Yesterday was such an insanely long day -- we woke up in a tent, had breakfast over a Treo, then released a lot of software and went to sleep in the middle of the night. It seemed like 4 days, not 1. And this morning I had to take our new mini-SUV into the shop for its first maintenance checkup. For the last 6 years, I've driven a beautiful old wp:Citro n DS station wagon, but around the time Amita June was born I decided I wanted her to learn to drive on it. Maj and I decided that that meant it had to be taken care of a little better, so I put it in storage and we bought at 2005 Hyundai Tucson. (The Hyundai people here in Quebec pronounce it like "Tux-awn", to our endless amusement.) It's weird having a new car -- like, newer than 1972. Parts are not only plentiful but inexpensive. There is a selection of multiple mechanics in my major metropolitan area that can service the vehicle. And people don't point and wave when you're driving, or stop you on the street to tell you stories about how their grandfather used to drive one on their family farm. We'll be driving the car to wt:Boston next week for Wikimania 2006, so I'm glad it went to the shop. It should be in good shape for the drive -- I hope the rest of us are. tags: hyundai tucson citro n ds quebec new car

Slides Speaking of Wikimania -- I'm nowhere near ready for my presentation. Jeez, how'd it get to be almost-August already? Thankfully, no one else I've talked to is really ready to talk, either... so at least I'm not the last one to get my homework done. tags: wikimania presentation slides

Software The OpenID software I did for MediaWiki went out yesterday, and I got a lot of good feedback on it. OpenID requires that some state data is stored between participating servers, and the code I wrote uses the memcached client built into MediaWiki to store it. Not optimal but it works. Well, better today than yesterday, that is. There were some pretty gruesome bugs in the implementation that were only showing up for some exceptional circumstances. So I adapted the JanRain unit tests for the other storage classes to my Memcached class, and that helped a whole hell of a lot for debugging. Yay, unit testing! Some people are still having problems with the software, though. The main thing I've found is that the key-value pair output required by OpenID for its inter-server communications is sensitive to extra whitespace thrown in. Why would there be extra whitespace? I've found that a lot of PHP libraries have bits of whitespace at the end, after the closing ?>, and that will show up in the output. Whether it matters depends on how sensitive the output format is to whitespace. In the case of OpenID, the answer is: pretty sensitive. But I'm looking forward to having some more people try the OpenID MediaWiki extension out. tags: openid mediawiki extension unit test php whitespace

Wikipedia's 25th of July Spot-on satire from The Onion: Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence. I quote:

• "On July 25, 1256, delegates gathered at Comerica Park to sign the Declaration Of Independence, which rejected the rule of the British over its 15 coastal North American colonies," reads an excerpt from the entry. "Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG*** know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America."

Does the fact that I find an Onion article funny say more about my declining humor standards, or about their recent improvements? I don't know. tags: the onion wikipedia satire

Four ideas I was very interested to see Tim O'Reilly's Four Big Ideas About Open Source. I think that there are some fascinating developments over the last few years that have fallen under the rubric of wp:Web 2.0, and I think they affect those of us who put our hearts and minds into Open Source software. I think this was part of his keynote at OSCON 2006, which, y'know, I'm not techically at or anything. It briefly crossed my mind, but I've got too much to do for Thermidor and Fructidor to flit off to yet another conference -- this one only tangentially involved with what I do for a living. Still, it's interesting that Open Source software and Web services are crossing paths. FLOSS has been critical for making Web services possible, but taking that up to the meta-level and seeking the same freedoms from Web apps that you expect from "regular" software... that's a Moebius strip of rights right up in there. tags: floss open source oscon tim oreilly

My life as a toolbar So, sometime in the last year I started installing Firefox toolbars. The main one that's useful to me is Chris Pederick's excellent Web Developer Extension, jam-packed with little tools that make my job as a developer that much easier. But I also install, well, pernicious toolbars. Judgemental toolbars. Toolbars that make me forget what really matters and turn the Web into a horserace or a highschool popularity contest. They're horrible, and they're addicting, and I can't stop using them. The Google Toolbar has some diddly little useless gadgets that I don't give a shit about, like searching my Gmail account for the given search terms (whoopee). What I loooove, though, is the wp:PageRank indicator. PageRank, of course, is the patented algorithm developed by Google founder Larry Page to estimate the importance of a page on the Web. It's incredibly accurate and valuable and though no longer the only criteria Google uses for ranking pages, it's still critical as a measure of the intrinsic value of a page. So, there's this little wp:progress bar on the Google Toolbar that shows the PageRank of any page you're looking at. It's an apparently logarithmic scale from 1-10, with the number showing up in a popup tooltip. Creative Commons? 9/10. Ted's story about the great worldwide race? 2/10. Technorati home page? 8/10. Male Secretary? 6/10. Wikitravel's France discussion? 3/10. And so on and so on. Even worse is the A9 Toolbar, which (again) has a whole bunch of bogus boring features, but also shows the Alexa ranking of any site you're looking at. Alexa ranking isn't some egghead hooty-tooty algorithm about the importance of a page -- it's a ranking on the Big Board of who's the most visited site in the world and who doesn't matter in the slightest. So, I can see that Flickr is ranked #41 today, le Sans Fil is #347,296, and wikiHow is #2248. Alexa is a lot more coarse-grained than Google's toolbar -- it measures the traffic to a given second-level-domain, not a particular URL. So any LiveJournal or Blogger site gets LJ's entire Alexa ranking -- not very useful. Still, I've taken to thinking almost entirely in terms of PageRank and Alexa rank. It's unreasonable. Every site I go to, my eye drifts up to my toolbars to confirm my idea about it. Do I really like Achewood? Sure, but it's only got an Alexa rank around 20,000... Doc Searls's blog has a PageRank of 8, which is really impressive; but... my page for 22 Prairial (Journal/22 Prairial CCXIV) apparently has the same PageRank. Holy moly! Why could that be? (I think it has something to do with the wp:Law of 22 Prairial, but I could be wrong.) Really, putting these numbers on everything is ruining the Web for me. It's turning me into a total jerk, too. I kinda want to go back to the time when I just found stuff on the Web and didn't think, "How do I measure up?" Thankfully the Yahoo Toolbar doesn't include anything remotely like rankings... just as well. Of course, that's the reason I uninstalled it, too. I can find my way to Yahoo! Canada Greetings just fine on my own if I need to. tags: google a9 alexa toolbar pagerank

So I’m planning a new box for college, and have come up with a tentative parts list. I am soliciting any advice and comments that people would be willing to offer. CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Manchester 2000MHz HT 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Dual Core Processor - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103562
$169 (This was $289 2 days ago when I was pricing it - sweet) Motherboard: ASUS A8N5X Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131569
$84.99 RAM: CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145587
$207.00 Video: eVGA 256-P2-N553-AX Geforce 7600GT CO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283
$169.99 (Before $30 mail-in rebate) Hard Drives: I was originally planning on doing 3 Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701, $82.99) in a RAID-5 (software) configuration but there is currently a sale on the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148140) for $99.99 and I might just order three today. Enclosure/Power: Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 ATX 12V V2.0 for AMD & Intel systems Power Supply - Retail
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129155
$104.99 (But that’s a one-day sale price, I think it’s like $109.99 normally, though this is the 2nd day in a row it’s had a one-day sale. Both before $15 mail-in rebate). Optical Drive: Reusing my Sony DVD Burner from my current box. Not including shipping or rebates, the total price comes out as: $1035.94 Advice, comments, etc. are most definitely welcome as I don’t follow the hardware market.

I have an important decision to make about moreutils, my collection of new unix tools. The question is whether to stand firm behind the idea of only adding tools to moreutils that are truely unique and not available in similar form in other packages, or whether to collect good tools to fill in missing gaps in the standard unix toolset, even if they are similar to already existing, but possibly hard to find tools. So far I've had an easy time deciding to reject some tools like add, todist and tostats, which are somewhat special purpose and which turn out to already be mostly implemented in the numutils package. And I'm also fairly comfortable with Lars's and my decision to not include mime, which is similar to File::MimeInfo's mimetype program, if only because implementing that requires a lot of code or a long dependency chain. The decision is harder for things like shuffle/unsort, which both fill in the gap of a file randomisation tool. There already are packages in Debian (bogosort and randomise-lines) that provide this functionality. Another example is srename, which is similar to the rename program hidden in perl, which is insanely useful and rather underused. It's also tricky since I could well be missing existing tools that overlap with moreutils. For example I just learned of the renameutils package, which contains a qmv. That is close to the same thing as vidir, although limited to filename removals (no deletions), and rather more complex, with an interactive command line mode. I've decided that it's worth keeping vidir despite this, if only for the delation support and the possible broader scope later, but it does point to a more general issue. I've already concluded earlier that:

Maybe the problem isn't that no-one is writing them, or that the unix toolspace is covered except for specialised tools, but that the most basic tools fall through the cracks and are never noticed by people who could benefit from them.

One way that tools fall between the cracks, after all, is by being spread amoung lots of little obscure packages like File::MimeInfo, bogosort, randomise-lines, odd corners of perl, mmv, renameutils, etc. You might know about some of these packages, but you probably didn't know about all of them -- I know I didn't. I suspect that the authors of some of them didn't know about others and duplicated work. A single package that collected good generic, consistent, and simple implementations of tools, even if some of them were not unique to it, could benefit from getting more attention than lots of small packages like those, and both help users find out about these tools as well as focus development energy on them to make them better. So which is more important, focusing on collecting and writing unique tools or promoting slightly less unique tools?

Speaker break-in tme myth or reality tries to debunk the myth of audio speakers needing time in orders of 30-50 hours to get to ther best audio properties after purhase.
I bought a new set of Sennheiser HD 215 a few weeks ago. I unpacked them and conected to my laptop. I was blown away by their performance, but something at how the bass frequencies were “muddy” and not clean confused me. Then I read in the manual that I should play some music on the headphones for at least 30 hours to break them in and only then they would get to their best audio characteristics. So I left the headphones on the laptop and left some music playing in them overnight and only came to them after at least 20 more hours of breaking-in. I put the same music on as I did the first time and I was not dissappointed - the bass was much more clean and instruments in the bass area were finally as distinct as they should be at this level of headphones. I did not listen to the music during the break-in time, so my brain did not adopt to the sound of these headphnes - they acctually sounded better.
I do not really care that a distinguised loudspeeker engineer can not find an explanation of how this break-in happens, but that does not change the fact - it exists.
Update - A few more links:

• Discussion - fun starts around page 10
• Pro-burnin article

In the end peple end up playing sine waves and measuring frequency response thus oversimplifying the problem. It is well possible that non-sinusiodal sound is needed for proper break-in (as in sound with multiple different frequencies at once, or sound with harmonics, …). It is well possible that the “sharpness” or “mddiness” that is reported by the audiphiles as the characteristic of a non-broken in sound system is not something that is measurable by frequency response - aharmonic dispositions, temporal dispositions and other distortions of the sound are easy to detect by a trained ear, but very hard measure with precision unless targeted. Also people ignore the real complexities of the materials that are used. We think that wood is simple and plain and understood material, but in reality wood is such a superior microcomposite material that it has properties that are still not nderstood by modern material science. And when we get cooperation of metalic parts, wood, chemicals and, most importantly, natural and complex vibration - predicting all effects of such vibration on the complex system, that is a simple speaker, is … well … complex. Audiophile ear can easily hear distortions that normal audio equipment simply can not measure with any confidence. Discarding phenomena that one simply does not know how to measure or explain is just blindfolding yourself. I was even more fascinated by the description of an simple non-scientific experiment showing break-in effect on audio cables. This was discarded outright as impossible, but it is acctually much easier to understand. Cable is simply a thin piece of metal through which a stream of electrons is flowing. It is not too hard to imagine that these electrons traveling at light speed could impact any impurities or defects in the cable. Any such impacts would distort the analog signal going through the cable. Also after multiple weeks of electron bonbardment it is not impossible to imagine such impurities or defects (or the material around them) being changed in a way to ease the flow of electros (like wind erosion of rocks) thus breaking-in the cables and improving their sound - making it more fluid. That is quite easy to see - why should not there be a set of similar efects working on a whole audiospeaker?

In the fall of 1998, work on our house caused me to take down my roof-mounted GPS antenna. I finally got around to re-installing it today. It's hooked to an HP 58503A GPS Time and Frequency Reference Receiver. This mean my NTP stratum 1 will be back online soon. More importantly, it means I now have an excellent 10 Mhz reference source to lock my test equipment and software defined radio experiments to...

As much time as I spend harping on portability, it's kind of embarrasing when one of my own packages fails to build from source on one or more architectures. Simple thinko in my use of autotools-dev, hopefully this makes the mips* crowd happy again.

Today I drove back to Canberra from Sydney, which was a nice drive given the rental car had cruise control. That Canberra-Sydney drive was what made me wish I'd had cruise control in the last car... Caught up with Mel and Ash, who were incidentally in Canberra and returning to Sydney, and we had lunch at Gus' Cafe. That was nice. The Civic redevelopment is continuing, but far from complete. The new buildings look a lot higher than I expected for a construction in Canberra. It certainly looks like it'll be an impressive bunch of buildings when it's done, but I wonder if it'll steal all the focus from City Walk? Caught up with some Bilby friends for afternoon tea, ran a few errands to collect things we miss from Australia and can't readily obtain in the US, and offloaded some DVDs on our old flatmate. There seems to be a few people arriving for the conference this evening, a roaming horde of sysadmins went out in search of food a little while ago. My luggage also turned up. Apparently they thought I'd failed to board (how, I do not know) and so didn't put my luggage on the plane. I'm glad that's behind me now anyway. Looks like Sarah received the flowers I sent her, given that we're spending our first wedding anniversary apart...

Summary: Think, Bike, Dance. Best grade in final exam for my previous six years of life. Biked 20 km in 50 minutes in city after-work traffic. Partied 9:30 hours, dancing most of that. Biked 20 km back, in 55 minutes.

• 7:00 wake up, having slept too little after having IRCed for too long
• 7:30 enjoy reading the morning newspaper
• 10:30 final oral exam for my studies. Programming paradigms, object oriented software development, UML, OCL, XML, CSS, XSLT, XQuery, techniques of logic programming, Prolog. Grade: 1.0 (best possible grade)
• 12:00 lunch with collegues
• 13:00 rest up. buy some hard to find lindy hop dancing CDs
• 15:00 return home by train
• 18:15 leave for an invitation-only-all-inclusive party. by bicycle.
• 19:05 arrival at the club, 20 km in 50 minutes having crossed most of munich. New personal record for this route.
• ... food, cocktails, dancing, more cocktails, more dancing ...
• 04:30 notice that you're the "last man standing" (i.e. dancing) and decide to leave, too.
• Bike back in 55 minutes, new personal record for this direction, too.
• Enjoy the sunrise for another sunny hot day, take a shower, go to bed.

Lately we are looking at groupware options, and have been looking at Scalix and Zimbra. We may need the features in the proprietary versions of these products, unfortunately.

So I downloaded an evaluation copy of Scalix.

They say they support RedHat and SuSE. Fine, I think, I'll just alien the RPMs to debs and be happy.

Not so fast. They have a whole proprietary install system. They check for /etc/redhat_release or /etc/SuSE_release (or something like that) and do different things depending on what is there. Ugh. Why can't these proprietary vendors just target LSB? The differences seem mostly related to init anyway.

So I touch /etc/SuSE_release into existence, run the installer again. It complains that DISPLAY is not set. UGH. I log in with ssh forwarding, to root (sigh), and run it again.

Now it complains that the SuSE_release file doesn't contain a valid release. I google a bit, but the file format doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I extract it from an RPM somewhere, but no luck.

So, I figure at this point, let's try an actual RPM distro. I'm running this in a Xen domain anyway, so it should be no big deal, right?

I think CentOS will be a good choice. It's RHEL with the non-free stuff stripped out. And they support RHEL and don't need any non-free stuff. I google, and find instructions for installing via rpmstrap for Xen uses.

Let me say, rpmstrap is not nearly the nice tool that cdebootstrap is. rpmstrap totally hosed the networking on the Xen host machine, requiring me to reboot to get it back to proper state. The resulting install wouldn't boot, either -- I later found out that, even though I listed explicit devices in /etc/fstab like usual, it requires labels on all my partitions to boot. Ugh. There are a host of other problems with the rpmstrap-installed chroot, and it's broken beyond my ability to repair due to problems with the rpm database.

So then I downloaded the "Server" CD for CentOS, which is supposed to have just the stuff a person would need for a server, and leave off all the graphical tools, multimedia, etc. I fired up VMware and did an install. Then I booted Debian From Scratch in VMware and used tar and netcat to copy the installed image over to Xen.

I got it booting fairly easily. But now I start to remember why I had this instinctive gag reflex last time I used RHEL.

First off, the network configuration, by default, is tied to the MAC address of your ethernet card. So if you replace your Ethernet card, your network is broken by default.

Then, there's the way the network is brought up. It uses arping as part of its procedure to bring up a NIC. If it sees a reply anywhere on the network with the IP you're trying to assign, it leaves the NIC half-up -- it's been ifconfig'd up, but without an IP. So that's right, if somebody happens to have a rogue device plugged in at the moment your server boots, your server will come up without a network configured. This is *Enterprise* Linux and it's pulling this sort of thing. Terrible design.

Next, there's the way the network is *configured*. There are commands such as system-config-network-tui, -gui, -cmd, -druid, etc. I go for -tui. to start with. It's a dialog-like interface, and asks the basics like IP address, etc. It doesn't have any way to configure more than one Ethernet card that I can tell. And some of the settings -- like nameserver -- apparently require you to press F12 to visit. But the program doesn't recognize F12 as sent by an xterm, so it doesn't work.

All the other options require X. So, I reluctantly ssh -X into it as root and run system-config-network-gui. It doesn't work -- complains it can't find DISPLAY. Strange, I think; DISPLAY is set properly to localhost:whatever. It turns out that /etc/hosts is empty by default, so the thing can't resolve localhost! Argh. I add a line to /etc/hosts and it fires up.

This tool works decently. I save, uncheck the tie to a MAC address box, and exit. I then think it might be good to fire it up again and see what it did. I try running it again, and get the same error about DISPLAY. The stupid tool blew away /etc/hosts and replaced it with an empty file! This is NOT what I would expect from an Enterprise Linux. You don't blow away a config file the administrator touched without asking, EVER.

Next, I figure, let's try installing the XFS tools so I can switch the root filesystem to xfs. I start with "yum update", which doesn't quite do what I expect. (It is more like apt-get update && apt-get -u dist-upgrade) So I hit Ctrl-C, but -- surprise -- IT DOESN'T WORK. I press it a few more times, and it seems to just make the downloader cycle through mirrors because of a "download error". So I hit Ctrl-Z and kill %1. I have my prompt, but it's STILL DOWNLOADING STUFF and spewing all over my console. Ugh.

I finally use ps and kill -9 and eventually get it killed off. Stupid thing.

I don't understand why anybody would want to use RedHat Enterprise Linux in an enterprise. It seems more suited to a hobbyist system at home. From reading some forums, it seems there are quite a few people out there using Debian for enterprise systems for similar reasons.

So now, maybe I'll have the chance to actually try Scalix.

(BTW, our intern got Zimbra installed on Debian just fine, so that's a plus for it.)

I talked with Raymond King and Mark Dilley at RecentChangesCamp in February (uh... I mean Pluvi se) about their plans to develop Mark's excellent SwitchWiki wiki directory into something... more. I'm glad to see that WikiIndex is really picking up steam. It's becoming my first-stop for getting information on what's wiki, what's not, and who's doing what. The site uses MediaWiki, but the principles and community are very much rooted in the traditions of Ward's Wiki, MeatballWiki and CommunityWiki. I really hope this site keeps up it's momentum and growth. tags: wiki wikiindex mark dilley raymond king recentchangescamp

CC Salon in Montreal Tonight is the first Creative Commons Salon in Montreal. The get-together is at Caf l tranger, 680 Sainte-Catherine Ouest (at Alymer) at 19h30. More details on the Creative Commons Canada blog: http://creativecommons.ca/blog/?p=185 . Maj and I are trying to get a sitter for the event -- Amita June is starting to get grumpier and grumpier about going to sleep after 8PM. But I'll be there regardless. tags: cc cc salon montreal

Great camping Website So, maybe I just haven't been camping a lot in other places outside Quebec in a while, but I'm extremely impressed with the quality of the S paq Web site. You can search the entire network for available campsites based on various criteria (size of tent vs. RV, for example), and then use a map-based interface to browse possible sites. The maps go down to the individual site level, and have popup descriptions of each and every site -- how much sun, how close to water, how private, etc. It's really nice. I have my quibbles -- we tend to do road-trip camping, where we'll stay in a different campground each night for a few days. It'd be nice to do all those reservations at once, but the site doesn't support that. And there are some search criteria I'd like to be able to specify (number of neighbors, access by car) that aren't possible. But as far as it goes, this is a real good site. tags: quebec camping sepaq s paq reservations

Wikispam lockdown I've been having a real problem with Wikispam on my site lately -- several of my pages have nothing-to-sniff-at wp:PageRank values of 6 or 7, and I think that attracts a certain spammity crowd. I think that dealing with Wikispam is something most wiki sites do very well-- an active community is the best counter-measure against spam. And there are lots of good tools, like regexp filters, per-page locking, email and IM notification, and ip blocking that make it easier to maintain a site. But I don't have an active community working on this site -- it's pretty much just me. And WiLiKi, as beautiful and Scheme-y as it is, doesn't have many of the anti-spam tools that users of other wiki engines take for granted. I plan on building more anti-spam tools into the site, but for now I've just been locking the site up when I'm not writing something. It's not as wiki-ish, but it does keep my writing up more often. I'd feel pretty bad about it, but it looks like Alex locks up CommunityWiki for days at a time. tags: wiki spam wikispam wiliki pagerank

Amazon man at the door Just got an order from Amazon in... full of CDs and books. When I used to live in my car (long story, there), I had my 100 favorite CDs in a box in the back. It was safe there in tons of cities -- wt:Chicago, wt:Saint Louis, wt:New York City, even wt:Monterrey and wt:Guanajuato. But I parked it about a block from It's Tops in San Francisco one night while visiting home, and one of my windows was smashed and the discs were taken. Devastating. Slowly but surely I've been re-stocking my music collection, but it's painful to buy the same album twice (and, yes, I know... I shoulda made backups! I do that now). Today's shipment contained a lot of stuff I re-bought: ''wp:The Last Waltz'', a bunch of wp:Neil Young (including the DVD of wp:Greendale), and one of my favorite albums ever, the eponymous first album from Lamb. Also in the box were a bunch of Lost paperbacks ("inspired by the hit series") and the hardback copy of Bad Twin, the mystery novel supposedly written by one of the people who died in the crash of Flight 815. Yeah, I know -- but I like the show, dangit. tags: lost lamb cd amazon san francisco theft music bad twin

Best thing ever Vaguely reminiscent of the very fine Good or Bad? feature from Brunching Shuttlecocks, bestthing.info, by the enigmatic but talented xkcd, is a good way to waste a few minutes. tags: xkcd bestthing brunching shuttlecocks

It’s strange to follow state of minds of big companies about open source (they rarely speak about Free Software but that’s another story;-)). Dalibor Topic, Mark Wielaard and all friends from GNU Classpath spent a lot of time talking with Sun to try to open source Java (or even just be able to get the tools to make open source java virtual machines and API). They are some moves in that direction and people like Tom Marble is working hard to make Sun’s JDK license DFSG compatible and integrate Sun’s JDK in the Debian distribution. Robert Brewin, co-CTO of Sun Microsystems’ software group, said: “I believe that we will have components of Java released into open source within the year,” meaning by next June, Brewin said. “I think [release of] the whole thing will take a little bit longer.” One more step. Another amazing interview is the one of David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft who called the open source software movement a “very powerful force in the industry.” He also wants us to believe that Microsoft will be more and more open… Wait and See

On July 10 my trainees started a project on Sourceforge called bibliotheque. The training is about web development (Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, SQL) and the whole six month day time courses, they use Debian GNU/Linux (guess why ) (well, some installed Ubuntu on their laptop). The last big exercice is often a pain because they are looking for a job and they have a lot of interviews. So we decided the last project to be team oriented. I have the idea to publish it on Sourceforge so they can learn all how to use Bug tracker, Subversion tools the way we do in Free Software. Also, it’s amazing to see the enthousiasme of the trainees about a project that is published. Even those who are not ’so good coders’ did a lot of things like documentation, logos, maintaining the MediaWiki website (french). The web application they are doing is made with tools they’ll use in companies: Struts, Hibernate; they also use patterns like DAO, MVC; and they’ll try to integrate AJAX in the application. Congratulation to this group.

XPilot development has changed hands over the past several years. While the original website at www.xpilot.org continues to be run by the original developers, XPilot-NG (xpilot.sf.net) is where all of the new development has been happening. But xpilot.org still performs an important function for the user community: they run the meta servers¹ that list all public xpilot servers around the world. Recently, we (the XPilot-NG developers on #xpilot at irc.freenode.net) noticed quite a number of uncontactable servers popping up on the meta servers. This is annoying, to say the least. Users don’t know they can’t connect until they’ve tried (unless they’ve bothered to try pinging the server first) and besides which, having all those “junk” servers in the list makes it harder to locate contactable servers. Now, naturally, we wanted to know where all of those servers were coming from, and why now, at this particular time? I knew my Debian package (and presumably any derivatives) do not report to the metaserver by default. Any admin starting an XPilot server would have to explicitly configure it to do so, so the incidence of uncontactable Debian XPilot-NG servers should remain relatively low and have a constant growth rate. Then I found the Fedora package, and started poking around inside. After a shallow review of the package, I concluded there was a good chance it was the culprit², especially since it recently (FC5) had an init script added. Such a bug, coupled with the relatively recent release of FC5, would account for the sudden spike in number of permanently running non-contactable XPilot-NG servers. Bingo! I found some helpful folks at #fedora-games at irc.freenode.net, including the XPilot NG maintainer, which led to filing this bug. I subsequently invited the maintainer over to #xpilot and had a nice time introducing him to the other upstream devs and chatting about our current issues. Ultimately, we know we need to fix the problem at the metas, but in the meantime, I am pleased to have established contact with my counterpart in the Fedora project, expanding the diminishingly small XPilot developer community by one.

¹ They deliberately never released any source code for those metas to try to keep the user community unified at the centralized servers. While I see the reasoning behind the decision, given the problems we’re facing now, it’s clear the XPilot community would be better off with meta server source that is actively being maintained.

² Admittedly two problems with the +reportMeta option upstream set us up for this problem. First, counterintuitively, +reportMeta disables reporting to the metaserver (following the rule ”+” negates the meaning of an option starting with ”-”). Second, -reportMeta is a stupid default. Most people starting servers are behind firewalls these days, so unless they consciously decide to make their server public, making the corresponding adjustments to their firewall, the option should not be set (not to mention the security implications of making a server public by default).

Everyone in or near Norwich should ensure they're at The Murderers this Wednesday (19th July) from 8pm for Dave's Reynard City launch party. Yes.

I'm extremely excited to see that Creative Commons Salon Montreal will be launching on Thursday 20 July. The event will be at Le Pistol, 3723 St. Laurent, 7PM. Should be extremely fun -- Marcus Bornfreund, national director of CC Canada, will be there, and he's always good to see and talk to. tags: montreal canada cc cc salon marcus bornfreund

Camping We're heading off to the wt:Mauricie for a weekend of camping at the R serve faunique de St.-Maurice. It's extremely difficult to get any camping reservations for the second half of July in Quebec, since it's the official Construction Holiday. This is a 2-week work holiday built into the union contracts of most (all?) construction workers in Quebec, as well as for many other unionized works. Which means that most Quebec vacation spots are completely packed for this period -- especially ones that are affordable. I managed to get us a weekend in St.-Maurice, which apparently has great lake swimming, but it's raining cats and dogs right now in wt:Montreal, so it might not be such a fun trip. I promised Maj we'd get out of the city this weekend, though -- they're predicting highs of 35C. tags: montreal quebec mauricie weather construction holiday july camping

In less than a month, I'll be flying for one year to Ghana, where I was offered a job as a teacher and network administrator at an International College in Tema. The school wants to get started using Free Software and so Ralph Amissah, a fellow Debian Developer, asked me if I'm interested. I was, so I got the job.I don't know yet my exact tasks there, and I don't know yet if I can make a difference, but if I can, I'll try to spread the word about Free Software. In my opinion, Free Software can play a role in giving a country like Ghana technological independence and allows for their own developments in this area. My favourite Linux distribution will be Debian, of course, and I'll keep you, especially on planet.debian.org, updated on my progress. I have orginially looked for a project in the developing world to work on after my Abitur (German Highschool Diploma), but I haven't found something in time, so I started my studies in mathematics and computer science. Last year at DebConf 5, I talked with a few people about things to do to fight the Digital Divide, including Kurt Gramlich, Mark Shuttleworth and Ralph, who contacted my in the winter. @Ralph: Thank you!Note that the non-technical reports are blogged in German and won't appear on the planet, so if you're interested, see my blog directly. Pictures will appear at the usual place.

I keep my Google Alerts keyed for news about Wikipedia, so I just got a link this morning to an article in the Guardian about Larry Sanger. Sanger was the original editor of Wikipedia, when the project had some semblance of editorial organization. When he was laid off from Bomis in 2002, Sanger left the project, and has been a gadfly for the project ever since. His article on Kuro5hin, Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism, was a call for better quality on the project. I think Sanger is wp:Stuart Sutcliffe of Wikipedia -- the wp:Fifth Beatle who missed out on the project's success. I'd be a pretty bitter Herb myself if it was me in that position. I also think his criticisms are way off the mark. Not that Wikipedia doesn't have quality problems -- it does. Grievous ones. But the quality problems aren't with the factual accuracy, but with the poor level of writing, kitchen-sink compositional strategy, and sloppy logical development. Sanger makes the same mistake that many Wikipedians do -- overemphasizing the characteristics and needs of contributors. Wikipedians are great, and their generosity of time and energy has made one of the crowning achievements of the Internet. (Disclaimer: I've been a Wikipedian since 2002, and I'm an admin on the English Wikipedia, so I have some bias.) But their value comes from serving readers, not from serving themselves. Many of Wikipedia's quality problems come from a feeling of entitlement on the part of editors -- that the most important thing is to make sure every contributor gets their say. Too often, we use the wp:NPOV rule as a conflict-resolution mechanism rather than as a guideline to writing good articles. Sanger's solution -- putting "experts" back in the driver's seat -- will drive his new Digital Universe project. But I'm not sure he's focusing on the right part of the problem. Sure, scientists and historians know their subjects in-depth, but that typically means they don't have the perspective to create accessible articles for the general public. The hoi polloi probably do a better job writing their own summaries at their own level than the Ivory Tower can. Grand plans for saving Wikipedia are like favorite characters on the Simpsons -- everybody's got one. Still, I'll give mine (plan, not favorite): what Wikipedia needs isn't scientists and historians, but writers and editors (in the traditional sense -- r dacteurs, redactors). Engaging that community's time and energy is going to be crucial to the project's success. Oh, also: Manjula. tags: wikipedia wiki editor larry sanger npov redaction experts digital universe manjula nahasapeemapetilon

Today, the uninstallabilities went down even more. Istanbul has been updated from unstable, and is now installable again. So, this leaves us with:

• 0 uninstallable packages on powerpc, alpha and mips*!
• the only uninstallable package on i386, stars has been rebuilt, and should go into testing tomorrow or so - so we can expect 0 uninstallable packages on 5 arches by then.
• ia64 still has libevolution-cil uninstallable; a rebuild of evolution-sharp might solve it.
• Some of the remaining 16 packages on amd64 are connected via the uninstallability of rpm to the neon/perl-transition; the major issue there is that perl FTBFS on a couple of architectures right now. But everything looks rather smooth there, once we resolve the perl issues.
• For the other architectures, not so much progress has happened.