Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Stephen Duncombe

This fall I have been awash in a few obsessions including book piracy and spam. I recently got to talk about one of these obsessions when I was interviewed about book piracy by Nora Young for her weekly CBC radio and podcast show Spark. I mostly gave a lay of the land panorama with a nod toward some of the conditions, technological and social, that can help us grasp the contemporary explosion of book piracy and also raised some thoughts about what might change the future landscape. What I don t raise is whether a politics built around an explicit embrace of piracy is regressive, progressive, or something else but these ethical questions were posed in the comments left for the full interview. Some of the comments pointed to the pitfalls and shortcoming that can follow the terminology of piracy many of which I share. But what keeps me interested in the politics of piracy is how it can speak the language of spectacle, which can be a powerful tactic and technique for broadcasting a political message. Here I just paraphrasing and cribbing the work of Stephen Duncombe, who has argued, I think quite persuasively, that we cannot rely solely on reasoned debate for building political programs. Duncombe does not argue that we must toss out rationality and truth seeking (these are absolutely necessary) but notes how on their own or if not clothed in some other cloak, they may not be enough to convey and compel, especially in this day of total media saturation. Or to put a but more poetically by him Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. Much (though not all) of contemporary digital piracy follows the logic of spectacle. It builds and conveys a fantastical drama of right and wrong, of new possibilities, of freedom from the noose of the law; it signals and speaks to the thrill and fun in twisting, even breaking, existing structures and constraints; and provides a window into another way of acting/behaving. In many cases what it provides is a commons (and I will be exploring it in depth in my class next semester on the commons) and many folks, I imagine, turn to piracy simply for the free stuff, and a number of them come out of the other side transformed into copy fighters willing to engage in a politics beyond sharing stuff and waving the pirate flag. For those of us who believe in greater access and different ways of imagining structures and strategies of re-compensation, piracy on its own is not certainly enough and I understand fully and even to some degree, share the skepticism many feel toward such language. But I am not quite ready to declare a politics of piracy as always politically bankrupt or necessarily backward. I guess what I embrace is a diverse political ecology. For some, the drama of spectacle and thrill of transgression are what turns their political mojo on; for others it is the cool and reasoned debate common to policy and reform; for others, they want to focus on building alternatives as we see with Free Software or radical tech collectives. For some, it is both the reasoned salt and the transgressive pepper that spices their political world. And I would rather have more spice than less, especially in an era where the blandness of political apathy is that which is our most dangerous enemy. Related Links: Here is a wonderful animation by the NZ Book Council that captures what I love about books and renders its materiality wonderfully alive. On the Media has a episode on book publishing and Cory Doctorow has penned some thoughts about the future of book selling. If you want to keep abreast on the politics of liberating books, check out Free our Books. If you are more interested in the technical side of things, check out the book liberator project.

1. Response times should dramatically improve on this new server - without flooding planets too. Together with Simon Waters, I've moved from a real (but tired) server to a snazzy virtual one with bytemark. Various other bits will be being updated and the new site will start to host more useful data on translations and string freezes in progress.
   DNS is currently updating, but over the next 24hours the old server should be able to take a rest before being finally powered down.


2. In other news, my house in Plymouth is now on the market - I'm preparing to relocate to Cambridge. No more pharmacy, it's time to work on embedded applications full time. It's going to be a chaotic few months ahead . . .

After I had been living with mostly the same electronic toys over the last few years (ok, I got the netbook earlier this year, but that's about it... and it might even count as a serious work tool given how much I came to use it) all the toys I've agonized over buying suddenly appeared on the doorstep within these two weeks... First part was the QNAP TS-419P which I bought after reading about QNAP on Martin Michlmayr's blog. The decision was quick when I realized that at least part of the Debian related information was not hidden in some obscure web forums but was there on the QNAP wiki itself, indicating quite some level of support from the manufacturer. Beyond that, tbm does an awsome job supporting QNAP users like myself through his excellent QNAP / Kirkwood pages and also, since Debian installer support for the 419 is not quite finished, by email. Kudos to him! So, once I get past some remaining obstacles (for some reason, the initrd refused to mount a raid1 root device when I tried it at first; working on that, but it's not that easy to debug without console access...) our old storage / Internet router (very old! Pentium II 350MHz with 128M RAM and its probably third internal disk, which became ridicolous to use when I bought a (big) external USB disk and realized it only has USB 1...) can be retired. Should be good for the environment, too, I should hope, in terms of power consumption even considering that I now run 3 more disks.

This is an updated version of yesterday's post with corrected URLs -- by copy-and-pasting I had still referenced the previous slides from UseR! 2009 in Rennes instead of last Friday's slides from the ISM presentation in Tokyo. The presentations page had the correct URLs, and this has been corrected below for this re-post. My apologies! As mentioned yesterday, I spent a few days last week in Japan as I had an opportunity to present the Introduction to High-Performance Computing with R tutorial at the Institute for Statistical Mathematics in Tachikawa near Tokyo thanks to an invitation by Junji Nakano. An updated version of the presentations slides (with a few typos corrected) is now available as is a 2-up handout version. Compared to previous versions, and reflecting the fact that this was the 'all-day variant' of almost five hours of lectures, the following changes were made:

• the 'parallel computing' section was expanded further with discussion of the recent R packages multicore, iterators, foreach, doNWS, doSNOW, doMPI;
• a first discussion of GPU computing using the gputools package was added;
• the section on 'out of memory computing' using ff, bigmemory and biglm (including an example borrowed from Jay Emerson) reappeared in this longer version;
• minor fixes and polishing throughout.

Comments and suggestions are, as always, appreciated.

As mentioned yesterday, I spent a few days last week in Japan as I had an opportunity to present the Introduction to High-Performance Computing with R tutorial at the Institute for Statistical Mathematics in Tachikawa near Tokyo thanks to an invitation by Junji Nakano. An updated version of the presentations slides (with a few typos corrected) is now available as is a 2-up handout version. Compared to previous versions, and reflecting the fact that this was the 'all-day variant' of almost five hours of lectures, the following changes were made:

• the 'parallel computing' section was expanded further with discussion of the recent R packages multicore, iterators, foreach, doNWS, doSNOW, doMPI;
• a first discussion of GPU computing using the gputools package was added;
• the section on 'out of memory computing' using ff, bigmemory and biglm (including an example borrowed from Jay Emerson) reappeared in this longer version;
• minor fixes and polishing throughout.

Comments and suggestions are, as always, appreciated.

Email scams have changed... for good and for bad (depends on the POV and the case).

I decided to pick two samples that demonstrate two directions scams seems to be taking:

NAME
ADDRESS
TELEPHONE
SEX

As simple as that. Now the subject takes a more important role than the content: "Your email ID has been awarded one million pounds. in our Tobacco Promo". This, I must say, seems to be one of the worst scam emails I've ever seen. Compare it to the following:

Dear Raphael,

This email might come to you as a surprise and the temptation to ignore
it as not serious could come into your mind but please consider it and
accept it with a deep sense of humility.
[...]
The sum of ( 10,700, 000.00 Million Pounds), has been floating as
unclaimed since 2002 in my bank as all efforts to get across the
relatives of our customer Mr. Ruben Geissert who deposited the money
have hit the stones. Unfortunately, He died of Cardiac Arrest in the
year 2002, without a registered nest of kin.

I've highlighted the important bits of the email; the difference is clear.

I was already wondering some time ago when this kind of "improvements" to the scam (and spam in general) emails would be seen.

What's next?


P.S. if you haven't voted at the Earth Hour website please consider doing so.
If you are having problems voting because of the flash application, here's a direct link.

Today, an episode of The Gadget Show aired in which they compared PC and Mac to put on their wall of fame . I was shocked that there was no mention of Linux at all in their rundown. Here is the email I just sent to them in response to the show:-

Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:16:28 +0000
From: Martin Meredith <mez AT debian DOT org>
To: gadget.show AT northonetv DOT com
Subject: PC vs Mac Yes, you mention windows But both PC s and Mac s have the ability to run a little thing called Linux Linux is the base of an operating system that s been around for years, often
making innovations BEFORE Windows or Mac are able to. It s an Operating system that s written by the people, for the people, which
shows in the fact that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of distributions
available to download and use for FREE!!!! A large motive behind the Linux movement is the fact that it s completely free.
Both in the sense of Free Speech, and in the sense of Free Beer. You don t have to pay for it, and you can do what you like with it. Compare the above to a Mac. With a mac, you re limited to the hardware you can use, you re limited in the functionality, etc etc. Comparing to Windows, you can see the benefit of the price. Constantly upgrading windows can cost a LOT of money. Ok, Linux does have it s flaws. Some hardware isn t supported correctly, and a lot of the software you ll find on the shelves of your local shop probably won t work with it. But, nowadays, with the advent of the iPhone, and to a lesser extent, Android based Mobile Phones, people are coming to expect easily available software. Enter the package Manager. Most distributions of Linux now offer an easy way to find and install applications, and some go a step further and give you an application that makes life even easier (See attached screenshot) Linux also has the benefit that, like the Mac, the fact that it s not Windows,
and something that 90%+ of people use, it s not a target for Viruses. Add that
to the fact that it has Least Privileged Access built in (Think Windows Vista
are you sure that you want to run this program as an admin? ), and has done
since the very beginning, and it makes it one of the most secure operating
systems you can find. Linux has come along in leaps and bounds in recent years, and is surely a
competitor for any operating system out there. While it may be unfamiliar,
with the advent of new technology, it s perfectly placed. This has been shown
by the fact that until Microsoft made a sly move to relicence Windows XP for
netbooks, it was hard to find a netbook with anything but a Linux based OS on it (and all those who tried out my eeePC 701 when it was new and shiny out of the box tended to prefer what was on that than Windows!)
Regards,
Martin Meredith Freelance Writer for Future Publishing
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/
Ubuntu Developer http://www.ubuntu.com/
Deputy IT Manager for Mobile Fun Ltd. http://www.mobilefun.co.uk/

The following is written in German and probably only interesting for people living near D sseldorf. I decided to post this to Planet Debian as it might interest some of you :)

Als (ordentlicher) Student kommt man ab und zu in den Genuss, eine Arbeit schreiben zu d rfen, von der Andere (sprich: nicht nur ich durch die gute Note *g*) profitieren k nnen.
So auch geschehen mit meiner Bacherlor-Arbeit. Und obwohl mein Vortrag erst am n chsten Montag (07.12.2009, 10:00, wahrscheinlich in Raum 25.12.02.33) ist, gibt es morgen auf dem diesj hrigen Dies Academicus der HHU D sseldorf bereits einen kleinen Vorgeschmack.

Dem geneigten Leser wird aufgefallen sein, dass der Link nicht auf die Webseite meiner Universit t zeigt, und auch nicht auf die Webseite unserer AStA, sondern auf Wikipedia.
Nein, ich bin noch nicht so ber hmt um f r die Wikipedia relevant zu sein. Es gibt schlicht und einfach nichts dazu auf den Seiten. Nicht mal im Kalender der AStA stehts drin...
Woran das liegt? Keine Ahnung, ich vermute ja, dass die Herren und Damen (puh, safe, sonst kommt noch der Gleichstellungsbeauftragte zu mir...) lieber mit Streiken, Maulen und sonstigem Quatsch besch ftigt sind, anstatt irgendwie mal die Bildung zu f rdern. Egal, hier ist nicht der Platz um zu St nkern (Twitter/Identi.ca ich komme! [Danke Asel f r die Idee]), ich wollte euch n mlich einladen!

Keine Einladung ohne Einladungstext, *such* *kram*, ach hier hab ichs: Programm zum Dies Academicus 2009. Leider wei ich nicht wie aktuell die Version ist, liegt irgendwo in den Tiefen der Seite der Fachschaft Modernes Japan und ich bin da als

Spam-Erkennung: Intelligent Greylisting
Ort: H rsaal 3C
Zeit: 13 bis 14 Uhr

auf Seite 8 vermerkt. Aber ihr wolltet ja einen Text haben. Den hab ich eigentlich auch eingereicht. Und nun ganz exklusiv und nur f r meine lieben Leser (und weil niemand auf die Idee kam den ins Programm aufzunehmen):

Intelligent Greylisting

Gute Spamfilter sind entweder ressourcenhungrig, weil sie die ganze E-Mail analysieren m ssen, oder fehleranfaellig, weil sie Entscheidungen zu voreilig treffen und dadurch legitime E-Mails verlieren. Wir stellen euch eine neue Methode vor, wie man Spam effektiv filtern kann, ohne viele Ressourcen zu verbrauchen und ohne legitime E-Mails zu verlieren.

So! Ihr kommt morgen alle um 13 Uhr in den H rsaal 3C (Geb ude 23.irgendwas, PhilFak) und genie t meine Anwesenheit!

Es gr t das Grummeltier.

Now that I'm not letting the cat out of the bag (I bought these as gifts) I can write a review. The use case was pretty simple: I thought it'd be a cool Christmas present for our parents to give them something Internet-enabled that would give them regular updates on their grandchild (when he/she arrives). I was thinking a picture a day type of thing. So I hunted around for a WiFi-enabled digital picture frame, and found the iGala being sold pretty much exclusively by ThinkGeek. The reviews seemed pretty good. I know WiFi-capable frames have been around for a few years, but they always seemed to be pretty lacking in terms of WiFi functionality. Like they wouldn't do any security, or they'd only do WEP. This particular product claimed to do the whole gamut, including WPA2. The fact that it was a touch screen and ran Linux also made it appealing. So I ordered a couple of them for a few weeks before we headed to Australia, with the intention of making sure that they'd work. Here's the highlights. WPA2 didn't work (nor did WPA) Despite the software on the frames claiming to be able to talk WPA2, the frame would not associate with my Linksys WRTU54G-TM. I had to drop it all the way back to WEP to get it to connect. For me, this was the most disappointing failure. I bought the product specifically on the strength of its claim that it supported WPA2, and it just didn't work. It was also pretty impossible to debug the failure. I downloaded the latest firmware update, and that added additional settings for TKIP or AES when selecting WPA2, but neither option helped. The automatic updates are brain-dead Speaking of downloading firmware updates, the latest firmware that I downloaded and installed on the frames added automatic over-the-air firmware updates. Nice enough feature, except for the implementation. The frame tried to make an HTTP GET request for a non-existent file, every 6 seconds. So the frequency of checking alone is totally ridiculous, but couple with this the fact that it's making a GET request (this is what $DEITY invented the HEAD request for, people!) and the website has a "friendly" 404 Not Found page that weighs in at a little over 10 Kb. By my calculations, that's nearly 150 Mb of failed update checking traffic a day. Taking these frames to a backward country like Australia, where ISP users still have monthly quotas, gives the frame a pretty horrendous running cost in terms of traffic. Not to mention the outbound bandwidth requirements for the server hosting the updates. Crikey, the mind boggles. I'd have thought checking once a day and on power on would be perfectly sufficient. Transitions are unavoidable It may be just me, but I hate cheezy transitions. Digital picture frames tend to come with a myriad of them, but they all look cheap. It's impossible to tell the frame to just change the picture, it has to use at least one transition effect all the time. It defaults to randomly choosing from all the available ones. At least you can tone it down to just one. Automatic on/off time I liked that it was possible to configure operating times. No need to have the thing chewing power 24x7. It just seems to turn off the backlight outside of the programmed operating hours, so it's still doing the lame uber-frequent and bandwidth-intensive checking for updates even when it's "off". Photo check frequency is configurable Another nice feature was the ability to check for new photos at varying intervals. What I wanted for my parents was to just update once a day, so they'd get a new photo every day (assuming we put a new one in the Picasa web album that it's checking). This was very doable, and coupled with the automatic on/off time, means they should wake up to a new photo every day (that we change it). Built in photos are a bit too sticky There's 3 or 4 in-built photos as part of the firmware. If there's nothing accessible or available online, it'll cycle through these. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to have at least two photos in your online source for it to stop wanting to incorporate the stock photos in the mix. The workaround is to put the same photo in the online album twice, so you don't realise it's switching between two images. Lame, but it works... Touch screen UI was adequate Given the alternative user interface for digital picture frames is a little IR remote control and some dinky menus, the iGala was nice to configure. A full on-screen QWERTY keyboard pops up for entering WEP/WPA/WPA2 keys and configuring the Picasa/Flickr connections. Fairly responsive support The main near-showstopper for me was the lack of advertised WPA2 support. I emailed the Aequitech support folks quite a bit during my "evaluation" period. They got back to me fairly quickly most of the time and wanted to know exact details of my setup so they could reproduce it in the lab. They'd be well served having an actual ticketing system, instead of hiding behind an email address, as it made it hard to keep track of the multiple issues I was raising with them. It's written in Lua?! I have no familiarity with Lua, other than I know of its existence as a programming language. I'm curious as to what their motivation was for this language choice. All of the Lua code shipped in the complete firmware refresh ZIP files is bytecode. I have no idea if it's possible to decompile it. The CPU architecture would appear to be a Blackfin based on the few compiled binaries included in the full firmware. Easy to update Prior to the new update "functionality" I've already railed against, it was pretty easy to update. Download a ZIP file and a shell script, put them in the root directory of a USB key, and plug it into the frame and stand back. The updates don't seem to cryptographically verified (even the over-the-air ones), so I wonder if it's possible to break into the frame by way of a cleverly crafted "update". I have no idea what breaking into the frame would buy you. I don't know what sort of computing power they have. Conclusion I still think the iGala is a reasonable, if somewhat immature product. If the software is going to be actively worked on, and the support people continue to be responsive, then I think it's got good potential. For the price, I expected a more polished product, though. I received an email from their support people shortly after returning from Australia saying that they'd fixed the WPA2 problem. Unfortunately I had no intention of trying to remotely talk my parents through how to reconfigure their access point or the frame (interestingly WPA2 didn't work with their Linksys WAG54G2 either, so I'd love to know what WPA2 devices it was tested with), so it's 128-bit WEP until I next go to Australia.

This weekend while I was on Guatemala just a few hours before to give a talk, my acer one decided to suddenly shut down, I tried to started again, remove the battery, plug the charger, etc, I actually even tried to boot it with some liv-usb distro, but the netbook keep shutting down a few seconds after boot I m still not sure what happend to the computer, it could be the motherboard or the HDD, I still have to check if it can be fixed Sadly, this was my main computer, I always used for almost everything, even for task when building a package tooked 50 minutes :p, but I m lucky since I did not loose any senssitive data (in case the problem is the HDD), and I still have other computers where I can work, but I still need to get used to a bigger screen/keyboard.

Just got back from Tokyo a few hours ago: I had an opportunity to give my 'Introduction to High-Performance Computing with R' tutorial / lectures (for which previous slides can be found here). This was an all-day talk at the Institute for Statistical Mathematics at their new site in Tachikawa in the greater Tokyo area, thanks to an invitation by Junji Nakano. Lisa and I turned this into a brief one-week trip to Kyoto and Tokyo, and we had a truly wonderful time on what was our first visit to Japan. I should blog some more about it, but now I will give in to the jet lag and catch up on some sleep...

I got a new computer at home a week ago and finally got around to assemble all the parts. Which wasn t as easy as expected, especially fitting the CPU cooler was a hard fight. Specs For the curious, here are the specs:

CPU

AMD Phenom II X4 965 (4 3.4 GHz)

Mainboard

MSI 790GX-G65

Graphics

ATI Radeon HD 3300 (on-board)

RAM

8 GB, DDR3

Hard drives

2x SATA 1.5 TB (by Western Digital)

Ubuntu installation For testing and having a first look, I installed Ubuntu karmic koala (amd64). Installation went like a breeze, everything was detected and worked out of the box. Well, kind of graphics performance was dreadful. Which was kind of expected. Debian installation I originally thought about using Debian only inside virtual machines or change roots. Still, Ubuntu does not really feel like the real thing . So I went to install Debian, aiming at a sid/unstable installation. The first boot using the official squeeze snapshot netinst image (Binary-1 20091128-11:21) went fine. Up to the first prompt: No input was possible. Probably a problem with the USB keyboard I had connected (Logitech wireless). Out of curiosity I tried the graphical installer, which did not even get so far. It was stuck in an endless loop trying to start an X11 server. So I dug for a PS/2 connected keyboard and had more luck. I got to the point where the installer searches for the CD-ROM drive. As I did not want to dismantle my old system yet, I used an external USB DVD/RW drive. This was not detected by the installer so I was unable to continue installation. I guess, the NIC driver was also on the disc so no ethernet either. Today I installed the DVD burner into the tower and had more luck. It still amazes me how easy it is to create my default storage setup using d-i (LVM on RAID). However, the installer failed to reread the partitions after I created two on each drive, interestingly telling me about /dev/sda2 being busy. Perhaps a left-over swap partition from the Ubuntu install? Anyway, after running fdisk manually and writing the same partition table again, I was able to continue. The remaining d-i steps went fine, with just a nuisance: I was asked for the console font setting twice. And I had no idea what it was asking of me, AFAIK UTF-8 should be fine for all possible uses. I selected # Latin1 and Latin5 western Europe and Turkic languages. Not that I will see the console unless Xorg fails to run After having the base system running, I rebooted without selecting any more software, partly because I knew that the resync on md1 will need restarting after booting into the new system. The new system booted fine and I called aptitude to install build-essential, Xorg and both KDE and Gnome desktops. This pulled in MySQL via akonadi-server (ouch!) and I was asked for a MySQL root password. Seriously, I don t care, this is a desktop system. I tend to forget the password anyway and the last time, root was able to reset it. So I just hit Enter, leaving no password set. This lead to the installation asking me two more times for the password, which really sucks given that the server is only used by Akonadi for whatever reason and the last time I looked, it creates its own MySQL configuration. Albeit my old system is 8 years old, the new system still seemed slower. Which of course is due to disk latencies, given that /dev/md1 was being synchronized in the background. Anyway, I was eager to test the desktop experience and started gdm. X came up fine, but again I had no mouse and no keyboard (USB mouse, keyboard connected as well as PS/2 keyboard). I also was unable to switch to a VT, so I logged in remotely and rebooted the new system. After the reboot, hal obviously picked up the input devices and X11 worked fine now. At this point, I stopped as the sunday almost passed already. Summary: Debian installation still needs some improvements I think. Maybe our distribution is just too stable, after all my last install is 3 years back due to a disk crash Relevant Debian bugs

• #558679: My installation report with some logs included.
• #558681: Nagging about MySQL root password.
• #558686: Failure to reload partition table.
• #545933: No USB keyboard support
• #315553: Installation from optical drive on usb fails (but this is for kernel 2.4)
• #558691: No keyboard and mouse after fresh installation of xserver-xorg.

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> I am normally not so keen on GMO but if you managed to Clone/GMO/Tweak-Feline-DNA to make one of these for me, a one that stays so youthfully cute, I might be open to such modification.

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/0Bmhjf0rKe8&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1&amp;" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"></embed></object> I am normally not so keen on GMO but if you managed to Clone/GMO/Tweak-Feline-DNA to make one of these for me, a one that stays so youthfully cute, I might be open to such modification.

I m about to leave for San Francisco, so my SE Linux Play Machine is turned off and will remain off until after I return.

Once there was a project called Debian and a Ganneff.... (unfortunately in German only....)

22:20 < cb> Das ist doch voll die Arbeit Maintainer zu werden :-). Ich geb
gew nschte Pakete immer nur weiter an einen der da sowieso schon den Kernel
betreut :-)
22:21 < Ganneff> es is nur viel arbeit wenn du keinen schimmer hast
22:22 < cb> ja ich hab nur das seepferdchen *g*
22:22 < Obilan> Knusper: ja sicher ist es das
22:22 < Knusper> kopf -> tisch
22:22 < cb> Knusper, wenn du die verwaisten pakete findest siehst du auf
der gleichen seite auch die links wie man maintainer wird
22:22 < Knusper> die hab ich gefunden
22:22 < cb> zumindest hab ich das das letzte mal dort gesehen
22:24 < Ganneff> wnpp?
22:24 < Knusper> aber man brauch dann schon leute, die einen "hoffieren"
22:26 < Ganneff> du brauchst erstmal die ahnung nen paket zu bauen.
22:26 < Ganneff> dazu siehe new maint guide
22:26 < Ganneff> dann brauchste nen sponsor. dazu gehe zur mentors liste
22:26 < Ganneff> dann machste mit dem eh weng rum (also normal so
paketuploads via dem)
22:26 < Ganneff> und hast da halt schon dein maintenance krams.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann is der sponsor angekotzt von dir und dem
laufenden arbeit generieren
22:27 < Ganneff> der tritt dich dann dass du mal DM anf ngst.
22:27 < Ganneff> das machste dann, und jemand anders tritt dir deine pakete
als dmua zurecht, nachdem du in nem keyring irgendwo steckst.
22:27 < Ganneff> und dann kannste denn krampf selbst hochladen. aber nix
andres.
22:27 < Ganneff> irgendwann willste was andres. und willst das auch noch
ohne son doofen sponsor
22:28 < Ganneff> dann versuchste dich an DD
22:28 < Knusper> ahhhhhh
22:28 < Ganneff> dazu musste dir nen advocate suchen
22:28 < Ganneff> der is  blicherweise einer dem du vorher im prozess
laufend auf den wecker fielst
22:28 < Ganneff> und er deswegen den nm leutz sagt "oh gott, befreit mich
bloss von dem"
22:28 < Ganneff> die machen das dann, aber sie wollen dir mal etwas
schmerzen zur ckgeben
22:28 < Ganneff> desdewegen wirste viele fragen beantworten m ssen
22:29 < Ganneff> und wie beim t v das auto musste hier deine pakete nochmal
vorstellen und checken lassen
22:29 < Ganneff> und dann nochmal fragen beantworten
22:29 < Knusper> thx...
22:29 < Ganneff> irgendwann gehst du dann mit den antworten den nm leuten
so auf den geist dass die dem frontdesk sagen "meine kacke, den wolle mehr
nit mehr sehen, schickts den dochma zu den DAMs, die hamms verdient"
22:30 < Ganneff> und die machen das dann meist. ausser sie m gen dich nich.
dann darfste nochma fragen beantworten
22:30 < Ganneff> bei den dams darfste nur warten. die testen deine geduld
22:30 < Ganneff> irgendwann langweilen die sich aber
22:30 < Ganneff> und dann kriegste pl tzlich mail
22:30 < Ganneff> OH MEIN GOTT. EIN NEUER DD.
22:30 < Ganneff> ende
22:30 < Ganneff> kapitel 2:
22:30 < cb> sch ne beschreibung
22:30 < Ganneff> du machst ne zeit als dd rum
22:30 < Knusper> LOL
22:30 < Ganneff> votest durch die gegend
22:30 < Ganneff> l dst pakete umher
22:30 < Ganneff> machst bugs in stable
22:30 < Ganneff> gibts dem security team arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> sprich - du gehst allen auf den sack. denn das is was ein
dd macht. muss ja schliesslich auch spass machen.
22:31 < Ganneff> aber irgendwann, also irgendwann, da wird das langweilig
22:31 < Ganneff> und dann verschwindeste mal ne zeit.
22:31 < Ganneff> weil du weisst - da gibts noch son team. das brauch auch
arbeit
22:31 < Ganneff> die suchen so leute die weggehen und sich verstecken
22:31 < Ganneff> nennt sich mia. die suchen.
22:31 < Ganneff> vielleicht finden die dich ja auch.
22:32 < Ganneff> dann kommste zur ck und machst mal wieder etwas arbeit f r
security/stable/sonstwen
22:32 < Ganneff> oder nicht, aber das is langweilig, da fliegste einfach.
22:32 < Ganneff> wennde dann gar keinen bock mehr hast und ne l ngre pause
willst
22:32 < Ganneff> dann gehste und machst eien auf emeritus
22:32 < Ganneff> das sind die rentner, die alten s cke, die sich
zur cklehnen und  ber die versuche der neuen lachen die sich grad von den
sponsoren qu len lassen
22:33 < Ganneff> ende kap. 2, ich hab keinen bock mehr. (jaja, emeritus)

Cheers to #debian.de on freenode

I love this guy. He plays in Times Square and is totally into his synthesizer. I can watch him for hours. One day I will ask whether he was a professor and if yes, of what (music? philosophy? both?). If only I could retire by performing in a subway station with a keyboard and dancing dolls. . . Thanks to the update left in the comments, you can watch him in action and find out what type of professor he was/is.

I love this guy. He plays in Times Square and is totally into his synthesizer. I can watch him for hours. One day I will ask whether he was a professor and if yes, of what (music? philosophy? both?). If only I could retire by performing in a subway station with a keyboard and dancing dolls. . . Thanks to the update left in the comments, you can watch him in action and find out what type of professor he was/is.

Earlier this summer, I wrote a blog post on taking a principled position on software freedom where I argued that advocates of free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) should take a principled position because the pragmatic benefits associated with open source --- "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility [and] lower cost" in OSI's words --- are simply not always present. More often than not, FLOSS projects fail. When they survive, they are often not as good as their proprietary competitors. Over the last year, I've been back at MIT taking classes, reading extensively, and otherwise learning how to act like a social scientist. My research goals, which I'm now beginning to focus on, are to help build a stronger understanding of the social dynamics in free software and free culture communities. With a slightly skeptical view toward my involvement with groups like the FSF and my work in the FLOSS community, at least one academic tried to suggest that taking a principled position in favor of software freedom might compromise the positivist social science research program in which I am engaged. "An advocate is too biased," they said. After many months of thinking seriously about this warning, I believe that this criticism can be addressed. After all, a principled position in favor of software freedom is a statement of how things should be, not a description of how they are. OSI will argue that open source leads to inherently better software. This statement, of course, is one that can be empirically tested and, in fact, there seems to be plenty of evidence that it is often wrong. On the other hand, the FSF's position that software should be free is ethical in nature. One can disagree with it, just like one can disagree with any other ethical position, but it can not be proved either right or wrong --- only convincing or unconvincing, logical or illogical in the context a certain set of other values that others might or might not share. Research has shown that the vast majority of FLOSS projects fizzle. A advocate who argues that FLOSS is inherently better is left trying to explain this fact and make excuses. As a result, OSI-style beliefs can certainly be a source of problematic bias in a social scientist. However, a person who believes that software should be free is welcome to recognize that it both fails and succeeds and to ask why. A principled idealist can argue in favor of behaviors that may be disruptive, difficult, or inefficient. Indeed, Stallman has never suggested that free software will be easier or better. Indeed, he routinely asks people to sacrifice their convenience for freedom. My goal, as a social scientist, is to understand why some FLOSS and free culture projects succeed and why many fail. I never take FLOSS's success for granted and, in fact, believe that proprietary software may often leads to better software in OSI's terms. Unlike an advocate who tows the OSI line, embracing evidence of the effectiveness of proprietary software is no way in conflict with my belief that software should be free. In fact, my desire to see software freedom grow becomes the driving force between trying to understand FLOSS's shortcomings! I am no more biased --- which is not to say completely unbiased --- than the person who both thinks that crime is wrong and who wants to study criminal behavior. In an analogous sense, starting out with the belief that all people are naturally law-abiding may be a problem in a way that beginning with the belief that people should be law-abiding is not. Starting from the fomer assumption, one has to explain away evidence to the contrary. Starting from the latter assumption, one can build an understanding of what drives people to obey or violate laws which, in turn, can help build a stronger society. To me, the question is not why FLOSS will succeed. Indeed, I believe its success is an empirical matter that remains very much up in the air. For me, the question is how it might. Embracing a principled position lets us face the facts and puts advocates and practitioners in a position to devise laws, social structures, and technologies to insure that it does.