At this month’s meeting of the Linux Users of Victoria [1] I gave a talk titled Everyone Should Blog (unfortunately the title was missed in the meeting announcement). I’ve been meaning to write about this but was finally prodded into writing by a ProBlogger post about overcrowding in the blog market [2]. Darren (the ProBlogger) suggests that the blog space is overcrowded, blogs are being sold for unreasonably high prices, and a bust similar to the dot-com bust may occur. I agree that there is some over-commercialisation, and that for Darren’s core market (people who want to make money directly from blogging) this is a serious issue to consider. However I believe that there is a lot of scope for more blogs. Firstly all of the services in the social networking space seem to have some feature that resembles a blog in some way (the online diary if not the RSS feed part of the definition). I have previously blogged about some ideas for an open social networking system [3]. A reform of the social networking scene should have the possibility of adding even more users and having them all be bloggers. While not everyone is capable of writing a blog that is of interest to a large audience, everyone who is capable of writing is capable of writing (or contributing to) a blog that is of interest to some people. The next potential area for expansion is in sales/marketting blogs. An example of this is car sales, it seems that every web site run by a car manufacturer only has information on the current model and at best only has information on prices of second-hand cars. There is a real need for authoritative information on older cars, it helps customers and it helps the car companies. If Ford was to provide good information on the cars they manufactured a few years ago it would increase the chance that I would buy a second-hand Ford and if enough people made similar decisions then it would increase the prices of such cars (basic rules of supply and demand). Increasing the second-hand price increases the price that people are prepared to pay for new cars and also allows them to buy a new car sooner - both of which are benefits to the manufacturer. It wouldn’t be difficult to use a blog server for all the information on new cars, you could have a front page that lists the available marques and links to the posts announcing the latest models of those marques. With a small amount of work writing a theme you could have Wordpress giving an appearance that’s almost indistinguishable from any of the major car companies web sites - apart from the fact that every car’s technical data would have a permanent URL of the form www.carcompany.com.au/2007/MARQUE/CODE which would be obviously a permanent link (unlike the Java servlet and ASP URLs you currently see) and therefore would encourage deep links by enthusiasts. This would also give RSS feeds for free (I would be interested in adding RSS feeds for several of the Australian car companies to my Planet installation if possible). A final benefit is the issue of ethics. When car companies remove data about cars they sold the previous year you have to wonder whether they have unreasonable price increases or whether the new cars have some specs that are lesser than the current cars. The general trend is slow and steady increases in features and performance at each price point, the number of people who are more likely to buy from an ethical (trustworthy) company is probably greater than the number of people who will look for details to nit-pick (and such people will find out anyway). Another use for blogs is for public events. It’s not uncommon for people to want to get some background information on an event that they attended years ago. If all the information was archived in the blog of the organisation that hosted the event then it would be easy for everyone to access. This would give additional promotion opportunities for the hosting organisation at almost no cost. Anyone who is announcing a future event should have an RSS feed for new information related to it, then as information is released all the interested people can see it in their favourite feed reader. Many people refuse to subscribe to announcement lists due to fear of spam and the fact that it is often inconvenient or impossible to unsubscribe (sometimes a list server regards unsubscribe requests as spam). Corporations have many potential uses of blogs, Google announces news about all their products via blogs and Microsoft has a good recruiting blog. Smaller companies can still achieve some of the same benefits via blogging. Also it’s well known that a blog which provides useful information about products in a field (not just the products being sold) can really attract potential customers who then react to the adverts in the blog. The same technique can be used by job seekers. Blog well and mention that you are looking for work and you will get offers of interviews. There is also no shortage of political and lobbying blogs as well, they don’t tend to convince the opposition but they are good for converting people who are ambivalent about an issue. As the people who read blogs get older (and therefore richer and more influential) such blogs will become increasingly important. I think that I have demonstrated the potential for a significant number of new blogs, some of which would have large subscriber bases and a lot of influence (which means a lot of potential profit for the Problogger crowd). Have I missed any major areas for developing new blogs?

• [1] http://www.luv.asn.au/


• [2] http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/11/18/leveraging-the-power-of-blogs-in-an-overcrowded-market/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/18/better-social-networking/

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Hi there! There are a few delegations that I need to confirm or make official, so that we don't end up 5 years from now wondering when or how they happened. First, Kalle Kivimaa (killer) was delegated Debian Auditor by the DPL last year and it was not completely obvious that delegation was to survive the end of Anthony's term. I am hereby confirming it is a permanent delegation (until resignation or future DPL decision). Second, Peter Palfrader (weasel) was added to the team of Debian System Administrators (DSA). This is to be considered a normal delegation by the DPL. And finally, Anibal Monsalve Salazar (anibal) was added to the Debian Maintainer Keyring team under the rules of the DM GR ("Changes to the team may be made by the DPL under the normal rules for delegations").

* Sometime ago, I thought, we should have T-shirt for Debian Project Day. I asked Pradeepto and he literally dragged me in pool of thoughts and he started things that had very happy end. Thanks to everybody who contribute so far. The design will be simple Debian logo plus ‘debian/rules’ below it (as we are going to lower the cost!). If you feel, if you can contribute in this, you have limited time! I should have blogged this earlier

Update: problem fixed, thanks for the comments; it was MTU related issues.

Note: This is a long post, but I expect it to bring in some questions for many Linux people; I advise you to read this when you have enough time.


After the last events related to connectivity at home which have been lasting since Thursday evening and the weird fact that it seems that NAT doesn't work at home, but does at work for the same setup, I called the ISP's support and wasted 15 minutes trying to convince them at least to send a technical team with another modem just to test if that is the reason for the breakage.

Of course, talking to the ISP support and trying to convince them that there might be a problem on their side since NAT works with another provider but doesn't with them, was fruitless.

Tonight I was stuck and tried another approach, convinced I would confirm my suspicion that there is something wrong on ISP's side. Still I am not yet sure what to conclude from what happened.


So, to get a better view of what is going on, I'll describe the setup I have and what are its limitations and characteristics. People in a hurry can skip to the paragraph starting with "I tested" and stare in wonder at will.


So the connection I have is done through a DSL modem which gets the MAC of the network card connected to it and exposes that as its own to the ISP's network. This MAC seems to be quite persistent and special measures must be taken in order to be able to use another NIC to connect. The modem (or probably some machine in ISP's; the IP is 10.10.0.1) offers a DHCP address and everything should work fine.

Because of this "your MAC is my MAC" issue, when I connected the first time, I used an USB NIC since a broken router or some temporary failure would have allowed me to use the Internet connection directly from my laptop. I can say this decision has proven in time to be wise.

The router I used until now is a NSLU2 with Debian installed on it. The built in network interface always faced the internal network.

The router (which I call ritter) served as a NAT router for two machines inside the network, my laptop and my apartment mate's laptop. All until last Thursday, after which it never got back properly.



I tested (doing NAT on my laptop; the laptop shouldn't have been affected by the power problems):

• with ritter behind the laptop NAT, at home
  
• with two different virtual machines as NAT "clients", at home
  
• with ritter behind the laptop NAT, at work
• with a virtual machine as NAT client, at home
• directly from the laptop
• NAT made through a SNAT rule
• NAT made through a MASQUERADING rule
• with TTL mangled (increased by one, although is was never in the ballpark of a low TTL)

Of course, I have n-checked that /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward was set to 1, the tables had policy ACCEPT and there were no extra rules, except the basic NAT-ting stuff, the routes were correctly set on both the clients and the machine doing the NAT.


All I could see is that:

1. the machine doing the NAT was always working fine
2. at work all NAT clients worked fine
   
3. at home any of the NAT "clients" were
1. able to resolve addresses while the DNS server was in ISP territory and another LAN
2. ping the outside world (if ping was available - in D-I is not)
3. hanging when trying to get a http page
4. telnet-ting directly to the port 80 was ok (but I didn't try to "GET / HTTP/1.0")

So after all of this, I was thinking of trying to see if a new client (the laptop of my apartment mate, a Windows XP machine) would work using the connection at home. It didn't work.

Then I thought of trying to do "Internet Connection Sharing" as is called in Windows. Of course, there was some pain to find Windows XP drivers for the ASIX AX88172 network card (remember, the modem needed to see the MAC of that NIC), but I managed to find the proper one.


And, almost sure the NAT wouldn't work for this case either, I configured the new connection as a shared one. I didn't even disabled the firewall, as I was thinking I could take those down gradually.

I wasn't expecting this, not even by pure chance, but my laptop which was a NAT "client" now was able to browse, ping and do whatever was normal through NAT, while the Windows machine was doing the "Connection sharing".

I was utterly flabbergasted. And that was just the beginning.

I was expecting that the problem coincidentally went away, but after a minute I was proven otherwise. It still didn't work with Linux as the NAT-ting machine. I connected back the USB NIC to the Windows machine and I saw the same thing. NAT was just working.


At that point I was to observe an even more shocking fact: the IP that the Windows machine got was different from the one the Linux machine received, in spite of the fact that the network card was the same, so it would have made sense to get the same one. More than that, the IP that the Windows machine got was from an entirely different network, although it was a valid IP belonging to my ISP.

I was thinking that one reason why it works with Windows might be that there could be some TCP protocol twist that is differently implemented in Windows and the equipment from my ISP gets along better with the Windows network stack.


As a way to test that, I am thinking of forcing somehow the IP on the Linux machine to see if anything changes. But before doing that, I felt the urge to post these, maybe some kind soul will shed some light on this issue for me or drop a hint.

Another reason might be different DHCP servers answering, but I don't know how I can see in Windows who offered the lease.


If anyone has any clue why these weird things happen, please drop a line. I would greatly appreciate it. TIA.

My relearned lesson for the day: when Linux networking weirdness occurs in a NAT environment, remember to try MTU clamping.

Thanks to the comments by Justin and Sesse, I was fast-tracked to the core of the problems I have been experiencing since Thursday, MTU issues. What's worse (from my pov) is that I have encountered this issue before with the provider I had in Timi oara, but, since that ISP was using PPPoE and my current ISP in Bucharest doesn't, I never really made the connection. I even had a commented out iptables rule for MTU clamping in my firewall script.

The rule I am talking about looks like this:

iptables -t mangle -A POSTROUTING -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -o $EXT_IF -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu

or like the one I have been using (seems more logical to me):

iptables -I FORWARD -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN -j TCPMSS --clamp-mss-to-pmtu


Note that this is not a fix, but a workaround and the real problem is over-zealous admins or weird setups[1] which think that banning TCP fragmentation (or the entire ICMP traffic) is a way to secure networks.


Once again, thanks to everybody who read and/or commented about my issue.

[1] Sesse told me that in his case there was a transparent proxy involved when he exeprienced MTU weirdness.

For a while I’ve been trying to find some easy way to keep a few machines I admin behaving the way I want them too with minimal effort. They don’t really need much maintenance – but I would like something to help keep them all in sync. Basically, something like FAI, but much, much simpler – ideally something that takes five minutes to understand, and another five minutes to deploy; and leave the more complicated and powerful tools for when they’re actually needed. I figured what I really want was just a simple way to make a meta-package – one that doesn’t really provide any functionality, just tells apt/dpkg what I want installed (via Depends), and what I don’t want installed (via Conflicts) and adds any extra configuration stuff or local scripts that I decide I want. But doing that with a real Debian package is harder than I’m really comfortable with – I don’t want to have to worry about potential lintian errors, or rules files and debhelper commands, or writing a Makefile to get my files installed or whatever, I want something more trivial than that. Looking for meta-package creators, the only one I spotted that I thought looked likely was cdd-dev, described as “Custom Debian Distributions common files for developing meta packages”. Unfortunately it seems to just provide templates, which makes things quicker, but no less complex. Fortunately equivs (“Circumvent Debian package dependencies”) is actually used for metapackages these days, according to its maintainer on IRC and its long description:

This package provides a tool to create Debian packages that only contain dependency information. One use for this is to create a metapackage: a package whose sole purpose is to declare dependencies and conflicts on other packages so that these will be automatically installed, upgraded, or removed. Another use is to circumvent dependency checking. […]

That turned out to work much better than I remembered (from whenever I last tried it – back in ‘99 I guess?), with the only drawback being that I couldn’t add files easily. But that’s just a matter of creating a patch to equivs, which I then won’t have to worry about again. So having done that, I can now create a metapackage to do whatever I want by creating a file like:

Suite: client
Section: misc
Priority: standard
Package: ajs-client-stuff
Version: 20071114.1
Maintainer: Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>
Description: Metapackage for aj's client computers
 Depends on necessary packages, etc.
File: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/client.list
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch main contrib non-free
 deb http://mirror.localnet/debian etch-proposed-updates main contrib non-free
 .
 deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
File: postinst
 #!/bin/sh -e
 .
 apt-key add - <<EOF
 [output of gpg --armour --export $KEY]
 EOF
 .
 ##DEBHELPER##

debhelper kindly takes care of getting the permissions right for me, and equivs will generate a full source package if I tell it to, which I can just upload to mini-dinstall and have a regular Debian repository just by writing a text file and running equivs-build. And my metapackage can add dependencies, conflicts, apt sources, cronjobs, scripts, configuration files, documentation, or whatever I happen to want – which means I can make it automatically update itself, and thus install any dependencies or remove any conflicts, which then means that modifying the config on all the machines is just a matter of updating the metapackage. And new installs is (hopefully) just a matter of doing a standard install and then adding the metapackage. Perfect. …even if it is really little more than a reinvention of rpm’s .spec files. :)

I’m currently evaluating Olivier Sessinks jailkit to maintain a small cvsd CHROOT with an included SSH server. The cvsd-buildroot command e.g. doesn’t handle the libpam-modules dependency in the CHROOT. So I tried to update the Debian packaging files included in the jailkit source. During this work I found some issues with the build environment - e.g. no DESTDIR support and some other stuff (another user already complained, that there might be problems with the SUID installation part for jk_chrootsh, jk_uchroot and jk_procmailwrapper of the Makefiles). So I began to check and “fix” the Makefiles and the configure script and then sent everything to Olivier. I did not only add the DESTDIR variables. I also made use of built-in rules, common variables (also for implicit rules), … and such stuff to make the Makefiles shorter and easier to maintain. My fault: I tested everything with GNU make. Now Olivier complained, that BSDs make doesn’t work anymore. So we began a short hack session to check for the problems. My first issue: I had to find some BSD make to test it myself. I found it in the freebsd5-buildutils, that contains the freebsd-make command. Then we began to check for incompatibilities and that’s the result:

1. ifdef statements differ in syntax
   • GNU make uses ifdef VAR
   • BSD make uses .ifdef VAR
   solution: We replaced the statement with a construct similar to AM_CONDITIONAL. But we do not use this macro, because it would need to be shipped in aclocal.m4, which is currently not necessary. The code simply sets a variable foo_TRUE to ‘# ‘, if the condition is wrong, or the variable is left empty, if the condition is true:

   if test "x$my_condition" != "xno" ; then
       AC_SUBST([foo_TRUE], [])
   else
       AC_SUBST([foo_TRUE], [# ])
   fi

   FILES = bar
   @foo_TRUE@FILES += foo

2. prerequisite variables differ in syntax
   • GNU make uses $<, $^, $@, …
   • BSD make uses $ .IMPSRC , $ .ALLSRC , $ .TARGET , … (note, that both *SRC variables hold a list of source files)
   Unfortunately both make implementations doesn’t seem to share a variable for the list of prerequisites. So the only solution is to list all prerequisites in the rule again. A variable would be much more comfortable. Maybe one could write a function, that first tests $ .IMPSRC and falls back to $^. Maybe that’s an alternative, but it’s IMHO not a very good solution. We’ve chosen to write down all prerequisites in a rule instead of using a variable. This is a little bit “harder” to maintain, but it works.
3. built-in rules are not shared and do not use the same variables
   • GNU make ships built-in rules to build objects from sources and link them; rules consider CPPFLAGS
   • BSD make ships built-in rules to build objects from sources, but there are no rules to link them; rules do not consider CPPFLAGS
   In the case of GNU make, one can simply write:

   myprog: foo.o bar.o

   and GNU make will automatically create foo.o from foo.c (.c.o:, ditto for bar.o) and at least link myprog (.o:). But BSD make will only create the object files. There is no final link-step. So we had to include the rule to link the program in the Makefile.

Finally we got it and it looks good now. I/We learned a lot of new things (I learnd a lot about BSD make) ;), but it took us 1-2 hours to understand and fix the problems. Here a list of URLs, that might give some more information about the programs, their syntax and limitations:

• GNU make’ manual
• FreeBSDs make
• Autoconf: Limitations of make

This is another case of a udev rule that took over an hour to figure out, and now seems very clear and obvious. Which probably means it won't next time I need it. I have a bunch of USB to serial adapters, all using pl2303, all so cheap that there's no product ID or any way to tell them apart. This is cheaper than buying actual console server hardware nowadays. So how to know which ttyUSB* device is hooked up to what? The solution is to use the USB bus ID, which corresponds to the usb port the device is plugged into. My /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent_usb_serial.rules:

SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ID=="3-2", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB_front_upper"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ID=="2-2", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB_front_lower"

The ID numbers can be found in dmesg.

Ian Lance Tailor started a discussion that has in the meantime reached Planet Debian via Miry and Giacomo. The single-threaded memory model is the only sane choice for languages that are as close to the "metal" as C and C++ are. For a multi-threaded model to work, the compiler needs to have intrinsic knowledge of "locking", and it needs to emit the appropriate code around all accesses to variables that cannot be accessed atomically (which also means that signal handling does not work — the signal might arrive in a critical section). Java uses such a model. In the language, there is the "synchronized" keyword, which can be used either as a modifier on a method definition (locking the object the method is called on), or before a block (locking an explicitly specified object). The lock is recursive, so calling another "synchronized" method on the same object works fine, leaving the last one finally unlocks the object. Memory consistency is achieved by flushing the object before unlocking (so accessing an object that another thread may use without locking it is still undefined behaviour — but class authors can avoid that by allowing access only through "synchronized" methods). I doubt we want the same in C/C++. For one, it adds a recursive lock to each instance of a class or struct, whether needed or not, since the compiler cannot rule out that some code might want to use this object as a lock. Also, the object inclusion and inheritance rules are quite different, as Java does not have inclusion, and only allows simple inheritance. Basically, if I were to emulate Java's rules, I'd need a "virtual" base class to provide the lock, which is a lot of extra overhead since every derived class now needs to keep the offset to the most derived class. The other two big show stoppers are the "intrinsic" knowledge of locking that the compiler must have (it needs to know how to embed a recursive lock into an object, which is an operating-system dependent structure as it stores some thread identifier for the current holder of the lock) and that it becomes a lot more difficult to write signal handlers, as you need to avoid any code that might implicitly lock some object (which is true already, but there is no implicit locking). Java can do that, as they have a virtual machine that provides locking primitives and object lookup (so they can keep the lock separate). There is a change to the memory model I'd like to see though: the concept of an I/O buffer that behaves like regular memory (so load/store coalescing/reordering is allowed), but will be flushed before volatile accesses and re-read afterwards (optionally, with finer grained control). This would work for both hardware accesses (where the volatile access triggers some hardware) and for "hosted" environments (where the compiler assumes that system calls perform volatile accesses), and still allow most optimisations like writing in the hardware's natural bus width. If you want to write reliable multi-threaded code with current compilers, there are two simple rules:

1. any data structure shared by multiple threads needs to be marked volatile
2. any access to a shared data structure needs to be guarded by a lock

The accesses to the shared data structure are ordered with regard to the locking functions and cannot be optimized out, which is exactly what you want. The appropriate mental model is that anything that is not declared volatile (or handled by a platform locking primitive) cannot be seen by the other threads.

Christian Perrier blogs about how he uses public transportation to go to work, how that works well, and how that has positively affected his Debian productivity. Personally, I couldn't agree more. I've graduated from school in 2001; and the only time when I commuted to work by car was when I worked at template, where I had a company car because I had to make customer visits. Today, as an entrepreneur, I do everything by public transportation. It is my intention to, eventually, make sure I have a car because doing customer visits by public transportation isn't easy; but it's not impossible, either; you just need to make sure you're prepared. If I have an appointment at a customer, what I usually do is to go to the de lijn website, of the flemish public transportation company that handles buses and trams; they have a schedule online, and a route planner that allows me to do much of what Google Maps does for cars, but then for public transportation—including trains. If I do that on time (that is, earlier than half an hour or so before the appointment), I hardly ever have problems reaching my destination in time. Of course there are days when the system fails, and I'm stuck in a train station for longer than I'd like; but these are the exception, not the rule, especially outside rush hour. And like Christian mentions, the absense of having to pay attention to the road while commuting is a real bonus, in that it allows you to actually get some work done. Or sleep, if it's been a short night. Or look outside the window, if you have nothing better to do. Or hack. In fact, at DebConf7 in Edinburgh, I had a little discussion with Ian Jackson about how the train provides the perfect environment for hacking: nobody around to disturb you (except, occasionally, people to check your tickets, but you can just put your ticket in plain view all the time and they'll be happy without you getting out of deep hack mode), and the view out the window is just perfect to stay concentrated: no still image to get distracted by, but nothing boring either. We theorized that it'd be nice if you could just go to the train station and state "I need a ticket. The destination isn't important, but I want to be waiting as little as possible and end up here again in about 2 hours". The only problem with that, of course, is that train rides aren't free, and that office rent is much more affordable...

daniels: lightroom makes me so unbelievably content
daniels: if i were a doe-eyed schoolgirl
daniels: and you were showing me this in the back of your car
daniels: i'd let you take me, there and then

I knew showing Daniel Adobe Lightroom was a bad idea... It is a truly majestic application though, with that killer combination of a very clean interface and incredibly well thought-out features.

As MJ Ray reports, ftp.mozilla.org now has “Free software” Firefox tarballs. While they are truly free and don’t contain the non-free logo nor Talkback, they are not Firefox either. Only the tarballs and the executables are named Firefox. The product itself is “Bon Echo”. And the name is going to change at every major release. This is why we changed for a “static” name.

As often seems to be the case, my internet at home vanished shortly after I arrived in Portland. Remote debugging (hurrah for flatmates) revealed that the modem would come up, start a PPP session and then OOM around 30-40 seconds later. This was kind of odd, since running ps in a tight loop showed that it wasn't the PPP daemon that was taking up all the extra RAM. Once we'd pretty much ruled out userland, that left the kernel. Limiting the value in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_conntrack_entries brought stability back, but left us wondering why it had suddenly broken (and, of course, made it difficult to actually route anything...). /proc/net/ip_conntrack showed a bunch of ssh connections. Lots of ssh connections. All coming from one machine inside the network, but targeted at a large number of machines with roughly consecutive IP addresses.

At this point, I remembered a party a month or so ago. One where I'd created an account on the TV machine to let people upload stuff to play. An account I'd cunningly called "media", giving it the highly secure password of "media". I blame vodka from Ikea.

You can guess where this is going.

Unplugging the TV machine resulted in everything rapidly returning to its normal state. I'm sure there's some sort of important lesson here, but I'm sure I don't know what.

...at least, in my opinion (which is obviously biased, let's admit that). There are several reasons for this loss:

• Strategic choices: Bernard Laporte deliberately chose to use the same tactic against England and New Zealand. However, the tactic that worked against New Zealand failed against England, mostly because that tactic...is just the play of the English team. So, as we say in French, "les Bleus" entered the game of England and therefore made the task easier for them.
• The choice of players. This is the result of the previous item. Reconducting the entire team that won against NZ was IMHO a bad idea. It is not a scoop that I dislike Rapha l Ibanez or Fabien Pelous and I would rather have seen the punch of Dimitri Szarzewski or, for once, S bastien Chabal beginning the game (actually, he entered pretty quickly because of Pelous' injury).
• Several failures to occupy the English side with kick play. In many occasions, kick shots by either Beauxis, Traille or Jauzion missed their target. This is IMHO the main reason for the defeat.
• Too many drop tentatives. When they were in the English side, why the hell did they choose to kick drops several times instead of just play. That sounds like a fear of not scoring and the French lost several key balls with that miserable tactic.
• Too many lost balls in mauls. That is not only a failure by the French but also good defense play by the English team.
• Discipline. It happened only once (high tackle by Dimitri Szarzewski) but that was *the* moment where no error was possible and it offered an ideal penalty kick to Wilkinson.
• Bad luck. We can't rule out that one. The difference is 5 points: this stupid 1st minute try....and the missing 50 centimeters on Chabal's action in the last minutes.

Some *bad* reasons for the English victory:

• Johnny Wilkinson influence: this is untrue. Apart from his drop goal, he missed penalty kick tentatives and his kick play was not brilliant during the same. I much preferred Andy Gomarsall during that game.
• Scrums. They didn't crush the French scrum which is one of the satisfactions of that game. The English team even had to cheat slightly during 1st half time to win their scrums.
• Good play. No. Watching the game again, there was as many bad choices in the English side than in French side. I can only enhance their defense, not their attack. So, as I wrote immediately after the game, that one was one of the worst matches in the entire WC.
• The referee. Before the game, some French newspapers were doubting of Mr. Kaplan because he's South-African (funnily, some English newspapers were also doubting because he was supposed to advantage England's opponents in the past). He was indeed perfect. Anyway, everybody knows I never blame referees in sports.

MJ, each French NPO is free to establish its own regulation rules, which may include a differential voting system if they want to. That should of course respect the French law (for instance, no discrimination based on sex, religion or any other genetic factor) but, as far as I know, nothing prevents deciding that "personnes morales" (ie non physical people) have a higher or lower vote than others. However, this is certainly not common, but many NPO simply don't have non physical members anyway (some don't authorize non physical people to be members). For those who care, Debian France (which is a NPO, but not regulated by 1901 law, but by the special NPO law for Alsace and Lorraine, inherited from the 1810-1918 years) admits physical and "moral" members with an equal voting right. The only special case is a rule that allows Debian developers to have a veto right on any decision of the organisation. See that official regulation rules of Debian France for details (French only). PS: Debian France is currently inactive, due to a longstanding dispute with the French Tax collecting organisation (Direction des Imp ts) who initially refused to consider us as a non profit organisation...because "we sell an operating system" (doh!).

Next round of catching up. Two more concerts I had been to since Texta. First of them was Wir sind Helden. They played again in the Gasometer, but the entrance wasn't as bad as I am used to at that location. The accoustic in the hall still hasn't really improved, though. But aside from the location the concert was truly worth it. The support band Polarkreis 18 was unknown to me but are worth keeping an eye on, and if you don't know them neither they pretty much reminded me of Radiohead. Wir sind Helden themself did rock the hall totally, it was true fun seing how the band themself enjoyed the concert, played with the fans, and when they sang Bist Du nicht müde nach so vielen Stunden ("Aren't you tired after so many hours") as encore my shouting of "NOOO!!" got Judith offtracks and laughing. ;) Last week at Halloween Grossstadtgeflüster had been to the B72 again. What can I say, I just love the band. I was though pretty impressed that they remembered me—hell, Jen even remebered my name Rhonda D'Vine without me mentioning it... It helps that they aren't that famous yet and thus one can just approach them frankly without much fear of annoying them or being pushed off by some security guy. It's sad though that they sill haven't got any record label since they were last here and that their fanpage has been closed for the second time. I am thinking about helping to fight the latter problem at least, it's pretty useless to buy domains (gsgf-fans.de, gsgf-fanpage.de) and then return them after a short while, making it mostly unusable again. :/

On Friday 2007-11-02, I watched Larry Lessig give a presentation at the University of Washington entitled Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? Since it was Lessig, the talk was articulate and thought-provoking, and he used his slides very well (unlike many presenters who just read bullet points).

The argument he made is that Google is like Microsoft in some ways (and so are other companies like Facebook). In his analysis, the problem with Microsoft was that so many companies made themselves Microsoft-dependent, which both forced other companies to follow suit (due to network effects) and gave Microsoft leverage they could use against everyone in their ecosystem (e.g., Netscape). According to Lessig, Microsoft was not evil to use this leverage, but you have to recognize that Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft, and this may not be what is best for you. He then suggested that we should be aware of the potential for the same thing to happen; in support of this point, he quoted excerpts from the terms of service from the APIs of Google and Facebook, which contain typical statements like we reserve the right to terminate your use of this service for any reason or for no reason, and asked: What if Microsoft had written this license agreement?

But it seemed to me that this wasn't his main point. He was using this observation as a springboard to talk about issues revolving around competition and public policy. Specifically, he feels that we should work towards a more just model of interaction between companies and users whose work makes the company more valuable (by contributing to a software ecosystem, by posting content on the Web site, etc). But the correct way to do this (he says) is not via competition, after-the-fact litigation, or voluntary codes of conduct: competition may not be around to enforce good behavior (as we've seen with Microsoft), litigation may be too late and ineffective (again, see Microsoft), and voluntary codes of conduct will disappear as soon as they get in the way of the bottom line. The correct approach, he argued, is across-the-board regulation so that all the companies have to play by the same rules.

From there he went on to talk about governmental corruption. He said (quoting Robert Reich's book Supercapitalism) that the reason we consistently look for solutions in the market and in voluntary compliance is that our governmental system is broken and does not effectively regulate corporations in the public interest. But Lessig is optimistic that we can change things (he joked that his publisher was unhappy with this point of view, because his brand has been built on pessimism). In his view, the politicians in Washington, by and large, want to be honest and do good, but they aren't able to within the current political system. For instance, on the few occassions that he managed to get access to lawmakers to discuss copyright issues, it was often the first time they had heard that there was more than one side to the argument. He thinks we need a national political movement that will shame politicians into being less corrupt.

This is all a simplification of what he said, of course; unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recording of this talk on Lessig's Web site, or I'd point you at primary source material. I don't know if this is because he chose not to post it, or because it just hasn't been made available yet.

My view

In general, I thought that the speech was very interesting and well thought out. But as much as I'd like to buy into his optimism that we can fix our system, I don't think it's well-founded, for two reasons.

First, he argued that competition will resolve some of these problems (that was before and after he said we can't rely on competition, which I found confusing and may indicate that I misunderstood something). His evidence for this seemed to be that when Microsoft was dominating the world, users responded by reducing their dependence on Microsoft products and by switching to alternatives such as Linux. But, in fact, although more people may be using Linux than in the past, virtually everyone is still only using Windows, it's still almost impossible to find a programming job that isn't Windows-only, and Microsoft is still raking in money hand over fist; indeed, they're doing so well that they're planning to expand their workforce by a third. To take just one data point of many: I ride the bus to Seattle and back, and I regularly see other people using laptops as they commute. Virtually all the laptops run Windows. Occasionally I'll see a Mac, and every few months I'll see a guy running Linux on his laptop; I say "a guy" because it's the same guy every single time. So by my estimation, use of Linux on laptops in buses on the 545 route from Redmond to Seattle is way below 1%, with Macintoshes somewhere around 5%.

To broaden my point, I think Lessig has fallen into a trap that highly intelligent people, particularly those in academia, tend to fall into. In academia, you are surrounded by people who value learning and thinking deeply about the world. These are people who will give serious and unbiased consideration to questions like what is the social effect of my acceptance of the Facebook Terms of Service? and If I become dependent on this service, will that possibly affect me in five years if the company decides to act against my interests? The problem with this is that these people are not representative of the population at large. The population at large thinks why is this check-box getting in the way of me sending pictures to my friends? And I have no doubt that any kid who, e.g., refuses to sign up for Facebook as a protest against their TOS will be roundly mocked in their social circles for being a weird antisocial nonconformist. (of course, this may not apply to the small minority of people like myself whose social circles consist of weird antisocial nonconformists)

Second, Lessig's optimism about the political system seemed to be based on his observation that the people in government are, by and large, not venally corrupt: they want to do good, but the system is constructed in a way that makes this impossible. To me, that's a tremendously disheartening statement. If our problem were simply a few, or even many, corrupt politicians, this would be a solvable problem: even nowadays, Americans have some ability to choose who gets elected, and I believe that a sufficiently well-coordinated campaign could replace bad politicians with good ones.

But if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the individuals are honest, it's a much deeper problem and frankly one that I don't know how to solve. While individuals have some direct control over who gets elected, we have no way to directly change the system that produces the corruption; the levers to do this are in the hands of the politicians elected through that broken system. It's unlikely that the politicians themselves will fix the problem, because they've benefited deeply from it: if the system is left as it is, well over 90% of Congress members will keep
their jobs in the next election cycle, and any effective change seems likely (by definition) to disrupt this cushy arrangement.

On the other hand, running new candidates for office will not fix the problem. After all, if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the participants are honest, then putting more honest people into government will have no effect. In order to get elected, these new politicians will have to become just as corrupt as the old ones, because that's how the system is set up. So we might change the faces, but we'll have the same old problems.

I recall two specific concrete proposals that Lessig made to make the system more responsive. First, he suggested shaming politicians who engage in corrupt behavior -- presumably taking large donations from interested parties. I don't see how this will help. Americans generally have a very low regard for the political class as it is; will pointing out particular examples of politicians taking money really make a difference when it comes to votes? And if it doesn't, will it really produce any change in their behavior? Politicians are motivated by votes the same way corporations are motivated by money; unless they stand a chance of losing their job (which is virtually impossible in any event), there's no reason for them to change how they behave.

His second proposal was for a system of contributions where it's impossible for any individual to prove they had donated a particular amount of money to a particular candidate. Even assuming it could be implemented perfectly, I don't think this will really solve the problem, for two reasons. First, it's not generally a secret what moneyed interests want. Politicians who want to attract large donations can just take positions that they know will appeal to donors of that sort. The donors themselves can make this easier on the candidates by, e.g., posting public position statements on issues of the day. Secondly, and this is far more insidious, even if politicians honestly represent their positions, then because success in running for office is so tied to the amount of money the candidate can raise, only candidates who hold opinions favorable to large corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to get elected. In fact, for all I know this is what happens already!

But with all that said, it was a really interesting talk and Lessig tied together some things you might not think would go together. If a video or Flash presentation becomes available, I would recommend watching through it. And hopefully my pessimistic predictions will be wrong; it's certainly happened before.

While bumbling about on a search engine, I found slides from a talk I gave in 2001 and these 2005 consultation submissions to the Department of Culture... about TV and the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus Here's some other stuff on other sites I wrote about since the last round-up of this sort:

A Cambridge Co-operator: Sorry!

EASF :: View topic - What happened to Norwich Citywide Co-op?

Bond films and the Roger Moore humor controversy Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

Does Having Fewer Rules Inspire Hard Work? etbe

The Right Width for Your Blog

The Right Width for Your Blog

Shine OpenStreetMap Cycle Map :: GravityStorm

Social mapping Tom Chance's website

Russ Nelson: Chordite versus CyKey

The prescient TomTom

robmyers - Bender's Big Score

Citing References in Blog Posts etbe

Matt Lee - Advogato Exploring Freedom

Ross Burton

Inside the Box Blog Archive Linux On a Mobile PC

Javascript performance in browsers

Bryan Clark : Web Browser Homepage

BBC SPORT Sport Editors' Blog Behind the Scenes at BBC Sport: Weekend feedback

][ stefano maffulli The end of a phase

A Cambridge Co-operator: Shoefayre / Cambridge City

(Persone) 12 25 Septembro 2007, 5:21

Buxy: DSA needs a leader

I have been rather quiet during the last few months. Not really because I wasn t doing anything, but because most of what I have been doing was done by private e-mail. Apparently people are expecting the DPL to disappear around the middle of their term, because I did not get many complaints. But yes, I know that sucked. And well, I now have a reason to regain motivation. \o/ DSA++ \o/ I am very, very pleased to let you know that this morning Phil Hands (fil) added Peter Palfrader (weasel) to the adm group. Which means that the DSA team now has a new member! The first since, wow, quite some time. I am grateful to everyone who made this possible, for bearing with my insistance, for making concessions, for being patient, and I hope this is only the first step to bigger and better teams in Debian. Of course the path is still long but I must admit this is truly refreshing. I wish great success to Peter for the thankless job that awaits him. Nexenta After meeting Michael Man and several Sun people at Debconf and seeing Michael s great talk I got really convinced that the technology present in OpenSolaris could benefit Debian in many ways. And the shortest path to there seemed to be Nexenta. I am currently discussing the possibility of having a Nexenta machine accessible to Debian developers to port and test their packages. I also suggested the Nexenta people to submit patches directly to Debian and try to join friendly packaging teams. Please be nice to them! Conferences Last month I attended Encuentro Linux 2007 in Arica, Chile where I gave a talk about the history and organisation of Debian and how to help and become a member of the project. Due to various issues (such as my passport being stolen when I was 2000 km away from the conference) I did not have the time to give my other planned talk about attracting developers who do not speak English to Debian and FLOSS projects. Fortunately I was able to discuss it with members of the local communities. My goal is to understand why such a large Spanish-speaking area has so few Debian developers, and what we can do about that. One of my observations was that two very important documents (the Debian Policy and the Debian Developer s Reference) were not translated into Spanish, while for instance there is a French translation of the latter. Any volunteers?

Two nights ago I was having dinner with a colleague who recounted a truly horrible experience he had with the modern-day American health care “system.” While in Montana over the summer, he got bit by a bat and well, as a result, he and his entire family had to get rabies shots. These shots are hard to get and priceeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeey. The final bill was $ 20,000 and his NYU based health insurance, United Health Care is claiming they are not responsible!### Like getting bit by a bat and the possibility of rabies are not bad enough. Isn’t the point of health insurance to take care of the unexpected?? Someone also pointed me to The Daily Kos’ wrangle with BCBS of California and well, they picked the wrong guy to mess with given there are so many many many many eyeballs tuned to his blog, everyday (just check out the number of comments). I wonder if the public relations director will contact him as they did with me after I blogged about my trials and tribulations. I certainly don’t have the audience and readers he does, so I am always surprised they ever contacted me in the first place. The Daily Kos also provided a link for a site that I was thinking of creating if my problems with BCBS were not solved (glad to see someone else has) called Sick of Blue Cross. I personally like the name I came up with a little better Blue Cross No Shield but the important thing is that a site like that exists and it is very good site, design and content wise. There should be a site created for every health insurance company and they should federate and pool resources to gain more visiblity. While I am not hopeful that the health insurance industry will change within, I think mounting and steady consumer pressure can do a lot to force the industry to change their awful ways. And while I think the bad publicity is a key part to putting pressure on the health insurance to change, I actually think that the power of the consumers also can come from elsewhere, and this elsewhere is overwhelming the administrative channels within and outside of the health insurance. The gist is if they send us a lot of (useless) paperwork, send them A LOT of paperwork back. On the Daily Kos, a lot of people noted that things got moving when they complained to the Department of Banking and Insurance. While my own complaint to that department did not produce any immediate fruit, it did get the ball moving for the appeal process, which eventually panned out for me. That is, I learned a lot and started to get decent customer service. Doors opened. Now, it took me weeks to find out that I could complain to the Department of Banking and Insurance and I am sure many find themselves in that situation of walking in a no man’s land of confusion and frustration. If more and more people know that you can file a complaint to these Departments (and why are doctor’s offices not relaying this information??!!), they and the health insurance companies will get inundated with that which they love to inflict on us, paperwork. This may slow things down for you but at a certain point, state governments will get the message that something is deeply wrong. So, people MUST use these channels and overwhelm these agencies with complaints, faxes, emails as this is a powerful and very material message that something is deeply wrong and broken and must be fixed. Also, send faxes and letters to various departments in your health insurance company (appeals, customer service, medical director’s office, public relations office…) get people’s email’s and send them emails. Inundate them with a barrage of administrative paperwork. If they are not being helpful, send a fax or two a day concerning your case until you get clear answers. While individual faxes won’t make much of a difference, imagine if there are 300 a day coming in or 3000…. This can work with the numbers are there and I have a feeling that the numbers Are There. So spread the word for housebreaking your health insurance and push the paperwork back on them.