I am amazed by MIT's decision to move it's EECS curriculum away from scheme, doubly so at the fact that they're swapping it for Python. It has been part of their definition, at least in my mind. It makes sense to me, but I suppose I have some bias. I see it as a move from a language with deeper cognitive benefits to a language with stronger pragmatic benefits-- a move towards actually building things. Of course, it's just a language, and the same course could be taught with either one.

I tried to ask our cats if they felt threatened by CDBS. They didn't seem really worried.

I'm not sure if it is entirely fair to blame CDBS for complex packaging issues. If CDBS was not available, more maintainers would just cook up their own spaghetti packaging scripts. The balance needs to be somewhere between "everyone reinventing the wheel" and "frameworks that are harder to use than the raw stuff". Currently I would recommend only using CDBS for simple packages.

I've been pretty interested in making Web sites WebSoftwareFriendly for a while, so I'm pretty psyched to see that Yahoo and Microsoft have embraced the Google Sitemaps format. They've started a site for the format, http://www.sitemaps.org/ , which lists out the protocol, which seems to be unmodified from the original Google version. Sitemaps have been a necessary part of Web sites for years. Netscape -- back when it was a browser -- had an RDF-based sitemap format that had a brief flare of popularity just before Netscape went into its weird late-90s spiral. Then RDF people got really abstract and academic, and decided that sitemaps weren't what RDF was all about, and RDF sitemaps were forgotten. So sitemaps went off the air, and we've had to wait for a standard on the idea until today. Yahoo lets you submit sitemaps today, as does Google; Microsoft Live supposedly will support it sometime in 2007. One thing that's interesting is a new "ping" protocol, for when the site is updated. I'm not sure how well it works or if it's even implemented, but it's interesting to see it working. I think the weak part of this whole thing is that site owners have to submit sitemaps to each search engine; it would be nice if there were some sort of discovery, like an HTML <link> element, so that other types of Web software besides the big search engines would benefit. tags: sitemaps web software friendly yahoo microsoft google

Knowing when to hold 'em From O'Reilly's wrapup of the Web 2.0 Summit, I got a good link to some other Evan's Knowing When to Hold Em. It's a little discourse on the growth of Web 2.0 sites after they've been acquired. Evan Williams, the author and the guy who sold Blogger to Google, knows whereof he speaks. He has some graphs that show traffic for various Web 2.0 sites sloping precipitously upwards after their sale to some big company. The implication being, I guess, that the sites would have been more valuable to sell later. He also points out that few of the sites have benefited visibly from being acquired. I'm not sure the argument makes sense. Traffic is a cost centre as well as a potential source of revenue for companies. Keeping servers up, running, and cogent is hard work. Most small Web sites have been throwing labor and cash into their sites for a while, and the ability to keep such a site going into the Alexa top 100 is beyond most small companies. Paying for a lot of servers, developers, designers, sysadmins and bandwidth for another couple of years may make the site bigger and more desirable for acquisition, but it's a big risk to take. My favourite part of the discussion is that my friend Kevin Fox shows up at the end with some good points about when and how to invest. tags: web2con evan williams blogger traffic web 2.0 selling out

Free Software Java I've been programming in Java off and on since the first beta versions of the VM and JDK in 1995. The language has always had a certain cachet with the Open Source set -- the free-as-in-beer tools, good documentation, and cross-platform compatibility made it an Open Enough system, roughly equivalent to proprietary C compilers shipped with every Unix variant. Its release was roughly synchronous with the growth of the Web, and Java applet support in Netscape made the first round of rich client applications conceivable, if not exactly elegant. And then Java grew onto the Web server; and into other parts of the network; and then all of a sudden everything had to be Java. The system grew from this nifty little tool to The Enterprise Solution For Your Enterprise. Serious people worked on Java. I worked on Java when I needed to be serious. Java stopped being fun. Early efforts at getting Open Source Java VMs and development kits working were pretty successful, but they just couldn't catch up with the rapid pace of development on Sun's core product. But inclusion of the language in the Gnu Compiler Collection, the great JBoss J2EE system, the growth of Apache's Jakarta project, and the growing Java Community Process made Java less and less a regular product, built in a silo behind a corporate firewall, and more of an Open-Source-y project. So I guess it was inevitable that Sun would either Open Source its codebase, or end up irrelevant. They probably squeezed just about all they could out of it without going Free, so that's pretty impressive. I think Free Software advocates are supposed to be grateful about this; my main reaction is: why did you put everyone through all this crap for so long? You've wasted 12 years that could have gone into making Java really incredible. We'll see what happens. My main interface with the JVM for the last year or so has been through scripting languages like Rhino JavaScript engine (very fun) and Pnuts. Who's got time for Java programming any more? tags: java gpl jboss floss jakarta gcc jcp

Recently I read an amazing review of patient advocacy and health (counter)movements by Steven Epstein from the STS program at UCSD. It is still a draft but bound to be published in the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and when it is, anyone who works in this area will gain so much from reading the review. It was stunningly broad yet highly specific. He is able to synthesize an enormous literature on patient advocacy, a field that has seen a blizzard of activity, especially in the last twenty years. Along with providing points of entry and departure into the field, he also examines who the burgeoning interest in the field of STS. What I found interesting is that there is very little work being done on a topic I happen to know a lot about, lyme disease and whose politics I have been following since at least 1999. I am not sure why the lacuna but it is an odd disease dripping and screaming with controversy and seems to stand apart from many illnesses, in part because of its odd dual existence. On the one hand, it is an illness that the medical establishment totally recognize as real (and thus in some respects is unlike the class of syndromes from MCS to chronic fatigue, which another STS researcher, Joe Dumit provocatively describes as illnesses you have to fight to get ). But that is only half the picture because mainstream medicine tends think that lyme is not only easy to diagnose but also to treat, so much so that if a person thinks they have lyme (even after a round of antibiotics or lacking diagnostic markers), the are either seen as suffering from something else (and usually then told they have one of those highly contested syndromes), or more often just crazy. So it exists dually: at once recognized but only narrowly, so that in another form, that of chronicty, lyme cannot exist. It is this dual quality of lyme that defines and shapes its politics and just recently, new developments have fueled the controversy. Namely it follows from the Infectious Diseases Society of America new guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of lyme, published last month. In a nutshell, they basically re-reduce lyme to a very easily diagnosable and treatable illness, calling for even more strict guidelines for its diagnosis than now exist. They sanction a small range of blood tests and thus totally nullify the role for clinical diagnosis, which even the CDC had acknowledged as vital in times past. Unsurprisingly this has thrown the chronic lyme community in a total tizzy and they have not taken this sitting down. A petition has been launched and protests have been planned. And amid the controversy, politicians have already heard the call to arms. In the state where lyme is a famous entity for it was first discovered there, Connecticut, its Attorney General is calling for an anti-trust investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in essence for using their clout and prestige to legitimate a gold standard in diagnosis and treatment, when it seems far from obvious that this should be the standard. According to the LDA press release:

The national non-profit Lyme Disease Association (LDA), representing more Lyme disease patients than any organization in the United States, applauds Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for beginning an investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Lyme disease guidelines development process. In an unprecedented move, the Attorney General’s office filed a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to look into possible anti-trust violations by the IDSA in connection with exclusionary conduct and monopolization in the development of the Lyme guidelines

What I find so interesting is that this latest chapter in the grungy and torrid politics of lyme encapsulates the very nature of the politics of lyme, which really is about the agency of bacteria and in the Latourian sense. If Pasteur had to put a lot of effort into making credible the bacteriological model of disease as Brunto Latour covers in The Pasteurization of France and if there was plenty of future prostelyzing needed to bring credibility to the bacteria to more general publics, as Nancy Tomes illustrates in The Gospel of Germs, well now, I think we are in an era where we think we have such intimacy with the biological ins and outs of bacteria, it is almost impossible for the scientific community to imagine bacteria as such complex organisms that they can be in fact very difficult to diagnose, eradicate and treat. It is just no longer part of the basic conceptual universe of most doctors and medical researchers to think of bacteria in this way. The LDA press release acknowledges this very fact in the following way:

The October 2006 guidelines do not acknowledge that a complex bacterium such as the Lyme disease spirochete could possibly survive in the body and the brain, evading the immune system and short-term courses of antibiotics.

For many lyme researchers and doctors, since lyme is a bacteria and we know how to treat those pesky critters, it is frivolous to even imagine or contemplate otherwise. I would call this a hubris that arises not from the arrogance of doctors and the medical establishment but following the heels of success that medicine has indeed had with conquering the bacteria with antibiotics. Even new forms of poweful and highly resistanant TB are still treatable with a potent cocktail. That is, at a cultural level, I understand the blinders. At a political level, however, because people are suffering and because it is plausible that lyme can exist chronically, it is imperative to unseat this cultural comfort borne from past success to get the ball of research rolling anew. I think bacteria (and parasites for that matter as a recent smattering of articles demonstrate) are a lot more savvy creatures that should be treated as novel, wondorous creatures, once again. I would dare say the medical establishment, by refocusing energies on that which they think they have solved, would find themselves quite surprised. updateHere is an article discussing the issues.

While NMUing plays an important part in getting us to a release, as shown by the thousand or so fixed-in-NMU RC bugs that we recently cleaned up the BTS state on, it's evident after doing this whole release-managing thing for a while that there is a very high (non-linear) correlation between the age of an open RC bug and the likelihood that a release manager is going to have to touch it at some point in order to get it fixed. By and large, maintainers really do a good job of fixing their own packages, which is probably something we don't say enough - maybe 75% of all RC bugs, I'd guess, will (or would) get fixed by maintainers in the first week without anyone needing to poke them about it, and of the remainder, probably another 80-90% get taken care of by BSPers and serial-NMUers like bug-a-day mascot Steinar Gunderson. That's why I'm not bothered overly much by the idea of full-archive searches for hidden RC bugs, like Lucas's piuparts tests, affecting the release timeline, because I know that 95-98% of those bugs are going to be gone two weeks after they're filed anyway, especially when they're no-brainer fixes to maintainer scripts or dependencies. But then that leaves the other 2-5%, which are the ones nobody else has fixed. And why hasn't anyone fixed them? Because they're the hard ones, of course... So although I follow the debian-bugs-rc list and occasionally swat a few non-bugs closed to save the maintainers time, and also provide some nudges when it looks like a package is causing RC bugs to be filed on other packages, my goal for the last full week of my Dunc-Tank contract was to get the count of etch RC bugs unfixed in unstable that are 20 days old or older down from around 50 to under 30. This seemed a reasonable goal, since it had been at 80 the week before, and it would go a long way towards helping the real blockers on the release. Initially I was aiming to bring down the count of RC bugs unfixed in testing that are 20 days old or older to this number, but quickly realized that this wasn't going to be realistic because it depended too much on the autobuilders all operating optimally and there wasn't time to both help fix 20 of the hardest RC bugs and handhold 60 RC bugfixes into testing in one week. In the end, we did miss this lesser target by a day or two. Still not a bad week's work, given that I'm pretty sure I fixed about 20 of these bugs myself in that time period (through NMUs, removals, and analysis+downgrades) and they seem to average 3 hours of work for a fix. And we've been holding at or below 30 on this list of bugs since then, so we're successfully keeping up with new bugs aging past the 20-day mark, which is also a good sign. Unfortunately, I seem to have left myself to fix the alpha Xorg 7.1 bugs on my own time. :) By now the announcement has made the rounds that the release team doesn't think we can hit the Dec. 4 target date because more time is needed for a final release candidate of the installer. Does that mean that RC bugs were the wrong thing to be focusing on for the past weeks? Well, no; if you want one place in Debian where Brooks' Law holds, I think you'll find that getting a d-i release out is it, and we still have a hard road ahead to make sure we do get our other RC issues sorted out in the same time frame. The installer just happens to put a lower limit on a release date, we still have an opportunity to screw it up from there. ;) At least the statistics suggest that we're going in the right direction.

• bugs 20 days old or older unfixed in unstable: 28
• bugs 20 days old or older, including those fixed in unstable: 52
• bugs 10 days old or older unfixed in unstable: 40
• bugs 10 days old or older, including those fixed in unstable: 78
• all RC bugs in unstable: 138
• all RC bugs, including those fixed in unstable: 217

Only 13% of RC bugs fall into the "20 days or older and unfixed" category. Half of all RC bugs over 10 days old have a fix of some kind in unstable, and 64% of all reported RC bugs are less than 10 days old. We'll see whether this graph backs me up on this in a couple more days.

Over five years ago, I wrote a very simple web-based system. This system, however, did some basic client-side (Javascript, of course) validations before sending the data off to the server. And it worked nicely. On Linux, of course.
The system went live.
It worked correctly less than 1/10th of the time. Yes, somewhat strangely, quite close to the ratio of Netscape/MSIE users.
Yes, a Javascript coding bug.
The embarassment made me swear not to get close to Javascript ever, ever again.
Of course, we live in a world where idle loops get optimized and where infinite loops have an ETA, this had to change at some point. Earlier this week, I decided to unfuck a web layout that worked (again) correctly in Mozilla and KHTML, but horribly in MSIE. I didn't care before, because this layout was used on a production system at work, but its users were only two colleagues and myself - Only I'm about to put a public module up. I re-did the site layout and CSS (I cannot believe Dreamweaver code is that ugly!)... The only problem was, I now know, quite common: I needed equal height CSS-made columns. And although I had come to several pseudo-solutions, they all appeared pseudo-b0rked in one or more pseudo-browsers. The only way I found to get it working was to free myself from prejudices and go back to Javascript. BTW, the Javascript X library looks quite handy - but at over 50k, it's not something I'm terribly happy about including in a website.
What's next? Am I going to fall for coding over-AJAXy sites? I hope to maintain at least partial sanity.

ITP: retty says:

retty is a tiny tool that lets you attach processes running on other terminals. So you were running that mutt outside of screen at your home machine and now wanna check your mail? Attach it with retty, do whatever you want, detach it again and everything is as it was before. You don't have to run them all in screen just in case.

Daniel Jacobowitz analyzed the tool a bit:

What it seems to be doing is injecting code onto the stack which causes the target process to open your terminal and dup2 it onto stdout, stderr, et cetera. Interesting.

Interesting isn't really the word I'd use here. More like Eek! Incredibly ugly, but incredibly useful if it works reliably.

/me on the Relevance of CDBS Whoa, people discussing about CDBS, I can't help joining them. My position: I love CDBS. I started switching my packages to CDBS an year ago or so and nowadays I've almost finished. I understand that people not knowing CDBS might have trouble fixing bugs in my packages, but that's life and it's the same as having to fix a bug in a software written in a programming language you are not fond of. It's just a matter of setting a minimal standard: today people in the NM have to learn debhelper, tomorrow they will have to learn CDBS too. I think it's worth the effort, because CDBS, if used extensively in our archive, has the benefit of providing a single place where to massively make changes to potentially all packages of the archive. That's a huge win for QA in Debian. The same does debhelper, but it only takes care of technical aspects in the packaging process while CDBS also takes care of behavioural aspects. Of course CDBS has drawbacks and nuisances (the available hooks for examples are not properly standardized nor documented IMO), but I think it's a step in the right direction. In Debian we should push more and more toward the possibility of making changes in a centralized/batch manner, so that when maintainers tend to get MIA we have a quick and easy way to take over their unfulfilled duties. Collaborative maintenance is a social step in that direction, CDBS is a technical one.

I received a Freecom DVB-T stick last week (early wedding present). I've not actually played with DVB-T before, so I wasn't sure how much of a hassle it would be. My first act was to plug it into my laptop, with the aim of finding out the USB ID and thus which driver I'd need to compile up (I have a tendancy to build my own kernels with only drivers I think I'm likely to need). I did so and was greeted with:

dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: did not find the firmware file. (dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw) Please see linux/Documentation/dvb/ for more details on firmware-problems. (-2)
usbcore: registered new driver dvb_usb_dtt200u

Interesting, think I. I'm more organised than I thought and have already compiled up all the various v4l bits I thought I might end up using. So I go looking for the firmware file, find a copy, dump it in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware/. Replug the device. And get:

dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in cold state, will try to load a firmware
dvb-usb: downloading firmware from file 'dvb-usb-wt220u-02.fw'
usb 1-4: USB disconnect, address 15
dvb-usb: generic DVB-USB module successfully deinitialized and disconnected.
usb 1-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 16
usb 1-4: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
dvb-usb: found a 'WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)' in warm state.
dvb-usb: will use the device's hardware PID filter (table count: 15).
DVB: registering new adapter (WideView WT-220U PenType Receiver (Typhoon/Freecom)).
DVB: registering frontend 0 (WideView USB DVB-T)...

Rockin'. Now I need to tune it. I find Adam's DVB page which has the initial tuning file for the Tacolneston transmitter in Norfolk. I type scan uk-Tacolneston. It fails to find anything. I wonder if I'm using the wrong transmitter. I decide the supplied antenna is probably to blame and go to see about sorting out the one in the attic. I try again. I get a channels.conf containing 91 channels. Wooo. Copy this into ~/.mplayer/ and fire up mplayer dvb://. And have Freeview on my laptop. Nice. Unfortunately this requires me to have the loft aerial plugged into my laptop, which isn't very portable. Paddy tell me this will get better when the analogue transmitters get turned off and the digital power ramped up, so I look forward to that. Until then it should still prove useful to have a portable DVB-T stick - I intend to see if I can pick up BBC HD next time I'm staying in London, and check if Freeview coverage has made it to my parents' yet. Writing this all down makes it seem quite convoluted, but actually the process was a lot smoother than I expected; plug in stick, copy firmware, replug stick, scan for channels, watch tv. The issue that took most time to sort was the aerial. It's really quite cool to think about how easily you can get yourself an MPEG2 stream of TV to play with.

I've decided it's been enough. Rock has been running 2.6.12 for ages. Not because I didn't want to upgrade, but since 2.6.12 was the last Debian-packaged kernel that would actually boot on rock. You see, this machine is a rather old SMP system, and there seems to be something wrong with its interrupt system. It would boot if I used a uniprocessor kernel instead, but then it's pretty silly to have a box with two processors, and only use one of them... At first I ignored it, assuming it would get fixed some time soon. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. And since we're at 2.6.18 right now, and the kernel team has done away with uniprocessor or SMP-only kernels, that means I can't even upgrade to the latest kernel anymore, even if I'd want to. I've been using git-bisect for the last few days in an attempt to find the issue, so that I can report it... only today I realized that I did remember 2.6.13 not to work, but that perhaps it failed for reasons not related to my current problem. Downloading that package from snapshot.debian.net and verifying showed that this is, indeed, the case. Grmbl. So I had to start all over again... Not fun. After starting that, I suddenly found out that make-kpkg didn't want to be friends anymore:

LC_ALL=C make-kpkg --initrd --config oldconfig --rootcmd fakeroot kernel-image
exec debian/rules  DEBIAN_REVISION=2.6.13-10.00.Custom  INITRD=YES  ROOT_CMD=fakeroot  kernel-image 
debian/ruleset/targets/source.mk:34: *** target pattern contains no  %'.  Stop.
wouter@rock:/usr/src/linux-2.6$ 

Hate. Grmbl.

While anyone who has had a 1) medical condition and 2) access to Internet in the last five years probably knows that patients are increasingly using the net (and now google) to diagnose medical conditions, it is only now that the medial establishment is starting to recognize or really admit to the reality of this widespread phenomenon and even doing studies on them, such as the one released a few days ago by the BJP Googling for a diagnosis use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet
based study. The study sought to ascertain how effective google was as an aid in medical diagnosis. As various new outfits are reporting it is moderately high. What I love about this study and the corollary reporting is the naive tone they have to assume, transmitting the news as if the public knew very little about this, and would in fact, be induced into surprise!!!!!!!!!! when first facing the new. But in fact, I think it works in the opposite way. The surprise is that they took so long to admit to what was in front of us for many years now. While the news articles reporting on the study stay within the province of doctors, the report acknowledges, in fact opens with, the fact that patients may be forging the path in Internet-diagnosis. The authors write in their second paragraph:

It seems that patients use Google to diagnose their own medical disorders too. After evaluating a 16 year old water polo player who presented with acute subclavain vein thrombosis, one of us (HT) started to explain that the cuase of the thrombosis was uncertain when the patients father blurted out But of course, he has paget-von Schrotter symdnome. Having previously googled the symptoms, he gave us a mini-tutorial.. and the correct treatment for the syndrome. This experience led us to ask How googe is google in helping doctors to reach the right diagnosis

Again, what I love about the tone of this opening is that it is as if these doctors stumbled on a great but deeply hidden fact to make a breath-taking discovery, one that, however, since is it is SO very emergent and thus still not *really* verified by Science, they must proceed with great caution, qualifying with phrasees like It seems that patients use Google to diagnose their own medical disorders too . I am sure they and most doctors are personally are not so na ve but since this has been something virtually without no official acknowledgment among professionals and in the journals, the genre of writing just requires it to be framed cautiously. As fun to read are the comments, for they stretch from moral panic:

The implication that ‘googling’ be an adjunct to proper medical school training, continuing medical education through courses and reading peer reviewed journals is laughable and bordering on dangerous. I am shocked that this has been published by the BMJ.

to celebration:

For the modern dermatologist, the internet is indispensible and google is only the start, and for this reason a desktop computer with high speed internet access is an essential tool for all clinicians. Long live the information superhighway!

While others muse on the broader emacipatory possibilities

One can imagine the benefit to young doctor in developing country who now have access to a grand medical library in their hands.

I am especially interested in this very dynamic because it is one pillar propping my next project on psychiatric survivors, which exceeds the particular topic of challenges to psychiatry in its general focus on medical/patient reconfigurations following from Intent-based activism, self-help, diagnosis, and critique. And for those who think I have made a radical departure from my last project, here is where I see one (of two or three) threads of continuity: for patients are generating an enormous amount of amateur knowledge, that I think is not unlike the peer-to-peer production of software hacking, and it is a form labor usually accompanied by a strong critique of expertise and other medical practices. I am now reading some literature on patient activism, like the issue from the February 2006 in Social Science and Medicine that collects 11 articles on patient organization movements. For those who work on this topic, the collection is worth your while and the editorial introduction by Kyra Landzelius is stellar. It is not only written beautifully (which I think is rare for these openings because it is often a rote, unimaginative regurgitation but this was a pleasure to read) but provides an engrossing overview of some new trends and some of the diverging forms of politics that arise from what is really a motley bunch of organizations and contests in patient and anti-patient activsm. She opens by defining four spheres that shape and inform the forms of contents that are part and parcel of these patient movements, the four being: 1. Revolutionary feats in technoscientific engineering
2. Restructuring of healthcare systems across industrialized nations
3. A Revised contract between science and the public stemming from a criss of confidence in science
4. An upsurge in the articulation and diversification of health activisms (p. 530) These four are key but I was shocked that there was no specific inclusion—though it comes out plenty in the introduction in other ways of the Internet. For while I am no techno-determinist, the Internet I think, can’t be ignored for it has fundamentally changed the map and tenor of patient activism, allowing for more rapid connections between various stakeholders, providing a medium by which those officially unrecognized illnesses are given shape and form, and where an ethical cultivation of self-help, self-diagnosis, self-medication, along with copious critique and forging of alternatives is happening, right before our eyes, virtually in real time. It is the medium by which a new chapter of patient activism is being written and I think it is a real mistake not to give it serious attention and credit. And perhaps one of the most interesting things about it is that it without it, it would leave many otherwise home-bound, sick folks, without a medium by which to engage in political activity or even community self-help, for let’s face it, these take a lot time and energy. When you are sick and home-bound, for example, there may be a limited number of types of engagements you literally have the energy to partiicpate in and the Internet lowers the barrier of political entry because of its ease and because you can still type away, even when feeling otherwise totally awful… This may be a brute material point but nonetheless, key to understanding the political power of the Internet. Now of course the question left is will Google capitalize on this and create “Google Diagnosis”?

A while back, my brother's computer had issues. It would dump core of random programs, and would produce a BSOD under Windows at random times, too. Running memtest86 showed that something was wrong with the memory, so we replaced it. Unfortunately, that didn't help; so the conclusion I made was that there was something wrong with something between the processor and the RAM—the cache (L1 or L2), some data or address line degrading, or perhaps even the memory controller. In any way, that didn't matter; what mattered is fixing the issue. So we replaced the mainboard and the processor with something newer. He's now got a pretty modern mainboard, with all the interesting bits and pieces found in such a thing, and a Dual Core Pentium4 at 3.4Ghz. Occasionally, I must say that the socket 775 is pretty... weird. But I digress. Upon installing everything, I found that trying to run the system with broken memory had managed to corrupt whatever was on the hard disk; his ReiserFS superblock thought the filesystem was some incredible amount larger than it really was, and Windows would turn up a BSOD before even booting. The first was pretty easy to fix; I hit 'e' in the grub menu, added init=/bin/bash to the end of the kernel command line, and instructed some tool from the reiserfs toolkit to fix the filesystem. After that finished, and after a subsequent exec /sbin/init finished, Debian was up and running again. That took all of a few minutes. Having booted it, I proceeded to install the security updates that had accumulated for Sarge since the time his system had started to break down (which is a few months). Then I realized that I had to reconfigure the system to understand the new mainboard. Only that had already happened. Hotplug, discover, and perhaps some friends, had all done their work and there was nothing to be done anymore. Isn't that nice. The same couldn't be said for Windows. Booting from the install medium and choosing "recovery" in the install menu didn't fix things. Even reinstalling the system without formatting the hard drive didn't get us any further. The only thing we could do was to wipe the drive clean and reinstall. Windows better hardware support? My ass.

Last friday we masterized last iso images of Gluz 2, the GNU/Linux distro of the University of Zaragoza. This morning I've been testing them out and look ok. Just a couple of stupid bugs, so I hope to make the oficial release tomorrow in the morning. It's based on Kubuntu dapper, with some customized apps: ubiquity and an auto-configurator for the KDE PIM in order to use the University mail, jabber and wireless network. You can download *only today* the beta images from my home in pulsar. And of course some screenshots here. Enjoy !

We're back in Montreal again after more than two weeks in San Francisco. It was great being in the Bay Area, especially since this time of year in Montreal is kind of crappy. Cold rain knocks all the red-yellow-orange leaves off the trees and into the gutter, where they turn brown and gray. Everything's damp and muddy and icy, but there's no snow yet. Blech. Our friend John Usher stayed at our apartment while we were gone, which was great for us since he watched our cats. We had our regular Friday Night Pizza together last night at 9PM, after a very long day in the plane. Traveling eastward is hard on the sense of time. But pizza night made it a little better. We went up to Le Comptoir on rue Masson this morning for breakfast. It's a nice little place that you can always get into, regardless of the time of day (like, say, if you try going out for brunch at 11:30 on a Saturday...). The menu is a little too much in the Montreal Kitchen Sink style (10+ pages of every kind of food under the sun), but the b n dictines are good, they have mimosas, and they serve caf au lait in big bowls. So what's not to like? John rented a new apartment in Old Montreal while we were away. He's been a vagabond since early this summer when he left McGill and went back to his hometown of Beer in Devon. His new place is great -- 2000 ft top-floor loft around the corner from Basilisque Notre Dame. I plan to abuse his hospitality and throw big parties in his home, if I can get away with it. One nice thing is that he found the place on Montreal Craigslist. I think that's a pretty good sign that CL in MTL is becoming worth using, although they still don't have an interface in French. I don't know how you get away with an non-localized international Web site in 2006. tags: montreal john usher le comptoir old montreal craigslist i18n

Web 2.0 Summit Wrap-up LinuxWorld.com published my article on Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Conference, which I have to say I think is pretty OK good. I had originally written a gossipy article about who was where and who announced what and what it meant for Linux users and the Open Source community. Don Marti, who edited the article, didn't like it. He told me to identify the key technologies mentioned at the conference that people could actually use and should know about, and write more about them. So I did, and I think the article is much better for it. Days 2 and 3 of the conference coverage come out next week. I really liked writing about the Web 2.0 Summit; it gave me a chance to talk to people in-depth about their work. I didn't draw as much out of the conference itself as I would have liked, but by working press on it, I had to find stuff that interested me and communicate that interest. Which made it fun. tags: linuxworld.com web2con don marti web 2.0

Que Rico I'm pretty psyched that planning for next spring's Wikitravel Get-together 2007 is going so well. The Get-together (despite my finest effort, this seems to be the final name for the event) will be a convocation of Wikitravellers from all over the world on one spot to meet, talk about issues, but most of all, travel. Our chosen destination for this year's event is Puerto Rico (the product of a months-long selection process, with two rounds of voting). Our coverage of PR in English Wikitravel is sub-optimal, and we hope that by bringing a bunch of wiki people to the island for a week to hang out and explore, we can greatly improve the travel guide for this big area. Participants will be doing research before the event (April 14-22 2007) to determine those parts of the island that need better first-hand coverage. Then, we'll convene in San Juan (Puerto Rico) for a weekend before spreading out to cover the rest of the island. We'll meet back up in SJ the next weekend for some discussions and meetings before flying off to our respective homes. It should be a really fun trip -- I've never been to the Caribbean at all, and I think PR sounds like a really amazing place to visit. And I think this style of meetup for Wikitravellers could be super-fun for future events; it will be cool to see how this one goes. tags: wikitravel get-together puerto rico san juan

Poppies One endearing custom in Canada for Remembrance Day is wearing small, red poppies on one's lapel, evoking the classic Canadian poem ''In Flanders Fields''. It's a beautiful tradition, but hard to watch a bit on this day in 2006, when Canadian soldiers are being killed not in Ypres, but in Kandahar by, among others, heroin drug-lords, for whom poppies have other meanings. tags: poppies in flanders fields remembrance day canada afghanistan

2.6.18-4 was uploaded on Sunday and should be soonest available after dinstall run for most archs. The ia64 build failure is fixed in svn thanks to Thiemo Seufer (ths). alpha is waiting for an updated gcc (see patch in #397139). s390 is currently broken by vserver, patch is awaited soon. linux-latest will be updated tomorrow and expect soon a 2.6.18-5, once those issues are cleared.
linux-image-2.6.18-2- is the Debian kernel team stabilized kernel. Please install it and report eventual bugs. If you know a patch from Linus git tree that fixes your problem even better name it. Thanks for your testing!
We had been quite busy to feed stable with patches that fit the Documentation/stable_kernel_rules.txt. Goodies like Xen, drm-i965 or ahci backport are shared with Fedora Core 6 release. Beyond that for example the r8169 patch series or ccisss support for 2 TB volumes got backported. Out of reach are destabilizing patches like the new 2.6.19 ACPI patches. Further backports are planed for the SUSE reiserfs 2.6.19 patches and vorlon has a fix in the pipe for the vga console driver on alpha.

Tonight an European power blackout happened. Some problems in the connection between Germany and France make the network unstable. What is most interesting is that this also affected some Spanish regions and Madrid areas. A Spanish windmill power plant and a gas power plant were disconnected from the network. As Joey say, automatic disconnection of users from the network worked, and it never collapsed, but I am amazed how far the problem reached. Also, some of the problems that Joey describe were due to a lowering of network's frequency, below standard 50Hz.

I was too busy to read my favourite tech news the last few weeks. This sunday I finally started working on the backlog. Parts of it - I'm not going to try to catch up with Slashdot... And most of the time, I'm only reading the headlines, too. Most of the stuff here will be in German; since I'm also interested in the politics surrounding technology here in germany, a local ticker such as Heise is most useful for me.

• If you're living in germany, please sign the Petition against the use of voting machines in germany. Read my german blog post on it for the reasons why voting machines undermine democracy (short version: most citicens can't verify their vote was counted, or that the system is fair)
• Nvidia closed-source drivers had a security issue. German article on it. Another example why closed source drivers are bad - they don't get the security verifications and support that opensource software has. Apart from being badly integrated and less reliable.
• Google bought YouTube. IMHO a bad idea. YouTube is full of copyright violations, and there is not that much original content or community, actually. Having the financial background of Google, it's now much more interesting to actually sure YouTube.
• Buchpfade.de a community platform created by friends of mine, centered around books. Don't ask me about details, I havn't used it yet. I think you can see what your friends have been reading, and get some book recommendations based on the reading habits of others.
• Kiss or Diss
. Like Hot or Not, but with video. (aka: "totally better"). Though not too interesting for the tech crowd, it actually is quite addictive. The official launch should happen sometime the next few days.

the Novell and Microsoft deal: I wonder if it's mostly to show an act of good will, to calm Europe in preparation of the Vista release. This and the new API for third party security software may get them to launch Vista on time in Europe, too.

Contact information on web pages. May now be reachable with two clicks from the first page, if the wording is obvious. Germany used to require contact information to be reachable with a single click for commercial web pages.

Flash 9 for Linux. Beta. Closed source, and it frequently locks up my browser. Probably has a lot of security issues, too; so better use it only with flashblock, and load flash only from somewhat trusted sites. But it works, and it finally allowed me to see that I don't care about MySpace videos and similar crap.

New Ubuntu release. Congrats, but I havn't tested it yet. I considered going Ubuntu for some of my computers, but ended up with Debian on all of them. I just feel more at home here, and there is not much that Ubuntu has in extras for me that I really need.

My new laptop has harddrive encryption, and encrypted swap. Suspend works, thanks to David Härdemann for helping me with that.

I missed the Debian bug squashin party, which was kindly hosted by the LiMux team, responsible for the Debian Linux installation at the city of Munich. This deployment may become one of the most prominent examples of good Debian use: customized, to offer the best end user experience.

Debian renames firefox and thunderbird. Welcome iceweasel and icefox. The official mozilla stuff is somewhat written for Windows, and needs modifications for proper Linux integration. This violates Mozilla trademark policy. In fact, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions would have to do this renaming, too!

BenQ Mobile crash in Germany. IMHO this was planned by both Siemens and BenQ to get rid of "liabilities". Reminds me of the famous un-word "Kollateralschaden"...

Firefox 2.0 - does this mean it has more features I do not need? I'm using epiphany; it has almost all the features I need, but a much nicer, less cluttered UI. Some say it's also faster, and it's Gnome integration definitely is better. The only thing I sometimes use firefox for is the web developer extension, which is a really nice tool when you have to fight HTML and CSS.

Java to become OpenSource. Well, I hope they use a sane license... but at least that should finally clear up the licensing issues many people still see with current Debian Java packages. But I fear it might already be too late - Mono support has been better than Java for some time now.

(this could probably deserve a DWN entry) On Monday, 30 October 2006, Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (the principal archive of books and periodicals in the nepali language, a non-governmental and non-profit organization based in Nepal) released the 1.1 version of Nepalinux, a entirely localized version of GNU/Linux, based on Debian (and the Morphix installer) for use by Nepali-speaking users. This work is supported by the PAN localization project just like the DzongkhaLinux project is. In the case of Nepalinux, though, the project is supported locally by a NGO rather than the local government During last year, good connections have been developed between the developers of this localized distribution and the Debian project, mostly through work on Debian Installer localization. This confirms Debian as the preferred choice of many CDD developers in the region. The success of NepaLinux can probably be seen by all Debian contributors as a success of the Debian project.

Welcome to this 4th issue of the DeFuBu contest, the monthly championship of the funniest bug reported to the Debian BTS. The challengers

• Pierre Habouzit with #316531 (apt-listchanges: closes regex too strict), #390794 (apache2-mpm-prefork: /usr/sbin/apache2 not executable) and #393149 (uae: cannot open display)
• kolter with #390263 (uswsusp: "Linux" not capitalized in package description)
• Julien Louis with #31581 (project: Time between releases is too long) and #393083 (Hijacked website)''
• David Pashley with #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel)

How the vote has been done Four Debian related people voted for these bugs, Philipp Kern, Florent Bayle, Cyril Brulebois and Gregory Colpart.
Mohammed Adn ne Trojette should vote quicker next time. Full ranking Bugs

• #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel) (21 points)
• #393083 (Hijacked website)'' (19 points)
• #31581 (project: Time between releases is too long) (13 points)
• #390794 (apache2-mpm-prefork: /usr/sbin/apache2 not executable) (13 points)
• #316531 (apt-listchanges: closes regex too strict) (9 points)
• #390263 (uswsusp: "Linux" not capitalized in package description) (5 points)
• #393149 (uae: cannot open display) (4 points)

Challengers

• Julien Louis (32 points with 2 bugs)
• Pierre Habouzit (26 points with 3 bugs)
• David Pashley (21 points with 1 bug)
• kolter (5 points with 1 bug)

The winners

• Bug: #393511 (irssi should notice when you are typing something in the wrong channel) (21 points)
• Challenger: Julien Louis
• Bug reporter: Jason Spiro
• Voter: Florent Bayle with the nearest non-ordered quart : #393083, #393511, #390794, #31581

Notes To participate, simply drop me an email with a bug number. About DeFuBu