I've bought a new camera; thanks to my friends at Nikon, I can now make photos instead of snapshots. I've used it since Friday, and have not been disappointed: the D70s is an easy to operate camera with the right possibilities for automatic and manual operation. Results of a quick test round are availble; I'm very satisfied thusfar.

Yesterday I was catching up with my magazine reading at Chapters (the Canadian equivalent of Border) when I came across an ad for a drug ad for bipolar disorder that struck me as slightly different less euphoric, more cautious to be exact compared with the ads that have been bandied loosely in all sorts of magazines in the last decade in the US. The ad was for a drug called Abilify which must be some verbal riff on Ability (no?) and there was a very clear pronouncement on that ad that admitted they had no idea how the drug even worked. It went like this: ABILIFY may work by adjusting dopmamine activity instead of completely blocking it and by adjusting serotonin activity. However, the exact way any medicine for bipolar disorder works is unknown. I find this interesting because its tone seems to depart from other ads that seem somewhat more confident (or if they were less so, it was probably kept in the fine print). But when I went to the webpage, this caveat was a little harder to find, as it was a few clicks away within a page entitlted The Brain, Bipolar I Disorder, and ABILIFY . It provides a “handy” pictoral representation of what may be going on with your brain with bipolar disorder/treatment. I found the series somewhat odd and amusing, especially the one that used a magnifying glass to see” all the neurons and nerves or whatever they are in your brain. update: so you know, the US and New Zealand are the only 2 countries that allow drug direct to consumer advertising so I am not sure what the ad was doing in this magazine. It was American magazine but in Canada. I would think they would make them get rid of ads like that. Anyone know why it can slip through the border like that?

So people may be wondering, How does Biella pass her time in the vast, desolate Canadian north? Thankfully there are many things to do in Edmonton proper, but I have delved quite a bit into reading so I thought I would take a break and give small reviews of the books I have read or am reading as they are all quite good. I am trying to be more systematic about my reading habits so I am back to using citeulike. I am adding anything new I read and then as I go back to I have already read (for articles), I am adding them to the list also. I hope this pays off in the future! I started the reading bash with a book that was recommended to me over a year ago while I was still in Chicago: The Fugitive’s Property: Law and the Poetics of Personhood as it deals with the bread and butter of my own work, intellectual property, liberalism, market capitalism, and American history. I found the introduction enlivening and was sufficiently interested to continue on. I think there is not a lot of innovative work in the field of intellectual property (only because it has been covered very well) and to bring together slavery/the fugitive person and intellectual property under the same analytical lens, seems productive. Best looks at how the legal treatment of the slave and that of IP, hold striking parallels for their highly fugitive (formal) nature, driven and intensified by the legal/market framework that makes personhood into property. There is a lot of good stuff in there (including a fantastic discussion on legal positivism) but in the end, the labor it took to sift through some really obtuse prose was too much for me. I can’t remember the last time I languished under the heavy weight of language that was far too ornate and under sentences that just lacked clarity. This was compounded by the fact that he assumed you knew a fair bit about slave history, which I did not. My drive also escaped me and while I hope to return to it later, I took a break and turned to more readbale material. After such heavy linguistic ornateness, I needed an antidote, QUICK, and I knew exactly where to go: William Sewell and his book I had on my shelf also nearly for a year: The Logics of History. Along with being a first rate historian he is like that black instrument popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Herbie Hancock, and Brian Eno, he is a synthesizer with an amazing ability to write clearly. Being the synthesizer that he is, he is skilled at connecting the dots between various theoretical topics like event, structure, and agency, making the theoretical implications so crystal clear you feel happy to have entered into a field (the social sciences that is) that feels awfully arcane and pointless at times. I left Stehpen Best, which was like leaving a cluttered medieval castle and into a simply decorated room filled nothing with good theoretical feng shui (I think about writing in spatial terms more than ever). He just makes reading fun, even when the topics can be less than enthralling. Many of the essays were published previously and I had read a number of them, such as his famous essay on structure and agency. What I appreciated along with the great writing, was that he takes serious the question of plurality of social life within the net of various social, economic, political determinants. So while he assumes the existence of structure (and turns Marshall Sahlins to establish), he also is quick to show that structure, like a cultural system, can only act as partial (and unexpected determinants of social life) because of the existence and presence of events (which is really Sahlins great masterful point) but more importantly because of the plurality of structures… This was perhaps on the the central motifs in my dissertation; while I placed hacking within the cultural lineage of liberalism, in no way is this the only cultural system that hackers operate through and with; they move through a cultural domain more intrinsic to their own praxis, not to mention other systems of value that reverberate more widely among the digerati… And it is this movement between social positions that allows for forms of reflexivity and social change. I primarily used Bakhtin to make this point but now I got Sewell to add to this mix. Here is a nice passage from the book that makes this point:

I would argue that a multiple conception of structures would make subjects cultural creativity easier to explain. If the cultural structures by which subjectivities are formed are multiple, then so are the subjectivities… Because persons, symbols, and objects of cultural reference overlap between structural realms, structurally generated rules, emotions, categories, and senses of self can potentially be transposed from one situation to another. Indeed, if actors commonly have the experience of negotiating and renegotiating the relationships between noncongruent cultural structures, it follows they should have some intellectual distance on the structural categories themselves, that they should be able to view one set of cultural categories from the point of view of others that are differently organized, to compare and critizise categories and categorical logics, to work out ways of harmonization or odering the seemingly contradictory demands of different cultural schemes. A multiple conception of structure, consequently makes human creativity and reflection an integral element in the theory of history, not a philosophically prior metaphysical assumption. p. 213

And here is a more engaged review that is a little more critical than my very short comments. As part of a reading group organized by my tireless supervisor, I am also reading The Cultural Locations of Disability written by two of the most prolific scholars in the field, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Since I am a novice in field it is hard for me to judge the two chapters we have so far read but it is a total total total treat reading a book slowly with a group of other folks from a vast range of departments. So far I appreciate the larger arguments presented in the introduction. For example, they point to two broad categories—capitalism and modernity/enlightenment– as driving forces in a new wave of obsession with the disabled. So while capitalism’s insistence on measuring the worth of humans through an abstract and actual ability to labor, marginalizes those who cannot offer their constant labor power (and makes them an “odd” cultural object), modernity–in its desire to march forward to the mysterious plane of progress, offers a technological promise to eradicate what it designates as deviant or primitive. As they nicely sum up: In a culture that endlessly assures itself that it is on the verge of conquering Nature once and for all, along with its own primitive instincts and the persistent domains of have-nots, disability is referenced with respect to these idealized visions. As a vector of human variability, disabled bodies both represent a throwback to human prehistory and serve as the barometer of a future without deviancy. p. 31 I, think, however, they should have also included some discussion of liberalism, which in many ways, was the legal and philosophical engine that helped to naturalize capitalism not to mention it also offered a vision of person, in which self-development, expression, and discrete autonomy was deeply cherished. Seen in this liberal light, disability becomes also a type of tragedy that can be resolved though new technological interventions they discuss under the guise of modernity. I have just started Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, which promises to be quite a tour de force into the contentious politics of uncertainty and the play of perceptibility and imperceptibility that surround one of many many syndromes sick building syndrome that now are part and parcel of the medical and patient advocacy field. Along with this I read and finished Andrew Lakoff’s Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, which will make for great teaching, and has one of the nicest discussions on the way in which psychiatry’s insecure status among the other medical science was one of the driving forces toward embracing the new scientism of the 1980s that coincided with new more general neoliberal trends. Another nice move about the ethnography is that he was able to clarify some of the trends and rationalities of American and European psychiatry by examining how it was received and resisted among more psychoanalytical Argentinian therapists. Very classicial anthropological lens in that sesne. Finally I am in the middle of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loop and I will say more about it when I am done, which should be soon as I am tearing through it evern night. I have been waiting for this book for a long while now because Dibbell is part of that trinity (Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Julian Dibbell) that offers some of the best writing on hackers, the internet, and virtual worlds. And this book continues in that tradition of providing a fantastic read, a vivid ethnographic picture of the topic at hand, along with key insights into the nature of economies, money, and plau within (and outside of) virtual landscapes. What I respect about Julian Dibbell is that he took a long time to get this book out. He started the research in 2003 and then spent a few years writing up. I think there is a lot of pressure to get any material or book on “virtual whatever” out there as quick as possible but for the most part I think that is a mistake. You need to let these things brew a long while or else they won’t acquire that taste of a finished product.

I guess the term "ajax clouds" is now more appropriate. Debtags clouds have evolved. They're no longer a static page with a single cloud that will forward you to the more complex browsing tool by Enrico, but now the cloud will adapt to your previous choices, and allow the selection of multiple tags. The biggest issue probably is tag naming now (e.g. what is the difference between "role", "use" and "scope" (unfold them to get an idea) or between "interface" and "uitoolkit" (interface is mostly commandline vs. fullscreen vs. windowed vs. 3d; uitoolkit is gtk vs. qt vs. whatever) - unless you're familiar with these terms, you'll probably find it still hard to navigate the tag cloud. Still I hope this inspires you to think of new UIs doable with tag information (which is a small step towards the semantic web; actually these facets here are quite similar to RDF triples...) These is so much things I'd like to try out with this data... If you have suggestions, please share them via email. For those interested in the technical stuff: tag clouds are loaded via ajax, served from a database with ~120 MB of precalculated, precompressed json files. Precalculation is rather expensive; on my 4+ years old laptop it took about 105 minutes (76 minutes of CPU time). Storing them in the filesystem instead of a BerkeleyDB hashtable took more than 4 hours. The outmost (i.e. largest amount of data) set takes 1.1 seconds to compute; there are 344871 precomputed tag selections, so it precalculated 75 selections per second on average. Yes, complexity is not linear; benefits from caching large results are huge. I'd really love to run a similar interface for e.g. last.fm, but I guess this would not work as well; their tags aren't grouped in facets. But I have some ideas to make up for that. P.S. This is also my first real Ajax app (except for using json instead of XML). And I still hate Javascript. [Update: I've worked around an issue with opera (which is stricter on javascript object syntax than mozilla). I havn't tried Internet Exploder yet. But this is a navigation experiment, not an application to be deployed...]

The recent Debian Bug Squashing Party was quite a success if you ask me. The most problematic was that it coincided with the Utrecht Programming Championship (a qualifier for the ICPC NWERC), which took much of my time as an organiser and of Jeroen and Jelmer as contestants. It was worthwhile though, because their Team J won the contest. On the BSP a significant number of bugs have been squashed, but also a lot of work has gone into debian-cd, the release notes, security updates and removing packages. Steve has very few photo's available. Let's repeat it for etch+1, especially when it doesn't share a weekend with other local events.

Last weekend, Jeroen van Wolffelaar and Thijs Kinkhorst organised a BSP at Utrecht University. I went along for a couple of reasons:

• to help reduce the number of RC bugs in the run-up to the Etch release
• to meet some of the Dutch developers and users, and to encourage them to work their best for Etch

I met up with Hanna Ollila at Schiphol Airport late on Friday evening, and we took the train down to Utrecht together. We found Jeroen and some others at the station and went straight on to a party in the middle of town for a few hours. Then after just a few hours' sleep we headed into the University to get breakfast and start squashing bugs. A group of about a dozen people turned up that day - mainly a mixture of Dutch DDs and other locals.

I took a look at a couple of bugs initially on Saturday: #387419 and #387498. Unfortunately, the first (kdepim FTBFS on alpha) was difficult to reproduce - the alpha machine I had available for testing was too short on memory and took a very long time to build kdepim, long enough that after 2 days I gave up. I couldn't reproduce the latter (system() hanging when running on mips) on any machine I had access to - it looks like more work is needed there... In parallel with those two RC bugs (found on Andreas' great summary page at http://bts.turmzimmer.net/details.php), I also had a very productive session working in parallel with Christian Perrier, fixing translation/i18n bugs in one of my own packages, CVS. Thanks Christian, you're a pleasure to work with! On Saturday evening, the gang of us headed into the centre of Utrecht for a nice meal, some beer and some spirited conversation at a Greek restaurant. I took the opportunity to talk with Frans Pop about some of the remaining work needed for d-i and debian-cd. On Sunday, the work continued. I was still waiting on feedback on #387498 and my build of #387419, so I decided to make the most of the uninterrupted time to get some debian-cd development work done. I'm still hoping to get multi-arch CDs working before we release etch, so this was a great help. In fact, I got so engrossed in this that I managed to work straight through dinner...! In terms of bugs, I must admit that I didn't do much in terms of reducing absolute numbers. This weekend, there were a lot of bugs in categories that don't really work well for Bug Squashing: licensing/legal bugs (which really need discussion with the maintainer), newly-opened bugs (IMHO it's a little rude to NMU a package when a bug has only just been opened - give the maintainer at least a couple of days to respond!) and deep bugs where intimate knowledge of the package is needed. I expect there will be more to work on next weekend in Zurich, if nothing else some of those "new" bugs will have aged. Early on Monday morning I caught the bus from near Jeroen's apartment to start the journey home. Thanks to the nice reliable public transport, I got all the way to Schiphol well in time. Then my flight back to Stansted was delayed... :-( It was great to meet up with a bunch of enthusiastic people. Some I'd met before (Frans, Jeroen, Hanna). Some I met for the first time (Thijs, Bas, Moritz and others). But all of them were working hard, wanting to help get Etch out on time. Let's keep up the good work! I have a small number of photos online.

I've been working a little bit more on the folding tagcloud for Debian packages. I've added closing of folds, and the code for displaying selected tags as well as matching packages is in place, too (you'll need to use a different .json data to actually see results though). To make it truly interactive, i.e. allow the selection of multiple tags until you get some results, I need to add more data files. So I'll have to decide now if I'm going to use a CGI (the "traditional" method), which will likely need to have some caching, or if I'll just precalculate everything into static .json files. I could even store them as .gz on the webserver; any browser with ajax capabilities should be able to do gzip decompression on the fly. This would offer maximum performance and security, but it means I'll need more magic in the javascript (and Javascript is ugly). Or I'll do a combination of both, use a tiny CGI serving the precalculated data; the CGI could then easily be replaced with a dynamic-caching CGI later. SVG rendering for the tag cloud would probably be also very cool. With some smart layouting algorithms, it could become much more cloud-like. And there could probably be a nice animation when "subclouds" are unfolded, pusing away the other folds. However, that would be much slower. Any animation means a slowdown, since it adds extra delays.

I mentioned OpenSearch a few days ago. I've been working on getting it implemented for Wikitravel, based on the great extension written by Gregory Szorc. Well, just as I get it finished and submitted to A9, they've redesigned their site, and now the Wikitravel search option is much harder to find. It does work, though. Another thing I found interesting was experimenting with the OpenSearch support in Firefox 2.0rc1. I was getting weird errors with it, but thanks to a helping hand from folks in #addons, I got the scoop. Hopefully Wikitravel will be OpenSearch-enabled sometime today. Interestingly, in the A9 redesign, they moved http://opensearch.a9.com/, with the OpenSearch plugin enabled! tags: opensearch mediawiki a9 firefox firefox2

After about 6 months of initial research in the Bay Area, I had to make a choice over the future direction of my more directed fieldwork. Would my project be on Silicon Valley, its religious fervor for the exuberant technology start-up, with the geek entrepreneur (probably with some affiliation with Standford) at its center stage, or would it be more broadly about free software and the culture of geekdom? I chose the later, for various reasons, but I think I wanted to write a dissertation that did not bleed with cynicism but instead flowed and flowered with a lot more joy than could have been possible if I had stayed within the grasp of the start-up and the venture capitalist. That said, I learned a lot about SV, took a lot of notes, and read most anything I could get my hands on whether the work of San Jose Anthropologist,Jan English-Lueck or published in magazines like Mother Jones, Harpers, and even the National Geographic. One of the luminaries that writes about SV from a cultural perspective is Paulina Borsook. And she is fine writer who admittedly has ticked me of on occasion (to be precise because she collapsed too much of geek culture into that of the specific SV world in Cyberselfish, which at the time I found almost personally offensive, probably more than it should have). Today I just came across a short, older but very illuminating piece of hers The Disappeared of Silicon Valley (or why I couldn’t write that piece) which is as much about the limits of historical representation in general as it specifically about the failings of start-ups in SV at the end of the recent boom and bust cycle. So her goal was simple enough: To find people involved in starting new high-tech whose companies had died.. and to find them to get a more visceral and cultural window into this experience. But it was a near to impossible task. Despite her impeccable record with confidentiality and a far flung social network, she could not get anyone talk about these ostensible failures. There has been a good amount of writing on the limits of historical representation because the archive or what comes to be the archive is a function of power and it is usually the powerless who are left out, as the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot has so eloquently shown. But while it is true that some CEO of a dethroned corporation may be powerless in some sense of the word, it is not what we associate with the word. But in fact, the power of stigma of failure in a region that magnifies an already well-develiped cultural fetish of success (especially, I imagine, among male graduates, of places like Stanford Buisiness School), is enormous, so much so, that it seems one can only write about the experience, as Barsook has done so well, through the reality of a lack, through silence.

I already started describing my time at JSLULL, the Free Software conference at La Laguna in Tenerife. It's been a few days since, and I'm now back at home and ready to summarise the rest. I should apologise up front that my memory of people's names is awful... :-( The slides from the talk are on my website now, in case anybody is interested, and my photos are up too. The original plan for Tuesday afternoon was to run a small Bug Squashing Party in one of the computer labs at ULL, but unfortunately this week the main internet link from ULL to Madrid had failed. It's a little difficult to work on bugs when you can't even get to the list, so we changed tack. Instead, I led a small workshop for interested people, demonstrating how to create Debian packages. About 8 people got involved, taking turns to drive the keyboard, ask and answer questions. People were keen to learn; there is a very active group in the University running the labs and other machines, and they were hoping to create packages of some of their own software to make maintenance and installation easier. I'm glad to help! We went out to one of the beaches near Santa Cruz that evening, then headed back into the city later on for drinks and dinner. We had a very animated conversation about the use of Free Software in schools and local government, with the Spanish people and Knut Yrvin from Skolelinux trading interesting stories about their experiences. On Wednesday morning, a group of us rented a car and headed inland to visit El Teide, the huge volcano that dominates the Tenerife skyline. It's the first time I've ever looked down on clouds from the passenger seat of a car! We headed almost to the top, and visited the desolate plain just down from the last summit. It looked almost like a lunar landscape, untouched by water... Later on that day, I headed back to the hotel in Santa Cruz and then on to the airport to catch my return flight to England. Carlos (again) had given up his time to chauffeur me around, and we chatting about all sorts of things while he drove south. Unfortunately, the flight was delayed by several hours because of mechanical problems. I would have been happy enough to have simply waited at the airport, but Carlos was having none of it. :-) He insisted we should go and have dinner together; we went for drinks at a beach bar, then up to his home village for a lovely meal. Eventually I caught my plane at 2:30am, and got back to England just in time to catch the rush hour traffic on the M25. I spent a lovely couple of days in Tenerife, spending time and making friends with the very enthusiastic local Free Software hackers. I'd love to go back again soon and see more of the place. Thanks to all the of the people involved, you were very welcoming!

My Athlon XP 2000+ died at the end of July; it appeared to the be the CPU. I had a 1GHz EPIA-M Via board sitting around, so I installed that and figured I'd have a look at sexy Core 2 Duo kit eventually. I did, and I've ordered some, but I suspect it's never turning up and I have to cancel the order and place a new one (combination of wanting an Intel G965 based board given their decent Free driver support as well as a silent case that wasn't in stock but was a lot cheaper than elsewhere). However, I cracked and bought an XP 2200+ CPU off eBay. The Via just worked out too slow and the hot weather has passed so I'm less concerned about heat generation. Even though this CPU is only slightly faster than what I've had for the past 3 years the 2 months on a slower box makes me really appreciate it. Aside from the raw speed increase the Athlon also has 4 times as much level 2 cache (256k vs 64k), twice as much RAM (the Via only has 1 DIMM slot so had 512M, while my Athlon mobo has 2 so gets 1G) and a real video card (the Via CLE266 seemed quite poor; even when the system was unloaded I was sometimes seeing a couple of seconds lag in focus-follow-mouse. My ATI 9200SE is much nicer. And doesn't steal system memory.) Plus there's the fact I can put my 4 port serial card back in. Living with 1 port is so primitive. :) I know that what I've got now is still a lot less powerful that what lot's of people have on their desktop (and conversely I know people who'd be glad of the Via), but my point is more about just how grateful I am for it after only a couple of months on something slower.

I think I'm loosing my geeky edge. I noticed today that my cable ISP offers a 20Mb/sec down package to which I could subscribe. It's $15 a month more than my 10Mb/sec package. The problem is that I can't think of what I would use that kind of speed for. The line already cheerfully holds my internet phone calls without a blip or a drop and apt-get routinely tells me that it's doing 1MB/sec.

It's *almost* worth bumping down to the 7Mb/sec down package, since it would save me $30/month, and I'm fairly certain that I would never notice. When I started with Videotron, that's what I had anyway. They've just been slowly bumping up the speed without charging me more.

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the LSB here, so I figured I was overdue to give an update. In short, it’s been a great year. Highlights include: » All major distributions, including Asianux, Debian, Mandriva, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, are either already certified to LSB 3, in the process of certifying, or planning to certify their next version (see our list of expected distribution coverage for LSB 3). » A number of ISVs (independent software vendors), including MySQL and RealNetworks, are in the process of certifying applications to LSB 3. For ISVs, LSB certification means fewer distribution specific packages without sacrificing distribution coverage (take a look at the MySQL download page for an example of how crazy it can get). For users, LSB certification means greater application availability with a minimum of hoops to jump through. Expect a lot more announcements about LSB certified applications in the coming months. » We’ve put together a solid roadmap for the LSB going forward. The LSB aims to provide a “highest common denominator” across the various Linux distributions—in other words, to provide a single target for ISVs writing or porting to the Linux platform, where “the Linux platform” is defined by a short (and potentially different from ISV to ISV) list of distributions on which their applications must run. To serve as an effective highest common denominator, it needs to be easy to map from LSB versions to distributions and vice versa; and it needs to be possible to target a version of the LSB with assurance that the application will work not only on that version but on future versions as well (i.e., an LSB 3.0 application will run on LSB 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, … compliant distributions). We’ve made great strides toward these goals in the past few months. To satisfy the “easy mapping” requirement, each major version of the LSB now corresponds to a major version, or “generation”, of the enterprise distributions. So, for example, LSB 3.x corresponds to the current generation (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, etc.), LSB 4.x corresponds to the next generation (RHEL 6, SLE 11, etc.), etc. To satisfy the application compatibility requirement, LSB versions both major and minor beginning with 3.0 are strictly backward compatible with previous versions. At a high level, then, the LSB roadmap looks something like this:

LSB 3.x (2006-2008)	LSB 4.x (2008-2010)
Asianux 2.0 Debian 4.0 (”etch”) Mandriva Corporate 4.0 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 & 5 SUSE Linux Enterprise 9 & 10 Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (”dapper”) […]	Asianux 3.0 Debian “etch” + 1 Mandriva Corporate 5.0 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Ubuntu LTS “dapper” + 1 […]

» Speaking of the LSB roadmap, we’re hard at work on LSB 3.2, to be released Q2 2007. The short list of new features include the addition of Perl, Python, several freedesktop.org specifications for desktop interoperability, CUPS, HPIJS, ALSA, and more. For LSB 4.0, we’ll be uplifting LSB Core to GCC 4.1 and glibc 2.4 and looking at two longstanding issues, the addition of Java and a packaging facility for ISVs, among many other things. The roadmap will be posted for public comment shortly. » We’re making it easier than ever to build portable applications using the LSB. We released the LSB SDK (Software Development Kit), which bundles everything a developer needs to write or port to the LSB, with LSB 3.1. We’re building something called the LSB Application Testkit, which aims to be the LSB’s validator.w3.org, an easy to use tool that developers can use to test for application portability. And we quietly launched a beta version of the LSB Developer Network last month. » In July, we hired Till Kamppeter, making linuxprinting.org, the de facto standard repository of Linux printer drivers, an FSG project. We’re adding both distribution neutral printer drivers (delivered, naturally, as LSB packages) to the linuxprinting.org foomatic database as well as an API that third party printer management tools can use to install and update printer drivers. We also plan to extend the LSB certification program to cover printers in addition to distributions and applications. If all goes well, you’ll be able to look for the LSB Certified mark on a printer at the store and know that it will work on your distribution of choice in the not too distant future. » Last, but certainly not least, we’re embarking on an exciting new project in partnership with the Institute for Systems Programming at the Russian Academy of Sciences to build the next generation LSB database and test suite infrastructure. The new system will interlink the various moving parts that make up the Linux platform to an unprecedented degree, providing upstream developers and distribution vendors a powerful set of tools for coordinating their work and improving the quality of the platform, as well as giving ISVs a more efficient way to provide feedback to both parties. This is a key tool for enabling the backward compatibility guarantee mentioned earlier, and it will also vastly improve the coverage and quality of the LSB tests, an area where we’ve been criticized in the past (our goal is 75% interface coverage by LSB 4.0). More details here. I’ll drill down on all of these topics and more in the coming months. In the meantime, you can keep up with the latest at the FSG and LSB by visiting the FSG web site or by signing up for the FSG newsletter (sorry, no RSS feed yet, though I’m told we’re working on it). Finally, if you’re interested in participating in the LSB project, join the lsb-discuss mailing list or the IRC channel #lsb on irc.freestandards.org, where the bulk of LSB development happens.

I asked Marc-who-shall-not-be-linked-to if he could take Sarah and I for a plane ride some time, not expecting it to be for a while, and he turned around and offered to take us out on Saturday, to Reno to see the air show. It was only after we got there that I discovered it was predominately air races, with a bit of a show tacked on. That was okay, it was a good day out. The flight, in a little single-prop, four-seater Trinidad, took about 90 minutes each way, give or take, and was fun. I'd already been in a little plane once before, so it didn't have quite the same novelty value for me as it did for Sarah, who was really excited. This was our first visit to Nevada, if you call flying into Reno International, with a 20 minute cab ride to Reno Stead Field, "seeing Nevada". Nevada's cabs were interesting, with rooftop advertising ranging from the local adult venues featuring pole and cage dancers, to the region's abstinence advocacy group. The airshow itself was an interesting display of patriotism and propaganda. I've never been to an airshow in Australia either, and I don't really know a lot about aeroplanes, but it's fun watching cool military aircraft whizzing around. We've been a bit spoiled living near the Moffet Federal Airfield, but even then, you only get to see stuff flying straight in or out. This was cool to see stuff flying around for the express purpose of being ogled. As for the patriotism and propaganda, I think it was the display of the F-15 Eagle. They had some dude from the Air Force on the public address system talking about whilst it did its tricks, and he was constantly going on about (your) US Air Force's military superiority and how the F-15 could do anything and blah blah blah, all with "God Bless the USA" being played in the background. In fact various versions of this song got played throughout the day, with the crowd often singing along. It was the lines

I'm proud to be an American
where at least I know I'm free,

that particularly make me smirk. It's like America's the only country in the world that's free or something. That, and God only blesses the USA. Gimme a break. Oh, and we all had to stand up for the national anthem. It's funny. Australia just seems so unpatriotic by comparison. Not that I've been to an air show in Australia, so I don't know what sort of a military slant they have. There was a bit of an exhibition also attached to the show, where all manner of government types were doing recruiting, from the state troopers to the military. I ran into the Australian family of a guy from the RAAF on exchange with the USAF, and a lady from Darwin running a stall that sold Australian products. Overall it was a good day out, with some more exposure to good old American culture. Photos from the outing are here

Tomorrow we'll have the first real-life meeting, together with Thijs Kinkhorst and dr. Bas Zoetekouw, to organize details about the upcoming Debian Bug Squashing party in Utrecht, The Netherlands, on the weekend of September 30th. As a study association, A-Eskwadraat has had Debian Developers for quite some time, from Bas since 2000 until our most recent addition, Thijs, but we've never organized a Debian event – yet. In 2002 though, there was a Mozilla 1.0 release party where also the release of woody was celebrated. The university has been supportive of the initiative, and is offering the location for free, as long as there are not too many people around that they feel the need for (expensive) security to be on-site 24h/day. For that reason, and also for food planning, please do subscribe yourself in wiki. If more than 25 people end up subscribing, we'll let you know how we'll arrange that. We're still not having a definitive deal with a sponsor, so don't know how flexible we are in this regard. At this moment, we've also got a handful of international attendees too, including Debian's "Second in Command", Steve McIntyre. I'm looking forward to it, and to meeting various Debian contributors (mostly again). See you in Utrecht!

Development Environment Conference(Japanese) was held in Akihabara, 8 Sep. The event was focused for that the famous geeks use what kind of tools, software configuration, or environment. Many people were using zsh, GNU screen, and vim or Emacs. In the event, I really surprised a man who use GNU screen with default prefix key!

As you can read in this mail we went and forked the cdrtools suite and named the fork cdrkit. I wont repeat all the reasons again here, please read this if you are interested. If you are interested to join us start with a

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debburn/nonameyet/trunk

and join us in IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn.

---

Personally I really hate that we got forced to fork, I never did want that to happen. For most of the past I was able to ignore most of the random flamewars that JS always seems to get in. But unfortunately that did not work this time, so I joined the running flamewar. Read the thread following that yourself to make your own opinion, but maybe its better to just not read it, the time can be used better.

On Oct 11th 14:35 JST, www.jp.debian.org (arashi.debian.or.jp) happened to be down without any notice. I'm afraid it would be hardware trouble or kernel trouble, since we got such trouble in yesterday too. Yesterday, mrmt went to the NOC and booted it up again, but this time nobody could go to the NOC, so we couldn't fix it soon. For the time being, we've setup www.debian.or.jp on the new machine. Once arashi.debian.or.jp boot up again, we'll move the services to the new machine.

As you can read in this mail we went and forked the cdrtools suite and named the fork cdrkit. I wont repeat all the reasons again here, please read this if you are interested. If you are interested to join us start with a

svn co svn://svn.debian.org/debburn/nonameyet/trunk

and join us in IRC, server irc.oftc.net, channel #debburn.

---

Personally I really hate that we got forced to fork, I never did want that to happen. For most of the past I was able to ignore most of the random flamewars that JS always seems to get in. But unfortunately that did not work this time, so I joined the running flamewar. Read the thread following that yourself to make your own opinion, but maybe its better to just not read it, the time can be used better.

Well, after reconfiguring my blog on Debian Planet, a few old articles have shown up again. Most probably the Planet had forgotten about having seen these articles before I left Planet weeks ago.It isn’t so bad, since most of the articles are still current - adduser is still beingn worked on, exim4 needs GnuTLS knowhow desperately, and clamav-data packages are still being built automatically for volatile.