There's been a bit of a plot in the air at church this Christmas. Mystery. Intrigue. Conspiracy. Even some good-natured holiday ribbing. And it's my fault. So let me explain. A little awhile ago, my dad and I pooled some money and purchased a nice Nikon Coolscan V negative and slide scanner. My first batch of slides to scan on this consists of 3 reels plus one box of slides from the church archives, some 600 images or so. I've got 350 scanned so far. We'll be using these in the centennial book we're working on, and I'll burn some DVD-Rs for use by the church in the future. There are some real treasures in this set. Some extremely rare color photos of the old church building (torn down in 1965), including its interior. All sorts of people in their younger days, plus photos of quite a few people that have since passed on. There were also many photos from 1983 for the church's 75th anniversary celebration. It's safe to say that few, if any, people have laid eyes on these photos in the last 25 years. About two weeks ago, I was remembering how I surprised Aunt Viola by giving her a print of a photo of the choir she directed in 1946. It occured to me how many photos are in this slide set that people would love to see. I started thinking "Hmmm....." As I was sitting there scanning, I had lots of time to think. (Each slide takes about 3 minutes at 4000 DPI). I finally decided that I could make nice prints of these images by uploading them to a photo printing service. I'd surprise a few people with an anonymous gift of photos on Christmas. Well, a "few" grew into "as many as possible", and I wound up ordering 175 prints. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I ran into a problem early last week. I don't know who many of these people are, or who their relatives are that still attend our church. I needed help. I had to enlist my dad in my conspiracy -- he knows many of these people and who they're related to. With his help on Monday, we identified people in some 300 photos. I rushed to get them uploaded to Shutterfly and place an order with overnight shipping to make sure they'd arrive by Christmas. They finally did. Terah helped stuff envelopes while I sorted out the photos. Each envelope had the name of the recipients, plus "Merry Christmas!" written on it. Our names were nowhere to be found. Saturday afternoon, before the big Christmas Eve program, my brothers and I (who had heard the conersation with my dad, but were good at keeping secrets) helped me stuff mailboxes at church. We escaped without tipping anyone off to what we were doing. The Christmas Eve service came and went. I tried to listen for conversations about pictures, but didn't hear any. I was a little concerned -- hopefully people liked these photos. I knew that the moment my aunt saw her photos, she would be able to figure out it was me behind it, and would spread that, but I figured I'd remain anonymous for awhile. It's fun to keep people guessing. Well, I accidentally blew my own cover this morning. I asked my aunt about her pictures, but she hadn't opened the envelope yet. Oops. (In my defense, that's not very like her!) But it turns out that these photos have been a topic of many conversations over the past two days. Lots of 70- and 80-year-olds "blaming" each other for delivering surprise photos on Christmas. Wild speculation about who this anonymous Santa is. And where did these old pictures come from? Whose closets would still have such a thing? Plus, lots of checking to see exactly what photos each person got. (I tried to give people photos that would be meaningful to them -- friends, relatives, etc.) There was even some amateur handwriting analysis going on. Apparently nobody even suspected me at all. This was probably the most time I've put into a Christmas gift in a long time. But also the most fun and rewarding. I got to see somebody run out the church to show a picture of some high schoolers in 1965 to a friend before they drove off. This is what makes Christmas such a fun time of year -- touching someone's heart. The sort of thing that can't be found on any Walmart or mall shelf. I've never been able to give a meaningful Christmas gift to so many people before, and it is a really wonderful feeling to have surprised so many this year.

The script starts out small and does a single job. You realise that you can do so much more, so it gets bigger and more arguments get added to it. Passing more than four parameters, in the correct order, gets painful so you add some option parsing code. Suddenly the number of options grows, so you add a manpage to try to explain the parameters and what they are used for. Other people start using the script and wish to change the behaviour, so you add yet more command line switches and complexity. Gradually you realise your once-tidy script is now a complete mess, so you remove 50% of the code and move it into external “plugins”, or helper scripts. The small script is now much neater, but suddenly users cannot find the code they wish to change - they have to grep through all your helper scripts and plugins to find the code to change. Beacuse users cannot find the right code they submit patches making your script bigger and more complex. Repeat indefinitely. p.s. xen-tools 0.6 is out. It has plugins

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite. It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already. Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)). VPN I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet. Debian/Ruby It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues. For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

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Hindsight Lad 80% Dr. Strange 80% Galactus 50% Namor The Submariner 45% The Blob 45% Valid HTML Girl 35% Bicycle Repair Man 35% Tony Iommi 35% Action Man (With Super Kungfu Grip) 25% Q*Bert 25% Webmin Defender 5%

You are 15 minutes behind every trend.

Click here to take the "Which Superhero are you?" quiz...

Tom Short, author of Rpad, emailed me today saying that he was running the newest Quantian inside an instance of the free (as in beer) VMware Player. And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:

Grab the VMware Player

I tried the rpm first, but the installation needs some post-installation mojo for kernel modules, networking, etc which the alien-created deb did not provide. So take the tarball, expand it and configure the player running vmware-install.pl All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.

Adapt the definition of the .vmx file

Tom sent me this Quantian.vmx file based on something from Damn Small Linux. It worked for me (TM) -- accept the suggested creation of a new uuid.

Launch vmplayer

And select the (suitably adapted) Quantian.vmx. At the bootprompt, say 'knoppix' or 'linux24' And the bootprocess should proceed. Tom reported he also needed the Knoppix cheatcode 'noscsi'. I didn't.

I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not. All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes. Update: Fixed URL for the Quantian.vmx file.

Tom Short, author of Rpad, emailed me today saying that he was running the newest Quantian inside an instance of the free (as in beer) VMware Player. And indeed, lo and behold, it works. Quite well, actually. Hhere is what I did:

Grab the VMware Player

I tried the rpm first, but the installation needs some post-installation mojo for kernel modules, networking, etc which the alien-created deb did not provide. So take the tarball, expand it and configure the player running vmware-install.pl All defaults were sane on my Kubuntu desktop, no complaints.

Adapt the definition of the .vmx file

Tom sent me this http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/computers/linux/debian/quantix/Quantian.vmx file based on something from Damn Small Linux. It worked for me (TM) -- accept the suggested creation of a new uuid.

Launch vmplayer

And select the (suitably adapted) Quantian.vmx. At the bootprompt, say 'knoppix' or 'linux24' And the bootprocess should proceed. Tom reported he also needed the Knoppix cheatcode 'noscsi'. I didn't.

I then tried to be cute and started two Quantian instances (which can be done if you copy the .vmx file to a new file), started both in kernel 2.4 and tried openMosix, It didn't start immediately, presumably because the test for /proc/hpc got tricked by the /proc filesystem of the non-openMosix host. A quick 'mkdir mfs; /etc/init.d/openmosix start' later, things started to roll. However, while the two machines 'saw' each other, no actual job sharing seemed to occur. They also did not 'see' the laptop running outside the hosted VMware setting even though all machines were on the same 192.168.1. subnet. Maybe a simple configuration issue, maybe not. All in all, a pleasant surprise that I was able to set all this up in a couple of minutes.

I'm working on new fuse (filesystem in userspace) packages and I really wonder if I should simplify their postinstallation procedure as it was mentioned in #337572. That would make my life much easier, cause there's quite many bugreports against undefined behaviour of post-debconf tasks, which are pretty hard to track for me. In fact I suppose that most users simply accept default answers so asking them about anything seems to be overhead.
Let's assume I will remove these superflous questions... now the problem is that if someone answered for them in some previous installation then I could leave unneded group and some config files on their systems. On the other head removing this group could even lead to nonworking system because of one of these bugs: #307624, 307627, 306281.
I'm quite confused what to do now. Both solutions have some advantages and disadvantages. First one at least could lead to less bugs in the future. Hints welcome.

To Wouter: No, I never used anything else than CVS for everything serious. Whenever I tried any of them for something (mostly because someone else used it for something I wanted to work on) they simply broke. I don't want debug my tools or use funny workarounds but get some work done on what I use the tools for. Using anything not in a Debian stable release is hardly acceptable for me (remember, it are tools), but when then even when the testing or unstable versions are not enough for simple tasks, it's just too bleeding edge for me.

"only suggests you haven't seen many large projects in the heat of code change"

That's simply a matter of style. If a checkin means a full compile, manually reading the diff and a minimal checking for correctness, writing Changelog entries and possibly adopting the documentation there is simply no need to handle checkins with a sub-minute resulution.

"Far too often have I seen people afraid to reorganize their code because that would lose history on the files."

That's a major problem, but the problem is the fear. No rcs will ever be able to track history for even most common possible reorganisations of code. Limiting yourself to what your rcs can cope with is the main problem, the abilities of your rcs are a minor one.

"How about the fact that upstream CVS development is rather extremely dead, [...]"

I prefer tools being able to do what I need over tools that will be able to adopt my needs normaly. Active development means when I encounter a bug I either have to wait a year until it does no longer bother me, or wait a week and update software on every computer I want to use on, possibly localy in my user account if I do no administrate the computer or the behaviour changes so much other usages are broken. Leading to problems to live within my disk quota and so on.

Don't understand me wrong, I'm not against SVN. I guess now (several years after everyone was already told to not use that old fashioned CVS, but not SVN version N but version N+1, because N was too brokenr; for several versions of N) it is quite useable. And things like atomic commits might even make it favoruable over CVS for larger projects. But not every project can be within the top ten list of size, coding and commit styles differ. But I believe for many people, the ratio of advantages to disadvantages still points into another direction.

Or: Why you should move away from Microsoft. Now. Visual Studio 2005, the new version of Microsoft's development tools, is coming out. Among its new features are Branching, Bug Tracking, and Atomic Checkins. Yes, that's right: Anno 2004, Microsoft still did not sell a version control system that had something as basic and important as branching. Kinda reminds me of the time when Microsoft implemented a telnet service for Windows right around the time when the UNIX world finally decided that telnet and RSH are insecure by design and that you should use SSH instead. If Microsoft keeps lagging behind on such fundamental issues, you shouldn't be using them.

Reading about California’s execution of Tookie Williams Monday night, it occurs to me that there are two categories of death penalty supporters:

1. People who don’t understand the legal system. If you’ve never sat through a criminal trial (or several), you can’t possibly understand the uncertainties in every case, including those cases that the press paints as “open and shut” (e.g, the O.J. Simpson Trial). Human fallibility permeates the process: the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the witnesses, the jury, and the judge. Sometimes it reduces to a question of whom to believe, and the legal process is not necessarily the most effective way to answer that question if your goal is to get to the truth. Sometimes “what happened” is actually pretty clear, but it still seems like fitting square pegs in round holes to match the facts of the particular case to the abstract categories set up by the law. The other thing that should be abundantly clear to anyone who has participated in or witnessed a criminal trial is that degrees of potential punishment have only a minimal impact on an individual considering a crime. For the most part, those individuals just don’t expect to get caught (or they aren’t thinking about it at all). I would be shocked if anyone could prove a crime was deterred because the death penalty was a potential punishment for the act in question, rather than, e.g., life in prison. It should be obvious that people who commit murder are generally not rational beings, weighing their options and the potential consequences. Certainly, there is no statistical correlation between increased application (or availability) of the death penalty and decreased violent crime.
2. People who use the death penalty for political advantage. These people, mostly politicians, may or may not appreciate the fundamental problems of the death penalty, but realize that most people do not understand the criminal justice system, and that taking a pro-death penalty position will communicate a message that they are doing their utmost to reduce crime and make people safer (regardless of whether or not that is actually true).

Are there any death penalty supporters who don’t fit into those two categories? Perhaps certain victims and their families, who view the death penalty as necessary to reestablish some sort of karmic balance in the world and “put the whole thing behind them”?

Josselin Mouette has thrown down the gauntlet -- Subversion is the One True Revision Control System and we should all just Stop Worrying and Learn To Love The Handcuffs. In particular:

[...] just use subversion, and if you feel it's missing features, please contribute them. By standardizing on subversion, we lower the barrier for people wanting to contribute, instead of increasing it by asking them to install and understand new tools.

Quick thought experiment, Josselin: replace "subversion" with "Java". Or "Perl", or "C", or even "Python" or "Ruby". Or any other language. It doesn't matter which one. Even if the language you substitute is a good one, and one you happen to like, it's still a fairly obviously braindead idea -- that there can possibly be One True Programming Language for all problems, and that there can never be any improvement that can't be bolted into the existing OTPL. Revision control isn't so much different from programming languages. Different systems will provide different advantages and disadvantages. There's also incremental and revolutionary improvement that will take place over time -- machine code to symbolic to procedural to object oriented -- that can never take place within the established framework. I happen to really like the distributed model -- it reduces (though, naturally, cannot eliminate) the division between the Blessed and the Peons in a project (those with direct commit access vs. the rest of us). You can get disconnected operation for (almost) free. Also, despite the assertions contained in your article, the "barrier to entry", ironically, is actually lower with a good distributed RCS than with Subversion. The barrier isn't what you think, though -- sure, using an unfamiliar RCS is troublesome, but it's a lot less hassle than learning a new language, and people do that on occasion to hack on a particularly interesting problem. The real barrier to entry is forcing anyone who isn't blessed with direct access to The One And Only Repository to use inferior development support tools. "An example!" I hear you cry. Gladly. This morning (literally) I got enough of a handle on the internals of Ruby on Rails to actually track down a bug that was irritating the crap out of me. Being a good developer, I wanted to use revision control to track my changes. In the All Subversion, All The Time "utopia", that would involve getting an anonymous checkout, making a copy, hacking on the copy, then (when all was done) running diff -urN between the original and the copy, and sending it all upstream with a manually-created log message (assuming I could remember everything I'd done). You also need to manually remember (or encode it in your directory or something) the source of your tree, so upstream can merge it reliably (and compare it against other equivalent work that may have been done in the meantime). Doing it better, I could do an anonymous checkout, and then import it all into a new Subversion repository (or directory) of my very own, and hack on it in there. Benefit: revision control of my changes. But it's non-trivial to create a new repo and import everything into it, and there's still no automatic record made of the upstream source of my new repo. Wanting to make a second change is even worse -- I either have to make a whole new copy of my source tree (disk is cheap, but this is getting silly) or just keep forging ahead with changing my existing tree -- so this second set of changes can end up being dependent on the first (which is Not So Great if upstream don't merge your first patch). In the "new repo" scenario, you can branch from the root of your new repo and continue hacking on your newly created branch, which is a good start, but it's still icky. And good luck having the system track new commits from upstream while you're working, too. If the project was using a DRCS, in contrast, the problem would reduce to making a branch into your local archive, hacking (committing at will), updating with new upstream commits as you go along, and then publishing your changes to a public place for reintegration (or, in some cases, sending your changeset via e-mail). Oh, and before anyone starts screaming "if anyone can branch, it will encourage forking!", consider which is more likely to result in a permanent fork (rather than a temporary independent line of development): a local set of changes in a tarball or local subversion repo, both of which are hard for anyone else to collaborate on without major pain; or a branch in a simple-to-publish (or push) designed-to-be-shared DRCS archive, which automatically keeps all of your interesting metadata intact and coherent across archives, merges, time, and space (and possibly even dimensions). This utopia doesn't really exist, and is hampered by everybody having their own Pet DRCS, but the problem, I'm fairly sure, is transient, and my main point isn't even so much against the choice of Final Ultimate Solution, or even the problem space, but more about the attitude that everyone should get behind Any One System and stay there. I can't imagine the world of pain we'd be in if Josselin had posted his message a few years ago (but with s/subversion/CVS/i, naturally) and everyone had followed his advice -- can you imagine per-file changesets with no effective merge capability for the rest of eternity? <shudder />

Thomas, don't feel bad if your Spanish doesn't work out sometimes. You'll remember how badly mine sucked. But nothing compares to the last time I was in a non-English-speaking country: I was at a bar, and pointed to the postmix Coke tap with the Coke logo on it, and said 'Coca-Cola'. Got asked small or large, figured I'd succeeded, motioned large with my hands. What I ended up with was the largest cappucino-like drink I've ever seen in my life, which was exactly what I wasn't looking for. Next time at the same place, I was a little more careful when asking what I wanted, and the dude behind the counter, without batting an eyelid, said, 'oh, you want Coke?' in a pretty flawless accent. Egads.

 Anyway, I think Portugal is not, at all, a small team, and I think, on group D, is the one that we have to pay more attention. Iran qualified as the 3rd out of 4 on the Asian seats, and we cannot minimize them, neither. And Angola qualified as the first of their group on the African zone; they made 21 points, just behind Côte d'Ivoire. Group D is a hard group, yes it is. In case Mexico qualifies to the second stage, the 1st and 2nd place of group D would go against 2nd and 1st places (respectively) of group C, where I, personally, fear Argentina :) Go Mexico! :) 

Well. I discovered this evening that my underwear has been rotated for me for the last three years. My wife and I were innocently discussing her tendency to make organized piles of things. Then this conversation happened: Terah: And I also rotate your underwear. Me: (laughing) Really? Terah: Of course. Me: (laughing uncontrollably for awhile...) So does it get rotated every 6,000 miles like tires or what? Terah: (pretending not to get the joke) No! Me: Why do you rotate it? Terah: So it all gets worn evenly. But you mess up the plan because you don't always take underwear from the front left pile first! Besides, you wouldn't want any underwear to be left out. Me: (just understand that I'm laughing pretty much this entire time...) How long have you been doing this? Terah: Since I started doing our laundry. (That would be since we moved to Kansas 3 years ago; I did our laundry before that.) Me: So do you rotate your own underwear? Terah: Oh, of course, I've been rotating mine for years. Me: How many years? Terah: Hmm, about 11. Me: So do you have a specific rotation plan? Terah: Yes! Each week, the 2nd-row right pile moves to the 1st-row left pile, the first row middle pile moves right, and the 1st-row right pile moves up. The left two piles on the 2nd row never rotate. (Initially, I wrote: "Each week, the 2nd row-left pile moves down to the front-row left, and everything else moves around, except the third row, which doesn't fit as well and never goes in the rotation." But Terah reviewed this before I posted it, and said: "There is no third row. You don't even know how many rows of underwear you have!!" Terah says that what I've written now still isn't quite right, but it's close. I guess I may never understand all the theory behind proper underwear rotation.) Me: So is there a set number of pairs in each pile? Terah: Yes. Three. But sometimes you mess that up because you throw away worn out underwear. Me: So what all gets rotated? Terah: Well, your underwear, my underwear, bath towels, kitchen towels, your t-shirts, and I used to rotate my socks but I don't anymore. I probably rotated them for about 9 years. Me: So I'm supposed to start taking underwear from the front-left pile each week. What happens after I have used three pair? Terah: Well, you move to the front center, then front right, then you go to the back right and work your way back left, making a circle. Me: This is great. I'm going to have to blog about it. I think I should take a picture of my underwear drawer and post it. Terah: But why are you laughing so hard? It's not really funny.

Apparently Microsoft has pushed back the beta Test of their upcoming Internet Explorer 7, which was expected to be released today. So Microsoft doesn't deliver. Again. The XBox 360 apparently has heat issues and is crashing a lot for some users. Also it has been said that Microsoft is losing quite some money with each unit sold - they are aggressively trying to obtain market share. "Vista" was stripped of all the interesting features, apparently all that is left is a prettier UI with tons of effects (and requring a DirectX 9 capable graphics board). The big feature enhancements like WinFS will not be included and will take at least one more year to be ready for beta... "Windows Live" and "Office Live" (which are neither Windows nor Office) don't live up to their names either: They are just web-based add-ons, even supporting Firefox, and offering pretty much the same as Yahoo and other portals do as well as an online version of SharePoint apparently. They are a meagre attempt of Microsoft to be not totally left behind by Google when it comes to web applications. Heck, these could (and probably are!) be from some other company that Microsoft just bought. The new office version of Microsoft fancies again mostly a new UI, that will be very different and probably confuse users a lot (especially if they have to alternate between office versions); Microsoft also has the reputation of breaking it's own file format again and again; the new office will use an incompatible file format again. The UI also doesn't help people to give their documents a more semantic meaning (for efficient processing by automatic tools such as desktop search engines), but will be more visually-oriented than ever (i.e. styles such as "headline" which do add a semantic meaning are degraded as "quick styles", whereas the bold- and underline buttons are more prominent than ever - good bye, corporate design!) Microsoft has been promising lots of new stuff recently, but has it showed any? Where is Microsoft Windows for Supercomputers? They are totally under control by Unix and Linux. Linux is gaining on Mobile phones and embedded devices. When was the last time you read about WinCE? Heck, even the WiFi network at Microsoft is now powered by Linux...

At the end of an interesting piece on permissions, Joey Hess concludes:

I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year).

I think Joey’s focus on “unix permissions” is a bit misleading; you could make the same argument more generally by talking about permissive and restrictive regimes. Permissive systems have the obvious risk of vandalism in various forms, whether deliberate and malicious like adding false information to wikipedia, or well-intentioned contributions that are low quality due to simple ignorance or carelessness. On the other hand restrictive systems have the somewhat subtler risks that good contributions will be turned away because the restrictions are more effort than they’re worth, and that the time it takes to administer the restrictions start detracting from the time to actually do the work in the first place. So obviously there’s a tradeoff. But as well as that, there are ways of easing both risks: the risk of vandalism can be overcome if the stuff isn’t relied upon too heavily and can be changed relatively easily – so problems in unstable aren’t much of an issue since they can be fixed in a day, and don’t affect people running mission-critical systems because they should be using stable or testing or similar. Likewise, managing restrictions can be distributed too: the new-maintainer process is a good example of that, in that a range of people are involved in helping people pass through the qualification round, and in that sponsorship allows people who haven’t passed through the main lot of restrictions to get their contributions in by going through a different process. One interesting approach, to my mind, is worrying less about permissions and more about space – so that different people with different ideas on how to do things can do them independently. That’s part of the idea behind usertags and usercategories: rather than having people try to find an imperfect compromise, let them work on the same stuff in the way they actually prefer. That reduces the risk of carelessness, in that you stop having any reason to bother other people, and also reduces the problem of restrictions, in that if you don’t have permission to work in someone else’s area, you can just setup your own area and work there. Perhaps the worst problem is if the drawbacks feed on each other: a restrictive system turns away contributions, which causes prospective contributors to get frustrated and hence careless, which then reinforces the reasons that the restrictions were put their in the first place and diminishes the chance they’ll be reconsidered. That’s a hard cycle to break, but it’s not one where anyone really wins. I’ll leave the last word to Joey:

Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. […] The challenge, then is to find ways to open things up to everyone, without throwing security out the window. It has to be done a piece at time, and some of the pieces that are left are the ones most resistant to this change.

In 1999 I went to LinuxTag as a Debian representative after the project has received an offer to staff a booth there. I took over the maintenance and organised the first Debian meeting in Germany. I also gave two talks during this event, one of them was even repeated on the second day. We've had a lot of fun and since this was the first meeting of Debian affiliated people in Germany, it was very interesting to connect faces to mail addresses and to learn more about the people behind a name. This LinuxTag was the last such event that took place at the University Kaiserslautern. Free projects such as KDE and Debian have been offered a booth in one building from which one could reach the lecture rooms, while company booths were located in the Mensa building with their own professional booths. It was a warm weekend and the Jolt people have supported us with cool and caffeined drinks. We had the opportunity to use a lecture room for sleeping with other project members. Klaus Knopper was supporting the network and supervised the security team, and hence, had the unfortunate job to move away all project members from their booths, out of the building or into the lecture room. I've heard, that he had a hard time, and still believes that Debian people don't need sleep. I guess we should have moved him into the lecture room for a sleep instead. This '99 LinuxTag was quite a real success. It took place at the rise of the dot com era and all people were happy about the event. There were about 7,000 visitors in total on both days. The city of Kaiserslautern has called the university several times since there were no free hotel rooms anymore. Former events happened more or less unnoticed by locals, but not anymore in 1999. After the show was over, we dismantled the booth, moved away our own equipment and left the place. However, I made the "mistake" to notice that the LinuxTag people, who have provided us such a great opportunity, still had work to do since they had to dismantle the booth system and clean the ground floor. My biggest "mistake" was that I didn't run away and have a nice evening but decided to help and ask other booth members who were still around to do the same. Having cleaned up the location quite fast was not the only result. Oliver Zendel, who was in charge of talking to the community and who offered Debian the booth, spoke to me afterwards and wondered whether I would be interested to join the team. Well, I knew how to organise stuff, can talk to people, know quite some people in the community, the LinuxTag people were a cool team, so why not. So for the event in 2000 I was in charge of the projects exhibition. In 2000 we also had to move out of the university of Kaiserslautern since 7,000 visitors were already too much for that small university and city. That's why we eventually moved to the Stuttgart fair. That was an interesting experience. It was also interesting to see how such an event can be organised by a team of friends and how the acceptance in the business world was. In Stuttgart we were able to use a small office (max. 15m ) for the entire team as working space. Two computers were installed which we were allowed to touch but not to install a real system on. Hence, Klaus brought Knoppix CDs. This was the first time that I learned about the Knoppix Live CD. Together with my notebook we've had three desks and could work. However, today I really wonder how this could have worked with so many people, but apparently it really did. Due to the need and my experience in both talking to the press and being the press I joined the LinuxTag press team and even held the final press conference, while my colleague held the opening press conference. So after all projects were happy, the show went fine and most of the office jobs were done, I prepared a press release together with others and maintained the final conference. This was also the first time LinuxTag has organised a business congress as a special extra program for business representatives. It was also the time I experienced the need for several supporters for various tasks. In that year, a dozen supporters were paid as "security" who also drove the shopping for us. Hence, I already acquired some people who supported us as volunteers. That was also the time when Benny joined the team. In 2000 the exhibition boomed and there were a lot of large dot com company booths, which was very nice because LinuxTag arose from a students association and became more and more professional, a platform for both companies and projects. It was organised just like a Free Software project and worked non-commercially. Despite several flame wars and disputes, which seem to be normal, it was organised by friends who believed of a higher goal. It was very nice and gave me a warm feeling when looking at what we have achieved. However, I had nothing to do with commercial interests, income, acquisition, invoices etc., so I may have missed a lot. This year, LinuxTag was planned to take place in one exhibition hall, but there were so many companies interested in running a booth that a second exhibition hall was later rented as well. That's why there were two adjacent halls instead of one large location. In 2001 we were using a different exhibition hall, a larger one due to the strong demand in 2000, but still at the Stuttgart fair. This time I was also in charge of the supporters and already dispatched jobs during the event. From time to time I also maintained the shuttle service to the airport to pick up speakers or take back speakers, which I've also done in 2000. This time we've had a larger office in which all of use fit and which was a nice working atmosphere. We were also able to provide more booth space to Free Software projects. In that year I've automatically taken over the office and communication with the outside world, collecting and distribution information. I don't think this was planned, but it just happened since I was able to do the job besides my other obligations. I also gave a talk about Debian, even though others in the team considered me insane for doing that as well. With a lot of help by the local user group, we were able to offer project members a cheap sleeping opportunity. The LUG acquired a gym hall during the night an cooked in the student's office "Hellblaues Nilpferd". After I've picked up Hans Reiser I went there for a snack with him before dumping him at the hotel. It was a nice atmosphere. One of the lead people for this effort, Hubert Kai er, was suddenly overtaken by death two weeks ago. In 2002 LinuxTag moved to Karlsruhe and thus to a new fair where everything had to start again from zero. We had to get acquainted with the local company and their representatives and learn how the new fairground works. The fairground was more interesting since there was a large open area between the conference site and the exhibition hall. Looking at past years, it was used by visitors. Thanks a lot to Jochen Topf from GUUG and members of the local user group KaLUG a lot of community events happened during LinuxTag. They maintained an Internet caf in the conference building and organised the legendary KaLUG party which has become a regular LinuxTag event. In addition to that I've also worked more and more and took over more areas where I noticed help was needed and that I could manage it. So it happened that I took over more work at and before LinuxTag which finally resulted in two months of work were I don't remember a day on which I've worked less than 8 hours for LinuxTag in 2005. In 2002 I worked on the coding marathon and delegated the tasks and support during LinuxTag to two other people, so it will run independent of me. Since I was the first of the team to arrive in Karlsruhe, I also built up the office and the storage. Due to the large distance I had to leave Oldenburg the day before I want to arrive in Karlsruhe, so that I was at the fairground at last at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Before the event a lot of issues had to be negotiated with various parties, which required quite a lot of work. Until 2004 the entire team was working in their spare time without getting paid for their LinuxTag work. The higher goal was the impulse and all of us had neglected one issue or another that wasn't important for LinuxTag. We've had some external service providers at least since 2002. The acquisition became a difficult task for students who liked to work until the morning and get up at lunch time, since many companies expect a partner that is available for them from 9 to 5. That's why Charter was eventually hired and this year ergomedia. For press work newthinking was hired. This year the social event was also organised by them. However, having two people from the board of directors being paid by the association for their LinuxTag work from April, and external service providers that were also paid, was something I considered problematic if not unfair, looking at how other people commit to LinuxTag and don't get a monetary compensation. Several people still worked a lot on LinuxTag in their spare time and had to live from something as well. It caused resentment in the team.

As I've previously said I bought a http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com/ Port g R200 a few months ago. It's lovely and wonderful and makes my old laptop (a Compaq N200) look tiny, but is still quite small. However I discovered it wouldn't hold charge. If I unplugged it and used it I'd quite happily get 3-4 hours use off the battery, but if I charged it up while off, then unplugged it (leaving it off) and didn't touch it for a couple of days it wouldn't power on and needed fully charged again. This is a bit of a bummer, but I hadn't got round to sorting it out as I wasn't finding it too inconvenient. I decided I should really get it dealt with before I go back to my parents' for Christmas, so rang up Toshiba's repair line a few weeks ago. Told them what the problem was and they said they'd ring back in the morning to arrange a pickup time. Except they actually rang back that afternoon. It was too late for collection the next day, but they said they'd pick it up the following day in the afternoon. Also I wasn't to pack it or provide any of the accessories; just the bare laptop. Handy. Lo and behold the nice man from DHL turned up when Toshiba said he would, had a piece of paper with the right reference number on it (though in quite small print) and didn't want the laptop packed up as he had a suitable box already prepared. Time passed and I heard nothing. I was getting a bit worried, but Tosh say it can take 5 working days and it hadn't been that long (and given the nature of the fault I guessed they'd need to charge and discharge to check). But it was a bit weird that they'd not asked me to do any of the stupid things you're normally asked to do. (Have you rebooted? Reinstalled? Repented?) Plus the laptop only has Linux on it, so I was worried they'd be freaked by that (though they'd been fine when I mentioned it on the phone). It came to day 5 and I decided I'd ring them the following day. And then the nice man from DHL turned up with a big, well padded, box containing my laptop. At first glance it appeared to only contain my laptop, but when I opened up the laptop there was an A4 sheet saying that the battery had been replaced and the BIOS upgraded. Since then the laptop has actually held charge, so it looks like they did the job. So, congrats to Toshiba. More communication would have been nice, but it got fixed, you didn't wipe my Linux install (though I'd backed it up and removed any personal data anyway) and it was done within the period you claimed. I've not had to get a laptop fixed before, but iDunno hasn't had fun with Acer in the past, so I was prepared for the worst.