Just a few moments ago, I was trying to commit a minor fix to the NBD subversion repository. However, suddenly the server refused my commit; the password which I knew to be right wasn't working. So I loaded SourceForge.net in my browser and went to the admin link there to find out whether I had perhaps fucked up my own commit rights. I've been known to do that before. Doing so of course required me to log in. Which revealed the problem that was causing this in the first place: apparently my password had expired. I had been using the very same password since ages, but for some reason unknown to me, sourceforge has now decided that they want to introduce password expiry. Of course, good password management is very important if you want to avoid issues with people stealing your passwords. For that reason, I usually generate my passwords with pwgen -s 15, which generates passwords that are impossible to guess—one example of an actual password that I have used in the past (but that I do not have in use in any other system anymore today) is qChjZeWIbSDGON/. The hard part is, probably, to memorize that; for that, I have a pretty simple method: I enter 'gpg -o ~/foo' and enter my new password. Then I pick out some random .jpg file somewhere on my hard disk, and concatenate the gpg data to that file. It is usually still possible to view the file in a viewer with that extra data added to it; IME, most image viewers have the ability to view all data in a corrupt JPG-encoded image that occurs before the corruption—which in this case, will be all of the image. As such, if you don't know which file it is, and you don't know my GPG password, chances are low that you'll find it and steal my login data. Additionally, of course the .jpg file is either removed or restored to its original state when I memorized the password, and finally I also update my GPG key and the password of the system that contained the file with the encrypted password to be using the same new password, so chances of stomeone stealing it get even lower. However, even with this method, it still takes me a few days or weeks to memorize it. Also, synchronizing the new password to all the systems and websites on which I have an account takes a while. For that reason, I prefer not to do it too often. With that in light, it is slightly problematic to have an account on a system that has a password expiration policy in force, because a) this makes it impossible for me to use the highly secure passwords that I use "everywhere else" on these expiration-using systems, b) because the average expiration policy is 2 months, making it impractical for me to generate secure passwords for these sites as well (by the time I memorized the new password, we're already at least halfway through the two months if I need to use that password fairly regularly—or it might even be too short if I don't use the password regularly. The result of the above is that password expiration policies, in my case, force me to use less secure passwords of which I'm sure I can remember them—old passwords which I used before I had a GPG key or had learned about pwgen. I still use those on websites that require me to enter a password but which I do not trust to handle my passwords in a secure manner; I don't want to give these sites the password to unlock my gpg key, for example. The problem with these passwords is that they are easy to guess; they're usually not some unintelligible bit of random letters, but are six to eight characters that actually have a meaning. In fairness, I did have one of those old and insecure passwords in use at sourceforge, because I indeed didn't trust them with my secure passwords. If they base their password expiration policy on the strength of the password, then this whole blog post should be ignored. But in general, it is my point that password expiration policies do not improve security at all. It forces people to use passwords that they can quickly memorize (otherwise they're trying to memorize all the time), and it does not give people who usually pick easy to guess passwords any incentive to pick better, harder to guess passwords. On the contrary, in fact. Password expiration policies suck.

First, a random amusing pattern: If you follow my family tree up, once you get back to the 1800s, you'll see several generations in a row in which people alternated names between B. H. Friesen and H. B. Friesen. The pattern finally broke when D. B. Friesen was born in 1891. This was back in the day when people were often called by their initials. (The initials stood for Heinrich Bernhard, by the way.)

Now then...

Frequent readers of this blog know that Terah and I purchased the place my grandparents owned (where my dad grew up).

The part I haven't mentioned is that my parents did the same thing -- my great grandparents owned the farm that my parents bought after they got married. My dad's mother grew up there.

My parents had an old farmhouse on their property, too. They opted to build a new house -- the old house made a nice home for rats, but not such a great home for people by that time. But that doesn't mean that the old house got torn down.

Nope, they had it moved to a museum, where a group of volunteers restored it.

Terah and I went to visit the 1911 Friesen House at the Mennonite Heritage Museum in Goessel a couple of weeks ago to get some decorating ideas for the house we're renovating. I'm going to get some more photos this weekend -- it's THRESHING DAYS again at the museum! Cliff, there's still time to drive down to Kansas! (Here's a partial schedule)

Terah liked the idea of buying the farm. But I don't think she'll go for restarting the other family tradition.... (well, I wouldn't, either, but it is funny...)

So I will end this post with a small collection of photos from Threshing Days 2004 (click the link).

Here's the usual sample:

If you work on open source projects and hang out on irc changes are you are familiar with CIA. CIA provides a convenient way to stay in touch with what is happening in a source code repository by reporting on all activity real time. Of course there is much more to a project than just source code changes: issue tracking is just at least as important, if not more. So wouldn't it be nice if CIA can report on activity there as well? If you are using trac now you can, with this patch: trac-cia.diff This adds a couple of new option to your trac.ini file which confifure the trac-CIA interface:

[notification]
send_to_cia = true
cia_project = YourCiaProjectName
cia_server = http://cia.navi.cx

This patch tells trac to report all newly opened tickets to CIA, which will show up like this:

<CIA-13> wichert * r #5725 Issue tracker/: [Infrastructure] trac/cia
	 testing ticket

Many in the geek community know about and follow closely the politics of patents. So this site, Big Patents will surely be of interest to many, especially those who really need to know all about a patent and its history. update:reading these patents can also provide hours of odd and confusing pleasure
From the site:

BigPatents contains a novel patent data set with features found nowhere else. You’re free to browse through the data and use our search to easily find patents. If you choose to become a premium member, you will have access to the complete, real-time family tree for a patent or application, including all continuations and divisionals. Our Premium Info page has more information about premium accounts. Premium users can also track changes to any patent family tree. Once you begin tracking a tree, you will be notified of new transactions for any of the applications in the tree, when any new applications are added to the tree, and when the status of any of the members of the tree changes

Writing blog entries in South Africa did not come so easily, mainly for technological reasons. While for the first 4 days of my trip I had steady Internet access, most of my time was spent enjoying the Law and Society Summer Institute. Once over, I headed from Joburg to Durban and my access became much spottier, not to mention that Bernard, my indefatigable host, made sure the days were filled seeing the gritty but beautiful urban beach town, hanging with the crew of University of Chicago students/graduates that descended upon the city, and having a go at sufring in the Indian Ocean. In the evenings, I did have some free time, but they were too chilly for me to do much of anything but burrow myself deep under a small mountain of covers and pass out after a day filled with plenty to do and see. The theme of the conference I attended was the intersection of rights and regulations and given the Summer Institute was held in South Africa, it was not all that surprising that much of the conversation centered on one class of rights, those of human rights. Since the end of apartheid, SA has become a particularly-impossible-to-ignore beacon for human rights, and acts as a sort of modern guiding light that has defined the meaning and institutionalization of human rights post-WWII. So if WWII and the Holocaust represent the generative genesis of human rights, South Africa represents a new era of human rights, a place that revisited, rejuvenated the discourse and implementation in a post-Apartheid Constitution that has been touted, world-wide, as exemplary for its generous commitment to equality and other rights. In this respect, one feels, quite everywhere, the collective pride of a nation who managed to end a brutal regime and it did so under the gaze of world who followed the drama on TV screens, college campuses, and newspaper headlines. As SA has moved to another era of picking up pieces and trying to build a more equitable society, many in the world are still eagerly watching. But pride does not stand alone, in isolation, for it mixes with other collective sentiments. The collective admiration and pride of a nation, like the sweet water of a river, visibly and freely mixes with a more salty frustration and anxiety to produce an in-between brackish state of affairs. Pride in other words sits alongside social anxiety, which palpably manifests at different registers and tones, to texture the cultural and political landscapes of SA. The frustration follows from the fact that many are still living in dire poverty and in the last ten years, many steady jobs have vanished. Shantytowns, the symbols and material conditions of apartheid, are still omnipresent (though very well hidden from the middle class and the rich). The ruling government, while having roots in communism and socialism, has to contend with a world-wide regime of neoliberal governance and, thus, must try to balance satisfying commitments with the outside world with delivering promised goods to its population, demands that often run uncomfortably counter to the neoliberal logic of deregulation and financial austerity. Alongside this or perhaps as a manifestation of it, the talk of the town, especially in Johannesburg, is of the rampant crime. As a sign of crime and fear, most middle-class and wealthy houses are adorned with metal fences, barbed wires, electric fences, and a simple sign from private security companies (Chubb being the most common in Johannesburg) that announce they provide armed response security to break-ins. This is serious stuff. And while some of the fear of crime is a self-perpetuation exaggeration of itself (and as my friends explained, before the end of Apartheid the monitoring of crime was not as common, so crime statistic can only go one direction, up), it has in certain parts of cities spiraled out of control. And if there comes a time when the crime abates, the architecture of barbed wire and security services is now really an architecture-in-place and will be hard to dislodge from the mental and physical spaces of SA. So more than anything else, I found that the vibe of SA seesaws between pride and anxiety. As a visitor, you are enveloped in this dyanmic duality. You can’t help share in the pride now enshrined in national monuments and museums. But at the same time, you also are not sure what path the nation is heading in and you too share in the fear of crime and move your body and belongings cautiously through the cities. There is no doubt of the governmental commitment to provide services like health care and housing, a commitment that in places like the United States seems to exist more like an endangered species on the brink of perpetual extinction. And so it was awfully refreshing to be in a place where talk of such things is not seen with a suspicious eye that in the US is often tagged as something that runs counter to the realization of freedom and a just society. But whether these important goals can be brought into the plane of existence is another question, one that is not unique to SA but is something that many other countries, especially Latin American countries, from Venezuela to Bolivia are also asking and trying to answer. Bernard and others reminded me that South Africa is number 4 in terms of producing new millionaires, which is quite a remarkable statistic given how many nations there are in the world. But despite the poverty of the place, this wealth is evident and there was one place in particular that symbolized this: Melorse Arch. Located in Johannesburg, this is a lifestyle compound/gated community that mixes posh residential condos with posh restaurants and bars. To tell you the truth, I have never seen anything like this and it was probably been the most extraordinary thing I saw in South Africa. The United States and Puerto Rico (where I am from) and undoubtedly many parts of the world are no strangers to gated communities. But Melrose Arch took the implementation of them to a whole new, somewhat disturbing, level, in part because the domestic sphere of expensive housing co-mingles so intimately with sites of accentuated consumption, reminding visitors that the point of life, (hence the name lifestyle) is to make money so as to consume, and to do so lavishly. And what brought this really home was that the South African Bond Market was also located here in Melrose Arch. In fact we could see the building clearly from our restaurant, which proudly displayed a large Elephant statute (which, I think, harkens to the large bull in Wall Street NYC). I guess if you are a bond trader, and dislike commuting, and like good places to eat, well this is the place for you as you don’t ever have to leave your complex. Work and play become seamless and thus this place is perhaps one of the most powerful signs that the point of work is to play, is to consume, so that a perfect cycle is reached in which making money is a path for self-pleasure (or at least nuclear-family self-pleasure), a form of life, that does not have to engage with the rest of society, literally. Of course, there are many layers of production that do exist and make a place like Melrose Arch possible yet are well hidden from the visitors and residents of the compound. But Melrose Arch is not fully gated. It is open to outsiders so they can enjoy the fine dining, and if you sit in one of the many outdoor tables, one can fully take in the glittering performance of this social cycle, and for some, undoubtedly it is a measure for and of the good life, the right life, that to which others will aspire. What I find interesting about the place is that it captures, with unmistakable clarity and precision, the point of much of neoliberal economy, especially the love for finance (in which money seemingly is made out of nothing), a robust service economy (the service in the restaurant was unlike anything I have seen, with people bring you ceramic jugs of water to wash your hands, live entertainment, outdoor fires, and blankets, henna painters etc), and consumptive pleasure. To drive home the point, in Melrose Arch, there is not even a supermarket; lest there be any mistake, this place was constructed as a place of consumption, through and through. There were many other posh areas in South Africa, and as I mentioned earlier, the impoverished areas were kept a distance from middle class neighborhoods, so much so, that in some areas, like Cape Town, you really had to go out of your way to see them (again this is very different from many parts of Latin America where, in an instant, poor neighborhoods switch to wealthy). On the other hand, quite visible were things like malls and there were a lot of them. Apparently South Africa has been a testing ground for the modern mall. To get to the malls, there are very good roads to travel (much better than most of Latin America) and other basic services like tap water, and infrastructure like airports and phones, are in excellent condition. So it was somewhat surprising and frustrating that Internet services outside of business are somewhat scant, expensive, and slow. Sure Internet services are the best in Africa and you can get Cable, ADSL etc. at home but you have to pay a pretty Rand for it and on top of it, the access is pretty slow. Now, there are many parts of the world where this is the case (though apparently in a study that compared 12 countries at a similar lever of development to SA, Internet access was 10 times more expensive in SA than the most expensive country which was Chile), but for me, it was the juxtaposition of having such solid infrastructure and wealth mixed with lackluster Internet access that made it somewhat odd. And it also made me realize how much the Internet and access to it had not only saturated my life, but how I have come to see it as a something creeping close (though not the same) as a basic right. Of course, security and self-determination, food, shelter, and health services are for me are the basic architecture of human rights. Without these, existence in the most basic sense becomes difficult. Access to the Internet, though in no way is indispensable to the basic conditions of living, can at least greatly facilitate the type of political work and organizing needed to demand other basic human rights. In this sense, it is more like an extension of or at least serious complement to basic services like clean water, and it seems like once there has been an investment in securing fiber optic (which I am sure is pricey), the cost of maintenance compared to physical infrastructures is so much smaller that it is really worth the initial costs. This bring up some difficult questions and vexing specters related to many of the human rights (in the Universal declaration), which are I think not so much so how to define them in a general sense (I think this has been laid out somewhat well) but how to specify them so as to realistically implement them . On the one hand, the flexibility and vagueness of human rights is what gives it tremendous currency. Folks around the world have wielded the discourse of human rights to make demands that resound strongly and profoundly. But once a proclamation of a human right has been made, like article 25:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control..

it seems like the real hard work is about specifying and implementation. We may easily agree that an adequate standard of living may not be Melrose Arch but it still does need definition and a plan for implementation. And so there seems to be plenty of room in human rights politics to move from the state of declaration to that of strategies of implementation.

Long day at Wikimania Hacking Days. Phillip Hallam-Baker gave a good talk about the importance of identity in the wiki community. David Recordon talked about OpenID, and I got to demo the OpenID MediaWiki extension. That was all pretty fun. But the hard part has been discussing WYSIWYG editor stuff. We're in a real bind with MediaWiki -- a complicated and almost non-deterministic text markup language with one (1) complete implementation and an estimated 5 million documents in various places on the Web. The challenge is to keep storage in Wikitext but editing in-browser with HTML. The marshalling between the two formats is so tricky to do, and the consequences in damaging documents so large, that it's almost impossible to make the project work. Meanwhile, wiki companies like JotSpot, WetPaint, and SocialText have WYSIWYG editors, and it's starting to look like MW will never have it. It's probably time to just bite down and do this job. Federico Caldeira Knabben of FCKeditor has come to Boston to offer his help. The guys from Wikia are working on using WikiWyg, which would be pretty cool, too. I just think it has to happen. tags: hacking days wikimania identity openid wysiwyg fckeditor

The councillor for Infrastructure and Technological Development, Luis Mill n V zquez de Miguel, announced that within one year all the computers of the Junta of Extremadura (government of the autonomous region of Extremadura, Spain) will run Free Software office tools and gnuLinEx, the local flavour of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, as mandatory operating system. It will be gradually introduced to all administrative organisations of the Junta of Extremadura. From now on, all workers of the public administration will also use Open Document Formats (ISO/IEC DIS 26300) for their office applications as well as PDF/A (Portable Document Format, ISO 19005-1:2005) for document exchange, when guaranteed unalterable visualisation is required. V zquez de Miguel explained that at the end of the period all additional software must be distributed under a free license. "This is an important initiative that the Junta of Extremadura has been working on for a long time, accumulating experience and analysing the impact on our organisation so as to guarantee its success", the councillor declared. According to V zquez de Miguel, Free Software also improves security, autonomy and rationalises public spending. Using Open Document Formats will guarantee the conservation of all the administrative documents for longer periods of time. It will also improve the relationship with the general public since it's not obliged to acquire proprietary software to access official documents. About Extremadura Extremadura is an autonomous region in the West of Spain, with a population of about 1 million. It is well known due to its innovative efforts to bring the information society to all citizens, recognised with distinctions such as the 2004 European prize for regional innovation, granted by the European Commission. About gnuLinEx gnuLinEx is based on Debian GNU/Linux 3.1, with GNOME as the default desktop. In 2004, it was already deployed in all public schools in Extremadura, and was in use in other environments, such as community centres. gnuLinEx closely follows the development of Debian, with a special focus on translation into Spanish, and easy of use and maintenance. About Debian Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system, developed by more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world who collaborate via the Internet. Debian's dedication to Free Software, its non-profit nature, and its open development model make it unique among GNU/Linux distributions. The Debian project's key strengths are its volunteer base, its dedication to the Debian Social Contract, and its commitment to provide the best operating system possible.

Let's say you're just getting started using ikiwiki as your blog, switching from something else and converting the data over from it, as more and more people seem to be. Which is great, but you don't want to flood your aggregator. You probably set up the blog with a line like this on a page named "blog" of your wiki:

[[inline pages="blog/*" show=30]]

Problem is all the links and guids and other less than stellar things that rss agregators use to prevent dups and flooding have changed and now all 30 pages are going to flood aggregators. As of version 1.16, ikiwiki has a nice new feature that can help deal with this:

[[inline pages="blog/* and created_after(blog)" show=30]]

Now only pages created after the blog page itself will show up on it, while all the old ones will still be available as archives. If you flooded your aggregator before this, I suppose you're forgiven. Though it was even possible to avoid flooding before this feature, with some difficulty. :-)

Today I

• Asked the Apache2 package team to see if they’d mind my performing a NMU. Will wait and see what they say.
• Booked a holiday in York for my girl and I.
• Looked at more bugs.
• Made the first tarball release of xen-shell
  • Is this worth a package? I could make one and share it locally, not sure that it is generally useful…

... I have backported security fixes recently announced by mozilla for firefox and thunderbird to the old branch – which we have in debian stable. You can grab the patchset I produced from http://people.debian.org/~asac/patchset_109b.tar.gz. In it you find patches that fix:

• all security flaws whose security advisories had been announced together with firefox/thunderbird 1.5.0.5 – if applicable
• a tricky issue that had not been fixed in the last debian stable-security update for mozilla, mozilla-firefox and mozilla-thunderbird (aka mfsa2006-32, Part 2/7).
• two regressions introduced in our last stable-security update that broke some extensions.

Good news is that a bunch of critical flaws have been identified to not affect debian stable, namely: Another good news is that MFSA2006-45 – which was recently /.ed with a working exploit – is in that list too. So debian stable users are not affected by that issue. In order to get feedback and testing I am now preparing packages. Testing this is critical, because upstream has abandoned 1.0.x development. So please help to test and report regressions … otherwise those might go unseen and finally slip through to our users. I will announce new packages available for testing on my site and on the pkg-mozilla-maintainers mailing-list. Thanks for your support!

Yesterday, I uploaded libcommons-collection3-java to add the testframework jar (bug#268223). I investigate the security alert for tomcat5 (CVE2006-3835) as mentioned by Alec Berryman in bug#380361. Alec also filed this bug for tomcat5.5 but I was not able to reproduce the attack with the releases of tomcat in Debian. I filed a removal bug for libgnujaxp-java (bug#381014) which is in GNU-Classpath for a long time now. I uploaded a new upstream of libapache(2)-mod-jk (bug#338158). Today, I uploaded libmsv-xsdlib-java (the package was prepared by Eric Lavarde, but it was refused by ftpmasters because of the license) to non-free and solved the FTBFS of libjaxp1.3-java reported by Andreas Jochens (bug#379530). Except the security alert I closed because I think they were not affected releases of tomcat in Debian, I did not investigate more bugs of tomcat. But I’ll need it for my day-time and extra jobs so I hope I’ll be working on it after augustus 15. Update: I’m trying to fix argouml in Debian and that’s a huge job (well, the whole afternoon!)!

1. Update libtoolbar-java (new upstream + comment issue#6);
2. Update libswidgets-java (new upstream + comment issue#1);
3. Downgrade libgef-java to match ArgoUML development;
4. Update ArgoUML from 0.19.6 to 0.22.beta3 (new upstream + open issue#4391 and issue#4392). The main developer of ArgoUML said in the mailing list that this release will not be that much different to the final release and the new upstream upload (plus some corrections in the package) will permit to close some bugs: bug#342200, bug#217878, bug#335294, bug#353464, bug#368244, bug#289241.

Even with all this work, argouml does not want to start on my laptop. It’s a problem loading the ‘models’. I suspect a problem with the new mdr-model that I do not build because of dependencies not documented and not DFSG free. So I uploaded every package except argouml. I updated the subversion repository so the work is not lost and I’ll review the problem as soon as possible. You can find a copy of the generated package at my Debian’s webspace (click on the argouml directory).

Since I lashed out on a metric fuck-ton of disk the other week, I figured I might as well continue with the trend, and get the PC that will be the MythTV box. Last week there was some spam in the snail-mail from Dell, the offer that caught my attention was a Dimension 3100 for under $500. I got a RAM upgrade to 1Gb, and the cheapest nastiest shipping available (which incidentally got rebated away to nothing) and the thing still turned up in two days and only cost me around $500. Gotta be happy with that. I installed Etch on it via a netboot installation with no dramas at all. I really like the automatic LVM partitioning. Very slick. My only complaint would be not to use all of the free extents, just because you can, and to put swap on an LV as well. Oh, and I think calling the VG consistently "Debian" is going to result in pain for people down the track when they try to move disks around. GNOME 2.14 is also looking pretty slick. The only specific problems I've had with running Debian on the machine so far have been that the hardware clock (/dev/rtc) seems a bit screwy, and the sound didn't work with the 2.6.16 kernel that was installed by default. (But works fine with 2.6.17). Oh, and I'm having some weirdness with audio CDs. Now all I need is to get a TV tuner card, a four-port USB 2.0 controller for my old 1RU server, and the right right-angled PCI riser, and I have everything I need.

It's official: I'm going to be on extended unpaid leave from my employer starting on the 22nd of June, for at least a year. I've been a part-time free software freelance for two years and a half, and I think now is a good time to grow that activity. Also, since I was hired almost seven years ago, the company grew (well, "was assimilated" is more like it) from about fifteen people (small start-up) to more than two hundred thousand (France T l com / Orange, you may have heard of them), and the growth pains haven't quite subsided yet. So I hope I'll get a breath of fresh air, at least, in case my venture goes flop and I go back to FT next year. So yeah, I'll be freelancing on everything I can, but my initial focus will probably stay on Gforge, Debian and related topics. Feel free to browse my Gnurandal website and contact me if you're looking for someone. I'm based in France, but if the job can't be done via Internet, I'd be happy to fly to all sorts of places.

Currently sitting next to Josselin Mouette aboard flight AF 434, due to arrive in Mexico in about four hours (and Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec maybe two hours after that). The new battery I recently bought for my laptop means I can type this and not fear being interrupted after a few minutes, and so here I am, re-using the asynchronous blogging system I had set up last year for my world tour. Fond memories come to mind, except that this time I'm reasonably confident there will be network access. And I'm looking forward to hacking all day long for a week. Some of my packages could use some attention. Hm. The only games installed on this laptop are moon-buggy and bastet. I'll have to get a few more in prevision for the return trip.

After large amounts of peer pressure from Rapha l Hertzog and other French Debian Developers, I finally created a new geek-fr category in this blog. The old geek category was renamed to geek-en for consistency, and both are now subcategories of a new geek category. I think that means you'll get articles in both French and English if you just read geek. Same applies for the RSS feeds, so you may like to update your feed readers and aggregators (I already updated Planet Debian). The new geek-fr subcategory will contain articles in French, as you'd expect, and will probably be more related to French-specific events. I'll post another announcement in French in a few minutes.

It seems what I've called my PDA for almost seven years (a Sharp PA-X500) is now dead. Well, it's not quite dead, but apparently the touch-sensitive screen is no longer sensitive to touching, and I'm not aware of any other input device for it. So I'm appealing to my fellow geeks, at least to those of you who know about this kind of things; hear my plea, and please provide some advice. People from Japan, I'm especially eager for your wisdom. First, is there any way I could recover the data that's in it? There's nothing deadly important, it's just to save me the bother of collecting all these phone numbers and addresses again. Some have sentimental value, even if I have totally lost touch with their owners. Before someone suggests deep hackery like removing the memory chip and plugging it into some hand-soldered adaptor then into their old Amstrad, I was more thinking about something infrared, since there's an infrared port. The problem is: can it be activated from outside? I can't switch the thing on the usual way (since the touchscreen is, well, not touchy), I can only get to what's best depicted by this picture of what happens when I remove and re-insert the battery. It's the standard touchscreen calibration tool, from what I understood, but maybe it says somewhere that it can be switched to infrared file-server or so. The manual (in Japanese) mentions Zaurus thingies numerously, but I don't know what they say about them (my Japanese skills are old, and they were never that great anyway). Any idea? Second part, in the very likely case I'm going to replace it: what should I buy? My specs are: stuff the PDA features, I initially bought that as a kanji dictionary, so the replacement needs to have a kanji dictionary too. One where you draw the kanji on the screen, and it recognises it. I'm clueless when it comes to classifying kanji, and if I have to tell the thing that what I'm looking for is something with 17 strokes and the key for "hand", then it loses much of its interest. A kanji→English dictionary would be nice, but not needed. I've managed to cope with kanji→Japanese then Japanese→English. The other, more normal, PDA thingies (addressbook, scheduler, world clock, alarm, etc.) would be nice, but are not compulsory. I don't care about games. I'm going to visit Japan in October, and yes I will spend a couple of hours of Akihabara, but I'd like ideas and opinions beforehand. If someone has an idea for getting the data out but it would require the manual, just say so, I'll bring it along. Why it chose to break down now will stay a mystery. Maximum embarrassment for me because I'll be dictionary-less for a few days in Japan? Or longing for some well-deserved rest since I'm soon going to have the opportunity to replace it? No idea. In any case, it sucks.

I'm at the Wikimania hacking days today. We drove down from wt:Montreal through wt:Vermont and wt:New Hampshire on Monday, stopping overnight in the beautiful town of wt:Lincoln (New Hampshire) in the White Mountains. Amita June had a crappy ride on Monday -- she was unhappy and uncomfortable and let us know it at every possible opportunity. We stopped in wt:Saint Johnsbury, VT for dinner, and she got some time to walk around and play, but beside that she was crabby. Tuesday morning was much better -- she had a big bagel from the Comfort Inn's breakfast buffet, and her Sleepy Bear teddy bear, and she was happy. Sleepy Bear is winning the war for hearts and minds in our house -- it's the bear that she's starting to sleep with more and more, and she makes a happy squeal when she sees it. This could be good or bad news. Anyways, we made it down to wt:Cambridge (Massachusetts) aaaalmost in time for the beginning of Hacking Days. HD is the technical pre-conference for the more sociological and content-oriented Wikimania. I thought it was going to be mostly MW committers and Wikimedia sysadmins, but it's turned out to be huge. I think there are about 40-50 people here -- a just gigantic group. Anyways, I was sitting in the One Laptop Per Child office meeting room with about 30 hackers yesterday morning. I was about 20 minutes late, but I managed to find a seat anyways. Everyone was giving introductions, and up stand David Recordon, Jonathan Daugherty, and David Strauss, all of whom say they're there to help me with the OpenID MediaWiki extension. As everyone's talking, I realize wp:Ward Cunningham is sitting right in front of me. The guy sitting next to me stands up to introduce himself, and says, "I'm Dan Bricklin, who many of you may know as the inventor of the spreadsheet..." Jeez. Anyways, the talk has been fast and furious. Yesterday was a long discussion about the state of Wikimedia servers, the upshot of which, for me, was: Holy Shit, Wikimedia is a big project. I managed to talk to a ton of people, including Travis Derouin of wikiHow, Jason from Wikia, all the OpenID folks, etc. etc. Jonathan Daugherty and I actually got some hacking done, which was great. tags: wikimedia wikimania wiki ward cunningham dan bricklin wikipedia hacking days

The future of MediaWiki This morning Brion Vibber and Tim Starling gave a discussion about the future of MediaWiki. The story? More cool features, I think. The OpenID will be part of it; incorporating a WYSIWYG editor like WikiWyg or FCKEditor into the software. Also, more [[wp:AJAX]-y features, which are coming up through the codebase right now. I think in a large way MW's future is going to be outside of Wikipedia proper. Some of the cooler developments using the MW as a platform include WiktionaryZ and Semantic MediaWiki, both of which provide a structured data substrate to wiki pages. They're not compatible, which I think is something that needs to happen at some point in the future, but they're very promising for future projects. Another big class of projects is bots -- like PyWikipediabot or some of the "vandal fighting" bots and interfaces, e.g. Tawkerbot. I think that MediaWiki is drifting from being a monolithic browser app more into a Web-based service, which will be really productive from a content-production and -maintenance point of view, but which is extremely challenging from the social point of view. Finally, I think the great explosion in the world of customized MW extensions and skins is meaning a real marketplace for expanding the software is happening. I think this is pretty fabu, also. Some people have been discussing formalizing this ecology into a CPAN or JabberStudio-style site for hosting and organizing MW extensions. We'll see what happens with that, but if it comes around, I hope that it's named $wgForge. Maj and Amita June are running around Boston today... very slowly and carefully. They've got a brutal heat wave on here, and people are fainting and collapsing like wilting flowers. I think they're going to go places that have air conditioning, like museums and so forth. tags: mediawiki future $wgForge boston heat wave bots wysiwyg

Hundreds of elderly people living in Zaragoza, Spain, will find a Debian-based KDE desktop in their elderly centers. The Zaragoza City Hall has just deployed a thin-client solution using PXES, Debian and KDE in six elderly centers with more than ten computers each. The number of elderly centers will grow up to some dozens in the future. We have dealed with the installation details. It has been officially presented today and people have already started using the desktops, browsing the web with Konqueror and enjoying the last annular eclipse using KStars.

Woah, tons of time without blogging again, and too much stuff to write about, I’ll be brief Last month has been great , I visited London for three days with some workmates, then I attended DebConf6 in Mexico, and the two weeks I’ve been in Zaragoza (my home city) since I was back from there have been also great, enjoying a lot with friends. For Battle for Wesnoth fans, we’re heading towards 1.2 now, which will be our second stable release ever, and should be out in mid-July. Be sure to help us trying out our latest development release, reporting bugs and so. Today I’ve made a donation to the Swedish Pirate Party, I really expect they can get themselves in the Swedish parliament, and then I should consider moving to Sweden

So, now that I finally feel that belpic in Debian is in working order (in unstable), let's talk about the interesting things one can do with it. You have an eID, run Debian, just bought yourself a cardreader, and feel "now what"? This is the blog post for you ;-) Note that there are still some rough edges; but I still have time to fix those before etch releases, so that's not much of an issue. First, you need some support packages. If you bought a cardreader from Zetes or got one from the Government somehow, then you have an ACR38 reader and you need a hardware support package to be able to use it; the package in question is called libacr38u. Obviously you will also need the belpic packages. For now, just install all of them—there still appears to be a dependency issue which I will need to fix; I'll announce on this blog when that has been done. Just run

aptitude install $(apt-cache showsrc belpic sed -e '/^Binary/!d;s/^Binary: //;s/,//g')

and you will install them. I uploaded these packages to backports.org, too, where they'll hopefully show up some time soon (the current packages are still at 2.3.13 for some weird reason). This will give you:

beidgui

a graphical application that will allow you to view the data on the card, and to change your PIN code (as long as you still know your current PIN code and don't need to unblock it with the PUK; for the latter, you need to go to your local town or city or district hall).

beid-pkcs11-tool

a command-line tool that will allow you to change your pin and do some other interesting things. Note that while this is a command-line tool, you still need a GUI environment to be able to run it; there are cases where the libbeidlibopensc2 library will open a dialog window to ask you for your pin, without going through the application.

beid-tool

a command-line tool with not much options; it doesn't allow for much more than to test whether your installation works.

beidcrld

a daemon that will update the CRLs (Certificate Revocation Lists) when there is a network connection, so that you can verify the validity of the card in your reader. If you have a permanent Internet connection, there is also OCSP (Online Certificate something Protocol) which will verify the validity of your certificates against an online server, and which the preferred way to do this. Future versions of the belpic packages will have a /etc/default/beid which will allow you to disable beidcrld.

beidpcscd

a daemon that is used if you need libpcsclite to talk to your cardreader. If you have an ACR38 cardreader, you need this. I personally have a different one, which uses openct, so I don't...

a whole bunch of libraries

However, only three are really interesting: libbeidlibopensc2, for low-level operations on the card (such as "read a file", "sign some data"; libbeid2, for high-level operations on the card (such as "read identity data", "read a picture"), and libbeidlibjni (JNI library, if you want to use the eID from Java). Libbeidlibopensc2 and libbeid2 are packaged separately; libbeidlibjni is packaged together with libbeid2 (though that might change in the future, not sure).

Some files to support mozilla, firefox, and other browsers.

The most interesting ones from a user point of view are /usr/share/beid/beid-pkcs11-register.html and /usr/share/beid/beid-pkcs11-unregister.html. Note that registering the module isn't enough to be able to use it; you will have to perform some additional steps which are outlined on eid.belgium.be, the government website about the eID.

Additionally, there is also OpenSC which you may want to install. The point there is that things like OpenSC's pkcs15-tool and pkcs15-crypt do not have a counterpart in the eID toolkit, so if you want that, you need to install it. So, that's the software in the eID toolkit. But what can you do with it? There are a number of things. For starters, of course, there's the beidgui, which allows you to view, save, print out, and do other interesting things with data on a card. If you work on a place where you regularly need to work with eID data, this may just be the appliation for you. If you have set up your browser to support the eID, you may want to go to mijndossier.rrn.fgov.be, a website set up so that everyone can view their own information in the Rijksregister. I'm sure there is a French version of that URL, but don't ask me—I don't know it. You probably already know about tax-on-web, where you can do your tax application online. It is possible to install a signing module into Mozilla Thunderbird, and to sign your emails using S/MIME and the eID card. This will give you a signed email which is legally binding; might be interesting for those of you out there interested in not having to use as much paper signatures. Details, again, on eid.belgium.be. The same is true for signing documents in OpenOffice.org. I haven't tried doing any of this myself yet, though. Of course, you can sign any text file as well, using pkcs15-crypt from OpenSC, or extract the certificates on the card using pkcs15-tool. Just run them with the --help parameter to find out about their options. And that's about it, I guess. More interesting links can be found on a a portal maintained by Danny 'godot' Decock on the eID.