Search Results: "ema"

8 February 2010

Biella Coleman: Hacker and Troller as Trickster

trickster 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.

Russell Coker: Security and Hiring

The main sources of information used when hiring someone are their CV, the interview, and references. CV The CV is written by the applicant or sometimes for the applicant. Naturally it says only good things, if a CV notes no skill in a particular area then it may be used to exclude an employee from consideration. But the trend is towards including a reference to anything that you touch, so someone who lists DBA experience may merely have done a couple of CREATE TABLE operations. Interview The interview is a good test of people skills but is often of little value in assessing technical skills. The interviewer asks questions such as do you know technology X and the applicant says I know that really well . If the company is hiring another person with similar skills to current employees then they can have their current employees sit in on the interview and ask difficult technical questions, but for unknown reasons managers often don t take that option and get no advice from their technical people. Also if the company is hiring someone with specialised skills (EG they are about to implement a new application and want to hire their first employee to work on it) then it may be impossible for them to assess the technical merit of answers. Probably the best use of the interview is to match answers with the CV, if the applicant doesn t appear to know the contents of their own CV then they should be rejected. The biggest problem with interviews is when the questions are all of the form do you know X . Someone who really knows it will say yes as will someone who doesn t know enough to realise the limits of their knowledge and such ignorant people vastly outnumber the skillful people. The real problem is that the people who are moderately skillful will lose out. If someone asks me about my MySQL skills I will tell them that I m not really good at it. Sure I ve run replicated servers with tens of thousands of users running 24*7, but that doesn t mean I m really good at it probably most people who will claim to be great at MySQL without qualification would have less experience than me. References Reference checks rely on an unknown person saying good things about the applicant. For starters there is the issue of the number of references which may not be representative of their employment history EG the applicant could use as a reference the one manager who didn t sack them. The next issue is that there is little incentive for the referee to be honest, most people are aware of instances where someone once worked for a friend and can rely on good references for the rest of their career. If a reference is inaccurate then there is no realistic opportunity for redress. Finally every reference check that I am aware of (checks where I have been the referee or the applicant) has involved the applicant giving the phone number of the referee to the hiring manager! The phone could be owned by a friend or relative of the applicant, so logically a good reference that is based on trusting the applicant to supply the phone number only proves that the applicant is either good or really bad. To make a reference check prove something the recruiter would at a minimum have to phone the number listed in the white-pages for the corporation that used to employ the applicant, asks to speak to the manager of the relevant department, and then gets a reference. Calling a mobile phone number that is supplied by the applicant (which seems to be the standard practice) is essentially trusting the applicant and trust is the root cause of most security problems! Really most of this ends up as trusting the applicant to provide honest evidence that they are trustworthy and believing that the applicant s technical knowledge is good enough to be correct when they say that their technical knowledge is good. It can fail spectacularly when someone isn t trustworthy enough to provide honest evidence of their integrity or when someone doesn t have the skills needed to know that their skills are lacking. As an aside, even if the reference is given accurately and in good faith it may still be misinterpreted. The fact that telephone references are exclusively relied on exacerbates this problem. Ideally references would be in writing with some way of proving their authenticity (maybe using phone verification of the accuracy of the written document). Solutions So how can we solve this? Some people believe that career based social networking software will solve the problems, but as usual I think that software doesn t magically solve human problems. The first challenge when trying to use social networking to solve the problem is to find someone on your friends list who has relevant knowledge, this may be viable in a small industry (EG when someone from bank A applies for work as bank B in the same city). The next issue is that of false friends . I m sure that I m not the only person who has been pressured to add people as friends on social networking sites, the non-computer social interactions really don t prepare people for saying no you are not my friend (apart from high-school I guess). With professional social networking sites there are further issues, if you are working on a client site and a manager demands that they be listed as one of your friends then what are you going to do? So it seems to me that the social networking sites are at best a helper for the gossip network. If you think that a friend of a friend from a social networking site might be able to help you then you first ask your friend if the person in question is really a friend, and if so are they one of the shifty pseudo-friends you only hang out with because their company pays good money. But the problem with the gossip network is that it s mostly secret and is therefore subject to settling vendettas, I ve heard of senior managers going out of their way to spread false stories about former employees to settle scores. The best solution I can think of is for someone who has a reputation to publicly stake it on the accuracy of their references. If I m going to give a reference then I would be happy to do so via a GPG signed email or a blog post. This doesn t mean that my references will always be correct, but it would show that I try to give good references.

7 February 2010

Ben Armstrong: Eee PC care at 2 years

In November 2007, we bought two of the first Eee PC netbooks available in North America: the model 4G in pearl white, one for me, and one for my wife. My plan was to start the Debian Eee PC project and get Debian working on them both which, thanks to the work of everyone on the team, has been a great success. Fast forward to February 2010, and they are still serving us well. Here is a list of hardware enhancements and issues over the past two years of continuous use: Battery life Asus claims 3.5hrs for the model 4G, though I don t think we ever experienced anything better than 2.5 hrs with wifi in operation. Today, I m down to something short of 2 hrs. If you consider the Lithium ion battery article on Wikipedia to be accurate, it is typical to permanently lose 20% capacity per year, so this sounds about right for the age of the battery. Touchpad The touchpad itself is fine. The buttons are not. They are hard to push and prone to become less responsive after a while, or to fail entirely. I now really have to bear down hard on my left button to make it work. Because the buttons are soldered to the motherboard, they would be hard to replace. Configuring the synaptics driver for tap-to-click is an acceptable workaround. Also, one of the first purchases we made was the Logitech VX Nano, one for each Eee, so most of the time now, we use our mice, falling back to the touchpad only when using a mouse is inconvenient due to space constraints (e.g. on the bus). Keyboard After two years of continuous use, both of our keyboards needed replacing. Some of the keys had been pounded flat and needed surgery (rubber springs sliced out of a scavenged Acer netbook keyboard and grafted on) to make them usable again. And aesthetically, the keyboards have really suffered, with a good percentage of the markings on the keycaps partially or completely eroded off. Fortunately, for $3 plus $10 shipping each, new keyboards can be ordered from a Chinese e-Bay seller. But with the new keyboards, there is still the problem with excessive flex in the keyboard making some keys less responsive than others. I m considering trying this hack to solve the problem. Display I have no complaints about the matte finish displays of either Eee. Both have stood up well. People tell me they don t care for a 7 display, but I find it bright, crisp and easy to get along with, so long as you maximize windows and increase font size as needed (e.g. for reading PDF books and magazines). When I really need the extra real estate, I just hook up an external monitor. Fan Some people complain about the noise of the fan, from the otherwise silent 4G (due to the lack of a hard drive) and seek ways to limit the amount of time the fan runs. We ve never had that problem. However, if any plastic bits break off inside the Eee, they will eventually find their way to your fan and get wedged. This has happened twice: once in my wife s Eee, and once in mine. Disassembly of the Eee to clear the blockage and get the fan running again was relatively painless both times. Plastic bits About those plastic bits: In my wife s case, I think the bit was some extruded plastic from the molding that had broken off. In my case, it was a deteriorating plastic post which was holding the hinge in place. More about this later. Sound Unfortunately, the integrated sound seems to be particularly sensitive to heat. During both fan failures, sound cut out. On my wife s system, it never fully recovered, and now only works on alternate Tuesdays, whereas on mine, after I unwedged the fan and brought the heat down, sound has functioned properly ever since. (Update: see my comments below on power adapters for an alternate theory about what killed sound.) We are waiting now for the delivery of a cheap ($1.42 including shipping, again from China) 3D Sound USB device which is reported to work on Linux. While some users complain about hum with this device, we re cautiously optimistic that on the Eee it won t be an issue. If it is, oh well, a buck and a half is a small gamble. Display hinge The plastic posts that hold the anchors for the machine screws for the hinge are fragile. Three out of four of these posts in my Eee have shattered, leaving the left hinge to float freely. For the past two days I was distressed about how I could fix this. Based on some helpful suggestions from #eeepc @ irc.freenode.net, I had worked out a plan to rebuild one of the posts with two-part epoxy, sand it and the fractured stub of the post, and use cyanoacrylate glue to affix it to the case. It sounded like fiddly work for which I didn t hold much hope of success. But this morning, I realized that the plastic in the bottom of the case was still sound, and that I could drop a screw into that hole, and with pliers, line up the anchor on the other side. This appears to work! I ll handle that hinge with care, but it should do me until I eventually repurpose the machine to some daily use that is less stressful on the hinge than daily travel on the bus. SSD and SDHC Some people were initially worried that the limited write life an SSD meant that you needed to take special measures to avoid its premature death, which I have always regarded as a myth. Our 4G SSDs each have no swap space, and ext3 filesystems. At the two year point, there are no problems. I expect our SSDs to outlast the other components. We did, however, eventually find the 4G to be a bit on the small side. We now each have Kingston 4G micro-SDHC cards for a bit of extra capacity for large media files and for some extra space for the apt cache. I recently priced the Lexan version of this card at $19 for a two-pack at Wal-mart, and these seem to work in the model 4G just as well (which seems to be an issue with this model not all SDHC cards work). Memory We found the 512M that came with the 4G somewhat constraining. Without any swap space (so we could maximize the space available on the small SSD) we decided our systems really needed a memory upgrade. At the time, 2G didn t seem overly expensive (though I no longer remember the exact price) so we splurged on 2G for each system, even though that was probably more than we needed. Power adapter When I first wrote this article, I forgot to mention the power adapter. The model 4G uses an unusual 9.5V power adapter for which it is hard to find a generic replacement. This unit is prone to fail in two places: in rare cases, (one out of 6 units that I have in some way assisted with: 3 of them mine, 3 belonging to others,) it will break at the wall plug end. The plug swivels into the unit for easy storage, but this adds a point of failure. More commonly, (in 3 out of six of the units,) the wires at the netbook plug end will fray due to stress on the non-angled cord, leading either to no connect, or to a short. In fact, since in the case of my wife s adapter, the netbook end of the cable shorted, making the cable heat up and the system spontaneously shut down after a little while, we can t say for sure whether the overheating of the Eee took out integrated sound, or whether this short did. On the one hand, I know for certain my own system, which never suffered a short, has responded to overheating by making the sound flaky, but it has never taken out sound completely. On the other hand, shorting the power cable can t be very good for the Eee, so who knows, maybe that s what ultimately killed my wife s Eee s sound. This is where it helps to have soldering skills, or a friend who can do the repair for you. In my case, it was the latter. While I was waiting for a replacement adapter I had ordered, we also found on eeeuser.com part#s for replacement plugs and sleeves from Digikey, total cost $20 including shipping, 10 pieces each. Cutting off the bad plugs on three units and attaching the new was a quick, straightforward operation, and succeeded in two out of three cases. Having carefully checked the failed repair, we deduced that the failure in that unit was at the wall end, and we judged there was nothing further we could do to try to save it. Even the unit that had previously shorted was returned to perfect health and has been in operation trouble-free ever since. Conclusion After over two years of continuous use, the model 4G has held up well for a $400 system. We definitely feel we have received our money s worth of value over that time. All of the problems we ve experienced so far have been fixable at very little expense, and we expect them to last at least another year before we seriously consider replacing them. In the next several months, I plan to order a high capacity 8-cell 10400mAh battery for my own system so that I can enjoy a 5-6 hr run time. The purchase will be roughly $55 including shipping, the most expensive purchase for my system to date, but still well worth it to extend the 4G s lifespan for another year or more.

MJ Ray: The Phone Co-op 2010

Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting
Ed Mayo talking to the Phone Co-op meeting Yesterday I had the pleasure to be at the Phone Co-ops annual meeting, as those of you who follow me on identi.ca or elsewhere will already know. The proceedings included a speech from Cooperatives-UK Chief Exec Ed Mayo that included the co-op pub in Salford, spurning David Beckham s gift and this summer s Co-operatives Fortnight. As ever, the bits I liked best were the lively question-and-answer sessions, both on Ed s speech and the annual report. I took notes and reproduce them below, but I didn t capture every question, or every answer and none of this is verbatim. Questions to Ed about UK cooperation included:

Questions about the annual report asked about:

Asheesh Laroia: Cosmetic carbon copy: The opposite of blind carbon copy

I propose a new feature for email software: Cosmetic carbon copy. CCC works very similarly to today's carbon copy feature: If you put an address in the CCC: list, when the recipients open the message, they can see the address. The one difference is that with "cosmetic" carbon copy, the CCC:d address never recieves the message. An example might illustrate the situation. Let's say someone (Alice) wants to invite Bob to a movie but doesn't want Charlie to come. She might send this email: 
From: alice@example.com
To: bob@example.com
CCC: charlie@example.com
Subject: MOOOVIEEE!

Hey all my friends, join me for a movie tonight!
When Alice sends the email, Bob recives a copy. Bob thinks that Charlie received a copy, as he will be in the CC list. But Alice's mail software never sent Charlie a copy. So Alice can relax, knowing that Bob won't forward a copy to Charlie, since Bob thinks he already received it. Alice and Bob will meet up without Charlie, and Alice will quietly sigh in relief.

How can this work? Cosmetic carbon copy works on the same principle as blind carbon copy: the contents of the message are fundamentally independent from the recipients. Saavy email users have used the "blind carbon copy" feature for years. When you place an address in the BCC list, that address will receive a copy of the email even though other recipients won't see the address listed. This allows for a form of privacy between the sender of the email and that hidden recipient. This works because, like postal mail, email messages are delivered using an "envelope" that contains the actual recipients. When you compose a message in Alpine, Gmail, or Thunderbird, you are writing the contents of the envelope. When you hit send, the mail software looks for email addresses that should receive a copy. It creates one envelope per address, stuffs the letter inside, and sends the whole thing on its way through the Internet using a protocol called SMTP. When the recipient (Bob)'s email system receives it, the letter is pulled out of the envelope and placed in an inbox. Which means the envelope is entirely invisible to Bob, the recipient. Most mail software puts information about the envelope in email headers. Since each email recipient gets a separate envelope, In the case of cosmetic carbon copy, Alice's letter claims that Charlie was on the CC: list. But Bob can never learn that Charlie's copy was never sent. So to implement cosmetic carbon copy, Alice's mail program must understand this rule:
  • For each address in the CCC list, copy the message to the CC: list in the email message.
  • Create no new envelopes when sending the message.
Because of the last bullet point, this "carbon copying" is purely cosmetic rather than functional.

A possible privacy problem You might wonder, what happens when Bob hits reply-all to say "Yes, I'm coming"? Then (oh no!) Charlie might see the invitation. Not a problem: Most of my friends use Gmail, and Gmail users almost always hit Reply instead of Reply-All. Gmail used to have an experimental option called "Reply All by Default", but thankfully they removed that option. A future version of this specification might suggest mangling the last "." in the BCC:d email addresses with the ONE DOT LEADER character, which looks like "." but isn't one. That way, even if Bob clicks "Reply all," Charlie's email address is subtly incorrect and will bounce.

Future work The story I've told here is marginally simplified so it's understandable to a less-technical audience. Those who want a more technical version can request I submit an RFC. Perhaps in two months? (File under "games to play with email.")

Holger Levsen: FOSDEM - video helpers needed and DPL election

FOSDEM is the usual awesomeness this year, I'm just too tired for too many words, so I'll keep this post very brief.

Once again, the videoteam needs your help. Please consider lending us your helping hands, so that we can record the room 1308 tomorrow/today (sunday) without burning out totally. From 10oo to 17oo there are seven talks scheduled with a total break time of 30min. And we are 3 or 4 people doing this, and have 4 jobs to fullfill: 2 camera operators, video and audio-mixer, not even mentioning handing microphones to the people in the audience. This obviously really cannot work.

So, if you can, please help us. Either just show up or even better, just show up and add yourself at the volunteer wiki page. Doing the latter will help us even more, as we can plan our ad-hoc work better.

Following an idea originated through contributions from Belgian beer, and to motivate zack a bit more to actually go for it, I've setup the alias leader@debian-community.org to point to his email address. Please send motivational emails ;-)

6 February 2010

Biella Coleman: Hard to imagine but it is our history

Stowe v Thomas (1853) where the court argued that a German translation of Uncle s Tom s Cabins did not constitute copyright infringement (quoted from Meredith McGill s excellent bookAmerican Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853:
Before publication [the author] has the exclusive possession of his invention. His dominion is perfect. But when he has published his book and given his thoughts, sentiments, knowledge or discoveries to the world, he can have no longer an exclusive possession of them. Such an appropriation becomes impossible, and is inconsistent with the object of publication. The author s conceptions have become common property of his readers, who cannot be deprived of the use of them, or their right to communicate them to others clothed in their own language, by lecture or by treatise

Biella Coleman: Hard to imagine but it is our history

Stowe v Thomas (1853) where the court argued that a German translation of Uncle s Tom s Cabins did not constitute copyright infringement (quoted from Meredith McGill s excellent bookAmerican Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853:
Before publication [the author] has the exclusive possession of his invention. His dominion is perfect. But when he has published his book and given his thoughts, sentiments, knowledge or discoveries to the world, he can have no longer an exclusive possession of them. Such an appropriation becomes impossible, and is inconsistent with the object of publication. The author s conceptions have become common property of his readers, who cannot be deprived of the use of them, or their right to communicate them to others clothed in their own language, by lecture or by treatise

5 February 2010

Marco Túlio Gontijo e Silva: More on sup


Going on with this post. I noticed, again with the help of hyperbolist@#sup@irc.freenode.net, that the startup.rb file can be more simple. I also noticed that the comment I ve made in the original code was making the thread not going away from the thread list in inbox. So, this one works: 
class Redwood::ThreadViewMode
  @@keymaps[self].add :kill_and_next,
  "Kill this thread, kill buffer, and view next", '&'
  def kill_and_next; kill_and_then :next end
  def kill_and_then op
    dispatch op do
      @index_mode.multi_kill [@thread]
    end
  end
end
Also, I used the suggestion of the New User Guide to Sup, and installed rss2email to read also blogs from sup. The r2e manpage has the indications to setup it.

Brandon Holtsclaw: My Friend Audio Business Converter Product

Audio information can be stored in a wide variety of formats, which vary in sound quality, file size, compatibility, etc. There are lots of extensions that cannot be read by some players. For this reason, many audiophiles are often confronted with compatibility issues. There are lots of audio conversion tools available on the web, but there are much more formats out there than they support. Most converters support only a few extensions and therefore they fail to satisfy users requirements.

Finding a high quality mp3 converter
has long been a challenge. Happily, software developers have designed Factory Audio Converter. It converts audio files to MP3, WAV, WMA, OGG, APE, MP4, FLAC, MPC, AAC. The array of input formats is even broader: MP3, RA, RMM, RAM, RPM, RM, RMVB, WAV, OGG, CDA, APE, APL, MPC, MP+, WMA, FLAC, AAC, M4A, MP4, TTA, OFR, SPX, WV, XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX, AMR, MP3/OGG compressed MODs, MIDI, VQF, AU / SND, PAF, IFF, SVX, WAV, SF, VOC, W64, MAT4, MAT5, PVF, XI, HTK, CAF. If you are looking for a flexible audio conversion utility, this one is the best!

Good audio converters feature batch mode. If you have a lot of wma files and would like to save them as mp3, you need a fast-working and powerful wma to mp3 converter. Factory Audio Converter can convert hundreds of files within seconds. If you have gigs of music on your PC, you can set the utility to convert all of them and turn in. You will get up in the morning to see all your files saved in your preferred format!

By aid of Factory Audio Converter, you can convert wma to mp3 right from the desktop. Once installed on a PC, the program integrates into Windows seamlessly, and Convert to option appears in the right-button menu. All you need to do is right-click on a wma file and select Convert to. You can also run Factory Audio Converter from within other programs via command line.

Advanced users do not only want toconvert wma to mp3
. They want to do it easily! User-friendliness all but heads the top-importance list of characteristics. Factory Audio Converter has a robust and intuitive user interface. It does not take any background to understand how to use it. The program wizard will guide you through the whole procedure. It will help you select your settings. You may either skip it and leave the default settings or specify your own settings. Sound quality will depend on your choice of bitrate, samplerate and channel.

The more new features a program has, the more likely it is to enjoy demand. Factory Audio Converter incorporates a built-in audio player and CD ripper. You can listen to your tracks prior to conversion and compare output and input files. The CD ripper will rip your CD files and help you save them on any type of hard drive. Factory Audio Converter permits you to change wav to mp3
and save a lot of drive space. Now you can use any portable player and listen to your favorite musicians any time, wherever you are!

You can buy Factory Audio converter at a price comparable to that of any other converter. However, few converters are comparable to Factory Audio Converter in terms of user friendliness and productiveness. <script class="owbutton" src="http://onlywire.com/button" title="My Friend Audio Business Converter Product" type="text/javascript" url="http://www.imbrandon.com/2010/02/05/my-friend-audio-business-product/"></script>

4 February 2010

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Travel agenda before FOSDEM

In last few days I spent some time with travel agenda. Tomorrow morning I am leaving for FOSDEM, so I'm arranging last minutes things like online checking. Whoever wants to meet me just drop me an email or just check things I want to visit and find me there. Meanwhile got open registration for Debconf 10, so when I was in travelling mood, I also filled in that one. Right now it looks like it will be quite tough for me to pay this trip, but there is still some time to sort it out :-).

Mike Hommey: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 diff stats

As part of preparing xulrunner 1.9.2 (which would lead to Iceweasel 3.6), I have gone through all the patches currently applied to the latest xulrunner release, to keep track of what should be upstreamed, what needed feedback, what patches I needed to update in upstream bugzilla, etc. As I have talked about our differences with upstream on a few occasions already, and as I was doing this grunt work anyway, I thought it would be nice to make the results public. First, a few reference numbers (excluding changes to generated configure files): A few observations on the above data: The latter used to be true, but is not anymore: xulrunner 1.9.1.6-2 added a lot of changes and is now up to: 98 files changed, 1107 insertions(+), 517 deletions(-). What happened ? will you ask me. A lot happened: the test suite, attempts at correctly installing C++ headers and IDL files, bug fixes. Work has also been done such that make clean/distclean doesn t leave stuff around and that xulrunner can be properly built twice in a row. Differences between 1.9.1.6-1 and 1.9.1.6-2 look like this: 31 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 167 deletions(-). Some were stolen from bugzilla (13 files changed, 162 insertions(+), 70 deletions(-)): Many others were sent: A few others were filed without a patch, as I felt a proper upstreamable patch needed discussion (3 files changed, 16 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)): A few changes are related to the way we build and how we run the test suite (5 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)): Finally, a few were related to the Debian changes history (2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 26 deletions(-)): Going through the rest of the changes between upstream and the latest Debian release, we can split in 5 categories of changes:
Those that were picked from upstream, or sent and eventually applied in 1.9.2 or trunk (12 files changed, 68 insertions(+), 41 deletions(-)): Those that were picked from bugzilla or sent there, but are not applied upstream for various reasons (29 files changed, 138 insertions(+), 209 deletions(-)): Those that were reported but for which I wanted feedback for a proper fix, yet a patch was applied in Debian because this was necessary (6 files changed, 22 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)): Those that are yet to be sent to bugzilla (15 files changed, 111 insertions(+), 54 deletions(-)): And finally, the changes that are either Debian specific or not deemed upstreamable (30 files changed, 460 insertions(+), 77 deletions(-) ; this can sound huge, but see the details below): Note, the numbers in the various diff stats obviously don t add up, since some changes overlap. All that information doesn t account the few additional components added in debian/filemonitor and debian/extra-stuff, that account for nearly 600 lines (excluding licensing boilerplate), but I ll talk about these in another post. This analysis also helped spotting another harmless merge error (the first one was spotted a few weeks ago and just left the enable-system-lcms around, without any effect): a variable replacement in a Makefile that doesn t have any effect, since the 2 variables have the same value. Only a pointless 1 line change.

DebConf team: Registration now open for DebConf10 (Posted by Jimmy Kaplowitz)

Registration is now open for DebConf10. The dates of the conference are August 1-7, 2010, with arrivals at our group lodging permitted as of 3 PM on July 31 and departures required by 11 AM on August 8. The conference is preceded by DebCamp from July 25-31 including the arrival day. To receive announcements regarding DebConf and DebCamp, please subscribe to the debconf-announce mailing list. In order to avoid spamming Planet Debian with a long post detailing registration procedure, travel sponsorship, DebCamp info, and cost of attendance, please instead see the DebConf10 website s registration page to answer all your questions. As always, feel free to contact the DebConf team via email or IRC for answers not provided by the website. DebConf10 is going to be great. We re looking forward to seeing you in New York in August! the DebConf team

Dirk Eddelbuettel: RProtoBuf 0.1-0

Romain uploaded our first release of RProtoBuf to CRAN yesterday. RProtoBuf provides bindings for GNU R to the Google Protobuf implementation. Google Protobuf is (and I quote) a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format that is used for almost all internal RPC protocols and file formats at Google. RProtoBuf had a funny start. I had blogged about the 12 hour passage from proof of concept to R-Forge project following the ORD session hackfest in October. What happened next was as good. Romain emailed within hours of the blog post and reminded me of a similar project that is part of Saptarshi Guha's RHIPE R/Hadoop implementation. So the three of us--Romain, Saptarshi and I---started emailing and before long it becomes clear that Romain is both rather intrigued by this (whereas Saptarshi has slightly different needs for the inner workings of his Hadoop bindings) and was able to devote some time to it. So the code kept growing and growing at a fairly rapid clip. Til that stopped as we switched to working feverishly on Rcpp to both support the needs of this project, and to implement ideas we had while working on this. That now lead to the point where Rcpp is maturing in terms of features, so we will probably have time come back to more work on RProtoBuf to take advantage of the nice templated autoconversions we now have in Rcpp. Oddly enough, the initial blog post seemed to anticipate changes in Rcpp. Anyway -- RProtoBuf is finally here and it already does a fair amount of magic based of code reflection using the proto files. The Google documentation has a simple example of a 'person' entry in an 'addressbook' which, when translated to R, goes like this: 
R> library( RProtoBuf )                      ## load the package
R> readProtoFiles( "addressbook.proto" )     ## acquire protobuf information
R> bob <- new( tutorial.Person,              ## create new object
+   email = "bob@example.com",
+   name = "Bob",
+   id = 123 )
R> writeLines( bob$toString() )              ## serialize to stdout
name: "Bob"
id: 123
email: "bob@example.com"
R> bob$email                                 ## access and/or override
[1] "bob@example.com"
R> bob$id <- 5
R> bob$id
[1] 5
R> serialize( bob, "person.pb" )             ## serialize to compact binary format
There is more information at the RProtoBuf page, and we already have a draft package vignette, a 'quick' overview vignette and a unit test summary vignette. More changes should be forthcoming as Romain and I find time to code them up. Feedback is as always welcome.

Gunnar Wolf: ber-redundant paperwork

ber-redundant paperwork
So I finally got off my lazy butt and started the paperwork to get a formal recognition of studies equivalence for a undergraduate studies (Licenciatura en ingenier a de software) via CENEVAL's Acuerdo 286 (licenciatura). Part of the paperwork involves filling the form I photographed and attached to this node. This is the utmost example of ber-redundant paperwork... Where it requires my personal data, some of the fields are:
CURP
Clave nica de Registro Poblacional, Unique Populational Registration Key. This is a string composed by:
  • WOIG: First letter and first vowel after the first letter of my first family name, first letter of my second family name, first letter of my given name
  • 760427: birth date, yymmdd
  • H: Sex (H = male, M = female, I guess)
  • DF: State or federative entity I was born in
  • LSN: First consonant after the first letter of the first and second family name and of the given name
  • 03: Deambiguation digits
So far, so good.
Age
Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It has my full birth date!
Sex
Well, cannot it be deduced from the CURP? It is a specific field in it
Birth date
Man, you already have it literally on top of the field!
Nationality
This tramit is only for Mexicans, so... what's the point?
Birth place
The CURP states already the state or federative entity I was born... But I'll accept this one, as not all states have only one city as DF does
Quite a nice catalog of redundancies. As a cherry on top of the cake, the phone number states I should write my long distance phone code (LADA historically, Larga Distancia Autom tica, Automatic Long Distance) only if I am in any of the states. I can only ask myself why... Anyway... Lets continue filling paperwork. Grah. Hopefully I will be able to get my papers... somewhen in the next half century.

3 February 2010

Biella Coleman: 2600 papers

:-) Glad to see his paper on hacking and zines was picked from a pool of 2600 papers .

Biella Coleman: 2600 papers

:-) Glad to see his paper on hacking and zines was picked from a pool of 2600 papers .

Barry Hawkins: The Agile Business Analyst

Agile Business Analysts? I have recently been fleshing out my thoughts on the role of business analysts in an Agile team. This is something I have historically addressed on a case-by-case basis with clients, but when thinking about it last week at a client site, I realized that I do have a general take on how the role and responsibilities of a business analyst change when a group moves to using an Agile process. Per the usual, I ll be using Scrum as the example process where needed. The Classical Roles Historically the business analyst has had two primary roles. In a process where cross-functional communication and collaboration are minimized, these roles are essential. What little communication that takes place between the business and the software development teams purporting to serve them passes almost exclusively through one or more business analysts. I view the business analyst in a phased development approach as having two roles; Translator and Gatekeeper. The Translator The business analyst is primarily tasked with taking the needs of the business and translating them into a written document that is then handed to the software developers and testers. This role s necessity is based upon some fundamental assumptions. First, programmers and testers are on the whole, too socially retarded to actually talk to the business persons and find out what they want. Second, the business is primarily viewed as being unable to focus its thought long enough to tell the programmers and testers what they need. Since a key value of an Agile approach to software development is to have individuals and their interactions be the driving force rather than processes an tools (see The Agile Manifesto), the obliteration of this role is a primary objective. The Gatekeeper Business analysts are also viewed the gatekeepers for requirements in classical, phased software process approaches. This is a somewhat unfair role, since they rarely have the authority to prevent business or technology changes, like a meter maid trying to stop an armed terrorist. It s even more unnatural since change always happens, so it s like the meter maid being assigned to an anti-terrorist unit with no additional training, authority, or weapons. The Agile Roles Some of the more extreme practitioners of Agile methodologies say that business analysts have no role in an Agile team. I disagree, provided the role of the business analyst is allowed to evolve. The roles I ve seen them take on as valuable members of an Agile team are Facilitator, Historian, and Journalist. The Facilitator A high degree of collaboration and interaction take place between business and technology in Agile Software Development. The business analyst can serve a critical need in these interactions, facilitating communication between business and technology and making sure that critical areas are being covered in an interaction. This can be a more fulfilling experience for an analyst, since they often talk to one side, then go to other to pass on the information, all the while thinking, Man, this would be simpler if you were both in the room with me at the same time. The Historian The business analyst s documentation skill is excellent for capturing significant information that often gets lost in a team of purely technical people. I have seen some great uses of business analysts in this area. One is to document the system that the team actually builds (not the big, up-front imagined system that is covered in a phased design stage). Another is capturing key technological and architectural decisions and the context in which they were made, so that when a group revisits certain items asking, Why in the world did we decide to do that? , they have the means to be reminded or informed why a particular path was chosen. The Journalist The business analyst can also be the team s journalist, making sure the latest information makes it out to all interested parties. One creative approach I ve seen at a client site is a business analyst who has a project blog. He posts entries after each meeting between the business and technology, documenting what new user stories were created (even scans in the story cards!), a summary of the discussions held, and documents any key decisions that might have been made. Oh, and he provides an excellent executive summary at the top that s suitable for anyone s review, right up to the CEO. Tell me you wouldn t love to have that guy in your Agile team.

Russell Coker: Michael Atkinson Lies

The South Australian government wanted to force bloggers to disclose their name and post-code when commenting on an election [1]. According to Adelaide Now this included posts on Twitter and Facebook [2]. As expected there was a strong public reaction to this and Michael Atkinson (state Attorney General) stated that the law was not going to be enforced and that it would be retrospectively repealed after the election [3]. Which might have been the end of the issue, but he also said All MPs and all parties voted for Electoral law. Hope Libs, Greens, Family First, Independents etc will join us to support repeal which seems to be a clear claim that the Greens supported that legislation. The Greens are pretty good about freedom of speech issues so I immediately enquired as to what was going on. The following is from a Greens media brief issued yesterday by the office of Mark Parnell MLC (the Greens MLC in SA) which was issued before the new law was retracted: Attorney General Michael Atkinson must urgently clarify the scope of new electoral laws covering public comment on the internet, in the wake of concerns that the impact will be much wider than expected.

With only weeks to go before the election kicks off, there is an urgent need for the Attorney General to explain exactly what his laws are
intended to capture, said Greens MLC Mark Parnell.

When this was debated in Parliament last year, we were told that the law change would only affect electronic versions of a journal . Now there is
concern that the laws could extend further, restricting public commentary on media sites like AdelaideNow and ABC Online, he said.

When the Bill was debated in the Lower House, Michael Atkinson originally wanted to include ALL material on the web. However, the Government
backed down on this by the time it got to the Upper House, with Minister Holloway saying:
The intention is to limit the coverage of section 116 as it applies to the internet to electronic versions of a journal rather than any electronic publication on the internet.

A journal was narrowly defined as a newspaper, magazine or other periodical . Now I don t have a great objection to a law that demands that journalists identify themselves when commenting on an election, and I think that most people would not care about that. It seems that Michael Atkinson is repeatedly changing his claims to try and match popular sentiment. He has got form for this sort of thing, his past achievements include censoring the censorship debate about an R18+ rating for computer games [4].

2 February 2010

David Moreno: Eben Moglen 'Freedom in the Cloud' 2/5 @ NYU

Biella passed this flyer around on the Debian-NYC mailing list. If you are in New York City this Friday, you won't want to miss this Eben Moglen's talk.

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