So iPlayer, the BBC's on-demand 7-days TV download service, launched as Microsoft-only, despite the feedback to the trial service. They come along to events like hackday pretending to be our friends, but they're really not. It's more BBC Backdoor than BBC Backstage. My IMDB-listed friend Martyn Drake estimates the cost of using iPlayer as at least 215 for GNU/Linux users and you can't do it with free software. It seems to be even more expensive for a Mac.

"The BBC should remain impartial, but they're currently having hot patootie with Bill Gate and his chums in Redmond. They continue to use OUR license fee regardless of our objections to their dimwitted decision to use DRM, and now say they'll review the situation is six months. Thanks, BBC. Thanks a lot. Can I get some of my license fee back to afford these additional costs, please?"

No wonder the Open Source Consortium says they'll complain to the European Commission - it's blatent bundled sales. TV has got away with worse in the past (for example, Channel4-satellite requires you to buy Sky), but the BBC's TV-tax-funded services had been getting progressively freer. This latest reversal of that makes me wonder whether Freesat will be fully-viewable with free software. Also, they're up against another big problem: given a choice between the expensive and inconvenient legal iPlayer and the free and easy illegal torrents (which I'm told have US imported shows earlier), which will users choose? Surely not even the BBC's advertising power will overcome iPlayer's 200 quid bundled sale and auto-delete? Let them know it won't: petition the Prime Minister to open iPlayer. The BBC is a Royal Charter Corporation and should act in the public interest.

Mark Greenaway writes about writes about robots being designed to remove weeds from farms. This seems like a bad idea given that we currently have an energy crisis due to CO2 emissions from power plants causing environment change (including reduced water supplies), and coal and nuclear power plants requiring water to produce electricity (pity about the reduced water supply). Introducing robots that require either electricity of petrol for operation and also maintenance (which probably requires plastic parts on occasion) seems to be more of a problem than a solution. Fortunately there is already work in progress on training sheep to eat weeds. Given that we already raise sheep for wool and food it makes more sense for them to eat unwanted vegetation (weeds in a vineyard is the example given) than to grow grass specially for them. Also Mark says that the recent increase in oil price is not good news. What would be ideal is a slow steady increase in petrol prices that allows individuals and companies to change to more efficient vehicles (smaller and slower vehicles, hybrid vehicles, and more use of public transport) and also allows governments to make changes (such as building new public transport infrastructure). Having the oil remain cheap until it starts to run out doesn’t do anyone any good (apart from the short-term interests of oil companies).

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Just a couple years ago, music and technology companies would advertise their DRM schemes. While these technologies only served to prevent users of computers and consumer electronics devices from doing things, the media and technologies companies tried to spin it positively. Think of all the wonderful media that the music, film, and publishing industries will be willing to distribute to you at the click of a button, they said. All they asked for in return is the keys to your computer and the legal right to attack and sue you if you try to take control. As everyone who purchased iTunes music and made the mistake of buying a non-Apple DAP incapable of reading Apple DRMed music knows, DRM is a bad deal for consumers. Users are always better off with an unencumbered media file. In all the excitement over major label content, some consumers didn't see this immediately. With time though, the inconvenience of a computer that does the Apple and the RIAA wants over what you want hit home. This, combined with activist projects like the FSF's Defective By Design, have turned the tide. The DRM label that used to be a badge of honor is now a stigma that smart companies are going out of their way to avoid. This past weekend, I saw this flier from Calabash Music in the crepe store across the street: The store served a general, non-technical audience. DRM-FREE, it turns out, is a good way to sell music. Not just to geeks but to any consumer who has been stymied unfairly by DRM or knows someone who has. That, it turns out, is a whole lot people. Consumers know what DRM is and they know don't like it. As consumers learn more about DRM, they want to avoid it. Seeing this, the companies that produce DRM are looking for ways to escape. The Apple/EMI deal seems to be an attempt to protect market share that the use of DRM is threatening. Others, like HBO's Bob Zitter, are disingenuously attempting to escape the stigma of DRM by simply rebranding the technology. Of course, DRM suffers from a much more fundemental problem than bad branding. The problem with DRM is that consumers don't like what it does and are only sometimes willing to suffer through it when not given the choice. Increasingly often, as with in the example of the flier I found, consumers have a choice. Things don't look good for DRM. For DRM opponents, the self-defeating nature of the technology is our greatest ally.

With the development of rebuildd and the fact that several people are interested in re-using my scripts, I feel the need to explain how this stuff works. Grid’5000 First, Grid’5000 is a research platform used to study computer grids. It’s not really a grid (it doesn’t use all the classic grid middleware such as Globus). Grid’5000 is composed of 9 sites, each hosting from 1 to 3 clusters. Inside clusters, nodes are usually connected using gigabit ethernet, and sometimes another high speed network (Myrinet, Infiniband, etc). Clusters are connected using a dedicated 1OG ethernet network. Grid’5000 is in a big private network (you access it through special gateways), and one can access each node from any other node directly (no need for complex tunnelling). Using Grid’5000 nodes When you want to use some nodes on Grid’5000, you have to use a resource manager to say “I’d like to use 50 nodes for 10 hours”. Then your job starts. At that point, you can use a tool called KaDeploy to install your own system on all the nodes (think of it as “FAI for large clusters”). When KaDeploy finishes, the nodes are rebooted in your environment, and you can connect as root. At that point, you can basically break the nodes the way you want, since they will be restored at the end of your job. Running Debian QA tasks on Grid’5000 None of that was Debian-specific. I will now try to explain how QA tasks are run on Grid’5000. The scripts mentioned below are in the debcluster directory of the collab-qa SVN repository. When the nodes are ready, the first node is chosen to play a special role (it’s called the master node from now on). A script is run on the master node to prepare it. This consists in mounting a shared NFS directory, and run another script located on this shared NFS directory to install a few packages, configure some stuff, and start a script (masternode.rb) that will schedule the tasks on all the other nodes. masternode.rb is also responsible for preparing the other nodes. Which consists in mounting the same shared NFS directory, and executing a script (preparenode.rb) that installs a few packages and configures some stuff. After the nodes have been prepared, they are ready to execute tasks. To execute a task, masternode.rb connects to the node using ssh and executes a script in the shared directory. Those scripts are basically wrappers around lower-level tools. Examples are buildpackage.rb, and piuparts.rb. Now, some specific details:

• masternode.rb schedules tasks, not builds. Tasks are commands. So it is possible, in a single Grid’5000 job, to mix a piuparts test on Ubuntu and an archive rebuild on Debian. When another QA task is created, I just have to write another wrapper.
• Tasks are scheduled using “longest job first”. This doesn’t matter with piuparts tests (which are usually quite short) but is important for archive rebuilds: some packages take a very long time to build. If I want to rebuild all packages in about 10 hours, openoffice.org has to be the first build to start, since building openoffice.org takes about 10 hours itself… So one node will only build openoffice.org, and the other nodes will build the other packages.
• I use sbuild to build packages, not pbuilder. pbuilder’s algorithm to resolve build-dependencies is a bit broken (#141888, #215065). sbuild’s is broken as well (#395271, #422879, #272955, #403246), but at least it’s broken in the same way as the buildds’, so something that doesn’t build on sbuild won’t build on the buildds, and you can file bugs.
• I use schroot with “file” chroots. The tarballs are stored on the NFS directory. Which looks ineffective, but actually works very well and is very flexible. A tarball of a build environment is not that big, and this allows for a lot of flexibility and garantees that my build environment is always clean. If I want to build with a different dpkg-dev, I just have to:
  • cp sid32.tgz sid32-new.tgz
  • add the chroot to schroot.conf
  • tell buildpackage.rb to use sid32-new instead of sid32
• Logs and (if needed) resulting packages are written to the NFS directory.

Comments and questions welcomed :)

We celebrated Leif's dedication a couple weekends ago on June 17th at the Unitarian Church of Montr al. I got permission from Diane Rollert, our minister, to post the text of it.

(LJ-cut used to keep it from being too long)


Dedication of Leif Alexander Bailey, June 17, 2007

To the Child:
Leif Alexander Bailey, you have come with stardust in your hair, with the rush of planets in your blood, your heart beating out the seasons of eternity, with a shining in your eyes like the sunlight.

Your parents have brought you here to be dedicated, to celebrate the joy they have and to count themselves blessed that you are a part of their family.

As you grow, may you come to love what it is that your parents and this community of Unitarian Universalists value. May you learn to count the number of your days, to weigh their meaning, to gather into your mind the wisdom of your ancestors, to know why we call one thing right and another wrong, and to treasure beauty, mercy and justice in the deepest places of your being.

To the Congregation:
A dedication in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is one of the few sacred rituals we share together as a community. It is a covenant, a promise of love and care, that the entire community bestows upon a child.
Although Leif and his parents are leaving us to pursue new lives in San Francisco, they have chosen to dedicate Leif here in this church that has meant so much to them. Their travels may take them far away, but in this act of dedication today, we will covenant to continue to hold a place of care and concern in our hearts for Leif as he grows. Do you, as this religious community called the Unitarian Church of Montreal, take upon yourselves the privilege and the responsibility of helping to nurture the character and spirit of this child even at a distance?

Congregational Response:
We who are members of this congregation rejoice with this family in the promise of this child. We pledge him now the love and care of this community.

To the Parents:
Angie and Jeff, parents of Leif, please repeat after me this pledge. Leif, we pledge to help you to realize the best that is in you. We will seek, to the best of our ability, to instruct you by our teaching and by our example. We promise to love you with an unselfish love.

To the Child:
Leif, I dedicate you to the service of goodness, beauty and truth. I touch you with this water, which is a symbol of purity, and with this rose which is a symbol of your unfolding life, on your brow, your eyes, your lips, your heart and your hands, that your thoughts, your vision, your speech, your love and your generosity may be dedicated to the care of the earth and its people. We dedicate you that the transcending power of all that is divine may be present in you all your life long.


Closing Prayer:
Spirit of Life and Transcending Source of Love that connects us all, bless this beautiful child Leif this day and all the days of his life. As we rejoice in the promise of Leif s life that stretches out before him, let us remember those no longer with us, especially Leif s grandmother Glennis Bailey who left this earth too soon to meet her grandson, but whose memory and spirit will continue on through him. May Leif continue to serve with strength as his life unfolds so that the richness and wonder of life may be abundantly his. May peace dwell in his heart,and understanding in his mind. May courage strengthen his will and may the love of truth forever guide him.

gimp-plugin-registry updated During the last days I've upgraded the gimp-plugin-registry package. Version 0.2-1 does not only fix a few smaller bugs, but also contains the following new plugins/scripts:

• Black and White Film Simulation:
  Converts the selected layer into Black and White using the channel mixer. Tries to produce results resembling tonal qualities of film.
• DBP:
  David's Batch Processor is a simple batch processing plugin for The Gimp - it allows the user to automatically perform operations (such as resize) on a collection of image files.
• Extended Borders:
  This script allows you to add double borders, add copyright notice and title, as well as decide fonts, font-sizes and positions of the title and copyright notice. Support for blurring the copyright and title is also included.

Please note that not all plugins will work with gimp 2.3 from experimental, therefore my next plan is to create a branch for experimental, which will not only include the proper changes for 2.3, but also include plugins which need the new gimp version to build/work. For example:

• Save for web
• Separate+

As usual, I'm searching for good plugins which should be added to the package - suggestions are welcome!

This isn't new, I just thought it was worth noting because it is useful to show an example of a packaging principle when sponsoring new maintainers etc.

deb-gview has been extended via GnomeVFS to view the contents of any .deb in the archive without having to install the package and without having to separately download the .deb itself. Either copy the link address and load the .deb on the command line or configure your browser to use deb-gview as a helper for .deb files (right click a .deb and select open with... or similar). Then just double click on any text file within the .deb to view it. Also works with manpages and images inside the .deb, other filetypes can be supported via a config file. Supports viewing a .deb for any architecture, not just your own (useful to see if the autobuilders have really done what you expected with generated files).

e.g. when advising on using README.Debian, it was useful to give a simple URL to allow the user to easily see the format:

$ sudo apt-get install deb-gview
$ deb-gview http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gpe-shield/gpe-shield_0.9-1_amd64.deb

The URL itself comes from viewing the package on packages.debian.org, clicking any architecture and right clicking the name of whichever mirror you want to use (or configure the browser as above).

Also supports .changes files so you can view all .deb files within a build or view the packages in the incoming queue direct from a d.d.p.o page.

The advantages over debc / dpkg -c dpkg -I are:

• support remote locations via GnomeVFS (http, ftp, ssh etc.)


• support viewing the contents of text files inside the .deb within the application - copyright, control, README, postinst, config files, header files in -dev packages . . .


• support external viewer programs to see ./usr/share/man/man1/foo.1.gz as a manpage instead of a text file


• can be passed any .changes file to view all contents without scrolling


• view all content in one .deb in one window with one command


• view the contents of any .deb in /var/cache/apt/archives/ - including old versions.


• view the contents of uninstallable archives to check the maintainer scripts etc.


• view the contents of .deb files in a repository without needing to add the repository to your sources list, e.g. backports or emdebian packages

Using GnomeVFS means using a few Gnome libraries but even for non-Gnome users, this shouldn't be too much of a burden.

Tonight, instead of minding my dinner, which did burn, I was drawn into and extended a pretty fiery IRC conversation on debian-devel on a topic that does not like to die: the merits and demerits of Wikipedia. It is not worth summarizing the conversation here for it followed a pretty predictable arc. There were those who thought Wikipedia was novel and valuable, others who saw it as a pit of bad facts, and inaccuracies and a few others who saw it in ways negative and positive. I found the conversation somewhat ironic, because I usually find myself defending free software to outsiders much in the same way I was defending Wikipedia to free software developers. I tend to be in the camp of admirers, and for many reasons, although, of course, I also was arguing that it is too early to judge the value of Wikipedia as it is in its infancy. Like Debian, since Wikipedia is an institution that has changed *a lot* in its short history, it is hard to make any hard and fast conclusions about its worth, impact, etc, although more modest and qualified claims are certainly in order. The only reason I feel like I can argue anything about Wikipedia is because I am currently reading a dissertation on Wikipedia by Joseph Reagle. He not only has really insightful things to say about the collaborative culture driving the online encyclopedia, but also about the prolific commentary that has closely followed the heels of Wikipedia in the last few years. Just today, he wrote a blog entry entitled, Punditry and The Web 2.0 debate, which so hit the nail on the head on the problems–not with Wikipedia–but with the peanut gallery (commentary) on Wikipedia. As he notes, the problem is often not with the so called correct or incorrect judgments on Wikipedia (or other Web 2.0 phenomenon) but with the very debates themselves, because many of them are built on a shaky foundation of sand, but this punditry, as Joe rightly calls it, is nonetheless worthy of critical examination:

.. while I follow the discussion with interest, I actually don’t find it substantively engaging. Many of the arguments, particularly Gorman’s, tend to be characterized by unsubstantiated claims and the purposeful construal of nuanced issues as extremes — propping up strawmen for subsequent potshots. As I’ve already indicated, while it might bring pundits a sense of righteousness and attention, in the end “Time, not arguments, will utlimately tell.” (And, for this reason I appreciate Larry Sanger’s continuing efforts to implement his vision.)Why, then, do I find this discussion of interest? Punditry, communicative disorders, and history. First, I’m trying to come to an understanding of “punditry,” and I think Gorman’s recent bloggings is an exemplar. My sense is that sometimes people argue for arguments’ sake. That is, even if they genuinely believe the thing they are arguing for, attention, not persuasion, is the goal. (In a sense, perhaps it is a high-brow, and perhaps more genuinely held, form of trolling — another interesting phenomenon.)

While punditry has always existed, there is no doubt that the Internet has accentuated and facilitated this form of (often male) communication and it is great to see someone tackle this topic. Because let’s face it, there is a lot more “garbage” spewing from Web 2.0 or Wikipedia commentary compared to than the actual Wikipedia articles themselves.

Reading once again Enrique's blog I see an entry about Pownce, an enhaced Twitter-like web. As you can read in their own website they are using Debian as their distribution, and utils as Apache, MySQL, Python, ... A nice example on how powerful things can be made in an easy and cheap, but at the same time powerful, way.

Debian’s binary packages are only built when they are uploaded (or when a binNMU is requested, but that doesn’t happen frequently). They are never rebuilt later. This means that some binary packages in etch weren’t build in an up-to-date etch environment, but possibly in a much older environment. Is this a problem? It depends. Old packages don’t benefit from the improvements introduced in Debian after they were built. Like new compiler optimizations, or other changes in the toolchain that could induce changes in binary packages. For example, some files used to be at some place, but are now put at another place. Also, some parts of maintainers scripts are automatically generated, and would be different if the package was rebuilt today. But is it really a problem? Are our packages _that_ old? Also, when a big change is made in the way we generate our binary packages (like Raphael Hertzog’s new dpkg-shlibdeps), when can we expect that the change will be effective in all packages? I went through all binary packages in unstable (as on 24/06/2007) (both main, contrib and non-free packages) on i386. Using dpkg-deb –contents, I extracted the most recent date of each package (which can reasonably be taken as the date of the package’s creation). And here are the results. Most packages are actually quite recent. 9008 packages (43%) were built after the release of etch. And 19857 packages (94%) were built after the release of sarge. But that still leaves us with 1265 packages that were built before sarge was released, and even one package (exim-doc-html) that was built before the release of woody! (the removal of this package has been requested, so we will soon be woody-clean :-) Now, what could we do with this data? We could review the older packages, to determine if:

• They would benefit from a rebuild (by comparing them the result of a fresh build) = I'm planning to work on that
• Integrate that data with other sources of data (popcon, for example), to see if the package should be removed. Such old packages are probably good candidates for removal.

Here is the full sorted list of packages.

Alex Hudson commented:

"Similar comments about another W3C WG: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1181118077&order=-1&count=1 W3C should be about authoring material for the web. It seems at the moment, they're more concerned with the stuff that happens after authoring - e.g., how stuff relates in "the semantic web". IMHO we still don't have any powerful tools for authoring either, so the idea that authoring tools will automate many of the "bolt on accessibility" tasks is pretty naive."

After implementing pingback, I have some respect for hixie. It's disappointing but not surprising to read those comments. Not sure what is meant by powerful authoring tools there. My tools are powerful, but I know they're not easy for new users. As I'm getting old and cynical, I'm not sure whether power tools can ever be correct and truly easy - just look at the pigswill spewing out of some Web 2.0 sites. niq sent me a link to the WCAG Samurai Errata and commented:

"The problem with WCAG 2, as with WCAG 1, is precisely that it's a Work of Committee, and seeks to represent too many irreconcilable viewpoints and egos. In some cases, even the ideas behind it are inconsistent. Many (myself included) regard accessibility as being about ensuring a reader with a physical disability can make use of a site (think Steven Hawking). That's also what HTML is designed to support. Others are concerned with the mentally impaired, also a worthy cause, but one that becomes counterproductive when its advocates fail to distinguish between a site that's inherently inaccessible because it presents a complex and challenging subject, and one that's unnecessarily difficult due to poor presentation. Add the two together, blend in some stupidity, and you get "accessible" sites full of classic "friendly" little illustrations like a "helpful" government booklet, and a horribly intrusive "alt" to explain each pointless "ethnic mummy and child" picture."

I think a Work of Committee could be useful, as long as you have the right committee. Thinking about that, I found the group membership list and I'm not sure that's the right committee. For example, I think the ex-Adobe Google-worker must surely have an irreconcilable conflict of interest (inappropriate use of Adobe's Flash and PDF formats and Google's Web Apps have done more than many to harm accessibility in the past IMO), yet is a leading light of WCAG 2.0 - maybe that's why it's gone so dark? Update: Thijs Kinkhorst comments:

"As I read in the draft, suggestions are still possible until the 29th, not the 27th of June."

I'm sure that's different to the email which started me writing this, but please go comment and see if we can make WCAG-2.0 useful.

As a result of commenting on some problems in CUBA's Jam Busting June site I was made aware of the Working Draft of WCAG 2.0 or the Not-Working Draft, as I think it could be called. If you want to comment on it yourself, you had until the end of 27 June 2007 (US EDT, I assume). Put simply, it's too confusing for both web developers and site managers. Even the Quick Reference is rather long for practical use. It's very indirect - it's not even clear whether xhtml over HTTP is preferred. I submitted a comment about that - also rather disappointing to find that W3C appear to fail to use stripslashes() when needed. I submitted another comment about the backwards step of allowing Javascript-required sites to be called accessible. Javascript is dangerous for accessibility and bad for power consumption. What the blue blazes is an AJAX-only webmail doing as one of the accessibility examples? I see that notable sites have already criticised WCAG 2.0. While I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, this is a very disappointing situation. Will WCAG 2 be rescued? Are accessible-friendly webmasters screwed if WCAG 1.0 is replaced by 2.0 in our national standards? It lets all the Flash-only cowboys claim WCAG-conformance as long as they note their site relies upon Flash. (Question: is a site still WCAG-2.0-accessible if it requires Flash to view the note that says it requires Flash?) Should we start looking towards MACCAWS, WHATWG, expanding IETF to cover the web, or starting another democratic/meritocratic standards body?

Below is a GNUPlot graph of ZCAV output from a 250G SATA disk. The disk has something wrong with it (other disks of the same brand in machines of the same configuration give more regular graphs). The expected graph will start high on the Y scale (MB/s) and steadily drop as the reads go to shorter tracks near the spindle. The ZCAV results page has some examples of the expected results. If you have any ideas as to what might cause this performance result then please make a comment on this blog post.

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Someone in the #mediawiki channel the other day asked, "Would it be possible to have easy-to-parse error messages?" and I thought, "Wow, that sounds like a microformat in the making." Probably one of the most common HTML patterns in Web applications is error messages. We see them all the time on the Web: login errors, form validation errors, backend errors and user input errors. But what if this common pattern was standardized? If HTML error messages all followed a similar format, we could have browser plugins that recorded and analyzed the errors that come up. They could either feed back this structured error data when we needed it -- say, when filing a bug report -- or use the error data to help us find workarounds or documentation online. I brought the idea up in the #microformats channel on Freenode, and it got a good response, so I took the next step and created a list of error message examples and some error message brainstorming on the microformats wiki. Hopefully this can be the start of some interesting feedback loops in software errors. tags: errormessages microformats

When I was 12 years old, I discovered free software. That discovery changed my life and I've never recovered. Over what is now more than half of my life, I have looked to the Free Software Foundation for vision, guidance, and an example of a free world and I have rarely been disappointed. The list of directors of the FSF -- Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Lawrence Lessig, Henri Poole, Jerry Sussman, Hal Abelson, and Geoffrey Knauth -- doubles as a list of some of my greatest heroes and role models. As such, I lack the words to describe how it feels that, just yesterday, I was elected to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation. With Moglen having stepped down I have staggeringly large shoes to fill. I'm more than a little intimidated. At 26 years old, I suspect that I'll be the youngest person on the board by quite a bit. This means I'll have to try and make up with hard work and passion what I lack in experience and wisdom. It's a challenge I look forward to. With free software becoming increasingly successful and widespread, we've already begun to see push back. I suspect that in the next years, we'll see much more. We reaching the dangerous part of the, "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" progression. I'll do what I can to defend freedom until we've won. In order to ensure that I have the time necessary, I'm going to be resigning from the board of Software Freedom International and will consider reducing and resigning some of my other commitments as well. If you want to support my work with the foundation, you can become an associate member.

Today I just noticed the following advert on one of my web pages:
MINIX3 is a new reliable
free operating system. Smaller
than Linux. Try it It’s free!
www.minix3.org This made me think about some of the potential ways of advertising free software projects. It seems that in some ways Google Adwords is not the only way that can be used for advertising free software, and in some ways isn’t the most effective. I believe that the most effective method would be to ask people to advertise the project. I am generally positive towards the aims of the Minix project and am happy to give them some free advertising if asked (I’ve just given them a free advert above without being asked). While Google adlinks and equivalent things in blog posts are easy to set up, effective advertising may require something more. A series of pictures (in different sizes and color schemes) for the link would help, and the project would ideally have a specific landing site for people who see the advert. Someone who sees an advert targeted to newbies will have different requirements from the web site to someone who already knows about it and typed the URL in from memory! For a big campaign you would probably want to have multiple landing sites for different adverts targetted at different people. One example of how this can be used is my Bonnie++ page which gets about 6000 hits a month - many of which are from users of proprietary Unix. Linux users often have Bonnie++ as part of their distribution and don’t have much of a need to visit my web site so I expect that even though the vast majority of Bonnie++ users run Linux the proportion of site visitors might not be so strongly in favour of Linux. I would be happy to place an advert on that page to encourage proprietary Unix users to use the most free distribution of Linux if someone was to prepare the advert and give me some HTML code I can easily add to my site. To some extent the web site for every free software project could be used to advertise some related projects (or projects that are liked by the people who run the site). If you are a contributor to a free software project that you think I would like then feel free to prepare an advert and send it to me. If it fits with what I’m doing then I’ll give you some free advertising! Blogs are also a good mechanism for advertising free software projects, but it seems that this is already being used a lot - having said that… As a gratuitous plug: my favourite distribution of Linux is Debian (here are my Debian blog entries) and I run NSA Security Enhanced Linux (SE Linux) on all my machines (here are my SE Linux blog entries).

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We had a great weekend this last weekend here in Montreal. Yesterday, June 24, was Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day here in Quebec -- the national holiday of this cool and fun nation. St. Jean Baptiste is important to me in a lot of ways. Of course, it's cool that it's the national holiday of our adopted new home. But John the Baptist, the patron saint of Quebec, is also our family's name saint. ''Prodromos'' means "forerunner" in Greek, and it's one of the titles of St. John. Most of all, it's the day that Maj and I moved to Montreal. We came in on St. Jean Baptiste Day, 2003, and we've been here ever since. We drove my beautiful 1972 Citro n DS from San Francisco, where my niece Elena had just been born, all the way out here. We arrives on June 24th and wandered around the McGill Ghetto looking for our sight-unseen sublet. It's hard to believe it's only been 4 years -- it seems like so much longer. We had a good day yesterday. The three of us went to Piknic in the afternoon and hung out with our friends Jeremy and Lina and their two great kids Clea and Sylvie. We had a lot of hummus and pasta salad and bread and cheese and generally had a great time. Meg and Catherine came and hung out for a while, and also our friend Kristen, who's 7 months pregnant and has a 10-month-old. Good luck on that one. Most of all a pretty day enjoying the outdoors in our new home town, as well as fun dancing to house under a big Calder statue. How great is that? tags: montreal quebec stjeanbaptiste prodromou piknic jeremy lina

72 hours from Flickr I forgot to mention that we had a really nice time on Friday evening going to the 24 Hours of Flickr party at the SAT. Heather Champ, community leader at Flickr and welcomer to partiers, put it well: "We have three requirements for Flickr parties: the food must be good, the drinks must be copious, and the schwag must be ample." And that's exactly what happened. All the usual Montreal suspects were out in force: YULblog types, Web entrepreneurs, Web pranksters. It was great seeing m-c and c-c, who wore their awesome Flickr Socks -- although they each had a matching pair. I also talked to Allen Morris, which was really fun. He's a developer living now in Saranac Lake, one of the towns in the Adirondacks I find strangely compelling. We exchanged GPG key signatures and talked a lot about the Bay Area (California), where we both once lived. Probably my best talk was with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek. We talked about their joys of creation of JPG Magazine, the despair of leaving it, and looking forward to the future. We also chatted a lot about print on demand technologies, which we're evaluating for Wikitravel. Heather took the photo of my friend Ben Cerveny at Burning Man that's become his avatar icon on about every social software platform I know of. It must be good to capture someone in the way they want to think of themselves. I took my own self-concept picture by putting the camera on the dashboard of my Citroen. Heh. All in all a good party. One thing I was interested to find out was that there's a Yahoo! Quebec, which launched last month and I guess just slipped by me. Sadly, if you click on the "English" button, it takes you to... Yahoo! Canada. Hey, Yahoo! There are actually a lot of anglophones here! Just in case you were wondering. tags: yahooquebec 24heuresflickrmontreal 24hoursflickrmontreal flickr montreal party

Montreal Web Development Book Club Montreal Web scene stalwart Heri Rakotomalala -- the man with the magic name, originally from Madagascar, along with Montevideo and Marfa, one of the M-places on my travel wishlist -- recently started a Montreal Web Development Book Club. It's a meeting for people interested in the practical side of the Web to talk about the books they read and let that drift into talk about the work we do and ideas we have. I think the book club is an awesome idea. Book clubs are a great grass-roots intellectual meetup that we don't often celebrate in the post-flash mob BarCamp-ized world. The great thing about a book club, for Web people, is that it filters out the bullshitters and dilettantes. If you're going to a book club, you're going to have to know what you're talking about, and you're going to have to care about the subject. The book gives focus that keeps the conversation from drifting to tangential topics. Flakes and hangers-on just don't have the stamina for it. Also, we met at La ka, so it was nice to have some beers in a good place on a hot night. Why not? We managed to talk about a lot of good books, too. Jean-Fran ois <something> (I didn't get his last name) talked about In Search of Stupidity, a look at the last 25 years of marketing and business blunders in the high-tech realm. Our industry is subject to a lot of decisions that seem absolutely self-defeating in hindsight, and the book goes in-depth on 15 case studies -- like Wordstar, Ashton-Tate and Borland. It sounds like a great cautionary tale for Web 2.0 startup mavens. Heri talked about the book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web -- the infamous "Polar Bear Book". It sounds like a really good book for doing initial planning for a Web site, but I'm really interested in tools for profiling an IA effort. We get about 2 million unique visitors a month at Wikitravel, for example, which is a huge amount of usability data I could be mining. But I don't really have the tools for it, so I don't do it much. I'd love to know, for example, about people who land on a Wikitravel page from a search engine and then leave. What were they looking for? Why couldn't they find it? Also, users who browse through our pages clicking on links, then resort to a full-text search. What did they think they were clicking on, and what were they looking for instead? Did they find it? How can we put that in front of them in the first place? Most of all, I want to know how and why people start editing Wikitravel pages, and why they stop. Of people who click the "edit" button, only 1 in 17 click "save". (That is one bit of clickpath analysis I've done.) Why? I've often been tempted to put a survey up when someone navigates away from our edit page. "Why didn't you save? Tell us so we can fix it for other people." I talked about the book I just finished reading a few weeks ago, Everything is Miscellaneous. It's the latest book by Dave Weinberger about how we impose order on information to make it easy to understand and retrieve. It's an awesome book -- really fun -- especially for someone married to a knowledge management expert. I don't think I gave a good enough description of the book to ignite the club's interest, but I hope they check it out, because it's really readable and good. At the end of the meeting Heri took a poll and decided that we'll continue doing the book club on the last Monday of the month. I've already picked out my book for next month: RESTful Web Services. I've heard good things about this book (admittedly mostly from the co-author Leonard Richardson) and I want to give it a look-see. So book-club fodder it is. ''Update: Heri has his own book club report here.'' tags: bookclub montreal heri webdev montrealwebdevbookclub

In reply to my comment about "things that reduce carbon footprint but aren't very green (nuclear power, for example)", Felipe Sateler asked:

"Why is it that nuclear power isn't green? If residues are disposed of securely, then there should be no problem with it."

It's not green mainly because we cannot yet dispose of nuclear waste. All we do is reprocess it, bury it in high concentrations and pray that the containers don't leak or get vandalised while it's being transported through our major cities, within arm's length of the public on train platforms or after burial, until it has decomposed enough to be "mostly harmless". There are also the problems of the amount of energy used in constructing and operating the power plants with all their security measures; and energy security for England, because current nuclear fuels are relatively rare and imported, and nuclear power stations are often built in flood-risk areas. Our nuclear power system seems very fragile. Read more from Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace UK about why nuclear is not green.

Via UH: Another good example of the new blog-enabled openness in medicine that I’ve written about before: a local anesthesiologist provides an impassioned defense of her work.

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