It’s probably impossible to get too much of Bruce Schneier, although I honestly wouldn’t mind if he stopped Friday Squid Blogging. His latest Wired.com article on the false dichotomy between security and privacy is an excellent counterpoint to a recent Lawrence Wright profile in the New Yorker on Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell. The Lawrence Wright article was surprisingly uncritical, considering the New Yorker’s usual zealous approach. Check out, for example, his description of the “Clipper” chip:

In the nineties, new encryption software that could protect telephone conversations, faxes, and e-mails from unwarranted monitoring was coming on the market, but the programs could also block entirely legal efforts to eavesdrop on criminals or potential terrorists. Under McConnell s direction, the N.S.A. developed a sophisticated device, the Clipper Chip, with a superior ability to encrypt any electronic transmission; it also allowed law-enforcement officials, given the proper authority, to decipher and eavesdrop on the encrypted communications of others. Privacy advocates criticized the device, though, and the Clipper was abandoned by 1996. They convinced the folks on the Hill that they couldn t trust the government to do what it said it was going to do, Richard Wilhelm, who was in charge of information warfare under McConnell, says.

(emphasis added). Compare, for example, EPIC’s Clipper Chip information page. Schneier, by contrast, sees right through the core:

We’ve been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often — in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric — that most of us don’t even question the fundamental dichotomy. But it’s a false one. Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other. Think of a door lock, a burglar alarm and a tall fence. Think of guns, anti-counterfeiting measures on currency and that dumb liquid ban at airports. Security affects privacy only when it’s based on identity, and there are limitations to that sort of approach. Since 9/11, approximately three things have potentially improved airline security: reinforcing the cockpit doors, passengers realizing they have to fight back and — possibly — sky marshals. Everything else — all the security measures that affect privacy — is just security theater and a waste of effort. By the same token, many of the anti-privacy “security” measures we’re seeing — national ID cards, warrantless eavesdropping, massive data mining and so on — do little to improve, and in some cases harm, security. And government claims of their success are either wrong, or against fake threats. The debate isn’t security versus privacy. It’s liberty versus control.

Read the whole essay. And send it to your mother, as well. Technorati Tags: Schneier, Privacy, Security

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I've been thinking about this for awhile, so time to put down some thoughts.

First, what is socialized medicine? If we listen to the politicians that label health care as "socialized", it seems to be "anything that is paid for by taxes and delivered free or cheaply to citizens." Putting aside the question of whether that meets the academic definition of socialism for the moment, let's look at things in the United States that are already socialized:

• K-12 education
• Police
• Fire fighters
• Public Libraries
• Roads
• Airports and air traffic control
• Military defense and offense

That's right. We trust the government with our children all day long for 13 years. For free!

Yet this is a country in which hospitals dump the homeless in the gutter for being unable to pay their bills. Even insured Americans find claims turned down for arbitrary reasons. People are afraid to change jobs for fear of losing health insurance.

Why is it bad to have the government pay for health care?

Here in the United States, our health care system is far from best in the world. It's not even top 10. Or 20. Our system encourages minimizing health care, and doesn't encourage preventative care.

I'd suggest that, in a democracy, it's best to have the government pay for health care. That's because, in a democracy, we are in control of the bureaucrats. If we wish to exercise common sense and pound into their heads that paying for preventative care makes good long-term sense, then we can do so at the ballot box.

So why the scare tactics about government being involved in health care?

Perhaps our real problem is that we have let government get out of our control? Perhaps we are too frightened of change to vote. Perhaps we've given up on a responsive government. Perhaps we think that the insurance companies and drug companies will never let us have a good health care system.

Yes, the lobbyists have a lot of power. But we have the power to remove it, and it's high time we used it.

The audacity of Obama to have hope. To say that we can do better. When Hillary Clinton falls in line with the Republicans and accuses him of having "false hope", effectively saying that we can't do any better, then is she -- or any Republicans -- really a candidate of change? I think that all these accusations from conservatives and Hillary that Obama has "false hope" has finally convinced me that he's the one to vote for. If everyone else claims that his ideas are too good, that his dreams too big, then I like him.

Oh, and you could substitute "college education" for "socialized medicine" everywhere in this article and get equally valid arguments.

As I mentioned I would a month or so ago, I attended a workshop on Computing in the Cloud organized by Ed Felton's Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The conference aimed to discuss the policy issues that are raised by the shift from computing on machines we own and have direct control over to computing on servers owned by others. Think Google, Facebook, MySpace, and that lot. I talked about what all this might mean for free software and for open source and our communities, a bit about the AGPL, and discussed some ideas of how might proceed as a community. Princeton has been organized enough to post audio and video of the whole conference, including recordings of my talk, in a variety of formats and qualities (although unfortunately not in Vorbis and Theora). As I said in my FSF membership appeal last month, I think complications raised by "cloud computing" are one of the most important sets of challenges facing free software this year.

Yesterday when walking down Flinders St I noticed that a new store has opened up selling organic food. It’s Flinders Organics and the address is 260 Flinders St Melbourne VIC 3000 (just across the road from Flinders St Station, not far from the Swanston St intersection). I bought some fruit, some Green and Black organic hot-chocolate powder (recently I’ve been making hot chocolate with Green and Black dark chocolate - the milk needs to be heated a lot and some stirring is needed - it is easier with powder) and some fruit juice. The fruit juice was good, one litre for about $4.50 which is significantly cheaper than any of the juice-bars which offer freshly squeezed juice (but not organic). Being sold in a bottle that can be re-sealed meant that I could carry it around the city and drink some whenever I was thirsty. People who are attending LCA might want to keep this in mind, both for food that they want to prepare themselves (EG making sandwiches in their hotel room) and for take-away stuff such as bottled juice. The location is almost within walking distance of the conference.

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Yesterday I got an Asus EeePC and I'm really impressed by it. One of the hardware pieces where I thought you get exactly what you pay for it.

So far I ripped off the Xandros installation. While it may fit some users it is a really stripped down installation, you can't actually do much with it. Instead I gave the DebianEeePC project a try. The installation was pretty straight forward like described in the wiki. Put the installer img on a USB stick together with the network driver and install

Most things are working like they are supposed to work, even the webcam and suspend works. Yay!

However some things don't work yet. For example acpi reports the remaining capacity in percentage rather than a real capacity in mAh. You just have something like 100 mAh in your proc which means 100%. This is really annoying, while it works to show the remaining percentage you can't calculate the remaining time. An additional deficit of this is that it is only capable of reporting this in steps of 10 here (until you are under 10% then it gets a bit more precise). This seems to be a BIOS or a battery firmware problem.

Another thing is that nearly all special keys do not work with unmodified acpi-support because the event ids don't match
For some strange reason asus-brn-up.sh is always executed no matter what fn key you use and even if another script like voldownbt.sh get executed as well.

Apart from this I am really happy with the device, I get a working X desktop with openbox in 25 seconds and even the often criticized small screen is not that small in my opinion. A bigger problem is the keyboard. If you have big fingers I think its not fun to type on it, the keys are extremely small.

So far, thanks to everyone for the efforts put in DebianEeepc to make this possible!

See tuxmobil for some other collected installation reports.

UPDATE: it takes like 3 hours to charge the battery while it's switched on which somehow sucks.

For those unfamiliar with the project, etch-and-a-half has the goal of making the existing etch release work on more hardware, but with minimal risk to existing etch users. This will be done by *adding* new kernel packages to the existing release. Kernel selection isn't final yet - the kernel team would like to use 2.6.24 if it proves itself stable in time; 2.6.22 is the backup choice. etch-and-a-half isn't restricted to kernel updates by-definition; new X drivers, or proven-safe X driver updates are reasonable candidates as well (though at this point, no changes have been proposed). An oft-asked question is around updating desktop packages, e.g. new versions of GNOME/KDE. This is beyond the scope of etch-and-a-half because it introduces a great deal more change than just additional hardware support, its wouldn't be a transparent upgrade to existing etch users, and we cannot say with a high level of confidence that it wouldn't introduce regressions for existing users. That said - a localized change to a package that adds support for new hardware and clearly doesn't break existing hardware is a valid candidate for any stable release. Such requests should be submitted to the SRM team like any other stable update request. The current plan for etch and a half is to release as part of a point release. 4.0r4 is the planned point release, since 4.0r3 is planned to have a quick turnaround to fix issues with 4.0r2. This means that pre-release bits will be made available via proposed-updates - testers are greatly appreciated. There is no plan to add support for etch-and-a-half to the etch branch of d-i. Rather, support will likely be added in a beta of the lenny installer. A wiki page exists here, and a coordination list has been setup on teams.debian.net.

If anyone tried to email me via ianhaken.com in the last three weeks, you probably met with little success. My contract for dedicated hosting ended at the beginning of the year, and for my small personal uses it wasn't worth the cost to renew it. Since I already had an always-on file server at home, I decided to move my hosting services to my own server. After some downtime associated with transfering domain registrars, I was able to get this much setup.

Since I'm just hosting on a cheap ISP connection, I of course don't get a static IP. Many free DNS services offer dynamic IP update clients which solve this problem, but of course you can't quite take advantage of your personal domain name. I took advantage of a tip I received to redirect all hostname lookups with a CNAME entry to my dynamic DNS domain name, which stays up-to-date with the free client. So in short, a little indirection was able to solve the dynamic IP problem.

What I failed to realize is the affect this would have on my MX records. While I had them properly configured for my domain name, I realized that mail was still not getting through. It took me longer than it should have to perform a manual MX lookup and figure out that my CNAME was being resolved and then MX records were being searched for this canonical name rather than ianhaken.com. So after adding identical MX records to my dynamic IP service all seems to be well again.

On a related note, I've also been trying to get exim working on my internal server. Since I do run a dynamic IP I can't run a full-blown mail-server, but I'll I really want to do is be able to send outbound messages anyway. I've been able to make this happen by configuring exim use gmail as a smarthost. Ideally, I would also like local mail to be delivered to my external mailbox. I figured this would do it:

echo myname@gmail.com > ~/.forward

and it seems to get half way there. Sending a message to myname@localhost results in the following lines in my log:

2008-01-06 13:50:46 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q = myname@localhost U=myname P=local S=388
2008-01-06 13:50:48 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q => myname@gmail.com R=smarthost T=remote_smtp_smarthost H=gmail-smtp.l.google.com [209.85.199.109] X=TLS-1.0:RSA_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA1:24 DN="C=US,ST=California,L=Mountain View,O=Google Inc,CN=smtp.gmail.com"
2008-01-06 13:50:48 1JBdOI-0005sm-4Q Completed

By the look of it, exim realizes it is supposed to be delivering out to the smarthost, but it's still sending to myname@localhost. At any rate, I'm definitely not seeing anything in my inbox on either end. Anyone know if I'm just not understanding the .forward file or is there something in the exim config I need to change? It's not particularly critical, but it would be nice to see error mail go to my inbox.

could have just been a nice Summer morning, uneventful as they usually are, were it not for the fact that it was already 19:00, and it was mid-winter. (with due apologies, of course, to Bob Dylan and Les Luthiers) Nadezhda called me, warning me about a very dark sky and strong winds, and went off for her meeting. I told her weather looked decent from mx office... But started paying attention. And yes, wind was crazed. Hints of an upcoming power outage were felt in the Institute. I left my office as soon as I could. Cycling back home was quite a challenge - The 3.1Km route back home, usually much easier than the way there as it's mostly downhill, was quite a challenge: Biking with eyes almost-closed because of the flying leaves and dust, and little but menacing raindrops... Scary, all in all. Anyway, it gets scary... At least one person was killed because of the winds not far from here. This city has the fame that febrero loco y los vientos otro poco (February is crazy, but the winds are even more). And the first crazy wind of the season are always scary.[update] One person dead because of the strong winds in Mexico City; Power outages in several areas; Three more hours of strong winds expected; Heavy winds caused by the #24 cold front(?); Winds cause mayhem on DF streets;

< zed0> can you get cp to give a progress bar like wget?

Damn right you can.

#!/bin/sh
cp_p()
 
   set -e
   strace -q -ewrite cp -- "$ 1 " "$ 2 " 2>&1 \
        awk ' 
	    count += $NF
            if (count % 10 == 0)  
               percent = count / total_size * 100
               printf "%3d%% [", percent
               for (i=0;i<=percent;i++)
                  printf "="
               printf ">"
               for (i=percent;i<100;i++)
                  printf " "
               printf "]\r"
             
          
         END   print ""  ' total_size=$(stat -c '%s' "$ 1 ") count=0
 

In action:

% cp_p /mnt/raid/pub/iso/debian/debian-2.2r4potato-i386-netinst.iso /dev/null
 76% [===========================================>                    ]

Zack's pam-hooks module got me thinking that the whole "start stuff at user login/logout" thing should be simplified a huge lot. Currently, there are just too many mechanisms depending on the user's shell, ?dm, distribution, session manager/desktop environment etc. Should this be a topic for the freedesktop.org people (or is it already - it might fit into Portland in some way)? A standardized way to hook into session setup/teardown might also be good for security: if there's only few ways to get stuff started at login, that means fewer places to look where malware could be hiding. Of course, it also means that said malware can spread more easily, being more independent of the user's desktop environment.

In just over a month (1 month and 1 day, to be precise), it's FOSDEM again. The Debian Developers Room schedule is almost complete, and some interesting things are being published around it. Such as the pre-FOSDEM beer event. In previous years, this always happened at the "Le Roi d'Espagne", a bar at Grand Place in Brussels. This was a nice place for many years, because it's easily found, and they have this backroom where quite a lot of people would fit in. Unfortunately, "quite a lot" does not equal "a huge number", with the amount of people going to the pre-FOSDEM beer event more and more approaching the latter than the former as the years go by. Last year, it finally became too crowded, and it was decided that the pre-FOSDEM beer event would change bars this year. Which has now happened. This year, the pre-FOSDEM beer event will be at the Delirium Caf , which is not at the Grand Place anymore, but just 100m away from it; the FOSDEM website has more information. A nice feature of the Delirium Caf , besides the fact that they are much larger, is the huge amount of different beers they have. Over 2000 of them, which you can query online!. And that's not even considering the soft drinks or waters or whatever, which they also have on their menu. Another novelty this year is the streaming; the main tracks that will be held in Janson will be streamed out of the event, and the Debian video team is also planning to do some streaming. Meaning, even if you can't make it to FOSDEM, you'll still be able to follow some of it. You won't be able to follow everything, especially not the hallway track which at FOSDEM is a very important one; but at least you'll be able to sample some bits, which is nice. Other than that, not much will change. There'll be a key signing party, organized by yours truly. There'll be Lightning talks, there'll be the Main track, and there'll be a number of Developer rooms, including the Debian one—which, occasionally, is also organized by yours truly. This conference has always been my favourite (even though I haven't been to many conferences besides FOSDEM); I've never missed even one edition ever since the very first one back in 2001 (when it was still called OSDEM). And since a few years, I've also been offering crashing space at our office, for international geeks who don't mind roughing it a bit (it's an office, there no shower, there's only floor space). This year, perhaps I haven't been spamming enough for that, but for now I only have two people who're interested in sleeping over (and they're not even sure); if you're going to FOSDEM and still need a place to sleep, you're (probably ;-) welcome. Send me an email. On the Debian front, things are going well, for the most part. The list of speakers for the Devroom is nearing completion, leaving me with little more to do than to start assigning times. We've been assigned a booth as well, but there I still need to figure out how to organize it, and what to do with it. There will of course be the regular UK T-shirts, and probably some other merchandizing, but I also want something involving some computer device. We've had this d-i "babelbox" installation running a few times now, which was nice; but I do think we need some variation, too. The only problem with that approach is that I don't really know what that variation could be. Suggestions are welcome! And so time goes on, and FOSDEM draws nearer. At some point it'll eventually happen, and then it will be over before one can say "blueberry pie". Sometimes I wonder whether all these months of preparation are actually worth it. But when FOSDEM is actually here, I'm sure I'll find that it is, indeed, worth it...

As you might know from reading my blog, at my workplace, we have largely standardized on Linux on the desktop and laptop.

We use systemimager to maintain a standard desktop image and a separate standard laptop image. These images differ because there are different assumptions. The desktop machines mount /home over NFS, authenticate to LDAP, etc. This doesn't work on laptops. Moreover, desktops don't use network-manager or wifi, but laptops do.

Our desktop image uses Debian's hardware autodetection -- plus a little hacking in /etc/init.d/gdm -- to automatically adjust to a wide range of hardware. So far this has worked well.

Laptops are much more picky. Our standard laptop model had been the HP nc4400 -- a small and light 12" model that people here loved. HP discontinued that model. Their replacement was the 2510p. We ordered one in here for evaluation. Try as we might, we couldn't get it to suspend and resume properly in Linux.

So I went out scouring the field of Linux laptops. Companies such as Emperor Linux buy retail laptops from people like Lenovo, test them for Linux, and sell them -- at a premium. These were too expensive to justify at the quantities we need them.

Then I stumbled across Linux Certified. I'd never heard of them before. I called them up and asked a few questions. They don't buy retail laptops, but instead have OEMs in Taiwan build laptops to their spec. They happen to use the same OEM that Fujitsu does, I believe. (No big company builds laptops in the USA these days). I asked them about wifi chipsets, video chipsets, whether they use stock kernels. I got clueful answers to all of these.

So we ordered one of their LC2100s models. They didn't offer Debian preinstalled, but did offer Ubuntu, so I selected that. The laptop arrived a couple of days (!!) later, configured with the particular CPU, etc. that I selected.

I was surprised at the thrill I felt at taking a brand new laptop out of its box, turning it on, and watching Grub appear before my eyes. Ubuntu proceeded to boot. I then of course installed our regular Debian image on the thing to check it out.

It needed a kernel and xserver-xorg-video-intel from lenny, as well as the ipw3945 driver for wifi, but otherwise worked with the exact same software as our HP nc4400 image. (In fact, it wasn't hard to support both laptops with that image, since both use a lot of Intel hardware.) The one trick was making hibernate call /etc/init.d/ipw3945d stop so that the ipw3945 module could be unloaded before suspend. (Why this particular chipset needs a daemon is beyond me, but oh well.)

The hardware is great. As far as I know, the ipw3945 was the only component that wasn't directly and automatically supported by DFSG-free software in lenny main. The screen is sharp and high-contrast (it's glossy, which I personally don't like, but I bet our users will). The device itself feels sturdy. It's small and dense. I haven't opened it up, but it looks like all you need is a screwdriver to do so.

The only downside is that they don't sell docking stations for it. Their standard answer on that is to buy a USB docking station. That's a partial answer, but can't handle power or video like a standard docking station will.

Also, the LC2100s is much cheaper than the HP laptop, even when configured when nicer specs in every way. That is no doubt partially due to the lack of the Windows tax.

I'm sending off an order for 4 more today, I believe.

Joey, just don't delay your releases waiting for incoming translations. Gettext is anyway smart enough to not use translations when they're non-existing (aha) of fuzzy. So, an incomplete translation for a program will just end up in a partially translated program. That's actually the case for *many* localized software, including the big ones. I suggest that you apply such a schedule:

• Plan a release
• Send call for translations (hint: podebconf-report-po is your friend even for non debconf translations...see its man page) and give translators a deadline. The deadline has to be reasonable and leave some room for translation proofreading. Most often, when few strings are impacted (say not more than 20 but, again, that's hard to judge)
• When the deadline is reached, upload release with what you have
• A few days weeks later, eventually release a new version with late translations

But, as you suspected, releasing without synchronised translations is the better choice....as long as you care abou tsending call for updates when needed. BTW, if you need some help to coordinate incoming translations for apt-key, maybe ask on debian-i18n and someone will eventually pop up (hopefully, not /me).

That's how I'm passing this week. What? No, I'm not getting married. It just feels like my body isn't quite sure whether it wants to be sick or not. On monday, I got down with influenza, mostly in the stomach area. Not only does that hurt and feel awfully bad, it also involves your yesterday's lunch reversing direction halfway through the digestive system, and finding the wrong way out. Some people call that puking. Being restless, doing nothing, I tried to do some work for Debian. Bad idza. Now usually, when I get sick, I get really sick. For one day. The next day, I can work again. That doesn't mean I'm at my best, but at least I can handle some stuff. So on tuesday, I went to work, since I had this appointment on wednesday and I still had to prepare some stuff for that. I made the mistake, however, of not dressing warmer than usual. With my body still recovering, and with the extra bad weather in the evening, I caught a bad cold. So on wednesday, I stayed at home. Lucky for me, customer had asked to postpone the appointment on wednesday to thursday, since he wasn't going to get everything ready in time otherwise. Me, I was still feeling the leftover sickness from the influenza, and now this cold was tearing me down. But as before, after one day I felt much better, so I thought I'll just dress much better this time, go to that appointment, and make the best of it. I figured it couldn't be that bad. Except that in a data center, the temperature is optimized for computers, not for sick human beings; and nobody cares about the noise, or about the fact that trying to yell above said noise isn't a very good idea if your voice is having issues because of some virus. I guess the only nice thing that happened this week was that nice lady on the train who gave me a clean handkerchief when my own was... well... you don't want to know. Tomorrow, I guess I'll just stay in bed. And on saturday, and perhaps even sunday, too. Get this week over with.

In an old post I dealt with the nice mod_chroot module to secure your multisite server. I also adopted recently vlogger in order to manage better apache logs for virtual hosts, when you have dozens or hundreds of them. Unfortunately the suggested way to use it (a simple piped command) does not work nicely with mod_chroot, because the piped command has to run in the chroot jail.

Of course, it is not a good idea installing the whole perl intepreter and all required modules in a minimized jail, so I adopted an oldish classic trick (the old things are always the best) to solve the issue: using a named pipe. You basically need to do something like the following:

mkfifo -m 600 /var/run/apache2/logger && chown www-logs /var/run/apache2/logger

cat /var/run/apache2/logger /usr/sbin/vlogger -u www-logs -g nogroup -s access.log /var/log/vlogger >/dev/null 2>&1 &

/etc/init.d/apache2 start

Of course your log directives will be something like:

LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"% Referer i\" \"% User-Agent i\"" vcombined
CustomLog "/var/run/apache2/logger" vcombined

You absolutely need to run the reader before the writer, else the init script would hang for ever. It is easy adding a simple init script to run vlogger before apache and it has also the big advantage of not requiring re-fork a perl intepreter at every damn log action. Piping rocks.

After the debacle last time I tried to grow the size of my existing RAID1 when I put new disks in daedalus, I thought this time I'd do my homework. I did some research, I found out the way I should have done it. I did a practice run on a USB key. I fully planned how I was going to do it:

mdadm /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sdb3
<delete /dev/sdb3, recreate at new full size>
reboot
mdadm /dev/md2 --add /dev/sdb3
<wait for sync>
mdadm /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sda3
<delete /dev/sda3, recreate at new full size>
reboot
mdadm /dev/md2 --add /dev/sda3
<wait for sync>
mdadm --grow /dev/md2
<wait for sync>
pvresize /dev/md2

Everything went as planned, until I went to grow the RAID1 volume. It still thought the underlying device was the same size. There was nothing to grow. So at this point, I decided to do something similar to what I did last time to get around the failing disk, and should have done last time anyway. I broke the mirror, created a new degraded RAID1 using the full size of the new partition on the half I pulled out of the mirror, and did a pvmove from the old non-full-sized degraded mirror to the new full-sized degraded mirror. All of that went swimmingly until the pvmove was around 50% complete, when the kernel decided to oops spectacularly. I had to power cycle daedalus to get it back under control, and even in single-user mode, without me doing anything, the kernel started oopsing again. Dammit. I had to boot into emergency-mode (insert standard gripe about Debian's single-user mode being far too non-singular here), then I could resume the pvmove without any further oopsing. After that completed, I was able to ditch the old non-full-sized degraded RAID1 device and resync the new one onto the old partition. There was still some minor filesystem corruption, more likely because I had everything mounted at the time of the crash. Yes, I still haven't learned not to do this kind of thing in multi-user mode. It seems every time I try to minimise the size and duration of an outage, it bites me in the arse. Even though I should have been able to move open logical volumes between physical volumes, the kernel oops seemed to be in the dm_mirror code. daedalus is running a fairly old kernel. The annoying thing is that getting some additional disk space on board was the dependency for doing a general upgrade of all of the software on it. Argh. Anyway, it's done. I hope not to have to go through this again. I just have to sit through a potentially nail-biting remote upgrade of Debian now, and I should be good for a couple more years hopefully.

I've been mentoring a high school student in biology for the past few weeks. The other day she came to me with a math problem that she was having trouble with. Looking at this relatively simple logic problem I realized that when faced with such a thing these days that I'd rather write a program to solve it because that's way more fun. So later on I wrote a little python script to calculate all the possible values that were correct for this program up to any given value. I'm not sure if the realization that I'd rather use a computer to solve even simple problems is a good or bad thing, but I bet I would have liked math class a lot more if this is what I had to do for it.

For the last four years, I have left my life and home to return to my mother’s far more precarious and fragile life in Puerto Rico. I do so to visit. But I also do so to give her caretaker, Milagro, a much needed break. I returned on December 18th and found my mother nearly in the same state as she was in October. Far worse than a year ago, but she still struck me as my mother, if nothing else because she knew I was her daughter. Over the course of a week, all of that changed. After a series of howling fits, by the end of my first week there, she no longer knew she was my mother. While I knew this would eventually happen, I was still caught off guard. You see, prior to my arrival, and since my last visit in late October, she asked me on the phone, and my sister and Milagro in PR, *nearly everyday,* when I was coming back. So even though she asked when her daughter, who she knew lived and worked in the city of New York, was coming back over and over again for 8 weeks, this seemingly hard-wired thought quickly vaporized thanks to what is a disease of the brain, but what strikes experientially as a cruel disease of the soul and personality. So while 2007 was overall a pretty good year, it is also the year when in certain respects my mother died, at least for me in so far she has morphed into someone remarkably different from the person I once knew. Now she only remembers small scraps of her life. She knows she is from Russia, she knows that she lives in the Casa de Vera (which she thinks is her bed), she knows she loves the dog, she knows that she had parents (and she would like to return to them but does not know where they are), she knows she has a good friend who is a painter (I think she had a massive crush on him if she still remembers him and not me but otherwise, everything is so twisted, so jumbled or so gone, it is beyond stunning. She certainly knew I was around and helping for she got upset when she knew I was leaving, often bursting in tears, asking me to take her to New York. But she just knew me as Gabriella from Nueva York who brought her novio bueno to PR and not as anyone else. It is certainly not easy to see this, to experience it day in and out but it is what it is and there is no running from it. Logistically it is also beyond hard to take care of my mom. To get her to eat, to calm down after one of her morning fits (she always, always, always had a raging fit in the morning, the afternoon and evenings being far more calm periods), to convince her to wear her dentures (which is the only remedy to stop her from spitting all over the place), to dress her, to deal with her in the middle of the night, often twice, are all extraordinarily challenging. Very quickly, your waking hours fill up with seemingly endless tasks and this I guess is, in some respects, a hidden blessing; there is just a lot less time to ruminate over how all of this, frankly, sucks. It is only later, late at night, early in the morning, or on the plane ride home where the darkness of her life would set deeply into my own. It may be obvious why this state and experience is tough but there are two parts that I find particularly rough. If my mother’s state is one of near total chaos and entropy, there is one thing that is utterly clear. She knows she is suffering and she wants out. On particularly bad days, she would mutter or sometimes yell loudly that she wants to die and would ask for the medicine that would accomplish this. She would even sometimes call me mala for not giving her this medicine. It is certainly not the case that everyone with Alzheimers goes through what my mother does. Apparently, some experience the illness quietly and peacefully. This is so not the case for my mother, who lived a particularly hard yet vibrant life. Donning a difficult personality, she lived lived as fully as she could and it is clear that as life leaves her, she would rather not be around to experience what is a cruel exorcism of self. Thankfully, she is not constantly or not even mostly in a suicidal state. I think she at times forgets how lousy she feels and rather enjoys the rather limited life she has. And at this point, I just hope that she continues to have calm or even happy moments. The second surprise concerns my own memories. My mother has had this rare form of Alzheimers, Posterior Cortical Atrophy, for at least 6, possible 7 years now, though we only received the official diagnosis 2003, which is the year when when I first started to write the occasional post about my experiences with her. In 2003 and 2004, she was pretty functionally in tact and it has only been the last 2.5 years when the persistent decline has set in, whittling her capacities and memories to what seems to be a bare minimum. But because her presence and reality is nothing short of totally enveloping and drowning, I am starting to lose my own memory of my mother prior to her illness. If Alzheimers robs people of their memories, I have come to realize, that if you are not careful, it is a thief that can also rob your own memories. I think it is for this reason that I have become so attached to my mother’s stuff her furniture, her paintings some of which I have taken back with me. They are material vehicles that transport me back to the past when my mother was in a different state and place. Now it is clear that if the challenge is to deal with the emotional toll this illness causes, it as much summoning the will and performing the labor to retain and recall my older memories of her.

If you follow online discussions of programming languages, you'll occasionally see articles about language X "dying". It is, however, a bad metaphor, because the "life cycle" of a programming language is different from single biological units, of which you can definitely say at some point "He's not pining ... this is an ex-parrot!". Once a programming language is widely deployed, it simply won't up and disappear from one day to the next. Too many people and companies depend on it, and replacing it is difficult enough, that the "switching costs" will keep it in place for many years. The obvious example is Cobol. This effect works in favor of languages that are not "the new thing", and means they will probably not truly cease to be used for many, many years. On the other hand, it's also pretty easy to tell which way the wind is blowing and get an idea of what's hot and what's not. Java got hyped a lot in the past, now it's Ruby. Scala is beginning to get hyped some, so is Erlang. Careful observers can spot the rise of languages as they hit the early stages of the technology adoption lifecycle. By paying attention to what's going on in the wider world, it's also possible to see when languages are used less and less for new projects, and solely kept on for the legacy systems. I think this is what most people mean by "dying", but of course it creates confusion, because it's clear that the language is still utilized. In some cases, I think it may be possible that a language continues to be more widely adopted, yet still seems to lag behind, simply because other languages are being adopted at a significantly higher rate. So what it's really about is two factors: how widely deployed is the language in any given moment, and, perhaps more importantly, the rate of adoption - is it accelerating or slowing down? Are more people jumping on the bandwagon, or is the language being used less by innovators, early adopters, and new projects? You need both those coordinates to understand where a language is at - it may be huge but declining, small but on its way up, or a niche language that never achieved widespread usage that isn't catching on any more. The last one is the one you'd probably want to be wary of. The first two will probably be ok as long as you understand what you're getting, and the type of user or organization you are matches where the language is at in its lifecycle. I think that perhaps those interested in discussing these things seriously ought to find some good terms to use. "Forth's rate of adoption is declining" doesn't sound as exciting as "Java is dying!" though. "Fortran's diffusion is decelerating" doesn't have much of a ring to it. Any other ideas?

Originally I planned to post this with the title "Last night I slept with 300 people" but this night happened two weeks ago... It was the night before the fourth and last day of the 24C3 were I slept in the gym :-) Actually I also planned to blog on the third day but then this day turned out to be really busy... and then I arrived home on new years eve and suddenly it was a week later and now it's the 10th of January. Time flies when you're having fun. And as you might have noticed it's not even the 10th anymore...

Timewarp back to the chaos communication congress! I think it's safe to say that the Debian booth at the 24C3 was a success. It was a nice meeting (and storage) point for Debian people, we collected quite some donations for t-shirts and stuff (the exact amount needs to be examined still) and we were able to help various users and contributors answering Debian specific questions of both kinds: how to install/configure/fix foo and packaging and other development questions from a number of people.. And we had a babelbox setup which was much better understood and perceived, once I added a sign explaining it :-)

Thanks a lot to the 24C3 organizers and the angels (thats how the congress volunteers are called) for making such a smooth and interesting conference as well as giving such a great space to the Debian booth! And equally thanks a lot to all the people operating our booth! For those who are interested to attend next year: roughly 64 talks were held in english, and 26 in german. I saw about five events live...



The sign hung for about an hour unmodified...

On the third day of the congress we had an OLPC.de meeting, which was quite productive and resulted in us founding OLPC Germany this monday. In the aftermath of this meeting I came up with the idea of having an OLPC Europe event at FOSDEM in Brussels in February, which by now has been accepted and scheduled by the FOSDEM organizers. Yay! So if you are in Europe and involved or interested in the OLPC, please mark the 23rd of February 15-17 localtime in your calendar :-) The idea of these projects is probably best summarized with "think global, act local and global", for more detail please read our vision. (And keep in mind this is in its very early stages.) OLPC Europe should also become an interface for all those european OLPC efforts which have been popping up recently and which all take up ressources in Cambridge, the OLPC "mothership", taking ressources away from the children of the world.

Then on the last day of the 24C3 congress I also gave the DebConf7 "thank you, Sponsor"-package to those four people from the freifunk community, who helped us out with accesspoints for Edinburgh. Much to my surprise and joy, they were really happy about it! Funnily two of those four are also among the three OpenWRT developers who ported OpenWRT to the OLPC laptop, which I borrowed to them somewhat in return :-) And now we work together in OLPC.de and .eu. Networking is sometimes really really fun.

Fast forward to 2008. Two days ago I finanlly had the time to to run etch, lenny and sid on the OLPC laptop (with wireless (including WPA), xorg and sound working and dualbooting with the original fedora install) and then yesterday I've created a usbstick which successfully booted a "d-i prototype". Yay! And best of all (for me), most of the actual work was done by other people, I just had to collect the pieces. My next steps will be documenting what I did and prepare a d-i image which actually works. I don't have pics yet (it's Debian running on a laptop, I guess you can imagine this), so for now I will just post another picture I received some three months ago and which made me incredibly happy at that time:



When I have a working d-i running on it, I'll post more pics.