After almost a year of working on and off on the package, glest is now in the new queue.

Glest is really a free 3D real time strategy game with amazing graphics and really interesting game play.

So maybe you're wondering why did it took me so long to package it. Well, glest is mainly developed on a Windows platform and GNU/Linux is the platform it was later ported to. So this came with some problems:

• the game uses jam as a build system; don't get me started on the intelligence of this build system; I had to go through real pain to make it build
  
• the game is entirely written with "little endian" assumtion in mind
• apparently the editor is not functional on Linux yet, but there is a patch (I will enable this later, after some testing)
• the build system was not bootstrapped before building the tarball
• the linux build creates some symlinks and I had to do some really nasty tricks so that there are no unrepresentable changes in the source
• the upstream is currently not that active, but it used to be a lot less last year; it seesm that there is a motivation/time issue with the leader of the project
  
• upstream moved the project to sourceforge and they keep the code now in subversion, but I wasn't aware about this until recently
• there are a few people talking about forks and a real fork which proclaims itself ast the real project continuation; I suspect that all this mess appeared due to inactivity of upstream last year
• the game used a non-free font
  

Since when I started the packaging work I was using a PowerBook G4 as my main machine I was upset that the game was little endian only, so I started working on a patch. I made an incomplete patch but I got stuck at some point. Time passed by and I replaced my laptop and I wasn't able to continue working on the patch. So I kind of forgot about it. Before debconf I decided is time to do the upload for little endian machines, add the endianess patch disabled.

During debconf I asked Tolimar to make an upload, and it turns out that for some reason I still don't know, the build resulted in a statically linked binary. I was amazed since I didn't recall doing any changes that might have triggered this. At some point I suspected that the build system is broken on other arches than i386 (my main machine is amd64) and halted. This until a few days ago Joey Hess added a comment in the ITP bug pointing out that the game is ok. After a couple of emails I realized that the static issue was just some strange temporary issue on my machine and now the package is in NEW.

So, that's my excuse. I hope that upstream glest issue get fixed. If not, I'll probably package glevolution, too.

I’ve found two major uses for my N800:

• Web browsing while watching TV. Seriously. Being able to check up on questionable facts or look up that actor you half recognized on the IMDB without moving or having something large enough to be noticeable sitting there really does make a difference. Less often it’s price checks in shops.
• Sometimes a laptop is just too big to carry around. There are a lot of times when I’m going out for the day and carrying a laptop would mean having to carry a bag of some kind. The N800 I can just shove in my pocket - much nicer if I’m going to be spending all day on my feet.

Really, they’re both just variations on the theme of “It’s tiny but has a screen big enough to render most web pages sensibly and do other internet access too” but it did surprise me just how useful this turned out to be once I started using the N770. This reminds me, I meant to have a look at the Pentabarf code and see if I could make it play sensibly with devices like the Nokias. I’d have loved that during Debconf, especially when I was running around making sure speakers showed up.

Libraries are great. They make sure I don't have to do some specific work. Libraries with proper API documentation are even better. They make sure I don't have waste half a day just to figure out how to use the damn library. If the API documentation is really well done, it has an index with all functions supported by the library so that one can easily find the function you're looking for. In order to make this index more easily searchable by the use of vgrep, such an index is commonly organized in an alphabetical manner, grouped per letter of the alphabet (so that you'd find a function foo() under the letter F, and a function bar() under the letter B. However, if it's part of your API to prefix all your functions with a common prefix (say, g_ or gtk_) and you don't skip that common prefix in the alphabetic grouping of your index file, you're just being silly.

As I sit here waiting for my 8:23am train, which actually will never come, I just discovered http://www.wheresthet.com/ (”Where’s The T,” if you need it spelled out). This third-party site serves a no-frills, no tables, no graphics, no flash, sensibly organized list of MBTA interruptions. This is one of the best implementations I’ve seen of this sort of thing — absolute simplicity. I immediately added it to my cell phone bookmarks and Google Reader subscriptions. More information from the creator.

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Running hot off the press 2.6.22-grml I took a look at the current version of VirtualBox. And I’m really amazed how responsive it is. Not only booting grml is rocking fast but also typing on the console is reaaaally fast - much more responsive than with VMware. (I took a look at VirtualBox several months ago already but the 64bit version did not work and I lost interest in it temporarly therefore.) Though I stumbled upon a small problem, that’s why I’m feeding google (several users don’t seem to manage the problem ;-)): That’s telling you that USB might not work as expected. When straceing the process you’ll notice that VirtualBox tries to access /proc/bus/usb/devices. Nowadays /proc/bus/usb is deprecated by libusb + /dev/bus/usb but of course it’s no problem to use /proc/bus/usb anyway. So until upstream of VirtualBox moves to libusb the workaround is as simple as:

# VBOX=$(grep vboxusers /etc/group   sed 's/vboxusers:x:\(.*\):.*/\1/')
# mount -t usbfs -o devgid=$VBOX,devmode=664,nodev,noexec,nosuid none /proc/bus/usb

I got a SIO2PC cable for my atari, hooked it up to a linux box, and used the atarisio tools to rip a few of my old BASIC disks. Now I can load them in the atari800 emulator, and will hopefully never lose this early code -- cuz it's in subversion now. The first disk I rescued ("finished programs disk 1") has a nice little menu on it with lots of games and stuff I'd put together. I've always been proud of the "vidio" game, which is the first game shown above. It'd give Pong a run for its money in simplicity, and has gameplay I still enjoy (for up to 5 minutes at a time). You're the green dot, which is flying from left to right. Each time it reaches the right side of the screen, it wraps back to the left -- but leaves a blue wall behind. Crash into the wall and you lose a life. Sometimes other dots appear that you can pick up to get new lives. This sounds easy, but it's not, mostly because the Atari joystick (or my code for reading it) is not very precise, so it's hard to line up to exactly the right place on the screen to go through a small hole in the wall. In contrast to that piece on innovation, the "jump" game is a pretty generic platformer, jump over the water and shoot the enemy that's crawling along the ceiling. It's also a bit buggy. I took a look at the code, but the bug on line 200 isn't very obvious, whatever it is. This is how everyone's old code looks to them after 20 years ... right?

---

Update: Some more games I found.. My version of Tetris for the Atari. It looks a lot better on a real TV tube. Two fun things in writing this were that I couldn't figure out how to program it to rotate the blocks on the fly -- so I just wrote out data with every possible rotation for every block. Also, Atari BASIC lacks arrays, so it uses strings for storing the game state.
(Colors are ok in 1st screenshot, but messed up in second.) Fatso's adventure had the best graphics I did on the Atari. It remapped parts of the the character set and used ATASCII characters as sprites. Ok, it's kind of a Lode Runner clone, but only the kind you write after having seen Lode Runner for 2 minutes. Looks kinda like it, but I don't think Lode Runner had spiders that dropped exploding eggs that broke all the rungs in the ladders..

---

Update 2: Disk images are nice, but regular files are nicer. I was able to explode files out of the disk images only with difficulty. I ended up using wine to run a windows program called Total Commander. It has a plugin that allows .atr disk images to be unpacked. To view the BASIC files, they have to be detokenized. I found a perl script to do that, that can be used on the fly of anything suspected of being a BASIC program. All the stuff is in my subversion repository.

As we reach mid-summer, I think now is a good time to provide a more detailed update on my summer of code project, vlosuts. For anyone not familiar (or for anyone forgetful) the following is a brief summary of my project proposal. In order to assist in distribution upgrades, vlosuts (Virtual Live Operating System Upgrade Test Suite) aims at performing upgrades of live systems (between releases and/or repositories) while logging any errors encountered. By running on a live system (virtualized via QEMU/KVM/Xen/other) problems that may only be encountered with services upgrading can be identified early. The full proposal can be found at: http://code.google.com/soc/2007/debian/appinfo.html?csaid=24C7766EC4271F15

I am happy to say that vlosuts is successfully in alpha, with most of the desired features already implemented. Based on my initial project propasal timeline, I'm well on schedule.

Some of the features that were proposed included the ability to run the upgrade with packages selected by priority, from a list, and as mirrored from an existing system (packages can even have a specific version specified, though of course the repository used must have that version available). Additionally, when mirroring this package list, configuration files can optionally saved as well. This allows testers to (as nearly as possible) reproduce a specific system.
These options have all been implemented among others. I have also put in support for running with QEMU, KVM, and Xen backends.

For the remainder of the summer, my goal will be adding additional features and tackling a few bugs that have come up. In particular I'm trying to take advantage of QEMU's ability to emulate various architectures. However, the stability of user-mode emulation has been uneven for me (segmentation faults whenever any program is launched), which is required in order to cross bootstrap. Once this is worked out, one should be able to test upgrades on any of QEMU's supported architectures.

Additionally, vlosuts is not yet available as a package, which is clearly something that needs to be fixed soon. I'll be spending some time in the next couple weeks packaging it and making sure it sets up correctly.

I think that about sums up the current state of things. It's been a good experience thus far, and hopefully the rest of the summer continues to go well.

I. Introduction

Today, the mid-term evaluations of the Google Summer of Code starts. It means it's a good for a comprehensive summary of what I've done so far.

For those who don't remember, My GSoC project is the Bug Triaging and Forwarding Tool, whose aim is to help triaging of Debian bug reports. On my proposal, I had included the following timeline:

• April - May: Study of the resources available for use in the project
  (Debian BTS SOAP/LDAP interface, Bugzilla interaction resources, etc)
  and the design of the tool. Request needed unavailable features,
  if any, with patches if possible


• May - July: Development of initial interface and code to interact with
  Debian BTS


• August: Development of Bugzilla plugin

During the proposals evaluations and the community bounding period, it was pointed to me that there's already a lot of good tools to handle bug reports, so I've changed this a bit and already started to work on BTS-Bugzilla interaction, which seems to be the more novel part of the
tool.

The development has been fragmented in three modules: btsutils, bzutils and bug-triage.

II. btsutils

The btstutils is a python module to interact with the Debian Bug Track System. Currently, it can query the bts by bug number, package, source package, maintainer, submitter and usertag. For each bug, it returns bug number, package, summary, status, severity, submitter and tags. Support for returning usertags is under way.

Ths btsutils can use html or soap to access the bug data, and has also a backend-agnostic module wwith tries the best method and, if that fails, tries the other.

Steffano Zacchiroli has offered me to include the btsutils on the debian-bundle, a bundle of python modules for dealing with Debian infrastrcture. I'm very excited by this idea, and believe that if all or at least some of the Debian tools which interact with BTS end using a standardized module for access, this might end up being the major contribution of my GSoC project for the Debian community.

III. bzutils

The bzutils is similar to the bzutils, but is to interact with bugzillas instead. Currently it can do queries based on GNOME's bugzilla boogle and the more generic boolean charts. The later works (at least) on GNOME, KDE and standard bugzilla (i.e., landfill). For each bug, it returns bug id,
product, component, status, resolution, reporter, assignee, summary, priority and severity.

IV. bug-triage

The bug-triage is the Bug triaging and forwarding tool. It's being developed using python, gtk and glade.

Currently, it can query the BTS using any of the btsutils' supported fields (even though the usertags aren't really accessible through the interface yet). It can also launch one of the returned bug reports in a web browser.

Integration with bugzillas is under development. It already has an interface to establish links between Debian packages and upstream bugzilla's address, product and component. The next steps will be to add an upstream button in the toolbar/menu and make it show the bugs selected through these info, allowing the user to mark the bug as forwarded to one of them.

V. The future

After that, I'll work on these features (in no particular order): filling a new upstream bug using the Debian bug data as a starting point, more advanced filtering options to filter the upstream bugs (such as filtering by words in the bug summary, and maybe through backtraces if available) and more ways to manipulate the BTS through the interface.

To be sincere, it seems this project won't be as advanced as I would like on the end of the GSoC. There are some new, unexpected (and good ^_^) things going on my life, which are taking some of the time I expected to dedicate to GSoC, which means I'll likely keep the current pace until the end of the project (I expected to increase it during July). Even so, I believe the
project is going on a good path, and I hope it'll be very useful for the Debian community.

Busy weekend, and I haven't taken the time to blog over the last few days as I should have. On Thursday and then Friday, Maj, Amita June and Brian and I went down to the Montreal Jazz Festival, which took place last week. It was a great time -- we went and saw some free acts, including some Dixieland, some Latin jazz, and the awesome Klez Dispensers playing klesmer. We also went to the huge playground and crafts centre for children on-site. It had slides, a big moonwalk bouncy-room, tunnels, a sandbox, and a giant piano that kids can step on to play music. They also had cool drawing and crafts projects -- a neat, active addition. The Jazz Fest is a great place to bring little kids. Amita June loved dancing to the music and playing in the playground. tags: montrealjazzfest maj brian amitajune

Quebec City Yesterday and today we spent in Quebec City. Brian hadn't been before, and the old, walled city is on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, so we dragged him up there. It was also the Festival d' t de Quebec while we were there, which was pretty fun. We had no idea the festival was happening, so it was a pleasant surprise. Hell, I have a hard time keeping the festivals in our own city straight. We got rooms at the really nice Hotel Ch teau Laurier just outside the walls near the festival site. It was really nice -- modern, sleek, and pretty affordable (we got a big double-queen room for $150). Then we walked around the Upper Old Town in on-again-off-again rain, and watched some of the street performers. There was a troupe of stilt-walkers dressed like stone angels and gargoyles -- an awesome performance that scared the bejeesus out of Amita June. But as they left she said, "Bye bye, monsters," so I guess they weren't all bad. We had dinner at the cozy Moine chanson, a really nice restaurant just outside the walls of the Upper Old City. Quebec's restaurant scene in this are is, well, pretty dreadful -- lots of mass-production restaurants that serve tourists mechanical food from conveyor belts. The Moine was an accidental find, and it was really a godsend -- pleasant, interesting pan-Mediterranean food. I had grilled sardines (memories of Portugal); Brian had a thoughtful paella and Maj had a roasted vegetables with polenta plate. They also had a choice selection of organic wines. I have preconceptions about organics, I admit, but we had a very tasty and complex organic Douro from Portugal last night that set me back in my seat. We walked home through the music festival just as Nickelback was coming on the main stage. Brian wandered a bit, Amita June and Maj and I went to bed. Unfortunately, that wasn't the last time we were up: AJ woke up vomiting in the middle of the night. She only barfed once, and we're not sure what caused it: whether she overate at the restaurant (she packed away a lot of food), or if she got some sausage or chicken in the couple of cupfuls of Brian's paella she ate. Either way, she was a sad toddler and we were freaked-out parents. Having your child get sick while you're traveling is really scary. You start thinking about helicopter rescue. But she was fine after one big purge, and we all slept well until this morning. Maj got up to change Amita's diaper, and we realized we didn't have any. Not in the hotel room, not in the car. I went out from the hotel in increasingly wide spirals looking for a convenience store, but those that had diapers weren't open on a Sunday morning, and those that were open didn't carry diapers. After a couple of hours (!), I came back to the hotel in defeat. Fortunately, Maj managed to find a diaper in the emergency stash in the trunk of the car. We picked up Brian and drove to another part of town, where we got a tasty brunch on the terrasse and found some diapers at the Jean Coutu drugstore. Brian kept going from Quebec City -- he's heading all the way around the Gasp Peninsula to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, and coming back to Montreal in about a week. Maj and I drove home on the South Shore -- Amita fell asleep as we hit the freeway and woke up when we pulled into the driveway -- and had a nice afternoon at home. tags: quebeccity summerfestival travel amitajune

Seafood windfall On Friday, our friend Sebastian called us with a problem: his sister, who lives in the les-de-la-Madeleine, had sent him too much fresh seafood. It had come out of the sea and been driven to Montreal, and there was too much for him and his family to eat. The fish was less than 24 hours out of the water -- could we help him out? So we ended up with two huge bags of succulent lobster meat and three more of scallops. Oh, man, were they good. On Saturday morning before we left for Quebec City I made up two giant lobster omelets for the four of us to share. They had just huge chunks of lobster in them, and it was the most decadent meal I've had in a while. It was so much, we all lay around on the couch moaning for about an hour. Tonight, I cooked up the scallops. They were gigantic, tender, and fresh, so I pan-seared them in butter and olive oil with salt & pepper and prepped garlic and oregano. I know, that seems too much for such a delicate meat, but it worked out great. I put them on a bed of whole-wheat linguine, arugula, and red peppers. They were really, really good. I don't think I'm going to have seafood this good again for a while. Mmmmm. Thanks, Sebastian! tags: scallops lobster seafood

News in brief from the land of the Free Two Freedom news items:

• Robin Millette has a great list of Sourceforge alternatives.
• openmoko.com is open for business. It's possible to buy the coolio new Neo 1973 developer preview through the Web site. I'm ordering one!

tags: freedom robinmillette openmoko

Well, the last day in Greece went swimmingly. It was mostly just relaxing, playing on the Internet, chatting with lovely Di, and working out logistics of taking a long flight back to the United States. The only strange thing about it is that I haven't slept since the last post, which is away from the norm. It's a kind of forced all-nighter caused by the bad scheduling that I made for myself. The flight from to Athens happened at 10:20pm in the evening. This was the latest flight that I could get and assure that I could get to the Athens airport in time for my 7:20 flight to Madrid, which connects through Chicago and back to Minneapolis at last.

I've spent a total of 10 days outside of the United States now, the longest time since I have been alive, according to my knowledge. It has caused some interesting results. I realized that I am inextricably connected to the people who I am familiar with in my life, and being without them decreases my mood significantly, and without contact to them decreases my mood sharply.

I am not alone in this fact. There are many studies that show that people who have more social connections lead happier lives. I am lucky in that I am technologically ept and can connect to my near and dear in a number of ways, and be resourceful in finding other ways to contact them if necessary. I feel that I am lucky to live in a time which it is possible for me to spend so much time apart and still be in connection with people. I am also lucky that I was born in a geological area which enables me to be as such.

At the same time, I am sad to leave this place. It is a nice area, with good food and a very long history. As Nikos reminded me the other day, it is the birthplace of Democracy, which I hold to a fairly high regard. It is also the birthplace of modern medicine, and a significant portion of many early sciences. The wealth of the nation as a whole and as parts is clear to me, and I wish to return.

I've learned part of the language while I am here, and it has made me more cognizant of communication with other cultures. People in Athens seemed put off when I tried to talk in Greek, but in Kos they were at the worst amused at my attempts. The language may not be as romantic to learn as French or Italian, and may not be as useful in the long term as Latin, but it would be interesting to speak nonetheless. I am tempted to start working on some of the i18n Greek QA issues in Debian -- It would help me learn the language more, and also keep me aware of the issues in software when you start working with other countries' characters. I have been lucky to be using a MacBook this entire time with decent Greek support, allowing me to type at least some greek while I was here. It helped me understand even more of the language - I now know mostly the numbers 1-9 at least.

The trip has highlighted for me something which is highly lacking in airports: power. Every airport that I have been to has prominently displayed the signs of wireless access, and has people using their laptops in almost every direction you can look (I am one of those), but they are sorely without power points for people who are using those laptops. This may be a designed flaw in order to save energy, but I don't really believe that 50 or even 5,000 laptops at 65-150W will put a significant dent in the power grid at somewhere as large as an airport, where LCD screens are running 24/7 with ads and bright lights illuminate every corner for all to be seen. I won't even start talking about the airplanes themselves.

All in all, the trip has been a happy one, and I would very much repeat it. I will make different decisions on lodging at some places and probably plan a shorter trip. I however wholly endorse Greece as a vacation spot, and even would consider moving here if offered a position (that would depend highly on Diana as well, obviously). I find it entirely favorable. I hope that this small series on the site has caused you, the reader some pleasure at least, even if it was at my expense.

Now begins the long trip home, on three planes and with 14.5 hours in the airplane and 18 hours in total. It'll be only 10 hours counting local time, unfortunately -- the jet lag will, I'm sure, be horrible.

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I've been spending some time on the #bittorrent channel on Freenode, to see if I could get any good information from other bittorrent client developers. After some poor initial contact, I did get some good suggestions, as well as some tidbits of information I wasn't aware of. One of the tidbits was that most of the bittorrent client developers frowned on the use of selective downloading for torrents, to the point where some refuse to implement it in their clients (apparently the latest mainline client doesn't even have it, though I haven't checked due to license issues). This concerned me, as the DebTorrent client I'm working on will rely heavily on selective downloading to only download packages to be installed by the user. It's not clear to me that it would be an issue though. I'm sure it will make it more difficult to find a rare package in a large swarm of peers, but that's to be expected, and is nicely solved by using an HTTP download from a backup mirror. This backup downloading could become extreme though, making the bittorrent-like download (peer-to-peer) mostly just an HTTP download (client-server). To see if it will be a problem, I conducted a simulation of different sized swarms to determine the amount of unnecessary HTTP downloading that will occur. First, some assumptions to make the simulation easier:

• peers join and download sequentially and one at a time
• peers never leave
• peers download all the packages for their system at once (i.e. all fresh installs, no upgrades)
• peers are all interested in the same version and architecture of packages
• there are N total peers, and each can make C connections to other peers

With these assumptions, the simulation becomes quite simple. I used the popcon data to assign packages appropriately to the N peers. The peers download their assigned packages from the C previous peers, if possible, or otherwise by HTTP. I ran this multiple times, varying N and C, and calculating each time how much was downloaded through the debtorrent protocol, and how much through HTTP. This graph shows the percentage of the total download that used HTTP from a mirror. The optimal line shows the minimum possible (i.e. all peers are connected), which corresponds to only one copy (the first) of every package being downloaded using HTTP. This verifies my previous thinking, which is that fracturing the download population into multiple small swarms results in lots of inefficiencies, and lots of HTTP downloading. All efforts will need to be taken to keep the downloading populations together. (This is especially difficult for unstable, when a new swarm could be created twice a day due to archive updates.) Swarms of 1,000 peers or more seem to be sufficient to minimize the HTTP downloading. This graph shows the amount of unnecessary HTTP downloading that occurred, which is just the difference of each line from the optimal one in the previous plot. This shows the danger of selective downloading, as all of this unnecessary HTTP downloading occurs because the swarm is too big to find peers that have the desired package (they do exist). Fortunately, this unnecessary downloading seems to approach a maximum as the swarm size increases. For the large swarm sizes needed to make the downloading efficient, and assuming a reasonable number of connections of 100 (bittorrent defaults to maintaining at least 40, and large swarms usually means a large number of connections), we can expect to be using HTTP for about 4% of the download. This number is surprisingly low due to the popularity distribution of packages (only rare ones are hard to find, but they aren't downloaded very often). I think 4% is manageable in our situation, given that there is a backup method to find the rare packages, though it does show the need to have that backup method available. This is probably more of a problem for regular bittorrent clients, in which there is no backup method.

gimp-plugin-registry updated During the last days I've upgraded the gimp-plugin-registry package. Version 0.2-1 does not only fix a few smaller bugs, but also contains the following new plugins/scripts:

• Black and White Film Simulation:
  Converts the selected layer into Black and White using the channel mixer. Tries to produce results resembling tonal qualities of film.
• DBP:
  David's Batch Processor is a simple batch processing plugin for The Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files.
• Extended Borders:
  This script allows you to add double borders, add copyright notice and title, as well as decide fonts, font-sizes and positions of the title and copyright notice. Support for blurring the copyright and title is also included.

Please note that not all plugins will work with gimp 2.3 from experimental, therefore my next plan is to create a branch for experimental, which will not only include the proper changes for 2.3, but also include plugins which need the new gimp version to build/work. For example:

• Save for web
• Separate+

As usual, I'm searching for good plugins which should be added to the package - suggestions are welcome!

My wife was very excited to hear that debian will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Social Contract with a virtual pancake party. She could care less about the social contract, she's just happy to have an excuse to have me make her pancakes again. In any case, I thought I'd share my favorite recipe for pancake batter:

Oatmeal Pancakes	
2 eggs
4 T. veg. oil
1 3/4 cup buttermilk
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup rolled oats
3 Tbl. brown sugar
1/2  tsp. cinnamon
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Beat eggs in medium-sized bowl.  Beat in vegetable oil until well mixed, then stir in buttermilk.  Add remaining ingredients and stir to blend. 

It seems that I've held up -at least for half a year- what I stated back in January - I come by bike to work almost every day, and really enjoy the time spent on two wheels. My times have -of course- improved, as has my dominion of the bike - I make ~10 minutes each way (must be a bit more on my way to work than on my way back, as it is uphill).
My city's government seems to be seriously promoting people to consider using the bicycle as means for regular transport and not just as a recreational device - I see some of its measures as quite silly, but some are just perfect. One week ago, while I was on the plane from Edinburgh, we had the first Ciclot n, a 32Km ride open to everybody (and of course, Nadezhda was among them). Over 70,000 people took part, reportedly, and it seems it will be held monthly. Besides that, yesterday we had the paseo dominical in Coyoac n very close to my house - What's that? Something similar to the ciclot n, only much smaller (14Km), much less publicized, and in a different place of the city every Sunday. Well, we started up the day at 8 AM by cycling from Metro Copilco to Miguel ngel de Quevedo, Av. Universidad, R o Churubusco, Divisi n del Norte and Henriquez Ure a back to Metro Copilco. We later learnt that around 10,000 people took part. 14 Km, 30 minutes - not bad, and quite enjoyable!
We didn't go for the second round, because we wanted to be by ~10 AM at Reforma, probably the city's most emblematic avenue, to be part of the demonstration marking one year of the electoral fraud. But... Well, we didn't want to just leave the bikes at home and go by metro - What can we do? Yes, take the open streets. We followed a bit of the path we had taken a bit earlier, then took Minerva, Insurgentes until Reforma (~45 minutes). And once we got to the meeting point, we didn't want to step down and crawl the bikes along... So we both found out that not only we dared take the main streets where people are not really used to cyclists and where taxi drivers will often try to make a point that if you don't own a car you should use a taxi and not a bike - We were able to cycle most of our way to Z calo, going slowly and moving through people, in what seemed to be almost an unthinkable feat for me just a couple of months ago. We can now control the bike, we can even be almost still while riding it, and not crash into anybody!
Of course, the way back was similar - We took our bikes across Obrera, Doctores, Algar n and lamos, then took Av. Universidad all the way down to Copilco, and -after some three hours riding, with my arms quite red and of course somewhat dehydrated and sore-butted- got home.
It feels great to have a well-deserved siesta! And... Well, biking is just too enjoyable. I guess we had ~45Km yesterday, plus some ~5 extra zig-zagging through the crowd. It rules.

I just released new version of Gammu. This release adds various fixes to AT phones driver and fixes various other crashes. Full list of changes:

• Initial support for Motorola phones (bug #15 and #310).
• Avoid work on uninitialized buffer when checking firmware.
• Use HTTP/1.1 requests for getting firmware and version info.
• Improve charset handling for AT phones.
• Fix crash on broken CPMS response.
• Fix reading of memory not starting from 1 (thanks to drgerafe).
• Fix pressing of keys on phones who do not support IRA charset.

Tonight, instead of minding my dinner, which did burn, I was drawn into and extended a pretty fiery IRC conversation on debian-devel on a topic that does not like to die: the merits and demerits of Wikipedia. It is not worth summarizing the conversation here for it followed a pretty predictable arc. There were those who thought Wikipedia was novel and valuable, others who saw it as a pit of bad facts, and inaccuracies and a few others who saw it in ways negative and positive. I found the conversation somewhat ironic, because I usually find myself defending free software to outsiders much in the same way I was defending Wikipedia to free software developers. I tend to be in the camp of admirers, and for many reasons, although, of course, I also was arguing that it is too early to judge the value of Wikipedia as it is in its infancy. Like Debian, since Wikipedia is an institution that has changed *a lot* in its short history, it is hard to make any hard and fast conclusions about its worth, impact, etc, although more modest and qualified claims are certainly in order. The only reason I feel like I can argue anything about Wikipedia is because I am currently reading a dissertation on Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle. He not only has really insightful things to say about the collaborative culture driving the online encyclopedia, but also about the prolific commentary that has closely followed the heels of Wikipedia in the last few years. Just today, he wrote a blog entry entitled, Punditry and The Web 2.0 debate, which so hit the nail on the head on the problems–not with Wikipedia–but with the peanut gallery (commentary) on Wikipedia. As he notes, the problem is often not with the so called correct or incorrect judgments on Wikipedia (or other Web 2.0 phenomenon) but with the very debates themselves, because many of them are built on a shaky foundation of sand, but this punditry, as Joe rightly calls it, is nonetheless worthy of critical examination:

.. while I follow the discussion with interest, I actually don’t find it substantively engaging. Many of the arguments, particularly Gorman’s, tend to be characterized by unsubstantiated claims and the purposeful construal of nuanced issues as extremes — propping up strawmen for subsequent potshots. As I’ve already indicated, while it might bring pundits a sense of righteousness and attention, in the end “Time, not arguments, will utlimately tell.” (And, for this reason I appreciate Larry Sanger’s continuing efforts to implement his vision.)Why, then, do I find this discussion of interest? Punditry, communicative disorders, and history. First, I’m trying to come to an understanding of “punditry,” and I think Gorman’s recent bloggings is an exemplar. My sense is that sometimes people argue for arguments’ sake. That is, even if they genuinely believe the thing they are arguing for, attention, not persuasion, is the goal. (In a sense, perhaps it is a high-brow, and perhaps more genuinely held, form of trolling — another interesting phenomenon.)

While punditry has always existed, there is no doubt that the Internet has accentuated and facilitated this form of (often male) communication and it is great to see someone tackle this topic. Because let’s face it, there is a lot more “garbage” spewing from Web 2.0 or Wikipedia commentary compared to than the actual Wikipedia articles themselves.

I came down with a serious case of Not Invented Here, and created a wiki of my own. Before you look, consider that:

• It doesn't have a lot of the features that I want.
• It may be broken (I didn't dedicate a lot of time to writing tests).
• Indeed, unless you're the kind of person who likes to hack on things, you'll probably seriously injure yourself if you so much as glance at it!

That said, I'd love to have a collaborator or two: DedaWiki It will eventually replace the wiki engine utilized over at http://www.leenooks.com, which is showing its age, and not as fun to work with as Rails at this point in time.

I am finally catching up with the remarkably thick goulash of email and blogs entries that comes from traveling for well over a month and today I read one in particular When is Open Source not Open Source? that captivated my interest for it compellingly addresses the dangers that follow from diluting, or one might say hijacking, the term open source. When people learn that I study “free software” one of the most common questions I get asked is: why did I chose free software over open source? The answer is quite simple: given that the bread and butter of my research covers ethics, freedom, and liberalism, free software is the obvious path to follow, yet I also feel like a lot of my work is still relevant to the open source camp because of the affinities between the two. I have long maintained that the ideological gulf between open source and free software is not so great nor impassable, but more modest. As most know, both share a certain strong commitment to access and in a strict technical sense they refer to the same set of licenses. Philosophically there is agreement that openness and, especially, non-discrimination are essential for the quality of software and often by close extension, the vibrancy of community responsible for the software. Of course, when pontificating the ramifications and implications of openness, they do part company and enter into different territories. Free software tends to flag rights and freedoms, while open source meanders into a discussion of markets, business, and competition and in this regard they do craft different visions of the social world and human behavior, etc. But the case that Karl Fogel writes about, where OSI is strongly opposing the use of the term open source for licenses that don’t adhere to the definition demonstrates where the two positions join. As Michael Tiemann from the OSI succinctly put it:

The FSF may have got the orthodoxy wrong, and the OSI may have got the interpretation wrong, but we both agree that prohibition of commercial use without special permission is antithetical to both positions.

There is a unmistakable kernel of agreement and it is great to see the OSI taking such a strong stance in this regard. Now, David Richard’s response, who seeks, I think, to essentially dilute the term open source, is as (or perhaps even more) fascinating for in a nut shell, and using a lot of florid religious imagery, it accuses the OSI of being too rigid! In his own words:

I believe the OSI has a wonderful opportunity to continue being relevant and helping to lead the movement forward. If, however, y’all choose to define your denomination of this religion in a way that we don’t fit in, that’s fine. No hard feelings. It’s your choice. You’ll ultimately be excluding a large congregation and we for one will continue trying to build a church made up of others like ourselves.

In response, I would say that the goal of F/OSS is not to be inclusive of anyone who wants to release bits of source code, but to create the conditions under which software, as it has been defined by the community, can be created. Join the church if you would like to make free/open source software as defined and you can go elsewhere (i.e., create a different term) if you are creating something different, even if it is only slightly different. Integrity matters. And again inclusiveness, if it comes at the expense of the main goal, is not a boon but a danger to F/OSS. The OSI will remain relevant by halting the dilution of the term OSI, not by expanding the definition so that it is left with no substance. And in contradistinction to what David Richard maintains, however, there is a great degree of flexibility within this domain but it does not lie in the strict definition of F/OSS but in the realm of interpretation. You are also free, as Mako and I have argued elsewhere to interpret the significance of F/OSS in multiple ways. And I think this is where the political strength of free software lies. There is interplay between a well-defined goal (in this case for creating free software) and a more flexible realm of interpreting the significance of these technical practice. And we wold lose and I might add, a lot if we became flexible about the strict definition of F/OSS and inflexible about its political significance. I get irked with folks like David Richards who would like to bend open source rules to meet their (often commercial) interests and I find it pretty na ve when folks say the political significance of F/OSS is just x (or worse should be x) for in reality its political significance lies in the fact that it has spawned multiple types of political and economic projects. And there is something almost playfully ironic, (or at least it makes me smile) in this fact. Though there is strict definition contained withing F/OSS, this strictness has, at least to some extent, encouraged by an extreme and very healthy form of political proliferation and promiscuity. More than anyone else I know, Mako has most passionately and thoughtfully argued for the importance of what I would call political clarity and integrity. That is, the importance of having a well articulated definition for social movements, for they act, as he says a rallying point to realize a social movement. Urging the Creative Commons to learn from F/OSS and dare to simultaneously narrow and more clearly define their goals, he states it quite nicely in the following terms:

Free software advocates have been able to use the free software definition as the rallying point for a powerful social movement. Free software, like the concept of freedom in any freedom movement, is something that one can demand, something that one can protest for, and something that one can work toward. Working toward these goals, free and open source software movements have created the GNU/Linux operating system and billions of lines of freely available computer code.

In essence, a definition that people can abide by, respect, and perhaps eventually cherish is the condition of possibility to make working political code. And given how hard it is to make social change happen (at least in comparison to build computer code), we should learn from what F/OSS has to offer. And at the same time there is another lesson embedded in F/OSS. The Free Software Definition is well defined; but it must be emphasized, narrowly so. It does not try to do everything and have everyone pledge allegiance to an inordinately complex set of commitments. Clarity, narrowness, and well-defined goals –> these three attributes have powered it far and wide and I hope it remains so. Now, since the term open source is not trademarked, we are left with the problem of how to challenge the current hijacking of the term. For the solution, I will leave you with Karl Fogel, who I think proposes a good solution:

Note that the OSI s objection is not to the Zimbra license per se. The objection is just to Zimbra s calling that license open source . They can use any license they want, but they shouldn t call it open source unless it actually is. Freedom is freedom, and no amount of spin will change that. So what should we do about this? The term open source isn t trademarked. Years ago, the OSI tried to register it, but it was apparently too generic. …But there is public opinion. What Danese and Michael are proposing doing is organizing a lot of open source developers (and I mean open source according to the traditional definition, the one the OSI and I and most other open source developers I know adhere to) to stand up and, basically, say All of us agree on what the definition of open source is, and we reject as non-open source any license that does not comply with the letter and spirit of the Open Source Definition.

Someone in the #mediawiki channel the other day asked, "Would it be possible to have easy-to-parse error messages?" and I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a microformat in the making." Probably one of the most common HTML patterns in Web applications is error messages. We see them all the time on the Web: login errors, form validation errors, backend errors and user input errors. But what if this common pattern was standardized? If HTML error messages all followed a similar format, we could have browser plugins that recorded and analyzed the errors that come up. They could either feed back this structured error data when we needed it -- say, when filing a bug report -- or use the error data to help us find workarounds or documentation online. I brought the idea up in the #microformats channel on Freenode, and it got a good response, so I took the next step and created a list of error message examples and some error message brainstorming on the microformats wiki. Hopefully this can be the start of some interesting feedback loops in software errors. tags: errormessages microformats