It seems that Toyota isn't alone in having non-functional web sites. In fact it's better than some, the basic information on the cars is available and it is possible to get contact information for car dealers, also they have a feed-back form on their web site (to which I submitted my previous blog post). Incidentally the Lexus site had much the same problem as the Toyota site (hardly surprising as Lexus is the luxury marque from Toyota). But I expect that if I phoned Lexus to ask about their vehicles I would get a better call-center experience which would make me less inclined to blog about them.

Daihatsu vehicles are sold by Toyota. Their web site doesn't use Flash, but it has so little content that it doesn't count.

I decided to quickly review the web sites of car manufacturers that sell in Australia for a fair comparison. I found three sites worse than Toyota, two sites that were equal (counting Lexus), and six that were better than it.

Holden has the worst site, they don't display any information if you don't have flash, they don't even display a phone number! I wonder how much Adobe pays web programmers to pull this sort of stunt. I can't imagine Holden management saying "if a customer comes to our web site and doesn't have Flash then don't display our phone number or any other contact information, they can use Flash or buy a Ford instead". Obviously some web monkey has run amok and done their own thing without following directions. Probably some people need to be sacked in the Holden web development group.

Volvo Cars has a very bad site. Most of the content is involved with Flash in some way and refuses to load. There is a mailto reference that is broken, and the overview page for the S60 seems to have a JavaScript loop (I aborted the load after it loaded 245 pictures and was still going). The Volvo page for their other business is quite functional although minimal.

Hyundai has a bad site. The front page works OK, but some of the sub-sites to display information on vehicles redirect to sites such as evolveddriving.com.au which are "optimised for 1024x768" and require Flash and Quicktime while others do strange things like changing the size of the browser window. Overall it's a very bad site, but at least I could find the contact details for my nearest dealer, and it has a feedback form.

Subaru has an OK site. The only thing I couldn't access without Flash is information on their AWD (All Wheel Drive) technology. Unfortunately they provide no email address and no form for sending feedback.

The main Ford web page claims that Flash is required, but their site just works without it. In a quick test I was unable to find any functionality on the Ford site that is missing because of not having Flash. Ford have a well designed site.

The Volkswagen site makes no mention of the fact that I don't use Flash, it does however have some strange unused spaces in the middle of the screen. I guess that it recognised that I don't have Flash and made a semi-successful attempt to work around it. I could get all information I wanted including dealer contact details.

The main Mazda web page displays a message about Flash not being installed and offers a link to a non-Flash version of the site. The Flash section is at the center and the buttons at the sides work if you don't have Flash. This seems to be a well implemented site.

Citroen has an OK site, no flash that I noticed (although there were large blank areas on the screen at times indicating that something was missing), the information was all available and browsing was reasonably easy. One thing that annoyed me was that there were movies available but only through some sort of JavaScript that tried to play them in my browser. I have never bothered setting up my web browsing machine for playing movies (among other things it has no speakers) so this is a problem for me.

Peugeot has a good site. No apparent flash and it's reasonably easy to use. It has more pictures than Kia but the JavaScript navigation stuff is fancy. One nice feature is a single page with pricing summaries for all models. If you have $X to spend on a Peugeot you will easily discover which ones you can afford.

Kia has the best site I saw! Not only is there no flash, but it's well designed, easy to navigate and it loads quite quickly. Please review the Kia site as an example of how to do it properly!

Let me know if I've missed any makes and I'll post an update.

Simon, you have a good point, but while I am not ashamed to admit that I fall on your "rating by others" end of the scale -- happy Debian users make me happy -- much of your analysis seems a bit simplistic and not mindful of the fact that scales include points in between. If Ubuntu only enticed all of our desktop users away, I wouldn't feel very threatened by it. I'd feel disappointed that we lost those users, but I'd see all the other users we have in other areas, and I could be satisfied with that. After all, Windows still has the lion's share of the desktop users, and I don't feel threatened by it. Or by OS X. However, when significant development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, when there are lots of things happening there, I do begin to feel very threatened by it. I begin looking to see if development that's happening on Ubuntu is being contributed back to Debian. I conclude that it's largely a one-way street; any improvement I work on in Debian will get into Ubuntu with nearly 100% probability, but any improvement Ubuntu makes will only get into Debian if someone goes out, reads through a patch, and finds it. See, I'm also motivated by Debian being suitable for many different purposes -- I fall on the other end of your scale too. And I know that I don't want to be today using the software and hardware I was using 5 years ago. And 5 years from now, I won't want to be using the software and hardware I'm using today. My needs will change, things will evolve, and lots of development will be needed for Debian to still be relevant, to still be suitable for all its many purposes. And if much of the development momentum shifts to Ubuntu, and if there is not even a culture of pushing improvements back into Debian, there's a very real possibility that that won't happen. And then those of us all along this interesting Scale of Superiority you describe will have to decide between giving up and going to Ubuntu, or taking up ballroom dancing. I've personally decided that if this happens, I won't be taking the former option; Debian is the last linux distribution I intend to work on.

That's threefold:

• a syntax file ~/.vim/syntax/git.vim
• a ftplugin file ~/.vim/ftplugin/git.vim
• and add a line in your ~/.vim/filetype.vim that says au BufRead,BufNewFile COMMIT_EDITMSG setf git

Now you will have a quite simple syntax colorization for the commit log, and the killer feature is that when you git commit, a vertical split shows the diff while you are commenting it :) I suppose those modes will evolve, please enjoy. Edit: the script was a bit modified to work even when you're not in autochdir mode, thanks to SungHyun Nam from the git-list.

I spent the day riding around SF looking for a place to live. Jeff and I only ended up seeing three appartments. Two where basically in the same building. The first was empty, suitable, but the a horrible paint job that had been done after the previous tenant moved out. The second was a really nice place where the guy is getting out of his lease. The last place was nice and big, sunny enough, but there were two problems. We couldn't figure out how to use the shower, and the landlord/super was absolutely useless to talk to.

Yesterday, I helped celebrate a few birthdays, one for Todd in his beautiful backyard, then later on up in the City for Sean and Trevors 26th birthdays. A good time was had by all, except Ben's replacement*, who got stuck at work the entire time.

* Further commentary and pictures are required for Ben's replacement.

Contact Lookup Applet 0.15 is finally released. Forgetting to release the fix to let it build with recent Evolution tells me quite nicely how many people actually use this: None. If there are any real users out there, please say so!

• Build with recent EDS (Ed Catmur)

Translators: Christophe Merlet (fr), David Lodge (en_GB), Francisco Javier F. Serrador (es), Gabor Kelemen (hu), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Jovan Naumovski (mk), Luis Matos (pt), Mahesh subedi (ne), Valek Filippov (ru). You can grab it from the usual place. Debian packages heading towards Sid now.

The Massachusetts race for governor has turned very ugly. Even setting my personal partisanship (and professional bias) aside, I’m certain that the blame is not equally shared on both sides. Massachusetts Lawyer’s Weekly says it better than I could, and I reproduce the entire editorial here:

Deval Patrick for governor During the 34-year history of Lawyers Weekly, the paper has never endorsed a candidate for elected office. This practice was borne out of the notion that the political, or societal, issues that dominate races typically outweigh issues that are of distinct interest to lawyers. But the race for governor in Massachusetts in 2006 is suddenly very much about what it means to be a lawyer. On the one hand, we have Democratic nominee Deval Patrick, whose stated policies on judicial independence and appointment of judges (among other issues) reflect a genuine understanding of the legal system. Conversely, Republican nominee Kerry Healey has launched a chilling assault on the practice of law. Healey is running a television ad that takes Patrick to task for his 1985 representation of a defendant accused of murdering a police officer — an ad that borders on the bizarre in its reasoning. “While lawyers have a right to defend admitted cop killers, do we really want one as our governor?” the ad asks. Last week Healey added an ad that references Patrick’s one-time support of convicted rapist Benjamin LaGuer. “What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?” the ad asks. With those misguided questions, Healey has insulted an entire profession. Here’s hoping she does not get away with it. What is Healey’s message? That criminal-defense attorneys somehow should be associated with, or blamed for, the actions of their clients? That protecting important constitutional rights is somehow a seedy business? Healey has resorted to the worst form of pandering, openly inviting voters to think of Patrick as someone who associates with criminals. Her finger-pointing has a flavor of McCarthyism, suggesting that anyone who has spent time in the criminal-defense arena should be identified, called out and avoided. The lieutenant governor proclaims herself a criminal-justice candidate who is tough on crime. Yet nearly everyone associated with the criminal-justice system, be they defense attorneys, prosecutors, police officers or otherwise, understand that the Constitution guarantees the right-to-counsel, and the right to a zealous advocate. Healey no doubt understands this as well, but conveniently ignores it as she paints Patrick a villain. Gov. Mitt Romney knows that diminishing the work of attorneys often makes for good politics. He rarely hesitates to criticize lawyers — or judges — if it suits his agenda. But even Romney has never sunk this low, to this crass sort of demagoguery. Healey has become the bully in the schoolyard, poking fun at the overweight children. Look, he’s a lawyer. He must be a second-class citizen. Deval Patrick, meanwhile, has quietly made it known that he appreciates the key components of the legal system. He favors giving judicial administrators more control over their budgets and pay increases for lawyers who do work for the state, including prosecutors. Patrick says he would devote much attention to selecting judges, returning power to the Judicial Nominating Commission. And the former civil-rights attorney has suggested that he will be careful before criticizing a judge’s decision. “Judges don’t go looking for hard decisions,” he has said. As to the LaGuer matter, Patrick missed an opportunity with a clumsy, disjointed explanation of the matter. Patrick could have simply stated that any efforts he made in helping LaGuer obtain a DNA test were in the pursuit of truth. As former Suffolk County District Attorney Ralph Martin so eloquently put it in an Oct. 8 Boston Globe op-ed article, “I never thought that serving the ideals of the Constitution made you soft or tough on crime. … Respecting the Constitution doesn’t make you soft or tough — it only makes you just and fair.” One need not be defined by one’s profession, of course, and lawyers will have other important matters (i.e., education, taxes) on their minds when they go to the polls on Nov. 7. But attorneys can rest assured that a vote for Deval Patrick guarantees an appreciation for many of the ideals that lawyers deem important — while a vote against Kerry Healey sends a message that lawyers won’t tolerate her unforgivable cheap shots. Do we really want someone who defends accused criminals as our governor? President John Adams, author of the Constitution that Healey swore to uphold as lieutenant governor, defended the accused killers in the Boston Massacre trial. Do you think Adams would have been qualified to be our governor?

There have been quite some comments on the Iceweasel case all over the planets, and I saw several assertions, especially from the Mozilla camp, that I, as the Firefox co-maintainer, the xulrunner maintainer, and (soon) Seamonkey iceape co-maintainer, have to rectify. They broke the –enable-official-branding flag
Half-true. We just replaced Bon Echo/Deer Park with Firefox at the appropriate places in the build tree so that we could have Firefox with the “unbranded” logo instead of the official logo, as Gervase Markham gave us authorization for. You’re still free to enable the official branding, except that since the logos and stuff are non-free, we removed the other-licenses/branding/ directory from the original tarball, thus yes, the flag is half broken. Firefox logos being subject to trademarks, Debian thinks they are not free.
Trademark and copyright are different things. Mozilla has unnecessarily given a non-free license to “clarify” the trademark situation, but that is not required. To make it clear: Debian thinks the logos are not free because they are not free. Period. Debian isn t properly collaborating with Mozilla , sending unusable 100000-lines patches for validation just before releases (as seen on Lucas Nussbaum’s blog)
Let me take the firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz file, strip the debian directory from it (it only contains maintainer scripts, our set of icons and some debian specific searchplugins), and strip the configure diff that is generated by autoconf due to some changes in configure.in… that’s exactly 2654 lines of diff. Very far from the 100000-lines patches they are claiming. The Mozilla people talked about Debian-specific changes that changed frozen APIs, breaking extensions (from Lucas’s blog again).
So, let’s dig into our firefox_2.0~rc1+dfsg-1.diff.gz:

• Changes to disable application upgrade (we want that to happen through apt-get) and change some other default preferences,
• Changes to fix “make distclean” so that it really cleans the build directory,
• Change not to build the “mangle” utility,
• Change not to call netstat to generate entropy, which is useless on linux,
• Changes to make Firefox build and work on architectures such as hppa, mips, mips64, m68k, ia64, sparc64, alpha, and arm, which the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care much for,
• Change to add a preference directory so that users can put their set of customized preferences in /etc/firefox/pref,
• Change to allow to build flat chrome without the zip utility,
• Change to allow to use system library for myspell, instead of statically linking the bundled one,
• Changes to allow to build s390 binaries on s390x host with s390 toolchain (same applies with x86 binaries on amd64 host with x86 toolchain),
• Changes to work around bugs with the hidden visibility pragma on gcc,
• Changes to make the pango backend actually build correctly,
• Changes to avoid some error messages while trying to create Makefiles from inexistant Makefile.in’s,
• Change to install in /usr/lib/firefox instead of /usr/lib/firefox-x.y,
• Change not to build useless chromelist.txt files,
• Changes to make helper applications with parameters work,
• Changes to allow builds against GTK 2.8,
• Changes to work around an Xrender bug,
• Changes to make the Gecko/yymmdddd string taken from preferences instead of being half-hard-coded (you could change it with preferences, but it would still be set to the hard-coded value at start time ; and you could change it again with preferences…),
• Change to allow mice extra buttons to act as something else than a left button,
• Change to allow to build with -Wl,–as-needed to avoid linking against a whole lot of useless libraries, without losing the link on libxpcom.so which is required by some extensions’ components,
• Changes not to shlibsign the NSS modules at build time, since we’re stripping the binaries afterwards, thus breaking the signature. We do build the signatures later, within the maintainer scripts.

That’s not that many changes, and most of them were taken from either some Mozilla CVS trunk or the Mozilla Bugzilla . And most of those that were not taken from there have been sent, except those that really don’t make much sense outside Debian. So, where are these frozen API changes ? And we’re not properly collaborating, huh ? The Mozilla project started by coming to a (admittedly uneasy) agreement with Debian for use of the name, but the Debian version diverged even further from the official version, so the permission was revoked. (from comments on Matthew Garrett’s blog) That one is really interesting, because between the time we got this understanding with Gervase and now, we are actually less diverging from the official version than by then. The main difference by that time was the extensions manager, which, in Debian, needed a lot of changes to actually act as it should, especially with globally installed extensions. I’m not saying the Debian one was perfect, it also had its own problems, but that was a whole lot less than the blatant crap that was the official one, obviously written for Windows without any thoughts for unix, and especially linux distributions. The only main difference now, between the official Firefox and ours, is that our build has the pango backend enabled, which we chose over the Xft backend for several reasons I won’t explain here. The others differences are that we use system libraries where possible, instead of the bundled libpng, libjpeg, libtiff, libmyspell and libcairo. We also build a flat chrome, instead of having everything in .jar files. Now, a little bit about differences the Mozilla guys don’t seem to care about while they really should: distributions build the Mozilla products with gcc 4.x, while the official binaries are built with gcc 3.4, as well as the extensions distributed on addons.mozilla.org. Fortunately, not a lot of extensions make use of binary components, and not a lot are linked against the standard C++ library, but when that happens (like with colorzilla), you get a component linked against libstdc++5 to load on a Firefox that is linked against libstdc++6. You are lucky if that setup doesn’t crash. Little extra from comments in Lucas’s blog:
Is it possible for the Debian Firefox maintainers to create an installer package for contrib which will install the vanilla FireFox from Mozilla s site.
How great would it be to have a package for one architecture instead of 12, and with a dependency on libstdc++5, that almost no other package uses any more. Update:
Debian is going to replace Firefox with a GNU fork called Iceweasel
Half-true. For the etch release, Iceweasel will only be Firefox with a different branding. We are taking the Iceweasel name because it was already know as a possible alternative name for Firefox when the trademark concerns have been raised more than 2 years ago (thanks Nathanael Nerode for this nice name, by the way). It appears that the GNU guys decided to start a fork with this name… that’s quite unfortunate, actually. Anyways, the plan is to get in touch with them to see what we can do together, but with the etch release approaching, we can’t and won’t do more than a rename for the moment. Update 2:
We (Mozilla ) presently have working relationships with most of the major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu (As seen in several posts from people of the Mozilla Corporation or Foundation)
Very interesting. Ubuntu uses the same set of patches as Debian, with some more of their own, and even releases beta software in their official releases. But when it’s Ubuntu, it’s fine. Sorry, I forgot Debian is lame, and DDs are frustrated fanatic integrists, on top of being bloody fanatic assholes. Update 3: Added some precisions about other differences with the official binaries, and a small patch I somehow forgot.

I've been a fan of the Open Directory Project for a long time. I finally volunteered to become an editor about a month ago, and I just started editing my first category, wiki farms , today. I hope to get the category up to good shape in the next few days. I've now got an ODP profile, too. tags: odp dmoz directory editor wikifarms

Hudson Maj, Amita June and I went down to wt:Hudson (New York) over the weekend for the wedding reception of our friends Morgan and Kate. The trip down was fantastic -- the colors in the wt:Adirondacks were really amazing, just hitting their peak. Amita June had a good drive, too: she got to look around a lot, listened to some music, and had a nap of about an hour and a half. Hudson was a cute town, but not cutesy like other parts of the wt:Hudson Valley can be. The town is small -- 4-5 streets wide -- with big brick buildings lining the main street down to a promenade overlooking the Hudson River. There are a few gourmet restaurants and a disproportionate number of art galleries and antique stores, but it doesn't feel like the locals have been pushed out of their town... yet. We stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, as arranged by Kate's stepmom for most of the guests. It was functional and clean but otherwise unexceptional. There was a bar and a restaurant downstairs, and the hotel itself is just opposite a nice little park. Sunday morning we had breakfast at the Earth Kitchen organic market; I had a bowl of granola and fruit, Maj had a huge plate of huevos rancheros, and AJ ate whatever she could get off our plates. We walked around town and down to the waterfront, where we got a panoramic view for miles up and down the Hudson Valley. With the leaves nearing their height of color, it was an awe-inspiring view. We took a late lunch at Mexican Radio, a branch of a restaurant by the same name in Manhattan. It had good quality California-style Mexican food, with a few fusion dishes (like "Mexican spring rolls") that were probably overdoing it a bit. The margaritas were top-notch, and they have a tequila sampler option with three excellent tequilas for... $125! You won't normally lose that much money on three shots of tequila unless you pass out in the gutter in wt:Nuevo Laredo. The reception itself was at the Ca' Mea restaurant, right next to the historic Hudson Opera House. Kate and Morgan were in good form, playing goth-y music from their early days, and family and friends had a good time too. We all probably ate too much, and Maj and I both had hangovers the next morning. Amita June, however, had an excellent time running around the party and dancing with the bride. She was made for weddings. The drive home the next day was less than optimal. We did brunch in the St. Charles's restaurant, Bridges, and then stopped by the house of Kate's dad and stepmom for an afternoon get-together. They have a really nice Victorian house on a hill above town that overlooks the valley. We had to leave after only a few minutes, though, since we'd been lucky enough to get guest-listed for the Massive Attack show in Montreal that night. Trouble hit us as we were coming up the 87, though. First, the baby refused to sleep, getting more and more hysterical the longer she went awake. By 4:30PM, we'd had to stop so many times to soothe her that we were starting to get worried about the time. Then, we hit a detour on the interstate -- a huge accident had happened going through the mountains. We got into a sluggish line of cars wending its way along highway 9, and by the time we were back on the interstate we knew we were going to be late. We decided that luck was against our going to see MA, so we called and canceled our baby-sitter and sent email to our friend DJ Ghostbeard who'd asked us to come to the show (although we didn't get a call through... his voicemail box was full). We stopped at Geoffrey's Pub in wt:Plattsburgh for a late dinner of blackened salmon, broiled seafood and mashed potatoes, and then got back on the road. ...and straight into a 2-1/2-hour line at the Canadian border. This weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, and apparently a lot of people took the opportunity to dip down into the states for a last bit of outdoorsmanship before the winter frosts settled in. Amita June, already a little frantic from not sleeping, went completely ballistic, and although we managed to keep her mellow most of the time, 2 hours in a line of cars with a crying baby is a little bit much for anyone. We didn't get back to Montreal until nearly midnight. It was great to get home, finally, and as usual travel's made me appreciate staying in one place. The Gazette this morning says the Massive Attack show was excellent, but I'm glad we didn't try to make it -- coming in 4 hours late is just too much. We're off to wt:Halifax next weekend for our wedding anniversary, and hopefully we'll be back into travel mode by then. tags: hudson kate morgan amitajune hudson valley adirondacks plattsburgh massive attack

Destinyland Dave Cassel has an excellent list of the 100 Greatest Internet Moments. A great compendium of Stuff What Happened over the last 10 years in cyberland. I think Dave's one of the best Internet culture observers out there. I'm glad to see he's got a new podcast, Destinyland, in which he tears apart the weird media culture we live in. Example: the crazy spiral of Dana Plato. Example: Schoolhouse Rock: Behind the music. Example: Dark side of the Hampster Dance. Good stuff. tags: destiny destinyland podcast dave cassel

There are a couple of bugs that really would need more attention. I started a short list here, if you want to find more - just look at http://bts.turmzimmer.net/.

• 364038: evolution: message moved from one imap server to another vanish under certain circumstances
• 370186: hal: HAL keeps CD drive spinning constantly
• 202488: isdnvboxserver: Spool directory incorrectly renamed on upgrade
• 330084: xawtv-plugin-qt: segfaults on start recording
• 379628: ntfsresize: resizing a Vista NTFS partition leads to corrupted partition (also as parted-bug, #380226, partman-partitioning, #379835)

I have just uploaded mindi and mondo 2.20 (version numbers are now the same for mindi and mondo).

This release marks a bit of a milestone in that we can ship the pristine upstream source in Debian for the first time because the busybox binaries were removed upstream. This together with the numerous bug fixes and stability improvements and combined with the fact that there are no revolutionary new features (despite the version number jump) made me decide to try and push the new upstream version into etch.

'Try' because although I've tested things quite thoroughly on both amd64 and i386, there is always a residual risk (one of my favourite alliterations ;-) ) of something bad slipping through. I think that taking this risk is justified, though, because 2.20 should be a definite improvement over 2.09. Bruno and I worked really hard to get this released in time for etch (Thank you, Bruno, for making my priority your priority!).

While testing, I found #389931, #389729 and #390653 (Thanks for your great help, Russ!). I've also found that archiving to tape doesn't work for me (still gathering more information, so no bug report yet), but it also fails with 2.09, i.e. there is no regression.

Main testing was performed on:

• sid, amd64, linux-image-2.6.18-1-amd64 (2.6.18-2), with NFS & AFS mounts, LVM, RAID1 & RAID5, onto NFS

• sid, i386, linux-image-2.6.18-1-k7 (2.6.18-2), with NFS & AFS mounts, onto DVDs

Oh, and this also contains the fix for RC bug #391127.

People seem to be using Mondo Rescue on 'vintage' versions of Debian which is presumably due to Mondo Rescue being disaster recovery software. So, I've made a change to post-nuke suggested by Augustin Amann (Thank you, Augustin!) to make people using the latest packages on sarge happier. I'm still in two minds about adding versioned depends on grep and binutils to make the life of woody (!) users a bit easier as well.

More than a thousand people took part in the anti-bullfighting demo that every year takes place in Zaragoza. (Spanish) For those who are not familiar with bullfighting, it’s basically a Spanish shameful tradition, where six bulls are released one at a time to a bullfighting arena. There the bulls are tortured to death, first they’re stabbed on the neck by horse-mounted lancers, then they got planted in their back several harpoon-pointed sticks, and after half an hour of torture and agony, the bullfighter definitely murders the bull with a sword. Does it sound disgusting, cruel and sadist? It definitely is, and I’ve skipped the worst details. (yeah, I’ve got sick just writing this) We gathered at a square near the bullfighting arena, and then we headed towards it shouting stuff like “torture is neither art nor culture” (as bullfighting defenders usually say that “bullfighting is a central part of Spanish culture”), “murderers”, “torturers”, “sadists”, “you’re cavemen, evolve!”, “if you wanna see blood, slit your wrist” or “you should be ashamed of how you are raising your children” (to people who brought little (5 or 6 years old) children to the bullfight arena). The demo lasted about two hours and was completely peaceful, which is a great thing IMHO, as it clearly shows which side despises violence and which one loves it. There have been several good news for the anti-bullfighting movement last years, like several Catalonian towns declaring bullfighting illegal, Barcelona declaring itself an anti-bullfighting city (although it doesn’t have the legislative power to really ban bullfighting), demos in lots of cities and increase in people attending them. If Bullfighting seems doomed, but we still will have to push for a few years to really bury it. Even if you are not Spanish you can still help abolish bullfighting by taking part in anti-bullfight demos in front of Spanish embassies (there were 17 of them this summer), boycotting travel agents that promote bullfighting, …

I guess the term "ajax clouds" is now more appropriate. Debtags clouds have evolved. They're no longer a static page with a single cloud that will forward you to the more complex browsing tool by Enrico, but now the cloud will adapt to your previous choices, and allow the selection of multiple tags. The biggest issue probably is tag naming now (e.g. what is the difference between "role", "use" and "scope" (unfold them to get an idea) or between "interface" and "uitoolkit" (interface is mostly commandline vs. fullscreen vs. windowed vs. 3d; uitoolkit is gtk vs. qt vs. whatever) - unless you're familiar with these terms, you'll probably find it still hard to navigate the tag cloud. Still I hope this inspires you to think of new UIs doable with tag information (which is a small step towards the semantic web; actually these facets here are quite similar to RDF triples...) These is so much things I'd like to try out with this data... If you have suggestions, please share them via email. For those interested in the technical stuff: tag clouds are loaded via ajax, served from a database with ~120 MB of precalculated, precompressed json files. Precalculation is rather expensive; on my 4+ years old laptop it took about 105 minutes (76 minutes of CPU time). Storing them in the filesystem instead of a BerkeleyDB hashtable took more than 4 hours. The outmost (i.e. largest amount of data) set takes 1.1 seconds to compute; there are 344871 precomputed tag selections, so it precalculated 75 selections per second on average. Yes, complexity is not linear; benefits from caching large results are huge. I'd really love to run a similar interface for e.g. last.fm, but I guess this would not work as well; their tags aren't grouped in facets. But I have some ideas to make up for that. P.S. This is also my first real Ajax app (except for using json instead of XML). And I still hate Javascript. [Update: I've worked around an issue with opera (which is stricter on javascript object syntax than mozilla). I havn't tried Internet Exploder yet. But this is a navigation experiment, not an application to be deployed...]

October is a busy month for us. October 14th is my birthday, and October 16th is our wedding anniversary. On our honeymoon in 2004, we took a trip to wt:Charlevoix at the mouth of the Saguenay fjord in Quebec. Then, in October 2005, Amita June had just been born, so we took a short trip to Ottawa for the weekend. At this point, I think we've established an anniversary tradition of short weekend trips to cities in Eastern Canada. This year, Maj started arranging a trip to St. John's in Newfoundland. I'm pretty fascinated by wt:Newfoundland -- it's one of the oldest settlements in North America, yet very isolated. Its culture is a unique blend of Celtic, English, and a smattering of French Canadian with an idiosyncratic accent and great music. But St. John's is just too remote for a relaxing, romantic anniversary weekend. We kept trying to find easier ways to get there, and nothing was working out. So we decided to save Newfoundland for a spring trip. My crazy-cuckoo dream is to drive from Montreal to Labrador City and then out to Goose Bay in Labrador on the mainland, take the ferry to Newfoundland, drive around a bit there, then back to Montreal on a car ferry. Good trip, eh? So, we decided to take things a little easier and go to another part of Canada. We've wanted to visit wt:Halifax for a long time, and now it looks like it's going to work out. It's only 1-1/2 hours by plane from Montreal, and it's supposed to be a very charming, fun city. I got good deals on Air Canada for the two of us, plus baby, and we're staying at the posh Lord Nelson hotel in the middle of town. Even though it's the "Splurge" hotel on the Wikitravel Sleep section, I was able to get a discount with my CAA card that makes the price just about acceptable for a special occasion weekend. Now we have to plan what to do when we get there. We've only been to Nova Scotia once, and that was just a jaunt across the border from New Brunswick for kcks. I'm going to pore over the Wikitravel and World66 articles to see what I can come up with, and hopefully do some research while we're on the road. Really, that's the best part for me. I probably shouldn't look so far ahead -- we've got Hudson (New York) still to do this weekend. Like I said, a busy month! tags: anniversary october st. johns halifax newfoundland travel nova scotia

Free Books I've been planning to go to the local Wiki Wednesday here in [wt:Montreal], so I was reviewing the Montreal Wiki Wednesday page for previous events. Although we've made it to a few of the previous ones, we definitely haven't made it to all the ones we said we would... so be it. One of the previous speakers was Hugh McGuire, a Montrealer who started an excellent project called Librivox. Librivox is a project to create free audiobooks, with chapters contributed over the Internet by readers around the world. They take books from Project Gutenberg (which is apparently a MediaWiki wiki site now... who knew?) and volunteers read them and then the whole thing gets munged into a nice little package. Everything stays in the public domain (bless their generous souls) and they even have a Librivox podcast just in case you swing that way. I'm super-hot for audio books. I love listening to them while driving, especially for long road trips. Maj is lukewarm on the idea, but she occasionally gets into them when we've got a good book going. The big downside is that they're ridiculously expensive -- $50+ for some books. The only thing that bothers me a bit about Librivox is that there arent CD Audio ISOs available. We have an MP3 CD player in our car, and I think it should work fine, but for sharing it's awful nice to have real CDs. UPDATE (from Hugh): There are mp3 ISOs available here: LibriVarc, but no aiff files. mega storage space, bandwidth and transfer problems to do that, but if anyone is interested in providing such CDs, or helping manage such a project, we'd love to know about it. tags: librivox audio books books on tape roadtrip project gutenberg

BarCampMontreal And while drifting through Hugh McGuire's blog, what do I see but a link to the newly-announced BarCampMontreal -- the first BarCamp to happen here in The City Without a Nickname. I had thought that the loose plan was to do a BarCamp to coincide with RecentChangesCamp in May 2007, but this plan seems more impetuous and uninhibited -- just like a BarCamp. There are just too many people to invite here in Montreal, though... we have something like 20 Debian developers, a whole passel of bloggers and wikitistas, lots of games developers and folks like that. Lots of work before the big weekend. Did I mention that October is a busy month? tags: barcamp montreal barcampmontreal

Day against DRM And look at that... October 3 is the Day against DRM per Defective by Design. A new DRM info clearinghouse, cleverly named drm.info, launched today, too. I've been in the weird situation lately of fighting against over-protectiveness w/r/t DRM in the Creative Commons licenses, when in fact I think DRM is twisted and dumb. It's a bill of goods being sold to entertainment companies by shady technology groups, it's rarely effective, and its only value is to punish law-abiding citizens. It's gotta go. A passionate and profanity-laced article I wrote about DRM coders for Pigdog Journal was linked from ars technica and BoingBoing last year. Although my writing style is a bit different (cough cough) than it once was, I still feel the same about DRM: a shameful and hostile way for technologists to treat each other. tags: dayagainstdrm drm pigdog journal

Are you experienced? So, I like the TV show Lost a lot, but I had no idea about this immersive alternate reality game The Lost Experience. Seems like just the kind of intense investigation game to keep losties busy for the entire summer. (You know, while they weren't trying to figure out the truth about lonelygirl15.) I'm not really that into figuring this stuff out, but I do enjoy reading the details once people have worked them through. tags: lost lost experience alternate reality game

I am hooked. I love to listen to Howard Stern. Up to now I have been doing it quietly by downloading it from P2P ever since I heard about him from a 60 minutes appearance just before moving to satellite radio on 1st January of 2006. Finally Sirius started transmitting their radio stations to the Internet (for a fee). 13$ a month is not cheap for Internet radio (that is common to be gratis), but Howard Stern makes up for every penny of that with 5 hours of great talk show 4 days a week. And the dozens of other channels are just bonus. If I were in the coverage zone of the Sirius satellite, I would get a receiver and look forward to the Stiletto, but as I am in UK, I have to make do with the Bittorrents shared by a highschool janitor and now with live streams from Sirius.com for 13$ per month. Luckily, the streaming works perfectly in Linux. (I did have to supply a USA address when registering, so I gave them the address of Google headquarters ) One more case where a gratis P2P downloads create a devoted fan and generate a sale. Now I am just relaxing and enjoying channels 100 - Howard, 9 - The Pulse, 12 - Super Shuffle and 33 - Area 33.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.
-Rainer Maria Rilke I have made it back from NYC after a pretty intense few days spent at the Open Minds Conference and Icarus-hosted workshops, Get Your Freak On. Both were incredibly interesting and I felt the ambivalent rush of excitement and fear that follows the prospect of working on a new project. While I have spent some time researching critiques of psychiatry, I have not spent all that much time with the people involved, academically and personally, in the various movements. And there is nothing like seeing in the flesh and blood some very passionate political work to get the intellectual excitement brewing. The first time I went to a survivor conference and protest I was living in San Francisco, deeply involved in my hacker research. I learned about the movement from a civil libertarian John Gilmore, who drew inspiration from psychiatric survivors to develop his free speech arguments for drug legalization. I had never heard of them and was intrigued so I naturally poked around the web. And I was fortunate to find out that their conference was being held the following weekend less than 10 blocks from where I was living at the time. I made time to go and unsurprisingly, it was a powerful event, perhaps the most stunning conference I had ever been to. There was something awfully inspiring about a political movement in which the members had experienced heavy doses of trauma, often through heavy doses of “treatment” and yet found the energy, will, and life to engage in political action, and in a society that does most everything to dampen the fire of politics. This weekend was no less inspirational. Even at the academic conference, the personal stories of trauma, survival, and the complex ethical decisions of choice in a landscape dominated by one medical model, erupted frequently. These were important eruptions that sometimes probably for some felt out of place in an academic setting where such outpourings are discouraged, buried deep away never to disturb the calm and rationality of talks. But without them, the conference would have felt dry, staid, and sterile, which would precisely have been the most disappointing atmosphere to have created for this environment. All the talks were engaging and illuminating and it was great to see and hear many folks working on these topics and especially working to carve out a different political and somatic reality. For me, the talks by David Oaks and Jackie Orr were the most electric and hopefully I will soon get the videos of them as well as most others (as I (tried) to tape most of the conference) up for those who are interested. In the meantime, David Oaks has already
released his talk, which is worth checking out. One of the more interesting parts of the conference was that it gave a clear indication of one of the great successes and strengths of the mad movement, which is its staying power, its ability to survive (even if not necessarily known to wider publics) generation after generation, which is more surprising given that the vitality of so many of the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, vanished or languished. This continuity was marked by David Oaks keynote speech entitled “Unite for a Nonviolent Revolution in the Mental Health System: What 30 Years in the Mad Movement Have Taught Me” and just by the fact that he and Celia Brown were there, both who have been involved for decades. Beyond that, it was also the new faces, the new groups, that include Icarus, and the
Freedom Center, that attest to the ability for this Mad Movement to thus far escape the cruel ravages of time and its intervention, often causing rifts within and across generations. Sasha Dubrul who gave a talk during the activist panel and founded Icarus four years ago talked about the deep alienation he felt when he first had encountered the rhetoric of psychiatric survivors and, even despite his deeply critical stance against psychiatry. He wanted to create an organization and a message and a place that resonates with our actual experiences of mental illness rather than trying to fit out lives into a conventional framework. It is a message that swoops into many territories that includes a stiff, unrelenting critique of psychiatry and the pharma industry all the while admitting that not everyone can survive without pharmaceutical drugs (and being deeply grateful for this), all the while also providing pathways to alternatives. It is not easy territories to navigate, due to the and cracks and crevices between positions but then again, most of life is filled with these bumpy textures and not a smooth plane free contradictions. If Icarus was born in part because existing organizations did not adequately address existing needs and desires, it did not grow and move away from existing organization but moved closer to them and is now is in alliance with
MindFreedom. And this is key. Difference in a political movement adds vitality, depth, opportunity but this can only be brought into healthy fruition with alliances. Otherwise, deep fragmentation follows, which given the already deeply fragmented nature of our lives, and of the political landscape, can end in political stasis. But so far, the Mad Movement has over years taken “mad anger” to fight a mad system, and given the last 30 years, I am sure will provide many more decadesof mad pride.

We had a busy day today. Our friend John Usher, an ebullient genius from the bubbly town of wt:Beer in wt:Devon has spent the last few years on a Ph.D. in Music (sound recording) at McGill University here in Montreal. He finished his thesis last spring, but due to scheduling conflicts with his board of advisors he couldn't defend the darn thing for several months. So he's been bopping around different parts of the world -- Chile, Beer (of course), France and such -- and has been crashing in our extra room for the last week or so now that he's back in town. He defended his thesis today, so Maj and I went to see the presentation. I'd never been to a thesis defense before, and it was different than I expected. I was picturing something along the lines of a parole hearing, with perhaps some fraternity hazing thrown in, but it was actually a very public lecture about his research. There were maybe 30 people in attendance -- friends, board, and curious department members -- and John gave a great lecture about his work. As one of his panel members from the Psychology department said, "You've done a good job making this really complicated issue clear enough that I could almost understand it." It's pretty great when you see someone you like and respect really shine in what they do best, and John absolutely shone today. His thesis is on the abstruse subject of audio-spatial imaging -- how we can tell where the source of a sound is -- but he made it clear enough that I could follow along -- almost. tags: john usher mcgill phd defense sound

Unfortunatly currently I don't have as much time as I want to, to share my thoughts about the dunc tank idea. So all I want to say here, is that I think that dunc tank in its current form does more harm to the release of etch than good. The same is also (and maybe even more) true for the long term effects of it, though of course this depends on how dunc tank will evolve.

Six more paragraphs deleted as I was not happy about them. (And I also have a mail sitting in my draft folder since thursday.) But as said, I'm short on time atm, RL takes it toll. Unfortunatly.

I just wish the dunc project would not have been announced like it was announced last monday. (But I have not yet seen a good proposol how "to turn back time".) At the moment we only lost seven days in the flames. So we only have 70 days for a timely release. Which I think is an important target, but not as important as keeping the technical and "moral" standards Debian is known for. (And harming *those* would really hurt debian.) I'm sure sure if we would release etch on february 4th 2007, most people would still be very impressed (20 month!) and say "Well, not completly on time. But this is debian, it's released when it's ready, and

Happy new year, everyone! I was away over the weekend, working hard on Ignition 2006, and I missed the big day here in front of the computer. Instead I was out under the stars with Montreal Burners, having Burning Man fun out in the wt:Eastern Townships. I'm not sure if it happened this year, but I think next year it would be great to have a Debian:BSP in wt:Black Rock City. OK, sure, it'd be super-nerdy, and the connectivity is pretty spotty, but there are some long, hot afternoons out there and I know that there are at least two DDs that are on the Playa pretty regularly (me and Don Armstrong). I wonder if there are more? I wonder if we had a BSP, if lots more would show up? tags: debian don armstrong bruleurs new year french revolutionary calendar

Usability So, my current computer usability problem has to do with the rockin' secure shell program OpenSSH. Here's what happens: I'm on a box and I have a new login goin' on. And I have to ssh to another box, and I get the message:

Enter passphrase for /home/evan/.ssh/id_rsa: 

This happens because I haven't run ssh-add when I logged in, to store the passphrase for the key with the current ssh-agent. So now I have two options:

1. enter my password and then possibly forget to run ssh-add before running ssh again
2. kill the current ssh instance, run ssh-add, then run ssh again

Both options suck. What would be nice is if I could enter my passphrase, and have that count as if I had run ssh-add. Like, after I enter it, the ssh client could say:

Add this key to your current ssh-agent session [Y/n]?

...and then ssh would add the key, like ssh-add does, and continue with the login. Wouldn't that be great? I think this is the biggest usability problem I run up against in my daily work life. Which, y'know, is pretty good. [You might want to look into libpam-ssh] [See also http://advogato.org/person/mbrubeck/diary.html?start=90 ] tags: ssh usability wishlist

Wikimania 2007 in Taipei I have to say that I'm a little wistful that wt:Alexandria wasn't chosen for Wikimania 2007. We had a really good bid to hold the event in Alexandria at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the "new" Library of Alexandria. I was getting pretty excited about going to the Mediterranean next year. But I think that Taipei is going to be a fantastic place to hold Wikimania, too. Holding the event in wt:East Asia will make it much easier for people there , in wt:Southeast Asia, and in wt:Australia or wt:New Zealand to come to the event. A Wikimania in East Asia will focus attention on the non-English-language and non-European efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation. Taiwan also has a really strong local Wikimedian group, with Wikimedia Taiwan soon on its way. Finally, a Wikimania in wt:Taiwan will re-emphasize the wp:Blocking of Wikipedia in mainland China. Jimmy Wales has said on the record that Wikimedia will not censor its Chinese-language projects to comply with the PRC's firewall (the so-called wp:Great Firewall of China), and I'm sure an official event in the ROC will further highlight that point. Personally, I'm looking forward to a trip to Taipei, which will be a good excuse for some more exploration of Taiwan. And I want to congratulate the Taipei bid team. I was impressed by the amount of work that went into the Alexandria bid, and I'm sure they did a lot of work for Taipei, too. I know the Alexandria crew is optimistic for next year: starting the steps for making a Wikimedia local chapter in Egypt, and continuing to develop relationships with the local technology companies as sponsors. Should be interesting... it might be worth a trip after all! tags: wikimania wikimania 2007 alexandria taipei

I haven't heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting. The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Lo c has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Lo c and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well. The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place. But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it'll probably be too late.

Lots of happy GRs! It's GR season, and everyone is rushing to produce a nice GR that would make Debian oh so much better than it already is. But some of us either lack the fantasy, or the grammatical competence, or just the time to contribute to this important effort. For those people, I prepared a handy polygen grammar that they can use. Here is today's GR:

1. After the release, the Donors widly do not take the Community in order to overruling this resolution in the interest of the Debian Release Managers for the purpose of promoting more prompt action.
2. The Debian Project Leader has the support of Debian for apologising the funds as seems subsidiary and reasonable for the purpose of promoting cooperation between Debian and the Debian Release Managers.
3. The Delegates broadly fund the swift funds for funding the Debian FTP Masters for the duration of the mandate for the purpose of the RMs.
4. For the purpose of being 100% Free Software, the Debian Project subsidiaryly can overrule the core proprietary drivers in main in order to apologising the needed funds for the Cabal promptly in the benefit of having a more harmful Project.
5. As seems harmful and experimental, the Debian Release Managers are devalued by the Debian FTP Masters in order to disbursing the copyright holder for the duration of the mandate for the purpose of Debian.
6. The Leader lets it be known that the Developers are approved by the Donors to reasonably revoking the Developers-controlled plan during the forthcoming release in the benefit of promoting more potential action.
7. Promptly, the Debian FTP Masters can be approved by the Delegates to establishing the reasonable Developers following internal discussion in the interest of our users and Free Software.
8. Effectively, the Delegates have the reasonable support of the Developers for neededly cooperating with the firmware in main with immediate effect, during the forthcoming release of Debian for the purpose of Everyone.
9. Debian reasonably funds the Community for broadly revoking the donations in the interest of Everyone for the purpose of having a more appropriate Debian Secretary.
10. In the interest of promoting more needed action, Everyone is of the core opinion that the Developers cannot be authorised by the Delegates to establishing the Developers-controlled Debian Release Managers as seems reasonable and needed for the purpose of reducing the delays of the New Maintainer queue.

I wish this GR generator helps to satisfy all our GR needs, and will finally free some time for people to work on making etch a really great distribution for all of us to run and love.