On Friday 2007-11-02, I watched Larry Lessig give a presentation at the University of Washington entitled Is Google (2008) Microsoft (1998)? Since it was Lessig, the talk was articulate and thought-provoking, and he used his slides very well (unlike many presenters who just read bullet points).

The argument he made is that Google is like Microsoft in some ways (and so are other companies like Facebook). In his analysis, the problem with Microsoft was that so many companies made themselves Microsoft-dependent, which both forced other companies to follow suit (due to network effects) and gave Microsoft leverage they could use against everyone in their ecosystem (e.g., Netscape). According to Lessig, Microsoft was not evil to use this leverage, but you have to recognize that Microsoft will do what is best for Microsoft, and this may not be what is best for you. He then suggested that we should be aware of the potential for the same thing to happen; in support of this point, he quoted excerpts from the terms of service from the APIs of Google and Facebook, which contain typical statements like we reserve the right to terminate your use of this service for any reason or for no reason, and asked: What if Microsoft had written this license agreement?

But it seemed to me that this wasn't his main point. He was using this observation as a springboard to talk about issues revolving around competition and public policy. Specifically, he feels that we should work towards a more just model of interaction between companies and users whose work makes the company more valuable (by contributing to a software ecosystem, by posting content on the Web site, etc). But the correct way to do this (he says) is not via competition, after-the-fact litigation, or voluntary codes of conduct: competition may not be around to enforce good behavior (as we've seen with Microsoft), litigation may be too late and ineffective (again, see Microsoft), and voluntary codes of conduct will disappear as soon as they get in the way of the bottom line. The correct approach, he argued, is across-the-board regulation so that all the companies have to play by the same rules.

From there he went on to talk about governmental corruption. He said (quoting Robert Reich's book Supercapitalism) that the reason we consistently look for solutions in the market and in voluntary compliance is that our governmental system is broken and does not effectively regulate corporations in the public interest. But Lessig is optimistic that we can change things (he joked that his publisher was unhappy with this point of view, because his brand has been built on pessimism). In his view, the politicians in Washington, by and large, want to be honest and do good, but they aren't able to within the current political system. For instance, on the few occassions that he managed to get access to lawmakers to discuss copyright issues, it was often the first time they had heard that there was more than one side to the argument. He thinks we need a national political movement that will shame politicians into being less corrupt.

This is all a simplification of what he said, of course; unfortunately, I wasn't able to find a recording of this talk on Lessig's Web site, or I'd point you at primary source material. I don't know if this is because he chose not to post it, or because it just hasn't been made available yet.

My view

In general, I thought that the speech was very interesting and well thought out. But as much as I'd like to buy into his optimism that we can fix our system, I don't think it's well-founded, for two reasons.

First, he argued that competition will resolve some of these problems (that was before and after he said we can't rely on competition, which I found confusing and may indicate that I misunderstood something). His evidence for this seemed to be that when Microsoft was dominating the world, users responded by reducing their dependence on Microsoft products and by switching to alternatives such as Linux. But, in fact, although more people may be using Linux than in the past, virtually everyone is still only using Windows, it's still almost impossible to find a programming job that isn't Windows-only, and Microsoft is still raking in money hand over fist; indeed, they're doing so well that they're planning to expand their workforce by a third. To take just one data point of many: I ride the bus to Seattle and back, and I regularly see other people using laptops as they commute. Virtually all the laptops run Windows. Occasionally I'll see a Mac, and every few months I'll see a guy running Linux on his laptop; I say "a guy" because it's the same guy every single time. So by my estimation, use of Linux on laptops in buses on the 545 route from Redmond to Seattle is way below 1%, with Macintoshes somewhere around 5%.

To broaden my point, I think Lessig has fallen into a trap that highly intelligent people, particularly those in academia, tend to fall into. In academia, you are surrounded by people who value learning and thinking deeply about the world. These are people who will give serious and unbiased consideration to questions like what is the social effect of my acceptance of the Facebook Terms of Service? and If I become dependent on this service, will that possibly affect me in five years if the company decides to act against my interests? The problem with this is that these people are not representative of the population at large. The population at large thinks why is this check-box getting in the way of me sending pictures to my friends? And I have no doubt that any kid who, e.g., refuses to sign up for Facebook as a protest against their TOS will be roundly mocked in their social circles for being a weird antisocial nonconformist. (of course, this may not apply to the small minority of people like myself whose social circles consist of weird antisocial nonconformists)

Second, Lessig's optimism about the political system seemed to be based on his observation that the people in government are, by and large, not venally corrupt: they want to do good, but the system is constructed in a way that makes this impossible. To me, that's a tremendously disheartening statement. If our problem were simply a few, or even many, corrupt politicians, this would be a solvable problem: even nowadays, Americans have some ability to choose who gets elected, and I believe that a sufficiently well-coordinated campaign could replace bad politicians with good ones.

But if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the individuals are honest, it's a much deeper problem and frankly one that I don't know how to solve. While individuals have some direct control over who gets elected, we have no way to directly change the system that produces the corruption; the levers to do this are in the hands of the politicians elected through that broken system. It's unlikely that the politicians themselves will fix the problem, because they've benefited deeply from it: if the system is left as it is, well over 90% of Congress members will keep
their jobs in the next election cycle, and any effective change seems likely (by definition) to disrupt this cushy arrangement.

On the other hand, running new candidates for office will not fix the problem. After all, if the problem is that the system is corrupt even when the participants are honest, then putting more honest people into government will have no effect. In order to get elected, these new politicians will have to become just as corrupt as the old ones, because that's how the system is set up. So we might change the faces, but we'll have the same old problems.

I recall two specific concrete proposals that Lessig made to make the system more responsive. First, he suggested shaming politicians who engage in corrupt behavior -- presumably taking large donations from interested parties. I don't see how this will help. Americans generally have a very low regard for the political class as it is; will pointing out particular examples of politicians taking money really make a difference when it comes to votes? And if it doesn't, will it really produce any change in their behavior? Politicians are motivated by votes the same way corporations are motivated by money; unless they stand a chance of losing their job (which is virtually impossible in any event), there's no reason for them to change how they behave.

His second proposal was for a system of contributions where it's impossible for any individual to prove they had donated a particular amount of money to a particular candidate. Even assuming it could be implemented perfectly, I don't think this will really solve the problem, for two reasons. First, it's not generally a secret what moneyed interests want. Politicians who want to attract large donations can just take positions that they know will appeal to donors of that sort. The donors themselves can make this easier on the candidates by, e.g., posting public position statements on issues of the day. Secondly, and this is far more insidious, even if politicians honestly represent their positions, then because success in running for office is so tied to the amount of money the candidate can raise, only candidates who hold opinions favorable to large corporations and wealthy individuals will be able to get elected. In fact, for all I know this is what happens already!

But with all that said, it was a really interesting talk and Lessig tied together some things you might not think would go together. If a video or Flash presentation becomes available, I would recommend watching through it. And hopefully my pessimistic predictions will be wrong; it's certainly happened before.

A few days ago, I wrote about my recent purchase of an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter built in 1944. Terah and I were at an antique store, and it was $25 and sorta an impulse buy.

Since then, something unexpected has happened: I'm getting interested in using manual typewriters.

I've been busily tracking down ribbons (Nukote BW277 doesn't work on it, even though their website says it does), typing paper (business-supplies.com has it at a decent price with free overnight shipping on most orders over $50), and various tidbits of knowledge (such as: what does the lever numbered 0 to 6 beneath the right ribbon spool do?)

Today I went to a local office supply store. Not OfficeMax or OfficeDepot -- they do carry ribbons for typewriters of this era, but not the right ones for my particular machine. But the store that has been owned by the same family since it opened in 1899 on Main Street, where it remains.

And, surprise, they had the ribbon I need!

It seems that typewriters are experiencing a certain resurgence in popularity. People that have computers -- and perhaps never knew a world without them -- are buying typewriters. Because of interest, novelty, or even usefulness. There are quite a few typewriter repair shops that still exist, most of them happy to work on typewriters up to a century old.

So why am I excited about it?

Part of it is the fun of making a really old piece of technology work.

Perhaps part of it is knowing that I'll be typing at a machine that was built the same year as D-Day, the year when the first German city fell in World War II. Part of it is knowing that this 40-pound machine was built to last, in an era before planned obsolescence. And, to a certain extent, it has outlasted its manufacturer.

Part of it is curiosity: will I write differently on a typewriter than a computer? It seems that most people that have tried both say that their writing is different on a typewriter, and often better. Perhaps it is the difficulty of editing that forces more rigorous thought up front.

Christopher Watkins wrote:

[Manual typewriters] just plain shame me into working. As with any fine instrument, they're made to be used, their very design bespeaks this, and there's been many a night I've caught one of my typewriters glaring sternly at me from the shadows, implicating me in a grand failure to honor their structural destinies. Chagrined and challenged, I dutifully sit down to see what I can do to contribute to the machine-age legacy I've been called on to uphold. . .

When you sit down to write a song at the piano, you're going to write differently than if you have a banjo in your lap. And if one instrument isn't bringing the magic and the muse, maybe another will. Typewriters are the same; they make me write in a different fashion, and also provide an alternate trigger for inspiration. And as an electric guitar is different from an acoustic steel-string guitar is different from a nylon-string classical guitar is different from a national steel resonator guitar; so does each individual typewriter differ. My Underwood is different from my Royal is different from my Remington is different from my Corona is different from my Hermes. And if one isn't giving me the juice, another might.

Brian Drake added (emphasis mine):

Or you print out the document again because someone misplaced it. Misplaced it! When we were on typewriters, let me tell you, no one misplaced a hundred-page contract! That meant another two days of typing, and tying up at least two secretaries to get it done then. . .

Gore Vidal said he could tell when a book had been written on a word processor. I can, too. Sometimes I can see the cut-and-paste.

I've worked as a professional proofreader and copyeditor, and I can attest that the computer has not led to better writing. What it has led to is more writing, acres and acres of it. Books have grown fatter and fatter while their content grows slimmer and slimmer.

These seem to resonate well. More typewriter essays here.

And perhaps a typewritten blog post or two, once I try out my new ribbon.

A few days ago, I was sponsoring some packages. My laptop has something broken and it sometimes shows irreproducible errors, so I used another computer to make the package builds... I did an error. I didn't do it with pbuilder... so the result was a few ftbfs.

To avoid this to happen again, I've prepared my own autobuilder with a incoming system with a few scripts writen by Matt Brown.

I suppose it will do my sponsors have his/her packages uploaded faster and I don't forget again to built them in a jail!

To follow up on yesterday’s MBTA philippic, I received a response from the T’s customer service regarding my complaints. Although it doesn’t give me hope that things will improve, it’s nice that they have at least hired someone to write personalized, polished replies. At least they can do that right:

Dear Mr. Kessel, Thank you for your email concerning service on the Needham Line. The past couple of months have been difficult for our passengers, and I want you to know we are very sorry for the inconveniences this has been causing. The causes of these delays have ranged from signal and mechanical issues to long stops boarding passengers at stations, and even track work on other lines. I know that it may seem odd that trains on other lines can impact your trains, but I assure you that is true. The Franklin, Needham, Providence, and Stoughton lines, as well as Amtrak all share the rail between Hyde Park and Boston. All it takes is one delayed train in this area to cause a cascading effect that delays other lines. There’s also the fact that trains may come in from one line to go out as another. For example, a train on the Worcester Line comes to Boston, and either the train set, or the crew (sometimes both) head out as an outbound Needham train. If the inbound is late from Worcester, then the outbound Needham will be late, which also means that its “turn,” the next inbound, will be delayed. In response to your comment about the doors not all being opened, even with a full compliment of conductors, crews are not able to staff every door, and especially at ground level stations we want to ensure that all customers are able to board and detrain safely. This is why conductors do not open all doors to the train. I contacted our Mechanical Department, asking that the PA system on train 625 be checked out to make sure everything is working properly. Please know that delays in service are not something that we take lightly, and all departments are committed to working together to ensure that our customers receive timely, safe, and reliable service. Once again, I am sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. Thank you for writing. Sincerely, Linda Dillon
MBCR Customer Service Manager

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Your ML-3051N is a lovely little 'network printer. Hopefully, it will serve us well in the next few years as a replacement for the thirteen year old HP Laserjet ML we bought (for about five times the price: a native postscript printer was rather expensive in 1994) a long time ago. And you even mention that it can talk to Linux! But still, I have a few things to talk to you about:

1. as you mention Linux, it's a tad odd that you enumerate various flavours (RH 8 to 9; FC 1 to 3; Mandrake 9 to 10.2; SuSE 8.2 to 9.2) but happen to exclude the two variants that run around here: Debian and its cousin Ubuntu. Besides, the versions of those other flavours are a tad old, no?
2. as you ship Linux software on a cdrom, it is even odder that the install shell script fails (note: spaces between #! and /bin/sh may not be a good idea). Fails not once, but twice: you say /bin/sh, but you meant /bin/bash as you use features of the latter. Oh well, I guess we all made that mistake in our youth. Irregardless, the software never installed. Which is a pity as this would be about the first 'household appliance' I bought with native Linux support. So close, and yet so far.
3. the control panel is a cumbersome way to set a static IP and to turn the odd protocol off.
4. did I really have to install all this windoze stuff on my wife's laptop just to learn that the printer does in fact have a nice web interface? You could have mentioned that with Linux info, no? It is in fact a rather nice and complete web interface.
5. as you supply networking support, do you really have to enable every possible protocol under the sun? I mean slp, snmp, multicast dns, dynamic dns, raw tcp, ipp, ethertalk, netware ...? I still see my cable modem go down 'seemingly randomly' rigth after I print even though I now disabled just about everything but raw tcp to port 9100 as well as ipp to 613. Still, dropping the cable connection just because the printer wakes up is odd, isn't it?
6. Cups, foomatic and all the other printing goodies do not yet know the ML-3050 family, so we are making do with the ML-2151NPS settings for postscript. Works fine, so I won't bother copying the ppd file from the cdrom to the handful of computers around here.

Kind regards, Dirk Updated to fix a markup error. And the shebanh space is standard, I am told.

Russell Coker, commenting on my last blog, and apparently after exploring some of the links stemming from the SFWA kerfuflle, apparently stumbled on a post from former SFWA VP Howard V. Hendrix, where he took the amazing position (for a SF writer) that he hated the using the internet, and that people who posted their stories on the web for free download were web-scabs, has taken the position that since such comments were an attack on our (Open Source Developer’s) community, that he would resolve “to not buy any more Sci-Fi books until I have read all the freely available books that I want to read”. Obviously, that’s his choice, but while I don’t have much respect for SFWA the organization, and certainly not for their choice in past and current vice presidents, there’s another side of the story here. First of all, Dr. Hendrix comments are not the official position of the SFWA, and there are many others who are SFWA members who would very strongly disagree with both the attitudes of Dr. Hendrix as well as the ham-handed DMCA pseudo-invocation by Dr. Burt. In addition, to quote Rick Cook:

The first thing you ve got to understand about the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is that it isn t. Like the Holy Roman Empire, which in Voltaire s phrase was neither holy, Roman nor an empire, SFWA is not an organization of science fiction and fantasy writers. While some of the leading SF and Fantasy writers belong, the vast majority of the members are people who barely meet SFWA s extremely lax publication requirements. They are not professional SF or Fantasy writers in any meaningful sense of the term and many of them haven t published a word of either science fiction or fantasy in years.

Secondly, there are plenty of Science Fiction writers that do really understand this issue quite well. In addition Rick Cook, whom I recommended in my last post, another example of a Science Function writer who has penned a very cogent series of articles about copyright, science fiction, and the business issues of being a SFF writer is Eric Flint. I strongly recommend his series, “Salvos Against Big Brother”,which includes a back-to-the basics examination of copyright quoting and reprinting two speeches by British Parliamentarian Thomas McCauley in 1841. Definitely worth a read, and again a demonstration that there exists Science Fiction authors that aren’t stuck in the dark ages; few (at least it is to be hoped) are like Dr. Hendrix. Eric Flint is also a senior editor for Baen Books (read more about the founder, Jim Baen here). Baen makes all of its titles available in e-book form without DRM, and many of its authors have agreed to make their books available completely free of charge. Eric Flint does so for all or most of his books shortly after they are published in mass-market paperback form; others only make a few of their books available, typically the first or second books in a series (in the hopes you will buy the rest of their books) — a wise strategy, as he explains in one of his Salvos Against Big Brother columns. More importantly, I strongly believe that if we enjoy an artist’s works, we should support the artist. That’s why I’ve directly reached out and given money to musicians, authors, and Debian release engineers. (Yes, that last was controversial, but to me and personal ethics, it’s all of the same piece.) Is patronage the right way to support musicians? Well, it’s one way, and I’ve always been fond of the “distributed patronage” model where we use the Internet to allow a large number of people to each contribute to support an artist’s work. The Big Meow is a good example how it might work. (By the way, to people who are wondering what is happening with The Big Meow — I have very recently pinged Diane, and she’s working on it. Between health and family emergencies, the last 12 months have thrown a lot of delays into her writing schedule.) Are there other models other than patronage that might work? Well, there is the traditional one — just buying the author’s books. But what if we don’t want a dead-tree copy and just want to be able to read it on our Irex Iliad, and the book wasn’t published by Baen Books, or one of the few enlightened publishers who make non-DRM’d eBooks available? That’s a harder question. Personally, I don’t find “Copyright Theft” immoral per se. Illegal, yes, but immoral only if I haven’t done something to materially support the author. If I’ve purchased a new copy of a book, and the eBook version isn’t available via legal means, I don’t believe it is immoral to download it from a site like scribd so I can read it on my laptop. Of course, that brings up other questions, such as what if the book is out of print (because the publisher don’t think it’s commercially viable to reissue the books), the author is dead, and the widow needs money? Lots of hard questions, and no good answers…. But in any case, I think it is the right thing to do to support those authors we care about as we can, and boyotting all SFF books isn’t necessarily appropriate or helpful.

Joey started a stats pron meme, so lets join, with stats from packages.debian.org AKA puccini.debian.org, which I am the local-admin for. This machine has

	2007
Unique visitors	4952207
Total visits	8572139
Total pageviews	43332086
Total bandwidth (apache only)	783.28 GB
Additional traffic due to robots	53328963 pageviews adding 265.73 GB traffic

Looking at the other statistics April and May had a few percent more visitors, but other than that its pretty stable with around 600k unique visitors per month. We do not resolve IPs to hostnames due to the huge amount of useless traffic and load this would generate, so no statistics about the countries. But we do have some other stats. Like a Robot/Spider statistic. It looks like we had about 151 different spiders on our site, a few listed below.

Yahoo	is the most active spider, making some 97.54 GB of traffic
Googlebot	follows on second place, responsible for 43.92 GB
MSNBot	caused about 21.52 GB traffic
Python-urllib	is used by multiple bots and they all made up 43.29 GB traffic

Next interesting point is that of Operating systems.

Linux	is of course the most used one, 48.1% of our visitors told us they use it.
Windows	only on place 2, with 40.5%.
MacOS	all kinds of MacOS add up to 2.5%.

There are various others in the list, but none with more than 1%. Like Sun Solaris which was used for about 63k hits (compare it to Linux with 32 378 942 hits). 5423 users did want us to believe they use CPM, another 76 tried that with VMS. Of course we are interested in more details for the 48.1% Linux users, here they are:

Debian	15397537	22.8 %
Ubuntu	9050014	13.4 %
Suse	542635	0.8 %
Red Hat	107240	0.1 %
Mandriva (or Mandrake)	166545	0.2 %
Fedora	623242	0.9 %
Centos	69998	0.1 %
GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)	6421731	9.5 %

Windows is boring, more than 33% are using the XP crap, all BSD version together, including that GNU/kFreeBSD variant have 0.1% all together. Browsers? Of course people do use lots of different browsers. The main browsers, if you ignore all the various versions, are Firefox with 44.7%, (shudder) MSIE with 17.7% and Mozilla with 14.6%. Konqueror is far behind with only about 8.5%, other browsers like Opera (3.4%) and Epiphany (1.5%) are even less used. One browser identification is interesting, namely Debian APT, which seems to be the “Fetch Changelog” function of aptitude. It generated about 200k hits (0.1%). Next point - from where do we get most people to our site? That are people not having any kind of referer information, 65%. The second place here goes to - yes, direct links from various people. Of course our search interface has most hits here, the rest is from some 80k different pages linking to us. Most of those seem to be upstream pages telling their users where to get a Debian package from (most are named something that fits “/software/download” or “is like sf/freshmeat” schema). Interestingly the links the BTS provides in their package overview going to packages.debian.org aren’t used all that much. Only about 30k hits in the whole year 2007 with the BTS as referrer. Only after all those individual links we have search engines giving us hits. That may be partly due to the fact that we did use robots.txt to block them (at least those that are good net citizens) for a long time from indexing our site. Final words: YES, I do know that the stats are likely to be wrong in any size you want them to be wrong. Yes, one cant really trust the User-Agent string, its too easy to change it. Yes, its easy to filter out referer, etc, etc, etc, but IMO its still nice to look at such things, it gives at least a little feeling for what we do burn all those CPU cycles. These stats are based on about 4.5GB of compressed apache logs from the last few months, it took some 14 hours to process the logfiles. Luckily future updates now happen once an hour and take only a minute or two… Ohh, you say Joeys meme was about mail stats? Damn. Ok, short text: 305k mails rejected in the last 7 days while we allowed 1097 mails to pass. For the yearly overview that means some 9.3million rejected and 73k accepted mails (that rate should get better, decreasing the accepted count, with the new etch setup we have now). Of course this isn’t as impressing as lists.debian.org mailstats are. :)

So, progress has been moving on nicely on a tool for generating gobject-introspection xml. Development’s getting pushed forward now by two veritable geniuses, J rg Billeter and Mathias Hasselmann. We’ve got sparse able to handle extended attributes, so headers can be marked up with details like ownership of returned data. There’s also a git branch of gobject-introspection where we’ve been delveloping some python code that takes the headers, runs sparse over and generates some basic introspection XML, using ctypes to call into gobject for getting interfaces, signals and properties. Very Nice! BUT, we’ve hit a big problem. Sparse is licensed under the Open Software License 1.1. Debian considers this non free, and it certiainly looks to have some overly onerous clauses. Linus did try to relicense it a few years ago, but hit a brick wall with Transmeta, who own some of the copyright from when Linus worked there. We might end up having to drop the use of sparse and maybe have our own bison-based parser. We really don’t want to have to go there though. So, here’s my lazyweb request - Does anyone out there know anyone at Transmeta that we could talk to about relicensing this work? It might be worth pointing out to that it might be in their interests, given the patent termination clauses.

Perhaps this conversation is a sign that we've been in the country for awhile:

"Terah, if you ever drive the pickup..."

"Why would I ever do that?"

"I don't know, but if you ever do, I just want you to know something. The reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel..."

At this point I had to wait for her laughter to die down.

"As I was saying, the reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel is that, unless you park facing uphill, the brake lights stay on all the time and will drain the battery."

More laughter followed.

I didn't even have the chance to tell her to remove the towel before she starts the truck. Oh well, guess she'll figure it out.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a sign that we haven't been in the country long enough:

Today as I went to lunch, I saw a long, narrow, light gray line across the door on my car. I was pretty annoyed that somebody would have pulled keys or something across it to do that. But as I got closer, I realized it was just a spider web. Terah and I park our cars a few feet apart, and every week or so there will be a spider web connecting the two of them when we go out in the morning.

My itinerant brother, presently in Tucson, Arizona is trying to visit my less-itinerant brother in Tahoe, California. (The latter is an editor and photographer for the Tahoe Daily Tribune, now available online in full print-like layout). Later this week, the itinerant brother flies from Tucson to Sacramento, the least expensive airport closest to Tahoe. Amtrak has a route from Sacramento to Tahoe (actually nearby Truckee), but it is actually a bus. Having made his plane reservations, my brother waited until today to order his Amtrak tickets online, only to discover the following: Yes, it’s true, you can’t actually board that bus (the only way to get to Tahoe after my brother’s plane arrives), unless you’ve at least set foot on a train first. Some research suggests that California State Law prohibits Amtrak from offering bus-only services within the state, apparently so it won’t compete with bus companies. I did figure out what I hope is a clever workaround: the next closest train stop on one of the lines to Sacramento is Davis. Amtrak allows you to buy a ticket from Davis to Truckee via Sacramento for basically the same price as the bus from Truckee to Sacramento. Hopefully no one will check to make sure he actually traveled from Davis to Sacramento before getting on the bus to Truckee. There must be some profound lesson here. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the floor debate in the state legislature when this law was enacted.

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Here's what I wrote on other people's sites last week:

Drake.org.uk: Welcome back..

MartynD reboots his blog yet again. This time with added eyetests.

Two Questions for All Serious Free Software Contributors

I answered, as did many others.

ProBlogger Redesign - Bedding Down for the Night

Much easier-to-read, but I still had an enhancement suggestion.

Blowing bubbles niq's soapbox

Comment on house-building and house-owning in England today.

gravityboy: This Is My Good Free Software Experience

I think the GPL is useful for things other than programs and CC is confusing about DRM for everything.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho I am going to rank MJ Ray low from now on

Commented more on my blog, but also directly. The criticism might be fairer if the SPI ballot were secret, but it isn't.

WEBlog -- Wouter's Eclectic Blog - Voting tactics

Is this about SPI? How is IRV broken?

Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process

Amending the amendment proposal - got enough seconds to reach the ballot, for a change.

Amendment to: reduce the length of DPL election process

This one doesn't look like it will get onto the ballot. Informative subthread on combination of amendments.

Here's some of what I read last week:

talks with Linus Torvalds

He's much ruder than I am, but can get away with it because he's done more.

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of Richard Stallman - Edward O'Connor

He's much ruder than I am, but doesn't get away with it because he's done more.

Mayor wants London to copy Paris bike rentals News This is London

I saw those bikes in Paris. Seemed like a good idea.

Parisian-style hire bicycles to beat London traffic jams - Independent Online Edition > Transport

Slightly inaccurate report.

Hacking gadflies: Open Document Format

It's almost September again.

dgh: Bike power

Interesting idea.

apenwarr's log

quite a funny letter to google

Bristol Climate Protesters En-Route to Camp

My legs hurt after cycling only 6 miles yesterday. Not sure what I did wrong.

The Weston Mercury - Call to 'have a say' on the future of Britain

Pensioners to save country. Or not.

BBC NEWS Technology UN's website breached by hackers

Can't be bothered to check netcraft.

Little's Log: North Norfolk Councillor defects to UKIP

Little's still raging against the media.

The Washington Post has an article about handwriting, apparently for some university entrance exams in the US 85% of students write their essays in block letters. The article claims that students who have poor writing skills demonstrate lesser ability to construct sentences - and claims that this indicates that there is a link between hand-writing and mental processes. While the article didn’t cover the evidence in much detail I was left wondering whether there were any tests of teaching students to touch type and then assessing them on the same tests. I suspect that increasing the ability to record text in any way would increase the sentence length and the use of long words. While students who can only write slowly will have an incentive to write more briefly. My handwriting is quite poor, I was never able to write quickly or particularly legibly and since completing university I have had little incentive to improve my writing skills. When laptops became cheap enough for me to own one (in 1998) my hand-writing skills decreased and when I started seriously using a PDA about a year ago they decreased again. I don’t believe that my writing skills (in terms of conveying ideas and instruction to other people) have declined during this time. In fact the steadily increasing amount of writing that I have done has improved my skills a lot. I think that children should be taught cursive writing, but it shouldn’t be regarded as especially important - or more important than touch typing! Then there’s the issue of the Dvorak keyboard. If the government wanted to improve the efficiency of the nation (which is what they claim to be doing) then maybe teaching all students touch-typing on a Dvorak keyboard and subsidising the purchase of such keyboards for everyone would be better than some of the current ideas in education. Dvorak keyboards would certainly be better than flag-poles! News reports indicate that hand-writing skills are decreasing dramatically in Japan due to word-processors - and a significant number of students are never learning how to write any significant portion of the Japanese letters. But the sky doesn’t seem to be falling on them either. Mark Greenaway writes about having bad hand-writing and is apparently considering some sort of remedial course. I have to wonder how good Mark’s touch-typing skills are and whether he would benefit more from improvement in that area.

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MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Luk Claes
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin Zobel-Helas
• Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Luk Claes
• Joerg Jaspert
• Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin 'Joey' Schulze
• Luk Claes
• MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

I wasn't elected to SPI's board. I didn't think I would be once I saw all the other candidates (I nominated before all declared), but it looks like I would have been elected with those votes under some other common systems. I think both first-past-the-post and alternative vote (also known as instant run-off voting, reportedly recommended by Robert's Rules for election-by-mail) would have resulted in this same board:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Joshua D. Drake
4. Martin 'Joey' Schulze
5. Luk Claes
6. MJ Ray

Instead, the results were:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Luk Claes
4. Joshua D. Drake
5. Joerg Jaspert
6. Martin Zobel-Helas

Nevertheless, well done to the new members. On one hand, I'm happier, because there's still two of my top four there and now I've less required work. On the other hand, I would have liked a crack at it myself and both boards are disappointing because there's no Ian Jackson. An interesting thing is how many times I appear in each position in voting lists: (5, 1, 2, 1, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 9, 37), or as a bar chart:

1. st
2. nd
3. rd
4. th
5. th
6. th
7. th
8. th
9. th
10. th
11. th
12. th
13. th

A fairly acceptable middle-of-road candidate for most of it, but then a huge spike at the low end. Note that a majority of voters put me in positions 11-13. There wasn't much warning of that one coming during hustings. WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what? More generally, is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views, or who many inexplicably dislike? What does this say for any plan to use a Condorcet for debian's social committee? Could majorities always prevent minority reps? Update: Neil McGovern posted a few comparisons of more complex systems (I only did the easy ones) and AJ posted STV results which completes the main systems, I think. It seems Condorcet-SPI wasn't as unusual as I first thought. Finally, as I understand it, turn-out was 25% of voting members (not the 25% of SPI members that some press reported). Why was turn-out so low? (2007-08-08: 1 pingback, 3 comments)

We've had a lot of great blog traffic about Vinismo. I thought I'd try to pull together a few of the better ones.

• vinismo! wiki wine compendium from Hugh McGuire.
• Vinismo Opens Its Doors to Wine Lovers Everywhere from the Creative Commons Weblog. Thanks, guys!
• Vinismo: Wiki + Wine from Zach Copley
• Vinismo from Wendy Copley.
• DemoCampMontreal3 report from Montreal Tech Watch
• DemoCampMontreal3 Report from Josh Nursing
• Vinismo Presentation at DemoCampMontreal3 on the SearchAnyway Blog. Probably one of my favourite pieces, although it makes Niko real mad since it cuts off just before he starts talking. Make mental note: don't say "Uh" so much.
• Bienvenue sur Vinismo, le guide des vins libre by Niko. Niko also bemoaned the difficulty of keeping our project under wraps in Mon lourd secret bient t d voil . What a drama queen.
• Vinismo : un wiki sur le vin by Olivier Niquet. He's suspicious that we are sponsored by J. Lohr, because there are so many J. Lohr wines on our front page.

All in all it's been pretty good. I hope we'll get some more, though! tags: blogs vinismo

DemoCampMontreal3 report So, it's been a couple of days and I should probably get around to posting my own DemoCampMontreal3 report.

• Niko and I started off with our own demo for Vinismo. It was a lot of fun: we talked about the reasons for starting the site, the technical, information architecture and graphics/UI design challenges, and what our future extensions are going to be. At the end of it, we took some questions, which was fun. The most interesting for me was from Roberto Rocha, whose TechnoCit is one of my favourite tech columns in Montreal. He asked, "Your typical contributor will be much older. What will you do to make your wiki more accessible to them?" It was a good question I don't have an answer to yet, but I want to think about it more.
• The second demo was by Heri Rakotomalala, who showed off his social-networking GTD tool, WorkCruncher. It's a TODO list with a twist: items that you don't get done age off the list. You have to re-commit to doing a task on an almost daily basis. I think it's a great and refreshing design; my TODO list gets depressing long and filled with unfinishable tasks, and I get too intimidated to work on ones that really matter. I think Heri might have to make some concessions to people's expectations for TODO lists -- maybe a way to automatically archive tasks, rather than deleting them entirely...?
• The third demo was by the gang from Defensio, who are providing an great anti-spam Web service similar to Akismet. They had a few examples of where they're different, but I'm not well-versed enough in comment spam issues to understand them. My guess is that since they're getting into the market after Akismet, though, they have the opportunity to make a smarter technology. Their one downside? They used slides -- which the rules of DemoCamp. They did demo the service, though.
• Fourth up was the indefatigable Simon Law. Simon's project? To turn back time. Talk about ambitious! His effort consisted of making a typical kitchen clock turn backwards. He disassembled the clock and explained how it worked to the audience. It was great, except for two things: the clock didn't work at the end of the demo (although he got it working by the end of DemoCamp), and he took a few minutes to draw a diagram of the clock; in my mind, that's just a low-tech PowerPoint slide.
• Fifth, and quite fascinating, was a tool that Jerome Paradis showed off. It was a Google-Maps mashup that filtered special emails for an informal private jet sharing network. Apparently, companies who charter private jets often have space in the jets, so they'll make that space available. People who need a last-minute charter jet can send email from their Blackberries and such, and if there's availability they get contacted by the charter companies. The interesting part? These people use a highly structured lingo ("O/W" = "one way"), and Jerome's tool scrapes these emails to make the data into a mapping app for his customers. Very interesting!

All in all, it was a good night -- probably made better by the Argentina Cabernet Sauvignon I had. There's a DemoCampMontreal4 scheduled for August 17th, but I won't be in town for it. Too bad for me! tags: democampmontreal3 defensio workcruncher simonlaw jeromeparadis vinismo

I've taken my camera around OSCon and Portland a bit. Here are a few photos that I've taken so far.

At OSCon Itself

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Overflow from breakfast. Most tables had powerestrips and laptops on them.



Debian booth at the expo hall. And the only one with beanbags. Sign reads "The developer is in."



Filing in for the keynotes. Everyone seemed to want a seat either at the very front or very back.



Simon Peyton-Jones explaining how locks with traditional threading can be improved upon with transactional memory.



Run for your life! The bell will attack at any moment!

I didn't hear it ring all week.

Around Portland

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The Japanese Gardens were beautiful and tranquil. Jacob actually feel asleep while being rolled around on his stroller.



For some reason, this one reminds me of the Jedi Academy in one of the Star Wars video games.



One of the many bridges in Portland.



Terah's favorite find: Sweet Masterpiece Chocolate and Coffe.

We went there after the Blossoming Lotus Cafe, which was an interesting experience but not quite as good as I had hoped.

Monday was the first day of the OSCon tutorials. The first question was: how to get there? OSCon is being held in the Oregon Convention Center, about half a mile from the conference "headquarters" hotel, the Portland DoubleTree at Lloyd Center.

MAX light rail is free in this area. It's about a block to the Lloyd Center station, and a block from the Convention Center station to the Convention Center. The trains run every few minutes and are very friendly to people that aren't from Portland. On-board announcements point out bus and rail connections in advance, and each station has a system map, city map, and digital display listing the time until the next arrival. Even bus and streetcar stations have that display.

In fact, everyone here is. The personnel at the Amtrak station were great. Our cab driver from the station to the hotel told us about all the things he loves about Portland and why he'll never move anywhere else. And the DoubleTree hotel has probably the friendliest hotel staff I've ever seen, even when we reported water dripping from the ceiling in our room. The concierge desk gladly showed Terah how to get to a nearby Safeway for groceries, and explained -- correctly -- to me how to use trains and buses to get to the Japenese Gardens in Washington Park.

Anyhow, back to OSCon. The first two days are tutorials. These are extended talks. You can go to 2 per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I attended Advanced Vim Scripting and Linux Performance Monitoring. Neither was quite as advanced as I'd like, but I got useful information out of them both -- especially out of Linux Performance Monitoring. I finally learned the exact difference between buffers and cache and what the IOwait state in top really means, among other things. I heard from others in IRC that Simon Peyton-Jones was a fantastic speaker and his tutorial on Haskell met rave reviews. I'm looking forward to his keynote and talk on Wednesday.

I also went to the keysigning BoF in the evening. Signed a ton of keys, and met some interesting people. I met a couple of folks from an independent telephone company in Michigan that were interested in my Asterisk experience, and spoke to an Earthlink employee from Georgia that was involved on the ISP side of things.

In all, a good first day. This is a great conference in a great city, with lots of variety in its programming and lots of opportunity to network (the old-fashioned way).

The venue is also very nice, and aside from not being right next to the venue, so it the hotel.

The day's main mystery: everybody has noticed, and nobody has figured out why, the hotel elevators all stop on the 2nd floor on the way down, even if nobody requested it.

Many online video sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe, and others only provide limited or inconvenient access to the videos; either they require you to install the proprietary Flash player (and I surely won't do that), and/or you can only view them online (but not download them). There are some solutions, each with advantages and disadvantages:

• youtube-dl, a command line script to download Youtube videos.
• metacafe-dl, same as above but for Metacafe videos.
• clive, a command line tool (with optional newt UI) for Youtube, Google Video (seems defunct at the moment) and Dailymotion.
• VideoDownloader, a Firefox plugin which is supposed to work with more than 60 video sites (Youtube and Google Video are among them). The only disadvantage compared to the other solutions: you need to start Firefox + X11 (no pure command line usage).
• UnPlug, a Firefox plugin similar to VideoDownloader, but with the advantage that it doesn't use the VideoDownloader web service (but rather figures out the video URLs itself).
• Gnash, a free software Flash video player is another option, but AFAICS it's not yet ready for daily usage (but it's getting there).
• swfdec, another Free Software Flash player, is actually working quite nice with Youtube already.

After the download, you can either view the videos using (e.g.) mplayer, or recode them into a more sane format. For all of the above programs there are Debian packages available, except for VideoDownloader/UnPlug (but you can easily install those from within Firefox). Update 2007-07-26: Added UnPlug and swfdec (thanks Joe Buck and Josh Triplet for the comments).

Last week, Terah, Jacob, and I boarded a train in Kansas. We were bound for Los Angeles, then would go up the coast of California, eventually winding up in Portland for OSCON.

Our first train was the Southwest Chief out to LA.



Jacob had a great time on the train. This is a picture of Jacob and Terah in our sleeping car room. Jacob slept in his carseat at night and played with us during the day. See all recent photos of Jacob.

We had the option to get off the train for a few minutes in La Junta, CO. I took some photos trackside.



Here's Jacob enjoying the lounge car. There were dozens of Boy Scouts on our train, heading to the Boy Scout camp near Raton, NM. Many of them hung out in the lounge car, so Jacob had plenty to watch and keep him entertained.



The lounge car has wrap-around windows. We got an expansive view of the Rockies on the first day of our trip, and of the California desert on the second. This route really gives you a feeling of being alone sometimes. There are times where you can look out the window, and as far as you can see, there is no evidence of people or civilization.

Here's a picture out the lounge car, looking at the train as it rounded a curve.



The lounge car was in the middle of the train, so the train really was longer than it might appear here.

We had a bit of an adventure in Lamy, NM. Apparently a terminal cancer patient was riding the train, and died in the night. We were held up for about 2 hours for authorities to arrive, perform their investigation, etc.

While we were there, passengers could get off the train and look around. I took a few photos there.



This is a photo looking towards the front of the Chief. It uses bi-level cars, so every car has an upstairs and a downstairs.

Just outside the Lamy station is an old dining car. It is now a stationary restaurant. The restaurant had closed just before we arrived, but they let me in to take a few quick photos anyway.



Just past Albuquerque, one of the two locomotives on our train failed. That meant that, combined with the delay at Lamy, we were more than 3 hours late into Los Angeles. That, in turn, meant that we missed our connection to the Coast Starlight. So the new plan was to take a bus to Bakersfield, then the San Joaquin train to Sacramento, where we could catch up with the Coast Starlight and get to Portland as scheduled.



Jacob really enjoyed the Bakersfield train station. I carried him up to the stone walls, which he enjoyed exploring with his hands.



This is the Bakersfield station. It's a nice building. But their large metal sign reads "To trains and busses." Someday I will forget about them misspelling "buses" on a large metal sign.

I've got two more pictures of Jacob at Bakersfield that you'd enjoy: one, two. He sure was a popular baby. We got countless compliments from strangers, and he got even more smiles and greetings from people. Even when he was fussy, people kept saying what a good baby he was. We were a little surprised at that. A few people even found his cry to be cute and funny!



One of the nice side-effects of missing our connection was seeing the grand old Sacramento train station. A beautifully-decorated building. We were there until about 12:30AM because the Coast Starlight had been delayed as well.

Terah saw a sign out the door saying "Quiznos: Now Open." I figured that meant that the store was open, not that the place was open late into the night, but she wanted to check. She stepped out and then back in again. "As soon as I got out, homeless people started yelling at me! Plus the store wasn't open," she reported.



On the Coast Starlight, we discovered the absolutely stunning Pacific Parlour Car. These cars were originally built in the 1950s for the Santa Fe railroad, and have been renovated and restored by Amtrak for service on the Coast Starlight. That's the only train where they run, and they are available only to first-class passengers.

I noticed stairs going to the lower level of the Parlour, and was curious what was down there. So I went down to check it out, and it is a small (18 seats, I think) theater!



We sat down there for awhile and talked to some of the other people.

The view from the Coast Starlight was amazing. The trip through the mountains was particularly nice. We saw mountains from the distance, up close, and at some points could look out our window directly down into a deep valley below. There were lakes, waterfalls, and little creeks all along.



And finally, this is the grand Portland train station. Still an active station and a sight to see, though not as nice as Kansas City's.

So that's the trip to Portland. More to come on the convention and the city itself.

So iPlayer, the BBC's on-demand 7-days TV download service, launched as Microsoft-only, despite the feedback to the trial service. They come along to events like hackday pretending to be our friends, but they're really not. It's more BBC Backdoor than BBC Backstage. My IMDB-listed friend Martyn Drake estimates the cost of using iPlayer as at least 215 for GNU/Linux users and you can't do it with free software. It seems to be even more expensive for a Mac.

"The BBC should remain impartial, but they're currently having hot patootie with Bill Gate and his chums in Redmond. They continue to use OUR license fee regardless of our objections to their dimwitted decision to use DRM, and now say they'll review the situation is six months. Thanks, BBC. Thanks a lot. Can I get some of my license fee back to afford these additional costs, please?"

No wonder the Open Source Consortium says they'll complain to the European Commission - it's blatent bundled sales. TV has got away with worse in the past (for example, Channel4-satellite requires you to buy Sky), but the BBC's TV-tax-funded services had been getting progressively freer. This latest reversal of that makes me wonder whether Freesat will be fully-viewable with free software. Also, they're up against another big problem: given a choice between the expensive and inconvenient legal iPlayer and the free and easy illegal torrents (which I'm told have US imported shows earlier), which will users choose? Surely not even the BBC's advertising power will overcome iPlayer's 200 quid bundled sale and auto-delete? Let them know it won't: petition the Prime Minister to open iPlayer. The BBC is a Royal Charter Corporation and should act in the public interest.