Search Results: "zed"

6 January 2006

Erinn Clark: Standby passengers love me

Usually waking up an hour after your flight has left is a bad sign -- like, a sign of imminent doom, that things are about to get horribly worse. At least, that's how it usually feels and this being the third 6:25am flight I missed in 2005, I was well-accustomed to that feeling. Luckily I got re-routed through Tampa, then Los Angeles, and I finally ended up in my San Jose, CA destination with a lovely Val awaiting me. She seemed shocked; said I was far shorter than she expected, then she realized I was walking with a group of Stanford basketball players and that, though they dwarfed me, I still managed to have at least an inch on her. (Val is "5'9 and three quarters!", according to her.) A lot of the visit was a bit of a blur. After arriving, I quickly showered, and was promptly told by Val that my skater rat apparel just wouldn't do and that our New Year's Eve party was meant to be dressy. A black shirt and some funky necklace managed to placate her, luckily, as well as my excuse of having just flown in from out of town with no instructions to dress pretty. Off to the party, where I met a load of brilliant and entertaining people, including Lina who was positively heartbroken by the lack of fireworks.
Lina and me in the ballpit The next day included eating vegan duck for breakfast, visiting Google offices for fun (not profit), getting lost with Val in some frightening redwood forest, Indian food in SF with Janet, Jen, and Val. Actually, the Indian food might deserve an entry of its own -- the owner of the restaurant actually spoonfed me, which was bizarre and funny. Afterwards, we went to visit Kristal and laughed at various things, including the most hilarious website ever. "Oh yeah baby, check out my throughput." Of course, that feeling of imminent doom was not entirely wrong. I contracted some kind of California Plague while there and spent my flight back doubled over with body aches, fever, and chills. Overall, well worth it. Happy New Year, everyone!

4 January 2006

Alexander Schmehl: Back from holidays! Couldn't you just have mailed?

Well... a week ago I thought, that when I would be back, I would write an other personal blog entry. After I already told you, that I was quite nervy meeting her parents, I could tell you now, that everything went quite well, and that we had quite some fun. But getting back, I was confronted with a not so nice thing, which tainted my mood a bit. So no details, just a complaint. Well, but one step at a time. First a small explanation: I help a bit organizing the DebConf-6. I'm member of the "review committee" whose job was to discuss the proposals we got in answer to our Call for Papers. After that we accepted and rejected different proposals, and didn't get any feedback at all. Well, we did that short before Christmas and then half of us went to holidays. I was one of them, and managed to check my emails from time to time, without receiving any comments about the decisions we made. Therefore I thought everything was quite well, until I retourned. Then I got back, connected to my irc client (where I was logged in all the time, but was marked as away), and saw a small note in my awaylog, asking me for some rational about something mentioned a few lines earlier. I didn't know about what - I just log someone mentioning my name or some keywords (e.g. packages I maintain or am interested in). Sounded somehow important, so I asked back what the questions was. Soon I got informed, that there were complains about a talk proposal we rejected. After a bit confusion (according to my memory and some note we indeed accepted the talk), we found out, that we did a small mistake in the database, so the submitter of that specific proposal got the wrong mail telling him the proposal was rejected. Not a big problem; we could still mark it as accepted and send them the information the other accepted proposal got. So at this point you might wonder, what the big fuss is all about. Well, first of all: The complains about the rejected proposal reached us by luck. Luckily I was in the channel, where the rejection was discussed. Luckily I was connected at that time. Luckily my irssi didn't crashed. Luckily I checked my awaylog carefully. Luckily I was informed about the whole matter. Luckily we could solve the problem. After nearly two weeks I thought everything was fine (and therefore did nothing), it took just two or three hours to solve the problem (most of the time was spent to carefully formulate a difficult mail in a foreign language). Not a big problem at all - although you might wonder why they raised their concerns in a complete other channel on an other network, instead of simply asking us. What I really dislike is the form they used to raise their complains. When they complained they asked if the DebConf was bought by Sun or the committee on crack and similar things. I'm sure they didn't really meant it that way, but after losing a couple of good friends to drugs telling me, I am on crack (or any other drug) is one of the biggest insults you can give me! Wondering if I (or a volunteer project I'm working for) got bribed by a company isn't much nicer. So let me say this: Yes, we rejected proposals. Yes, we rejected even some proposals we found good in some way or an other. Neither have we been on crack nor have we been bribed! We rejected some proposals because they didn't fit to DebConf, were a rerun or had big overlaps with other proposals we accepted. We rejected some round tables, because the one proposing it didn't provided us with useful information: Whom to invite and what to ask. Sometimes we had mixed feelings about proposals; we usually then accepted them if we knew the one who made the proposal is a good speaker, we rejected some where we knew the proposal come from a bad / disorganized / boring speaker. We did that in a public discussion and answered questions by non committee members when they were raised. I really don't think we did anything wrong, beside the small mistake when we rejected a proposal which was accepted, and I think we got a nice mixture for the main track with some really good talks! As said: Telling me I'm on crack is a big insult. Nevertheless I tried to stay calm, tried my best to solve that matter, and later wrote a mail, apologizing for the mistake. Part of that mail was that we didn't liked their way of raising their complains (showing that I knew what they said about us). I expected at least an answer, thanking us for solving the problem, perhaps even a small apology about the insults. But till now - two days later - I didn't received anything, not even a small "thanks" via irc :( Now I just could forget the whole story. But then I saw it again: Someone wondering about the committees decision in the same channel, instead of just asking us! Damn! If you want to know why we rejected your proposal, just ask! Stop griping in unrelated channels. That's just a wast of other peoples time, resulting in nothing but damage to to the DebConf. Update: Small correction: We got some feedback. Liw raised some concerns. His mail was answered 8 minutes after we received it by a committee member. Since he didn't answered I guess he is satisfied by the answer or at least doesn't feel very strong about that point.

Andrew Pollock: [life] Sleep

Thanks to Grant, I discovered a couple of interesting blog posts about how to become an early riser, and about polyphasic sleep. I'm certainly interested in becoming an early riser. I'm not naturally a morning person, but for a few years I managed to force myself into it, but then I lapsed back into being a night-owl sleep-in type person. At the moment, when the weather permits, I'm trying to cycle to work with enough time to eat breakfast there and be operational at my desk by about 8:30am. It's just as fine to start at 10am, but I'd rather not get into that habit, and just treat it as a bit of a splurge from time to time. This of course means I can't stuff around in the morning, and ideally I need to leave the house by about 7:45am, with appropriate flow-on affects on when I wake up and get out of bed. It certainly takes a lot of self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. At the moment, I tend to opt for two alarms. One to wake me up and get snoozed a lot, and one to actually get out of bed. If I was more disciplined about getting out of bed, I could just have the one alarm go off, and get extra sleep. The extra waking hours gained by polyphasic sleep are tempting also, but I think it's altogether too disruptive to try at the moment. An interesting concept nonetheless. So once we're a little bit more settled, I'll hopefully become more of a morning person again. I think the key is consistency. Sleeping in on weekends just buggers everything up, which is a shame. I quite like my weekend sleep-ins. Downside is you spend half your weekend asleep, when you could be out exploring a fabulous new foreign country, for example...

3 January 2006

Amaya Rodrigo: Castration

I just came back from the vet. I left Vi and Emacs there and will pick them up after work, as today they will be spayed and neutered (450 EUR total). I am all shaky inside.
My little cats! (Well, not so little, as Emacs started acting like if she was in heat only a few hours before I had to take a plane for my Holidays, so I guess she is not so little anymore, nor is Vi, who seemed completely fascinated by her new behavior. Anyway, my vet knew this would happen one month in advance, when we were arranging an appointment for the surgery that will be performed today).

  


  

Good luck, my babies!

1 January 2006

Gergely Nagy: 2006

2006, what a lovely year! Not. I heard its a custom, that at the start of the new year, one looks back at the past one. So I did, and wasn't impressed at all. Mind you, the same happens each and every year, so it is no suprise, really. For the past year, I have been rather inactive, I should have gone on an extensive vacation from Debian a long time ago, around May, when I quit my last job. I intend to rectify that as soon as I manage to dig up my GPG key. Most of my packages will get officially orphaned too, as I lack the time and motivation to work on them - no news here, either, as this is the case since early last year. Lets see what I did on the free software front in the past year or two... One of my most succesfull projects was CCZE, a log colouriser. Needles to say, the idea is not mine. The crap implementation, the most messy and bad code I've ever written, is mine, though. It hasn't seen an update since I don't know when. Nor will it in the foreseeable future. The only thing that could help the codebase, is a rewrite, which I had been planning since 2003, and not a bit of code was committed ever. In the meantime, new programs appear, whose logs could be colourised, new demands arrive, but the project has been dead for good. Once, Thy was the software I was most proud of. I really loved it, and spent most of my time hacking on it. Those times are past, new, similar software appeared, that surpassed my beloved HTTP daemon in nearly every respect. I don't believe thy has any place among todays similar projects. This, I truly regret, I had great fun developing Thy. But as everything, even good things must come to an end. Back when I worked for a company that was into this media streaming business, I contributed a few bits and pieces to GStreamer, but all the "grand ideas" I had, and wished to make reality, never happened. Looking further back, I can't notice any significant contribution I made.. except maybe one, a very small one.. Even nowadays, I can't stop feeling a little proud, when it crosses my mind. Some may know, most probably don't, I acted as an application manager for Debian, and for a little while, I like to think I wasn't that bad at that job. For a little while... Anyway, during this, I had the pleasure to work with Daniel Stone. Heh, those were good times! I hope, that what we've done there, was of at least a bit useful. Meh, enough of this. My projects failed, I didn't have the neccessary resources to make some of my dreams come true. All I need now, is a break, a break so I will not feel bad about things I do not have time for. I'll let them go, as I should have done ages ago, that's best both for them, and me. Until a time I feel I can contribute back something, for all I received from the free software community, I'll take a vacation. From time to time, I'll be hanging around on IRC, but my activity will be as low as it was during the past year. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish! P.S.: Yamm, my over-sized tamagotchi expressed interest in maintaining me in Debian. If, by any chance, he'd take over my computer, and expressed his wish to run for DPL-ship, please, by all means, stop him. Thank you.

Joshua Kwan: ALAC decoder hacking

On the advice of one of my Mac-using friends, I read this article on Slashdot. Pretty cool, I thought, and fairly relevant seeing that I am still actively hacking on ify. As one might expect, I concluded that it would be pretty neat if ify were the first tool to be able to simplify conversion between ALAC and other formats like FLAC, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis. At about 1:30AM, I realized that the first hurdle was that the ALAC decoder did not have a facility to access the metadata in ALAC files. At 5:30AM, I was pretty much done. This required me to study the QuickTime container format, I had to understand the ALAC decoder API, then I wrote the code, then debugged it to hell while I continued to familiarize myself with the nature of the QuickTime format. (I don’t know about you, but that hacking session felt like 1 hour. Maybe 30 minutes even.) By that time I had added support to ify to use the new extension to the ALAC decoder. (here’s a patch if you’re interested.) With the help of said Mac-using friend I got some ALAC files (hey, they are actually from albums I own) and tested them this afternoon after 42nd rehearsal. Behold: 
darjeeling:~ 0 % alac -i 2-11 Stop.m4a
Available track information:
title: Stop
artist: Pink Floyd
album: The Wall (Disc 2)
disk: 2
date: 1979
tool: iTunes v4.7.1
tracknumber: 11
genre: Rock
darjeeling:~ 0 % flacify 2-11 Stop.m4a
[alac->flac] 2-11 Stop.m4a
darjeeling:~ 0 % ogg123 2-11 Stop.flac 
Audio Device:   OSS audio driver output 
Playing: 2-11 Stop.flac
FLAC stream: 16 bits, 2 channel, 44100 Hz
Track number: 11
Album: The Wall (Disc 2)
Artist: Pink Floyd
Disk: 2
Tool: iTunes v4.7.1
Date: 1979
Title: Stop
Done.
Pretty…

31 December 2005

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Unbounded Tic-Tac-Toe

Here is the result of a few nights’ worth of hacking. This project was originally my solution to an exercise I had posed to my functional programming students. Since then, I’ve rewritten it once and redesigned the user interface completely. It’s an idealized implementation of a game we used to play during breaks at school. We would take a sheet of cross-ruled paper and play tic-tac-toe, with the following two changes: the whole sheet was allowed as the board, and we required a sequence of five, not three, marks for a win. The ideal was that the “board” was infinite, or unbounded, though in practice we did take the paper’s edges as the board’s bounds. (We also usually played more than one game on the same sheet of paper; previous games were simply declared “no-man’s land”, effectively creating weirdly shaped “holes” in the game board; I haven’t duplicated that here.) Version 1.1 implements a single-player mode (the other player is simulated) and a demo mode (the program simulates both players). It’s written in Haskell, and requires gtk2hs 0.9.10 (or later) with Cairo enabled, and GTK+ 2.8 (or later). The source is available as release tarballs and as a darcs repository. (Yes, I know that the arrow in the lower-left corner is wrong. That’s not my bug, though.)

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: Christmas balance

I calmed down for Christmas on Friday. Calmed down is exactly the right verb, as I ended up sleeping through most of it. I slept though Friday, hacked during the late evening and night, then slept again most of the Christmas eve. My father came around six to drop me his (other) gift. It was a book on European history 1600–1800, nice, what I had asked for, for I have this dream of writing something in the 163x-verse some time (though I doubt it’ll ever happen). I had received (and opened) his other gift earlier, which was Star Wreck’s soundtrack (probably better than the movie, though the movie was very good too). Opened also my mother’s package which I had picked up earlier in the week from the post office’s local agent: a Heidi Hautala scarf, a long scarf made by my mother herself, and some writing material. Thank you! I slept through most of Sunday, too. Advance subscriptions to Jim Baen’s Universe opened also on Christmas eve. Picked up the Titan membership, for even the other membership classes appealed to me (extensive Tuckerization rights, yessss!), they would have posed cash flow problems. So I took the Titan one, hoping that it will help the magazine at least a little. However, I started reading one of the books that came with the advance subscription package, Empire from Ashes by David Weber, and helped me spend most of the time I wasn’t sleeping (of course, I realized later that I already had that book, since it came with the At All Costs hardcover bonus CD). Today’s minus fifteen degrees, along with the threat that it might actually go below twenty today, made me finally look for my long johns. Surprisingly, my current trousers have been warm enough without long johns even slightly below minus ten; but I knew I’d have to look for the long johns eventually, as a Finnish winter at Jyv skyl ’s longitude just isn’t complete without at least a few days of minus 25 degrees. All Celsius, naturally. All in all, it was a most relaxing Christmas :)

30 December 2005

Adeodato Sim : Guadalajara

A couple weeks ago, Debconf-ES II was held in Guadalajara. It was terrific: meeting again some people whom I already knew, many of which are more than fellow developers; meeting for the first time some others who I hadn’t; and, of course (and finally!), Mao. There was also a KDE talk, telling a bit the story of the Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers. I enjoyed it a lot; among other things: As always, eternal gratitude to the people that worked their asses off to make this event possible. Even if not tons of work got done during that weekend, it was surely a big dose of energy for all of us! NP: Astrud, Masaje

29 December 2005

Decklin Foster: lastfmsubmitd

Apparently, tis the season to be writing your own Last.fm plugin. So here is mine. I finally got fed up with finding and causing bugs in mpdscribble (I am a bad sponsor!) it s written in C with libsoup, blah blah, can t stand C, and so I revived the MPD pseudo-listener I had started on as a replacement for that awful orphaned cacheless one-off we were all using before mpdscribble. I also fixed a few issues that were bugging me, like failing to detect restarts and tag changes. Not wanting to muddy up any of that logic with HTTP gar, I decided to write a separate program to queue, cache and send along song submissions. They re two or three hundred lines of Python each, and single-threaded (yes, that means child writers blocking and hanging around if the network code is in the middle of timing out or backing off. Deal with it! This is UNIX). I m pretty happy with the design, although the implementation is still very rough. This also mimics the model they want to move to for player plugins in general, which is good, because it will be less work for me to implement version 2.0 of the protocol once that is finalized. Additionally, I was able to find a more satisfying way to solve the disconnected-CD-player problem than my previous dreadful method of either using a few kludgey scripts to frob around in my primary plugin s cache or dealing with using cdscrobbler and having to be very careful about one plugin not stepping on the other s toes and invalidating my backlog. So this is the second example program included. (Oh yes, that part uses the Python bindings for MusicBrainz. MB is awesome. The Python bindings are hideous, however straight port of the C++ API. I d probably be better off just dumping the RDF into a real RDF implementation and doing my own cross-referencing, instead of prying it out piecemeal with select queries and non-polymorphic getters and all the other absolute nonsense you have to deal with when writing in a language without high-level data types or garbage collection. But regardless of implementation woes, this has kept me close to the MB metadata for my favorite CDs, and so I ve been busy all week entering and voting on mods (and doing research to justify my changes), which is very satisfying. I have yet to begin the gargantuan task of adding MB tags to my Ogg collection (I know, this is really just a matter of babysitting tp_tagger, but I ve got some work cut out for me to even get to that point).) And of course, once this becomes less prototypey, anyone who likes it can knock all the networking code out of their plugin and use it as their system service . Perhaps if I m agile enough this can become official code! It is at least a mootable proof-of-concept that UNIX systems don t necessarily need a heavyweight libscrobbler to abstract the service stuff out of the player plugin. I won t get my hopes up though. Still a bit unsure about the name. Theoretically it seems the service (you know, the thing we pay money to if we like it) should be Last.fm, while the software and protocols should still be Audioscrobbler, but the distinction does not seem to be drawn very clearly in practice. With the analogous situation of livejournal vs. ljcom you had a grokkable technical delineation (different repositories) as well as other widely used installations besides ljcom (DeadJournal, etc). I really can t see there ever being a competing installation of Audioscrobbler, because licensing the streamables is a formidable investment hurdle, and there s a negative market effect (also, the web site is not open source). But I am also bored of just sticking scrobble onto something else, so I wanted to grab sticking last onto something else before it got old. I haven t the faintest clue what makes me prefer whimsical names for some projects and prosaic ones for others. Note to actual MPD users (all, like, 5 of you): the stuff in the package will not handshake at the moment, as I have not yet gotten Russ to bless the client ID I made up. Will try to catch him tomorrow. Or later today I suppose. It s ready to go now. Next up: Because it s either this or Sound Juicer, I think perhaps it s time to bid adieu to abcde and write a MusicBrainz plugin for jack (jack is nice enough, I just haven t had a truly compelling reason to switch, and there have always been lots of good eyeballs on abcde). FreeDB delenda est.

25 December 2005

Andres Seco Hernandez: Merry Xmas


Perhaps people needs a good reason to keep in touch with somebody a lot time ago loose contact. Christmas, i think, is just a good reason to call them and lought some time about old reminds.

I promise to call some old friends during this days, and to finish my compromise to see inside some packages two future (i am sure) DD to upload soon as sponsorized packages.

Merry Xmas for all of you, and all other people.

23 December 2005

Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt: The differences between Christmas and Chanukah

If anyone asks you what the difference is between Christmas and Chanukah, you will know what and how to answer!

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It's another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure.
Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don't look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel(especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos... Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful...Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful.... Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols are composed and written by our tribal brethren.

And don't Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.

11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, "Joseph,you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn't sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here's the number of my shrink".

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? .....

Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family.
Tickets a mere $200 per person.

[Stolen from $unknown]

Christian Perrier: DADVSI: see you on Jan 17th

Yesterday evening, the Ministry of Culture has deciced to report the discussion of the DADVSI bill after the reopening of the French Parliament, on January 17th. The debates yesterday have been featuring different representatives from the majority (UMP party) coming to explain that que "global license" amendments, adopted yesterday, are severely critized by the "artists". Indeed, it turns out that the major artists feel themselves in danger with the disposals of the "global license" while artists will a less wider diffusion are mostly OK with it. Who would be surprised? :-) Debates around this will be very hot again on January and we can expect an active lobbying by the "official artists" and the major entertainment companies. About the parts of the bill which were highly criticized by the Free Software community, it seems that all concerns about the copy protection schemes are on their way for being removed. The debates clearly show that the Free Software community has been heard, even by several representatives who are in favor of several other parts of the text. In short, I'm now confident that this bill will in no way be able to lead to an illegal Videolan Client, for instance. The transcription of the debates shows that all representatives are very motivated in trying to limit the influence of the major software companies (Microsoft is explicitely mentioned several times). I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't stop being very careful and stop following what will happen. But, again, all things I have read from the debates shows me that the free software community is heard in France, even by our representatives and even by the current majority parties, which I don't share many things with. I consider this a victory for our community even if "we only won a battle and we now have to win the war".

22 December 2005

Uwe Hermann: A bunch of new releases

Some interesting Free Software releases: Lots of stuff to try out...

Alexander Schmehl: Coming home from Linux-Info-Tag Dresden...

... 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 ;)

21 December 2005

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Doing It Right: BabyOp, Perl, and OOP?

I’m coding a new CGI application, tentatively entitled BabyOp. It is software to run a babysitting coop; I suppose it is a species of “social software.” The idea is to be able to track hours credits, schedule babysitting times, centralize contact information and other details about babysitting requirements. I considered using something like Zope or Drupal for the application, but I’ve never liked developing exclusively through a web-interface and found myself having to do a fair bit of “actual” coding to get the results I wanted. I realize there is a command-line interface for Zope, but it’s really pretty limited. I had some plans a couple of years ago when I designed my wedding site in Zope to extend it to be more useful, but sadly never got around to it. So I’m back in my comfort zone, perl. I’ve written a fair amount of unmanageable perl code, however, CoopOrder probably being a shining example (it was also my first perl program). I’ve certainly improved since then, and the fact that I’ve received several patches from others for randomplay suggests that my coding style is getting to a half-decent point. I’d really like to get it right this time, though. One thing I’ve learned over the years is always to look for a module to do what you want before setting out to do it yourself, since chances are the module writer is a better coder than you (or at least, than me!). To that end, I’m using CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and DBIx::Abstract, among others. I’m also trying to keep things really granular and avoiding long subroutines. Certainly taking the HTML out of the perl code helps with that. I’m amazed at how often my code now just “works” on the first try, similar to esr’s story about his first look at Python (“Brace yourself: this code only took me about ninety minutes to write—and it worked correctly the first time I ran it.”) I’m trying to figure out if it would be sensible to make this application more fully object oriented. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s and having done a lot of database programming, I’ve always been unfortunately pathologically declarative. (My first major package was in Clipper—I was 13 years old). I find it a lot easier to modify a pre-existing object oriented package than to design my own. But then again, does it really make sense to attempt an object-oriented design where there is really only one important “object” — in this case, the babysitting unit?

19 December 2005

Christian Perrier: Old timers

After Bdale blogged about the 5.25" floppy drivers he had in his Fido BBS, I googled a bit and found the following nice gems: http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/FidoNews/1985/FIDO228.NWS: 
        ============================================================
                                  NEWS
        ============================================================
        Bdale Garbee
        Sysop of L5NET Gateway, Fido 129/13
              Some Utilities I'm Looking for and Haven't Found
        There are a few public domain utilities I would like to
        locate for my Fido host, which I have unfortunately not yet
        found in my random wanderings around other Fido systems.
        I'm running a Tandy 1200HD, which is an IBM XT-clone.
        If you have any of the things I'm looking for, either send
        them to me by Fidomail, or send me a message detailing how
        I can get them.  Emphasis on public domain.  Sources
        desirable but not absolutely necessary (beggars can't be
        choosers!) 
.../...
http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/FidoNews/1986/FIDO333.NWS: 
     =================================================================
                                  NOTICES
     =================================================================
     Announcing the return of the "HIP Shack" to Fidonet, now in
     Colorado Springs, CO.  The files and message areas are in
     the process of being reorganized, but Amateur Radio and SWL
     are still the primary themes.  I'm looking forward to
     hearing from everyone I've been out of touch with for the
     last 9 weeks...
     Bdale Garbee, sysop 128/18, 303/593-0766, 1200 baud, 24hrs
This seems to confirm that, despite our 6 months age difference (guess who wins?), Bdale is way much an old timer than my poor self, whose first appearance in the BBS world is around 1990. Anyway, I found this funny and wanted to share. Enjoy...

15 December 2005

Benjamin Mako Hill: OLPC and Charges of Technological and Cultural Imperialism

Quim Gil asked a number of good questions about the One Laptop Per Child initiative. I will not answer all of his questions now and am not sure answers exist yet for every question. With that said, I will try to answer his final question with the traditional disclaimer that the thoughts expressed here are my own and may or may not be shared by others within the project are not the official position of OLPC. Quim asked, "what measures will be taken to avoid or [inhibit] the spread of a (unconscious or well-intentioned?) cultural neocolonialism?" I have been asked this question many times. It is an issue that concerns me personally. As such, I'll give you my personal feelings on the subject. Discussion of cultural colonialism, Westernization, Americanization or techno-imperialism are hardly limited to OLPC. Sometimes it comes in the form of reactions against what is seen as the homogenizing or Americanizing effect of US-based multinationals (e.g., McDonald's or Nike) or against the culturally oriented US-based motion picture or recording industries. In terms of technology, the debate is often framed in terms of Appropriate Technology. There is an argument that modern information technology -- designed and developed in highly industrialized countries to address their particular set of cultural contexts and needs -- may be inappropriate and potentially dangerous in the developing world. This is a fair critique. But while there may be a danger, insisting that the technology be kept out is unrealistic and may miss the larger evil. These discussions can not responsibly ignore the fact that, depending on whose numbers you trust, there are between and 1 and 2 billion mobile phones in the world today and that number will reach something like 2.6 billion operational units in 2009. That's nearly half the world population and it's not hard to find out where most of those phones are going:
All the growth in subscribers is coming from emerging markets," says David Taylor, Motorola's director of strategy and operations for high-growth markets. Researchers predict that of the 1 billion cell phones expected to be sold in 2010, half will be in developing economies. (link)
Information and communication technology is, in one form or another, on a fast track into the developing world. That may very well be a problem but it's not the biggest problem in this field. The bigger problem is the nature of the technology that is being imported. People in the, rich and developed countries may have cellphones, but they frequently also have computers: full-fledged, reprogrammable, hackable computers; computers that they can use to write software, design hardware, install new OSes on, and even -- if they are really adventurous -- use to reprogram their mobile phone. People in the developing world will have information technology (in the form of cellphones at least) but do not have the ability -- no matter how interested, talented, or intelligent they are -- to change the way they work. This is the greater danger. The most powerful and empowering quality of information technology in the context of personal computers is that as communication is being mediated, facilitated, and defined through software on computers fully within users' control, each user has the ability to determine the terms on which they communicate. In a world where people are communicating, trading, voting, learning, working, and organizing through digital channels, massive power lies in the hands of those who have the tools (e.g., computers and development platforms) and access and permission (e.g., Free and Open source software) necessary to make the necessary changes. In three years, there will be a billion people in the developing world who are using information technology on the terms and at the whim of the today's global elite and they will not be able transcend their role and consumers and subservients in this context. Their ability to transcend their depressed role in larger economic contexts will be highly influenced by this fact. The developing world's "computers" will not be able to create or change the software that define them. The code that runs these devices will be proprietary and will remain immutable even in the context of additional hardware. Unless we do something about it. As far I'm concerned, that something is two steps:
  • We need to create and distribute -- real computers that can be used as development platforms -- at a price that can begin to compete with their alternatives (e.g., phones, thinclients, WebTVs, etc).
  • We need to make sure that these machines are hackable -- totally hackable -- on every level. That means open hardware. That means Free and Open Source software. That means open specifications, protocols, and data formats.
That is my personal goal in OLPC and it is one that has seemed to have been echoed by others involved in the project. Of course, I have hardly washed myself or my project of the stigma of cultural imperialism yet. That said, while making a completely malleable machine allows every user to, if they choose to, transcend their role as a consumer of technology and technologically-defined culture, one side effect of this process is that it also allows them to do so on their own terms. Because the machine is completely free and open, users are free to use the machine in ways that not only have the originators not considered, but that they could not imagine. With time, the machine -- and its software in particular -- can be rewritten, reshaped, and eventually replaced with something of, by, and for its users. Of course, this will not happen overnight. As the first step, OLPC will attempt to create something we think provides a compelling and flexible platform with which the world can learn and build. With this in hand, governments and ministries of education that purchase the machine will get to shape (or replace?) the platform in line with their own ideas and curricula. As the students and communities to which the machines are deployed learn and build with and upon the machine, another transformation will occur. As those communities grow in relation to their technology, this change will be sustained. The potential for this dynamic and empowering relationship is the reason I'm here.

14 December 2005

Hanna Wallach: grow little margin, we gonna solve AI

I’ve just returned from NIPS 2005. The conference was great, and I hope to post more later about my favourite papers, posters and talks. The highlight of this year’s conference was undoubtedly Jeff Bilmes, Michael Collins, Koby Crammer and Fernando Pereira’s summary of their workshop on structured learning for text and speech processing. Fortunately, I captured the entire thing on video for the enjoyment of the machine learning community (and anyone else who’s interested). So, without further ado, I present Jeff Bilmes (bass), Michael Collins (sax), Koby Crammer (bongos) and Fernando Pereira (vocals) performing “We Gonna Solve AI”. For those of you that wish to sing along at home, the lyrics are:
Summertime, and the learning is easy. Our problem is structured,
And the accuracy is high. Your funders are rich,
And your colleagues are good-looking. So grow little margin,
We gonna solve AI. Wintertime, and the learning is #-P. Our speech is recognized,
But we don’t know why. Our code is in MATLAB,
And our data’s synthetic. So grow little margin,
We gonna solve AI.
[*] sung “sharpee”

13 December 2005

Gunnar Wolf: DebConf6 in May - Why?

I see that plans start getting ready. Bubulle is coming, Wouter is not, and people will soon start getting their plans ready. I am quite excited about it! Of course, I need to devote more time to it, which is hard to me - but I will do it. Oaxtepec rules, you will _love_ the place. I went there again to spend a weekend with Nadezhda - Took some more photos, added them to the album. Debconf guys: Yes, I owe you a full report... It will come. Soon. Promise.
Anyway... I'm excited. Debian friends, Mexican interested friends: What are you waiting for? Join us! Register!
[update] Well, I published this entry, but then realized I wanted to answer to Wouter's question: Why in May? ;-)
First of all, weather: The weather is plainly better in May. Somewhat warmer... The rainy season starts in May/June, but believe me, you don't want to have your laptop out during Morelos State's well known thunderstorms!
Second, I fear of political instability. Next July we will be having our federal elections. We don't anticipate instability such as what we had in 1994 (which, please you all be quiet, didn't even mean violence in the streets), but still... It's better not to have Debconf too near the elections.
Third, prices - Most places are noticeably more expensive during Summer.
And, yes, I know some people will not be able to attend... I am sorry to learn you are one of them. Still, I'm sure some other people would not be able to make it in July.

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