Search Results: "ag"

28 March 2010

Stefano Zacchiroli: RC bugs of the week - issue 25

RCBW - #25 Last (long) week has finally passed: first in Geneve visiting Gismo, then in Sierre/Crans-Montana to present a paper at SAC 2010, then back in Paris for half a day before a day in Bruxelles for the 2nd year Mancoosi project review. (And of course campaigning has always been going on ...) All went fine and I can finally relax a bit for a week-end back "home" (i.e. Paris). Regarding RCBW, it looks like that in the past 2 months I've stabilized around 3 issues per month, which makes me happy nevertheless. Without any further ado, here are this weekissue's squashes: Random points:

Russell Coker: Autism vs Asperger Syndrome

Diagnostic Changes for Autism Spectrum Disorders Currently Asperger Syndrome (AS) is one of a group of conditions that are grouped into the category Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The American Psychiatric Association plans to merge Asperger s Disorder into Autism Spectrum Disorder [1] in version 5 of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). Apparently a primary reason for the change is the difficulty in assessing people into the various categories (AS, Autism, and PDD-NOS) and some variation in diagnosis between regions. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (a leading researcher on Autism and Asperger Syndrome) wrote an insightful article about this for the New York Times [2]. He suggests that while genetic research about the causes of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) is in progress there should be no change. If it turns out that AS and Autism have the same genetic cause then that would be good evidence to combine them into a single diagnostic category. If however they turn out to have different genetic causes then they would need different categories and he suggests that changes should be delayed until this issue is resolved. Simon also raises the issue of the status of people who have already been diagnosed, this is one of the social issues relating to a change in diagnostic criteria. Social Issues related to Diagnosis Unlike some disorders listed in the DSM, many (possibly most) people with AS really care about such things. I think that a common reaction to being diagnosed with Aspergers is to make the study of ASDs a Special Interest , which therefore makes it impossible to ignore what the psychologists are doing in this regard. The biggest problem with changing the diagnostic criteria in this regard is that AS has a good reputation. Some people even think that it s generally a good thing and seem to imagine that every child who is diagnosed with it will end up working for Google! This means that parents will be less likely to reject a diagnosis and therefore will be more likely to try and create a good environment for their child and seek appropriate therapies (such as social skills training and occupational therapy). I expect that a child who is diagnosed as Autistic but who doesn t obviously conform to the worst stereotypes will likely have their parents reject the diagnosis which will lead to a bad result for everyone concerned. The contrary view in this issue is that people who are on the spectrum but who insist that they aren t Autistic are prejudiced and they should embrace the Autism Spectrum label as a measure of solidarity [3], while that s a reasonable point it s not going to happen in the short term. Also there is the issue of adult diagnosis of AS, there are lots of adults who could benefit from being diagnosed and obstacles to such diagnosis (such as associating it with a label that is not well accepted such as Autism) are not going to do any good for anyone. Is Asperger Syndrome really that similar to Autism? Roy Richard Grinker (Professor of Anthropology) wrote a positive article for the New York Times about the diagnostic changes [4]. He seems to think that because in some cases it is difficult to distinguish the difference between Autism and AS they should be in a single diagnostic criteria. Based on that logic you could say that no-one should be diagnosed with an ASD because there is never a clear dividing line between the Neuro-Typical and those who are on the spectrum! Some people are clearly on the spectrum, some clearly aren t, and some are near the border. Roy cites his daughter and Temple Grandin as examples of Autistic people who have greater ability to relate to animals than someone who is Neuro-Typical (NT). I don t have any particular skills in terms of relating to animals. Animals have smaller brains than humans and have thoughts that are less complex and more related to short-term issues, this makes them easier to predict in some situations. I do have significantly better skills in figuring out how to operate machines than most NTs, and this doesn t appear to be uncommon among Aspies. I ve read some of the material that Temple Grandin has written and watched the video of her TED talk, and I get a strong impression that she isn t like me. Even the Aspies who are the least successful in terms of their career (IE quite unlike Temple Grandin) often seem to be like me, I can understand the way they think and recognise that the problems they face are similar to mine but merely more severe. It seems to me that there are significant personality differences between people who have an affinity for animals and those who have an affinity for machines, maths, and engineering. I wouldn t be surprised if it was discovered that Autism and AS had different genetic causes, and this might mean that someone could have both sets of genes. It is obvious that the dividing line between Autism and AS is not that clear. It also seems that part of the diagnosis as implemented by psychologists may be based on the ability to act like an NT and succeed by objective criteria IE earn a good salary in the case of adults. One thing that Roy does get right is that he notes that among people diagnosed with AS and Autism there are both high and low functioning individuals. One thing that Roy gets wrong is the implication that Autistic people can become Aspies. An adult who is assessed without background information on their childhood may get a different diagnosis. If someone was reassessed as an adult with the full facts about their childhood available then (barring DSM changes) the same diagnosis should be returned. Conclusion It appears that this DSM change is going through regardless of the opinion of the people who are affected. While there is a logical basis for giving more weight to researchers than to the research subjects (who are bound to be more biased) it seems that there are some things you can t properly understand unless you live them. When a good portion of the research subjects feel compelled to share their experiences with anyone who will listen it is disappointing that so few of the researchers appear to be listening.

John Goerzen: Trip part 5: Leipzig

Note: this post written on March 19 for posting after we return. We arrived at Leipzig surprisingly about 5 minutes late on Wednesday morning. My friend Brad was at the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (central stration) to meet us. As we walked through the city with him, he commented that I hadn t yet tried Currywurst, and there was a stand selling them with different levels of spiciness. I tried one and liked it; Terah was afraid to touch them. After a light lunch with Brad and Anna, we went back into town and saw the V lkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations). We were warned that it was weird and ugly. And when we arrived, I noticed that it was enormous. And, well, somewhat ugly. And, yes, weird. IMG_2681 After that, we walked through the old trade fair grounds. Leipzig has a long history as a trade center, and after they built the new trade fair grounds, the old ones were reused for other things except for the old Soviet building, which is now both gaudy and abandoned. We picked up Fritzi, who is a very cute 4 years old, from preschool and returned to their house for supper. After that, Brad and I went back into town, intending to hear a reading at the old city pool. When we realized it was a different day, we walked around the city center for awhile and then had a beer at a yes combination cafe/laundromat. Thursday was our day to explore the city. Brad showed us a couple of buildings in the university, including the library, then dropped us off at St. Thomaskirche. That s the church where J. S. Bach was music director for many years, and was buried. Like so many, it was impressive in its height and history. IMG_2703 Next we went to the Stasi museum. The Stasi were the feared and powerful East German secret police during the Communist times. The museum itself was housed in the former Stasi headquarters for Leipzig and was involved with the history of the overthrow of the Communists. The museum covered a lot of the history of the Stasi, including its frantic last days during the 1989 revolution. The level of spying on people was incredible and sophisticated, and they tried to destroy records as the overthrow of the government was imminent. One of the offices in the inner part of the building was left untouched from the Communist years, right down to the typewriter and coffee machine. IMG_2717 After that, we went to the Altes Rathaus (old city hall or townhouse, built in 1556) to do a bit of shopping. Terah was wanting some souvenirs, and I had spotted a shop I thought she might like when walking through the city with Brad the night before. We had already bought some souvenirs at the Schloss Charlottenburg museum store in Berlin (some East German-style crosswalk fridge magnets, and a decorative egg), but wanted something a bit nicer for us and were on the lookout for gifts for others too. We wound up buying a wood carved church scene with a woven wheat tree for us, and another item for others. The shopkeeper spoke no English, and my German vocabulary is small, but we managed to communicate the question of whether or not she could wrap it up in a box for our trip home and she could, and did. Excellent. (I didn t know how to ask about box, but knew how to say that we were Americans, and with a fair bit of gesturing all around, managed to get the idea across.) Then we went in the Altes Rathaus itself, which was both a museum and an interesting cultural experience. We bought our tickets at the booth downstairs, then went upstairs to the entrance. We asked for the English audio guide, which is very common at museums in Germany. (They are small digital audio players that contain recorded information; each room or display has a number you can key in to hear about it in your own language.) We got it, and were told in incredible detail how to use it, even though they are quite easy to figure out and we had used them before. The museum employee told us where the audio tour starts, and in what order it usually goes, which was an effort for her given her limited English. But we all understood and went on our way. It wasn t even 5 minutes later when she had left her desk and came over to us. She was slightly alarmed at two things: one that we didn t have the volume at full blast (which was loud enough for the entire room to hear), and secondly that we weren t looking at the exhibits in the proper order. Never mind that it s easy enough to pull up the audio information about any room just by keying in the number posted in it, I guess. Anyhow, we sort of inwardly shrugged, let her turn the volume up to potentially disturbing the other visitors level, and went through the museum in the order she wanted us to. (Note that this wasn t a museum where there is a one-way flow of traffic or something; you walk into one exhibit, back to the main hall, and then pick your next one.) So we went through the rest of the museum with our English audioguide blaring throughout the large, echoing, wood rooms, feeling a bit rude to the other visitors (maybe 5 of them while we were there) due to its volume. Anyhow, the Altes Rathaus was beautiful and interesting, covering mainly the pre-industrial history of Leipzig. We learned about some of the guilds, the city treasury (vault), and where the town council/parliament met along with rich merchants. There were about as many museum guards as visitors there, and one or two of them sort of followed us around, pointing out the large and completely obvious signs with audio guide numbers in the rooms for us. They are serious about their audio guides in Leipzig. I m glad we went, and I m glad we had the experience we did, too. Terah told me later that she felt reprimanded about the audio guide and visiting order. My take on it was a bit different: the museum is impressive and interesting, but obviously not visited by tourists as much as museums in other cities, or even touristy sites like Thomaskirche in Leipzig. I think they they noticed two people, obviously very foreign (speaking only a little German, and with an American accent) with an interest in their city s history, and took pride in making sure we got the most of our visit and learned as much as possible about something they care about. Here is the main hall of the Altes Rathaus. IMG_2727 We met up with Brad in a cafe near St. Thomaskirche for coffee and cake, then it was on to St. Nikolaikirche (the Church of St. Nicholas), the other large church in town. We stepped out of a passageway to face the large building, and walked in. The interior was decorated in pastels, and was also beautiful and historic. I can t get enough of that sort of building, I think. This building was especially important because it was the site of organizing for the Monday evening protests against the Communist government in 1989. People met at the church, sang a few hymns (to qualify it as a religious service, perhaps), then organized their protest for the evening. Sometimes they would wind through city streets and put flowers at the Stasi headquarters steps, and once the citizens actually overtook the Stasi headquarters. IMG_2745 After awhile we grabbed a bit more for lunch: a pretzel for Terah and a Currywurst for me. (This one wasn t spicy and wasn t all that good.) Then we went to the GDR museum, which was large and interesting, but unfortunately for us, completely in German with no English guide available. That evening, we went to a Bach concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, celebrating Bach s 325th birthday. That was fun, and a neat experience with such good music in a very nice venue. The program included Bach s Suite for Orchestra no. 1 in C Major (BWV 1066), Concerto for Violin no. 2 in E major (BWV 1042), Ich habe genug (BWV 82), and Suite for Orchestra no. 4 in D major (BWV 1069). Sir Roger Norrington was conducting, and was rather fun and atypical to watch. He had the audience chuckling a few times with his minimalist conducting or perhaps his flamboyant gestures. Anyhow, the music was excellent and the tickets included free passage on the public transit system 3 hours before and after the concert a nice touch. Due to our schedule, we didn t spend much time with Fritzi, but we did get to play with her a bit. She likes to pretend to be a shopkeeper, and had her store all ready to lay out. We would ask her for some items, which she d put in a basket for us, and then of course there would be a child s twist: we d get our items, and she d pay us for them too. Terah and I brought some books for Fritzi. The particularly enjoyed Goodnight Moon because inside it is an picture of The Runaway Bunny, which she already had. Fritzi chose one of her books to give to Jacob it was a German book (Maulwurf) based on a Czech cartoon mole. That was nice of her, and Jacob really liked it (I ll write about that later). We had a good time in Leipzig, and I was getting fairly good at navigating downtown and with the trams and then, of course, it was time to move on. So Friday morning we caught our 7:50 train from the Leipzig Hauptbahnhof. We took the ICE train to Dresden, then walked a few feet to get onto the EC to Prague. That was a bit of a funny experience. The ICE trains are all sleek, modern, meticulously maintained, and the passengers tend to be very quiet. Talking is barely above a whisper, and people seem alarmed if their cell phone rings, even outside the quiet car. The EC passenger car appears to have been built, or last renovated, in the 1970s, and may have been Hungarian. The seats and curtains are old and faded; some of the seat backs have rips in the vinyl headrests. People were talking or eating loudly, in a very different setting than on the ICE train. As we rode along, we were on the right side the river Elbe for many miles. The scenery was beautiful, with small houses in the river valley, and the occasional house up in the hillside. At one point (a bit before we passed through K nigstein on the way to the Bad Schandau stop), we spotted what looked like an old walled city up on the hill. I figured out later that it was Festung K nigstein (K nigstein Fortress). Update: I forgot to mention a couple of things about Leipzig. One was our walk through a forest yes, a forest in the city. That was a nifty, quiet, and pleasant surprise. Secondly was seeing all the DDR apartment blocks, where the apartments evidently were quite literally blocks. It is interesting to see the Communist architecture.

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 007

Bernd Zeimetz:
From the other candidates I'd like to know their opinion and plans (if there are any) about license/copyright requirements in Debian.
I believe that intellectual property laws are wrong and should be abolished, so I am not particularly in favor of giving copyrights any more respect than necessary. However, I do not think that Debian is the place to undermine copyright, and that we should attempt to maintain standards which not only protect people from legal liability, but are also in the best interests of our developers and users. I do not know what level of nitpicking best serves our developers and users. A GR seems like an interesting way of determining at part of that. Anthony Towns:
What's your estimate of the current number of Debian users?
I do not have one. While I do acknowledge that the number of users does affect us in terms of potential contributor base, and scaling issues (including bug reporting), I do not think that the exact number is important at all to what we do. Also I would hope that whichever DPL is elected chooses to focus on practical matters rather than academic exercises. Kurt Roeckx:
I think that one of issues we have is that there is alot of work to be done by some teams, some of them even regularaly mail that they need more members, but they seem to have a hard time keeping the numbers up, burning the other team members out. What are your ideas to make sure those teams keep running?
Note that I do not think it appropriate either for core teams to choose their own members or to reserve the privilege of demanding that a new person be able to work with them in a certain way. An ideal team member should be able to work with anyone. If the existing delegates are unable to work with new people, perhaps they are not ideal team members. Charles Plessy:
During the discussions that started after the GR, I suggested that the GR proposer should have more control about the options put to the vote. In particular, it would be useful if he can refuse an option that would disequilibrate the voting system. That would make him responsible for the success of the GR: discarding a popular option is taking the risk that the whole GR is refused and the option is accepted as a separate GR, which is the kind of public failure that I expect that people will avoid.
I do not think GR proposers should have any special control over general resolutions beyond what is Constitutionally granted at present. In fact, I would prefer if people did not try to propose multiple options or strategically craft ballots for any purpose. To me, the only honest method is to propose the outcome one genuinely wants to win, and let our strange and special brand of parliamentary procedure take care of the rest. As for the supermajority issue, I am not a huge fan of political word games. Debian distributes non-free software. We have a non-free section within our normal infrastructure, and while it is segregated and does not receive quite the same love that main does, it is still very much part of what we work on and distribute from our official infrastructure. So there is no amount of word lawyering, cognitive dissonance, or NM indoctrination that can make me believe that it is an honest statement to say that non-free is not part of Debian. Likewise I do not believe in redefining success or the meanings of Foundation Documents. I do not think that we should allow ourselves to pass any kind of magical resolution that contravenes the DFSG or Social Contract without actually modifying them. That seems utterly absurd to me, and I have seen what has become of the United States government.

Russ Allbery: Why no comments

When I first converted my journal from Movable Type, I converted all the comments with it and planned on adding comment support, as a long-term goal. But I've increasingly found that not having comment support is nice, and recently after reading several different takes on this topic, I've decided to take this off my long-term to-do list. A point made by both people involved with sites with strong commenting communities (Making Light and John Scalzi's Whatever) and others who have turned off comments is that maintaining a good comment community in the face of significant interest is a lot of work. One of my goals right now is to do less work that isn't directly interesting so that I can reserve my energy for things that I consider more core. I've now added a link to my explanation for why there are no comments to all of my journal posts and indices. A few more thoughts in addition to the ones there: I've been reading a lot of comments recently, mostly from following the debate in the US about health care reform, and I've been struck at how rarely comments are meaningfully addressed to the original post author or show intent to participate in a discussion. On political topics, most comments appear instead to be taking advantage of the comment platform to post one's own opinion in public, sometimes with the additional gratification of forcing that opinion to show up in the space of someone who obviously disagrees. I'm not interested in participating in or enabling that. If you want to make a controversial statement or take a political stance, own your own words and take that stance in your own space. I also suspect that one of the reasons why this happens so much in comments is that comments are considerably more anonymous than journals. Even if one's journal isn't openly connected with one's real name and life, like mine is, there is some persistance and history to most journals. I'm a strong believer in anonymous speech for a variety of different reasons, but one of those reasons is not to permit drive-by content-free attacks on other people. And that's the standard behavior in both political blogs and comment pages on newspaper sites. The anonymous speech I have the most respect for is the type that creates and builds reputation for an anonymous nom de plume, presenting a consistent public image and taking responsibility for one's previous beliefs. This isn't what happens in comment threads. Finally, I consider all of my web site, including my journal, to be to some extent permanent. I mostly do not take down pages, and I wouldn't want to take down comment threads. But for the most part comments, particularly on controversial topics, don't fit into that model. There's nothing wrong with that, but it makes me want to redirect them to a more appropriate forum. If I felt like there was some lack in the world of places where people could anonymously publish controversial opinions, I might feel more obligation to provide one in my journal, but I don't. It's also not something that I'm good at; other people are doing a much better job. So I'm going to stay out of hosting that type of on-line discussion and leave it to people with more interest and time. I welcome e-mail replies to journal posts, and have had several good discussions in those e-mail exchanges. That's what works best for me.

27 March 2010

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 006

Gerfried Fuchs:
I have a question to the candidates: History has shown that DPLs more or less disappear not too long after their period or at least reduce their visible efforts immensly. I wonder where you see the reasons for this trend, what your impression is about it and wether you try to follow that trend or what you will try to do to not have this happen to you, too.
I think that some DPLs are overwhelmed by the amount of requests they receive, and more importantly, are overwhelmed by the feeling of futility from perceiving that it is impossible to fix the things that they had intended to fix. So, unless there are other factors I would need to adapt to, I would try to discourage the number of private requests, and to not lose hope and faith in Debian. I imagine that delegation could be very useful in both these areas. Gunnar Wolf:
What would be different if there was no leader? Where would the project lose more? Would it gain in some aspect?
The DPL is theoretically one of the most important checks against the power of delegates. The absence of a DPL would thus increase any power imbalance in the the project, and likely to make the fighting between core teams even more political and harmful. Communities and teams are destabilized by egos because people stop paying attention to their healthy shared goals and the people around them and instead focus on their own individual success. So if the project were to achieve some kind of anarchic utopia where this is not an issue, I could imagine that the DPL would be the last remaining ego threat, and removing that role would make things better. However, we are nowhere near that now, and I think the DPL can do more good on this front. Yavor Doganov:
What do you think the project should do (with or without or regardless of your help as potential DPL) to preserve this goodness (maximum supported architectures) for as long as possible? Do you think it is "goodness" or you're in the "good riddance" camp?
I definitely think that one of our strengths is being available on a large number of architectures, and beyond that, providing nearly identical experiences on each of those platforms. I am saddened when porters or package maintainers make decisions to stray from the norm on a particular architecture, because I truly enjoy the consistency. I have run Debian on i386, sparc, hppa, powerpc, amd64, and in the few cases where something was different, I found it irksome. However, there is definitely a point where the cost in maintaining a release architecture far exceeds the benefit, and at that time I think we must regretfully bid it farewell. So you are right that porters are a precious resource, and as DPL I would try to reduce their attrition. Speaking as a former porter, I found the unresponsiveness and uncooperativeness of certain buildd maintainers (especially when not porters themselves) to be extremely demotivating. I would try to find a way mitigate porters being demotivated in such a way.

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 005

Marc Haber:
Do you see the diminishing care for our Core infrastructure as a problem? Do you have any idea how do sensibilize our new blood for the fact that "new packages" doesn't help Debian if our Core stuff is diminishing? I know that this is not exactly within the power of the DPL, but do you think that you, as DPL, can help speeding up Core development again?
Note: "core infrastructure" here refers to dpkg and apt. I am seeing numerous projects across the free software world struggle with a lack of contributors, and wonder why they cannot get anyone to help them. In most cases, I think there are hints about why people might feel disenfranchised by a particular development process, and in most cases, I think the people in charge are mostly unwilling to change the way that they have been doing things for years and years just to accommodate potential contributors. I think this is particularly true of projects where there is a dictatorship or a single gatekeeper for all VCS repository commits. Frequently these things seem to work themselves out after a long time. Old people leave, new people come in. Sometimes it is peaceful, sometimes it is violent. Rarely does it result in structural improvements. I do not know why there is lack of manpower on dpkg and apt right now. I know I tried to make a change to dpkg a few months ago and was unable to do so, partly due to the codebase and partly due to important information existing only in Guillem's mind. In the end, I had to just wait for Guillem to do it, which he helpfully did, and now we have libdpkg-dev in experimental, with one reverse build-dep. Had I been able to make the change myself, it is unclear whether I would have made any other contributions; that was the only itch I needed scratched, and I have plenty of other things to work on. So even though I found it near-impossible to contribute to dpkg in this way, I don't think that I'm excluded. So as DPL I would first try to determine why there might not be enough contributors to dpkg and apt, or why the existing contributors are not performing up to your standards. This could be an instance where I would solicit private communication from people who might have potentially-valuable information that they do not wish to communicate in public for fear of hurting someone's feelings. This does not mean that I would try to resolve these issues behind the scenes, because I consider that to be a dangerous and potentially-harmful tactic. Given a reasonable theory about why the problem exists, I would then proceed to encourage the resolution of that problem. I also think that some package maintenance teams may share some issues with some core teams and even the project at large, and addressing the more general problems could lead to relief in many areas. Specifically I would name problems related to ego and teamwork, which is a theme on which I plan to elaborate later.

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 004

Russ Allbery:
Do you have any thoughts about how to resolve release issues with less hurt and negative impact to the project all around?
I sure do. There has been a trend over many years to conflate the release management role with many other things: QA work, buildd work, ftpmaster-like work (I mean britney here), and in some cases I would even say DPL work. If we relegate release management to a strictly managerial role, I am certain that much of the stress, tension, and burnout will be mitigated. This means putting more access into the hands of many people, which is a good thing anyway. A release manager's job should be to say when a release is ready, what should and should not be in that release, and potentially some coordination with other developers, who are almost their equals. There will still be social conflict when the spirit of teamwork and cooperation is overcome by other factors, but I can conceive of a point where even that would not happen. Raphael Hertzog:
What do you think of this and would you be ready to withdraw a delegation for a delegate that behaved badly towards another DD (even outside of his delegated role), that has been warned once by you and that did it again later on? Do you think we can draft a code of conduct for Debian and do you think you can ensure that it would be respected by delegates?
I do not think that any long-term delegations should exist. I think that if they do, we have a structural problem which should be addressed in another way. Therefore I do not think it should be a big deal to withdraw a delegation for any legitimate reason, and if we are trying to force people to behave better (by a definition I agree with), then it seems reasonable to withdraw a delegation for bad behavior. Of course I would include ignoring people and having secret meetings in Vancouver as bad behavior, so that is perhaps not what you are getting at. I am not particularly in love with any formal codes of conduct, but I do think it is reasonable to hold DPL delegates or anyone who holds privileged positions of power to a much higher standard of behavior than the standard DD. With power should come responsibility, and all that. Presumably I would not delegate anyone who would place self and ego ahead of the well-being of the project, and presumably if there were a formal code of conduct or set of guidelines for delegates, those principles would align.

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 003

Dmitrijs Ledkovs:
Sometimes technical Debian discussions (mailing lists, bug reports, blog posts, etc.) become personal flame-wars. Do you think current frequency/amount of heated discussions is acceptable for the Debian project? What would you do to reduce those?
I do think that the current frequency/amount of heated discussion, as I perceive it, is acceptable for the project. I think that it is acceptable because it demonstrates that we have problems, and we should not be trying to hide problems. A code of conduct, or CoC, is something that treats symptoms but not causes. As DPL I would encourage the identification and resolution of the root causes. Why are people so angry? Why is there lack of respect? Why are people not asking these questions? In any healthy, functional organization, there are shared goals. Shared goals, obviously, contribute to a feeling of unity of purpose, and perhaps a vague and general direction to follow. Another thing is the spirit of cooperation and teamwork, and perhaps this is most important. Such spirit does not flourish when there are power inequalities or hierarchical structures. Such spirit does not flourish when you say that it is reasonable to make someone ask for permission to do things that anyone should be able to do. Such spirit does not flourish when things like ego and greed get in the way. Anyone can claim to be a team player, but it is rare that I actually encounter one. Paul Wise:
Which project and external Debian-related communications media do you follow? and contribute to? As well as a general list I'm interested in specific lists (for eg #debian, #debian-devel, debian-devel@l.d.o, debian-project@l.d.o, the Hardware forum on forums.d.n etc). How do you see those two lists changing if you become DPL? Which of these communications media do you feel is important for the DPL to read?
I am subscribed to over 50 Debian mailing lists. I do not follow them all. I am currently on #debian-glibc, #debian-devel, #debian-women, #spi, #alioth, #debian.de, #debian-devel.de, #debian-devel-fr, #debian-release, #debian-kernel, #debian-private, #debian-dak, #debian-devel-changes, #debian-ftp, #debian-buildd, #debian-games, #debian-dpkg, and #debian-bugs. I do not follow them all. I joined #debian-admin after a misunderstanding which led me to believe that it had become open and transparent, and was kicked out after about a week. I do not read any web forums, as I find them to be unbearable. As for external media, I occasionally read LWN. The only specific change I would anticipate after becoming DPL is the addition of leader@debian.org. I feel that it is important for the DPL to have a grasp of what is going on in the project, but I would not cite anything other than debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org to be required reading. As for tones and perceptions on these various communications channels, I cannot say that external perception is entirely unimportant. However, if Debian is made the best it can be, I think external perception will become positive or not matter very much. So unless there are specific public relations needs arising out of a particular incident, I imagine that I would prefer to focus on improving Debian rather than improving Debian's external image.

Tollef Fog Heen: Why I think you should publish your infrastructure

GNOME's current sysadmin team is entirely voluneer-based, but as they are having problems finding enough (trusted) volunteers they are looking at hiring a part-time sysadmin. From looking at the GNOME wiki, it looks like they have had a meeting about the shortage of sysadmins. Citing from the minutes
The biggest problem that we've always had with the maintaining an active sysadmin team is the need for trust. If somebody shows up and wants to help out with a GNOME coding project, then it's easy to build up trust over time. Suggest a project, have the person send patches, review the patches, if the patches are good, eventually give them direct commit access. However, for sysadmin work, we get a lot of people who want to help out, but it's very hard for someone to contribute without being given a "dangerous" level of access to the GNOME systems.
Without having looked very hard, I would guess at the GNOME infrastructure being about as open as most proprietary software projects. There's no way for me, as a third party to take a look at their infrastructure, take a look at their ticket backlog and submit patches for problems. Similarly, their nagios setup is behind a password prompt, so there's no way for me to look at what services often have performance problems, suggest new monitors or point out any servers or services that are not monitored. I'm not saying this to pick on GNOME, and as I'll touch on below, they do seem to mostly do the right thing, and as one of the Freedesktop.org sysadmins, I know we're not any better at least not yet. One way to make it at least somewhat easier to contribute and get involved is to use a tool like Chef or Puppet and publishing the recipes. This won't magically make everything transparent, but it'll be a big step up. Ideally, the recipes should be complete enough that you can bootstrap a working system from them and so easier reproduce the infrastructure and any problems. It seems like GNOME is using puppet, but I couldn't find the recipes. Moving a complete infrastructure from something managed by hand to something managed using automation tools is a fairly big and involved process. However, if you're serious about getting more people involved in your sysadmin team, I think it's one of the more reasonable ways to opening up. It also means that when one of your servers is stolen, catches fire or suffers other catastrophic failure you can rebuild the service much quicker. My last point is to open up your ticket tracker. Most tickets aren't security sensitive, so provide a way for people to mark those tickets that are sensitive as such and make the rest public. The GNOME wiki makes this a bit confusing as it talks a bit about RT, but it seems like they actually use bugzilla for sysadmin tickets and just hide security-sensitive ones.

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 002

Raphael Hertzog:
Imagine a DD contacts you, she wants to setup an infrastructure to finance Debian related projects (i.e. paying people to enable them to work on the projects that they'd like to do for Debian) but she wants to avoid the main mistakes made during Dunc-Tank; in her project: - everybody can propose projects to be financed - the projects to be financed are selected by the Debian developers and by the donors - eligible projects can only concern new developements and not recurring tasks
I am imagining that this contact took place in public. I see very few legitimate and good reasons to approach the DPL privately, and as DPL I would encourage people to to work toward transparency unless there were very good reasons to do otherwise. I would begin by telling her about the beauty of Debian as a gift economy community, and point out how great it is that I do not need to pay people to respond to my bug reports, apply my patches, release new versions, or develop any code not funded by corporate sponsors. I would recount my recent experience with a different free software community, where there was much talk of the motivational power of money, and how best to link PayPal to bug tracking systems and write a boilerplate email response template suggesting a donation of $5,000 to help facilitate the development of any feature requests. I would confess my suspicion that if this trend continues, any goodness in that community will be driven elsewhere, and the gift economy, which I believe to be a very important basis for free software, will be severely undermined. When I have completed my feeble attempt at political persuasion, if she is still firm and stubborn in her desire to proceed (and when monetary greed is involved, I expect this kind of stubbornness), I would suggest the following points: Then I would ask her once again not to do anything like this. Dmitrijs Ledkovs:
Please finish "In ten years I'd like Debian...."
In ten years I'd like Debian to still be my favorite operating system. In ten years I'd like Debian to be egalitarian and cooperative. In ten years I'd like Debian to be completely free software, without a non-free section.

Dominique Dumont: Big Thanks to Xorg dev and X Strike Force

Hello My PC at home is not personal, my wife and my kids all have their personal account. They are used to open a new Xorg session to log on and we all often use CTRL-ALT-F7, F8 and so on to switch from one session to another. We somehow got used to the wait required to switch from one session to another. Recently I ve upgraded to kernel 2.6.32-4 with KMS enabled and, wow ! the switch is much faster now. That s great. Even better, XV video is now working in all sessions. No need to log off and log on to first session to get video and games working. So I think it s time to say a big thank you to all developers involved in Xorg , radeon , kernel and debian kernel team. Thanks a bunch guys :-)

Wouter Verhelst: Annoyed by Marc Wickmayer

In just under a month, Belgium will face Estonia in a Fed Cup World Group Playoff tie. The winning team will participate in the world group next year, which, in theory, opens the possibility of winning. So this is an important encounter. When team captain Sabine Appelmans announced the Belgian selection, it was described by the Belgian press as the 'dream team' Clijsters, Henin, Wickmayer and Flipkens, aka the four best Belgian female Tennis professionals. That, combined with the possibility of a World Group promotion, seems to excite much of the country, to the extent that 10000 tickets have been sold in no time. Yes, I'll be there too. But one man seems unhappy. Marc Wickmayer, father of Yanina, will say to everyone who wants to hear it, that 'Appelmans needs to choose'; that he's 'tired of the hypocrisy', and so on. His arguments: Clijsters and Henin have not been part of the Fed Cup selection in two years, and his daughter should not be the fourth wheel on the wagon after having been much of the reason why Belgium is playing these playoffs. Sigh. Let's check some facts, shall we? Curiously, Yanina herself does not share her father's opinion. She's been quoted several times as being excited to have Clijstes and Henin on the team, since 'the team is much better with them'. Indeed. Her relationship with her father, is often described as being 'very close'; apparently that doesn't mean they are of the same opinion on everything. Maybe it is time for the two of them to have a little chat on the whole Fed Cup thing, before this gets out of hand. I'd hate for Appelmans to have to make the wrong choices to appease people...

John Goerzen: Trip part 4: Berlin

Note: this post was written on March 16 and posted after our return home. Also, I took no photos in Berlin, reasoning that I could leave my camera at the hotel so as to not worry about it, since I m sure there are enough photos of the Brandenburg Gate in the world already. Photos on this story only are from others. We ve had a good time in Berlin it s been adventurous to be out on our own in an unfamiliar city with an unfamiliar language, but has gone well. I feel that I m finally getting used to it a bit, and now tomorrow we move on to Leipzig. Stepping off the train at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, and seeing all those people connecting to all those trains, I had a feeling of excitement: here is a grand train station that is actively used by so many people. I got a sense of what the beautiful and enormous Kansas City Union Station once felt like, I think; that station at its peak served almost the same number of people in a day at Berlin Hbf does.
(photo by eliotc) Stepping outside in the cold and snow to wait for our bus, I got the first sense that Berlin felt a bit more like an American city than did L beck: a beggar with a suspicious story was working the crowd with Speak English? (We saw many dressed similarly using the exact same tactic during our stay in Berlin.) Our bus ride to the hotel showed us some graffiti a fact of life in many cities in the USA too. Our hotel, the Circus, most definitely did not feel American. The staff was very friendly (I think I ve only seen that level of friendliness and helpfulness at one hotel in the USA: the Portland Doubletree). The room was small (which we expected) but very nice. There was a fresh flower waiting, and a whole printout of information with my name on it waiting in the room: info about the hotel, restaurant, and a multi-page history of this part of the city. They are very energy-conscious there. The hall lights automatically turn off, but you can touch your (apparently RFID-enabled) room card to any switch to turn them on for a few minutes. When in your room, you put your key card in a little holder that keeps it safe and enables the use of the lights. They don t put shampoo in the rooms, but have a selection free for the taking at the front desk: the rationale being that it generates waste when they have to replace it for people that don t need it replaced. They are very environmentally conscious with everything except the showerhead, which appears to use so much water that it would be illegal in the USA. Here s the obligatory surprising to an American comment about Germany: the complete lack of water drinking fountains. In the US, you can get a drink of water at any building of any size airports, train stations, museums, shopping centers, and also in many public places such as parks. I may have seen exactly one water fountain in the Hamburg airport, but that was it. It is odd given the general sense of environmentalism here that so much energy is being wasted on bottling water, not to mention the expense of having to pay for it all over the place. The bus ride to the hotel was interesting. I needed to buy two tickets from the bus driver. I didn t know the German word for ticket, so I just guessed and went with Zwei Ticket, bitte. Wohin? Rosenthaler Str. Then the price came up. I believe that was my first completely successful German-only conversation. (Most Germans hear a couple of words of mine and quickly switch at least partially to English, which probably gets things done a lot faster, and saves me embarrassment, but doesn t give me much chance to practice my German.) We ate dinner Monday night at the Hackesche H fe at Weihenstephaner, a Bavarian restaurant. It was a fun meal, and the tables were long and seated multiple parties. I tried out their special Bavarian beer, and of course had some Wienerschnitzel. I had noticed apple strudel on their website but not on their menu, so when it was time for dessert, I asked our waitress if they had apple strudel today. They did, and it was delicious. Tuesday began with a walk to the Pergamon Museum. From our hotel, this was a walk of about a mile. We had been introduced to excellent German bakeries during our time in L beck. So, since we hadn t had breakfast, when we spotted a bakery along the road, we went in. Terah got a croissant with chocolate on top, which turned out to also have chocolate inside. I found a couple of smaller rolls with various seeds and flavorings on top. All were excellent, and I believe we spent less than EUR 2 all together. We ate our breakfast of rolls as we walked towards the museum. It was a cold and somewhat windy morning, but it was also fun and exciting to be there. The Pergamon was quite the experience. The Pergamon Altar was the first large artifact we saw, and was particularly interesting given that I have recently read The Iliad and The Odyssey.
(photo by *hoodrat*) The Market Gate of Miletus was also impressive, but the true highlight has to be the Ishtar Gate and processional way. Wow. It was built in 575BC by King Nebuchadnezzar II, and importantly was built out of glazed tiles, so the original artwork, color and all, still survives. You can walk through the processional way and get the feeling of kings and armies proceeding there. Truly spectacular.
(photo by Rictor Norton & David Allen) After the Pergamon, we crossed a bridge to the east taking us off Museumsinsel (Museum Island). We walked down a quiet and somewhat forgotten back street and found a small restaurant for lunch. I had the Berlin Wurst , some excellent sausage with excellent and not-so-sour sauerkraut. Terah had some breakfast-type items with fruit. After that, we walked over to the famous Unter den Linden. It wasn t yet spring, so the scenery wasn t all that spectacular yet, but that and the light snow didn t stop the tourists, or the tacky tourist shops, which appear to be a universal global feature. ( Berlin flip-flops and t-shirts made in China, anyone?) The destination of all this walking was the Brandenburger Tor, the famous Berlin icon. The Brandenburg Gate was immense, and the sense of history of standing there was impressive.
(photo by Andrew Mason) We of course walked through the Brandenburg Gate on our way to the Bundestag, which we intended to tour. We didn t, though, due to the cold and very long line snaking out of the building. We then got on the train to Checkpoint Charlie. We saw the outdoor checkpoint still in the middle of the street. We intended to visit the museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, but was so packed that it was difficult to even get in the door. We stood in line to buy tickets for a few minutes, but made absolutely no progress; meanwhile, it appeared that an entire school group came in after us somehow and was also waiting to pay. So we decided to go see Schloss Charlottenburg instead.
(photo by Poom!) The Schloss (palace) was a baroque design, intended to impress visitors with the power and wealth of the owners. Only the old wing was open Tuesday, but we had about an hour and a half available to tour it: enough to see the whole thing, but not enough to linger and read all of the information. It was impressive and interesting. Particularly interesting was the chapel, which was this odd state/religion combination decorated both with sacred symbols as well as symbols of the king. After Charlottenburg, we had dinner at the Prussian Restaurant Marjellchen near the Savignyplatz S-bahn. We started with a smoked herring appetizer. Then I had the K nigsberg meatballs, and Terah had creamed ham. Both of us really enjoyed our meals, and Terah s reminded her of Verenike. Wednesday started with an early rise, then we went to Mauerpark to see a remnant of the Berlin Wall. I am glad to have seen it, and was a bit surprised with how small it was at that point compared to my expectations.
(photo by Eichental) Then we had a few minutes back in our hotel to munch on some rolls for breakfast; after that, it was off to the Hauptbahnhof for our train to Leipzig.

Russell Coker: How to Choose a Free Software Mission

Jane McGoningal gave an interesting TED talk about how Online Gaming can Make a Better World [1]. One of her points is that there is no unemployment in games such as World of Warcraft, there is always a world saving mission available to you which is just within reach of your skill level and no-one is assigned a mission that they can t possibly do. It seems to me that the free software development community has a similar issue, there are always missions available at all skill levels. Our challenge is to find ways to encourage people to accept the missions and to provide them appropriate levels of support to encourage them on their path to an epic win . Choosing a suitable mission is a particularly difficult problem as you often don t know how difficult a task will be until you are more than half complete. Jane makes points about humans being happier when working hard and a desire for epic meaning . She says that it s a problem that gamers believe that they can change a virtual world but not the real world . If you change the virtual world of software development then that changes the real-world . Jane cites Herodotus as reporting a kingdom that was gripped in a famine for 18 years where the king instituted a policy of playing games and eating on alternate days with the aim being that the games would distract people from their hunger. I m sure that I m not the only person who s gone without food or water for a day because of being too busy coding She has a lot of other interesting points and I recommend that you read the Institute For The Future [2] web site for more background information. Now my question is, how can we encourage programmers to start doing Free Software and Open Source development and achieving some Epic Wins? I don t claim to have good answers and I would appreciate any suggestions. If you blog about this please leave a comment on this post to direct readers to your blog.

Christine Spang: Christine Spang: a late Ada Lovelace Day tribute

I meant to participate in Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate and acknowledge the accomplishments of women in science and technology, but I got distracted and then it was late and I fell asleep. Such is my life. Anyway, I'd like to acknowledge a woman who I've only recently met, mostly through the Free Software Foundation's women's outreach events. Marina Zhurakhinskaya works for RedHat, and is a developer for GNOME Shell. She's always enthusiastic about sharing her work with other people in person and inviting others to get involved, and is one of those people who is in there every day getting stuff done. I wish I were as confident about the things that I work on. Marina has also been working on the second incarnation of the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program, I believe. And she keeps giving talks all over the place, which is great! Go visibility. Now if only she would blog more. ;) I'd never met Marina before last September, despite living in the same metropolitan area! I'm glad women that I don't know about and who work on free software exist and that I get to meet them and find out that they live nearby.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Finance::YahooQuote 0.24

Having espoused rule number one in regression testing in the post about yesterday's bug fix upload 0.23, we can now add rule number zero: Do not introduce a new error by omitting the trailing semicolon. I guess it shows that I don't really program in Perl anymore. Anyway, a new version 0.24 of Finance::YahooQuote which addresses the issue that required upload 0.23 yesterday is now in the Debian queue and on CPAN and my local yahooquote page. This time it may even work. A big thanks to the CPAN Testers for getting me reports on this one too.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 0.7.11

A new versions 0.7.11 of Rcpp is awaiting inclusion into CRAN and Debian. It is also available from here. This version fixes a somewhat serious bug uncovered by Doug Bates when working with vectors of strings. We also added a few new accessor functions as well as a new convenience function create that is particularly useful for creating (possibly named) list objects that are returned to R. Here is the full NEWS entry for this release: 
0.7.11	2010-03-26
    o	Vector
 gains a set of templated factory methods "create" which
        takes up to 20 arguments and can create named or unnamed vectors.
        This greatly facilitates creating objects that are returned to R. 
    o	Matrix now has a diag() method to create diagonal matrices, and
        a new constructor using a single int to create square matrices
    o	Vector now has a new fill() method to propagate a single value
	
    o	Named is no more a class but a templated function. Both interfaces
        Named(.,.) and Named(.)=. are preserved, and extended to work also on 
        simple vectors (through Vector
::create) 
	
    o	Applied patch by Alistair Gee to make ColDatum more robust
    
    o	Fixed a bug in Vector that caused random behavior due to the lack of
        copy constructor in the Vector template



As always, even fuller details are in 
Rcpp Changelog page and the 
Rcpp page which also
leads to the downloads, the 
browseable
doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats.
A local directory  has
source and documentation too. 
Questions, comments etc should go to the
rcpp-devel mailing list
off the R-Forge page

26 March 2010

Clint Adams: DPL Campaign Questions 001

A while back, I promised some people that I would answer the campaign questions on -vote despite not being on the ballot. Many things came up to pre-empt me, including a short-lived surprise stint on the Release Team. I am still a bit behind on bug reports and such, but it might be inappropriate to start answering after the official campaign period has closed, so here is a start. J rg Jaspert:
Do you plan on taking on a "2IC" or a team?
I do not. I do not believe that either option is a good idea to begin with, and even if I did, I would not be in favor of undermining the Constitution by making an end run around it in this fashion. Martin Zobel-Helas:
The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, ffis, debian.ch, etc. a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What qualifies a "Debian Partner"?
a) I think that it is important not to spend money on things that only benefit a single person or small group, such as ex-post facto legal defenses, core team travel expenses, or equipment for select persons. I would consider valid expenditures to be only those that directly benefit Debian as a whole. b) Ideally, contributors, whether they be hardware donors or developers or anything else, would be motivated solely out of doing good for the project and community, and not be seeking recognition, praise, power, or favors in return. However, since it is considered acceptable to have other motives, I think it fairly appropriate to display logos and give recognition on the Partners page. b) If I had my druthers, I would reserve the term Partners for those organizations who were fully aligned with us in a common goal. In the absence of such, though, the current usage seems fine. Paul Wise:
How much time do you currently devote to Debian? How will that amount of time change for the DPL term? How will you balance your DPL time and time for other Debian activities.
My time commitment varies due to a combination of external factors and Debian-related motivation. Since I have been slowly scaling back my involvement over the past several years, and unless you assume that the DPL role is inherently demotivating, I would presume to be spending about the same time or more on Debian if elected. I will be orphaning some more packages after squeeze is released, regardless of the outcome of the election. I would definitely not run if I doubted my ability to muster up the time and energy to be a good and effective DPL for the full length of the term.

Steve Kemp: I don't like it when people yell at me for no reason at all

Ubuntu always gets a lot of coverage in blogs, and the recent controvesy realisation that it isn't a 100% community-made distribution has triggered yet another round of this. A lot of the controvesy, coverage, and attention can be laid at the feet of Canonical themselves; I think it is fair to say that the visibility, hype, advertising, and the goal of trying to be all things to all men means that even relatively trivial issues can easily get blown out of proportion, and to a certain extent this is a self-inflicted. Live by the sword media & etc ... I think it is fair to say that Ubuntu has attracted a huge swathe of non-technical users. They want something "easy", "free", and "sexy", but more than that they want to use their computer, not develop the operating system. When a particular bug report, with 400+ comments, hits the press we're primarily seeing a marketing-fail rather than technical-fail. The realisation that yes bugs are reported, but no the community (of users) doesn't get input into every single thing is as it should be. If you look back over "controvesy" in the past you'll see comments from the non-technical users which are tantamoint to blackmail:
This should be fixed ... or I'm gonna .. install .. gentoo. yeah. really.
(Similarly you see many comments of the form "I agree", "oh noes", or "Please revert ASAP", rather than technical arguments.) This non-technical nature of the userbase is also readily apparent if you browse through the answers to problems posted in forums for example "Delete this file, I don't know why it works but it fixes it for me!!2!". (I've seen some truly horrific advice upon Ubuntu forums, even so far as chmodding various parts of the system to allow users to write binaries to /bin.) Similarly you'll see that the launchpad is full of generic linux misunderstandings and bugs that aren't "real". The unfortunate fact is that the Ubuntu bug tracker is a wasteland in many places: The tight timescale of releases combined with the sheer number of incoming bug reports means that often issues are overlooked. (For example one bug that bit a colleague is #402188 - on the one hand it is a trivial bug, on the other hand its readily apparent to users. If something like that can be missed it makes you wonder ..?) ObRandom: Ubuntu has 100 bugs open against its Vim package, some of which have been marked as NEW since 2009 (ie. untouched, ignored). By contrast the Debian vim package has way fewer bugs. I'm sure there are packages where the situation is reversed but I think is not an unusual comparison. Finally in addition to sheer numbers of bugs, and tight timescales, it has to be noted that the relative number of developers to users is miniscule, and this in turn has lead to some interesting solutions. The Ubuntu PPA system (personal package archive) should be a good thing. It should allow people to submit new packages for testing, for bugfixes, and for more visibility. Instead downloading a PPA file is no different than going to download.com and downloading a random binary - sure it might be legit, but there's no oversight, no quality control, and most likely no future updates.
Ubuntu as a distribution is interesting, and I'm not trying to be overly critical - A year or two ago had somebody thrown money at me I might have been inclined to accept it. I think most of the perceived problems stem from a single common source, which is largely the issue of scale. (e.g. bug reports to bug handlers. developer numbers to user numbers.)
There are many good things to be said about Ubuntu (& Canonical) in addition to the negative ones that we see in the press or that I've perceived and mentioned above. The truth is it works for a lot of people, and the growing pains will continue until it either dies or both its audience and itself matures. Either way I don't hate Ubuntu, in the same way that I don't hate Microsoft, Oracle, Fedora, Gentoo, or other mass-entities. There are pros and cons to be made for most of them, (and of course Debian itself is no different).
However I will say that every time I see people write "If you want a sexy/shiny/easy to use Linux desktop then install Ubuntu" I glance over at my Debian Lenny desktop, marvel at how sexy, shiny and easy to use it is, and get a little bit disappointed at our own marketing failure(s).
ObFilm: Day of the Woman

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