A quick update before the big one about the 2009 Google Summer of Code. I believe we had a great recruitment drive this year and we have a very good set of proposals to work with. We d like to thank everyone involved for their help. We re now ranking out student applications. I promised elsewhere that I ll send out our shortlist of projects once Google sends us our preliminary slot allocation today but I misread the thread on the -mentors list and that count will only happen on Thursday, so we ll have to wait a bit more. That shortlist would only include projects, but not individual students. The idea is to give a heads up to everyone before committing to a group of projects and students. It is very important to inform the community as it increases visibility of the students work, giving them more help and support (and also avoids duplicating existing not yet publicized work!). As far as mentors go, we should have all of our approximately 14 planned projects covered, except for 2. I m posting them here in case you could mentor or help find mentors for those projects. (The wiki pages are not really up to date, so please come on IRC and ask clarifications, see below)

• Qt4 Package Manager:

Finish Petr Rockai s Adept 3.0 and bring a Qt4 Package Manager to Debian, with a different interface paradigm than Aptitude-gtk.
Petr said he would provide help with the existing codebase but can t mentor. Sune Vuorela from Debian KDE is ready to help with Qt4 related issues.

• EC2/Eucalyptus:

Build Debian tools to create Debian images for Amazon EC2 and the free Eucalyptus implementation. Packaging of the Eucalyptus hosting framework is also possible.
For this project, we already have on board to help: Charles Plessy from Debian Med, Eric Hammond, developer of the existing vmbuilder Ubuntu tool for EC2 and Chris Grzegorczyk and Rich Wolski, from the Eucalyptus team. Plenty of people to get help from. Mentoring is a great experience! See this for what it entails. If we still can t find a mentor by the end of the week, I ll blast an announcement over at debian-devel@l.d.o along with the project shortlist. In the meantime, don t forget to idle on #debian-soc on irc.debian.org.

I ve been tilting at windmills, recently. Windmill, actually. It s a Python program that lets your computer drive a web browser, without any human interference. We use it at Akoha to run tests that make sure that our website works with Firefox. We use it to help us test our site with Internet Explorer. So I dutifully set up a Windows machine and tried to get it to run our test suite. I quickly realized that our software was going to need something more Unix-like. Cygwin is the answer to that problem. It provides a full POSIX environment inside Windows. I built all our software and tried to fire up Windmill.

ImportError: No module named _winreg

Uh oh! Windmill needs to access the Windows Registry. According to the winreg documentation, it s only available for Windows. Apparently, Cygwin doesn t count as Windows. So I spent the weekend writing a library that fills in the gap. cygwinreg allows you to read, write, and explore the Windows Registry from inside Cygwin. Whenever you want to use winreg, use cygwinreg instead.

import sys
if sys.platform == "win32":
    try:
        import winreg
    except ImportError:
        import _winreg as winreg
elif sys.platform == "cygwin":
    import cygwinreg

After I did that, I plugged it in, stepped back and ran my tests. They worked!

Download cygwinreg
or install it with
easy_install cygwinreg

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

The bits of paper I m hanging on the wall tomorrow (well, later today) at Midwest wherein I discuss Geographic Data Visualization Using Open-Source Data and R are now online here for the curious or insomnia-stricken.

I updated Web service 'Debian HCL - Debian GNU/Linux device driver check & report page' is an easy tool to check and see the support status of your hardware on GNU/Linux, with many improved features. Integrating the check page and submitted reports is convenience. The vendor tree view will make easier to find models what you'd like to see. Although Searching isn't implemented yet, I think new URL structure is friendly to search engine crawlers. I'll put Google search form on the page after Google crawls. Handling your submission is semi-automatic periodically. So please don't submit again and again even it won't be shown soon. :) This service is localized in English, Japanese, French, Spanish, Spanish-Argentina, Italian, Polish, German, and Portguese at this time, by using your Web browser language information. Because I introduced the GNU gettext system for internationalizing, it's easy to translate and update the translations. You can take template.pot file and translate in your language. If you'd like to translate in your language, please tell me. Have a fun!

My patch for initial kernel support for the QNAP TS-119 and TS-219 Turbo NAS got accepted and will be in 2.6.30. I can run Debian on a USB disk without any problems but there are some issues left (some severe, some cosmetic):

• SATA: there are long timeouts when initializing the disk. In most cases, the disk is eventually recognized but it can take quite some time. I've no idea why those timeouts happen.
• Flash: I can read from flash just fine but writing doesn't work.
• Parsing the MAC address: even though a MAC address is set in u-boot, the QNAP firmware stores the real MAC address in flash (similar to the TS-109 and TS-209). The TS-109/TS-209 code to read the MAC address doesn't work because the flash on the TS-219 is connected in a different way (SPI).
• SATA lights: the activity light doesn't work.

Unfortunately, I've no idea how to resolve these issues. However, the QNAP TS-119 and TS-219 have started shipping so hopefully someone else will investigate these issues.

This weekend, I was going to go to an acquaintance so that we could edit the material which we had filmed at the concert. Yes, we did use DVswitch, but due to me being somewhat late in proposing a video team, there was no team, and hence nobody switched anything. So instead we'll have to edit stuff now. Since I'd never done anything of the sort before, I guess it's fair to say that I'm not exactly the expert. As such, I installed samba, plugged the (LVM2/ext3 formatted) external hard disk containing the movie files to my laptop, and served them over a gigE link to his; the idea being that we could then do the editing on his system, using the software which he knew. After having copied those files (one 22G DV file, one 15G one, and a few much smaller ones), he loaded them into the editing software. Which promptly sat on its ass, making us wait, as it 'analyzed' the movie clip. This of course took ages. As said, I don't really know a lot about movie editing. However, in preparation to this, I had been playing with Cinelerra CV, and so I knew that this particular application does not require such an utterly useless delay. This I told Werner, who got interested. So we went over to Cinelerra's website, and had a look at the features list. That got him interested, and he suggested that it might be more interesting for me to install Linux and Cinelerra on his laptop, so that he could do the editing using that, rather than the Windows application that he wasn't entirely fond of anyway. So I did. A few hours later, everything was up and running, we had had lunch, and we were copying data from my external hard disk to his. As we were waiting on the data to be copied, I installed foobillard, and we had a bit of fun playing pool and snooker. Closing words, as we were wrapping up and he had a slightly more general look at the system: "sortof useful these days, isn't it?" Sure. I really believe that this kind of thing is the ideal way to do advocacy; rather than suggesting freedom for freedom's sake, one should suggest something people actually care about, and work from there. Of course, that doesn't always work.

In a Java framework I'm working on, 'pairs' arise everywhere. Unfortunately in contrast to e.g. C++, Java doesn't include a predefined 'pair' class. C++ templates are really nice because of the way they are complied and optimized (in particular they also handle what Java calls 'native datatypes'); Java generics aren't up to par with that. (But yes, Java offers other benefits, such as being much easier to parse and thus refactor). Anyway, this is not going to be a rant on Generics.So I have this interface in Java called Pair<FIRST,SECOND> along with two implementations SimplePair<FIRST,SECOND> and ComparablePair<FIRST extends Comparable<FIRST>,SECOND extends Comparable<SECOND>>.For performance reasons, SimplePair is declared 'final', and so is ComparablePair. It's written everywhere that making classes final can make a large difference in Java, and since these objects will be used in a lot of places, it seems reasonable to care about this here.However, it would often be nice to have better readable code, that is assuming I'm using SimplePair<Monkey,Banana>, it would then be nice to make a derived class BananaPreference extends SimplePair<Monkey,Banana>, with added methods getMonkey() and getPreferredbanana() to make the resulting code more readable.Having readable code is also often quite as important as having performant code, after all ...If someone with solid experience in Java optimization has some ideas to share, please do so! Email: erich AT debian DOT org - no comments in blog.Right now, I have one idea on how it could be possible to achieve both (seriously, I could use some feedback from Java Gurus on that): make SimplePair and ComparablePair abstract, all methods there final, then derive final classes as needed. Does that combine the benefits?[Update: I received from Joachim Sauer the following helpful link: JavaOne presentation on performance tuning and various VMs. Basically this seems to indicate that in all these common situations, any modern Java VM should be able to figure out the inlining options automatically and optimize appropriately, so it won't benefit from any "final" hint by the developer. Note that a C++ compile doesn't do runtime optimization, but allows compile time optimization at a much lower level, so this rule doesn't apply to C++.]

DPL campaign woes DPL campaigning is going to end today, and the draft ballot has apparead already. The latest bits of news I've to offer are that my rebuttals have been published a couple of days ago (also in the platform from www.d.o, of course, which is just lacking a direct anchor). Also, I've summarized campaigning discussions at my candidacy page. You can find there pointers to all topics raised on -vote, as direct or indirect questions to the candidates. Please let me know if I forgot something. All in all I was expecting more discussions between the candidates for a campaign, but I presume the volume is meant to remain low having just two candidates. That notwithstanding, some very inspiring and unexpected questions have been posed; it has been intriguing to think about them. As a campaign-concluding fun bit, I cannot resist posting a screenshot of my candidacy post, as it appeared to me about 10 minutes ago: ... I mean, having fellow DDs making fun of me for this DPL thingy on IRC is fine, but ads stepping in is kind of too much ...

Following-up to the story of having all the movies I ve watched in a PostgreSQL database, I now have a tendency to run the following query after wathing one, to take a look at what other movies I ve watched in which some of the actors also participated:

  movies=> SELECT s.name, s.title
             FROM seen_cast s JOIN seen_cast s2 USING (person_id)
             WHERE s.movie_id != s2.movie_id AND s2.title = 'Sideways' 
             ORDER BY name ASC;

(Replacing Sideways with the movie I just watched, of course. Also, seen_cast is a view, that s why it looks as if the database is not normalized.) So, apart from informing me that I have seen Paul Giamatti in other five films in addition to Sideways, the above query returned the following rows:

       name             title        
  --------------+--------------------
   Adolf Hitler   Germania anno zero
   Adolf Hitler   The Good Shepherd

Apparently, Adolf Hitler has a page in IMDB, and is credited (generally by IMDB only, not by the film credits themselves) in every film that shows any archive footage of him. Which, as of today, are more than 400.

Today over lunch, I and 6 others went to visit Grandma. She was in her room, looking better physically today than yesterday. When I walked in, I said brightly, Hi Grandma! She took my hand warmly, and said to me, Now I don t think we ve met. Who are you? I knew that moment would happen someday, but still was surprised when it happened. Mom told her that we were there to tell her we love her. Grandma counted out the seven of us, and said, All these wonderful people here to tell that to ME? That s Grandma still there! It was a difficult moment. Many of us were tearful, and Grandma was sick enough that she sometimes lost the battle to stay awake. But we were all glad it was happening. Mom thought it right (me too) that she should tell Grandma about the latest word from the doctors. The conversation went, in part, something like this, with my mom addressing her mother: My Mom: Mom, the doctors say your heart is probably wearing out. My Grandma: *shrug* Yeah. My Mom: And your body is probably tiring out too. My Gramdma: Yes it is. I m 94. It s not that Grandma was depressed or anything. Just that she had long ago been at peace with the idea of death, and actually told us more than once that the was rather surprised that she has lived to be as old as she has. So it wasn t frightening or surprising to her to confront her own mortality. To her, it was a fact, and an obvious one at that. My brother brought along Grandma s old Bible. She had given it to him a few years ago. It was filled with highlights and handwritten notes from cover to cover. She had carefully analyzed it, and when she bought a new Bible, had carefully copied the notes to it. My brother read to her two passages that she had highlighted:Psalm 23: (which she has noted as a favorite of many Christians ) and Numbers 6:24-26. He then held her hand and said a prayer with her. Then he said a blessing for her, and as he was getting to the end, she interrupted, saying the last word for him: forever! She still had her sense of humor, and made us all laugh several times. She said, as she always has when any of us stop by to visit, how happy she is that we came by, and what a wonderful family she has. She said several times Danke sch n, Danke sch n, Danke sch n! (Thank you, thank you, thank you! she had made sure to teach a few German words to all of us as kids.) When it was time to go, she got lots of hugs from us, and made a point to tell each of us individually thank you for coming! As we walked down the hall, I was reminded of her old tradition going back many years. Whenever we would leave her house, she d wave to us from the porch. And, if it was dark, we d turn on the car light and wave back. Since she s been in the nursing home, she ll wave to us from her doorway as we walk down the hall. And, sure enough, today s visit ended with her waving to us from her doorway with both hands (as she always does) and a big smile. We all waved back with a smile as we walked away, too. I don t know if this will be the last goodbye with her, but if it is, I can t think of a better one.

Two days ago I read about the Ada Lovelace day, which was an event were men and women were asked to blog about the women in technology which made an impact on them, in an effort to present girls (and women) all over the world with female role models in technology.

In similar though more personal motivation I choose my machine naming scheme at home two years ago: my (virtual) machines at home are named after women who made a difference, mostly in IT, but also some in more general science. Even though this list is not 100% in the spirit of pointing out the one woman who made a personal difference to one self, I thought I share my list, as I found it very interesting to learn about these great women myself.

goldberg is named after Adele Goldberg, who pioneered the smalltalk programming language in the 70s. According to a sympathetic annecdote she refused to show the system to Steve Jobs and only did so after her superiors ordered her to do so. Thats were Apple got many ideas which made them famous for being innovative...

goldwasser is named after Shafi Goldwasser, who is a RSA professor at MIT, doing research in complexity theory, cryptography and computational number theory. She is the co-inventor of zero-knowledge proofs.

lovelace is named after Ada Lovelace, and is widely recognized as the first programmer, who wrote a program (something that manipulated symbols according to rules) for a machine which has not even been build at that time. Of course, some men on this planet object to her being the first programmer, as work by women is always insignificant... </irony or maybe sarcasm>

bunten is named afer Danielle Bunten Berry, who was a game designer and programmer best known for the games M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold.

holberton is named after Betty Holberton, who was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, during and after World War II.

hopper is named after Grace Hopper who wrote the first compiler ever, the A compiler. She was also heavily involved in creating COBOL and standardizing COBOL and FORTRAN.

koller is named after Daphne Koller who does AI research at MIT and who seems to behind the idea of bayesian machine learning, which you might know from your spam filters... (I can only state her involvement in bayesian learning so vaguely as I'm basically clueless about the topic :)

leveson is named after Nancy Leveson who is also an MIT professior and is an expert in systems and software safety.

Last but not least I like to remark that none of the women above is even nearly covered with what I wrote here or what is written in wikipedia, which I used as my main source for this blog post. It's simple impossible to sum up one life that brief and be close to accurate.

And then there is another group of women whose achievements are noteworthy as well and who choose to present themselves on that webpage to show others that Debian is not a mens club. Thank you (a lot) for that and for your other contributions to Debian! If you want to learn more about these giants, I recommend this talk. Guess who's achievements I admire most in this group ;-)

Somewhat unrelated I wish to shout cheers to Yvonne, who tought me many things and who died six years ago today. You will also not be forgotten, though the pain is mostly gone now (well, it's gone, except for days like today). Thank you, among other stuff, for teaching me to celebrate and cheer every day, even if not everything is cheerful. Wenn die Nacht am tiefsten, ist der Tag am n chsten! :-)

Enabling ikiwiki comment with a bit of CSS I've finally spent some time to understand why the amazing comments ikiwiki plugin was not working for me. Obviously the reason were page templates which I had customized and hence were missing the needed template variables that expand to comments links and content. That made me wonder about keeping my ~/.ikiwiki/templates directory as a Git repository (which actually already is, even though for different reasons) which tracks Joey's ikiwiki repo for better merging future changes to upstream templates. Looks like a good idea, but I didn't have the time to testdrive it yet. Still, I've updated my ikiwiki CSS (also available from ikiwiki's CSS market) for fancier rendering of comments and I'm quite happy about the result. So, to the nice guy who once wrote the following in the discussion page of an old blog post of mine: p.s. this is the dumbest comment method I've ever used You were totally right!, the issue is fixed now, big up to Simon McVittie for the plugin. /me now only dreams of an automatic conversions of old discussion pages to comment series, knowing that it is impossible in the general case due to the lack of structure ...

I ll take chance now that microblogging seems to be fashionable in Debian to comment this. Luk did create a while ago an Identi.ca account to send updates about his work on Debian, eg. updated chroots for goetz (official alpha buildd) . I ve created an account for myself, and intend to send there the same kind of Debian-related updates let s see how it goes. We ve also talked about setting up one for the release team as a whole, but we ll see about that. Relatedly, now that I m a tircd user and Twitter lives now on my Irssi (thanks, Decklin!), I can say it ll be easier to update my account there, which I ve had for a while. It ll be personal stuff, mainly, i.e. not intersect with the Identi.ca one. P.S.: Apologies for today s post in Spanish in Planet Debian. I realized right after Planet software had fetched it, and albeit I removed it from the feed I send to planet immediately, Planet seemed not to pick up the removal.

Identi.ca is one of the contestants in the Internet March Mayhem e-Tournament. We're up against LinkedIn in the first round. Help us out by clicking the "Identi.ca" link in the lower left-hand part of the tree. tags identi.ca marchmayhem voteforus

Ada Lovelace Day FAIL Updated. I signed up for the Ada Lovelace Day pledge a few months ago, so I wrote a churlish, short, and ill-tempered blog post on the subject. (Since redacted.) Among other things, I said, "I dislike the canonization of Ada Lovelace as a patron saint of women in computing. [...] Hundreds of thousands if not millions of women have written more code that mattered more for people's real lives than anything Ada Lovelace did. [...] Maybe instead of honoring Ada Lovelace, we need to honor these other women instead." But on re-reading the pledge, I realized that I totally missed the point of Ada Lovelace Day, and that this is exactly what people are supposed to do. Oops. See #ald09 for some nice posts about women in computing. Oh, and to pick a woman in technology I admire: Eve Maler, one of the co-creators of XML. I met her when she was chairing the SAML committee, and she led that group of competitive egos through some very difficult security and protocol design issues with great intelligence and diplomacy. tags: women technology adalovelace adalovelaceday AdaLovelaceDay09

and now for something completely different... sometimes in a shell script you need to do stuff that modifies the positional parameters ($@, $1, $2, etc) from the cmdline, usually via the builtin shift, maybe from using getopt(1) or similar. for example, it's quite common to see the following in a shell script that parses cmdline flags with getopt

# parse cmdline options with getopt
TEMP= getopt -o h123 -n $0 -- "$@" 
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then usage >&2 ; exit 1 ; fi
# overwrites $@ with getopt-generated/sanitized arguments
eval set -- "$TEMP"
# destructively iterates across $@
while true; do
  case "$1" in
        -h)
          # handle option h
          shift
        ;;
        ...
        --)
          shift
          break
        ;;
      esac
...
done

but sometimes you want to be able to restore the original positional parameters later, or otherwise quote them in a manner where they can be passed along to another script/function, log them, embed them in a string/file, etc. you can't always just stash them in another variable to use that later, because "$@" has a special meaning to the shell that can't otherwise be reproduced with another variable. one way you could try to store/save them would be to save the original copy of $@ and use eval set -- later on to change it back to the saved variable. using a slightly simplified version of the above:

#!/bin/sh
# save the cmdline
saved="$@"
echo original command line, $# arguments: "$@"
while test -n "$*"; do echo arg: "$1"; shift; done
echo mangled command line, $# arguments: "$@"
# restore the cmdline
eval set -- "$saved"
echo restored command line, $# arguments: "$@"
while test -n "$*"; do echo arg: "$1"; shift; done

and at first glance, it seems to work:

rangda[/home/sean] ./bad.sh one two three
original command line, 3 arguments: one two three
arg: one
arg: two
arg: three
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 3 arguments: one two three
arg: one
arg: two
arg: three

but you may run into problems when some parameters have spaces, or quotes:

rangda[/home/sean] ./bad.sh "1: one" "2: two"
original command line, 2 arguments: 1: one 2: two
arg: 1: one
arg: 2: two
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 4 arguments: 1: one 2: two
arg: 1:
arg: one
arg: 2:
arg: two
rangda[/home/sean] ./bad.sh "one's one"
original command line, 1 arguments: one's one
arg: one's one
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
./bad.sh: eval: line 12: unexpected EOF while looking for matching  ''

or worse, shell meta characters:

rangda[/home/sean] ./bad.sh 'i wonder what  pwd  would do'
original command line, 1 arguments: i wonder what  pwd  would do
arg: i wonder what  pwd  would do
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 6 arguments: i wonder what /home/sean would do
arg: i
arg: wonder
arg: what
arg: /home/sean
arg: would
arg: do

the solution is to build up the saved value a bit more manually, single-quoting each parameter (which should prevent any unintended side effects of space/quotes/metacharacters), and escaping existing single quotes inside of parameters.

# escape any single quotes in an argument
quote() 
  echo "$1"   sed -e "s,','\\\\'',g"
 
# save up a properly quoted/escaped version of "$@"
for arg in "$@"; do
  saved="$ saved:+$saved  '$(quote "$arg")'"
done
echo original command line, $# arguments: "$@"
while test -n "$*"; do echo arg: "$1"; shift; done
echo mangled command line, $# arguments: "$@"
# restore the cmdline
eval set -- "$saved"
echo restored command line, $# arguments: "$@"
while test -n "$*"; do echo arg: "$1"; shift; done

let's see how it behaves:

rangda[/home/sean] ./good.sh "1 one" "2: two"
original command line, 2 arguments: 1 one 2: two
arg: 1 one
arg: 2: two
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 2 arguments: 1 one 2: two
arg: 1 one
arg: 2: two
rangda[/home/sean] ./good.sh "one's one"
original command line, 1 arguments: one's one
arg: one's one
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 1 arguments: one's one
arg: one's one
rangda[/home/sean] ./good.sh 'i wonder what  pwd  would do'
original command line, 1 arguments: i wonder what  pwd  would do
arg: i wonder what  pwd  would do
mangled command line, 0 arguments:
restored command line, 1 arguments: i wonder what  pwd  would do
arg: i wonder what  pwd  would do

while not entirely pretty, it does to do the trick. i'd be interested to know if anyone has a better way of doing this (or if there are hidden problems in what i've posted above).

My experience with LapStore's used-ThinkPad warranty repair service My ThinkPad T40 arrived back from warranty repair today (well, actually yesterday, but I had to run off to the Gnome-2.26 release get-together in Munich so I did not have time to open the box then). I bought it used roughly two years ago at LapStore when my R51 had died. I had bought the R51 new with a one year IBM warranty but unfortunately within two years the graphics chip with got damaged and would freeze the notebook after a couple of minutes. I then decided that I do not really need a new notebook anymore, and opted for a used T4x series (there were no used X40s available at that time). I chose LapStore because they offered a one-year "Garantie" (guarantee? warranty?), which was rather unusual for used notebooks - at best, you would get a one-year "Gewaehrleistung" which is the promise to fix things which were supposedly broken already by delivery. Even better, one could optionally extend the warranty to two years, which I did. The notebook they sent was in pretty good condition (apparently a business out-of-warranty return) and I put in my R51's hard disk, the ipw2100 WLAN card and the RAM (unfortunately, I realized too late that the keyboard and the CDRW/DVD drive do not fit). I was pretty happy with it (and LapStore in general, I recommended it to a couple of friends since, and e.g. my current flatmate bought a T42 there a while ago as well) until the fan started dropping out and making weird noises by the end of 2008. So just before the end of warranty, I sent it (after removing hard disk, optical drive and battery) in to LapStore to see how their service is. I also mentioned a clear bright spot on the display (apparently some fatigue, you see it often mentioned in ThinkPad eBay descriptions) and a crack in the palmrest between the cursor-right key and the hard disk slot. When they sent a mail that the ThinkPad had arrived at their site, I also followed-up via mail that the "indestructible" keyboard caps stickers they used to mod a Scandinavian(?) keyboard into a German one were pretty much destroyed by now and would also need servicing. I assumed that they would service the fan (which looked like a clear-cut warranty issue to me) without arguing, but probably not the display and palmrest (and did not know whether they got the mail about the keyboard stickers), so when they sent another mail two days ago that they sent the notebook back without asking further questions, I became worried about what happened at all. So, long story short, I was totally positively surprised when I opened the box today and read: "Aktion: L fter, Display, Palmrest und Tastatur getauscht" (action: fan, display, palmrest and keyboard replaced) The replacements are still used parts (and the keyboard is still not a real German one, but one with new stickers on it), but they basically changed my almost-totally-broken-will-fall-apart T40 back into a almost-as-good-as-new T40. (not sure whether that is positive or negative, but they also forgot to remove the service-hard disk they put in to test things, I guess I will send it back to them) So all in all, I am very much impressed by their service. I would have expected this kind of service from IBM/Lenovo if I had a manufacturer warranty, but not from some random sell-used-ThinkPads shops on the net. I can now even more strongly recommend LapStore as the place to buy good notebooks. Certainly you can get cheaper prices at some eBay stores, but you do not get real warranty then and what about the service? I recommend geting a T42 - I believe the T43 is inferior to it and the T40s and T41s don't have "LapStore Garantie" anymore. You can get them without operating system and can customize the hard disk, memory and optical drives - unfortunately you cannot downgrade those, which is my only gripe with them.

Bruce Schneier writes about the risks involving children abandoned in cars and cites an article about the tragic deaths of children in hot cars [1]. One unfortunate error that he made was to not cite the following from the end of the last page of the Washington post article he cited [2]:
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. We are vulnerable, but we don t want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters. I believe that similar thought processes are used in relation to many other situations, and that such thought processes prevent people from taking appropriate actions to minimise the risk. If someone considers that forgetting a child in the back seat to be an accident that could happen to anyone then they would be inclined to take action to minimise the risk (such as spending some money on a sensor). If however they consider such forgetfulness to be proof of being a bad parent , then as they are a good parent they would have to avoid buying a monitor. I m surprised that Bruce didn t draw an analogy between this and the forgetful losses of laptops and guns by people who work for law enforcement agencies (which he has written about before). I wonder how expensive it would be to make a sensor for heart-rate, breathing, and temperature integrated with a GSM modem and a GPS? If it could be small enough to be attached to clothes then the child could wear it at all times. If such a sensor was to detect a sign of a problem it wouldn t matter whether the child was forgotten in a car, at day-care, or even being actively supervised. The data would be sent to the monitoring agency along with GPS data. The monitoring agency could then phone the parents. If the parents don t answer or don t know where the child is then the police could track down the GPS location. Probably most calls would be due to parents leaving a child too close to an air-conditioner or playing outside in the sun in summer which are unlikely to give a fatal result and a phone call would get a quick fix for what would only be a minor health problem. If the device was marketed as monitoring for sleep apnia then parents could buy it without admitting to the possibility that they might do anything wrong. The causes of SIDS are a topic of ongoing research and parents can admit to being worried about their children suffering from it without admitting any possibility that they might make a mistake.

• [1] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/03/leaving_infants.html


• [2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html

I live in the USA. Our government issues many grants to scientists for research via the National Institute of Health. I recently found out about the NIH's recent requirement that publicly-funded research must be published freely online within 12 months. As you can imagine, i think this is a remarkably Good Thing (though 12 months seems a little bit long for fast-moving fields). Apparently, John Conyers and several co-sponsors have introduced HR 801, which appears intended to overturn this remarkable policy, primarily for the benefit of the companies that publish scientific journals. This bill is a shame, and i had hoped for better from Rep. Conyers, who otherwise has a remarkably positive record as a legislator advocating for government transparency and the public good. Sadly, his stance on so-called "Intellectual Property" seems characterized by heavy-handed legislation designed to benefit the parties already heavily favored by the current imbalanced copyright situation. If you live in the US (and especially if you live in Conyers' district in Michigan), please send him e-mail or get in touch by phone and tell him to drop the bill. You might also check the list of cosponsors to see if one of them is more local to you. If you want to read more, Lawrence Lessig has written about this issue, addressing Congressman Conyers directly in the Huffington Post. Curiously, Rep. Conyers' web site contains no mention of HR 801.Tags: policy