Here I am writing today to tell something that might not be known outside Brazil at least, I haven t read much in English about it the attempt to turn the Internet into a government surveillance device. This story goes back to 2006 (and even back), when we first successfully blocked the approval of a bill that would, in effect, turn the Brazilian Internet into a giant Big Brother. This bill was introduced by Senator Eduardo Azeredo as a replacement to a series of other similar bills that were attempted before and was followed by a strong resistance by civil organizations, one of those being ASL, of which I am proud of being one of the founders. By that time we ended having it postponed for more debate. It happened that the bill made a come back last weeks, and was pushed into approval by a subcommittee of the Senate (one that was suppose to deal with the constitutionality of bills) and now is heading to the Chamber of Deputies for appreciation. Apart from the first debates back in 2006, nothing happened between then and the approval. The bill have changed a little bit, but not much as to change its effects. In Brazil, we have two legislative houses, Federal Senate and Chamber of Deputies. If a Law Project is proposed by one, is revised by the other. So we have already lost 50% of the fight. Ronaldo Lemos, professor of Funda o Get lio Vargas (think about a Brazilian version of Harvard Law School ) have already stated how dangerous such a Law can be, once approved. In his own words: The wording of the law is too broad, and can be applied in several cases. The interpretation of what is a crime or not will be done by a criminal judge, who is used to deal with homicides and not with technology . Since its approval in Senate, several people have been putting together a resistance. Central to it is a Petition, hosted at Petition Online, that already holds 64-thousand signatures. One of the writers of that petition, Andr Lemos, a university professor and researcher, have said that the regular user will have the feeling of being watched, and not knowing if what he s doing in legal or not: For instance, if I disseminate a virus without knowing, will I be arrested? Can I exchange my files in P2P networks (my pictures, my musics, my text files) without asking for permission? How will the ISPs interpretate these exchanges? Can I copy a part of a text from a blog and paste it into mine? This law creates a feeling of insecurity and generalized fear . FGV s Center for Society and Technology have published an analysis of the Law Project, and have spotted a lot of problems in it. For instance:

• Unlock a cellphone to be used in another carrier or unlock a DVD player, so it reads disks from different regions, can be a crime punished with 1 to 3 years of imprisonment and a fine, as deals article 285-A;
• Copy something from a blog that doesn t state access restrictions is turned into a crime since a blog is covered by copyright and, if not stated otherwise, those restrictions should apply, and someone that copies can be punished with the same 1 to 3 years of inprisonment and a fine, as deals article 285-B;
• Unlock the iPhone using softwares like jailbreak is turned into a crime punished with 2 to 4 years of imprisonment and a fine, as deals article 163-A. Even put a link somewhere in your site pointing to the software jailbreak is considered a crime;
• The ISP is turned into a surveillance apparatus, and is mandate to inform the authorities about any of the crimes the Law deals with, as states article 22.

Thinking of how I can help, after sending an email to every Deputy whose email address I was able to get, I decided to translate the law into English (I also uploaded a version with indentation, since it s pretty hard to understand the whole law without it, if you re not used to), so the World can be made aware of what s going on in Brazil. I also just sent an email with it to EFF, asking for their help. Not that I think they can do much, but they surely will know one or two strings to pull in order to put more pressure on the Brazilian government. I also hope that, once this post reaches Planet Debian, even more people become aware of the issue. In a sense, this is an appeal for all the Freedom Culture lovers out there to take any actions they can to help us prevent this Law Project to become a Law. (In time, I d like to thank Alexandre Oliva, who revised the translation). Update (2008-07-23 11:50): Steve Langasek also revised the translation of the Law Project and I ve made a cherry-pick merge , which resulted in the version currently linked in the text above. Older version of the plain and the indented documents are still available. Thanks Steve!

Forget it, there's no fucking way in hell to accomplish that. The last 6 months of my life had been turned upside-down, it's too much work, too much pressure... My performance at the University (which was never too good) degraded, sometimes I took too much time from my paid work, not to mention the abandon of almost all my other Debian duties. That is enough to drive you nuts, but there's more: a couple of event at my jobs resulted in lots of overwork around March-April and even more in the last month... Sum all this up, and you find that the only way to keep doing things is to rob precious sleeping hours: to finish pending work, to prepare the exams, and from time to time to have a little fun. The result is a grumpy mood, a aching back, and a tendency to get into arguments easily. My apologies to all the people that I mistreated, specially Marga, who's in a similar state of madness. So I really hope that DC8 turn out to be a great conference, and that everybody will have a good time. So all this would be justified. Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi

Aaron Swartz writes about what government might do to encourage entrepreneurship: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/prostartup As an American who has lived in Europe for a while, I've seen both sides of the coin (or pond, as it were), and feel qualified to add a few things to the conversation, even if many of these points merit a discussion of their own.

• He's right about health care. It's one of those things with a huge downside risk that people in Europe simply don't have to think about. You can change jobs, take a break from a job, start a company...whatever, and you never have to think about "what if". Even if you have the sort of preexisting condition that can hang like a stone around your neck in the US. How to implement such a system (which of course has potential disadvantages as well) is well beyond the scope of this journal.
• Universal education. I don't think it's as great as Aaron seems to think, but I don't think it's very influential one way or the other on startups. People get good educations in both places, although, by and large, the best Universities are in the US because they have more money, and have in the past attracted highly qualified people from all over the world. In both places, students manage to meet other like minded people with whom they can start companies. There are definitely improvements to be made to the US system, but that's really just a political discussion: like I said, differences in universities are not the limiting factor.
• Minimum income without having to work or even having to look for work sounds like an enormous can of worms. Might be good for startups, but has big risks associated with it, and wouldn't be politically feasible in the US. Even in most European countries with that sort of thing, you don't just get money: you have to look for work, do job training, or prove that you're just not capable of doing anything productive.

And here are some thoughts of my own: I think it's best to focus on the startup "curve", and costs associated with various points on it: when people are just getting started, keep state-imposed costs low. If someone makes a lot of money, worry about taxing it then. This is quite different than what has previously been the norm in many places in Europe, which have policies akin to slaughtering the goose before it lays any eggs, let alone golden ones. Italy is a particularly bad example, but it's the place I know best, and not too far off what happens elsewhere in terms of policy: fixed, sunk, startup costs are in the order of 10,000 Euro, which for most people is a lot of money. This creates a bias towards people who already have a lot of money, and away from random people who happen to have good ideas and a strong desire to execute on them. This is something that the US more or less gets right: it cost me $55 in state fees to start DedaSys LLC as a limited liability company (even throwing in money for lawyers and the like, you're still far under the thousands it costs in many European countries). Incidentally, it looks like Germany may be on the right track, if you look at the "Mini-GmbH" mentioned in the article. It's progress, if nothing else. Beyond that, there is a lot more red tape in Europe, and that, I think, rather than a bit higher taxes for companies that are profitable, is the thing that, outside of culture, probably weighs most heavily on European startups. Culture, however, is also a very key factor, and not something that will change soon or easily. In Italy, there's a lot of pressure to land a permanent job, from which you can basically never be fired. The idea of striking out on your own is probably simply not on most people's radar screens. I think culture is what means that Europe produces tons of great open source software, for example, but relatively fewer startups (if you're just counting open source startups though, Europe does ok). Perhaps this is slowly changing, but it will take a while, and without some policy changes, the incentives won't even materialize. Returning to things that government can do, something critical that many people don't get is that government funded startups are usually big failures (see the French "Google competitor") and a big waste of money that would probably simply be better to spend in lowering taxes, improving education, or other "level playing field" initiatives, rather than having government employees attempting to "pick winners". This is a common problem in Europe, but also in many areas of the US that want to replicate Silicon Valley's success. Going back to the US, which was Aaron's original point of focus, beyond health care, what could the US improve? At the moment, immigration seems to be the big problem: people from all over the world want to go to the US to work and start companies, but look at what kinds of hoops someone (who is coming to spend money and create jobs!) has to jump through to do so: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/02/coming-to-america-getting-visas-to-do-business-in-silicon-valley/ Embarrassing and shameful. In conclusion, I think the common theme is that the government can't really do much to actively promote startups, but can certainly hinder them by setting too high a bar in terms of bureaucracy and fixed costs. Lowering those fixed costs for new companies, be it through at least basic health care for everyone, or lower taxes and less paperwork should be what governments aim for. Given the right conditions and incentives, bright, hard workers will do the rest.

Something I never really mentioned was the purchase of the foldable bike: a Dahon with a reasonably lightweight aluminum frame, a seven-speed hub and high-pressure tires. It's great fun in the city for the rides to and from the commuter train, or across downtown for occasional errrands after work. I have had this foldable bike for nearly two years, and used it almost (work-)daily, even in the Chicago winters. 'Almost' because I did suffer from broken parts on a few occassions: a pedal broke (easy replacement), the axis in the front wheel broke (a good week for a new and inexpensive wheel) but the bummer was that a part of the frame-folding mechanism broke last fall. Given that the bike, which I bought used via craigslist, is a few years old, the part was no longer standard and so we waited for it to be shipped from the manufacturer. And waited and waited some more until Dan's decided to give me a matching part from a bike in their inventory. But apart from that episode, and the occassional problem with conductors on the Metra commuter trains, it has been a smooth ride. Highly recommended, and I do see a few more foldable bikes downtown. But what is new now is that I finally gave in and bought a road bike, once again off craigslist. My daily commute is about ten miles one-way, which works out to about 35 to 40 minutes of cycling, plus a few minutes of locking/un-locking, changing, etc. I had used my trusted (yet heavier) touring bike with its steel frame a number of times, but felt that a road bike may make for a faster ride. While it saves a few minutes, it is not really a time saver as the bike-train-bike commute also takes around 40 to 50 minutes. That said, riding is simply a nice way to clear the head before or after work. I am back on the schedule I tried for a few weeks last summer / fall: running on Tuesday and Thursday leaves Monday, Wednesday and Friday for the bike commute. So far, I am 8 for 9 over the last three weeks. On the downside: one rather wet ride home, and already to minor flats that (luckily) still allowed riding home. The hardest part is meeting up with some other riders at 6:00am meaning that I am now getting up at 5:00am whether I am running or not. But all told a nice way to get some exercise in outside of running.

Just up on arxiv.org this week appeared Warming the early Earth - CO2 considered, by von Paris et al. Just a preprint, and i'm working through its 53 pages now, put its likely to put the cat among the pidgeons:

Abstract: Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere. However, geological evidence seemed to indicate that the atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Archaean and Proterozoic were far too low to keep the surface from freezing. With a radiative-convective model including new, updated thermal absorption coefficients, we found that the amount of CO2 necessary to obtain 273 K at the surface is reduced up to an order of magnitude compared to previous studies. For the late Archaean and early Proterozoic period of the Earth, we calculate that CO2 partial pressures of only about 2.9 mb are required to keep its surface from freezing which is compatible with the amount inferred from sediment studies. This conclusion was not significantly changed when we varied model parameters such as relative humidity or surface albedo, obtaining CO2 partial pressures for the late Archaean between 1.5 and 5.5 mb. Thus, the contradiction between sediment data and model results disappears.

The suspected composition of the eary Earth (the Archean, when life is believed to have started, 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), has alternated between CO2 and other reducing gases, such as methane. Originally CO2 was thought to be the main greenhouse gas, making life possible. However the high CO2 levels required were a problem; high CO2 levels would have created siderite (FeCO3) in the top layers of soil as iron interacted with CO2 in the oxygen-free air. Since then methane has top billing as the greenhouse gas responsible, with significant hydrogen levels a possibility. Over time, methane has come out on top. And thats what I wrote when I did my literature review for my PhD. Now I'm tidying it up a bit, and that section may be in for a rewrite. But what does it mean for our Climate change models of today? Tags climate, co2, thesis

[Warning, long post ahead. If you aren’t interested in Debian or it’s internals or my work - skip it. :) ] So as you might have read here, I got the delegation of the debadmin AKA FTPMaster group lately. I’ve got some pressure to not accept this delegation, but the response to my blog post about it had been extremely positive, everyone said I should not deny it. Knowing to have such a support within Debian is something I really appreciate, making it worth to spent time on my various jobs. Now, lets take this and write a little about what happened since I gained that extra group:

• Aj resigned from anything that requires additional group privileges. (As a DD run id ajt on a debian.org machine if you want to verify this).

Work I did since then:

• One of my first action was to finally finish the release transitions support, something which was waiting for it’s final merge for a long time. The release team was waiting for this and did ping us (ftpteam) multiple times, but now it is there. You can read more about this feature in my list mail and my initial blog post. (Oh, and something I have missed about everywhere I wrote about this: This whole transitions thing is based on an idea from Marga!)
• Added a mapping in dak, requested by Luk
• Merged a patch from another ftpteam member, Thomas Viehmann, which fixes daks handling of Format 3.0 (something) uploads. Currently it rejects them, without the merged patch it just crashed.
• Changed our daily cronscript to no longer VACUUM/VACUUM analyze projectb in every run. Postgres >= 8.1 has autovacuum, and its turned on, so we should be fine without extra runs of it. (And while i write daily cronscript or cron.daily - I mean dinstall, right now run twice a day).
• Fixed a breakage in code introduced by Debian maintainers which led to process-accepted (one main part of the daily cronscript) breaking. It was triggered by some octave-$FOO package upload, where the ###censored### did add someone twice into the Uploaders: field. Not helpful, but now we ignore this case and just warn us.
• Added a script to expire old database dumps. We do dump our projectb (the main archive database) twice in every run (beginning/end), which made 4 dumps a day. While old dumps seemed to have been removed on an irregular schedule - the dumps took about 71Gb in total. Which pretty much filled up merkels /org, as they get synced there. Now, my script (reworked version of a script from Florian Reitmeir) works with an “incremental deletion” scheme:

  RULES = [ ‘days’:14, ‘interval’:0 , ‘days’:31, ‘interval’:1 , ‘days’:365, ‘interval’:31 , ‘days’:3650, ‘interval’:365 , ]

  That means we now keep all files from the last 14 days. Then keep one per week. Then one per month and finally one per year for up to ten years. All the rest gets deleted. Space usage of our dumps now: 4.8Gb. Thats 66Gb gained. Source is in dak bzr if you want it, MIT licensed. If you improvie it further I love to see patches.
• Changed the way the projectb copy on merkel gets synced. Up to now it was run from a cronjob which syncs a number of files people want to see on merkel, including the database dumps, then reloads the database using the latest dump. This was run at a “random” time, scheduled to be shortly after dinstall. Problem with such a setup is that it will miss extra dinstall runs and also might import old data, as the timing of the cronjob meant it runs while dinstall on ftp-master is still doing its work. So bad bad. It is now done using the ssh trigger feature I described a while ago. So our daily cronscript now tells merkel when it should sync its database again.
• Coordinated with the qa group we now also push them, when the sync on merkel is done, so they can kick their cronjobs to reread projectb and just run whenever they get told that something changed. Yet another bad timing eliminated. (Well, will be done today). Oh, if you have something that depends on information from projectb / ftp-master and try to schedule it to run after dinstall - talk to me, we might just push you too.
• Started talking with the release team how britney, the script which manages our testing distribution, should be handled in the future. It currently is run fully under control of us ftpmasters (and reading hint files from the release team). Ideally this gets changed so that the release team has the control of the code and whatever gets run with it and then, in some way, maybe using ssh triggers, tells us to import a new dataset for testing. That needs some thinking, as obviously it should be limited to testing and we should make sure it doesn’t break the archive, but I think that is doable.
• Prepared a patch that sanity checks the Provides: field, something we currently don’t do. Mailed our internal team address about 3 days ago, to let others look at it, no response yet.

The above should nicely sum up my work in the past few days. Most of it pretty trivial, but still things that have to be done. I plan to keep doing things, slowly going from the trivial stuff to more complicated ones, but there is lots of stuff ahead. Some ideas, and this is a very incomplete list just from my head, there are tons of things that one could do, include

• Finally allowing dpkg-sig support in .deb files. I once, years ago, made a patch for it, which never got applied. (Mostly my fault here). Need to rewrite that to fit the actual code.
• Add a few more sections to our archive. There are multiple bugs asking for them, and some others also come to mind. Like java, ruby, octave, haskell, debug to name a few, but there might be more needed. (Yes, longterm all sections should die and be replaced with debtags. I just don’t think debtags is there yet?!)
• Maybe finally drop m68k and add other architectures to the archive, like some $foo*bsd one. (Thats for after lenny of course, at the time arm also gets dropped).
• Merge a patch I got from Myon which will keep uploaders in projectb.
• Enable bzip2 support for sources, not only for the binary packages. I have a patch ready, it’s not yet merged. Needs to test if anything breaks in stable if we apply it, before we can think about it. Worst case it has to wait until we are running lenny. (The archive runs on a machine with stable, so allowed features always have to be supported in stable).
• Process the currently waiting requests for pseudo-packages and either reject or approve them. After thats done - talk to the BTS maintainers to hand the management of pseudo-packages over to them, as 99% of the usage of those is in the BTS.
• Get dak to optionally mail the sponsor of a package too, if not already in the list of those getting a dak mail. Which isn’t easy. One proposal is to just look at the gpg keyid and get the Debian uid from it, send mail there. I don’t want this, as people are, unfortunately, able to disable mail receiving for their @debian.org address. Which would give us lots of bounces. No way we like that. Similar problems with “Just take one userid that looks like a mail address from their key”.
• Improve various parts run by our daily cronjob, as that one takes ages (about an hour today). Speed improvements are always nice there.
• Think about having more dinstall runs a day. Like - every 2 or 4 or 6 hours could be nice. But that needs discussion within the ftpteam and also with the mirror people before it can be done. But 6 hours seems to be something nice to have, more might be also ok.
• Coordinate with DSA to enable the continous AKA WAL archiving for our database.
• Make merkels sync be more instant, ie. no longer rely on a push of a database dump whenever dinstall run, but something thats near realtime. Having changes done on ries immediately synced to merkel.
• More (active) ftp-team member, maybe?!

Now, do you have any time to kill? Do you want to help? Some things you could do:

• Go look at our bug page and start there. Someone, I think Don, already started using user categories. It would be nice if someone is willing to keep up with the bugs and put them in categories. And continue to do that in the future.
• Generally help with our bug page. One nice task some people do, and possibly more could also do, is retitling bugs. Especially removal bugs tend to have a wrong title. The format is pretty specific…
• Feel free to submit patches to me. I promise to look at them without too much delay and at least give you a hint what might be wrong or could be done better. And if it makes sense, doesn’t break the archive, works, and is something dak should have - I will also merge it. Of course trivial patches are way easier in that regard, non-trivial ones should go via our ftpmaster address first, to leave others a chance to comment on. Bonus points if you provide bzr trees one can merge from, and the bzr tree you should work with is http://ftp-master.debian.org/bzr/ftpmaster-dak/ - patches/bzr trees against outdated versions won’t have much luck to get looked at. :)
• Keep me happy. However you do it, just don’t hug me. :)

It has now been more than 4 months since the last Debian developer account was created. 18 contributors have been through all steps, and are simply waiting for this simple administrative task to be done. We are sending a terrible message to potential contributors. We have strong requirements on the technical level of our developers. During the new maintainer process, we ask them to answer about 80 questions about Debian. We ask them to do grunt work. We review their reports twice (New Maintainers’ Front Desk, then Debian Account Manager). But even after we are totally satisfied about what they did, even after they became more qualified than many of our current DDs, we ask them to wait for months, so that the only person allowed to create accounts can finally do his “job”. It discourages the contributors currently in the NM process. I’ve seen several signs of frustration, or even depression. Some of them reduce their involvement in Debian, so we lose them before they even became Debian developers. Some of them consider resigning from the NM process. We should all feel guilty about that. But it also discourages people from joining Debian. Instead, they go to other more welcoming projects, which is totally understandable. Debian isn’t the only distribution with developers from the community those days. There’s Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE. Some of those have nice programs for new contributors, like “school” sessions. Sure, Debian is the “biggest” distribution without a company behind it. But is independance worth all the trouble? Of course, we have Debian Maintainers. DM is great for people who want to work on their packages. But, when we are trying to release lenny, we need more: people who are going to go through RC bugs, submitting patches. Who are going to do QA work. In short: people who care more about the whole distribution. Can we afford not recruiting anybody? Can we run Debian with the current manpower? I don’t think so. There are more than 550 RC bugs in lenny, many packages are currently blocked from migrating to lenny because they are RC-buggy, and many packages are orphaned or neglected. There are also a lot of bugs which haven’t been filed yet (I asked for help with running piuparts, which would probably result in 100-200 new RC bugs, but nobody had time to help). Most of the work that needs to be done is not rocket science. We could use a lot more manpower. Currently, the same small set of developers is doing most of the grunt work. They will get tired too. So, what can we do, as simple developers? There’s no magic solution, but we can try a few things.

1. It seems that some people disagree that there’s a problem. Let’s prove them wrong: we could start a blog meme with “I, too, agree that the Debian accounts and keyring situation is severely hurting Debian, and that a solution needs to be found RSN.” It’s not going to solve the problem by itself, but it will at least show that we consider it very important. Pressure could help.
2. We could start discussing solutions together. Our newly elected DPL said that he would talk with the problematic teams to determine how the situation could be improved. Unfortunately, this has been tried in the past (and failed). It might work this time, of course, but we could prepare a backup plan. So let’s find one or two good plans, and vote on them. (I liked the idea of giving accounts creation/management to DSA. After all, it’s only an sysadmin task once the report has been approved by FD and DAM.)
3. We could push forward Josip Rodin’s proposal about infrastructure teams. It might not solve the DAM problem immediately, but would probably help avoid similar problems in the future.

Notes:
1. Maybe the 18 waiting accounts will be created today or tomorrow. Even if that happens, it won’t solve anything. Waiting 4 months for a simple administrative task is not acceptable, and we need to fix that problem anyway.
2. Account creation is not the only problem. Some people have been unable to upload packages or to vote for the DPL election, because their PGP key expired, and nobody updated it even if they have been asking for more than 4 months.

I’ve just been reading about oil deterioration when deep frying [1]. Apparently frying food can cause the production of Acrylamide [2] which causes cancer, is a neurotoxin, and does other bad things to your body. Deep frying in a vacuum [3] is a solution to this problem as the lower temperatures reduce the formation of the bad chemicals (and also increase the life of the oil thus making for cheaper fried products). Of course this means that deep frying in a pressure cooker as KFC does probably gives a result that is a lot worse for your health [4]. For some time I’ve been avoiding KFC due to concerns about the treatment of the chickens. I have been regularly eating fried chicken from a local store which looks and tastes very similar to KFC so presumably is cooked in the same way. I guess I’ll have to stop eating that now. I wonder if toast is also bad in this regard. I expect that sausages would be a problem when cooked on a BBQ. In other health news I’ve been reducing my meat consumption and I’m considering trying to entirely avoid farm raised animals to restrict my meat consumption to game meat, this should be good for my health and is also a lot better for the animals and the environment.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-frying#Oil_deterioration


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fryer


• [4] http://www.kfc.com/about/pressure.asp

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• Virgin is testing the use of babassu oil and coconut oil blended with regular jet fuel in commercial flights [1]. They have flown with 20% bio-fuel and tests indicate that they could use up to 40%. This is a difficult problem to solve as most bio-fuels either have problems with vaporising at low pressures or becoming too viscous at low temperatures, it’s good to see some progress on this.

Interesting Rolling Stone article about the US government encouraging idiot “terrorists” [2].

Cory Doctorow predicts a poor future for hardware e-book readers [3]. For my personal use a laptop is better for reading. In most cases when I’m going to do some reading I’m likely to want to write notes or be in a situation where I need my laptop for other purposes. So a laptop plus an e-book reader would be more weight and more battery problems than having just a laptop.

On page 2 of this article about what might happen if the source code to Windows was released freely [4] I am quoted. One thing I should note is that I have nothing against OpenSolaris, it’s merely one large project for which I could inspect the source if I didn’t have legal advice to the contrary. The situation of OpenSolaris may have changed in recent times, but I have not felt the need to seek further legal advice as there seems no real benefit in viewing the source. There is no shortage of GPL source that I would like to read if I had the time…

Location Independent - a blog about working from no fixed address and how to live on the move [5]. Should be of interest to all the people who seem fascinated by my living in hotels for ~18 months.

Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail [6]. Inspirational and it is also relevant when considering the positions that churches take today on moral issues. I found the link from The Reid Report blog [7] which is an interesting analysis of US politics.

Scientific American has an article about high altitude destroying brain cells [8], apparently this can happen even when there is no noticable injury and it is permanent. It seems that it would be a good idea to try and locate conferences to minimise air travel by delegates and speakers…

• [1] http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/travel/coconut-jet-fuel-thats-nuts/2008/02/25/1203788223183.html


• [2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18137343/the_fear_factory


• [3] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html


• [4] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17132/1090/1/0/


• [5] http://locationindependent.com/blog/


• [6] http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html


• [7] http://blog.reidreport.com/


• [8] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brain-cells-into-thin-air

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Since about half a year now we have a fibre to the home connection. This means that two fiber lines terminate at a box in our living room. It is a blown fibre which means that a tube is buried to your house, after which they use air pressure to put the actual fibre from the house to the POP. There are two fibers: one for bidirectional data (IP), and one that does nothing more than carry the analog cable TV signal. We started out with only the internet facility but now have so-called triple play: phone, analog tv and internet connectivity. The results are in: I find it to be just as good or better than the previous offerings: phone from KPN, tv from Casema or internet from Surfnet. But there's nothing revolutionary. Phone and tv just provide the same service over a different medium. The internet connection is with the standard of 24 Mb/s more than fast enough for any day to day use and an upgrade to 50 Mb/s is pending. A real improvement is that the upstream speed is just as high, very useful when uploading photos, packages or the text of this blog post. One drawback is that they only provide one IP address instead of 32. Also, the service provider (XMSnet) does seem to be a bit stuck in the late nineties with an unfriendly help desk telling you that your situation is impossible , and bad billing, There are plans however to open up the line to other providers in the future. So for now it's just a convenience bundling of services, but nothing really ground breaking. Let's see what the future brings.

I recently purchased a Grace ITC-IR1000 Wifi Radio from Beach Audio. There seem to be a number of competing products available at the moment, and it seems they are all based on the Reciva internet radio platform. This appears to be an ARM based system running Linux (checkout the GPL compliance area). It has built-in wireless, so connects up directly to your 802.11 network. It supports WEP and WPA; entering the WPA key is a little like entering your high score on an arcade game with a built-in scrolling alphabet. It supports all sorts of codecs, including the most important Real, WMA and MP3. Once on the network, it contacts Reciva service (free) to update and download channel lists. Once there, you can select stations filtered by region (Europe, Oceania, etc) then country. There are literally thousands to choose from, and users can contribute streams which are filtered by Reciva and added to the database periodically. An excellent feature is the ability to log-in to the website and both build favourite lists and add your own personal streams. You then register your radio's serial number with the website and on the next channel update you get access to your lists. It also offers you the opportunity to connect to a local PC to stream music from folders there; I haven't looked into this feature at all. Overall, it's a great device. The audio quality is great, and it seems to have at least a little sub-woofer built in. It has some nice features; 5 of the buttons on the front are quick access preset buttons, just hold it down when you are listening to the station and it remembers it. It supports a wide range of streams, the interface is simple to understand, it keeps the clock via NTP and directly connecting to the wireless is great. My ideal application is for a bedside clock radio, so I can listen to .au radio as I go to sleep and wake up. It has an inbuilt back-lit clock, sleep timer and alarm system, but they all take a bit of fiddling. The buttons are small and black, which doesn't help in the dark, and most access is done via the big scroll wheel which you press to make a selection (think iPod). However, the resistance of the rubber pads is less than that the pressure required to push the button in, so it really takes two hands. This means when you want to setup an alarm and put on the sleep timer as you go to bed there is a bit of fiddling through menus, etc. Also, as it is playing the clock seems to go away. Initially I had a problem with firewall ports, but it doesn't seem a big issue on the forums so it must have just been me. I also wonder what happens when Reciva go out of business, because all the tuning happens via their website. Something similar happened when 3com Audrey support was dropped; it then became a matter of faking DNS replies. Sniffing the protocol might be fun :) All in all, although it sounds a little silly, if you know what you want it for this is a great little system. I imagine any expat will get their money's worth listening to home radio stations. If you're only interested in local radio, I'd still suggest the best thing is still probably (surprise, surprise) a radio. It leaves a little to be desired as a bedside radio but is otherwise a very nice toy!

In case you didn’t know, I’ve decided to resign as atheme project lead. This is for a few reasons:

• Firstly, I have felt overall ineffective in this role since late 2007. This is probably due to the fact that disagreements between me and several other people have resulted in people leaving the organization to work on other projects, and the fact that atheme has not grown in any significant way since last year’s Summer of Code event.
• Secondly, I am busy with a lot of other things and do not have time to give the proper attention this role needs. This role is basically defining the direction that atheme grows in, and capitalizing our strengths to expand the project and promote it. I see the lack of growth and proper promotion as a personal failure.
• Thirdly, at the moment I am under a lot of stress due to dealing with various issues at the moment, which is leaving me irritable and generally quick to anger. This is not a quality we want in our project leadership. In short: I’m fucking up, and it needs to stop. So right now, I am resigning as project lead. If people want me back when I am under less pressure in general, then that’s great.
• Fourthly, we need to see new leadership in atheme anyway, to keep things interesting. Without a regular change in leadership, people will start to see us as someone’s personal project, and that’s not the case with atheme.

However, just because I’m resigning as project lead doesn’t mean that I will stop working on projects I care about inside atheme, like audacious, mowgli, and mcs. These projects are critical components of the modern FOSS desktop, and I intend to continue working on them. This is purely an administrative change, so that any mistakes or stupidity I do have no effect on atheme.org’s overall health. I hope to see many other Atheme members step up and try to become project lead. Under the right leadership, atheme’s projects could become a much more notable platform in FOSS development within a short amount of time. Update: Due to popular demand, I have changed my mind. I’m no longer resigning as project lead of atheme.

Being fairly interested in this whole mobile phone software thing, it's pretty hard not to sit up and take notice of the iPhone SDK that was just announced. A few thoughts:

• Of course it's nice, polished, and lets you do some interesting things with the phone. That was not too surprising though.
• The "investment fund" seems like something of a response to the Android Developer Challenge, and is certainly an interesting move on Apple's part. Strategically, it certainly alters the focus of the money flowing into the equation. Comparing the two, the dollar amounts in the ADC are much smaller, but they are also more "concrete": N people will get X dollars in time frame T. As an independent developer, that works fairly well for me as something to have a go at and then move on from, win or lose. An investment fund backed by Kleiner Perkins is on a whole different scale and level. The amount of money is huge (they won't even bother with less than 100K), but who knows how that works out in practice, or how much of that is actually 100% committed to iPhone companies. KP aren't the sort of people that are going to just hand that out to any old company that does an iPhone app. They're also going to want to be involved in the companies, which means there won't be too many of them. In short, it brings in all the good and bad aspects of venture capital. In short: in one corner, lots of money for relatively big, organized players, and in the other, small, quick incentives to do cool things that anyone has a shot at. We won't really be able to judge the results until we see how it plays out. (As an aside, I still have some bad memories of the management that KP foisted off on Linuxcare).
• The system for selling applications is smart. You will have one place to go to to get your apps, and as a user you'll have some assurance that they're up to certain quality standards. People will like that kind of thing, and is far nicer than anything JavaME ever had. Instead of multiple, fractured marketplaces, you get one big one. Of course, it also keeps Apple in control of everything, which also has some negative implications as well.
• 37 Signals seem to be wildly ecstatic about Apple's potential, but I'm a bit less sanguine. I don't doubt that the iPhone has a bright future, that much is pretty obvious. However... dominate? First of all, if it's so widespread, it loses some of its cachet, doesn't it? I don't think Apple wants that. I don't see them licensing the system so that other phone manufacturers can use it, so it will only be adapted as widely as Apple sees fit. Cheaper Nokia models are very popular over here in Europe. Will iPhones at those price points (less than 100 euro) be available and competitive with Nokia's offerings? Open and adaptable aren't necessarily things that Apple is known for, which might be the difference between "strong presence" and "dominate", as we saw with Mac vs Windows. Getting 10-15% towards the high end of the market might be what they aspire to, rather than ubiquity.
• I could, however, very easily envision Apple getting into some kind of business niche and dominating that completely, as they did with education for a while. That might not extend to the broader market, though.
• Moving on to other considerations, this one is important to me: apparently, according to the license agreement, you can't run an interpreter that fetches code and executes it, amongst the various other restrictions! That's kind of a deal breaker for Hecl, which counts that ability as one of its strengths. I don't think a port was in the works in any case since Hecl is written in Java. Still, though, that's the kind of annoying restriction that reaffirms my commitment to open source.
• As an aside, I wonder what Sun is up to at this point - between this and Android, they have to be under enormous pressure to release a successor to Java ME, which was a good effort for its time, but is beginning to look dated and limited, even though it is very widely deployed.

I'm an open source guy at heart. I love openness and source code and the freedom to tinker... and while I'll certainly give Apple their due for making some fine products, closed and controlled is simply not for me. Others may feel differently - it's a matter of taste and preferences. So for the moment, my efforts will be focused on Android, which I see as the best, most open thing out there at the moment.