Just a few weeks ago, the world heard the news of the tragic school shooting at an Amish school in rural Pennsylvania. A deranged man entered the schoolhouse, bound and gagged female hostages, brought along torture equipment, and shot 10 of them. 5 died, and the remaining 5 are believed to still be hospitalized.

Back in 1990, a deranged man committed a series of murders near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. The story mentions 5 people that were killed.

Both were tragic situations. Both men killed people that had their whole lives in front of them. Both shook an entire community.

But look at how the communities responded. The Amish responded like this:

CNN reported a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: "We must not think evil of this man."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts," he told CNN.

The Amish have reached out to Roberts' family. Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

An article in a Canadian newspaper the National Post stated that the Amish have set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. (Wikipedia)

In addition, the Amish invited the Roberts family to attend the funerals for the Amish girls he killed.

Gainesville reacted this way:

Dianna Hoyt, Christa Hoyt's stepmother, said Rolling's execution has been eagerly awaited by the victims' families. Some will be inside the prison to witness it. . .

Sadie Darnell, who was the police department's media spokeswoman at the time and developed enduring friendships with the victims' families, said Rolling's execution still matters, even if it also provides him more of the notoriety he sought.

"Retribution . . . is important because it represents that our society is holding that person accountable," said Darnell, now a candidate for Alachua County sheriff. (CNN)

We've all heard of murders that have taken place lately. Usually they are accompanied by calls by politicians, victim's family, and sometimes even clergy to kill the perpetrator. In the days after 9/11, there were reports of anybody that looked Middle Eastern being attacked in several different places around the country.

I have never understood this great desire for revenge. How does that help anyone?

What the Amish did was right religiously and morally. They truly followed the New Testament call to love your enemies and forgive. It is not easy to follow all of Jesus' teachings, and nobody said it would be. But they are doing it, and they have already begun healing. Reports are that the Roberts family has become friends with several of the Amish in the area, and they are working to help each other out after this horrible tragedy.

Even putting religion aside for a moment, the Amish actions are quite simply the right thing to do. By spreading love instead of hate, and friendship instead of revenge, they have succeeded in making sure that no cycle of violence starts there.

In contrast, 16 years later, the families of the victims in Florida still aren't healing. They are still angry and bitter. They are still seeking revenge. They hope that their lives will get back to normal after the murderer is killed. But after 16 years of stewing about it, will they really? And what about the family of the murderer, whose lives certainly must have been a mess for the past 16 years? They will now lose a family member. Does anyone care about them, or will they now turn angry at society and possibly spread the pain more?

Imagine what would happen if so many more people around the world took the Amish perspective -- to forgive those that wronged us. How long must it be before we can forgive? How far back do we spread our hate? Do we still hate those that were involved in 9/11, or can we forgive them? Do we still hate the Germans for what their ancestors did in World War II, or can we forgive them? Do we hate politicians with whom we strongly disagree, or think are liars? Do we still hate all those that have wronged us personally -- someone that stole something from us or the sadistic boss?

Knives, electric chairs, and bombs do not buy reconciliation. They can not "win over" the hearts of others. They do not make our lives easier. Hate brings more hate, and more resentment.

Forgiveness is not easy. We all hope that we will never be involved in such a tragedies as these. But let us follow the example the Amish have shown -- forgive for all things, big or small, important or not, painful or not.

Only then will we be at peace with ourselves, and only then will we have the chance to be at peace with our neighbors.

Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law. Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples). At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the ugly, this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied. I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at The Law in Shambles a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles. For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy. The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals). While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is meaner and more complex than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover motive, which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that I can force you to tell me everything what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns. The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force. This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it? He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law which would take mandarin to learn that no one enforces.. The law is there. On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it. p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, We’ve come a long way, Baby, when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.” There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time. Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

Morning! I know, cyrus-sasl2 is a horror for some people because its lack of documentation. So I decided to write this little tutorial. In my example I will use “pam” authentication, I use exactly the same pam rules as I use for the system login, which means pam_ldap. It’s also possible to authenticate directly on LDAP with cyrus-sasl2, but I don’t want this because the “normal” users which I haven’t in LDAP should also be able to use my postfix. Only the users which have access on all machines in my network are stored in LDAP. Ok, first of all: apt-get install postfix-tls (you need -tls, because only this one is compiled with SASL support) apt-get install libsasl2 libsasl2-modules (in -modules is the “pam” module included, for special ones there are other modules, for example -modules-kerberos-heimdal). Then go ahead… add the following lines into /etc/postfix/main.cf which enable authentication: smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_tls_auth_only = no # (this is optional, but I want to be able to authenticate without encryption) smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination # (means that all machines in mynetworks and the external clients may relay over the server, the external ones have to authenticate) Ok, postfix is now more or less ready. Because postfix on Debian runs in a chroot (/var/spool/postfix) and cyrus-sasl “works” in /var/run/saslauthd you have to make a binding which enables postfix access from the chroot to saslauthd, the following line in /etc/fstab solves the problem: /var/run/saslauthd /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd auto bind 0 0 Then you have to specify the sasl options to postfix, create a directory “sasl” in /etc/postfix and edit /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf, there you could enable sasl with mysql, sasl with kerberos, ldap whatever, but as I said I just use pam for it: saslauthd_path: /var/run/saslauthd/mux
pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login
Last but not least you have to specify the pam rules when used by smtp (because I use pam ), for this you have to edit /etc/pam.d/smtp, because I have LDAP and local users enabled in the /etc/pam.d/common-* files I just include them: @include common-auth
@include common-access
@include common-password
Yes, and that’s already all, not so difficult, is it?

To get the maximum value out of my writing when I am asked a question that is of general interest in private mail I will (without in any way identifying the person or giving any specifics of their work) blog my reply. I hope that not only will this benefit the general readers, but also the person who originally asked the question may benefit from reading blog comments.

The question is "I wonder whether I can define a domain which is a union of two existing domain, that is, define a new domain X, which has all the privilege domain Y and Z has got".

There is no way to say in one line of policy "let foo_t do everything that bar_t and baz_t can do" (for reasons I will explain later). However you can easily define a domain to have the privileges that two other domains have.

If you have bar.te and baz.te then a start is:
grep ^allow bar.te baz.te sed -e s/bar/foo/ -e s/baz/foo/ >> foo.te
Then you need to just define foo_t in the file foo.te and define an entry-point type and a suitable domain_auto_trans() rule to enter the domain.

There are other macros that allow operations that don't fit easily into a grep command, but they aren't difficult to manage.

The only tricky area is if you have the following:
domain_auto_trans(bar_t, shell_exec_t, whatever1_t)
domain_auto_trans(baz_t, shell_exec_t, whatever2_t)

As every domain_auto_trans() needs to have a single target type those two lines conflict so you will need to decide which one you want to merge. This is the reason why you can't just merge two domains. Also the same applies for file_type_auto_trans() rules and for booleans in some situations.

During the past years, I have usually kept outside of heated arguments, but since I slipped on debian-private today anyway, I might as well go all the way and write a proper opinion, disguised as an outside view to simulate objectivity. Intellectual Icebergs Episode 10 talks about "Scales of Superiority". Simplified, we have a set of fields that we consider important to us, and where we will go to great lengths (and be irrational about it) to achieve a state where we can feel superior to others. To a large extent, that is what drives us on. If you think ballroom dancing is fun, you pick it up as a hobby, but if you place your "scale of superiority" in this field, you will go beyond that, and train every day, until you finally win the competition. Obviously, this is highly irrational to someone who is just not that "into it", but as they are generally not offended by you secretly sneering at their inferior dancing skillz (because they could hardly care less), this is not a problem. Now, inside Debian, we also have our scales by which we measure our success. For some of us, it is suitability for a particular field or work, for others it is rating by others. Debian has been suitable for a lot of tasks (since it is the universal operating system, after all), and has been held in high esteem for quality, so both camps were happy. So, what has changed? I believe that the biggest change was the advent of Ubuntu, and specifically, the community's reaction to it. A lot of people we considered our peers jumped ship, claiming that Ubuntu was "better". If you only cared about whether Debian was suitable for your needs, then your reaction was probably "good riddance". If you cared about peer rating, you were in hell now, as someone else was getting all the attention (and, since that is what your brain cares about really, all the MOTAS). In short, Debian's status as the superior distribution, your "herd" as the supreme rulers of the land of stability, your entire self-worth as defined by your "scale of superiority" was challenged. This is the situation we're in. Half of us feel threatened by Ubuntu, half of us do not, and to each group the behaviour of the other is completely irrational. Most of the behaviour we have seen in the past years is a direct result from this. The discussion about Ubuntu "not giving back patches" in the proper way was seen as an attempt at building a competitive advantage over Debian. That Ubuntu ships non-free drivers for hardware that is unsupported otherwise is a direct threat, because it allows them superiority in the field of hardware support. Now, with "LTS", they have even challenged our status as the distribution with the longest (heh) security support, while Debian shows severe stamina problems. That my girlfriend runs Ubuntu on her laptop is a direct threat to my masculinity, because I am unable to "perform" a network install on her laptop via wireless LAN. "I am sorry, dear, I have no idea why this device is unsupported, I never had any problems with that before." So we are looking for ways to regain our confidence. Some of us seek superiority by shifting their scales, claiming that while we're not as sexy as Ubuntu, we at least do not tie our users to our desktop, where they have to do kinky stuff to get to a harddisk, with us it is straight fsck, mount, umount. Some of us are trying to recreate Ubuntu's success by copying their methods (mandatory team maintenance, paying core developers) in the hope of eventually surpassing them. I can see that Debian also shares the goal of being a strong "contender" on the desktop, because "universal" simply includes everything, so I can understand that some developers are feeling threatened here. But I think I should ask you to get a broader view here. We are not measured by the number of one-user-only desktop installs we have. While it gives some short term satisfaction, it is not the same thing as a long-lasting installation on an university cluster and watching the users grow from nano to vi users. Debian is behaving as if it had a massive midlife crisis. I think we should try to remain calm here. Because Debian with a wig will not look young, it will look ridiculous, and in the long run, Ubuntu will either grow up, try to become another Debian (which makes them redundant), or they will stay in their niche and score the desktop users, which need not bother us at all, because they are bad in the sack anyway. I'm now going to turn myself in to Dr. Freud, and you go and get laid.

Debian Games won a status page : http://nana.rulezlan.org/~goneri/pkg-games/. I expect it to help us improve the global quality. Currently we need DD interested in sponsoring. Feel free to contact us if you’re interested.

Back to work on Debian now. Released an updated security advisory, which seemed to work out OK despite the archive changes. Some of my packages have new maintainers. The rest I will go through and upload with the maintainer set to QA tomorrow. Some coding issues to resolve in the next day or two:

mod_ifier

This apache module is utterly broken with regard to POST data. How I managed to use it in production for so long and not notice is beyond me. Short version: The module intercepts incoming HTTP requests and filters them according to a set of user-defined rules. It allows you to block incoming requests with particular CGI parameters (get vs. post). However once the module has read the POST data it is destroyed - and unavailable for use by the CGI itself. Apparently I must use the Apache API to use buckets/brigades to read only a copy of the submitted data, so that when the module is finished processing the data is still available. I can find no understandable code for doing this. But I’m trying.

xen-tools

I need to rework some of the error detection so that roll-back will work when installation fails.

I need to find time to write more articles for the debian-administration site, but I think that will be difficult for the next week or two. I feel like I need a holiday…. despite just having had one. I guess that is because of the aftermath, but still .. ugh.

I just reinstalled my workstation on two new SATA disks with a recent etch d-i snapshot . That worked really fine, and it was so funny to create RAID 1 + LVM partitions by clicking with a mouse in a GTK interface. Etch will rocks. 8-)

I went back out to the site of Ignition 2006 today. We left the event early due to pouring rain and general bad unhappiness, with a strategic retreat to a loft in Old Town Montreal to have fun, hang out, and wear costumes that weren't covered with mud. But we left some equipment on site, and I went out to get it today, and whoooooo boy was it a mess. We tarped everything up and left up protective canopies when we left, but I guess the wind really got into this cache of stuff in the last couple of weeks, because the canopies were blown all over the place, bent, bruised, and generally indignant. Most of the tarped equipment was still tarped and dry, but there was one corner of one tarp that had come up, and everything under it was wet. Fortunately it wasn't anything important -- empty bottles, a barbecue, and some folding tables. The drive out to the site was great. It's a piece of land owned by my friend Sherman Samuel, just north of wt:Mansonville in the wt:Eastern Townships. The leaves on the trees have just about turned, so there's starting to be some bare trees and the last sharp colors of the trees. It's melancholy and beautiful -- great October weather. I was able to cram everything into the Sleek Black Tux (my just-made-up name for the Hyundai Tuscon we drive), but the drive back was pretty rough. The smell of all that camping equipment put up wet and left in the forest for a couple of weeks was... well... pretty gamy. Like really, really old towels. We call that smell "meefy", and that's pretty much what the car smells like now. Meefy. When I got home, Maj and Amita convinced me not to unload the car, but to come inside and watch the Battlestar Galactica season premiere on tape, and drink red wine and have warm split-pea soup. Allllll right. tags: meef burning man ignition eastern townships snazzy tux

Lars, you well-informed and chaste commentator I agree with Lars: Eric is doing the right thing. I understand what the Mozilla Foundation is doing, and it's more than likely the right thing for them to do. I understand what Eric is doing with Gnuzilla, and it also seems like the right thing to do. Debian and Mozilla can be friends and yet not use the same name for the software. That's OKAY. tags: lars eric dorland iceweasel firefox well-informed chaste

Freedom It sounds like, at least briefly, China has unblocked Wikipedia. It's interesting to see if this will continue, and what it will mean for future policies towards China by other Web sites. Unlike Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the Wikimedia Foundation has steadfastly refused to censor its content to meet Chinese government standards. If the WMF can stand up to China and win, what does that mean for other Web sites in the future? tags: china wikipedia unblock

I have my email inbox finally under control. I started with 3000-odd messages in my Inbox a few weeks ago, and decided that I wanted to get my Inbox truly down to messages I hadn't replied to but intended to. I had a few still from when we moved a year ago, and I got to the last of those today - and found out that she's on LJ as well (Hi, Peggy!)

After this, the only one that's not from sometime in the last past week is a message about HPPA ELF ABI documents and LSB.

With some luck I'll be able to keep it this way!

So people may be wondering, How does Biella pass her time in the vast, desolate Canadian north? Thankfully there are many things to do in Edmonton proper, but I have delved quite a bit into reading so I thought I would take a break and give small reviews of the books I have read or am reading as they are all quite good. I am trying to be more systematic about my reading habits so I am back to using citeulike. I am adding anything new I read and then as I go back to I have already read (for articles), I am adding them to the list also. I hope this pays off in the future! I started the reading bash with a book that was recommended to me over a year ago while I was still in Chicago: The Fugitive’s Property: Law and the Poetics of Personhood as it deals with the bread and butter of my own work, intellectual property, liberalism, market capitalism, and American history. I found the introduction enlivening and was sufficiently interested to continue on. I think there is not a lot of innovative work in the field of intellectual property (only because it has been covered very well) and to bring together slavery/the fugitive person and intellectual property under the same analytical lens, seems productive. Best looks at how the legal treatment of the slave and that of IP, hold striking parallels for their highly fugitive (formal) nature, driven and intensified by the legal/market framework that makes personhood into property. There is a lot of good stuff in there (including a fantastic discussion on legal positivism) but in the end, the labor it took to sift through some really obtuse prose was too much for me. I can’t remember the last time I languished under the heavy weight of language that was far too ornate and under sentences that just lacked clarity. This was compounded by the fact that he assumed you knew a fair bit about slave history, which I did not. My drive also escaped me and while I hope to return to it later, I took a break and turned to more readbale material. After such heavy linguistic ornateness, I needed an antidote, QUICK, and I knew exactly where to go: William Sewell and his book I had on my shelf also nearly for a year: The Logics of History. Along with being a first rate historian he is like that black instrument popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Herbie Hancock, and Brian Eno, he is a synthesizer with an amazing ability to write clearly. Being the synthesizer that he is, he is skilled at connecting the dots between various theoretical topics like event, structure, and agency, making the theoretical implications so crystal clear you feel happy to have entered into a field (the social sciences that is) that feels awfully arcane and pointless at times. I left Stehpen Best, which was like leaving a cluttered medieval castle and into a simply decorated room filled nothing with good theoretical feng shui (I think about writing in spatial terms more than ever). He just makes reading fun, even when the topics can be less than enthralling. Many of the essays were published previously and I had read a number of them, such as his famous essay on structure and agency. What I appreciated along with the great writing, was that he takes serious the question of plurality of social life within the net of various social, economic, political determinants. So while he assumes the existence of structure (and turns Marshall Sahlins to establish), he also is quick to show that structure, like a cultural system, can only act as partial (and unexpected determinants of social life) because of the existence and presence of events (which is really Sahlins great masterful point) but more importantly because of the plurality of structures… This was perhaps on the the central motifs in my dissertation; while I placed hacking within the cultural lineage of liberalism, in no way is this the only cultural system that hackers operate through and with; they move through a cultural domain more intrinsic to their own praxis, not to mention other systems of value that reverberate more widely among the digerati… And it is this movement between social positions that allows for forms of reflexivity and social change. I primarily used Bakhtin to make this point but now I got Sewell to add to this mix. Here is a nice passage from the book that makes this point:

I would argue that a multiple conception of structures would make subjects cultural creativity easier to explain. If the cultural structures by which subjectivities are formed are multiple, then so are the subjectivities… Because persons, symbols, and objects of cultural reference overlap between structural realms, structurally generated rules, emotions, categories, and senses of self can potentially be transposed from one situation to another. Indeed, if actors commonly have the experience of negotiating and renegotiating the relationships between noncongruent cultural structures, it follows they should have some intellectual distance on the structural categories themselves, that they should be able to view one set of cultural categories from the point of view of others that are differently organized, to compare and critizise categories and categorical logics, to work out ways of harmonization or odering the seemingly contradictory demands of different cultural schemes. A multiple conception of structure, consequently makes human creativity and reflection an integral element in the theory of history, not a philosophically prior metaphysical assumption. p. 213

And here is a more engaged review that is a little more critical than my very short comments. As part of a reading group organized by my tireless supervisor, I am also reading The Cultural Locations of Disability written by two of the most prolific scholars in the field, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell. Since I am a novice in field it is hard for me to judge the two chapters we have so far read but it is a total total total treat reading a book slowly with a group of other folks from a vast range of departments. So far I appreciate the larger arguments presented in the introduction. For example, they point to two broad categories—capitalism and modernity/enlightenment– as driving forces in a new wave of obsession with the disabled. So while capitalism’s insistence on measuring the worth of humans through an abstract and actual ability to labor, marginalizes those who cannot offer their constant labor power (and makes them an “odd” cultural object), modernity–in its desire to march forward to the mysterious plane of progress, offers a technological promise to eradicate what it designates as deviant or primitive. As they nicely sum up: In a culture that endlessly assures itself that it is on the verge of conquering Nature once and for all, along with its own primitive instincts and the persistent domains of have-nots, disability is referenced with respect to these idealized visions. As a vector of human variability, disabled bodies both represent a throwback to human prehistory and serve as the barometer of a future without deviancy. p. 31 I, think, however, they should have also included some discussion of liberalism, which in many ways, was the legal and philosophical engine that helped to naturalize capitalism not to mention it also offered a vision of person, in which self-development, expression, and discrete autonomy was deeply cherished. Seen in this liberal light, disability becomes also a type of tragedy that can be resolved though new technological interventions they discuss under the guise of modernity. I have just started Michelle Murphy’s Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers, which promises to be quite a tour de force into the contentious politics of uncertainty and the play of perceptibility and imperceptibility that surround one of many many syndromes sick building syndrome that now are part and parcel of the medical and patient advocacy field. Along with this I read and finished Andrew Lakoff’s Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry, which will make for great teaching, and has one of the nicest discussions on the way in which psychiatry’s insecure status among the other medical science was one of the driving forces toward embracing the new scientism of the 1980s that coincided with new more general neoliberal trends. Another nice move about the ethnography is that he was able to clarify some of the trends and rationalities of American and European psychiatry by examining how it was received and resisted among more psychoanalytical Argentinian therapists. Very classicial anthropological lens in that sesne. Finally I am in the middle of Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loop and I will say more about it when I am done, which should be soon as I am tearing through it evern night. I have been waiting for this book for a long while now because Dibbell is part of that trinity (Steven Levy, Bruce Sterling, Julian Dibbell) that offers some of the best writing on hackers, the internet, and virtual worlds. And this book continues in that tradition of providing a fantastic read, a vivid ethnographic picture of the topic at hand, along with key insights into the nature of economies, money, and plau within (and outside of) virtual landscapes. What I respect about Julian Dibbell is that he took a long time to get this book out. He started the research in 2003 and then spent a few years writing up. I think there is a lot of pressure to get any material or book on “virtual whatever” out there as quick as possible but for the most part I think that is a mistake. You need to let these things brew a long while or else they won’t acquire that taste of a finished product.

Barbicane asked me the other day: “Why Ichthux and Ubuntu CE? Why not consolidate efforts?” As much as I’d like to see Ubuntu CE succeed, I believe they are headed down a path that will make it difficult for them to survive if they continue. In this thread (see Google cache since the forums seem to be having problems today) Jereme severely understates the differences in development philosophies that keep us apart. One key difference is more fundamental than just using metapackages instead of scripts. As I wrote about earlier, the approach Ichthux has chosen is to be a Custom Debian Distribution (CDD), working within Debian and Ubuntu to configure those distributions for the needs of Christians to meet their various needs. This is incompatible with CE’s approach, which uses scripts to tailor an Ubuntu system. This approach risks violating the integrity of the packages being modified, and makes each system upgrade an adventure for the user. What you end up with cannot truly be called an “edition” of Ubuntu at all, but is more accurately described as an Ubuntu derivative. Derivatives are not easily sustained because they are always struggling with staying in sync with the parent distribution. Ubuntu itself is a derivative, but it has an impressive amount of infrastructure with a lot of manpower behind it to ensure that the branching and merging process doesn’t get out of control. I don’t see how the much smaller Ubuntu CE development team will manage to accomplish anything significant using their current approach without being crushed by the maintenance costs of their customizations. Another difference, perhaps more readily apparent to end users, is what’s included in each distribution by default. While CE has chosen the Gnome desktop, Ichthux has gone with KDE. With each new release of Ubuntu CE, it seems what is stressed the most in their release notes is “what’s included”. Well, I just can’t see how that’s terribly important. Debian and Ubuntu both have a vast amount of software available, and both make it easy for users to make choices. If a user wants to add another application, it’s often just a few clicks away. It’s not nearly as important to have these installed by default as it is to ensure that the packages we do include are as solid and well-integrated with the system as possible. To this end, Ichthux makes use of its Debian and Ubuntu developers to ensure that each package included is kept in good shape from release to release. This means addressing bugs and wishlists that matter to our users, improving those packages not just for Ichthux, but for Ubuntu, Debian, and where those fixes flow back upstream, the broader community of Christian FOSS users everywhere. This is the real work of Ichthux: not just the production of a livecd, nor merely tweaking the default selection of packages we include from one release to the next, but to be actively involved in the Christian FOSS developer and user community. Our greatest successes will not be in the degree to which we differentiate ourselves from other Linux distributions, but rather how well we’re listening to what Christian FOSS users are saying they need, and how broad we can make our solutions. We can’t afford to be a niche distribution working off in a corner on our own pet project. That would be a terrible waste of our energy. We’re dreaming big: we want every Christian Linux user to be able to benefit from our work.

...has listed lists.gnu.org again on 2006-10-04, thereby taking away all subscribers who stupidly use it to reject email. Darwin rules list subscriptions too.

Hey, somebody used a photo I took of the Papineau mural in Papineau metro station in a discussion of the prison Pied-du-Courant. They even gave me proper attribution, per the license under which the photo was published. As an American I have a shamefully bad understanding of Canadian history. Example: when I first moved to Montreal, I had to get my local land-line phone service set up. When I was asked for my address (in English -- I didn't even try doing this stuff in French back then), I answered: "Avenue Papineau. That's P-A-P-I-N--" the operator cut me off. "I know perfectly well how to spell 'Papineau', sir," he said, icily. Oops. I'm trying to get caught up. I've been reading a ton of wp:Pierre Berton books, but I still don't have the whole story as integrated into my own mental processes the way I know, say, American history almost instinctively. Like, even though I know the story, I continue to boggle that wp:Louis Riel keeps popping up in various apparently unconnected historical contexts and era. It's like, "Wha? Louis Riel again? Didn't they shoot him four or five chapters ago? Why is he still here?" I guess it just takes time. Or maybe it's something I'm never going to understand, like why there were two teams called "Roughriders" in the CFL for so long. I dunno. tags: papineau flickr louis riel bell canada me

Talk about your busy days Busy, busy day today. Alain Desilets, a researcher at the National Research Council and a really smart person when it comes to wiki, came to Montreal today for Wiki Wednesday. We had lunch with Alain and fellow researcher Julie at nearby Ty Breiz restaurant, a neighborhood landmark that makes fine crepes and cider and good garlicky salads. We talked about improving wiki interfaces to make it easier to translate between multiple language versions of a page (like you see on Wikipedia and Wikitravel), and came up with some interesting solutions. Then it was off to Wiki Wednesday proper, at which Alain presented his translation projects and also some collaborative fiction ideas for children. Very cool stuff! It was a real celebrity event: Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, Sebastien Paquet of SocialText, Marc Laporte of Tiki CMS/Groupware, Anne and Antoine, organizing the RoCoCo 2007 event, and lots of other folks too. Anne and Antoine also presented their brilliant image-only wiki, Wikigraphe. It lets people upload images as a replacement for pages, then build "hotspots" on the images that link to other pages -- which are in themselves images. It's a destruction of the tyranny of text in the wiki world -- and fun to watch. Sylvain Carle compared it to drawball, but I think they're different. Much followup talk on RoCoCo 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- so glad to have wiki friends around the world coming here, to my favorite city. Lots to do between now and May, but I think we can get it done and have a fantastic wiki (and wiki-like) event. Wiki Wednesdays are such excellent events -- kudos to Seb Paquet for organizing them in Montreal, and also to SocialText for such a good idea, and Robin Millette and gang for hosting. tags: wiki wednesday alain desilets ty breiz sunir shah seb paquet sylvain carle anarcat marc laporte rococo

CC Salon Montreal On top of that, we had the Creative Commons Salon Montreal tonight at Am re de boire on rue St. Denis. The Salon is developing internationally as a way for CC-related people to interact, chat, and have fun in cities around the world, and Montreal has too many CC folks to be left out. Tina Pipers, co-chair of Creative Commons Canada, is on the faculty at McGill, so we're lucky to have such a heavy hitter in the area to chat with us. (Also, I found out tonight she's Greek! Good for us.) Tonight was expecially great since Maj and I talked about Wikitravel and our new project, Crossroads, to create Open Content travel opinion, stories, blogs, photos, etc. It's just getting off the ground, but it was great to share our vision with some people who really understand the idea of content sharing and an information commons. The discussion after our talk was great. I couldn't drag myself to YULblog, though, after 6 hours of talking... I had wanted to go to get people interested in BarCampMontreal, but Sylvain (one of the event organizers) was already going, so I felt justified in sitting it out. But when am I going to get to another Yulblog? I just don't know. tags: cc cc salon cc salon montreal tina pipers wikitravel crossroads travel barcampmontreal yulblog

Searls ha ha Searls's 4th Law: No matter what car you want to rent, what you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier. Man, I love the wp:Chevrolet Cavalier. It's a fun car to drive, and it just says "rental car". Which mean, y'know, "vacation" and "distant lands" and "irresponsibility". How can you not love that car? Not to mention that someone has to straighten out Doc Searls on Elements of Style Rule #1: Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. This includes singular names that end with s... like "Searls". There are a few exceptions for ancient names ending in -is/-us/-es, but those are few. To paraphrase: I knew Achilles; I served with Achilles; Doc Searls, you are no Achilles. tags: searls doc searls chevy cavalier elements of style

UFO Beliefs Hey! I'm back on Technorati. Rockin'! After like 3 months complaining to their customer service Web form and getting 0 (= zero) response, I finally canceled my blog claim and started a new one. The software picked up on my site right away. Problem solved! It would have been nice to hear, you know, one tiny peep out of Technorati about my 8-10 bug reports, but I guess they're pretty busy. tags: technorati listing bug reports

Strange comments from Release Manager Andreas Barth predicting that this resolution would mean:

'The debian-installer has to be changed prior to release of Etch. This change alone would delay by at least 6 months, according to Joey's estimations.'

The resolution does not specify how it should be implemented technically. I'm pretty sure other options (such as dropping some hardware support from the official release) have been mentioned and there are probably suggestions that I'm unaware of. If the release managers choose to delay the release until debian-installer is changed, then that is their choice.

'Even fonts and videos would fall into the category where we would need source - but what is the source of a font? or a video stream? (and yes, fonts are "works that are executed by other means", i.e. displayed on the screen) That is a great new place for lots of new discussions that don't really help our users, but will definitly waste lots of time.'

The source of a font is what you used to make that font. Similarly for other work. It's pretty obvious in most cases. As far as I understand the concept of streaming video, we don't have it in the release, so that one seems a strange argument to me.

'We would be in a very bad situation e.g. with the debian-keyring (and all other sort of crypthographic stuff) - I definitly don't plan to distribute the sources for my public key (as the sources can also be used to generate the private key).'

I think this is the only interesting point: but is the debian-keyring made up of programs, rather than data that is input to a program? Do the private keys contain instructions which are executed by GnuPG? If not, note that source provision is only "strongly recommended" not required and there is a pretty strong reason for it not to be included in this small case.

'In summary, this proposal would delay the release of Etch by at least 6 months, probably even one year. Of course, any of the pending GRs can still overrule the result of this GR, but - that is not something we should be proud about, or even plan.'

In summary, I think we should remember that predictions can be wrong as well as right, even from a release manager, whether or not they are being paid for their time by an external organisation. Of course, the release manager could try to make those predictions true, but that would be pretty cynical. Vote to reaffirm DFSG 2! Update: shortly after publication of the above, someone at TU Wien wrote "yay for debian-legal fuckheads". Good argument(!) I can see why you are at university(!) Also, Andreas Barth's last blog post keeps changing the date, so it sits in the top place on planet for ages. I didn't think it was so weak as to need that sort of help. This update suggests it might be a software bug, though. Update 2: Hoho, guess I found part of the problem!