Wow, what a wonderful weekend was this for Debian. And, yet again, I managed to miss the live announcement and party on IRC.
So... We got a shiny, new, French DPL. Just after that, we got one last release for Sarge, and right away we got a stable Etch - Who says having a new DPL cannot speed up things? ;-) Anyway... I don't remember where I started the meme when Sarge was released (it was not on my blog, it seems)... But here it goes again:
What were you doing at...
Etch release? Having a nice time with Nadezhda, walking around this broken and dear city in my last day of vacations.
Sarge release? At my psychologist. Yes, Sarge drove us all nuts.
Woody release? Sitting at a lent workstation at Departamento de Seguridad en C mputo in my University. Of course, the announcement was broadcasted right away to everybody around me ;-) I was in NM by then, and was a bit disappointed because my work didn't appear in the release.
Potato release? Don't know... I was not yet involved with Debian by then.
[Update]: Thanks to Wouter, my old meme-starting message appeared - is he more patient than I am, or just more organized? :-) Anyway, boo for Jaws breaking old URLs (I upgraded 0.4->0.5->0.6->0.7 since then)

It was on your blog. At least if I didn't miscopy the URL back then. And, no, I again don't remember where I was when Sarge released. I do know where I was when etch released, though—at home, on IRC. :-P

I've written a small parser for iptables rules in Python, and made it output GraphVis data. Byte counters are translated to line width, packet counters to line color. Dashed lines didn't receive any data so far. This is the result for my laptop's tiny firewall setup (generated by Pyroman; the double accept/drop/reject rules are mostly for cosmetic purposes, and counting data and packet totals. However the reject rule also does a 'cleaner' reject for TCP connections) I've ran it on a much larger firewall (~100 chains, ~600 rules; a multi-homed firewall at our university), but it becomes to messy with the dotty layout algorithm. The firewall chains generated by pyroman are pretty flat; it generates one chain per client-server combination, the INPUT etc. chains are filled with source/destination filters, the services are filtered in the second level then. Also most of the traffic is handled by connection tracking, so it boils down to having one big accept line, with little going on beyond that. So the visualization turned out to be only of partial interest (at least for Pyroman-generated firewalls. It could be useful if someone actually nests chains more levels deep). Still there is some interesting stuff I might be going to try with the iptables-save parser I've written:

• pyroman could reload the firewall, keeping traffic counters where possible
• based on traffic counters for hosts and services, it could reorder entries in the firewall to optimize the firewall slightly (in the pyroman model, hosts and services can be reordered to a certain extend; I'm aware that this is not true for generic iptables rules. It might however be still helpful for some users to get suggestions on how to order their rules. It's also unlikely this will have a large performance impact in general, unless you have one really heavily used service and didn't place it first on your own...)

[P.S. Anyone aware of a GTK/Gnome application or library for visualizing graphs?]

The etch release is imminent, so I thought I'd run sloccount on an unpacked Debian source tree. I wrote a little script that downloads and unpacks all Debian source packages. It does dpkg-source -x only, no debian/rules unpack or such, since that isn't standardized. The result is a source tree that is 46 gigabytes. Unfortunately, there is something in that tree that makes sloccount fail. It reports a mere 45 million lines of code, which is about 1022 lines per kilobyte. (Later, I'll narrow it down and report an actual bug. For now, the best I have is "something in Debian breaks sloccount".) Sloccount would give fairly good results, and it would exclude, say, JPEGs, of which there are 455. However, in this situation the best I can easily come up with is a sum of running a plain wc -l on each file, and that sum is 1005505921. That's just over one billion lines of code, in 2868448 files, or 350.54 lines per file, on average. Disclaimer: that sum includes many non-source files, such as the JPEGs, and a number of packages don't actually unpack properly with dpkg-source, you have to run some variant of debian/rules unpack. However, I'd be willing to bet the number is in the correct ball park. We can get better results once sloccount gets fixed.

I've been added to Planet GNOME (thanks jdub!), and this post is just to say hello! I havn't been a large GNOME contributor so far (I was the Debian maintainer for Galeon some years ago, thats about it), but I recently started a small DBus related project (for exploring the DBus APIs of programs), dbus-inspector, which is now hosted in the GNOME subversion repository. Other GNOME-related projects I'm thinking of:

• DBus hook, an application that allows you to easily setup ECA rules (event-condition-action) for DBus signals. E.g. to start your music synchronization tool when you plug in your mp3 player, whatever, in a rather generic way. Mount your network file server when you connect to your home wireless network, etc. - preferrably in an easy to understand way
• MP3val GUI, right now a tiny PyGTK wrapper around the MP3 validation and repair tool mp3val (you can't imagine how many MP3's are broken in one way or another, fortunately most errors are ignored by most players or only affect e.g. seeking) could use some extended functionality.
• Pyroman, a firewall configuration tool with some nice capabilities (rollback on error, debugging, very fast and efficient, Python or XML configuration files) could use an easy to use UI. It doesn't expose you to all the complexity of iptables, but instead lets you work in a "client, server, service" way of configuring the firewall, generating a somewhat sane layout of tables automatically.
• Flow analysis and visualization of iptables rules

I'd like to say thank you for all the great work you did. Having been a Galeon power user, I'm by now quite convinced of the "keep it simple" approach, and I have the impression that not having so many options means that I get more work done (since I don't waste time playing around with infinite options). Thanks for that. And for providing me with a pretty and unobtrusive work environment for the last 8 years or so.

For a few months I have been spending a lot of time using a Mac running OS/X for 40 hours a week. Recently a discussion started at a client site as to whether Macs or PCs should be used for future desktop machines.

The Apple hardware is very slick, everything fits together nicely and works well. For example my Apple monitor connects to my Mac via a single cable that supplies power, USB, and the video signal. My USB keyboard and mouse connect to my monitor. So my Mac has only three cables connected to it, power, Ethernet, and the monitor cable. The same thing on a PC would require an additional USB cable going to the PC and an additional power cable going to the monitor.

That is just one trivial example of how Macs are slick.

The advantage of a PC is that installing Linux is much easier and better supported (the vast majority of Linux users have PCs). The benefits of slick hardware are greatly diminished if it's only partly supported in terms of drivers and/or getting answers to technical questions on the net.

Another issue is that of software compatibility. When doing Linux work having a desktop machine that runs X is a significant benefit - even if all your work is text based. The Apple X server that I have installed never worked properly and it's a hack like the various Windows X servers. To make things worse the current versions of OpenOffice for Mac use X and therefore don't work for me - I've been told that the next version of OpenOffice will fix this.

Then there's the issue of price. For a Mac you would want to have a machine with an Intel CPU which means a recent and expensive machine. For a PC the benefits of a 64bit machine over an old P3 or P4 are very small. For all the work I do a refurbished IBM or Compaq P3 machine would provide all the performance I require, have better software compatability than a Mac, and cost only $120 for a machine.

Also I imagine that some common and cheap PC expansions (such as KVM switches) would cost a lot more for a Mac.

You can run Linux on a Mac, but what's the point? You lose some of the hardware features so the Mac becomes an expensive PC that's not entirely compatible. I'd rather have a P3 PC on my desktop than the latest Mac.

But I wouldn't rule out recommending a Mac to other people. People who have no-one to help them run Linux are best advised to use a Mac. Of course Windows isn't viable due to security problems.

Our local supermarket, Village Market (whose domain name seems to have disappeared) is generally pretty good considering its small size. Oddly, though, they don’t carry a single special kosher for Passover product. Not even a box of humble Matzah. Rachele asked the putative owner about the lack of Passover foods, but a week into the holiday there doesn’t appear to have been any progress. The lack of kosher-for-Passover products is particularly surprising in our community which has a fairly sizable Jewish presence. In fact, I would be surprised if there were a single large supermarket in all of Massachusetts that doesn’t carry at least have a few token items during Passover. Even from a purely economic perspective, it must be irrational to not carry these items. The overall U.S. Kosher market is over $35 billion annually. I’m not sure what percentage of that is Passover goods, but it must be substantial. I know lots of Jews who observe Passover dietary rules even when they make no attempt to follow any other kosher laws. I’ve even observed people eating shrimp on matzah! Village Market needs to get with the times. (And fix their website while they’re at it.) Update: Steve in the comments asked for a source on the economics of Passover. I found this:

Out of an estimated $250-billion worth of kosher food sales annually, more than 40 percent take place during the Passover season, Lubinsky said.

I’m not sure how to reconcile the $250 billion here with the $35 billion figure I found elsewhere, except perhaps the former figure may not be limited to the United States, or perhaps it is retail rather than wholesale.

Ubuntu got AppArmor support. This is bad news. AppArmor is a weak design. IMHO it gives the users a false impression of security, while leaving too much open to bypass security. But the biggest problem IMHO is that noone at Ubuntu seems to be working on their SELinux support. All I've seen is Ubuntu users breaking their system to a point where they didn't know how to fix it in the attempt to install their SELinux packages. The packages are mostly a 1:1 copy of the Debian packages I guess, but for example their new 'upstart' init-replacement likely isn't capable of actually starting a SELinux enabled system. Oh, and Debian didn't include the relevant package in any 'stable' release, Ubuntu had it in 'universe' since 'warty'. Right now, feisty will include the package, though it reportedly can't be installed. In the example used in the blog, evince is maybe protected from exploits by bad PDF files, but if you do a cp /usr/bin/evince /tmp and run that copy, all the protection is gone. A symlink might already be sufficient! So AppArmor is heavily relying on the user playing nicely. You might want to read this Article at LWN about AppArmor and why it's having a hard time getting into Linux mainline and "Security Anti-Pattern: Path based access control" in Joshua Brindle's "SecurityBlog" for a detailed article on the weaknesses in AppArmors approach. And their constant claim of being easier to use than SELinux isn't true either: the 'learning' mode itself will only generate you an incomplete policy. It's about as much as you can achieve in SELinux by transforming audit errors to allow rules using the "audit2allow" tool. Maybe even less; for example when an application accesses a font file, SELinux audit2allow will generate a rule that allows access to all font files (since they have the same type). This doesn't rely on any directory globbing magic, but because there is a type for font files. I expect that future versions of audit2allow will actually recommend which interfaces to add instead of just listing raw allow statements. AppArmors 'abstractions' seems to match what is called 'interfaces' in SELinux, except that interfaces in the SELinux reference policy are well documented and much more extensive. The 'abstractions' offered look like an early, incomplete version of the old NSA policy to me, before this was restructured to become the 'reference policy'. Interaction between processes also seems to be completely ignored by AppArmor. So it seems to me that "preventing evince from trashing your home directory when opening a malicious PDF file" is pretty much all you can do with AppArmor? But again, this isn't so much about bashing AppArmor or Ubuntu. I'm just disappointed that noone at Ubuntu seems to work on the more sound and solid SELinux. Most of SELinux is already in Ubuntu (inherited by their Debian roots), but it's lacking some integration work and such. Ubuntu is often said to be more agile than Debian and better at adopting new technologies, but in my experience, this often is limited to 'visual' stuff. If Debian were better at recruiting new people (for example in the SELinux section, we also seriously lack manpower), I'd probably be annoyed by Ubuntu 'trying to be first with all the pretty stuff' (yes, saying this would not be fair, that's why I'm putting it in quotes). Right now I'm mostly happy that they 'divert' many newbies off Debian and to their huge forums. Although it occasionally means I need to help an Ubuntu user to fix his system when he doesn't get any help there.

Had a great time at DemoCampMontreal2 tonight. There were a ton of people there, the demos were great, and the bar at the SAT was open for business, so it was possible to drink beer and watch demos. There were all very solid projects with lots of interesting stuff going on. My favorite aha! moment came from Hugh McGuire showing off Collectik, his new social-podcast-aggregation platform, when he demo'd how he uses the site, and I realized that that's how I want to organize my podcast listening, too. I also liked Kakiloc, a location-oriented social networking site. They let you tell your friends what you're doing and where you are, and the friends can see it on the Web, by SMS, or through IM. Sound familiar? Yeah. Kakiloc's advantage is that they have more geo-oriented interface, and some extremely powerful rules that trigger activity when you (say) get close to someone in your circle of friends. However, I think in a world of Worse Is Better Kakiloc is going to have a hard time making a sale. Twitter already has the mindshare in this market, and the network effect makes it more valuable for people to stay with the popular platform. I also really dug the films from OpenSourceCinema.org, although they skirted the "demo" concept pretty scarcely. One thing that was neat was that the OSC Web site was built by a real-life barn-raising: Sylvain Carle put out the call for some help, and people convened on his house to build the Web site. Cool idea. All in all I had a really good time. DemoCampMontreal2 worked out well. tags: DemoCampMontreal2 kakiloc collectik opensourcecinema

Bait and switch So, on the way out the door to DemoCamp, I grabbed a handful of loonies out of my bedside change basket for the parking meters downtown. When I got to SAT, though, I realized that the "loonies" I'd brought were in fact Sacagawea dollars. I'd gotten them as change from the ticket machines on the Las Vegas monorail. Doh! Fortunately, downtown Montreal parking meters take credit cards, so I was OK. tags: loonie sacagawea parking meter monorail

Feisty Upgraded to FeistyFawn on Wednesday. Worked fine, nice smooth upgrade (who expects that?). Nothing revolutionary, but the software works well. tags: feistyfawn ubuntu upgrade

A lot of people seem to post their votes onto planet these days. More so than 2 or 3 years ago. I'm still not going to post the full details, but here's my usual summary, based on the debate and the platforms.

Above None Of The Above

• Sam Hocevar - I share his view of the problems, although I don't agree with all the suggested actions. A bit quirky, but seems nice enough.
• Aigars Mahinovs - I think he could be an accountable and fair DPL. Has ideas - not all good ideas and I don't like the aim of releasing less often - but I can't see him driving on if he's getting flamed to a well-done crisp. A leader more than a ruler.
• Gustavo Franco - nice guy, but maybe I just think that because I've had more direct contact with him than other candidates recently. I agree with most of his views of the problems, except Ubuntu and the tattoo. Maybe too inexperienced for this time.
• Raphael Hertzog - I think the team model is a good idea for the size of the project now and it learns from past attempts.

Borderline

• Wouter Verhelst - I'd be voting mainly based on what I've seen of him. I don't want to vote for someone standing with a low-detail platform, as that's just scary. Even when people break promises, it's hard enough to remove them. The debate did give a bit more detail. I fear the adoption of ESR-style "authority follows responsibility" - that's just impractical for parts of the debian infrastructure.
• Simon Richter - Generally OK, but I'm worried by the cutting it fine with the platform, not posting any rebuttals and being late for the debate because one battery went flat.

Below NOTA

• Steve McIntyre - This won't surprise anyone: it's because of the manner in which the Debian UK Society retail business was started; but also the trial misadvertised as mediation of the d-i conflict. I shudder to think what social conformance tests he wants in NM.
• Anthony Towns - last year I didn't vote for this politician (while correct in one way, most DDs have never even seen me in a mediation situation and he didn't have the courage to cc me on that email) because I thought that email suggested he'd be a terrible DPL. This year, he's demonstrated how terrible and the platform and debate suggests he hasn't even noticed: he thinks he's been a successful leader, despite the recall vote. One or two interesting ideas, but not enough to overcome that. His rebuttal seems to utterly miss Sam Hocevar's point about how being not-evil (Corporate Social Responsibility, as seen in the private sector) is different from actively being good (Concern for Community, as seen in the third sector): is that being dense or devious?

So, how wrong am I this year? Is there more trouble ahead?

A relatively recent addition to the Google range is Google Docs. I'll be testing it shortly, but I see it has already suffered google's usual security/privacy bugs Apart from encouraging the larger Atom feed format, dropping RDF support and unreliable alternatives to its eyetests, Blogger is one of Google's best services. The basic service seems to work in a half-decent manner. Of course, it still has bugs and that let someone post a hoax Google news release Google's search results are still unstable: here's a consultant spotting lots of turbulance in the results. If Google's actions were unfair and harmed your performance, you can't touch them, as kinderstart discovered (but that ruling might be an interesting reference for other ratings sites, so there's a silver lining). The site complains constantly that I don't let it rampage through my browser and I haven't downloaded the latest from Adobe. It's a bit less annoying now that ytplay is available, but it shows that Google doesn't care much for free software support. An interesting twist has been Viacom suing Google for a billion dollars and calling them all sorts of names. (Beware bias in the BBC reporting on this, as BBC just signed up for Google-YouTube [BBC] - is there a monopoly that the BBC won't befriend?) Adwords and adsense looks like some of Google's top mass-market money-makers. I have mixed reports about them, including some of my customers that are happy to use them, and others that get results like this commenter at Problogger which suggests that adsense referrals maybe don't always report accurately. There is also a privacy/trust problem with having one company seeing so much of the world's searches. This was the basis for a recent Ask.com ad campaign (nice idea, shame about the microsite's poor accessibility and various other things - it gave one Google-worker a good laugh and got better commentary from Susan Hallam Communications). Privacy bodies backed Google's step towards allowing user privacy [BBC] but there's more that should be done. That's enough for now. I've got some more positive news which I'll post along with the Docs review.

I'm not really sure which I find more disappointing - this, this or this.

The Ubuntu Code of Conduct is something that's designed to ensure two things. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, that discussions don't end up bogged down in personal abuse with no useful conclusions being drawn. Secondly, and perhaps more subtly, to ensure that potential contributors aren't put off by an atmosphere of perceived hostility.

The second point has been most commonly raised with respect to women in computing (perhaps most notably by the FLOSSPOLS findings), but it's not limited to that. One of the reasons I'm not involved with Debian nowadays is the atmosphere on the mailing lists[1]. If you're about to make something that you expect to be a controversial point, realising that the likely result is going to be a certain number of responses implying that holding that opinion is stupid is a pretty strong incentive to avoid posting in the first place. Suppressing the expression of thoughts isn't beneficial, even if you're not doing so deliberately.

Now, the obvious response to this is to accuse the CoC of enforcing some sort of Tellytubby land where people are nice to each other and it's all a mutual love-in. Which isn't, in fact, the case. Disagreeing with people is fine, but disagreeing in a factual and precise manner is significantly more useful than disagreeing in a manner that gives the strong impression that it would have been more helpful if the original poster had died rather than sending the mail in the first place. You're not even obliged to behave in a friendly way towards people - just avoid behaving in a clearly unfriendly way. A good rule of thumb is probably that if you think it would potentially result in a complaint to your boss if you did it in a moderately large company, then doing it on an Ubuntu mailing list is a bad plan.

So, the original point. The joke itself implies that there's no way to know why women behave the way they do, even to the point where a (presumably) omniscient god has no idea. Unsurprisingly, telling a large body of potential contributors that their behaviour is irrational[2] isn't a great way making them feel like their contributions are welcomed. But, oh no! It's actually ok - we're supposed to replace "women" with "newbs", because suggesting that basically your entire pool of potential contributors that their behaviour is irrational is much less bad.

Cough.

We then get to Caroline's post, an expression of frustration about an aspect of life. It contains the word "Fuck", which doesn't seem unreasonable in context. There's then a complaint from someone claiming that it's offensive, which means we have to consider a few things. Firstly, is the author of the complaint actually offended, or just attempting to claim that there's hypocrisy involved? Given the context, I'd suspect the latter. Arguably this isn't really the point, though - the issue isn't whether a given person is offended, it's whether it'll offend someone who would otherwise potentially make a valuable member of the community. Right now, I'd suspect that we (as a community) don't really object to it strongly. Google suggests that swearing isn't unheard of on the lists. While swearing in the context of a personal attack is pretty clearly a violation of the CoC[3], people don't seem to be objecting to it in general.

So, is it unacceptable to swear within the Ubuntu community? Right now, I'd say that (in appropriate contexts) it's not a problem. If a moderate number of people claim that the current degree of swearing dissuades them from being involved, then it may become a problem. Accusing someone of hypocrisy for swearing (not clearly a CoC issue, especially in context) after they claimed that a sexist joke might be, well, offensive? Yeah, I'd say that that one's pretty clearly unacceptable. Telling people that it's pretty funny and that they're wrong to be offended? History suggests that it's not a good plan. If you think someone's wrong to be offended, then a good first step is trying to figure out why rather than just dismissing them.

Of course, there's also the entirely secondary issue of what the roles of planet sites in the community are. Personally, I like to think of them as opportunities to see what people are really like rather than being reflections of people's behaviours on project mailing lists[4]. From that point of view, I think that the bounds of acceptable behaviour should be a little more liberal. If people disagree, that's not a problem and things can change - but expecting people to change their behaviour before there's any sort of general opinion that it's unacceptable isn't ok.

Which leaves open the question of whether posting sexist jokes to mailing lists is on the acceptable side of the CoC[5] or not. I'd be surprised if the ubuntu-uk community genuinely thought so, but if they do then there are pretty clearly issues that we need to solve. As far as I'm concerned, justifying that sort of behaviour has no place in Ubuntu.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that there's a certain degree of irony there
[2] For the record, yes, I do believe that women often behave in irrational ways. So do men.
[3] I find it surprisingly hard not to write that as COCK. Too much Jerkcity
[4] Which is, to an extent, why this journal isn't on Planet Ubuntu - there'd be potential for things I said to be mistaken for some sort of official Ubuntu position, which would end up limiting what I could say, which would kind of ruin the point
[5] Must... resist... temptation...

With updated cross-building toolchains and a much improved emdebian-tools package, work has finally started on actually building cross-built packages for Emdebian. Wookey has identified the first set - a usable rootfs. http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianRootfs

Nineteen packages have been cross-built so far, from base-files and popt to util-linux and ncurses so I thought I'd make a note of how it has gone at this early stage. Packages, patches and build logs can be viewed at: http://www.emdebian.org/packages/search.php

Results:
======

1. CDBS cross-builds like a dream. No failures, no missing files, no misplaced files, no files Emdebian doesn't want (like changelogs and manpages). em_make replaces one makefile with a customised one and everything else falls into place. Fantastic.

2. debhelper packages generally cross-build quite well - as long as debian/rules sticks to actually using debhelper rather than creating bespoke rules that just do what dh_foo would have done anyway! (I then have to go behind them and remove the custom rules to get rid of manpages etc. when if the task had been left to dh_foo, em_make would have removed dh_foo automatically. Grrr.)

3. Packages built without CDBS or debhelper are an absolute PITA. I know it is a good exercise to build without "high-level" tools, but PLEASE, only put non-debhelper packages in the main archive if you really cannot have debhelper involved. It'd make my life SO much easier right now.

4. Splitting out the translation files into individual, dedicated, packages one per language is having two related effects: there are a plethora of packages in the repository with only 19 source packages built; the size of the main binary packages has dropped substantially. Some translation packages are 30-60kb in size but in Debian, 12 maybe 30 of these are packaged inside the main binary or a similar combined _common package. Users get no choice, it's no translations or all translations. I cribbed the idea from OpenEmbedded and it's nice to see it paying off, even if it means that 'apt-cache search' listings will be at least an order of magnitude longer in Emdebian. (Sounds like a wrapper is needed.) Need to start testing 'langupdate' soon to make sure it can cope with keeping users up to date with translations of installed programs.

So far, haven't needed too many cache files to be used with ./configure --cache-file but I'm bound to meet those soon.

Overall, things are going well (famous last words).

Hard to believe it's already time for DemoCampMontreal2 tomorrow night (Thursday, March 29, at the SAT). I had a pretty good time at the first DemoCampMontreal back in February, despite my demo going belly-up a few times. It was a good space and a fun time to talk. I think the BarCamp page on DemoCampMontreal2 has some good info, too. Check out Fred Ngo's writeup of DemoCampMontreal2, including a fancy photo of yours truly demoing in February. It looks a little like BarCampHell, but in a good way. tags: barcamp democamp montreal DemoCampMontreal2 fred ngo me

Big day Today's our big day -- we're closing on the house at 4690 rue Pontiac tonight at 7. We just got in from Las Vegas last night, but we headed out to the bank this morning to get a cashier's check for our (very large) down payment and dot the t's and cross the i's for the mortgage. Lots more running around today, but we go to the notaire tonight, and we'll have some sort of paper certifying us as homeowners sometime tonight. Shom-pan-yah to follow. tags: house buying closing 4690ruepontiac

Open Web Design One really great Open Content (or is it Open Source...?) resource that I don't pay enough attention to is the Open Web Design repository. It's a collection of very nicely done Web designs, delivered in convenient packets of HTML and CSS. They make very nice templates for "skins" of blog engines, CMSes, or even wikis. It's a great complement to the tons of Free Web software available out there (most of which is quite skinnable, and most of which has execrable default themes). My favourite part is that all the designs are dedicated to the public domain or made available under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license, which makes them honest-to-goodness Free Culture per the Definition of Free Cultural Works. I'm going to be using one of these Web designs to clean up my kinda bland home site. It could use a bit of editing. tags: web design design open content skins themes

Thanks Mark, Allegra, No ma and Anoushka Thanks to Mark and family for the congratulations on our new house. We signed the papers tonight, and it went surprisingly smoothly. Our seller is a fascinating guy who started the animation lab at Ubisoft, so we enjoyed getting to talk to him in between onslaughts of legalese and flurries of signatures. In other good news, I guess the gang is coming out for RoCoCo. Wow! That'll be pretty fun. Good thing we'll have two houses then. tags: mark house rococo ubisoft

The major problem — one of the major problems, for there are several — one of the many major problems with governing people is that of who you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize:- It is a well known and much lamented fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

It’s election time, as Debian Developer I get to chose who is going to be the Debian Project Leader for the next year - but I don’t really care. If we can’t get a naturally strong leader, then I don’t think it matters at all. A naturally strong leader is one who actually leads and do so by strong consensus instead of just wanting to rule. For a naturally strong leader the election is a mere formality and he will run virtually unopposed. So my vote is:

- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
e0acebd2-71f1-4df8-ae4d-50355ad7aa81
[ 1 ] Choice 1: Wouter Verhelst
[ 1 ] Choice 2: Aigars Mahinovs
[ 1 ] Choice 3: Gustavo Franco
[ 1 ] Choice 4: Sam Hocevar
[ 1 ] Choice 5: Steve McIntyre
[ 1 ] Choice 6: Rapha l Hertzog
[ 1 ] Choice 7: Anthony Towns
[ 1 ] Choice 8: Simon Richter
[ 1 ] Choice 9: None Of The Above
- - -=-=-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

What about “None of the Above” option? Isn’t that excatly what I want? No, not really. I don’t think we would be better of by not electing one of the candidates than we would by electing one of them. So “None of the Above” should be ranked equally with the others. Why vote at all? I want to make a point, as feeble as it is, which is clearly different from just being lazy. I want to show by active participation that I don’t think the election matters. Effectively a whatever option. Now go grab some beer…

The Children’s Online Protection Act, or COPA, requires website operators who provide commercial material that could be “harmful to minors” to verify their users’ age, for example, with a credit card. The statute was immediately challenged as unconstitutional under the First Amendment. A preliminary injunction against enforcement of the law was upheld by the Supreme Court, which remanded the matter for factual development as to whether filters could accomplish the same purpose while interfering less with free speech. (Ironically, the ACLU found itself in the unusual position of arguing for Internet filters in this case.) It was just about one year ago that the Government sought to enforce a subpoena against Google for records of user queries and URLs stored in Google’s database. The court granted the motion with respect to stored URLs but not queries in Gonzales v. Google. It was never quite clear what the Government would really do with the data or why they pushed so hard to get it after receiving what they needed from other search providers. (The U.S. apparently argued Google’s search results would “add luster” to its analysis). In any case, the statute has now finally been held unconstitutional. As Ed Felten insightfully points out, unlike in previous instances where courts have struck down Internet speech regulation, in his opinion, Judge Reed did not provide a roadmap for Congress to try yet again to enact a law that would pass First Amendmend muster. Maybe Congress will leave the issue alone for a while:

Two things make the judge s ruling relatively roadmap-free. First, it is based heavily on factual findings that Congress cannot change things like the relative effectiveness of filtering and the amount of HTM material that originates overseas beyond the effective reach of U.S. law. (Filtering operates on all material, while COPA s requirements could have been ignored by many overseas sites.) Second, the alternative it offers requires only voluntary private action, not legislation. Congress has already passed laws requiring schools and libraries to use content filters, as a condition of getting Federal funding and with certain safeguards that are supposed to protect adult access. The courts have upheld such laws. It s not clear what more Congress can do. Judge Reed s filtering alternative is less restrictive because it is voluntary, so that computers that aren t used by kids, or on which parents have other ways of protecting kids against HTM material, can get unfiltered access. An adult who wants to get HTM material will be able to get it. Doubtless Congress will make noise about this issue in the upcoming election year. Protecting kids from the nasty Internet is too attractive politically to pass up. Expect hearings to be held and bills to be introduced; but the odds that we ll get a new law that makes much difference seem pretty low.

In June I plan to attend the DebConf 7 in Edinburgh. I like train riding and after all it s good for the climat, so I ruled out flying.If you want to go to UK by train, you have to take the EuroStar through the tunnel. The Deutsche Bahn offers a nice package including a sleeper train for 86, so I got that part covered. But that only gets me to London, and I need to go to Edinburgh.So today, I orderd a one way ticket from London to Edinburgh for 28.50 from GNER, one of the private british rail companies, and payed by credit card. Right after I sucessfully booked the ticket, I noticed some problems with the shipping address: An Umlaut in the street name has turned into weird characters and it did not display the counry (Germany) that I m sure I selected. So I immediatelly sent this mail to GNER:

Hello, I just booked this ticket online. It seems there are problems with the German address, though. The correct address is: Joachim Breitner
Ehb hl 33
71083 Herrenberg
Germany (you can replace by ue if necessary) My Booking Reference: xxxxxxxx Thank you,
Joachim Breitner

And got this response:

Dear Joachim

Thank you for your recent e-mail regarding delivery address of tickets.

I can confirm that we do not deliver tickets overseas. However, since our system is automatic, as soon as you click on the 'Buy tickets' button, the tickets are printed and sent in post.

Please remember that once the booking is confirmed, the delivery address/method cannot be changed.

In this case, if we receive the tickets back from the General Post Office, they can be reissued to a UK address and if we do not receive the tickets back, you will have to buy new tickets as your tickets are non refundable.

Please reply to this e-mail with a UK address, where you would like the tickets to be delivered so that I can update it on the notes, and the tickets will be posted, once received back. If we do not receive the tickets back, you will have to buy new tickets.

If you have any further queries, please do not hesitate in contacting us.

Kind regards

Saurabh

Now I really wonder:

• If they don t send tickets abroad, why do they allow me to enter a German address?
• Should I ask my credit card company to deny the payment (if that is possible)?
• How do I get my ticket now?
• And do we really want to privatize the Deutsche Bahn?

Update: I gave them an address in the UK now, I hope it works out (thanks Ben). And the Deutsche Bahn is already privatized, just not publicy traded yet and is 50% owned by the state, I was confusing that.

Tomorrow at 9 in the morning some officers from the Valencian regional Government will drive up to the mountains of the Bartolo, Serra Perentxissa, Montd ver and Carrasqueta to power off the set of antennas which have broadcasted the signal of TV3, the Catalan public television, during the last 20 years for the entire Valencian territory. These news have been responded with protests from most of the Valencian cultural collectives. You can sign a petition, or send an e-mail, which will be swiftly ignored by the people in charge. Behind the official reasoning for this attack to our freedom of choice -the broadcast is illegal- there is a set of good reasons for the usual suspects, the Valencian Partido Popular to do this. The biggest one is that two months before the local and regional elections, the right-wing are doing their math and it may not be working out too well for them. They need to scrape as many votes as they can, and an easy granary is attracting the extreme right-wing, which is a bit active but fragmented in the region, and mostly in the city of Val ncia. This social group is greatly virulent against anything which sounds like Catalan , especially the people known as blaveros , who claim our culture and language has no common root and has nothing to do with the culture and language from the North. Fortunately, the ISO 639 standard and the entire scientific community agree that they are nuts. But back to my rant. So, how can the PP try to get a handful of votes from the right-wing? Easy, start an anti-TV3 show on the media and start scalating it until the final act -tomorrow-, where milions of citizens are deprived of one of the best channels available in our TV sets. This will surely be sold as a major victory against the Catalan invasion or as the end of an "alegal situation", although there are like 30 other channels in the same situation in the city of Val ncia, and the PP-controlled Canal 9 channel is broadcasted in the Balear Islands (also controled by PP) in the same legal situation. In a time when watching Middle-East or American channels is trivial using a satellite set, some people think the best thing they can do is to end a service paid and provided for free by Acci Cultural del Pa s Valenci , an important cultural entity, during the last 20 years, ending the right to choose one of the only channels with all the programs in our language for milions of Valencians. Their right to do it is also challenged in court, but there is no doubt that tomorrow they'll go ahead and shut it off. We could have a reasonable government who would maybe want to accept the Catalan TV and radio channels in our territory, if the Catalan government would also accept our (crappy) channels in theirs, but they refuse this as well, because they now feel insulted . All in all, I had enough of PP long ago, and am hoping I am not the only one. In less than a month, Valencians will celebrate the 300^th anniversary of the Batalla d'Almansa on the 25th of April of 1707, although we seem to be fighting a new battle now in 2007. The Batalla d'Almansa meant the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in Spain, but also the start of tough times for our culture, language, and people, when Felipe V abolished the Valencian furs. But this story can make a blog post of its own next month. Quan el mal ve d'Almansa, a tots alcan a...

Debian as a Linux distrubtion is all about integration and ease of management, which includes init-scripts. I d like to propose a feature that might be helpful to quite a few system administrators while being non-disruptive to all others.For a lot of daemons there are use-cases that require more than one instance of the daemon to be running. With instance I mean a separate process with it s own configuration files, but on the same system, which rules out virtualisation or changeroots. Examples are copies of the main server running on a different port, to test new settings, different servers on different IPs, a HTTP-Server-Split into a slick static-and-proxying server and a heavy backend server, a mail server split with a virus scanner in between etc.So as an administrator I currently not only have to write the configuration for the additional instances, but also write my own init scripts and modify them, never being sure if I did it good or whether it will cause problems on package upgrade or similar things. I d rather see the functionality built-in to the package s init script directly.There is a package in Debian that already provides this: The OpenVPN package maintained by Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta allows the user to define new instances of OpenVPN simply by adding a new file to /etc/openvpn/. The file /etc/default/openvpn defines which of these instances are to be started when I or the system start runs /etc/init.d/openvpn start. /etc/init.d/openvpn stop stops all running instances and /etc/init.d/openvpn restart also restarts just the currently running servers. I can easily control a specific instance by adding it s name (which is the configuration file s basename) after the command to the init script.I think these semantics are clear, sensible and non-disruptive and should be available with every Debian package where the administrator might want to run several instances at once: web server, mail server, ftp servers, name servers etc.In those cases where the daemon is not configured by a single file alone, one directory with the configuration for one instance is needed. Otherwise, I don t see why this should be a problem. For backwards compatibility, the normal configuration file locaction could be an implicit instance called default and all additional instances go to their own directory (e.g /etc/ntpd.conf is instance default , and /etc/ntpd/public.conf is instance public ).Comments welcome.

Rule #1: don't do "svn commit" in a working directory of my blog when there are some unfinished and ill-worded blog posts still in that directory. Or, in other words, my previous post shouldn't have gone out yet, it wasn't ready; it was way too convoluted and thus failed to bring across the intended message. Revisiting this post before posting it, is something that's been on my list of things to do for a fair while, but it just never happened. I guess the cat's out of the bag now, so I might as well clarify it here and now. Let me make clear that I did not mean to say that people should just be Cc'ing everyone, whether or not they're on the list, in violation of the stated list policy. Instead, what I meant to say is that I do not believe that a policy on whether or not you should send Cc's to people is the right solution to this kind of thing. Instead, I think we should have our mail clients support this kind of thing by themselves. There are really two types of "reply" in a mail client: one is a "public" reply, where everyone who read the original mail can also read any follow-ups, and the other is a "private" reply, where you only send your reply to the person who sent the mail you're replying to in the first place. There should not be a difference on the UI level between "reply to the list" or "reply to each and every email address that's in the 'To', 'Cc' and 'From' headers"; MUA software should be smart enough to notice when you're mailing to a mailinglist, and pick the right option out of the latter two all by itself. And if someone really wants a private copy of the mail, adding a header to do that is already possible today. With that in place, there shouldn't be a need for a code of conduct to state that you should not randomly Cc people. QED. Then again, obviously mailinglists suck and usenet is much better. But that's another discussion for another time.