So it s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography (1). We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship (2).

source (1)

Do your statistics cover all categories of content removals? No. Our policies and systems are set up to identify and remove child pornography whenever we become aware of it, regardless of whether that request comes from the government. As a result, it s difficult to accurately track which of those removals were requested by governments, and we haven t included those statistics here.

(So, why did you mention this as these requests ?)

(2)

* Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.

(where s the real transparency?) Furthermore, I tell you the incorrectness regarding requests/removals data from Brazil in your tool is a big truth.

Starting about a year ago, I started following the release of videos from TED events. If one looked interesting, I would download the video to watch later. In this way, I accumulated a substantial collection of talks which I never managed to watch. I spent a Saturday evening working my way through the list. These are my favorites out of this batch.

• Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory exploring the subtle and evasive nature of happiness, how we can study it, and the surprising way in which it manifests in our lives
• Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success a critical look at how we evaluate ourselves and others, and how this shapes our social constructs
• Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity an insightful questioning of commonly held and accepted ideas about the creative process, and how they could be changed for the better
• David Logan on tribal leadership a taxonomy of tribal groups in modern society, and how leaders influence them
• Eric Dishman: Take health care off the mainframe a radical perspective on health care, and how technology can help to transform it into a more decentralized and personal system
• Erin McKean redefines the dictionary a humorous and accurate look at lexicography: where it came from, where it is and where it needs to go
• Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action deriving design inspiration from natural systems
• Jill Bolte Taylor s stroke of insight a riveting first-person account of a stroke from a brain scientist: funny, bizarre, transcendent and awesome
• Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral coral reefs, non-euclidean geometry, general relativity and more unfold from a global community art project
• Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds a look at different types of mental capacities within the autism spectrum, how they create our perception of the world, and how they can be nurtured in young people

With only a few days until the Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid" release I'm starting the planning for a release party here in the Kansas City Metro area on the evening of Friday April 30th 2010, I'm not 100% on the venu yet , ideas welcome but I have setup a wiki page entry to get the discussion going.

I'd also like to setup a time before hand ( maybe an hour prior ) to do a "key signing party" for anyone that would like to exchange information. If there are any Debian Developers in the area I'd be thrilled to have one stop by to sign keys too, even if they could not or wish to not stay for the Lucid Release party, I still need one to begin part 2 of the NM process.

Just drop a note in the comments or email me ( me@brandonholtsclaw.com ) if you need any more info.

Nearly a year ago people starting worrying about the complexity of SHA-1 being reduced and the potential availability of viable attacks against things such as PGP keys that used SHA-1. Many people (myself included) generated a new key, or updated preferences on keys that were otherwise strong enough. There were worries about what this might mean for Debian. We were getting ahead of ourselves a bit though. Firstly there haven't been any public viable attacks that I'm aware of (though of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to migrate away), but secondly there's a much easier method of attack. PGP v3 keys. To quote RFC4880:

V3 keys are deprecated. They contain three weaknesses. First, it is relatively easy to construct a V3 key that has the same Key ID as any other key because the Key ID is simply the low 64 bits of the public modulus. Secondly, because the fingerprint of a V3 key hashes the key material, but not its length, there is an increased opportunity for fingerprint collisions. Third, there are weaknesses in the MD5 hash algorithm that make developers prefer other algorithms. See below for a fuller discussion of Key IDs and fingerprints.

At the time of writing Debian has 21 remaining v3 keys. This is a significant improvement over a year ago, when we had 200, but it's still 21 more than I'd like. I've been chasing people since last May (starting with those who had v3 + v4 keys, all of whom now only have a v4 key) and we're down to the stragglers. So it's time to name and shame, in the hope of kicking them into action. The following keys are what's left (doesn't match the currently active keyring because we've had a few replacements since the last promote):

0x0D2156BD3D97C149 Michael Stone <mstone>
0x225FD911CD269B31 Carlos Barros <cbf>
0x31E73F14E298966D James R. Van Zandt <jrv>
0x366CD3FEEBC11B01 Chris Waters <xtifr>
0x37A73FE355E8BC4D Frederic Lepied <lepied>
0x3E973117DCC528E9 Ardo van Rangelrooij <ardo>
0x5C7A46637953F711 Rich Sahlender <rsahlen>
0x5D6560F85F30F005 Craig Brozefsky <craig>
0x6B0E322836129171 Jim Westveer <jwest>
0x723724B4A5B6DD31 Christian Meder <meder>
0x7629B22ED71DAABD Adrian Bridgett <bridgett>
0x8FFC405EFD5A67CD Adam Di Carlo <aph>
0xB0D269DE17F3D4D1 Matthew Vernon <matthew>
0xBC151FC8D2A913A1 Peter S Galbraith <psg>
0xC1A0A171C2DCD3B1 Jim Mintha <jmintha>
0xC3168EBA23F5ADDB Ian Jackson <iwj>
0xCE951B1160D74C7D Patrick Cole <ltd>
0xE82A8B0D57137FE5 Paul Seelig <pseelig>
0xF20E242CE77AC835 Brian White <bcwhite>
0xFBAA570C3087194D Alan Bain <afrb2>
0xFFD1B4AC7C19FD19 David Engel <david>

Of these keys only 2 voted in the recent DPL election. 8 have failed to make any response to my mails (3 since last August). Only 9 have uploaded a package since August 2008. And 10 were already known to the MIA database. Some of them have stated they'll sort out a new key, but not yet done so.

If you are one of these people, please either get a new key sorted and signed and reply to the mails I've sent you, or reply and say you no longer wish to be involved in Debian. And if you know any of these people, encourage them to get a new key sorted and offer to sign it for them.

On 21st and 22nd August 2010 the fifth (wow, impressive how fast time goes) FrOSCon is taking place St. Augustin (near Bonn) Germany. Like in the past its hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group St. Augustin.

A few days ago this years Call for Papers started and will end on May 23rd. So if you want to attend on a really cool conference please submit your paper - and even if you don't want to give a talk join us at the Debian booth :).
<script defer="defer" src="http://static.zemanta.com/readside/loader.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

At my last job, I created several web applications designed to replace built-in apps on mobile phones. While modern browsers and HTML5 made this incredibly easy in many ways, we still ended up writing native (i.e. non-web) code for most of our applications. There were a few different areas where the browser alone didn't meet our needs, but one that I found suprisingly common was background processing. Consider the following mobile applications:

• Calendar or clock with alarms.
• E-book reader that syncs content from a server.
• IM or email client that notifies the user of new messages.
• Shopping list that pops up whenever you are near the store.

Ideally, each of these apps will perform some actions even when the user does not have it open. (Background processing is not strictly necessary for the e-reader, but it would be useful to ensure the library is up-to-date even when opened in a place with no network connection.) You can't do this with a web app. Web Workers don't solve the problem, because they run only while the web page is open. What we need are headless web workers.¹ The API Headless workers could use almost the same API as Web Workers. Instead of responding to messages from a web page, they would listen to events from the host system (browser or OS). These events might include time intervals, power-on/resume, changes in network connection, geographic locations, or "push" notifications from a remote server. The event-driven architecture of JavaScript in the browser allows the host system a high level of discretion over resource consumption. There's no special code needed to suspend processes and later restore their state, because JavaScript workers are naturally inactive between events. The host can provide limits on CPU or memory usage per event, with a separate message to notify processes whose handlers were aborted. And it can limit the number of concurrent processes by choosing when to dispatch events to listeners. Some listeners could even be disabled completely at times (like if the device is busy or the battery is low), and notified later of the events they missed. This is almost a return to the old days of cooperative multitasking. Mobile computing is definitely driving everyone towards higher-level process control in the OS, and different assumptions for applications. It's not surprising that my whole proposal resembles Android and iPhone 4.0 multitasking in several ways, since I've been doing development on Android for the last 18 months and encountering many of the same issues. The UI Headless workers do need some way to interact with the user. They could display standard system notifications (via Growl on the Mac, libnotify on Ubuntu, the status bar in Android, etc.) using W3C Web Notifications, which already have an experimental implementation in Chrome. Users also needs to know which sites have background tasks installed. Headless workers could be represented by icons in a standard location (perhaps a toolbar in desktop browsers, or the home screen on a mobile device). The icons could display ambient status; clicking one would reveal a menu with options to configure or remove it. Questions This proposal might be hard to standardize, especially where it's tied to specific OS capabilities. For now I'm just curious: would it be useful? You can write a native app or a browser extension to solve this problem today. But would it be worthwhile to have a standard, cross-platform way to do it? Has anyone else run into problems that this approach could solve?

1. Because all web standards should have names that sound like Harry Potter creatures.

DebConf 10 will be held this August 1-7, in New York. I love DebConf, and I look forward to seeing friends at it each year. It rekindles my interest in the project; I leave each DebConf with new things to do. Many developers make it to most DebConfs, helped by the conference's impressive travel and lodging funding. But I know others have never gotten to experience DebConf, or have not been in years. If that's you, there's probably a reason. Maybe the scheduling never works out for you, and I can't help with that. But if your reason comes down to "money" or "they'd never pick me", we can help. This year there is special funding available for Debian Developers (and DMs) who have not been to DebConf before, or who have not been in years. Outgoing DPL Steve McIntyre has previusly mentioned this special funding, and his successor Stefano Zacchiroli has asked me to manage it, since it was originally my idea. Email me soon (before May 15th) to apply, or to suggest that a team member should be sponsored. This wiki page has the details. Let us get you to DebConf -- I promise you won't regret it! PS,

If you re convinced that cloud is a useless buzzword, being used to describe everything under the sun, old and new, then well, you re right that is, except for the useless part. It s true that this word is being (ab)used in many different products, services and technologies, which do not seem to relate to each other in any concrete way. Cloud in the abstract is being defined in many different ways, based on different fundamental characteristics of cloud technology . Nonetheless, there is something genuinely important going on here, and this is my view of what it s about. The hype Countless business which only had web sites or web applications in 2008 now call them cloud services . They aren t delivering any new benefits to their users, and they haven t redesigned their infrastructure. What do they mean by this? Cloud is defined, some say, by where your data is kept, and cloud means storing your data on remote servers instead of internal ones. Millions of Gmail and Flickr users have been in the cloud without even knowing it, and so has everyone who reads their mail over IMAP, or uses voicemail. In short, cloud is just data that is somewhere else. Last September, I watched a presentation on Cloud computing where Symantec pitched their anti-virus product as having something like three different cloud computing technologies. These, it turned out, all involved downloading files over the Internet. In this view, cloud is essentially about the network, derived from our habit of using a drawing of a cloud in our network diagrams for so many years. Wikipedia currently shares this view, as its Cloud computing article opens with Cloud computing is Internet-based computing . No Internet, no cloud. Maybe cloud is just SaaS, and any service provided on a pay-per-use basis over the Internet is a cloud service. It would seem that cloud is about paying for things, especially on a utility basis. The cloud is computing by the hour; it s something you buy. Others maintain that cloud is just virtualization, so if you re using KVM or VMWare, you ve got a cloud already. In this view, cloud is about operating systems, and whether they re running on real or virtual hardware. Cloud means deploying applications as virtual appliances, and creating new servers entirely in software. If your servers only have one OS on them, then they re not cloud-ready. If this vagueness and contradiction irritates you, then you re not alone. It bugs me, and a lot of other people who are getting on with developing, using and providing technology and services. Cloud is not just a new name for these familiar technologies. In fact, it isn t a technology at all. I don t think it even makes sense to categorize technologies as cloud and non-cloud , though some may be more cloudy than others. Nonetheless, there is some meaning and validity in each of these interpretations of cloud. So what is it? A different perspective Cloud is a transition, a trend, a paradigm shift. It isn t something which exists or not: it is happening, and we won t understand its essential nature until it s over. Simon Wardley explains this, in presentation format, much better than I could in this blog post, so if you haven t already, I suggest that you take 14 minutes of your time and go and watch him do his thing. This change doesn t have a clear beginning or an end. Early on, it was a disconnected set of ideas without any identity. We re now somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, with enough insight to give it a name, and sufficient momentum to guess at what happens next. In the end, it will be absorbed into the way things are . What s going on? So, what is actually changing? The key trends I see are:

1. People and organizations are becoming more comfortable relying on resources which do not exist in any particular place. Rather than storing precious metals under our beds, we entrust our finances to banks, which store our data and provide us with services which let us use our money . In computing terms, we re no longer enamored with keeping all of our programs and our data on our hard drive: as it turns out, it s not very safe there after all, and in some ways we can actually exercise more control over programs and data out there than in here . We can no longer hoard our gold, or drive off would-be thieves with a pistol, but that wasn t a productive way to spend our energies anyway. While we can t put our hands on our money, we can know exactly what s happening with it from minute to minute, and use it in a variety of ways at a moment s notice.
2. IT products are ceding ground to services. In many cases, we no longer need to build software, or even buy it: we can simply use it. As computing needs become better understood, and can be met by commodity products, it becomes more feasible to develop services to meet them on-demand. This is why we see a spike in acronyms ending in aaS . Simon explains the progression in detail in his talk, linked above.
3. Hardware, software and data are being reorganized according to new models, in order to provide these services effectively. Architectural patterns, such as hardware/OS/framework/application are giving way to new ones, like hardware/OS/IaaS/OS/PaaS/SaaS/Internet/web browser/OS/hardware . These are still evolving, and the lines between them are blurry. It s a bit early to say what the dominant patterns will be, but system, network, data and application architecture are all being transformed. No single technology or architecture defines cloud, but virtualization (at the infrastructure level) and the web (at the application level) both seem to resonate strongly with cloudy design patterns.

These trends are reinforcing and accelerating each other, driving information technologies and businesses in a common direction. That, in a nutshell, is what cloud is all about. So what? This transformation is disruptive in many different ways, but the angles which most interest me at the moment are:

• Operating systems Cloud seems to indicate further commoditization of operating systems. We will have more operating systems than ever before (thanks to virtualization and IaaS), but we probably won t think about them as much (as in software appliances). I think that the cloud world will want operating systems which are free, standard and highly customizable, which is potentially a great opportunity for Ubuntu and other open systems.
• Software freedom As Eben Moglen and others have pointed out, this trend has significant consequences for the free software movement. As the shape of software changes, our principles of freedom must evolve as well. What does it mean to have the freedom to run a program in the cloud? To copy it? To change it? What other protections might people need in order to exercise these freedoms in the future?
• DevOps I see a strong resonance between cloud which is blurring the lines between hardware and software, infrastructure and applications, network and computer and DevOps, which is bringing together the people who currently work in these different categories. Cloud means that we can no longer afford to treat these elements separately, and must work together to find better approaches to developing and deploying software, knocking down barriers and mapping new territory. Fortunately, cloud also means developing powerful new tools which will power this revolution.
• Clients A majority of cloud related activity seems to be focused on what happens to back-end servers, but what about the computers we actually touch, on our desks, and in our pockets? How will they change? Will we end up reverting to a highly centralized computing model, where clients are strictly limited to front-end user interface processing (e.g. a web browser)? Will clients join the cloud and be providers of computing resources, not only consumers? What new types of devices will we need in order to make the most of cloud?

I d like to explore some of these topics in future posts.

Upgrade Requirements Debian/Squeeze (the next release of Debian) will be released some time later this year. Many people are already upgrading test servers, and development systems and workstations that are used to develop code that will be deployed next year. Also there are some significant new features in Squeeze that compel some people to upgrade production systems now (such as a newer version of KVM and Ext4 support). I ve started working on an upgrade plan for SE Linux. The first thing you want when upgrading between releases is a way of supporting booting a new kernel independently of the other parts of the upgrade. Either supporting the old user-space with the new kernel or the new kernel with the old user-space. It s not that uncommon for a new kernel to have a problem when under load so it s best to be able to back out of a kernel upgrade temporarily while trying to find the cause of the problem. For workstations and laptops it s not uncommon to have a kernel upgrade not immediately work with some old hardware, this can usually be worked around without much effort, but it s good to be able to keep systems running while waiting for a response to a support request. Running a Testing/Unstable kernel with Lenny Policy deb http://www.coker.com.au lenny selinux In Lenny the version of selinux-policy-default is 2:0.0.20080702-6. In the above APT repository I have version 2:0.0.20080702-18 which is needed if you want to run a 2.6.32 kernel. The main problem with the older policy is that the devtmpfs filesystem that is used by the kernel for /dev in the early stages of booting [1] is not known and therefore unlabeled so most access to /dev is denied and booting fails. So before upgrading to testing or unstable it s a really good idea to install the selinux-policy-default package from my Lenny repository and then run selinux-policy-upgrade to apply the new changes (by default upgrading the selinux-policy-default package doesn t change the policy that is running we consider the running policy to be configuration files that are not changed unless the user requests it). There are also some other kernel changes which require policy changes such as a change to the way that access controls are applied to programs that trigger module load requests. Upgrading to the Testing/Unstable Policy While some details of the policy are not yet finalised and there are some significant bugs remaining (in terms of usability not security) the policy in Unstable is usable. There is no need to rush an upgrade of the policy, so at this stage the policy in Unstable and Testing is more for testers than for serious production use. But when you upgrade one thing you need to keep in mind is that we don t to support upgrading the SE Linux policy between different major versions of Debian while in multi-user mode. The minimum requirement is that after the new policy package is installed you run the following commands and then reboot afterwards: setenforce 0
selinux-policy-upgrade
touch /.autorelabel If achieving your security goals requires running SE Linux in enforcing mode all the time then you need to do this in single-user mode. The changes to names of domains and labeling of files that are entry-points for domains is significant enough that it s not practical to try and prove that all intermediate states of partial labeling are safe and that there are suitable aliases for all domains. Given that you need to reboot to install a new kernel anyway the reboot for upgrading the SE Linux policy shouldn t be that much of an inconvenience. The relabel process on the first boot will take some time though. Running a Lenny kernel with Testing/Unstable Policy In the original design SE Linux didn t check open as a separate operation, only read/write etc. The reason for this is that the goal for SE Linux was to control information flows. The open() system call doesn t transfer any data so there was no need to restrict access to it as a separate operation (but if you couldn t read or write a file then an attempt to open it would fail). Recent versions of the SE Linux policy have added support for controlling file open, the reason for this is to allow a program in domain A to open a file and then let a program in domain B inherit the file handle and continue using the file even if it is not normally permitted to open the file this matches the Unix semantics where a privileged process can allow an unprivileged child to inherit file handles or use Unix domain sockets to pass file handles to another process with different privileges. SELinux: WARNING: inside open_file_mask_to_av with unknown mode:c1b6 Unfortunately when support was added for this a bug was discovered in the kernel, this post to the SE Linux mailing list has the conclusion to a discussion about it [2]. The symptom of this problem is messages such as the above appearing in your kernel message log. I am not planning to build a kernel package for Lenny with a fix for this bug. The command dmesg -n 1 will prevent such messages from going to the system console which is something you want to do if you plan to login at the console as they can occur often.

• [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/330985/
• [2] http://marc.info/?l=selinux&m=122538041011707&w=2

Hi everyone! I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC:

/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

Hi everyone! I hope you all have already seen at least parts of our preparation for a Mini DebConf in Berlin this year. There are various posts on planet, some mails on -project and -events-eu and as I saw just today even identi.ca is not spared. If you haven t heard of it, this is your chance. Every year the LinuxTag (Linux day) is a four-day event in Berlin, Germany, likely comparable to other OpenSource events. It provides talks, discussion and a lot of booths of various Free Software projects. This year s LinuxTag will be on June 9th till 12th. Since it s held on a huge fairground, we were able to get quite some piece of it for our own use. We will have two areas, one for talks, the other as a hack lab and use right the middle of the LinuxTag for the Mini DebConf: June 10th and 11th with the hack lab open all through the night of course. Finding sponsors was the hardest deal in the beginning and we re not done with it yet. We got enough money, though, to make the decision and we still hope to get everything covered. Luckily we also have hardware sponsors and help on various issues we would not be able to deal with on our own. What s still missing, is you! :) The schedule for the talks is almost full, yet the hack lab could need more man power. Our idea is since we will be in freeze by then, right? to do a BSP incl. help for newbies. That means we will not only try to help users, we also would like to teach how to squash bugs and thus attract possible maintainers and other contributors. All that of course only works if we are enough people there. Now I understand this might seem to be only attractive to german developers as most of the talks will be held in german. But I strongly believe we can deal with it if you don t speak german. :) And at least on the first day of the event, you can meet our new DPL zack who will have the pleasure to provide the opening talk. Yay! Having said all this, you are more than invited to attend and help. Find more info (and a way to offer help) in the debconf wiki and enjoy more press announcements within the next few weeks. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Miniconf-LT-Berlin/2010 On OFTC:

/join #debian-miniconf-berlin

One day a very well known Internet theorist writes a rant on women. The rant generates controversy, controversy lands theorist on WYNC on the media , despite the fact the he does not really work on the politics of gender. If this is so, why then give him more air time and focus on the NPR show? There are three lessons that precipitate from this social fact that are worth highlighting: 1.The fact that NPR chose him to pontificate and not a woman nullifies Shirky s thesis that behavior is one of the most important factors in keeping women behind, unless of course NPR asked a bunch of women but they were too meek to be on the air (not likely). If they wanted to keep the star power that is Shirky, the very least they could have done is had a woman respond. The solutions to get more women in the limelight are so easy to implement but they do require some thoughtfulness and foresight. 2.So what I am saying, it is about networks and Shirky, isn t he a theorist of networks and behavior? It seems to be to more controversial, he really did not address how important networks are for the politics of visibility, instead he focused on individual behavior. If famous highly networked folks, most of them men, don t highlight women in their blog posts, their twitter feeds, and don t invite them to conferences, it is going to make very little difffernce whether a woman is meek or confident. So if there are more guys that are visible, which is certainly the case, it is as much their job to help engender change, not so much by pontificating but acting. 3. I realized that though I first thought his rant was a reflection of his personality (at least his public persona, I am sure he is a nice guy), in fact the rant is valuable to an anthropologist interested in digital media because it is an auto-ethnographic snapshot of web 2.0 punditry culture. It often comes across as smarmy and snarky, which is due in part, to how difficult it is to get your message heard in the sea of many voices. Just like there is an aesthetic of audaciousness in a lot of Internet memeology, for example, the pundits too must often act in extreme ways to get attention which might inf fact be one of the reasons why they are reluctant to share the stage once they have worked hard to get there.

One day a very well known Internet theorist writes a rant on women. The rant generates controversy, controversy lands theorist on WYNC on the media , despite the fact the he does not really work on the politics of gender. If this is so, why then give him more air time and focus on the NPR show? There are three lessons that precipitate from this social fact that are worth highlighting: 1.The fact that NPR chose him to pontificate and not a woman nullifies Shirky s thesis that behavior is one of the most important factors in keeping women behind, unless of course NPR asked a bunch of women but they were too meek to be on the air (not likely). If they wanted to keep the star power that is Shirky, the very least they could have done is had a woman respond. The solutions to get more women in the limelight are so easy to implement but they do require some thoughtfulness and foresight. 2.So what I am saying, it is about networks and Shirky, isn t he a theorist of networks and behavior? It seems to be to more controversial, he really did not address how important networks are for the politics of visibility, instead he focused on individual behavior. If famous highly networked folks, most of them men, don t highlight women in their blog posts, their twitter feeds, and don t invite them to conferences, it is going to make very little difffernce whether a woman is meek or confident. So if there are more guys that are visible, which is certainly the case, it is as much their job to help engender change, not so much by pontificating but acting. 3. I realized that though I first thought his rant was a reflection of his personality (at least his public persona, I am sure he is a nice guy), in fact the rant is valuable to an anthropologist interested in digital media because it is an auto-ethnographic snapshot of web 2.0 punditry culture. It often comes across as smarmy and snarky, which is due in part, to how difficult it is to get your message heard in the sea of many voices. Just like there is an aesthetic of audaciousness in a lot of Internet memeology, for example, the pundits too must often act in extreme ways to get attention which might inf fact be one of the reasons why they are reluctant to share the stage once they have worked hard to get there.

A few People on IRC have ask me to elaborate on my email reading setup. ( As far as hosting I use Google Apps for your domain, but I wont be getting into the details of that. )

First this will work for anyone that uses IMAP to currently fetch their mail, no matter the provider even though I'll be hi-lighting Gmail because thats what I use. This also works well for GMail and/or IMAP Backup of your email.

In short the setup is as follows:
IMAP Server --> offlineimap --> Local Maildir --> Evolution Reading Local Maildir

Soo lets get to the meat of this, first install offlineimap sudo apt-get install offlineimap then lets configure it, below is my config file, most everything should be straight forward (the formating below seems wrong on planet click the post link to copy/paste):
[general] accounts = brandonholtsclaw maxsyncaccounts=1 ui = Noninteractive.Basic metadata=~/.offlineimap [Account brandonholtsclaw] localrepository = gmailLocal remoterepository = gmailRemote [Repository gmailLocal] type = Maildir localfolders = /home/bholtsclaw/.maildir/brandonholtsclaw/ sep = / [Repository gmailRemote] type = Gmail remoteuser = me@brandonholtsclaw.com remotepass=XXXX realdelete = no # This translates folder names such that everything (including your Inbox) # appears in the same folder (named root). #nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub('\[G.*ail\] ^\.INBOX\.*', '.', re.sub('^', './', foldername)) nametrans = lambda foldername: re.sub('^(\[G.*ail\] INBOX)', '.', foldername) # This excludes some folders from being synced. You will almost # certainly want to exclude 'All Mail', 'Trash', and 'Starred', at # least. Note that offlineimap does NOT honor subscription details. folderfilter = lambda foldername: foldername not in ['[Gmail]/All Mail', '[Gmail]/Trash','[Gmail]/Spam','[Gmail]/Starred']
Save that file as ~/.offlineimaprc and then create the directory ~/.maildir/

Make sure to chmod 0600 ~/.offlineimaprc so because it stores your email password and you dont want anyone else reading that. Other than that you are now all set, just Setup a new email account in Evolution and tell it to use Maildir , point it at your ~/.maildir directory and your golden.

If anyone else uses a setup similar to this and noticed something glaring I missed please drop me a comment, and I'll update the post ( plus I might learn something new ).

Cheers!
P.S. Dont forget to add a crontab to run offlineimap once in a while ( every ~10 minutes ) to check for new mail and sync your local changes back to the IMAP server.

I ve got a bit of a problem. I enjoy writing software. I often write software to solve some sort of problem that I ve had. Usually virtually any code I write winds up in my git repositories, on the theory that it might be useful to someone else. Some of the code that I think might really be useful to people gets even better treatment. OfflineIMAP, for instance, has a very comprehensive manpage, heavily commented example config file, wiki, mailing list, public bug tracker, etc. Most of these I did the majority of the work to create, but OfflineIMAP does occasionally receive code and documentation contributions from others. Now here s my dilemma. For my purposes, OfflineIMAP is, well, finished. It does everything I ever wanted it to do, and does it better than I ever expected it would. There are some people that would like it to do other things; for instance, optimize performance for IMAP folders with 100,000 messages in them, do UTF-8 folder name translation, and retry a sync if a connection is lost rather than crash (OfflineIMAP was designed to crash gracefully and be automated, so this has never bothered me.) None of these are features that I care about, and I don t have much time to devote to OfflineIMAP these days. It is not an interesting problem to me anymore as, well, I ve solved it already. Yet I ll be honest and say I feel guilty about the bug reports that are stacking up in the OfflineIMAP bug tracking system. OfflineIMAP is used by people that have an expectation for improvement. My efforts to hand over maintainership of OfflineIMAP have failed (the people have gone AWOL shortly after agreeing to maintain it). This problem is even more acute for hpodder, my command-line podcatcher. hpodder works great and is simple. But I no longer listen to podcasts. At all. (I blame my Kindle for that.) Therefore I no longer even use hpodder. Again, I feel guilty for not working on it; for instance, when language changes broke its UTF-8 support, I haven t gone in to fix it. Neither has anybody else, for that matter. This leads me to a dilemma. If I do nothing with my code but toss it on git.complete.org, few people will benefit from it. Most people need documentation, packages for their distribution, etc. git repos don t tend to show up highly in search engines. So, although technically I ve shared things with the world by putting them there, practically speaking I haven t done people many favors. On the other hand, if I go the whole responsible maintainer route, writing documentation, wiki, mailing list, Debian packages, etc., then I have the problem of, well, actual users who want actual support. I feel bad if I m not in a position to give it to them. Many people seem to have the expectation that software is never finished and will continue to be improved. (Ah, if only my name were Knuth I might stand a chance to evade that one. But only a chance, given all the TeX spinoffs.) This expectation, in turn, reduces my enthusiasm for publishing my code online as Free Software. Because now I can t just toss it up there and say help yourselves . Now I get angry emails about all the bug reports piling up. On the other hand, I also get occasional small contributions via my PayPal tip jar , which are awesome and motivating. Despite my grumbling, I do continue to maintain OfflineIMAP, primarily as a patch reviewer these days. I take an aggressive stance on quality, and when I get patches that add features without documentation, I usually write documentation for them before committing them. If I have evidence that a patch hurts quality, I yank it (as I had to do with IDLE support, which was a great feature, but the patch caused all sorts of stability problems due to its requirement of imaplib2.py). For that reason, I suspect, forks haven t taken off. So what s a person that writes niche software to do? OfflineIMAP isn t at the level of popularity of something like Gnome, or even debhelper, and never will be; its userbase consists of people that think that IMAP support in $MUA isn t good enough. hpodder is the somewhat small domain of console-loving podcast listeners. What are your suggestions? Should I abolish the bug trackers and just go for simple? Is there something more I could be doing to make the community feel more empowered? Is simple posting on git.complete.org not as bad as I thought?

The TEDxVolcano The TED conference franchise has been extended to TEDxVolcano [1], this is a small conference that features people who are stranded by the Eyjafjallaj kull volcano in Iceland. As usual TED is an inspiration to us all, so there is obvious potential for other conferences to be organised in similar situations there s no reason why a free software conference can t be organised in Europe right now! What You Need to run a Conference If a conference will have limited attendance (EG due to a volcano preventing anyone from flying to the area) then filming everything is very important. I ve seen adverts for digital cameras that support Full HD resolution (1920*1080) for as little as $AU400. $AU600 will get you a digital camcorder that does Full HD which will offer some benefits for recording long movies (such as the ability to store the video on an external hard drive). If I was stuck in a foreign hotel with not much to do then I would be prepared to buy a digital camera or camcorder for the purpose of running such a conference (my current digital camera is 5.1MP and only has 3* optical zoom, it s a nice camera but I could do with something better. A tripod can cost up to $100, but I recently bought myself a 15cm tall tripod for $10 that would do at a pinch. Once you have high quality video you can easily upload it to something like Blip.TV. Of course you get a better result if you do some post-production work to merge images of the slides for the lecture into the video, but that is a lot of work and probably requires a camera that outputs uncompressed video for best results. The next issue is getting a venue. Different hotels cater for different parts of the market, some cater to tourists, some to business travel, some to conferences. If you want a venue at short notice you may be able to get a good deal if you find a hotel that is adversely affected, for example I m sure that there are some quite empty conference hotels in Europe right now but the tourist hotels are probably reasonably busy (why not do some tourism if you are stuck). I expect that hotels really don t want to have empty conference rooms and are prepared to offer good deals for bookings at short notice. Of course you would want to try to ensure that hotel rooms aren t too expensive in that hotel as some delegates will want to stay in the hotel which hosts the conference. The minimal staffing for a micro conference is probably two people, one for taking payment, directing people, etc, and the other to film the lectures and moderate panel discussions. Rumor has it that attending without paying is a problem at conferences, for conferences that are planned in advance corporations will try and send multiple employees on the one ticket and have them share a name-tag one issue with this is that there is a fixed quantity of food supplied and if extra people appear then everyone who paid gets less, another is that people who pay really hate to see freeloaders. The best reference I ve found for people not paying at conferences is Jon Oxer s description of how Leslie Cachia of Letac Drafting Services brazenly stole a book from him [2]. Name-tags are needed for any meeting with more than about 15 people. I m not sure how to get proper name-tags (ones that pin on to clothing and have printed names maybe the bigger hotels can add this to the conference package). But a roll of sticky labels from an office supply store is pretty cheap. Costs in Wellington Along with a few other people I considered running a small security conference immediately before or after LCA 2010, that ended up not happening but I will consider doing it in future. When considering that the general plan was to get a hotel to provide a meeting room for 10-30 people (we had no real idea of the demand). When investigating the possibilities for running a conference in Wellington I discovered that the hotel fees for a conference room can either be based on paying a fixed fee for the room plus additional expenses for each item or you can pay a fixed rate per person. It seemed that there was the potential to save a small amount of money by paying the fixed fees and avoiding some payments for things like tea/coffee service. But the amount that could be saved would be small and it would incur extra effort in managing it saving $5 per person is a good thing if you have 600 delegates, but if you have 30 then it s probably a waste of time. So it seemed best to go for one of the packages, you tell the hotel what time you want the lunch and snack breaks and how you want the tables arranged and they just do everything. The cost for this seemed to be in the range of $nz35 to $nz55 per delegate per day. There is some flexibility in room arrangement, so a room that seats 12 people in the board-room layout (tables in a rectangle facing the center) would fit 25 in the classroom layout (tables all facing the front) or 50 in the theater layout (chairs facing the front with no tables). So the hotel could accommodate changes in the size at relatively short notice (whatever their notice period for buying the food). The cost for a catered conference dinner seemed to be about $nz45 per diner. In many cases it would be possible to get a meal that is either cheaper, better, or both by going somewhere else, but that wastes time and effort. So that gave an overall conference cost of about $nz135 for a two day conference with a dinner at the end of the first day. Given that the cheapest budget rate from Wotif.com for a 3 star hotel in Wellington is currently $nz85 per night it seems that $nz135 for a two day conference including dinner is pretty cheap as the minimum accommodation cost would be $nz170. Also note that the hotels which I considered for hosting the conference had rates for their hotel rooms that were significantly greater than $nz85 per night. The hotels all offer other services such as catered cocktail parties , these would be good things for any company that wants to sponsor the conference. Different cities can have vastly different prices for hotels. But I expect that the way conference rooms are booked and managed is similar world-wide and the ratio of conference costs to hotel booking fees to also be similar. Most of the hotels that cater to conferences seem to be owned by multi-national corporations. It would probably make sense to charge delegates an extra $10 or $15 above the cost of running the conference to cover unexpected expenses. Of course it s difficult to balance wanting to charge a low rate to attract more people with wanting to avoid the risk of a financial loss. Conclusion The hard part is getting speakers. If you can get speakers and panel participants who can fill the time slots and have interesting things to say then all the other parts of organising a micro conference should be relatively easy. When the cost is less than $150 per delegate then a syndicate of a few people can easily agree to split the loss if the number of delegates turns out to be smaller than expected, a potential loss of $2000 shared among a few people shouldn t be a huge problem. Also if the conference is booked at short notice (EG because of a volcano) then the hotel shouldn t require any deposit for anything other than the food which is specially ordered (IE not the tea, coffee, etc) that limits the potential loss to something well under $100 per delegate who doesn t attend. Anyone who has enough dedication to a topic to consider running a conference should be prepared to risk a small financial loss. But based on my past observations of the generosity of conference delegates I m sure that if at the conference closing the organiser said unfortunately this conference cost more than the money you paid me, could you please put something in this hat on the way out then the response would be quite positive. Note that I am strictly considering non-profit conferences. If you want to make money by running a conference then most things are different.

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2010/04/tedxvolcano_exp.php
• [2] http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/224

I tend not to be a huge Apple fanboy. They make nice stuff, but it's just too closed for my liking. I like to tinker. I had a PowerBook for a while, but I gave it to Sarah in favour of a Linux laptop. Sarah's been a happy Mac user for a number of years, and had an iPhone (until I gave her a Nexus One). For a "normal" user like her, a Mac is fine, especially if you want to embrace Apple's entire ecosystem. Anyway, the iPad. When it was announced, I sat up and took notice. Why? This seemed like something I might actually use as a casual computing device. I mean, I'm almost in the target market for Chrome OS these days. I spend most of my time in a web browser, and the rest of my time in a terminal window SSHing to another computer. I could leave this thing lying around on the coffee table in the living room, and instead of digging my phone out of my pocket to look something up, I could pick this up instead. It is also appealing because I found Microsoft's Surface to be pretty cool. The iPad is like a more affordable, portable, version of that. It also appeals to me as a computing platform for my parents. Their computing needs have simplified over the years, but they're still running Windows, largely because I've never had the time to try and foist Linux on them. Since I moved to the US, my visits back home have been too brief to do a proper migration. I think an iPad that supported user switching would be perfect. Mum and Dad could share it, and read their email and do their web browsing from anywhere in the house. Since the first generation iPad doesn't do user profiles and lacks a camera, I'll wait impatiently for the second generation one. I heard a rumour today that it would have a camera, and do user profile switching based on the face of whoever was in front of it. That would be pretty cool. I'd also be very interested in an Android tablet. I love Android's speech to text input support, and I could really see an Android tablet stuck to the wall in the kitchen, instead of a whiteboard on the fridge and a paper calendar. The WePad also sounds intriguing. So I'm not so bothered by the iPad's closed nature. I think for the set of users who have basic computing needs, and don't care about openness, it's very cool.

It takes a lot to prepare for a big trip if you want to really enjoy it. This time, we re going to Japan, and we bought some stuff to stay connected there. First, there s the new camera: that s a Sony 230. We haven t made a photo trip to see all its capabilities yet, but it looks like an excellent toy so far. You ll see probably more photos on this blog in the future. And there s the new laptop: a Packard-Bell Dot-M/A. Theoretically it s called a netbook, but in practice it has everything a real laptop has. The reason I chose this model is that it features Radeon (X1270) graphics and a 64-bit processor, all in a 11,6" laptop which is one of the cheapest of all. Lots of power in one kilogram for a low price, although the drawback is more cells in the battery. Getting the Dot-M/A to work under Debian I first tried to install lenny on it, and while it worked nicely there are several problems with hardware support.

1. The CPU runs extremely slow; you would think it is an Atom. It takes no less than one minute to boot a minimal installation. This is a very strange issue.
2. Wi-Fi doesn t work, even after installing the firmware.
3. 2D works out of the box, but 3D doesn t: the kernel doesn t recognize the PCI ID.
4. Frequency scaling doesn t work, it always runs at full speed which eats battery at an impressive pace.

Upgrading to squeeze solved the first three issues in a blink. The CPU is now as fast as you can expect from an Athlon 64 @1,2 GHz, there s wifi and 3D. OTOH I was hit by a GStreamer bug when the useless snd_pcsp module was loaded why isn t this thing blacklisted by default? ACPI nightmare CPU frequency scaling is another story. I discovered that the BIOS for such Athlon L110 computers does not expose P-states in the ACPI DSDT table. Which means Linux cannot tell at which frequencies it is supposed to work. However, thanks to the awesome work from a guy named Krists Krilovs and the awesome tutorial from the Gentoo wiki I was able to:

• rip the DSDT table from the CPU that s the easy part;
• disassemble it using Intel tools still easy;
• debug the table, which is written in an arcane language no one understands, and using references to a tutorial that was probably excellent until it disappeared from the intarwebs;
• integrate the P-states for the Athlon L110, basing again on the work of Krists Krilovs who wrote the corresponding ASL code;
• build a custom kernel using it that s the easy, but long part, that s done on a faster computer.

After a reboot, I immediately noticed the fan slowing down. Under GNOME, the CPU was no less than 10 C cooler and the CPU frequency applet started to work. <hrule> The Debian kernel maintainers deliberately chose not to provide support for loading a DSDT table from the initrd. There are very good reasons for this, and anyway it shouldn t be necessary to hack something as awful as that to have power saving support. The question remains: how do we deal with this madness? There needs to be some kind of support out-of-the-box for the Athlon L110, which is otherwise a very nice beast. Could the powernow-k8 module set hard-coded defaults when it detects this CPU model? It would be better than the current situation. Other pieces of the toy Otherwise this laptop is very good hardware. Among other things, I enjoyed:

• the keyboard which is very comfortable for this size;
• the awesome screen, quite small, yet 1366 768 and very bright and sharp;
• the quite fast SATA disk (~60 MB/s);
• the card reader, which makes a useful replacement for a CD drive;
• the webcam that worked out of the box;
• power management that works just as expected too.

There is one minor annoyance: the integrated RealTek Ethernet card is only 100 Mbits/s. With all this performance otherwise, you would have expected Gigabit, but well, not everyone has GigE at home yet.

Today all across America, many are experiencing a soft form of hell, anxiety, and constant cursing for it is tax day. Thankfully last night I squared those away (more or less). Today is also the last day to register forDebconf sponsored registration. Even if there is a chance you can t make it, it is worth filling out the form just in case. For those spending a little extra time in NYC or planning on sneaking out to take a whirl in the city, here are some more fun options. NYC is known to be a cultural cornucopia of sorts and one reason are the many museums. I just found a twitter list listing those museums with a feed. Probably one of my favorite museums is located in the far north of Manhattan, the Cloisters. It is a haven, an oasis with small beautiful gardens, as well large stone rooms and buildings filled with medieval art, tapestry, and manuscripts. If you need to get away from people, chatter, and computers, this might be a good place to visit. Museums are easy enough to find but there are other spots in NYC that may be a little harder to spot. If you want to hit Chinatown for dim sum, I would recommend Jing Fong, which is mind blowing largely because of its LARGE (like there are escalators that take you up) room, which gets pretty darn packed on the weekend. If you want something that involves not just food but involves sweat, water, food, sun, hot rocks, body scrubs, funny looking pink, orange and blue uniforms and all in a cross-cultural context, then Spa Castle is the place to go to. Just check out the website and you will see what I am talking about. It s family friendly, has a cornucopia of saunas (filled with jade, gold, ice, Tibetan bricks), some decent Korean food, among many other attractions. In general is one of the best deals in NY.

Today all across America, many are experiencing a soft form of hell, anxiety, and constant cursing for it is tax day. Thankfully last night I squared those away (more or less). Today is also the last day to register forDebconf sponsored registration. Even if there is a chance you can t make it, it is worth filling out the form just in case. For those spending a little extra time in NYC or planning on sneaking out to take a whirl in the city, here are some more fun options. NYC is known to be a cultural cornucopia of sorts and one reason are the many museums. I just found a twitter list listing those museums with a feed. Probably one of my favorite museums is located in the far north of Manhattan, the Cloisters. It is a haven, an oasis with small beautiful gardens, as well large stone rooms and buildings filled with medieval art, tapestry, and manuscripts. If you need to get away from people, chatter, and computers, this might be a good place to visit. Museums are easy enough to find but there are other spots in NYC that may be a little harder to spot. If you want to hit Chinatown for dim sum, I would recommend Jing Fong, which is mind blowing largely because of its LARGE (like there are escalators that take you up) room, which gets pretty darn packed on the weekend. If you want something that involves not just food but involves sweat, water, food, sun, hot rocks, body scrubs, funny looking pink, orange and blue uniforms and all in a cross-cultural context, then Spa Castle is the place to go to. Just check out the website and you will see what I am talking about. It s family friendly, has a cornucopia of saunas (filled with jade, gold, ice, Tibetan bricks), some decent Korean food, among many other attractions. In general is one of the best deals in NY.