Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

Looking at the sorry state of Python in Debian, makes me wonder if we shouldn t enforce team maintainance of packages above a certain popularity/importance/whatever threshold. People worked hard in the last months to fix any bugs that would prevent Python2.6 to land in unstable and yet nothing happens. Time passes by and we will eventually end up with Squeeze having a horribly outdated Python version.

The Association For Free Software (AFFS) seems to have been finally wound up last week. So long, AFFS was Richard Smedley s view of it. I actually left four years ago (when I wrote State of the AFFS site currently moving) but I was still a signatory for the bank, so I helped wind that up. So as one door closes, another opens. Today I m off to meet our co-op s newest member and also to see if we can reinvigorate the Principle Six business network. I ll post more about that in a few days, but if you ve any ideas about how Free and Open Source Software can help, I d love to read it in the blog comments.

Well that all happened rather quickly. This morning, we met with our agent to go through all of the offer paperwork, at the bright and early time of 7:30am after (for me at least) a bad night's sleep staring at the ceiling. It wasn't that bad. A lot of disclosures, a lot of initialling and signing. Here's what the stack of paperwork looked like: The existing building reports didn't come back with any red flags. There's a little bit (around $1,000) of termite damage. We put in the contract that the sellers have to fix that. The hot water tank needs to be strapped to the wall to be in earthquake compliance. We put that in the contract too. A couple of hours later, we'd got all of the paperwork out of the way, and Nick said he'd present the offer to the seller's agent at 3pm. I got a phone call at about 5pm from Nick saying that they'd accepted the offer, with all of our conditions, so we're all ready to go for closing on the 23rd. Apparently the reason the sellers are so motivated is because they borrowed against the equity in this condo to buy a house, so they're eager to close the deal. We managed to negotiate the price down slightly to $519,000 (anything lower would have been a short sale for them, and we already know all about what that can entail). Even for that price, they've made a tidy profit on the $180,000 they paid 14 years ago. So this is working out really well, timing-wise. We'll close on the 23rd, go visit Chris, Bri and Clara in Atlanta for Christmas, and then have all of January to do any work on the place before our current lease expires. Just got to wait for the finance approvals and an international money transfer now. I'm slightly miffed that I booked it yesterday at 0.90 cents, and the AUD has risen to 0.92 cents today.

My (very) humble efforts this week:

• 2009-11-25: #527710 in 'ming' - closed as no longer occurred.
• Prodded some bugs, especially #555036 in 'bash-completion-lib'; don't remember actually fixing any. :(
• 2009-11-29: #552680 in 'libtest-valgrind-perl' - investigated and closed. Was actually a previously-closed bug in valgrind.
• Then bringing up #551926 in pip and python-pip on debian-devel.

Less of the instant gratification of NMUs for me lately. But; the Perl packaging team is down to a much lower number of RC bugs now. I'm one step closer to being a DD, apparently. And today I found somewhere to live for the next year; this is actually going to threaten my internet access in the near future, which is a little annoying. But once it's done, I'll actually be working on a desktop machine again, rather than a netbook.

Biggest, in terms of money involved, piece of equipment is a nice piece of glass to put in front of our camera. Since my wife had been using a Canon SLR since forever (and we stayed with that when moving from the EOS 300 to the current EOS 40D), the choices to upgrade from the kit EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 basically have been:

• EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM: since it's been announced with the 18Mp 7D it should be quite good on the 10Mp 40D. Newest design, certainly one of the best IS on Canon, true wide angle.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM: The old trusted one. No IS, but a constant f/2.8. Narrowest zoom range of the lot. A real tank, at almost 1kg.
• EF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM: The other full frame L lens. Not quite as big, longer, but only f/4.
• EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L IS USM: including waiting for it to be announced and available, of course.

In the end I got the EF 24-70mm f/2.8 L USM, because the EOS 40D is no high ISO monster (we don't plan to upgrade immediately.) Also: I bought the Tokina AT-X 116 PRO DX (11-16mm, f/2.8) a while back and we're quite happy with that so wide-angle is covered. And since we're often shooting indoors (family and other events), f/2.8 is a big plus. On the tele end, there's quite a gap from the 24-70 to the old EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM [age of the page to reflect the age of the lens ;-) ] but then the latter is probably the next lens to be replaced anyway. Since I only got 24-70 I can not directly compare these lenses. But after a few early tests I think I'm happy with the 24-70: while it seems to be a bit soft wide open at 24mm and at 70mm, it seems to be very sharp center to edge even at f/2.8 when used in the 35-50mm range. (Note that the 40D is a crop sensor camera, so I'm nicely using the sharp center area of a lens designed for full frame!) Yes, it's huge, so for casual walking around the 17-85mm will probably still get some use. Time will tell. And since it can, potentially at least, be used on a a EOS 5D Mk II, I now have another gadget to covet. Although this would mean giving up the Tokina 11-16mm. Anyway, not for quite some time yet... (The test also included the venerable EF 50mm f/1.8, Mk I, and I must say I'm quite surprised how sharp that one is in the f/4 to f/11 range.)

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks... First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him! So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

This is an updated version of yesterday's post with corrected URLs -- by copy-and-pasting I had still referenced the previous slides from UseR! 2009 in Rennes instead of last Friday's slides from the ISM presentation in Tokyo. The presentations page had the correct URLs, and this has been corrected below for this re-post. My apologies! As mentioned yesterday, I spent a few days last week in Japan as I had an opportunity to present the Introduction to High-Performance Computing with R tutorial at the Institute for Statistical Mathematics in Tachikawa near Tokyo thanks to an invitation by Junji Nakano. An updated version of the presentations slides (with a few typos corrected) is now available as is a 2-up handout version. Compared to previous versions, and reflecting the fact that this was the 'all-day variant' of almost five hours of lectures, the following changes were made:

• the 'parallel computing' section was expanded further with discussion of the recent R packages multicore, iterators, foreach, doNWS, doSNOW, doMPI;
• a first discussion of GPU computing using the gputools package was added;
• the section on 'out of memory computing' using ff, bigmemory and biglm (including an example borrowed from Jay Emerson) reappeared in this longer version;
• minor fixes and polishing throughout.

Comments and suggestions are, as always, appreciated.

After getting a new disk for my Popcorn Hour A-110 device I had to copy all partitions from the old disk onto the new one so I do not have to reinstall some applications and reconfigure everything.

After searching the web and trying to find a free alternative to Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image, preferably not using a boot disk on its own (I did not want to backup my workstation after all, just a simple partition to partition copy between two SATA disks) I gave up and decided to do the copying manually.

So I fired up gparted to do the partitioning, did a right click and... I noticed that gparted supports copy/paste. Being curious about what this could potentially do I gave it a try. I marked partition one on the old disk, did a copy, went to the new disk and clicked on paste - and guess what, gparted did what I was looking for.

Putting a long story short: you can copy whole partitions using gparted's copy/paste mechanism and even resize them whilst doing so. I am somehow ashamed I did not notice this feature earlier, having been a gparted user for a few years now and I can imagine I am not the only one who missed that.

resurrecting CamlJava (testers welcome) CamlJava is a great project by almighty Xavier that bridges the OCaml and Java worlds via the respective C interfaces (Caml/C interface for OCaml and JNI for Java). Unfortunately, the last stable release was a bit out of date and seemed not to work with recent JDK (both in terms of buildability and of runtime correctness, i.e., segfaults). With the tremendous help of Gr goire Henry, I've managed to prepare a set of patches that enables to build (and use without segfaults ...) CamlJava with recent JVM: in particular it seems now to work with both Sun's JVM and OpenJDK. A Debian package has been prepared; while it gets processed by archive manager, you can get an equivalent unofficial package from my APT repo:

    deb http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/
    deb-src http://people.debian.org/~zack/debian zack-unstable/

Any form of testing is very welcome. In case you want to try O'Jacare on top of CamlJava however, you need to wait a bit more: Gr goire is working on it, but in the process he banged his head against bugs in both CamlP4 and CamlP5 (the only two available porting paths from the last stable release of O'Jacare)

So we pretty much gave up on the condemned house. The more we hear about it, the worse it looks. Our agent got some paperwork on the red-tagging today. Apparently the large room out the front used to be a car port, and enclosing that was done without a permit. There's also a standalone room out the back that has had a bathroom added without a permit. Apparently the owner is getting fined $2,500 a day by the city until it's either brought into compliance or reverted. No idea if that's actually being paid, or who's responsibility it would become in the event of a sale, so we'll just quietly back away from that whole mess and pretend it never happened. Sarah was poking around Redfin again last night and found this property, for less than what the condemned house was going for (granted, this is a condo, not a house). We got our agent to show it to us today, and we really liked the look of it, so we're going to put an offer in on it and see what comes of it. We have to spend about three hours with our agent tomorrow morning going through paperwork. Wee. It certainly seems like a good time to be buying. Interest rates are low, the AUD is high against the USD, and prices are down.

As mentioned yesterday, I spent a few days last week in Japan as I had an opportunity to present the Introduction to High-Performance Computing with R tutorial at the Institute for Statistical Mathematics in Tachikawa near Tokyo thanks to an invitation by Junji Nakano. An updated version of the presentations slides (with a few typos corrected) is now available as is a 2-up handout version. Compared to previous versions, and reflecting the fact that this was the 'all-day variant' of almost five hours of lectures, the following changes were made:

• the 'parallel computing' section was expanded further with discussion of the recent R packages multicore, iterators, foreach, doNWS, doSNOW, doMPI;
• a first discussion of GPU computing using the gputools package was added;
• the section on 'out of memory computing' using ff, bigmemory and biglm (including an example borrowed from Jay Emerson) reappeared in this longer version;
• minor fixes and polishing throughout.

Comments and suggestions are, as always, appreciated.

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

The following is written in German and probably only interesting for people living near D sseldorf. I decided to post this to Planet Debian as it might interest some of you :)

Als (ordentlicher) Student kommt man ab und zu in den Genuss, eine Arbeit schreiben zu d rfen, von der Andere (sprich: nicht nur ich durch die gute Note *g*) profitieren k nnen.
So auch geschehen mit meiner Bacherlor-Arbeit. Und obwohl mein Vortrag erst am n chsten Montag (07.12.2009, 10:00, wahrscheinlich in Raum 25.12.02.33) ist, gibt es morgen auf dem diesj hrigen Dies Academicus der HHU D sseldorf bereits einen kleinen Vorgeschmack.

Dem geneigten Leser wird aufgefallen sein, dass der Link nicht auf die Webseite meiner Universit t zeigt, und auch nicht auf die Webseite unserer AStA, sondern auf Wikipedia.
Nein, ich bin noch nicht so ber hmt um f r die Wikipedia relevant zu sein. Es gibt schlicht und einfach nichts dazu auf den Seiten. Nicht mal im Kalender der AStA stehts drin...
Woran das liegt? Keine Ahnung, ich vermute ja, dass die Herren und Damen (puh, safe, sonst kommt noch der Gleichstellungsbeauftragte zu mir...) lieber mit Streiken, Maulen und sonstigem Quatsch besch ftigt sind, anstatt irgendwie mal die Bildung zu f rdern. Egal, hier ist nicht der Platz um zu St nkern (Twitter/Identi.ca ich komme! [Danke Asel f r die Idee]), ich wollte euch n mlich einladen!

Keine Einladung ohne Einladungstext, *such* *kram*, ach hier hab ichs: Programm zum Dies Academicus 2009. Leider wei ich nicht wie aktuell die Version ist, liegt irgendwo in den Tiefen der Seite der Fachschaft Modernes Japan und ich bin da als

Spam-Erkennung: Intelligent Greylisting
Ort: H rsaal 3C
Zeit: 13 bis 14 Uhr

auf Seite 8 vermerkt. Aber ihr wolltet ja einen Text haben. Den hab ich eigentlich auch eingereicht. Und nun ganz exklusiv und nur f r meine lieben Leser (und weil niemand auf die Idee kam den ins Programm aufzunehmen):

Intelligent Greylisting

Gute Spamfilter sind entweder ressourcenhungrig, weil sie die ganze E-Mail analysieren m ssen, oder fehleranfaellig, weil sie Entscheidungen zu voreilig treffen und dadurch legitime E-Mails verlieren. Wir stellen euch eine neue Methode vor, wie man Spam effektiv filtern kann, ohne viele Ressourcen zu verbrauchen und ohne legitime E-Mails zu verlieren.

So! Ihr kommt morgen alle um 13 Uhr in den H rsaal 3C (Geb ude 23.irgendwas, PhilFak) und genie t meine Anwesenheit!

Es gr t das Grummeltier.