The build-essential package is not a definition of the build-essential policy. The actual definition is given in the policy manual:

It is not necessary to explicitly specify build-time relationships on a minimal set of packages that are always needed to compile, link and put in a Debian package a standard "Hello World!" program written in C or C++. The required packages are called build-essential, and an informational list can be found in /usr/share/doc/build-essential/list (which is contained in the build-essential package).

The build-essential package is an informational list, it is documentation. The idea of the build-essential package is to document which packages are always needed to compile, link and put in a Debian package a standard "Hello World!" program written in C or C++. The build-essential package maintainer's main job is to make sure that the informational list is correct. When I maintained build-essential, I got multiple bug reports asking (and sometimes demanding) that debhelper be added to the list of build-essential packages. I closed all such reports (#64827, #70014, I thought there were more but can't find them) with a suggestion that the proper place to make this request is the policy list, not the build-essential package bug list. In fact, when I asked for a new maintainer (Colin Walters ended up taking the package), I specifically listed the following requirement:

I consider the capacity to deal with stupid requests (like "plz add debhelper"; lately, there have been not so many of these) and an understanding of the relationship between this package and Policy as essential qualities of the maintainer of this package.

I'm a little concerned that the current build-essential maintainer apparently does not understand the relationship between the package and policy. For the build-essential package maintainer, it is irrelevant whether debhelper is used by 92 % of the archive. That argument might be a good one, but the proper place to make that argument is the policy list, seeking to amend policy in such a way that debhelper is included in the set of build-essential packages. But it is not the job of the build-essential package maintainer to decide it!

This musical Russian roulette thing that's been going on lately in Planet Debian is not a new thing. It made rounds in the Finnish blog circles in the beginning of December. Here's my list (I made a twenty-song list, not just ten-song like most):

1. Jethro Tull - Acres Wild
2. Cliff Eidelman - Surrender for Peace (Star Trek VI soundtrack)
3. Miljoonasade - Paskanmarjat
4. Roxette - Fireworks
5. Verdi - Alfredo! Voi! (La Traviata)
6. Ultra Bra - Hei kuule Suomi
7. Cincinnati Pop Orchestra - Back to the Future theme
8. Johann Sebastian Bach - Blute nur, du liebes Herz (St. Matthew passion)
9. Verdi - Annina? (La Traviata)
10. Miljoonasade - Radiorakkautta
11. Pave Maijanen - Palava syd n
12. Nirvana - In Bloom
13. Albert Prefjean - Sous les toits de Paris
14. (unknown horrible synthesizer thing) - Thunderball (James Bond)
15. Sibelius - String Quartet D minor op. 56 "Voces intimae" I Andante - Allegro molto moderato
16. Emmi - No Nothing
17. The Kings of Convenience - The Girl from Back Then
18. Maija Vilkkumaa - Kristiina
19. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Oh, Boy!
20. Buddy Holly and the Crickets - Valley of Tears

When I save this posting, it is precisely the first seconds of 2005 in Finland. Happy New Year to everybody!

create your own visited countries map

As I start to write this, it's the last minute of my country's 87th birthday (the Finnish Independence Day). It got me thinking about nation-states and independence and whatnot. And I came to a threefold conclusion: First, there is some value in independence. Getting rid of the status of a Grand Duchy in personal union with Russia was certainly a good step for Finland, in light of the rough road the Russians themselves have since travelled. For the same reason, the two wars Finland fought against the USSR were quite worthwhile. Similarly, if Finland were to be threatened by a neighbour again, armed defense would certainly be justifiable. Second, there is no intrinsic value in independence. If a humanly life (including freedom and local government) can be guaranteed even if there is no Finnish state in itself, I see no reason to hold on to the old-fashioned concept of a nation state. Third, I am in favour, as a long-term goal, of a world government. Of course, a single government becomes a single point of failure in case of a coup, for example, but if the global state is arranged properly, the danger of a successful coup is minimal. On the other hand, a world government is in far better position to institute necessary policies to combat the global problems of poverty, climate change and other such issues than the current system of competing and cooperating nation-states. In the current system, the big issues are easily put aside in name of local opportunism. Finland is by no means immune to that problem. The great crises of the 20th Century were its devastating wars. Fortunately, we have overcome them to a sufficient degree. The great crisis of the 21st Century is not terrorism - though it is a symptom. The great crisis is caused by the limits of growth, and we are already feeling quite concretely the nearness of those limits. If something is not done, our current civilization will crash spectacularly. The human race will probably survive - but do we really want to live through another Dark Age? Long Live the Earth!

For obvious reasons, I need to get more exercise. To that end, last Monday I purchased equipment required for a fairly new sport, quite popular nowadays here in Finland, though it used to raise a few eyebrows here. The equipment is a pair of poles with length of 125 centimetres, quite similar to (but shorter than) poles used in cross-country skiing. Nordic walking was originally developed from specific summer-time exercises that the cross-country skiers did. Specifically, it consists of walking while using the poles in a similar (but not identical) fashion as they are used in cross-country skiing. It's supposed to exercise both the upper body and the lower body much more equally than just walking, and it's supposed to be one of the best forms of exercise for a computer geek. And I don't doubt it. Tried it twice already. The poles do help in maintaining balance while walking in slippery grounds :) NaNo is effectively dead for me. I hang around but I haven't written anything in a week. It was too stressful for me at this time. I do hope that I get around to finishing the story later (but not now; the stress is too fresh in my memory).

I am taking part for the second time in the (Inter)National Novel-Writing Month. The goal is to write 50000 words in one month of novel-like prose, regardless of quality. Essentially, it is a group effort of producing novel first drafts in a fairly good pace. Seems to work for some people, but I'm lagging behind with no realistic hope of catching up. I am writing each day, but my output is on the order of 500 words a day, not the 1700 words a day that the official goal requires on average. So, I'd properly belong in the International Write Something Month (IWriSloMo), affectionally known as I Write in Slow Motion. The goal there is to produce 200-250 words of bad short fiction (bad, short and fiction being all optional) each day in one month. But I think I'll stick with NaNoWriMo - there's gotta be the losers, too, you know :) And I get a noticeable boost from being able to compete in my own weight class (I can order participants by word count, and I can try to up my position on that list:). My current minimum goal for each day is to restore myself to the first page of Finnish contestants. So far, I have been successful. So what am I writing? It is a Horatio Hornblower pastiche set in the 25th Century and the setting is space. I can hear you yawn, but hey, nobody said it was any good! :)

It seems I'm such an important person that my birthday is celebrated by the United States of America by holding elections. I'm honoured. Or not. Being forced to choose between two evils would be not that nice. Fortunately, I'm not qualified to vote. I'll be 27 years old this evening at 20:18 local time (+0200).

I wrote earlier about the municipal elections that were held yesterday. This is just a small note to tell the result. The Green League held its seven seats in the city council. I got 67 votes, which is two short of me having been selected as a deputy councillor in our city. This result is still quite good for me: I have now a rather good bargaining position within our group for the lesser positions (seats and deputy seats in the standing special committees). And it is likely that I'll be promoted to deputy councillor later on (all that is required is for one of the councillors or deputy councillors to resign, which likely happens due to moving out of the city).

On Sunday morning, the polls open in Finland's municipal elections. In these elections, representatives of the people are selected to all municipality (city, town or rural district) councils in Finland. Eligible for vote are all citizens over 18 not living abroad and certain foreigners living in Finland. The polls close at 8 pm local time, and early results based on the hand-count of the votes given during advance polling are announced soon after. The full (manual) count is finished around 11 pm local time; partial and full results are announced as they become available. A mandatory manual recount is then performed during the next few days and the official results (essentially never resulting in any significant changes, while close contests may see changes) are announced on Wednesday. The new municipal councils begin their work after new year and sit for four years. The votes are tallied according to the open list variant of the d'Hondt method. While a voter marks the number of a single candidate on the ballot, the vote is counted toward the total sum of votes received by the candidate's party, and seats are allocated to parties more or less in proportion of votes received. The list of candidates within each party is then sorted in descending order of individual vote count and from the top of the list and the first N candidates are elected, where N is the number of seats allocated to the party. The upside of this mechanism is that - as long as parties represent true differences of opinion in material issues - the different opinions held by the people are represented faithfully, in miniature, within the municipality council. There is a small bias toward large parties in that fractional numbers of seats tend to get rounded up for large parties and down for small parties, but the system works, nevertheless, fairly well. A preferential system would be my preference (no pun intended:), though. And now for the good part: I am running in these elections as candidate number 129 in the combined candidate list of Jyv skyl . My party affiliation is the Green League. It is estimated that I would need about 150 votes to get in the city council, though the exact treshold cannot be known in advance. For the past two weeks, I have been exerting myself in distributing my personal and our party's election materials to people in my local area, as well as standing in the city centre trying to get people vote for me, or alternatively, for other candidates in our party list - or even to vote at all. My body is aching all over, since I have not been very good at exercising before this endeavour. The end is near: tomorrow evening we will know what will become of this. Please wish me luck :)

This posting is part of my Finnish criminal court series. See the introductory essay for more information and an overview of the Finnish criminal court system. The following is a fictional account of a criminal case, one of the most frequent ones, written in the form of a play script. A PDF is also available. There is also an OpenOffice-generated XHTML renderition, which may be more pleasant to read than the version below (but lacks most of its logical markup). DRIVING WHILE INTOXICATED
A glimpse of Finnish criminal justice
Part One Dramatis personae
Presiding judge
Prosecutor
Defendant Extras
Three lay judges
Court reporter Sets
Courtroom
Courthouse lobby DISCLAIMER This is a work of fiction. Although this play is based in general terms on real life, all the specific characters and events portrayed or described in this play are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. The verdict presented is fictitious, and while it is based on the author's understanding of the law, it may be erroneus. No legal advice should be inferred from this work of fiction. Scene One: And so it begins The courtroom is about the size of a large school classroom, and shaped as a rectangle in terms of floor layout. The judges' bench, a long wooden table, lays near one of the short walls; the space between the bench and the wall is enough to give the judges and the court clerks comfortable room to sit and to move behind the sitting judges. At the center of the bench is the seat of the presiding judge, who has easy access to a telephone, a public address system and a panel for controlling the LED display visible in the lobby above the courtroom door. To his or her right is the court reporter's seat in front of a PC and in control of recording equipment. To the reporter's right there is room for one additional individual. To the presiding judge's left, there are three chairs for the lay judges. If one were to stand directly opposite the presiding judge, on the other side of the bench, one would find an open Bible. In front of the bench, disregarding the Bible, there is some room, approximately two meters or so. Along each long wall there is a small table, and those two tables face each other, and are therefore turned sideways from the bench's point of view. By the desk on the bench's right is the seat of the prosecutor, and the other, facing desk is reserved for the witness being examined. Facing the bench, separated from it by that empty space, are two rows of tables with chairs. Beyond them there are two rows of seats for the audience without tables; the farther row is right at the other short wall. The long wall to the judges' right contains one double door leading to the court building lobby, and the other long wall contains two sets of double doors at each end of the wall, leading to a part of the building not accessible to the public. We'll call the door closer to the bench the judges' door. The PRESIDING JUDGE is a 50-something man dressed formally in black and blue. The three LAY JUDGES are more casually but still essentially formally clothed. LAY JUDGE ONE is a sixty-something male, LAY JUDGE TWO is a female in her fourties and LAY JUDGE THREE is a female just under thirty. The COURT REPORTER is a female in her fifties, also dressed formally. It is 9:00. The four JUDGES and the COURT REPORTER are sitting on the bench. Each JUDGE has papers in front of him or her, the PRESIDING JUDGE's stack being by far the thickest. The PROSECUTOR, fourty-something man, enters through the judges' door, carrying law books and a large stack of paper. He sits down at his desk. PRESIDING JUDGE (Nodding to the prosecutor.) Okay. Let's start. (Enters codes on the LED machine. Then picks up the public address microphone.) The criminal case 'prosecutor against Matti Meik l inen' begins in room three. Parties to room three. Scene Two: Main hearing The DEFENDANT enters through the double door from the lobby. He feels a little lost. PRESIDING JUDGE (To the defendant:) Matti Vihtori Meik l inen? (DEFENDANT nods.) Please, take a seat in the front row. (He waits for the defendant to comply.) This case will be tried as follows. First, the prosecutor will read the charge. You will then respond by telling us if the charge is correct or not, that is, if you in fact did commit the acts specified in the charges, and if you did not, or the charge is only partially correct, you should state briefly why the charge is in error. The prosecutor will then present the case, he will describe us his understanding of the events in question. When he is finished, you will again have opportunity to state if the prosecutor is correct or not, and if not, in what way is he wrong. If there is disagreement between you and the prosecutor, we will hear the evidence. After that, the prosecutor will state his or her concluding opinion of the case as presented here. Again, you will have the opportunity to respond. We will conclude with discussion of what punishment, if any, would be appropriate. The court will then discuss the case alone, and will finally announce the verdict. Is this understood? (DEFENDANT nods.) Okay. Prosecutor? PROSECUTOR (Reads the charge from a paper everyone has in front of his or her.) I demand punishment to Matti Vihtori Meik l inen for driving while intoxicated. Matti Vihtori Meik l inen had on the first of May this year operated his car while his exhaled air contained 0,597 milligrams of alcohol per liter. Matti Vihtori Meik l inen's driving license must be suspended. PRESIDING JUDGE (To the defendant.) Is the charge correct? DEFENDANT Yes, it is. PRESIDING JUDGE Okay. The prosecutor will now tell us the circumstances and events in detail. PROSECUTOR Thank you. It was to my understanding late evening on May day, and the defendant had come from a bar and was apparently trying to move his car to a cost-free parking space. A police patrol happened to observe this and the defendant had apparently been a little shaky in his walking, so the officers gave him a breathalyzer test, which showed significant alcohol content. The defendant was brought in the station where a precision test was performed. The first reading was 0,597 and the second reading was 0,617; the mean of these two is 0,607, and after performing the confidence subtraction, the reading 0,597 milligrams per liter was obtained. PRESIDING JUDGE (To DEFENDANT) Well then, is what the prosecutor just said true? DEFENDANT (Speaking in a colloquial manner and very somberly. He is ashamed and wishes this would be over soon.) Yeah, it is. PRESIDING JUDGE All right. It seems to me that there are no points of disagreement, so we don't need to hear witnesses. (The PROSECUTOR nods.) Okay, it's time for the concluding statements. I think we will hear consequence opinions at the same time. Prosecutor? PROSECUTOR Thank you. I don't think there is much to say. The case has been shown beyond reasonable doubt, in my opinion. We have the precision test readings and the defendant's admission. As to the penalty... the amount of alcohol we are talking about is just below the limit for serious intoxication, so this is no small deal. On the other hand, the circumstances were not very dangerous. I think suspended imprisonment could well be considered, though a stiff fine would probably be more appropriate. The driving ban must be fairly long, obviously. PRESIDING JUDGE All right. (To the defendant.) Do you have anything to say before we adjourn to consider the case? DEFENDANT Well, I suppose it's clear that something is going to be given to me. I prefer a fine, naturally. PRESIDING JUDGE Naturally. The court will consider all options. Do you have any special requests concerning a driving ban? DEFENDANT As short as possible, of course. PRESIDING JUDGE Do you have a particular need for a car, do you need it for work, for example? DEFENDANT No. PRESIDING JUDGE Okay. Now, your income. We have here the last completed tax report for you, it says you earned 500 euros a month and had no children. Has this changed? DEFENDANT No change. PRESIDING JUDGE Okay, thank you. If you will then go outside to wait while we consider this case, thank you. The DEFENDANT exits to the lobby, the PROSECUTOR exits through the judges' door. Scene Three: Deliberation We are now in the lobby outside the courtroom. There are many doors that lead to many courtrooms. Above each door, attached to the wall, is a display showing the current case number; there is also a light saying do not enter, which is lit for most of the rooms, including Three. Also there is a numeric display which is out at the moment for most of the rooms. For some rooms, they indicate when the session will resume. Each courtroom door also has a paper pasted to the door frame listing the cases for the day. The door leading outside is separated from the lobby by a routine security check area, and one of the courthouse police guards stands there waiting for people to enter. Some other guards and janitors sit in their glass booth. There are many people sitting on the chairs, waiting for their turn to enter one of the courtrooms. DEFENDANT enters from the Courtroom Three door and sits down, waiting. It takes about fifteen minutes. During this time, announcements from other courtrooms could be occasionally heard, and people would enter or exit other courtrooms. Then... PRESIDING JUDGE (Over the PA) Verdict in the case 'prosecutor against Matti Meik l inen' in Courtroom 3. DEFENDANT exits through the Courtroom Three door. Scene Four: The Verdict The DEFENDANT enters from the lobby and sits down. After a minute, the PROSECUTOR rushes through the judges' door. PRESIDING JUDGE (Announcing to all people present.) The District Court has examined this case and has decided that Matti Vihtori Meik l inen did in fact commit the crime he was accused of in the way specified in the charge. The justification is the combination of the measured alcohol content in Meik l inen's breath and his own admission of guilt. Matti Vihtori Meik l inen is therefore sentenced to pay sixty-five day-fines, that is three hundred and ninety euros. Penal code, Chapter 23, Section 3. His driving license is suspended until the first of November this year. Road Traffic Act Section 75 Paragraph 1. One who is dissatisfied with this verdict can appeal it to the Vaasa Apellate Court within thirty days. Dissatisfaction must be declared, however, either right now to me or within a week to the Office of this District Court. (To DEFENDANT) Come and take the fine ticket and written appeal instructions (DEFENDANT takes those from the COURT REPORTER.) This hearing is concluded. The DEFENDANT leaves, as the court and the prosecutor prepare for the next case. TO BE CONTINUED
(with the next case)

I've been recently investigating a poorly maintained box (granted, it was just a workstation used for surfing the web) which was behaving oddly. In fact you could not longer login via SSH. I quickly noticed that there was a non-working sshd on it, in /usr/local/bin. So I thought - why would a badly maintained box have a non-standard SSH on it? This made me very suspicious, so I immedeately ran chkrootkit. It didn't find anything except it told me that someone had tampered with the wtmp file. The "tampering dates" aligned with the creation times of the ssh. A quick "find" run came up with the tool to do so, too. A quick check in the logfiles - which were fine, since they were not standard syslog, probably - showed that a SSH scanner had managed to login into an unprivileged account with a weak password, then used a kernel exploit from january to gain root privileges. Apparently he was unsatisfied with the sshd on the box, so he tried to put a different version on it, which, well, didn't work and he could no longer logon to the box himself. A rootkit was apparently not yet installed (verified after a clean boot), he was just about to setup his own sshd... maybe he had noticed that the box was just a stupid surfing box and then didn't care enough to cover his tracks (or just shoot himself in the foot by breaking the sshd) So if you are running boxes on the internet:

• Make sure you don't allow shell logins with weak passwords
• Have your system and kernel up to date (note: you need to reboot for activating a new kernel...)
• Don't run an sshd unless you really need to
• Maybe setup a recent-match filter to stop ssh scanners
• Scan your log files for unusual entries such as logins by users who shouldn't really exist in the first place... Use logcheck.
• Don't allow PHP scripts to run binaries on your system ...
• Or better, don't allow PHP at all

(PHP guys: yes, I know that there are some good PHP scripts. But there are tons of badly written ones, too... and PHP is a major intrusion vector, and the privilege escalation I've seen here would have worked just fine with a PHP installation not using safe mode and safe_mode_exec_dir) A firewall I maintain at our university has been tracking ssh connections using the recent match for quite some time, and a nice side effect is that it reduces all their "spam" in your logs, too (in case you bother to read them. Do at least read the logcheck results!)

Andrew: to work out the fourth Thursday of the month, use this instead:

function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

  $first_dom = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
  return 1 + ((7 + $dow - $first_dom) % 7) + 7 * ($instance - 1);


Or, using Zeller s rule and avoiding function calls:

function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

  if($month < 3) $year--; $D = $year % 100; $C = (int)($year / 100); $m = 1 + (($month + 9) % 12);
  $f = 1 + (int)((13 * $m - 1) / 5) + $D + (int)($D / 4) + (int)($C / 4) - 2 * $C;
  $first_dom = $f % 7;
  return 1 + ((7 + $dow - $first_dom) % 7) + 7 * ($instance - 1);


Update: thanks to Andrew for spotting the error in the second version. Due to my misunderstanding of a hack in Zeller s rule, I had forgotten to decrease the year when the month was January or February. Also, PHP was not doing proper integer divisions and I had to cast results back to int despite all operands being ints.

According to Jeff, I’ve become a smelly Nokia contractor (the reason he stayed with Luis instead of at Mako’s place in Boston, although I’m sure he was referring to Rob Taylor causing the smell). Part of this entails exchanging project schedules with various managers, where time is often talked about in terms of numbered weeks of the year, like: Foo task will be completed by week 42 of 2005. We ran into some problems with varying definitions of these numbers when exchanging schedules with people running on different platforms. Then we realised that even the software we’re using seems to have different ideas about what’s going on too…

• Outlook and Evolution seem to agree, and define the week as starting on Monday, and the first day of the year is always week 1, even if this results in a truncated week. Hence, week 1 of 2006 starts and ends on Sunday 1st January, and then week 2 begins on Monday 2nd, etc. It’s my belief that this is the correct behaviour as defined by some ISO standard somewhere which governs week numbers.
• GtkCalendar gets the week number correct, in that the first day of the year is always in week 1, but varies its definition of the first day of the week depending on your locale. This is presumably so that the display of the weeks is correct, but using it to number the weeks results in bogus week numbers. For me in LOCALE=en_GB it claims that week 1 of 2006 starts on Sunday 1st January, and ends on Saturday 7th January, making my week numbers one lower than the rest of the world.
• Planner uses GtkCalendar for inputting dates, so gets it wrong there as described, but seems to get it wrong in its Gantt chart view in a different way. It has the week starting on Monday, but claims that January 1st 2006 is the last day of week 52 of 2005. This results in week numbers that, match those GtkCalendar give me on weekdays, but differ over weekends, and are still totally bogus when I try and talk about project plans with my managers.

The result is a whole world of pain, and at best causes extreme confusion when we provide documents referring to both dates and week numbers which are inconsistent with each other in their minds, and at worst makes our managers think we’ll have things done a week sooner than we do. I’m not using Evolution at the moment for calendaring stuff, so I can manage if I remember to add one to all my 2006 week numbers when interacting with managers based on GtkCalendar and Planner, but this all seems to be horribly broken. I really don’t want to have to do this for the whole year.

Right - I've got some clean django packages ready, just waiting on my pbuilders to update then I'll upload them to my repository, it's the first official django release, and they state (quite clearly) on the site that there maybe backwards incompatible changes between now and 1.0, so I'm not sure wether I'll try to get this sponsored in to unstable or not at this point. My debian repository for django is at: deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ unstable django or for sarge (yes, there should be some sarge packages soon!): deb http://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/debian/ stable django At the moment these contain an older set of django packages built from an svn snapshot, I may make some new svn snapshots in the future, depending on time constraints and if anyone is interested in having them :)

This essay is part of my Finnish criminal court series. See the introductory essay for more information and an overview of the Finnish criminal court system. There are no juries in Finnish criminal courts. Instead, there are lay judges, trusted lay people who actively take part in deciding criminal cases and can in some cases completely override the legally trained judge's opinion. See more ...

Django has finally got a release! I'll be packaging it very shortly, once I sort out the few problems that I've got in the current packages that I've built. I might even finally get round to getting something useful working in it, I just haven't had time to rewrite my site yet to use django, I'm still using a (rather non-elegant) home grown set of scripts to apply my 'template' to my site, but I think that I can make it all a lot nicer using django, and much easier to update :) Django is really quite nice, but it does need some tweaks to fit in to the FHS better, which I'll do against this nice shiny new tar ball release shortly.

This essay is part of my Finnish criminal court series. See the introductory essay for more information and an overview of the Finnish criminal court system. The main hearing is the only part of the trial which directly affects the court's decision. It is immediate and oral and usually lasts no longer than a couple of hours. The current system is fairly young. There were several fairly substantial reforms of Finnish court procedure in the 1990's. I will discuss this history in a later essay. See more ...

I'm very excited to announce the Call for Participation for XTech 2006. Submissions are due by 9th January. The conference itself is 16th-19th May 2006, in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The theme this year is "Building Web 2.0", focusing on the technologies and issues involved in building the next generation of web applications and services. There are four tracks --

• Applications -- "mashups", frameworks, publishing, open source solutions, aggregation
• Browser Technology -- browsers, AJAX, design and interaction for Web 2.0
• Core Technologies -- the XML and RDF family, RSS/Atom, databases, nuts-and-bolts tech
• Open Data -- information design, identity, tagging, privacy, trust, Creative Commons, DRM, government

I'll write a bit more about each track in the coming weeks, but if any of this turns you on, head over to the full call and submit your abstract. Also, do read the full track descriptions -- they go into more detail than I can here. Tutorials will be held on the 16th, and the presentation tracks from 17th-19th. In 2006 I want to build on the success of last year and broaden XTech's reach into web technologies. On the technology side, I'm particularly interested in getting more in about databases, frameworks like Ruby on Rails, tagging and search. In addition to technology, I'm interested in opening up dialogue between developers, designers and information architects about the kinds of applications being built on the web now, and the issues of their design, organization and implementation. Partly to encourage this, 2006's conference will have more room for panel discussion sessions. Feel free to drop me a note with any questions or suggestions about XTech 2006. (If you want to propose a session, please use the online submission form rather than sending email.)

I didn't follow this disaster too closely, but here's a short (most probably incomplete) roundup of what happened so far:

1. The Sony DRM installs a rootkit,
2. people use the rootkit to make game cheats safe from the (Blizzard) Warden,
3. trojans start (ab)using the DRM rootkit,
4. Sony gets sued,
5. Sony pulls the rootkit.

Nice bedtime story so far. Now it turns out that Sony s web-based XCP (rootkit) uninstaller seems to open huge, gaping security holes itself... Not that I would care too much, I don't buy any Sony CDs. There's a huge pile of great Creative Commons licensed music out there (shameless plug: check my music podcast for some hand-selected goodies). No need to pay huge corporations for crappy music which comes with funny "extras"...