Postr 0.2 is finally out. I didn't get around to finished the all new Flickr API, but instead there are a lot of bug fixes.

• Rewrite threading logic to fix various weird missing upload and "4 of 2" bugs.
• All-new progress dialog (Ross, Germ n Poo Caama o)

You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.2 tarball.

As a reaction to what is happening in Debian, following the renames of Firefox to iceweasel, Thunderbird to icedove, Mozilla to iceape, cdda2wav to icedax,… (also notice the lack of capital letters, in the original names) abcde will be renamed to icetheripper, trac to icekeepmeupdated and spamassassin to iceshitmailkiller. Blah… UPDATED: icedax, not iceadx

Over the last few weeks, I have been very busy at work, and therefore hadn't have much time for Debian. Especially, I haven't been able to help the Dunc-bank project as much as I wanted to. However, it recently became obvious that I brought my contribution to the project's impressive success (despite being not too dramatic). That was, orphaning libpng. The one thing to know about libpng is that upstream developers like to break their software at every single release. Given the number of packages depending on it, it is not reasonable to upload new versions less than 6 months before the release; this is the reason why I carefully kept the working 1.2.8 version. However, despite being warned, the new maintainer decided to upload two new upstream versions with a high urgency to fix two security issues, instead of backporting them. Looking at the rest of the changelog is eloquent :

• removal of the libpng3 package despite my explanations of why not to do so - a change reverted later;
• moving development examples to the shared library package - I'm sure the 91% of users having libpng12-0 installed, according to popularity-contest, will be glad to have them;
• last but not least, removal of a patch that was introduced to not export some useless symbols - of course, this was done without bumping the shlibs, just like the two new upstream releases.

The result is now, according to the unofficial RC bug list, no less than six libpng-related release-critical bugs:

• broken on amd64;
• incorrect dependency information;
• new bug introduced upstream;
• pngcrush broken.

Before anyone asks me: no, I'm not volunteering to fix these bugs. Maintaining libpng is a tedious and time-consuming task that requires more motivation than I currently have. It is way too late in the release process, and my advice for a short-term solution (suitable for a release in two months) would be to revert completely to 1.2.8 and backport the security fixes. The medium-term solution involves even more work, but I think there is no more choice: the library needs to be split in two, one private library with an unstable ABI for software like pngcrush and optipng, and one public library with a very strictly fixed ABI (probably following closely the LSB). Good luck to anyone implementing this. The long term solution is more appealing: rewrite everything from scratch. The PNG specification is much clearer than the libpng code, and calls for a clean reimplementation using modern programming techniques. For a completely unrelated, but more entertaining moment, I recommend the reading of this Bjarne Soustrup interview, where he tries to defend C++ against all common sense. The introduction really made my day: C++ remains the archetypal "high level" computer language (that is, one that preserves the features of natural, human language). Something to meditate on.

The first installment of Mark C. Chu-Carroll's Haskell tutorial series went up last week.

It begins this way:

Before diving in and starting to explain Haskell, I thought it would be good to take a moment and answer the most important question before we start:

Why should you want to learn Haskell?

It's always surprised me how many people don't ask questions like that.

Farther down:

So what makes Haskell so wonderful? Or, to ask the question in a slightly better way: what is so great about the pure functional programming model as exemplified by Haskell?

The answer is simple: glue.

Languages like Haskell have absolutely amazing support for modular development.

An interesting and though-provoking article, even for someone that's been using Haskell for more than 2 years now. (Yikes, I had no idea it was that long)

You can also see all his posts on Haskell, which include a couple more installments.

My work permit in Canada expired on December 1 (that's 10 Frimaire for you French Revolutionary Calendar fanatics), so I needed to renew it. It's possible to renew these things by mail, which is worrisome and time-consuming, or even to go into an office in Montreal (near-mythical, crowded, reportedly ineffective). I've never liked doing either, so whenever we have to deal with immigration, our family drives the 50km down to the border with the US. They have a big immigration facility there, and if you drive out of Canada and back in again, they have lots of nice officers in bullet-proof vests to deal with any immigration issues on the spot. It's called "driving around the flagpole" here, but Maj and I try to make a trip out of it when we have to go. So we drove down to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks last Friday morning -- sufficiently distant and different to seem exotic, without being too far away for a weekend trip. Plattsburgh, the nearest American town to us, is, well, kinda boring. We've spent a day in Burlington (Vermont) before, and that was pretty fun, but we wanted to try something different -- so Lake Placid it was. Friday was a crummy day for a drive, though -- there was snow and freezing rain in equal measures, so the roads were a little dangerous. The hood of our car kept building up this several-inches-thick icy-snowy mass that I was afraid would rip off the hood and go careening into the dark, so I kept stopping to chip it off with my handy ice scraper. Once we got down to the Adirondack park, though, the rain was just a regular drizzly non-freezing kind, and we could actually enjoy the scenery. The roads in were remarkably small -- hard to believe that not one but two Winter Olympics were held at this remote location. When we got to town, we took a look around at the main drag -- a single street that fronts onto Mirror Lake and points directly into the Olympic centre. We stopped at the Great Adirondack Brewing Company for a late lunch, and had a nice crabcake and caesar salad with roasted shrimp. Maj is a little squeamish about eating seafood in the mountains -- with good reason, since she's been burnt before -- but we both ate up anyways, and it was real good. Amita June had a grilled-cheese sandwich that came with french fries shaped like little happy faces. Awww. We then went to check into our motel, the Wildwood Inn. I've got a weakness for a certain kind of woodsy mountain motel -- lots of wood paneling and alpine flavor -- and I especially like paying motel prices. The Wildwood was just what I like -- clean, inexpensive ($65/night), and charming, with a nice view from our room out onto Lake Placid proper. It also had a nice big indoor heated pool complex and free WiFi. (On that subject -- why is it that so many motels in North America now have perfectly acceptable free WiFi, but major hotels in big cities charge you $30/night for crummy WiFi with complicated authentication schemes that take half an hour to configure? Is it just because the big hotels charge too much for everything, or is it because they know they can rake business travelers over the coals and it all will go on the expense report? It makes me really mad to pay for WiFi, and it makes me extra-mad that it's usually so complicated and of such poor quality. Anyways.) We took a big nap and went out after dark (4:30PM) to look at the town and get some dinner. Unfortunately, it was still raining big fat cold raindrops all over downtown. The ski season was supposed to start this weekend in the Adirondacks, but with all the rain they canceled opening the runs, and with the bad weather and no skiing the town was pretty empty. Most of the restaurants we passed were closed, and when we eventually got to one, the Black Bear, we were the only people there. The Black Bear turned out to be really nice. They had a good selection of organic vegetables and seafood nicely prepared but not too fancy -- what we Californians call "California cuisine". I dunno what anyone else calls it. Amita liked it because they had a big chalkboard on the wall and she spent most of her time running between our table and the board or drawing big jagged marks on the wall. That night the wind and storm howled outside our motel room -- I dreamed the place was falling down. When we got up in the morning, though, there was a light dusting of snow on the ground outside -- the first one of the season! Maj and Amita June went outside on the motel lawn to play around -- Amita doesn't remember last winter, I don't think, so snow is new all over again for her -- and I went to clear off the car. Then we went downtown to get some breakfast. We shopped for books (I bought James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder) and winter gear (Maj almost but didn't buy some boots) walking up and down the main street in the light snow, then piled into the Soulshine Bagel shop for some bagel sandwiches and coffee. The food was good -- the bagels were thick and doughy, not like the little Montreal bagels I've grown fond of -- but the place only took cash, and we hadn't gotten out any American money yet. Oops. They were nice enough to take our Canadian cash, which earned them a decent tip, and then the three of us walked back to the car in the snow, Amita trying for the first time to catch snowflakes on her tongue. After our nap, we went out with good intentions to go visit the Olympic Centre and get ourselves a little bit of cultural value from the trip, but the early dark and our darker natures drove us instead to the Lake Placid Pub in a residential area right by Mirror Lake. The Pub was great -- really good beers (I liked the 7% Ubu Ale) and fine pub-grub. There was a table of kids next to our table, and they had a little table barbecue on which they were making s'mores. They kept handing Amita their extra graham crackers, which she noshed contentedly. This morning we went to the Saranac Sourdough deli and bakery for an early breakfast. It was right across highway 86 from our motel, and they had great pancakes. I had a big spinach-crab frittata with sourdough rye toast -- really satisfying. We took the long route back to Montreal -- west through Saranac Lake then north up to Malone (New York), a little town on the Salmon River with a big collapsed mill in the middle of downtown. By the time we got down to Malone, all the snow was gone, and it was back to that bitter snowless winter look all over the place. Malone had some nice architecture, but we ducked into the homey Nancy's Village Diner for some lunch. Then out onto the road again, through Chateaugay and Mooers and back to the border after a brief stop at duty-free. Our immigration issues took about an hour -- that was pretty good turnaround -- and we were on autoroute 15 back home to Montreal pretty quick. Not far from the border, though, the snow started coming down hard, and by the time we got to the St. Laurent river it was sticking to the road, making driving a little hazardous. But we managed to get home OK, glad for a nice little weekender. tags: lake placid montreal new york saranac lake adirondacks immigration snow maj amitajune

WTF IS THIS SHIT? Ok, that above would be what a newly-baptized “FOSS advocate-slash-zealot” would say upon seeing Federico Pascual Jr.’s PostScript regarding the FOSS bill. I suppose I could have said that myself a couple of lifetimes ago. But, there is more than meets the eye. While I would like to think of myself as a “FOSS veteran”–believe me, I have still so much to learn about it–I would like to step into the shoes of such a person when approaching an article as sensational as Mr. Pascual’s. Despite what seems to be a most interesting article on the mechanics of government software usage, it fails to address the one particular bit that is just as important as the proposed bill itself: the real Free and Open Source Software. Let me nitpick this article bit by bit:

FREE RIDE: A bill is being pushed in Congress forbidding all government agencies and state-controlled firms from buying and using any of the computer software sold in the market!

Alas, when I first heard of the FOSS bill sometime before September, I also had a bad impression of it. Perhaps I was just too politically allergic at that time (yeah right,) but I tried to adopt a wait-and-see’ approach first and let the dice roll. Perhaps because this bill was to be introduced by a very visible congressman with alleged leftist ties made me feel uncomfortable, but then, so was (and still is) with the current administration. Or perhaps I just felt it wasn’t damn right to legislate FOSS as an end-all solution, preferring instead of presenting is as a process for reforming the local software industry. Looks like first impressions definitely make a difference.

The proposed law to be called “Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) Act of 2006″ commands government offices to use only information and communications software that are given away for free and have no restrictions as to their use. The objectives appear to be to save money for the government and to encourage the making of free (non-commercial) software.

So? What’s wrong with these objectives? FWIW, the early FOSS bill draft did seem to have such a Draconian section as forcing the government and allied offices to use, and use only, FOSS. IMHO that by itself ran against the very fundamental ideal of FOSS: the freedom of choice. Not Hobson’s choice, but real choice. The current bill IIRC now allows this true choice; unless there is an extreme case where FOSS cannot be applied without becoming non-self-sustaining (not to mention self-liquidating,) agencies may implement their infrastructure using FOSS as their primary instrument, with the application of open standards (that is, open document formats, open communications protocols, etc) unifying the disparate components. Perhaps right now, this situation may seem kind of far-fetched, but its not really that far-off, considering what other nations and cities have done (or not done) with FOSS. Munich, Extremadura, Beijing… the list is not yet that long, but its bound to go a long way Now, while the government may now adopt open standards and open-everything, does not mean that the openness’ forgoes security, either; the government may opt to use well-known encryption protocols and even base their own security infrastructure on them. In fact, they are free to even look inside the source of these well-known standards, to study them, and to branch off new implementation that may even change the way these standards work. In fact, even without this bill in place, the government can participate in the production and development of FOSS!!! Wait a minute, wasn’t I supposed to defend this bill? Eh, well. I suppose this bill is good and all, but like I said earlier, there are those first impressions made by the parties involved in the making of this bill which unsettles me. IMHO I would rather see applications of this first in key cities (the happy works in Munich and in Extremadura are no accident, believe me) which in turn, would allow both local the national government to see just exactly how this FOSS magic works. Then, when the observations have been made, the papers are in, and the workers get hired, then, maybe, we’ll have a nation where FOSS can be mandated as a very strong preference, but never a forced one. Its all about growing up, really. I’m being reminded of Tom DeMarco’s The Deadline, where a newly-retrenched guy from a telco literally lands into the fantastic job of his life, managing an entire nation of software engineers and architects to develop several killer apps within a year (or so; raid you nearest Book Sale and be lucky Its a great experiment: when it succeeds, you’ll be the first to be present, but when it fails, you’ll be the first to be nowhere.

But I can also hear in the background a call to an unholy war against multinationals whose popular software run virtually all maybe 95 percent? of the computers of the world.

Now this is a low blow. Maybe partly because of the prevailing images of the advocates–geeks and leftists, my, what a c-c-c-combo!–is what drives Mr. Pascual to make this point. But really, multinationals are not the main concern. FWIW, FOSS is multinational in nature: it is even multi-denominational and multidisciplinary. FOSS is one of the things that make anonymous people like you and me Internet superheroes. FOSS connects the Internet’s tubes and keeps away the trucks. FOSS makes the Internet serious business, yet also drives them crazy. The Linux distros that I have worked, am working, and continue to work on, are all multinational: Debian and Ubuntu. People from all over the world, from all 7 continents, participate and work on what would arguably be the biggest software distribution the human world may ever produce, freely, regardless of motivation or goal. I suppose all the folks involved have only one common goal, and that is to see a work created for the benefit of the community by the community. I suppose the background howl comes from somewhere altogether, but its hardly just from FOSS. FOSS is the epitome of what is truly multinational, and one thing that is not truly controlled by any one single person, corporation or not.

[Absolutely nothing related in any way to Debian or Free Software here, so you can just skip ahead]

As some of you may be already aware of, I suffer from OCD, in a very mild form. If left untreated for long enough time, in my case it was years, it leads to depression. A good one. You can end up in Learned Helplessness Land, where your closest companion will be your inner voice, constantly criticising you, blaming you for anything that happens, I even used to believe I brought bad luck to the people I was with or met.

I strive for perfection, and the world is not perfect, not everything is under my control, and OCD is just a jail. In my case it is cleaning and re-arranging stuff. My perfectly shiny jail.

Some of my friends think it is so bourgeois that I have a person come clean my house every week. Maybe they do not understand that I can t clean, because I can t stop. The same way an ex-addict can t take $SUBSTANCE_OF_CHOICE. When I get stressed I tend to clean, and when I start cleaning I just don t stop. One stupid example of how ridiculous it can get: doing the laundry in an empty laundry machine so that it is clean inside. I can kill my plants by watering them too much, specially Cactus, dist-upgrading all my machines every morning, and then several more times a day, even if i know there will be no updates available at all.

And while I am doing it, I don t enjoy it. I can t stop, control it or decide anything. I follow very strict rituals, things have to be the right way, following a very complex set of rules that make sense to no one else but me. Well, not even me. But I have to, I don t choose to, and that is where the jail comes from.

I think it all comes from my childhood, in a very chaotic household, at a deeply disturbed family, with an abusive, alcoholic father and a very overwhelmed mother, the only thing I could control in my life was that my room was clean and arranged, as opposed to the rest of the house, and my homework perfect, as opposed to the rest of my life. The same way anorexics feel in control when they let themselves starve to death, because they control the food they eat, their hunger and their bodies.

My father also turned up to be psychotic, manic-depressive, and what not. When my mother finally forced^W helped him to stop drinking, I had this hope that things would be fine, but they didn t really improve. I was eleven. At the beginning it was the drinking, then the mental illness, then the aging, but my worst fear has always been to become him. To do onto others what was done to me. When I was 16 I already knew I would never have kids. I can t even bear to think that I could fuck up the way my family did. I can t even bear the thoughts of passing these genes onto an innocent baby. I specially hate the idea of bringing a new baby into this fucked up world, with so many kids out there so helpless, as myself as a kid, that nobody wants. I would definitely adopt a kid one day, if I was sure I would not repeat certain behaviours on him/her. If a doctor would put it in writing with his own blood.

In 2004, wanting to kill myself, even with a well thought plan and a written unofficial will (who gets my laptop, who gets my clothes, who gets my money, and so on) I went into treatment. Some of you might remember I was kind of MIA at the time. I was on Prozac, tranquilizers, and a year and a half therapy later, I was fine. I was even happy! That was by Debconf 5, after being fired from a job that was hurting me, giving up a 15 years relationship that had become unhealthy for both of us, the death of two very dear friends, and other looses not worth mentioning in this blog post that already gives too much away, I was finally happy. My life radically changed, my jail was almost gone, my fears were under control, I was finally free.

But, recently, a very dear friend of mine got sick, not any near what my father was or had ever been, but I saw myself in a mirror. My worst fears paralyzed me. My inner voice whispered I would end up being him. Again. And again. And some more. So I had to fight my I can do this alone pride, called my doctor and I am back on all the crap that will probably fuck my brain chemistry in the long run, and back on therapy, which is the only resource that will be really helpful for my life. I am not as bad as I once was, and it is going to be much easier this time, but I am scared as hell, because I though this was gone forever. But my friend got sick, and I had a stressful couple of months at work, and (yay!) I started cleaning again.

My physical health is also reflecting what I am going through. I am in a very acute UTI episode. The amount of pills I take in the morning is getting scary now. The pain and the burn are hardly bearable, and I have become unwillingly an early riser. I wake up at 5:30 or 6:00 am, and go to bed somewhere between 8:00 and 10:00 pm. One of the side effects of the painkillers is I can t really focus my sight at the moment, so my computing is painful and limited.

Being unable to concentrate on the computer I engaged in compulsive house improvement.

* I changed every light switch and power outlet in the house without turning the power off. Dangerous? Sure. Am I proud of my new skill? You bet!

* I revamped a very old and crappy piece of furniture I found in the trash. When the lady that cleans for you has a better cell phone than you, and you can t afford new shoes for the winter, you start looking at the stuff other people throw away in a different way. In a very different way.

* I lost ten kilos, and the clothes I wore to Brazil fit again. I am fixing the broken bits, because I can t really afford to get clothes of my new size anymore either.

Some pics of my achievements (some work is still in progress):



You might have noticed my web server is down at the moment. I hope this post explains why I am timing out. My server is called aenima, latin for soul, and quite incidentally.

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:

• install the qemu package
• optionally install the kqemu module:
• install the kqemu-source package (from 'non-free')
  
• run 'module-assistant prepare'
• run 'module-assistant auto-build kqemu' (Daniel, in case you read this: This may be easier than running make-kpkg as suggested in the README.)
  
• install built package with 'dpkg -i kqemu-modules-[kernel version]'
• possibly change permisisons/ownership of '/dev/kqemu' to allow non-root users
  
• run 'depmod -a' and 'modprobe kqemu' to load module
  
• create a disk image (Using qcow means we are not using a sparse file, so compressing and decompressing does not inflate the file.): qemu-img create -f qcow hda_40GB_sarge.qcow 40G
• get a sarge install CD, e.g. 31r4 netinst
• install the initial sarge system:
• start qemu e.g. like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow -cdrom ./sarge-31r4-i386-netinst.iso -boot d
• start the installer and go through the normal motions
• restart qemu like this: qemu -m 512 -hda ./hda_40GB_sarge.qcow
• finish the installation:
• select a mirror (Note that DNS is not setup - fix this or use IP addresses for repositories. Also, something like apt-proxy comes in quite handy.)
• choose 'manual package selection' in the installer
• update the packages as suggested by aptitude
• quit aptitude and finish the installation
• now would be a good time to take a copy of the fresh sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_pristine.qcow
• compress the copy (The uncompressed image is ~ 1GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 100MB.)
  
• install X:
• start aptitude, select 'x-window-system-core' and install
• leave all X config settings standard, except:
• mouse device: /dev/psaux
• mouse type: PS/2
• screen size: 1024x768 (or similar)
• install Gnome (That's just what I use, KDE or others are equally fine.):
• start aptitude and select the following packages and install:
  
• 'gnome-desktop-environment'
• 'xscreensaver'
• 'gdm'
• 'gdm-thmes'
• 'synaptic'
• 'menu'
• 'menu-xdg'
• quit aptitude
• restart gdm: invoke-rc.d gdm restart
• now might be a good time to take another copy of the sarge install before continuing:
• halt the (qemu) system
• copy the image file, e.g.: cp hda_40GB_sarge.qcow hda_40GB_sarge_gnome.qcow
• compress the new copy (The uncompressed image is now ~ 2GB, the bzip'ed one ~ 540MB.)
  
• install other software as desired that you want test the upgrade with, e.g.:
• 'mondo'
• 'mondo-doc'
• perform the upgrade (following the preliminary Release Notes):
• get to the command line in the qemu system, e.g. by running 'invoke-rc.d gdm stop' in a gnome-terminal
• change apt source from sarge to etch
• run 'apt-get update'
• upgrade the kernel by running 'aptitude install linux-image-2.6-486' (This is not what the Release Notes say but it works for me.) (Say 'Yes' to removing the running kernel.)
• upgrade aptitude by running 'aptitude update aptitude'
• upgrade the system by running 'aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade'
• if applicable, rerun and keep rejecting offerings to resolve conflicts until the one upgrading mondo is offered (I'll have to look into this.)
• run 'aptitude -f --with-recommends install gnome-desktop-environment' to reinstall Gnome

All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

I was very happily surprised today. Some weeks ago, walking in downtown Mexico City, I found the Interactive Economy Museum (Museo Interactivo de Econom a - MIDE, for which I had seen some posters at my workplace (of course, as some of you know, I work at UNAM's Institute for Economics Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Econ micas)). MIDE is one Mexico's youngest museums (opened about two months ago), and it is... Frankly impressive and well done.
When I first heard about an interactive economy museum, I could only think about entering a room with buttons that would cause economic or politic crisis in different Asian or African countries, so we could watch the outcome. Of course, it was not so (or at least, I hope so - I pressed quite a number of buttons!) The museum is multimedia rich, and will attract children (I'd suggest going with 10 year old kids and older) and grown-ups. It is quite well balanced, having many things that are just fun to do (i.e. for the scarcity topic, recording a video saying what do you want but don't have so other people see you, and see other people's videos, or "designing" -of course, quite simplisticly, but still- your own banknote, with your own photo), that give you a better insight of the full economic process (how money changes hands: A story told by six different animations, each explaining a different part of the process, about the relations between a family, the bank, the factory owner and the supermarket; a stock exchange simulator; comparisons between different indicators on the living standards over the world).
But even more than the exhibit itself, just being at the Bethlehemit ex-convent and ex-hospital is very well worth a visit. Even if the XVIII-century building endured very rough times and got severely deteriorated, it has been completely rescued - and unlike most colonial palaces we have, it was rescued mixing modern elements with the old architecture with a very good balance and taste.
...Very well worth a visit. Really. If you happen to be in the Mexico City center, go to Tacuba street, just by Metro Allende, in front of Caf Tacuba. Oh, and don't go without having lunch first: We entered at 2PM, and had to fast-track over half of the museum because we were too hungry to pay attention. Of course, we plan to return with the family, so it's not lost. Besides, maybe next time I'll have time for a nice chat with Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who are seen walking around the museum. I talked a bit with one of the Bethlehemit monks.
Who runs the museum? It is never obvious, and I want to know. The building was, accodring to their web site, acquired in 1989 and remodeled since then by the Bank of Mexico, which would make perfect sense. Besides, it's quite clear that the Bank helped for some of the exhibits, such as the numismatics collection or the banknote printing technology room.

One of my tasks for today was to upgrade to the new versions of the JanRain OpenID libraries for Wikitravel. However, since those libraries implement the draft OpenID 2.0 standard, which includes support for i-names, I had to do some i-names playing today. i-names is a distributed system, with different "i-brokers" (yes, they're really called that) providing naming services. Unfortunately, the service that I used for registering my i-name, 2idi, isn't compatible with the JanRain Open Source libraries I'm using. JanRain's implementation depends on the very latest version of the OpenID 2.0 draft, and 2idi doesn't support it yet. So testing with my current i-name, =evan.prodromou, doesn't work. So, I had to register a new i-name with an i-broker that supports the new draft standard, which, y'know, it's the whole point of this stuff not to have to register all over the place. But whatever. JanRain folks in #openid, the OpenID channel, let me know that i-brokers that use EZ iBroker, a kind of i-broker-in-a-box package, would work with their library. The best one I could come up with is LinkSafe, which works OK. Now, rather than spend another US$20 and register a variant on my given name, I decided to spend the US$55 get an organizational i-name so I could make as many different testing names as I needed. And rather than register an i-name for a real organization, I registered just a bogus one, @gratis, so I could give them away to whoever wanted an i-name. My new i-name, @gratis*evan.prodromou, works great. If you'd like an i-name to play around with, please drop me a line using the Web form at @gratis, and I'll set one up for you. I've toyed around with it, and it seems to work for sites that support i-names. tags: i-names 2idi janrain openid ibroker linksafe gratis

La ka I met my friend Nicolas Ritoux at La ka, the wireless-enabled lounge on St. Laurent. We hung out at the bar and had a beer or so, which was a nice way to spend the early evening -- of course, it was an hour after dark when I met him, but just 5PM... We talked a lot about his projects working on a new version of Hyst rie, the classic Quebec Web zine, formerly hand-coded in HTML but soon to be implemented in a CMS. He's using SPIP, a cool-looking French jobby that seems to have a lot of features. He's really getting into the XHTML+CSS aspect of it... a sure sign of madness. I like La ka, but it didn't dawn on me until today that it's named after Laika, the Soviet cosmo-dog that was the first living thing intentionally launched into space by humans. Good dog! tags: laika niko montreal

Movie night I had to rush back to the house pretty quick, though -- our friends Patti and Meg offered to babysit Amita tonight so Maj and I could go see a movie. Awww! Of course, given that opportunity to have a romantic evening with my beautiful wife, what did I decide to go see? Borat, of course. We were pretty worried about the baby -- she's been kind of feverish and cranky for the last few days -- but when we came home, she and Meg and Patti were dancing and twirling around the room. Good girl! tags: amitajune meg patti borat movie night

Well, I should say I don't appreciate Mark Shuttleworth's post to the OpenSuSE mailing list too much. It might be okay for most of you, but I feel it's tasteless. I have a naive side.

Besides, the real surprise was JP Rosevear's counterattack for Mark's post. JP argues that Canonical actively sabotages the development of Debian, e.g. by preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped. Again, it might be okay for most of you since Canonical hired him, but it still gets on my nerves somehow.

The funny part of this story is, some of OpenSuSE people seems to know things about Debian which I don't know.

Rob Myers commented:

"Since all CC licences allow NC copying and distribution, any DRM that limits copying in any way is a breach. Or any DRM as it is also known. And since the CC licenses all support fair use and DreAm (an oxymoronic idea that I thought had died of lack of interest) restricts it, that's another problem. Not to mention how harmful electronic enforcement of CC licenses would be."

That's an argument I've heard from several CC supporters, but I don't accept it: fair use is inconsistent globally. What is fair use in the USA might not be fair dealing in England, or the other way around. As to whether any DRM is possible under CC licences, there's the small matter of Lessig's "praise for better DRM" which seems to acknowledge the existance of TPMs that restrict in a CC-OK way. Rob continues:

"Mako's arguments are a rehash of ones that were considered in depth when the debate was happening. Terry covered most of them [in an article on a magazine web site]"

Maybe the points Mako presents were considered, maybe they weren't, but it's very hard to tell from the limited transparency of CC. I think the points are clear, direct and difficult to argue against - that may be why it's so hard to get a good debate with CC about this. What's more, Terry Hancock's article is a rehash of his old list posts. I think Terry's points were all covered in mailing list discussions and they don't even try to make a case for the TPM-ban in CC-BY. I like recycling, but it's disappointing to see people use the press to recycle old threads. Also, I don't find it particularly surprising if someone writing for a magazine web site isn't entirely comfortable with some forms of redistribution. Rob finishes with:

"And I would add that, as someone who has installed GNU/Linux on my iPod, who has recently read the Yellow Dog Linux announcement for the PS3, who uses their PS2 as a CD and DVD player, and whose son seems to get MP3s, images and movies onto his PSP OK, I do not understand the argument that the best way of "helping" users is to help third parties trap them under DRM regimes rather than assisting users in installing and using free software."

Maybe that's not understandable because it's not an argument that's used, except as a straw man by pro-format-discriminators? Personally, I think it's a pretty poor show that you have an iPod, PSP and so on - weren't Apple's and Sony's DRM-mania well-known when they were bought? Which brings me on to why I feel locked-media distribution is worthwhile: educating people to make better device choices next time. I bought an Ogg player this time - hearing Cory Doctorow's talks as MP3 was partly why. If CC 2.0 had had an aggressive-patent ban similar to CC 3.0's TPM ban, maybe that wouldn't have happened.

Pointed at the issues by Josselin Mouette’s post, I got aware of a list of issues posted by JP Rosevear, which is a reply to Mark Shuttleworths post to the opensuse mailinglist. Note especially point 2, which is: “Preventing the Debian GNOME maintainer from updating GNOME packages until after Ubuntu LSO had shipped because you had hired him.” If this issue is true, it’s the worst thing I ever heard of regarding Canonical. I mean it’s bad enough that points 1 (“Having a stated policy of not funding any significant new software development because the Return on Investment is not good enough”) and 3 (“Not releasing any source code for launchpad/rosetta/malone to maintain a competitive advantage”) certainly are true (even though I can’t prove and therefor don’t 100% believe the second part of #3). But unless there is a very good reason to delay the submission of the patches developed to “upstream”, Debian.
It’s bad enough that Canonical hired the most active Debian Developers, depriving Debian of much of their time, while not really supporting Debian (i.e. while not actively submitting patches to Debian). It would have been better for the community if Canonical had hired less active DDs (or even non-DDs). Sure it would have been harder to select some sufficiently qualified people for the jobs, but the total outcome whould have been better IMHO (getting time from previously uninvolved people, while keeping the existing contributors). Anyway, I really would like to know wether the mentioned point #2 is true, and if so wether any valid reason for doing so could be given before I set my opinion about this issue in stone. One thing is sure however, I’m becoming more and more critical regarding Ubuntu and Canonical over time while I once hoped that the opposite would become true for those criticizing Canonical at that time. Actually I still hope so (and thus I hope reason to become less sceptical again).
Another thing is also sure: If Canonical wants to use Debian as a base for much longer, it should make damned sure to work with Debian more actively instead of seemingly working against it (more or less openly). Update: As also pointed out in a comment below, a post by Scott James Remnant proves point 1 from the the aforementioned list and gives a further hint that point 3 might be true. More precisely it says “we have a policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed”, which probably means “not doing our own major software development”, since - as a comment to that post also says - Canonical did some software development, like launchpad/rosetta/malone and some other relatively small projects.

Many years ago I was involved in a free software development project with write access to the source tree. For reasons that are not relevant to this post (and which I hope all the participants would regard as trivial after so much time has passed) I had a disagreement with one of the more senior developers. This disagreement continued to the stage where I was threatened with expulsion from the project.

At that time I was faced with a decision, I could have tried to fight the process, and I might have succeeded and kept my position in that project. But doing so would have wasted a lot of time from many people, and might have caused enough productivity loss for enough people to outweigh my contributions to the project for the immediate future. But this didn't seem very productive.

So I requested that my write access to the source tree be removed as I was going to leave the project and unused accounts are a security risk.

I never looked back, I worked on a number of other projects after that time (of which SE Linux is one) and the results of those projects were good for everyone. If I had stayed in the project where things weren't working out then it would have involved many flames, distraction from productive work for everyone, and generally not much good.

The reason I mention this now (after many years have passed) is because in another project I see someone else faced with the same choice I made who is making the wrong decision. The people who are on the same private mailing list as me will all know who I am referring to. The individual in question is appearently suffering health problems as a result of stress caused by their inability to deal with the situation where they can't get along with other people.

My advice to that person was to leave gracefully and find something else to work on. If you don't get along with people and make a big fuss about it then they will only be more glad when they finally get rid of you. Running flame-wars over a period of 6 months to try and get accepted by a team that you don't get along with will not do any good, but it will convince observers that removing you is a good idea.

The main reason that the CC 3.0 draft licences don't seem to follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines is that they single out TPM as an unacceptable field of endeavour. However, Dare to DReaM? [copyrighteous] suggests that what some CC fans are supporting as a TPM ban may not be a TPM ban after all. Mako's Parallel Distribution is a brilliant summary of the flaws in the most frequently-used arguments for CC simply banning TPM/DRM in the crude manner of the CC 3.0 drafts.

So I’ve got my shiny new laptop which should complement my 5 years old PowerBook G4 500 MHz and had a bit of fun installing Debian AMD64 on it. I did it the hard way, not using debian-installer as it was a given for me that both the kernel and debian-installer itself were unable to deal with the machine. Installation method:

• debootstrap an amd64 system and an i386 system on a FireWire disk
• build a suitable x86_64 kernel for the MacBook Pro, handpicking patches from mactel-linux
• reinstall a fresh and stripped down Mac OS X system on a smaller partition
• boot on the mactel-linux live CD
• partition using parted
• sync GPT and MBR with gptsync
• mkfs, mkswap
• transfer the amd64 system using xfsdump/xfsrestore
• chroot into the i386 system, edit lilo.conf, run lilo
• reboot, hold down the option key, choose the infamous “Windows” icon
• ENJOY

Note that you do not need to install BootCamp on Mac OS X. On the Core2 Duo machines, the firmware already includes the SMBIOS stuff, so you’d only install a useless Mac OS X GUI which you can’t use because you’ve repartitioned before running BootCamp Assistant :-) Current status: most of what should work with Linux sort of works (that is, to say, everything but the WiFi). Things that do not work:

• external VGA monitor: a DVI-D monitor works fine, looks like fglrx does not enable the DVI-I output on the DVI connector (it even reads the EDID data from the VGA monitor). If you know someone at ATI, please point them to this post. My bug report to ATI has been discarded with this comment: “we do not supply drivers for laptops, it’s up to the manufacturer” (roughly). Yeah, right. Not buying ATI anymore if this doesn’t get fixed.
• WiFi: new Atheros5008 a/b/g/pre-n chip, unsupported by madwifi and future support is uncertain at best as of now. Happy. NOT. (madwifi ticket #1001)
• sound: sort of works with Linux 2.6.18, sound works on both headphones and speakers. Broken in 2.6.19. (ALSA issue #2198)
• no keyboard in LILO: strange, but the keyboard doesn’t work at boot time in LILO when run through rEFIt, though it does sometime work when run directly from the Apple chooser. lilo -R to the rescue, but this is painful. Maybe GRUB would work better.
• applesmc: has issues, the SMC times out frequently. Works nonetheless, and it does not happen when first booted into OS X. Probably an initialisation issue.
• trackpad: doesn’t work as good as in Mac OS X, some synaptics config tuning should fix that
• battery life sucks: power consumption is a steady 26 W for a 55 Wh battery, even with both cores running at 1 GHz instead of 2.33 GHz. Power consumption doesn’t vary depending on the CPU frequency. Bug ?

Everything else works, and works fine. Wrote a small daemon to handle the special keys for LCD backlight, sound, keyboard backlight and CD ejection. Still needs a bit of polishing, after what I’ll release and package it. rEFIt isn’t available in Debian AMD64 yet, so gptsync isn’t available and must be run from an i386 system for the time being (plus gptsync is buggy on 64bit architectures). Patches ready, waiting for GNU-EFI on amd64 (#383801). Suspend to RAM and suspend to disk both work, use s2ram -f -p -m until the machine makes it into the built-in whitelist. The machine is pretty nice, though I’d appreciate it if the fans weren’t running at 5500 rpm when I have the laptop on my laps. Might be related to both the applesmc and power consumption issues. WiFi remains the biggest issue, battery life comes second ex-aequo with DVI-I output and sound is third. I’m quite unhappy with having to taint my kernel by using the fglrx (and madwifi in the future) proprietary crap, and even more when it doesn’t work as good as it should. Maybe RMS was right about ATI.

It was a pretty day in Montreal today, and since I was taking care of Amita today I knew I wasn't going to get any computer stuff done. So I decided to take care of some tasks that needed doing around the house -- cleaning up our storage room, changing some light bulbs, fixing some furniture and putting plastic on the windows for winter. This is one of my least favorite jobs for preparing for winter. Probably the biggest sink of heat for an apartment is the windows and doors, so we do our best to insulate them. Doors get insulated foam around the cracks, and windows get covered in a thin film of clear plastic, which forms a pocket of air and provides an extra insulating barrier from the outside. It sounds crazy, but it's remarkably effective -- it really makes the difference between a cold house and a cozy home. It's extremely labor-intensive, though: it involves putting up lots of double-sided tape, cutting just-right rectangles of gossamer micron-thin plastic sheeting, climbing up and down ladders, hanging, measuring, moving. Probably the silliest part is that you blow on the plastic with a hot hair drier to make it contract tightly over the window so it's easier to see out. That takes like 10 minutes to do. Last year I waited until mid-January to do the job, and we were all walking around the house shivering and wheezing. This year I'm getting it done before winter's really upon us, but that doesn't mean I like it any better. I guess I'll just be happy when it's done. tags: winter montreal insulation plastic

My JavaScript workbench So, I've been working on making a Wikiwyg plugin for PmWiki. Wikiwyg is an ingenious Javascript library for doing WYSIWYG editing in the browser, but keeping all communications with the server in wiki syntax. Every wiki engine should be using it, but for some reason it's not well-implemented. I think it's mostly a community-marketing problem, but that's a separate subject. I want to eventually get it working on Wikitravel, which runs MediaWiki, but I wanted to give it a try on an little more deterministic wiki syntax. So I started an extension for PmWiki. I've learned a lot so far; I'm far from done, but if you use darcs you can see my work so far by running:

darcs get http://evan.prodromou.name/darcs/pmwikiwyg/

Since the code's mostly in Javascript, I've been getting my JS workbench back into shape. By "workbench", of course, I mean "loose collection of tools for documentation, debugging, and editing". For documentation, I've been using the excellent JavaScript and DOM docs from Mozilla Developer Center -- itself a wiki. The docs are (almost) complete, well-written, and well organized. And, of course, Free -- it's all under the CC attribution-sharealike. For debugging, I've been using the Venkman JavaScript debugger for Firefox. It's been a while since I've worked with a half-decent debugger, so it's been a pleasure to use. And for editing, I'm sticking to my favorite programmer's editor, JED. I first started using JED because it had the same name as the founder of Spock Mountain Research Labs, but eventually I've grown to like it on its own merits. I was a longtime Emacs addict, and JED has been my editorial methadone. It's got all of Emacs's advantages -- same keyset, different but valuable extensibility -- without the long load times and heavy weight on system resources. I'm at the point where JED is my only editor. One nice thing about JED is that writing language modes is pretty easy, so there are a lot of them out there. I found a half-decent one for JavaScript floating around on the Internet a few years ago, and it seems to still be the best there is. As mentioned above, I've pretty much transitioned fully to Darcs as my version control system for whatever projects I can help it. It's a great piece of software -- all the strengths of GNU arch without the idiosyncratic naming conventions. And that's my workbench. It's no Eclipse, but I'm having fun working with these tools. tags: darcs javascript workbench mdc jed venkman

Get enigma (new version 1.00 beta in incoming, should hit unstable soon) and you won't have time to work for the release anymore. It's a great game, and it has almost 1000 levels now. Please help test the beta, and lets delay etch! :-) This is also the first package I've built with cowbuilder. I don't know if its faster - my new laptop is much faster, and I've been setting up a new development environment. But it works for me.

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous. Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a far-away exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation. I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer. One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon. Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce). Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it to own unreality. Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx. The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and gaming the virtual game. Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest: It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world. p. 104