A post I wrote back in 2012 got linked from a couple of the discussions relating to Brendan Eich being appointed Mozilla CEO. The tldr version is "If members of your community doesn't trust their leader socially, the leader's technical competence is irrelevant". That seems to have played out here.

In terms of background[1]: in 2008, Brendan donated money to the campaign for Proposition 8, a Californian constitutional amendment that expressly defined marriage as being between one man and one woman[2]. Both before and after that he had donated money to a variety of politicians who shared many political positions, including the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman[3].

Mozilla is an interesting organisation. It consists of the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which is wholly owned by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation's bylaws require it to work to further the Foundation's goals, and any profit is reinvested in Mozilla. Mozilla developers are employed by the Corporation rather than the Foundation, and as such the CEO is responsible for ensuring that those developers are able to achieve those goals.

The Mozilla Manifesto discusses individual liberty in the context of use of the internet, not in a wider social context. Brendan's appointment was very much in line with the explicit aims of both the Foundation and the Corporation - whatever his views on marriage equality, nobody has seriously argued about his commitment to improving internet freedom. So, from that perspective, he should have been a fine choice.

But that ignores the effect on the wider community. People don't attach themselves to communities merely because of explicitly stated goals - they do so because they feel that the community is aligned with their overall aims. The Mozilla community is one of the most diverse in free software, at least in part because Mozilla's stated goals and behaviour are fairly inspirational. People who identify themselves with other movements backing individual liberties are likely to identify with Mozilla. So, unsurprisingly, there's a large number of socially progressive individuals (LGBT or otherwise) in the Mozilla community, both inside and outside the Corporation.

A CEO who's donated money to strip rights[4] from a set of humans will not be trusted by many who believe that all humans should have those rights. It's not just limited to individuals directly affected by his actions - if someone's shown that they're willing to strip rights from another minority for political or religious reasons, what's to stop them attempting to do the same to you? Even if you personally feel safe, do you trust someone who's willing to do that to your friends? In a community that's made up of many who are either LGBT or identify themselves as allies, that loss of trust is inevitably going to cause community discomfort.

The first role of a leader should be to manage that. Instead, in the first few days of Brendan's leadership, we heard nothing of substance - at best, an apology for pain being caused rather than an apology for the act that caused the pain. And then there was an interview which demonstrated remarkable tone deafness. He made no attempt to alleviate the concerns of the community. There were repeated non-sequiturs about Indonesia. It sounded like he had no idea at all why the community that he was now leading was unhappy.

And, today, he resigned. It's easy to get into hypotheticals - could he have compromised his principles for the sake of Mozilla? Would an initial discussion of the distinction between the goals of members of the Mozilla community and the goals of Mozilla itself have made this more palatable? If the board had known this would happen, would they have made the same choice - and if they didn't know, why not?

But that's not the real point. The point is that the community didn't trust Brendan, and Brendan chose to leave rather than do further harm to the community. Trustworthy leadership is important. Communities should reflect on whether their leadership reflects not only their beliefs, but the beliefs of those that they would like to join the community. Fail to do so and you'll drive them away instead.

[1] For people who've been living under a rock
[2] Proposition 8 itself was a response to an ongoing court case that, at the point of Proposition 8 being proposed, appeared likely to support the overturning of Proposition 22, an earlier Californian ballot measure that legally (rather than constitutionally) defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. Proposition 22 was overturned, and for a few months before Proposition 8 passed, gay marriage was legal in California.
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/02/controversial-mozilla-ceo-made-donations-right-wing-candidates-brendan-eich
[4] Brendan made a donation on October 25th, 2008. This postdates the overturning of Proposition 22, and as such gay marriage was legal in California at the time of this donation. Donating to Proposition 8 at that point was not about supporting the status quo, it was about changing the constitution to forbid something that courts had found was protected by the state constitution.

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Back in 2007 I stumbled over the "Plus Fours Routefinder", an invention of the 1920's. It's worn on the wrist and allows the user to scroll through a map of the route they planned to take, rolled up on little wooden rollers. At that point I thought: that's awesome for long trips where you either dont want to take electronics with you or where you are without any electricity for a long time. And creating such rollable custom maps of your route automatically using openstreetmap data should be a breeze! Nevertheless it seems nobody picked up the idea. Years passed and in a few weeks I'll go on a biking trip along the Weser, a river in nothern Germany. For my last multi-day trip (which was through the Odenwald, an area in southern Germany) I printed a big map from openstreetmap data which contained the whole route. Openstreetmap data is fantastic for this because in contrast to commercial maps it doesnt only allow you to just print the area you need but also allows you to highlight your planned route and objects you would probably not find in most commercial maps like for example supermarkets to stock up on supplies or bicycle repair shops. Unfortunately such big maps have the disadvantage that to show everything in the amount of detail that you want along your route, they have to be pretty huge and thus easily become an inconvenience because the local plotter can't handle paper as large as DIN A0 or because it's a pain to repeatedly fold and unfold the whole thing every time you want to look at it. Strong winds are also no fun with a huge sheet of paper in your hands. One solution would be to print DIN A4 sized map regions in the desired scale. But that has the disadvantage that either you find yourself going back and forth between subsequent pages because you happen to be right at the border between two pages or you have to print sufficiently large overlaps, resulting in many duplicate map pieces and more pages of paper than you would like to carry with you. It was then that I remembered the "Plus Fours Routefinder" concept. Given a predefined route it only shows what's important to you: all things close to the route you plan to travel along. Since it's a long continuous roll of paper there is no problem with folding because as you travel along the route you unroll one end and roll up the other. And because it's a long continuous map there is also no need for flipping pages or large overlap regions. There is not even the problem of not finding a big enough sheet of paper because multiple DIN A4 sheets can easily be glued together at their ends to form a long roll. On the left you see the route we want to take: the bicycle route along the Weser river. If I wanted to print that map on a scale that allows me to see objects in sufficient detail along our route, then I would also see objects in Hamburg (upper right corner) in the same amount of detail. Clearly a waste of ink and paper as the route is never even close to Hamburg. As the first step, a smooth approximation of the route has to be found. It seems that the best way to do that is to calculate a B-Spline curve approximating the input data with a given smoothness. On the right you can see the approximated curve with a smoothing value of 6. The curve is sampled into 20 linear segments. I calculated the B-Spline using the FITPACK library to which scipy offers a Python binding. The next step is to expand each of the line segments into quadrilaterals. The distance between the vertices of the quadrilaterals and the ends of the line segment they belong to is the same along the whole path and obviously has to be big enough such that every point along the route falls into one quadrilateral. In this example, I draw only 20 quadrilaterals for visual clarity. In practice one wants many more for a smoother approximation. Using a simple transform, each point of the original map and the original path in each quadrilateral is then mapped to a point inside the corresponding "straight" rectangle. Each target rectangle has the height of the line segment it corresponds to. It can be seen that while the large scale curvature of the path is lost in the result, fine details remain perfectly visible. The assumption here is, that while travelling a path several hundred kilometers long, it does not matter that large scale curvature that one is not able to perceive anyways is not preserved. The transformation is done on a Mercator projection of the map itself as well as the data of the path. Therefore, this method probably doesnt work if you plan to travel to one of the poles. Currently I transform openstreetmap bitmap data. This is not quite optimal as it leads to text on the map being distorted. It would be just as easy to apply the necessary transformations to raw openstreetmap XML data but unfortunately I didnt find a way to render the resulting transformed map data as a raster image without setting up a database. I would've thought that it would be possible to have a standalone program reading openstreetmap XML and dumping out raster or svg images without a round trip through a database. Furthermore, tilemill, one of the programs that seem to be one of the least hasslesome to set up and produce raster images is stuck in an ITP and the existing packaging attempt fails to produce a non-empty binary package. Since I have no clue about nodejs packaging, I wrote about this to the pkg-javascript-devel list. Maybe I can find a kind soul to help me with it. Here a side by side overview that doesnt include the underlying map data but only the path. It shows how small details are preserved in the transformation. The code that produced the images in this post is very crude, unoptimized and kinda messy. If you dont care, then it can be accessed here

Zoe slept pretty well last night. She only woke up briefly at 4am because Cowie had fallen out of bed and she couldn't find her. Today was the last Playgroup of the term. Megan, her little sister and her Dad came as well to check it out, which was nice, because Zoe then had someone to actively play with in addition to me. After Playgroup, we went to the adjacent Bulimba Memorial Park with Megan, and then had some lunch at Grill'd. Megan's Dad wanted to do some work on their house while Megan's little sister napped, so I offered to give Megan a play date at our place. The plan was to watch a movie and chill out. The girls picked Ratatouille and I made a batch of popcorn for them. Unfortunately Megan seemed to be less of a square eyes than Zoe, and she lost interest after a bit, so we stopped watching the movie and moved out to the balcony to do some craft. Zoe had been wanting to make a crown for Mummy's boss for a while, so we made a couple of crowns with the hot glue gun. I had bought this bag of mixed craft "jewels" and it's probably the best single craft thing I've bought. Zoe loves gluing them onto everything. After that, Zoe pulled out the bag of coloured foil confetti. If the gems were the best thing I've bought, this would have to be the worst. So far, all it's done is leak in the drawer it's been stored in, and I've been avoiding using it because it was going to be messy. Today, Zoe wanted to glue it onto the outside of her cardboard box, so I decided to give in and embrace the mess, and boy, did we make a mess. It probably ended up being the longest bit of cooperative play the girls did. They'd alternate between handing each other a fistful of confetti while I applied globs of glue where directed. Probably about 10 percent of each handful ended up stuck to the rocket, so the balcony looked like quite a mess by the end of it all, but at least it was a dry mess, so I could just vacuum it all up. I suspect I'll be encountering dregs for quite a while, because I doubt it's stuck to the cardboard particularly well. After that, the girls played indoors for a bit, and watched a bit more of the movie, but Megan seemed to be scared of Anton Ego, so I think that was why it wasn't holding her attention. The other activity that the girls seemed to thoroughly enjoy was tearing around the living room squealing while they took turns at throwing a grapefruit-sized beach ball at me, and I threw it back at them. Jason came back to pick up Megan, and I started dinner. Not that long after Megan left, Sarah arrived to watch Zoe for me so I could go visit my cousin in hospital. I had dinner on the table pretty much as soon as she walked in the door, and headed out.

I had a busy morning this morning. I had a small flood of emails in response to various inquiries I made yesterday, so it took me a while to get my inbox under control. One of Zoe's Kindergarten teachers is returning to New Zealand as of the end of term 1, so they were having an afternoon tea for her today. Parents were requested to "bring a plate", so I thought I'd bake some spinach, pumpkin and feta muffins that I've been meaning to try making. After my chiropractic adjustment I got stuck into that. I'd hoped to finalise my US taxes today, but I learned I could deduct my moving expenses, so now I have to dig up the documentation for them. I had a later than usual massage, and drove directly from there to Kindergarten, muffins in hand. They'd omitted rest time today to facilitate the afternoon tea, so the upside of that was Zoe was happy. Zoe's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu teacher had said that she could try out one of the 4-7 year old classes, so for her last class of the 10 week block, we went to one of them this afternoon. I wasn't sure if today would be a good day for it or not, given she'd had Kindergarten and hadn't napped, but I gave her the option, and she wanted to do it. It worked out well, aside from Zoe really not wanting to wear her gi (I managed to convince her to wear the pants). There were three other kids of varying school ages in the class, and Zoe followed the instructions really well. I'm really glad we signed up the classes. I'm pretty sure Zoe has enjoyed herself, and she's definitely bonded with the teacher. I'll miss it. I can't believe how fast this term has gone by. There's now two weeks of "school holidays", where I'll have to entertain Zoe for the entire week. I'm not too worried about finding things to do, I'm more worried about contention with all the other kids on school holidays. Zoe was pretty tired tonight, I'd say with the combination of Kindergarten, no nap and BJJ class. Nonetheless, she procrastinated all the way through the bed time routine anyway. When I finally got her to bed, she fell asleep without a peep. She went on her second "bushwalk" at Kindergarten yesterday and picked up three mosquito bites, so I'm hoping they don't trouble her overnight.

I would like to publicly apologise for the inconvenience caused by my recent updates to the mediawiki and mediawiki-extensions source packages in Debian wheezy (stable-security). As for reasons I m doing Mediawiki-related work at my dayjob, as part of FusionForge/Evolvis development, and try to upstream as much as I can. Our production environment is a Debian wheezy-based system with a selection of newer packages, including MediaWiki from sid (although I also have a test system running sid, so my uploads to Debian are generally better tested). I haven t had experience with stable-security uploads before, and made small oversights (and did not run the full series of tests on the final , permitted-to-upload, version, only beforehand) which led to the problems. The situation was a bit complicated by the need to update the two packages in lockstep, to fight an RC bug file/symlink conflict, which was hard enough to do in sid already, plus the desire to fix other possibly-RC bugs at the same time. I also got no external review, although I cannot blame anyone since I never asked anyone explicitly, so I accept this as my fault. The issues with the updates are:

• mediawiki 1.19.5-1+deb7u1 (the previous stable-security update) was not made by me but by Jonathan Wiltshire
• mediawiki 1.19.11+dfsg-0+deb7u1 (made by me) was fine, fixed the bugs it was supposed to, but was delayed after being uploaded to security-master-unembargoed
• mediawiki 1.19.14+dfsg-0+deb7u1 was supposed to be a mostly upstream update, but I decided to add changes to fix issues pointed out by lintian (not trivial ones), and mistakenly forgot to remove two lines that should not have crept in from sid
• mediawiki 1.19.14+dfsg-0+deb7u2 was quickly uploaded to fix this issue but took about half a day to be ACCEPTed
• mediawiki-extensions 3.5~deb7u1 should have be named 2.12 but could not, due to the aforementioned lockstep update requirement and version checks in maintainer scripts; it fixes the issues but does not add other changes from 3.5 in sid unfortunately, the packaging uses cdbs (which I dislike quite a lot, but as the newcomer in the team I decided to accept it and go on; changing the existing packaging would be quite some effort anyway) and wants debian/control to be regenerated from control.in which I thought I had done, and normally do
• mediawiki-extensions 3.6 (in sid) fixes another dir/symlink conflict shown up after 3.5 was made. I ve requested upload permission for regenerating debian/control and asked whether I am allowed to include this fix as well

My unfamiliarity with some of the packaging concepts used here, combined with this being something I do during $dayjob (which can limit the time I can invest, although I m doing much more work on Mediawiki in Debian than I thought I could do on the job), can cause some of those oversights. I guess I also should install a vanilla wheezy environment somewhere for testing I do not normally do stable uploads (jmw did them before), so I was not prepared for that. And, while here: thanks to the Debian Security Team for putting up with me (also in this week s FusionForge issue), and thanks to Mediawiki upstream for agreeing to support releases shipped in Debian stable for longer support, so we can easily do stable-security updates.

Microsoft have announced that Windows XP reaches its end of life 2014-04-08, in 7 days. But there are heaps of machines still running Windows XP, and depending on Windows XP to run their applications, and upgrading will be expensive, both when it comes to money and when it comes to the amount of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP to a new operating system. Some obvious options (buy new a Windows machine, buy a MacOSX machine, install Linux on the existing machine) are already well known and covered elsewhere. Most of them involve leaving the user applications installed on Windows XP behind and trying out replacements or updated versions. In this blog post I want to mention one strange bird that allow people to keep the hardware and the existing Windows XP applications and run them on a free software operating system that is Windows XP compatible. ReactOS is a free software operating system (GNU GPL licensed) working on providing a operating system that is binary compatible with Windows, able to run windows programs directly and to use Windows drivers for hardware directly. The project goal is for Windows user to keep their existing machines, drivers and software, and gain the advantages from user a operating system without usage limitations caused by non-free licensing. It is a Windows clone running directly on the hardware, so quite different from the approach taken by the Wine project, which make it possible to run Windows binaries on Linux. The ReactOS project share code with the Wine project, so most shared libraries available on Windows are already implemented already. There is also a software manager like the one we are used to on Linux, allowing the user to install free software applications with a simple click directly from the Internet. Check out the screen shots on the project web site for an idea what it look like (it looks just like Windows before metro). I do not use ReactOS myself, preferring Linux and Unix like operating systems. I've tested it, and it work fine in a virt-manager virtual machine. The browser, minesweeper, notepad etc is working fine as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, my main test application is the software included on a CD with the Lego Mindstorms NXT, which seem to install just fine from CD but fail to leave any binaries on the disk after the installation. So no luck with that test software. No idea why, but hope someone else figure out and fix the problem. I've tried the ReactOS Live ISO on a physical machine, and it seemed to work just fine. If you like Windows and want to keep running your old Windows binaries, check it out by downloading the installation CD, the live CD or the preinstalled virtual machine image.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 9
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	112

Due to various other life priorities, it's been quite a while since I read this magazine. Let's see if I can remember the contents well enough to review it properly. The editorial this issue was about the Readers' Awards. Vaguely interesting, but Williams didn't have much to add beyond announcing the winners. I'm very happy to see Rusch's "Becoming One with the Ghosts" win best novella, though. The Silverberg column was more interesting: some musings and pop history about the Japanese convention of a retired emperor and how that fit into national politics. Di Filippo's book review column is all about short story collections, continuing the trend of Di Filippo mostly being interested in things I don't care about. "The Observation Post" by Allen M. Steele: A bit of alternate history set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but with airships. The protagonist was a radioman aboard a blimp that was patrolling the ocean for Russian vessels sailing to Cuba. A storm forces them down on an island, resulting in an encounter with some claimed tourists who may be Russian spies. The SFnal twist is unlikely to come as much surprise to an experienced reader, and the barb at the end of the story suffers from the same problem. I appreciate the ethical dilemma, but I've also seen it in lots of stories and have a hard time getting fully invested in another version of it. But the story is otherwise competently written. (6) "D.O.C.S." by Neal Barrett, Jr.: Everyone has an author or two that they just don't get. Barrett is one of mine, although this story is a bit less surreal than most of his. I'm fairly sure it's an odd twist on the "death panel" conspiracy theory given a fantastic twist, but it's not entirely forthright about what's going on. Possibly of more interest to those who like Barrett better. (5) "Danilo" by Carol Emshwiller: Emshwiller's stories are always distinctive and not quite like anyone else's, involving odd outsiders and their attempts to make sense of their world. This one involves, as is common, an out-of-the-way village. Lewella claims that she's going to be married to a stranger from the north. No one believes her, although they give her bridal gifts anyway, and then one day she takes her gifts and leaves. The protagonist follows her, to look after her. The rest of the story walks the boundary that Emshwiller often walks, leaving the reader unsure whether the characters are in touch with some deeper reality or insane and suffering, but the ending is even more ambiguous than normal and, at least for me, entirely unsatisfying. (4) "Shadow Angel" by Erick Melton: This is another retread of an old SF idea. This time, it's that piloting through hyperspace involves alternate modes of consciousness and has profound effects on the pilot. The risk of this sort of story is that it turns hallucinatory and a bit incoherent, and I think that happened here. I like the world-building; the glimmers of future politics and trade and the way he weaves alternate timelines into the story caught my interest. But the story wasn't quite coherent enough (although part of this may be reviewing it quite some time after I originally read it). Promising, but not clear, and without quite enough agency for the protagonist. (6) "The Odor of Sanctity" by Ian Creasey: I found this story more memorable. The conceit is that a future society has developed technology that allows the capture and replay of scents, which has created a huge market for special scent experiences and the triggering of memories. The story is set in the Philippines and revolves around a Catholic priest who takes the mission to the poor seriously. He's dying, and several people wonder if it is possible to capture the mythical odor of scantity: the sweet scent said to follow the death of a saint rather than the normal odor of human death. Creasey handles this idea well, blending postulated future technology, the practical and cynical world of the poor streets, and a balance between mystical belief and practical skepticism. Nothing in the story is that surprising, but I was happy with the eventual resolution. (7) "Grandma Said" by R. Neube: This story's protagonist is a cleanser on a frontier planet made extremely dangerous by a virulent alien fungus. It is almost always fatal and very difficult to eradicate. Vic's job is to completely sanitize anything that had been in contact with a victim and maintain the other rules of strict quarantine required to keep the fungal infection from spreading uncontrolled. Nuebe weaves world-building together with Vic's background and adds a twist in the form of deeply unhealthy responses to the constant stress of living near death. Well told, if a bit disturbing. (7) "Stalker" by Robert Reed: Reed has a knack for fascinating and disturbing stories, and this is an excellent example of the type. The protagonist is a manufactured companion who is completely devoted to its owner. Their commercial name is Adorers, but everyone calls them Stalkers. In this case, the protagonist's owner is a serial rapist and murderer; given that, and given how good Reed is at writing these sorts of stories, you can probably imagine how chilling it is. As usual, there is a sharp barb in the ending, and not the one I was expecting. Good if you can handle the graphic violence and disturbing subject material. (7) "Burning Bibles" by Alan Wall: This is an interesting twist on the spy thriller. A three-letter agency in charge of investigating possible terrorist plots becomes suspicious after a warehouse of Bibles burns in mysterious circumstances. The agent they send in is a deaf-mute with special powers of intuition. This prompted some eye-rolling, and there's a lot of magic disability powers here to annoy, but it's played mostly straight after that introduction. The rest is a fairly conventional spy story, despite special empathic powers, but it's one I enjoyed and thought was fairly well-written. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

parenting and a haircut with a spot of painting How's that for some alliteration? Today was a really good day. And that's before I started drinking red wine. I got up this morning and successfully banged out a 10km run. It wasn't pretty, but I did it in under an hour, so I was happy. I got home, and after breakfast I pretty much flopped on the couch with my laptop and procrastinated instead of doing my taxes. But it was productive procrastination. I:

• booked flights to the US for our trip in July
• sought some quotes for outsourcing the production of Zoe's birthday cake
• made some pizza dough for dinner with Anshu
• booked a haircut for Zoe and I
• Got taken hook, line and sinker by an April Fools joke
• found a couple of patent lawyers who will give me an initial consultation for free instead of charging me $250 plus GST (yay River City Labs)

I also (finally) got my taxes to a point where I'm ready to send them off to my US accountant and deal with the rest of it incrementally. So it was a productive day! I had a follow up appointment with my podiatrist in the afternoon to see how my orthotics were going. I biked to Kindergarten early, ditched the bike trailer, and then biked over to the podiatrist, and made it back to Kindergarten about 10 minutes before pick up time. Zoe was, unsurprisingly, fast asleep. I decided to try applying sunscreen to her while she was asleep as a way of killing two birds with one stone. I got as far as getting her legs done before she woke up and had a massive meltdown. Poor kid really doesn't deal well with being woken up. One of the teachers took pity on us and distracted Zoe by letting her cuddle one of the baby chicks, which snapped her out of it for the duration, but she had another meltdown once it was over. Another teacher gave her a cuddle for a bit, and she eventually calmed down enough for me to get sunscreen on her arms. I'd foolishly left the bike trailer separated from the bike, so I had to drag the trailer back to the bike, whilst carrying Zoe. Fortunately another teacher took sympathy on us and helped me with the trailer. Turns out trying to drag a single-wheeled trailer single-handed whilst carrying a toddler and having excess sunscreen on my hands is extremely difficult. We finally got the trailer on the bike, and Zoe in the trailer, and headed towards home. Zoe's ballerina pumps aren't great on the bike because the straps on the pedals cross the tops of her exposed feet and irritate her, so there were multiple meltdowns on the way home, culminating in needing to go to the toilet "right now" before we got home. I stopped at the health food shop on the way home, to see if they had a toilet we could use. Luckily I'm a customer and the naturopath let us use the toilet in the clinic. Zoe had another meltdown in there, announcing she "didn't like being woken up". Poor kid. It wasn't a good afternoon for her. I'm just glad I was in a sufficiently good mood to be able to deal with it all in a satisfactorily positive parenting way. We finally made it home, and I'd promised her we could have a big cuddle on the couch once we got home, so we did that and read a library book, and then it was time to head to the hairdressers for our haircuts. We started out on foot, and had made it one block from home, and she saw another kid on a scooter and announced she wanted to ride her scooter too. Initially tried saying we couldn't do it this time, because we'd be late, but she was on the verge of having another meltdown, so I capitulated, and we went back and grabbed it. I'm actually really glad I did, because she was as happy as Larry from that point on, and we were only a couple of minutes late at the hairdresser. We did her fringe trim first, and then she had a great play in the kid's corner while I got my haircut. She even cleaned up the corner better than she found it without argument. We then had plenty of time to scooter back home, so I decided to check out the 'OO'niverse Family Cafe, which is next door to the Hawthorne Cinemas. It's this thing I've never gotten around to checking out, and it was the second thing I was glad I did this afternoon. It's not a big place, and it was super quiet. There was just us and two twin Kindergarten-aged girls being babysat. Zoe had a banana milkshake and got a dolphin painted on her arm and a balloon dog made, and I had a coffee and we just chilled out for a bit while I chatted with the owner (who was babysitting the twins). By this stage Anshu was already at my place, and Sarah wasn't far off leaving work to pick up Zoe, so we made our way back home. Zoe had a great time playing with Anshu until Sarah arrived. So I was basically really happy that I managed to turn around a massively molten afternoon and give Zoe a really good afternoon instead. Anshu and I then proceeded to made a couple of really fantastic pizzas. I really love my Thermomix. I made the pizza dough earlier today, and tonight I made some pizza sauce, some pesto sauce and caramelized some onions in it, and we were still done with dinner by 8pm.

Typing Animal wrote an interesting article about the dangers of stainless steel in a medical environment [1]. Apparently silver and copper are best due to the oligodynamic effect. Instead of stainless steel drinking bottles they should sell silver plated drinking bottles for kids, I m sure that lots of parents would pay extra for that. Mark Kendall gave an interesting TED talk about a replacement for the hypodermic syringe in vaccinations [2]. His invention can reduce the cost of immunisation while increasing the effectiveness and avoiding problems with people who have a needle phobia. The TED blog has an interesting interview with Will Potter about the use of the war on terror to silence journalists and the invention of the term eco terrorism for non-violent people who are politically active [3]. The TED blog has an interesting article by Kate Torgovnick May about designing products for sustainability [4]. It links to an insightful TED talk by Leyla Acaroglu about some of the complex issues related to sustainability [5]. Manoush Zomorodi wrote an informative article about How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40% [6]. Slate has an interesting article by Jamelle Bouie showing the way that support for capital punishment in the US is linked to racism [7]. The Southern California Public Radio blog has an interesting article by Josie Huang about Suey Park and her success in using twitter to oppose racism [8]. Andrew Solomon wrote an insightful interview with the father of Adam Lanza for the New Yorker [9]. Waleed Aly wrote an insightful article about George Brandis attempt to change the Racial Discrimination Act specifically to allow Andrew Bolt to be racist [10]. He describes it as the whitest piece of proposed legislation I ve encountered which is significant in a country with as much racism as Australia. Really we need stronger laws against racism, there should be no right to be bigoted. A German Court has ruled that non commercial licenses don t permit non-commercial organisations to re-publish material [11]. This seems bogus to me, I d be happy to have my non-commercial licensed work published by a non-commercial publishing organisation just as long as they don t run adverts on the page. Professors Woolley and Malone wrote an interesting article about their research into group performance, apparently having more women in a group improves the collective intelligence of a group, but having smarter men in the group doesn t [12]. Susie Hill wrote an article about the SPARX computer game that is designed to treat adolescent depression [13]. They are working on a rainbow edition for GLBT kids and a version for Maoris. Unfortunately their web site is down right now and the version at archive.org says that it s currently only available to participants in a clinical trial. Tim Chevalier wrote an insightful article explaining why people who campaign against equality shouldn t be given senior positions in corporations [14]. Zeynep Tufekci wrote an insightful article about how French High Theory and Dr. Seuss can help explain gender problems in geek communities [15]. Hannah Levintova wrote an informative article for Mother Jones about how the US based hate group the World Congress of Families incites homophobic violence in Russia [16]. Josh Sanburn wrote an article for Time about people in the Deep South who claim to be Christian giving away guns to encourage people to attend church [17]. This is the same part of the world where people who claimed to be Christian used their religion as an excuse for supporting slavery. I m quitting bourbon, too much evil comes from that part of the world and I m not buying anything that comes from there.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/mowfcro
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/nr9oze9
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/ku5oucj
• [4] http://blog.ted.com/2014/02/11/play-the-sustainability-card-game/
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/poqo2x7
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/ltl8yhr
• [7] http://tinyurl.com/nt347m4
• [8] http://tinyurl.com/pxujxg2
• [9] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_solomon
• [10] http://tinyurl.com/l6flm43
• [11] http://tinyurl.com/ln5u4x9
• [12] http://www.academia.edu/2734058/What_makes_a_team_smarter_More_women
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qzhdzt3
• [14] http://tim.dreamwidth.org/1844711.html
• [15] https://medium.com/technology-and-society/2f1fe84c5c9b
• [16] http://tinyurl.com/kk6mygn
• [17] http://time.com/15748/gun-giveaways-at-kentucky-churches/

Continuing with my tendency to vent about stuff, today I want to talk about telephony. Since a few years ago, I need to use different VoIP providers to keep in touch with friends and family, in different parts of the world. So, I have a DID in Argentina (bought trough the excellent DIDWW), and another one in Ireland (which came for free when I was using BlueFace for call termination). I also have a service to handle outbound calls (FlowRoute), but it is not necessarily the only one I use, as cost and quality of Internet calls vary wildly. I have also used several Betamax providers, the aforementioned BlueFace, tried Netelip, etc. This results in having soft-phones installed in my mobile devices and laptop, and a hardware SIP phone that I carry around; all of them having configurations for at least 3 different providers. This does not lead to hilarity. In light of this, it's been a long time since I want to set up my own SIP router to be able to handle all of this, and be able to register to a single SIP proxy that will handle all the complexity. Last Friday, the Irish DID decided to stop working. It turns out, that since I don't have my own setup, I was using that provider as a kind of hub, with their provided voicemail, and terminating the Argentinian DID there. So the damage was big. This made me spend way too many hours during the weekend trying to set up some SIP solution. And I am not pleased.

Asterisk First, I went with the old and known Asterisk. The default installation in Debian puts 95 configuration files in /etc/asterisk, which you are supposed to review and adjust. Yes, you've read correctly: ninety-five different configuration files. None of them having anything close to a sensible explanation of their syntax or function. Also, not a remote hint of consistency. I could not find any configuration helper in the Debian archive, just hundreds of PHP-based projects scattered around the web. All the started guides I've found only guided you for the most basic tasks, but did not give you a way to have a functioning system. Needless to say, after a short time I grew tired of this, and decided to try something else.

Way too many options After this, I have spent an inordinate amount of hours, just trying to comprehend the difference between the gazillion different VoIP systems out there, I am still struggling to see that. Even if I understand that X is not a PBX, I don't exactly need a PBX, and most products deliver at least some of the features I need. It seems none of them makes a good job of just explaining what you can or can't do with their software. Documentation is awful in all the projects I researched. When it is there at all, it is incomplete, maybe super detailed at points, but in most cases, there is just no big picture view of the system to just start understanding how things work, and how to find your way. Sadly, not even the distros seems to be able to put a list of "recommended VoIP software for different needs".

Yate Finally, I've found YATE (Yet Another Telephony Engine). It seemed promising: not too bloated, fairly extensible, and scriptable in a few languages! Sadly, after many hours, it turned out to be a fiasco. The documentation seems decent, until you realise there are many key details left out. Basic information about how a call is handled cannot be found anywhere. Using the scripting power, I was able to find out at least the variables that were available, but that was not enough. I found a mailing list (with the worst archive reader I've seen in ages), where people made the very same questions I have, and nobody has replied. In years. So here I am, stuck with not being able to tell if a call is coming from a random host on the internet, or one of my DIDs, or one of the authenticated clients. I guess I will have to start from scratch with Yet Another (Another) Telephony Engine.

Review: Sundiver, by David Brin

Series:	Uplift #1
Publisher:	Bantam
Copyright:	February 1980
Printing:	September 1995
ISBN:	0-553-26982-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	340

Sundiver is the first book of Brin's Uplift series, which I think it's fair to say are the books that made his reputation as an author. It's less well-known than the later sequels Startide Rising and The Uplift War for reasons that I'll get into in a moment. This was a re-read; I've read the first Uplift series before (and Startide Rising separately before that), but not in many years, and I wanted to re-read them and review them. I haven't finished doing that yet, several months after I re-read Sundiver, largely because this book wasn't as enjoyable as I remembered. The Uplift series is set in a heavily populated galaxy with a multitude of alien races. It follows the SF alien life pattern where the galaxy was well-populated and fully developed long before humans discovered it. The Earth is a relatively obscure backwater, and humans are expected to adopt to and follow the rules and restrictions that the other races had long-since established. This primarily means a complex and very formal system of caste and patronage: species brought to sapience by the technology of their patrons are expected to serve their patron races for millennia, and one's status in the galaxy is determined by the length of those patronage chains and the number of species one has fostered in turn. As is typical for stories of this sort, humans break the rules in unexpected ways. They have no known patrons, having apparently evolved sapience entirely on their own (although the galactic races are quite dubious of this theory). And they have uplifted two species to sapience (chimpanzees and dolphins) before their discovery by the rest of galactic civilization, although in fairly primitive ways and not properly by galactic standards. Set against this background, Sundiver is a science fiction puzzle story of a fairly old style. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, is a scientific investigator who retired after a tragedy that killed his love. He's recruited out of that retirement and into this plot by an alien who is sympathetic to humans. A human exploration mission into the chromosphere of the Sun, treated as ridiculous by most of the galactics since the shared Library Institute certainly contains more information about stars than human technology could possibly uncover, has found strange and apparently sapient creatures living there: flocks of cattle-like creatures that are apparently being herded. There is no reference to such star-dwellers in the Library, which raises the possibility that humans have discovered something novel. That would be quite a coup against the galactics. But after the destruction of one of the solar exploration ships, it starts looking like these creatures are hostile. Jacob reminded me of a mix between a Larry Niven short story protagonist, working through the practical impact of a physics puzzle, and Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley. What exactly is going on, both scientifically and politically, remains unclear for nearly the entire book. Both Jacob and the reader are constantly forming and then discarding hypotheses as events overtake them. The stakes are more interesting than a lot of science fiction novels: rather than survival or war, the stakes are prestige, influence, and status, with subtle but possibly vital effects on what position humans will take among the other species of the galaxy. All this sounds promising, and is why I remembered this book fondly. Unfortunately, re-reading it was a disappointing experience on several fronts. First, the characterization varies between trite and stereotyped. The aliens suffer from the standard alien characterization problem: each of them is an exemplar of their species, and all of the aliens feel like archetypes. While there are some twists in the inter-alien politics, one never gets a sense of the aliens as varied and complex societies in their own right. The humans are more varied, but that primarily means varieties of irritating. The worst is Peter LaRoque, a journalist who is set up as a villain of the story, and who is such an unremitting and over-the-top stereotype of everything possibly bad about journalists (and French people) that every scene containing him felt like someone scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. The other characters are a bit better, but not by much. Jacob himself has a bizarre, semi-mystical psychological problem from trauma that seems to give his amoral subconscious a life of its own. Brin appears to be setting this up to have major plot significance, but it never made any sense to me, didn't matter much in the end, and seems to mostly be an excuse for Jacob's hypercompetence. Sundiver's treatment of female characters also annoyed me enough to be worth a mention. The primary female character, Helene, is clearly intended to be a strong character with her own agency (she's both station commander and a starship captain), and Brin makes a lot of the humans switching to different words than male and female as a sign of a more egalitarian future. But this all feels skin-deep. The inevitable romance is all about Helene's attractiveness and ability to listen to Jacob, her logic is described as unscientific, and I got more and more annoyed by her portrayal as the book went along. She's not entirely without agency in the story, but she's much closer to a damsel in distress than the independent character Brin appeared to be trying for. It's hard to shake the feeling that she's being persistently belittled by the story. But this is a scientific puzzle story more than a mystery; characterization would be nice, but isn't strictly required. On re-read, the part of Sundiver that annoyed me the most was how much of a letdown the plot resolution was. I'm going to avoid any specific spoilers here, but I found the ending of both quite disappointing and a sign of the major problem with this series as a whole. The setup over-promises and Brin fails to deliver, a pattern that will repeat itself in this series. We get tantalizing hints of a new solar species, of revelations about the past of humanity, of deep galactic politics, and of vast knowledge contained in the Library that humans don't yet have access to. We get superficial archetypes for characters, politics that seem more like the bickering of children, plot twists that persistently take the story in more mundane and less interesting directions, and a sense of wonder, or lack thereof, that feels more like a Scooby Doo story than what I expect from science fiction. Some of the plot twists are unexpected and almost add some interest to the story, but don't make enough sense in the context of the story to be satisfying. And, of course, there's an climactic action sequence involving physical combat, as is required of all good Star Trek (original series) episodes. (I was waiting for Jacob's shirt to fall off.) The problem I have always had with Brin as a writer is that his ideas are far better than his ability to write characters and plots. In the hands of a better author, the Uplift universe background has so much potential. And I think Brin is a better author a few years later; my recollection is that both Startide Rising and The Uplift War do a better job of delivering on their promises. But Sundiver is deservedly forgettable. The good ideas rarely go anywhere beyond the obvious, the characters are irritating and often don't make sense, and the story is disappointing. I can't say I'm sorry to have read it, since my memory edited it down into a much better story, but I can only recommend it as background for later, better books. Rating: 4 out of 10

Debian Edu / Skolelinux keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC, #debian-edu, with a wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background. Who are you, and how do you spend your days? My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally, I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the last development phase of a new social networking concept. I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability and as a necessary step to gain expertise. In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux hunger. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I discovered the LTSP advantages with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent, and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and running. I just loved it. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to be made of steel. What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I found two main disadvantages. I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched or dropped. It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can discourage many people too. Which free software do you use daily? I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and Virtualbox. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of the "R" statistical language; a few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people. Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many different level of studies. I believe free and open software will increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the first scenarios where this will happen.

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page: See you in Chicago in May!

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Out of laziness, like many, I use WordPress for this blog. I did try others, but was disappointed (after my blog got hacked a few times), so I just use that. WordPress has a long history of security issues. So upstream decided to preform automatic updates. This would have been a good thing if automatic update didn t completely mess my blog each and every single time. On my hosting system, PHP scripts have to be chmod +x to be executed. Otherwise, there s a error, and Apache wont execute the PHP script. The same way, an error will happen if a directory is world writable (eg: chmod 777). This is in order to prevent some of the most common hacks: a hacker finds a way to upload a PHP script (often via a feature of the hosted software), and then uses the uploaded script to do nasty things (like installing phishing sites, send spam, you name it ). Checking on these basic unix rights prevents uploaded scripts to be executed, and it s normally a way harder for hackers to find a way to chmod the PHP scripts than it is to just upload it. Unfortunately, WordPress, on each upgrade, is resetting these unix rights. Someone got to explain to me the reason why it absolutely needs to chmod 777 the hosted folders, and why it wouldn t keep the chmod +x on the php scripts. Direct result? My blog often gets completely broken by these automated updates. And I didn t find a way to disable them (if someone knows, please send me a quick email). I have reported the bug upstream: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/27568

A number of talks about Rcpp are scheduled over the next couple of months:

• Our sixth internation conference R/Finance, will take place May 16 and 17, 2014, at UIC in Chicago. See the current draft agenda for details of the program---which once again will be preceded by one-hour workshops. And as in the past, I will offer a one-hour gentle introduction to Rcpp. This workshop requires registration and a fee, and registraion details should be available at the conference website in the next few days.
• A few days later, on May 20, 2014, I will present a one-hour webinar which is part of a series organized by Ray DiGiacomo and the Orange County R Users Group. See this page for details and registration information; the talk itself will be free of charge.
• Later in the month, on May 30, 2014, I will give a talk / guest lecture about Rcpp and RcppArmadillo and over in Economics at the University of Chicago. I reckon that this event is not open to anybody not part of U of C.
• Another three-hour tutorial is scheduled for the tutorial day preceding useR! 2014 at UCLA in early July. This tutorial will also require registration as part of the annual useR! conference.
• Last but not least I am very honoured to have been asked to give one of the invited keynotes at useR! 2014. The talk may (or may not) cover at least some aspects of Rcpp.

So the month of June is still pretty open. If someone wants me to talk somewhere else, preferably on a Saturday, feel free to get in touch.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

I've been with Flickr since 2005 now, posting a lot of my photos there, so that other poeple from the events, that I usually take photos of, could enjoy them. But lately I've become annoyed with it. It is very slow to uplaod to and even worse to get photos out of it - there is no large shiny button to Download a set of photos, like I noticed in G+. So I decided to try and copy my photos over. I am not abandoning or deleting my Flickr account yet, but we'll see. The process was not as simple as I hoped. There is this FlickrToGpluss website tool. It would have been perfect .. if it worked. In that tool you simply log in to both services, check which albums you want to migrate over and at what photo size and that's it - the service will do the migration directly on their servers. It actually feeds Google the URLs of the Flickr photos so the photos don't even go trought the service itself, only metadata does. Unfortunately I hit a couple snags - first of all the migration stopped progressing a few days and ~20 Gb into the process (out of ~40 Gb). And for the photos that were migrated their titles were empty and their file names were set to Flickr descriptions. Among other things that meant that when you downloaded the album as a zip file with all the photots (which was the feature that I was doing this whole thing for) you got photos in almost random order - namely in the order of their sorted titles. Ugh. So I canceled that migration (by revoking priviledges to that app on G+, there is no other way to see or modify progress there) and sat down to make a manual-ish solution. First, I had to get my photos out of Flickr. For that I took Offlickr and ran it in set mode:

./Offlickr.py -i 98848866@N00 -p -s -c 32

The "98848866@N00" is my Flickr ID which I got from this nice service, then -p to download photos (and not just metadata), -s to download all sets and -c 32 to do the download in 32 parallel threads. An important thing to do is to take all you photos that are not in a set in Flickr and add them to a new 'nonset" so that those photos are also picked up here, there is an option under Organize to select all non-set photos. It worked great, but there were a couple tiny issues:

1. There is a bug in Offlickr that it does not honor pages in Flickr sets, so it only downloads first 500 images in each set, fix for that is in that bug;
2. It also wanted Python2.6 for some reason, but worked fine with Python2.7
3. With that number of threads sometimes Flickr actually failed to respond with the photo, serving a 500 error page instead. Offlickr does not check return code and happily daves that HTML page as the photo. To work around that I simply deleted the HTML errors and then ran the same Offlickr command again so that it re-downloads the missing files. Had to repeat that a few times to get all of them:

ack-grep -l -R "504 Gateway Time-out" dst/   xargs rm

After all that I had my photos, all 40 Gb of them on my computer. Should I upload them to G+ now? Not yet! See the photos all had lost their original file names. It turns out Flickr simply throws that little nugget of information away. It is nowhere to be found, neither in metadata or the UI or the Exif of the photos. Also some of my photos had clever descriptions that I did not want to loose or re-enter in G+ and also geolocation information. Flickr does not embed that info into the Exif of the image, instead it is provided separately - Offlickr saves that as an XML file next to each image. So I wrote a simple and hacky script to re-embed that info. It did 3 things:

1. Embed title of the photo into the Description EXIF tag, so that G+ automatically picks it up as title of the photo;
2. Embed the GEO location information into the proper EXIF tags, so that G+ picks that up automatically;
3. Create a new file name based on original picture taken datetime and EXIF Canon FileNumber field (if such exists), so that all photos in an album are sequential.

It uses exiftool for the actual heavy lifting. After all that was finished I tested the result by uploading a few images to G+ and testing that their title is being set correctly, that they have a sane file name and that geo information works. After that I just uploaded them all. I tried figuring out the G+ API (they actually have it) but I was unable to pass the tutorial, so I abandoned it and simply uploaded the photos of each set int their own tab via a browser. That took a few hours. But that is much faster that with Flickr. Like 4 MB/s versus 0.5 MB/s faster. And here is the result. So far I kind of like it. We'll see how it goes after a year or so. Now on to an even more fun problem - I now have ~40 Gb of photos from Flickr/G+ and ~100 Gb of photos locally. Those sets partially intersect. I know for a fact that there are photos in Flickr set that are not in my local set and it is pretty obvoious that there are some the other way round. Now I need to find them. Oh and I cann't use simple hashes, because Exif has changed and so have the file names for most of them. And not to forget that I often take a burst of 3-4 pictures, so there are bound to be a some near-duplicate photos in each set too. This shall be fun :)

I am often asked about my accent . The most common guess is that it s a British accent, while I lived in London for about a year I don t think that my accent changed much during that time (people have commented on the way I speak since I was in primary school). Also there isn t a British accent anyway, the Wikipedia page of Regional Accents of English has the first three sections devoted to accents in the island of Britain (and Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom which people often mean when they sat Britain ). The Received Pronounciation is the main BBC accent and the accent that is most associated with Britain/England/the UK (which are three different things even though most people don t know it) and I don t think that I sound like that at all. I ve had various other guesses, the Netherlands (where I lived for a few years but mostly spoke to other foreigners), New Zealand (which I ve visited a couple of times for conferences), Denmark (the closest I got was attending a conference in Sweden), and probably others I can t remember. If I actually had developed an accent from another country then it would probably be from the US. The amount of time I ve spent watching Hollywood movies and watching US TV shows greatly exceeds the amount of time I ve spent listening to people from all other countries. The fact that among all the people who wanted to try and guess where my accent supposedly originated none have ever included the US seems like strong evidence to suggest that I don t have any sort of accent that really derives from another country. Also I have never had someone mistake me for being a resident of their own country based on accent which seems like clear evidence that all claims about me having a foreign accent are bogus. Autism forums such as WrongPlanet.net [1] always turn up plenty of results for a search on accent . In such discussions it seems that a British accent is most common mistake and there are often theories raised about why that is often related to speaking in a formal or precise way or by using a large vocabulary. Also in such discussions the list of countries that people supposedly have accents from is very inclusive, it seems that any country that the listener has heard of but doesn t know that well is a good candidate. The fact that Aspies from outside the US are rarely regarded as having an American accent could be due to the fact that Hollywood has made most of the world population aware of what most American accents sound like. Also if I really had some sort of accent from another country then probably someone would comment on that when I m outside Australia. When I m travelling people tend to recognise my accent as Australian, while it doesn t please me when someone thinks that I sound like Crocodile Dundee (as happened in the Netherlands) it might not be entirely inaccurate. This is Annoying The way the issue of accent is raised is generally in the form of people asking where I m from, it seems to imply that they don t think I belong in Australia because of the way I speak. It s particularly annoying when people seem unable to realise that they are being obnoxious after the first wrong guess. When I reply no to the first are you from $COUNTRY question and don t offer any further commentary it s not an invitation to play 20 questions regarding where I m supposedly from, it s actually an indication that I m not interested in a conversation on that topic. A Social Skills 101 course would include teaching people that when someone uses one-word answers to your questions it usually means that they either don t like your questions or don t want to talk to you. Social Skills vs Status The combination of persistence and misreading a social situation which are involved when someone interrogates me about my supposed accent are both parts of the diagnostic criteria for Autism. But I generally don t get questions about my accent in situations where there are many Aspies (IE anything related to the Free Software community). I think that this is because my interactions with people in the Free Software community are based around work (with HR rules against being a jerk) and community events where no-one would doubt that I belong. I mostly get questions about my accent from random middle-class white people who feel entitled to query other people about their status who I meet in situations where there is nothing restraining them from being a jerk. For example random people I meet on public transport.

• [1] http://www.wrongplanet.net/

Yesterday I took a diversion from thinking about my upcoming cache project, largely because I took some pictures inside my house, and realized my offsite backup was getting full. I have three levels of backups:

• Home stuff on my desktop is replicated to my wifes desktop, and vice-versa.
• A simple server running rsync (content-free http://rsync.io/).
• A "peering" arrangement of a small group of friends. Each of us makes available a small amount of space and we copy to-from each others shares, via rsync / scp as appropriate.

Unfortunately my rsync-based personal server is getting a little too full, and will certainly be full by next year. S3 is pricy, and I don't trust the "unlimited" storage people (backblaze,etc) to be sustainable and reliable long-term. The pricing on Google-drive seems appealing, but I guess I'm loathe to share more data with Google. Perhaps I could dedicated a single "backup.account@gmail.com" login to that, separate from all-else. So the diversion came along when I looked for Amazon S3-comptible, self-hosted, servers. There are a few, most of them are PHP-based, or similarly icky. So far cloudfoundry's vlob looks the most interesting, but the main project seems stalled/dead. Sadly using s3cmd to upload files failed, but certainly the curl based API works as expected. I looked at Gluster, CEPH, and similar, but didn't yet come up with a decent plan for handling offsite storage, but I know I have only six months or so before the need becomes pressing. I imagine the plan has to be using N-small servers with local storage, rather than 1-Large server, purely because pricing is going to be better that way. Decisions decisions.

My late biological maternal grandmother ("Nana"), remarried late in her life to a long-time friend named Bryce. I was probably an early teenager. He was a nice guy, and I kept in loose contact with him after my Nana passed away. After my Nana passed away, he moved out of the retirement home he'd been living in with my Nana, and in with one of his sons. Sometime before I moved back to Australia, in ailing physical health, he moved from his son's place into Masonic Care's aged-care hostel in Sandgate. He turned 90 last year. Mentally, he's doing pretty good. Physically, he's very wobbly on his legs. He's had a few falls, which was the main catalyst for moving from his son's place to the aged-care hostel. Other than that, he's in pretty good physical health though. I remember the first time I visited him in the hostel. After I left, I wept uncontrollably. Here was a man who was literally just waiting out the rest of his life in a small cupboard of a room. I was appalled at how small the room was, and the fact that he was just sitting around waiting to die really upset me. I've visited him a few times since I've been back. I've taken him over to my parent's place when I've taken Zoe to visit them, just so he gets out. I should say that I'm sure his own family do spend some time with him, so it's not like he's spending all his time rotting in this place, but probably still a fair chunk of it. Growing old sucks. Yesterday, when the weather forecast for today was looking like it was going to be pretty wet and miserable, I decided I'd use the day to take Zoe to Underwater World (which I've since learned has rebranded it self as "Sea Life: Mooloolaba". I had the presence of mind to call up Bryce yesterday to see if he'd like to join us today. We had to pass in his general direction to get up there, so it wasn't particularly out of my way. He informed me that he was now in a wheelchair, which I thought was fine for this excursion. So this morning, after we got ourselves going, we stopped at Sandgate to pick up Bryce, and made it to Underwater World by about 10am. I was a bit leery of the drive, because from home, it was another 30 minutes on top of the drive to Wet and Wild, and 15 minutes on top of the drive to Sea World, so I wasn't sure how Zoe would take that length car trip. It turned out that she took it pretty well. She started getting a bit restless in the last 30 minutes, but it was manageable. I was a little apprehensive about how wrangling Zoe and looking after a frail 90 year old in a wheelchair was going to work out. It turned out it worked out just fine. I could leave Bryce wherever he was, if I had to chase after Zoe, and Zoe quite liked helping push the wheelchair around. Towards the end of the day, when she got tired, I could just pop her in Bryce's lap, and push the pair of them around. It was a really good outing. I have only vague memories of visiting the place in my childhood, and it's become significantly better since then. Zoe really enjoyed going through the glass tunnels under the main ocean exhibit. We did several laps of that. We were fortunate enough to catch the sting ray feeding almost immediately upon arrival, and we also saw the seal show and made the otter feeding. The place was more focused on salt water aquatic life, hence the name, but there was also some freshwater exhibits. I never thought that much of the Monterey Aquarium, much preferring the California Academy of Science's aquariums, especially in terms of drive time accessibility. If you ignore the freshwater/salt water diversity, I think Sea Life is even better than the California Academy of Sciences. We left at about 2pm, and after a lot of hunting around, tracked down the photo they took when we entered, and then drove home closer to 3pm. To my surprise, Zoe didn't fall asleep immediately, but she did fall asleep on the way back to Bryce's place. She woke up to say goodbye to him, and then we drove home, stopping off in the Valley to check my post office box along the way, and arrived back home about 15 minutes before Sarah arrived to pick her up. It ended up being a very full day. Bryce really enjoyed himself, and I felt really happy that I was able to relatively easily brighten up his day. I've resolved to try another such outing again, I just need to figure out what to do. I thought I'd try for a 10km run, but it started to rain at the 4km mark. I was also not feeling particularly confident about lasting the distance, so I decided to just turn it into a 5km run instead.

A new bug-fix release release 0.4.1 of RProtoBuf, is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides GNU R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. Murray once more shouldered most of the actual burden and fixed a number of issues detailed below.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.1 (2014-03-25)

• Document and add a test for the deprecated group functionality.
• Add a CITATION file pointing to our arXiv.org preprint.
• Fix a bug in the show method for EnumDescriptor types.
• Import all top-level enums from imported .proto files.
• Removed duplicate enum value type from the unit tests that caused problems with the most recent libprotobuf-2.5. (without option allow_alias).

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. More information is at the RProtoBuf page which has a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. Questions, comments etc should go to the rprotobuf mailing list off the RProtoBuf page at R-Forge.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.