Today's the festival of Opinion in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a day for people to speak their minds about various subjects. My current opinion is about the Dunc Tank, a project by various users, developers, and maintainers of Debian to make sure that we hit the 4 Dec 2006 release date for Debian 4.0 (codename 'etch'). (That's 13 Frimaire CCXV for you revolutionaries out there.) One sub-project of Dunc Tank is to raise money to support the release managers for etch -- the people most responsible for keeping the release on schedule. This would free the RMs from worrying about their day jobs and keep them 100% focused on the release. I think this is a great plan. Debian is a fantastic operating system, and we have a lot to be proud of, but the main source of criticism for the project is that we don't hit our release dates. Not the first, not the second, not the fourth release dates. We've built up a reputation as a reliable, flexible OS, and we need to start earning one as a reliable, flexible organization. Projects like Ubuntu have shown that it's not impossible to get code released on time -- I think we can do it in Debian, too. I've already pledged money privately for the Dunc Tank project, and if you're interested in this particular way for getting 'etch' released on time, I hope you consider contributing too. tags: debian dunc tank etch release os deadline

I am currently working on something which hopefully end up being a good calendar server. The goal is to make it easy to add new frontends such as a CalDAV frontend, a Web frontend, etc. So far, I am just working on getting the data model right. The iCalendar RFC has a data model which I am trying to formulate into SQL, something which is ending up being quite hard. Shannon Clark blogs about why calendars are hard, and all of those issues are issues I am running up against when trying to make the data model. The main problem seems to be related to time zones, more closely: "How do you store timezone information in your database". The easy (but wrong) solution is to just normalise everything to UTC. This will not handle the case of events crossing timezone changes, such as to or from daylight savings. What I am currently considering is making sure all data in the database is stored in UTC, but also store the original time zone information. While a bit more complex, this allows applications to get back the same timezone they put in (I am not convinced Evolution will be happy if the timezones are renamed, for instance) and it allows my application to generate recurring events properly. My main issue with this is having the application responsible for making sure the data in the database makes sense, but without putting half my app in PL/perl, I can not see a way around that. Oh, and if anybody has great ideas on how to represent timezones in a relational database (postgres), please do mail me or grab me on IRC or something similar.

Today's the "day of Genius" in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- a festival to celebrate human reason, innovation, and inspiration. Something that deserves our respect and attention. My big genius accolades today are for the people who put on the Piknic Electronik Summer Sundays in Montreal. We stopped by the last one for 2006 yesterday, and it was a great time. Our friend John Usher (in town to defend his Ph.D. thesis) came along with us, but we also met friends Jeff and Anne-Marie, Lou and Candace and little Olive, Patti and Meg and Lucinda and Damian and Douglas and... lots of folks. Piknic remains one of my favorite parties in Quebec. An afternoon dance party under a giant Calder stabile on a beautiful island park in the St. Laurence River? Truly genius! I hope Piknic 2007 keeps growing and going with the mellow, friendly atmosphere that it's had in the past. tags: montreal piknic electronik party genius

Web 2.0 Conference So, I'm sad to see that the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in November is sold out. Maj and I made plans to visit SF during this time just to get to the conference, but I guess it's all filled up. Now I'm trying to track down a spare ticket or two. Anybody got a miracle? tags: web2.0 web2con san francisco miracle

R RS There's now a draft version of the Revised Report on the algorithmic language Scheme (R RS). It's not much news for folks who read the recent status report on R RS, but it's still pretty interesting. Most of the good ideas seem to have gotten into the spec, and the icky idea of doing immutable pairs seems to be gone now. Check out http://www.r6rs.org/ for a copy of the draft spec and a signup form for the discussion list. tags: r rs scheme spec

SxSW Panels and Wiki I'm pretty excited to see that the new 2007 South-by-Southwest Interactive panel voting interface is up today. I proposed a panel called Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community that Pays the Bills, to discuss different ways that private companies are creating wikis and investing in Wiki technology. I was surprised to hear that, for SxSW Interactive 2007, it's the only proposed Wiki panel! If you're thinking about SxSW 2007, or if you just feel like voting on things, please drop by and give the wiki panel your support. tags: wiki sxsw sxsw2007

Ms. P. I'm really proud of my cousin, Lisa Prodromo, who's a teacher in Chicago. Lisa's from the poor branch of the family that can't afford a "u" at the end of their name, but she's overcome that hardship and is now a really great English teacher. She's got a blog at http://www.msprodromo.com/ for her students, but I'm waiting for her to bust out with one for grownups, too. Anyways, she was just nominated for the prestigious Golden Apple award, a Chicago-area teachers award. I'm sure she's going to win. tags: lisaprodromo u msprodromou teaching chicago golden apple : What's the protocal for commenting here in your bliki? Edit now and ask questions later has always worked for me, so I'll try that. When am I got to get an introduction to the illustrious Chicago Ms. P? We're doing some scheming here in Chicago and would love to include her. --TedErnst

It's the Festival of Virtue today in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the first of the five wp:sansculottides, festival days at the end of the year just before the fall equinox. The day is dedicated to singing the praises of individuals who've shown especially good qualities. I'd probably start off with the great people involved in Wikitravel -- they've been hugely successful at self-organizing and creating an incredible collection of high-quality travel guides. I'm always amazed at the persistence and goodwill of this great group of unselfish and dedicated travellers. Another is the great local local Montreal Burning Man community, putting together Ignition 2006, the regional burn event here in Quebec. There are people coming out of the woodwork to make this a fun campout, and I'm really looking forward to the event next weekend. There's still a lot to do, but I think it's going great. Who else? The thousands of people making and sharing Open Source software and Open Content music, images, and text continue to astound me. When we're in the thick of it, it's hard to remember how generous and giving you have to be to dedicate time and energy to sharing Free Information with the world and with posterity. It is a saintly pursuit and it deserves praise and support. tags: vertu equinox ignition open source

Devido a um projeto no trabalho, bem poss vel que eu tenha que passar as pr ximas semanas (ou meses, quem sabe) me dedicando a produzir muita documenta o. Eu escrevo muito diariamente, mas desde sempre s uso vim. Por m, devido a essa documenta o ter que ser produzida em um formato que possa ser compartilhado com outras pessoas normais (n o t cnicas), me vi obrigado a come ar a explorar as possibilidades do OpenOffice.org Writer, j que o m nimo que eu poderia fazer era dar for a ao padr o ODF. N o estou acostumado com esse tipo de software e n o consigo gostar de processadores de texto complexos como esses, mas pelo que vi at o momento, ele parece at bem completo. O mais estranho perceber que, depois de um tempo lidando com o bicho, voc se d conta de que est fazendo downloads de verificadores ortogr ficos e de dicion rios de termos de inform tica e, o pior de tudo, est realmente usando isso tudo. Uau ! Tenho medo do que pode estar por vir. Acho que vou come ar a virar usu rio comum. Socorro

So K. called me a brat, and rightly so. Now I could go on about the bizarre dysfunctional ways A. and M. keep trying to drag me into their extramarital insanity, but that would be overuse of initials. I could tell you about Fatslaps and his plans to splatter Harry with onions, but Harry is whimpering just about the right amount. I'm talking about Harry, not Harry. I could do a Marxist literary criticism of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, but something disturbing happened to me, indirectly leading me to have a flashback. It was another century, though not more than a couple miles away. As with all progress , some things are better now, and some things are worse. Maybe that's just how I see it. It's stereotypically geriatric to reminisce about the past, accentuating the positive, but it's stereotypically me to only comment on the negative. So in the interest of stalling, here comes a m lange of the two. Value judgments are left as an exercise for the reader, assuming the prostitute/lover question isn't still getting top billing. Warren Zevon was still alive. Nouvelle Vague hadn't released any albums yet. I only knew one person who spoke Brazilian Portuguese. I hadn't seen Rent yet. I used to eat a lot more Colombian food. I refused to eat tomatoes. Actually, I ate quite a few things then that I don't now, and quite a few things now that I didn't then. I don't remember what I ate that night, but it wasn't Kraft dinner ; I'm sure of that. I know because I went to see a free concert as performed by the Barenaked Ladies. The concert was free because they were almost completely unknown. I was introduced to them a while before, by a dirty, dirty slut who squealed with delight because the lyrics featured words such as erection . It took me years of recovery to be able to appreciate that song. Years. If she hadn't, I would have found out about them through Minna Bromberg because she does a cover. One of the people I was with shouted out to Steven Page, calling him by the wrong name. If being a starstruck poseur weren't enough cause, I think the error would have made me implode from embarrassment. He took it on the chin. I know this Canadian who keeps telling the same tired old story that the Barenaked Ladies is the only Canadian band to ever become famous outside of Canada. He uses this dubious claim to segue into his bit about how The Tragically Hip is really popular in Canada, but unknown everywhere else. I tell him that I've heard of The Tragically Hip. He doesn't believe me. I try telling him that I've never heard of Moxy Fr vous or Rush, at which point he breaks down and admits that everyone has heard of Rush. Then we repeat the conversation a month later. So BNL did get all famous and mainstream and STUFF. That night, they urged everyone in the audience to promote them so they could GET PAID and sell out to The Man. I must confess not comprehending their earnestness and the gravity of the situation. I also never expected them to be played on Z100. Boycott ClearChannel. They're sellouts now, but they weren't then, and a good time was had by all. At the time, If I Had $1000000 might've been their most popular song. AS SUCH, the more rabid fans in the audience had brought boxes and boxes of macaroni & cheese, as well as a stuffed monkey or two. These items were flung at the stage, at appropriate times, frightening the band. I don't believe that anyone threw a green dress. Now, Canadians are funny people. They like to flap their heads and do medleys and covers and rap gratuitously in the middle of concerts. Well, Rush doesn't, but Moxy Fr vous and BNL do, and that's enough for me to make a sweeping generalization, because Rush can be disqualified purely on the mullet factor. You probably don't know this, but If I Had $1000000 is a song which gets a lot of variation and perhaps improv. For example, the owner of the remains will vary, and they'll vamp the introduction with the lyrics of some other song. You can hear it on the Rock Spectacle album, where they lead in with Grade 9. That night they did Prince's Raspberry Beret. We swooned. We swooned.

Today, as it was widely anticipated, the Superior Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) declared Felipe Calder n, of the currently right-wing governing PAN party, elected as president for the 2006-2012 period.
My regular readers will know that my political views are against his party's, and that I completely oppose him - Of course, being consequent, in June I started, together with some friends, FeCal.org.mx, a site destined to show the incongruencies and incoherences in the official version - and that evolved to a site I am quite fond of, having good and deep analysis of the political situation. Of course, it is time now to redesign and think forward for this site, now that FeCal is no longer a candidate - but lets leave it aside for now.
Today, we are mourning. We are not mourning an electoral loss - Wherever there is democracy, there are losers, and it might be right that we lost this time. Furthermore, in political systems such as ours, it is practically guaranteed that the majority of the citizens will lose (this means, it is terribly hard for any candidate to get over 50% of the votes - If Calder n wins with almost 35% of the votes, or if L pez Obrador wins by a similar amount, we will anyway have 65% of losers). But what we are mourning goes far beyond that: We lost faith in our electoral institutions, which we were so proud of a couple of years ago. They proved not to be serious, not to be adequate for a hard decision. Why am I saying this? Lets analyze a bit.
First of all, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE)'s main function is to organize the federal elections, and to make sure they are run with neutrality. Since the early months of the formal competition (as the campaigns themselves started way too early and we Mexicans are sick of the eternal electoral climate), the IFE has not acted in time to stop a dirty campaign, made not only by the PAN party but by the nation's President himself and by groups that, being privately owned, are said to be outside the reach of the IFE's regulatory spectrum. The IFE's general council should have been built with representants of all of the main political forces, but only PRI and PAN (which means, center-right and right wing) were represented.
Secondly, over the last six years, President Fox seems to have made constant efforts not only to prove us all he is a complete fool and inept as a statesman (examples abound, there is no rush to prove Vicente Fox just cannot be trusted to run a country), but that his fight for democracy was nothing but a race for personal power. He took every oportunity he could to promote his party - while the Mexican law requires him to remain neutral during the electoral period. There are many proven examples of irregularities and corruption inside his cabinet (most notably those carried out by Josefina V zquez Mota, who was in charge of all of the federal programs to fight poverty, and was the coordinator of Calderon's campaign) leading to inject resources into the campaign. Yes, this should have been stopped by IFE as soon as they were detected - But it was not. And, thank you Mr. Fox, by doing this you severely undermined the respect there should be for the Presidential figure.
Now, IFE's role ends shortly after the elections. After that, it is TEPJF's role to qualify the elections - To ratify they complied to the required equity, legality and certainty. Many of us had more trust in TEPJF than in IFE, mainly because of the series of personal and group connections that came up between IFE and the power groups. Most of us were quite vocal on the voto por voto, casilla por casilla front - Demanding from TEPJF to request to recount all of the votes. Having only 0.58% distance between the top candidates, with lots of statistical anomalities, with tons of reports of illegal tampering of the ballots, having a wide recount would surely make many among us believe and accept the results - Of course, the PAN repeated ad nauseam that the ballots had been counted and we should not go again over the same excercise, quoting all kinds of arguments that came from a too narrow interpretation of the law. And, in the end, too narrow was the response of TEPJF - Only 9% of the booths were reinspected, and not all of them were recounted. In fact, one week ago, they decided to discard over 300 appeals (this means, 300 requests for trial on a specific booth or on a whole district), without yet disclosing which appeals were they, on what basis were they discarded, what geographical areas did they impact, or anything. They nullified about 235,000 votes - And this number is quite scary, as it practically matches the official difference between the two lead candidates (244,000 votes before this partial recount, 233,000 after it). We can now state for certain that the difference between the candidates is smaller than the error margin.
Today, with a very important portion of the country in doubt on whether their decision was legal and correct, TEPJF ratified Felipe Calder n as the elected president. This would be good news. I would like to accept Felipe as my president - Sadly, I cannot, just because all of the TEPJF's principles were violated:

• Equity: The process didn't progress with equity. Illegal publicity was repeated over and over. Just as one example, the Presidency has had the equivalent of 24h a day of ads in the national electronic media for over six months - And IFE acknowledged it was used in a way that promoted the vote for their candidate. The final message was very subtly changed, many people were left unsatisfied, and... That was it.
  Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador was often protrayed as a puppet of Fidel Castro and Hugo Ch vez, and there are still people who believe he was setting to create a communist regime in Mexico. Of course, this was also a direct result of what is now known as the hatred campaign that the ruling party and an important group of industrials pushed. So, no, we had no equity.
• Legality: Most of this posting has dealt with the ilegalities of the process, they are really not in short supply. The sad and alarming thing is that it was the TEPJF itself which commited the last and most important illegal acts.
• Certainty: In a strongly contested electoral scenario, I perceive this to be the sole most important principle. How many votes were cast for each of the top candidates? We have repeatedly stated that the difference between them is below the statistical error margin for a process where a million people counted the votes. And after last week's results where nearly 240,000 votes were discarded, the difference is objectively and undoubtely smaller than the error margin. Even if no fraud was made, people make mistakes, and it is too na ve to assume not even one out of each 200 votes was incorrectly accounted. And even if no fraud was done, not allowing the society to ensure the results of the process really match the reality is by itself a fraud. We will now probably never know if Felipe Calder n cheated, the same as we still don't know who won in 1988 and by how much. Then, official records say that Carlos Salinas had over 50% of the votes, Cuauht moc C rdenas almost 30% and Manuel Clouthier close to 20% - But both C rdenas and Clouthier were sure they had won. And while C rdenas (founder of the PRD, which now supports L pez Obrador) called off the civic resistence to start creating a strong political movement for future, PAN's Clouthier did exactly what his party criticizes L pez Obrador for. In fact, our president Vicente Fox was the Agriculture Secretary in Clouthier's parallel government. Only that Clouthier had a misterious accident some months later and died - giving way to the dark period of PRI-PAN concertacesiones led by Diego Fern ndez de Ceballos.

So... In short, what comes now? We are exhausted by this long process. As too many people, I just cannot accept the imposition of yet another fraudulent president. I had the hopes that Mexico had changed in the last 18 years - But it has not. We are still in a strong presidentialist regime, and we still don't have hopes of getting a democratic government. If we do have a democraticly elected president, perfect, I will accept it. Of course, criticizing and keeping a close eye on his government, as I don't think the social and economic principles they push, but accepting. But there are too many signs of a fraud, there are too many stinky bits in the decision. The stinkiest of them all, the refusal of their opportunity to shut us up. Is it better to have millions of angry citizens closing important streets and giving Mexico a bad name by writing about our trip back to the stone age than to allow for a legal recount? Is it too much asking giving some certainty to our elections? Is there any doubt we will keep fighting this imposition?

For a long time I've enjoyed reading books by David Brin. Not only does he have some good sci-fi ideas and a good writing style, but he's also a cool guy when you meet him at a signing. One of the core concepts in a number of his books is the idea of uplift, whereby advanced races use a combination of breeding programs and genetic manipulation to raise animals to a similar level to humans in terms of intelligence and ability to use tools.

I believe that it's a necessary step in the development of the human species to encounter other species as equals. It seems obvious that a person who was raised in isolation would not be able to reach their full potential (there are many examples of children being abandoned and living with animals, the results are not positive). It also seems obvious to me that a species that is raised in isolation without interacting with other equal species will also be unable to reach their full potential. I believe that the human race needs to meet with another species of an equal level as the next stage in the development of our civilization.

Given the lack of success of SETI programs it seems that uplifting a species such as dogs, monkeys, or dolphins is likely to give better results in this regard than trying to contact non-human intelligent creatures.

Dogs might be a good first choice for uplift because they are well domesticated, this means that you are permitted to own them in residential areas without a license and there are good veterinary services for them. A possible way of starting an uplift program would be for people around the world to buy dogs of some particular breeds and then measure them by some objective scales. There are intelligence tests for animals that could be applied to dogs, the ones that get the best scores would be permitted to breed. Also we would want to breed them for communication ability (the ability to talk) and dexterity (evolve their toes into fingers). The statistics of the dogs and their lineage (don't want in-bred dogs) could be stored in a database and the breeding program could be done in an open-source manner over the net.

Most domesticated dogs are in-bred to some degree so we would want to cross-breed them to some extent. Poodles are reasonably intelligent and live for a long time so may be good for a start to this program, also blue-heelers, terriers, and labradors are reasonably smart and could be included.

I switched to evolution from mutt a little over a year ago. I found that I really need a side-panel list of folders and some better calendar integration. Since then, I'd discovered muttng and other ways of dealing w/ calendar stuff at work, but I just couldn't make myself go through the MUA switch again. Today I have a couple new . (No offence intended to the gnome/evo guys - they've been responding quickly, and ia64 doesn't have a huge desktop userbase - its something I've wanted to do for a while anyway). I spent a couple hours splitting out configs so that I can share all of my common settings across machines, and have customizations where necessary for specific locations/situations. I used the 'source file ' syntax to call a shell script that uses heuristics to guess at my environment & generate relevant pieces of muttrc. I'm already (re-)impressed by how much quicker I can process mail, and of course, the fact that I can customize every little property of the MUA. And I can use my $EDITOR again :) Now I guess I should take another look at calendaring tools to go with it - I hear sunbird has pretty good support for read/writing calendar info via WebDAV...

I'm always on the lookout for a better way to maintain and share my calendar. I currently have a hybrid solution - evolution/webcalendar. I use evolution to store all of my HP appointments, because it can easily import ical appointments. It also has a pop-up reminder mechanism, which is certainly a must. But what sucks is that I want to see/be reminded of the same appointments whether I'm on my laptop at home, or in the office on my workstation. evolution doesn't share its calendar with other clients. Outside of work, I use webcalendar - which is actually pretty feature rich. It can send e-mail reminders and even has a .ics interface that evolution can poll. That way I can overlay my (read-only) webcalendar appointments on top of my evolution calendar, so I only have to maintain those appointments in a single place, and can still get pop-up reminders. Unfortunately, this hasn't been working with recent evolutions - and when it did, it was flaky - random crashes, etc. A problem with webcalendar is that everyone I invite to an event needs to have an account. I want to be able to invite anyone in the world, with just their e-mail address. When I'd first read about hula, I let my mind go wild with how it might work. Wouldn't it be cool if this was just a simple to install/configure/use client that people could just install and run locally? And then what if all these clients could somehow be organized into useful groups? Like I could tell my client that I'm an HP employee, and it could talk to some hp hula server to see my coworker's schedules? And I could also see my buddy's calendar that lists all the concerts he's going to this month, by communicating with his client directly, in an rss fashion? No required central server, just a client that knows how to collect/post information in standard formats and present it in a useful way. Well, that's not what hula's all about, it seems. It looks very centralized, and isn't something many of my friends could configure themselves. I installed sid's hula today; which is admittedly about 6 months out of date. I was initially impressed with the ease of install & the pretty web page, but quickly became disappointed by the admin architecture. Adding a user is terribly, terribly non-intuitive. And the whole thing looks overly complex, like its inherited a lot of design cruft. But, once you log in as a user, things look fine. hula's calendar looks nice, and I'd seen a flash video that makes newer versions look really spiffy. So, I wanted to see if I could easily import an e-mailed invitation into it. This means I'd need to give hula access to my e-mail. You can have hula pull mail from a remote server - I was hoping to connect it to my imap server as a read-only client for this test. However, it seems that hula will only pull mail every N hours, where N is configurable globally. I really just want to have an active imap session, using hula as a front-end, but that feature doesn't look like its there. I also couldn't find anyway to import an existing calendar/.ics file. Anyway, I've seen enough to know that hula isn't going to work for me yet. It doesn't appear to offer me anything that I don't already have, or simplify anything I do already have.

So, thanks to Ari I'm all moved in to my new place with Nicole. It's a complete mess and but it's going to be fun being there. I don't have internet at home right now (posting this from work) so I'll be going in to Debian hibernation mode for the most part during this time. Speakeasy is scheduled to come and hook things up on the 13th, which would be a nice post-birthday event. I'll be working on some Debian stuff in the meantime which doesn't require internet access though.

On other matters, reading Scott's post made me sad, though not surprised, much like it felt reading Matthew's post. It's sad to see people go, although they're still in the Debian family more or less. I can only wish them the best and hope that I get to meet them sooner than later.

Scott's post, as well as discussions with Mako, have got me thinking about setting up a committee in parallel to the technical committee: a distribution steering committee. The tech committee would be around to perform the same function it already does, but the steering committee would be the ones to make decisions that don't involve so much in the way of conflict. Questions like default MTA and desktop environment (which are more matters of preference than clear superiority) could be handled by the steering committee. The rationale for separating it from the tech committee would be to have the tech committee act as a check to balance the power of the steering committee. There could be a limited amount of overlap between the two, but not enough to allow a majority in either committee to serve in both. In order for this to work, the steering committee would have to have the ability to override maintainer decisions on matters that affect the entire distribution. If a maintainer had a serious issue with this, they could take it to the tech committee, who would have the final say. Any developer could do work on things mandated by the steering committee, including 0 day NMU's with such features, thereby allowing people to work across packages they don't own easily.

The key to the steering committee would be that it would set active goals for the release. The release team is able to currently set release goals, but they don't do so with any strong authority right now. People who wanted to do something like make upstart the default in Debian, would bring the case before the committee (who would also potentially set their own goals rather than wait around for people), get it approved, and then start working. They wouldn't own the packages they alter, but this would give them the ability to get the necessary work done. It would require a culture and a group of people who were actively interested in making things happen across the entire distro, much like Ubuntu has. I'd love to get some feedback on this to see if people think it's a good idea to pursue creating it. It would require changes to the constitution, but it might give us a mechanism to drive the project forward without resorting to a benevolent dictatorship of the DPL.

Well John Howard said he wanted to start a nuclear debate in Australia. Seems it has already started on Planet Linux Australia. I figure I might as well have a meandering blog post about alternative energy and current world events, since I've just been immersing myself in the best news I can obtain with my crappy cable package in a country not renowned for its awareness of world affairs. Firstly, since there's been talk about nuclear power, I'd like to offer my thoughts on Iran, and how it's sounding like Iraq all over again. People are getting in a flap about Iran enriching uranium. Iran says that they don't want "the bomb", they only want nuclear power to meet their energy demands. Now if this is true, then surely should applaud a country that sits on a chunk of the Middle East's oil reserves looking to use something other than oil for its energy needs. I for one don't know if you need to "enrich" uranium to use it for a nuclear reactor, or whether it's good enough "as is". But let's just assume that Iran's intentions are as they have said, then it's going to be Iraq all over again. The US said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The US is saying Iran is enriching uranium for the purposes of making a bomb. So far the former claim hasn't been proven, so what's to say the latter is true either? Let's say the nuclear debate in Australia determines that it'd be a good a thing for Australia to go nuclear. How is Australia enriching uranium for electricity generation any different to Iran doing it? (Other than Australia is in the Coalition of the Willing, and Iran is in the Axis of Evil). Speaking of Iran being in the Axis of Evil, how is Iran supplying weapons to Hezbollah fundamentally any different to the US supplying weapons to Israel? Oh, and is anyone allowed to criticise Jewish people without being called anti-Semitic? Since when is invading a neighbouring country considered okay? I am so glad Australia is an island nation. These countries with land borders, sheesh... Anyway, back to alternative energy. I'm a greenie, (with a lowercase "g") so I'm open to nuclear power, but it does frighten the willies out of me, with things like Chernobyl. I'd never heard of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor until Paul wrote of it. It certainly sounds safer than previous methods of nuclear reaction. But of alternatives. Wind, for example, doesn't need to be big and arguably ugly. These guys in the UK have made a very sexy and quiet wind turbine. I don't know how it stacks up in terms of cost or output to the traditional three-bladed wind turbines like what I've photographed in Southern California, but they're supposed to be quiet, which is apparently one of the (many) arguments that landowners like farmers have against wind generation in general. This Australian company has come up with a very small, but less sexy wind turbine, that I believe to be fairly cheap. Finally, in terms of generation, and I've written about this before, but I find the Tower of Power to be a fascinating concept in natural energy generation. Where am I going with this ramble? No idea. I do think rapidly developing countries like China should completely leapfrog over the era of oil and move to renewably generated electricity. Maybe they can get the manufacturing costs down of the equipment, and it'll be less of a big deal in terms of cost for the rest of the world to adopt it. Whew. What a ramble. Don't start me on flushing toilets with drinking water.

I found out today that someone found the small amount of information about me they needed to nearly successfully buy stuff in my name. They call this "identity theft", but since my identity still seems to be intect (pats his rampant ego) and since as an ardent SF fan, I'd like to reserve the term identity theft for the possibility of someone stealing a copy of me, I prefer not to use that term for this form of fraud. Luckily I already had a fraud alert placed on my accounts before this happened; I started placing these alerts a while ago, on the basis that the banking system's verification methods are so broken that it makes sense to just do it pre-emptively, before you have any reason to think someone is trying to defraud you. Who knows if that does any good though. Oddly, I almost ranted about this id theft nonsense last week, before I knew this happened. The thing is, while I'm calling to report credit cards as compromised and learning that someone managed to put together my name, address, phone number, and a not very well secured credit card number; at the same time I have something here with these properties:

1. Anyone can use it to verify if a given statement (such as "transaction #128: please pay this person $500") was actually made by me and actually applies to the person I meant it to.
2. Using it doesn't automatically give it to a supposedly trusted third party, such as the low-paid phone support guy who has my credit card number and all the rest up on his screen right now as I ask him to cancel the purchase.
3. According to the experts is not breakable by any means except for a brute-force attack that would use the resources of a medium-sized country.
4. Can be used to identify me with a fair degree of certainty, even if you've not met me.
5. Is suitable for use on the internet.
6. Even if physically stolen from me is not trivially easy to break and use.
7. If I lose it or know that someone has stolen it from me, I can revoke its use in a way that is just as hard to forge or break.
8. Can, incidentially, be used to make private conversations just as hard to snoop on. But that's probably a different rant.

That magic thing is a public and private key pair for GPG, and it seems really weird to me that I can use this for unimportant things like signing email, and for crucial things like authenticating changes to the software deployed on millions of coumputers, but I cannot use it to pay a bill. I wonder if the world at large will ever catch on to the uses of public key cryptography? Anyone want to start a First Bank of GPG?

MJ Ray talks about AJAX and Accessability, as much as I hate most things JavaScript, and most things on the web (it's full of bad designers, and pages that I just can't view with a text based browser... grrr ;), I have do disagree with AJAX inherently breaking accessability - that'll be bad web designers. AJAX and JavaScript are supposed to be used to enhance the user experience when run on a platform that supports it, they are not there to replace the job of the server in the first place, good web designers know this, and when they use AJAX it's to minimise data transfer when JavaScript is enabled, but otherwise everything should have safe fallbacks, ergo they're still accessable. It's not the technology that is the problem, as usual it's the crowd of "ohh, shiny" that don't use any common sense. Fix the people, fix the web. While people are still in the "oh shiny" mindset, we're going to see more problems, it's quite simple. New technology, expecially stuff that really actually isn't new, it's just been bent in to "shape" by a bunch of people that had more time than sense and wanted a set of libraries to make sick things possible... make things simple, people use them. People use them, they use them incorrectly. It's been the way of the world for many years. Simple solution to the problem, force people to use a text based browser for a day a week - no, not w3m with javascript support, that'd be cheating... watch as the web (slowly) became a better place. Anyways - that's my 2p on the issue.

Ajax is devolution [vitavonni] is a good argument based on the pain of writing Javascript and the drawbacks of running complex Javascript on most browsers, but says nothing about the accessibility problems.

Ajax isn't progress, it's actually a step back. Most people have been happy to actually use some sane advanced language for doing web sites. There is Java, JSP, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, ... And then there is Ajax. One of the main components is JavaScript. That language most of us would have loved to forget. Forever. Ajax brings you back into the dark ages of internet development, with browser incompatibilities, it features memory leaks, and many Ajax apps (such as live.com) will run unbearably slow on older computers. Such as my 1.8 GHz P4M laptop. If they work at all - live.com just shows "Loading..." for me right now. Have you ever looked at some of the actual Ajax code? This isn't the future, this is the dark ages coming back! [MJ Ray replies that I didn't mention accessibility issues with Ajax. That's true; I'm aware of them, but this post focuses on Ajax doing away with all the advances in programming languages and software engineering... The in-accessibility of Ajax stuff is worth an own blog post sometime]

Tag clouds [en.wikipedia.org] are a current must-have for web 2.0 applications. Examples can be found for bookmarks, blog entries, photos, music or books. Tag clouds are hip, because they're a dynamic feature and show the "Zeitgeist" [wikipedia]. They given an overview on the users ("California" in flickr) or on current hot topics ("Israel", "Lebanon" in technorati). However, tag clouds also have severe limitations. First of all, they're arbitrarily ordered. Usually alphabetic, so there is no content relationship among the entires. Secondly, they only show an excerpt, since there are usually much more tags than fit on the screen. Thirdly, they're atomic information, whereas relations as used e.g. in RDF [wikipedia] can convey much more complex information. I'm trying to push tag clouds to a next level. They're a gimmick right now, but maybe we can make them to a powerful navigation tool? Together with Enrico Zini I've just created my first tag cloud (I've skipped making a tag cloud for my blog...). Well, it quickly evolved beyond a tag cloud. You could maybe call it a tag sky. Or tag forest. I'm not using my blog or something like this for the tag cloud. That would be quite boring, I'm not doing real tagging on it. Instead I'm using software tags. The Debtags project, led by Enrico and I, has been working on software tags for some years now during our spare time. We have about 600 tags in a dozen of facets, and 15000 software packages (I don't have the number ready how many of that are somewhat tagged already). Well, the tagging efforts are still far from complete, thats why we're currently working on an AI to assist tagging efforts, too. We generated two different renderings of the tag clouds for you: one separated cloud per facet, and all folded into one big cloud. Oh, and actually click on one of the tags, it will take you to a more complex tag-based navigation tool and a tagger. So what makes these different from the usual tag clouds you see everywhere (apart from the sheer size, sorry about that. Maybe we'll add buttons next to hide/show tags with low occurrence numbers)? Well, the tags next to each other aren't completely unrelated any more, since they are (in both renderings) grouped by their facet. This makes it easier to locate something - go through the red facets first, then look at the tags in the group. I'm thinking about a second step, which would involve dynamic expanding details in the tag cloud, or hiding them, finally transforming the tag cloud into a true navigation utility beyond a "single click filter". In my final diploma thesis, one of the topics to work on suggested by my professor is doing "tag clouds" (i.e. weighted lists) for relations. The prototype will likely be integrated with the IkeWiki semantic wiki. I don't have a clear vision of how the "relation cloud" will work or look like, but I havn't started with my tesis yet anyway. I currently imagine up to three clouds (corresponding to the empty places in the relation) that will dynamically adopt to the choices already made by the user. Some zooming will probably be needed, too. Another use of tag clouds would be a visualization of the AI - the weights could be chosen by how sure the AI is about this tag; the cloud would then describe the AIs rating of a software package description. If you have some ideas, good links, relevant papers or other feedback, just send me an email to erich@debian.org. Thank you.

I've been using the maildir format for my mail boxes for some years now. I'm really happy with this solution - no locking issues, and decent support in all applications I use. (Well, evolution has been crashing with Maildir recently, but switching to using a local IMAP server resolved this just fine.) But the biggest benefit of maildir is that it's dead easy to write your own tools for it. I've written a small perl script that moves read mails that are not flagged into my archive after 30 days. Over the last few years, this archive (not containing large mailinglists such as debian-devel which are publicly archived) has grown a lot. Now the benefits of maildir, a separate file for each mail, turn into drawbacks. For my archive, I don't need to care about locking or random access. Actually I rarely access it ever. But since a file always occupies whole blocks, my mailarchive occupies 1.6 GB on my disk, with just 1.2 GB of data. An experience value is a compression ration of around -60% for bz2. So by switching from Maildir to mbox.gz I can probably free up 800 MB on my disk. (And I'll move the older years onto my encrypted backup HD anyway) Now I'm looking into scripting the conversion from Maildir to mbox.gz. I'm still a bit undecided on which tools to use... [Update: python2.5 has support for mbox and maildir... Here's maildir2mbox in 5 lines of python:

import sys, mailbox
md = mailbox.Maildir(sys.argv[1], None)
mb = mailbox.mbox(sys.argv[2])
for mail in md:
        mb.add(mailbox.mboxMessage(mail))

nice, uh? ;-) ]

So where will search engines evolve to? With Google not doing many improvements to their search results page, I can see a certain group of users actually preferring other search engines. Live.com - Microsofts new generation - is so slow here, it's unuseable. And it actually doesn't have any benefits over Google. In fact, it looks like an mere ajaxified copy of Google. More interesting are the contenders Snap.com, Exalead and Clusty. Snap.com definitely has the prettiest Ajax interface of the three. It has keyword completion like Google Suggest, and will display a screenshot of the currently selected result. However it only displays one screenshot at a time; and since screenshots are most useful for finding again a page you didn't bookmark thats only of limited use. Clusty offers you the benefit of grouping the results automatically by topics. If you aren't very experienced at searching, this can offer huge benefits for you. Searching e.g. for "sports" with Google is rather pointless. Clusty actually gives you useful ways of refining your search. Exalead sits inbetween. It has an ajaxish interface (but isn't overdoing it like live.com), it has screenshots (but not as big as snap; you can get an overview with 12 screenshots per page which is IMHO much more useful; however there are still some slight bugs) and it has some clusterin (though not as good as Clusty, but you can select multiple clusters) Anyway, I'm looking forward to what these search engines become, and what Google will do to draw even with them. (Yes, I'm aware that some people like Google because of its minimality. But not everyone does. Some users will actually need search assistance such as offered by Clusty and to a lesser extend by Exalead.)