A couple of months ago I was sitting in a north Sydney pub cradling a beer with the ineluctable jdub, the decidedly unparsimonious rusty and (if I’m accurately remembering who’d left and who hadn’t by this point) the irremediable mrd. As you might imagine, these sort of conditions are a perfect breeding ground for a particular type of discussion, and with Jeff’s departure from Canonical not that long beforehand accompanied by the then ongoing DPL elections, talk turned to the future of Debian, and in particular Jeff’s views on that future. Obviously more than a few weeks have passed since then, so please imagine this as a dream sequence with a stylish TV fade-in accompanied by appropriate fine print caveats about paraphrasing and the perfidy of memory. I think it’s fair to sum Jeff’s main point about the future of distros as one of “disintermediation” – that is removing, or at least minimising, the barriers between the authors and users of a piece of software, and in general getting closer and quicker collaboration between everyone involved and interested in developing and maintaining that software. Which means things like trying to remove the line between the Debian bug tracker and upstream bug trackers entirely, so that Debian users end up talking directly with the upstream maintainers, rather than having a Debian maintainer relaying information between the two. It also means making the path for updated packages to get to users quicker and smoother – so that as soon as a developer commits a new version of the software to version control, the next time users of that software “apt-get update” they see it, download it, and start using it. Or at least, they do if they’ve chosen to follow the bleeding edge. Jeff had a bunch more ideas in that vein – like not bothering with a central archive, but having users collect the packages they’re interested in from upstream sites all over the place, standardising, reducing or removing the “control” information for packages so that creating the correct packages for 80% of free software (that uses ./configure in the usual way, eg) was a complete no-brainer, and perhaps viewing distributions not so much as the gatekeepers and central players of the open source world, but perhaps more as systems of providing resources, assistance and opportunities to software authors who deal with their users directly – and in so doing have more of an opportunity for their users to actively participate in the project’s development, and have more feedback (and control) of how their project is perceived by its users. I’m not sure if I’m doing it justice – it’s a pretty radical notion, and as an upstream-type hacker, Rusty was pretty enthralled by it. As a distro-type hacker, on the other hand, I’d have to say I was daunted: getting rid of the middleman here means getting rid of Debian, which I must admit I have something of an attachment for… and yet, in principle at least, I can’t see anything but good sense in the idea – getting users and developers interacting more closely is important to improving the free software community, and while distros have historically been a force for making free software more accessible to people, it’s entirely possible we can now make it even more accessible now by, in some sense, doing away with distros. And if that’s the case, then we definitely should, because it’ll benefit both users and developers of free software, which is what we’re all about. On the other hand, distributions (at least currently) aren’t just about collecting and compiling software which could be automated; it’s also about integrating it, standardising interactions between software, and in some cases acting as a buffer between users who want to use a bit of software and developers who for one reason or another don’t actually want to deal with those users (perhaps due to lack of a shared language or political or philosophical disagreements). I think it’s also pretty interesting to view Gentoo through this light; that is, not so much as a distro that makes you compile everything from source, but rather as a distro that gives its users a system based on exactly what the developers produce, with the addition of only a comparably tiny amount of Gentoo-derived content. Maybe it’s just me, but Gentoo sounds a lot more interesting to me in that light. So is that a foretaste of the future of binary free software distributions too? There’s a lot of things that would stand in the way of Debian managing that, but so far all I can think of is a thousand problems that should probably be solved anyway, and not even one that can’t. I think, btw, that jdub had been reading Accelerando (also available as a Creative Commons licensed ebook) somewhat concurrently with thinking about this stuff, so perhaps it should be called “Distributions 2.0” or something. Accelerando’s a crazy-awesome near-future/singularity book by Charles Stross, who happens to live in the city that will host the forthcoming DebConf 7…

I'm installing Paul Martin's iptables ssh-rate-limiter on the public machines that I run, to reduce the amount of logfile rubbish that ssh-scanning crackers produce. I've also added an iptables-restore line to the pre-up of the relevant sections of /etc/network/interfaces So far, there doesn't seem to be any disadvantage to doing this. Is there one? If not, why doesn't everyone do this?

A mail from strk to Gnash development mailing lists announces what many of us were waiting for. I’ve put some newer packages available, built against Etch, in case someone wants to try them. I’ve changed the renderer to AGG instead of OpenGL, which is preferable, and the media player to GStreamer instead of FFmpeg, because FFmpeg is still giving some problems. It seems that we’re closer to the next release!

Debtags paper for Debconf 7 Paper contents:

• Introduction
• Available data sources
• Procedures
• Data formats
• Algorithms
• Development
• Resources
• Links

Today I gave three talks at my local LUG. The first was my latest SE Linux talk (I’ll put the notes online soon). The second was a talk about voting. I asked for a show of hands, who has already decided which party they will vote for at the next federal election (about 12 people put their hands up). I then asked people to put their hands down if they were not a member of the party that they intend to vote for, including myself there were only two raised hands in the room (including mine)! With the way party politics works nowadays the major parties are not very interested in representing their core voters. Why try to please for people who will vote for you anyway? Instead they try to appeal to swinging voters and pressure groups. If you have decided to vote for a party they have no reason to try and impress you. Therefore you should join the party and try and influence the policy decision making process from within. The issues that I believe are most important to the Linux community are free software use in government, sane intellectual property laws, the right to a fair trial, and not pandering to the US (which is related to the previous two points). If you have already decided who to vote for then you should join that party and make your vote count in the party room. One member of the audience said that he had been a member of one of the major parties but that the internal politics turned him off. If that is your experience then I think you should ask yourself whether you want to vote for a group of people that you can’t work with. The final talk I gave was about getting speakers for Linux Users’ Groups. There is always difficulty in finding speakers for clubs. Ideally we would have meetings planned a few months ahead of time so that they could be advertised in various ways. Newspapers often have columns dedicated to providing information about public meetings but the lead time is usually at least a week (and the meeting would have to be advertised at least two weeks in advance - so more than a month’s planning ahead is required). Getting a larger number and variety of speakers will attract new members, encourage existing members to attend more meetings, and inspire members in their Linux work. Talks can be given by almost anyone. There is a constant demand for speakers who have expert knowledge in the topic, but anyone who is a decent speaker and has the confidence to stand up at the podium can give a good talk. For expert speakers possibilities include academics, industry leaders, leaders of free software development projects, and journalists. But that’s not all, anyone who wants to spend the time researching a topic can give a talk on it. For example I’ve been learning about MySQL recently for my own servers and will probably offer a talk about MySQL aimed at sys-admins who don’t want to become DBAs but who just want to get a database running. I’m not a MySQL expert (and don’t plan to become one) but I believe that there are many people who want to do the things I do with MySQL and who could benefit from a talk that I might give. The best place to find speakers is a conference or trade-show. If they give a talk that works well you can suggest that they give it again for your local LUG. You can also find speakers at conferences that you can’t attend. If someone visits your country for a trade-show in a different city you could send them an email saying “unfortunately I can’t attend your talk, but if you are interested in visiting my city in the same trip then there will be an audience of X people interested in seeing you”. There’s no harm in asking, the worst that they can do is decline. Ask everyone who you think can do a good job. Also make sure that you don’t make any commitment (unless you are member of the LUG committee).

I remember that when I started making Debian packages, one of the things I found more difficult was to get information about how multiple binary packages should be done. It’s quite an important topic when packaging games, as most of games often consist of a small arch-dependent binary executable and a big bunch of arch-independent data that includes images, maps, models, textures, sound, music, fonts and so on. I order to make it Debian-mirror-friendly, there’s no sense in multiplying all this arch-independent data by the number of architectures in Debian, and thus, most of the games shall be packaged as a small arch-dependent (any) package that includes the game itself, and a bigger arch-independent (all) one with all the data. I’ve made a small hello-world example to ilustrate how to achieve that. The example uses autotools (1, 2, 3) for building, and consists of a small program that reads an arch-independent text file and prints it to the screen. Small enough to be a nice example, and with all the features needed to show what i mean to. I won’t comment it in detail right now, but what rules do is to build the program with the default building system (./configure && make), install it in debian/tmp (make install DESTDIR= pwd /debian/tmp), and afterwards installing the files in their proper binary package directory. The resulting packages are described in debian/control. The example also includes menu and desktop descriptions and how to install an icon. We should still find a way to avoid having to release a newer version of the data (usually much bigger in size than the code) when only a change in the code is done, but I doubt if there’s a global solution for that, or if it should be done in an individual per-package way.
Files:

• hello_0.1-1.dsc
• hello_0.1.orig.tar.gz
• hello_0.1-1.diff.gz

I got ‘remote: abort: No space left on device:’ when running ‘hg push’ via ssh during a repository migration (from subversion to mercurial). Huh?! The partition with all the repositories on it has enough free space, so what? Ah, wait a second. When pushing data via ssh, mercurial does a ’ssh $HOST hg -R /path/to/repos serve –stdio’ and the data is put into /tmp/hg-unbundle-… in the meanwhile. As I’m running the mercurial repository inside a vserver system /tmp was limited to 16M tmpfs. So the temporary fix was pretty easy:

vnamespace -e repos mount -t tmpfs -o remount,size=32m,mode=1777 \
              none /var/lib/vservers/repos/tmp

I just talked to mercurial devs, quoting them:

00:24 < mpm> It finds the tmp dir based on the standard environment variables.
00:24 < mpm> We'll probably move it to .hg/
[...]
00:33 < brendan> defaults to /tmp if unset

Excellent.

I boggled at getting used as a throwaway line in LugRadio and then: Jono Bacon's PA (is this for real?) commented:

"I will get Jono to schedule a call with you sometime to discuss these problems if thats fine with you. He can probably fit you in before Bill Clinton at 2pm on Tuesday."

It also appeared (with a few comments from me) on as days pass by: Die Broadcom (and yes, Die Broadcom!)

Ah, beautiful Sunday! This is the first day this week we've had a little peace around the house. It'll all go crazy on Monday, of course, but it's nice to have something like a day off. tags: sunday rest

BarCampMontreal2 I had a great time yesterday at BarCampMontreal2. It was pretty fortunate that my parents are visiting this week, because it meant that both Maj and I could go to the event together. We also had our friend and fellow Wikitraveller Jani Patokallio visiting from Singapore, so we brought him along with us. Jani's a community and technology hacker and he's a lot of fun, too. This was our first event in the new BarCamp venue at the SAT, and it turned out to be a good one. The space is really big, with about 3 huge spaces. We used the back room, which is wide enough for a lot of video displays, to good advantage. The front area became an informal caf and it was really great for personal talks -- isolated from the main presentation area. Damian DiFede gave a great talk about his Ajax-based MUD, Mujax. I think it looks really cool -- I hope he can get the kind of participation and content to make it a more immersive space. I gave the second talk. I'd really wanted to do a talk about The Keiki Project, our upcoming venture, but it was too soon for a real hands-on demo. So I'd planned to do a presentation about RDF and our use of Wikitravel:Turtle RDF on Wikitravel, but I kind of got too busy by the end of the week. So I ended up recycling my talk about Commercialization of Wikis (see Talks/SXSW07), which got a lot of positive feedback. I liked seeing Sylvain Carle's presentation on what he'd learned in Silicon Valley. Sylvain is one of the best presenters at BarCampMontreal -- he's a big goofball who loves his work and communicates that passion with intelligence and sincerity. For example, he themed his talk with songs by Quebec rocker Robert Charlebois. Candid and ingenious. Also great was Hugh McGuire's talk about lessons learned in development of the cool podcasting platform Collectik. His talk came down to one great point: that you have to be able to communicate the purpose of your Web site (or other project) in one sentence. He didn't do that for Collectik, and now he's trying to figure out how to. It's great hearing people talk about their mistakes. Maj gave a great talk about Wikitravel Extra, the new personal-opinion and -experience platform that we've built to complement the objective, consensus information in Wikitravel. I keep forgetting what a good public speaker she is. She did a good job talking about the needs we were trying to fill, and she demo'd the platform (flawlessly). I think she's got a good presentation to take to other conferences now (lucky dog). Another talk I found fascinating was Chris Car's discussion of his past project, MeshCube. The MeshCube is a tiny mesh networking tool that Chris and a partner developed in Hamburg. Chris talked about what worked and what didn't work with that project, showed off some cool hacks (mesh network robots!) and was (like Hugh) open about mistakes. Sitting in the middle of about 8 WiFi networks (in my home office) as I type this, I'm really interested in mesh networking and I was glad to hear from Chris why it doesn't currently work and what can be done to make it work. Probably the most important talk, for me, was Martine Pag 's discussion of what we need to do to bring more women to technology conferences. She did a great, fair overview of the topic, and then opened the floor to discussion. We had a really great, frank talk about -- both men and women -- and a lot of diverse points of view were expressed. I'm really appreciative of Martine opening up this discussion, and I'm glad we're going to be more proactive in the Montreal technical community about being inclusive of the really great women working in technology in this city. There were some other good talks, of course: apenwarr gave a good talk about the new, new way to have a startup; the mysterious and elusive Madame Woo talked about traveling alone; and Australian visitor Moomlyn gave a great description of lucid dreaming. There were good demos of Cake Mail and My Carpool Station. All in all a great set of presentations. I also liked meeting up with some of the people there. Patrick Tanguay gave a great lunchtime standup symposium about the state of Montreal's coworking space and where we're going from here. I also liked talking with Tamu Townsend, who I hadn't met before. Probably my best talk was with Sylvain and Martine about what the boundaries of BarCamp are. Why do we have talks about solo travel, digital photography, and lucid dreaming? Sylvain had a great answer: BarCamp comes out of the hacker ethic: that spirit of curiosity, humor, passion and playfulness that makes working on computers so enjoyable for so many. If someone can communicate that same passion and intellectual captivation with another subject, it's going to go over well at BarCamp, no problem. Well said!

Pros and cons Here are some things I liked and didn't like about BarCampMontreal2. First, things I liked:

• The people. Yet again, meeting up with my favourite technologists in Montreal. Many people I first met at BarCampMontreal1, and it was nice to see how our friendships have developed in the 6 months since then.
• Diversity. I was really glad that there were many more women at this vent than at previous ones. My guess is somewhere around 20-25%, which isn't anywhere near where it should be but a big improvement over the 5-10% we had at BarCampMontreal1. Special props to Hugh, whose invite to women was, I think, pretty helpful. And of course to all the women who took the extra step to show up at a majority-male event.
• The presentations. Almost uniformly really, really good. Some were just excellent.
• Lunch. Simple and easy, didn't get in the way of socializing.
• The Bar. I liked having the bar open at lunch. Having a beer with friends really changes the dynamic of the event; and SAT has a decent selection of brews and friendly barstaff.
• The screens. A-V was great this time around -- good job by SAT on this.
• The space. It was cool having the back room at SAT. It's a really nice place for this kind of event.
• Powerpoint Karaoke. A great idea (people have to give 5-minute presentations based on off-topic slidesets they've never seen before), but I think the scheduling was off. It would have been great to spread these out between other sessions during the day for comic relief, rather than clumped all together at once.

Second, things I wasn't happy about:

• Registration. It was really great being welcomed at BarCampMontreal1, and this was distinctly missing at our second event. We had a pile of nametags on the table by the door, and no other form of greeting. For a space like SAT, this just didn't work. I'm going to volunteer to help out with this step at future events, since it's so important.
• Coffee. I realize I'm a coffeeholic, but it would have been nice to have a coffee table out. It's nice to have on a rainy Saturday, and it gives shy people something to do.
• T-shirts. I think every BarCamp should be an event worthy of a t-shirt. Fred gave out some shirts left over from BarCampMontreal1, but it would have been nice to have new ones for this event, too.
• Tables. I realize they're expensive to rent, but dang, they're really great to have if you've got your laptop and other techno doodads. It changes the event from being a show to being a symposium.
• Schedule timing. The (very important) talk by Martine about women in tech conferences ran far over schedule and wiped a few talks off the board. I think that was a mistake. After it was done, the joke segment of Powerpoint Karaoke started. By the time it was finished, 60% of the audience was gone, even though there were 4 serious talks still to go. We need to do a better job with timing this kind of thing so we keep the energy going through the entire day.
• Too much noise from the caf area. As people drifted off from the main presentation area, the caf filled up, making for lots of loud chatter that drowned out the presentations. We should probably figure out how to fix this problem; it would be nice to stimulate this casual conversation while still being respectful to the speakers. Maybe more breaks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon)?
• <100% participation. It seemed like there were a lot of spectators this time around, which drags down the participative nature of the event. I think that asking registrants how they're going to participate when they come to the door is a great way to gently remind people that they're expected to be involved (we do this for Burning Man events sometimes). I think Powerpoint Karaoke and other exercises would be a great way to get better hands-on participation by people who didn't prepare talks. (I hope that MadameWoo does a talk in the future about how to do an ad-hoc talk at BarCamp.)

My net feeling about the event was extremely positive, and I'm making these notes not to criticize anyone but to remind myself to do something about them for the next BarCampMontreal. I think that we can continuously improve this event to be inclusive, stimulating, fun and exciting, and I hope we keep this great barcamp spirit going in this city for a long time. tags: barcampmontreal2 barcampmontreal barcamp

Here are a number of links to various postings and other information related to my research about release management in free software projects:

• Bruce Byfield wrote an article about my research for Linux.com.
• I recently gave a presentation about my research at Google as part of their Tech Talks series. A video of this talk is now available.
• MORITA Hajime kindly translated my blog postings about my research to Japanese.
• Matt Asay briefly discussed my work in his blog and relates it to commercial and proprietary software development. Roberto Galoppini relates my findings to his work and concludes that hierarchy is a must. Murray Cumming summarizes what he believes are the key findings of my research.

For those of you who like to follow cutting edge developments in the politics of intellectual property law, do not miss today’s Democracy Now program AIDS Activists Call for Global Boycott of Abbott for Withholding Drug Sales in Thailand. It is sort of stunning in that empowering and disempowering way. The show discusses protests launched again the large pharmaceutical company Abbot who in reaction–no, make that retaliation–to Thailand’s decision to issue compulsory licenses on AIDS drugs, and import generic drugs acted in highly questionable ways:

“Abbott responded in a way that shocked many AIDS activists - the company announced it would withhold seven new drugs from sale in Thailand including a new AIDS drugs and treatments for arthritis and high blood pressure.”

It is great to see countries use the very slim rights granted to them by organizations like the WTO but in order for the rights to have any punch, these countries *must* be given the space to make these decisions without the deep intimation and that is exactly what Abbot is up to. To learn more, read the transcript, listen to the show. And if you want to go on, I have pasted the “favorite” part of the show: (more…)

As it’s quite predictable that we’ll have a newer version of Gnash in one or two months, I’ve created a newer experimental set of packages from the CVS, so that everything is ready when the release comes out. There is really much more to do before they’re in a decent state, mainly making them work out-of-the box for Konqueror, and decide how to handle the shared objects that are being built right now. The plugin for iceweasel works out-of-the-box for me. Do not expect a stable program for the moment anyway, it’s still under heavy development. I’ve been reported some more bugs about these packages anyway, so be careful with them. Chipi has built the packages for amd64 for me, so if you want them, they’re available online. According to one of the developers: “gnash should not have shared objects, they have been enabled again recently to allow builds on Darwin, altought I think we should disable them again”, so I think that matter about shared objects is likely to be solved soon. As it is right now, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be compliant with The Policy. As there’s no API for gnash yet, it doesn’t really make sense to create a -dev package for the moment, even though there seem to be some demand for it. Somewhere in the future we will likely have one. For those who want to experiment with later versions, I’m using SVN for handling the packaging, so it’s quite easy to create some really extreme latest version of the packages: svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-flash/packages/gnash/trunk/ latest-gnash
cd latest-gnash
fakeroot debian/rules get-orig-source
cd gnash-0.7.2+cvs*.????
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot


The panel ratings for SXSW07 just came out today. I'm glad to see that my talk on the commercialization of wikis scored so highly (4.42 out of 5). I'm already planning to pull together a panel for next year -- we'll see how that works out. You can get the slides for my talk this year at Talks/SXSW07 and on slideshare.net. tags: sxsw sxsw07 wiki commercialization talks

Creacamp So, I just found out about Creacamp, a meeting for female DIY "creators" d'ici ("from here", but... a loaded word in Quebec). It's happening Saturday, 5 May at noon at the Me dia world headquarters, 2025 rue Parthenais, #304. I'm going to go, but it's interesting -- sounds like there's a real crossover with BarCampMontreal, with the exception that the presenters will be exclusively female. Local BarCamp organizers are trying to attract more women, so Creacamp makes me feel like we've failed in some way. But I take this kind of thing way too negatively; I'm sure it will work out to be a positive thing. Maybe there's something too phallic about the "bar" in "BarCamp". I dunno. I'm at La ka today working with Niko, so when I heard about Creacamp I went across the caf and asked Hugh McGuire about it. He'd heard about it just seconds before, in a blog comment. Weird, wired world. Hugh has a blog post about BarCampMontreal and women, by the way. tags: creacamp barcamp barcampmontreal women laika

This is now established as my german annual pilgrimage. Every year since 2002, I migrate to G ttingen for 3 days to attend the SambaXP conference, the world conference of the users and developers of Samba. Halfway between a very classical conference (high-class hotel, nice conference rooms, drinks and food at will...and expensive fee) and a "geeky-style" conference (the whole Samba Team usually attends it as well as many users and developers), it is now established as the annual reference for people involved in Samba use and development. After an always interesting tutorial (this year, as often by Jerry Carter, Samba3 release manager) about making samba friendly to administrate to....Windows admins, the track continued with talks drawing the future of samba development. This year, I was however missing No l K the who could not attend, so the Debian crowd here is pretty small (but many Debian users and admins are around). I however could have interesting talks with Jelmer Vernooij (mostly involved in Samba4 development...and also in our NM queue). I also used some time to try cleaning out the Debian BTS for samba bugs, using the opportunity to show old bugs to upstream developers. I also could visit Alex and Meike who live not that far, which was a real pleasure, including the Real Swabian Sp tzle that make swabian women so strong and powerful. The conference will end up today. It will have been too short, as usual and I will feel like I'm running away on the A7 up to Hannover to catch the plane and come back home....and, as usual, I'll promise myself to come back next year and practice my German, which sucks. Tomorrow, leaving to Rome for a long week-end with Elizabeth. No laptop, no mail. Just enjoy the city. Gut!

* Finally, we did it! List of people who attended meet:
1. Hardik Dalwadi (DeepRoot Linux)
2. Kartik Mistry (Magnet, Utkarsh)
3. Isaac Praveen (DeepRoot Linux) We met at CCD near LD College of Engineering around 7 PM yesterday. It was surprise that only 3 people actually turned up at meet (I though of atleast 6/7 people). But, since this was Meeting Zero, Never mind! We discussed lots of things from Debian Etch release to DeepRootLinux. Hardik showed fancy Beryl and Deepofix working. I handed over Debian Etch Multiarch CD, We tried to install it over VMware but couldn’t get it working We also talked about attending some next cool events and involving student in LUGA. For any LUG, it is vital to have student base. Well, we had nice coffee too (Thanks to Hardik/Abhas Abhinav for sponsoring it!) And yes, we had nice BSOD when Hardik tried to show me Windows XP Embedded! I took chance to get its video too!! Pictures at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kartik_m/tags/lugameet0/ So, if you are at/near Ahmedabad or Gandhinagar and care and dare to travel on Sundays, you are most welcome!

Thursday 26 April 2007 (7pm - 9pm), The Campus, Locking Castle, Weston-super-Mare. (Map) Topics to include: The Joint Local Transport Plan: How the forum may maintain pressure to implement cycling benefits in the plan? Appointment of new chair for the meetings Diversion of the Avon Cycleway onto the old NCN33 to Portishead New Local Rural Routes to be sign posted Date of next meeting: Thursday 28 June 2007 @7pm, The Campus - WSM Cycle Forum homepage

Long time no blog. Well, a long time for me -- it's been more than a week, which is pretty unusual. To be fair, I've been blogging on my Wikitravel Extra blog, since we were spending our week in Puerto Rico. We had a great time while we were there. Our last few days we spent in Luquillo, a colonial town turned beach resort northwest of Fajardo. It has a great beach and some of the best food shacks in PR, so we managed to really enjoy ourselves. We also took some time hiking in El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the US national forest system. (I've actually visited the temperate rainforest, the Quinault, in the Olympic National Forest). Probably my big regret is not getting to Culebra, which according to Biella and other sources is perhaps the highpoint of Puerto Rico. We just didn't manage it, but there's something to be said for saving good things for the next visit. tags: wikitravel travel puerto rico get-together07

Visit from my parents My mom and dad came for a week-long visit last night (less than 24 hours after we landed on the plane from San Juan. They're going to visit our new house and spend some time with Amita June. They're going to get to see some of the nicest weather in Montreal. The early spring is really the greatest time to be here. tags: amitajune mom dad montreal parents visit

BarCampMontreal2 We're coming up fast on BarCampMontreal2, the second BarCamp in the Montreal area. We've had two DemoCamps this year, which have been great for getting people interested in the *Camp idea. I think BarCampMontreal2 is going to be a real hoot. The event is going to happen Saturday, April 28th (that's 8 Flor al to you and me) from 9:30AM until the early evening. I'll be presenting and so will Maj. The list of registrants (BarCampMontreal2Registrants) reads like a Who's Who of the Montreal tech scene, including some more Debian and Ubuntu people this time around. Good deal! This will be the first BarCampMontreal at the SAT, on 1195 blvd. St.-Laurent just south of St. Catherine. The venue is huge, has great A-V equipment, and is definitely funky. Hopefully the bar will be open at some point. tags: barcamp barcampmontreal barcampmontreal2 sat event

Speaking of Camps I've been working pretty hard on our RecentChangesCamp event here in Montreal, RoCoCoCamp. It will be a 3-day event, 18-20 May 2007, hosted by the international wiki community but open to all people interested in creativity, collaboration, and building communities. Our list of RoCoCoCamp participants is getting quite long, and it looks like our RoCoCoCamp sponsors are going to help us cover the costs of the event. We've still got some people on our RoCoCoCamp invitation list who haven't gotten an invite; I've got some work to do there. I'm excited, though, that so many people are going to be there. We're going to have the project leads for the most important PHP wiki packages -- MediaWiki, PmWiki, PHPwiki and TikiWiki. It'd be great if something came out of that! And Earle Martin of OpenGuides will be there. We're trying to work out an RDF interchange format for our wikis, so I hope to work on that issue, too. Hopefully we'll find the sponsorship to make up our budget shortfall -- there are some Open Source developers and students that we'd like to give travel microgrants to. But I'm optimistic that more companies like Google, Atlassian, AboutUs, SolSeed Movement, Keiki, Wikia, and wikiHow will come through for us over the next few weeks. All in all I think it's going to be a really cool camp. tags: recentchangescamp rocococamp rocococamp07

I have just installed a machine running CentOS 5 as a Xen server. I installed a full GUI environment on the dom0 so that GUI tools can be used for managing the virtual servers.

The first problem I had was selecting the "Installation source", it's described in the error message as an "Invalid PV media address" when you get it wrong which caused me a little confusion when installing it at 10PM. Then I had a few problems getting the syntax of a nfs://1.2.3.4:/directory URL correct. But these were trivial annoyances. It was a little annoying that my attempts to use a "file://" URL were rejected, I had hoped that it would just run exportfs to make the NFS export from the local machine (much faster than using an NFS server over the network which is what the current setup will lead people to do).

The first true deficiency I found with the tools is that it provides no way of creating filesystems on block devices. The process of allocating a block device or file from the Xen configuration tool is merely assigning a virtual block device to the Xen image - and only one such virtual block device is permitted. Then the CentOS 5 installation instance that runs under Xen will have to partition the disk (it doesn't support installing directly to an unpartitioned disk) which will make things painful when it comes time to resize the filesystems.

When running Debian Xen servers I do everything manually. A typical Debian Xen instance that I run will have a virtual block device /dev/hda for the root FS, /dev/hdb for swap, and /dev/hdc for /home. Then if I want to resize them I merely stop the Xen instance, run "e2fsck -f" on the filesystem followed by "resize2fs" and the LVM command "lvresize" (in the appropriate order depending on whether I am extending or reducing the filesystem).

Xen also supports creating a virtual partitioned disk. This means I could have /dev/lvm/xenroot, and /dev/lvm/xenswap, and /dev/lvm/xenhome appear in the domU as /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, and /dev/hda3. This means that I could have a single virtual disk that allows the partitions to be independently resized when the domU in question is not running. I have not tried using this feature as it doesn't suit my usage patterns. But it's interesting and unfortunate that the GUI tools which are part of CentOS don't support it.

When I finally got to run the install process it had a virtual graphics environment (which is good) but unfortunately it suffered badly from the two-mouse-cursor problem with different accellerations used for both cursors so the difference in position of the two cursors varied in different parts of the screen. This was rather surprising as the dom0 had a default GNOME install.

"a monthly public demonstration of Free Open Source Software (FOSS), aimed primarily at beginners. It's not specifically for Linux, as the software will be demoed on a WinXP system to lure people in ;) -- however, I will make some live linux distro CDs for the event. Here's the details: Title: Introduction to Free Software
Date: Wednesday 18th April
Time: Lunchtime 1-2pm
Place: Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS
Map
Price: Free
The website"

The second one will be on 26th May 2007 at the Cube Cinema, Dove Street South, Bristol BS2 8JS (Map), 1pm-3pm, and is hopefully a music one with a barbecue (weather permitting!).

Leon Brooks blogged about the Right to Fork (an essential right for free software development) but notes that governments of countries don't permit such a right.

One of the criteria for the existence of a state is the ability to control it's own territory. Lose control of the territory and you lose the state, lose some of the territory and the state is diminished. Therefore preventing a division of the territory (a split after a civil war) is the primary purpose of a state. The other criteria of a state are the ability to tax the population, impose civil order, and to administer all other aspects of government. All of these operations are essential to the government and lead to the destruction of the state if they are lost.

It's not that governments want to prevent forking, it's the fact that the existence of the state (on which the existence of the government depends) demands that it be prevented in all but the most extreme situations.

With free software forking is not a problem as multiple groups can work on similar software without interference. If someone else works on a slightly different version of your program then the worst that they can do is to get the interest of more developers than you get. This competition for developers leads to better code!

With proprietary software the desire to prevent forking is due to the tiny marginal cost of software. Most of the costs of running a software company are in the development. The amount of work involved in development does not vary much as the user-base is increased. So doubling the number of sales can always be expected to significantly more than double the company's profit.

One thing that would benefit the computer industry would be to have all the source to proprietary programs put in escrow and then released freely after some amount of time or some number of versions have been released. If Windows NT 4.0 was released freely today it would not take many sales from the more recent versions of Windows. But it would provide significant benefits for people who want to emulate older systems and preserve data. I expect that current versions of MS-Office wouldn't properly read files created on NT 4.0, I'm sure that this is a problem for some people and will become more of a problem as new machines that are currently being designed are not capable of booting such old versions of Windows.