In response to my own post from 7 years ago Bachelorhood, I would like to announce that I am a much better married man than Simon. My bachelorhood days are truly over, my laundry goes in a laundry basket, my clothes are always put away (whether I like it or not). My fridge is plugged in, has real food in it; I have a cell phone (actually numerous cell phones); I have an awesome custom made table; lastly I have a TV in my house. Bachelorhood officially ended last year, 30 years was a good run :)

Recently, I got to try out working in a couple different environments. Working in these environments helped me formalize some of the things that I like and some of the things I don't like. With these new environments I've come to realize my style of development. It's called penance driven development. It's called this because there are two important things:
1) It's better to ask forgiveness than for permissions
2) You need to be deserving of forgiveness.

So the concept is simple, whenever you break something, you first fix the symptom, then you improve the infrastructure so similar breaks should be harder to do. The cost of the penance doesn't have to be huge, but the penance has to be done, otherwise technical debt accumulates and people believe there is no downside to breaking things.

What needs to be improved depends on what is missing. For example, if an engineer broke a feature, but that feature didn't have a test, the penance should be to write a test. Even if the one that broke the feature isn't the owner or the one that wrote the feature. If someone breaks the build and no one noticed because the continuous build didn't email, the fix could be setting up the continuous build to email out build failures, or even better, run each change on a build bot before allowing commits.

I think I'll have to start a penance of the day blog/twitter stream.

I've been practicing this style of development for most of my career, and it's similar if less precise than the 5 whys . As mentioned in the The Lean Startup, the cost of the penance should be proportional to the cost of the break.

I like App Engine, my wedding website runs on App Engine as well as a couple recent commercial projects. However, there are some annoyances that make a lot of the useful things I learned at Google not applicable.

1. Chunked responses
   App Engine doesn't have a way of doing chunked responses.
   1.5. Processing after sending the response My annoyance here is that I can't send an early response and wait for some resource. Say I want to do 5 url fetches that I cache for a short period of time. If I want to reply in 250ms, I want to use any of the results I've gotten and reply to the user. Then once the rest of the fetches come in, I want to put them in the cache, so they will come back quickly the next time.
2. Counters
   App Engine has crappy support for counters. You can shard your counters into the datastore: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_counters#counter_python or you can use taskqueues: http://blog.appenginefan.com/2009/10/non-sharded-counters-part-2-using-task.html . Now, how do you graph these counters over time, well, that is left as an exercise for the reader. Google has special datastores for stores and retrieving counters.
3. Backends
   Backends in appengine are versioned separately from frontends. This sounds like a good idea, but to run the devserver with backends, the backends need to be in the same source tree. Thus backends share the same url space. Backends also share the same app.yaml, so again the url space is shared. Thus, if you make a change that you want to coordinate between the frontend and the backend, you need to change the application version in app.yaml, then rename all the backends in backends.yaml. If backends are supposed to be in the same source tree as frontends, then they should be prefixed with the application version. If backends should be versioned separately from frontends, then they shouldn't share url handlers from app.yaml.
   3.5 Uploading backends is slow
   Each backend is uploaded through appcfg.py separately. So if you are crazy and have one backend per backend level, then you need to upload 4 copies of the source code each time the backends get updated.
4. Logging
   I want structured logs. Instead what you have to do is use the python logging module to write out human readable logs, then parse them out into the structure you want.
   http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-samples/source/browse/trunk/logparser/logparser.py
   

As a preemptive counter, 1.5 could be dealt with using backends and a background thread, except backends don't scale to the number of queries, so my use case above isn't fixed.

It's not too obvious how to test email receive handlers in Appengine. The important observation is that the handlers take HTTP POSTs with multipart/form-data encoded data. In python you can build an email to be handled with the following code:

from email.message import Message 

def test_email(self):
  body = Message()
  body.add_header('to', 'test-unknown@other-app.com')
  body.add_header('from', 'test@app.com')
  body.add_header('Content-Type', 'multipart/alternative', boundary=self.boundary)
  text = Message()
  text['content-type'] = 'text/plain'
  text.set_payload('I am I! Don Quixote!  The man of La Mancha!')
  body.attach(text)

  post(payload=body.as_string())

I have two annoyances with Appengine's NDB OR queries. One is that the order must be by key, the other is that OR queries are done in series, so ndb.OR(a == 1, a == 2) are done as query(a == 1) then query(a == 2). To work around this, I created a new cursor class that allows sorting by any attribute.

Using this cursor does come with it's own caveats, one is that the order between the queries is not maintained (fixable) and two the limit attribute is per query not for the results of all queries (fixable).

import base64
import json

from google.appengine.ext import ndb

class MultiCursor(object):
@staticmethod
def from_websafe_string(value):
values = None
try:
value = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(str(value))
values = json.loads(value)
except Exception as e:
logging.error('Invalid Cursor %s - %s', e, value)
if not values:
return MultiCursor()

cursors = MultiCursor()
for key, cursor in values.iteritems():
try:
if isinstance(cursor, basestring):
cursors.set(key, ndb.Cursor.from_websafe_string(cursor))
else:
cursors.set(key, cursor)
except:
logging.error('MultiCursor.from_string - bad cursor (%s) for %s in %s',
cursor, key, values)
return cursors

def to_websafe_string(self):
values =
for key, value in self.values:
if isinstance(value, ndb.Cursor):
values[key] = value.to_websafe_string()
else:
values[key] = value
return base64.urlsafe_b64encode(json.dumps(values))

def __init__(self, values=None):
self.values = values or

def get(self, key):
return self.values.get(key), self.values.get(key + _'done')

def set(self, key, cursor, more):
self.values[key] = cursor
self.values[key + _'done'] = not more

def __len__(self):
return len(self.values)

To use the cursor the code should look like:

@ndb.tasklet
def _query_A_by_value_async(value, cursor, limit=100):
start_cursor, done = cursor.get(value)
if not done:
query = Foo.query(Foo.A == value)
query = Foo.order(-Foo.last_access_time)
foos, end_cursor, more = yield query.fetch_page_async(
limit, start_cursor=start_cursor)
cursor.set(value, end_cursor, more)
raise ndb.Return(foos, end_cursor, more)
raise ndb.Return([], None, False)

I moved to Boston in 2005 at the same time that Aaron Swartz did and we were introduced by a mutual friend. Aaron was one of my first friends in Boston and we became close. When Aaron moved to San Francisco, I moved into his apartment in Somerville where he kept a room for a year or so. Mika and I still live there. His old posters remain on our walls and his old books remain on our shelves. Aaron s brothers Ben and Noah both lived with us and remain close friends. I have spent hours (days?) reading and thinking about Aaron over the last two weeks. It has been disorienting but beautiful to read the descriptions of, and commentaries on, Aaron s life. Although I suspect I may never feel ready, there are several things I want to say about Aaron s death, about Aaron s work, and about what Aaron means to me. 1. Aaron s Death The reaction to Aaron s death has been overwhelming and inspirational. At some point in the near future I plan to join some of the important campaigns already being waged in his name. There are many attempts to understand why Aaron died and many attempts to prevent it from happening to others in the future. Unfortunately, I am familiar with the process of soul-searching and second-guessing that happens when a friend commits suicide. I m sure that every one of his friends has asked themselves, as I have, What could I have done differently? I don t know the answer, but I do know this: Aaron was facing the real risk of losing half his life to prison. But even if one believed that he was only facing the likely loss of ten percent or even one percent of his life I wish that we all, and I wish that I in particular, had reacted with the passion, time, anger, activity, and volume proportional to how we have reacted in the last two weeks when he lost the whole thing. 2. Aaron s Work Of course, Aaron and I worked on related projects and I followed his work. And despite all the incredible things that have been said about Aaron, I feel that Aaron s work was more focused, more ambitious, more transformative, more innovative, and more reckless (in a positive sense) than the outpour online suggests. Although discussion of Aaron has focused his successes, achievements, and victories, the work that inspired me most was not the projects that were most popular or successful. Much of Aaron s work was deeply, and as it turned out overly, ambitious. His best projects were self-conscious attempts to transform knowledge production, organization, and dissemination. Although he moved from project to project, his work was consistently focused on bringing semantic-web concepts and technologies to peer production, to the movement for free culture, and to progressive political activism and on the meta-politics necessary to remove barriers to this work. For example, Aaron created an online collaborative encyclopedia project called the TheInfoNetwork (TIN) several years before Wikipedia was started. I talked to Aaron at length about that project for a research project I am working on. Aaron s work was years ahead of its time; in 2000, TIN embraced more of the Wikimedia Foundation s current goals and principles than Wikipedia did when it was launched. While Wikipedia sought to create a free reference work online, Aaron s effort sought to find out what a reference work online could look like. It turned out to be too ambitious, perhaps, but it taught many, including myself, an enormous amount in that process. When I met Aaron, he was in the process starting a company, Infogami, that was trying to chase many of TIN s goals. Infogami was conceived of as a wiki aware of the structure of data. The model was both simple and profound. Years later, Wikimedia Deutschland s WikiData project is beginning to bring some of these ideas to the mainstream. Infogami merged with Reddit as equal halves of a company with a shared technological foundation based on some of Aaron s other work. But when Reddit took off, Infogami was rarely mentioned, even by Aaron. I think that is too bad. Reddit got traction because it made the most popular stuff more visible; Reddit is popular, fundamentally, because popular things are popular. But popular is not necessary positive. For that reason, Reddit never struck me as either surprising or transformative. But what started as Aaron s half the company, on the other hand, aimed to create a powerful form of democratized information production and dissemination. And although Infogami didn t take off, the ideas and code behind the project found life at the heart of Open Library and will continue to influence and inspire countless other projects. I believe that Infogami s lessons and legacy will undergird a generation of transformative peer production technologies in a way that the Reddit website important as it is will not. 3. What Aaron Means to Me A lot of what has been written about Aaron speaks to his intelligence, his curiosity, his generosity, his ethics and his drive. Although I recognize all these qualities in the Aaron I knew, I ve felt alienated by how abstract some of the discussion of Aaron has been my memories are of particularities.

I remember the time Aaron was hospitalized and I spent two hours on the phone going through my bookshelves arguing with him about the virtues of the books in my library as we tried to decide which books I would bring him. I remember Aaron confronting Peter Singer intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival to ask if humans had a moral obligation to stop animals from killing each other. I lurked behind, embarrassed about the question but curious to hear the answer. (Singer sighed and said yes sort of and complemented Aaron on the enormous Marxist commentary he was carrying.) I remember 1-800-INTERNET.com. I remember talking with Aaron about whether being wealthy could be ethical. I argued it could not but Aaron argued uncharacteristically I thought that it could. Aaron told Mika she should slap him if he ever became wealthy. The very next day, it was announced that his company had been acquired and that Aaron was a millionaire. I remember the standing bets I had with Aaron and how he would email me every time news reports favored his claims (but never when they did not). And I remember that I won t hear from him again.

Aaron was a friend and inspiration. I miss him deeply and I am very sad.

Pere Ubu, or James with Echo & the Bunnymen?

Today in the USA is Martin Luther King, Jr., day. But sometimes these holidays get confusing for a 6-year-old. I asked Jacob the other day if he knew what holiday was coming up. He thought about it for a second, then declared it would be St. Patrick s Day. He was excited because St. Patrick s Day is green. When he realized that it was really MLK Day, he was disappointed. That day isn t green. So I said, Jacob, how about we celebrate pretend St. Patrick s Day on Monday? His face lit up, he got a huge smile, and said, Oh yes! Great idea, dad! Oliver got all excited about it too. I was already planning on us doing some cooking, and thankfully had green food coloring already. So I sort of discarded my plans so each meal could have something green in it. When the boys woke up this morning, I wished each of them Happy Pretend St. Patrick s Day! We all wore green. Jacob put his shirt on backwards so the side with more green would be facing front. For breakfast, our green dish was green crepes with a succotash (based on baby lima beans and corn) filling. The boys were excited to discover that the crepes could be green on one side, and green and a little brown on the other. Jacob was unsure of the succotash idea, but after having a few bites, declared it excellent . After breakfast, we made bread. They loved watching the green food coloring disperse in the water. We checked on how green the dough looked periodically. We watched how it was rising and whether it was staying green. And we checked in on it backing, as the crust turned from green to brown. We discussed green bread over and over. Important questions were asked and answers were attempted. And then, of course, the moment of truth removing the loaf from the pan. The boys jabbered excitedly that there was some green peeking out. While we waited for it to cool, we went out to the creek. The creek is dry this year, so we got to walk in it. Jacob used his stick to make a line behind him. I asked him, Is that a line so we can find our way back? Oh! Uhm. Yes! And then he added arrows so we d know which way to go. Jacob stopped every 20 or so feet to collect pretend train tickets from Oliver and me. Oliver eventually grew tired of this, so Jacob started collecting Oliver s ticket from me. They climbed on some trees, managed to find some mud, drew outlines of train cars in the dirt, and then followed Jacob s line back down the creek bed. They pointed out any green things they saw. Then we went back to the house, took off our warm coats, and cut into the bread. Can you imagine the excitement? I hadn t realized green is a flavor, but it must have been somehow, because those boys absolutely loved this green bread. When we got out the jam, Jacob realized that it was red on the green bread, and that now his bread was Christmas-colored. All sorts of green bread discoveries were made, but the best among them was that if you hold a slice of green bread up to the bright sun, the sun makes it glow green and it looks like a stained-glass window. Sometimes a few drops of food coloring can add a ton of excitement to a day.

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 120, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Charles de Lint's book review column sticks with the sorts of things he normally reviews: urban and contemporary fantasy and young adult. Predictably, I didn't find that much of interest. But I was happy to see that not all the reviews were positive, and he talked some about how a few books didn't work. I do prefer seeing a mix of positive and negative (or at least critical) reviews. James Sallis's review column focuses entirely on Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore (by way of reviewing a collection). I'm always happy to see this sort of review. But between that and de Lint's normal subject matter, this issue of F&SF was left without any current science fiction reviews, which was disappointing. Lucius Shepard's movie review column features stunning amounts of whining, even by Shepard's standards. The topic du jour is how indie films aren't indie enough, mixed with large amounts of cane-shaking and decrying of all popular art. I find it entertaining that the F&SF film review column regularly contains exactly the sort of analysis that one expects from literary gatekeepers who are reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps David Langford should consider adding an "As We See Others" feature to Ansible cataloging the things genre fiction fans say about popular movies. "Scatter My Ashes" by Albert E. Cowdrey: The protagonist of this story is an itinerant author who has been contracted to write a family history (for $100K, which I suspect is a bit of tongue-in-cheek wish fulfillment) and has promptly tumbled into bed with his employer. But he is somewhat serious about the writing as well, and is poking around in family archives and asking relatives about past details. There is a murder (maybe) in the family history, not to mention some supernatural connections. Those familiar with Cowdrey's writing will recognize the mix of historical drama, investigation, and the supernatural. Puzzles are, of course, untangled, not without a bit of physical danger. Experienced fantasy readers will probably guess at some of the explanation long before the protagonist does. Like most Cowdrey, it's reliably entertaining, but I found it a bit thin. (6) "A Pocketful of Faces" by Paul Di Filippo: Here's a bit of science fiction, and another mystery, this time following the basic model of a police procedural. The police in this case are enforcing laws around acceptable use of "faces" in a future world where one can clone someone's appearance from their DNA and then mount it on a programmable android. As you might expect from that setup, the possibilities are lurid, occasionally disgusting, and inclined to give the police nightmares. After some scene-setting, the story kicks in with the discovery of the face of a dead woman who, at least on the surface, no one should have any motive to clone. There were a few elements of the story that were a bit too disgusting for me, but the basic mystery plot was satisfying. I thought the ending was a let-down, however. Di Filippo tries to complicate the story and, I thought, went just a little too far, leaving motives and intent more confusing than illuminating. (6) "The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu: Back to fantasy, this time using a small bit of magic to illustrate the emotional conflicts and difficulties of allegiance for second-generation immigrants. Jack is the son of an American farther and a Chinese mother who was a mail-order bride. He's young at the start of the story and struggling with the embarassment and humiliation that he feels at his mother's history and the difficulties he has blending in with other kids, leading to the sort of breathtaking cruelty that comes so easily from teenagers who are too self-focused and haven't yet developed adult empathy. I found this very hard to read. The magic is beautiful, personal, and very badly damaged by the cruelty in ways that can never really be fixed. It's a sharp reminder of the importance of being open-hearted, but it's also a devastating reminder that the lesson is normally learned too late. Not the story to read if you're prone to worrying about how you might have hurt other people. (6) "The Evening and the Morning" by Sheila Finch: This long novella is about a third of the issue and is, for once, straight science fiction, a somewhat rare beast in F&SF these days. It's set in the far future, among humans who are members of the Guild of Xenolinguists and among aliens called the Venatixi, and it's about an expedition back to the long-abandoned planet of Earth. I had a lot of suspension of disbelief problems with the setup here. While Earth has mostly dropped out of memory, there's a startling lack of curiosity about its current condition among the humans. Finch plays some with transportation systems and leaves humanity largely dependent on other races to explain the failure to return to Earth, but I never quite bought it. It was necessary to set up the plot, which is an exploration story with touches of first contact set on an Earth that's become alien to the characters, but it seemed remarkably artificial to me. But, putting that aside, I did get pulled into the story. Its emotional focus is one of decline and senescence, a growing sense of futility, that's halted by exploration, mystery, and analysis. The question of what's happened on Earth is inherently interesting and engaging, and the slow movement of the story provides opportunities to build up to some eerie moments. The problem, continuing a theme for this issue, is the ending. Some of the reader's questions are answered, but most of the answers are old, well-worn paths in science fiction. The emotional arc of the story is decidedly unsatisfying, at least to me. I think I see what Finch was trying to do: there's an attempted undermining of the normal conclusion of this sort of investigation to make a broader point about how to stay engaged in the world. But it lacked triumph and catharsis for me, partly because the revelations that we get are too pedestrian for the build-up they received. It's still an interesting story, but I don't think it entirely worked. (6) "Night Gauntlet" by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., et al.: The full list of authors for this story (Walter C. DeBill, Jr., Richard Gavin, Robert M. Price, W.H. Pugmire, Jeffrey Thomas, and Don Webb) provides one with the first clue that it's gone off the rails. Collaborative storytelling, where each author tries to riff off the work of the previous author while spinning the story in a different direction, is something that I think works much better orally, particularly if you can watch facial expressions while the authors try to stump each other. In written form, it's a recipe for a poorly-told story. That's indeed what we get here. The setup is typical Cthulhu mythos stuff: a strange scientist obsessed with conspiracy theories goes insane, leaving behind an office with a map of linkages between apparently unrelated places. The characters in the story also start going insane for similar reasons, leading up to a typical confrontation with things man was not meant to know, or at least pay attention to. If you like that sort of thing, you may like this story better than I did, but I thought it was shallow and predictable. (3) "Happy Ending 2.0" by James Patrick Kelly: More fantasy, this time of the time travel variety. (I call it fantasy since there's no scientific explanation for the time travel and it plays a pure fantasy role in the story.) That's about as much as I can say without giving away the plot entirely (it's rather short). I can see what Kelly was going for, and I think he was largely successful, but I'm not sure how to react to it. The story felt like it reinforced some rather uncomfortable stereotypes about romantic relationships, and the so-called happy ending struck me as the sort of situation that was going to turn very nasty and very uncomfortable about five or ten pages past where Kelly ended the story. (5) "The Second Kalandar's Tale" by Francis Marion Soty: The main question I have about this story is one that I can't answer without doing more research than I feel like doing right now: how much of this is original to Soty and how much if it is straight from Burton's translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Burton is credited for the story, so I suspect quite a lot of this is from the original. Whether one would be better off just reading the original, or if Soty's retelling adds anything substantial, are good questions that I don't have the background to answer. Taken as a stand-alone story, it's not a bad one. It's a twisting magical adventure involving a djinn, a captive woman, some rather predictable fighting over the woman, and then a subsequent adventure involving physical transformation and a magical battle reminiscent of T.H. White. (Although I have quite likely reversed the order of inspiration if as much of this is straight from Burton as I suspect.) Gender roles, however, are kind of appalling, despite the presence of a stunningly powerful princess, due to the amount of self-sacrifice expected from every woman in the story. Personally, I don't think any of the men in the story are worth anywhere near the amount of loyalty and bravery that the women show. Still, it was reasonably entertaining throughout, in exactly the way that I would expect a One Thousand and One Nights tale to be. Whether there's any point in reading it instead of the original is a question I'll leave to others. (7) "Bodyguard" by Karl Bunker: This is probably the best science fiction of the issue. The first person protagonist is an explorer living with an alien race, partly in order to flee the post-singularity world of uploaded minds and apparent stagnation that Earth has become. It's a personal story that uses his analysis of alien mindsets (and his interaction with his assigned alien bodyguard) to flesh out his own desires, emotional background, and reactions to the world. There are some neat linguistic bits here that I quite enjoyed, although I wish they'd been developed at even more length. (The alien language is more realistic than it might sound; there are some human languages that construct sentences in a vaguely similar way.) It's a sad, elegiac story, but it grew on me. (7) "Botanical Exercises for Curious Girls" by Kali Wallace: One has to count this story as science fiction as well, although for me it had a fantasy tone because the scientific world seems to play by fantasy rules from the perspective of the protagonist. Unpacking that perspective is part of the enjoyment of the story. At the start, she seems to be a disabled girl who is being cared for by a strange succession of nurses who vary by the time of day, but as the story progresses, it becomes clear that something much stranger is going on. There are moments that capture a sense of wonder, reinforced by the persistantly curious and happy narrative voice, but both are undercut by a pervasive sense of danger and dread. This is a light story written about rather dark actions. My biggest complaint with the story is that it doesn't so much end as wander off into the sunset. It set up conflict within a claustrophobic frame, so I can understand the thematic intent of breaking free of that frame, but in the process I felt like the story walked away from all of the questions and structure that it created and ended in a place that felt less alive with potential than formless and oddly pointless. I think I wanted it to stay involved and engaged with the environment it had created. (6) "Ping" by Dixon Wragg: I probably should just skip this, since despite the table of contents billing and the full title introduction, it's not a story. It's a two-line joke. But it's such a bad two-line joke that I had to complain about it. I have no idea why F&SF bothered to reprint it. (1) "The Ifs of Time" by James Stoddard: This certainly fits with the Arabian Nights story in this issue. The timekeeper of a vast and rambling castle (think Gormenghast taken to the extreme) wanders into a story-telling session in a distant part of the castle. The reader gets to listen to four (fairly good) short stories about time, knowledge, and memory, told in four very different genres. All of this does relate to why the timekeeper is there, and the frame story is resolved by the end, but the embedded stories are the best part; each of them is interesting in a different way, and none of them outlast their welcome. This was probably the strongest story of this issue. (7) Rating: 6 out of 10

Unfortunately I'm not going to make it to LCA this year, but there's still plenty of UEFI coverage - Dong Wei, Vice President of the UEFI forum, will be giving an introduction to UEFI, and James Bottomley, who's been working on the Linux Foundation's UEFI bootloader solution, will be talking about Secure Boot.

For those of you on this side of the Pacific (or who just can't get enough of listening to my melodious voice), I'll be keynoting the Southern California Linux Expo next month. This will be a discussion of the more social aspects of our work on Secure Boot over the past year and a half - an epic tail of astonishment, terror, politics, confusion and hard won victories, and the remaining issues that are yet unsolved. Clearly not to be missed. If California's too far for you, then come March I'll be at the North East Linux Fest. I'll be talking about how to make sure that your Linux distribution works with Secure Boot, and, assuming I've got the code finished by then, a little about how to break it.

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Just back in from an amazing concert at the Chicago Symphony Center. Vocalists Angelique Kidjo, Dianne Reeves and Lizz Wright supported by all-star band of Geri Allen on piano, Romero Lubambo on electric and acoustic guitar, James Genus on electric bass guitar, Munyungo Jackson on percussion and Terri Lyne Carrington on drums (and musical director). The concert alternates between solos and joint pieces with more joy and soul than I heard in a long time. Great evening.

I just returned home from Aaron Swartz s funeral in Chicago. Aaron was a good friend. The home I ve returned to is an apartment that was Aaron s before it was mine, that I have lived in with Aaron during several stints, and that I still share with many of his old books and posters. Although, I ve spent what feels like most of the last five days reading things that people have written about Aaron, I m still processing and digesting myself. Right now, I m very sad and at a loss for words. While I reflect, I wanted to share this video recently put online by Finne Boonen. The video was made in 2006 at a Web 1.0 Elevator Pitch Competition held at Wikimania 2006 about a year after that both Aaron and I moved to Cambridge and met. The goal of the contest was to pitch Web 1.0 DotCom business ideas to a team of real Web 1.0 investors like it was still 1999. Aaron and I formed a team along with SJ Klein (who I traveled to the funeral with this week), and Wikimania general counsel and interim executive director Brad Patrick. The video shows how as Danny O Brien has reminded us Aaron was funny. He came up with many our teams best lines in addition to checking our Web 1.0 boxes for tech guru and Stanford dropout. Our pitch for 1-800-INTERNET.COM is in the video below. The transcript was done by Phoebe Ayers in Facebook and the video is also available in WebM. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NzFjWY6Fd_g" width="420"></iframe>

SJ: You know, Mako and I had some pretty good ideas for improving connectivity to the internet, and we think we can reach 90% of the world s population. So think about this. You re sitting in a Starbucks, and you need to connect to the internet. But you can t, because there s no internet. But what is there, near every Starbucks? There s a payphone! You pick up the payphone, and you call . 1-800-INTERNET. You can connect to our bank of researchers on our fast T1 connections and get any information you need! So, we don t actually have 1-800-INTERNET yet, we have 1-800-225-3224, so the first thing we need to do is buy the number. So here s Mako, who is our web designer from UC Santa Cruz and Bradford, our financial guru, and Aaron, who s handling all of our technical implementation. But Mako, you should explain the earballs. Mako: So, so, so yeah, so most people on the Internet are going for the eyeballs, but they ve just left all of these earballs. So I have some experience in web design, and it s true that this isn t really a website, but we still need good web design. So, so, I ve actually got a really experienced team, we can go into later, and we have some really great earcons not icons, but earcons.. And it s going to be all together, not apart like some of the websites. It s going to be together. Brad: so how does this work technically? Aaron: Well, I mean, so I only spent one year at Stanford but that s Ok, because there are new developmental technologies, we re going to throw away all that old stuff, we re going to use really reliable and efficient well-designed code that everyone can clearly understand, and write the whole thing in Perl. I know this is a risk, but I am confident that Perl is going to destroy those old C websites. No one will write websites in C anymore once we do this, it s going to be so much faster, and so dynamic, everythings going to be like, on top of everything. It s going to be great. Bradford: So here s the business model. It s really really simple, and it s a really really great idea. It s all about the licensing. Because what we re going to have are these underlying audio ads, While you re on the phone you re going to hear this subliminal advertising message. And the way it works is really really cool, because it s really really low volume, it s high impact! And it s even better, because we license it, and the way it works is when a caller calls 1-800-Internet, they re hearing the ad, but so is the representative, so we get to bill em twice! So that s it: All: 1-800-INTERNET.COM

We did not win and I still believe that we were robbed.

I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of us will ever do. I'd only met him IRL a couple times, but (like many others) i had encountered him on the 'net in many places. He was a good person, someone i didn't need to always agree with to respect. I read Russ Allbery's posts about Aaron and "slacktivism" with much appreciation. I had been ambivalent about signing the whitehouse.gov petition asking for the removal of the prosecutor for overreach, because I generally distrust the effectiveness of online petitions (and offline petitions, for that matter). But Russ's analysis convinced me to go ahead and sign it. The petition is concrete, clear (despite wanting a grammatical proofread), and actionable. For people willing to go beyond petition signing to civil disobedience, The Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator is an option. It makes it straightforward to potentially violate the onerous JSTOR terms of service by re-publishing a public-domain article from JSTOR to archive.org, where it will be accessible to anyone directly. As someone who builds and maintains information/communications infrastructure, i have very mixed feelings about most online civil disobedience, since it often takes the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack of some sort. DDoS attacks of public services are notoriously difficult to defend against without having huge resources to throw at the problem, so encouraging participation in a DDoS often feels a little bit like handing out cans of gasoline when you know that everyone is living in a house of straw. However, the JSTOR Liberator is not a DDoS at all -- it's simply a facilitation of people breaking the JSTOR Terms of Service (ToS), some of the same terms that Aaron was facing charges for violating. So it is a well-targeted way to demonstrate that the prosecutions were overreaching. I wanted to take issue with one of Russ' statements, though. In his second post about the situation, Russ wrote:

Social activism and political disobedience are important and often valuable things, but performing your social activism using other people's stuff is just rude. I think it can be a forgivable rudeness; people can get caught up in the moment and not realize what they're doing. But it's still rude, and it's still not the way to go about civil disobedience.

While i generally agree with Russ' thoughtful consideration of consent, I have to take issue with this elevation of some sort of hyper-extended property right over the moral agency that drives civil disobedience. To use someone else's property for the sake of a just cause without damaging the property or depriving the owner of its use is not "forgivable rudeness" -- it's forgivable, laudable even, because it is just. And the person using the property doesn't need to be "caught up in the moment and not realize what they're doing" for it to be acceptable. Civil disobedience often involves putting some level of inconvenience or discomfort on other people, including innocent people. It might be the friends and family of the activist who have to deal with the jail time; it might be the drivers stuck in a traffic jam caused by a demonstration; it might be the people forced to shop elsewhere because the store's doors are barricaded by protestors. All of these people could be troubled by the civil disobedience more than MIT's network users and admins were troubled by Aaron's protest, and that doesn't make the protests described worse or "not the way to go about civil disobedience." The trouble highlights a more significant injustice, and in its troubling way does what it can to help right it. Aaron was a troublemaker, and a good one. He will be missed. Tags: aaronsw

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 4 & 5
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	192

Williams's editorial this issue is about the tendency of SF to take a rose-colored view of the world, which on the surface seems odd given the tendency of recent SF towards dystopia. But she makes a good point that the portrayal of the past is rose-colored, linking that into the current steampunk trend. She doesn't take the argument quite as far as I'd like, but I'm glad to see editorials raising points like this. I'm inclined to think that a lot of the rose-colored frame of the past is because few of us want to read about real historic conditions at any length, even for edification, because the stench and discomfort isn't fun to read about. Silverberg's column is another discussion of programmatic plot generators, which mostly makes the point that plot ideas are the easy part of writing. James Gunn contributes an extended biography of Isaac Asimov that probably won't be new to long-time genre readers but may fill in some details (although it politely sticks to mostly flattering material). Spinrad's book review column is one of his better ones; it looks at two novels by China Mi ville and two by Ian McDonald and explores differences in world-building. Spinrad predictably makes the case in favor of science fiction with rules and against the New Weird, but the discussion along the way was worth reading. "The Day the Wires Came Down" by Alexander Jablokov: Speaking of steampunk, here's an example. There is even an airship, although the primary technological focus is suspended street cars. Jablokov postulates a city-wide transportation network of suspended carriages called telpher cars, along with a city built around the telpher cables: stores on roofs, windows displaying merchandise to passing cars, and even a history of heated competition and dirty tricks between competing telpher networks. The story is set, as the title would indicate, on the last day of the network. It's being shut down for cost, with some hints that progress is destroying something precious. There is a plot here, revolving around some mysteries of the history of the telpher network and the roles of several people in that history. But the story is primarily a celebration of old technology. It's a rail fan's story recast with a steampunk technology, featuring the same mix of fascination with mechanics and a sense that the intricate details are falling out of common knowledge (and perhaps usefulness). As a story, it's a bit slow-moving, but I enjoyed the elegiac tone. (7) "An Empty House with Many Doors" by Michael Swanwick: This is a very short story, more of an emotional profile, involving a man's reaction to the death of his wife. Oh, and parallel universes. It's sort of the inverse of Niven's classic "All the Myriad Ways." Similar to Niven's story, I found the idea vaguely interesting but the conclusion and emotional reaction unbelievable and alien. (5) "The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick: Resnick tends to yank on the heart-strings rather sharply in his stories, so I knew roughly what to expect when a father comes home to find his son is visiting. A son who, rather against his father's wishes, has been significantly altered to be able to live with aliens. Throw in a mother with serious dementia, and you can probably predict what Resnick does with this. Still, most of the story is a two-sided conversation, and I thought he succeeded in doing justice to both sides, even though one of them was destined to lose. (6) "North Shore Friday" by Nick Mamatas: Illegal Greek immigrants, a family-run system for getting them married off before the INS catch them, government psi probes and eavesdropping on thoughts, joint projects between computer and religion departments, secret government experiments, and even ghosts... this story is a complex mess, with numerous thoughts stuck into small boxes and scattered through the surface story. It's one of those stories where figuring out what's going on, and even how to read the story in a sensible way, is much of the fun. If you find that fun, that is; if not, it will probably be frustrating. I wished there was a bit more plot, but there's something delightful about how much stuff Mamatas packs into it. (6) "Clockworks" by William Preston: This is a prequel to Preston's earlier "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down". Like that story, it's primarily a pulp adventure, but layered with another level of analysis and thoughtfulness that tries to embed the pulp adventure in our understanding of human behavior and the nature of the world, although this one stays a bit more pulp than its predecessor. As with Preston's other story, we don't get directly in the head of the Old Man (here, just called the man, but identifiable from clues in both stories as Doc Savage); instead, the protagonist is a former villain named Simon Lukic who the man hopes to have fixed by operating on his brain. The undercurrent that lies beneath a more typical pulp adventure is the question of whether Lukic is actually healed. I think there was a bit too much daring-do and human perfection, but it's a perfectly servicable pulp story with some depth. (6) "The Fnoor Hen" by Rudy Rucker: If you've read any of Rucker's work before, you probably know what to expect: a mind-boggling blizzard of mathematically-inspired technobabble that turns into vaguely coherent surrealism. (You can probably tell that I'm not much of a fan, although the clear good humor in these stories makes it hard to dislike them too much.) There's a mutated chicken and some sort of alternate mathematical space and then something that seems like magic... I'd be lying if I said that I followed this story. If you like Rucker, this seems like the sort of thing that you'd like. (4) "Smoke City" by Christopher Barzak: At the start of this story, I thought it was going to be an emotional parable about immigration. The progatonist lives two lives: one in our world, and one in the Smoke City of industry, a world of hard labor, pollution, and little reward, with families in both. But nearly all of the story is set within Smoke City, and the parable turns out to be a caustic indictment of industry and its exploitation of labor. I kind of wish Barzak hadn't used rape as a metaphor, but when the captains of industry show up, I can't argue with how deeply and accurately the story shoves in the knife. There isn't much subtlety here, but it's still one of the better stories in this issue. (7) "A Response from EST17" by Tom Purdom: I'm very happy to see Purdom's writing appearing regularly. His stories are always quiet and matter-of-fact, and at first seem to miss emotional zest, but they almost always grow on me. He lets the reader fill in their own emotional reactions to events, and there's always a lot going on. This story is a first-contact story, except that the "humans" here are not human at all. They're automated probes sent by two separate human civilizations, with different programming and different governance algorithms, and they quickly start competing negotiations. The aliens they've discovered similarly have factions, who start talking to the different probes in an elaborate dance of gathering information without giving too much away. The twist is that this pattern has replayed itself many times in the past, and information itself can be a weapon. I enjoyed this one from start to finish. (7) "The One That Got Away" by Esther M. Friesner: Friesner is best known, at least to me, for humorous fantasy, and this story is advertised as such from early on. The first-person protagonist is a prostitute in a seaside town. She's bemused to finally be invited over by a sailor who's been eyeing her all evening, but that sailor has something else in mind than normal business. For much of this story, the fantasy element is unclear; when it finally comes, it was an amusing twist. (7) "The Flow and Dream" by Jack Skillingstead: This is a mildly interesting variation on the old SF story of hibernating humans (on a generation ship or elsewhere) waking up to a transformed world. Here, it's not a ship, it's a planet, and the hiberation was to wait for terraforming rather than for transit. The twist comes from an excessively literal computer and the fun of putting together the pieces. Sadly, the story trails off at the end without much new to say. (5) "Becalmed" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: "Becalmed" takes place immediately before "Becoming One with the Ghosts" and explains the incident that created the situation explored in that story. The first-person protagonist of "Becalmed" is a linguist, an expert in learning alien languages so that the Fleet can understand the civilizations that it runs across. But something went horribly wrong at their last stop, something that she's largely suppressed, and now she's confined to quarters and possibly in deep trouble. As is the ship; they're in foldspace, and they have been for days. "Becalmed" is structed like a mystery, centered around recovering the protagonist's memories. It's also a bit of a legal procedural; the ship is trying to determine what to do with her and to what degree she's responsible. But the heart of the story is a linguistic and cultural puzzle. This is another great SF story from Rusch, whose name on a cover will make me eager to start reading a new magazine. I love both angles on the universe she's built, but I think I like the Fleet even better than the divers. The Fleet captures some of the magic of the original Star Trek, but with much more mature characters, more believable situations, and a more sensible and nuanced version of the Prime Directive. Rusch writes substantial, interesting plots that hold my interest. I'd love to see more like this. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

Since 2004, I ve used the blogging software PyBlosxom. Over that time, the software has served me well and I have even written a series of patches and plugins. PyBloxsom is blog software designed for hackers. It assumes you already have a text editor you love and relies on features of a POSIX filesystem instead of a relational database. It s designed so you can keep your blog under revision control (since 2004 I ve used GNU Arch, baz, bzr and now git). It is also hackers software in the sense that you should expect to write code to use it (e.g., the configuration is pure Python). I love it. What PyBlosxom does not have is a large community. This summer, the most recent long-time maintainer of the project, Will Kahn-Greene, stepped down. Although the project eventually found a new maintainer, the reality is the project entered maintenance mode years ago and many features available in more popular blogging platforms are unlikely to make it PyBlosxom. The situation with comment spam is particularly dire. I ve written several antispam plugins but time has shown that I don t have the either the expertise or the time to make them as awesome as they need to be to really work in today s web. So, after many months of weighing, waffling, and planning I ve switched to WordPress a great piece of free software with an enormous and established community As you ll know if you ve read my interview on The Setup, I think a lot about the technology I surround myself with. I considered WordPress when I started my blog back in 2004 and rejected it soundly. Eight years ago, I would have laughed at you if you told me I d be using it today; If PyBlosxom is for hackers, WordPress is designed for everyone else. But the way I evaluate software has changed over that period. In the nineties, I used to download every new version of the Linux kernel to compile it it took hours! to try out the latest features. Configurabilty, hackability, and the ability to write my own features was after a point more important than the features the software came with. Today, I m much more aware of the fact that for all the freedom that my software gives me, I simply do not have the time, energy, or inclination to take advantage of that freedom to hack very often. Today, I give much more value to software that is not just free, but that is maintained by a community of people who can do all the work that I would do if I had unlimited time. Although I don t have the time or experience to make WordPress do everything I would like, the collective of all WordPress users does. And they ve done a lot of it already! The flip side matters as well: Today, I give more value to other people using my software. When WordPress doesn t do something and I write a plugin or patch, there are tons of people ready to pick it up and use it and perhaps even to collaborate on it with me. Want to guess how many patches my PyBlosxom plugins have received? None, if my memory serves me. In the past, I ve written about how free software is a victory even when it doesn t build a community. I still believe that. But the large communities at the heart of the most successful free software communities (the promise of open source ) are deeply important in a way that I increasingly value. In that spirit: If you want to make the jump from PyBlosxom to WordPress, I ve shared a Git repository with the scripts I used and wrote for the transition.

Big release notes since 1.0: We ve got a new list dput-ng-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org feel free to subscribe!

1.3:
  * Avoid failing on upload if a pre/post upload hook is missing from the
    Filesystem.
  * Fix "dcut raises FtpUploadException" by correctly initializing the uploader
    classes from dcut (Closes: #696467)
1.2:
  * Add bash completions for dput-ng (Closes: #695412).
  * Add in a script to set the default profile depending on the building
    distro (Ubuntu support)
  * Fix a bug where meta-class info won't be loaded if the config file has the
    same name.
  * Add an Ubuntu upload target.
  * Added .udeb detection to the check debs hook.
  * Catch the correct exception falling out of bin/dcut
  * Fix the dput manpages to use --uid rather then the old --dm flag.
  * Fix the CLI flag registration by setting required=True
    in cancel and upload.
  * Move make_delayed_upload above the logging call for sanity's sake.
  * Fix "connects to the host even with -s" (Closes: #695347)

Thanks to everone who s contributed!

     7  Bernhard R. Link
     4  Ansgar Burchardt
     3  Luca Falavigna
     2  Michael Gilbert
     2  Salvatore Bonaccorso
     1  Benjamin Drung
     1  Gergely Nagy
     1  Jakub Wilk
     1  Jimmy Kaplowitz
     1  Luke Faraone
     1  Sandro Tosi

This has been your every-once-in-a-while dput-ng update. We re looking for more code contributions (to make sure everyone s happy), doc updates (etc) or ideas.

Happy new year, Debian! To celebrate, here are some freshly posted, bits from the DPL for December 2012.

---

Dear Project Members, happy new year! Here goes another report of DPL activities, this time for December 2012. This issue of the DPL-monthly is skinnier than usual: during the past month I've been struck by the catastrophe also known as "family holiday season", enjoying a solid 10 day break from computer-related activities. Talks

• I've been invited to talk about Debian and its opportunities in the field of education (for both students and teachers) at the fOSSa conference in Lille, France. Slides of the talk I delivered there are available.
• On related news, I've gladly accepted an invitation to talk at the next LibrePlanet conference in Boston, next March. It will be the occasion to discuss the status of collaboration with the FSF and the GNU Project. (FWIW, I'm trying to secure travel sponsorship with the conference organizers, but if that won't turn out to be possible I plan to go on Debian funds, as I consider this event important enough to do so.)

Assets

• The debian.eu saga is over! DNS is now under control of DSA, currently as a redirection to debian.org as for many other ccTLD, and we have now paid the corresponding transfer costs.
• The saga about the relicensing of www.d.o content, on the other hand, is still ongoing. But we made progress! Bradley Kuhn has kindly offered his experience to complete the relicensing part --- and most notably for dealing with contributions from people we haven't been able to contact. Due to busy-ness we will proceed further only in a few months, but in the meantime there is some work to do on our side, as documented in #388141.
• In conformance with the periodic hardware maintenance plan (the goal of which is, I remind you, having all Debian hardware under warranty) we have bought extended warranty for the storage array that serves project machines hosted at UBC ECE (~830 CAD). Thanks goes to Luca Filipozzi for taking care of the order part.
• As they did last year, Amazon kindly renewed their offer of AWS credit to be used for Debian related purposes, such as QA rebuilds. This year they offered us 8'000 USD of credit which, according to projections from last year usage, should be enough for QA rebuilds and buildd usage for events like BSP. Many thanks to Lucas Nussbaum and James Bromberger for reaching out to Amazon contacts and making this possible.

DPL helpers

• The experiment of sharing the load of DPL responsibilities within a larger team still ongoing. We held one more IRC meeting in December (and skipped one due to holiday season ). Logs are available at the usual place.
• Also, I've now started moving the DPL-related part of my own TODO list to the dpl-helpers.git repository. The idea is to further reduce SPOF and ease the transition to the next DPL. BTW: this is my last-3 report as DPL. If you haven't yet started encouraging project members you think could do a good job as DPL to apply, you should better hurry up!

Collaboration with the outer world

• I've signed the OSI affiliate membership agreement on behalf of Debian. This is just a long overdue formalization of the decision to join of a few months ago. The signed version is available in the DPL document archive on master.d.o, and it has been publicly discussed with other projects on the OSI affiliates mailing list.
• As requested, I've provided a quote for FSF's restricted boot campaign, that we have subscribed as a project a while ago.
• Thanks to the prod of various people (hi, Sune!), I've noticed an interesting call by the Italian government to representatives of FOSS communities, to form a group of experts that will have to decide the criteria to adopt in the public administration. The call is in Italian, but an article in English on the matter has been posted on the Joinup website of the European Commission. I've therefore submitted an application as Debian representative and, if accepted, I'll be happy to push for criteria that too often leaves high quality and well reputed community-based distributions out of the door for futile reasons (e.g. corporate "certifications").

That's all for last year, enjoy the new one, which will soon see a new Debian release out of the door. And to make it happen sooner, let's go back fix RC bugs! Cheers.

---

PS the day-to-day activity log for December 2012 is available at the usual place master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.txt.201212

mksh made quite some waves (machine translation of the third article) recently. Let s state it s not just Amigas ara5 is a buildd running the Atari kernel, an emulated though. On the other hand, the bare-metal Ataris used to be the fastest buildds, so I expect we get them back online soonish. I m currently fighting with some buildd software bugfixes, but once they re in, we will make more of them. Oh, and porterboxen! Does anyone want to host a VM with a porterbox? Requirements: wheezy host system (can be emulated), 1 GiB RAM, one CPU core with about 6500 BogoMIPS or more (so the emulated system has decent speed; an AMD Phenom II X4 3.2 GHz does just fine). Oh, and mksh is ported to more and more platforms, like 386BSD 0.0 with GCC 1.39, and QNX 4 with Watcom and more bugfixes are also being worked on. And let s not forget features! jupp got refreshed: it s got a bracketed paste mode, which is even auto-enabled on xterm-xfree86 (though the xterm(1) in MirBSD s a tad too old to know it; will update that later, just imported sendmail(8) 8.14.6 and lynx(1) 2.8.8dev.15 into base, more to come) and will be enhanced later (should disable auto-indent, wordwrap, status line updates, and possibly more), lots of new functions and bindings, now uses mkstemp(3) to create backup files race-free, and more (read the NEWS file). In MirBSD, Benny and I just added a number of errnos, mostly for SUSv4 compliance and being able to compile more software from pkgsrc without needing to patch. This is being tested right now (although I should probably go out and watch fireworks in less than a half-hour), together with the new imports and the bunch of small fixes we accumulate (even though most development in MirBSD is currently in mksh(1) and similar doesn t mean that all is, or worse, we were dead, which we aren t). I ll publish a new snapshot some time in January. The Grml 2012.12 also contains a pretty up-to-date MirBSD, with a boot(8/i386)loader that now ignores GUID partition table entries when deciding what to use for the a slice. If you haven t already done so, read Benjamin Mako Hill s writings!

I finally published a short essay I wrote about a year ago: Freedom for Users, Not for Software. Anybody who has hung around the free software community for a while will be familiar with the confusion created by the ambiguity between "free as in price" versus "free as freedom." In the essay I argue that there is a less appreciated semantic ambiguity that arises when we begin to think that what matters is that software is free. Software doesn't need freedom, of course; Users of software need freedom. My essay looks at how the focus on free software, as opposed to on free users, has created challenges and divisions in the free software movement. The essay was recently published in Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State, a book edited by David Bollier and Silke Helfrich and published by Levellers Press. The book includes essays by 73 authors that include some other folks from the free software and free culture communities along with a ton of people working on very different types of commons. My essay is short and has two parts: The first is basically a short introduction to free software movement. The second lays out what I see as major challenges for free software. I will point out that these are some of the areas that I am working most closely with the FSF who are having their annual fundraiser at the moment to support and build advocacy programs around.

Sometimes an attic is all it takes to delight children. This afternoon, the boys and I made cookies. Jacob has been talking about setting out milk and cookies for Santa Claus for several days, and of course the fact that we had made cookies reminded him of this as I figured it would. So after the boys got into their pajamas and all ready for bed, we set out milk and cookies for Santa. The boys have always known that Santa is pretend, but love the stories and traditions anyhow. Never mind that Christmas was 3 days ago, and they ve already opened their presents. It s SANTA! It s magic! It doesn t matter! I asked Jacob, Would you like me to pretend to be Santa tonight? A big grin, then Oh yes, dad! Do it! So after I read them their bedtime story, sang them a song (Jacob chose a Latin hymn that s my boy!), and tucked them into bed, I pretended to be Santa. I went back downstairs. I drank the milk and ate the cookies. Then I went to my small future present stash, selected a few small items, and put them under the tree. I gave it a few minutes. Then I crept up to the attic. I snuck along the wood floors quietly, until I was above the boys room. Then I jumped. And I scraped a wood chair along the floor. And then I yelled out HO HO HO! Merry Christmas! I had a brief conversation with Rudolph, then made some sliding noises. I was silent for a few seconds, then made some more noise and said, Wow, Rudolph, Jacob and Oliver left some great milk and cookies! Let s go deliver the rest of our presents! And made some vague sleigh taking off from the roof of a house noises. I crept back down the stairs. I put my ear to the outside of the closed door to the boys bedroom. I heard Jacob excitedly jabbering, He said milk and cookies! He liked them! He really liked them! Ooo butterfly, he was here! (Butterfly is a stuffed, er, butterfly that he sleeps with.) I gave it a minute or two, then I went in. Jacob, did you hear something? Yes! What was it? Well, it was a loud thud! I sat straight up like this. [ he demonstrates ] Then I heard ho ho ho ! And milk and cookies ! And I was excited like this! [ more demonstrations ] What do you think happened? I don t know! Dad, what did you do? I told him. It only increased his delight. Did it sound like Santa s sleight landing? (annoyed) No, dad. It sounded like a crash. (brightening) And then Santa coming down the chimney with presents! Oh, it is so exciting! (We don t have a chimney) It was still magical, even though he knew exactly what happened. For his part, Oliver slept through it all. He will still discover the empty plate, empty cup, and slightly less empty area underneath the tree. And neither boy knows about the thank you note from Santa yet. I anticipate smiles in the morning!