Everyone knows that exercise can heal the body. But why only a few people who routinely perform the activity? Ask yourself. The answer is, maybe you less motivated to do so. A survey ever conducted to find out why people rarely do sports. The survey involving 15,000 women from 25 countries showed that although nearly half of them know that exercise is very important for health, but less than 25 percent of it done. Why? More than two-thirds of respondents said that they would exercise more often if the gym was fun. So far, they consider it as a routine or demand to stay healthy so feel burdened. Although the facts say so, but it is unfortunate if people take sport as a less desirable activity. If you are not motivated to do the morning run, bike or fitness, try these few tips that may improve your mood for a workout without having to feel it as a demand or load. 1. Participate In A Club
Come in a club full of adventure and can arrange your sporting activity each week. Find information from friends or open the website that provides these facilities. 2. Involve Friends
If you are interested in joining a club, you can do sports with your friends or beloved. Sport activities together can evoke passion and spirit to not realize that you are really doing is exercise, not just recreation. 3. Try New Types
Trying something new will make you feel to have new experiences and unexpected. Make your muscles work with the new type of sport and do not usually very good for your body. 4. Make A Game
You would be very interested in an adventure or a game. Making sport like games is a good idea. Make activities as the game ran find treasure limited time, and you will feel more happy and challenged. 5. Back to Boyhood
Do you remember when as a child running around all day without feeling tired and bored? It feels good right? That s what you should do now. Create a day where you can be reunited with friends and do sports or play activities you usually do in childhood. Rollerblading in the park to play or jump rope can be very enjoyable. 6. Give Credits For Yourself
If you ve managed to do sports, try giving a gift to yourself. Watching the film series, enjoying a plate of spaghetti or relax at the spa can be temoat rewards you deserve for successfully achieving exercise goals. Most people who do not enjoy the sport has a very dense activity and also because they are not used to doing. But if once you find that it is a routine exercise that is enjoyable, you will begin to enjoy it. Without realizing it, you also have to do two things at once is fun, physical exercise and psychological. Good luck.

The Telegraph has a silly article titled Aliens are likely to look and behave like us [1]. It s based on the ideas of Professor Simon Conway Morris [2] who is a big fan of evolutionary convergence. He seems to believe that humans evolved in a way that is close to optimal and that aliens would have to evolve in a similar manner. The article s claim that aliens will look and behave like us has three flaws, one is assuming that humans are the ideal form for space travel, another is the significant possibilities for vast objective differences between species, and the final one is the human tendency to regard small differences as being really significant. The Arrogance of Assuming that Humans are Ideal. It seems extremely arrogant to assume that humans have the ideal form for performing tasks that we have not yet performed such as traveling to another star system. To assume that it is certain that humans will colonise the stars is also extremely arrogant and foolish as well, I think that a significant amount of money should be devoted to existential risks that we face. People who believe that humans will inevitably colonise the stars (probably because God told them there s no other reason for such certainty) will tend to oppose taking prudent measures to reduce the probability of failure. We should also consider the possibility that a human society that colonises another star system at some future time might be so different from us that we regard them as alien. How Might Aliens be Different? It seems to me that one problem with the theory of convergent evolution (as applied to different planets) is that evolution doesn t seem to work in big steps. It seems to me that for an increasing portion of the jobs in our technological society there would be a benefit in having four arms and two legs, and maybe having more than four fingers on two of the hands. But evolving a bone structure that makes four arms useful is not a minor tweak so it seems unlikely to happen naturally we might be able to genetically modify humans to have four arms and two legs with some future technology. I can t believe that four limbs is the optimal number for every mammal, amphibian and reptile (apart from the legless ones), that two legs plus two wings is the optimal number for every bird, and that six legs is the optimal number for every insect. I also can t believe that two arms and two legs is the optimum number for every primate with the only significant difference in limbs being the primates that possess a prehensile tail. Evolution doesn t produce perfect creatures, what it does is to produce creatures that tend to be slightly fitter than their ancestors. So even if there was an optimal form for a species that develops interstellar-craft, there would be no reason to assume that humans have such a form even if we had developed interstellar travel. I think it s relatively safe to assume that aliens would have two eyes (stereoscopic vision is a significant advantage), but apart from that I don t think we can assume much about their appearance. For example I don t think that there s any inherent reason why creatures as intelligent as current humans could not evolve from octopuses 8 arms would be quite useful for operating machines. Aliens that spread beyond their own home planet don t have to be optimal for such tasks, they only need to become the dominant species on their planet, develop decent technology, and then want to leave their planet. A species that took 100,000 years to achieve what humans have achieved in the past 100 years might not be considered optimal but it might still be able to eventually launch interstellar craft. I don t think it s reasonable to assume that aliens would have to be as intelligent as humans to do that. But it does seem most likely that any aliens who manage to get here would be more intelligent than us. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond has a really interesting analysis of how human history was determined by geography and the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication. Part of the explanation for the apparent lack of intelligent aliens could be planets where the dominant species was stuck in a situation like that of the people of New Guinea, the lack of plants and animals suitable for domestication prevented their society from developing. A stone-age human civilisation could potentially be stable for millions of years. The article says Extra-terrestrials might not only resemble us but have our foibles, such as greed, violence and a tendency to exploit others resources . Well for starters a species that can displace all other contenders to become the dominant species in their planet would have to be capable of greed and violence. So that is probably correct but is not really going out on a limb. Physorg.com has a short article describing the benefits of sexual reproduction in terms of the rate of accumulation of harmful mutations [3]. So it seems that sexual reproduction is most likely among intelligent aliens. But I don t think that there is any reason to assume that aliens couldn t be hermaphrodites. The Telegraph article claims that Star Wars and Star Trek could be more accurate than they ever imagined in depicting alien life , but given that Star Trek has avoided homosexuality even when demanded by the plot it seems that whatever aliens do in the bedroom would be way outside the range of activities alluded to in Star Trek. It seems that almost all sci-fi has aliens that are less alien than a significant portion of the human population. I think it s safe to predict that if we should meet aliens they will not look like humans wearing cheap make-up or rubber suits that has more to do with the budgets assigned to movie studios than any claim to potential realism. It seems most likely that a society capable of developing space travel would need a great deal of training for it s young before they become self-sufficient. Species of animal that abandon their eggs and hope for the best seem unlikely to succeed in doing that. I think that this implies that a pair-bonded species that spends an extended amount of time raising their young is most likely to succeed. Perceptions of Aliens Vulcans are widely regarded as being on the Autism spectrum. So it seems that having some similarities in personality to about 1% of the human population is enough to convince most human viewers that the character in question is an alien. A Google search for such things just turns up many references to people on the Autism spectrum who feel like aliens which incidentally is the source of the alias ETBE [4] that I used for more than 10 years before being diagnosed as an Aspie. Star Trek aliens aren t actually very alien by human standards! Given the repeated demonstrations of the general human inability to recognise the psychological similarities in people from different countries or racial/ethnic/religious backgrounds it seems likely that few people would recognise aliens as being at all similar to us. As so many people are unable to recognise the fundamental similarities in people who happen to have a different skin color I can t imagine many people immediately regarding beings that look like octopuses as having human traits. Could an eusocial organism (such as bees or ants) develop space travel? It seems to me that most people wouldn t regard humans who act in a manner that resembles ants (such as the Borg Collective) as being like us . The possibility of an eusocial race evolved from humans is explored in Coalescent: A Novel (Destiny s Children, Bk. 1) by Stephen Baxter (and more briefly in the sequels). Probability The universe is a large place. Making a specific prediction about the first alien species that we might encounter might make some sense. But given the potentially billions of species that might be out there we should assume that some of the more improbable forms are represented. Claiming that anything in particular is impossible seems very rash. Also anyone who makes claims about what evolution should do seems to have missed the point. What evolution does is to give rise to species that tend to be a better fit for the environment. Different environments result in different creatures. We can try and predict what creatures might evolve, but we don t get to say that things should happen.

• [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7071013/Aliens-are-likely-to-look-and-behave-like-us.html
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Conway_Morris
• [3] http://www.physorg.com/news183318256.html
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraterrestrial_Biological_Entity

(maybe) After the two updates in the previous post, I got further and eventually fixed the root of the remaining problems on ARM. It appears I got on the wrong track at the very beginning of the investigation. My first test was to disable the JIT compiler during the tests, and it didn t affect the result. I assumed from there that the JIT compiler was doing fine and wasn t involved. Which led me to believe the alignment of the stack at 32-bits word boundary instead of 64-bits was a standard behaviour. I turns out my first test itself was wrong, because I hadn t disabled the JIT compiler at all. You need to modify the runxpcshelltests.py script to disable the JIT, and not fiddle with the javascript.options.jit.chrome preference. The JIT compiler was misaligning the stack, and disassembling the generated code leading to broken behaviour revealed that it was doing so when setting up arguments on the stack for function calls. While I was afraid this would be difficult to fix without changing a lot of code, and first only disabled the JIT compiler, it turns out the way nanojit works by compiling the last instructions first did make it straightforward to fix. But ARM was not the only RC buggy architecture left after sparc and powerpc were fixed. MIPS remained. Alpha fails, too, but it is not a release architecture. Update: It appears hurd fails too, but like Alpha, it is not a release architecture. So, while I didn t want to wait 50 hours for a build, I managed to execute a failing test with the last xulrunner-1.9.1 packages that got built (before I enabled the test suite) under qemu. And I was able to track down the origin of the bug: the xpcom layer that translate function calls between languages doesn t fill arguments correctly when they are smaller than 32 bits. While the code is adapted to the mipsel case, which is little endian, it doesn t work on mips, which is big endian. I came up with a patch that should work, and which I hope won t break mipsel as a consequence. All that is left to do is to build and test the fix. I hope someone else will be able to do that for me. All in all except a 1.9.1.8 release this week with a lot less red on the buildd status page.

This spring I'm taking a class that does all its programming assignments in MIT Scheme. The last time I had to write Scheme for class, we used PLT Scheme, and thus the DrScheme editor. This time, with that option out, I've decided to do the assignments in Emacs. It is, after all, an editor built out of lisp. I've used vim for the last five years or so. Some people ask me why this is so I do go to MIT after all, where Emacs was originally written. The answer to that is simply that Debian got to me first, and at the time at least, the people I knew there used vim. I've heard Emacs is good, but up until this point every time I've tried it I've thrown it down in frustration and then couldn't figure out how to exit the damn thing. This time I was more determined, and made it through the initial hump of being completely useless at the editor. Here are a few of my observations so far, after mucking around for a couple days over a period of about two weeks:

• The movement commands seem much more awkward to me. Since I'm using the Colemak keyboard layout, I have backspace bound to Caps-Lock, and it is not available to be a Control key. It may be that I just need some more time to get used to emacs not being modal.
• It's awkward to switch between split windows using C-x o when I have 4-6 open at a time. I'd like to be able to jump between specific ones directly.
• C-x 3 will always split the window containing the current buffer evenly in two, which makes it difficult to, for example, create three equally sized vertical windows, side-by-side. Vim defaults to creating evenly sized windows even when you invoke a split twice in a row.
• The paradigm of being able to have e.g. a scheme buffer or a shell as one of my split windows is nice, though I haven't yet gotten used to having to use emacs special bindings to interact with those buffers rather than what I'd use if I'd just invoked the command from a terminal.
• I noticed that emacs automatically detects the VCS in my directory. It seems incredibly bizarre to me to interact with my VCS from my editor. Do people actually do this?
• Emacs's use of the tab character to perform code indentation is interesting. It does solve the problem of code being auto-indented when you don't want it to, which sometimes happens to me in vim, but I wonder if it actually ends up saving keystrokes in the end, since I think not auto-indenting is the exception rather than the rule for me.
• There seem to be two different methods for completion: "dynamic abbrev" expansion, which I believe is analagous to what I'm used to in vim, and M-TAB (what a horrible keybinding, as most window managers will grab this for window-switching), which seems to be some sort of language-specific completion. I haven't yet seen how this can be harnessed since the symbolic completion seems to be irrelevant for scheme.
• Emacs's syntax highlighting gets at least one thing right about scheme that vim doesn't: extended comments between # # patterns.
• Bookmarks seem waaay more verbose/awkward than vim's marks. C-x r m NAME huh? I like being able to have a very short pattern to mark and jump back to points in a file, like vim's m/ syntax for marks. Maybe I'll need to bind the bookmark functions to something else.

I'm pretty sure at this point that I'm still trying to bend emacs into being vim with different keybindings instead of figuring out how emacs wants to be used. It's also difficult to compare and contrast between the two editors in that my .vimrc contains years of tweaks and customizations whereas my .emacs started out as a clean slate. There are two things I'm doing to try to mentally separate emacs from vim, to avoid my fingers' muscle memory from becoming confused:

1. I'm always using emacs in an X window with dark-on-light text, whereas I always use vim in a terminal with light-on-dark text.
2. I'm only writing scheme in emacs. No other languages so far.

I'm planning to keep working on these programming assignments in emacs, despite it being annoying slower than I would be in vim. Tips and pointers for improving my experience are welcome.

Right now, your government is probably engaged in the discussion of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). You are likely not aware of that because your government has been actively keeping these negotiations and details surrounding them secret. Your government does not want you to know about a treaty that has far-reaching negative effects on your freedom, as well as your basic human rights. If you did know, you might speak up and make it difficult for the drivers of ACTA to smoothly push their interests past you. The red light should light up in your head right now! The goals of the trade agreement that is being negotiated are multifarious, but essentially seem to centre around challenges related to intellectual property, and copyright in the digital age, even though it is sometimes claimed that the agreement serves primarily to contain trade of fake Prada bags and Rolex watches. In reality, ACTA is about content producers like movie studios, who try everything to prevent you from copying their work without paying for it even if you cannot actually purchase the work, because of e.g. technical measures designed to prevent certain people from legally obtaining content, or simply because the media companies are greedy and consider it PR-savvy to delay the release of a given work in certain countries until after people have had a chance to pay a lot of money to the cinemas. In theory, a creative work goes out of copyright 50 or 75 years after its author died, depending on whether the creativity can be attributed to a person or a corporation, respectively. Therefore, 50 or 75 years after creation, it gets increasingly hard to monetise a work that has not been reinvented in that period of time. Sounds plausible to you and me, but this sort of stuff frightens companies like Disney, who seem powerful enough to simply have the law changed. That is not how things should work. The media producers are failing to control the Internet, and hence they want to turn it into something more like cable TV, which they do know how to control. ACTA aims to make copyright infringement a criminal offence. ACTA wants to make it possible for a government to cut you off the Internet because someone thinks you did something bad they don t actually have to prove it though, accusation is enough. Similar efforts have already failed all over the world, e.g. in France and New Zealand. That s a sign, not a reason to try again. ACTA wants to set in stone that you have absolutely no rights when you cross borders. This is largely already the case border officials can pretty much do with you whatever they want now it s supposed to be made official, and legally binding. ACTA will create a culture of surveillance and suspicion. ACTA is designed to break the Internet, among other things. But worst of all: I am just speculating because we are not supposed to know the details. The best current source of information on ACTA seems to be Canadian law professor Dr. Michael Geist, who has been collecting content and linking to articles consistently since the ACTA negotiations commenced 2 3 years ago. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has comprehensive resources available. It s even more important today than before to put an end to this secrecy. Don t let your government enter secret agreements that affect you and your life, refusing to talk to you about it beforehand, and probably refusing all responsibility afterwards. Talk to your politicians and ask questions that cannot be answered with stock replies. If you have specific contact addresses for politicians, please let me know so I can add them. Colin Jackson helped me with this article at Kiwi Foo Camp. He also takes an issue with the secrecy around ACTA.

A mural that geeks just might like. (via one of my students )

A mural that geeks just might like. (via one of my students )

Back in the Lenny release cycle, I published some statistics of the release critical bugs. As we are (try to) get nearer to a freeze of Squeeze I think it's time to start that again. But first, a small explanation follows, what these numbers actually mean. If you look at our official bug tracking system currently lists 750 release critical bugs affecting the next stable release. While this number is kind of true, it is not accurate to use it to measure the state of the release. The unofficial rc bug thingy at bts.turmzimmer.net is quite more powerful to actual get some interesting numbers, as you can ignore specific kinds of bug and filter them properly. Note, that at the very end of the detailed list of the bugs you get the total number. With that interface you can for example filter them by different distributions. For example it currently lists 650 rc bugs in total for any distribution, but if you filter for squeeze bugs, you get only 518. That's a different number as the official bug tracker shows; I'm not entirely sure why, but a part of that difference is that both the official and the unofficial web pages are only synced periodically. Should someone be able to give a good explanation about the differences, please step forward ;) But let's play more: You can filter for bugs valid in squeeze-only, but not in sid. These bugs are already fixed in sid, but the packages haven't yet migrated to squeeze. Currently that are 94 bugs. We can furthermore ignore bugs only in sid; when squeeze is unaffected, we just don't migrate the broken package from sid to squeeze. The number that is most interesting for contributors is the number of bugs affecting both, sid and squeeze, as these are the ones which really need to be fixed as no fix is known, yet. So filtering for bugs for both we are down to 424 at the moment. But of these 424 remaining release critical bugs, we can still ignore some (for now). For example bugs concerning packages in non-free or contrib (9 currently) won't stop us from release, will they? There are also many bugs marked as pending (32), meaning that the maintainer is aware of the bug has a fix prepared and is just waiting with the upload a moment. Some of this bugs have already a patch (64), but no one reviewed it and uploaded it by now. You'll also see that you can ignore merged bug reports (47). That are bug reports reporting the very same bug several times. Finally there are bug fixes already uploaded to the so called delayed queue (6). This are bug fixes which where uploaded by someone else than the real maintainer, but to give the maintainer a chance to act on himself or to comment, the upload is delayed by some days before it will actually hit the archive. Currently 6 bugs are fixed by uploads to delayed. 17 bugs are claimed meaning that someone already said he will take care of this bug (but they are not finished, yet). You could also ignore the bugs invalidated by today's britney bug category, representing bugs which will vanish after the next migration of packages from sid to freeze, but as we are only looking at rc bugs in both sid and squeeze, this number will always 0 ;) That leaves bugs somehow other marked as fixed which are bugs (39) where I honestly have no Idea what they are... If someone can explain them, please do so ;) Here is a small tabular showing the above numbers:

Total:	650
Affecting Squeeze:	518
Squeeze-only:	94
Unfixed bugs remaining in Squeeze:	424

Of these 424 bugs...

... are pending	32
... are patched:	64
... are duplicates:	47
... are in Non-free or contrib:	9
... are claimed by someone:	17
... are fixed in the delayed queue:	6
... are somehow marked as fixed:	39

Or in other words:
Release critical bugs left in squeeze, when ignoring all these:
260 That's a pretty number, isn't it? There are only 260 bugs left which need our immediate attention :) But that is a rather optimistic view of the situation. We e.g. assume that all bugs having a patch are really fixed by the patch. We also ignored, that some bugs in squeeze are already fixed in sid, but the package can't migrate because the package in sid contains a new bug. (Which happens to release wizard Marc Brockschmidt quite often.) So if we take off the purple classes and take a more pessimistic view (release mangers must be pessimists to ensure high quality packages ;) we count the bugs in squeeze and ignore only those bugs, which are:

• hinted / delayed upload (hint means a package is forcefully migrated from sid to squeeze without waiting the usual time span)
• merged
• contrib
• non-free
• bugs invalidated by today's britney (fixed in sid, package will migrate soon)

With this release managers views, 424 bugs remain to be fixed somehow before we can release. As far as I know, we can freeze once that number is reliable under 300. So we better get working ;) When asked, what is the thing mostly needed to help the release, I was told: mips porter!
As you might have read we have some problems with the mips and mipsel architectures. It seems we have all the hardware we need, but it doesn't work very reliable. I have been told, that over 300 packages are only waiting to be build on mips* architectures. So if you can help us in that regard, please contact our mips porter mailing list. Update: Andreas Barth just told me, that he already send a couple of mails to the mips list describing the problem and asking questions. Answers to these questions would be most welcome and accpeted gladly.

It might be quite premature, but in phpMyadmin we've started our preparations for this year Google Summer of Code. This is basically just one of followups to the team meeting at FOSDEM, where we decide to apply again this year, but to try as hard as we can to be standalone project and not hidden inside of MySQL. We're grateful for participation in their project, however we feel it would be easier to manage if we're standalone project. So if you are a student who might be interested in participating, you can already browse our ideas list (this time PHP coding skills are not strictly necessary as I've given there a documentation improvements also) or come with your ideas and follow our student checklist, to see what you can do to get accepted (in case we're accepted to GSoC).

Should universities switch away from hosting their own email and join the Google bandwagon? Adi Kamdar wrote to the Students for Free Culture discussion mailing list linking us to a Yale Daily News article discussing an "almost-definite" switch for Yale to Google Apps for Education. Adi asked for thoughts, so here are mine.

Privacy One interesting thing about the Gmail option is that, when deployed for all students, students have no choice but to let Google read their official email. Some students might take part in activism that they want to shield from Google, a corporation with its own interests, or the attackers that attempt to break into Google's systems (see the recent attacks from crafty pro-Chinese-government hacktivists). Before a switch to Gmail, each student could choose if Google was the kind of company they wanted to share their email with. After a switch to Google Apps, the choice is made for them. But this highlights a different issue: Before a switch to Google, students have no choice but to let university administrators read their official email. That's not necessarily optimal, either. Others have pointed out in this thread that this option comes with legal advantages with regard to privacy law. At least that's some consolation. It's still true that students can encrypt their email and make it difficult for any eavesdropper to figure out the bodies of their emails. But that's no use for hiding the identities of the people with whom they communicate -- no email crypto I know hides email addresses.

Software freedom and open standards This is juxtaposed against another difficult situation: Matt Senate wrote about the sucky Squirrelmail system that Berkeley uses (used?) for webmail. The fact that SquirrelMail is Free Software is small consolation for Matt. From his perspective, because it's a hosted web application, he has no more freedom than he would have with Gmail. At least Berkeley's IMAP server followed standards! That's more than we can say for the Gmail IMAP server, which is famous for basically supporting just enough IMAP for Microsoft Outlook to work. But standards compliance is small consolation. If the university email server "properly" supports IMAP, but isn't fast or doesn't provide the new extensions that make threading or search speedy, it's not much relief to know that you can use any client you want to slowly read your email.

Internet history Truth be told, University-hosted Internet services are based on what you might call the original Internet perspective. The Internet began as a network of networks. A University was a network island unto itself, running its own email, news, and Ethernet services. When inter-network connection was available, you can email people at other institutions. When it wasn't, well -- the Internet is a useful tool, but it's down right now. "Don't worry," the admins might tell you, "you can still read your email with PINE." It used to be that inter-network connectivity was icing on top of the "real" network a person used. Today, inter-network connectivity is the whole point of a network connection. How embarrassing for each individual network! To test if our connections are working, we skip right over the local content and point our web browsers at a search engine. Users today aren't satisfied to read their email from imap.institution.edu and read USENET news-- they thirst for real-time access resources available beyond the university. Students weren't interested in the J-Stream service I helped set up at Johns Hopkins; instead they mostly posted and watched videos at YouTube. They don't really care if the the student-oriented wiki is based on campus or instead halfway across the globe (say, in Japan). The original Internet was based on autonomous networks and opt-in routing. But eventually, all the networks opted in. Users drive everything, and when they don't get what they want, they vote with their feet. Companies like Facebook and Google stand ready and armed to provide shockingly-efficient services to millions of users who choose them. You could say that with today's network, the autonomy shifted from the network to the users. The nice thing about University-run services is that students can organize and ask for changes, as Fred pointed out. And for people like me, there's something nice about knowing the person who runs your email system. But if your busy university staff doesn't have time to investigate an email server with fast full-text indexing, you might wish for change. Having the university tear down its internal services is a progression toward seeing its network as simply transit. Imagine the loss of pride. It used to be that the university personally ran a system for helping users get what they wanted. As it becomes simply transit, the staff are just greasing the cogs of a larger, invisible machine that's easy for users take for granted. Some netizens like me hold email as sacred, a beautiful institution based on standards and a decision to interoperate. When your university switches to Gmail, I'll be sadder, but maybe what you'll get is professors who can spend more time with students and less time configuring desktop software.

Trade offs Every university has a choice: Pay hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year for dedicated staff to run an in-house email system, or let Google do it. Think for a moment of what good could come from those dollars when put to use in other ways for students. Your school could start a switch to all-organic food. It could start paying more of its employees a living wage. Imagine the travel funding for student activities that can come from hundreds of thousands a year well-spent. It could run a massive used textbook clearinghouse to help students avoid pouring their dollars into the textbook industry. And now cry with me. What I've asked you do is to consider sacrificing institutional autonomy for cold, hard cash. That's to say nothing of the ecological benefits or the productivity increases possible from having Google's paid experts run this part of the computing system.

Conclusion Is an official Google email system much different than the reality most students I know live, which is configuring their student email address to forward to gmail.com? For those of us who would be sadder with one more push toward centralizing email with Google -- for those who see it as the behemoth whose size threatens the decentralization that used to be the core of the Internet -- I ask you to think positive. "See the profit from your loss." I have no conclusions for you, just niggling questions.

If I told you that you suffer from MEAD you might think (if you are an anthropologist like me) that you suffer from an obsession with a plump anthropologist of said name who popularized the discipline bringing home tales of Samoan teenagers who did not seem to suffer from the angst and anxiety of their American counterpart. Or you might think MASSIVE EMAIL ANXIETY DISORDER, which is a DSM diagnosis I invented last week and thus have minimized the work that the American Psychiatric Association will have to put into updating their DSM (you re welcome). So I have penned down its major characteristics and effects so that you too can identify with some other inner pathology that might mark your daily life and being (you re welcome)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association currently defines Massive Email Anxiety Disorder (MEAD) disorder in the following way. Please note that while this definition of MEAD is the most definitive and clearly produced to date, there are several potential problems with this definition that will hopefully be addressed by the task forces, editors, and research coordinators of the association as time progresses. The Current DSM-IV Definition (Abridged): A. A persistent fear of one or more emails situations in which an author of an email worries about the status of a sent email. The individual fears that the tone or content of a message was misinterpreted or that an email never arrived to its correct destination. Alternatively, they worry excessively about why they have not received a response. B. Exposure to the feared situation almost invariably provokes anxiety, which may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally pre-disposed Panic Attack. C. The person recognizes that this fear is unreasonable or excessive. D. The feared situations are avoided or else are endured with intense anxiety and distress. Alternatively the person suffering from MEAD shuffles over to their partner or office-mate to talk (obsessively) about the nature and possible effect of the email, sometimes for hours, sometimes even for days. E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress in writing email, which interferes significantly with the person s normal routine, occupational (academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, or there is marked distress about having the phobia. F. In individuals under age 18 years, the duration is at least 6 months. G. The fear or avoidance is not due to direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., drugs, medications) or a general medical condition not better accounted for by another mental disorder. Problems with the DSM Definition of Massive Email Anxiety Disorder While this definition is clearly the most definitive and precise official definition produced so far, Massive Email Anxiety Disorder has only been officially recognized since 2020, and the problem did not become adequately explained until the 2015 version of the DSM. Thus, the definition of MEAD disorder is becoming clearer and more precise with each edition.

Written in honor of current revisions for the DSM, expected to be published in 2013

If I told you that you suffer from MEAD you might think (if you are an anthropologist like me) that you suffer from an obsession with a plump anthropologist of said name who popularized the discipline bringing home tales of Samoan teenagers who did not seem to suffer from the angst and anxiety of their American counterpart. Or you might think MASSIVE EMAIL ANXIETY DISORDER, which is a DSM diagnosis I invented last week and thus have minimized the work that the American Psychiatric Association will have to put into updating their DSM (you re welcome). So I have penned down its major characteristics and effects so that you too can identify with some other inner pathology that might mark your daily life and being (you re welcome)

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association currently defines Massive Email Anxiety Disorder (MEAD) disorder in the following way. Please note that while this definition of MEAD is the most definitive and clearly produced to date, there are several potential problems with this definition that will hopefully be addressed by the task forces, editors, and research coordinators of the association as time progresses. The Current DSM-IV Definition (Abridged): A. A persistent fear of one or more emails situations in which an author of an email worries about the status of a sent email. The individual fears that the tone or content of a message was misinterpreted or that an email never arrived to its correct destination. Alternatively, they worry excessively about why they have not received a response. B. Exposure to the feared situation almost invariably provokes anxiety, which may take the form of a situationally bound or situationally pre-disposed Panic Attack. C. The person recognizes that this fear is unreasonable or excessive. D. The feared situations are avoided or else are endured with intense anxiety and distress. Alternatively the person suffering from MEAD shuffles over to their partner or office-mate to talk (obsessively) about the nature and possible effect of the email, sometimes for hours, sometimes even for days. E. The avoidance, anxious anticipation, or distress in writing email, which interferes significantly with the person s normal routine, occupational (academic) functioning, or social activities or relationships, or there is marked distress about having the phobia. F. In individuals under age 18 years, the duration is at least 6 months. G. The fear or avoidance is not due to direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., drugs, medications) or a general medical condition not better accounted for by another mental disorder. Problems with the DSM Definition of Massive Email Anxiety Disorder While this definition is clearly the most definitive and precise official definition produced so far, Massive Email Anxiety Disorder has only been officially recognized since 2020, and the problem did not become adequately explained until the 2015 version of the DSM. Thus, the definition of MEAD disorder is becoming clearer and more precise with each edition.

Written in honor of current revisions for the DSM, expected to be published in 2013

I found out yesterday that my university s Microsoft Exchange Server account stopped forwarding my mail on 8 December 2009. As a result, mail accumulated there and remained unseen. Dear examiners, paper authors, supervisors, sponsors, participants, and peers who responded to my calls and cries related to my PhD thesis. I am terribly sorry that you were subjected to this. You replied usually within a few days, but I still sent you reminder after reminder in the weeks to follow. You must have thought that I was a real dork. Please forgive me. I really appreciate your patience! I filed a ticket with my university s IT service provider, which got closed the next day with it should now work again . That wasn t going to cut it for me, so I reopened the ticket, asking for an explanation. Next, I received an apology with a bit of speculation. After a bit of research, it seems that the reason was to be found in the inconsistency of being an external staff member (i.e. an e-mail address outside of the Active Directory domain), but still having an account on the server. On 8 December 2009, the server was upgraded with a service pack. This caused Exchange to go a little manic on the housekeeping. After all, why would anyone ever want to forward their e-mail elsewhere, and still have an account? Well, I certainly don t want an account, and yet I have to have one: Microsoft has bought their ways into the university and spread their germs all across, I need credentials to be able to access shared files, print, browse the library, or search the phone book. However, considering that UL s Outlook Web Access instance does not let users of decent browsers search their mailboxes (a premium feature reserved for users of Internet Exploder), one cannot manipulate more than a page-full of e-mails at a time, bounce messages, or do many of the other operations that make dealing with large amounts of e-mail possible, and because Exchange mail if it doesn t get lost in the first place sucks in so many other ways, I certainly prefer my mail to be handled by a real mail server with a proper mail filter (writeup in progress). Maybe the Exchange service pack was simply designed to get rid of outcasts like me who don t buy into the low-Microsoft-quality vendor lock-in? We ll never know, thanks to the proprietarity of their software (and the fact that the university service provider apparently does not keep logs of changes). NP: AC/DC: Back in Black

Working on some document today, it occurred to me, once again, that OpenOffice's method for designing and applying documents styling totally sucks! Granted, this was not the first time that I cam to this conclusion but, today, I've come to realize that OpenOffice's paradigms constantly make me waste time trying to form a mental image of how every style element is suppose to relate to the other one, yet without having the full picture available within a single, easy-to-read document. Also, there is a complete lack of consistency in how style elements work. Some want to be defined in millimeters, while others want to be defined in points, while other still in number of lines. What a mess! In short: to become remotely usable, OpenOffice needs to approach document styling via the "HTML document with a separate CSS style sheet" paradigm. In other words, I need to be able to edit styles globally, as a group and separately from the document content itself, rather than having to click my way through a multitude of dialogs, for each and every type of text elements. To compare this with web design, there, I can focus on the actual content, formatted around semantic text elements (headers, paragraphs, block quotes, etc.) and then decide on the presentation styling as a separate global process by attaching a CSS style sheet, in which the relation between each type of text element and how it will be displayed is crystal clear, because it's handled as a unified style editing process. I think that this is one area in which Free Software could innovate in a positive way, by distancing itself from the Redmondesque practices of Microsoft Word, from which OpenOffice borrows too much. How about having a proper Style Editor application (similar to a CSS editor), within the OpenOffice suite, while Open Writer itself would only be allowed to load the style sheets produced by it and to apply them to semantic text text elements?

RCBW - #20 With a couple of days of delay, here are this last week squashes, by yours truly:

• bug #567767 - nxml-mode - request removal, integrated into emacs23
• bug #546764 - d-feet - add missing dep on hicolor-icon-theme
• bug #566290 - php-wikidiff2 - add missing dep/substvar on phpapi-*
• bug #567860 - php-net-ping - sponsored fix (+ upstream release) for DM maintainer
• bug #248275 - anteater - proposed removal
• bug #536285 - mirage - avoid tricking users to delete the wrong file (patch by Evgeni Golov)

The delay is due to FOSDEM, it's hard to squash bugs when you are: (1) having fun (best FOSDEM ever, if you ask me), (2) connected with very poor network connectivity (let's say: FOSDEM-quality network). Also, there are just 6 squashes, but last week there were 8, so ... (I know, I suck). Among the main highlights of the week, I just want to cite Mehdi Dogguy: he was with me at JFLA 2010 last week and I've managed to grab him into the "RCBW tunnel". With a handful of well-targeted NMUs, he has fixed about 10 RC bugs in the few days of the conference. He is too shy to blog about that, but since I'm evil, I'm disclosing it here Welcome on board, Mehdi! (now you're doomed: you must continue doing that!)

Looking at using google apps for my home email, as I want to be able to have my home machines totally turned off from time to time. Found this interesting gem in the sign up agreement (which I have not yet agreed to ):

11. PR. Customer agrees not to issue any public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement without Google s prior written approval. Google may (i) include Customer s Brand Features in presentations, marketing materials, and customer lists (which includes, without limitation, customer lists posted on Google s web sites and screen shots of Customer s implementation of the Service) and (ii) issue a public announcement regarding the existence or content of this Agreement. Upon Customer s request, Google will furnish Customer with a sample of such usage or announcement.

This is rather asymmetrical: If I agree to the sign up page, I cannot say I am using google apps , but google can say Robert is using google apps . While I can appreciate not wanting to be dissed on if something goes wrong, this is very much not open! A couple of implications: Everyone seeking support for google apps in the apps forums is probably in violation of the sign up agreement; we can assume that anyone having a terrible experience has been squelched under this agreement. Le sigh.

remember Mutt's mail in Org-mode and jump back to them As already anticipated, I've been implementing my own Getting Things Done work flow. This post documents one of its main bricks: the integration between Mutt and Org-mode. As a geek, my main incoming stream of TODO items and information in general is email. As emails hit my INBOX, I either deal with them immediately (reply, archive, delete) or I need to store them elsewhere, possibly adding extra information such as a deadline, a personal note, the associated next action, the context in which it is actionable, etc. This need of adding extra information is what defeats the usage of my mail client (Mutt) as a list manager (in the GTD sense), and that's where I plugged Org-mode in. My main goals are:

1. create Org-mode notes from Mutt, referencing the current email, and possibly inlining some of its metadata (e.g. subject, sender)
2. quickly retrieve referenced emails from Org-mode notes; ideally that should happen in my usual email environment (i.e. Mutt), so that I can process the retrieved mail as usual (e.g. to inform the sender that I did something about it)

In fact, both would be straightforward to achieve if I were using some Emacs-based mail client such as Gnus, but I resist the Emacs operating system syndrome, and therefore I insist in using my beloved Mutt. Let's see how the two parts of the interaction between Mutt and Org-mode work. (1) Mutt Org-mode (there ...) The interaction from Mutt to Org-mode happens via org-protocol. Using it external applications can feed content to Org-mode note templates, which are then interactively edited (via emacsclient), and finally filed away. The Mutt glue macro from my ~/.muttrc is as follow:

macro index \eR " ~/bin/remember-mail\n"

The remember-mail script is trivial: it parses the fed mail from STDIN (using a couple of legacy Perl modules) and then invokes org-protocol. The relevant configuration from my ~/.emacs is reported below; the comments explain the various parts:

;; standard org <-> remember stuff, RTFM
(org-remember-insinuate)
(setq org-default-notes-file "~/org/gtd.org")
(setq org-remember-templates  ;; mail-specific note template, identified by "m"
      '(("Mail" ?m "* %?\n\n  Source: %u, %c\n  %i" nil)))
;; ensure that emacsclient will show just the note to be edited when invoked
;; from Mutt, and that it will shut down emacsclient once finished;
;; fallback to legacy behavior when not invoked via org-protocol.
(add-hook 'org-remember-mode-hook 'delete-other-windows)
(setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)
(defadvice org-remember-finalize (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember finalization"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-remember-kill (after delete-frame-at-end activate)
  "Delete frame at remember abort"
  (progn (if my-org-protocol-flag (delete-frame))
     (setq my-org-protocol-flag nil)))
(defadvice org-protocol-remember (before set-org-protocol-flag activate)
  (setq my-org-protocol-flag t))

The result is that when you hit ESC-R in Mutt, emacsclient will be fired up in place presenting a note template that already contains relevant mail information (date, subject, from) and lets you add extra information before going away. Additionally, the email message-id will be hidden in the note as a mutt: hyperlink with anchor text "mail". (2) Org-mode Mutt (... and back again) Going back means that clicking on a "mail" hyperlink within an Org-mode note should bring up a Mutt instance showing the original message, in its context (e.g. its own mailbox). Achieving that consists of 2 separate steps:

1. looking up a specific message by Message-ID
2. firing up Mutt on the looked up message

For the first part I use maildir-utils (AKA mu): a Xapian-based mail indexing tool, which nicely integrates with Mutt; check out my previous blog post on the subject for a sample setup. Using mu, Message-ID lookups are as simple as:

zack@usha:~$ mu find -f p m:E1NbJad-0007x9-B7@ries.debian.org
/home/zack/Maildir/Debian.project/cur/1264883664_0.9472.usha,U=6320,FMD5=2284e927bb93d8a2ec434f5614dc04ba:2,S

Note: I'm relying upon maildir-utils version 0.6 or greater, for all presented scripts. For the second part I use the mutt-open script which fires upon a Mutt instance on the maildir containing a specific message, and then "hits" the appropriate keys to open the message and shutdown the sidebar (if desired). It is a nicely reusable script, which I've being using elsewhere too. The needed glue on the emacs side is just a function to invoke mutt-open in a brand new terminal, and its declaration as the handler for mutt: URLs.

(defun open-mail-in-mutt (message)
  "Open a mail message in Mutt, using an external terminal.
Message can be specified either by a path pointing inside a
Maildir, or by Message-ID."
  (interactive "MPath or Message-ID: ")
  (shell-command
   (format "gnome-terminal -e \"%s %s\""
       (substitute-in-file-name "$HOME/bin/mutt-open") message)))
;; add support for "mutt:ID" links
(org-add-link-type "mutt" 'open-mail-in-mutt)

Voil ! Download Summary of scripts and configuration snippets discussed above:

• remember-mail - store in Org-mode a note back-referencing an email
• mutt-open - open Mutt on an email having a specific Message-ID
• Emacs configuration
• Mutt configuration

If you read the literature on tricksters, you will confront a string of words that capture the moral quality and sensibilities of these figures, figures scattered across time and place and largely enshrined in myths and stories:

Cunning, deceit, lying, provocateur, mischief, audacious, thief, play, shrewdness, audacity, grotesque, over the top, appetite, shocking, fun, delight, wit, trap, subversive, ability, wanderer.

These figures, which include Coyote, Loki, Hermes, and Eshu, among many more, push the envelope of what is morally acceptable and in so doing, argues Lewis Hyde (in his tome on the subject), renew and revitalize culture, especially the moral stuff of culture. They are not only boundary crossers, they are boundary makers. As the title of his book so succinctly and masterfully broadcasts Trickster Makes this World. Or as he suggests with a bit more elaboration:

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be a space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on p. 9

At the opening of the book, Hyde asks whether there are tricksters in modern industrial societies. His answer is a plain no. The con man who might share some similarities does not qualify. For in fact what is needed is either a polytheistic system or lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people, to instructions, and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly distributed p.13 He does locate the spirit of the trickster in spirited individuals: in Picasso, in Frederick Douglass, in laudable figures who push certain boundaries and renew our world for the better but nonetheless fall short of the archetypal trickster. I bet it is pretty obvious where I am going with all of this given my object of study: phreakers, hackers, and trollers. The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster). Their relationship to other powers are many and can be located in terms of information, intellectual property, the government, language itself, institutions of power like the FBI and AT&T. The list is not short. For a few years now I have been thinking about the linkages between the trickster and hackers as well as the troller but it was only in the fall when I found myself trapped in a hospital for a week that I finally cracked open the book by Hyde and devoured it. Within a the first few pages, it was undeniable: there are many links to be made between the trickster and hacking. Many of these figures, push boundaries of all sorts: they upset ideas of propriety and property; they use their sharpened wits sometimes for play, sometimes for political ends; they get trapped by their cunning (which happens ALL the time with tricksters! That is how they learn); and they remake the world, technically, socially, and legally and includes software, licensing and even forms of literature (think textfile, the Jargon File or most dramatically, ED). But if the trickster generally resides in myth, and the trickster of the information age resides in practice, myth matters everywhere because there is a mythos created around these figures. Sometimes the mythos is propagated these groups (take a look of ED for example or Phrack in the past) and of course the media has played an undeniable role. And yet, unlike what is represented in the pages of Hyde, there are living, actual bodies in motion, in conversation, in transformation, a group that goes far beyond the other more controlled and bounded tricksters we might be able to locate in society, such as artistic/political groups like the Yes Men. But the most shocking (or hard to think through) element lies less in the many associations one can make, but in the following curious fact. For the most part the trickster is enshrined in myth and stories but the tricksters I am referring to are in fact full-bodied, full-blooded groups of people who are actually engaging in all sorts of acts of trickery. This is culture not in the sense of art and myth but people and practice and this of course makes an (ethical) difference. What happens when you are the recipient not of a story offered an elder, but the recipient of trickery, an act of pranking or trolling, for example? What happens when you can trace all sorts of instances of boundary re-shifting and remaking, as with the GPL? I think this, even more than the linkages, is what makes this connection so remarkable and I trying to think through what it means to have a figure that we can find and talk to, as opposed to one embodied in myth and story. For now I am going to leave this post short and in the next installment, will start raising some of the connections between trickery and variants of hacking and trolling.