You might expect that a vaccine against a disease that causes cancer would be widely embraced as soon as it was proven safe. If the disease in question was transmitted by contaminated food or water, sneezing, or most of the other ways that diseases spread then it probably would be widely accepted.

However recently there is a recently released vaccine against Cervical Cancer. The virus in question is only transmitted sexually. Apparently 80% of women in the US will catch it before the age of 50 (so it's obviously not scaring people away from unsafe sex).

There is a strong Christian lobby against the vaccine, their idea is that if sex doesn't cause debilitating and/or fatal conditions such as cervical cancer then their daughters will have less reason to avoid it. The fact is that religious people are statistically more likely to practice unsafe sex (see this link) so it seems unlikely that preventing one of the STDs that religious people might catch will affect the amount of unsafe sex.

One thing that seems strange about the entire discussion is that no-one has raised the possibility of vaccinating boys. Vaccinating boys could lead to the virus being eradicated. Even if an eradication attempt fails it will help save some of the Christian girls.

Back in October I mentioned that I may soon try out Zotero, “The Next Generation Research Tool” that they claim is “easy-to-use.” Well after various upgrades, it has been installed and I am up and running with it. And I have to say it made me as happy as my morning cup of coffee, which is basically ecstatic. The software was not only a snap to install, but so amazingly smooth in terms of user interface and functionality. While I wish this existed years ago, well, I am just happy it does now. I know it will make my life dealing with the infolanche of books, articles, and blog entries so much much less overwhelming. So thanks to all the people and organizations that have made Zotero happen. I love you all.

Yesterday evening I got back home from Linuxforum day 2. There was some nice talks, and I saw the Google geek herder fall off the stage. I also got a nice introduction to Qt. Finally I saw a spam fighting deathmatch. Among the serious competitors, a pseudo-icelandic guy also joined in. A short post-presentation (in danish though, but you might get the meaning of it anyway), but you might find the principles. Find it at YouTube. Anyways, there was funny presentations of policyd (with and without the -weight), dspam, annoyance filter, milter and postgrey. As it was most a matter of funny presentation and the technical details were more secondary, it was more a person than a product that won. The winner was Ralf Hildebrandt with .. something (policyd either with or without the -weight).
No open source events without beer, so there was after the spam contest, a couple of nice beer. It was basically a nice Linuxforum - and I am looking forward for next year. But it was also a bit ‘interesting’ if it was possible to get to linux forum, just like yesterday, because some violent criminals and spoiled younsters have tried to set large parts of the streets on fire in Copenhagen. PS.: Comments by anonymous hooligans will not be accepted.

The l10n NMU blitz campaign continues to give results and not only for French. I'm now reaching quite recent bug reports (about 30-40 days ago)....which were sent by some teams when I started this campaign, back in January. So the stats for these teams will improve strongly, namely the Czech team stats and a few others (Galician, Portuguese, Catalan...). On the ranking contest, Spanish is coming closer to Dutch for the 7th rank, mostly because many Spanish translations were pending in the BTS while much less Dutch ones were. Both these teams have strong QA processes so that slows them down when compared to 1-person "teams". Of course, the result is certainly definitely better. For the 9th rank, Portuguese should come before Brazilian as of today. Ditto for Galician/Catalan for the 14th rank. Another activity began yesterday: try to complete a few packages in testing. These packages have a complete translation for several languages in unstable but they don't qualify to enter testing. So, I will offer to upload l10n fixes through testing-proposed-updates as the release team seems to be OK with that. There's a chance that my own language reaches 100% for testing also, then. And, finally, I'm polishing a new project: proofreading ALL debconf templates, and bring more wording consistency, with the help of debian-l10n-english members. That will of course be a lenny project.

One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.

When I give lectures at conferences I'm always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.

Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.

Linux Conf Au has an event called the "Professional Delegates Networking Session" which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don't attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it's more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.

If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).

Hi from Chemnitz! As expected it's great here. As usual. :) My two talks went really well. They were mostly freely improvised since I was kind of slack regarding their preperation, but I got very positive feedback on both and plan to expand them for future events. There's still a lot of visitors walking around. The debian booth is well visited with questions in all ranges, babelbox is running merily on the demo machine in rotation with bb, which never ceases to fascinate people. ;) My saturday was really busy. I walked over here around 8:30, had breakfast and gave my first talk. After a two hour break I gave the other one and ever since then I've been switching from one conversation to the next without pauses. Most of these conversations were with "strangers" who visited my talks and wanted to tell me about projects and ideas of their own, their personal experiences with Linux and Free Software or give further suggestions for my talks. I've really enjoyed these conversations, though they got a bit tiring after a while since for some reason people always catch me when walking somewhere, and so most of these long conversations were held standing and my legs are pudding now. In a few minutes (hopefully) the social will start and I hope it will be as good as last year. I plan to take things a bit easier tomorrow, visit other peoples booths, take some pictures and maybe even visit a talk or two. The rest of this day will hopefully be spend having some more inspiring conversations, enjoying good food and drink and continuing to try to coax Noel into relinquishing to me his old Debian shirt, that he grew out of. (Small Debian shirts are such a rare and precious good!)

These are some random thoughts based on a not very thorough reading of candidate platforms of the DPL Election 2007, and my subjective view of the candidates based on the mailing traffic I remember reading. Wouter Verhelst: Has quite a broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. Aigars Mahinovs: Quoting from his platform: “My goal of running for DPL is not to be DPL, but to get a few concepts closer to real life.” So don't run for DPL, but start doing these things you're thinking about. Not being DPL has the advantage that you don't have to spend time on DPL stuff that would detract you from these goals. Speaking about your goals: (i) No release: I've thought about that, too, but I feel this would quickly make Debian irrelevant. (ii) $HOME configuration files organisation: take it up with the upstream developers of all the application. I think this is a very good idea, but freedesktop.org would be a better platform. (iii) Old Maintainer Process: Idea looking for a problem. (iv) Dropping Trademarks: not sure what to think about this. Gustavo Franco: Some focus on the desktop, and a constructive attitude towards Ubuntu, both positive in my book. (The first one primarily because on servers Linux is already quite well established, while the desktop is where more work is still to be done. Not because servers are less important.) His goals: (i) Core teams: as with Wouter, he sees that people and what goes on between them are where the problems are. (ii) Release goals: I think building the release based on release goals could be a driving force, but this is more RM area than DPL. (iii) Adding features to the bts doesn't need DPL powers. (iii) New developers: certainly an area that still needs attention, but the intended course is not entirely clear to me. (iv) NEW queue: same. (v) CTTE: Not sure what the idea behind this is. (vi) Groups: yes, but again not entirely clear what and how. (vii) Backports: yes, new versions of some software should go into Debian (stable) faster. Officially supporting backports or something else, I don't know, but this is an area where a DPL could pull together the RMs, security team(s), backports.org people etc. (viii) Universal OS: is this about more media coverage or about more face to face meetings? Both are good, but we should set clear goals beforehand. (ix) Much work is needed, especially in the area of buildd management (meaning: the processes and people behind it!). Does Gustavo have previous involvement here? (x) Vendors, Website, Publicity: This is more or less all about media coverage and popularity. Much needed, but as Debian as it is will never be able to commit to a public official opinion of anything, we'll need to think hard about what to do here. (xi) NMU: I don't see a great need for action here, personally. Overall: this platform contains too much material, I fear trying to tackle all these areas will lead to a burned out DPL within three months and little actually getting anywhere. Sven Luther: It's true that it always needs at least two people for a flamewar. But having a DPL who is always ready to provide one side of an argument is not a good idea. Sam Hocevar: Everything is high-level on his platform. Both good and bad. Not sure how to rate this platform, but I see myself nodding along. Learn from other OSs is good, but I hope he also means active cooperation and not just passive let's see how they do it. Steve McIntyre: Should have won 2006. Certainly did a lot of both behind-the-scenes work and some good communication. The platform lacks mention of relations between Debian and the outside world, which is an area where I feel some work is missing (and where the DPL as the only person with a official role also known outside Debian can make a difference), and also lacks mention of legal problems (trademarks and patents) where I'm not sure how solid Debian's work is. Additional argument in favor of Steve: Having a 2IC and promoting him to DPL the year after might be a good idea overall. Maybe we should actually elect the 2IC and only have a confirmation vote to promote him to DPL? Raphaël Hertzog: I like the DPL board idea. I also like how Raphaël focuses, in his platform, on the DPL board idea and some selected problems. On the other hand, the platform is wholly focused inward, outside relations are important, too ! Anthony Towns: Not sure what to think of the current DPL. I think he had good ideas, and I still think the original “spend Debian funds for the release”-idea was not that bad, but seeing how it all worked out was very, very painful for too many people. The platform seems pretty much empty, so I guess ajt won't have my vote this time. Simon Richter: Maybe I miss something, but I only see “don't repeat the dunc-tank flamefest” in his platform, which seems a bit thin. His observation that the real power of the DPL is to get everybody's attention may be partly true, though, even if this power will be spent as soon as a DPL, trying to mediate, lets himself be drawn into the flamewar instead (I don't accuse Simon that he ultimately will do this, but I fear that it happens all too quickly). Now what? I really don't have the time to thoroughly follow the campaigning, but I'll certainly have a look at the rebuttals, and perhaps somebody will do some summary. So the ballot below will certainly change. (You might also be able to buy the vote if you're rich enough ;-)

 [ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
 [ 5 ] Aigars Mahinovs
 [ 3 ] Gustavo Franco
 [ 6 ] Sven Luther
 [ 3 ] Sam Hocevar
 [ 1 ] Steve McIntyre
 [ 2 ] Raphaë Hertzog
 [ 5 ] Anthony Towns
 [ 4 ] Simon Richter
 [ 5 ] NOTA

The low quality theora versions of the videos from the Debian Devroom at FOSDEM 2007 are available online now.

Better quality ones and slides will follow as they appear.

The encoded videos from the NetConf and the Formal Dependency Management talks are broken, the DV files look ok, so I expect I will be able to fix them, but this might take some time.

Enjoy :-)

P.S.: Maybe it's worthwhile to go for speaker microphones next year...

Shell scripts are good for a lot of things. It's quick and easy to design shell scripts that take input from one program, pass it to another program, munge it for filenames, etc.

But there are a few drawbacks to shell scripts.

The #1 drawback, in my opinion, is that it is extremely difficult to get quoting and escaping right. I often see things like $@ in shell scripts (breaks if a parameter has a space in it). I also see people failing to check for errors properly (set -e helps that). It's also difficult to do a more modern style of exception handling (do a sequence of actions in a temporary directory, and always remove that directory, even if there's an error, but stop processing and propogate the error). Command-line parsing is esoteric and odd, even with getopt. That's not to say that it's impossible to make a secure shell script that handles filenames with spaces in them properly. Just that it's difficult, and makes using common operators like backticks difficult.

Awhile back, I toyed with the idea of making Haskell a shell scripting language. This week, I spent some time to make this a reality. I released HSH, a shell scripting environment for Haskell.

HSH makes it easy to run shell commands, set up pipelines, etc. straight from Haskell. You can either use simple strings to invoke commands (they'll be passed to sh -c), or you can specify arguments as a list (like exec...() takes), which eliminates the strange filename problems.

But the really cool thing is that HSH doesn't just let you pipe from one external program to another. It also lets you pipe to/from pure Haskell functions. Yes, you can pipe the output of ls -l straight into a Haskell version of grep. I've found it to be very nice, especially for more complex processing tasks.

I put these simple examples on the HSH homepage:

run $ "echo /etc/pass*" :: IO String
 -> "/etc/passwd /etc/passwd-"
runIO $ "ls -l" - - "wc -l" 
 -> 12
runIO $ "ls -l" - - wcL
 -> 12

In this example, wcL is a pure-Haskell line-counting function.

The results were surprising. According to SLOCCount, porting hg-buildpackage from a shell script to a HSH script achieved a 20% reduction in source lines of code. And at the same time, gained better error handling, better safety of filenames, better type safety (compile-time type checking), etc. Yet it does exactly the same thing in almost exactly the same way.

Even greater savings will occur too. I decided to reimplement a small part of sed just for fun, and that code is still in my tree. If I removed that and replaced it with a call to sed as in the shell version, that would probably buy another 5% savings.

I didn't really expect to achieve a reduction in lines of code. I thought that I'd be lucky to come close to breaking even. After all, who'd expect something other than the shell to be better at shell scripting?

I don't know if these results are generalizable, but I'm really excited about it.

I have not been active with SELinux recently. I was seriously lacking motivation, and recently the old server I was using to test my SELinux stuff died because of a hardware failure. But these days I installed vmware, and in order to try it out, I decided to install a SELinux Debian etch system. Then I also updated my policy packages. I actually did quite some progress on the packages; I not only merged the latest upstream SVN version, I also fixed a couple of Debian policy issues (or worked around them), and added some new functionality. First of all, I extended the update tool (now called update-selinux-policy). It will not only install the current version of each module, but also rerun autodetection and install additional modules if you added software in the meantime (it won't do the relabeling for you, though). This should make system administration a lot easier. The packages now come with a -dev companion, which includes the interface files. The README.Debian file details how you can use this to build a custom policy module, and the policygentool included will actually generate a template for you. This should make the development of policy modules a lot easier. Grab the policy packages from my experimental refpolicy directory. Note: while they share the "refpolicy" source name with the packages in Debian main, they are packaged independently. Manoj is maintaining the official packages, and I never learned how his Makefiles work, so I'm sticking to my own packaging for my development stuff. Oh, and for me they don't work in enforcing strict mode at boot yet. Policy is still incomplete for Debian (but down to ~25 audit errors). Targeted mode works in enforcing at boot time. The main issue seems to be the way Debians init ramdisk is working and the /dev directory is populated. I don't think I'll keep the packages updated frequently, sorry, and I don't think I'll have time to get enforcing working for strict, either. :-(

MJ Ray said in Bad Tech: CGI Scripts and Line Endings, "Problem: CGI scripts uploaded with the MS Windows version of FileZilla over SFTP don't work until converted. Either there's some FileZilla settings wrong by default, or it just doesn't work." - the problem is that unlike with traditional FTP, which in ASCII mode would automagically translate line endings in to a sane format, SFTP (as far as I can tell) will always send them as binary, and thus if they were in DOS format before the transfer, they'll be in DOS format after the transfer. So, your choices are (other than the evil perl^M symlink)... Teach users about line endings - get them to do the equivalent of a :set fileformat=unix in vim before saving ;) (I'm not sure which editors out there let you set what line endings to use - might be worth finding out what the users use and looking it up) When they upload, rather than them uploading directly in to FTP space it hits an area that is checked every x minutes - that area is then copied to the right area with the transformation being done server side Something else.

I have recently noticed that the sound output of my (nearly) 3 months-old Dell Inspiron 1300 is broken. I am pretty sure it is something like a bad contact. As I use this laptop mainly as a media box, I cannot leave it in this state. I thus wrote to Dell Support team on Thursday evening, less than 5 days before the end of the 90 days warranty. They called me back yesterday morning to confirm they have received my request, and I received an e-mail yesterday afternoon asking me to do some further tests. I think I will have to sent the laptop back and wait for ages until it comes back. As it obviously runs Debian, I will also have to set up the original system back on it, which will oblige me to re-install the whole system after repair. Cheap is not always good.

lkcl: Not that I want to imply that you're on crack or anything, but the Koolu machines aren't the same hardware as the OLPCs. The fact that they have wired ethernet is a bit of a giveaway, as is the extra USB port, the mini-PCI connector and the way that it's a Geode LX rather than a GX. The hardware's massively more capable than the OLPC project, which is hardly surprising given that it costs rather more and doesn't come with a built-in screen. Does it run the OLPC software? Yes, but so will anything with an x86 and 128MB of RAM. The spec requirements really aren't that high.

We had one of the biggest snows of the year today in Montreal. The storm, which happened overnight and was supposed to let up around noon, still hasn't stopped. It's a practical white-out outside -- big fluffy flakes everywhere. The radio said we had more than 40 cm of snow, which is just amazing. I headed over to La ka this afternoon for an interview with Steve Faguy of the Montreal Gazette. I was pretty worried about going out, but as usual I was pleasantly surprised when I was outside. Snowy weather is pretty gentle, and although I was cold and wet when I got to La ka, it wasn't all that bad. I had a good talk with Steve about Wikitravel, Montreal tech scene, and the French Revolutionary Calendar. I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out. tags: steve faguy la ka snow interview gazette

certifi.ca doing well I was glad to see a post about certifi.ca in the Solution Media Blog of Thomas Huhn. Thomas set up the extremely useful OpenID Directory, so his opinion is pretty valuable. I'm glad he's as enthused about certifi.ca as I am. tags: thomas huhn certifi.ca openiddirectory openid

Registration and privacy I think I have an account on every free OpenID service on the Web. I need lots of accounts for debugging purposes, and I also like to have an idea of what people are doing with the protocol. I checked out prooveme.com a few days ago. prooveme.com gives out OpenIDs with SSL cert authentication, like certifi.ca. It seems like an OK service, but I don't think they use SSL and certs the right way. I tested the prooveme ID on a couple of services, had a couple of errors, and that was that. So I was surprised to see this posting in the proovemeblog today:

• certifi.ca is another site doing certificated OpenID. Evan, the creator of certifi.ca is a subscriber of ours. We'll obviously be pleased if he carries on using us!

Now, I've been in wikis long enough to know that you have to AssumeGoodFaith when people post things in public forums, so I'll take this comment as nothing more than clumsy but good-natured ribbing. Ha ha ha. But: I haven't publicly said that I'd tested out the prooveme server. I'm not particularly embarrassed about it, but I hadn't had any reason to mention it to anybody, either. So the only way the poster could know that I'd registered for their service was to check their database records for my registration information. Publishing users' registration info without their consent steps over an important privacy line for me and, I think, for a lot of people. I'm not sure making a joke really justifies that kind of privacy invasion. I don't feel fairly treated, here. I partly blame myself: after all, I submitted personally-identifying information (PII) into a Web form on a site without an explicit privacy policy. I've gotten so used to OpenID providers being experienced with security and privacy issues that I made assumptions that turned out not to be the case. I've taken the incident as a wake-up call to put a privacy policy on certifi.ca. I hope that will communicate to users what I consider acceptable use of their data. And I'll make sure to check carefully for privacy policies whenever creating a new account in the future. For clarity: if I have an account on a Web service, that is not any kind of endorsement of their service, and doesn't necessarily suggest that I use that service regularly (or at all). I'm going to see what I can do to get my account deleted from the prooveme servers to avoid any misunderstanding in the future. tags: prooveme privacy openid

I have built a preliminary Debian packages for Maven 2 for people who need it or wanna look into Maven. I did this by using the binary distribution from upstream. You can install it by adding

deb http://people.debian.org/~mkoch/maven2/ ./

to your

sources.list

and then do

aptitude update
aptitude install maven2-binary

This package is just for personal usage. It will not get uploaded to the official Debian archive. The Debian Java team (including me) is working on a maven2 package for Debian which builds from source but has itself around 90 dependencies. And the dependencies mostly need maven2 for building too. Bootstrapping can be fun.

While I’m not a Harvard student, I’m vaguely affiliated through some friends of mine with Harvard Free Culture, a local Free Culture chapter. They are, after all, just up the street. One of our newest projects is the Free Music Project. The goal, is, well, to gather together music under free licenses, both for just making a centralized collection of free music and for other specialized purposes, like providing music to go on OLPC laptops and school servers. So, go find free music, or if you’re an artist, re-release your music under a free license or record some new stuff. (If you’re in the Boston area, Antenna Alliance can help you get your music recorded for free. Who knows, maybe your music will end up on millions of laptops.

[ Yes, entry written for my Mexican fellows. My blog is in English. Don't rant about that, your pleads won't be listened ]
Damog just ranted (in Spanish) about too many people coming to Mexico City. I completely agree with him, but not with his conclusions. We are a ~25,000,000 people city, in a ~100,000,000 people country. The inequity we face every day is huge (Cd. Nezahualc yotl, among the poorest in the city, is the most densely populated region in the whole world, but you can easily spot over 2000 sq mt houses in Bosques de las Lomas or similar regions - And the whole Santa F region just scares me, it is an unknown planet I don't even want to think of). But what's really terrible is how living in this city changes our collective moods.
Sometimes it strikes me to understand how people in other countries can live in one town and work in another, over 40 minutes away. Well, for many years I worked at places over one hour away from home - and I didn't even cross the city. Mexico City is, or was last time I checked, 40x70km, and without enough adequate main ways. Of course, people get grumpy and aggressive while driving.
What's my answer?
Don't drive.
Seriously.
Yesterday, for example, I chaired three talks at Linuxworld Mexico. In friggin' Hip dromo de las Am ricas, a convention center located in one of the worst-connected pieces of land in Mexico. Usually, it would take me 40-90 minutes to get there by car, depending on the time of day and phase of Deimos against Fobos. Of course, it took me 70 minutes to go by metro+bus. I took two nice books (La regi n m s transparente, a beautiful book by Carlos Fuentes no Mexico City inhabitant should skip, and Laurence Rosen's Open Source Licensing). And I didn't get bored, and I didn't hate the people I was riding with. Even though I crossed the most crowded metro stations. Not only I saved a fair amount of money (MX$6.50 each way against probably something close to MX$120 between the gas and the parking fee of that unholy convention center), but I used my time much better. Some years ago, when I regularly travelled one hour back and forth to work, I learnt most of what I know today of Computer Science during the long time I spent sitting on small microb s seats. Not the most luxurious way of travelling, but still a very good way of moving around our messy city.
Of course, today I have learnt even more, and I want to advocate it: don't work far from your house, or at least, don't work far from a place reachable by Metro. Sometimes it sounds impossible, but really... How much do you value your time? Do you think that it's better to get MX$20,000 a month in a Santa F office than to get MX$15,000 in an office in Insurgentes? Do you think nobody will pay you decently if the offices are in Ermita Iztapalapa? Good work done brings a good salary. And seriously, the extra MX$5,000 in my first example is not worth the daily anger you will get by crossing the city to get to Nowhere Land and work for the corporate overlords.
I might be extremely lucky, but I work 3Km away from home. I come by bike every day. And yes, I was scared at first - Even in Ciudad Universitaria people drive aggressively. You have to take care where you drive. Taxi drivers are among the worst, as they are always in a hurry. And, yes, my elbow has an ugly scratch, as I prefered to stop and fall off my bike than to land over a car whose driver was in a hurry. I've just had my bike for ~6 weeks (after over 10 years of not riding one, and back then, just for a bit), but I'm confident enough to get off the safety of a protected University with no cafres driving their microb s as they damn well please. Last weekend I had a ~6km drive (Copilco-Miguel ngel de Quevedo-Loreto-Alta Vista-Copilco) using several high transit vialities (Universidad, Revoluci n, Insurgentes). I crossed three times the San ngel bus hub, which scared my ass as I approached - But it's perfectly doable, far easier than what I expected. It was fun. It is a decent excercise. And we need more people to take the streets with their bikes.
This morning I heard on the radio that Marcelo Ebrard (Mexico City mayor) is pushing a plan to boost bycicle usage in the city. Something similar to what has been done inside Ciudad Univeritaria, but -of course- in a larger scale: Useful ciclov as along the main roads, city-owned bike rental places (where you can rent your bike at one and drop it at another spot), all this well connected to the main Metro stations. In this interview (in this morning's 98.5 FM news program - sorry, I don't know who heads it... Mart n something IIRC) they said that today, ~0.7% of the trips outside home in Distrito Federal (where only 8 out of our 25 million people live) are carried out on bycicle, and they expect to raise it to 5% over the next six years. We will see about that, I can only wish this program best luck.
Damog complains that we drive like shit because dealing with too many people for too long pisses us off - Ok, Damog, here is the recipe: Don't get pissed off. Each of us will make a minor but tangible contribution. Don't drive so much. Quit your job so far away, get a decent (even worse paid) job closer to your house, closer to the university. You will be happier. Get a bike. Use it, you live close to UNAM as well. You will be happier. And we will be one step closer to total world domination. (yes, we the bikers, not we the Debianers ;-) )

In about half an hour I'll leave for Chemnitz in order to attend the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage 2007. I am very much looking forward to going there. Ever since the LinuxTag left Karlsruhe, the CLT are my favourite Linux event within Germany. Because of this I registered even two talks this year, one in the beginners section and of course the inevitable social talk. ;-) They're both new, so this CLT will feature two premieres. Giving new talks basically means that anything is possible. Very high rock and roll factor! New talks always have the highest risc for "accidents" but also they're usually most fun, because there's still some room (or need) for improvisation left. This is probably also why I tend to lose interest in a talk once I've given it a few times. Though, the BOFH one is of course a golden oldie! PS: Tolimar is a copycat!

Recently, I got a comment on an older blog post on Edmonton that basically agreed with another comment that Edmonton was so not the cat’s meow. Despite the winter and many months later, I guess I still do think it is, although in saying so, it is not I think their assessments are wrong, I think my take has as much to do as what has come before (like NJ, which was not the high point o my life), my experiences here, and what is to come in the future. I tend to like Edmonton because there is enough stuff to do but not too much to do. It is that whole freedom from choice that I like because I often shut down in the face of too much choice. What also colors my experience in a positive light is that generally, Canadian politics, social policy, and way of life, are a step up or two (or maybe three) than that of the United States. So the worst of Canada (if you are even to call Edmonton that, which I would not), in this regard, beats out the best of the United States. And I have lived most of my life in the US so that is my point of comparison. Even if you are living in a fantastic American city, you always face the possibility of struggling in ways that will *never* happen in Canada. It makes for a calmer, less aggressive society. For example, I recently learned that Edmonton has the highest murder rate in Canada, at a whopping …. 36 people per year (population of Edmonton = 1 million). I grew up in a place, Puerto Rico where the yearly murder rate hovers at about 700-800 per year (population = 4 million). And yet people here are freaking out over the high rate of murder, which is a good thing because hopefully they can bring it down but this fact should make the US pause and think about what they are doing up north to keep the murder rate so darn low (and the answer I think is pretty easy to find). But perhaps a lot of my love of the place has as much to do or more with my state of mind. After a grueling year of finishing a dissertation under pressure as I had deadline, and then living in NJ where I was on the job market (which meant spending so much time churning out application after application and then flying around interviews), in addition to flying 7 times in one year to visit my mom, my life here just feels so much more sane than it has been in years. What sealed it all was that right before I moved here in August I was lucky enough to be offered a permanent job (which means this summer I will be moving to NYC to join this department and I will be back to the land of overwhelming choice), so that for the first time in 5 years I did not have to apply for anything in the fall that would guarantee my livelihood for the next academic year. I was not faced with a year of lots of travel (and actually traveling in out out Edmonton is really one of my least favorite things). With that firmly in place, I could just concentrate on things like my work, my friends, brewing kombucha and do things routinely, like exercise, which I had not consistently done for years. There are things about Edmonton that I find totally obnoxious like the cities inability to plow roads leaving a thick glaze of black ice on the roads so that when you drive in the city, you basically are at real risk for an accident (and this is despite a 6.6 BILLION government surplus). There are a tad too many strip malls in the outlaying areas, and of course there is the infamous winter. We are still deep in it. The cold temperatures have been with us steadily for months now and according to folks, there are still two more months to look forward to. The cold and the constant layering of clothes are getting to me a little, although I do appreciate that the cold is just not as cold as one would think with the actual temperatures. The lack of wind, the dry conditions, the cute as chubby-as-anything- bunnies that run through the snow, and the overpowering sun all help to make -6 F much more mild, so it is not as bad as you would or I would think it was. So while I am thrilled to join the department where I am moving too, I will be sad when I leave, though perhaps not as sad as Edmontons “darling” hockey player, Ryan Smith, who was just traded by the Oilers to the NY Islanders. The day he left, he literally was shedding tears at the airport. And I have to say, even though I have no attachment to hockey, I found the pictures endearing because there is nothing like seeing a grown Canadian man cry over hockey! : )