Chris Samual writes a good summary of Peter Gutmann's analysis of the cost of Vista (in terms of DRM).

The following paragraph in the article however seemed more interesting to me:
Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function (details on this are a bit vague here, presumably some minimum functionality like generic 640x480 VGA support will still be available in order for the system to boot). This means that a report of a compromise of a particular driver or device will cause all support for that device worldwide to be turned off until a fix can be found.

Now just imagine that you want to cause widespread disruption - a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack against Windows users. What better option than to cause most of them to have hardware that's not acceptable to the OS? I expect that there will be many instances of security holes in drivers and hardware being concealed by MS because they can't afford the PR problems resulting from making millions of machines cease functioning. But just imagine that someone finds hardware vulnerabilities in a couple of common graphics drivers or pieces of hardware and publicly releases exploits shortly before a major holiday. If it's public enough (EG posted to a few mailing lists and faxed to some major newspapers) then MS would be forced to invoke the DRM measures or lose face in a significant way. Just imagine the results of stopping 1/3 of machines working just before Christmas!

Of course after the first few incidents people will learn. It shouldn't be difficult to configure a firewall to prevent all access to MS servers so that they can't revoke access, after all our PCs are important enough to us that we don't want some jerk in Redmond just turning them off. Of course disabling connections to MS would also disable security updates - but we all know that usability is more important than security to the vast majority of users (witness the number of people who happily keep using a machine that they know to be infected with a virus or trojan).

If this happens and firewalling MS servers becomes a common action, I wonder if MS will attempt the typical malware techniques of using servers in other countries with random port numbers to get past firewalls. Maybe Windows updates could be spread virally between PCs, this method would allow infecting machines that aren't connected to the net via laptops.

Finally, I recommend that people who are interested in such things read Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow, he has some interesting ideas about people DOSing corporations that they work for which seem surprisingly similar to what MS is doing to itself. I'll post about my own observations of corporations DOSing themselves in the near future.

You still got some money left after buying all those Christmas presents? How about donating some of it for a good cause:

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia is entering 2007 as one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. That's a great proof of our success. However, with this success comes a new set of challenges and responsibilities. As we plan for the future of Wikipedia and all of the Wikimedia projects, our two most important goals now are the reliability of our content and the long-term sustainability of every project in which we are involved. To meet these goals we have a lot of work to do, so I am asking for your help. In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates dramatically increasing spending to keep up with server and traffic capacity demands, add new staff on the organizational level, improve our software and develop methods to better ensure high quality content, all while making progress toward our goal of giving free knowledge to everyone.

-- Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Creative Commons

It's once again time to show your support for Creative Commons. Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible but that network is fragile. Creative Commons needs your support to help enable a participatory culture a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us. We need your support to assure access to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.

Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Freedom is more precious than anything else we have and we need to protect it while we still can.

-- Eben Moglen in his FSF year end video appeal (OGG, 24 MB)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries working to protect your digital rights.

Tor: anonymity online

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Or how about some organizations not directly related to Free Culture or Free Software?

• Amnesty International (AI)

Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights. AI s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

Red Cross

The International Red Cross (and Red Crescent Movement) is an international humanitarian movement whose stated mission is to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for the human being, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.

The first step is to configure the CRM114 files, and these are now in pretty good shape as shipped with Debian. All that I needed to do was set a password, say that I'd use openssl base64 -d, and stick with the less verbose defaults (so no munging subjects, no saving all mail, no saving rejects, etc, since I have other mechanisms that do all that). The comments in the configuration files are plenty good enough. This part went off like a breeze; the results can be found here (most of the values are still the upstream default). The next step was to create new, empty .css files. I have noticed that creating more buckets makes crm114 perform better, so I go with larger than norm crm114 .css files. I have no idea if this is the right thing to do, but I make like Nike and just do it. At some point I'll ask on the crm114-general mailing list.

    % cssutil -b -r -S 4194000 spam.css
    % cssutil -b -r -S 4194000 nonspam.css

Now we have a blank slate; at this time the filter knows nothing, and is equally likely to call something Spam or non-Spam. We are now ready to learn. So, I girded my loins, and set about feeding my whole mail corpus to the filter:

 /usr/share/crm114/mailtrainer.crm               \
   --spam=/backup/classify/Done/Spam/           \
   --good=/backup/classify/Done/Ham/            \
   --repeat=100 --streak=35000                  \
         egrep -i '^ + train Excell Running'

And this failed spectacularly (see bug #399306). Faced with unexpected segment violations, and not being proficient in crm114's rather arcane syntax, I was forced to speculation: I assumed (as it turns out, incorrectly) that if if you throw too many changes at the crm114 database, things rapidly escalate out of control. I went o to postulate that as my mail corpus was gathered over a period of errors, the characteristic of Spam drifted over time, and what I consider Spam has also evolved. So, some parts of the early corpus are at variance with the more recent bits. Based on this assumption, I created a wrapper script which did what Clint has called training to exhaustion -- it iterated over the corpus several times, starting with a small and geometrically increasing chunk size. Given the premise I was working under, it does a good job of training crm114 on a localized window of Spam: it feeds chunks of the corpus to the trainer, with each successive chunk overlapping the previous and succeeding chunks, and ensuring that crm114 is happy at any given chunk of the corpus. Then it doubles the chunk size, and tries goes at it again. All very clever, and all pretty wrong. I also created another script to retrain crm114, which was less exhaustive than the previous one, but did incorporate any further drift in the nature of Spam. I no longer use these scripts; but I would like to record them for posterity as an indication of how far one can take an hypothesis. What it did to was have crm114 learn without segfaulting -- and show me that there was a problem in the corpus. I noticed that in some cases the trainer would find a pair of mail messages, classify them wrongly, and retrain and refute -- iteration after iteration, back and forth. I noticed this when I added the egrep filter above, and was not drowning in the needless chatter from the trainer. It turns out, I had very similar emails (sometimes, even the same email) in the Ham and the Spam corpus, and no wonder crm114 was throwing hissy fits. Having small chunks ensured that I had not too many such errors in any chunk;and crm114 did try to forget a mail differently classified in an older chunk and learn whatever this chunk was trying to teach it. The downside was that the count of the differences between ham nd Spam went down, and the similarities increased -- which meant that the filter was not as good at separating ham and Spam as it could have been. So my much vaunted mail corpus was far from clean -- over the years, I had misclassified mails, been wishy-washy and changed my mind about what was and was not Spam. I have a script that uses md5sums to find duplicate files in a directory, and found, to my horror, that there were scores of duplicates in the corpus. After eliminating outright duplicates, I started examining anything that showed up with an ER (error, refute) tag in the trainer output; on the second iteration of the training script these were likely to be misclassification. I spent days examining my corpus and cleaning it out; and was gratified to see the ratio of differences to similarities between ham and Spam css files climb from a shade under 3 to around 7.35. Next post we'll talk about lessons learned about training, and how a nominal work flow of training on errors and training when classifiers disagree can be set up.

I'm pretty happy about the way the 'Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use' episode of the LinuxCast came out so well. I'm not very used to talking for recording, and like everyone I don't particularly enjoy hearing my own voice recorded (do I really sound like that?), but it was fun to do, and I think it's a nice adjunct to the Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use article itself. tags: api podcast linuxcast linuxworld

Tijuana We're on a trip in Southern California this week, so we decided yesterday to go to Tijuana for the day. Maj, Amita June and I got out of the condo we're staying at in Encinitas early in the morning -- well, early for a vacation day -- and headed down to downtown San Diego. It's a trip of about 25 miles, with one tricky turnoff at highway 805 that seems to get me every time I visit this part of the world. Going into Mexico with a car can be a bit of a hassle. Many American insurers don't cover cars going into Mexico, and you'll often get asked about insurance when you cross over. There are some quick-and-dirty insurers on the border that can give you one-day insurance or other short-term coverage, but we have a rental car right now, and most (all?) rental car companies forbid with bitter, mouth-foaming forbiddance driving the car across the border. Fortunately for us, San Diego has a great way around this problem. Their trolley system goes from downtown San Diego right up to the border in San Ysidro. So, we picked it up in the Civic Center downtown, after a brief stop at the Downtown San Diego Vistors Center (to get tourist material), a shopping foray at a stall outside of the downtown Macy's (to get Amita June a pair of purple Crocs), and a side trip into the Westin for a bathroom break. Man, the Westin in San Diego has nice bathrooms! I'd heard about these trolleys in the past, and I guess I'd expected a kind of fancy tourist train, but it's really just the Blue Line for typical light-rail trains for San Diego and its suburbs. The seats were comfortable, but the train right-of-way went through some of the least scenic parts of Southern California I've ever seen. There's something about this corner of the United States of America that's depressing and end-of-the-world; I get the same feeling about other borderlands, like around Plattsburgh and Laredo. The end of the line for the trolley is completely opaque as to how get into Mexico. We wandered around past some ugly strip malls until Maj spotted a tiny oblique walkway that said "US PROPERTY SUBJECT TO SEARCH AND FINE" and in much smaller letters "a Mexico - to Mexico". We went through a wiggly walkway and across the no-man's land between the scary metal fence at the US border and the actual Mexican customs area. Nobody was there, but we got the feeling we were being watched. At the end of this weird walk was a very nice tourist info center, where we got some maps and brochures and such. Another 10 minutes walk through the streets up against the fence, we got to Avenida Revolucion, the central way through the Tijuana/Zona Centro. It had been a while since we'd been to a city with aggressive touts, so getting yelled at by people in shop doorways or in the street was a bit of a jolt. I hate the invasion of my anonymity, and I'm pretty reflexive about saying "NO NO NO NO NO" to everyone, but Maj is a little more practical. "If everything is run by aggressive sideshow barkers, you're going to miss out on everything," she points out. "Sometimes, you have to say 'yes', even if you don't like the way the question was asked." By the time we hit av. Revolution, we were pretty tired, so we stumbled into the first restaurant we found -- El Torito, a big nightclub with go-go cages, a mechanical bull, and a tattoo parlour on premises. I was attracted by the racy Absinth Mexico posters. "Family restaurant, family place," said the touts, seeing the baby in the stroller. Sure. The food wasn't bad -- I made the mistake of ordering the fish Vera Cruz, but the waiter made a smelly-face and suggested I get the shrimp instead -- and the cocktails at 1PM were generous and inexpensive. Probably the nicest part was a guy with a guitar who came over and asked to sing. "We've got enough music," said Maj, pointing at the ceiling where loud disco tunes were booming. But he was insistent, so we let him play, and he sang a loud Besa Me Mucho that drowned out the Ricky Martin and had us, the waiter, and nearby diners singing along by the end. Amita June was fascinated by the sounds, and clapped along when he was done. After lunch we walked down av. Revolucion, which had a dense layer of souvenir shops and discount pharmacies offering Viagra and Cipro without a prescription. One weird repeated theme was donkeys painted as zebras, hooked up to carts where you could sit and get your picture taken for $2. Some of the donkeys looked pretty good in their zebra stripes, but most looked pretty bummed out. I'm not sure why tourists would expect to get their picture taken with a zebra while in northern Mexico. It got a lot nicer as we got down to the end of the block, and we kicked ourselves for being so lazy when we passed Chiki Jai, a charming little restaurant with tiled walls and rough wood furniture. Much more to our tastes than El Torito. We stopped at the monumental Jai Alai courts, with a beautiful facade and a nice statue out front. Ducking into the Tia Juana's next door, we did a diaper-change break and had some chips and salsa and pineapple juice (and Dos Equis Dark on tap for Papa). Then we started walking back to the border. On our way back, we got off of Revolucion and walked over to the city's Cathedral. It was a much more realistic part of the town -- shopping and bars and restaurants, true, but less ridiculous touristy crap. When we got to the cathedral, there was a holiday street fair going outside, with games and food stalls and people laughing and walking around with kids. It felt a little more human than the pressure-tactics-dense world of Revolucion. On our way back to the border crossing, we dipped briefly into the red light district at the head of av. Constitucion (who knew?), then made the long slog back to the USA. We didn't get much in the way of souvenirs, but Maj bought a nice set of luchador dolls for her brother, complete with a tiny wrestling ring. The line at the border was huge, and we had to wait at the trolley station for another 30 minutes before one left for SD again. By the time we got back downtown, around 5:30, we really weren't up for a dinner in the San Diego/Gaslamp Quarter like we'd originally planned. So we piled into the car, paid the $20 parking to get out, and headed right into rush-hour traffic that led to the over-populated and under-networked North County (San Diego County). Would I take the trolley to Tijuana again? Maybe. Next time, I'd probably go to one of the stops between San Diego and San Ysidro, where there are free parking lots and a little less hassle. tags: tijuana san diego travel san ysidro

Hazards of vacation homes I was just rifling through the fridge here at the condo in Encinitas and found what I thought was a delicious Abita beer, the fine drink you have when you can't handle another hurricane in New Orleans. But it turned out to be an Abita Purple Haze, a gross raspberry-wheat beverage. Unfair! It has probably been stuck in the back of the fridge of this condo for years. Fortunately there was still another Stone Pale Ale, from the North County local microbrewery, to satisfy my lunchtime beer needs. tags: stone brewing abita beer

In part 1, I described the problem of software installation on Linux; in part 2, I’ll describe the solution we came up with at the recent LSB Packaging Summit. After reading through the comments to part 1, let me first point out that our goal is to create a vibrant third party software ecosystem around Linux—you know, like the one Microsoft has built around Windows. No, it’s not about imitating Microsoft. It’s about being competitive. A platform is only as good as the applications that run on it. Bottom line: Many third parties have built their businesses around proprietary software, and we can’t just ignore them. And “ecosystem” implies decentralized, which I argued in part 1 was a key tenet of open source development anyway, i.e., this should be playing to one of our core strengths. So, if your “solution” is to tell ISVs (independent software vendors) to give us their source code so the distributions can include it because that’s just how we do things, you can safely skip the rest of the post below. You’re simply not going to agree that any of this is a problem. Ok. Assuming our goal is to create a vibrant third party software ecosystem (and everyone still reading agrees that’s a good goal, right?), we have the following challenges. First of all, the distribution vendors are hugely invested in their existing package systems, and for the most part, those package systems work extremely well. As I said in part 1, “if [an application] is in your distro of choice, you re only an apt-get or a yum install away from running it.” (I’m saying it again here because some of the commenters apparently didn’t see that. The tricky bit is “in your distro of choice”, which by definition is not the case with third party software.) Furthermore, a variety of highly sophisticated systems management solutions are built above those package systems, such as Red Hat Network and Novell ZENworks. This is a pretty important consideration, because these days, the “software management problem” largely involves managing software across the entire infrastructure, not just a single system. What problem then? This: ISVs have thus far been reluctant to use the native package systems. Why? THEY’RE hugely invested in “package systems” for other platforms, and every Linux specific thing they have to support costs money. In a world where decisions are ruled by cost vs. benefit, this is a pretty important consideration too. How do ISVs handle this today? For the most part, they ignore the package systems on Linux and do their own thing. Trouble is, while doing their own thing gives ISVs the flexibility to work cross platform, it ultimately makes their products integrate poorly in the broader systems management context because the package systems know nothing about them. What is needed is a way to bridge the gap between what the distros provide and what the ISVs want. But how? First off, we have to understand what ISVs want. The answer is simple: ISVs want to treat Linux as a single platform, which means they want to offer a single package for Linux, much as they do for Windows. So, if one commenter is right that “[t]he problem is that people (including software distributors) believe there s such [a] thing as ‘Linux’ as a target platform” and that “[i]f you re distributing software for ‘Linux’ then it won t be simple to install it, ever”, well, then Linux is destined to suffer the fate of UNIX. I’m not ready to give up so easily. Several commenters suggested that what we need is a brand new package system. That’s a non-starter—for one thing, the distros aren’t going to be too keen on replacing something they’re hugely invested in, and if ISVs aren’t going for RPM today, why would they go for something different tomorrow? No, to find a way forward, we need an evolutionary step from where we are today. From there, perhaps we can do more, but even the first steps can be quite valuable in their own right. To help find those first steps, we put some of the leading minds in Linux packaging in the same room (including the maintainers of RPM at Red Hat and Novell and the authors/maintainers of APT, yum, alien, and klik) along with ISVs large and small, server and desktop. The discussion pretty quickly converged on constructing a single API that could be implemented across the various package systems, because APIs make for nice evolutionary steps and can, done right, mask underlying implementation differences. Question is, what do ISVs need in such an API? Limiting the scope is key here, because providing an API that spans all the functionality of, say, RPM and dpkg is overwhelming to the point of being unworkable, not to mention more work to implement, which in turn makes it less likely to get into the distros so that ISVs can count on it being there, the whole point of this exercise in the first place. Fortunately, the ISVs don’t really need much. At the most basic level, an installer just needs to be able to query the system to see if it’s LSB compliant, and if it is, what version of the LSB it’s compliant with; and it needs to be able to “register” with the package system, so the package system knows about it, including what files it has installed. And that’s really about it. Importantly, because we assume an environment that’s LSB compliant, we don’t have to worry about dependencies, because everything is covered by the single LSB dependency, and dependency management is 95% of the package systems right there. We still need minimal dependency support—components can extend the LSB, and applications can depend on those other components being installed—but we’re talking on the order of a handful of components, not the tens of thousands of components typical package systems have to deal with. We only had a day, so we obviously don’t have a complete solution yet. For one thing, we barely touched on the issue of uninstallation (should we allow applications to register GUI uninstallers?), and the issue of how applications go about changing the system configuration still needs discussion (in a lot of cases, the assumption of LSB compliance means the installer is going to be well behaved, but there’s undoubtedly corner cases to be explored). And it’s going to take time for the API to be implemented and put into widespread enough use that ISVs can depend on it. However, everyone in the room did come to consensus pretty quickly that this was an important problem, and that providing a simple API that provides the minimum necessary functionality was the way to go. Perhaps most exciting, the very people whose support are needed to put the API into widespread use were in that room, and active participants in the discussion too. Everyone is certainly motivated: The distros get more applications, which makes the shared platform more attractive; and ISVs get lower cost, which tilts the cost vs. benefit equation in their favor, making Linux versions more economically attractive and potentially opening new markets. Because this is just a start, the FSG is launching a Packaging workgroup to continue the discussion we started at the Packaging Summit. If you’re interested in this topic, I’d encourage you to join the mailing list and get involved. There’s still plenty to be done. Update: One more thing: In addition to making it easier for ISVs to better support Linux by simply extending their existing installation scripts, the API approach really comes into its own when you imagine it implemented in things like Autopackage and InstallAnywhere. Let the market decide!

Mozilla Firefox Locales In 2004, we had for every individual localization a dedicated source package in the Debian archive, such as: mozilla-firefox-locale-ar, mozila-firefox-locale-ca, etc. This is a mess from every point of view. First, it creates much overhead on the archive infrastructure side as well as on the maintainers one, and second, since it often results in localization packages out of sync with the browser, it is a major pain in the ass for the users. Mozilla Firefox Locales All In January 2005, Cesar Martinez Izquierdo introduced the common source package mozilla-firefox-locale-all which included most of the available localizations. That was the inital step to clean up the mess. Later, David Moreno Garza and Luk Claes took the package over and accompanied it through the Mozilla Firefox to Firefox transition. Iceweasel l10n In September 2006, I jumped in as the new maintainer. Since then, the package did continue to evolve:

• rebranding for the Firefox to Iceweasel transition (currently, the foreign locales are fixed, only the en-US locale included in iceweasel is not, patch is at #400721).
• renaming to use the proper l10n naming scheme ($ program -l10n-$ language and not $ program -locale-$ language ).
• with the inclusion of the Catalan and Ukrainian localizations, iceweasel-l10n includes now really all Iceweasel locales which were previously packaged seperately in Debian (Thanks again to Jordi Mallach and Eugeniy Meshcheryakov for their permission for inclusion).

Additionally,

• with the readdition of temporarily removed locales within the Firefox 2.0 release (he for Hebrew and pa-in for Punjabi, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),
• with the inclusion of unofficial but complete localizations (fa-ir for Persian and fur-it for Furlan),
• and the half-official localizations (ka for Georgian and ku for Kurdish, taken from 2.0.0.1-rc3),

iceweasel-l10n as of 2.0+debian.1-1 supports 43 languages in total. That is more than any other distribution (yes, including Ubuntu :) contains. Icelizard Currently, the locale packages for iceape and icedove are not unified. This September, I was writing to the some of the maintainers but they seemed not interested to fix it for Etch. I will try it again in 2007, my aim is to have proper unified localization packages for all icelizard applications in Lenny. Update: iceweasel-l10n 2.0.0.1+debian-1 adds Valencian localization, so supporting 44 languages now.

Aaron Leventhal of IBM has more details on the relationship between iAccessible2 and the UNIX/Linux accessibility API (ATK/AT-SPI) as well as the motivations behind iAccessible2’s evolutionary approach:

[A]n evolutionary path was needed for applications which already had MSAA (IAccessible) support… [and] an API was needed that did not require separate accessibility implementations for each platform. […] The IAccessible2 interface itself collects important ATK features from other areas, as well some completely new methods and features… For the most part, features were added either to bring Windows capabilities up to the level of ATK/AT-SPI, or in order to support the features of ARIA (previously known of DHTML accessibility). […] [W]hat we’re doing is expanding MSAA while matching ATK/AT-SPI to a very helpful degree. […] [B]ecause IAccessible2 is backwards-compatible with MSAA, the current support of Windows screen readers and other assistive technologies can continue to work on applications that add IAccessible2 support. However, the newer IAccessible2 capabilities will also be exposed, and thus newer assistive technologies will be able to take advantage of them.

Peter Korn of Sun weighs in as well. (Via Andy Updegrove.)

On several occasions in discussions about life etc friends have mentioned the theory that quantum mechanics dictates the way our cells work. In the past I have not been convinced. However this site http://www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/Outline.htm has a very well written description of the theory which is very compelling.

The Free Ryzom Campaign that I have mentioned earlier is now officially supported by the Free Software Foundation with a donation pledge of $60.000 (which now makes a total of ca. 134.000 Euros together with the contributions by many other people).

The Free Ryzom campaign was established to purchase the online game and universe known as Ryzom, property of the now bankrupt Nevrax company, and release the entire game as free software. As stated by Peter T. Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, the FSF considers the Free Ryzom campaign "a high priority project for the free software movement". The aim of the campaign is to publish the source code to the entire game under the terms of the
widely-used GPL, as well as publishing all of the artwork and other content under similar free licenses. The Free Ryzom campaign represents a unique opportunity for the free software movement and the emerging free gaming field. A fully free MMORPG (massively multiplayer online roleplaying game) engine and client/server architecture would allow the development of a myriad of universes, each one evolving its own philosophy and unique content - but sharing in general technical improvements. If successful, this campaign would allow any user to create their own universe and produce their own content based on the Ryzom/Nevrax architecture.

The new goal is now to reach 200.000 Euros in order to increase chances to convince the judge to choose the Free Ryzom project as the new owner of the code and game data.

Pledges must be made within the next few days, since the deadline for the final bid is expected sometime before Wednesday, December 19th, depending on when the judges make their decision.

Good luck to the project! Update 2006-12-14: Fix the numbers (Euro vs. Dollar messup). Thanks Ward Vandewege!

As it has become virtually costless to become a web video publisher, we’re seeing more and more really funny noncommercial content. To make a funny web video, you don’t really need anything, other than to be funny. Special effects and paid actors are not really essential and perhaps detrimental. After much urging by Steve, I have finally become a devotee of The Show with Ze Frank. See this wikipedia entry for background. I suspect if The Daily Show had been born a few years later, it might have taken the no-budget format that Ze Frank uses. (The fact that the show is the top result in a Google search for the show (no quotes) must be some proof of its worth.) I was going to recommend a particularly good episode, but they’re all great. Also via Steve, this excellent piece about OS X and Linux security (slightly not work-safe). Lest you think I’m unduly influenced by Steve’s recommendations, I should point out that Steve has finally gotten around to taking some of my suggestions. (As a follow-up, I’ve been meaning to assemble my numerous tips in assembling/publishing video from linux, but the list keeps growing. Unfortuantely, it’s not trivial, but once you’ve figured out all the arcane pieces it’s possible to have a pretty efficient video production workflow. I’ll get around to documenting it eventually.)

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.

One problem with keeping your journal in the French Revolutionary Calendar is that you have to keep looking up what the date is. It is nice to know that there are functions for converting Julian dates to French Revolutionary dates in PHP. Also a nice link on that page to the strange and mellow http://bottoms-dream.de/ , which isn't anywhere near as pornographic as it sounds. tags: french revolutionary calendar php bottoms

Blinky Redux I had Blinky Hockey again tonight -- the first time in a month that I've gone. (Blinky is the pickup hockey team my friends Meg and Patti started. It's for people who don't play hockey so good but want to learn. Like me.) Last time we had it, I flew out to California at 6AM the next day for 2 weeks, so I missed two practices in between. And then last time I had everyone over for Thanksgiving dinner, and I fell asleep putting the baby down. Doh. So it was good to go out this time around. I've been going to our local hockey rink, Ar na Mont-Royal, for free skating from 4-5PM a couple of times per week since we got home, and I think I'm getting a little steadier on the ice. I still haven't got the whole stop-on-a-dime thing or skate-forwards-backwards-forwards thing, but I'm able to get around without going face down. Which is good. Tonight we did some more sophisticated drills and had a good scrimmage at the end of practice. I didn't score but I had an awesome shot. It would have been cool if it were a score. Anyways, I think I'm going to have to keep practicing on my own. Going to the Ar na is great, but maybe I should fill our parking lot out back with water, like this R ves de Glace site suggests. That'd be cool. tags: hockey blinky skating montreal

Calendar wishlist So, I'm always trying to learn to use my calendar application, whatever's easiest and most available. I have a Treo 650 and Evolution, and they work OK, but they don't work great. I have a lot of things that I wish calendar programs had.

• Project management integration. This is probably the biggest one for me. I can't believe that we have two different kinds of programs for planning the exact same information: what you're going to do with your time. On top of that it's remarkable that so few of project planner programs talk to calendars (or vice versa).
• Hierarchical TODO lists. I'd like to break up tasks into sub-tasks that depend on each other.
• Effort estimates. I'd like to be able to make notes about how long I think a task is going to take, and when I'll get it done.
• Repeating TODOs. Probably the most egregiously un-ergonomic thing about modern calendaring programs. Almost everything I have to do in my life I have to do on a repeating schedule. I have to take out the recycling once a week before Wednesday morning. I have to pay rent before the 1st. I understand it's a tricky problem, but that doesn't mean I don't want a program to do it.
• Open invitations. I'd like to be able to send open event invitations to mailing lists and have people RSVP automatically (if they want). All the systems I've used require that I know the email address of each invitee ahead of time. And they rarely work across calendaring systems.
• Skipped TODOs. Sometimes I give myself a task todo and I just don't get around to doing it. I'd like to be able to mark a task as not done, but no longer important. I don't want to forget it forever, just remember that it never got done.
• Logging. It'd be nice if there were more and nicer interfaces to say what I did with my day after it's done. When did I finish that module? When was the last time Niko came over for dinner? It would be nice if my calendar helped me remember the past as well as plan the future.
• Sharing by default. I want to set up calendar sharing once, have my local and remote calendar synched transparently, and never worry about it again. CalDAV seems neat, but I have got no idea how to get it working.
• More shared calendars. I like using shared calendars; I wish more organizations published them. I'd like it if Bell Canada published a calendar that told me when to pay my phone bill, and I'd like it if MSLUG published a calendar of their meetings. I'd like it if I could mark my phone bill as paid, and RSVP for an MSLUG meeting, through my calendar interface.
• ACLs. Different people need to see different parts of my calendar. It'd be nice to have finer-grained control than "public" and "private".

tags: calendar wishlist

I’ve been doing some maintaineresque bashing at Alacarte recently (with the maintainer’s permission.) This means the bug list is down to four. Two of which are enhancements and two of which are quite mischievous little critters: #364080, which has something to do with the completion stuff but I can’t reproduce and #372477, which seems to be a bug with gnome-menus or the Python bindings perhaps. Any help would be most welcome! Update: Rogue space broke the links. Fixed now.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

Venkatesh Hariharan recently wrote an article on Indias traditions of knowledge and how Open Source meshes with them. Now having met him at foss.in and knowing of his work, I am 100% convinced he is on the side of the angels and their is no malice in what he wrote. However, his interpretation (really not his, but the conventional wisdom amongst the Indian elite.) of Indian history and culture is so monumentally wrong it bears correction. While I admit my hackles were raised by the cultural and theological mistakes made, there are implications for Open Source advocacy in India and the world at large too. He starts by giving the example of Nalanda, supposedly "the first university in the world." but more accurately a Buddhist vihara (monastery.) Its' very name indicated sharing. I use the past tense because Nalanda doesn't exist anymore. In fact except in a few border areas influenced by Tibet or Burma, Buddhism itself is so thoroughly extinct in the land of its birth, the place where it flourished for over 1500 years, that the only reason people like Hariharan or myself only know that there ever was such a thing due to the work of 19th century Western Indologists. How could this be? One theory is that a resurgent Hinduism coopted or persecuted the Buddhists into oblivion. However this is unsatisfactory. It does not explain why Jainism (a religion as old as Buddhism and equally heretical for exactly the same reasons from the Hindu point of view) still survives to this day and it doesn't explain how it could have happened for even the most advanced genocidal regimes of the 20th century have been unable to "disappear" undesirables to the extent which Buddhism disappeared. A more plausible explanation revolves around the fact that, as I mentioned before, places like Nalanda were Viharas. This doesn't mean that they can't have university-like properties too; after all the great academic institutions of Europe also had religious foundations but the monastic nature of a vihara is salient. A monastery is not a place you go to engage the world, its a place you go to escape it. To mix metaphors a bit, the viharas were cathedrals not bazaars. While there may have been a lively intellectual life within its walls, there is no evidence that Nalanda and its denizens interacted much with the surrounding culture. An economically unproductive institution of such vast size (15,000 monks at its peak) could only survive by the patronage of kings and other rich people. When that patronage dried up as for example when the medieval Muslim invasions swept away the old royalty, Nalanda and its sisters couldn't survive. Just as when a proprietary software company dies, its "intellectual property" often dies with it, when centralized Buddhism died, Buddhist ideas died with it. (Luckily Buddhism had spread to other countries by then and developed new, less monolithic forms so it was not lost to the world altogether.) In contrast Hinduism (and for that matter Jainism) while having all due respect for monks were and are primarily lay movements. The pursuit of morality (Dharma), wealth (artha) and pleasure (kama) in this world are equally valid human goals alongside liberation from the world (moksha.) and this manifested as the much maligned institution of caste. Hariharan quotes the conventional view probably familiar to Westerners from Anthropology 101, a lock-step hierarchy of four classes (varna is the Sanskrt word) with fixed occupations, with knowledge and privilege on top and ignorance and oppression at the bottom. The thing is, this view bears no relationship whatsoever with social reality in India now or historically. There is another Sanskrit word, jati, which can be translated as caste. There are thousands of these jatis and while Indian thinkers have periodically attempted to try and shoehorn them into the varna framework, they have had little success and varna is for all practical purposes just a theory. And this is not just a fall from some putative golden age (Like the canard that once caste was flexible and merit based and only later became rigid.) but the state of affairs throughout recorded history.

A jati consists of people who share a common (or fictive) kinship, who have particular food and ritual choices, and marry endogamously. While many jatis are associated with a particular occupation, many others are not. This is what caste means to a typical Indian (it is also the social organization prevalent amongst Jains, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians even if they don't accept its theological basis.) Yes, hierarchy and concommitantly oppression, are in some cases a byproduct of casteist thinking but they are hardly its raison d'etre. A comparison can be made to the Western nuclear family system. Some people think it is superior to any other form of social organization. Most people wouldn't go that far but go along with it as "the way it is." Some of those of a liberal persuasion might want tweaks of certain aspects of it. A very small fringe think it is nothing more than a nefarious plot to spread patriarchy, subjugation and racism etc. They are mostly considered kooks by the other groups. (Unfortunately when India and caste are concerned, the kooks are ruling the roost.) The diversity of jatis like the diversity of open source creates a certain resistence to disruption that a monoculture cannot. Thus though Hinduism also suffered grievously from invasions, it was able to hold on where Indian Buddhism could not. Brahmin (sic. That's an English mispronounciation.) is also misinterpreted as one who knows Brahma (masculine noun. The Creator God.) instead of Brahman (neuter noun. The supreme spirit pervading the Universe.) though even then it would be wrong because Brahmin, Brahma, and Brahman all come from a common root word brhati (feminine noun. Sacred speech.) as any Sanskrit dictionary will attest. Hariharan cites the example of the sacred scriptures (Sic. He means the Vedas) and the notorious statement of the Manusmrti saying that an unqualified person who hears them should have molten lead poured into their ears as examples of the proprietarization of knowledge. Now the long-suffering untouchables may have been afraid of many things but having lead earplugs was not one of them. There is no historical evidence that any such action was ever attempted. You can criticize the Manusmrti for even saying such a thing but that is a far cry from using it as evidence of historical attitudes. You see, the Manusmrti is not even in the most orthodox conception Hindu Sharia and the Vedas are not "Sacred Scriptures" in the sense that the Bible or Koran are. Rather they are part of a wide range of significant literary works respected in Hinduism of which other important examples are the two Epics the Mahabharata (which includes the Bhagavadgita), and the Ramayana, and the vast compendia of geneologies, philosophy, lore and legend called the Puranas. Hariharan actually missed a good chance to make his point here because while the Vedas are indeed "proprietary" the other works I mentioned are not and have in fact permeated all over India and even beyond its borders. Many Indian languages owe their literary existence to translation of the epics or Puranas. For instance one of the earliest monuments of Hindi literature is the Ramacharitamanasa, Saint Tulsidas's translation of the Ramayana. When he wrote it in the 16th century, he did face some opposition from those who didn't think such an august work should be rendered into a "vulgar" tongue, he also received encouragement from equally orthodox people (including those who believed the Vedas should be restricted to Brahmins) Today it is by many accounts the most popular Hindu holy book in existence. So really the whole idea that the Hindu canon shows a fall from open grace to rigidly controlled private property is just bogus. To those who have slogged their way though all this verbiage wondering what it has do with Linux and Open Source, let me assure you I am getting to the point :-) It's bad enough from my point of view as a devout Hindu that my religion would be misrepresented this way but from my point of view as a supporter of Free Software ideals, it is catastrophic. Linux and Open Source in India has spread, as in most parts of the world, primararily as a hobby amongst computer enthusiasts and for a hobby it's doing ok. However if you think of it as more than that, as a tool to enhance society and empower peoples lives, that is not nearly good enough. But how can one serve a society if one apparently has no clue about that societies history and mores? The developing world is littered with failed projects that were carried out with the purest of motives but no regard to what the putative clients actually wanted. Do we want Linux and Open Source deployments to go the same way? For a couple of years now I've been trying to get Indian and NRI programmers to get involved in localization in debian-installer and elsewhere but even with the small minority that are sympathetic to Open Source (a scandal in itself.) it is like pulling teeth. To their credit, Red Hat India pays people to work on such things but volunteerism is the heart of the Open Source movement as we all know so the apathy of Indian IT professionals is deeply troubling. Hariharan is trying to increase interest by appealing to the Indians' sense of cultural pride which is a good tactic--it has been successfuly applied by many non-western or minority cultures--but he is not going to be very successful if the vision of Indian culture he is presenting is as alien as Eskimo culture to the vast majority of the people. Western Open Source advocates also run into difficulties due to being tone-deaf in their understanding of how third-world cultures actually operate. When India declined to participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, some commentators on places like Slashdot were perplexed. Wouldn't a poor country want an inexpensive yet efficient pc using free software instead of high-priced imports? The thing they missed is that while people in India may be poor, thanks to a more-or-less democratic polity and more-or-less open communications, their frame of reference is no longer their village. Their trends are increasingly set in Mumbai, New York, Paris, and London. The forward-thinking amongst them know that computers are the key to the future. They also know Bill Gates is the richest man in the world thanks to something called "Windows" knowing which can get you a green card and your own chance of becoming rich. So if Linux comes along, presented as a cheap alternative which is "just as good", the fake Gucci handbag of IT if you will, it is not going to impress. Thinkpads and Dells appeal to the upwardly-mobile persons vanity, a third-world hand-cranked laptop does not. (This incidently is what is behind the "Nalanda university" meme too. Monasteries are yesterday. Universities are the in thing so we have to have some in our past and not just any but by golly, the first university in the world.) When they venture from pure technology into the realm of culture, Open Source advocates need to be a lot more sophisticated, not to mention accurate, in their arguments lest they fall on deaf ears. Platitudes and sentimentality about "spiritual" versus "material" culture aren't enough. There must be concrete demonstrations of the benefits of why the Open Source approach to knowledge is better. They must be more sensitive in their presentation to avoid needlessly antagonizing people who might otherwise be natural allies. I believe the Open Source ideal is good for India and the whole world, not just in software but for society at large and I wish Venkatesh Hariharan and all the others on the frontlines of the fight for openness the best of luck. But good intentions cannot excuse sloppy thinking.

As previously announced, I plan to have an open house on these days. If you happen to be in Munich at the time and, as Matthew puts it so well, if I haven't wished you dead in the last three months, you are invited. There is going to be infrastructure as can be found in a typical home, such as space, electricity, network, a shower and a kitchen. I have a few mattresses as well, but the usual sleeping gear is probably a good thing to bring anyway. I plan on stocking up on noodles and tomato sauce before the event, and there is a Chinese restaurant with an all-you-can-eat offer just downstairs, so I believe food is not going to be an issue either. I expect the entire event to be mostly geeky in nature, given the people who are invited. I think some might see it as an opportunity for another bug-squashing party, while others see it as an excuse to devote a full day to their pet project. If you're planning on not bringing a computer and just generally hanging out and socialising, that's fine with me, too. My personal plan for the weekend revolves around a bunch of software and hardware projects, most of which being related to cool hardware. I have a soldering iron here (25W only, but it works), so you are welcome to bring a hardware project as well. If you plan to come, it would be nice if you could drop me a short message so I won't be off to the video rental store when you arrive, plus I can tell you more details then, like where exactly. Also please tell me whether you prefer sitting on the floor/some mattress or on a seat with a chair, as it allows me to allocate the space accordingly in advance so that we don't have to move people around. The fine print: this is a non-smoking flat (and the wind conditions do not allow smoking out of the windows), we're on the 6th floor and it's the beginning of winter. While it is certainly possible to smoke outside, it might be something to consider.

Wow... The amount of press/coverage inside the FS community (not necessarily good press) the Ubuntu people are receiving lately is huge. I smell the possibility where Canonical might face what many people call the ugly side of Debian - But what we, the insiders, call it the most important part of it: Our people's devotion to the Free Software ideals. Of course, even inside Debian there are all kind of opinions (to the point that Debian's main activity seems at times to be debating rather than coding), but the general perception is that we are the fundamentalist zealots.
It's only funny to imagine what lies ahead. No, I'm not talking (for people not following planet.debian.org) about Ubuntu's latest big media scandal, although it might share some connections. Apparently, Canonical wants to grow and bring more people in. And, of course, being a commercial desktop-oriented distribution, being flashy (or in their words, going for the bling) is needed to keep up with the Joneses.
This time, it starts (for me) with Scott's interesting and worthy posting regarding the future of binary blobs and clearly non-free drivers inside Ubuntu. In short: Scott explains why Ubuntu will apparently sacrifice some of its ideals for (what I read as) some extra popularity, and states he is not too happy with it. This, of course, has triggered a load of postings - not necessarily in chronological order, but: Mako, also an Ubuntite, asks people (users, developers) to tell their opinions on this - But he is not at all happy with the direction this might take. Many Ubuntu enthusiasts are voicing their opinions in Wiki form. I guess that Joey's peace of mind comes also because of this discussion (although I'm only stretching my views).
...There is always the debate of whether Ubuntu is good or bad for Debian, as Norbert points out. I've tried to stay away from it, quoting one of Luis Echeverr a's famous it's neither good nor bad, it's just the opposite. I do think the two systems will eventually diverge too much - But I'm not at all involved in Ubuntu, and I refuse to back my claims ;-)
The point of this posting is: When forming Canonical, obviously Mark wanted to gather the best of the best, people who knew their way developing and coordinating an eminently Free and high-quality distribution, but without the distraction of 1000+ developers trying to pull the whole distribution their way. By being the boss, he can ensure a single vision (and not a multitude of egos) drives the excellent work of talented hackers. However, there might be a subtle mistake: Maybe his team are too Debianites? Maybe they will show they are as strongly Free Software (and not Opensource) oriented as they were when they joined Debian? Maybe, even with the unlimited powers that being a SABDFL gives, Mark and the Ubuntu technical committee/community council will have to concede on not having the latest and flashiest, just to keep his elite team happily working?
I'm not, of course, blaming them for selling their principles - Of all the commercially-oriented Linux distributions, Ubuntu is clearly the one that stays closer to what I'd like. And it's not by mere chance that it derives and keeps in constant sync (at least until now) with Debian. Still... This has the potential to make a big dent on their structure and vision.

While I appreciate the research and legal commentary over at Groklaw, the tendency of PJ and the regular posters to imagine vast conspiracies makes me more than a little uneasy. Yesterday I came across a truly jaw-dropping example that would be offensive if it wasn't so laughable; and since I happen to know more about the situation, I felt I should comment on it:

I have some questions about this group, BELUG, who did the article, I gather. There is no info on the site to be more informed. Anyone in the Seattle LUG know anything about this new group in Bellevue, 5 mins. from Bill Gates' house?

...

I don't like to be a cynic, and maybe they are a Linux user group, but if so, maybe the Seattle LUG can give them a hand.

Of course, we all know that the Microsoft corporate campus has an enormous mind-control ray mounted on Building 1 that turns everyone living on the Eastside of Seattle into mindless Gates-worshipping zombies. Part of Bill's personal security plan, dontchaknow. That's why BELUG starts every meeting with a round of "All Hail Gates, Lord of All That Is Electrified".


She goes on to complain about "major confusion" in their description of free software. At a quick read, I can only see two glaring problems with this page: first, they describe free software as being both "free in a monetary sense" and able to be sold (which is actually true but sounds like a contradiction without more explanation that they don't provide); later, there's some weird wooly-headed stuff about revolutionizing entire economies and societies. I don't know what they're talking about, but they certainly can't be accused of lacking enthusiasm.

Finally, she quotes a section of the FAQ that suggests that Microsoft professionals should learn Linux and vice versa, since the world is heterogenous and getting more so. I don't think that's controversial, so I think she must be referring to this question:

Q: Why does BELUG dislike Microsoft?

A: That is a complete misunderstanding. BELUG does not dislike Microsoft. Microsoft is our neighbor, and many of our friends and relatives work there. Both Microsoft's headquarters and Bill Gates' house are located just minutes away, and Microsoft's world sales headquarters is currently under construction nearly adjacent to BELUG's meeting location. BELUG merely believes in friendly competition and that competition can benefit everyone, including Microsoft. This is what a free market economy and the American system is (supposed to be) all about, and this is what has helped make the U.S. a great country.

The statement that Microsoft is nearby is nothing but geographical fact (I could walk about fifteen minutes from my apartment and be on the MS campus; does that make me an MS mole?).

As for the rest, I really don't see anything to complain about. I know some people like to rhetorically shred Microsoft at every opportunity, but if you're trying to attract members in Microsoft's hometown, it's wise to keep your comments polite. It's also true that Microsoft benefits from competition (even if they don't see it that way); I don't think it's a coincidence that their products started sucking drastically less as OSX and Linux became reasonable alternatives to Windows. And the fact that we can have friendly competition (as opposed to the cut-throat, take-no-prisoners style that's popular in some quarters) is exactly one of things I like about Linux. You will notice, however, that the Q&A carefully doesn't mention what sort of competition Microsoft engages in. I think anyone who knows anything about the company knows the answer to that one.


Here's the kicker, though: I actually attended a BELUG meeting a few months ago. It seemed pretty much like what I'd expect from a small group of volunteers: one guy gave a talk about hooking ALSA up to a digital audio receiver, another guy showed off a Unix kernel he had written for classic MacOS (it ran as a user process and presented a Unix-like interface to the Mac), someone passed around cookies, and people talked a bit about using Linux and so on.

The poor quality of the Web site and the lack of a mailing list probably reflect the fact that there are a handful of people organizing the thing who all have day jobs and other committments, not some vast Microsoft conspiracy to undermine Linux from the inside by setting up fake LUGs. PJ never said they were fakes outright, but it was a clear subtext of her comment, and the Groklaw regulars who replied knew exactly what she was getting at. If she really thinks they might be fakes, then I think she needs to take a break from watching SCO (which could make anyone paranoid and suspicious) and enjoy the holiday season instead.

Nothing new for you? Well, this is a brand new GNOME session using the artwork (you just can see the wallpaper) that will be into Etch. There's much more in the artwork camp being worked on as we speak. In term of apps, some of what you can't see is:

- Iceweasel and Epiphany: browsers;
- Evolution: mail and stuff;
- GAIM: instant messaging;
- Totem: multimedia even in the browsers, using xine backend;
- Gnomebaker: let it burn;
- OpenOffice: people write a lot;
- and much more (including: synaptic, gdebi, printing and scanning support, ...).

Do you want to help us and enjoy the goodies right now? Download the debian-installer etch release candidate 1 and select 'desktop environment' after base install. After your first login, do as root in a terminal 'aptitude update && aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop' (just to update everything). I recommend you the 1st DVD (everything needed is included), but you can do a net install or use the 1st CD without problems, it will just spend some time downloading more packages during the installation.

Introduction: This guide will walk you through the creation of an encrypted filesystem using LUKS. LUKS is the Linux Unified Key Setup and is a standard format for linux hard disk encryption. It has a lot of interesting features such as using a key on a removable disk, keeping multiple keys, and more. This is the technology used by the Debian Installer (since etch beta3) and is quickly becoming a standard in the linux world. Who this guide is for: This guide is for anyone who wants to secure their data using an encrypted partition. While it is tailored to users of Debian, it should apply elsewhere in the linux world. This guide is intended to add an encrypted device to an existing install, if you are contemplating a fresh install, the Debian Installer will configure encrypted filesystems for you. Ready? Then let’s begin Prepare the partition (or other block device) to be used This can be a partition on disk, a logical volume in LVM or some other block device. For this example, I created a 40 GB volume in LVM.

• For a physical partition, you would need to have an entire partition available on disk. Instructions for this can be found from many other sources
• For LVM, create a partition like this
  lvcreate -n crypto_test --size 40g asimov-vol

Install cryptsetup This utility provides an interface into the code in the linux kernel that handles encrypted block devices. It’s packaged for Debian in both testing and unstable, stable has an older version and I don’t know whether or not it will work in the same manner.
apt-get install cryptsetup Set up encryption on the partition: This initializes the partition for encryption and sets the initial key. People not using LVM will want a path like /dev/hdxY where hdxY is the partition on their hard drive that will be used for encryption. Important! This command will wipe out anything on that partition

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test
WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Congratulation! You now have an encrypted block device! However, it’s not quite ready to use. Open and map the device: This opens the device (prompting for a passphrase) and maps it to a block device in /dev/mapper. This can be used like any other block device, and the encryption/decryption is transparent. The first path (/dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test) is the encrypted partition you set up earlier. The name (crypto_test) is the name of the volume, the block device will be mapped as /dev/mapper/<name>.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test crypto_test
Enter LUKS passphrase:
key slot 0 unlocked.
Command successful.

Create the filesystem of your choice on the device: This is just like setting up any other block device. I use ext3, others may prefer different formats.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypto-test Add the definition to /etc/crypttab: /etc/crypttab is a list of encrypted devices that are mapped on boot. The format is <map name> <path to device> <key file> <options> Since we’re using a passphrase, we don’t have a key file.
crypto_test /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test none luks Create a mount point: This is where the encrypted device will be mounted on your filesystem.
mkdir /mnt/crypto_test Add the device to /etc/fstab: /etc/fstab tells the computer where to mount different devices on the filesystem. The format is
<source path> <mount path> <type of filesystem> <options> <mount options options> <dump frequency> <fsck pass> More information can be found by reading man 5 fstab. You will want to add a line like this: /dev/mapper/crypto_test /mnt/crypto_test ext3 defaults 0 2 somewhere in this file. Update the initial ramdisk. The initial ramdisk is used to jumpstart the boot process and load modules for the kernel that it can’t load itself (such as drivers for block devices that contain the modules it uses). I’m not sure if this is needed or not, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
update-initramfs -u -k all Congratulations Now your encrypted filesystem is completely set up! Reboot the system and you will see it prompt you for your passphrase during the boot cycle. Once the password has entered, the encryption is completely transparent. If you want to use your encrypted filesystem before rebooting, simply type mount /path/to/mountpoint.