A song This Is Not America by David Bowie tuned me in to the radio playing in the background. And I realised - the USA that exists today is not The America anymore. The America is the land of free and brave. The USA is the land of self-restricted cross-monitoring cowards. And I am talking about the attitude of the people, not about the government here. People make the country, not the government. The America would have laughed in the face of 9/11 and said “Bomb us all you want, bet we will not give up our freedoms!”. The USA crawled into a corner and pleaded to its president to take away all its freedoms and wealth just to get a false sense of security, which it still has not got. I would like to live in The America, but the USA is just pitiful. The American dream is dead and buried by the same people that once made it - the USA public. RIP. P.S. If you think that my blog has become too political, then I am sorry, but the problem is that politics slip into our lifes more and more and if we - regular people, do not become politically involved, then the polititians will just assume the we do not care and make decisions based on who pays their lobbies more. Think software patents, just on a much wider scale and with much wider implications, like the WW3.

Armin provides a nice outlook into the future of (G)obby, a collaborative editor and the corresponding library to embed this feature into other applications. A C rewrite of the obby library is currently in progress, but it's still quite some time away. We will release the 0.4.0 branch soon, though. There will be another set of release candidates for all components in the next few days, which hopefully pave the way to a final release of that series. It was delayed for a long time due to a desyncronisation issue, which seems to be fixed since 0.4.0rc3. The 0.4.0 branch of Gobby will have the following advantages over the 0.3.0 one (which is in Debian unstable and Ubuntu dapper):

• Encrypted connections (using GNUTLS), dropping the GMP dependency
• Periodic keep-alives to detect dropped clients
• Reduced memory footprint
• Basic IPv6 support
• Quite some usability enhancements

I just wanted to pass along the invitation. Robin Millette is throwing a birthday party for Debian on Saturday, 19 August 2006. You can show up at 17:30 and apparently it will last until the wee hours of the morning. Just knock at 8655 rue Saint-Denis, Montr al. It's right by the Cr mazie station. I'm afraid I won't be able to attend as I will be far away. But do have fun celebrating!

If one really wants to make international flying perfectly safe (at least safe from terrorists masquerading as passengers), it is in fact very simple and quite cheap: * No carry-on or check-in luggage at all (all kinds of chemical, bacteriological or radioactive materials could be hidden there, for example it can be trivial to make a laptop burn up in flames mid-flight and make in in non-detectable way). * No personal items of clothes (clothes can be soaked in certain chemicals to make them explosive). * Secure passengers during the flight ( so that they can not actually do any terrorist activity). So, the optimal way of securing air transportation would be to have people come in without any luggage at all, remove all items and clothing at check-in, dress in uniform one-time paper clothing where one can not hide anything, sedate them, feed them trough introspective inspection to detect in-body foreign objects and check the chemistry of skin and hair, pack them into the airplane on secured padded shelves, fly them to the destination, reverse the sedative and give them a standard set of clothes and essential personal items. In addition to perfect security, this plan will also reduce the overall cost of air travel by allowing to pack more people into an airplane of the same size - the padded shelves can go from the bottom of the airplane to the very top with minimal spacing (all passengers are sedated - they will not walk around), no separate cargo hold will be needed (no luggage) and no in-flight entertainment or food will be required. If the current security craze continues, we might reach this perfection by 2020. Congratulations! Note: All software by that time will be Web-based, so there will be no sense in taking your “personal” laptop with you.

A while ago, I blogged about going to Ghana, to spread Free Software. By now, I'm here in Tema, at the coast near Accra, and school has started. My actual work has still to get going, but I know I will hold a Club where I hope to assemble all the possible future Hacker here at the school, to introduce them to the world of Free Software, of wikis and collobarative work and to the Blogosphere. Or something like that, depends on what they want. I have put up signs to advertise the club, if you want, you can have a look at the slogans.For the school infrastructure itself, I have created a list of possible applications of Free Software Comments are welcome!PS: The "Obroni" in "Obroni Computer Club" is what the kids in the street call me. It actually just means "White Man"...

I can't believe it's the end of wp:Thermidor already. The summer's going so fast; Fructidor is the last month of the year in the French Revolutionary Calendar, and then it's the fall equinox and things change. Speaking of the fall equinox, the Br leurs de Montr al Burners, the local Burning Man regional organization in Montreal, is planning a decompression regional burn campout event for the weekend of 22-24 September 2006. Folks interested in Burning Man and near Montreal are encouraged (by me) to participate on the Br leurs wiki or join the bruleurs mailing list. And, yes, the event starts on La F te de la R volution on the Republican calendar. Neat. tags: montreal burning man bruleurs wiki fructidor

And you smell like one too As has been mentioned in many other places, yesterday, 16 Aug, was the 13th anniversary of the launch of Debian. It's definitely something to celebrate -- the project continues to be a huge success and a bulwark of Free Software. Robin Millette and the Atelier du Libre will be hosting a Debian birthday party here in Montreal on Saturday the 19th at 8655 rue St Denis, at the Cr mazie metro stop. The event is from 1:30PM to 5:30PM and is open to all. More info at http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/2006/08/17/party/ . tags: debian montreal robin millette birthday party atelier du libre

Tons of videos on YouTube use background music. Usually its some well-known song, in full length. So the authors are violating the song artists copyright, aren't they? I wonder when RIAA will target youtube users because of the background music used in their videos. For example the Israel attacks, Lebanon burns pathetic "video". Isn't that U2 in the background and thus most likely a copyright violation (apart from all the photos which most likely are just copied off some web site). And there a tons of examples. I bet you'll find people dancing to all kind of copyrighted music on YouTube...

try Today was a quite exciting day, first of all I had to stand up early in the morning, fortunately i reached the train on time. At 7.30 the school began and we had 3 lessons “ABU”, this was the most interesting part because later we had 2 hours of english. I mean, I don’t speak really good english yet, but I would like to learn it better, and the only thing we learned today was that “must not” doesnt mean “not have to” as most native german speakers would think. But yeah, I already learned it in the second month in the 8. schoolyear which is now nearly 3 years ago. The afternoon was also a little bit a horror, first we had programming, the topic was “Exceptionhandling in Java”. I think it’s a quite interesting subject, but the teacher was so boring, I mean, the examples didn’t “fix” a problem during runtime, they only printed out “there was an error!” or whatever useless. Then we had theory about servers and a little bit networking, I mean, most IT-students administrate some servers in their office and we learned today “A server provides a service in a network”, very interesting! Yes, so I will better forget this day! catch(ExceptionMarioDemotivated md) There are also reasons to celebrate! Today are 2 birthdays which are quite important to me. First Kerim, one of my best friends, became 17 and has now only to wait one year anymore until he’s “adult” here in Switzerland, ok, “to be adult” is relative anyway. Kerim, I wish you a lot of luck and love and whatever for your future! Stay as you are and I’m already glad to go to Zurich with you again (I’ll pay the next Frappu) The other important birthday belongs to the Debian project which is now 13 years young. Thanks to the whole community. For example I’m writing now this blog (and serve it) with Debian, so it’s time to say all “members” THANK YOU to make it possible! I’m thinking again about the future, what will be actual in 13 years in the IT? Will we win “the war” against software patents and all the other problems? At least our success with the ODF is motivating for the next 13 years! Ok, I’m quite busy now with baking some Debian-bread, I will offer a little brunch tomorrow in the office. Details, pictures and recipe will follow tomorrow.

Debian turns 13 today, congratulations to the whole Debian universum and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this longterm success story. Birthdays are always some sort of breakpoints in life, where people making a pause, looking back what they have done in the last year and what they are planning to do in the next year, similar as on New Years' Days. In the past years, I have not done much for Debian except some simple package maintenance. Here are some statistics as of today. debian.org

• First sponsored package
  On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 03:16:50 -0400, Rene 'rene' Engelhard sponsored doodle.
  
  
• Last sponsored package
  On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:47:49 -0700, Christoph 'myon' Berg sponsored dcd.
  
  
• Sponsored package uploads
  I managed to find sponsors for 322 uploads (151 in 2006, 142 in 2005, 29 in 2004). These were only uploads for my own packages as I did not do any NMU or QA upload while being non developer.
  
  
• First own upload
  On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 07:17:06 -0700, I uploaded gnunet.
  
  
• Own package uploads
  I managed to make 138 uploads for my own packages, 4 QA uploads and 45 to sponsor other peoples packages, that makes 187 in total.
  
  
• Package count
  I maintain here and here 105 (100 main, 2 contrib, 3 non-free) and co-maintain 9 (9 main) source packages. They are producing 308 (303 main, 2 contrib, 3 non-free) and 14 (14 main) binary packages. That makes a total of 114 source packages producing 322 binary packages.
  
  All packages are still maintained by me since my first upload, except one which I orphaned (drsync) and one which was an accidentally hijacked ITA (linuxlogo). Both are not counted above.
  
  

backports.org

• First upload
  On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:08 +0100, I uploaded libextractor.
  
  
• Package uploads
  I managed to make 155 uploads for backports of my own packages, 125 uploads for backports of other packages, and 142 to sponsor other peoples backports, that makes 422 in total.
  
  

And now to the future... I don't think that I will change the way how I give a little bit back to Debian in compensation for how much I am taking from it. There is always need for people doing higher level tasks, such as various teams in Debian already do. However, people doing the grunt work of simple packaging are also needed, and that is where I'm happy with (remember: never change a running system :). I have still some packages to introduce on my todo list... Nevertheless, I'm interrested in doing QA work (such as with piuparts), and maybe, if I have the time to further advance my Esperanto, I'm even able to help out with translations. But both things will, as far as I think at the moment, be of less priority to me. For my work at Debian Live and Debian Unofficial, there will be a dedicated report soon.

Debian turns 13 today, congratulations to the whole Debian universum and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this longterm success story. Birthdays are always some sort of breakpoints in life, where people making a pause, looking back what they have done in the last year and what they are planning to do in the next year, similar as on New Years' Days. In the past years, I have not done much for Debian except some simple package maintenance. Here are some statistics as of today. debian.org

• First sponsored package
  On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 03:16:50 -0400, Rene 'rene' Engelhard sponsored doodle.
  
  
• Last sponsored package
  On Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:47:49 -0700, Christoph 'myon' Berg sponsored dcd.
  
  
• Sponsored package uploads
  I managed to find sponsors for 322 uploads (151 in 2006, 142 in 2005, 29 in 2004). These were only uploads for my own packages as I did not do any NMU or QA upload while being non developer.
  
  
• First own upload
  On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 07:17:06 -0700, I uploaded gnunet.
  
  
• Own package uploads
  I managed to make 137 uploads for my own packages, 4 QA uploads and 44 to sponsor other peoples packages, that makes 185 in total.
  
  
• Package count
  I maintain here and here 105 (100 main, 2 contrib, 3 non-free) and co-maintain 9 (9 main) source packages. They are producing 308 (303 main, 2 contrib, 3 non-free) and 14 (14 main) binary packages. That makes a total of 114 source packages producing 322 binary packages.
  
  All packages are still maintained by me since my first upload, except one which I orphaned (drsync) and one which was an accidentally hijacked ITA (linuxlogo). Both are not counted above.
  
  

backports.org

• First upload
  On Sun, 18 Dec 2005 17:08 +0100, I uploaded libextractor.
  
  
• Package uploads
  I managed to make 155 uploads for backports of my own packages, 125 uploads for backports of other packages, and 140 to sponsor other peoples backports, that makes 420 in total.
  
  

And now to the future... I don't think that I will change my way how I give a little bit back to Debian in compensation for how much I am taking from it. There is always need for people doing higher level tasks, such as various teams in Debian already do. However, people doing the grunt work of simple packaging are also needed, and that is where I'm happy with (remember: never change a running system :). I have still some packages to introduce on my todo list... Nevertheless, I'm interrested in doing QA work (such as with piuparts), and maybe, if I have the time to further advance my Esperanto, I'm even able to help out with translations. But both things will, as far as I think at the moment, be of less priority to me. For my work at Debian Live and Debian Unofficial, there will be a dedicated report soon.

The release of Etch, the next full release of Debian, will be delayed by a year. Sources close to the release managers revealed the change in the release plan to the D-Inq. before it is announced publically. The source, who calls himself (or is it herself? we're not telling) with the covert nickname "twin", told the D-Inq: "I'm, like, close to the are ems, y'know. I, like, live in Europe and listen to ABBA. Andreas calls himself ABBA on IRC, see." The reason for the delay: the co-incidental occurence of two mystical omens. First, this year is Debian's thirteenth year, and thirteen is always a bad omen. Says twin: "It's, like, bad luck and all." Second, the number of release critical bugs is now 666. "That's, like, the number of yeast, or something", reveals our source. Apparantely the release managers could have dealt with either omen alone, but not with both of them at the same time. Once again, D-Inq. has the scoop! And we verify the reliablity of our sources!

A new RQuantLib package 0.2.4 was uploaded to R's master CRAN host and Debian. The principal changes are a small ajustments to work with the new QuantLib release 0.3.13, and the addition of some first unit tests. As of right now, this version will not build in Debian testing due to problems with g++-4.1 (see #383251). It works on unstable, and should work with either a slighly older g++-4.1 or g++-4.0. However, as CRAN runs Debian, it may not be until a fixed g++ hits testing that this package will hit the CRAN mirrors. There's always my page as a fallback.

13 years...

[Debian]

Happy Birthday!!! I was waiting a little bit, in other parts of the world Debian is already celebrating, now people from Brazil (and also UTC-0300) can join the party! Last Saturday our Debian User Group celebrate the Debian Anniversary with a big barbecue, sports and good conversations during the entire afternoon! Next Saturday (19.August) different Debian User Groups in Brazil will coordinate the Debian Day in different cities at the same time. Have fun! 13 years of Debian and counting! :-)

In a quick note, I'm still moving ahead with my NM. I have to fix a few points on my packages (and I'm still waiting my sponsor -- Hi Otavio! -- to upload a couple of packages). And I have a few more to work on, I hope I find the time in the next days.

[Random Stuff]

At Monday (14.August) night (20h 00min UTC-0300) I visit (pt_BR) a very small city in the state I live in Brazil. They invited me to speak about Debian and Free Software for a group of students and also for locals. It was a nice talk and one of the things that got my attention is the number of women interested, of course, I told them to visit the Debian Women Project (which reminds me that I need to translate the site -- and lots of other files). Back to the work!

An updated java-package will hit unstable in the next mirror pulse. Apologies to all for the delay; my discretionary time and that of my sponsors has been rather sparse for some time now. There are at least 9 bug reports addressed in the release. All users who have a JRE or JDK packaged by a previous version of java-package are encouraged to first remove their existing packages and then install an updated one generated by 0.28. Again, sorry for my low level of productivity for Debian, but paying my bills and being a new dad has been quite taxing (albeit rewarding) the past nine months.

I spent most of the day today putting polishing touches on the OpenID MediaWiki extension I took to Wikimania a couple of weeks ago. It was fun to work on, but spending a lot of time with Jonathan Daugherty of Janrain Inc., David Recordon of Verisign and David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios let me know that there was still a lot of work to do. Needless to say, helping kate of Wikia and Travis of wikiHow step through the installation and testing also was a humbling experience. "No... don't do that... Ouch... No, I didn't think of that... Uh, I'll definitely get to that later..." Probably the most painful moment was having about 4 people all at once exclaim in horror that I was storing searchable data inside a blob in the database. "Uh, see, it was just easier that way..." Harsh stares for Evan, you can believe. So today I've been sanding a few of the rough edges and doing some optimization (indexed columns -- what a concept!) and otherwise fudging with the code to make it work better. Jonathan had done some quick hacks at the conference, and I've been adding in his patches as well. tags: mediawiki wikimania openid extension

Tha Grill Maj, Amita June and I went out to dinner at the Tha Grill on rue Laurier and St. Laurent this evening. We had some anniversaries to celebrate, so it seemed like a good day to go out for dinner at a new restaurant. The Grill is at the portal between Montreal's Plateau Mont Royal hipster neighborhood and foodier-but-also-hipster Mile End. It's got huge, open windows on St. Laurent and we got to sit right off the sidewalk, perfect people-watching spot. The room is big and airy with pleasant wood details and lots of Thai statuary -- all in natural wood tones. It's a very nice room. The food was great, too. We got crab claws in curry sauce, and a green curry, with papaya salad and fried squid as appetizers. It was all done very nicely. Most pleasant was the proprietor coming to our table with small, heart-shaped slices of melon d'eau (watermelon) for Amita June. Les enfants sont sacr s en Tha land, he gave as explanation: that is, children are sacred in Thailand. Ah, if that were only the case everywhere. It's hard to see summer slipping away in Montreal -- especially since we're off to Wikisym this weekend, and by the time we come back it will be a few days into September. Such a good place to be when the sun is warm, really. tags: montreal thai grill restaurant

Uh, yeah. So I "lost" a whole day due to two "signals" missing in the ruby-gtk2 wrapper. Both GtkTreeDragSource's "row-draggable" and GtkTreeDragDest's "row-drop-possible" are implemented as virtual functions, instead of plain signals. This means that a new gobject class needs to be created to properly use those callbacks. Well, Armin Burgmeier and I had a nice long Gobby session (completely over IPv6 by the way, welcome to the bleeding-edge of technology, where no port forwards are required) about this problem. Him being the main developer of Gobby, he knows much about Gtk, so finally we came up with this patch, which adds both functions as signals to the Ruby-Gtk API. It's sad that my program will require a patch to the GUI wrappers in order to run correctly, but this is, as far as I see, the only way to get proper drag'n'drop in Ruby.

Today was a strange christian day here in Kanton Solothurn and I didn’t have to work, so I had a lot of time to prepare my presentation for next Friday about OpenLDAP. First of all I prepared the stuff for the school which begins tomorrow, so my holidays are now definitely past . I was excited that I didn’t receive my timetable by snailmail so I had to google and found it finally. Poorwise i have now to stand up very early in the morning, my train goes at 07.07 in the morning. Now to OpenLDAP, fortunately Mathias Weyland, the president from the LUGS, gave me a book about OpenLDAP from O’reilly, I really like it: It’s quite informative and sometimes the author is making some jokes. Priska Rubischon already bothered that i have to tell something about netgroups and autofs, this was completely new because I newer worked with NIS (and netgroups etc.) and neither with autofs (in most cases I use samba and libpam-mount). It’s not so difficult as i thaught. OpenLDAP in Debian comes with nice schemas which help to migrate from NIS to LDAP, so I had a look at those schemes and the chapter about netgroups in the book. Also autofs is not complicated, for example, if you want to share /home to the clients you have to prepare a NFS-Server which shares this directory and configure /etc/auto.master and /etc/auto.home on the clients. These two files can lookup where and how it can mount /home. On my testing-infrastructure I just used netgroups for the NFS-exports, so I have now an example what they’re for. After all I realized that my speech will also be about “How do I plan a network in a company”, so I realized that the security of LDAP is also very important. Fortunately OpenLDAP can be secured quite hard, it supports SASL and KERBEROS_V4 authentication mechanisms! When I would realize now a network i would do the following:

• Most parts of the directory readable anonymously
• Use SSL for LDAP
• The password writable by “self” (the “dn” can write the password itself when authenticated as it)
• Create an NFS Share, writable by some netgroups

I still ask me how i can protect my netgroups so that nobody can plug computer “x” out and plug in his computer, take the IP of “x” and mount the NFS-shares. Kerberos as user authentication would be a solution, but I don’t really like it. As I already told I prefer libpam-mount, with it’s help it would be possible that every user gets his share mounted maybe over smb. Now I will search for a solution how i can properly secure NFS, so it does only allow connections from users@boxes authenticated with LDAP and not user@host-which-can-be-faked. If you have an idea feel free to write it down here in my blog! In the evening I went to “Biel” by train to join the LUG-Seeland meeting. Beat Fasel explained me a lot about genetical biology, his work and the evolution, this was very interesting. Later we talked about the future of our community, I will prepare bylaws for the next meeting which we will sign. Other ideas were about preparing an install event and a mailinglist because we don’t have communication over the internet and this is quite complicated if we want to organise something in teamwork.

I hate debugging. I strongly prefer writing code that works to finding problems in code later. Because I hate it, I've never been good at it. I've never spent the effort to figure out a good, systematic way to find a bug. Instead, I've developed ways of avoiding them. In the long run, this isn't the smartest strategy: every now and then a bug slips through, and then I'm screwed. Worse, sometimes I need to debug other people's code. David J. Agans's book Debugging is a gem. It crystallizes an approach to debugging that feels very good to me. In summary:

• Understand the system
• Make it fail
• Quit thinking and look
• Divide and conquer
• Change one thing at a time
• Keep an audit trail
• Check theplug
• Get a fresh view
• If you didn't fix it, it ain't fixed

None of these should come as a surprise to anyone experienced in programming, of course, but I've never seen them presented together, or so well. Agans's genius is not that he's come up with a new debugging method, but in presenting the obvious aspects of the debugging process in a clear, logical manner. Also, he has funny war stories. The book is written in a fairly chatty manner, with many jokes. The style, or the jokes, don't get in the way, and they may help remember particular points better. It's a fairly short book, at about 170 pages. I like that: I dislike the modern tendency of making computer books so thick and heavy that future civilizations will assume we used them for bricks. It's only been a few days since I read the book. It's already made me a better programmer. Highly recommended.