I have a new guest in my apartment. Give a warm welcome to the Adrianus Johannes Wilhelmus Duijvestijn s spirit. Thanks a lot to Bartu and Rezlaj, who carried out the necessary seance that make this possible. The complete photo set is here. If you do not have the slightest idea of what I m talking about, take a look to Wikipedia or my previous post (Spanish only). (esta entrada tambi n est disponible en Espa ol)

Seth Berkley gave an interesting TED talk about developing vaccines against the HIV and Influenza viruses [1]. The part I found most interesting was the description of how vaccines against viruses are currently developed using eggs and how they plan to use bacteria instead for faster and cheaper production. One of the problems with using eggs is that if the chickens catch the disease and die then you can t make a vaccine. Aigars Mahinovs wrote a really good review of Microsoft Azure and compared it to Amazon EC2 [2]. It didn t surprise me that Azure compared poorly to the competition. Johanna Blakley gave an insightful TED talk about IP lessons from the fashion industry [3]. She explained how an entire lack of IP protection other than trademark law was an essential part of the success of the fashion industry. She also compared the profits in various industries and showed that industries with little or no IP protection involve vastly larger amounts of money than industries with strong IP protection. Lisa D wrote an insightful post about whether Autism Spectrum Disorders (such as Asperger Syndrome) should be considered to be disabilities [4]. I don t entirely agree with her, but she makes some really good points. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy gave an interesting TED talk about the way the Taliban train young children to become suicide bombers [5]. Apparently the Taliban prey on large poor families, sometimes paying the parents for taking children away to school . At the Taliban schools the children are beaten, treated poorly, and taught theology by liars who will say whatever it takes to get a result. Then after being brain-washed they are sent out to die. Wired has an interesting article about Charles Komanoff s research into New York traffic problems [6]. He aims to track all the economic externalities of traffic patterns and determine incentives to encourage people to do things that impose less costs on the general economy. His suggestions include making all bus travel free as the externality of the time spent collecting fares is greater than the fare revenue. It s a really interesting article, his research methods should be implemented when analysing traffic in all large cities, and many of his solutions can be implemented right now without further analysis such as free buses and variable ticket pricing according to the time of day. William Li gave an interesting TED talk about starving cancer by preventing new blood vessels from growing to feed it [7]. Drugs to do this have been shown to increase the life expectancy of cancer patients by more than 100% on average. Also autopsies of people who died in car accidents show that half the women in their 40 s had breast cancer and half the men in their 50 s prostate cancer but those cancers didn t grow due to a natural lack of blood supply, so the aim here is to merely promote what naturally happens in terms of regulating cancers and preventing them from growing larger than 0.5mm^3. There are a number of foods that prevent blood vessels growing to cancers which includes dark chocolate! ;) Also drugs which prevent blood vessel growth also prevent obesity, I always thought that eating chocolate all the time prevented me from getting fat due to the central nervous system stimulants that kept me active Graham Hill gave an inspiring TED talk about becoming a weekday vegetarian [8]. Instead of making a commitment to being always vegetarian he s just mostly vegetarian (only eating meat on Sundays). He saves most of the environmental cost and doesn t feel guilty if he ever misses a day. It s an interesting concept. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Guardian about the phrase Information Wants To Be Free [9]. He points out that really it s people who want to be free from the tyranny that is being imposed on us in the name of anti-piracy measures. He also points out that it s a useful straw-man for the MAFIAA to use when claiming that we are all pirates. The Atlantic has an interesting article about the way that Google is working to save journalistic news [10]. Adam Sadowsky gave an interesting TED talk about creating a Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video This Too Shall Pass [11]. At the end of the talk they include a 640*480 resolution copy of the music video. Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk advocating increased government spending on scientific research [12]. Among other things he pointed out that the best research indicates that the amount of money the US government invested in the Apollo program was returned 14* to the US economy due to exports of new American products that were based on that research. It s surprising that any justification other than the return on investment for the Apollo program is needed! Moot gave an interesting TED talk about Anonymity [13]. I don t think that he made a good case for anonymity, he cited one person being identified and arrested for animal cruelty due to the efforts of 4chan people and also the campaign against the Cult of Scientology (which has not been very successful so far). Rory Sutherland gave an intriguing TED talk titled Sweat the Small Stuff [14]. He describes how small cheap changes can often provide greater benefits than huge expensive changes and advocates corporations having a Chief Detail Officer to take charge of identifying and implementing such changes. TED Hosted an interesting debate between pro and anti nuclear campaigners [15]. They agreed that global warming is a significant imminent problem but disagree on what methods should be implemented to solve it.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_berkley_hiv_and_flu_the_vaccine_strategy.html
• [2] http://www.aigarius.com/blog/2010/05/19/so-what-is-microsoft-azure-and-how-it-compares-to-amazons-aws/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html
• [4] http://chaoticidealism.livejournal.com/80330.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/sharmeen_obaid_chinoy_inside_a_school_for_suicide_bombers.html
• [6] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_komanoff_traffic/
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian.html
• [9] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/may/18/information-wants-to-be-free
• [10] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/04/how-to-save-the-news/8095/
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_sadowsky_engineers_a_viral_music_video.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/christopher_m00t_poole_the_case_for_anonymity_online.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_sweat_the_small_stuff.html
• [15] http://www.ted.com/talks/debate_does_the_world_need_nuclear_energy.html

AdRevenge is an interesting concept to pay for Google Adsense adverts about how companies suck [1]. If a suitably large group of people pay to warn you about a company then it s a good signal that the company is actually doing the wrong thing. A guest post by Mili on Charles Stross blog has an interesting analysis of the economcs of Intellectual Property and concludes that content is a public good [2]. New Age Terrorists Develop Homeopathic Bomb [3], an amusing satire of medical fraud and security theatre. The sit has a lot of other good satire too. Mark Shuttleworth wrote an interesting post about new window management changes that will soon go into Ubuntu [4]. He points out that the bottom status bar in applications is a throw-back to Windows 3.1 and notes that a large part of the incentive for removing it (and using the title-bar for the status) is the work on the Netbook version of Ubuntu. This is really ironic given that the resolution of current Netbooks is quite similar to that of desktop systems that were current when Windows 3.1 came out. Omar Ahmad gave an insightful TED talk about the benefit of using a pen and paper to send a letter to a politician [5]. Sebastian Wernicke gave an amusing and informative TED talk about how to give a good TED talk [6]. His talk gives some useful ideas for public speaking that are worth considering. Catherine Mohr gave a brief and interesting TED talk about how to build an energy efficient house with low embodied energy [7]. Her blog at www.301monroe.com has the details. Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) gave an interesting TED talk [8]. He covers a lot of interesting things that can be done with computers, primarily based on the Wolfram Alpha [9] platform which allows natural language queries of a large data set. He also talks about the search for a Theory of Everything. Esther Duflo gave an interesting TED talk about using social experiments to fight poverty [10]. She describes how scientific tests have been used to determine the effectiveness of various ways of preventing disease and encouraging education in developing countries. One example of the effectiveness of such research is the DeWormTheWorld.org project which was founded after it was discovered that treating intestinal worms was the most cost effective way of getting African children to spend longer at school. David L. Rosenhan wrote an interesting research paper On Being Sane In Insane Places about pseudo-patients admitted to psychiatric hospitals [11]. It seems that psychiatric staff were totally unable to recognise a sane person who was admitted even though other patients could do so. It also documents how psychiatric patients were treated as sub-human. One would hope that things had improved since 1973, but it seems likely that many modern psychiatric hospitals are as bad as was typical in 1973. It s also worth considering the issue of the treatment in society of people who have been diagnosed with a mental illness, it seems likely that the way people are treated in the community would have similar bad results to that which was documented for treatment in psychiatric hospitals even the sanest people will act strangely if treated in an insane manner! Also it seems to me that there could be potential for using a panel of patients assembled via the Delphi Method as part of the psychiatric assessment process as it has been demonstrated that patients can sometimes assess other patients more accurately than psychiatrists! Simon Sinek gave an inspiring TED talk about how great leaders inspire action [12]. Of course the ideas he describes don t just apply to great leaders, they should apply to ordinary people who just want to convince others to adopt their ideas. Stephen Collins write a good article summarising the main reasons why the proposed great firewall of Australia is a bad idea [13]. Lenore Skenazy who is famous for letting her 9yo son catch the metro alone during broad daylight on a pre-planned route home has created a web site about Free Range Kids [14]. She seems to be starting a movement to oppose Helicopter Parenting and has already written a book about her ideas for parenting. The incidence of crime has been steadily increasing, as has the ability of the police to apprehend criminals and recover abducted children. There s no reason for children to be prevented from doing most of the things that children did when I was young!

• [1] http://ramthemdown.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/adrevenge- -a-business-idea/
• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-content-is-a-public-good.html
• [3] http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/04/20/new-age-terrorists-develop-homeopathic-bomb/
• [4] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/333
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/omar_ahmad_political_change_with_pen_and_paper.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/catherine_mohr_builds_green.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html
• [9] http://www.wolframalpha.com/
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/esther_duflo_social_experiments_to_fight_poverty.html
• [11] http://www.walnet.org/llf/ROSENHAN-BEINGSANE.PDF
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html
• [13] http://www.acidlabs.org/2010/05/13/on-folly-freedom-and-filters/
• [14] http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/faq/

Steve Jobs has published an interesting article about Flash [1]. He criticises Flash for being proprietary, this seems a little hypocritical coming from Apple (who s the only competitor for Microsoft in terms of being the most proprietary computer company) but is in fact correct. Steve advocates HTML5 which is a better technical solution to a lot of the things that Flash does. He claims that Apple users aren t missing out on much, but I think that sites such as Physics Games [2] demonstrate the benefits of Flash. I think that Apple s attack on Flash is generally a good thing. HTML5 web sites will work everywhere which will be a good incentive for web designers to fix their sites. I also think that we want to deprecate it, but as it s unfortunately popular it s useful to have tools such as GNASH to use Flash based web sites with free software. Microsoft has belatedly tried to compete with flash, but it s Silverlight system and the free but patent encumbered Linux equivalent Moonlight have very little content to play and will probably disappear soon. As an aside the relentless determination of GNOME people to force the MONO project (including Moonlight) on it s users convinced me to remove GNOME from all systems that I run. OS News has a good analysis of the MPEG-LA patents [3] which are designed to prevent anyone making any commercial use of H.264 which includes putting such videos on sites that contain Google advertising! These patent terms are so horrible that they want to control video streams that were ever encoded with them, so you can t even transcode a H.264 stream to an open format without potentially having the scum at MPEG-LA going after you. This is worth noting when examining Apple s actions, they support MPEG patents and therefore seem happy to do anything that reduces the freedom of their customers. Apple s 1984 commercial has been proven to be a lie, it s Apple that wants to control our freedom. Charles Stross makes some good points about the issues related to Apple and Flash [4]. He believes that it s all part of an Apple push to cloud computing and that Apple wants to own all our data at the back-end while providing a relatively reliable front-end (IE without all the anti-virus nonsense that is needed on the MS-Windows platform. Cloud computing is a good thing and I can t wait for the Linux support for it to improve, I support a number of relatives who run Linux and it would be a lot easier for me if they could have the primary storage for everything be on the cloud so that I can do central backups of user data and they can use their own data while visiting each other. I think that a network filesystem that is similar in concept to offline-IMAP would be a really good thing, I know that there are some filesystems such as AFS and CODA that are designed for wide area network use with client-side caching but as far as I am aware they aren t designed for the type of operation that offline/caching IMAP supports. Matt Brubeck has given a good status report of the work porting Firefox to Android [5]. He notes that the next version of Fennec (mobile Firefox) will have Electrolysis the Firefox one process per tab feature that was first implemented in Google Chrome [6]. I think that the development of Fennec and the one process per tab feature are both great developments. Matt also says One of my personal goals is to make Firefox compatible with more mobile sites, and to give web developers the tools and information they need to make their sites work great in mobile Firefox. I ll write much more about this in future articles , that sounds great, I look forward to the results of his coding and to reading his blog posts about it!

• [1] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
• [2] http://www.physicsgames.net/
• [3] http://www.osnews.com/story/23236/Why_Our_Civilization_s_Video_Art_and_Culture_is_Threatened_by_the_MPEG-LA
• [4] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/why-steve-jobs-hates-flash.html
• [5] http://www.advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary.html?start=120
• [6] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

The DPL vote is over. I did not win, apparently. Let me start off by thanking the other candidates for running, and congratulating Stefano for winning. My own results aren't too bad; I beat 'none of the above' by a comfortable margin of almost 10 to 1, and ended up defeating Charles Plessy by a slightly smaller margin. My margin to NOTA was far better than during the previous DPL election that I participated in, though I did end up defeating more than half of the other candidates back then, which I didn't this time around. All in all, not enough to win, but enough to conclude that I might have a chance some other time. Margarita and Stefano were just better candidates this time around. My own vote was:

[ 2 ] Stefano Zacchiroli
[ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
[ 4 ] Charles Plessy
[ 2 ] Margarita Manterola
[ 3 ] NOTA

If you run, you have to be serious about running, and support yourself. So I did. After that, I wasn't sure that Stefano would do a better job than Margarita (or vice versa), so I put them at the same spot. Finally, I became convinced during campaigning that Charles has a lot to learn still about what lives in the Debian community, and I am of the opinion that feeling the community is a vital requirement for a DPL; so that ruled him out. So why did I not win? Obviously because there were better candidates in the election, but the real question is: why is that the case? What did I do, or what did other candidates do, that meant they fared better than I? One possibility was given on IRC:

< svuorela> ol: and "I'm running because no other runs" is also
not a good way to get votes ...

Which is fair enough; but I did run with the intention of winning, and I did try to make that clear. I'm hoping that worked out okay, which would imply that there could be other reasons. I'd like to know about those. So if you voted, and did not place me on the top spot, I'd very much appreciate learning about your motivations for doing so especially so if you were one of the 39 people who would rather have redone the vote than see me win. Comments on this blog post are welcome, or by private e-mail if you'd rather not see them made public.

I ve been AWOL for most of the debian project leader election campaigns this year, but I still want to vote, so I ve been dredging the emails on the last day. Maybe someone still has to vote and reads this, or maybe it ll help someone to interpret the result. What I ve done this year is to make a quick tally of platform points and campaign answers that I liked and disliked for each candidate, then total them up to get an order. If anyone gets a negative (more dislikes than likes), then I ll rank them below NOTA. Platforms: Margarita Manterola, Stefano Zacchiroli, Wouter Verhelst, Charles Plessy. Some of the questions:

• Do you plan on taking on a 2IC or a team? No SZ, WV, CP, MM
• What do you think are valid goals to spend donated money on? How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? What qualifies a Debian Partner ? Spend on what we cannot receive by donation CP. Partner is defined on website CP. Spend on maintenance, development, contributions, use MM. Spend on keeping the project running and emergency reserve SZ. Partnership programs usually require an yearly subscription fee SZ. No specific spending list WV. No formal list of partners WV
• How much time do you currently/would you devote to Debian? Couple of evenings per week and a couple of days per month CP. A daily hour, more in future MM. 1-2 hours/day + 2-4 hours/week SZ. Varies WV.
• infrastructure to finance Debian related projects? Why not use other infrastructure? CP, MM. Don t SZ, WV.
• Please finish In ten years I d like Debian . to still be thriving as the Universal OS MM. to be *THE* renowned distribution in terms of freeness and democracy SZ. to be mainstream CP. to still be the distribution I consider to be the best one out there WV
• Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those? too agressive, use social pressure MM. Acceptable? No. Normal? To some extent, yes. DPL must set a good example SZ. Stricter policies CP. No amount of ad-hominem attacks is acceptable, see platform WV.
• Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? lists, IRC, planet MM, WV. lists, Planet CP. lists, IRC, planet, DN, identi.ca SZ.
• How, as DPL, you would (or even could) address the social issues around releasing? add manpower MM. status reports SZ. public disappoval of bad behaviour WV. reshape the archive CP
• should we try to coordinate our release process with Ubuntu s? Yes MM, SZ. Why not WV. More info CP
• Will you withdraw delegations of DD not behaving correctly? On recurrence MM, CP. No(?) SZ. No WV.
• Is there any part of Debian that should be restricted to a small subset of developers? Yes WV, CP, MM. No except security reasons SZ.
• Personal mentoring? Good idea MM. Recycle NM process CP. Use teams SZ. NM already is mentoring WV.
• Standardization, large scale changes, innovations valuable questions, but the responses are too complex to summarise here, sorry.
• How would you enforce Debian Community Guidelines? wouldn t SZ, MM, WV. No clear answer from CP.
• is planet.d.o a good thing? Not necessarily WV. No clear answer from SZ, MM. No reply from CP.
• How do we face the challenge to do more every year? improve our way of working and get more people to help us do our jobs MM. open Debian s door wider CP. have enough people to work on Debian WV. use our communication media SZ

Make of that what you will. It surprised me which way the scores came out, but there was one answer with such a massive problem (in my opinion) that I ranked its giver equal with the next candidate down anyway. If you re a debian developer (DD), have you voted yet?

Note: this post written on March 20-21 and posted after our return.
(two women looking into the crypt at St. George s Basilica) We ve had a good couple of days in Prague. The city definitely feels more, well, foreign than Germany and that is perhaps accentuated by the fact that I don t know any Czech at all, while I know some basic German. It s been slow going at times, and surprisingly easy at others. Despite my lack of knowledge of Czech, I d say communicating here has been roughly as easy as in Germany. That is perhaps partially due to the fact that, of the places where we ve needed to communicate, we are either making simple requests (buying bread at a bakery) or the people we re talking to know some basic English. (Or, in one case, a guard at a museum at the Prague Castle complex used German to ask me to check a bag at the coat check, mildly surprising me and confusing Terah when I started to comply with instructions she didn t understand, and didn t know how I did.) The very first time we had a situation where it was a bit difficult to communicate, in the bakery, I got into my difficult to communicate mode and accidentally slipped in a couple of German words. Oops. Terah was laughing at me later, and commented that the store owner might have also been laughing at me or perhaps at his employee that also accidentally slipped into basic German mode. On Friday, we visited Vy ehrad Castle, the one that nobody that visits Prague seems to know about. That is perhaps because the palace/castle part of the complex has been mostly destroyed (but we did know that before going there.) It is in a nice, quiet, and beautiful park, and has the beautiful and old Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, as well as a large ornate cemetery. Then we visited two iconic Prague places: V clavsk n m st (Wenceslas Square) and Starom stsk n m st (Old Town Square). Both were beautiful. And, unfortunately, also packed with tourists and made-in-China plastic trinket shops. There I got my first clue that large tour groups tend to have a detrimental effect on any free site in Prague. They come in, the guides yell, they clog up things, and also generally miss the sites of true interest because buying tickets to them makes the price of the tour uncompetitive. On Saturday, we took the tram out to Pra sk hrad (Prague Castle) the one that everybody knows about. We got there at about 8:15, and although the grounds are open, most of the buildings weren t open until 9. As a result, we had 45 minutes almost to ourselves in the nearly-empty castle complex. We could walk around on the giant squares, take some photos, and generally enjoy a crisp and quiet morning. At 9, it was still pretty empty and we went into the ticket offices to buy our tickets. By the time we got out a few minutes later, it was packed mostly due to the arrival of innumerable tour groups from all over Europe and, apparently, Japan. We went to the Star kr lovsk pal c (Old Royal Palace) first, since I knew from their website that it would close at noon due to a visit from Prince Charles. That was a beautiful building, and it s amazing to read about the features of it that are centuries old or even almost a thousand years old. The Vladislavsk s l (Vladislav Hall) and chapel particularly caught my eye. Underneath the palace is a museum, including some 1000-year-old jewelry and flooring, and some clothing that is several hundred years old recoverd from burial plots.
(Vladislav Hall) Next, we went to the iconic (and free) Katedr la svat ho V ta (St. Vitus Cathedral). Our audioguides fortunately allowed us to bypass the long line, and we could step inside at a side door. That was one of many times in Europe I stepped inside a building, and suddenly came to a stop with a wow . That building is every bit as much impressive as it is made out to be, even crowded as it was. We also went to Bazilika Sv. Ji (St. George s Basilica), which one of the guides described as ancient . It was another wow moment, and it felt like the oldest church we were in yet. I think it probably was, actually; last rebuilt in 1142. For lunch, we asked for a recommendation from our hotel. They suggested one place, which we walked to. It was a nice easy walk down some Prague side streets, but the restaurant and all the others along our walk were closed on Saturday. We eventually made our way back to the hotel and asked for a new recommendation, which was successful this time. Terah ordered some ribs, while I ordered a more traditional Czech goulash, which happened to be served in a bread bowl. A minute later, the waiter brought Terah a fork and knife. And he brought me a bowl of water with a slice of lemon, and announced wash for you. That was a surprise, and a bit puzzling one at that. Turns out that eating bread that had stew served in it is indeed a bit messy, and having some water to clean up with is indeed helpful. We met up with Anna from Leipzig and one of her Czech friends for dinner Saturday night. We found a nice local Czech place. I had ham with sauerkraut in a folded potato cake. It was excellent, and the total bill for Terah and me came to 235 Kc or about $12.50. We had a nice walk back to the hotel in the crisp, dark evening. Sunday morning we had breakfast at our hotel the only time we ate a meal at a hotel this whole trip then got on the tram, the metro, and the bus to the airport. Total cost for that trip for two: 52 Kc, or about $2.75. Far cheaper than a taxi. One weird thing happened to us in Prague. We were riding the tram towards downtown, and as we would be on it for several stops, Terah was sitting. I was standing as there wasn t an available seat for me. Terah and I were both looking out windows, until Terah was startled because her arm was wet. She looked around and it turned out a middle-aged woman had spit on her, and was glaring at her. We never did figure out why. About all we can think of is maybe someone else, such as a very old person, had gotten aboard but Terah hadn t noticed and therefore didn t offer to give up her seat. That was probably the only real rude gesture towards us on the entire trip. We ran the story by Anna s friend (the native Czech) and she was as surprised and baffled as we were. As I wrap this up, we re sitting at our gate in Prague waiting for our flight to Munich. In this airport, in an out of the way corner on the very lowest floor, I spotted only the second drinking fountain I ve seen in Europe this entire time and also perhaps the continent s most expensive cup of coffee. After we get to Munich, it s a flight to Chicago, another to Indianapolis, and finally a drive home Monday.

Serafeim Zanikolas:

With respect to attracting new contributors, please ponder the idea of a formal one-on-one mentoring scheme (as opposed to one-off interactions via d-mentors).

I see nothing particularly objectionable about this. A long time ago people were talking about replacing NM with a saner mentoring process, and I am certain that mentoring occurs unofficially. I see no reason that you could not set up a formal one-on-one mentoring infrastructure with or without the Project's blessing. Charles Plessy:

So my question to other candidates is simple: what is your opinion and program about membership?

I think that we have enough inequality in the project as it is. That is why I consider DM to be a bad thing, even though it has practical benefits. I think that NM is probably fundamentally broken, and I get a bit nervous when people are talking about increasing the amount of NM indoctrination or bureaucracy. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with some kind of mentorship-type process, though I would worry it would not scale. I would be in favor of exploring the replacement of NM with something like Lars's proposal a while back, though I would worry that it would encourage popularity contests and cliques and cabals. Raphael Hertzog:

1/ Do you believe that it's a good move to standardize our packaging tools? (example: debhelper is almost standard, quilt is gaining status of the standard patch system thanks to the new source format) 3/ Do you have any preference on the tools that we should try to standardize on (which source format/patch system, dh7/CDBS/yada/etc., VCS helper, etc.)? 4/ Organizing changes that have an impact on (a large part of all) the archive is very difficult: How can we change our processes so that doing/organizing such changes is less of a burden? 5/ I have the feeling that Debian is innovating less than it used to do. We are more often followers rather than leaders. Do you share that feeling? What shall we do to make that change?

1/ I think that we should standardize on dpkg-dev. If there are features which absolutely every package needs, it would seem the logical place to add them. 3/ Right now I wish everyone were using git, but I do not believe in forcing them. Of the available source formats, I like 3.0 (quilt) with no additional patch system, and no package helpers at all. I am not quite sure what a VCS helper is so I have no known preference to express. 4/ I am not sure whether or not what you are talking about should, in fact, be less of a burden, and why it should or should not, so I do not have a valid opinion on how to change the process. 5/ I do share that feeling. I think that sometimes we get bullied by Ubuntu when there are things we would do for our own benefit which would make their lives difficult. I think that people are generally resistant to change, even when it would be of little cost to them and great benefit to someone else. These problems are social and might be correctable with a better spirit of teamwork and cooperation. However, I do not think we should be innovating just for innovation's sake or to be known as the most innovative kid on the block. We should be making my favorite operating system.

Bernd Zeimetz:

From the other candidates I'd like to know their opinion and plans (if there are any) about license/copyright requirements in Debian.

I believe that intellectual property laws are wrong and should be abolished, so I am not particularly in favor of giving copyrights any more respect than necessary. However, I do not think that Debian is the place to undermine copyright, and that we should attempt to maintain standards which not only protect people from legal liability, but are also in the best interests of our developers and users. I do not know what level of nitpicking best serves our developers and users. A GR seems like an interesting way of determining at part of that. Anthony Towns:

What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users?

I do not have one. While I do acknowledge that the number of users does affect us in terms of potential contributor base, and scaling issues (including bug reporting), I do not think that the exact number is important at all to what we do. Also I would hope that whichever DPL is elected chooses to focus on practical matters rather than academic exercises. Kurt Roeckx:

I think that one of issues we have is that there is alot of work to be done by some teams, some of them even regularaly mail that they need more members, but they seem to have a hard time keeping the numbers up, burning the other team members out. What are your ideas to make sure those teams keep running?

• Diffusion of power throughout the rest of the project
• Delegation of people who do not seek to be core team members if they have the time, are willing, and would make good additions.

Note that I do not think it appropriate either for core teams to choose their own members or to reserve the privilege of demanding that a new person be able to work with them in a certain way. An ideal team member should be able to work with anyone. If the existing delegates are unable to work with new people, perhaps they are not ideal team members. Charles Plessy:

During the discussions that started after the GR, I suggested that the GR proposer should have more control about the options put to the vote. In particular, it would be useful if he can refuse an option that would disequilibrate the voting system. That would make him responsible for the success of the GR: discarding a popular option is taking the risk that the whole GR is refused and the option is accepted as a separate GR, which is the kind of public failure that I expect that people will avoid.

I do not think GR proposers should have any special control over general resolutions beyond what is Constitutionally granted at present. In fact, I would prefer if people did not try to propose multiple options or strategically craft ballots for any purpose. To me, the only honest method is to propose the outcome one genuinely wants to win, and let our strange and special brand of parliamentary procedure take care of the rest. As for the supermajority issue, I am not a huge fan of political word games. Debian distributes non-free software. We have a non-free section within our normal infrastructure, and while it is segregated and does not receive quite the same love that main does, it is still very much part of what we work on and distribute from our official infrastructure. So there is no amount of word lawyering, cognitive dissonance, or NM indoctrination that can make me believe that it is an honest statement to say that non-free is not part of Debian. Likewise I do not believe in redefining success or the meanings of Foundation Documents. I do not think that we should allow ourselves to pass any kind of magical resolution that contravenes the DFSG or Social Contract without actually modifying them. That seems utterly absurd to me, and I have seen what has become of the United States government.

The nomination period for the Debian Project Leader Elections 2010 is over and we have 4 candidates this year:

1. Stefano Zacchiroli [nomination mail]
2. Wouter Verhelst [nomination mail]
3. Charles Plessy [nomination mail]
4. Margarita Manterola [nomination mail]

For the next 3 weeks, you can ask your questions and follow the debate in the debian-vote mailing list.

Or should I say *we* are going to Debconf 10? Last week-end, I booked the whole set of plane tickets for the Perrier family to fly to USA next summer:

• Jean-Baptiste (aka "Habanero" on IRC) and myself will from from Paris Charles de Gaulle on Wednesday July 28th, arriving in NYC after a connection in Dublin (shame that connection flights are much cheaper than direct flights). As I already wrote earlier, I'll attend Debconf with my son, yay!
• Elisabeth, Sophie and Magali will fly the same route on Aug 5th. We'll stay partly separated during the first days: JB and I at Debconf and them doing some sightseeing in NYC.
• On Aug 8th, we'll start ou family holidays: first stay a 1 or 2 more days in NYC, sightseeing together
• Later on, we plan some trip in the NE part of USA: probably something around Boston and New England, wandering around undertermined places in NY and Vermont states, maybe up to Montreal...then back to NYC
• Finally 5-6 days in our family in the Kansas City area
• Then back to Paris, via New York again, on Aug 23rd and 24th

Nice.

Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
• [2] http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855
• [3] http://www.sendmail.org/dkim/wizard
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_napoleoni_the_intricate_economics_of_terrorism.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_lobo_through_the_lens_of_compassion.html
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/12/21st_century_phone.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html
• [9] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/journal-ultimate-griefing-in-a-lottery-economy.html
• [10] http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/13/home-schooling-socialization-not-problem/
• [11] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.999,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
• [12] http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/296
• [13] http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer
• [14] http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340
• [15] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html

For a long time it has been obvious that in all cases anti-piracy technologies discourage purchases and in many cases encourage piracy. I first discovered the significance of this in about 1991 when I attended a public lecture by a senior employee of Borland and a member of the audience claimed that the Borland product he bought didn t function correctly due to anti-piracy measures. The Borland employee firmly stated that Borland did not use anti-copying technology on any of it s products, didn t have any plans to do so, and the problem in question must have been caused by something else. Of all the hostile questions that were asked, this was the only one that caused the speaker to appear agitated so it was obviously an issue that was considered to be important within Borland. In the late 80 s anti-piracy measures were mostly based around creating floppy disks that couldn t be easily copied (violations of various aspects of the disk formatting standards). This meant that you couldn t make a backup copy of the data, so it wasn t uncommon for people to seek pirate copies of their commercial software for daily use to avoid wearing out their valuable original floppy disks. Then the dongle was invented and people who bought software sometimes sought pirate copies so that they could use their printer and their commercial software without having to change plugs on their PC. But in those cases the benefits to uncrippled software to the users were small. Now a large part of the battle on copy protection concerns DVDs. If you had a DVD of a recent movie and an MP4 which would you rather watch? Would you prefer to be forced to watch some anti-piracy rubbish for a couple of minutes at the start of the movie (with fast-forward disabled) or would you prefer to just start watching it? Would you prefer to be able to pre-program the sections of the movie that you watch (as some parents desire to skip the sex and/or violence in movies for their teenagers) or would you prefer to be forced to watch the movie straight-through with only a manual fast-forward to skip sections? Would you prefer to have a DVD that can t be played properly on many (most?) computers because of the CSS encoding or an MP4 that plays on everything from PCs to mobile phones without an issue? Would you rather have 100 movies in the spare space on your laptop hard drive when you travel and 1000 movies on your desktop system or the much smaller number of boxed DVDs that you can store? I think that in most cases a pirate MP4 will give a better experience than a DVD. So the question is, why pay for a DVD when in most cases you get a lesser experience than you will get from a MP4 file downloaded by bittorrent? One reason for buying the DVD is to support the film industry. But I doubt that such a profitable industry will get much sympathy in today s economy. Another reason is the morality, some people consider piracy to be theft (it isn t by definition theft requires that for at least a moment the property be completely in the possession of the thief) and therefore avoid it. One technical reason for buying a DVD is the fact that it may have multiple languages supported, it will have subtitles, it may have an audio track with the creators giving a commentary, and it may have extra scenes that were cut from the main release. I believe that work on adding subtitles to the video file formats is a work in progress, so it s only a matter of time before the DVD rips include all this extra data. Really the content creators should focus on making a product that meets the needs of users and that they want to pay for. Pirating books is technically possible, but almost no-one does it. Some successful authors such as Charles Stross freely publish significant parts of their work and Cory Doctorow freely publishes all his work in electronic form. Books just work well, they meet the needs of users and people want to buy them. Sure they can sell them second hand, lend them to other people, and it s technically possible to pirate them, but they remain profitable. On my documents blog I have a page of links to free short stories that I liked [1] and a page of links to free books [2]. It seems to me that creators of other copyright content should consider how they can be of service to their customers. We are all familiar with corporations and misguided individuals who get whiny about the supposed losses due to piracy. Bruce Everiss has unfortunately joined this trend and demanded the disconnection of Internet users based on unproven accusations of game piracy [3]. I don t know whether the game buying experience sucks as badly as the DVD buying experience, but based on the reports of locked-down consoles that have to be cracked before they run Linux I expect that the modern game industry is doing at least as badly as the movie industry. They need to provide things that users want! One thing to note is that a Windows or console game player who uses pirate games will probably buy some games at some future time, while someone like me who uses free software both by principle and because it gives a better user experience will probably never pay for a game (I haven t got time to play all the free games so I probably wouldn t even buy a Linux game).

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-books/
• [3] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/05/304149300-stolen-from-activision/

I guess you can say that A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens has been a success. It was published in 1843 and has never been out of print since then. It s spawned all manner of plays, films, adaptations, and spoofs. It s been adapted at least twice by Disney, once featuring Mickey Mouse and another time featuring Jim Carey. We re almost inundated with the story I m not sure how many ways I ve seen it. Yet I had never read the original story by Dickens until just now. And I must say, what a treat it was. Despite knowing the plot in advance, it was a very good read. The 19th century London setting was done well. It wasn t some idealized London as is often portrayed in film adaptations. It had depth, as did the characters. Dickens Scrooge had a troubled childhood, the son of poor and apparently abusive parents. He turned to business, with which he was successful. Along the way, he lost sight of family, and really of his humanity in general, striving to be a richer and more successful businessman at the cost of all else. How apropos this story is for us in the 21st century. Our large banks define success in terms of profits made for their shareholders, while adding more gotchas to the terms of the credit cards held by their customers. Our governments play geopolitical games over weapons, oil, and gas, while unwilling to sacrifice anything to prevent a climate disaster. Our politicians, even in the season of Christmas, turn a blind eye and a cold heart to the suffering of those that can t afford health care for naught but political reasons, rather than trying their hardest to make a plan that will help them reality as soon as possible. And what of us, the citizens of the 21st century? We consume ever flashier cars, houses, computers, and cellphones with data plans, while poverty intensifies across the globe in this economic downturn. Well, count me among those many inspired and reminded by Dickens to be a more empathetic person, to remember how good even many of the poor in the West have it compared to other parts of the world, and to try to do more for others. And that, perhaps, is part of the genius of Dickens. He inspired a complete change of how people looked at Christmas in his time. And his work is no less relevant today; perhaps it hits even closer to home these days. He invites us to carefully consider the question: what does it mean to achieve success in life? And he deftly illustrates that wealth is wrong answer. Here s hoping that many others will also learn a small bit about life from Dickens. How to find it: A Christmas Carol is available for free from Project Gutenberg for reading online, printing, or reading on an ebook reader such as the Kindle. Be careful when buying printed editions. Many have been abridged or improved for a modern audience , and thus lose a lot of the quality of the original. I found at least one edition that looks true to the original; I m sure there are others. [This review also posted to Goodreads]

Dan Gilbert gave an insightful TED talk about our mistaken expectations of happiness [1]. Don Marti has an insightful post about net neutrality and public property [2]. When net access requires access to public property then it should be sold in a neutral manner. Rachel Pike gave an interesting TED talk about the scientific research behind a climate headline [3]. The people who claim to be skeptical of the science should watch this. Mark Peters wrote an interesting article A Happy Writer Is a Lousy Writer about the correlation between emotional state and work quality [4]. Apparently watching a film about cancer will make people more careful and focussed on details. CERIAS has an interesting short article about Firefox security as well as some philosophy on why web browser security generally sucks [5]. Cory Doctorow writes in the Guardian about Peter Mandelson s new stupidity in trying to legislate against file sharing [6]. This is going to seriously damage the economy of every country that implements it. Charles Stross has been blogging a series of non-fiction essays about space colonisation, in The Myth of the Starship he describes how most ideas of space travel are bad and how the word ship is always going to be unsuitable [7]. Brent T. White is an associate professor of law at the University of Arizona who has written an interesting paper about mortgages [8]. He says that anyone who is underwater (IE owing more than the value of their house) should walk away. The credit damage from abandoning a bad mortgage apparently isn t that bad, and there is the possibility of negotiating with the bank to reduce the value of the loan to match the value of the house. Mako is working on a project to allow prisoners to blog [9]. It s basically a snail-mail to web gateway as the prisonsers are not allowed Internet access. PracticalEthicsnews.com has an article about the special status that homeopathy is given [10]. It also notes that homeopathic medicines include arsenic and mercury. Such quackery should be outlawed, a life sentence for homeopathy would be appropriate IMHO. Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting essay about why he is not selling one of his books in audio form (he s giving it away) [11]. He concludes by noting that he wants no license agreement except don t violate copyright law . The fact that he can t get anyone to sell an audio book under such terms is a good demonstration of how broken the marketplace is. Thulasiraj Ravilla gave an inspiring TED talk about the Aravind Eye Care System a program to bring the efficiency of McDonalds to eye surgery [12]. Hopefully that program can spawn similar programs for other branches of medicine and spread to more countries. In many ways they are providing better service (both in quality and speed) than people in first-world countries who pay a lot of money can expect to receive. Scott Kim gave an interesting TED talk about his work designing puzzles [13]. He is also a big fan of social networking, unfortunately (for people like me who don t like social networking) his web site ShuffleBrain.com relies on Facebook. Gordon Brown (UK Prime Minister) gave an inspiring TED talk about global ethic vs the national interest [14], with a particular focus on the global effort required to tackle the climate change problem. Now if only we could get Kevin Rudd to listen to that. Brough has written an interesting analysis of the AT&T network problems that are blamed on the iPhone [15]. His essential claim is that the problem is due to overly large buffers which don t cause TCP implementations to throttle the throughput. This seems similar to my observations of the Three network in Australia where ping times of 8 seconds or more will periodically occur. One particularly nasty corner case with this is when using a local DNS server I can have a DNS packet storm where basic requests time out while BIND uses a significant portion of available bandwidth (including ICMP messages from receiving ports that BIND has closed). To alleviate this I am now using the Google public DNS service [16] (the Three DNS servers never worked properly).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_gilbert_researches_happiness.html
• [2] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/freedom/property-rights/
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_pike_the_science_behind_a_climate_headline.html
• [4] http://www.good.is/post/a-happy-writer-is-a-lousy-writer/
• [5] http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/site/blog/post/firefox_vulnerabilities_souvenirs_of_windows_95/
• [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/26/digital-economy-file-sharing-mandelson
• [7] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/the_myth_of_the_starship.html
• [8] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/10/30/its-ok-to-walk-away-a-law-professor-argues/
• [9] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091201-00
• [10] http://www.practicalethicsnews.com/practicalethics/2009/12/diluted-evidence-is-there-anything-special-with-homeopathy.html
• [11] http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6709919.html
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/thulasiraj_ravilla_how_low_cost_eye_care_can_be_world_class.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/scott_kim_takes_apart_the_art_of_puzzles.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/gordon_brown_on_global_ethic_vs_national_interest.html
• [15] http://blogs.broughturner.com/2009/10/is-att-wireless-data-congestion-selfinflicted.html
• [16] http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

Russ Allbery has written about the hostile reactions of sci-fi fans toward the delay of a book release [1]. Russ makes some good points regarding the issue of whether paying $100 for some books entitles a reader to have the rest of the series written (in summary - no, the author owes the fans nothing). Russ also notes that when someone makes a public promise to do something (such as writing a book) they will probably be feeling bad about being unable to live up to that, and harassing them about it is not going to make them feel any better - or make them better able to do the work. Charles Stross has written a blog post about this topic, he makes some interesting points and the comments illustrate most of them [2]. One comment claims that the author of the delayed book in question flaunts his NFL watching while the same person also criticises the author for writing a blog. This level of contempt for the author amazes me. In case anyone is interested I watch The Bill and Desperate Housewives every week. Anyone who wishes to criticise me for watching soapies instead of documentaries is welcome to do so. But I will not make any apologies for spending some of my time doing things other than coding. If I watch Desperate Housewives instead of fixing a bug that inconveniences you then you just have to deal with it. I believe that taking a regular break from work is a basic human right, apart from which there is evidence to show that working excessive hours decreases the quality and quantity of work that is completed [3]. It seems to me that members of the free software community are in a better position regarding fans than most creative people, and that this is largely due to how transparent the development process is. The most influential members of the user (fan) base are software developers. While people will be disappointed when software is not released on time or has some bugs many users know what is involved and understand that no testing will find all bugs. Even some basic shell scripting can teach people the difficulties of programming and convince them to have a little more patience than they might otherwise have. So the typical user of free software will have some idea of what is required to write software while the typical reader of a novel has no idea of what is involved in writing a book. Another benefit for the free software community in this regard is the open development process. When users are unhappy about release delays (as some Debian users were before Lenny was released) they can easily look at the bug list. If a user is pushy they can be invited to fix some bugs themselves, if they investigate the matter and discover that the bugs are too difficult for them to fix then they will probably feel compelled to stop hassling the people who can fix the bugs. Complaints from users regarding the release process can be turned around with the software is late because YOU haven t fixed any bugs . Please note that submitting bug reports is NOT criticism, it is in fact helping the development process (particularly when the bug reports contain information on how to fix the problems). This exposes another significant difference between writing software and writing a book. Even if I was a talented author I would not be able to offer any assistance to an author who had trouble completing a work simply because I wouldn t have the same vision for the plot of a book. But it s not uncommon for software development projects to be forked if the users are unhappy with some aspect of how they work, and it s also not uncommon for a programmer to voluntarily give one of their projects to another developer - sometimes developers try and convince other people to take projects from them when they don t have enough time. Even without changing the ownership of a project, anyone can submit a patch. The patches that I have received from users of my software have generally been of a high quality and it has taken little work to merge them. A final difference is that any programmer can produce a private fork of a project. I have lost count of the number of times that I have produced custom versions of free software for my own personal use or for the use of my clients. Sometimes the modifications that I made were unsuitable for wider use (IE they broke things for usage cases that I didn t care about) so I just privately made the software do what I needed. This makes the upstream developer (or team) and other contributors irrelevant to fixing the problem in question. Now this is not to say that the free software community is perfect. But it seems that certain types of bad behavior that we see demonstrated in the sci-fi fandom circles are uncommon and the people who demonstrate them are significantly outnumbered by people who oppose such actions. Publicly criticising a programmer for watching the NFL in their spare time is akin to holding a sign saying kick me . As I am a fan of science fiction (and hope to write some in the near future) I wonder whether the sci-fi community could be changed to have a culture more like that of the free software community. The web site 365tomorrows.com publishes a short sci-fi story every day [4], they have been doing this for a few years now. They started out publishing work by a small team of authors with the aim of writing a story a day for a year. Now they also take submissions from users and they have a forum for budding authors to discuss their work. The site Protagonize.com is based on the idea of collaborative fiction [5]. I wonder whether the increasing number of sci-fi fans who join such forums will change the nature of the community. Maybe when a book is delayed the fans could take comfort in an increasing amount of fan-fiction based on characters from that book, I expect that the fan fiction will probably not impress all authors - and some may be offended by having their characters used in pornographic fan fiction. But that might just lead to a market shift towards authors who are not overly concerned about such things. When attending sci-fi book signings I ve noticed fans who appear to have stalking tendencies. I have been wondering how much of this is another symptom of the same problem and how much of it is due to science fiction attracting some people who don t understand the concept of personal space and who haven t considered the mathematics of interactions between famous people and fans - as one of many fans the famous person will not remember your fan letters or whether they have met you before, it s not possible. I look forward to the day when a well known author can have lunch with some fans after a book signing and not be afraid of weird fans. I wonder if Cory Doctorow [6] already has such cool fans, Cory seems to be one of the leaders in the new open way of writing and releasing sci-fi so it seems likely that he would be among the first to reap the benefits. I m sure that most authors would like to have lunch or dinner with their fans if they could be assured that the probability of getting stuck with a nutty fan was extremely low.

• [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2009-02/016.html


• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/the_art_of_being_late.html


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/02/increasing-efficiency-through-less-work/


• [4] http://www.365tomorrows.com/


• [5] http://www.protagonize.com/


• [6] http://craphound.com/

My copy of Charles Stross's The Revolution Business, (book 5/6 in the "Merchant Princes" saga) arrived today. I'm currently half way through Iron Sunrise. I will have to put one of them aside for a while, but which one...

P. W. Singer gave an interesting TED talk about the use of robots in war [1]. He briefly covered some of the ethical and social issues related to robot soldiers as well as showing many pictures of existing robots. Since November 2007 there has been a request for Google Gears to support Iceweasel (the Debian name for Firefox due to trademark issues)[2]. Apparently supporting this different name is not easy for the Google people. If you visit the Google Gears Terms and Conditions page [3] then it will work with Iceweasel on the i386 platform - but not for AMD64 (or at least not my Debian/Lenny AMD64 system). Charles Moore gave a disturbing TED talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch [4]. Pollution in the oceans from waste plastic is worse than I realised. Ressuka documented how to solve the Time went backwards problem on Xen DomUs [5]. Run echo jiffies > /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource or use clocksource=jiffies in your DomU kernel boot parameter list. Nassim Taleb [6] has written Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world [7], this is in regard to the current US financial crisis. It s worth noting that he made a significant amount of money due to successfully predicting some aspects of the crisis. James Duncan Davidson has some good advice for speakers based on his experience in filming presentations [8]. Some of the ones that were not obvious to me were:
Take off your name-tag - it doesn t look good
Stay in the part of the stage with the best light

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html


• [2] http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=313


• [3] http://gears.google.com/terms.html?platform=linux


• [4] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html


• [5] http://ressukka.net/blog/posts/20090305_XenServer_and_non_citrix_kernels/


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Taleb


• [7] http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/tenprinciples.pdf


• [8] http://duncandavidson.com/2009/03/dear-speakers.html

Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.

A quick update before the big one about the 2009 Google Summer of Code. I believe we had a great recruitment drive this year and we have a very good set of proposals to work with. We d like to thank everyone involved for their help. We re now ranking out student applications. I promised elsewhere that I ll send out our shortlist of projects once Google sends us our preliminary slot allocation today but I misread the thread on the -mentors list and that count will only happen on Thursday, so we ll have to wait a bit more. That shortlist would only include projects, but not individual students. The idea is to give a heads up to everyone before committing to a group of projects and students. It is very important to inform the community as it increases visibility of the students work, giving them more help and support (and also avoids duplicating existing not yet publicized work!). As far as mentors go, we should have all of our approximately 14 planned projects covered, except for 2. I m posting them here in case you could mentor or help find mentors for those projects. (The wiki pages are not really up to date, so please come on IRC and ask clarifications, see below)

• Qt4 Package Manager:

Finish Petr Rockai s Adept 3.0 and bring a Qt4 Package Manager to Debian, with a different interface paradigm than Aptitude-gtk.
Petr said he would provide help with the existing codebase but can t mentor. Sune Vuorela from Debian KDE is ready to help with Qt4 related issues.

• EC2/Eucalyptus:

Build Debian tools to create Debian images for Amazon EC2 and the free Eucalyptus implementation. Packaging of the Eucalyptus hosting framework is also possible.
For this project, we already have on board to help: Charles Plessy from Debian Med, Eric Hammond, developer of the existing vmbuilder Ubuntu tool for EC2 and Chris Grzegorczyk and Rich Wolski, from the Eucalyptus team. Plenty of people to get help from. Mentoring is a great experience! See this for what it entails. If we still can t find a mentor by the end of the week, I ll blast an announcement over at debian-devel@l.d.o along with the project shortlist. In the meantime, don t forget to idle on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.