You miss out on the Web's power to enhance your life as a well-rounded human being -- your personal life languishes for the benefit of your professional one. You give up on some important opportunities to connect with other human beings in a deep and meaningful way. Especially if your interests are shared by only a small percent of the human population, it's unlikely you'll run into other people who share them off-line. I also think there's something unhealthy about stifling your personal side for your professional life's benefit.
2. Use pseudonyms. Another way of being "discrete" -- here, I mean separated into different parts. I think this is one of the most common ways to deal with the problem. Use your "real name" for activities, groups, and opinions that you feel safe presenting to the world at large, and use made-up names or handles for activities you might not feel like discussing at a job interview. This can be very successful, but also nerve-wracking. What parts of life require a "secret identity", and what parts don't? What if one part of your life leaks into another? It can also be tedious to set up, say, two or three different Flickr accounts, two or three Facebook accounts, umpteen blogs, etc. Or, you keep a LinkedIn account for work and a MySpace one for your partying set, and hope that Google doesn't make a link between the two. But you can get sick of managing them, and other people don't know which name or pseudonym to use and when to "out" you to their other friends.
3. Integrate. By this I mean: let your personal and professional life grow together. Decide what parts of your personal life you're willing to make public, and bring them into your public persona. Parts of your life that you don't feel you can integrate, consider letting go of. I think this can be risky and difficult, but ultimately I think it's the most healthy psychologically for people who spend a lot of time on the Web. Most often, these people either work for themselves and don't have to answer to others, or they work in industries where offbeat or out-of-the-mainstream lifestyles are tolerated or encouraged (or the need for highly-skilled people makes those "quirks" easier to ignore). Or they just gamble that nobody at their work or in their family is really checking (quite often the case).
4. Wait for better software. I think the main reason that this is a problem is that social software developers aren't very good sociologists. Or, rather, we focus on the software rather than on the social. It would be nice to see the next generation of Web services support the multiple facets of a person's life. I'm an Open Source fanatic, a Web developer, a wikitista, an entrepreneur, a father, a Burner, a Montrealer, a man, a prankster, a partier and a cook -- among many other things. How can social software, or a federation of services, let me reflect these different aspects of my personality to my friends, coworkers, colleagues, relatives and strangers? Could I define finer-grained relationships with others than just "friend", and choose what parts of my life to feature or downplay with each? It's a fascinating design and implementation question, and my hope is that someone will take on the challenge in the future.

I think this is a situation where our society and our software both need to evolve and change. It would be nice -- very nice -- if edgy politics or weirdo culture didn't hurt your chances of advancing in your chosen field. And if friends, family and colleagues could accept us all for who we are, in all our parts. But it will also be nice if software and software usage patterns on the Web let us find a way to adapt to that, too. People have lots of different parts and lots of different personae that they inhabit at different times and in different contexts -- it would be great to match our social software more to that reality. tags: socialsoftware web privacy persona self

One-liners Some other things to note:

• Montr al has had an insane amount of snow in the last few days. I dug out our car for about 90 minutes this morning, and drove for hours in snow-blind traffic. Not an easy time, but boy the city is lovely like this.
• I'm doing a talk on extending MediaWiki at the PHP Qu bec meeting this Thursday, Dec 6. Meeting info is here.
• Pictures from Montreal Santarchy are available on Grimmwire's Santarchy Montreal 2007 set. Great group, fun crowd, loooooong night. Oh boy.
• Speaking of SantaCon, Santarchy in Second Life sounds totally nutso.
• My server overload problems seem to be getting better. I moved Vinismo to its own server on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. I also moved SonaUiki and the Br leurs site to GoDaddy, where I have a ridiculous number of free Web hosting credits. It worked surprisingly well, and GoDaddy supports PmWiki out-of-the-box. Nice! Update: Apparently GoDaddy adds a whole bunch of ads in on their free Web hosting. I didn't notice; I have Adblock Plus installed. Gar. I'll have to move these sites back pronto.
• My light and convenient Toshiba Port g R200 has been throwing I/O errors. So I gotta get a new hard drive. Good news: the thing's still under warranty (yay!). Bad news: I gotta drive through this miserable weather to a place in St. L onard to get the HD replaced. Boo!

tags: montreal snow phpquebec mediawiki santarchy secondlife toshiba port g r200

• Many Worlds, Most Strange
  I first read about the many-worlds theory in The Hollow Man, one of my favorite Simmons novels.
• Making Mario
• My column on Facebook s coming social meltdown

• I believe the Gettext transition is now more or less complete. The initial bulk of it was done during the summer, but a few odds and ends were still dangling, such as plural forms here and there. The translations should now also be used in the appropriate place (no more receiving an email in Dutch even though you're French, simply because the person who clicked on the button that triggered the email was Dutch). I'm trying to bring the French translation to completion, but it's a long and boring task, so it'll happen gradually. As for other languages... "patches welcome".
• I've started using IPv6 at home, with a dual IPv4+IPv6 stack and hostnames that resolve to both kinds of addresses. The problem is that neither Gforge nor its packaging were designed with IPv6 in mind, so the Apache virtual host didn't listen on the IPv6 address, and even when it did, Gforge wouldn't understand IPv6 addresses in its session code. All that has been fixed, and you can now run Gforge on a dual-stack server.
• Lots of "undefined variable" PHP warnings have been fixed (not only by me, by the way). They probably weren't harmful by themselves, but they were signs of sloppy coding.
• The FCKeditor plugin now uses FCKeditor as provided by the Debian package, rather than its own (outdated and unmaintained) copy.

• Making the clean-and-working Mediawiki integration plugin public (the delay is not due to technical reasons).
• Using placeholders in SQL queries, to reduce the risk of SQL injections. This probably means a full audit of all the places in the code where queries are made, so it may take some time.
• Maybe a full audit for HTML injections and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, too. Probably a long and boring task too.
• Switching to ucf for management of config files.
• I'm still toying with the idea of switching to dbconfig-common, too. But since I'm not sure it's going to be good enough, that's not very high on my priority list.
• I'm pondering whether I should try to make a live-CD with an installed Gforge. Or maybe a fully automated installation with debian-installer and preseeding. That may debunk the misconception that Gforge is hard to install.

• Translations! I can do French, I fixed a few strings in Spanish and Japanese, maybe I can do some minor fixes in German too, but that's not good enough. Of course, translators should be aware this is not a small task: gforge.pot contains about 2200 strings. But even reading and fixing (or removing) the obviously incorrect translations would help.
• Packaging for RPM-based systems. I fear that aspect of Gforge has been all but abandoned, and I don't think there are any working RPMs around.
• Testing, testing, testing. Gforge is rather versatile, and a big piece of software. I don't use all the features myself, so bugs are likely to lurk in those places I don't see often enough.
• I know some of you out there have a locally patched Gforge installation. You know you'll have a hell of a time porting those patches to the next version when you upgrade. Why not share them, so everyone profits from them (and you can then profit from the patches from the other users)?

• Evolution of the heart emoticon <3
• Ethnicity's Role in Social Networking
• The GNU Configure and Build System
• Caja: Capability Javascript

• Configurable MySQL socket path.
• More extensive SMS PDU parser tests.
• Experimental support for OBEX in Siemens.
• Support for listing messages using CMGL (bug #408).
• Parse T630 reply on CPBR (bug #420).
• Fix buffer overflows in PDU decoder.
• Properly catch invalid PDU data received from phone.
• Handle more OBEX error codes.
• Handle vCards from Yahoo and Evolution (bug #424).