Lisa has been thinking for a short while that she’d like to get a Motorola RAZR phone. We were AT&T Wireless customers, which now makes us a weird type of Cingular customer where we not only have our AT&T plan, but also special AT&T customer service representatives (which I’ll get to in a bit). So we went into our local Cingular store and she asked about getting the shiny new black RAZR, and they said that it wouldn’t be a problem, they’d just need to upgrade our service, and since we’re on the same plan and the service is changing, I’d need to upgrade my phone as well. AT&T Wireless has a email-to-SMS gateway and gives every phone its own email address, yournumber@mmode.com. Since AT&TWS only charges if you send a message but not if you receive a message, I use it all the time (mostly for stock quotes but also for various other things). So in an average month I probably receive 30-50 emails on my phone, as well as the occasional spam, all of them free. Cingular has the same service, yournumber@cingularme.com. But unlike AT&TWS, Cingular charges you both for sending and receiving messages. (”Text, Instant, and Multimedia messages are charged when sent or received, whether read or unread, solicited or unsolicited.”) So my 30-50 messages a month are going to cost me $3.00-$5.00 a month. Of course, I could always get a package, which will limit those 50 messages to just $3.00. Or I could get a $20 package that lets me receive 2500 messages. That’s not the point. The point is that once that limit is hit, it goes back to $0.10 per message, regardless of the plan. That means that some evil person can send you thousands of messages and you could end up owing hundreds of dollars. The only way to prevent that is to call Cingular and turn off the E-Mail Messaging feature from your service. (You can use the Message Center to “Create block and allow lists to limit e-mail messages received” and “Control what times of day your phone can receive e-mail messages.” Also it looks like you can block email containing some spam attributes. But none of those things guarantee that you’re not going to get a bunch of junk.) I tried calling Cingular to confirm this, and when I entered my phone number, it redirected me to AT&TWS customer service, who confirmed that AT&TWS does not charge for receiving text messages, and confirmed that Cingular does charge for receiving messages, but did not have an answer for how Cingular deals with spam. In fact, they didn’t seem to have a lot of information about the Cingular service at all, other than how to “upgrade” my account to a Cingular account. I had to call Cingular sales, who also didn’t know the answer to how to prevent abuse; but they were able to transfer me to Cingular customer service, who confirmed that yes, I really do have the potential to get screwed if I don’t turn off E-Mail Messaging.

I had a wonderful little entry written up talking about how I’m going to become a godfather, and how I switched web browsers, and other meaningless stuff, when it got eaten. I was nearly done with it too. I don’t know exactly what caused the crash, but I do know that it took down the entire screen process, and all the windows with it. This happens to me probably once a week. It only happens to me on DreamHost’s shell server though; it doesn’t happen to me on any of the other computers I run screen on. They all run Debian, but DreamHost is the only one that runs sarge; all the others run etch. So I blame you, Debian, and will keep blaming you until I actually look into the issue enough to figure out where the problem is. Also, I continue to hate LiveJournal, even after I’ve stopped using them. Lately they’ve started tinkering with what cookies they send and when, and which ones you need in order to read protected entries. When you request the RSS feed for a LiveJournal blog, first it redirects you to a place where it checks your ljmastersession cookie, then it redirects you to a place where it sets your ljdomsess.ljuser cookie, then redirects you back to the original page you requested. This works fine in standards-compliant browsers but in half-hour hacks that you put together yourself it sends you through an infinite loop of redirects. So I had to spend another half hour working to fix that fun problem. (It really wasn’t a problem for me, other than I wasn’t able to read LJ users’ blogs for a while; the UI still worked fine, since everything is done with libnbio.) I should have just used curl, and would have except their non-blocking IO API is crap. And in other obscure software news, my viwp plugin is occasionally broken, so I’ve stopped using it, which pisses me off. I don’t like the WordPress web authoring UI for a variety of reasons (largely because it’s just a textarea), and it’s not convenient for me to use a GUI tool, and I didn’t see a TUI tool worth using. So at some point I’m probably going to have to figure out why viwp is buggy and fix it. Until then I blame WordPress.

It is with some sadness and reluctance that I canceled our daily subscription to the Boston Globe today. I like the idea of a print newspaper, but in reality, it doesn’t work for me anymore. Perhaps the biggest problem is newspapers deliver news at the least useful interval. Radio and the web give you up-to-the-minute updates, while weekly and monthly magazines give you in depth, critical treatment of the news in perspective. (Of course, the web also gives you everything, although it is not always as portable as a magazine or radio.) Newspapers end up somewhere in between: they are generally hastily (and thus poorly) written; don’t usually have space for in depth and contextual treatment (although certainly better than most TV news); but by the time you get them they are already dated if you’ve been checking Google News and listening to NPR. Newspapers also have vast amounts of irrelevant content that just creates more work for me in taking out the recycling. I never look at the sports, real estate, “lifestyle,” or automotive sections; the hundreds of pages of advertising material in the Sunday edition likewise go right into the recycle bin. At the end of the week, I look at the pile of unread dead trees, and realize what an inefficient process it is. Finally, it’s just not a good value. $400 a year could pay for a lot more high quality online or offline content. I understand the newspaper business has been having a tough time, and I’m not helping things by unsubscribing. (The desperation is palpable in the “Free Boston Herald” hawkers stationed outside my office every evening.) I hope the good investigative reporters still find a way to ply their trade. Maybe they will all end up at high quality weekly and monthly publications, e.g., Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker. In any event, I’m looking forward to less work and less guilt carrying the recycling to the curb. I suppose I’m just doing my part to kill old media.

The 2006 Tour of Britain will be calling at Glasgow (29 August), Castle Douglas, Blackpool, Liverpool, Yorkshire, West Midlands, Rochester, Canterbury, Greenwich and central London (3 September). This year, the tour takes the chance to road-test some of the Tour de France and Olympic routes, so the London stage is a bit more than a tiny circuit in Westminster. [cont with links]

DebConf6 has now officially started! So far I sadly haven't seen any talks, since I've been busy with orga stuff (making signs, collecting reimbursement forms, receipts, passport copies etc, speaker training, chasing people for information/keys/cables/...). I hope I'll have more time once things get going. I've also given two speaker training sessions already, one on Saturday and another one on Sunday evening. They've both been pretty well attended (six to eight people, which is the almost ideal size to have a decent number of opinions but still don't have it take too long for everybody to have a go.) The Sunday evening session was a bit shorter since it was scheduled pretty late (21:30) and most participants (including me) felt tired after a while. I also noticed that I started being rather unconcentrated, so I only did a few more active exercises and skipped the rather dreary pronunciation stuff. I haven't yet received much feedback on the sessions but all attendees seemed to have fun, and there definitely was noticeable improvement in people's speaking skills over the time of the workshop. It is now Wednesday morning and everyone is getting ready for the day trip. I am really looking forward to it, even though my ankle is still acting up a bit (sprained it last week). I will also take my camera along and hope to finally take a few pictures.

We are leaving in a couple hours for Xochicalco, one of the many archeological sites here in Mexico. All in all, we are very pleased with the trip we are offering, and really hope everyone likes it.We do have a long day ahead of us, since it will take almost two hours to get there, then we’ll be touring the place for about three hours, go for lunch and then head for Cuernavaca, where we’ll spend a few more hours before heading back here. I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of pictures of the site for those of you following along at home, so check people’s galleries afterwards. And, it’s kind of late to say this, since everyone has seen Gunnar’s feeling better, but still: Gunnar, you’ve made some terrific work here! Us mexicans are very proud of you.

I was a bit lazy today and mostly attending nothing. Not saying that the talks were not interesting, but mostly I wanted to work on a few pending stuff such as this damn Xorg debconf templates rewrite and the subsequent French translation update (a huge one). Being in the hacklab most of the day lead me to good discussions with many people, out of which I'll keep a very long talk with Otavio Salvador. We could some day have a dedicated server for Grisu's work on the DDTP to be hosted while it is used y some translators as a testbed for a future infranstructure. I also attended the interesting "Debian in Latin America" BOF, even though it was in Spansih. It was good to get a picture of how building a community in Latin America is facing challenges. The discussion was animated and very nice with valuable interventions and good animations. Kudos to Anibal and Damog who animated it. Oh, I went assassinated during the day. I won't tell more, of course (except that now you are safe when meeting me, folks...I shouldn't even tell that, but anyway....). This sucks and I hate my murderer....:-)...I will find ways to revenge, believe me, pal. The day ended with the Wine and Cheese party. It was indeed added in the official schedule, so we felt in duty of organizing something nice. And, actually, I think it has been nice with something like 40 different cheese varieties around the table. It bringed a big crowd near the hacklab and triggerred a more than great moment, I think. So, it sounds like a Cheese Party is now becoming an official rendez-vous for all Deconfers, so see you in Debconf7 Cheese and Wine party, which will be huge. Mako, Hannah and Matt, we missed you on that one (Matt, where the hell were you?).

Apparently Sun has finally relicensed Java in a way that Debian can ship packages in it's non-free section. I guess they've been realizing that people started using other Java implementations or Mono instead, that were easier to install on Linux systems. A couple of things were wrong with Java before that, making it a pain to install. The Debian Java people had gone a long way to fix that (e.g. by making the nice make-jpkg application that will convert the official Java into a nice Debian package you can install on your systems, but just cannot give anybody else). While installation wasn't hard with that tool anymore (download, run make-kpkg, install package), this still couldn't give you automatic upgrades. The free java implementations had huge benefits here, so does Mono. Sun Java still has shortcomings with installation, though. First of all, it's in the frowned upon, second-class "non-free" part, secondly you need to agree to it's license on installation, making unattended installation (legally) impossible, I guess. (You can probably just preseed the debconf flag, though) I've recently been recommending people to use Mono instead of Java if they only have these two choices. Mono apps are supposed to run on Windows as well, look a lot better than Java, are apparently more fun to write and easier to install. Now let's hope no patenting issues will be used by Microsoft to make Mono go away. (I wonder if that is one of the reasons why they absolutely do not support Mono meetings at their Dot-Niet gettogethers, because you could use that in a legal trial as them acknowledging Monos use of their stuff, because overall they are benefiting from Mono being .Niet on Linux and thus being a bit more platform independant...)

• Back Door Found in Diebold Voting Machines. Really? Who would have thought?
• You can now say apt-get install sun-java5-jdk (and a few other packages) in Debian, as Sun has finally relaxed its license a bit. Note that it's still not free, it's just free enough to be distributed in Debian's non-free section now ;-)
• Can We Make Operating Systems Reliable and Secure?, by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Or: How to restart an ancient flamewar...
• I reached the last level of Battle for Wesnoth, of the "Heir to the Throne" campaign to be more precise. Replays will be available when I'm through...

At least according to this clueless republican:

Like all the greatest American engineering, it's an example of innovation that makes a growing group of European and Chinese hackers jealous. They hate our lead in computing technology and will stop at nothing until they have control of all our computers.

Hah. Let me tell you, Shelley, I am not jealous of anything. The only thing I feel about people using Windows is pity; you are giving away your freedom in return for some Pride.

If you see a company using Linux, it may be that they have not paid for this software. Report them to the Business Software Alliance who have the legal authority to inspect any company's computers for illegal programs like Linux.

Rotfl. First, the BSA has the legal authority to do absolutely zilch. Second, using Linux is anything but illegal. Get a life. No, really. Update: While I was sleeping, I received no less than 24 comments that the site is not real. I get the picture. Get off my back. :-)

dilinger’s first rule of packing: no matter how well you prepare, you will end up needing something that you’ve already packed. In 15 days, I will no longer be a resident of New York. I certainly won’t miss Queens at all!

I wanted to make sure the hackergotchi (small picture of my head that floats on the entry in planet debian) looks ok. Thanks to Wouter for his guide and others in #debian-devel for helping me make it. Edit: Looks like a typo in the config was making it 404. Will get someone to fix it. Edit2: Thanks gravity!

X Window security. Wandered outside the hack lab to sip a drink and cool down. There I saw Keith Packard and Bdale Garbee. Quickly introduced myself to them both, then asked Keith what his take was on the recent OpenBSD complaints that X11 is insecure by design [1] [2]. Keith said he wasn't going to respond to those complaints, because DRI/DRM already provides what Theo de Raadt says he wants in the way of kernel control over dma and register access on video cards. Many X11 video drivers are not yet converted over to doing things the DRI/DRM way, and so Theo is correct that X11 has huge security holes. But they are not permanent; the future is already arriving. Although DRI/DRM is positioned as a 3d technology, it is intended that even 2d drivers in the future will conform themselves to its API. Keith also said that OpenBSD's representative on the X11 team is easy to work with and cooperates well with the team, so there is hope that if OpenBSD turns its attention to X11 support, everyone will soon benefit from the comprehensive security audit. Although the DRI/DRM design solves the security problems, it is a bitch to implement. Mode switching alone is so finicky and is so tied into both the video hardware and x11 server optimizations, that it has never successfully been implemented in the kernel. Keith said he supported the idea of isolating the mode switching code out into a small, privilege separated userland utility. There were many other things said, which sounded positive, but without the aid of a tape recorder, I can't remember them. Putting packages out of main. Learnt a trick today, courtesy of Phil Hands and Ralph Amissah. If you want to upload a package into a part of the distribution other than main, you alter the Section: field of the debian/control file in your package. Suppose your package fits into the text section, because you use it to process text. Maybe you reimplemented awk. If you put Section: text the package will go into the text portion of the main repository. If your version of awk depends on a library that is in the non-free section, you would put it in the contrib section. So you would put this in your debian/control file: Section: contrib/text and Bob's your uncle. Politics. I find myself doing vastly more politics at this conference than coding, although I am getting some of that done too. When people are deep inside their own worlds, it takes a lot of work to bridge between the worlds. So far it seems like time well invested. Embedded. If anyone needs any embedded work done, Wookey is your guy. Send him an email with a proposal.

1. 2006-05-11 22:00:04 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)
2. 2006-05-13 20:07:35 Re: security bug in x86 hardware (thanks to X WIndows)

Back to a normal schedule now and, thus, woke up at 06:00..:). Quiet hacking near the pool, with a few mosquitos so that I don't feel alone. We had a nice breakfast at the Tower (too lazy to go in the village and have some more barbecue food). Watching Lior discover that he actually ordered a giant piece of meat was kinda funny (less funny for Lior, though). After hacking in the hacklab, I'll have to gather people for the 1st i18n infrastructure session. I hope I'll find everybody...we'll see. I quickly attended Mark Shuttleworth Ubuntu report. I'm quiet balanced about it as it is still giving good promises....but the real achievements aren't coming. Rosetta which is a promising framework, even though it still has IMHO many design flaws or missing features, will not be free. So that seems to definitely rule it out from our i18n infrastructure project. Talking about it, I escaped from Mark's talk and ran into the hacklab to handle what was supposed to be an informal session about i18n infrastructure, which I did set up very quickly (and badly, with many schedule changes). It finally turned out to be an interesting brainstorming with about 30 people attending and many interesting exchanges about what we would like to see in future i18n infrastructure. Thanks to all people who participated, it was a real pleasure to animate that one. After lunch, I've been quietly attending Manoj's workshop about SELinux. It flies way over my head but it is always interesting to hear about these security things. I also took the opportunity to a very good discussion to setup plans for the i18n meeting in Extremadura with Dario Rapisardi and Cesar Gomez Martin.

At least according to this clueless republican:

Like all the greatest American engineering, it's an example of innovation that makes a growing group of European and Chinese hackers jealous. They hate our lead in computing technology and will stop at nothing until they have control of all our computers.

Hah. Let me tell you, Shelley, I am not jealous of anything. The only thing I feel about people using Windows is pity; you are giving away your freedom in return for some Pride.

If you see a company using Linux, it may be that they have not paid for this software. Report them to the Business Software Alliance who have the legal authority to inspect any company's computers for illegal programs like Linux.

Rotfl. First, the BSA has the legal authority to do absolutely zilch. Second, using Linux is anything but illegal. Get a life. No, really.

Laundry day. New roommate Thaddeus Black is really on the ball; today is the first laundry day we've had at the conference, and he was prepared for it, and reminded the rest of us when we woke up. I think I'll wait until the Thursday laundry day. To get your laundry done here, you put it in a plastic bag, and mark it somehow. Then the bags go into a pile, and some company hired by the hotel comes and washes them, and returns the bags of clean clothes to you the same or next day. You can even choose between regular drying and sun drying the clothes. Debian. Yesterday someone filed a bug against my expect package; today Alec Berryman sent in a patch that fixed it. Thank you Alec! The fixed package is now uploaded and should be available to everyone tomorrow. Food. Ville Vuorela brought a big bag of candies from Finland for Simon Richter, who shared them with the table here in the hack lab. They were salty and sweet, with mild licorice flavor. They were quite good. My friend Jesus Monroy, a food columnist in the San Francisco Bay Area, had a few comments on my food adventures yesterday, which I will quote here:

Pancita is Spanish for stomach. Most likely you had a type of menudo, or soup dish. This is a very common and popular dish. Usually used for hangovers. Check the chicken vendor's spices when you can. With some hope he did not use MSG. MSG, as you may know, can be toxic in large amounts. It's not unheard of in Mexico, but they don't know that MSG can be toxic. My mother has refused to eat at some friends houses because they use so much the chicken tastes extremely over-salted. MSG toxic effects are lathargy, nausea, headaches, all the way to death (very extreme). Then again too much salt, or just water, can be toxic. As for the church, they have not changed much in 500+ years in Mexico. Most likely what you saw was what was built.

Conference. Today I attended the one presentation that motivated me to attend Debconf; Peter van Eyndes Common Lisp presentation. Common Lisp, of course, is the best programming language ever, in terms of developer time. Haskell is similar, but is designed more for machines to run fast, than for developers to develop fast. The LISP community has almost universally switched to using darcs for their revision control system, which is not only the easiest to use I have ever found, but is also written in Haskell. Nine people attended Peters presentation. He showed us how to drive the Lisp compiler from inside emacs using slime, with its advanced auto-completion features. He demonstrated the common lisp controller which has advanced dramatically in the past five years. It is now simple and intuitive to load libraries into your Lisp program. He showed us how to package lisp libraries using asdf, which has long been an opaque mystery to me. Luca Capello fom Switzeland, the maintainer of the stumpwm window manager was present, and he promised to demonstrate stumpwm later tonight. stumpwm is not yet as advanced as ratpoison, but it could become far more advanced and whiz-bang than ratpoison could ever be. It has potential. I also met Erick Lopez of Mexico, who wants to package cl-wiki, but is looking for a sponsor. As a Lisp developer, he will be an asset to Debian. After the presentation Peter opened the floor, and every question I'd had about Lisp for the past few years was answered very satisfactorily. At the end, Peter showed us a book called Practical Common Lisp, by Peter Seibel, which he praised highly for those who want to use Lisp for "real" things. Such as a streaming MP3 server. I'm sold! But if you are poor (povre), you can read it for free at Gigamonkeys.

Jonathan Schwartz: “The question is not whether we will open-source Java, the question is how.”

So it’s finally OK to mention it now; Java has made it explicitly possible (read legal) to distribute the Sun Java JRE/JDK on a GNU/Linux distrubtion. The new license is for Java SE 5 on Linux only, called the Operating System Distribution License for Java, or DLJ for short. You can read the license in text or pdf form. The FAQ for the DLJ is also available in text and pdf. Heck, go through the README for the JRE and JDK while you’re at it. So what does that mean? Well, GNU/Linux distrubtions like Debian can now package a Java runtime environment or Java development kit in their repositories. That was previously not possible due to restrictions present in Java licensing. Users still have to accept the Java SE 5 binary code license that is totally not free and has the same restrictions Java has always had, but this at least makes packaging and supporting Java less painful for distributions. Sun is coordinating the efforts via a java.net project, jdk-distros. This is an unprecedented level of cooperation from Sun with external parties in anything related to Java. I consider myself fortunate to have been a founding member of the project. It has been a pleasant and refreshing experience to meet a few optimistic and forward-thinking people from Sun who have a keen interest in Free Software; a big thanks to Simon Phipps and Tom Marble. I was encouraged that they allowed our contributions to be covered under the MIT license. If you would have told me that a month ago I would have laughed at you. The Debian announcment should be posted on the debian-devel-announce list today. I am sure this will draw both praise and ire from the Debian community. That’s cool, though; the rich diversity is part of what makes it such a vibrant organism.

Simon Phipps: “Yes, you can now apt-get install sun-java5-jre and have it install without fuss on Debian and Ubuntu.” Great news. We’re one step closer to a Java/Linux combo that’s more than just Java bolted onto the side of Linux (admittedly, there’s still a bit of that here, though at least it’s attached with standard componentry now rather than the old bubble gum and bailing wire). Why is tighter integration important? Because the alternative, namely Windows and .NET, offers a tightly integrated combo that “just works”. The more a developer has to do (like, say, ship a bundled runtime because that runtime isn’t guaranteed to be available on a key platform), the more attractive the alternative looks. The real question is: Will this be enough? I’ve long contended that open-source Java is a red herring—the real challenge for Java on Linux is ubiquity, not licensing, and licensing is really only an issue because it gets in the way of ubiquity. Time will tell if this step represents the boost Java needs to become to Linux what .NET is to Windows. I don’t know though. For that to happen, the major Linux distributions have to not just add Java to the menu of available software, they have to add Java to the default configuration (much as Perl and Python are default components today), and I just don’t see Red Hat, Debian, or Ubuntu doing that till Java is open source. Still, I’m optimistic we’ll get there. Question is, will we get there in time? P.S. - How about making some of the Java platform components available via APT too? If I’m developing an application that uses, say, JavaMail, I have to go to the web, download it, figure out that it depends on the JavaBeans Activation Framework (JAF), download that, set up my classpath appropriately depending on where I downloaded them, etc. It would be great if I could just apt-get install javamail and have exactly the environment I need without additional effort.