This was born from a need to see how big a ZIP file I could send my accountant in Australia, and scratching the itch to write some code. The fact that most SMTP servers talk Extended SMTP makes this relatively easy, and Python has some great modules for DNS and SMTP. One gripe I do have is how long it takes the Python modules to mature. It's taken until Python 2.6 for smtplib.SMTP() to gain a timeout parameter, for example. Anyway, I was able to write something nice and generic (it works for any domain) in around 100 lines, thanks in no small part to the DNS module, which makes getting a list of MX records stupidly easy.

$ ./maxmessagesize.py andrew.net.au
daedalus.andrew.net.au: -1
$ ./maxmessagesize.py pollock.id.au
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM: 35,651,584
$ ./maxmessagesize.py debian.org
master.debian.org: 104,857,600
$ ./maxmessagesize.py cameronp.com
mail1.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
mail2.mysmarthost.com: 30,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py ubuntu.com
mx.canonical.com: 62,914,560
$ ./maxmessagesize.py clug.org.au
mx.clug.org.au: 50,000,000
$ ./maxmessagesize.py linux.org.au
morton.linux.org.au: 52,428,800

It's good to see that in most cases of domains I tried, all of the MXes had the same maximum message size. Source code is here

I wrote this for the FSF's annual membership drive where it was originally published. I am reposting it here.

At its core, I think of free software as about the ability of computer users to take control of their technology. Insofar as our software defines our experience of the world and each other, software freedom is an important part of what allows us to determine the way we live, work, and communicate. Free software is not really about software in this fundamental sense; it's about bringing freedom to users through software. In free software's incredible success over the last two decades, many people have lost sight of this simple fact. We have created an incredible array of applications, libraries, and tools. We have created vibrant development and support communities. We have created new development methodologies, powerful copyleft licenses, and massive collaborative projects. But these are all how we give users freedom. They are not freedom itself. They are not what we were trying to achieve. They are our instruments, not our goal. This distinction becomes central in a world where technology is in flux. Indeed, we live in such a world. We can see signs of this in how, as most users' primary computers become mobile phones and new types of network services make up most of many users' interactions with computers, the free software movement's old applications, communities, development methodologies, and licenses can become ill-suited to, or ineffective at, protecting user freedoms. And indeed, in the next few years, bringing freedom to computer users will need to involve new software and new forms of advocacy. It will need to involve new licenses and new techniques for their enforcement. It will need to involve new forms of collaboration and organization. If the free software movement is to succeed, it must stay focused on computer users' freedom -- on the question of why we do what we do -- and then work creatively on how to best respect and protect the freedom we are working toward. If we are overly focused on how we've done things in the past, we may lose sight of the most fundamental goal of supporting users' control over their technology in general. There are many organizations that support the how of today's free software in various ways -- they are law firms and companies and nonprofit organizations supporting various free software projects. The Free Software Foundation is, by far, the most important organization focused on why --- on the underlying principle of software freedom. As such, it plays an essential role in keeping our broader community focused on the key issues, threats, and challenges that will affect the success of every free software project, and every computer user, in the present and in the future. In this period of rapid change in computer technology, its role is more vital than ever. The consequence of any failure is more dire. Here are some of the ways that I will be encouraging the FSF to serve the free software movement in the coming year: Mobile Phones In a short essay I wrote earlier this year, I pointed out that there are now billions of mobile phones and that, although these phones are increasingly powerful computers, they represent one of the most locked-down, proprietary, and unfree technologies in wide use. The implications of this fact for users' control over their technology are dire. Although some widely used phones make extensive use of free software, most free phones are locked down and Tivoized and their users remain fettered, divided, and helpless. We must raise awareness of free software issues among users of phones, communicate to users that phones are powerful general purpose computers, and explain that control over these devices has critical implications for individual autonomy in the future. Toward this end, the FSF staff will launch an advocacy campaign around mobile phones and software freedom in the coming year. Network Services As network services -- like those built by Facebook, Google, and others -- have continued to grow both in scope and penetration over the last year, the importance of a meaningful free software responses grows as well. The launch of products like Google's network-centric ChromeOS offers one glimpse of what a future computing platform may look like. The implications for user freedom, and for the effectiveness of traditional free software approaches, are frightening. The fact that many network services are built using free software does not make the effect of these services on users' autonomy and freedom any less catastrophic. In the next year, the FSF is planning to release the first of what I hope will be several statements on software freedom and network services. Building off the work of the FSF-supported group Autonomous, the Foundation will help provide guidelines for those implementing network services, for users deciding whether to use services, and for developers trying to build services that go further to respect their users' freedom. Reaching beyond our traditional communities Successfully fighting for user freedom is going to mean successfully reaching out to users outside the FSF's historical base . The FSF continues to do so with its Defective By Design anti-DRM campaign and its End Software Patents work. In the last year, the FSF has also reached out to younger users through its "GNU Generation" campaign run by and for high school students. Additionally, the FSF convened a summit this year on women in free software. The FSF plans to build on these successes in the coming year and to expand similar outreach projects. Of course, fighting for and promoting software freedom is more work than today's FSF has the resources to accomplish. Each of my three points above represents an ambitious undertaking, and yet just a portion of the items on the plate of the FSF's small but dedicated staff. Even just continuing its existing projects will require that the FSF adds hundreds of new members by the end of this period. Your membership and donations help make goals like this possible. A strong free software movement focused on the principled issues of software freedom -- and a strong FSF in particular -- will determine what freedoms the next generation of computer users will enjoy. At stake is no less than that next generation's autonomy. I know that this is not the first fundraising appeal you've read this season and I know that the weakened economy makes giving difficult for many. I understand that the cost of a membership or donation may be less easy to afford this year. But we also cannot afford a weakened FSF at this important point of technological transition. If you are not an FSF associate member, now is the time to become one. If you've read my appeal the last two years and decided to wait, now is the time to take the plunge. Membership is $120 per year ($60 for students) and payable monthly. If you are already a member, please join me in giving generously through a tax-deductible donation, or encourage a friend to sign up. The FSF is a small, humble organization of passionate individuals working tirelessly for our software freedom. I've seen firsthand that even small gifts make a difference.

Join now with a $10 monthly donation

Working on another laptop, I was missing my quiltrc settings. I think, I got them from a this email by Marco d Itri. Perhaps it is of help to somebody (for example, when I go searching for it again). BTW, I changed it locally to check only for debian folder in parent directories and create debian/patches automatically if needed: I d rather end up with a patches dir inside the debian folder instead of having it at a random place in the package sources when adding the first quilt patch. I wonder if we should ship this with the quilt package!?

the ultimate text diffing helper I use Git not only for code, but also for text, my most common use case being co-authorship of scientific papers typeset in LaTeX. While reviewing other author changes, the usual line-by-line diff is often annoying since:

1. Paragraph re-formatting gets in the way (hello guys accustomed to compulsory Vim's gq or Emacs' M-q): it does not effect the final rendering, but it still hinders peer-review of changes.
2. Even in the simplest case of a single word change on a single line, it will take some time for your eyes to spot where, along the line, the actual change is.

Stuff like wdiff does help, but I've never looked at how to integrate it with Git, and I still find it a pain in the eyes due to the fancy ASCII arts used to denote additions and deletions (pain that I usually experience when looking at the output of debdiff). There are nice diffing GUIs or editor-integrated solutions out there, but what I've always dreamed of is a plain old cmdline geekism. Enter Git's --color-words, that can be passed to both show and diff commands. My favorite related Git aliases are as follows:

    [alias]
        wdiff = diff --color-words
        wshow = show --color-words

Here is a sample fancy output, yet very intuitive and console-based, of git show --color-words (text in red denotes deletions, text in green additions): Maybe not new to you, but it has been life-changing for me.

While I was under snow last week, the world saw a flurry of Koha company news. We found out that PTFS is to acquire LibLime and ByWater Solutions and BibLibre are partnering for the U.S. With the past ByWater Solutions and PTFS, Inc. partnering, it seems like four of the younger Koha companies (established 2005, 2007, 2008 and PTFS started with Koha in 2008 I think) are now linked together, so it s not entirely surprising that ByWater congratulates PTFS on the purchase of LibLime. What did surprise me is the impressed with PTFS s resources quote from Liblime owner Josh. Some librarians are asking What will the acquistion of Liblime mean to Koha libraries? but I m wondering what does this mean for the Koha project? Well, there s still our co-op (established 2002) and the other older private Koha companies (Calyx, Katipo and so on), as well as the rest of the younger ones, so I think there s still the motivation for a vendor-neutral non-profit group to host the project. Recent history has shown that it s too painful if any one private company hosts it. It ll be interesting to see how the recent private company deals help that work. If all goes well, a bright new day for Koha, as wizzyrea hopes. On another level, I m a bit disappointed that a theoretical Free and Open Source Software player (even if things like LibLime Enterprise Koha had muddied the water) has been sold to a mixed FOSS+proprietary player. I m almost cross with Liblime s owners for selling up, but I don t know if that s fair. Selling up is a fairly common exit move in private companies, so shouldn t I expect it? Do librarians expect it? Is this why some seem reluctant to buy from start-ups which are still independent? As you may know, TTLLP software.coop is in common ownership, so we can t really be bought. This is a self-defence or legacy-guaranteeing mechanism for our cooperative, where our assets are pledged to other common ownership cooperatives if our corporation dies. I think it also has the fringe benefit that we re a fairly safe home for things like trademarks. This unbuyability means that I feel I m watching the sales and cross-linking of our competitors from the sidelines, from a viewpoint more like Koha users than the other vendors, waiting for the dust to settle and the chips to fall where they may. Whatever happens there, software.coop will still be here. Unsurprisingly, there have been a couple of new entrants into Koha support, although the Liblime-controlled Koha project website doesn t show them yet and reportedly its new support company submission form has been broken for weeks, which is irritating. Interesting co-op-y things are happening in the wider library systems world, too, with Karen Coombs going to work for the OCLC library cooperative and Polaris Library Systems workers buying the company although I m not sure yet if they re becoming a worker co-op or merely employee-owned. I suspect many of these announcements are timed for #alamw10 which is a big US library conference. Has anyone seen more co-op or Koha announcements which I haven t spotted in the conference PR flood?

Quodlibet is a GTK+ audio library manager / player. In Debian, it makes up four binary packages: quodlibet, quodlibet-ext, exfalso, and quodlibet-plugins. It's big/popular enough to get a few bugs filed against it and for people to yell when things break, but not so big as to be overwhelming. Since the previous comaintainer has been inactive for some time, I've been thinking that it might be nice to have a comaintainer again. During my academic term at MIT or if I'm on vacation, I don't get to things as quickly as I should. The package has also gone through a period of inactive Debian maintainers and a period of inactive upstream maintainers, so it's accumulated a fair number of ignored bugs in the BTS. And in general, having others to fall back on is a good thing, as long as it doesn't lead to no one taking responsibility. So, here's a deal: I want a comaintainer. There's a catch, though: this person doesn't need to be already involved in Debian. In fact, I'd prefer it if she weren't. If you have a good grasp on the English language, enthusiasm for Debian, and a willingness to learn some technical skills, contact me, preferably via email, and let me know who you are. Quodlibet is written in python, but I'm explicitly not saying that you need to know python in order to help out. You'll gain the benefit of having someone willing to answer your questions and direct your efforts and an automatic sponsor for uploads you prepare. I can't say I have a ton of time to put into mentoring someone, but I'm willing to put in some, so hopefully such an arrangement will turn out well for all parties involved: you, me, upstream, and Debian.

In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane . In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast amounts of data. As the demand for capacity increases it s not THAT difficult to lay more fibers. You also have competition between different companies that lay fiber. To get data to Australia you must lay cables under the sea, this is expensive and can t be done quickly. Therefore all international data transfers are expensive to cover the expense of laying the cables. I don t think that we have any real competition in the market for International connectivity from Australia either. Now the links between Europe and the US aren t cheap either, but I believe that there are economies of scale (as well as shorter distances) that make them significantly cheaper than the links to Australia. Also a good portion of the traffic that you generate as a customer of a European ISP will stay within Europe as there are heaps of good sites in Europe. The number of people living in Europe who speak English as their first language is more than twice that of Australia. The number of Europeans who communicate in English almost as fluently as the native speakers (such as about half the population of the Netherlands) is also quite significant. I expect that the amount of English-language material on the net that is published from the EU is more than three times greater than the quantity published from Australia. People who speak languages that have a more limited geographic spread (IE anything other than English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will have a higher portion of local traffic which is therefore cheaper for their ISP. So based on the relative population sizes we should expect to have Australians making a higher portion of their Internet bandwidth be expensive international data transfers than that of Europeans. Then of course there is the issue of server costs. Running servers in Australia is horribly expensive, while user access to the net is merely annoyingly expensive, the costs of hosting servers are significant and usually the offers have slower hardware and slower transfers (particularly to the important US and EU markets). My blog is hosted in Germany because the company that was offering me free hosting in Australia encouraged me to host it elsewhere due to the price. Also hosting in Germany gives me slightly lower ping times to the US and significantly lower ping times to Europe. As about half the readers of my blog are based in the US, a significant quantity of the readers are based in the EU, and Australia only contains a small portion of the readers the overall experience for readers of my blog is improved by having it hosted outside Australia. It would be better to have it hosted in the US (where most of my readers are located) but I was offered free hosting in the EU. It would be nice if there was a cheap and easy way of getting a mirror of my blog running in Australia with Geo-DNS so that people using Australian IP addresses would get a local server. Putting the static images on an Australian server would be trivial, setting up Geo-DNs would be painful and probably increase reliability issues later on but isn t insurmountable (I have root on both DNS servers). The Debian blog gives some basic information on how to setup GeoDNS [2]. Then I would need to set up a MySQL slave for Wordpress data and modify Wordpress to send it s writes to the master server which is probably impossible for me unless someone else has already written a Wordpress plugin for this, I m really not good at PHP programming. Another possibility would be one of the Wordpress cache plugins that maintain static files to avoid needless database lookups. Until/unless I do such things, every Australian reader of my web site (and those of my friends who do similar things to me regarding hosting) will slightly tilt the balance of Internet transfers in favor of expensive data from foreign servers instead of cheap content from local servers. Sometimes it just sucks to live on an island.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://dsa.debian.org/dsablog/2009/06/Setting_up_GeoDNS_for_security.debian.org/

Two days ago, I posted about looking for a new netbook or notebook, and asked for people s advice. Since then, I ve done some investigation based on these suggestions. Rejected Candidates First, I ve outright rejected several options. The Thinkpad X100e was out, mainly because it doesn t compare favorably to the Acer 1810TZ. The X100e s battery life is worse than the 1810TZ, it is heaver, and has a single-core CPU. Secondly, the EeePC 1201N was ruled out. Again, its battery life was quite a bit worse than the 1801TZ, and also worse than my existing Eee 901. Finally, the EeePC was out because of its extremely slow performance. Remaining Candidates I took information from notebookcheck for models I was interested in, and those suggested in the comments at the earlier post. After reviewing them, I made a comparison chart showing issues that matter most to me. Candidates: Battery Life Let s start with battery life. The X200s presents an interesting picture here. In the 9-cell battery, we can expect over 15 hours of life in idle mode, and 7 hours when surfing the Internet over wifi. This was best in class performance for the idle and surf tests, but when under load it drops to one of the worst ad only 2.57 hours. This could correlate with what Lars Wirzenius commented, saying the X200s battery life is poor: obviously it is doing a lot of power management in software to achieve its runtimes, and if a default Linux installation isn t doing that power management, battery life could be poor. The other standard in terms of battery life was the Acer 1810TZ, with 12 hours runtime in idle usage and almost 6 when surfing the net with wifi: that s an hour longer than my Eee 901. It was also the best performer under full load of anything on my chart. Disappointing results were turned in by the HP 2530p. Even with a 9-cell battery, it couldn t match the 1810TZ s battery life. The Dell E4200, with its 6-cell battery, fared even worse though I should note notebookcheck hasn t tested the E4200, so those figures come from elsewhere. Candidates: Size and Weight Looking at weight, the X200s and E6200 turn in amazing weights at under 3 pounds for a 12 notebook. HP s 2530p is the heaviest in the group at 3.84 pounds with the 6-cell battery (the 9-cell will be heavier but I couldn t find specs on it). The 1810TZ checks in at 3.1 pounds, a bit more than half a pound heavier than my Eee 901. Considering size, the E4200 is the thinnest in the group at just 0.79 inches thick. The 2530p is also thin, but is one of the deepest. The Eee 901 is smallest in terms of length and depth, but it is the thickest of all. Candidates: Performance Here you can really see why I complain about the Eee 901 being slow. On the PCMark 05 test, it had a third of the performance of the 1810TZ. The best performer was the X200s, followed by HP s 2530p. In terms of hard disk speed, the E4200 was fastest due to its SSD (though I suspect these tests are not fully evaluating write performance). The SSD on the EeePC 901 didn t help it; it finished with less than half the speed of the E4200. Conclusions From this chart, it looks like there are only three really interesting models: the X200s with its top-of-the-line performance and display, the HP 2530p, and the 1810TZ with its stellar battery life. The disappointing battery life on the E4200 rules it out for me. The battery life on the HP 2530p is modiocre, but it has a touchpad. For the 1810TZ, my main concerns are size of screen and the fact that the screen is glossy. I am not at all a fan of glossy screens. For the HP 2530p, we ve had an HP 2510p in at work. Its size is virtually identical to the 2530p, and felt a bit bigger than I d like. It was also lighter than the 2530p, but still a bit heaver that I d like to see. But the 12 screen might be worth it. The X200s lacks a touchpad, which is a major annoyance in my book. I have reports of 7-hour battery life on it with the L9400 CPU under Ubuntu. Another person has reported 12 hours on Arch Linux using a power saving guide (which looks helpful in general as well). Considering size and weight, the X200s is lighter than the 1810TZ, though only by a little if using the 9-cell battery. It s very slightly bigger in every dimension than the 1810TZ, but perhaps not enough to influence the decision. What are your thoughts?

I've been using an iphone since late 2007 as my primary phone and so I've gotten quite a few contacts and SMS conversations stored on it. Now that Collabora has given me a nice and shiny N900, I wanted to move my contacts and conversations over, but this proved to be a bit more work than expected. Please note that the following procedure worked for me, I have tried to take reasonable steps to prevent anything breaking, but if something breaks, you get to keep both pieces. I am not responsible and this comes with absolutely no warranty. Take backups. What you need

• the addressbook and SMS SQLite databases. On my phone, they live in /var/mobile/Library/AddressBook and /var/mobile/Library/SMS.
• A copy of my iphone-contacts-convert script. It's written in Perl and should be reasonably easy to understand. Put it in the same directory as AddressBook.sqlitedb.
• A copy of my iphone-export-sms script. It's also written in Perl and should also be reasonably easy to understand. Put it in the same directory as sms.db.
• The smstools program you can get from this thread on talk.maemo.org.

The address book conversion script takes the SQLite database structure and converts that into a VCF file. It should be completely safe to run multiple times (it only does SELECT from the different tables in the contacts database, and you have made backups, haven't you?). If it dies with an "Unknown property", "Unknown label" or other error, you can poke it and see if you can work out what's wrong or drop me an email and I'll see if I can help you. Assuming it doesn't fall over, it will spit out a series of VCards, which you should store in a file, which you then to the N900 and open in the address book. Assuming you have less than 1000 contacts, they should now all be in your address book. If you have more, you need to split the file. A couple of known limitations:

• It doesn't handle some of the attributes, like job title, notes, department, display names, prefix and suffix. None of my contacts used those, so I just didn't care. Patches to change this accepted. Also, it doesn't handle custom attributes and birthdays. I intended to handle birthdays, but forgot and I have few enough contacts with birthdays that I just did it by hand.
• When it hits something it doesn't know how to handle, it stops and you need to add the relevant handle to the code. I think it is mostly clear, how to, but again, feel free to contact me with any problems.
• Only tested on firmware version 2.2. Yes, ancient, but it's what my iphone is running.
• If you have contacts that are organisations, they will come up with a blank full name. Just edit them on the N900 (pressing edit and then save immediately works fine) and they'll be automatically fixed.
• No picture support. This looked a bit involved, so I didn't do this bit. Should be possible with a bit of effort.

The procedure for exporting and importing SMS-es is a bit more involved. First, export the sms-es by running the perl script. It spits out a tab-separated file which you should copy to the N900 along with the smsimporter program from the smstools thread. Run ./smsimporter foo.csv and you should get all your SMS-es put into the conversation app. I ended up compiling my own smsimporter based on the 0.2.1 from the thread with the UUID patch too. Read the whole thread and it should be fairly clear.

For the first time in a long while I took a vacation in New Zealand where I am for LCA. I decided to also take a break (mostly) from the Internet but I decided to it was worth to come back to write a brief response to Clay Shirky s rant about women, which I find pretty unsettling. So the basic upshot of his entry is that for women to get ahead in this world, they need to not only behave more like men but in specific, like all the effing blow-hard jerky self-promoting men like, well Clay Shirky (I guess, right? and he in fact might be proud, I a woman, made this accusation). What I appreciate about the post is the fact that he does not pigeon hole women as caring, maternal, and meek. I have always resented the idea that women can t be assertive and confident. However, confidence and self-esteem, which I agree are vital for getting noted, does not inherently entail jerky behavior.I think Shirky s perspective might be skewed because of his home field, which is filled with just the type of guys he is describing. I call them pundit-entrepreneurs (though to be sure some are pretty darn nice). If you take the field of anthropology, for example, it has traditionally and for a long time been known for grand slam female scholars from Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the past to the ones of the present like Nancy Scheper Hughes and Jean Comaroff. During grad school, I was surrounded by strong, smart, witty, confident ladies and always felt I had role models to follow and emulate. They were not, however, low-life jerks clawing their way to the top of the academic mountain leaving a trail of destruction behind their path. Then when I started to go to the tech and media academic conferences, I was soon swimming in a sea of mostly white men and the vibe was different. I was ignored and talked over a handful of times, which had never happened to me before. There was a lot more self-promotion than I had seen in other fields, in part, it seemed because the media pays more attention to this field so folks are trying to get the media light focused on them. While I don t disagree that many fields from medicine to law promote and reward blow-hards and massive unrestrained arrogance, I would rather not create a false binary between meek/low self-esteem/female and total-jerky/arrogance/confidence. Why not instead promote and highlight behavior that rewards confidence sans the arrogance? Here are some thoughtful related posts.

For the first time in a long while I took a vacation in New Zealand where I am for LCA. I decided to also take a break (mostly) from the Internet but I decided to it was worth to come back to write a brief response to Clay Shirky s rant about women, which I find pretty unsettling. So the basic upshot of his entry is that for women to get ahead in this world, they need to not only behave more like men but in specific, like all the effing blow-hard jerky self-promoting men like, well Clay Shirky (I guess, right? and he in fact might be proud, I a woman, made this accusation). What I appreciate about the post is the fact that he does not pigeon hole women as caring, maternal, and meek. I have always resented the idea that women can t be assertive and confident. However, confidence and self-esteem, which I agree are vital for getting noted, does not inherently entail jerky behavior.I think Shirky s perspective might be skewed because of his home field, which is filled with just the type of guys he is describing. I call them pundit-entrepreneurs (though to be sure some are pretty darn nice). If you take the field of anthropology, for example, it has traditionally and for a long time been known for grand slam female scholars from Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead in the past to the ones of the present like Nancy Scheper Hughes and Jean Comaroff. During grad school, I was surrounded by strong, smart, witty, confident ladies and always felt I had role models to follow and emulate. They were not, however, low-life jerks clawing their way to the top of the academic mountain leaving a trail of destruction behind their path. Then when I started to go to the tech and media academic conferences, I was soon swimming in a sea of mostly white men and the vibe was different. I was ignored and talked over a handful of times, which had never happened to me before. There was a lot more self-promotion than I had seen in other fields, in part, it seemed because the media pays more attention to this field so folks are trying to get the media light focused on them. While I don t disagree that many fields from medicine to law promote and reward blow-hards and massive unrestrained arrogance, I would rather not create a false binary between meek/low self-esteem/female and total-jerky/arrogance/confidence. Why not instead promote and highlight behavior that rewards confidence sans the arrogance? Here are some thoughtful related posts.

The culture of freedom lies in the details Here is an interesting blog post by Bradley Kuhn about Ubuntu, Debian, and (warning: my interpretation ahead) the culture of freedom. While reading it, I had kinda moment of truth, because just yesterday I was musing with Mehdi and Lucas on the fact that Debian is basically the only remaining distribution among the mainstream ones (if that means something) that is free from the ground up, including its infrastructure. We "just" seek hardware via donations and then we run, thanks to the amazing work of DSA, our own free infrastructure on top of it. Let's cherish this value! Thanks to Roberto Di Cosmo for the pointer to Bradley's post. Update: there's a thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about Bradley's post.

As Dries Buytaert, the creator and head of development of Drupal, announced on Twitter, the new major (pre-)version of Drupal, namely Drupal 7 alpha 1 has been released! This was on the 9th birthday of Drupal.

This is great news and the release notes are mentioning some aspects why this is so:

Revamped User Interface
An incredible amount of work has gone into improving the user experience and administration interface. The new administration theme "Seven", the overlay module, the dashboard and the configurable shortcut bar, all lead to a much more user-friendly interface. In-place editing is enabled for blocks and nodes by default, so modifying the content of a site becomes much simpler.

Custom Fields
Drupal 7 bundles in the ability to add custom fields, similar in functionality to the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module. However, fields are no longer limited only to content types; they can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities. Fields also have support for translations.

Image Handling
Drupal 7 brings native image handling to core. Image fields may be added to content, and have image styles applied to them, such as scaling, cropping, and other effects.
Update Manager
Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manger module can also install and upgrade modules and themes.

Front-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A new render API allows for highly granular theming, core template files have been revamped to provide more semantic markup, Drupal 7 now has built-in RDFa support, includes jQuery UI and a new AJAX framework, and a new core theme "Stark" which exposes Drupal's markup directly for those who want to dive in and start theming.

In addition, Drupal 7 has several major accessibility enhancements, making it the most accessible release of Drupal to date!

Back-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A revamped database layer resolving nearly all limitations in the Drupal 6 database layer, automated testing framework, new PHP stream-based file API that supports private and public files simultaneously, revamped node access system, new hooks for more flexible system interaction, an Entity API, a job queue API, and many, many, many more improvements.

Drupal 7 is also the most scalable release to date, with features such as built-in proxy server support, advanced caching techniques, and Content Delivery Network support for static files.

Alone the inclusion of CCK and Views are great news, whereas all PostgreSQL users will benefit from the new database layer under the hood. I've tested a pre-alpha development version some weeks ago and that Drupal 7 experience was already great. So, it would be nice to see Drupal 7 in Debian soon as well, but I guess a alpha 1 version might be too early to be packaged.

News is slow this month on the FusionForge development front. We're all busy gathering all the things that we want to go into the next release, but there's no big news from the code. However, there is something of interest. You may have heard about the Coclico project, which is an initiative aiming at collaboration and convergence between several forge engines, most notably FusionForge, Codendi and Novaforge. That project was started last October, and it holds regular meetings with its members. The next meeting is scheduled for the 2nd of February in Paris, and we thought we could host an open meeting on the 3rd for non-Coclico members, a bit like the forge meeting we had last year (which is when FusionForge was officially born), but with an emphasis on what Coclico did so far. Since most of the FusionForge hackers are in Western Europe, and several are in Paris (especially if we add those who go to Paris for the Coclico meeting), we thought it would also be a good opportunity to gather for a technical and social meeting. It seems the Coclico open session didn't generate much interest this time (at least, it hasn't so far), so I proposed to hijack the room for this FusionForge meeting, and I didn't hear any objections. I have several themes I'd like to discuss with people, and possibly start implementing during that day:

• database maintenance and schema: unification of the upgrade scripts (including for plugins), cleanup of obsolete stuff, addition of missing constraints, and so on;
• configuration system: my initial prototype didn't raise many objections (at least in its scope), now what to do with the next steps?
• packaging and installation system: what needs to be done to keep the three ways of installation (manual, *.deb, *.rpm) in sync with as little work as possible?
• permissions system: clarification of what happens currently, ideas for evolution;
• plugins and interaction with external software: do we lack stuff that would make this easier?
• roadmap, long-term plans, this sort of things;
• other things that users may want to discuss with hackers?
• possibly drink a beer or two;

and so on. These are in no way specific to FusionForge, and in fact I think it would be great if hackers/users of other forges were present, because we could benefit a great deal from their experience and plans. But if we find ourselves amongst FF people only, I think these would be good to discuss, possibly write some code for, and go home with a clearer picture of where our efforts should focus in the near future. I'd therefore like to invite interested people to mark the 3rd of February on their agendas. The meeting will take place in Issy-les-Moulineaux (near Paris, within reach of the tube). If you're interested, please get in touch with us (#FusionForge on the FreeNode IRC network, or the fusionforge-general mailing-list), so we can have a rough estimate of how many people to expect. The meeting room is provided by France T l com, and they're probably going to need numbers if not names. Further details will be announced when known.

The cheapest ADSL or Cable net access in Australia seems to be about $30 per month. I ve been using 3G net access by the Three phone company for 18 months now and it s been working well [1]. I recently bought a new 3G modem because the old one broke, so it has cost me $250 in modems plus $15 per month for the connection which compares well to $100 (or more) for an ADSL or Cable installation plus $30 per month. My Three net access gives me 1G of data per month. I have just noticed that they have pre-paid net access that gives 12G of data that must be used within one year which costs $149 per year [2] that is $12.41 per month or 83% the price of the plan access plus it means that any bandwidth quota that isn t used in one month can be used the next month (so you can save up for upgrading to a newer distribution of Linux). Dodo has pre-paid mobile net access on the Optus network for $139 which gives 15G of data that must be used within one year [3]. So that s equivalent to $11.58 per month or $9.20 per gig. A member of my local LUG mentioned that Exetel has a 3G plan which is good value if you don t use much data transfer but which has per-megabyte charges for excess data transfer. I couldn t recommend it for my parents as I never know when they will do something that may transfer a lot of data, I could just imagine them saying loading web pages was really slow for a week and then I got a big bill . Ross Barkman s GPRS/UMTS page gives some critical information on using a 3G phone with a tether [4]. Using that information I discovered that I need to use AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","3netaccess" in my chatscript to get ppp going with my old LG U890 mobile phone (with 3netaccess being the important word). I plan to give my old mobile phone to my parents and let them use prepaid 3G net access to reduce their net access bill by more than 1/3 while also giving them more data transfer quota for times when they need to transfer a lot (EG when my sister visits them). At this stage I m not sure whether I will get them to use Three or Dodo. One advantage of Three is that I ve used them a lot and know exactly how to get it all working, the other is that my old mobile phone is locked to Three they agreed to unlock it on demand after the contract is ended (which happened over a year ago) but it will be a hassle to get it done. Saving the hassle of getting an old phone unlocked may be worth the $10 per year cost. Also I have used my 3G modem at my parents house on a few occasions and know that the reception is quite good, while the reception for Dodo (Optus) 3G is unknown One extra benefit with doing this is that my parents will have some freedom to move their PC. If they decide that the computer room is too hot in summer and want to move their PC to below their air-conditioner they will be able to do so without needing a long Ethernet cable to connect their PC to the cable modem. For my personal 3G net access (which I require for fixing servers on occasion) I am stuck with Three. When I bought a new 3G modem I decided to save about $20 by getting a device that s locked to Three. 12G per year is more than enough for sshing to servers and checking email and if I had paid extra for the unlocked modem it would it would probably have died before the savings on net access made up for the higher purchase price. Update:
Crazy John has a good deal, $129 for 7.5G which expires in a year [5]. I won t use that for my parents though, the probability of them going over 7.5G is too high to make it worth the risk for a $10 saving.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/28/new-net-connections/
• [2] http://www.three.com.au/cs/ContentServer?c=Page&pagename=Three%2FPage%2FBusinessVideoCallingTemplate&cid=1221530707570
• [3] https://secure.dodo.com.au/prepaid-wireless/PlanSelection.aspx
• [4] http://www.taniwha.org.uk/gprs.html
• [5] http://www.crazyjohns.com.au/mobile-broadband/

Maybe we could define the [ACPI] APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open.
Or maybe we could patent something related to this.

Bill Gates, 1999, the others is Linux (Bill says so explicitly in this email, too.) Obviously, we find similar anti-Windows rethoric en masse on Linux mailing list, and obviously it's been a few years since but I find myself asking if anything really changed in the top level of MS management, except perhaps that a few people realized that trying to make the Linux / FOSS crowd look like a ridiculous bunch of amateurs wouldn't work.

A new version of RQuantLib (a package combining the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language) is now out at CRAN and in Debian (where it depends on the 1.0.0 beta of QuantLib that is currently in the NEW queue with its new library version). This RQuantLib release works with either the current release 0.9.9 as well as with the just-released first beta of QuantLib 1.0.0. This versions brings a few cleanups due to minor Rcpp changes (in essence: we now define the macro R_NO_REMAP before including R's headers and this separate non-namespaced functions like error() or length() out into prefixed-versions Rf_error() and Rf_length() which is a good thing). It also adds a number of calendaring and holiday utilities that Khanh just added: tests for weekend, holiday, endOfMonth as well dayCount, date advancement and year fraction functions commonly used in fixed income. Full changelog details, examples and more details about this package are at my RQuantLib page.

Some days are passed, but I'm still pleased to announce that


It was a really nice experience, it offered me the possibility to work on Matplotlib, do some really interesting stuff, and I'm quite proud of it :)

On the other hand, it was not a "straight" way: the effort I put in this was huge, practically I had to stop all other stuffs and projects I was working on (Debian included) and I was getting more and more tired as time passed. Also, sometimes Packt employees and actions were somehow problematic. but anyhow, the important thing is that THE BOOK IS OUT!!

Now I got also a nice box about the book on the sidebar of this blog!

Enjoy it!!