With the vrms meme raging on Planet Ubuntu, I noticed some people still have sun-java6 installed. I ve been using openjdk-6 since Hardy, and everything I use works fine with it (e.g. Vuze, Catan, Eclipse, FreeMind, and even Facebook s photo uploader thing). Given the Ubuntu Tech Board s remove sun-java6 from the archive Agenda item, it s possible sun-java6 (being redundant and orphaned) would go away in Ubuntu Karmic (sun-java5 is already gone because Sun will drop support for it in October, and sun-java6 is not far behind). I ve heard some noises about openjdk-6 not working for people, but I haven t actually seen any direct technical evidence of something working in one and not the other. Seeing as Jaunty s OpenJDK was certified by Sun, it would be very interesting to find failures, as this would indicate that Sun s certifications are missing something. Looking for examples of failures in Google, I couldn t find anything with obvious test-cases that failed with openjdk-6. I suspect I m just not trying hard enough, but I m curious what other people have run into. Test for yourself:

sudo apt-get purge sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-jre sun-java6-bin sun-java6-plugin
sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk icedtea6-plugin

(Don t forget to restart your browser.)

During Debconf9, most Debian developers and contributors who were present there were kind enough to answer my call for dedications, meant to turn a gift I planned to offer to my former boss who just retired, into a special gift. You may then remember me going over all of you with Rapha l Hertzog and Roland Mas book in French (definitely the best French book about Debian) and asking you to sign it and write down some words. I finally managed to give Fran ois the book this week and, on his behalf, I'd like to thank all people who contributed to this. This was much appreciated and having that great book with that special addition made him very happy (even if he managed to install his other gift, namely a Dell laptop, with Debian squeeze, without the help of any book). Ladies and gentlemen, you rock. But you know that.

After a long time of ignoring (or at least not using) micro-blogging services such as Twitter, I recently tried the Free-Software based identi.ca service, and I'm beginning to like it. The choice of service was pretty obvious while Twitter uses proprietary software and has custom Terms of Service, identi.ca is based on software under the GNU Affero General Public License, and the contents are CC-BY 3.0 licensed. The code behind identi.ca is called Laconica (recently renamed to StatusNet) and is hosted at gitorious:

 $ git clone git://gitorious.org/laconica/mainline.git

My account details are available under http://identi.ca/uwehermann, where I'm posting smaller announcements and notes about random technical stuff I'm working on (slightly more regularly than in this blog). Sometimes I use the web interface for posting, but using the Jabber integration available at identi.ca is even more convenient. You can both be notified of new posts ("dents") in real time via Jabber, as well as post your own dents from within your Jabber client, which is nice. identi.ca seems to become more popular every day, which will hopefully make the proprietary Twitter pretty much irrelevant sooner or later.

Ever since I read about the ATA TRIM command, I've been thinking that something like that would make a lot of sense for things like NBD. Currently, it's possible to serve a sparse file using NBD. I often do this, for example, testing things like the fix for Bug #513568 (nbd-server choking on a >3 TB RAID device) which would otherwise require me to spend significant amounts of money so that I get enough disks to test. Obviously that's not going to happen. If we're using sparse files, that means we claim to export more than we actually do. This is obviously useful for testing, but there are other cases where this kind of behaviour could be useful; for instance, when exporting swapdevices to several diskless clients, it would be a rare case indeed where all those clients need all of their available swapspace; it might be safe to slightly overcommit the disk space on your hard disk, on the assumption that none of your clients is going to use all that space at the same time. Similarly, when a file is removed on a filesystem on an NBD device, the kernel might use the generic TRIM layer described by Ted in the article above to relay that removal to the nbd-server process, which could then make sure the diskspace is deallocated. However, unfortunately, there currently is no way for an nbd-server to tell the kernel to create a new hole in a sparse file. Creating sparse files is done at file creation time; if you later want to add more holes than you did when creating the file, you need to recreate the whole file from scratch in order to do so. Additionally, when we're talking about a large amount of data that needs to be removed, it's usually much faster to say 'remove this block of data' rather than 'overwrite several megabytes with zeroes here' not just in API, also in kernel-side implementation, provided the filesystem supports extents. I think it might be nice if there were a public (userspace) API to tell the kernel that particular bits of a file or a block device are no longer required, and that they may thus be removed. But then, I'm not very experienced with kernel code, and it might be that I'm just plainly missing something here. Anyone?

Thanks Behdad for pointing out this interesting advertisement campaign by HSBC. I m very surprised how a word, printed on top of an image, can completely reverse the impression that the image makes on you.

Russ Allbery has written about the hostile reactions of sci-fi fans toward the delay of a book release [1]. Russ makes some good points regarding the issue of whether paying $100 for some books entitles a reader to have the rest of the series written (in summary - no, the author owes the fans nothing). Russ also notes that when someone makes a public promise to do something (such as writing a book) they will probably be feeling bad about being unable to live up to that, and harassing them about it is not going to make them feel any better - or make them better able to do the work. Charles Stross has written a blog post about this topic, he makes some interesting points and the comments illustrate most of them [2]. One comment claims that the author of the delayed book in question flaunts his NFL watching while the same person also criticises the author for writing a blog. This level of contempt for the author amazes me. In case anyone is interested I watch The Bill and Desperate Housewives every week. Anyone who wishes to criticise me for watching soapies instead of documentaries is welcome to do so. But I will not make any apologies for spending some of my time doing things other than coding. If I watch Desperate Housewives instead of fixing a bug that inconveniences you then you just have to deal with it. I believe that taking a regular break from work is a basic human right, apart from which there is evidence to show that working excessive hours decreases the quality and quantity of work that is completed [3]. It seems to me that members of the free software community are in a better position regarding fans than most creative people, and that this is largely due to how transparent the development process is. The most influential members of the user (fan) base are software developers. While people will be disappointed when software is not released on time or has some bugs many users know what is involved and understand that no testing will find all bugs. Even some basic shell scripting can teach people the difficulties of programming and convince them to have a little more patience than they might otherwise have. So the typical user of free software will have some idea of what is required to write software while the typical reader of a novel has no idea of what is involved in writing a book. Another benefit for the free software community in this regard is the open development process. When users are unhappy about release delays (as some Debian users were before Lenny was released) they can easily look at the bug list. If a user is pushy they can be invited to fix some bugs themselves, if they investigate the matter and discover that the bugs are too difficult for them to fix then they will probably feel compelled to stop hassling the people who can fix the bugs. Complaints from users regarding the release process can be turned around with the software is late because YOU haven t fixed any bugs . Please note that submitting bug reports is NOT criticism, it is in fact helping the development process (particularly when the bug reports contain information on how to fix the problems). This exposes another significant difference between writing software and writing a book. Even if I was a talented author I would not be able to offer any assistance to an author who had trouble completing a work simply because I wouldn t have the same vision for the plot of a book. But it s not uncommon for software development projects to be forked if the users are unhappy with some aspect of how they work, and it s also not uncommon for a programmer to voluntarily give one of their projects to another developer - sometimes developers try and convince other people to take projects from them when they don t have enough time. Even without changing the ownership of a project, anyone can submit a patch. The patches that I have received from users of my software have generally been of a high quality and it has taken little work to merge them. A final difference is that any programmer can produce a private fork of a project. I have lost count of the number of times that I have produced custom versions of free software for my own personal use or for the use of my clients. Sometimes the modifications that I made were unsuitable for wider use (IE they broke things for usage cases that I didn t care about) so I just privately made the software do what I needed. This makes the upstream developer (or team) and other contributors irrelevant to fixing the problem in question. Now this is not to say that the free software community is perfect. But it seems that certain types of bad behavior that we see demonstrated in the sci-fi fandom circles are uncommon and the people who demonstrate them are significantly outnumbered by people who oppose such actions. Publicly criticising a programmer for watching the NFL in their spare time is akin to holding a sign saying kick me . As I am a fan of science fiction (and hope to write some in the near future) I wonder whether the sci-fi community could be changed to have a culture more like that of the free software community. The web site 365tomorrows.com publishes a short sci-fi story every day [4], they have been doing this for a few years now. They started out publishing work by a small team of authors with the aim of writing a story a day for a year. Now they also take submissions from users and they have a forum for budding authors to discuss their work. The site Protagonize.com is based on the idea of collaborative fiction [5]. I wonder whether the increasing number of sci-fi fans who join such forums will change the nature of the community. Maybe when a book is delayed the fans could take comfort in an increasing amount of fan-fiction based on characters from that book, I expect that the fan fiction will probably not impress all authors - and some may be offended by having their characters used in pornographic fan fiction. But that might just lead to a market shift towards authors who are not overly concerned about such things. When attending sci-fi book signings I ve noticed fans who appear to have stalking tendencies. I have been wondering how much of this is another symptom of the same problem and how much of it is due to science fiction attracting some people who don t understand the concept of personal space and who haven t considered the mathematics of interactions between famous people and fans - as one of many fans the famous person will not remember your fan letters or whether they have met you before, it s not possible. I look forward to the day when a well known author can have lunch with some fans after a book signing and not be afraid of weird fans. I wonder if Cory Doctorow [6] already has such cool fans, Cory seems to be one of the leaders in the new open way of writing and releasing sci-fi so it seems likely that he would be among the first to reap the benefits. I m sure that most authors would like to have lunch or dinner with their fans if they could be assured that the probability of getting stuck with a nutty fan was extremely low.

• [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2009-02/016.html


• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/the_art_of_being_late.html


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/02/increasing-efficiency-through-less-work/


• [4] http://www.365tomorrows.com/


• [5] http://www.protagonize.com/


• [6] http://craphound.com/

On Thursday it was my birthday, and I fulfilled a promise I made to myself many years ago. I've always been a car nut, and when I was about 6 years old and had posters of Lamborghinis on my bedroom walls I promised myself that by the time I reached 35 I would have one. That would be long enough in the future that it might happen, but I'd still be young enough to still be able to appreciate it. Well, as it got to the beginning of this year I realised I was running out of time and my bank balance didn't quite look large enough to buy a Lamborghini. So, I cheated a little and I hired one for the day on Thursday. More pictures here. I had one car booked a few weeks ago, but unfortunately the company involved had to let me down as the car developed problems a couple of days before I was due to have it and needed to go away for repairs. I'm not going to complain too much about them, as it wasn't their fault and they did their level best to make things right: offering a different car, a refund or a later replacement hire. But dammit! I wanted the Lamborghini and I wanted it on my birthday! I quickly rang around on Wednesday to find somebody else, and thankfully the folks at Signature Car Hire were very helpful, sorting out a car with just a few hours' notice. Yay! When they guys turned up on Thursday morning to deliver the car to my office, I couldn't stop myself grinning like the 6-year old boy whose promise I was keeping. Here was a gorgeous car, and it was mine for the day!!! I planned a route for the day to take in some nice driving roads and, importantly, some tunnels. I've watched Top Gear on the TV and I read Autocar every week, and they had both said that taking a fast sports car through a tunnel with the roof down was a good thing to do. I now know that's an understatement! As a whole, the car was awesome: the acceleration, the handling, the brakes were all wonderful. But, as I found out on that day, the noise from the engine was just astonishing. I went through several tunnels that day, heading down past Baldock to Hatfield and back, and at full throttle I could not help but laugh out loud at the music coming from the 5-litre V10 orchestra just inches behind me. It's an experience I'm never going to forget. grin. I also gave short rides to quite a few of the people at work; oddly I had lots of friends that day... :-) I'd also planned other things for the day. I bought myself a new camera in advance to make sure I got some nice photos of the day. Then at the end of the day I went out to the pub with a huge group of friends and I was forced to drink lots of beer. It was horrible, horrible I tell you.

Thinking that this might be worth hacking on tail (because I felt the functionality would be better kept there than in head), I started to have a look at its source. Lo and behold! tail -n +N already does exactly this... (Obviously a followup to Zack's comment on my previous posting.)

While drinking my coffee, I stumbled over http://www.longurlplease.com/ on Golem.de (sorry, it's German).

They say, that when you get a shortened URL, you

• have no idea where it links to
• are unaware you've been there
• may secretly linked to yucky websites

That sounds correct, esp with the "funny" "new" ideas of the German government about blocking sites with 'Kinder"pornographie"' (sorry for the German again, and for the multi-quotes, but they say I have to call it like this...) and recording those who try to access such sites.

Anyways, that great service over at longurlplease.com will make the world a safer place:

• You see you've been there before
• Tell it links to youtube
• More information before you click

(the lists are copied from their site, without care about proper rewording for my context)

Sounds great, huh? And they even support 65 different shorturl services. But lets see how they support the same service twice in a row (should be easy too, right?).

1. Go to http://tinyurl.com/
2. Create a shorturl for http://gpl.imageafter.com/ (= http://tinyurl.com/oae8sx)
3. Go to http://tinyurl.com/
4. Create a shorturl for http://tinyurl.com/oae8sx (= http://tinyurl.com/r6n74h)
5. Ask the longurlplease.com API about http://tinyurl.com/r6n74h (curl "http://www.longurlplease.com/api/v1.1?q=http://tinyurl.com/r6n74h")
6. See "http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/r6n74h": "http:\/\/tinyurl.com\/oae8sx" as result
7. Laugh and spread double-shortened Rick-Rolls (people will love you!)

That makes the whole service somehow useless, as you gain exactly nothing, and tell longurlplease.com about each shorturl that comes to your browser (if you have the Firefox plugin installed).

On the other hand, the creator could easily add a recursive resolver, but I bet he (or she? or they?) won't do that, when one does not want the service to die completely in a endless loop (I don't have a black hat, neither I have a white one - I actually don't like hats at all, but it should be possible to construct some funny redirection loops with such services).

Update:
It seems tinyurl.com was intelligent and changed that behaviour now:
Error: TinyURL redirects to a TinyURL.
The URL you followed redirects back to a TinyURL and therefore we can't directly send you to the site. The URL it redirects to is http://tinyurl.com/oae8sx.

But one still can fake this:
http://ow.ly/9Arf -> http://tinyurl.com/oae8sx -> http://gpl.imageafter.com/

Via Planet Bazaar, this paragraph from a post by Paul Hummer caught my attention (emphasis mine):

Finally, I wrote an open ended question to myself to think about, and thought that maybe I d throw it out here as well. For context, Jono Bacon was talking about community (y know, plugging his book and all that :), and I wrote Open source thrives on a meritocracy - how can we prevent feelings of entitlement? I see this a lot in open source communities: people earn their commit rights and then start behaving like everyone owes them something. Collaboration is about peers, not about hierarchies.

Now I m reposting that here because, although I m not very keen on philosophizing myself, something in that thought was of immediate appeal to me.

Hola all,
So this is my first blog post since UDS started (although I have been doing some work microblogging this session around (I find that if I treat it like multicast IRC using gwibber, it suddenly makes more sense to me). We're now three days into UDS, and working hard on defining what Ubuntu karmic will be, and I must say I am excited with the way things are shaping up to UNR discussions, to the Android Execution Environment (and if anyone has any questions on it, please direct those emails to Michael Frey and Debbie Beliveau as they are the people behind it, despite Slashdot's reports on the subject).

There are loads going on, including Moblin (which you'll see this afternoon), Android (same), ports kernel handling, and loads of other cool things come up. I'll comment on some of the more interesting things as time goes on.

In other news, as of late last night, I'm officially an upstream KDE developer with SVN commit writes. I've written an email detailing my plans for working on KDE to kde-core-deveonl, where is it is happily stuck in a moderation queue, so hopefully those involved in upstream KDE development will soon learn of my intentions :-).

I'll write more later,
Michael

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. - Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line

What a fun read. It s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line. He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at high speed . Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, bits in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor. Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago. He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon! Prospective station wagon buyer: I know what you say is true but er I don t know how to maintain a tank! Bullhorn: You don t know how to maintain a station wagon either! Buyer: But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music. Bullhorn: But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep! Buyer: Stay away from my house, you freak! Bullhorn: But Buyer: Can t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

That doesn t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don t want control in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional. He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . . Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a corpus of typesetting lore rather than a program. Or how about this one: Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch. The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: Debian s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or honoring diversity or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.

Thanks, CRM114. From yesterday morning (where I ran my daily dist-upgrade) to now, you just *trashed* all my legitimate mail. Oh, sure, I got warned in some way by NEWS.Debian entries, but I didn'tfigure out that it was URGENT that I change my *.css files. What was happening is, in short, that all non whitelisted mail was just...reduced to a blank line. And I didn't figure out immediately because I have several whitelist entries, so I was still receiving *some* mails. So, it is not only "stop working"....it is doing much harm. If you're a CRM114 user and haven't upgraded to 20090423-1, you've been warned. I'm currently considering what to do and if a bug report is warranted (RC, of course). Oh, for sure, there *is* a warning through NEWS.Debian but is breaking existing behaviour so badly really something that we want in Debian? Losing legitimate mail is the worse thing a program can do, isn't it?

Some might dread the feature of read notifications supported by certain MUAs; some call it an invasion of privacy ; and yet, it can also be useful in certain situations: When a message is read or seen in a MUA supporting this extension, the programme emits a notification back to the sender saying something along the lines of your message was read on . This is good to know, especially in times when you cannot wait for the failed-delivery-notification that follows four to five days of unsuccessful (but furious) attempts of some delivery agent, assuming it doesn t get trashed as spam. Such a read notification is logically a reply to the original message, isn t it? The RFC 680 proposed in April 1975 defines the header References as a way to point to other correspondence which this message references . This header, along with In-Reply-To (defined in the same RFC), is commonly used in every-day mail traffic to refer to previously exchanged messages, and enables mail readers to thread separate messages together into coherent conversations (it takes a human to remove the coherence, the technical aspect is infallible). Cut. Microsoft was also founded in April 1975, and it took them 20 years to barely manage to squeeze through the Internet door without the proverbial foot in it. They published a browser and several e-mail programmes, and it always appeared as if they tiredlessly tried to be different from the rest, attempting to form a clique of users, a Microsoft league in which to increase their revenue through network effects. Sounds bad, is bad, but yet again, they managed, through unimaginable feats of entrepreneurial genius and ruthless behaviour. Cut. In 1982, STD11 declared the aforementioned In-Reply-To and References headers as standards. At that time, Microsoft software didn t even know what a computer network was. Cut. Does it come as a surprise that read notifications sent by Microsoft e-mail programmes, such as Microsoft Outlook do not make use of either of these standard headers to tag read notifications they send? Instead, Microsoft pushes Thread-Topic and Thread-Index, which are undocumented and thus probably only work in a Microsoft-only context. How am I supposed to assume anything else than Microsoft actively trying to oppose standards. Anyone who boycotts standards is hindering progress and should be left behind. It s good to see that the Internet society seems to follow that trend more and more. Update: I found a way to extract the data to recreate the In-Reply-To with procmail. I don t see a way to do the same for the References header. Also, I ve only verified that this works for message disposition notifications from Outlook 2003, although I expect it to work for other, similarly crippled MUAs too.

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10. For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted. In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it s just not happening. I feel partly it s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.

It's taken a lot longer than I expected (mostly due to getting other things done in Emdebian etc.) but now that Lenny is out, QOF can finally drop all the previously deprecated code and move to libqof2, so the upstream code has now been released via Alioth (0.8.0) and the binaries have been uploaded to Debian and are waiting in NEW.

QOF provides a set of C language utilities for performing generic structured complex queries on a set of data held by a set of C/C++ objects. This framework allows programmers to add query support to their applications without having to hook into a SQL Database. QOF is a large part of my attempts to get some degree of data freedom to complement the source code freedom. This remains a problem with certain applications, especially financial ones, so I've tried to make it easier to both import and export data between programs using QOF and to convert the default QOF data storage formats into other common formats using simple tools and scripts based on XSL or perl. Having a SQL-type query interface accessible via the command line is a huge bonus when dealing with large data sets.

There is a patch for gnotime that makes the final adjustments to handling the removed code. pilot-qof and gpe-expenses already build cleanly without the deprecated code but each of these is also pending a new upstream release, so rather than need a binNMU, I'm simply going to make those releases when QOF clears NEW.

Having said that, pilot-qof and gpe-expenses introduce new binary packages themselves so they will spend time in NEW too. pilot-qof will be the last of the set to be released because the new upstream version can use symbols from the new gpe-expenses release to make it easier to move data between applications. However, that support is optional at build time and could be done via a Debian revision, so I might do it that way.

This also marks the completion of the migration of QOF from SourceForge to Alioth - principally for easier bug tracking and a usable mailing list archive. The QOF VCS is in svn.debian.org.

The mailing list for QOF development is therefore at alioth:
QOF-devel and archives also.

I'm still working on two other QOF-based utilities - one that can handle simple accounts and one to handle simple invoices. The invoice handling is already partially implemented in pilot-qof but I'm looking at a GTK+ frontend with a robust command line interface so that scripts can update the invoice data behind-the-scenes. Hopefully, some form of arbitrary-format parser can be arranged that can handle extracting data from whatever form the client happens to send - typically PDF. It'll need tweaking for each client, but it could work. The objects used by gpe-expenses and pilot-qof (including invoices) are exposed via QOF and can be mixed together in any new QOF application, easily able to read data from multiple sources, merge data sets, query data sets and export into other formats. The core currency and expense types come from pilot-link but are then enhanced to support GnuCash conventions.

For information on another QOF application called "estron" - an idea for a data-driven query interface - see http://estron.alioth.debian.org/. Problem 1 with estron: the examples all rely on postgres and I just can't get that to setup properly as either a test system or as a Debian package. Problem 2: estron was intended to be an interpreter that could be written "in itself" but whilst this is possible for the simpler examples, doing more complicated stuff like calculating values from other values makes the estron XML very obtuse. The current codebase uses GOB2 to

QOF is now stable and I don't expect to need another SONAME bump for quite a while. If anyone is interested in taking on estron or helping with the Cash and/or Invoice frontends, let me know. The problem with estron currently is bitrot - the GTK+ frontend has too many gtk1.2 hangovers which now fail to build.

Switzerland voted today for the introduction of biometric passports, with 50.1% for and 49.9% against, one of the closest votes since 1848 (according to NZZ). While the news don t fill me with glee there are too many unanswered questions around the digital passports one aspect of the decision surprised and even shocked me. I do not like biometric passports, because I like to know when my data are consumed, and by whom. The German government assures that only authorised parties can access those data, and published information about the security features of the German biometric passports, but I am unconvinced that those are adequate to protection for the 10 years of validity of the passport. Furthermore, I could find absolutely no information on who the authorised parties are, or which regulations cover who will become authorised in the near future. If that was properly addressed, e.g. by leaving it up to me and only me to decide who gets access, then the digital passport could actually be a good step forward, streamlining border control and making travel easier. But there is a completely different avenue of concern, no matter who gives permission to whom to consume whose data: how are they used, and where, and how long are they stored, and for what? Again, I cannot find any regulations. Instead, my question to the German Department of the Interior was answered (!) along the lines of it being up to each country to decide themselves over the use and storage of the data. In this light, it makes little difference that the German procedure for the digital passport does not permit the issuing bureau to store the data, while Switzerland s strategy is to build a central database of all these personal details (this is what shocked me). It might make you wonder what use the Swiss government is hoping for, and you might feel uncomfortable with your government building up an even tighter database of its people. But I d much rather have my data stored in Switzerland than consumed and stored every time I enter another country, because when I compare the style of governance of Switzerland to pretty much anything else out there, I am glad I get to live here (even though I am not Swiss and cannot vote). Yet, it s a worrying step in a direction of the glass human , of a society in which personal privacy is unknown and everything is part of the system. These are totalitarian visions, and it s doubtful whether we ll ever actually get there (so far, I don t think any state has come up with the information management strategies required to properly store, make use, and read sense out of the massive amounts of information), but the trend is clearly visible. In the end, however, what worries me the most is how relaxed people treat their personal information these days. Look at the infamous social networking sites, or other Web 2.0 gimmicks and you really start to wonder how headless people can be these days. I cannot immediately paint a scenario where it might be dangerous to push all kinds of information about yourself to the masses, but the mere idea of that is scary in and of itself. I d prefer to have the choice with whom to share what data. The biometric passports, despite the advantages they might bring, are one step away from that, because they empower the government to make that choice for you. I don t consider that progress at all. Update: NZZ reports that the issue is not closed. In the cantons of Grishuna and Lucerne, people are challenging the vote and a recount or even re-vote seems possible. I will post an update as soon as I know more. Then, I would also like to address some replies I ve received over the real problems behind the digital passports, because it cannot be just the central data storage it s not like your government doesn t already have all that, and I can t imagine how your fingerprint could be used against you.

It is time for stupid, empty politicians slogans once again in my dear country. And, as always, while we had lively, controversial presidential elections three years ago (and I won't rant this time on why so many Mexicans still believe the current president can only be called a de facto president), the mid-term elections... Fail to get any attention and cause only bored reactions. I am writing today mostly because I stumbled upon Francisco's post on why the Mexican Ecologist Green Party (PVEM) campaign does not impress him. As many, many other people with strong political opinions I know, I will go to the voting booth next July 5th, as I have done every time since I was of age - But I will most probably void my ballot, as I have found nobody worth my vote. And even if I am (and have always been) a leftist person, none of the four so-called leftist parties inspire the smallest bit of confidence. But hell, even the rightist or centrist parties fail to inspire confidence to their voters - After the 2006 electoral fiasco, we got a political system nobody believes in. And all analysts seem to concur that we moved from the most complete presidential regime to an utter partidocracy, where all of the (strong enough) parties cover each other's back not to lose the respective privileges (largely, money, but also law-making faculties and influence, which of course translates to impunity). Worth a very special mention is the crown jewel of political clowns in Mexico - PVEM, the Mexican Ecologist Green Party. A party that gets the gold medal for the most corrupt in our country (which is no small feat). A party where the National Party Presidents to date have only been father and son. And it is alarming because it is the only party apparently gathering more voters than they had before. But also, because of its utter pragmatism and lack of respect for anything they might once have stood for. I still remember on the 1994 elections, the first time they participated in general elections, their slogan was don't vote for a politician Vote for an ecologist... Little did the society know by then they were worse off than our oft-hated politicians. Can you imagine a so-called ecologist party that is expelled of the Global Greens as its behaviour is completely antithetical to anything a green party stands for? A party that promotes reinstating the death penalty (which was abolished from our Constitution, after decades of not being applied, less than a decade ago)? Or they say that, if a given medicine is not available at the Social Security hospitals, the government should pay the citizen so he can go and buy it at a drug store? (of course, if a needed medicine is not available at the Social Security it is most probably because the government is underfunded, not because the lazy administrators don't want to buy the medicines. And yes, with those two retrograde, stupid and -thankfully- completely unfeasible promises they have doubled their probable voters outcome in the past couple of months. The campaigns are only officially starting now. They are all really pathetic. A voter turnout of ~30% is expected. But yes, I am a politized person and just cannot help inviting everybody who has the right to go and vote. If there is somebody worth voting for in your district, please vote for him/her. However... Together with many people I admire, together with many of my friends, together with the people who still believe it is possible to make something out of this forsaken country's politic system... I invite you to void your ballots. Hopefully they will be enough so they must be heard this time.

It s been awhile since I posted some Jacob updates. He s 2.5 years old now. So here we go! Here s what I think A recent conversation after Jacob had been misbehaving. John: I think we should have some consequences for that.
Terah: Do you think he should have time out?
Jacob, eavesdropping: I THINK NOT! He managed to evade time out that time because once we got over our shocked silence, we were both laughing too hard. The Post Office Every time Jacob and I drive past a Sonic (a drive-in restaurant), he says, See post office over there. Have cherry limeade! Yes, he was there with Terah to get a cherry limeade once. The post office thing was a mystery to me. Near as we can figure, he had gone to Sonic with Terah right after the post office one day, and got them confused. Then I took him to an actual post office last week. I told him we were going to a post office. I started getting him out of the car. He looked confused (after all, post offices don t look like this, right?) But then he said, This post office. Have cherry limeade inside! I had to tell him it is a different kind of post office, with mailboxes inside. Hmm. I gave him a piece of junk mail to carry to the car, which I think may have been more exciting for him than even a cherry limeade. Terah has tried to explain that a Sonic isn t a post office, but he doesn t believe her. Trains and Chicago We took the train to Chicago for a quick weekend last week. Jacob loved it. He jabbers on and on about going to the train station to get on the night train (we did get on the train at 4AM), eating in the train diner car , and seeing all the conductors on the train. He also loves to talk about the elevators in our hotel, riding on a city bus, and seeing ambulances on the streets. Didn t Notice It We got a new Roomba off Woot the other day. Its box has been sitting in our kitchen for a few days now, since we didn t have time to unbox it yet (already have another Roomba). Finally Terah started unboxing it. Jacob said, Ooo, a SPECIAL Roomba! I didn t notice it there. Terah: What makes it special, Jacob? Jacob: Comes from Walmart. Can t win em all, I guess. Colors Terah read in her What to Expect book about the toddler years that, at Jacob s age, there s a small chance that children can identify one color. Jacob can identify more than a dozen, maybe even two. Navigation This really shocks me. As we re driving down the road, Jacob will correctly point out directions to me: This way to day care! That way to grandma s house! That way to Newton! What really shocked me, though, was when he pointed to an entrance ramp to an Interstate one which we never take with him and correctly told me where it went. And when he pointed down a country road that we have never even talked about, let alone driven on, and told me where it must wind up (in Newton, yep). I have no idea how he managed to figure that out. Scary Memory Last week, Jacob got a balloon. It reminded him of a balloon he got last Halloween six whole months ago. He was at a Halloween event for kids, and they gave him a black balloon. It was filled with helium, and it rose up high enough that it touched a sharp edge of a fire sprinkler and popped. Jacob told us about all of that, right down to it being a black balloon that popped on a sprinkler. They gave him another balloon to replace it orange. Jacob told us, Orange balloon not pop. Six months ago. I think it s time to get him signed up for the debate team Days of the week Jacob doesn t know what day it is, or in what order they come, but he does know that we go to church on Sunday, that he goes to grandma and grandpa s house on Tuesday, and to the clinic and Walmart on Wednesdays.