The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is one of the most surprisingly successful projects I've ever had the privilege of working on. On my first day working for the company that would become Canonical, I talked with Mark Shuttleworth about some ideas for community governance. Partially in reaction to some harsh behavior in other free software projects we'd worked on, Mark and I agreed that some sort of explicit standard for behavior in Ubuntu would be a good thing. Over lunch of what was my literally first day working on Ubuntu, I wrote a draft of code of conduct that was essentially the version that Ubuntu has used until today. Shuttleworth made a series of modification to my draft but I don't think either of us took it too seriously. We figured it would be easy to update it later. Over time, that code has become a central piece of the Ubuntu community. Every new Ubuntu member cryptographically signs the code. When conversation in any Ubuntu forums, channels, or lists becomes disrespectful, users almost instinctively remind each other of the code. Through this process, the code has become a sort of constitution of our community and a widely enforced standard. People treat the code as a reflection of what "ubuntu" --- both the concept and our project --- stands for. Over time, the original code has spawned a Leadership Code of Conduct (which I also worked to draft), and has been modified and employed by scores of free software projects and by many projects that have nothing to do with free software at all. This is all wonderful, but a side effect has been that updating the code has become a more a difficult process that we originally imagined. Despite it success, the code remains a text written in an afternoon in Mark's flat. At times, this fact shows. For example, the code contains some off-hand humor that now seems a little akward and the text was a bit too developer centric at points. And there was a lot that, quite simply, we would have done better if we had realized that the code would be so important. So this summer, Daniel Holbach and I spent another afternoon in Berlin discussing and crafting a new version of the code along with a detailed rationale document that describes all the things we'd changed and why. We believe that what we've created is fully in the spirit of the original code. We've made efforts to minimize the delta in terms of text as possible. Daniel and I realize that changing the code out from under our community is a dangerous game, and we've make exceptional efforts to make sure that the new code doesn't say anything substantively different than the old code --- but that it does say it better. So I'm thrilled that, after being posted since early June and after incorporating a series of revisions with members of the Ubuntu Community Council, the new draft was approved at a council meeting earlier today. Of course, we are continuing to think about how we might improve the text going forward. One important goal we've thrown around, for example, is the creation of a code that is no longer Ubuntu specific and that can be employed by a wide range of different groups and different free and open source software projects.

I've just read Vincent Sanders' Bits from the kernel team. First, a big thank you to him: this kind of detailed information about what the team intends to do, down to a very technical level, is needed much more often on d-d-a. Debian is about producing a distribution, which in the end comes down on how to make independently produced pieces of software work together, so getting all the fiddly bits right is the most important aspect of Debian's work. (And it is also where I think Debian still does better than all other distributions I've ever used.) What immediately sparked this article is (could it be otherwise? ;-) the part I didn't like too much about these Bits: ... was discussed ... ... was resolved ... ... further investigation ... would occur. and right at the top ... a member of the release team ... Of course the team should work together as a whole. Of course it isn't really relevant who of the release team was present. Of course, this information is contained in the minutes. But on the whole, these Bits read a bit like a press release of a large corporation where the spokesman reads a communique prepared for him by a marketing team responsible. I miss the personal touch that should in my opinion run in parallel with our promise of openness: it's not only that we don't hide bugs, it's also that we're not hiding behind a corporate identity , but that we're not afraid to name names (No, this is not in a foundation document as such. It's my interpretation of openness.) A start is simple use of active vs. passive: Why not we discussed/decided ... instead of it was discussed/resolved ? (It's used in a few places, I note.) I appreciate that naming names with each action item is probably better left in the minutes, but at least naming the release team member (he's not just a functionary...) and perhaps at the end a short paragraph about who was there would have improved the announcement. Also: none of the items has an ETA obviously Debian is famous for not having any ETA's but we're trying to change this, aren't we? So why not give at least a rough estimate which tasks would take a week, a month, half a year... to complete? I'm sure you discussed it (have yet to read the minutes), if only to guesstimate what is realistic within the timeframe of the squeeze release cycle. Debian not only is no company, but it's also, and I hope I'm not the only person who thinks this is important, a Linux distribution where no corporate body has the power to force changes on the community. The single person is important, because it's the single person who in the end decides to implement a thing this or that way. It may be the outcome of a team discussion and a team's decision, but the work is done by individual people and not by employees impementing a corporate policy.

One thing I noticed when I got my new LG U990 Viewty [1] mobile phone is the way the core telephony functionality has suffered while features for web browsing etc have been added. It seems that the core phone functionality (making and receiving calls and maintaining a list of names and phone numbers) has generally decreased since about 2004 when I got my first camera-phone. The Nokia GSM phones that I used prior to getting a 3G phone seemed to have a combination of signal reception, voice quality, and basic telephony features that beat all the 3G phones I ve used. The only way the 3G phones were better for core telephony features is in managing the list of recently called numbers. In my past two LG phones I ve been able to easily call an alternate number of the person I last called this feature was dropped in the Viewty. Some of my relatives have camera-phones that have an extremely poor ability to get a signal, they can t get a GSM signal in places where my Viewty can get 3G! Obviously making a usable phone was not a design priority for those devices! Then there s the issue of battery life. Early mobile phones had NiCd batteries that lasted a week, later mobile phones had Li batteries that lasted a week as a standard feature. Nokia sold phones with replacement batteries, so if you wanted to make lots of phone calls while on the move you could have a second battery charged and ready for use. Now the latest BlackBerry [5] apparently has batteries that only last for one day I haven t investigated the options for storing a second battery but a casual glance indicates that changing a battery will be a lot more difficult than on an old Nokia phone. I ve been wondering, why don t they just sell some mobile phones that don t support making phone calls? Smart phones that aren t very good at telephony is really only going half way, do it properly and just rip out the phone functionality! Or they could use the word phone to apply to devices that already exist to do mobile stuff. You could have an Amazon Kindle phone [2] that allows you to read documents, and a Nokia N800 tablet phone [3] for general Internet access including web browsing and email really the only smart-phone feature that is missing from the Nokia is a camera. For that matter my EeePC 701 [4] is probably about twice as heavy as my first mobile phone, maybe it could be called a phone too. If you have two phones, one for making phone calls and the other for doing smart-phone stuff then it won t matter so much if the smart-phone (which can t make phone calls) has it s battery run out. One likely objection to the idea of selling phones that can t be used for making phone calls is that it might confuse the users. However the current situation is that there are significant differences in the signal reception ability of mobile phones, the people who sell them don t know what the difference is, and the rare reviews that analyse signal strength (as done by Choice [6]) are become outdated rapidly and never cover all phones on the market. So I think it would be a great improvement if the phone sales people could say don t buy phone A if you want to make phone calls because it can t do that because currently anyone who just wants to make phone calls has a matter of luck to determine whether they get a phone that works well. The really sad thing however, is that some people apparently have usage patterns that are similar to my satire above. I have heard of people having two phones, one for smart-phone functionality and another for making calls. What we need is to have manufacturers put more effort into making hardware that can receive week signals, from now on I will consult the Choice review of this before making any mobile phone purchase or recommendation. If only a few million other people would do the same then the manufacturers would improve their products. The next thing we need is to have better software to run the phones. The deficiencies in the software on my Viewty could easily be fixed if everyone had source code access. Benjamin Mako Hill writes about some of the problems with closed-source on mobile phones [7]. He mentions security (in terms of our trust in the phone manufacturers), and the general ideal of having control over your own device. One specific problem he doesn t mention are the ways that mobile phones are deliberately crippled by the manufacturers, 3G phones have precious main menu space occupied by the services that are most profitable to the telephone company without regard to what the users desire. Another problem for people who desire free software is file format support. Camera-phones that save video to AVI format instead of OGG reduce our ability to use free software in other places as a general rule every time you transcode a video you either lose some quality or increase the file size so the format that the phone uses will be carried through many other computers and devices. Smart-phones generally have the ability to view a range of data types, the ability to view MS file formats is common (which excludes free competitors). My Viewty has an entire menu section dedicated to Google services (Gmail, blogger, youtube, etc). That s nice for Google who presumably paid well for that, but not so good for me as I don t use any of the Google features on my phone. Now a menu that had a caching IMAP client, an RSS feed reader, a Wordpress API client, a Jabber client, and a caching Wikipedia client would be really useful. My current phone is just under a year old, so I won t be buying a new phone until January 2011 (unless I break or lose my Viewty). Hopefully then there will be some better options. Before anyone suggests that I buy another phone to help with the coding, my current free software coding projects are all behind schedule

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/05/31/lg-u990-viewty/
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/21/review-of-the-eeepc-701/
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry
• [6] http://www.choice.com.au/
• [7] http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091017-00

http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/20091017-00

Nice coreboot news the Free Software x86 firmware ("BIOS") is featured on the cover of issue 186 of the Linux Journal. Anton Borisov's article Coreboot at Your Service! explains the basic ideas behind coreboot, how to build an image for your board, which payloads are available and how they are used, e.g. GRUB2, SeaBIOS if you need legacy BIOS callbacks (e.g. for booting Windows), Etherboot/GPXE, or more fun stuff such as space invaders or tint (a tetris clone) in your flash ROM chip... If you read the article and think the build process is a bit complicated and ugly, do not despair! We're currently in the process of converting the whole coreboot code base to use kconfig (the widely-known configuration tool used by the Linux kernel, busybox, and other projects), so in the very near future the whole process for building a coreboot image will work like this:

  $ make menuconfig
  $ make

Flashing the image can then be done using an EEPROM programmer and/or via the user-space utility flashrom (available for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, etc.)... It's nice to see that coreboot is getting more and more coverage in "mainstream" media and is growing both in number of deployments and in number of supported chipsets and boards. We are desperately in need of more developers though, there are just way too many chipsets, boards, and datasheets out there; we're happy about every patch and every new tester or developer who likes to mess with code that runs in the very first few (micro)seconds after power-on. If you think kernel hacking and related low-level development is nice, you might also be interested in writing code where there's no RAM yet (as coreboot has to initialize it), there's no serial port for debugging (coreboot has to initialize it), no PCI devices have been set up, most of your auxiliary hardware is not yet up (ethernet NIC, parallel port, audio, IDE, SATA, USB, you name it). It's a fun environment to work in and you'll learn a lot about PC hardware, even if you (so far) thought you knew everything there is to know. Feel free to join us on the mailing list or on IRC in #coreboot on Freenode.

It is great to see that the collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu is improving; and I don't say that just because it probably can't be much better within the Debian/Ubuntu Games Team, we have people from both distributions working inside the team and most of the packages don't carry Ubuntu specific patches (anymore) because of that. Actually, seeing that things do go pretty well in that area made me consider signing up to become a MOTU. To do that one has to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct (CoC) which is a fairly good document, actually. I wish there would be something similar within Debian that is considered binding, it would be able to reduce quite some tough and rough times, actually. It is about and explains to be considerate, be respectful, be collaborative, what to do when you disagree, when you are unsure and wants you to step down considerately. If these principles would be carried out amongst all the free software communities (and I really mean carried out and not just be there and grow old) I expect it would be much more welcoming for new people. And it's not too hard to do your part for it (... says the person who just recently had to excuse for her behavior). Anyway, there is this one part with the CoC that itches me. It's not that one has to sign it with their GnuPG key, but related to it. Making it a requirement to sign it gives the document a much more official character, actually gives it the feeling and impression of a contract and I expect it is meant to carry that feeling. Though, there is this one part in it that I consider off for such a document:

Nobody knows everything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Ubuntu community (except of course the SABDFL).

Given that the acronym SABDFL refers to Mark Shuttleworth it means that one has to expect him to be impeccable which I am sorry but cannot sign. I don't expect that from anyone else but myself, even Mark is only human and can make mistakes. Even though it's obvious that this is a tongue-in-cheek kind of joke which might be meant to make it clear that the Ubuntu community isn't just sterile having this in a document that is expected to get signed by contributors is just an extremely bad idea. Sorry, Ubuntu, as long as this joke is part of the CoC I can't sign it with clean conscience, no matter how much I would sign the rest of it a thousands' time. It really makes me wonder how many others actually did read the "contract" carefully that they are signing but on the other hand simply didn't care. There is too many site signup stuff out there that noone reads neither.

Lets suppose you've got an array with numeric indices:

[0] => 'bla'
[1] => 'blub'

Now you want to do something if the element 'bla' is found in that array.
Well, you know that PHP has a function array_search, which returns the key(s) of the found values. Lets say, you write something like this:

if(array_search($array, 'bla')) do_something

Would you expect that do_something would actually do something?
If yes: You are wrong.
If no: Great, you've understand some parts of PHP - insanitygoodness..

Actually, if 'bla' wouldn't have the index 0 it would work, because 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. is TRUE. But unfortunately PHP has some sort of implicit casting, which makes 0 behave like a FALSE, depending on the context. So following this, the if() works for all elements except 0.

You might be tempted to write

if(array_search... != FALSE)

But this wouldn't help you, because 0 would still evaluate to FALSE, leading to if(FALSE != FALSE) which is (hopefully obviously) never true.

A PHP beginner (or even an intermediate, if he never stumbled across this case) might ask:
Whats the solution for this dilemma?

Luckily the PHP documentation is great. It tells you about this. And additionally PHP has got this great operator (===), which causes people to ask "WTF?" when they hear about it for the first time. Additionaly to comparing the values to each other, they also check the type of the variable. This leads to the wanted result because 0 is an integer, while FALSE is Boolean. So the solution for our problem looks like this:

if (array_search($array, 'bar') !== FALSE)

Isn't this great?

This entry was originally posted in slightly different form to Server Fault If you're coming from a Windows world, you're used to using tools like zip or rar, which compress collections of files. In the typical Unix tradition of doing one thing and doing one thing well, you tend to have two different utilities; a compression tool and a archive format. People then use these two tools together to give the same functionality that zip or rar provide. There are numerous different compression formats; the common ones used on Linux these days are gzip (sometimes known as zlib) and the newer, higher performing bzip2. Unfortunately bzip2 uses more CPU and memory to provide the higher rates of compression. You can use these tools to compress any file and by convention files compressed by either of these formats is .gz and .bz2. You can use gzip and bzip2 to compress and gunzip and bunzip2 to decompress these formats. There are also several different types of archive formats available, including cpio, ar and tar, but people tend to only use tar. These allow you to take a number of files and pack them into a single file. They can also include path and permission information. You can create and unpack a tar file using the tar command. You might hear these operations referred to as "tarring" and "untarring". (The name of the command comes from a shortening of Tape ARchive. Tar was an improvement on the ar format in that you could use it to span multiple physical tapes for backups).

# tar -cf archive.tar list of files to include

This will create (-c) and archive into a file -f called archive.tar. (.tar is the convention extention for tar archives). You should now have a single file that contains five files ("list", "of", "files", "to" and "include"). If you give tar a directory, it will recurse into that directory and store everything inside it.

# tar -xf archive.tar
# tar -xf archive.tar list of files

This will extract (-x) the previously created archive.tar. You can extract just the files you want from the archive by listing them on the end of the command line. In our example, the second line would extract "list", "of", "file", but not "to" and "include". You can also use

# tar -tf archive.tar

to get a list of the contents before you extract them. So now you can combine these two tools to replication the functionality of zip:

# tar -cf archive.tar directory
# gzip archive.tar

You'll now have an archive.tar.gz file. You can extract it using:

# gunzip archive.tar.gz
# tar -xf archive.tar

We can use pipes to save us having an intermediate archive.tar:

# tar -cf - directory   gzip > archive.tar.gz
# gunzip < archive.tar.gz   tar -xf -

You can use - with the -f option to specify stdin or stdout (tar knows which one based on context). We can do slightly better, because, in a slight apparent breaking of the "one job well" idea, tar has the ability to compress its output and decompress its input by using the -z argument (I say apparent, because it still uses the gzip and gunzip commandline behind the scenes)

# tar -czf archive.tar.gz directory
# tar -xzf archive.tar.gz

To use bzip2 instead of gzip, use bzip2, bunzip2 and -j instead of gzip, gunzip and -z respectively (tar -cjf archive.tar.bz2). Some versions of tar can detect a bzip2 file archive with you use -z and do the right thing, but it is probably worth getting in the habit of being explicit. More info:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(file_format)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bzip2
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip

I tend to dress quite casually - unless there's a good reason to do otherwise I'll be in jeans and a t-shirt, or something similar. I'm comfortable in it and I take the view point that in general people shouldn't be making assumptions based on what I'm wearing. Of course they do, and while this can be infuriating at times it can also be amusing. The man at the RBoS who witnessed me signing the personal DD guarantee form for Black Cat obviously couldn't reconcile my appearance with what I was there to do, for example.

I'd never thought about this from the other side until a few weeks ago. I spoke to someone who explained how difficult it had become to conduct business meetings with other companies with the increased level of business casual. In fact on occasion different branches of the same company that he'd be meeting with would have different dress codes, so he'd go to something involving casual dress in the morning and something with full business suit attire in the afternoon and end up feeling over or under dressed.

This isn't likely to make me change my own behaviour in the immediate future (I don't have to interact with external parties as part of my current job). It did help me realise that there was another explanation for awkward behaviour when I'm my usual scruffy self that wasn't just about judging on appearances though.

(All of the above blatantly obvious once you think about it, but it took that conversation for me to do so.)

So, now that I completed my 2009 program by running the Cologne marathon 6 months after my first one in Paris, I now plan the 2010 "season"..:-) (one point for you guys who told me that once you start you don't stop) The next step is definitely Paris. The race is close to my home, this is a great race in a great city at a great time. I really can't miss it. So, that one is registered. The point is "what about 'the other one'". I plan to run another marathon during that year, preferably during autumn. Actually, I would probably be able to run at least one more but, well, many people urge me to avoid exxagerating and that includes my beloved wife..:-) So, one more. Which one? At this very moment, I have about 4 options:

• Cologne again. Pros: this is a nice race, human-size, in a welcoming place, also an oppotunity to run again with local friends. Cons: what the hell would we do in Cologne during the few days we would stay there, now that we've seen most of the city (one cathedral, 12 roman churches)...and that would mean the same program than 2009
• Berlin. Pros: the top german marathon, one of the "Big Ones", in a city that deserves a few days sightseeing and which Elizabeth really wants us to visit. Cons: a little bit early in September...and Germany again..:-)
• Donostia (San Sebastian). Pros: this is an open invitation by a relative of my brother in law, this is in Basque country which I enjoy, probably with a quite warm crowd. Cons: late in November and I fear the hills to be quite hard over there
• Chicago. Pros: would be a great opportunity to met with Dirk and even though we would not run together, I would enjoy this. Also a nice place to visit and p ssible to arrange a visit to my wife's family in Kansas City neighbourhood. Cons: arrangign a 10-days trip tp USA in early October is very very hard to fit with our professionnal schedule...and fairly expensive...:)

So, at this moment, Berlin and Donostia have the lead. A good compromise could be running a marathon in Berlin and the 20km Behobia-San Sebastian run which is very popular in Basque country. We'll see..

I just put online new Wammu and Gammu website at http://wammu.eu/. The reason for this change is that I want all relevant information about Gammu and related programs to be available in one place. You can find there information about Gammu, SMSD and python-gammu as well including some information and documentation which used to be spread in wiki and various other documents. Also all Gammu and Wammu related announcements will be published only on that website and will no longer pollute my blog (and all planets where my blog is being syndicated). If you followed RSS feed, you should update your reader to http://wammu.eu/news/rss/. The new website also includes updated Gammu Phone Database, which will look almost same to users, but has been completely rewritten underneath, what will allow some extensions in future and allows easier management of entries for me. What currently lacks behind old website is Czech translation. The reason is in simple fact that new website contains much more texts and I did not yet have time to translate it. If you want to help, just go to l10n.cihar.com, or just follow translators instructions. This time it will be also possible to add other translations, so if you want to translate website to other language, you are welcome!

don't set DEBEMAIL in /etc/pbuilderrc That's pretty much it. The reason is that, if you do set DEBEMAIL pbuilder/cowbuilder configuration option (most likely, to the same value of your $DEBEMAIL envvar) you will end up generating .changes file containing fields like:

    Maintainer: Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>
    Changed-By: Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>

even when you're not the maintainer, e.g. when the maintainer is a team address or when you are doing an NMU (which I've been doing quite a lot recently). I discovered this thanks to Ana about a month ago and it quite shocked me, since I've been using the same pbuilder (and then cowbuilder) configuration for quite a while (years ...) without realizing that. The complicity of a missing lintian check has surely helped (wishlist bug filed) as well as a weird/buggy behavior on the *builder side (there are some bugs on that line, I just haven't taken the time yet to understand what should be the correct behavior). Bottom line: just check whether you are screwing up *.changes file due to overzealous attitude in *builder configuration

Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam. I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package). The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different. Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.

I m back from Taiwan since Thursday already. It was a nice trip, the whole week and I do like Taiwan. We had a transit stop in Bangkok, pretty annoying useless stop (I m sure the smokers disagree, seeing how fast they got into the smokers lounge :) ). One nice detail at Bangkok airport are the ramps down to the Gates. If you use a wheelchair, you might end up having some fun in case you ever lose control of it. Better don t. The ramp down directly ends in a set of stairs, with nothing between which would stop you. Makes too great a jump down, hehe. We arrived in Taipei Thursday (the 24th) evening and so got rid of our luggage and went out for Dinner. Which was the only time in Taiwan I wasn t happy about the food, only one of the dishes was ok, the rest not for me. But the rest of the group did like em, so maybe it was just me after a long flight. On Friday we had nothing planned, except for Dinner, so took a very relaxed day. Somewhere around noon we went out for food, after that a bit sightseeing around the hostel . There are two attributes that are always true for Taipei:

1. It s a busy place, lots of people. No matter where.
2. It has more scooters than you ever saw before. (True, there are two times more scooters than cars).

Oh, and of course there are the same rules of the road than in Mexico: Something might be written on paper, but better don t count on that. Red traffic lights are followed (mostly), and then its whoever is stronger. But if everyone is following this, it does seem to work out. :) Friday evening we had Dinner in a place run by Taiwan aborigines where we met the other people attending the mini-DebConf. Oh, and as it was the third time I had to use them, I was slowly growing accustomed to chopsticks, a thing I was never able to get done before. (Ok, fine, if its the only way to get food and all the others are stealing your food if you can t handle them, now thats a good reason to learn to eat with chopsticks fast :) ). Saturday and Sunday we had the mini-DebConf as part of the ICOS. I took no pictures there, but a number of other people have, you can find them on gallery.debconf.org. It was a pretty nice event where I held one talk about the Debian archive and lead one discussion round about SPI and non-profit organizations behind OpenSource Projects. The slides for the archive talk are available (beware of the kittens!), the SPI stuff only had a small introduction, no slides here. Oh, before I forget it: Taiwan does feel very hot. And we found a nice notice in our hostel Monday til Wednesday was planned for just play the Tourist game and see stuff . There was a plan made to visit the Taipei 101. It turned out that Canonical has an office within that building, as well as Google. So people planned to visit their offices too. Just - what the hell would I want to visit a Canonical office? Or a Google one? Besides that it was much too early in the day and promised to be boring, so h01ger and myself skipped it. Luck did mean it good with us, we managed to get Sabrina as a local guide for the day and so went to the Taipei 101 later. The 101 is a pretty nice building, though I would have loved to be able to get up to the real top. And not just in the upper part. Anyways, we had been lucky and had a pretty nice view from it. Getting up from the 4th floor to the 89th is also an experience one has to take: The elevators go up with 1010m/min, which makes it a 37second trip only. Down is much slower, only 600m/min, pretty boring (though you do feel it more than enough in your stomach. I wouldn t want to do lift-boy job there). After the 101 we went and visited the Lungshan temple and in the evening a night market. As it was Monday the market was empty. (Where empty translates to enough people around that you never ever feel alone. Nor think its dead). Good that, I don t think I want to experience it during weekends when its busy We had a pretty good time there, with all the various little shops. Fun how many old-style game places there are. Like, playing basketball, throwing things at other things to win stuff, all those non-computer-using games. In a country where lots of the high tech comes from this is not exactly what you would expect. On Tuesday our trip continued as good as it started on Monday, as we had the pleasure to keep Sabrina as guide for Tuesday and Wednesday. So our Tuesday started out with a visit to the National Palace Museum. Which has a large enough collection that you can spend multiple days exploring it. We didn t have the time nor memory for all of that, so left it after half a day. Lunch we took in a Japanese restaurant and here it was the first and only time during my Taiwan visit that I used a fork. Well, none of the dishes would have worked otherwise. The afternoon we spent in the Yangming Park, so we actually saw a bit of nature near Taipei. Tuesday did end early for us, as we planned to attend the TOSSUG meeting, where I met some more people from debian.org.tw and had an interesting chat about non-profit organizations in Taiwan, their way of operation and what to think of when trying to create a new one. I ve also got a nice debian.org.tw shirt, but I won t ever be able to wear it. They didn t expect someone that large when producing them, oh well. (Hrr, people, if you make Debian shirts of any kind, always do some XXL too. There might be fat, large guys like me visiting. :) ) Anyway, they have another thing, one which I like very much. They created a map of usergroups of other open source projects in Taiwan. It s a foldable map style, titled FLOSS Community Manual , and a lot of different Projects/Usergroups/ are listed there. While its all written in Chinese and I can t read it, it does list them, then describes what they are/do (I think), gives contact information and further links. The backside of it also seem to list events happening there. You can find more information (so you can read it :) ) at their website. Does seem a very nice idea to take. Sometime during the evening I also managed to pick up a Chinese name. Or better, Andrew did so for me. I don t even know how to type it, so copy&paste it has to be. :) There: . And that is:

• Definition in English: long, far, remote, distant; liesurely; Mandarin Pronunciation: YOU1
• Definition in English: axle; personal name of mencius; Mandarin Pronunciation: KE1

Wednesday was our last day in Taiwan, unfortunately. We went out of Taipei, visting the Golden Mountain City. Another nice place, with a market and a history, but as our Taxi was leaving at 1630 we didn t have much time for sightseeing. You could spend a lot there. Especially not as we still needed to buy postcards, something people left home always request from one. Tssk. I really enjoyed the time I had there. Not only was the organization of the conference we attended good (especially the mini-DebConf is what I saw. The event around it, while named International, was so much chinese spoken, that I couldn t make much of it), but the details around the whole stay had been nicely taken care off. And then people in general did appear very friendly. Now, it might have to do a bit with me not being exactly their height, but I dont think that is all of it. Even without such a conference as an opportunity I think I will visit the country again, but that time I will have much more time available. Like two or three weeks. And I certainly will see more than Taipei City then. Like the whole country. :) (And hope I am lucky again with local guides :) ). So thank you SLAT, Andrew, Arne, (Sabrina), Rita, (Candy) and all the people who worked for the event which names I forgot. Oh, if you didn t find it yet with all the links, a set of my pictures is available from here.

High-speed internet links are something that makes FOSS development much easier, but I m still having reliability problems with my ADSL. A fringe benefit of moving to a more open Linux-based router is that I can see what s going wrong in more detail. But now I have to gamble nearly two hundred pounds in order to get the service providers to continue trying to find the bug! Sorry for the length, but let me explain how bad broadband in rural England is just now Outside the big cities with their cable networks, Company A owns the lines, Company B provides the services and we buy those services from reseller Company C. Sometimes the same company is A and B or B and C, but never all three. Most of the companies who are B won t be C themselves - in other words, they don t sell retail, but they nearly always seem to have a main or preferred retail partner. Company A is nearly always OpenReach, part of BT Group, the telephone monopoly privatised back in the 1980s but still somehow keeping its landline monopoly. Why is that allowed? Company C has been The Phone Co-op for me for the last few years. Back in February, I changed how I bought my services, combining phone and broadband into one purchase. They d been two purchases mainly because I switched my ADSL from Pipex to the co-op at a different time to switching my line to them. As I understand it, this change had the side effect of changing Company B from OpenReach to Opal Telecom. Opal are the provider business behind TalkTalk, hardest to use Broadband ISP 2009. Since the change, I ve been suffering unexplained disconnections, especially in the early evenings and at weekends. I m pretty sure it s Opal s equipment to blame for two reasons:- Firstly, this wasn t happening until Opal became Company B, while Companies A and C are the same as before (when I had a stable but unspectacular 4Mbps connection). Secondly, since changing my router, I can see LCP TermReq being sent by Opal s PPP peers. Opal insist their equipment isn t sending TermReq messages. My Netgear router disagrees, but I can t seem to get anyone to take its pppd debug logs seriously. So, I ve complained to my supplier (Company C), they ve pretty straightforwardly passed it to Company B and I ve jumped through all the bloody silly hoops like using only wired connections to the router (yay, wires across the house), plugging the router into different phone sockets (yay, more wires across the house) and disconnecting everything from the phone sockets so Company A can run some voltage test (yay, uncontactability - just as well other software.coop workers can cover for me). Now the next step is for some phone engineer to call. For this to happen, I have to agree that I will pay GBP 164 if a fault is found on my phone network instead of theirs. If I don t, they will give up trying to find the fault. I don t really see why this is necessary: surely if there was a line fault, it would have shown itself on the old service? Also, the router says the line has no fault and the SNR and Attenuation are both fine but not great. Unlike most people, I ve already had my house phone network tested with professional equipment (yay for network engineers in the co-op trying to avoid the painful state of British broadband bugfixing), but I m still left betting hundreds of pounds on the phone engineers not pointing the finger at my network. What choice do I have? I ve read elsewhere about people giving up on ADSL and switching to mobile internet because then they have only one company to deal with. I can see some attraction in that, but I live in a village with poor mobile service and I suspect the forthcoming T-Mobile/Orange and T-Mobile/Three link-ups will soon make that less straightforward too. A confusopoly is probably more profitable to telephone companies. Do most people bet a couple of hundred pounds to get their broadband fixed? How many broadband faults get ignored at that point? Why don t the retail company Cs have access to enough Company B systems to lead the fault-finding instead of only being able to pass it on to people who seem to give replies that contradict the logs and won t talk directly to customers? Is fixing this A-B-C three-companies-pass-the-buck system a necessity for Digital Britain? Why isn t the government intervening to end the OpenReach monopoly outside the big cities?

I can t say I m surprised, but I m still appalled by reading, again, a completely out-of-reality polemic about a leader of the Free software community being called sexist (among other nice names), after an innocent and random word used in a talk. Oh noes! Serving in the navy will hurt! It s often that you hear jokes or references picturing French as arrogant, Italians as womanizers, geeks as bearded and smelling under the arms, sailors as gay, et c tera. It s called a clich , and it helps people understand each other because it s part of the collective imagination. If you insert a reference to an Italian in a speech about womanizers, it helps picturing the clich of a guy in a black Armani suit, wearing sunglasses and using gomina. It doesn t mean you think Italians are like this, and if it ever convinces someone that they are so, it means that someone really had trouble using the thing she calls brain to begin with. The same goes for a talk about people not being familiar to computers, that is using women as a clich . When you look for a picture in your mind of someone who has trouble with using computers, what do you find? A granny fighting with her keyboard which keys are not in alphabetical order, or a busty blonde following with her eyes each movement of the mouse cursor. It s only natural to use these pictures as a ground for communication, and it doesn t mean you think bad of grannies or busty blondes. And if, because of that or of anything else, some people end up thinking that women can t use a computer, or that they are not equal to men in this regard, these people are the sexist ones. Not the guy who drew that picture in a magazine you read 10 years ago and forgot since, nor the one using it as a reference. My intolerance is worth more than yours And instead of actually focusing on educating or slapping those people, some of us are conducting a witch hunt, in which anyone implying the very existence of different categories of people, called men and women, regardless of his merits or opinions, is called a sexist and has stones thrown to him on several public fora. This is not acceptable. Do not let your speech be dictated by intolerance. If you apply the same reasoning to anyone that could be possibly hurt, in a completely literal and simplistic analysis of the speech, you can stop right now using any kind of metaphor, idiomatic expression or proverb. All that remains is a poor, sterilized speech. And when the speech is poor, the ideas get poorer as well. Imagine what would a complete stranger reading those blogs understand. She would surely picture hackers as a completely misogynistic community in which people only talk about women (whether it is for sexist jokes or for rhetorical discussions about them) and never talk with them. Which would be utterly wrong, since hackers (and geeks in general) are on the contrary open-minded and friendly to feminism, compared to the rest of the population of course, except for the OMG OMG it s a woman! We need to be nice!!! kind. And this is actually the reasoning that hides behind all this insane RMS and Mark Shuttleworth are sexist trolls. The picture they are giving of women are that of fragile little things that need to be protected against any attack of all these evil misogynist bearded geeks. Pretty ironical for people who claim fighting for gender equality, isn t it? Questioning the unquestionable Frankly, RMS and Mark are among the people I trust the less in the community, but I don t need to paint them as misogynists for that. Look at what they say instead of how they say it: one is an intolerant man who used to be a visionary but turned his principles into dogma; the other has seen the light and behaves as if he was the savior of Free software. I d prefer if we questioned their vision and leadership based on their ideas and actions, not on distorted ways to interpret what they say based on a few people s neuroses. Or, to say it shorter: dudes, get a life.

Normally I, like most people, ignore cold calls but someone asking about opinions on software caught my interest - doesn't happen often. Turned out to be a study using contact data gleaned from a now dead Linux magazine which, in turn, had been gleaned from the attendance information submitted to a now all-but dead conference: LinuxExpo (the data itself was hidden in the data stream behind those fancy barcodes on the admission badges).

Simple questions about which languages I used, which development environments I used (questioner hadn't heard of either anjuta or geany but then as she also asked me to spell Debian that was probably to be expected) as well as questions about magazines and other sources of technical information. (She had heard of LinuxFormat and El Reg so that wasn't too bad.) More complex questions about why I chose a particular tool which I couldn't really answer in just a few words seeing as Martin has done an entire thesis on the answers to that question!

Got a more interesting response when asked for my opinion on various vendors - 1 to 5 where 1 is rubbish and 5 is superb. Adobe: 1 - got an oooh, why's that? (umm, no source code and better free software alternatives). RedHat: 4 got a slightly surprised tone but Microsoft: 1 got a "Really? why?" - to which the only answer had to be "release all the source code".

Interesting that RedHat was mentioned, along with Google and Sun/Oracle but neither Ubuntu nor Debian.

Gradually found that the inspiration for the (expensive) methodology came from companies trying to get me to use proprietary demos which then turned into subscription-model tools. No go area for me, all my tools will need to remain free software or I'll just find something else. (Got another "why?" to that - with the inevitable "I need the source code to fix the tools" answer.) Also asked "what are your hobbies?" - to which I could only say "You've spent the last 5 minutes asking about my hobby, my paid work is not in IT".

Despite the call ending not 5 minutes ago, I've no memory of who was doing the survey. Still, she seemed impressed that I've been subscribed to LinuxFormat since about issue 3.

Humm... Has anybody else seen a pattern like this? I am getting a flurry of root login attempts at my main server at the University since yesterday 7:30AM (GMT-5). Now, from the machines I run in the 132.248.0.0/16 network (UNAM), only two listen to the world with ssh at port 22 And yes, it is a very large network, but I am only getting this pattern on one of them (they are on different subnets, quite far apart). They are all attempting to log in as root, with a frequency that varies wildly, but is consistently over three times a minute right now. This is a sample of what I get in my logs: [update] Logs omitted from blog post, as it is too wide and breaks displays for most users. You can download the log file instead. Anyway This comes from all over the world, and all the attempts are made as root (no attempts from unprivileged users). Of course, I have PermitRootLogin to no in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but I want to understand this as much as possible. Initially it struck me that most of the attempts appeared to come from Europe (quite atypical for the usual botnet distribution), so I passed my logs through: The top countries (where the number of attempts 5) are: I am attaching to this post the relevant log (filtering out all the information I could regarding legitimate users) as well as the full output. In case somebody has seen this kind of wormish botnetish behaviour lately please comment. [Update] I have tried getting some data regarding the attacking machines, running a simple nmap -O -vv against a random sample (five machines, I hope I am not being too agressive in anybody's eyes). They all seem to be running some flavor of Linux (according to the OS fingerprinting), but the list of open ports varies wildly I have seen the following: Of course, it strikes me that several among said machines seem to be Linuxes, but (appear to) run Microsoft services. Oh, and they also have P2P clients.

Attachment	Size
Results of parsing the logs	21.58 KB
Relevant portion of the logs	1.05 MB

So not even 3 months out from RMS's sexist Gran Canaria virgins remarks, we have another powerful leader in the Free Software Community making sexist remarks in a talk to developers (this time, it's Mark Shuttleworth). It's a shame that these two people have said stupid things that hurt their causes and their communities by perpetuating an unfriendly environment for women. And it's a bigger shame that neither leader appears to care enough about their community to issue a sincere public apology for their screwup (if i'm wrong about this, please point me to the apology i've looked). These guys are in a situation which is nowhere near as hard as writing good software or managing complex technical projects: if you make a stupid mistake, own up to it, apologize, and try not to make similar mistakes in the future. Perhaps worst of all, are the remarkable number of unreasonably fucked-up comments on the blog posts discussing these unfortunate events. If you're in the habit of defending remarks like those made by RMS and Shuttleworth on the 'net, please take a minute and ask yourself a few questions:

• Do you think that the Free Software community today is overwhelmingly male (even by the standards of the male-dominated IT industry)? If not, thanks for playing. You are living in a fantasy world. Try some basic research.
• Do you think that the significant under-representation of women is a problem? Let's say there are about three answers here:

  Gender disparity in Free Software is a Good Thing

  If this is your position, please announce it explicitly so we all know. Just so you know: I don't want to be part of your all-boys club. You can stop these questions now, sorry to have bothered you.

  I don't really care about gender disparity in Free Software one way or the other

  You may not care; but a significant subset of the Free Software community thinks that it's a problem and would like to address it. Please keep this in mind as you go to the next question. Also, have you thought much about the idea of privilege and how it might apply to your situation?

  I think gender disparity in Free Software is probably a Bad Thing

  Great, glad we agree on that.

• People in our community have a problem with the current state of affairs, and point out some specific behavior that makes the bad situation worse. What should you do?

  Shout them down or attack them

  Gee, it sure is upsetting to hear people talk about problems in the community. It's almost as upsetting as getting bug reports about problems in our software. Shall we shout them down too? Maybe we should attack them! Condescension is also great. Those silly bug reporters!

  Argue them out of having a problem

  This just doesn't work very well. Someone has already volunteered to tell you about a problem that you hadn't noticed. You are unlikely to convince them that they were imagining things.

  Take them seriously

  Yes! It seems to be surprising to some commentators that this is not a witch hunt or a lynch mob (interesting that these terms often-used in defense of white men connote specific historical traditions of the exercise of male privilege and white privilege, respectively). Well-meaning people have respectfully raised good-faith concerns about the state of our community, and made very simple suggestions about what to do to make the community more welcoming to women: lay off the sexist remarks at conferences, apologize when some nonsense does slip through we're all struggling with various kinds of internalized oppression, you won't be perfect and try not to do it again. Why not listen to these people? Why not support them?

Please read the Geek Feminism wiki and blog. Even if you don't agree with everything on those sites (hey, it's a wiki! and a blog! you don't have to agree with everything!), people are at least trying to address the problem of sexism in our community there. Engage constructively and don't hide or ignore problems! UPDATE: I've asked the site admin to remove some trollish comments. If you want to use the comments on this blog to announce something like "i'd like for free software to be a boys-only club", that's fine, i'd like to know who you are so i can adjust my perception of you accordingly. Anything advocating or excusing rape and/or murder is way over the line and is not welcome here. i'm sure you can find some other place to troll. Tags: community, conduct, feminism, free software, sexism