Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See

Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

Brands are most often associated with the world of crass consumerism but they can play a key role in fomenting political change. Or so claim some pretty clever thinkers and activists and they will be giving talk about the importance of branding for democratic politics, this Monday at 7 PM, at the Change You Want to See

Please join us this Monday, October 26th as we continue our series on Symbols, Branding and Persuasion with an exploration of branding in the context of electoral and legislative politics. We ll start with a presentation by media theorist Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Reimagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and the forthcoming Branding the New Deal. Afterward Jessica Teal, design manager for the Obama 2008 presidential campaign will join Duncombe for a conversation via video skype. Like it or not, propaganda and mass persuasion are part of modern democratic politics. Many progressives today have an adverse reaction to propaganda: ours is a politics based in reason and rationality, not symbols and fantasy. Given our last administration s fondness for selling fantasies as reality, this aversion to branding, marketing and propaganda is understandable. But it is also na ve. Mass persuasion is a necessary part of democratic politics, the real issue is what ethics it embodies and which values it expresses. Looking critically at how the Roosevelt Administration tried to brand the New Deal and how the Obama campaign leveraged principles of marketing and advertising gives us an opportunity to think about different models of political persuasion.

Over the past couple of months the machine which hosts the Debian Administration website has been struggling with two distinct problems:

The dreaded scheduler bug/issue

The machine would frequently hang with the messages of the form:

Task xxx blocked for more than 120 seconds

This would usually require the application of raised elephants to recover from.

OOM-issues

The system would exhaust the generous 2Gb of memory it possessed, and start killing random tasks until the memory usage fell - at which point the server itself stopped functioning in a useful manner.

Hopefully these problems are now over:

• Bytemark have generously increased the memory installed upon this (donated) machine from 2Gb to 4Gb.
• I've cleaned up some of the site code and switched to using a combination of nginx & apache 2 to serve the site. (I've documented this upon the site itself : Speeding up dynamic websites via an nginx proxy.)

The combination of these two changes should resolve the memory issues, and I've installed a home-made 2.6.31.4 kernel which appears to have corrected the task-blocking scheduler issue. ObTitle: Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason

Every time Facebook changes anything, people complain. Most of the time just because something has changed, without knowing actually what changed.The october layout change for example isn't too big in fact. As far as I can tell it's not much more than turning the "hot" items that were in the right sidebar into a special tab (and breaking the refresh for the live feed, but I guess they'll fix that soon). The "live" tab is basically all information (see below for getting rid of certain restrictions); the "News" tab tries to reduce this amount of information by only showing you certain posts Facebook magic considers to be "important". If you are a heavy user you will probably prefer the "Live" feed, if you are a casual Facebook user, go with the "News" feed to have less crap posts to read.Still there are some things you should be aware of when you are a facebook user (not all of these are new):

• Privacy settings in Facebook. You really should have a look at them. Be aware that if you put them all to the maximum, it may be next to impossible for not-yet-friends to add you. So I recommend to leave the "search privacy setting" to "all" but only have it show your photo and the option to add you as friend. This is enough for people to be able to actually add you as friend. (Setting it to "Friend of a Friend" was not sufficient for me.)
• Friend lists. These are really useful when you use Facebook for promoting events. Make lists of regional and topic grouping, for example I have a "swing dancers in Munich" list. If you bother people with irrelevant invitations they'll just ignore or unfriend you!
• Friend lists can also be used as a privacy device. I have a friend list called "privacy" with only those I consider to be really close. Photo markers etc. are restricted to these friends.
• The "live" feed will not show all your friends. By default it is restricted to 250 friends. The "Options" button at the end of the live feed page will allow you to increase this setting to 5000 and allow you to check which friends activities facebook had been hiding from you. (And indeed some people were I wondered if they had stopped using facebook had just been hidden from the feed by facebook ...)
• I wrote a Greasemonkey script (Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, but by now also available for many other browsers, apparently even IE) to move the filters from the left to the right column, expanding the main feed column. Much more senisble layout IMHO.
• Avoid using applications where possible, especially all those Quiz applications and games. Remember: you will give the application access to most of your data and most of your friends' data as well. So make sure you can trust that application! (See this Post by the American Civil Liberties Union for details)

Also you should never forget that all the data you put online is hard to get rid of again. Just don't put anything there you don't want everyone to know. Facebook can be really powerful when used right for example as promotion channel. But the way you should be using it is to first consider what you want people to have an impression of you, then try to present yourself this way. Don't just throw everything that comes to your mind there. (This even more applies to blogs and web sites, obviously, that don't have any privacy control)

I ve just added the Wordpress Minify [1] plugin to my blog. It s purpose is to combine CSS and Javascript files and to optimise them for size and it s based on the Minify project [2]. On my documents blog this takes the main page from 313KB uncompressed, 169KB compressed, and a total of 23 HTTP transfers to 306KB uncompressed, 117KB compressed, and 21 HTTP transfers. In each case 10 of the HTTP transfers are from Google for advertising. It seems that a major obstacle to optimising the web page load times is Google adverts of course Google has faster servers than I do so I guess it s not that much of a performance problem. The minify plugin caches it s data files and I had to really hack at the code to make it use /var/cache/wordpress-minify a subdirectory of the plugins directory was specified in many places. deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny wordpress
I ve added a wordpress-minify package to my repository of Wordpress packages for Debian/Lenny with the above APT line. I ve also got the following packages:
adman
all-in-one-seo-pack
google-sitemap-generator
openid
permalink-redirect
stats
subscribe-to-comments
yubikey The Super Cache [3] plugin has some nice features. It generates static HTML files that are served to users who aren t logged in and who haven t entered a comment. This saves significant amounts of CPU time when there is high load. The problem is that installing this requires modifying the main .htaccess file, adding a new .htaccess file in the plugins directory, and lots of other hackery. The main reason for this is to avoid running any PHP code in the most common cases, it would be good for really heavy use. Also PHP safe mode has to be disabled for some reason, which is something I d rather not do. The Cache [4] plugin was used as the base for the Super Cache plugin. It seems less invasive, but requires the ability to edit the config file. Getting it into a shape that would work well in Debian would take more time than I have available at the moment. This combined with the fact that my blog will soon be running on a system with two quad-core CPUs that won t be very busy means that I won t be packaging it. If anyone would like to Debianise the Cache or Super Cache plugin then I would be happy to give them my rough initial efforts as a possible starting point. I m not planning to upload any of these packages to Debian, it would just add too much work to the Debian security team without adding enough benefit.

• [1] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minify/
• [2] http://code.google.com/p/minify/
• [3] http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/
• [4] http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/

I have just noticed the latest gnome-session package doesn t use compiz as default WM if installed. I have had to found the right way starting it for my session, anf finally found the following was the easiest and cleanest solution:

echo export WINDOW_MANAGER=/usr/bin/compiz >> ~/.gnomerc

Writing it here so that I can find it again

From left to right: Obey Arthur Liu, Olly Betts, Stefano Zacchiroli, Dirk Eddelbuettel, Sylvestre Ledru, Jelmer Vernooij.

Dear Planet,

We arrived at the Google Summer of Code 2009 Mentor Summit and are having a blast here. The weather is awesome, the candies are plenty and the conference rooms are comfy at the Googleplex. We will write to you again soon.

Cheers

The Debian people Arthur, Olly, Zack, Dirk, Sylvestre, Jelmer

To get more Google juice to the problem. If you are trying qemu or libvirt or kvm or virt-manager and when you are starting up your second guest you see a message such like this:
QEMU quit during console startup
bind() failed
Then two of your guests have the same port set for their VNC devices. Change the port in the VNC section to something that is free. A more specific erro would have save a half an hour of Googling.

Over the last few days I have worked for some hours on packaging the last dependency of GNOME Shell that was missing in Debian: gjs. That work has been sponsored by Collabora, along with the work required to package GNOME Shell itself. I was very impressed by the time it took for FTP Masters and Assistants to deal with the new packages - it only took a couple days for each; kudos! What this all means is that you can now easily test GNOME Shell, and even make it your default environment on a Debian unstable system, by just installing the gnome-shell package. As I expected, some people have been having trouble with the new package, but the general feedback has been fairly positive. If the README.Debian package doesn t help you with your specific issue, do take the time to file a bug report! By the way, thanks go to Joss, for his work on dh_girepository, and for him, and Sebastian Dr ge for their work on creating the new GObject Introspection policy.

Today I've uploaded usplash-theme-debian_5 to sid, making it the first upload since more than two years. To celebrate this and to make the (upcoming) change(s more) visible, I've exchanged the artwork against the one by Chad Albers. In the future I plan to provide alternative splash images too, like the one done for Lenny (which sadly was never uploaded), a new one for Squeeze (once there is one) or this darker theme. Of course, the old theme will also be reintroduced by then and equally of course, I'm interested to hear about more good artwork!

If you want to help out, usplash-theme-debian is maintained in the collab-maint repository in alioth and the BTS is eagerly waiting for your bug reports and patches :-) Currently supported resolutions are 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1365x768 and 1600x1200. 1024x600, 1280x1024, 1440x1050 and 1900x1200 are already on my list of what's nice to have, what other resolutions are there you need to have? :-)

And then, I plan to upload a new version of usplash itself eventually as well, and again, I'd be delighted if someone would work on this with me... :-)

I'll publish this post on debian-devel@lists.debian.org, please reply there. Thank you.

The Guardian reported this week that rights holders will have to obtain a court order before punishing persistent offenders by reducing or cutting off their internet connections. This is an important step in the right direction. For too long, rights holders and their agents have been able to make allegations without fear of repurcussions, even though loss of internet access can be a terrible problem for customers, especially as more government services move online. In the US, we ve even seen rights holder agents acting against legitimate publishing by TV production companies these groups really are out of control! There are still unanswered questions about who pays when an allegation is made, with the cost usually being left with the customer, either directly (through having to pay the ISP an admin fee for the allegation) or indirectly (through higher ISP fees). Hopefully the courts would rule fairly on who should pays the costs in each case. The next step would be to prohibit things like Karoo s Three Strikes as unfair terms in consumer contracts.

dput xcowsay_1.1.1_amd64.changes Closes: #551864. It was downloaded from: http://www.doof.me.uk/xcowsay/ Upstream Author: Nick Gasson (also author of the initial Debian packaging, Nick, you rock!)

This is just a reminder for all of you that have packages that depend on the udev package: I hate you. A Debian package depending on the udev package (with very few exceptions like for example the initramfs-tools package that actually uses udev) is so wrong.

• The majority of those packages will work just fine without. All that is lost is some autoconfiguration of devices, which can be properly be done by hand. So even if you feel like it would not be the same without, that is at most a reason for a recommend.
• Depending on a package whose sole purpose is to heavily modify the behaviour of the system and especially what modules are loaded at boot time and how device nodes are named is a no-go in my eyes.
  Installing udev on a system not having udev installed has a realistic chance of breaking something or even making the system totally unbootable. (That is no bug in udev, it's main purpose is to load all the stuff and do much guessing. Unless you are able to write omniscient code there is no way for such a system to know what has to be changed to make the system still bootable with udev suddenly (re)installed in all cases.).
• Before anyone wants to start to argue with some hypothetical uninformed user that could be confused by some magic not working: please switch on your brain and reconsider.
  Udev has not be installed in new installs since ages. Lenny shipped without yaird so it is all but easy to have a system without udev running (if wanting to have a kernel installed). So if there is any user not having udev installed ending up with your package installed, that system was either time-consuming modified to not have udev or never had and was upgraded multiple times (thinking of a squeeze package) with each upgrade doing additional complex steps.
  What do you think are the chances on such a system for a dependency on udev to do any good? And what are the chances for it to cause a catastrophic failure?

One of the more annoying aspects to deploying Kerberos and GSS-API is making sure that clients have the correct name for the server they re talking to. CIFS, the Windows file-sharing protocol, provided the identity of the server to the client. Windows used this to make a few things easier with NTLM but does not use this information with Kerberos. I keep finding myself in conversations where someone has the bright idea of making this problem easier by generalizing this mechanism and having the server tell the client its identity. The client can then authenticate to that identity. There s definitely an implementation advantage: you remove all the complexity of name mapping. The problem of course is that it matters what server the client is talking to; the client actually needs to make a decision about how much to trust the server. Authentication to the bad guy is just as bad as the bad guy being able to subvirt your authentication to the good guy. I was talking recently to another implementor who has similar experience with their customers. Frustrated, I was looking for an analogy simple enough that people could understand the mistake here. I was running through nursery rhymes and other childrens tales in may head until I came to the Three Little Pigs. It s perfect!
The pigs do not want the results of the Let me in, service from the big bad wolf. There s no way that the situation could be made better by more authentication. Asking the wolf for his PIV Card (when have you met a big bad wolf who was not a federal contractor) will not help the pigs decide to let the wolf in. Because the pigs think to consider who they are getting a service from, they decide not to trust it. Of course, physical security is something that first two pigs should have worked on. However even their brother would not have been safe if he d taken an approach similar to the one proposed for GSS-API of asking the bad guy what name to trust before authenticating to see if the bad guy in fact has that name. There may be things we can do to make name mapping easier. However we cannot provide security without making a trust decision about who we talk to, and whenever we talk about who and trust together, we must consider the security of the mapping. Of course, as Little Red Riding Hood could tell you, sometimes it is all about authentication. Sadly, her grandmother was unable to get better than level of assurance 1 for her identity as Little Red Riding Hood s grandmother, and the wolf was able to claim that identify for himself.

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:

• Recent files: Recent file information is pulled from the GtkRecentManager and the thumbnails are pulled from the XDG thumbnail specification directory. Metadata for the file comes courtesy of gio which I presume comes from shared-mime-info. Yay. By using the GtkRecentManager for all our recent activity metadata across the platform we re allowing legacy GNOME applications to just work. Sweet.
• Events and tasks: These are pulled from EDS using libjana, a calendaring library primarily developed by Chris Lord (of Dates fame.) A couple of months back (well, uh, March) I enhanced libjana to support tasks and thus we are able reuse the existing Tasks/Dates apps for interacting with the calendar.
• Favourite apps: Here I let the side down. I use some quite crazy custom format for doing this which frankly stinks. I m going to try and sit down with the GNOME shell guys to see if we can come up with some better way for dealing with user originated application metadata.
• Social networking/web service integration: This comes courtesy of Mojito and librest, two projects that I and the esteemed Ross Burton have been working on. Mojito is a project that pulls in content from a variety web services into a centralised place, abstracting some of the complexity and the makes it trivial to query. librest is a library for to keep developers happy even though they re having to deal with web services. It does this by making requests and parsing the result simple.

Myzone in action

A topic I've been trying to understand more about for some time is color calibration. I've used lprof to get a very rough starting point for my old CRT (sorely in need of replacement by now...) Since hardware colorimeters are not cheap and probably not many can be used with Linux (I've not really looked, to be honest) I've wondered if I couldn't use the one device that is (should be) calibrated that I already have: my camera. With some kind of feedback loop like shoot screen, analyze img file, adjust settings, shoot again (and the same process for the printer, and, possibly a bit more error prone since the freshly calibrated printer would be used to produce the template, the scanner), shouldn't it be possible to arrive at sane settings? The camera explicitly allows using sRGB or Adobe RGB color model, so I'd think the colors should be more or less narrowly defined, at least when shooting raw or using manual white balance. (Another thought: I have a dual screen system. Can X even do this? And if X can do it, is it possible to tell Gimp to set this up? But this is just idle speculatio. I've not really looked at Google's results yet, either.) Update: Haven't really thought about ambient light. But the display emits light, so I'd shoot the screen in a darkened room, with white balance of the camera set manually. OTOH thanks Jo l if I can get a colorimeter for not much above 100$, it's not worth investing too much time. I had always thought these devices were much more expensive. divide_by_zero Yes, I know CRT are usually much better than LCD, but OTOH my screen apparently starts to show its age: it will suddenly, and visibly, change brightness and color every few hours. I suspect the high voltage circuitry is not too stable anymore... And I won't buy another CRT, those things are just huge...

(No apologies to the original.) I get the impression that the Windows 7 launch is a lot like seeing an old boyfriend suddenly show up on your doorstep wanting to get back together. He's had some work done, apparently: stomach stapling to take off some of the weight, teeth whitening, and a radical nosejob to make him look as much like your current boyfriend as medical science will allow. He's handsome, of course, almost too handsome. He still uses far too much product in his hair and carries that desperate look in his eyes. The fragrant haze around him is the cologne he overuses to mask the scent of failure. But standing there in that form-fitting t-shirt, you'd almost forget for a moment what a psycho he was- how he used to shut down in the middle of a date and forget everything you were talking about and how he was only happy when you were paying attention to him. You'd almost forget about carrying around his legacy baggage or those nights when, for seemingly no reason at all, he would simply stop speaking to you and when you asked what was wrong he'd just spit a string of hex code at you and expect you to figure it out. You complained about him for years before finally deciding to get rid of him, and here he is again. Though, somehow, he seems like a completely different person now. "I'm up here," he says when he catches you staring at his package. Tempted though you may be, you know that over time he'll get bored and slow down on you just like he always does. And then you'll be right back where you started: trapped. He keeps you by convincing you that you don't have a choice. You're just not smart enough for one option or rich enough to afford the other. "But I'm different now," he says, batting his eyes innocently. "I've changed." Indeed he has. Apparently, he's really into Kabbalah now or something like that. It's helped him discover loads of untapped potential in himself. But it also means that you'll have to buy all new furniture to fit with his understanding of feng shui. That's not the only change he has in store for you. The minute you let him move in, he'll have a new alarm system put in that succeeds only in preventing your friends from coming over on poker night. He doesn't love you, but he doesn't hate you, either. The truth is that he couldn't care less one way or the other. He's here because he doesn't want to be alone. Like all human beings, especially those well past their prime, he wants to feel wanted and, after a string of lost jobs and bad investments, he needs a place to stay. But all in all, he's OK. He's a seven. He'll do, I guess. UPDATE: There was a Hacker News thread about the Slashdot link that got killed before I could reply to someone who left a negative comment. I'll reproduce it here for the sake of anyone still scratching their head.

Thank you for replying instead of simply downvoting. There are assumptions in the structure of the original text that I don't think most of the people discussing it (here, or over there) appreciate. To wit: the narrative of technology belongs to men. Women are objects. The dumbest, easiest way to make that stick out (I did it over breakfast, ffs) is to swap the genders. It sounds "wrong". The emotional-abuse stuff is more creepy. The physical descriptions are more awkward because men aren't leered at in the same way. It's not about evening things out, it's about subverting what the text doesn't say outright by making it obvious. I am, I'm sure, as aware as you that "deconstruction" is not (anymore) a word you say to sound smart, rather a word you avoid saying to avoid sounding like you're trying to be pseudo-smart, but sometimes you just gotta call a spade a spade. You're free to disagree with that (I assume you still will), but I think "not even wrong" is a little over the top.

Thomas Dukleth writes in:

Remember to vote for your choices in the final Koha foundation forming election before the poll closes on the 25th. Turnout in the final Koha foundation forming election is lower than in the previous preliminary poll at this point. This is the poll which determines our actual choice. The previous poll was more of a survey to discover interests and inform the process of how to conduct the final election. The links to the ballot are as follows. English:
http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=88794&lang=en
French:
http://opensource.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=88794&lang=fr Pages linked from the Koha Wiki foundation forming options page, short link http://bit.ly/4AjYin , and discussions which we have had on the Koha mailing lists should inform you of the options.

Go vote! In other news, there s a bugfix release of koha-3.0.4.

The first episode of Trauma that Sarah was an extra in aired on Monday night. I'd seen a news story about how they were looking for extras for it with medical experience, and Sarah had just completed her Certified Nurse Assistant course. I mentioned the news story to her, and she signed up. Ironically, for the three episodes they've called her up for so far, the closest to using her medical experience is being a patient, and if you're lucky, you'll see her ankle. Marc was kind enough to rip out some stills from his recording of the episode.