Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the spread and evolution of what is called Chinese food [1]. In that talk she compares McDonalds to Microsoft and Chinese restaurants to Linux. Her points comparing the different local variations of Chinese food to the variations of Linux make sense. The CentOS Plus repository has a kernel with support for the XFS filesystem, Postfix with MySQL support, and some other useful things [2]. Mary Gardiner comments about the recent loss of a blog server with all content [3]. One interesting point is that when you start using a service that maintains your data you should consider how to make personal backups in case the server goes away or you decide to stop being a customer. Val Henson makes some interesting points about the reliability of Solid State Disks (SSD) [4]. Some people are planning to replace RAID arrays of disks with a single SSD with the idea that a SSD will be more reliable, this seems like a bad idea. Also with the risk of corruption it seems that we have a greater need for filesystems that store block checksums. Lior Kaplan describes how to have multiple Linux bonding devices [5], the comment provides some interesting detail too. programmableweb.com has a set of links to sites that have APIs which can be used to create mashups [6]. One of the many things I would do if I had a lot more spare time is to play with some of the web APIs that are out there. Gunnar Wolf has written some insightful comments about the situation in Israel and Palestine [7]. He used to be a Zionist and spent some time living in Israel so he knows more about the topic than most commentators. Charles Stross has written an informative post about Ubuntu on the EeePC [8]. What is noteworthy about this is not that he s summarised the issues well, but that he is a well known science-fiction writer and he was responding to a SFWA member. One of his short stories is on my free short stories page [9]. He also wrote Accelerando which is one of the best sci-fi novels I ve read (and it s also free) [10]. Don Marti has written about Rent Seeking and proprietary software [11]. It s an interesting article, nothing really new for anyone who has followed the news about the coal and nuclear industries. Erik writes about The Setting Sun and points out that Scott McNealy had tried to capitalise on the SCO lawsuit but Red Hat has ended up beating them in the market [12].

• [1] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_tso.html


• [2] http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories/CentOSPlus?action=show&redirect=Repositories%2FCentOSPlus


• [3] http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/January/3/backup-policies


• [4] http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html


• [5] http://liorkaplan.wordpress.com/2009/01/03/network-bonding-types-and-configurationin-linux/


• [6] http://www.programmableweb.com/


• [7] http://gwolf.org/blog/about-recent-events-and-possible-outcomes-israel-and-palestine


• [8] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/01/i_get_mail.html


• [9] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/


• [10] http://www.accelerando.org/


• [11] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/freedom/rent-seeking/


• [12] http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/setting_sun.html

Here s for the second installment of my review of this past year s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3). I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here ) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages. Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices Presentation There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+, If you don t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit. The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM. Student Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn t find time to dive in. Result This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff. Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code. Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages Presentation GNU R has become the preeminent platform for computing with data . The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation. R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages. The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R. Student Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects. Result This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It s working, we re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian. Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren t into Debian and it s not pretty. Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files Presentation FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great. The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing. The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal. UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal. Student Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects. Result This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it s dead, Jim. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian. PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time Presentation It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers. To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot. The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student. Student Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON. Result This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve Vorlon Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was the wrong solution to the problem . You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn t publicize his (enough). That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

Portrait of myself today, on the day the United States of America inaugurate their first black president. This post will probably be more valuable to me in years to come than anyone else right now, but never mind... I'm tired tonight. I mean physically tired, not mentally. Reading this back to myself if I just wrote "I'm tired" I'd assume mentally fatigued, as that seems to be my ground state. I'm suffering a mild cold but it's nothing serious. I'm unseasonably upbeat about work; for anyone looking forward, predictably but conciously disorganised, but improving. Tomorrow I have my annual review. I ate Quorn Korma tonight, one of my (very few) signature meals. I'm about to make the mistake of leaving the dishes until the morning. I'm in my third year occupying the NM queue and currently making a concious effort to get through it. On sunday I spent several hours on the effort; first, beating some of my packages into shape; then, looking at my outstanding questions. Tellingly I found the latter much more rewarding than the former. I'm also going through one of my seasonal "why do I do this" moments with Debian, perhaps not coincidentally whilst we are mired in a freeze for an overdue release. More on that in another post. I had a flat viewing this morning, one last night and another scheduled for thursday night. I'm living in "cosy" a one-bedroom flat with a nice view and terrible heating. I'm about to go to bed and pick up my current novel, "the Family Trade" by Charles Stross. As it's a fantasy novel, I can kid myself that I've broken out of the habit of reading Science Fiction novels (this after finishing Crichton's "State of Fear", an undeniably SF novel that sits in the mainstream literature shelves of just about every book shop). I shall probably write and publish book reviews for "State of Fear", "The Family Trade" and "Accelerando" (another Stross, thank you AJ) at some point.

On Saturday I went to the British Library's Taking Liberties exhibition on "the 900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights". The majority of the items on display were truly iconic, including a copy of the Magna Carta, Ms Davidson's return ticket from Epsom as well as Charles I's death warrant - with Cromwell's signature easily identifiable in third position. In contrast, the video interviews that were scattered around were rather distracting at best (isn't it a library?) and embarrasingly biased at worst. I wonder how many visitors need convicing that detaining suspects without charge for forty-two days isn't a good idea. Near the exit was a wonderfully lo-fi anonymous commenting system based on a wall of bulldog clips and postcard-sized bits of paper. Fascinating in itself.

I was having a look at this paper on the development of Fortran: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/p165-backus.pdf (which I found here ) And I noticed the following quote:

1.2. The Economics of Programming Another factor which influenced the development of FORTRAN was the economics of programming in 1954. The cost of programmers associated with a computer center was usually at least as great as the cost of the computer itself. (This fact follows from the aver- age salary-plus-overhead and number of programmers at each center and from the computer rental figures.) In addition, from one-quarter to one-half of the computer's time was spent in debugging. Thus programming and debugging accounted for as much as three-quarters of the cost of operating a computer; and obviously, as computers got cheaper, this situation would get worse. This economic factor was one of the prime motivations which led me to propose the FORTRAN project in a letter to my boss, Cuthbert Hurd, in late 1953 (the exact date is not known but other facts suggest December 1953 as a likely date). I believe that the economic need for a system like FORTRAN was one reason why IBM and my successive bosses, Hurd, Charles DeCarlo, and John McPherson, provided for our constantly expanding needs over the next five years without ever asking us to project or justify those needs in a formal budget.

As Hal Varian says, "Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not." I would continue to bet on programming languages that save programmers time, or otherwise make them more productive.

Until very recently I thought that it would be almost impossible to get someone worse than George W Bush as the leader of any significant country. Unfortunately it seems that I was wrong and John McCain and Sarah Palin promise more of the economic, regulatory, and military disasters that are the trademarks of the US Republican party (or at least the dominant Neo-Con branch). Here are some links about John McCain: Here’s a good summary of the racial issues in the current US presidential campaign (This is Your Nation on White Privilege) [1]. The Obama campaign is highlighting the connection between John McCain and Charles Keating [2]. McCain was one of the senators helping Keating while his bank (the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association) was going under. In the end 20,000 people lost their savings and the US taxpayers ended up losing $120,000,000,000. Frank Rich has written an article for the New York Times about the racist attacks on Barack Obama [5]. The current actions of the McCain campaign only barely stop short of calling for an assassination. The South Florida Times has an interesting article about the McCain family’s history of slave ownership [7]. Now John McCain is not responsible for the actions of his great-great-grandfather in owning slaves, and there’s nothing wrong with having black relatives who are the descendants of some of those slaves (even though there is doubt about whether the female slaves were legally adults or even consented to the sex acts in question). But he should be honest about it. Denying having non-white relatives in the face of the facts seems to be strong evidence of racism. It is however understandable that John doesn’t want to discuss the fact that some of his relatives have announced plans to vote against him. Rolling Stone magazine published an interesting article about John McCain’s history as a spoiled brat in the navy [10]. It seems that if your father is an admiral you can ignore orders, crash planes, and basically do whatever you like. It also reveals that John was broken by the Viet Cong torturers and provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid. I’m not going to criticise John for breaking under torture - I think that the assessment of wing commander John Dramesi (who was tortured by the same Viet Cong torturers but didn’t break) should be accepted. John Dramesi says that McCain “wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” while in captivity. However McCain’s use of his former POW status in propaganda is quite dishonest. John McCain is also documented as having described his wife as a “cunt” and a “trollop“. Here are some links about Sarah Palin: Former US Army Brigadier General (retired) Janis L. Karpinski writes about Sarah Palin [3], it’s interesting to hear what an intelligent female soldier has to say about her. One thing that I found noteworthy was the repeated references to “murdering” wild animals, shooting at a defenseless animal is of course quite different from shooting at a person who can shoot back (and different again from commanding an army). Janis also makes reference to Sarah setting the feminist cause back decades - I think that is what Sarah desires though. Also Janis points out the emotional problems for which pit bull terriers are known. There are many claims that Sarah is a “Maverick” and has a record of opposing corruption. This article in the Village Voice documents some of her corrupt activities - including having her home built for free in exchange for assigning the contract to build the Wasilia ice-hocky rink [4]. Thomas L. Friedman has written an article about Palin’s Kind of Patriotism [6]. According to Sarah it’s not patriotic to pay taxes, it seems to me that encouraging citizens to disobey the law should disqualify her from being elected without all the other issues. Thomas notes that Sarah is promoting the interests of Saudi Arabia by prolonging the US dependence on oil imports. The Huffington Post has an interesting article about Sarah Palin’s church [8]. It’s strange how little notice has been taken of Sarah’s former pastor who stated that people who didn’t vote for Bush were likely to go to hell. The Times has an article about “Troopergate”, some of Sarah Palin’s other corrupt practices, and the role of her husband as a shadow governor [9]. Update: Corrected URL [6].

• [1] http://www.opednews.com/articles/This-is-Your-Nation-on-Whi-by-Tim-Wise-080916-307.html


• [2] http://www.keatingeconomics.com/


• [3] http://www.truthout.org/article/palin-can-launch-us-back-time


• [4] http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-10-08/news/the-book-of-sarah/


• [5] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html?ex=1239681600&en=b38b2d4387d4e3c4&ei=5087&excamp=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_id=NYT-E-I-NYT-E-AT-1015-L1


• [6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=palin%20patriotism&st=cse&oref=slogin


• [7] http://www.sfltimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2024&Itemid=1


• [8] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/02/palins-church-may-have-sh_n_123205.html


• [9] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article4692408.ece


• [10] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/23316912/makebelieve_maverick/print

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Wow this Joe the Plumber phenomenon really seems to have Democrats spooked as they are now scrambling to find any possible dirt on the guy who dared to question Dear Leader. One might think people with a solid 6-10% lead wouldn't need to be so desperate but Adam is probably well aware of the Democratic partys penchant of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A lot of these progressive types are still nursing resentment for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry and wary that it will happen again so todays strategy is pre-emptive douchebaggery before Karl Roves evil minions can sully the pristine reputation of their fair candidate. What they don't realize is that calling Kerry an America hating traitor worked because there was reasonable evidence that he threw his medals away, and made speeches denouncing his country which are typical of acts people associate in their minds with America hating traitors. The 527s exaggerated but the exaggeration would not have worked if there was not an element of truth behind it. Now no one is disputing that Obama actually did make the "share the wealth" remark. Whether the person he said it to is a republican plant or some other sort of nogoodnik is immaterial. Obama is a redistributionist and that is precisely the reason why liberals want to him to be president. And how pathetic is the "dirt"? He owes backtaxes? Gee I wonder why someone who already owes money would be apprehensive about having to pay more? A lot of people owe money at one time or another and even have liens placed as a result. Perhaps it is relevant to mention that for someone in public office (like oh, say, Charles Rangel who I'm sure Adam will discuss in his next post.) but for a private citizen? Isn't that one of the "chilling effects on free speech" we were going to be subjected to in Bush's America? The other one one was how is not a real plumber. Apparently he is not licensed but, sit down for this one, it is actually possible to do work without a piece of paper from the government. Really! I've seen it happen. Is it always a good idea to ignore licensing regulations? Well they often serve to protect the public from malpractice but then again they often prop up cartels. Here in the NY/NJ area plenty of people of all political persuasions seem to be willing to take the risk of hiring unlicensed plumbers and other tradesmen because at the end of the day, it's the, you know plumbing, that makes you a plumber nothing else. And none of this has any bearing on Obamas policies or what they mean for America. So if you like socialism and think its what America needs, feel free to make the case to the voters and perhaps they will agree with you or perhaps not. But stop with with the ad hominems against people who point that out.

My parents found it strange that I spend considerable time in the night doing "some Linux thing", so the other day I explained to them what Free software is and we talked about copyright and licensing. I was very happy that they were able to appreciate it. I also gave a Debian Installer demo. While there are a bunch of Indian languages supported in the Debian Installer, (Telugu) isn't one of them. They noticed it and motivated me to work on te_IN translation for d-i and promised to help me. So the three of us have been discussing translation strings. I have been committing changes slowly and intend to complete this activity in a few months. Lack of interest in translation meant that I never gave much thought to it but I see that translating software is rather difficult and it is an activity that would benefit a lot from two or three people doing it together. I found a glossary at swecha.org but there are a bunch of problems

• Computing terminology is context sensitive and one word doesn't fit all uses.
• A lot of words in the glossary are rather contrived.
• Most words can be understood only by the elite of the Telugu speaking world.

I am using these simple guidelines for translation:

• Use language that is used in the newspapers today. Most people who can read would be used to this and understand it best. e.g password would be rather than .
• Do not invent words. If a certain computing term or a word doesn't have an equivalent colloquial Telugu word, use the English word written in Telugu script. Include the English word in paranthesis next to it. e.g. Registering modules... would be (modules) ...
• If a translated Telugu word sounds complex or ambiguous in the translation context, include the corresponding English word in Telugu as well as English in parentheses next to it. e.g Partitioning scheme: would be ( [partitioning]) :

A few resources that I have been using:

• lekhini - a browser based tool for transliteration based on RTS.
• en2te and uchicago.edu's Charles Philip Brown Telugu to English dictionaries.
• J. P. L. Gwynn's Telugu to English dictionary hosted by uchicago.edu

I will have to find a good quality comprehensive Telugu general knowledge book or an official A.P. govt. document to translate ISO 3166 codes etc. The Manorama yearbook would've been great, unfortunately Telugu is not one of the few languages it is published in. I will also bring my copy of Sankaranarayan's dictionary from my next month Hyderabad visit. If you have suggestions on any of these (pointers to guidelines, resources that are DFSG free and I could copy from etc.) that would make doing this easy for me, please do let me know. Naidu does good one-off Telugu string translations in Launchpad (so does praveenkumarg, btw), and Naidu has promised to do some of the work as well as review. If all goes well, I will try and create a debian-10n-telugu sometime in the future.

I did it! :) I defended my thesis and passed master finals from theoretical physics at Charles University in Prague couple hours ago.

After almost dropping out of my school exactly a year ago for not having enough credits to go to the next year, I gave myself an obligation to finish my school on time. I worked very hard the last year, I had to do 8 exams, some of them very hard, requiring more than a week of thorough learning and 9 seminars, requiring a lot of work too and also a master thesis, for which I had to had working finite element solvers and together with SymPy it took all my time and energy. I even had to cancel my trip to Austin and Caltech for the SciPy conference. But I finished my school after all, I am very happy about it.

Last year, two of my friends bet $100 between themselves that I will not finish on time. Jarda, who believed in me is now at Princeton doing his Ph.D. Matou , who didn't believe in me, will now pay $100 to Jarda. I think that life is fair.:)

Now I'll be visiting pubs quite often and then I'll fix some long standing issues in SymPy, hopefully finish my Debian task & skills (to finally become a Developer couple months after that) and finally do useful stuff for my research with a fresh head now.

While drafting emails to be sent out as part of my research, I just had an idea about a new mail header field, let s call it X-Respond-By. This header field allows the sender to specify when s/he requests/requires/needs a response. The recipient could make use of this in multiple ways:

• automatic expiry of messages whose deadlines have passed, possibly with an acknowledgement issued to the sender,
• delayed delivery of messages until they are due,
• prioritisation of message display within the user agent to highlight messages which require action.

Obviously, care would have to be taken to prevent abuse, e.g. by some senders who make all their messages require responses on the next day. One way to achieve this would be to give the recipient sender-specific policies to ignore the field, extend it by a fixed period, or simply reject messages with the field set. I already use a tickler system (which works locally as well as remotely) inspired by the GTD concept of a tickler file, which allows me to have email messages delayed to a given point in the future. I could very well imagine how such an approach could extend into a cooperative communication method. I am looking forward to your comments. Update: Jan Hudec wrote in to tell me about the Reply-By field used by Outlook, which sends messages with those headers:

X-Message-Flag: Follow up
Reply-By: Wed, 10 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0200

According to Jan, this will

will mark the message with specific symbol,and at the time specified it will pop up a notification in the same way as it does for calendar events and after that it will show the mail in red in the index until it s marked completed .

He also notes that Reply-By stems from X.400 via RFC 2156 and has indeed been standardised by RFC 4021. I shall investigate this further when I have time. NP: Foo Fighters: Echos, Silence, Patience & Grace

I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager. Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane! Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.) I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!

Earlier today, I presented a 3 1/2 hour tutorial Introduction to high-performance R (here is a brief description of the talk) at the UseR! 2008 conference at the TU Dortmund. In a nutshell, the tutorial covered how to measure / profile R performance for speed and memory use, how to accelerate R using vectorised expression and tools like Ra / jit, how to add compiled code to R using either the .C or .Call interface and using the inline and RCpp packages, how to use R code in parallel (explicitly using NWS, Rmpi or snow as well as implicitly using pnmath / OpenMP), and how to script / automate R using littler, Rscript or RPy. The final version of the slides is now available via my presentations page, and the live cdrom with software support for all the software used is at Alioth. Update: Corrected link to presentations page thanks to heads-up by Charles. Thanks!

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

When it comes to research and writing, anthropologists are notorious for being slow as molasses. It takes, on average, 9 years to finish grad school and then another 3-6 years before you write and publish your first book. Such is the sometimes frustrating pace of academia. But sometimes it is worth the wait as this new book, Two Bits, the Cultural Significance of Free Software by the anthropologist of science and technology Chris Kelty, makes clear. I am pretty intimate with the details of the book as ck was one of my dissertation committee members. I have read earlier versions and was fortunate enough to teach the final version to a small group of graduate students last spring. While there have been previous books on the subject of open source or peer-to-peer production more generally, this is the first book to delve deep, analytically and historically, into the cultural significance of free software. And the best part is that ck managed (I am not sure how but he did) to convince Duke University Press to release the whole book under a CC license. So download it to your heart’s delight and if you find it useful, do order a treeware copy (as you can’t beat that for easy and comfortable reading). For the developers out there, I would suggest starting with the introduction, which provides an initial overview of some of the main themes he develops and then I would dig into part two where the historical chapters reside and then loop back to the theoretical chapters in part one or continue to part three. Trust me, these will fascinate and surprise even those geeks with a relatively deep historical sense of this world. In fact, my very favorite academic piece on free software exists in these pages: and is the chapter on the history of the actual conflict between James Gosling and Richard Stallman that led to the creation of the GNU General Public License. Here is a small excerpt to whet your appetite:

In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his version of EMACS a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS to a commercial software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation of EMACS (after Stallman s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them into new releases. Stallman s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the official EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and support GOSMACS a task he considered the proper role of a corporation.
[ . . .]
Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme, but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized without telling Labalme conceivably, but not likely, the same code. Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The once proud hacker ethic that Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and losing records that may or may not have existed hardly a noble enterprise.
[. . .]

The story is a lively one, punctuated with some great e-mail “moments,” and gives you a play-by-play sense of how it is that free software become so entangled with the law and how the unwritten norms that guided sharing were violated to then become transformed, explicit, and written. The other chapter that will also fascinate those who want a deeper sense of this history is on UNIX and its role in creating the technical and collaborative conditions necessary to secure the explosion of free software years later. The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, writes Kelty, also the history of the UNIX operating system. This connection has been made by others but not shown in any historical detail as it is done in this book. For those interested in more anthropological issues, the first few chapters is where this type of more conceptual theorizing is at. Chris Kelty introduces the master trope of his book: the recursive public which is an idea that feeds into a longer academic debate, inaugurated by Jurgen Habermas, on the role of publicity, dialogue, and circulation of ideas and texts in cementing a democratic sphere. Many others, such as Charles Taylor, Michael Warner, and Nancy Fraser have since refigured and rehashed the meaning publics and public debate but there have been few ethnographies on the topic. It is here where Chris Kelty intervenes most forcefully to conceptualize publics in explicitly ethnographic terms and in an arena technology and the Internet which is often left undertheorized by cultural theorists. There is a lot more in the book (the third section examines some of the various political modulations of free software, such as Connexions and Creative Commons) but instead of saying any more, I will just leave you with his definition of a recursive public and again urge you to check out the book for yourself!

A recursive public is a public that is vitally concerned with the material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal, practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a collective independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the cost of petrol, Colin Charles is one of the few people to consider the issue of wages in this discussion [1]. Unfortunately almost no-one seems to consider the overall cost of running a vehicle. While I can’t get the figures for Malaysia (I expect Colin will do that) I can get them for Australia. First I chose a car that’s cheap to buy, reasonably fuel efficient (small) and common (cheap parts from the wreckers) - the Toyota Corolla seemed like a good option.

A search on www.drive.com.au shows adverts for Corollas made in 1990 and 1991 for prices ranging from $3000 to $5000. Assuming some optimism on behalf of the advertisers I could probably buy one for about $2500. The current term deposit rate from the major Australian banks is just over 8%, so spending $2500 on a car (instead of having the money in a term deposit) means a loss of $200 per annum interest, if instead the car was purchased with a bank loan the rate would be significantly higher (car loans have quite high interest rates). Of course the real cost is whenever you sell a car and buy a newer one that costs more - but this is harder to estimate. The next issue is insurance, for a 1990 Corolla of the smallest engine size (as a rule of thumb the smaller the engine the smaller the insurance bill) comprehensive insurance (sans optional extras such as windscreen protection) would cost me $489 per annum, and third-party fire and theft would cost me $398. Of course those rates are for someone who is more than 25 years old and has a good driving record. The majority of people who “flip burgers” appear to be younger than 25 and would therefore pay more. Car registration starts at about $550 per annum (varies by state). Car service would cost at least $200 a year (for scheduled services). So it seems that the cost of a cheap car is around $1,350 per annum before you even drive it! Now with a car that’s 18 years old you have to expect that some parts are wearing out, including parts that make it unroadworthy and must be replaced. Assuming that $300 per annum is spent on parts and labor to repair parts that wear out seems quite conservative (especially if driving a car that costs less than $3,000 - one of the cheaper cars in that age range). That brings the total cost per year to $1,650 if you are lucky (if unlucky then expensive parts could wear out at financially inconvenient times). The amount of driving that I do is around 5,000 to 7,000km per annum (according to the ABS the average passenger vehicle was driven 14,100Km in 2005 [2]). Assuming 7.5L/100Km (one of the results that has been quoted for fuel efficiency of a car of that age) and 7,000Km of driving that would be 525L of petrol per year, at $1.70 that is $892. So at current fuel prices when driving a small car for minimal distances (either for environmental or financial reasons) the cost of petrol may be about 35% of the vehicle operating cost. If driven for the average distance the fuel cost will be about 52% of the total vehicle operating cost (which is about $3,400) - which seems like a reasonable incentive to save fuel. If someone wants to advocate measures to make cars more affordable for poor people then the first thing to consider would be a reduction in the vehicle registration fees (which are a significant part of the vehicle operating costs). Another would be government incentives for car sharing schemes (see my previous post on car sharing for details on what is on offer in Melbourne at the moment [5]), $3,400 would give 340 hours (or more with the weekend deals) of driving a shared car (including fuel) at current prices. A shared car would not be suitable for driving to work but would be good for most other car use. Also it should be noted that share cars are new and have all the latest safety features - I really wouldn’t want to be involved in a crash while driving a 20yo car. Unlike the costs of registration etc for owning a car, all the costs of a shared car will be reduced if you use it less. The tax rate for someone earning $28,579.20 is $2,850 plus 30c for each $1 over $25,000 [3], which is $3,923.76, which leaves a total after tax income of $24,655.44. Someone working 40 hours a week on the minimum income who drives an average distance will spend about 14% of their after-tax income on their car if they have a small old car and were able to buy it without borrowing money. According to the ABS the median income is actually slightly lower than full-time work at the minimum wage [4]. So it seems that there are many people who are working part-time and earning less money than they would if they worked full-time at the minimum wage. So the question for Colin is, how does this compare to Malaysia? Is someone on a minimal income in Malaysia going to spend ~7% of their after-tax income on paying insurance, tax, and basic maintenance on a car without the additional expense of driving it? How does the cost of the basic car ownership compare to the cost of fuel in Malaysia?

• [1] http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2008/06/15/on-fuel-subsidies-and-earningspending-power


• [2] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/mediareleasesbyReleaseDate/66E24E957EB09229CA2571E10077D71D?OpenDocument


• [3] http://www.ato.gov.au/individuals/content.asp?doc=/content/12333.htm&mnu=5053&mfp=001


• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/96e08af8f4178a45ca257306000d4fd4!OpenDocument


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/13/car-sharing-in-melbourne/

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Colin Charles writes about a woman who is selling advertising space on herself [1]. Like Colin I haven’t bought a t-shirt in about 9 years (apart from some Cafepress ones I designed myself). So it seems that the price for getting some significant advertising at a computer conference is to buy a few hundred t-shirts (they cost $7 each when buying one at a time from Cafepress, I assume that the price gets lower than $3 each when buying truck-loads). I have been given boxer-shorts and socks with company logos on them (which I never wore), I think that very few people will show their underwear to enough people to make boxer-shorts a useful advertising mechanism, socks would probably work well in Japan though. It seems to me that many people regard accepting free t-shirts as being an exception to all the usual conventions regarding advertising. Accepting gifts from companies that you do business with is generally regarded as a bad idea, except of course when t-shirts and other apparel are given out then it’s OK. Being paid to wear a placard advertising a product is regarded as degrading by many people, but accepting a free t-shirt (effectively being paid $7 for wearing advertising) is regarded as OK by almost everyone. I don’t mind being a walking advert for a company such as Google. I use many Google products a lot and I can be described as a satisfied customer. There are some companies that have given me shirts which I only wear in winter under a jumper. The Oracle Unbreakable Linux [2] shirt is one that I wear in winter. Now I would not consider accepting an offer to have advertising on my butt (although I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t get enough attention that anyone would make such an offer). I would however be happy to talk with someone who wants to pay me to wear a t-shirt with advertising when giving a lecture at a conference. I am not aware of any conference which has any real dress requirement for speakers (apart from the basic idea of not offending the audience). The standard practice is that if your employer pays you to give a lecture as part of their marketing operation then they give you a shirt to wear (polo more often than t-shirt). I am currently working on some things which could end up as papers for presentation at Linux conferences. If someone wanted to sponsor my work on one of those free software related projects and then get the recognition of having me wear their shirt while giving a lecture and have me listed as being sponsored by that company in the conference proceedings then that seems like a reasonable deal for everyone. One thing that you need to keep in mind when accepting or soliciting for advertising is the effect it has on your reputation. Being known as someone who wants advertising on their butt probably wouldn’t be fun for very long. On the Internet advertising seems to be almost everywhere. It seems that more than half the content on the net (by the number of pages or by the number of hits) either has an option to donate (as Wikipedia does and some blogs are starting to do), has Google advertising (or a similar type of adverts from another company), is a sales site (IE you can buy online), or is a marketing site (IE provides background information and PR to make you want to buy at some other time). Note that my definition of advertising is quite broad, for example the NSA web site [3] has a lot of content that I regard as advertising/marketing - with the apparent aim of encouraging skilled people to apply for jobs. Not that I’m complaining, I’ve visited the National Cryptologic Museum [4] several times and learned many interesting things! I think that Internet advertising that doesn’t intrude on the content (IE no pop-ups, page diversions, or overly large adverts) is fine. If the advertising money either entirely pays people to produce useful content or simply encourages them to do so (as in the case of all the blogs which earn $10 a month) then I’m happy with that. I have previously written about some of my experience advertising on my blog [5] and how I encourage others to do the same. I don’t think that space on a t-shirt is any more or less appropriate for advertising than space on a web site hosting someone’s blog. Finally there is one thing I disagree with in Colin’s post, that is the use of the word “whore“. It’s not uncommon to hear the term “whoring” used as a slang term for doing unreasonable or unworthy things to make money (where “unreasonable” and “unworthy” often merely means doing something that the speaker wouldn’t be prepared to do). But using the term when talking about a woman is quite likely to cause offense and is quite unlikely to do any good. The Wikipedia page about prostitution [6] has some interesting background information.

• [1] http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2008/06/13/on-whoring-oneself


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/02/18/oracle-unbreakable-linux/


• [3] http://www.nsa.gov/


• [4] http://www.nsa.gov/museum/index.cfm


• [5] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/04/14/friends-and-adverts/


• [6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution

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As mentioned a few weeks ago, I had submitted two entries as possible topics for this year's version of the Google Summer of Code. And lo and behold, the response was very, very good and both applications were slotted! For the topic 'create a PostgreSQL package for R that uses the standard DBI interface', a number of interested students contacted me, and a total of three applications were submitted. And while the R Foundation was only able to allocate four topics among a number of really good applications, Sameer Prayaga was our pick for this topic. It would be nice to fill this gap among the existing database connection methods for R, and I feel that Sameer can pull this off. For the second topic of 'create a cran2deb tool for converting CRAN sources into Debian package' which I had submitted within Debian, Charles Blundell wrote an excellent application. In a way, this topic is a '2.0' version of our previous attempts of a 'top-down' set of tools in the pkg-bioc project on Alioth. This time, we will try something smaller, maybe more modular and lighter and see how far we get there if we try it 'bottom-up'. And as we are currently in the community bonding phase, say Hi to Sameer or Charles when you come across them these days. Lastly, I'd like to thank everybody who submitted an entry at Debian or R, or who contacted me about one of the topics I posted. The respone was very humbling, many of you were imminently qualified and seemingly very motivated -- but even Google's pockets can only pay for a finite number of projects. Sorry if yours did not get picked.

People who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less. That’s what Justin Kruger and David Dunning (both of Cornell University) demonstrated in a series of experiments they carried out. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill, fail to recognize genuine skill in others and fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill. In one of their investigations, they discovered that 98% of university professors believed they were above the average, while that is obviously impossible statistically. Bright students, far above the others, considered themselves below their real skills, standard students saw themselves as above the average, while real bad ones were fully convinced of being among the best. In fact, the worse the person was, the most their conviction was that they were right. Even more, the most incompetent ones were incapable of realising the superiority of others, and they tended to think that the answers of the tests were the wrong ones, and not themselves. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”, quoting Charles Darwin. Most of the people react to this study with a smile, thinking about the incompetent people they know and how well this study describes them. It should be noted that everyone is incompetent about many things, and this effect affects all of us. How can a person realize that they’re wrong? The lesson that comes out of the study is that it’s really hard to find out, according to Dunning. His recommendation is not to trust just one’s own thoughts, but to ask for other’s opinions, especially before taking important decisions. Nobody should ever stop trying to improve and to learn, because it’s really difficult to know when to do it.

Some more information about my current research for flights to Debconf. First of all, the conditions:

• Departure from Paris, either Orly or Charles de Gaulle, Aug 8th
• Arrival to Buenos Aires
• Return on Aug 17th

All this is non negotiable The best quote is still EUR902, which I obtained for an Air Europa flight (Paris-Madrid-Buenos Aires) on www.expedia.fr. The same flight is quoted higher is many other booking sites...including www.aireuropa.com. Moray Alan pointed me to www.checkfelix.at which is indeed one of the most convenient search engines around...but it misses my EUR902 quote... Don't ask why the very same flight booked from Madrid, thus direct is much more expensive: that's the joy of air transportation where nothing is logical (except in terms of getting the most out of your pocket, of course). Probably more random results to come in my blog in the next days/weeks. I hope that all this is already useful for some of you.