Yesterday I went to activate phone service out at the farm. It got me to thinking a bit about how things change, and how they stay the same, too.

Before I go on, I'll have to say that every one of my history books is in storage, so if I get some details wrong, it's because I'm not remembering correctly.

Anyhow, phone service came to our community via an unusual route about 100 years ago. It wasn't Bell/AT&T or some other company that brought it there, as it was most places. I'm sure they figured that a small, scattered rural community would cost too much to support. So the community organized, built, and supported the phone system themselves.

Even today, roads around here can be impassible after a good rain. I'm sure that, in the early 1900s, before heavy road-maintaining machinery, things were worse -- and, of course, transportation was a lot slower then anyway. There were real problems: getting the word out about funerals, being able to summon a doctor when necessary, or letting people know that church was cancelled because of too much snow.

People in the community saw a phone system as a real need. So did the churches, which have left a legacy that is still reflected in phone company territories today.

Once phone service arrived, it was used for all the things that people expected, of course. But it also proved to be an important part of the social fabric of the community. Since party lines were the norm, it was possible to announce things to every listening subscriber pretty quickly. Older people remember announcements of fresh fruit arriving at the grocery store, funerals, or other news of the day.

To place a call, you would pick up your phone and turn your crank. That caused a bell to ring at the telephone office, which everyone called "Central." The operator would connect to your line and ask whom you wanted to talk to. The operator would then send the distinctive ring for your party down their party line, and patch -- manually -- your call through to them. And, if he was busy, the operator wouldn't listen in on your conversation -- but others on the party line very well might.

Central's hours were published. If you were making a call in the middle of the night, you were going to wake up someone at Central to do it -- plus everyone on the entire party line. So calls after hours were rare.

Fortunately, while some of the old Central operators were still around, some people in the community wrote down some of their stories.

There were some people in the community that were notorious for eavesdropping on other people's conversations. Two brothers one time figured that they knew somebody was listening to their conversations, so they devised a code. One called the other, and said, "I'll be going to McPherson in the morning for band practice." That meant something along the lines of going to town to buy groceries.

A few days later, their prime suspect came up to him and said, "What on earth are you going to band practice for? I didn't know you knew how to play an instrument!" Apparently she realized she was had when he burst out laughing uncontrollably.

The Central operators learned to know the habits of telephone users. Sometimes they would connect calls without even bothering to ask who people wanted to talk to -- and seemed to always get it right.

The phone system supported itself for about 50 years. But as the rest of the world moved on provide direct dialing, this proved a controversial subject in the community. People liked having their operators. The people that worked at Central were everybody's friend. They were people that were there, 24 hours a day, to assist with any emergency. They would gather volunteer firefighters to help fight a fire, or be able to spread community news quickly. This wouldn't be available with the newer phone systems. How would the community be informed of events quickly now? Who would just happen to know whose house the doctor was at when he was urgently needed?

The change was resisted for some years, but eventually the finances of the telephone cooperative turned out to be in deep trouble. Operators grew to be much more expensive than automation, and in the late 1960s, the telephone cooperative was no more -- sold to a phone company from a small town more than twice our size, and a for-profit company at that! Central no longer existed. I remember reading about this event -- it seems people were sad about that for quite some time. They felt that they had really lost an important part of the community when Central went away. Some machine locked in a cabinet doesn't care for people the way Central did. Even today, the older people in the community sound a little sad when they remember telephone modernization, and get the wistful look of somebody that has just remembered something that they miss.

The phone company that bought the system wasn't an AT&T, though. It was a small, independent phone company. To this day, that phone company serves only the two communities. And it was this company that I called yesterday to establish service out at our house.

They had already upgraded our lines -- over a mile of new copper, benefiting only us, at no charge to us -- last fall. The box was already on the outside of the house. Just need to get it activated.

So I called the phone company. They said I needed to drop by their office and sign some papers. Uh-oh, I think -- this is a bad sign. Sounds like a bunch of phone company bureaucracy.

But not so much. I went to the office and signed up. They asked the usual questions: name, address. Plus a few that bigger companies wouldn't ask: who used to have service at that address? Of course, most people would know that answer in our community. I couldn't have told you in Wichita, Dallas, or Indianapolis.

Then they asked when I'd like service to be activated. "As soon as possible," I say, figuring that this would be a couple of weeks like it is with AT&T or Sprint. "Well, we probably can't get out there for a couple of hours. Would it be OK if it's on at about 3?" Yes, that would be fine!

Now, how about DSL? "Well, we're a little backed up on that right now." Uh-oh. Sprint took several weeks when they *weren't* more backed up than usual. "So it'll probably be Monday or Tuesday before we can get out there. Should I just have the installer call you and arrange a time when it gets closer?" Yes, that would be fine, too!

Now, how about finding a phone number.

Out comes a large paper book. Yep, paper. They paged through it, and told me that my grandpa's old number would be available if I wanted it. I said yes -- after all, we've got his old address, so might as well keep the same phone number. OK, no problem. She whips out some white-out, whites out grandpa's name, and writes ours in. Done.

Now, do we want any optional services? Caller ID, call waiting, voicemail? How much is caller ID, I ask. $5 a month. We'll try it for now. "OK". A box was checked on the form and that was that. No high-pressure sales pitch on taking "the works" for some poorly-disclosed price, providing a ton of services I'll never use and don't want. No confusing "discounts" for having The Works and DSL at the same time.

Then I ask about an unlisted number, or at least an unlisted address. We figure that anybody that we really want to be able to reach us will figure out how without using a phone book, and these things get in so many databases these days. Sprint charged almost $10/mo for a fully unlisted number, but only a few dollars a month to just keep our address off the directories.

Our new company charged 50 cents a month for a fully unlisted number. Done.

Now it's time to pay for the first month's fees and the setup. Oops, I've forgotten my checkbook in the car. No problem, the secretary says, I'll watch your baby while you go get it! Jacob was with me, but had fallen asleep, so I brought him inside in his car seat. I went to get the checkbook -- just out the door and close by. I was back in a few seconds later, and the secretary was already on the other side of her desk talking and playing with Jacob. "My baby's 12 now," she said, and for a second, looked like a person that was remembering Central.

..or he's not telling us something. If the multi-year exclusive agreement is true, then the goals are probably unachievable. In the keynote yesterday, Jobs put out there that almost a billion phones are sold each year to consumers. Granted, most of these are regular phones without the whiz-bang and special features of the iPhone -- and are usually free to the consumer, subsidized by the contract agreements. Still, he set what most would consider a modest goal, of getting 1% of the cell phone sales - 10 million phones, by the end of 2008.

However, lets do some napkin math. A very small percentage of phones out there today are smart phones. C Net says that 37.4 million smart phones out there. This is probably a pretty conservative estimate by now -- the Gartner study was released in October. Let's give the smart phone people the benefit of the doubt and say that usage triples by the end of 2008. That makes about 100 million smart phones out there. 10 million is ten percent of that market.

Let's look at the math another way. Cingular has 58 million subscribers. Assuming that they gain 20% per year, they will have 68 million at the end of 2008. If Apple is aiming at 10 million phones, that is one out of every seven Cingular customers. Next time you walk down the street, notice count 7 people that you can notice have a phone. If Apple makes its goal, one of those 7 people will own a iPhone, and will have shelled out at least half a grand on it.

These are amazingly high goals for a company that is new in the market. Granted, the iPhone is pretty revolutionary, but I don't think Steve is that crazy. I'm betting that he has something up his sleeve that will help him meet or beat this 10 million goal.

Richard MacManus: “Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you [should be able to] use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too.” I agree wholeheartedly. I’m a big believer in the componentization of the web, as I’ve written about before. Without a way to write independent apps that integrate with each other regardless of where they’re hosted, the future starts to look more and more like the mainframe era (albeit with better graphics). The world needs only five computers (shaping up to be Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, Windows Live and Yahoo!). However, we need to ensure that these five computers operate more as computing utilities where a thousand flowers can bloom than as centralized monoliths where the only way to integrate is to be assimilated.

Just spent a long weekend (Thursday night to Monday afternoon) in Finland. Hanna invited me over a while ago with a promise of sauna and ice swimming, and I'm a sucker for travelling to parties these days... *grin*. Unfortunately, the weather in Finland (just like in the UK) at the moment is ridiculously warm for the time of year. When I visited in November for the BSP, there was some snow on the ground and temperatures were as cold as I expected. This time, there was no sign of any snow and I was worried that we might not get any ice...! Lars was kind enough to offer me some crash space at short notice for my visit (there's nothing like last-minute organisation for this kind of jaunt!). On Friday we met up with Jesus, Jeroen, Hanna, Pixie and Dave for lunch and some wandering around in the middle of Helsinki. Then on to some bars later for some drinks and food. I could get used to this... :-) On Saturday, we got up early, bought large amounts of food and drink to take with us, and caught the bus north-west out of Helsinki towards central Finland. 90 minutes on the bus and in a taxi, and we were dropped off at Hanna's family's cottage by the lake below: As we got there, the temperature was dropping just enough that we could actually see the ice forming on the lake. Beautiful! In the middle of nowhere in the forest, things were incredibly quiet and peaceful. We lit the fire for the the sauna, and wandered off for a walk through the forest. Later on, beer, sauna and (almost) ice swimming. Naked geeks! I must admit that I chickened out a little - coming out of the sauna into freezing temperatures slowed me down a little. By the time I reached the bottom of the steps to the lake surface, I couldn't force myself into the lake fully. I got three toes wet, then ran back inside into the warm... :-) Dave was more resilient (in and out FIVE times!), but it looks like he maybe overdid things. He crashed out later and was acting quite oddly for a while - we worked out that he was probably dehydrated. We carried on drinking and snacking at the cottage, then headed back into Helsinki for the bars and clubs later that night. More of the same on Sunday along with a cinema visit, and I was thoroughly exhausted and ready to head back to the UK on Monday. Thanks very much to Hanna, Lars, Jesus and the others for making my trip so much fun. Helsinki is a lovely place to visit, although probably too expensive for me to manage it too often. I'm saving already for the next time! I've put my photos online as usual.

Our brunch yesterday went super-well. We had about 15 people over, which was far too many for our supposedly mellow evening. But it was great -- we got to catch up with a lot of folks I've been missing over the holidays and haven't gotten to see. I hadn't seen Lucinda Catchlove much for a few months, and Heather Kelley and Damian DiFede made an appearance, too. We got to see John Usher, who's off to do weird things to people's ears at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Niko came with friend Johanie, who made some great black-bean brownies; DJ Ghostbeard was still feeling ill from NYE; and Meg showed off her deep purple hockey bruises. It was also nice to have some new friends come, too. I've been wanting to hang out with MC Turgeon, one of the most experienced bloggers in Quebec, founder of me dia and toiles-du-Web, since we met last year at South by Southwest. She and her partner Chris came over with a nice bottle of wine and got to know everyone there. Actually, she knew a lot of the people already -- she and Anne-Marie had met at Mutek, for example. When Patti came in, she said, "Oh, yeah, I know M-C. We do a lot of panels together." Ah, the panel circuit. Altogether a really good time. Probably the only downside is that our oven was really dirty, and while I was making quiches and roasted potatoes I smoked up the entire house. But it cleared pretty quickly, and with the nice weather we're having, I could even have the kitchen door open to clear the smoke. Unheard of! tags: bruncher mcturgeon montreal cooking

Making a point Speaking of unseasonably warm weather, the Green Party of Canada held a picnic and ice cream social on Mount Royal last Saturday, which would have a couple of feet of snow on it in a regular year. The subject of discussion? Climate change, of course. I dunno -- clever move, but do they have to rub it in? tags: green party picnic climate change

Shameless plugs My friend Allegra has started a great new blog, Sucking-stones. She's got a really good voice and it's now in circulation as one of the blogs I read each morning. Also, my friend Anne-Marie Bergeron has her first travel TV show on 33mag tomorrow. She's got a four-part series on her trip to Iceland which they're going to show. It's in French, but her husband Jeff only cusses in English, so that's probably what you'll hear when they're climbing glaciers and lava floes. Did that get everyone? I hope so. You know what they say: You can plug your friends, and you can plug your ears, but you can't plug your friends' ears. Or something. tags: allegra sucking-stones annemarie jeff 33mag

Chix I was just reading Angela Beesley's end-of-year blog post and realized that I'd missed the establishment of WikiChix. It's a new organization for female wiki participants, in the great tradition *Chix tradition of Linux Chix or Debian Women. All the more galling is that two other blogs I regularly read also covered the new group. Joseph Reagle made a note about gendered spaces and the role they play in any movement (like Open Content and wikis). Biella blogged about his bloggage and put some social-science twist that was a little hard for me to follow. In any event, good luck to WikiChix. I find clubs extremely fun and useful and by nature exclusionary, and nothing to get worked up about. Of course, as one of the two founding members of the Maldekstrulaj Vegeteranaj Esperantistaj Linuxamantoj (Left-handed Vegetarian Esperantist Linux-users Club), I'd probably be pretty hypocritical calling anyone else exclusionary. tags: wikichix wiki angela beesley joseph reagle biella coleman clubs

Recently there has been some really hot weather in Melbourne that made me search for alternate methods of cooling.

The first and easiest method I discovered is to keep a 2L bottle of water in my car. After it's been parked in the sun on a hot day I pour the water over the windows. The energy required to evaporate water is 2500 Joules per gram, this means that the 500ml that probably evaporates from my car (I guess that 1.5L is split on the ground) would remove 1.25MJ of energy.from my car - this makes a significant difference to the effectiveness of the air-conditioning (the glass windows being the largest hot mass that can easily conduct heat into the cabin).

It would be good if car designers could incorporate this feature. Every car has a system to spray water on the wind-screen to wash it, if that could be activated without the wipers then it would cool the car significantly. Hatch-back cars have the same on the rear window, and it would not be difficult at the design stage to implement the same for the side windows too.

The next thing I have experimented with is storing some ice in a room that can't be reached by my home air-conditioning system. Melting ice absorbes 333 Joules per gram. An adult who is not doing any physical activity will produce about 100W of heat, that is 360KJ per hour. Melting a kilo of ice will abrorb 333KJ per hour, if the amount of energy absorbed when the melt-water approaches room temperature is factored in then a kilo of ice comes close to absorbing the heat energy of an adult at rest. Therefore 10Kg of ice stored in your bedroom will prevent you from heating it by your body heat during the course of a night.

In some quick testing I found that 10Kg of ice in three medium sized containers would make a small room up to two degrees cooler than the rest of the house. The ice buckets also have water condense on them. In a future experiement I will measure the amount of condensation and try and estimate the decrease in the humidity. Lower humidity makes a room feel cooler as sweat will evaporate more easily. Ice costs me $3 per 5Kg bag, so for $6 I can make a hot night significantly more bearable. In a typical year there are about 20 unbearably hot nights in Melbourne. So for $120 I can make one room cooler on the worst days of summer
without the annoying noise of an air-conditioner (the choice of not sleeping due to heat or not sleeping due to noise sucks).

The density of dry air at 0C and a pressure of 101.325 kPa is 1.293 g/L.

A small bedroom might have an area of 3M*3M and be 2.5M high giving a volume of 22.5M^3 == 22,500L. 22,500 * 1.293 = 29092.500g of air.

One Joule can raise the temperature of one gram of cool dry air by 1C.

Therefore when a kilo of ice melts it would be able to cool the air in such a room by more than 10 degrees C! The results I observe are much smaller than that, obviously the walls, floor, ceiling, and furnishings in the room also have some thermal energy, and as the insulation is not perfect some heat will get in from other rooms and from outside the house.

If you have something important to do the next day then spending $6 or $12 on ice the night before is probably a good investment. It might even be possible to get your employer to pay for it, I'm sure that paying for ice would provide better benefits in employee productivity than many things that companies spend money on.

According to my neighborhood newspaper (the Roslindale transcript), there has been a rash of late-night home burglaries in the area lately. Although the paper calls them “robberies,” they are probably more accurately burglaries (and thefts). Common law burglary requires breaking and entering the dwelling of another during the night with the intention to commit a felony therein; robbery requires taking property from a person by force. (Modern statutory definitions of burglary typically do not require the “night” element). In any event, my point is not to quibble with the legal terminology, but rather to question the preventitive measures. From the article:

Captain James Hasson of District E-5 said that this robbery does not fit the mold of the Bellevue Hill break-ins. … Hasson said he was very shocked because Rendall Road is a beautiful, quiet neighborhood that doesn’t normally see violent crimes. He added that there have been extra patrols of the Bellevue Hill area and there will now be extra patrols of the Rendall Road area.

On a much smaller scale, this response is similar to the air travel liquid ban that occurred shortly after the foiled transatlantic bomb plot from last August. Obviously a complete ban on liquids will make it less likely that a terrorist will concoct a liquid explosive plot, but does nothing to actually deter attacks overall. Similarly, once a house on a particular street has been burglarized, adding additional patrols on that street might make another attack on that street less likely, but I don’t see how it makes the community as a whole any safer. More likely this response makes the community less safe. Assuming the total amount of police protection hasn’t changed but just been reallocated, there are now other areas with less coverage. Even a dumb criminal should be able to figure out to avoid heavily policed areas. Unless you actually live on the street that is now getting the additional protection, I would not be reassured by this news.

Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And since I wouldn’t want to be accused of being either cool or vanity lacking here’s some from me.

• I used to be a regular bit-part actor in school plays and musicals; I was in the school choir for four years in high school too. I tried getting back into it once during uni, but didn’t really have the time or interest, so I’m just left with going to the occassional show and watching these days. Of course, when they’re as spectacular as Woman in White that’s not much of a problem…
• For quite a while, my favourite food was lamb’s brains, crumbed and fried with a white sauce. I’m quite fond of offal, also known as “variety meats” apparently, in general really – I’m not really persuaded by the “it’s morally wrong to eat animals” thing, but I figure if you’re going to anyway, it makes sense to not be wasteful about it. Kidneys are pretty awesome too; though liver seems to get boring before you’ve finished eating it. I’ve never tried haggis; but I suspect that’ll change before the next DebConf is over…
• Prior to getting an 486sx33 that eventually ran Linux, I used to be an Amiga geek. As an Aussie Amigoid, that meant reading the Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (edited by Andy Farrell), and eventually when I became really elite, subscribing to Megadisc, a monthly magazine on floppy disk, which included useful programs, reviews, letters, and all sorts of interesting things. My first published C progream was included on one of the issues – it was a teensy little app for people with hard disks that would see if you had a Megadisc in the drive, then open up a dialog box so you could choose a directory to copy the disk too, and not have to worry about seek times and such. Unfortunately I was new enough at the whole “C” thing that I wasn’t sure how to make a new directory myself, and decided to just expect the user to use the “New Dir” button in the standard Amiga dialog box for that. Which would have been fine if I hadn’t also gone to the trouble of helpfully emptying the selected directory so the user wouldn’t end up with two Megadiscs in the same place. Put the two together, and evidently you end up with Megadisc’s editor, Tim Strachan, calling you at 9am the morning after publication and telling you how someone had tried it out and it had started deleting all the files on the hard drive. Ooops. With the Amiga dying out and the rise of the internet, it looks like Tim’s now more into alternative health products than computers.
• On the Friday before flying down to Canberra to be Rusty’s wingman for a meeting with the Attorney-General’s department I had my first motorbike accident – not making a turn on a wet road at night just near home, hitting the asphalt and the gutter. I came out of it with some torn jeans and a grazed knee, a banged hand that needed icing, a nice bruise on my side, and a bike that ended up taking aaaages to get fixed and ridable again. Happily it’s gotten another couple of thousand k’s on the odometer since then.
• In the couple of days before I head to Sydney for the 2007 edition of the fantabulous linux.conf.au I’ll be moving from my unit in Toowong to a house in Highgate Hill. Clinton and I will be sharing the upstairs, while the downstairs will be turned into a granny-flat for my parents for when they decide to stay in the city. The theory is it’ll be an investment over the longer term, with the idea being to try building some townhouses in the rather large backyard and sub-dividing. Should be fun!

Let’s see, I’ll tag: vocalist extraordinaire James, companionable carnivore Pat, sometime C hacker David, fellow motorcyclist Sez, and future housemate Clinton.

Hi. I’m currently working on a system image which is (among other things) supposed to automatically mount CDs as they are inserted. The big problem with this is that I finally had to recognize the fact that with all those hotplug events issued, a media change in an existing device is recognized by the kernel (at least it seems so when looking at drivers/ide/ide-cd), but this is not passed to userland, i.e. the hotplug handler (/sbin/hotplug or whatever you wrote to /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug) doesn’t get an event for this. The only way to recognize a media change that I found is to poll the CD-drive(s) for their media status and handle any changes there appropriately. Given that the kernel already seems to have a mechanism to recognize media changes, it would really be cool if it could issue hotplug events for them.

Maj, Amita June and I took a ride up to San Francisco to see our friends Jack and Tricia in China Basin. Jack started wikiHow, and we've become friends over the last year or so as we're both learning about growing big wikis bigger. We had good lunch from Specialties and talked about their recent trip to Oahu. Then we raced back to Mountain View in time to have dinner at Chevys with my brother Andy, sister-in-law Pam, their two daughters, my parents and Pam's mother Midge. A big party, but we managed to get along, even with 3 girls under 4 years old around. Maj had a cranberry margarita bigger than her head, and Amita June ate her complimentary ice-cream cone all by herself. tags: jack herrick tricia herrick wikihow specialties oahu

I support advertising on Wikipedia Mike Linksvayer has a great follow-up on my discussion in Journal/11 Niv se CCXV about advertising in Wikipedia. He notes quite astutely that a $100M/year budget, based on Web advertising, would put the Wikimedia Foundation ahead of almost any other non-profit organization in the world. $100M is a mind-boggling sum of money to leave uncollected. Think that number's gotta be off by a couple of digits? Mike points out that "In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M." Could Wikipedia get something on the same order of magnitude? Almost certainly. Among other things, he suggests that contributors to the current Wikimedia fundraising drive add a simple comment to their donations: "I support advertising on Wikipedia." Great idea! tags: wikipedia advertising mike linksvayer

l33t So, I got a notice from Aeroplan, Air Canada's frequent-flier-miles program, that with all the travel I'd done in 2006, I'd almost be eligible for their Elite benefits level. I'd done 24,341 miles of travel last year -- mostly with trips to California, Portland and Copenhagen -- and the elite threshold was 25K. Today I was reviewing my 2006 flying record and realized that I wasn't credited for one leg of one flight to the West Coast, so I called up and got the miles. Starting in March, I'm gonna be in the the l33t crowd at Aeroplan. Rad! tags: aeroplan air canada l33t

After some comments on this post by Javier Candeira I've read more carefully Coloriuris license and I've revoked the license because I've some doubts that I should clear before anything. Also some statement are not as accurate as should be. I should not post anything when I've to study. Quick posts can be very dangerous :-/. Also I've closed comments because I've noticed that spam was hitting my blog. Sorry, I hope to fix this after exams. ... and I'm not talking about colors. Coloriuris is an organization that provides free licenses with the same spirit of Creative Commons. This well-known licenses are only applicable in the Common Law, countries like Spain, Portugal and the whole Latin America are based on the Roman Law where Coloriuris licenses should be used instead CC. For this blog I've choosen Coloriuris blue which allows comercial use and derivated works keeping the same license.

Sven Mueller commented:

"There is a better solution for building packages if you don't have a local unstable machine up. Use pbuilder (w/ or w/o the pdebuild "frontend"). I had refrained from setting up pbuilder for quite a while, and was amazed how easy it was when I eventually did. The only "problem" is that you probably want to make sure that at least "debian/rules clean" works even under Debian/stable. But I personally like to keep my packages buildable under stable anyway (since I usually use backports of them on production systems)."

I tried pbuilder at first and it failed because of the aforementioned debootstrap stable/unstable difference. After I read up on debootstrap, I didn't really see what pbuilder added to the system besides more tarball processing, so I didn't bother trying it again after debootstrap worked. Am I missing out on anything important? Mark Brown commented:

"pbuilder provides management of the chroot environments (you can have several set up and it'll let you choose between and update them) and a convenient front end for building packages in a chroot (you can just point it at a package and say "go build this in a chroot")."

I'm probably being dense, but I still don't see a benefit. A chroot is more-or-less just a tree on the disk so I can have several set up anyway, updating them is just running update inside the chroot and I just mv the package into the chroot and say "go in that chroot and build this". Maybe pbuilder just isn't beneficial for me.

The simple answer is, you can't. I didn't want cats while we were here in the US. And yet, we have three of them. We made the decision not to take our current cat with us from Australia, because of the length of the journey, and the fact that we were planning on being away a lot travelling, and because of the length of time she'd have to stay in quarantine when we returned to Australia. Then along came Stumpy, a cat we were supposed to be temporarily fostering, because she was hit by a car, had a broken pelvis and lost her tail. She was all sweet while she was convalescing, and Sarah really wanted to adopt her, so I caved in. Stumpy was probably less than a year old, so still at the boisterous kitten age, and sure enough, she recovered, and became a boisterous kitten again. To the point where she was so energetic, she needed a little friend to wear her out, and I was asked if we could get a second cat, and since I seem to have problems saying no to anything (but heck, I was getting attacked in bed by her in the middle of the night as well), along came Lily (wow, Sarah really needs to spot breaking all the image links in her blog posts). Sarah was taking Lily back to the shelter we adopted her from, for her shots, and was asked if she'd foster a tiny 4 week old kitten, that was going to have to be euthanized if a foster home wasn't found for her. We still have Smudge today, months later, technically still as a foster, but we intend to adopt her as well, because she's such a sweet little kitten, and of the three, she's the most affectionate towards me. Call this one "my" cat. Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we've got people coming round for dinner (it's been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried. After our last trip away, the cats got sufficiently bored that Stumpy thought chewing on laptop power adapter cables would be fun. My laptop no longer charges. (I'd just had said power adapter replaced under warranty not two weeks previously). Don't get me wrong, I love cats, I just so didn't want them right now, and especially right now, I'm wishing I'd stuck to my guns on that one. I think I'd have rather brought LC over from Australia, and not have her become obese by the new owner we found for her, than have so much of our stuff be destroyed by three kittens in a small townhouse that we're away from too often to give them the attention they need as kittens. Sigh.

My brother Nate and his girlfriend Kristen live in the Laurel Heights area of San Francisco, just north of Presidio Heights, across the street from Laurel Village on California Street. They invited us up for dinner at their house last night, and since my Mom and Dad hadn't seen their apartment yet, they decided to join us, too. Maj, Amita June and I went up early yesterday afternoon, right after naptime. (That's our main measure of time -- before naptime, after naptime, before bedtime, after the baby goes to sleep.) We initially planned to go downtown and do some post-Christmas shopping, but we hit gruesome traffic getting off North 280 into China Basin. Friday afternoon traffic in San Francisco is pretty crappy any day of the month, but yesterday was Critical Mass, which really tangles things up downtown. So we juked west and headed out to Ocean Beach instead. I parked at the end of Golden Gate Park by the giant windmills. We all walked out onto the beach -- Amita at 0.5 mph, of course, and rarely in the correct direction -- just at sunset, which was great. It was our second beach day in a row, but it was great being out there. The baby chased dogs and waves, and we got to watch the sun go down. There were kites everywhere -- I explained to Amita how people had to hold their strings so that they could keep flying. It's so counterintuitive. We dropped into the Beach Chalet on the Great Highway for a late afternoon snack. Amita June had her trademark grilled cheese sandwich, Maj and I split a plate of calamari. The chalet does its own beers, so Maj had a Christmas ale and I tried the more than decent stout. We got to Nate's place just after 6, and they ordered Indian food from Rotee in the Lower Haight. It was excellent -- we got some tandoori fish and about 12 different curries. Maj's brother Brian came too, and we stayed up pretty late talking. Maj and I stayed over at Nate and Kristen's last night, then shared coffees this morning from Peet's. There's a really nice Cuban place, Caf Lo Cubano right up the street, but we wanted bagels from Noah's, so it's just natural to get Peet's, too. We had a long ride home, though -- Maj and I are both feeling sick, and the baby's not too happy about long car rides anymore. But we got home for a good nap and a radio interview. tags: san francisco laurel heights golden gate park rotee beach chalet cafe lo cubano kites beach

Get Connected Radio I did an interview today on Get Connected Radio about Wikitravel. It was pretty fun -- the interviewers were pretty clued-in about wikis, so we got to talk a bit more about the interesting travel aspects. Also cool that they emphasized the "open source" aspect, which is something a lot of media don't cover. tags: get connected radio wikitravel interview

Jesus came to Madrid for Xmas, and all he got was this awsome tshirt!
/me desperately looks for a girlie sized one :)

Merry Christmas! I'm catching up with some RSS feeds, including the Linux Weekly News (LWN). This is a high-quality news site for Linux, and being issued just weekly is a nice feature for all those suffering from information overload. They had an interesting article some weeks ago on Virtual Machines and Memory Protection. If you are interested in system and application security, this is an interesting read. SELinux has permissions called "execmem" and "execstack". Basically these allow applications to map some memory executeable, or execute their own stack. Back in the assembler days, some techniques relied on this, but it has lately become frowned upon: most buffer overflow and other attacks used by viruses and worms relied on an executable stack or memory. Recently, Intel and AMD added support for "non-executable" bits for memory maps, i.e. hardware support to enforce these permissions; this was sold as an achievement in application security. Though this is mostly true - tons of attacks rely on this permission - it's not that easy. Modern programming languages such as Java and C# rely on so called Just-In-Time compilation for fast execution. (And future version of perl and python will probably do that, too.) And JIT requires executable memory, because it basically compiles the VMs bytecode into (optimized) machine code, and executes it. Now you could say: okay, let's just grant mono and java the execmem permission; (which is also what SELinux does) - and this will probably be okay unless there is some grave error in the mono or java runtime. Or any other native library they use. And this is where the problems start: both Mono and Java rely to a certain extend on native libraries. For example the GTK libraries for the UI. Mono applications can also use gstreamer, gnome-vfs, zlib, libpng, libjpeg, ... That means, security issues in these libraries that need execmem and would not work on native applications can suddenly be exploitable in mono and java apps. Since we can't do without execmem for Java and Mono: the executable bit for memory does add some extra layers, but doesn't give you full protection from this kind of attacks, sorry. No magic "my computer is no longer hackable because I have the NX bit".

With an NX Bit capable operating system such as Windows XP SP2, harmful viruses are stopped before it can cause any damage to the system.

... unless you're using .NET or Java applications.

Merry Christmas! I'm catching up with some RSS feeds, including the Linux Weekly News (LWN). This is a high-quality news site for Linux, and being issued just weekly is a nice feature for all those suffering from information overload. They had an interesting article some weeks ago on Virtual Machines and Memory Protection. If you are interested in system and application security, this is an interesting read. SELinux has permissions called "execmem" and "execstack". Basically these allow applications to map some memory executeable, or execute their own stack. Back in the assembler days, some techniques relied on this, but it has lately become frowned upon: most buffer overflow and other attacks used by viruses and worms relied on an executable stack or memory. Recently, Intel and AMD added support for "non-executable" bits for memory maps, i.e. hardware support to enforce these permissions; this was sold as an achievement in application security. Though this is mostly true - tons of attacks rely on this permission - it's not that easy. Modern programming languages such as Java and C# rely on so called Just-In-Time compilation for fast execution. (And future version of perl and python will probably do that, too.) And JIT requires executable memory, because it basically compiles the VMs bytecode into (optimized) machine code, and executes it. Now you could say: okay, let's just grant mono and java the execmem permission; (which is also what SELinux does) - and this will probably be okay unless there is some grave error in the mono or java runtime. Or any other native library they use. And this is where the problems start: both Mono and Java rely to a certain extend on native libraries. For example the GTK libraries for the UI. Mono applications can also use gstreamer, gnome-vfs, zlib, libpng, libjpeg, ... That means, security issues in these libraries that need execmem and would not work on native applications can suddenly be exploitable in mono and java apps. Since we can't do without execmem for Java and Mono: the executable bit for memory does add some extra layers, but doesn't give you full protection from this kind of attacks, sorry. No magic "my computer is no longer hackable because I have the NX bit".

With an NX Bit capable operating system such as Windows XP SP2, harmful viruses are stopped before it can cause any damage to the system.

... unless you're using .NET or Java applications.

You still got some money left after buying all those Christmas presents? How about donating some of it for a good cause:

• Wikipedia

Wikipedia is entering 2007 as one of the 10 most visited websites in the world. That's a great proof of our success. However, with this success comes a new set of challenges and responsibilities. As we plan for the future of Wikipedia and all of the Wikimedia projects, our two most important goals now are the reliability of our content and the long-term sustainability of every project in which we are involved. To meet these goals we have a lot of work to do, so I am asking for your help. In the coming year, the Wikimedia Foundation anticipates dramatically increasing spending to keep up with server and traffic capacity demands, add new staff on the organizational level, improve our software and develop methods to better ensure high quality content, all while making progress toward our goal of giving free knowledge to everyone.

-- Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation

Creative Commons

It's once again time to show your support for Creative Commons. Digital technologies are connecting people in ways that were never before possible but that network is fragile. Creative Commons needs your support to help enable a participatory culture a culture in which everyone can actively engage in the creativity that surrounds us. We need your support to assure access to cultural, scientific, and educational content that has been pre-cleared for use by its authors.

Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Freedom is more precious than anything else we have and we need to protect it while we still can.

-- Eben Moglen in his FSF year end video appeal (OGG, 24 MB)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

EFF is a nonprofit group of passionate people lawyers, technologists, volunteers, and visionaries working to protect your digital rights.

Tor: anonymity online

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet. Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.

Or how about some organizations not directly related to Free Culture or Free Software?

• Amnesty International (AI)

Amnesty International (AI) is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights. AI s vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards.

Red Cross

The International Red Cross (and Red Crescent Movement) is an international humanitarian movement whose stated mission is to protect human life and health, to ensure respect for the human being, and to prevent and alleviate human suffering, without any discrimination based on nationality, race, religious beliefs, class or political opinions.

Watching my sister's Welsh boyfriend slowly learn Finnish, I'm reminded of the fact that the language is often considered difficult. At any rate, it is spoken by a very small percentage of the world's population. Some Finns therefore think they can safely use it abroad to talk about anything, even if it is embarrassing or sensitive. I've found that not to be true. There's other Finns everywhere. There's always someone who will hear and understand if you say something not meant for outsiders. A couple of anecdotes might prove this. In 1990, I was abroad for the first time, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, for an ACM programming competition. I and a team mate spent one evening in a local bar, talking with each other. After a while we were interrupted by a Finnish woman who lives in Eindhoven. Luckily, we hadn't said anything too bad, she just recognized fellow Finns and wanted to say hi. In 1999, I was in London for a conference, and had a bit of free time, which I spent walking on Oxford Street. At some point, I was walking behind two young men, in their early twenties. They were speaking fairly loudly, commenting on the physiological features of the woman walking in front of them. The woman eventually stopped, turned around, and started swearing at them. Loudly. In Finnish. My theory is that Finns are slowly taking over the world by spying on each other abroad. That's why there's always at least two Finns anywhere.