Today I have effectively started with my Master Project! I have been been at it for a few days already in the past weeks though, but now I’m sitting on my own spot working on some proofs. So, what am I actually doing? Well that’s still hard to put in words yet and it also requires some process algebra and general math prior knowledge, but I’ll try. My graduation supervisor is Bas Luttik and in July he co-published a paper on defining a finite equational base (a set of equations from which all others can be derived) for a specific process algebra called CCS. This paper used a specific subset of CCS, namely without restriction (hiding) and relabelling. Restriction is an operator of the process algebra to block certain actions of happening, relabelling is an operator to replace actions by other actions. Take 1 of my project is to try to consider this algebra with restriction and finding a new equational base and proof that either it works or it can not be done. This is a risky assignment because it can lead to: we have tried but haven’t gotten either results. The short period to come will entail considering CCS with restriction but without concurrency to drastically reduce the cases to be considered. If we succeed, we’ll continue with CCS with restriction and concurrency. If we do not succeed it’s quite possible we’ll change my project assignment. More to come!

Yesterday the release manager Andreas ‘aba’ Barth announced:

Etch is now frozen! Wheeeeeee!!!

This means, that “all packages now need to be hand-approved in order to go to testing”.
So policyd-weight needs to be hinted, which is already done, but ipplan will never make it into etch, since its out of NEW only 2 days ago. So here needs etch-backports to take place.
I hope etch will be released now soon (mid next month). Good work since here .. go ahead! Anyways … many, many thanks goes to my great sponsor Daniel Baumann. Without his patience and help this list of packages would never happen. Debian, opensource, Packaging, planet

So I am back to le study of le hackers, trying to write a super-secret paper that I will present in January and then of course I am back with and to my beloved book (which for now has the following title: “Freedom’s Pleasures: Hacker Practice And The Limits of Liberalism” but I am sure it will morph, endlessly). As part of my transition I just finished re-reading one of my favorite articles on the history of Usenet: If I want it, it s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech by B. Pfaffenberger (available here for download. When I released one of my dissertation chapters where I addressed the phenomenon of the Cabal, Bryan was nice enough to write me and point me to his article, which also examines the existence of Backbone Usenet Cabal. The artile, which provides just the right mix of history and commentary, analyzes how a free speech ethic came to be valued on Usenet and the ways in which technological and social factors co-mingled to facilitate and dampen the free flow of expression. You are provided with classic Usenet quotes like:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea–massive, diffi-
cult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling
amounts of excrement when you least expect it. (Spafford, 1993b)

You learn about the early attempts to control spam by the likes of “CancelMoose:”

In 1995, a secret, shadowy figure known as the CancelMoose
devised a spam-canceling program called a cancelbot.”

And then in the end, he provides his challeng to one of the dominant STS theories of the time, SCOT: “It should be noted that this picture is at odds with the predictions of the social construc-
tion of technology (SCOT) theory (Pinch & Bijker, 1987), in which the outcome of a period
of technical controversy is ascribed solely to social factors. Underlying SCOT s dogmatism
is a justifiable aversion to technological determinism, the doctrine that a technology s con-
tent leads irresistably to predictable social consequences a doctrine that is simply the re-
verse of SCOT s insistence on social causation. Two wrongs, as we were taught in kinder-
garten, do not make a right. What we see in the history of Usenet is a contingent outcome
that is shaped neither exclusively by social nor by technical factors, but rather is best under-
stood as a long process in which contesting groups attempt to mold and shape the technol-
ogy to suit their ends sometimes successfully, and sometimes not. They are as likely to be
blindsided by technological developments as they were to succeed in changing the system
to meet their ends. As this article attests, it is one thing to create new technologies with a
coherent social vision, and it is quite another to control the way it grows and develops.” I could not agree with him more. I think what he is highlighting is that if we dip into the historical record, we have instances in which technology can trump the social and vice-versa (and often instead it is a co-mixture), so in the end, understanding the impact of technologies is less about theories of technology and more of a historical question…

William Patry on Judge Posner visiting Second Life. Unfortunately, I missed the event. I haven’t quite mastered Second Living. It’s hard enough to fit everything that needs to be done in First Life.

Yesterday was general assembly of the Linux user group Aargau (a place in switzerland). The association hasn’t got enough money, this is a severel months old story already, and the person who managed the money was very inactive. The president also didn’t want to do his job anymore, so we had to search a new advisory board. Unfortunately there weren’t enough members who are interested in this job, so the association will be resolved. This is quite hard for me because I met there some cool people which became (some of them at least) good friends, I say “thank you very much” to G rkan, Daniel, David, Werewolfi, Harzi, Nils, B, Vany and last but not least also to the “swisscom idiot”…
Yeah, there isn’t much more to say about this, only that I will miss those cool evenings very much But from another point of view, yesterday was a very good day because Debian Etch is finally frozen, so we had to celebrate at the LUG-AG meeting and there are some pictures (the big ones are 403, if you want them just send me a mail and I will allow it for your IP). Thanks to all Debian people who helped getting Etch in shape and thanks to the releasemanagers…

The fight against terrorist has been mostly abandoned in favour of the fight for terrorist fighting money from the federal (U.S.) governement. And, it appears, the fight for the biggest silliness. But they still tell me the Ministry of Silly Walks doesn't exist...

[...] a mathematical value purporting to represent the square root of terrorist intent. The figure appears deep in the mind-numbingly complex risk-assessment formulas that the department used in 2006 to decide the likelihood that a place is or will become a terrorist target [...]

Needless to say, locations with more likely to-be-attacked locations get more money. And, as it turns out, frequently have more republican politicians.

Several years ago, Pinochet was prosecuted by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garz n:


On October 17, 1998, while traveling to the United Kingdom for medical treatment, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish provisional warrant for the murder in Chile of Spanish citizens while he was president. Five days later, Pinochet was served with a second provisional arrest warrant from judge Baltasar Garz n of Spain charging him with systematic torture, murder, illegal detention, and disappearances. Pinochet was placed under house arrest in Britain while appealing the legal authority of the Spanish and British courts to try him, but eventually released on medical grounds by the then Home Secretary Jack Straw without facing trial. .

Garz n became my hero since that very moment.

Since then I have been repeating like crazy: Pinochet, al talego , which barely means Get Pinochet behind bars . Now I am smiling as I think Pinochet, al hoyo , which I will not even try to translate. I pity the worms his unpunished criminal corpse will breed.

Go take a look at the Valech Report.

Cheers!

It's been more than one year that I'm waiting on NM queue, waiting for an Applicant Manager, performing Philosophy & Procedure part 1 & 2, then Tasks & Skills.

When applying for NM, it's really appreciated to already maintain a few packages in the archive, so for T&S the AM can check them and appreciate the work done. I guess people applying for NM first start by taking care of some package, before submitting.

But for me, it was the opposite way. I joined pkg-xfce team more than 18 months ago, and got my first packages in the archive a few weeks later.

I only applied to NM 6 months later, because, as I was dedicating more time to pkg-xfce, it would be more efficient for me to be able to upload directly, without
bothering huggie or ema (the two DDs in the team). It wasn't really required, but
it interested me, and huggie said me that it'd take some time so the sooner, the better.

Now, due to personal reason, huggie and ema don't have time/motivation anymore to work on pkg-xfce. I'm currently the one in charge, as I spent some time on it, and tries to spent some time on debian-desktop team, so we have a nice and consistent look for desktop environments in Etch. But I can't upload my packages myself, I need to find a sponsor. Xfce represent more than 50 packages (including goodies), that's quite a lot, and we have scripts and procedure to be efficient when rebuilding everything. If I could do everything myself, Xfce 4.4rc2 (released 2006/11/05) would have been in Etch since a long time. But I can't, because I'm stuck in NM queue.

Most of 4.4rc2 packages have been uploaded by my AM, Dafydd Harries (which I want to thank, though), but not everything, and few packages won't be in Etch, now that it's frozen. Yeah, that means that Etch will have half rc1 and half rc2, which isn't really good. Not really bad either, but still... (ok, and not as bad as shipping broken svn snapshots...)

I'm interested in beeing a Debian Developper because I *know* it'll make my work and my time more efficient. And not beeing able to push rc2 to Etch because of that really makes me sad...

I work at the Ministerio de Administraciones P blicas, the MAP. My main task there is to administer an email cluster for something between 8.000 and 10.000 users, based on free software (LDAP, Postfix, Amavis...) which has been pretty fulfilling so far.

The problem they have is a lot of consultants from external companies that come for big or small projects and they know of no easy way of being able to grant enough permissions to achieve certain tasks without giving away the root password and having to change it every other day. I am one of these external consultants, only I am there for a long term project. I have been there for more than a year and a half now, and our contract was just renovated for two more years. This basically means I am doing my job pretty well.

But a couple of months ago, the company I work for, Alanta, agreed with the MAP on me giving a 12h a training session on sudo. After spending 100 hours in preparing my slides on a sudo workshop (spanish only, sorry), starting from file permissions to ssh public-private key pairs, and ending with sudo, a high amount of stress, as I had to work full time as I prepared this in paralel, I bitterly complained to my boss. (That s when the cleaning started, BTW).

So we had a nice lunch in which I was given a 200 EUR 2GB 2nd Generation Silver Ipod Nano. Which is nice, but taking into account that when I worked for IBM as a certified trainer I made something between 24-60 EUR per hour, depending on the subject, and all the material (slides, exercises, TOC and Trainer material) was already done for me, so I just had to prepare and give my lessons, I felt patronized and a bit insulted, even if I did not expect any compensation for this extra effort that really damaged my (mental) health. Getting presents in exchange for hard work doesn t make sense for me, specially when I can hardly make it to the end of the month, constantly being in (small, to be honest) debt.

But you could be making more money, couldn t you? Yes, sure. But at what price? I like the relaxed work environment and the lack of sexism in my current project. I have plenty of spare time, and my life quality is overall great, I can walk home from work, I am not juiced and then disposed of, despite the punctual stressful periods everyone gets every once in a while (which are rare here, at MAP).

And this thing will never run IpodLinux or Rockbox. I feel like I want to throw it out the window. It lacks support for my favourite music file formats, UTF-8 and hangs up more than MS Windows 95.

Last night, when we got home after the long weekend up around theawesome Terres de l'Ebre, first thing I learned from the news is that Augusto Pinochet had finally died while we were driving back. It is too bad that once again he managed to avoid a trial that would have made him officially guilty of all the horrible happenings of Chile during his military coup and his bloody dictatorship. But he's gone now, and this will be a great relief for the thousands of Chileans who survived his regime, and for those who lost family members or friends just because they defended some ideals. The world will associate his surname to torture, murder and corruption; he surely won't be remembered for the image of the old, calm man surrounded by family members that an ever-shrinking minority tried to transmit. Last night, I raised my cup to celebrate Pinochet's death. Viva Chile!

The Wireless Telegraphy (Exemption) (Amendment) Regulations 2006 came into effect on Friday 8 December. It is now legal to use CE-marked "micro" FM transmitters, which are intended for linking portable ogg players to nearby FM radios. Transmitters can have at most 50mW power (if I understand page 35 of Ofcom's Interface Requirements 2030), compared for the local 100W commercial station on top of the hill, 25W for a full Restricted Service Licensee, 1W for low-power FM (LPFM) and 300mW for stadium commentary stations. Update: Kimmo Jukarainen / OH3GNU commented:

"Minor correction - those "micro FM" transmitters seem to be only 50 nW (nanowatts), not 50mW (milliwatts). At least according to http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/exemption/exemption.pdf I couldn't find the final document from Ofcom's web, but that draft's 50nW is in sync with Finland's similar regulation from August."

Good catch! It's IR 2030 from this list and I used a graphical viewer to see the tables. In sans-serif fonts like that, m and n look very similar to my poor eyes. Good old ps2ascii indeed confirms

v 87.5 - 108 MHz 50 nW e.r.p.

Can you do anything with 50nW? Does the transmitter have to sit on top of the receiver? See the statement from government agency Ofcom for more information. Anyone heard any fun uses of these yet? Tobias commented:

"These transmitters were legalised some month ago in Germany, too. eBay is still overflowing with illegal HK-imports... I made a small list of device which are allowed in Germany on my homepage (see link, currently only in German, since this is now interesting for people from the UK, I will translate it this week...) - See the list at the bottom of the German page for the currently allowed devices..."

Rob Hart commented:

"If you assume power from a distant transmitter is inverse-cube law, then 50nw at 80cm, is equivalent to 100w at 1km."

Andy Parkins commented:

"The joys of the inverse square law make this not so crazy. Take the 100W transmitter on a hill. Let's say you were 20km away from it. The energy density would be 100/(pi*20000^2) = 79nW per sq metre. It's fairly clear then that as long as you're close to a 50nW transmitter, you will see a signal strength not dissimilar to the signal strength you're getting from the big transmitter. (Incidentally, this is the same reason why mobile phone masts are definitely not dangerous, but mobile phone handsets could potentially be (although unlikely))."

The 100W transmitter is 1km away, so 100/(pi*1000^2) = 31830 nW/m^2, compared to my 50nW? And inverse-square or inverse-cube? (Did I mention I hate physics?) Simon Farnsworth commented:

"50nW should be enough power to just about get from a transmitter in a car to a receiver in the same car, provided you've chosen a frequency that's only used by other 50nW devices. Don't forget when trying to work this all out that the inverse square law applies; my maths suggests that if you can receive a 100W transmission from 45km away, you'll be able to receive a 50nW transmission from 1m with the same field strength. Given the sensitivities of a car radio (in my case, I can pick up 2-Ten FM on 102.9 from high terrain in Oxford, some 50 km away from the transmitter), 50nW should be enough for a car radio to pick up a transmitter in the car (1m from the receiver). It's clearly intended to let you use a microtransmitter with your Ogg player in your car, while not letting you use enough power to interfere with the radio in the lorry you're overtaking (whether the driver's listening to their Ogg player through a similar microtransmitter, or to commercial radio)."

Damnit, I wondered about broadcasting to the estate around and beneath me.

The other day I had was tinkering with that cute little poster child of Web 2.0, Flickr. Looking for a lightweight way to incorporate some photos into a web site, I headed to their feeds page to find some XML to use.Before you read on, don't forget that the XTech 2007 call for participation ends this week. The result was interesting. Flickr have a variety of outputs in RSS dialects, but you just can't get at the raw data using XML. The bookmarking service del.icio.us is another case in point. My friend Matt Biddulph recently had to resort to screenscraping in order to write his tag stemmer, until some kind soul pointed out there's a JSON feed.Both of these services support XML output, but only with the semantics crammed awkwardly into RSS or Atom. Neither have plain XML for public consumption (some is available behind a registration protected API), but do support serialization via other formats. We don't really have "XML on the Web". We have RSS on the web, plus a bunch of mostly JSON and YAML for those who didn't care for pointy brackets.Did we as supporters of XML get it wrong somehow? I think we did. The success of the XML project and the W3C as a unifying forum was seductive, and we felt more bound to the edicts of the W3C than we thought. Our justified love of open standards inadvertently promoted a straitjacketed approach to using XML. XML was felt to need a schema language.What we missed was that settling on schemas for data serialization represented much more of an up-front commitment than most developers could really make. The rise of agile programming techniques further emphasizes the hazards of prematurely freezing a design.Schemas never really came with great evolution or migration strategies.
And of course it didn't help that both DTDs and W3C XML Schema are pretty darn obscure. Somehow we never got the word out, despite the "standalone" XML declaration, that it's OK to spread schema-less XML around.We had of course the Simple XML movement, but it came to little. Other voices pointed the way forward. Walter Perry notably promoted an agenda that required little a priori agreement between communicators, but it gained little ground in common thought. Ironically it took James Clark to push the agenda of developer convenience, with the RELAX NG compact syntax giving us all permission not to think in angle brackets.Meanwhile, busy developers with work to do on the web have created non-XML syntaxes such as JSON and YAML. Though I deliberately closeted myself in XML for a long time, I have come to appreciate the utility of these syntaxes.One of the more intriguing developments is that the Semantic Web crowd, while still very much W3C oriented, have really proved themselves more flexible in their attitude than the XML world at large. RDF/XML is hardly the only acceptable way to approach the throne of Tim, and the man himself threw out XML syntax pretty early on with the development of the N3 scribble format. More recently, the work on GRDDL to scrape semantics from HTML has shown the semweb folks' amenability to outside initiatives such as microformats.Maybe it's not such a bad world, as making an XML mapping of YAML, JSON and friends isn't really very hard. I'd just like to get the message out to web application developers that Plain Old XML is fine by me. I live in hope yet that the rise of REST will hit this home.So while markup has most definitely won on the web, it's a shame XML hasn't yet achieved as much as it could. It's not too late for an injection of pragmatism and a little less constraint.

A few month ago, I blogged a way to spread Free Software effectively, especially in developing countries: By deploying Free Software in internet caf s, where most people learn their way around computers. Most of them (and there are a lot, much more than in Europe) have a buisness plan that relies on software for free, but currently they achieve that through pirating Windows and software like Cybercafe Pro. Back than, I wrote this more or less theoretically, but it happend that I ended up having some time to actually start working on it.While Free Software, especially Debian, provides a very good base to build internet caf s from, one key component is more or less missing: Software to hand out these codes ( timecodes ) to the customer, to let them log in and surf for the time they bought. Very recently, Zybacafe was released, but I did not really like it, nor felt like maintaining a Pascal/Lazarus based Debian package. So I went ahead and implemented my own ideas.The Idea is to keep it very simple, very modularized and integrate deeply with normal unix ideas. So what we have now is a PostgreSQL database (one table so far), and all communication just goes via this table, so we don t have to design or implement complicated protocols. A python gtk application for the front desk generates the timecodes that are then, on paper, passed to the customer. The workstations greet the user with standard GDM, but our pam modules authenticates the timecode instead of a username/password pair. While using the system, a small floating window informs the user about the remaining time. If he does not log out voluntarily, a system daemon will kill all his processes eventually.The long term mission is to form that into a Custom Debian Distribution that will install the server hassle-less, and besides being pre-configured for the internet caf s needs, also immediately serves as an automated installation server for the workstations (think FAI), all useing stock Debian packages, as far as possible. Another pam module could, upon login, mount the homedirectory as a copy-on-write overlay of a template user s home directory, and through away the changes afterwards. The goal is to offer easier installation, less maintenance, better robustness and more flexibility than the current common non-free systems.But, of course, this project needs help. First of all: Users! If you have any use for time-limited logins (Internet caf , school surf terminaly, parents with otherwise not to bed going kids), you can be an earliy adaptor. Developers are very welcome as well, and due to the modular structure, cooperation should be quite smooth.The development happens on alioth, where we have the subversion repositry, as well as on the Debian wiki page. Alpha packages for these components can be found on the alioth group s webspace. We do not have a mailing list yet, but feel free to e-mail me. We will set up a mailing list once there is a need for it. Thank s to the KACE for supporting this.

It looks like November-December are the most popular months for people coming to visit me, or crashing at my place in their way to their final destination.

In November I had the pleasure to host Sulamita, while she was on her way to India. One of the most interesting girls I have met this year.

Baby Jesus left yesterday, after spending several days at my place. He brought Salmiakki, smoked salmon and smoked reindeer with him, which I used to like before I became vegan (and later pescatarian). The salmon was incredible, though.

Just as I was writing these lines, Luk, who was also going to stay at my place before The Extremadura QA Meeting called me from BRU airport claiming his ticket had been cancelled :( I called C sar and found out that the travel agent they work with had not bothered to confirm several people s flights, so he will be coming to Spain on the 13th, just like everyone else. He will not be staying at my place, and will miss out on the smoked reindeer, that will be eaten by some other carnivore, I guess .

The great man I got the Linksys from lies sick in my bed, and spends almost as much time at my place than at his own, so I guess he doesn t count.

As described in a NO2ID newsletter you need to send an opt-out letter to your GP, else all your medical records will be transferred to central government and could be made available to thousands of people who have nothing to do with your medical care.

Russel Coker has posted a SELinux on Debian etch in 5 Minutes guide. Some small things to note:

• This is for etch, which has Linux 2.6.18 - there are SELinux changes in 2.6.19 which require policy version 21, whereas 2.6.18 has policy version 20. Changing it in /etc/selinux/semanage.conf may or may not be enough.
• rjc posted this Policy fix you'll likely need for running enforcing
• strict, while being more secure, will likely require you to write some policy modules on your own
• policy is a snapshot from october, you might want to get an updated policy. However I currently don't have time to work on it, and I just heard that etch was frozen. But maybe Manoj has still time to update the policy and get it into etch...

As Fast as Wikipedia Yesterday evening I was zapping on the (Italian) television. A rare event since I'm not really fond of (especially Italian) television, but sunday evening offers a nice interview show on Rai 3 with Fabio Fazio. At the end of the show the director of the network (Claudio Cappon) made a phone call to the anchorman announcing that Enzo Biagi, interviewed during the show, is going to come back working on Rai 3. That's a great news, since Enzo Biagi was basically fired during the years of Berlusconi's government, after the so called Editto Bulgaro, since he was too much irreverent with our former prime minister (damn!, is still painful to refer to Berlusconi as our "former prime minister", I wonder how much this feeling will last ...). That was one of the saddest page of Italian mass-media history. A few minutes after the end of the show (the time of having some water and washing my teeth) I went to the wikipedia page about Biagi, looking for the story of his daughter and I found the mention of his coming back to the Italian television. According to the history of wikipedia the page was changed during the interview (when Biagi firstly mentioned his probable coming back to television) and again 5 minutes after the end of the show to mention Cappon's phone call. That was fast!

Ajax, when used properly, can be a great user experience. Badly written ajax however can be a pain. Often huge javascript libraries are loaded, it makes your browser and system slow and sometime you just end up staring at an spinning animated gif for "Loading ...". Good Ajax makes the application snappy, responsive, fast, and avoids screen flicker. But with your traditional "get new HTML page" model, error handling is done by your browser. DNS issue? Your browser will say server not found. Connectivity issues? Browser will inform you of the timeout. Slow connection? our browsers throbber [wikipedia] gives you an indication something is happening. With AJAX, it's up to the authors of the Ajax application to do proper error handling. And many AJAX application have serious issue here. User proofing Ajax application [A list apart] is a good article on some basics on how to improve your Ajax applications. Ajax is in the need for some software engineering for QA. Right now, it's so much low level hacking there, it makes you expect 90% of Ajax applications have serious usability and reliability issues.

mbeventd 0.6 is out, featuring support for the MacBook. Thanks go to Ryan Lortie for his macbook-backlight tool, providing the backlight control routines for the Intel GMA950, and to Enrico Tassi for bringing this to my intention with his ITP (#402193) and testing the new version. Thanks to Ludovic Rousseau who confirmed that mbpeventd was working on the Core Duo MacBook Pro. Additionally, mbpeventd should now detect all versions of the Mac Intel laptops. If it doesn’t, please drop me a mail and the output of mbpeventd -f run as root. I’m still not sure that the SMBIOS detection will work when using an EFI-aware kernel. Note: for the Core2 Duo machines, you need to use a kernel >= 2.6.19 for the function keys to work. Version 0.6 AMD64 packages and sources: http://people.debian.org/~jblache/pkg/mbpeventd/ Still no sound support, it’s the next item on the TODO list. It’s going to be a bit tricky, and I’m not yet sure how that should work (wrt the fact that the laptops use 2 different outputs for the headphones and speakers).