Here s for the second installment of my review of this past year s Summer of Code at Debian. See the previous part here: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3). I apologize for being so late at getting this second part out but I have been very busy. Still, I ll get the last part out before FOSDEM. Those of you who ever had to write a Java compiler (ok, Java subset, but the OOP part was here ) in brainfucking Ada will understand what I went through working on two of my most loathed languages. Debian NAS, improve support of Debian on NAS devices Presentation There is a large range of inexpensive Network storage devices available on the market. For some of them, such as Linksys NSLU-2 and Thecus N2100, we have added support, but there is many many more devices we could support. For this summer we look forward at supporting multiple Marvell Orion based devices (as outlined in Martin Michlmayr s talk Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices), such as Revogear Kuro Box Pro, Buffalo Linkstation, QNAP TS-109+, If you don t have old computers lying around to turn into NAS servers, you need to sleep at night without the soothing sound of computer fans or if you actually pay your own electricity bill, you might want to have a look at standalone NAS devices. They re cheap and can be made vastly more capable by slapping a Debian on it. If you ever heard of DD-WRT, you know the spirit. The project was mentored by Riku Voipio, with help from Martin Michlmayr. The project proposal (sorry, Google cache) was introduced by Martin, who did a presentation about it the previous year at FOSDEM. Student Per Andersson was a 24 year old student working towards a MSc in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. He had been looking for ways to join Debian but with school still being priority one, he didn t find time to dive in. Result This project was successful. The Kurobox Pro is now supported and several useful tools were packaged to make life easier with these NAS devices. Martin Michlmayer is still working on Debian NAS related stuff. Per was happy to be invited to the Emdebian work session in Extremadura and has been active within debian, maintaining the packages he created during the Summer of Code. Cran2deb, generate Debian packages from R packages Presentation GNU R has become the preeminent platform for computing with data . The CRAN archives contain over 1300 source packages of very high-quality, and BioConductor has again almost as many focuses on bioinformatics. We want more of these in Debian, and going beyond the 50+ packages we currently have suggests more scripting and automation. R is a pretty big among statisticians and all of them they wasted no time writing their own package to work on particular research subject. It s a lot like Perl with CPAN or LaTeX with CTAN. It s always a pain to discovery that a particular R package is not wihtin Debian and having to resort to unmanaged installation of said packages. The project was mentored by Dirk Eddelbuetel. The project proposal (which is nowhere to be found but seemed to be good) was introduced by Dirk, along with another proposal he did for R. Student Charles Blundell is a research student at.. hum.. didn t do my homework about that. Anyway, you can find him around R related projects. Result This project was successful. Cran2deb is happilly turning more than 1400 of the ~1500 CRAN R packages, all with correct dependencies. The work has since been moved to R-Forge. It s working, we re almost there. We just need it to be polished and we ll get a whole bunch of new packages into Debian. Charles pinged me about the status of Cran2Deb after the previous post. He admits that he hasn t done much about cran2deb recently because of his new position as a research student but hopes to commit again to it soon. I do encourage him to get these R packages into Debian. I had to manually install some packages myself when I had to use R for school because they weren t into Debian and it s not pretty. Mergemaster, interactively merge changes in configuration files Presentation FreeBSD has a shellscript called mergemaster which is used to interactively merge changes in configuration files, based on 3-way diffs. Debian s approach to configuration file differences is much more primitive: either keep the original file, or blow it away (including all local changes) and use the Debian-provided file. It would be nice to get a system such as mergemaster into Debian. Important is to remember that Debian contains two often-used configuration file management systems: ucf, and conffiles; porting mergemaster in such a way that it will be used in both cases would be great. The handling of configuration files during upgrades has always been a little.. brutal, with the user being asked at gunpoint to make a good decision, lest the upgrade won t continue or configuration files get borked (ever tried automerging nagios configuration files?). Having a less stressful upgrade experience is a good thing since the point of Debian is to make package management a stressless thing. The project was mentored by, hum, Manoj Srivastava. I have no idea who came up at first with the proposal. UPDATE: Wouter Verhelst mailed to say that he made the original proposal. Student Max Wiehle was a physics student at the University of Heidelberg. He did a Summer of Code stint (Archive.org copy..) as a student for Beagle Project in 2006 which, I suppose, was successful. He s been active in the past with Gnome and desktop related projects. Result This project was somewhat successful. He posted an update one month into the program with repositories with code to test. Last commit to the mergecf branch of project was September 19th but it was never merged in. According to Steve McIntyre, it s dead, Jim. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Max within Debian. PAS NSS Debian Installer, improve support of PAM and NSS at install-time Presentation It would be very important for the Debian allowing the user to configure additional PAM and NSS modules (eg. LDAP, NIS) during the installation process inside the Debian Installer. To do this, we have to provide tools and helpers to modify /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/pam.d/common-*, as well as changing the maintainer scripts for the packages libpam-* and libnss-* to apply the required changes at install time using debconf and these helpers. To be honest, I will probably never use this. I don t do that many coordinated installs in the same place to warrant doing funny authentication with PAM and NSS, and if I did, I would probably use a more elaborate tool to personalize the install, like FAI. On the other hand, I can see the appeal of being done with authentication mechanisms before the first boot. The project was mentored by Fabio Tranchitella. The proposal came from the student. Student Juan Luis Belmonte was a computer science student. He worked in a couple of companies in the area of Sarragossa. He is now founding debug_mode=ON. Result This was quite a disappointement after seemingly good work. Although Juan was satisfied with the project, the PAM package maintainer (Steve Vorlon Langasek) was not. He was never asked about this project (but didn t intervene timely either when the accepted projects were announced though). In his words, it was the wrong solution to the problem . You can find his lenghty rationale on the wontfix bug report that resulted from the project. It really was a problem of communication with the Debian developpers since Juan could certainly have done the right work if pointed to it. Juan didn t ask thoroughly for existing work and Steve didn t publicize his (enough). That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to give a student point of view of the Summer of Code in general, and more specifically, at Debian. It will be post 2.5/3 since it s getting a little longer than I planned. Release early, release often, as the say.
If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.

It's been a somewhat long day... I got up at 6:30am for a 7am ankle physical therapy session. I went to the hospital after that. When I got there, a sonographer was doing the echocardiogram on her heart to check the valves. I missed the doctors. Sarah didn't feel any more knowledgeable about her condition even though they'd been through. The patient Sarah was sharing with had a bad night, caused her to have a bad night's sleep also, and she always deals with all of this crap much worse when she's got a sleep debt. Dinner stayed down, but breakfast did not. The sonographer seemed fairly confident about her heart condition. Usually they don't make any comments on what they're seeing and leave that to the doctors, so we took some comfort from that. I managed to corner the physician's assistant who had been following Sarah in her office, and quizzed her on what was going on. It turns out a PICC line had been ordered, and they get installed by specalised PICC nurses and that's all they do all day. The PA implied that it might not happen until tomorrow. The gall stones were definitely unrelated, and something to follow up with her primary care physician. Incidentally, Wikipedia has some wicked pictures of gall stones. Talk about freaky. I think I hung around until 10am, and then headed into the office to try and get some work done, with the intent to come back after work. Not long after, Sarah called me up all beside herself about the PICC line (she doesn't deal well with the idea of getting jabbed at the best of times, and being tired put her over the edge), so I scrapped work, and went back to the hospital for the remainder of the day. I decided to hunt down her cardiologist to see if the PICC line was absolutely necessary, and I managed to get the exact low down on her condition.

• the infection is staphylococcus aureus, not one of the other staph strains that I can't remember, which are considered less serious. The one Sarah has/had is the "bad enough" one, a.k.a. "golden staph". Fortunately it's sensitive to antibiotics, unlike MRSA, which is the really bad news one to have. So my heart skipped a beat when he said it was aureus, but I recovered when he said it was sensitive. I could have sworn the staph infection she had last year wasn't aureus, but he seemed to think that it was.
• when she presented at the ER on I guess Sunday morning, this staph was found in the blood sample they took. What is unclear is whether this is because of contamination from the skin when they took the sample (staph is present on the skin, it's only a problem when it gets internal), or it was indeed in her blood, whereas with the infection she had last year, it was never present in her blood.
• because of her aortic root replacement/graft and the risk of endocarditis destroying her heart valves, they didn't want to take any chances. Hence the PICC line and the two weeks of intravenous antibiotics. Two weeks is really a compromise. He said if they'd wanted to get all paranoid on her, it'd be a six week course, and they'd have done a transesophageal echocardiogram to boot.

So armed with the facts, I headed back to tell Sarah the news that she really should have the PICC line installed, and that she was getting off fairly lightly, relatively speaking. The PICC nurse had a cancellation, so she was able to do the installation today. It was totally less traumatic than I think either of us were expecting. It took about 45 minutes to install, and it was done at her bedside. Sarah was very brave and I don't think it really hurt her all that much. I watched the whole thing, and it was very interesting. It was particularly interesting because there was another nurse observing, so the PICC nurse was explaining everything as she went. She was also really nice and good at what she did (she'd been doing it for 14 years) so I think all of that helped. So Sarah's now got two IV ports strapped to the inside of her upper left arm (attached to the PICC line), and no other IV lines in. She should get discharged tomorrow after they sort out whether she's going to receive IV antibiotics on a 4 or 8 hourly schedule at home, and exactly how all of that's going to work. I think they send someone out to our place to give us some training, and someone comes out once a week to do a bit of maintenance on the PICC line itself. I presume I'll be her personal nurse again. All it involves is a bit of plumbing. Her cardiologist seems to think she should be able to still do her CNA clinical training with the PICC line in. She may just have some problems with lifting duties. I guess we'll just see how all of that pans out. So that was the excitement for today. Sarah had her appetite back at dinner time, and was generally in much better spirits when I left her this evening than she was this morning. I could go into much more detail about the ins and outs of the PICC line installation, but I don't really have the energy.

And I thought the recovery from original heart surgery was a bit rocky... Let me try and gather my thoughts... Yes, Sarah's got gall stones, no, they're not the problem. Yes, she's definitely got a staph infection, no, it's apparently (again, fortunately) not the bad type, but unlike last time, it is in the blood. Apparently that makes endocarditis a bigger concern, the consequences of which are rather scary to put it mildly. I'm guessing this is why they're pumping her full of IV antibiotics. The doctor(s) that is/are looking after her only do their rounds in the morning, so we've only got all of this information out of band from the cardiologist who popped in to see her this afternoon and sneaked a peek at her chart. So the exact course of action is unclear. He mentioned the possibility of getting a PICC line, which can stay in for up to a month, so they can continue giving her IV antibiotics for a while. We don't know if that means they could or would then discharge her. They want to do an ultrasound of her heart tomorrow to make sure everything's still okay there. Pain-wise, she's doing better. She hasn't had any more IV pain medication since this morning (just oral stuff), but she hasn't got much of an appetite since throwing up last night. She did eat some dinner though. Nausea has been coming and going throughout the day. Despite all of this, she's in fairly good spirits and is fairly mobile. I'm going back to the hospital tomorrow morning to try and catch the doctor(s) when they do their morning rounds. Somewhat ironically, this hospitalisation is now buggering up her attendance at the Certified Nursing Assistant course she's doing in the evenings. She was due to start clinical training this week. Somehow, even if she were to be discharged tomorrow, I don't see how working in an aged care facility with a PICC line, an open (albeit packed and covered) chest wound and a staph infection is going to be a good idea for anyone involved.

The changes to whitehouse.gov are being used as an example of ephemeral digital content.

At the exact moment Barack Obama was inaugurated, all traces of President Bush vanished from the White House website, replaced by images of and speeches by his successor. Attached to the website had been a booklet entitled 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration - they may never know them now. When the website changed, the link was broken and the booklet became unavailable.

At the same time, the Obama administration is chafing under rules that don't allow them to use Facebook, gmail, Blackberries, and Twitter. Because of this pesky Presidential Records Act.

Suddenly, they have to relearn how to communicate, because the law has not caught up with the way people live. They are being forced to return to older technologies (or they will once those technologies start working properly), and abandon or become more guarded in their use of newer technologies.

Anyone else find the dissonance am(az us)ing? Seems that anyone who really wants a copy of that missing booklet will be able to access it via FOIA in a few years (unless it got wiped with all of Cheney's files). Meanwhile, if the new guys find a way to stop being hobbled by the law, their digital content will likely be truely ephemeral, since they have become addicted to "newer technologies" that eliminate all expectations about data's preservation and privacy. I think this is one case of the law not keeping up with technology that I can support. It might be more fair to describe it though, as technology not keeping up with the law.

It was kind of interesting to see this the other day, on the train from Monselice to Padova: That's a Debian system, kernel 2.6.8.1, which appears to have some problems booting. That's not the only problem with the train system in Italy, unfortunately: My Padova->Monselice train, roughly a 20 minute train ride, was 65 minutes late, and would end up being nearly an hour and a half late. Ouch! To be fair, the train system in the US is actually even worse, if that can be believed. And in Austria, while they run on time, they're so expensive and don't run often, so that it's often much more convenient to drive.

It took more than a week this time, because I was ill, but new testing Gammu version is here. This time there are finally no really major changes, only fixes of regressions (PostgreSQL SMSD brokeness) and bugs found by testing and reported by users. Full list of changes:

• Fixed getting of network name from saved message.
• Fixed encoding of text to some encodings in AT engine.
• Detect more Siemens CME error codes.
• Windows binary is again with MySQL support.
• Initial native support for Motorola phonebook (bug #748).
• Use getpass if available for PIN code prompt.
• Fixed parsing of phone number from incoming calls.
• Added ID for Nokia 1112.
• Dropped obsolete packaging/debian and point users to proper packages.
• Fix crash when operator logo is empty.
• Fix memory leak in SMS backup.
• Fixed processing of SMSD outbox with PostgreSQL (bug #803).
• Automatic detection of lib64 directory for installation.
• Allow separate installation of some components on Windows.

You can download sources and Windows binaries (now for first time you can select which parts you want to install) from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Debian users will find packages in experimental soon and RPM users can use my repository at OpenSUSE Build Service. PS: I'd like to thank to "j t" who kindly donated me Nokia 6822 for testing.

Fellow countrymen, happy Republic day to you all. Any trip to Punjab is incomplete without atleast one visit to the daily tamasha at the Wagah-Attari border. This is probably one of the few places on earth where you would see the Pakistan flag right next to the Emblem of India.

I arrived at the place a couple of hours before the vening flag down ceremony but was too late to be able to get a comfortable seat in the crowd of a few thousands; the place was already packed. Luckily, a BSF ranger (who incidentally was not allowing the crowds in any more) looked at my tripod and camera, thought I was a journalist and led me to the VIP section which is as close to the gates as one can get.

For a very long time preceding the ceremony, there is nationalist music blaring on the tannoys, crowds screaming in unison: LA ilAha ill-Allah on the Pakistani side and vandE mAtaram, bhArat mAtA ki jai on the Indian side. On either side of the border gates, kids run up and down the road with their respective national flags while young men climb onto the top-most walls and wave flags high in the air. One gentleman was commenting that while women on 'our' side are allowed to dance and sit anywhere, 'they' don't allow that, "see how the men and the women there are grouped separately".


The half hour of the retreat ceremony is full of action with the Indian BSF rangers in their red turbans and khakhis, and the Pakistani rangers in black salwaar-kameez marching heavily down the road, glaring into each others eyes, competing on who can kick higher into the air and possibly also on who has the best kept moustache. The rangers on either side of the gates know that they are entertaining their home crowd and spare no effort to do their best.


The retreat ceremony is so popular that it is difficult to allow in all the people that come in to watch. So a clone of the ceremony has been setup at the Hussainiwala border. However, Hussainiwala is popular not because of the flag retreat, much less because the 1971 war memorial still has a lot of marks of artillery firing, but because of Bhagat Singh's memorial. The memorial moves one to tears.


Few more pictures from the Hussainiwala memorials:

Seriously, every time Sarah has surgery, it all goes pear shaped. The bottom (last time it was towards the top) of Sarah's incision from her recent wire removal surgery was looking a bit red, swollen and hard on Friday, so she went in to the clinic at got them to take a look at it. They decided that a knot in the sutures was trying to work its way out, and causing inflammation or something, so just like last time, they decided to reopen the incision a bit. They did that, and cut the knot out, and rather than packing with gauze, they just taped the small opening closed with some steristrips and covered it with gauze and sent her on her way. Somewhat fortunately (for me) Sarah went into the clinic during the day while I was at work, so I missed participating in the fun and games. They didn't use any local anaesthetic, but Sarah said it didn't hurt too much. That night, though, she was in a reasonable amount of pain, again, similar to last time, except it was a band across her upper abdomen, below her breasts, instead of chest pain. Mindful of the staph infection disaster from last time, we trotted off to the ER on Saturday afternoon, hoping to nip this in the bud. They did some blood work, which came back clear, and gave her some IV pain medication, which didn't seem to do much, and were generally scratching their heads as to the cause of the pain. Fortunately, one of the surgeons involved with Sarah's wire removal from 2.5 weeks previously happened to be on call, so he got called in. He had a bit of a poke around the opening with a long cotton bud, and declared that it was possibly infected, because there was a bit of cloudy fluid discharged when he poked it in. Oh, and the cotton bud disappeared a good centimetre or more under the skin further up the incision, which indicated an abscess was forming. So, for the second time, I got to watch my wife being cut open with a scalpel. I think the local anaesthetic injections were the most painful part for her. He opened the incision up a bit further, and packed it with some Betadine-soaked gauze, and we got sent home with the same instructions as last time this happened: I had to repack the wound with saline-soaked gauze two to three times a day and let it heal from the bottom up. She was also prescribed some antibiotics. She's got about a 2cm incision just below her breasts. It looks a lot deeper than the hole from last year's incision. So we got home about 6pm last night, and went to bed around 11pm. Sarah lasted a couple of hours before she woke up in even more pain than before. She called up the hospital and had the same surgeon paged, and he advised her to come in to the ER again. So at I think about 2am, we headed back. They took some more blood, did a CT scan, which came back clear, and decided to admit her. They're giving her IV antibiotics and pain medication. Initially she didn't want to have any more IV pain medication because it didn't seem to be working, and it tends to make her nauseous. She wasn't keen on dealing with throwing up with the amount of pain she was having. It hurt to move as it was. With a mixture of IV anti-nausea drugs and the IV pain medication, the pain has finally come under control though. She did have one bought of vomiting this evening, which didn't seem to cause her too much discomfort, and she's getting in and out of bed more comfortably. They're going to keep her in overnight. She has a post-operative followup tomorrow in the clinic, so I expect they'll keep her in the hospital until at least then, depending on how things go. Her cardiologist, intimately familiar with last year's debacle, dropped in this afternoon. He's wondering, given how this has happened twice now, if Sarah has some sort of allergy to the type of absorbable suture they've used. Apparently there are different types of sutures, so if she ever has any other surgery, we'll have to get them to try a different type It'll be interesting to see how she goes tonight, as the pain seems to get worse overnight. She hasn't had any IV pain medication since about 1pm, and she wanted to see how she goes without it, because if she gets discharged tomorrow, she'll have to rely on oral stuff anyway. I think it definitely gets harder for her to manage her pain when the pain is causing her to lose sleep. She can only deal with having a couple of night's worth of bad sleep before it all gets too much. So I'm really hoping she gets a good night's sleep tonight. Not that hospitals are renowned for that...

A little while back, Terah was leaving the house one morning. On that particular morning, we had an unusually intense even for Kansas wind. It caught the storm door and whipped it around with such force that it bent the metal arm that goes into the pneumatic plunger, and even bent the bracket that the arm connects to. It was not possible to un-bend either of them with household tools, even with dad s help. So I went to the hardware store and picked up a replacement. But I had been putting off actually replacing it because, well, the door almost closed automatically and there were more important things to get to. Until yesterday. I got out the tools and went to work. Jacob was around and took an interest in the activity. I was stretched out on the floor on my stomach working with the drill to try to get out some extremely tight screws without stripping them. And Jacob, at one point, got down on the floor on his stomach right beside me, and proudly announced I (am) like dad! Terah was working on something nearby, and noticed this, and went for the camera. Unfortunately, I had left its CF card in my digital audio recorder. She found the other card, and was hurrying to put it in so she could get the cute picture. Even more unfortunately, she inserted it sideways. CF slots have 50 tiny pins in the space of 1.7 inches. The slots normally force the card to align properly, but not when the card is put in sideways. It slid back and bent a pin back. The slot is thus unusable. I was going in to town anyway to pick up my bike from the bike shop, so I stopped at Moler s Camera on the way. This is my favorite camera shop it s the sort of place where you take a seat at the counter while they help you. I showed the sales guy the camera and he knew off the top of his head that the cost to fix it is $206. Which is pretty much in line with reports on the Internet. The old camera is a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (EOS 400D). It s over 2 years old, so out of warranty, but I wasn t planning to upgrade soon. On the other hand, the camera shop estimated that they could buy the XTi from me for about $150 to $200, considering its condition, and a new XSi (EOS 450D) is $570 at B&H. So about $200 to fix the old one, or about $400 cost to us to get a new one and the next model up, which uses SD instead CF, and thus will never have a bent pin again. With that kind of cost, we decided to spring for the XSi. Plus, it would take about a month to get the repair on the XTi. So there you have it. The wind can be expensive and cause camera upgrades.

Executive summary To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth. Longer version, with details After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were public and free, subject to the GNU GPL. In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or "GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for "the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for the public to know which version was which without doing extensive research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005. So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its development would be hosted on FusionForge.org. So is this a fork? Well, we don't know yet. It could arguably be called one, since we're taking the code and running away with it under a new name. However, we believe it's not a fork unless both roads continue their own way (more of a oddly-shaped bend). What happens to the GForge codebase developed by the GForge Group at gforge.org remains to be seen, although for the sake of our users we will backport security fixes to the gforge.org Subversion repository (at least for the 4.5.x series and the unreleased 4.6 and 4.7 pre-series) for some time. The bulk of the development will move on to FusionForge and the repositories at FusionForge.org, though, and users are encouraged to migrate at their own pace. Since we're basically continuing the evolution rather than starting from scratch, the migration path should be rather smooth. So why the FusionForge name? Because there were actually lots of locally-patched versions of GForge (and Sourceforge), and we felt it was a waste of resources that should be fixed. It seems many people and organisations took these codebases at some point in time and evolved them for their own needs. Sadly, many of the changes were not contributed back or even published, so lots of efforts were duplicated. Fortunately, many of the people managing these locally-patched forges are now realising that "out-of-tree" patches and features require quite some manpower to maintain. Some formal inter-project discussion is already taking place, and we hope to achieve actual merging of most of the interesting features that have been developed here and there into a common base that can be reused locally with minimal changes. We'd like to "un-fork" as much as possible. We also expect that, by using standard components and tools, we'll facilitate the work of potential contributors, thereby reducing the risk of a new era of fragmentation. And who are we anyway? We're Christian Bayle, Roland Mas and Alain Peyrat, long-time contributors to GForge and responsible for over 95% of the commits over the past two years, as well as a few relative newcomers. Christian and Roland have been maintaining the Debian packaging since the "Debian-SF" era, and Alain has been focusing on code quality. The three of us have, for various reasons, a vested interest in maintaining a lively codebase in a healthy ecosystem. What are our plans? Our short-term goals, as currently planned, include:

• pushing a stable FusionForge release out of the door;
• cleaning up and auditing the database schema to ensure consistency and increased performance;
• merging in new plugins, in particular for new version control systems;
• continuing streamlining the installation process to make it more portable across distributions.

Longer term goals are less well defined, but we're thinking about the following:

• increasing code quality by the use of modern automated tools;
• encouraging a lively stream of external contributions, to reduce the gap between the official version and the locally-patched ones;
• defining an explicit governance model and release process for the FusionForge project;
• as a consequence, a more frequent and predictable release schedule;
• increasing data portability and interoperability with other forges, to reduce lock-in for users and projects.

Some of these items should be facilitated by our switch to a distributed version control system and a new coordinated workflow. Also, the Debian i18n team has been kind enough to offer to host our translation effort on their Pootle server, which means translators will have a much easier time doing their job. We hope to hear from users and contributors alike in the near future. For more information, we can be reached via our fusionforge-general mailing-list (see our lists), which is also suitable for general discussions. We can also be found on IRC (#fusionforge on the Freenode network).

Giving up on a position within a free software project when you know you re no longer managing to do an effective job is a wonderfully liberating experience. Now that I have started to talk with Miriam Ruiz about handing over the Debian Jr. project, I can stop worrying about the leadership task and just have fun with it. I can always count on Miriam for recommendations for games in Debian my kids may enjoy, as she has a passion for finding good games to package for Debian, and in particular, games for children. Over the past few weeks we ve had some fun with her picks. At the same time, I always have Debian Jr. in mind. How can we ensure kids can have the most fun with this? How do we equip their guides to help them? What we ve done with each new piece of software is to find a quiet time when one or more of the children can start playing with it on their own while we watch, offering such guidance as they need, but for the most part just letting them loose with it. Each wrinkle of the brow, each impetuous thump of the mouse, every illuminated grin and exclamation of delight is noted. We try to see what frustrates or pleases our kids and discuss it both with them and the Debian maintainers and upstream developers. This is an excercise we ve managed to pull off without being overly intrusive and the results have been well worth the effort. Using a few of Miriam s picks we tried this week, we were able to draw their play into the free software development process. Here s a brief summary of those sessions: Platinum Arts Sandbox puts into children s hands the ability to role play in a 3D world and edit that world using simplified controls. The expressions on the faces of our kids as they played were priceless: both the ups and the downs. I wanted to capture this on video and share it. After having established a rapport with upstream, we took a 20 minute clip of one of our play sessions and gave a copy to them to use to help further their work. Here is the edited result. They were very pleased to have that kind of feedback and found the video valuable for determining where the software still needed improvement and to notice which aspects particularly pleased the children. I happen to know that Hex-a-hop is one of Miriam s personal favourites. We have a household full of puzzle-lovers so this puzzle game was an instant hit. While on irc on #debian-jr with Miriam we relayed in real-time some of the reactions as they played this and a handful of her other picks. This gave her some confirmation of areas she knew needed work as well as inspiration for upcoming releases of these packages. During this play session, which also included StegaVorto, kartofel, Anagramarama, Funny Boat and Vodovod, my youngest girl, age 7, plunked down on the couch next to me as her 10-year-old sister played. Then she started to notice I was typing what people in the livingroom were saying and doing on irc. She took a mild affront to me copying her own words and actions, so I decided it would be better to let her participate so she would feel included. At this point, I started playing secretary for her, typing what she dictated to me while she read the responses from the display. Later, I just handed her the keyboard so she could type and read the responses on her own. She was still at it long past bedtime and it was with some reluctance that she finally gave up the keyboard. We all had a lot of fun and look forward to doing this again. We are particularly careful with privacy, taking care to share pictures, videos, and other personal details only so far as we believe it does not put our children at risk. Also, we need to ensure we observe in a way that is welcome and doesn t interfere with their enjoyment. But with a little bit of prudence and a practiced eye and ear for what increases or diminishes enjoyment of the software, we can involve our children directly in the free software development process. I commend to anyone who has the privilege to share free software with children to use this method to communicate with maintainers and developers, increasing your own enjoyment of the software in the process and that of children and their guides everywhere.

If you are in the NY-area and would like to help out with the project described below, they are looking for volunteers. Help FLOSSIFY the enormously popular book Digital Foundations. The event is being hosted Feb 6-8 at the lovely Eyebeam with some Free as in Beer and Grub provided! ******************************************************* FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
For a long time educational courses have been cheap marketing
for proprietary software companies. Can a student really afford all
those expensive softwares required by the courses? No. Ever hear of a
software company kicking up a fuss because students are using
unofficial versions? Well, it does happen but not often. And why not?
Because proprietary software companies know, as the universities know,
that once the students leave their training they will be indoctrinated
with those tools and simply slipstream into being paid up proprietary
software citizens. Simply put, unlicensed software used in education is
tolerated because it is cheap marketing. This is how tools become industry standards . FLOSS Manuals is fighting this flow by converting textbooks that
use proprietary software to using free software in their examples. We call this process FLOSSify . We convert the book from
closed software to Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) hence we
FLOSSify the book. Our first text book is the wonderful Digital Foundations book produced
by Michael Mandiberg and Xtine Burrough
(http://digital-foundations.net/). Its a text book designed to teach
software by teaching design. The current toolset it uses is the Adobe
Creative Suite and we will convert these examples entirely to using free
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations will focus on a fun 3 day event at
Eyebeam, NYC. Anyone is welcome to attend and some food and beer will be
provided. Come and meet some of your old geek friends, make some new,
and help make a step towards unshackling education from proprietary
software. FLOSSIFY 1 : Digital Foundations
Eyebeam, New York City
Feb 6-8
starts 10ish
finishes when we are done
fast connection, a table, some chairs, and beer and food provided
contact adam@flossmanuals.net for more info venue:
http://eyebeam.org/
540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY 10011
Tel. 212.937.6580 Fax: 212.937.6582

Since I keep ending up in situations where I need to clean up postfix queue from mails sent by a single host and always forget the command, I'm posting it here. Maybe someone else will find it useful as well. To begin with, you need to determine the IP address of the culprit you want to eliminate. How you do this, is up to you. Grepping logs or examining the files in the queue both work. But for some reason there doesn't appear to be a good tool to get statistics on the sending IP addresses, only the origin and destination domains. Once you have determined the IP address which you want to purge, you can use the following spell. You might have to repeat the same line for active and incoming queues as well, but usually deferred is the queue I have the most mails. grep -lrE '[^0-9]10.20.30.4[^0-9]' /var/spool/postfix/deferred xargs -r -n1 basename postsuper -d - It's important that the IP address has escaped dots, because dots can account for any character. In the worst case it will end up matching a lot of wrong IP addresses. Another important bits are the '[^0-9]' groups in both ends of the pattern. Those make the IP address only match that particular IP address. Without that extra limitation 1.1.1.1 would match anything that has 1 as the last number in the first octet and 1 as the first number of the last octet. For example: 211.1.1.154 would be a valid match. The other important bit, yet oddly unknown, is the postsuper command. Postsuper modifies the queue and -d flag makes it delete files in the queue by QueueID. For some reason I keep on seeing all sorts of find -exec rm spells all over, which isn't really that nice for the daemon itself. So here it is, one more tidbit I've been meaning to write up for quite some time now. Enjoy!

I have been wondering for a while how to get X.org "input-hotplug" to work, but I never actually tried before today. It is actually fairly easy, once you know what to do. Requirements First, make sure you have the evdev X driver installed (xserver-xorg-input-evdev). You might want to use X packages from experimental since things are much more recent than in Lenny or Sid these days, and upstream improved input management in the meantime. Then, if you are not running a pre-packaged kernel, check the the evdev driver is enabled and loaded in your kernel (CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV). Telling hal what to do with input devices Now, you need to tell hal how to configure your input devices. Actually, you do not have much to do since latest xserver-xorg-input-evdev packages bring what you need. hal reads all fdi files under /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy to find out how devices should be configured. If you run lshal and look for input, you should see that the evdev is planned to drive your input devices. However, if you look at keyboard devices in lshal (look for input.keys), you will see that the US layout is used. To switch to another layout, you can add some overriding rules as a new *.fdi file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/. For instance, to get French layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.keys">
      <-- Enforce XkbLayout=fr and XkbVariant empty -->
      <merge key="input.xkb.layout" type="string">fr</merge>
      <merge key="input.xkb.variant" type="string" />
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

Thanks to this, you can enforce XkbLayout, XkbVariant and friends as usual in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Don't forget to restart hal after modifying some fdi files. Then run lshal, and look for Xkb, you should find your setup there. Note that you can add some matching rules to configure some devices with different setups if needed. Just need to read the output of lshal and find something like a hardware identifier to match on. You can find some documentation about these rules by looking at the existing fdi files in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/, and in the upstream x11-input.fdi (note that input.xkb.foo is the actual recommended syntax instead of input.x11_options.XkbFoo). Touchpads If you have a touchpad and want to use the synaptics driver, installing the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics will bring another fdi file. /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/11-x11-synaptics.fdi matches input.touchpad in the device capabilities in hal. Now the synaptics driver will be automagically loaded for your touchpad (instead of evdev for regular mice). Again, you can override this rule in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ and you can add many configuration options for synaptics as well. See /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/11-x11-synaptics.fdi to get an example. Fortunately, you will not have to manually take care of the above /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ file for ever. The plan is to have hal look at the Debian console configuration and get at least the keyboard layout from there automatically. Telling the Xserver to talk to hal Now, you need to tell the Xserver to use what hal wants. Basically, you want to remove everything about keyboard, mouse and other input devices from your xorg.conf. Just drop all InputDevice sections and all references to them within other sections. With recent Xserver versions, options AllowEmptyInput and AutoAddDevices are enabled by default (otherwise, you might have to add them in the ServerFlags section). For more documentation, you want to read Peter Hutterer's blog, especially this post and this one. By the way, if you don't want this input-hotplug thing and you want to run a recent Xserver anyway, you should set AllowEmptyInput and AutoAddDevices to off in the ServerFlags section. Update: Fixed the way to manage fdi files, fixed the syntax of input.xkb.foo rules, added a paragraph about synaptics, and organized things in sections. Thanks to everybody's comment.

It has been a while since my last post here. Not because nothing happened, but mostly because I did not have time to do much for X. Fortunately, Julien is taking good care of X in Debian so we are still close to latest upstream bits. Obviously, due to Lenny's freeze, everything is happening in experimental these days. Xserver 1.6 The release Xserver 1.6 is expected in the near future. 1.6-rc1 (1.5.99.901) entered experimental recently. Both video and input driver ABIs changed and very few drivers have been rebuilt so far. So if you're not running Intel or Radeon, you might not be able to upgrade yet. Please be patient :) You might have heard that many things are happening in X.org these days: DRI2, kernel-modesetting (KMS), RandR 1.3, ... Everything is not ready yet, but it's getting close for real. Radeon 6.10.0 and Intel 2.6.1 Radeon driver 6.10.0 was released in early 2009. As usual, it brings many fixes, and improvements for modern boards (see Alex Deucher's blog for details). However, Radeon is not ready for above DRI2 and KMS yet. Most of the development for these new features is first done in the Intel driver, which got recently bumped to 2.6.1 as well. DRI2 DRI2 is the new Direct Rendering Infrastructure. The most noticeable change from the user point of view is support for Redirect Direct Rendering, which basically means that your 3D application can be wobbly/transparent in Compiz. See Kristian H gsberg's blog for details. If you want to try DRI2 on Intel, you have to enable UXA as the acceleration architecture in xorg.conf (Option "AccelMethod" "UXA" in the Device section). DRI2 will then be enabled automatically. Then, it may or may not work, depending for instance on the hardware. I get a black screen at startup on i865 while i945 works fine until I start Compiz (the server suddenly exits for some reason then). Note that you probably want to upgrade your Mesa packages to experimental as well here (7.3 has been released recently). Of course, running git snapshot of various components (Mesa, libdrm, kernel drm, Intel driver, ...) may help since the released versions seem to not be entirely ready yet. But, things should may be ready to use for everybody in the near future. Kernel Modesetting The other nice feature that makes a lot of noise in X.org these days is Kernel modesetting (KMS). It moves the management of mode (aka resolution+rate) into the kernel. It helps support for switching between different users' sessions, enables reporting of kernel messages (oops, panics, ...) while X is running, and reduces the need to blank the screen during boot (since the kernel can setup the display early and X doesn't have to change it later independently). KMS testing requires a bleeding-edge kernel (2.6.29). Using a git snapshot of the drm stack is probably a good idea as well since I couldn't get KMS to work on 2.6.29-rc2 here. Again only Intel will support KMS soon, but other drivers will follow. Panning is back (aka RandR 1.3) Xserver 1.6 brings support for the 1.3 version of the RandR X extension. Among other improvements, it reintroduces one feature that many users miss since it was removed back in Xserver 1.3 or so. "Panning" (often referred to as "Virtual Desktop") gives the ability to move the display within a larger screen when the mouse approaches from the border. Instead of being configured with the Virtual option in xorg.conf (this option means something else nowadays), it may now be enabled/tuned with xrandr --panning. You'll need the latest libxrandr2 and xrandr utilities to do so (the latter is not uploaded yet).

Once upon a time I ran a Valentine-Matching site for Livejournal users. (Actually I did it for about three years in a row, but then got bored.) The basic idea was simple, you'd visit a magical site and it would present you with the usernames of all your friends. You'd tick a few boxes, and that would nominate those users as your potential valentines. Then you'd do nothing until February 14th, at which point you'd discover if you matched. A match being made if you chose bob, and bob chose you in return. (Essentially the site is a big double-blind matching system, albeit with constrained membership, via lj.) The major technical difficulty in early days was preventing spoofed accounts. I didn't want Evil Alice to be able to visit the site and pretend to be Bob. In the couple of years I did this I came up with a couple of fun schemes to minimize the chances of this occuring - anything from using email validation, to requiring that users taking part updated their profiles to include a magic cookie-string, or posting to a specific community which I could later screen-scrape. These days the use of openid allows me to prevent spoofing in a trivial manner - and once I realised that I figured why the hell not?! In short here I am and here we go again:

• http://my.ljvalentine.com/

The motivation? Playing with openID and because I still like to "match people up". I am aware of one marriage that resulted from a match on my system back in 2003. There could be more. If you're a long-time reader you might remember ctrl-alt-date - how time flies - I just let the domain name(s) expire this week. The timing is a little bit of a coincidence, but not entirely. The only thing that I'm doing this time is not sending emails on matches, because I just can't. Unless I asked people to volunteer their mail addresses I don't have the data. Still I expect remembering to return for the results won't be a challenge. Now, lets get viral. But not in an icky fashion .. ObFilm: Daywatch

It s the last day of the most awesome linux.conf.au 2009 conference in Hobart, Tasmania. I ve just witnessed the a room full of 500 people sit with baited breath as Linus wielded a set of clippers to shave Bdale Garbee s beard, followed by Bdale (with a razor with 3 more blades than last time he shaved, a tiny bowl of water and a hand-mirror) trying to make it look neater. The LCA twitter feed was up on the projector, and someone rightly observed this whole event was actually pretty weird. There are already pictures on flickr too. However, well done to Bdale for being such a good sport, but it looks like his wife Karen will accompany him next year to make sure he doesn t agree to anything else like this, and supervise the waxing of Rusty s chest :) What s this all in aid of? After the incredible auction for this beautiful picture from Karen, and generous donations at the Penguin Dinner on Wednesday night, the conference has now raised between AU$ 35k and 40k towards the Save the Tasmanian Devil appeal. Around AU$ 1.3k of the nonsensical winning consortium s AU $10.6k bid came from the Collabora folks who were at the dinner, and AU$ 1.2k from Collabora and Collabora Multimedia directly. We were all set to place a winning AU$ 3k bid but then Matthew and Daniel came up with the Bdale shaving scheme, and then things really picked up. I m glad we took part - the lead scientist from the project was really grateful, and I hope the money can make a real difference to their great work. On more mundane matters, I also gave my talk this morning, and my slides (Telepathy slides v2.0 thanks to Marco) are online. I also made a few demos of new awesome stuff you can do with Telepathy (most of the patches are already merged upstream or well on the way):

• Geolocation support (XEP-0080) support in the XMPP backend and Empathy, using GeoClue to find your location and the libchamplain Clutter & Open Streetmap widget to display where your contacts are. Thanks to Pierre-Luc, Alban and Daf for their work here - more details on Pierre-Luc s blog.
• Support for launching file transfers over link-local XMPP from Nautilus using the Empathy plugin for nautilus-sendto. This is already merged upstream but needs a patch to work with trunk Empathy. Thanks to Marco, Jonny and Guillaume for their work on this.
• Alban also made a neat hack to Rhythmbox which allows exporting your DAAP music server to one of your contants over a Telepathy Stream Tube. Thanks also to recent work from Marco, these tubes now go over XMPP s SOCKS5 Bytestreams, giving much better throughput than the earlier in-band implementation, network permitting. The next step is unleashing the full might of our libnice NAT traversal library, signalling tubes with Jingle, and therefore making connections work peer to peer in up to 95% of the cases. However, this won t affect the APIs, stuff will just go faster! Isn t Telepathy wonderful?
• Olivier stepped up to show off the demo from his talk about Farsight, which shows his branch using the new telepathy-farsight library to allow recording Telepathy video calls directly into the PiTiVi video editor. His network was screwed up so it didn t work, but I did see it work in his talk yesterday! Awesome stuff, hopefully Edward and friends can pick it up and merge it in before too long.
• Unfortunately we ran out of time for Will to show off Guillaume s recent work on Telepathy-enabled Abiword on the desktop (rather than just Sugar s Write activity), but I expect he ll blog about it soon!

On that note, these were just the five that I picked to try and fit into my talk. There are a load more demos in the pipeline from the other guys in Collabora of doing stuff with Telepathy, so keep a close look on Planet Collabora for the next cool thing.

When I explain the importance of free software, I often use some variation of the following example:

Suppose I see a beautiful sunset and I want to describe it to a loved one on the other side of the world. Today's communication technology makes this possible. In the process, however, the technology in question puts constraints on message communicated. For example, if I pick up my cellphone, my description of the sunset will be limited to words and sounds that can be transmitted by phone. If I happen to have a camera phone and the ability to send a picture message, I will be able to communicate a very different type of description. If I'm limited to 150 characters in an SMS message, my message will be constrained differently again.

The point of the example is this: the technology I use to communicate puts limits and constraints on my communication. Technology defines what I can say, how I can say it, when I can say it, and even who I can say it to. This is neither good nor bad. It is simply the nature of technology. But it means that those who control our technology control us, to some degree. As information technology becomes increasingly central to our lives, the way we experience, understand, and act in the world is increasingly controlled by technology and, by extension, by those who control technology. I believe that the single most important struggle for freedom in the twenty first century is over the question of who will set these terms. Who will control the technology that controls our lives? Free software can be understood as an answer to this question: An answer in the form of an unambiguous statement that technology must be under the control of its users. When free software triumphs, we will live in a world where users control their technological destiny. We simply cannot afford to fail. The Free Software Foundation is the most important organization fighting for the rights of users in this struggle. Here are some of the ways that I plan to direct the FSF to support software freedom in the coming year:

Network Services Last year, the FSF organized a meeting on software freedom and network services that lead to the creation of the Autonomo.us group and the release of the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. As network services --- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others --- continue rise in popularity, progress in this conversation is of increasing importance. This year, I will direct the FSF to build on the work of Autonomo.us to launch the first of what I hope will be several FSF position statements on software freedom and network services. More importantly, the FSF will begin to provide support and planning for solutions --- technologies, social campaigns, and legal steps --- that will protect computer users whose freedom is currently threatened by network services. Enforcing free software licenses Early on, people who decided to work on free software did so because they agreed with --- or, at the very least, were willing to abide by --- the principles and rules laid out in our licenses. In our push for software freedom, we have created software of immense value and attracted companies and individuals to our community who are less willing, or simply less interested, in protecting users' freedom. In December 2008, the FSF went to court for the first time in the organization's history to force Cisco to uphold the freedom of the users of FSF copyrighted software. This lawsuit asks Cisco to live up to its obligations under the GPL and to ensure that it does so in the future. The FSF needs the support of its community in this and in future enforcement actions. The FSF has operated a compliance lab for several years and has ensured software freedom for countless users. As free software becomes more successful in the next year, the FSF will be playing an increased role in protecting software freedom from those who do not share its principles. Continuing the fight against software patents As I said last year, one cannot write non-trivial software today without running a serious risk of infringing patents. The software patent minefield we've found ourselves in is a very fundamental threat to the success of free software and we've already begun to see the first casualties and costs. We must eliminate software patents. Now. The FSF will continue its work toward this end. The FSF's End Software Patents project's major contribution this year was a brief submitted in the In Re Bilski case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Recently, an opinion was issued which seems to mark an important shift away from broad protection for software patents. With this victory, now is the time to keep up this momentum. The FSF is drawing up a strategy to do just this and will be announcing the relaunch of its campaign on February 9,2009 led by Ciaran O'Riordan.

Every recent fundraising appeal seems to mention the difficult economic climate and it seems to cliche to do so here. That said, the effect of a bad economy is, in fact, felt most strongly in non-profits dependent on donations. The FSF is not immune. The FSF's work is essential for success on the issues I've described here and on all of its other campaigns and projects. Although the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year for many of you, the free software movement cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important moment. If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation. The FSF is a very lean, very humble organization of passionate and dedicated individuals working tirelessly for software freedom. Every single gift makes a difference.

On Tuesday afternoon I gave a talk on behalf of KaiGai Kohei about SE Linux and the LAPP (Linux Apache, PostgreSQL, PHP/Perl) stack. KaiGai has blogged about this [1], unfortunately Google Translation does a poor job of Japanese and has particular problems with KaiGai s work (could anyone who knows Japanese and English well please submit some tips to Google). KaiGai s post is useful for links to his notes which are good background reading. My talks about SE-LAPP and SE-PostgreSQL have been getting some notice, Bob Edwards referenced SE-PostgreSQL in his talk about database security. It s good to see KaiGai s great work getting the notice that it deserves. I hope that it becomes a standard feature of the PostgreSQL code base in the near future! Also Casey Schaufler, James Morris, and I have bought KaiGai a present of some Tasmanian wine, in recognition of his great work.

Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. . . Our security emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. - Barack Obama, inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2009

This, right here, is why, for the first time in my life, I actually feel good about an American president. Why I have hope about our government for the first time in years. Why I m glad I used a vacation day to sit on the couch and watch TV yesterday. On the occasion, once every 4 or 8 years, that is a celebration of American strength, power, and pride, we see our new president speaking of humility, of peace, of moral leadership, this is something remarkable. Past presidents have used occasions such as these to speak of crushing our enemies, of wanting people dead or alive, of grand government promises that turned out to triple the national debt. Obama spoke of extending the hand of friendship to anyone that would unclench their fist. He spoke that we had kicked the can down the road too far, and now we ve reached the end of the road. We have to stop thinking that we can have everything: low taxes, expensive programs, and a large military, simply by mortgaging our future. And he leveled with us: we all are in this together, and all have to work to make it better. Conventional politicians assumed it would be political suicide to say even half of what Obama has said. Yet he went out there and did it. He was blasted during the campaign by people on both sides of the political spectrum for being just words . He s the first presidential candidate that meant what he said about bringing Americans, and their representatives, together. The shock in Washington has he invited gasp! both an openly gay bishop and an anti-gay evangelical minister to give prayers was telling. It s as if people were saying, Wait, he really MEANT that? Yes, he did. Let s hope he can pull it off. And as Rev. Lowry concluded with his benediction:

With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream. . . Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. (amen) Say Amen! (Amen!) Say Amen! (AMEN!)