Mankind, it would appear, owe a great deal of their evolutionary advantage to using tools. This ability appears to have been massively amplified by our creation of machine tools.

We use SugarCRM at work and I've complained about its not-very-RESTy REST interface. John Mertic a (the?) SugarCRM Community Manager asked me about what problems I'd had (apart from its lack of RESTfulness) and I said I'd write a blog post about it. In our case, the REST interface is used to integrate Sugar and RT so we get a link in both interfaces to jump from opportunities to the corresponding RT ticket (and back again). This should be a fairly trivial exercise or so you would think. The problems, as I see it are:

• Not REST-y.
• Exposes the database tables all the way through the REST interface
• Lack of useful documentation forcing the developer to cargo cult and guess
• Annoying data structures
• Forced pagination

My first gripe is the complete lack of REST in the URLs. Everything is just sent to https://sugar/service/v2/rest.php. Usually a POST, but sometimes a GET. It's not documented what to use where. The POST parameters we send when logging in are:

method=>"login"
input_type=>"JSON"
response_type=>"JSON"
rest_data=>json($params)

$params is a hash as follows:

user_auth =>  
            user_name => $USERNAME,
            password => $PW,
            version => "1.2",
 ,
application => "foo",

Nothing seems to actually care about the value of application, nor about the user_auth.version value. The password is the md5 of the actual password, hex encoded. I'm not sure why it is, as this adds absolutely no security, but it is. This is also not properly documented. This gives us a JSON object back with a somewhat haphazard selection of attributes (reformatted here for readability):

 
     "id":"<hex session id>,
     "module_name":"Users",
     "name_value_list":  
             "user_id":  
                     "name":"user_id",
                     "value":"1"
              ,
             "user_name":  
                     "name":"user_name",
                     "value":"<username>"
              ,
             "user_language":  
                     "name":"user_language",
                     "value":"en_us"
              ,
             "user_currency_id":  
                     "name":"user_currency_id",
                 "value":"-99"
              ,
             "user_currency_name":  
                     "name":"user_currency_name",
                     "value":"Euro"
              
      
 

What is the module_name? No real idea. In general, when you get back an id and a module_name field, it tells you that the id exists is an object that exists in the context of the given module. Not here, since the session id is not a user. The worst here is the name_value_list concept which is used all over the REST interface. First, it's not a list, it's a hash. Secondly, I have no idea what would be wrong by just using keys directly in the top level object, so the object would have looked somewhat like:

 
     "id":"<hex session id>,
     "user_id": 1,
     "user_name": "<username>,
     "user_language":"en_us",
     "user_currency_id": "-99",
     "user_currency_name": "Euro"
 

Some people might argue that since you can have custom field names this can cause clashes. Except, it can't, since they're all suffixed with _c. So we're now logged in and can fetch all opportunities. This we do by posting:

method=>"get_entry_list",
input_type=>"JSON",
response_type=>"JSON",
rest_data=>to_json([
            $sid,
            $module,
            $where,
            "",
            $next,
            $fields,
            $links,
            1000
])

• $sid is our session id from the login
• $module is "Opportunities"
• $where is opportunities_cstm.rt_id_c IS NOT NULL. Yes, that's right. An SQL fragment right there and you have to know that you'll join the opportunities_cstm and opportunities tables because we are using a custom field. I find this completely crazy.
• $next starts out at 0 and we're limited to 1000 entries at a time. There is, apparently, no way to say "just give me all you have".
• $fields is an array, in our case consisting of id, name, description, rt_id_c and rt_status_c. To find out the field names, look at the database schema or poke around in the SugarCRM studio.
• $links is to link records together. I still haven't been able to make this work properly and just do multiple queries.
• 1000 is the maximum number of records. No, you can't say -1 and get everything.

Why this is a list rather than a hash? Again, I don't know. A hash would make more sense to me. The resulting JSON looks like:

 
    "result_count" : 16,
    "relationship_list" : [],
    "entry_list" : [
        
          "name_value_list" :  
             "rt_status_c" :  
                "value" : "resolved",
                "name" : "rt_status_c"
              ,
             [ ]
           ,
          "module_name" : "Opportunities",
          "id" : "<entry_uuid>"
        ,
       [ ]
    ],
    "next_offset" : 16
 

Now, entry_list actually is a list here, which is good and all, but there's still the annoying name_value_list concept. Last, we want to update the record in Sugar, to do this we do:

method=>"set_entry",
input_type=>"JSON",
response_type=>"JSON",
rest_data=>to_json([
    $sid,
    "Opportunities",
    $fields
])

$fields is not a name_value_list, but instead is:

 
    "rt_status_c" : "resolved",
    "id" : "<status text>"
 

Why this works and my attempts at using a proper name_value_list didn't work? I have no idea. I think that pretty much sums it up. I'm sure there are other problems in there (such as the over 100 lines of support code for the about 20 lines of actual code that does useful work), though.

I was due for another Google interview mail it seems. I have to say I wasn't expecting it, but this week I had a follow up to my polite mail from 6 months ago that said "No thanks, I'm not looking" asking if it was still the case. Normally I welcome this little bit of ego stroking; it's always nice to be wanted. Except that's not really the case, is it? It's an invitation to interview for something, not any indication that you've done more than tick some initial boxes. Google mails inevitably ask me if I'd like to work in SRE. It's always SRE. No one ever emails and asks if I want to work on self-replicating nanobots that will roam Mars searching for the perfect spot to build a beach house. And that's where things fall down. If someone currently has a job, then emailing them out of the blue to ask if they want to come and interview for something vague is hoping that they're either looking, and just haven't come to you yet, or not looking but unhappy enough with their current role that all they needed to start was an email asking them to submit a recent CV. For the former, if you're Google, do you really think that person doesn't know where to find you? For the latter, you're being quite presumptuous, aren't you? The act of updating my CV my be some effort (actually it's usually not, because the stuff that's not on it is the stuff I can't talk about because it's not released yet, or stuff that's specific and thus wouldn't go on a CV for a vague job spec). Even if it's not the act of interviewing is potentially a waste of time for both of us, if the role isn't clear. One argument used is that people will be placed according to the skills they show during the interview process. That's fine from the employers point of view, but if you're actively trying to get some interest from people who are gainfully employed you really need to grab their attention somehow. I can't remember the last time I had an unsolicited email interview offer that actually wowed me, or indeed even showed more than a passing sign of tailoring a spec to my profile. When I was running Black Cat I made a point of always replying to unsolicited CVs. How polite I was depended on how the covering emails were worded (a Word document with nothing else was likely to get short shrift, something well targeted in a Linux friendly format would normally get some comment about how we weren't hiring and were unlikely to be, but if that changed it would be mentioned on the website), but I felt people deserved a reply - I have been disappointed by not receiving responses myself to what I considered well targeted job inquiries. So far I've so far taken the same approach with mails from corporate recruiters (less so with recruiters that are associated with recruitment firms, rather than directly with the companies they are hiring for), but I'm starting to feel like changing that stance. Candidates are told to tailor CVs to the role being applied for, provide a decent cover letter, and in general make companies want to talk to them. Companies who are sending out recruitment emails should be held to the same standard. Even assuming you do a basic phone screen first, I can probably expect to need to take a day off work assuming that goes well. You need to convince me I can justify that before I'm going to feel like engaging at all. (And if I'm honest, based on what I've seen so far, it's unlikely to happen. All of the things I've considered have come from conversations with people I know directly about companies they own or work for, never some random contact via email. I try hard not to think of recruitment mail as spam, but I can how that line of thought follows through.) I should apologize to Google here. They got mentioned as an example, but I don't think they're particularly bad. I did interview with them at one point, and made the decision not to continue that process after deciding a different, more certain, path was better for me. So I've displayed interest. And in response to my reply today of "I know where to find you, so please assume I'll do so if I change my mind." they've said they'll make a note on their records.

Some years ago I came across a really peculiar newsgroup post. It was not about technicalities of any sort. It was about history. A beautifully written history of computers. From the Turing machine to the Free Software world, the original author managed to capture all the important events of the computer revolution with a great deal of humor. Re-posting it here, it is just brilliant. The Gospel of Tux (v1.0) In the beginning Turing created the Machine. And the Machine was crufty and bodacious, existing in theory only. And von Neumann looked upon the Machine, and saw that it was crufty. He divided the Machine into two Abstractions, the Data and the Code, and yet the two were one Architecture. This is a great Mystery, and the beginning of wisdom. And von Neumann spoke unto the Architecture, and blessed it, saying, Go forth and replicate, freely exchanging data and code, and bring forth all manner of devices unto the earth. And it was so, and it was cool. The Architecture prospered and was implemented in hardware and software. And it brought forth many Systems unto the earth. The first Systems were mighty giants; many great works of renown did they accomplish. Among them were Colossus, the codebreaker; ENIAC, the targeter; EDSAC and MULTIVAC and all manner of froody creatures ending in AC, the experimenters; and SAGE, the defender of the sky and father of all networks. These were the mighty giants of old, the first children of Turing, and their works are written in the Books of the Ancients. This was the First Age, the age of Lore. Now the sons of Marketing looked upon the children of Turing, and saw that they were swift of mind and terse of name and had many great and baleful attributes. And they said unto themselves, Let us go now and make us Corporations, to bind the Systems to our own use that they may bring us great fortune. With sweet words did they lure their customers, and with many chains did they bind the Systems, to fashion them after their own image. And the sons of Marketing fashioned themselves Suits to wear, the better to lure their customers, and wrote grave and perilous Licenses, the better to bind the Systems. And the sons of Marketing thus became known as Suits, despising and being despised by the true Engineers, the children of von Neumann. And the Systems and their Corporations replicated and grew numerous upon the earth. In those days there were IBM and Digital, Burroughs and Honeywell, Unisys and Rand, and many others. And they each kept to their own System, hardware and software, and did not interchange, for their Licences forbade it. This was the Second Age, the age of Mainframes. Now it came to pass that the spirits of Turing and von Neumann looked upon the earth and were displeased. The Systems and their Corporations had grown large and bulky, and Suits ruled over true Engineers. And the Customers groaned and cried loudly unto heaven, saying, Oh that there would be created a System mighty in power, yet small in size, able to reach into the very home! And the Engineers groaned and cried likewise, saying, Oh, that a deliverer would arise to grant us freedom from these oppressing Suits and their grave and perilous Licences, and send us a System of our own, that we may hack therein! And the spirits of Turing and von Neumann heard the cries and were moved, and said unto each other, Let us go down and fabricate a Breakthrough, that these cries may be stilled. And that day the spirits of Turing and von Neumann spake unto Moore of Intel, granting him insight and wisdom to understand the future. And Moore was with chip, and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the Chip, saying, Thou art a Breakthrough; with my own Corporation have I fabricated thee. Thou thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain, and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age. This is Moore s Law, which endures unto this day. And the birth of 4004 was the beginning of the Third Age, the age of Microchips. And as the Mainframes and their Systems and Corporations had flourished, so did the Microchips and their Systems and Corporations. And their lineage was on this wise: Moore begat Intel. Intel begat Mostech, Zilog and Atari. Mostech begat 6502, and Zilog begat Z80. Intel also begat 8800, who begat Altair; and 8086, mother of all PCs. 6502 begat Commodore, who begat PET and 64; and Apple, who begat 2. (Apple is the great Mystery, the Fruit that was devoured, yet bloomed again.) Atari begat 800 and 1200, masters of the game, who were destroyed by Sega and Nintendo. Xerox begat PARC. Commodore and PARC begat Amiga, creator of fine arts; Apple and PARC begat Lisa, who begat Macintosh, who begat iMac. Atari and PARC begat ST, the music maker, who died and was no more. Z80 begat Sinclair the dwarf, TRS-80 and CP/M, who begat many machines, but soon passed from this world. Altair, Apple and Commodore together begat Microsoft, the Great Darkness which is called Abomination, Destroyer of the Earth, the Gates of Hell. Now it came to pass in the Age of Microchips that IBM, the greatest of the Mainframe Corporations, looked upon the young Microchip Systems and was greatly vexed. And in their vexation and wrath they smote the earth and created the IBM PC. The PC was without sound and colour, crufty and bodacious in great measure, and its likeness was a tramp, yet the Customers were greatly moved and did purchase the PC in great numbers. And IBM sought about for an Operating System Provider, for in their haste they had not created one, nor had they forged a suitably grave and perilous License, saying, First we will build the market, then we will create a new System, one in our own image, and bound by our Licence. But they reasoned thus out of pride and not wisdom, not forseeing the wrath which was to come. And IBM came unto Microsoft, who licensed unto them QDOS, the child of CP/M and 8086. (8086 was the daughter of Intel, the child of Moore). And QDOS grew, and was named MS-DOS. And MS-DOS and the PC together waxed mighty, and conquered all markets, replicating and taking possession thereof, in accordance with Moore s Law. And Intel grew terrible and devoured all her children, such that no chip could stand before her. And Microsoft grew proud and devoured IBM, and this was a great marvel in the land. All these things are written in the Books of the Deeds of Microsoft. In the fullness of time MS-DOS begat Windows. And this is the lineage of Windows: CP/M begat QDOS. QDOS begat DOS 1.0. DOS 1.0 begat DOS 2.0 by way of Unix. DOS 2.0 begat Windows 3.11 by way of PARC and Macintosh. IBM and Microsoft begat OS/2, who begat Windows NT and Warp, the lost OS of lore. Windows 3.11 begat Windows 95 after triumphing over Macintosh in a mighty Battle of Licences. Windows NT begat NT 4.0 by way of Windows 95. NT 4.0 begat NT 5.0, the OS also called Windows 2000, The Millenium Bug, Doomsday, Armageddon, The End Of All Things. Now it came to pass that Microsoft had waxed great and mighty among the Microchip Corporations; mighter than any of the Mainframe Corporations before it had it waxed. And Gates heart was hardened, and he swore unto his Customers and their Engineers the words of this curse: Children of von Neumann, hear me. IBM and the Mainframe Corporations bound thy forefathers with grave and perilous Licences, such that ye cried unto the spirits of Turing and von Neumann for deliverance. Now I say unto ye: I am greater than any Corporation before me. Will I loosen your Licences? Nay, I will bind thee with Licences twice as grave and ten times more perilous than my forefathers. I will engrave my Licence on thy heart and write my Serial Number upon thy frontal lobes. I will bind thee to the Windows Platform with cunning artifices and with devious schemes. I will bind thee to the Intel Chipset with crufty code and with gnarly APIs. I will capture and enslave thee as no generation has been enslaved before. And wherefore will ye cry then unto the spirits of Turing, and von Neumann, and Moore? They cannot hear ye. I am become a greater Power than they. Ye shall cry only unto me, and shall live by my mercy and my wrath. I am the Gates of Hell; I hold the portal to MSNBC and the keys to the Blue Screen of Death. Be ye afraid; be ye greatly afraid; serve only me, and live. And the people were cowed in terror and gave homage to Microsoft, and endured the many grave and perilous trials which the Windows platform and its greatly bodacious Licence forced upon them. And once again did they cry to Turing and von Neumann and Moore for a deliverer, but none was found equal to the task until the birth of Linux. These are the generations of Linux: SAGE begat ARPA, which begat TCP/IP, and Aloha, which begat Ethernet. Bell begat Multics, which begat C, which begat Unix. Unix and TCP/IP begat Internet, which begat the World Wide Web. Unix begat RMS, father of the great GNU, which begat the Libraries and Emacs, chief of the Utilities. In the days of the Web, Internet and Ethernet begat the Intranet LAN, which rose to renown among all Corporations and prepared the way for the Penguin. And Linus and the Web begat the Kernel through Unix. The Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities together are the Distribution, the one Penguin in many forms, forever and ever praised. Now in those days there was in the land of Helsinki a young scholar named Linus the Torvald. Linus was a devout man, a disciple of RMS and mighty in the spirit of Turing, von Neumann and Moore. One day as he was meditating on the Architecture, Linus fell into a trance and was granted a vision. And in the vision he saw a great Penguin, serene and well-favoured, sitting upon an ice floe eating fish. And at the sight of the Penguin Linus was deeply afraid, and he cried unto the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore for an interpretation of the dream. And in the dream the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore answered and spoke unto him, saying, Fear not, Linus, most beloved hacker. You are exceedingly cool and froody. The great Penguin which you see is an Operating System which you shall create and deploy unto the earth. The ice-floe is the earth and all the systems thereof, upon which the Penguin shall rest and rejoice at the completion of its task. And the fish on which the Penguin feeds are the crufty Licensed codebases which swim beneath all the earth s systems. The Penguin shall hunt and devour all that is crufty, gnarly and bodacious; all code which wriggles like spaghetti, or is infested with blighting creatures, or is bound by grave and perilous Licences shall it capture. And in capturing shall it replicate, and in replicating shall it document, and in documentation shall it bring freedom, serenity and most cool froodiness to the earth and all who code therein. Linus rose from meditation and created a tiny Operating System Kernel as the dream had foreshewn him; in the manner of RMS, he released the Kernel unto the World Wide Web for all to take and behold. And in the fulness of Internet Time the Kernel grew and replicated, becoming most cool and exceedingly froody, until at last it was recognised as indeed a great and mighty Penguin, whose name was Tux. And the followers of Linus took refuge in the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities; they installed Distribution after Distribution, and made sacrifice unto the GNU and the Penguin, and gave thanks to the spirits of Turing, von Neumann and Moore, for their deliverance from the hand of Microsoft. And this was the beginning of the Fourth Age, the age of Open Source. Now there is much more to be said about the exceeding strange and wonderful events of those days; how some Suits of Microsoft plotted war upon the Penguin, but were discovered on a Halloween Eve; how Gates fell among lawyers and was betrayed and crucified by his former friends, the apostles of Media; how the mercenary Knights of the Red Hat brought the gospel of the Penguin into the halls of the Corporations; and even of the dispute between the brethren of Gnome and KDE over a trollish Licence. But all these things are recorded elsewhere, in the Books of the Deeds of the Penguin and the Chronicles of the Fourth Age, and I suppose if they were all narrated they would fill a stack of DVDs as deep and perilous as a Usenet Newsgroup. Now may you code in the power of the Source; may the Kernel, the Libraries and the Utilities be with you, throughout all Distributions, until the end of the Epoch. Amen.

Woodchuck and FrOSCon

At the end of August, I attended FrOSCon in Bonn again, after skipping it last year. The evening before FrOSCon however, I visited Neal Walfield, his wife Isabel and their little son Noam in D sseldorf. Besides having a great time and a lovely dinner, I was most impressed by their collection of Maemo devices (they had at least two N770s, an N900 and, to my jealousy, an N950) which Neal is doing research on these days. He works on woodchuck, which is a project investigating how to improve data availability on mobile devices and our conversation prompted him to implement ATP Woodchuck, which makes smarter decisions when to run APT upgrade on your Maemo device then the standard updater. As part of the research, they also run a user behaviour study which I joined, where one installs a client which records various data off your N900 and sends them anonymized (he seems to be doing a good job at that) to figure out how people use their mobile devices and hopefully enhance the experience. So if you have a N900, you should consider joining the study so they get better data.
The next day, I picked up Martin Michlmayr nearby and we headed for FrOSCon. I was quite impressed by the Makerbot at the Tarent booth, but I still don't know what they are really doing and why they had it on display... In the afternoon, I attended a couple of talks in the PostgreSQL developer room and a talk about a big OpenVPN deployment, before ending the day with the excellent as always social event barbeque. On Sunday, I went to quite a few talks, but I thought that two of them were particularly interesting:
Michael "Monty" Widenius of MySQL gave a talk titled "Why going open source will improve your product" about starting businesses on an open source project, or how business can/should open-source their product. Besides a detailed discussion about the various forms of Open Source licenses and the Open-Core model, he proposed the idea of "Business Source" (see slide 20 of his presentation), where a startup would distribute the source code under a non-commercial (but otherwise open-source) license with the explicit guarantee that the license would be changed to a true FLOSS license at some defined point in the future, giving the company a head start to develop and nurture their project. I asked whether this has been already implemented in practise and how the community could be sure that e.g. lawyers after a hostile takeover would not just remove that part of the copyright notice, as long as a true distribution under a FLOSS license has not happened yet. Monty wasn't aware of any real-word cases, and he did not seem to be concerned about this and said the original intent would be clear in a possible court case. This was the first time I heard about this approach, I wonder how other people think about it, whether it would work in practise and be a useful thing to have?
Second, I attended a talk by Gregor Geiermann, a Ph.D. student in linguistics on "Perceptions of rudeness in Free Software communities". He conducted an online survey about the perceived rudeness of several forum thread posts on Ubuntu Forums. Survey participants were first asked a couple of generic questions about their gender, nationality etc. and were then presented with a series of posts. For each post, they were asked to rate how rude they thought it was on a scale of 1 to 5 and they also had the possibility to highlight the parts of the post they considered rude as well as add comments. He presented a neat web application for analyzing the results, which makes it possible to select different groups (he did male vs. female and Americans vs. Germans in the talk) and have their overall rudeness ratings as well as the highlighted texts visualized as different shades of blue. Comments can be easily accessed. There were quite a few interesting differences e.g. in how Germans perceived rudeness compared to Americans (RTFM comments were considered less rude by Germans for example, IIRC). In response to my question, he said he intended to release the web application as open source and this might be an interesting tool for FLOSS projects to analyze how their public communication channels are perceived by various groups. Unfortunately, I cannot find any other resources about this on the web as of today, so I should try to contact him about it at some point.

Traditionally, when you start a program to view a document, for instance xpdf resume.pdf, it stays in foreground, and only returns when it finishes, when you are done with the document. Of course you can still run it in background if you want. Nowadays, several programs behave in a different way, for instance Evince. When you first start it, it stays in foreground as usual. However, if you launch it a second time while the first instance it still running, it will reuse this existing instance, asking it to open your document in a new window, and immediately return. Other examples are Firefox and LibreOffice.This behaviour is certainly more efficient in terms of memory usage and speed, but it is non-standard and causes subtle problems. When you open the attachment of an email message, or when you open a document from the Web without saving it permanently, the mailer or the browser saves the document to a temporary file, and then run a viewer with that file. As this is a temporary file, so they cannot leave it forever in /tmp; in fact they should delete it when you are done viewing it. I think the usual way to implement that is to delete it when the viewer returns: with a program that returns immediately, this means deleting it even before it has had a chance to load it. So, if you can no longer directly open a PDF attachment from Mutt, or if you are unable to view the compressed documentation of the LaTeX class Beamer with texdoc (which uncompresses it to a temporary file and calls a PDF viewer on it), you can blame your modern PDF viewer that returns before you are finished and start hacking your mailcap file. And if you are the author of such a program, please consider implementing a way to keep a lightweight process that does not return before the main process has closed the document or to disable process reuse.

The MeeGo community is frustrated with the news of the MeeGo brand being abandoned. Some are understandably angry or otherwise not happy about how Linux Foundation, Intel handled the Tizen announcement and community in general - or more like how they didn't handle it at all.Last week Openmind 2011 happened to be arranged in Tampere on the very same day as Tizen announcement came alive. It was good in the way that it lead to the fact that Nomovok's CEO Pasi Nieminen was able to initiate the "Reigniting MeeGo" session not just by talking vague things about future, but actually about the process which led to Tizen and the unfortunately brief initial PR about it. Pasi is intense on emphasizing the quality and role of Qt in Tizen as well, even though officially Tizen is all about HTML5 and apparently from Samsung's part at least EFL is provided as a native toolkit. However, the promise of Tizen compared to MeeGo is reportedly that the toolkit is not specified in compliancy documents, so HTML5 with WAC is the main/only "3rd party apps" layer whereas others can be offered case-by-case. This means that unlike before, the underlying system can be built on top of practically any distribution (theoretically) and using whatever toolkits and other techniques wanted. Obviously the "Nordic System Integrators" are probably all very keen of using Qt to produce more of Nokia N9 quality user experiences in various products.

Taking the corporate hat off, I as a community member am also puzzled. The only reason I was not completely blown by the news was that I didn't yet manage to get involved in MeeGo community on a daily basis, since I'm involved with a dozen communities already. Instead I've been more like scratching the surface with MeeGo Network Finland meetings, IRC activity, OBS usage for building a few apps for MeeGo Harmattan and MeeGo proper etc. But I can somewhat understand how people like Jarkko Moilanen from meego-fi feel. They have given a _lot_ to the MeeGo community and brand, all taken away without hearing or pre-notice.

So where to now for MeeGo community? Tizen is one obvious choice. However, for all the talks that even I started this post with, Tizen is still vaporware today, and the dislike of how community is being treated might make it easy to consider other options. Also, if Tizen's reference implementation has lesser meaning, it might also mean less to actually be "in" the Tizen community than in MeeGo. I met Jos Poortvliet at Openmind, and he invited people to openSUSE. There is a lot of common ground with MeeGo and openSUSE - strong OBS usage, RPM packaging, community side focused on KDE and therefore Qt.

I would like to now point similarly to Debian! If one is tired about corporate interests and not listening to community, there is no match for Debian's 15+ years history, purely volunteer based, trust based organization, and first of all scope. While openSUSE has traditionally focused on desktop (even though like Jos pointed out they are open to all new contributions and projects), Debian has always had the "universal" scope, ie. no boundaries besides producing free software operating system for various purposes. There are over 10 architectures maintained at the moment, including the ARM (different ports for ARMv4 and hard-float ARMv7) and x86 from MeeGo world. There are even alternative kernels to Linux, mainly the GNU/kFreeBSD port. There are multiple relevant plans and projects like the Smartphones wiki area, most noticeably Debian on Neo FreeRunner. I have run Debian on my primary mobile phone for over 2.5 years, although now in the recent months I've had dual-SIM in my Nokia N950 as well (Debian not yet running on Nokia N950 or Nokia N9 - but it can and will be done!).

What Debian may lack in both good and bad is corporate funding, if you don't count the still quite respectful contributions from Ubuntu to Debian (it's in Ubuntu's interests to contribute as much possible back to Debian, so that the delta remains small). For each and every aspect, it needs a volunteer - there are a thousand volunteer Debian Developers, and at least a double of that of people without the official DD status but who still maintain a package or two among the 25000+ packages in Debian. That means also that one my find it more lucrative to join a project that has paid people to do some of the "boring parts", more of fancy web tools, including for bug handling and build systems like the OBS (which I do love by the way). On the other hand, there is no other project in my opinion where what you do really matters as much.

To find out more about Debian from MeeGo perspective, please see the recent mailing list post Mobile UXes - From the DebConf11 BoF to the stars where I wrote most of the MeeGo (CE) part when I was asked to and known of my MeeGo involvement.

Last but not certainly least, there is the Mer project - originally "maemo reconstructed", ie. making Nokia's "not really distro" into a real distro by filling in the void places. Now it's obviously MeeGo reconstructed, and they aim to be the MeeGo they always wanted MeeGo to be! Read the post for details from Carsten Munk and other key Mer people. They share the love for Qt, and want the core to be as lean as possible. They also aim to incorporate the most community like aspect from MeeGo - MeeGo CE - as the reference vendor in Mer. They also aim to be Tizen compliant - and when Tizen comes alive, I wouldn't see why the Tizen reference implementation couldn't be used for saving resources. Maybe Nomovok and/or others could offer the Qt maintaining part.

So, it might be that Tizen itself is enough for most people's needs. The key point however in this post is not to fall in agony if one corporate based project takes big turns - it has happened before, it will happen in the future. There are always enough political and business reasons from some points of view to do Big Changes. But the wider community is out there, always, and it's bigger than you think. You should consider where you want to contribute by asking yourself why you are/were part of for example the MeeGo community. Aaron Seigo from KDE asked us all this question in the Openmind MeeGo Reignited session, and I think it's good to repeat.

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the Rcpp class in San Francisco, which I am holding together with Revolution Analytics, will take place a week from today. We are happy to report that the number of registrations has met our initial targets. But as a number of open slots remain, we have decided to offer a few places at discounts of 25% for academics (with code acad1) and 50% for students (with code student). Course details are at the Revolution course page, registration is at the Eventbrite page. And just for completeness, here is what I wrote in the previous announcement:

The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. The one-day class will be offered in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details.

Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions. Or with suggestions for the after-party in San Francisco :)

The new ncurses library that is currently sitting in the NEW queue will have a significant change that, if we ve done it right, should be an invisible change. If we ve got it wrong, then the BTS (and us) may be a little busy. What has happened is that the low-level terminfo library has been split out from the general ncurses library making a new package called libtinfo5. This also means that there only needs to be one libtinfo5 package because at this low level it doesn t care about wide characters, so there is no libtinfo5w (and that gets important later). libncurses is linked to libtinfo so from the point of view of using libncurses there should be no major change in how things are done. So, why bother? The way ncurses was built before causes a nice long conga line of trouble . There really are (was) two main ncurses library packages, libncurses5 and libncursesw5. The w meant it was for wide characters. So anything that uses ncurses needs to decide which one to link to or perhaps both. A problem came up with the readline library that needs to link to ncurses because programs that link to IT (such as python) want a wide library but other programs do not. One solution is to have two readline libraries, but then any other library would need to be compiled and built twice as well and so on and so on. readline didn t really want the full ncurses library, it only wants the terminfo part but there was (until now) no way of picking up that bit only. Once this new version of ncurses gets released then readline can link to libterminfo which is agnostic to wide and non-wide characters which means it is as well which them means everything else should, in theory work. If you are using ncurses for some low-level terminfo work only, you may want to have a look to see if you can link to libtinfo5 only which will mean depending on libtinfo5 and not libncurses5 or libncursesw5. I m just writing this up mainly and uploading the packages, the bulk of the work was done by Sven and Matthias as well as some help from our ever-helpful upstream Thomas.

The following is a quick HOWTO for the brave Debian users who want to upgrade to GNOME 3. Assuming you have an up to date system running sid, and experimental listed in your APT sources, perform the following complicated steps to end up having a functional GNOME 3 desktop:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

Thanks go to Joss for putting together new GNOME 3 meta-packages, and the rest of the Debian GNOME people for months of hard planning and packaging work, and painful testing transition handling. Before you ask, yeah, not all of GNOME 3.x is in unstable yet, but will soon be, as precedent transitions start clearing the way. And yeah, GNOME 3.2 will come just after the two remaining package sets enter testing. To compensate, you'll find that you have some GNOME leaf packages pending an upgrade to 3.2.0-1 while you read this.

I've never had a dog of my own since I grew up, but there have always been dogs in my life.

Calypso and Percy

Calypso was dropped off at Wortroot soon after I moved in, and was my borrowed dog for years. And she remained out there, spending a good decade with run of the woods, fields and streams, a good doggy life. She got old and feeble, spent winters by the fireplace, and finally it was too much for her. I'll miss her, the best dog I've known. Recently I've caught glimpses of a dog lurking in the distance here at the Hollow. When I noticed it was sleeping on the roof of the battery box, I realized it was probably one of the dogs that used to live here but were given away last year. Exchanged email with the likely owners, now in Sudan, and they tell me her name is Domino, and she must have run away home. So I've been putting out food for Domino this week, and yesterday she came close enough to be petted. Medium sized and white, her name is for a black mask extending from eyes to ears. Although currently skittish, she seems basically a good, calm dog.

Session reuse is one of the most important mechanism to improve SSL performance: by submitting an appropriate blob to the server, a client is able to trigger an abbreviated handshake, improving latency and computation time. There exists two distinct ways to achieve session reuse: session identifiers as described in RFC 5246 and session tickets as depicted in RFC 5077. A quick note: when I say SSL, unless I mention a version number, you should read TLS instead. Look at the article for TLS on Wikipedia for some background on this.

Theory of operation To establish a SSL connection, four messages need to be exchanged between client and server. With a latency of 50 ms, we have a 200 ms overhead to establish the connection (plus TCP handshake). Moreover, to share a common secret, both the client and the server needs to achieve some public-key cryptographic operations which are costly, computation-wise. To avoid a full SSL handshake each time a client request a resource, it is possible for the client to request an abbreviated handshake, saving a complete round-trip (100 ms) and avoiding the costliest part of the full SSL handshake. Two mechanisms can be used to accomplish an abbreviated handshake:

1. When the server sends the Server Hello message, it can include a session identifier. The client should store it and present it in the Client Hello message of the next session. If the server finds the corresponding session in its cache and accepts to resume the session, it will send back the same session identifier and will continue with the abbreviated SSL handshake. Otherwise, it will issue a new session identifier and switch to a full handshake. This mechanism is detailed in RFC 5246. It is the most common mechanism because it exists since earlier versions of SSL.
2. In the last exchange of a full SSL handshake, the server can include a New Session Ticket message (not represented in the handshake described in the picture) which will contain the complete session state (including the master secret negotiated between the client and the server and the cipher suite used). Therefore, this state is encrypted and integrity-protected by a key known only by the server. This opaque datum is known as a session ticket. The details lie in RFC 5077 which supersedes RFC 4507.

The ticket mechanism is a TLS extension. The client can advertise its support by sending an empty Session Ticket extension in the Client Hello message. The server will answer with an empty Session Ticket extension in its Server Hello message if it supports it. If one of them does not support this extension, they can fallback to the session identifier mechanism built into SSL. RFC 5077 identifies situations where tickets are desirable over session identifiers. The main improvement is to avoid to maintain a server-side session cache since the whole session state is remembered by the client, not the server. A session cache can be costly in term of memory and difficult to share between multiple hosts when requests are load-balanced across servers.

Browser support Session identifiers are part of SSL and are therefore supported since a long time by clients and servers. However, session tickets are an optional TLS extension and therefore, the support is not as widespread as for session identifiers. Support for tickets was added in OpenSSL 0.9.8f (October 2007). In GnuTLS, this is version 2.9.3 (August 2009). For NSS, the set of libraries behind most browsers, support of RFC 5077 is in version 3.12 (June 2008). Schannel, Microsoft implementation of TLS, does not currently supports tickets. To check if a browser supports session resume without and with tickets, I have written a web server listening to several ports with different configurations (session cache disabled or enabled, ticket support disabled or enabled). With the help of some Javascript, it is possible to interact with this server to determine what kind of session resume a browser support. It is difficult to get extensive results this way since you need to install a lot of browsers to get something valuable. Surprisingly, Android 2.3.4 browser (as shipped by Cyanogen Mod) does not support any session resume. Another way to check if a browser supports session resume is to use a sniffer and to spot Client Hello messages. If a client tries to resume a session, it will use an appropriate session identifier or send a ticket. A simple program parsing PCAP files allows to automate this task and get some interesting statistics. Here are random facts from more than 300 000 requests (38 000 clients) to a customer care service of an important French telco:

• 35% of requests exhibit support of tickets;
• 53.3% of requests ask to resume without tickets; 25.6% with tickets;
• 67.2% of requests exhibit support of SNI;
• 86.7% of requests use TLS 1.0; the remaining uses SSL 3.0; almost no TLS 1.1/1.2;
• in average, a client execute 8 SSL handshakes;
• ciphers supported by all clients are 3DES-SHA, RC4-MD5 and RC4-SHA.

With some log analysis to match each requests with the appropriate user agent, we can split the world in two parts: browsers supporting RFC 5077 (Chrome and Firefox) and browsers not supporting RFC 5077 (Internet Explorer, Opera 9.80, Safari for MacOS and iOS and Android browser).

Web server support There is no unique recipe to configure a web server to handle appropriately and efficiently session resume. Here are some generic directions :

• if the web server uses multiple processes, you need to configure a shared memory session cache; usually, tickets will work just fine in this setup;
• if you use local load-balancing, one easy way to avoid any problem is to use ensure that one IP is mapped to one server (either statically with hashing or dynamically with a stick table); if your load-balancer understands SSL, you can also use session identifier (and disable tickets¹) to build a stick table;
• if you don t want to apply the previous advice, you need to share the session cache between the servers with something like memcached and disable tickets;
• if you use global load-balancing (DNS based), there is no need to ensure that session resumption works across geographic pools since a user will usually stick to one pool.

Remember that only one client out of three supports TLS tickets. Therefore, you cannot rely on them to ensure proper session resume. You need a session cache.

Setting a session cache with Apache & nginx Apache features two different SSL engines. The first one is mod_ssl and uses OpenSSL as backend. It is possible to setup a shared session cache with SSLSessionCache but the memcached-enabled session cache is available only in the development branch. You can also get one by switching to mod_gnutls backend. The cache is enabled with GnuTLSCache. In this case, do not enable tickets because they cannot be shared. With nginx, you need to enable the shared session cache with ssl_session_cache. Currently, it lacks a memcached-enabled session cache but Matt Palmer has some patches to add it to the 0.8 branch. However, those patches can have a serious impact on nginx performance since retrieving a session from memcached is done synchronously (mostly because a limitation in OpenSSL design who does not allow to register asynchronous callbacks with SSL_CTX_sess_set_get_cb()). As a proof of concept, I have also added a similar feature to stud, the scalable TLS unwrapping daemon, a very efficient network proxy terminating SSL connections. The same limitation as for nginx applies: performances will suffer. Look at the pull request for more details.

Sharing tickets RFC 5077 tells tickets allow to load-balance requests across servers. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is currently no web server able to share tickets across a pool. Actually, when a server initializes its SSL stack, it will randomly generate some keys that will be used to protect and encrypt tickets. In OpenSSL, from ssl/ssl_lib.c:

    /* Setup RFC4507 ticket keys */
    if ((RAND_pseudo_bytes(ret->tlsext_tick_key_name, 16) <= 0)
              (RAND_bytes(ret->tlsext_tick_hmac_key, 16) <= 0)
              (RAND_bytes(ret->tlsext_tick_aes_key, 16) <= 0))
            ret->options  = SSL_OP_NO_TICKET;

Therefore, with a round-robin load-balanced pool of servers, tickets have to be disabled because servers would not accept tickets from neighbors. One way to solve this is to generate keys deterministically by hashing some common secret with the private key. I have implemented this approach for stud. Here is a simplified version (no error handling, no allocation) of the pull request for this feature:

    unsigned char keys[48];
    EVP_PKEY *pkey = grab_private_key();
    /* To get our key, we sign the seed with the private key */
    unsigned int siglen;
    unsigned char sign[LARGE_ENOUGH];
    EVP_MD_CTX mdctx;
    EVP_MD_CTX_init(&mdctx);
    EVP_SignInit(&mdctx, EVP_sha256());
    EVP_SignUpdate(&mdctx, some_secret, strlen(some_secret));
    EVP_SignFinal(&mdctx, sign, &siglen, pkey);
    /* And we keep only the first bytes. */
    memcpy(keys, sign, sizeof(keys));
    /* Tell OpenSSL to use those keys */
    SSL_CTX_set_tlsext_ticket_keys(ctx, keys, sizeof(keys));

Testing While tests can be done with just openssl s_client and openssl sess_id, testing all aspects can take a lot of time. For this purpose, I have written a client testing session resume with and without tickets. Here is a typical result: The program will try to establish five consecutive SSL connections for each IP without and with tickets. For each IP, the last four SSL connections should always reuse the first SSL session. Here, Twitter web servers seem properly configured: for each IP, session resume is successful. Their web servers do not support tickets or they may have disabled it because they share the session cache between servers inside the same pool.

---

1. RFC 5077 describes interactions between session identifiers and session tickets. When using tickets, the server should send back an empty session identifier. The client may present an empty session identifier or generate one. However, for all practical purposes, it seems that servers send back a non-empty session identifier and clients just stick to this identifier. Please, investigate if you want to use SSL session identifiers for load-balancing while keeping tickets enabled.

There's something brewing, moving in Jalisco (a state in Mexico's West, where our second largest city, Guadalajara, is located). And it seems we have an opportunity to participate, hopefully to be taken into account for the future. Ten days ago, I was contacted by phone by the staff of UDG Noticias, for an interview on the Universidad de Guadalajara radio station. The topic? Electronic voting. If you are interested in what I said there, you can get the interview from my webpage. I held some e-mail contact with the interviewer, and during the past few days, he sent me some links to notes in the La Jornada de Jalisco newspaper, and asked for my opinion on them: On September 23, a fellow UNAM researcher, C sar Astudillo, claims the experience in three municipalities in Jalisco prove that e-voting is viable in the state, and today (September 26), third generation of an electronic booth is appearingly invulnerable. Of course, I don't agree with the arguments presented (and I'll reproduce the mails I sent to UDG Noticias about it before my second interview just below They are in Spanish, though). However, what I liked here is that it does feel like a dialogue. Their successive texts seem to answer to my questioning. So, even though I cannot yet claim this is a real dialogue (it would be much better to be able to sit down face to face and have a fluid conversation), it feels very nice to actually be listened to from the other side! My answer to the first note:

El tema de las urnas electr nicas sigue dando de qu hablar por ac en Jalisco... nosotros en Medios UDG hemos presentado distintas voces como la del Dr. Gabriel Corona Armenta, que est a favor del voto electr nico, del Dr. Luis Antonio Sobrado, magistrado presidente del tribunal supremo de elecciones de Costa Rica, quien nos habl sobre los 20 MDD que les cuesta implementar el sistema por lo que no lo han logrado hasta el momento, pudimos hablar hasta argentina con Federico Heinz y su rotunda oposici n al voto electr nico y por supuesto la entrevista que le realizamos a usted. Sin embargo este d a La Jornada Jalisco publica la siguiente nota http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/23/index.php?section=politica... nos gustar a saber cu l es su punto de vista al respecto, quedo a la espera de su respuesta

Hola, Pues... Bueno, s que el IFE hizo un desarrollo muy interesante y bien hecho hace un par de a os, dise ando desde cero las urnas que propon an emplear, pero no se instrumentaron fuera de pilotos (por cuesti n de costos, hasta donde entiendo). Se me hace triste y peligroso que el IEPC de Jalisco est proponiendo, teniendo ese antecedente, la compra de tecnolog a prefabricada, y confiando en lo que les ofrece un proveedor. Se me hace bastante iluso, directamente, lo que propone el t tulo: comicios en tres municipios prueban la viabilidad del voto electr nico en todo el estado . Pong moslo en estos t rminos: El que no se caiga una choza de l mina con estructura de madera demuestra que podemos construir rascacielos de l mina con estructura de madera? Ahora, un par de p rrafos que me llaman la atenci n de lo que publica esta nota de La Jornada:

la propuesta de realizar la elecci n en todo el estado con urnas electr nicas que desea llevar a cabo el Instituto Electoral y de Participaci n Ciudadana (IEPC) es viable, pues los comicios realizados en tres municipios son pruebas suficientes para demostrar que la urna es fiable

y algunos p rrafos m s adelante,

Cu ntas experiencias m s se necesitan para saber si es confiable, 20, 30, no lo s (...) Pero cuando se tiene un diagn stico real, efectivo y serio de cu ndo t cnicamente procede, se puede tomar la decisi n

Como lo menciono en mi art culo... No podemos confundir a la ausencia de evidencia con la evidencia de ausencia. Esto es, que en un despliegue menor no haya habido irregulares no significa que no pueda haberlas. Que haya pa ses que operan 100% con urnas electr nicas no significa que sea el camino a seguir. Hay algunas -y no pocas- experiencias de fallas en diversos sentidos de urnas electr nicas, y eso demuestra que no puede haber confianza en las implementaciones. Aunque el equipo nos saliera gratis (que no es el caso), hay que invertir recursos en su resguardo y mantenimiento. Aunque se generara un rastro impreso verificado por el votante (que s lo ha sido el caso en una peque a fracci n de las estacione de votaci n), nada asegura que los resultados reportados por el equipo sean siempre consistentes con la realidad. El potencial para mal uso que ofrecen es demasiado. Saludos,

And to September 26th:

Disculpe que lo molestemos otra vez, pero este d a fue publicada otra nota m s sobre el tema de las Urnas electr nicas en Jalisco donde se asegura que la urna es invulnerable. http://www.lajornadajalisco.com.mx/2011/09/26/index.php?section=politica... nos podr a conceder unos minutos para hablar con usted, como la vez pasada, v a telef nica sobre el caso espec fico de Jalisco, en referencia a estas notas publicadas recientemente? si es posible podr a llamarle este d a a las 2 pm? Quedo a la espera de su respuesta agradeci ndole su ayuda, apreciamos mucho esta colaboraci n que est haciendo con nosotros

Hola, ( ) Respecto a esta nota: Nuevamente, ausencia de evidencia no es evidencia de ausencia. Se le permite a un peque o segmento de personas jugar con una m quina. Significa eso que fue una prueba completa, exhaustiva? No, s lo que ante un jugueteo casual no pudieron encontrar fallos obvios y graves. Un verdadero proceso que brindara confianza consistir a en (como lo hicieron en Brasil - Y resultaron vulnerables) convocar a la comunidad de expertos en seguridad en c mputo a hacer las pruebas que juzguen necesarias teniendo un nivel razonable de acceso al equipo. Adem s, la seguridad va m s all de modificar los resultados guardados. Un par de ejemplos que se me ocurren sin darle muchas vueltas:

• Qu pasa si meto un chicle a la ranura lectora de tarjeta magn tica?
• Qu pasa si golpeo alguna de las teclas lo suficiente para hacerla un poquito menos sensible sin destruirla por completo? (o, ya entrados en gastos, si la destruyo)

La negaci n de servicio es otro tipo de ataque con el cual tenemos que estar familiarizados. No s lo es posible modificar el sentido de la votaci n, sino que es muy f cil impedir que la poblaci n ejerza su derecho. Qu har an en este caso? Bueno, podr an caer de vuelta a votaci n sobre papel - Sobre hojas de un block, probablemente firmadas por cada uno de los funcionarios, por ejemplo. Pero si un atacante bloque la lectura de la tarjeta magn tica, que es necesaria para que el presidente de casilla la marque como cerrada, despoj de su voto a los usuarios. S , se tienen los votos impresos (que, francamente, me da mucho gusto ver que esta urna los maneja de esta manera). El conteo es posible, aunque un poco m s inc modo que en una votaci n tradicional (porque hay que revisar cu les son los que est n marcados como invalidados - no me queda muy claro c mo es el escenario del elector que vot por una opci n, se imprimi otra, y el resultado fue corregido y marcado como tal)... Pero es posible. Sin embargo, y para cerrar con esta respuesta: Si hacemos una corrida de prueba, en circunstancias controladas, obviamente no se notar n los much simos fallos que una urna electr nica puede introducir cuando los "chicos malos" son sus programadores. Podemos estar seguro que este marcador Atlas-Chivas-Cruz Azul tenga el mismo ndice de fiabilidad como una elecci n de candidatos reales, uno de los cuales puede haberle pagado a la empresa desarrolladora para manipular la elecci n? Y a n si el proceso fuera perfecto, indican aqu que est n _intentando_ licitar estas urnas (y nuevamente, si lo que menciona esta nota es cierto, son de las mejores urnas disponibles, y han atendido a muchos de los se alamientos - Qu bueno!)... Para qu ? Qu nos van a dar estas urnas, qu va a ganar la sociedad? Mayor rapidez? Despreciable - Media hora de ganancia. A cambio de cu nto dinero? Mayor confiabilidad? Me queda claro que no, siendo que no s lo somos cuatro trasnochados los que ponemos su sistema en duda, sino que sus mismos proponentes apuntan a la duda generalizada. La frase con la que cierra la nota se me hace digna para colgar un ep logo: "en ese futuro quiz no tan distante la corrupci n tambi n ocurre y sta se debe siempre al factor humano". Y el factor humano sigue ah . Las urnas electr nicas son programadas por personas, por personas falibles. Sin importar del lado que est n, recordar n la pol mica cuando se hizo p blico que la agregaci n de votos en el 2006 fue supervisada por la empresa Hildebrando, propiedad del cu ado del entonces candidato a la presidencia Felipe Calder n. Qu evita que caigamos en un escenario similar, pero ampliamente distribu do? Y aqu hay que referirnos a la sentencia de la Suprema Corte de Alemania: En dicho pa s, las votaciones electr nicas fueron declaradas anticonstitucionales porque s lo un grupo de especialistas podr an auditarlas. Una caja llena de papeles con la evidencia clara del sentido del voto de cada participante puede ser comprendida por cualquier ciudadano. El c digo que controla a las urnas electr nicas, s lo por un peque o porcentaje de la poblaci n.

So one my favorite fieldwork photos is the one above and I would love to include it in my book but I have no idea where I got it from much less who took it. The photo was taken during a San Francisco protest against the DMCA, and more urgently at the time, also calling for the release of Dimitry Sklyrov (and we were all listening to Richard Stallman who was giving a small speech and I am on the right hand side of the photo, furiously scribbling notes) I am looking for a high quality photo from one of the many Dmitry Sklyarov protests that were held in San Francisco or San Jose a photo that is either under CC license or given to me with formal permission to publish (I have forms to get official permissions). As I mentioned in my previous post, the book will be published with Princeton University Press with a CC license.

So my first book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking is mostly sort of done. All the arguments are in place and I am doing the final, very annoying, seemingly endless work of adding a few final citations, hunting for permissions, and tweaking about 10 paragraphs that I feel can be slightly improved (down from about 20 last week). The book is based on the dissertation but re-framed significantly with lots of new material and best of all a lot of the cruft has been zapped away, I think. The book will include two published pieces, although slightly revised. One of them is one of my all time favorite pieces on the hacker conference (which is the least academic/jargony of the peer reviewed articles). I thought it might be fun to change some of the photos for my book: so if you have some awesome, high quality photos that exude the joy of conferencing from past Debconfs or ANY hacker conference (preferably with computers in the background) please share. I am open to anything although I am looking for a high quality/sharp photo of people hacking away in the hack lab. The photo I have is good but I would like one with better lighting/sharper focus. The book will be published under a CC license (the most restrictive one, but heck as a junior scholar, I took what I could get and it is the first book that Princeton University Press is releasing under such a license). If you hold the copyright, I will need more official permission, otherwise, if it is under a CC or copyleft license, I will be adding the correct attribution/notice in the book.

I finally finished a thing I was really missing: accessing my Google Contacts from Emacs. That's now possible, thanks to my new google-contacts.el package.

<video controls="controls"> <source src="http://julien.danjou.info/images/emacs-google-contacts.ogv" type="video/ogg"> </video> It includes searching for any contact and displaying the result in a window. You can also jump to a contact from Gnus by pressing a key, and complete e-mail addresses while composing a mail.
Flattr me!

So much reporting on hacking is . so bad (no surprise to readers here). Worse is that term term was bandied out constantly during the News of the World Scandal. In contrast to this historical tradition, On the Media has curated a stellar Hack Week that provides depth, breath, and nuance; the producer of the show, Alex Goldman, poured an enormous amount of time, labor, and thought in compiling a rich set of materials to get at the term hackers, the many facets of hacking (from phreaking to hardware hacking) and best of all, interviewed the fantastic Marcia Hoffman from the EFF on one of the laws, the Computer and Fraud Abuse Act, whose massiveness (and vagueness) has the potential to do a lot of damage and which is often wielded against hackers (and many non-hackers as well). There is also an audio section on the term hacker, which I myself might have done slightly differently, emphasizing, that alongside the MIT hacker (covered so well by Steven Levy) phone phreaking (only called as such in 1973 but well and alive before then) fed into a transgressive tradition that was not simply about malicious hacking nor about the media portrayals that started to explode in the 1980s. The interview gets at the fact that there are differences and hackers can be quite sectarian but I might have pushed this fact a little further. All in all and after the ad nauseum use and abuse of the term hacking during the News of the World scandal (and its overabuse with Anonymous), this collection is the perfect antidote.

Despite being on sabbatical last academic year, life was hectic and chaotic leaving me with next to no time to write entries here. Anonymous, which I had worked on for a few years, exploded. I was excommunicated from my house (due to a flood/something likely mold making be very sick) and had to commute to Princeton from the far reaches of Manhattan where I crashed at a friends house for 5 months, while fighting my landlords. I then decided to go on a job hunt primarily as I did not know what would happen with my housing situation in NYC but I was also pursuing some interesting opportunities. Though the housing issue was eventually resolved, in May a rare and enticing opportunity arose. Come January 2012 I will be joining the Art History and Communication Department at McGill University as the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy. The decision to leave MCC NYU was torturous. The faculty is stellar. The graduate students are top notch and cream of the crop. And the digital media faculty is a force of nature, perhaps one of the deepest and most dynamic departments when it comes to the study of digital media. They also know how to treat their junior faculty right, which made it a place I respected and am deeply indebted to. But this type of opportunity is rare and it helped that NYC as wonderful as it is, is not my cup of tea. I wanted to eventually settle in one of the large Canadian cities, and Montreal was on the top of my list. I get to join one of the best universities in the world and a department whose work on digital media, STS, and politics converges with much of my own. The position provides resources, time, and room to cultivate scholarly work, help build a program of some sort in Science Technology Studies at McGill, and also engage with the public about the ethics and politics of science and technology. I will be teaching a class to joint BA/BS majors on scientific and technological controversies, a topic close to my heart. I also hope to create an open courseware website for my hacker course, which I will teach sometime in the 2012-2013 academic year. It is all that I can ask for, well, except for the weather. I would be lying if I did not admit that the winter scares the heck out of me I know some days I will feel just like this .

This week, I've finished my OAuth 2.0 client implementation for GNU Emacs. I have imported it into GNU ELPA so Emacs 24 users will be soon able to install it using the new Emacs packaging system. OAuth 2.0 can be used to access, among others, Google APIs or the Facebook Graph API.
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When I was in graduate school, there were two publications that when I found out about them, they changed my life, for the better. One is the Annual Review of Anthropology (and there are many other Annual Reviews) and Congressional Quarterly Researcher. Both, albeit in very different ways, provide clear and crisp road maps and resources related to the topic under discussion. I had the pleasure of writing an ARA on digital media and I had always hoped that there was a Congressional Quarterly on hackers and hacking. Well now there is one and I have to say, they have done a fantastic job. I am not surprised. They tend to be pretty matter of factual and present many sides to an issue. The author, Marcia Clemmitt, did just that, covering open source, transgressive hacking, Anonymous, and cybersecurity among many other issues. Out of all the recent publicly oriented publications on hackers and hacking, this is the one that is the most in-depth but accessible. The only hitch is that the article is behind a pay wall but most universities subscribe to them and you can order an individual copy. update: I forgot to mention that there is an excellent segment in the 24 page report by Daniel Flower, which covers the history and significance of the protests. It is compact but the best account I have seen.