A reasonably common feature in Internet debates is that of one party claiming to not care about the issue. Statements such as I haven t got time to debate this or I m not interested are used to try and disclaim any interest in the topic. Such claims are silly and rather amusing. Outside the Internet it does make sense to say I don t care because interactions are between small numbers of people. Telling a tele-marketer that you don t care about their product is part of the process of getting them to stop calling you. But it doesn t make sense in interactions between large numbers of people. If there are 100 people on a mailing list then there will be a variety of opinions about any issue, but one thing you can count on is that the majority of people on the list are not interested in whether any individual cares about an issue. If there was a general desire to discover how many people cared about a topic of discussion then the way to determine this would be via an online poll. In almost every situation individuals saying I don t care in email just isn t a scalable solution. The only exception is when someone in a leadership position is asked for an opinion, in such a case a response is expected and if the leader actually doesn t care then saying so and letting other methods be used to resolve the dispute makes sense. One common case where an I don t care message is seen is at the end of a long and heated discussion. After a discussion has gone on for a while (well beyond the point where it was obvious that no-one was going to change their position) one party might claim to not care or not have the time to debate the issue. But of course if they didn t care at all or had no time then they wouldn t have written any messages on the topic. If they had a limit to their time or care factor then they would probably have stated their opinion once and maybe written a single follow-up post clarifying the first one. Anyone who has written 6+ messages or a total of 1000+ words on a topic obviously cares and obviously has time. In such cases it seems that claiming to not care or not have time is a final desperate attempt at getting the last post on a topic by someone who subscribes to the last post wins school of online debating. Another common case is when someone makes a point that is decisively refuted. The Internet is filled with people who can t handle criticism and who can never leave any critical email without a reply. In such a situation claiming to not care is a way that such a person can protect their fragile ego even if the point is indefensible. One of the variations on this theme is to claim to be an expert who doesn t care enough to educate people on mailing lists (or even provide a couple of URLs that reference what they need to know). As a hint, if you are going to claim to be an expert while making statements that disagree with notable experts in the field in question (professors at prestigious universities, Nobel laureates, or people who have demonstrated great practical success) then you really need to demonstrate your expertise and cite references. While generally it s the scope of the Internet that makes the I don t care argument silly, it also doesn t make sense in interactions via electronic media such as private email where a sender can be ignored. If you don t care about a private email in reply to one of your messages then what you will do is simply delete it. Replying and saying I don t care merely demonstrates that you do care, invites another reply, and shows that you have a fragile ego to protect. My general practice when dealing with such people is to send one reply to every message that they send me, such people typically demonstrate how much they care by sending me more than a dozen messages explaining in detail how much they don t care. Another variation on the theme of private correspondence is people who write blog comments that are obviously inappropriate and will not pass moderation. Someone who polls my blog to see if their comment has been approved and then writes an abusive comment when they discover that they fell well short of my comment quality standards obviously cares about having their comment published. To then claim to not care about whether their comment was approved is obviously a lie. Google is almost entirely filled with things that I don t care about. I demonstrate the fact that I don t care about them by not commenting.

So as part of my efforts to work in PR, I bought a printer. The one that was 1) the cheapest 2) worked with the Linux (an HPJ4550) also had a scanner. I thought it would never work on Linux, or not without some series fiddling and tweaking. But I bought the postcard, pictured above, to do a test run, and the run of test worked immediately. Go Linux! Now on to the postcard: love the postcard because it is so 1972-1982 or so. It would be hard to find such a scence today. Not only are windsurfers a dying breed (kite surfing is the new kid on the block), well, current windsurfers are definitely not so 1970s orange, yellow, and blue. And so you have to ask: are there just truckloads of these postcards printed decades ago or do they actually print them anew? Can t answer but at least I know the scanner works!

I've had a few enquiries from my blog post about trying to control dumb USB-powered lights. I thought I'd just write something up to save myself replying to any more emails. Yes, it's doable. Finding a USB hub that will do it is another story. From my own research, I found someone else who was doing something with USB-powered devices (I can't remember what now), and he had been using a what is now a Linksys ProConnect USB 4-Port Hub USB 2.0 I'd first tried a couple of random cheap hubs from Fry's with no success (fortunately I was able to return them) before I determined that the Linksys one would definitely work. The downside of the Linksys hub is it requires external power. It was also one of the more expensive USB hubs on the market. One of my co-workers, who is an Electrical Engineer by education, said that the USB spec requires the functionality that I wanted, but most chip manufacturers had cut a corner in the interests of cost saving. The Linksys hub uses an NEC chipset. Every other hub that I could get my hands on had a Genesys Logic chipset, and did not work. You can tell if you've got a winner by the output of lsusb -v. If the hub characteristics include "Per-port power switching", you're in business. To do the actual port powering on and off, I'm using a setuid-root hub-ctrl, wrapped with a small shell script, which has the USB ID of the hub and the port number the lights are plugged into hard-coded in it. In my searching, I found also that it may be possible to do with Python, but I did not invest the time trying to find out.

Since this afternoon, bts-link is able to interact with Google Code issue tracker.

So, if you're upstream code & bugs are maintainer there and what to keep them monitored, just drop us an email to the devel mailing list (see link above).

You can also write us if your tool uses another upstream issue tracking still not managed by bts-link and we will see what we can do.

Soon before leaving NYC for the summer, Sumana invited me to see a monologue on facebook by Mike Daisy. It was a good show and he has since provided an mp3 of it. There are some classic moments in there, especially toward the middle of the audio. I am looking for am mp3 of his Great Men of Genius where he addresses Mr Hubbard among others (I find stuff on it
but not it). Anyone have it or pointers to where it might be?

Soon before leaving NYC for the summer, Sumana invited me to see a monologue on facebook by Mike Daisy. It was a good show and he has since provided an mp3 of it. There are some classic moments in there, especially toward the middle of the audio. I am looking for am mp3 of his Great Men of Genius where he addresses Mr Hubbard among others (I find stuff on it
but not it). Anyone have it or pointers to where it might be?

In the spirit of Thomas Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, this is my checklist for setting up a new Debian system. I have added a few notes to the original list to justify their existence and to provide some background information. Whilst you should avoid performing repetitive interactive configuration and defer to the multitude of tools designed for this task, constructing and sharing a checklist can still be an instructive step. It can also be useful in situations where a machine has already been partly configured for you.

So, the latest buzz on the web is all about Google Wave. I would urge everyone developing stuff for the Internet and technological people depending on the Internet for their daily work, to watch that introductory video. The concept is frankly mind-blowing. If this is done right and embraced by all the right people, Google Wave could be the new platform concept that could be used to create new generation of email, instant messaging, collaboration software (CMS, wiki, Sharepoint, workflow, ), blogging software and forum software and do all that while integrating back with current technologies, like Twitter and RSS feeds. It remains to be seen what parts will be open source and federated and what parts will remain Google-only services. For example, I am convinced that Spelly the spellchecker bot and Rozy the automatic translation bot will be hard to impossible to federate. This being Google, it is practically a given that the code will be good, but a bit hard to understand and contribute to. Management of the free software community and proprietary community relations will likely be the key to the success of this technology. I love the technology itself - imagine that you have a web blog. The blog software makes each your blog post a wave. When people leave comments on the post, these comments show up in your email inbox. You can reply to people right from there. By default your replies will show up on your blog and also show up in the email inboxes of the commenter, but you also have the option to mark your reply private and only send it to the commenter. Also it looks to be possible to choose to host all the data yourself or to make Google host all your blog and comment data and make your blog just be a frame where this data is displayed in, possibly allowing you to use very, very minimal system resources to maintain the blog even in a case of Slashdotting. I hate blogs without comments, let s replace them all. I would also love to see replacements to Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint be built using Wave technology with a full support to ODF if possible. Imagine collaborative document editing in OpenOffice using this technology in the backend. It would be one huge project, but it should be possible. Companies currently pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to set up MS Exchange+Sharepoint+Active Directory to be able to simply share documents in their Intranet and see who edited a document (no live editing, no change tracking). It is possible to make a much better product with ODF and Google Wave and it is possible to earn a bunch of money supporting such a product for companies that need support contracts. If it would be possible to licence spellchecking and translation services from Google in a way where a box is installed in customers data centre and the data to be spellchecked and translated never leaves that data centre, then I believe that people would be willing to pay for this superior spellchecking and translation experience. We need open source products that people can depend on. We also need ways for business people to sell services with an easily visible added value so that they can make money and contribute their developer work hours back to the open source projects. We (the free software community) have great ways to get a positive feedback loop with users that can develop software, but when our users have no interest in developing anything, the feedback loop breaks and free software growth slows down. There is a lot of untapped potential in this area - we just need to find a way to convert needs and demands of non-developers into code. I m gonna stop this rant before it diverges even further off topic, but the main point is - go watch the Google Wave demo, read the tech specs and think how you could integrate that into your free software project. Useful wave discussions (will update as I find more):

• About Wave from the TG2 guy
• SMB CRM on Wave (ideas)
• A Twitter feed with more useful links

An old friend is ranting about localization. I first considered not really reaction to Joey's post, mostly because he has very true points...and particularly when he has about the same reaction than mine about a recent post in ou mailing lists. So, I will stick to react to one part of Joey's post...the one I consider really inaccurate. "everyone uses the software in English anyway" Really, Joey, really, that's completely untrue. Of course, I do live in a country that very well known (or at least that has the reputation) for being deeply ignorant in English language. But, really....*all* computers I see around me, both in my personal life *and in my professionnal life* are nearly completely localized. It's probably now well know that I spend most of my professionnal time....providing desktop systems (or managing the people who provide them) to users in ONERA, "the French Aerospace Lab". That means about 2000 users in a scientific environment where the use of English is much more developed than the average environment. Most of these users speak a fairly decent English and are perfectly able to understand that language in some way. About 80% of these systems are Windows-based and 20% are Linux-based. Probably more than 95% of them are localized in French. Even on Windows systems, we mostly integrate free software. And for *each* of them, the most important feature we need, besides software being free, is it to be localized in French. I bet our friends from Extremadura can say the same. The success of Linux-based free systems there also happened because the software is available in Spanish. And, of course, there are tons of similar stories and counter-examples (M nchen, Bhutan, Venezuela, etc.). So, really, please don't spread out that idea. Oh, yes, geeks *do* use their software in English (and, even here, I need to be convinced if I remember well what I saw at conferences in Germany or Spain, for instance). And, yes, it's very well widespread among geeks that using software in English is "better" or "easier". Which I indeed always fight and will fight until I die..:-). We certainly agree that these l10n needs put a high load on development and sometimes slow it down. and, for sure, we sometimes need to make a balance and I really thank you for giving me the credit to try doing that balance. Anyway, all this (including your rant) had to be said and it's interesting to have that small discussion (I just should not start writing down a blog entry at 23:00...:-)) See you soon, hopefully, Joey !

As part of my reading bonanza, I am currently reading and enjoying Ellen Ullman s The Bug. She has a short section on puns and programmers which I like:

Puns, I would say, represented a human being s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer s conversation with the machine! p. 59

Last night, I heard a Spanish pun that I particularly liked, having to do with my sister s dog, Shorty who is an odd creature (being a mix of Pit Bull, which is for certain, and legend goes, Chihuahua) will be as of the end of the day > sinbolico. I bet the Spanish speakers know what is happening to Shorty today. Anyone want to take a guess?

As part of my reading bonanza, I am currently reading and enjoying Ellen Ullman s The Bug. She has a short section on puns and programmers which I like:

Puns, I would say, represented a human being s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer s conversation with the machine! p. 59

Last night, I heard a Spanish pun that I particularly liked, having to do with my sister s dog, Shorty who is an odd creature (being a mix of Pit Bull, which is for certain, and legend goes, Chihuahua) will be as of the end of the day > sinbolico. I bet the Spanish speakers know what is happening to Shorty today. Anyone want to take a guess?

This weekend I implemented an idea I had some weeks ago: sending regular mails with the translation status and the contents status of debian-edu-doc to the Debian Edu mailinglist, in the hope this would motivate people to finish the documentation and its translations. Currently the package contains four different manuals, translated in up to 6 languages: the old Debian Edu etch manual, the new Debian Edu lenny manual and manuals for teachers using Rosegarden and Audicity. All four are being written on wiki.debian.org, then exported to Docbook, then .po files are created with the great po4a tool suite. Those .po files are kept in svn of the the debian-edu-doc package, for translators to edit. Detecting missing or half finished content is done by putting the string "FIXME" plus a description what to fix in the wiki text. Then a small script is run by cron every 2nd and 4th sunday of the month, which outputs the translation status and greps for FIXME and formats this nicely. The result looks like this:

The (translated) debian-edu-lenny manual as PDF or HTML is available at http://maintainer.skolelinux.org/debian-edu-doc/

To understand this mail better, please read /usr/share/doc/debian-edu-doc/README.
This mail is automatically send by a cronjob run by Holger Levsen every two weeks. Please send feedback, suggestions, flames and cookies via this list.


debian-edu-lenny-manual.de.po: 545 translated messages, 193 fuzzy translations, 220 untranslated messages.
debian-edu-lenny-manual.es.po: 85 translated messages, 204 fuzzy translations, 669 untranslated messages.
debian-edu-lenny-manual.fr.po: 447 translated messages, 279 fuzzy translations, 232 untranslated messages.
debian-edu-lenny-manual.it.po: debian-edu-lenny-manual.it.po:7683: end-of-line within string
debian-edu-lenny-manual.nb.po: 711 translated messages, 159 fuzzy translations, 88 untranslated messages.
----------------------------------
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Features
FIXME: describe new features in 5.0.1+edu0 here.
----------------------------------
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Requirements
FIXME: a description of main-server and thinclient-server is missing.
----------------------------------
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/Documentation/Lenny//Installation
FIXME: probably each paragraph on this page needs to be (slightly) rewritten for lenny.
FIXME: describe PXE installation here, if its only two sentences, then they should be here.
FIXME: path to preseed file location missing
----------------------------------
[...]
====================
24 FIXMEs left to fix
====================


I'm quite happy with the result, now we we just need to fix those FIXMEs :-)

The same tools will probably be used for the illustrated Lenny installation guide and maybe others. I've described the requiered structure for such a manual on wiki.d.o in an email to debian-boot (as the discussion about that guide happened there), in case you are interested.

In mostly unrelated news, I've started running everyday again six days ago (slowly running a bit further each day) and yesterday I've also started with doing gymnastics. It was high time to realize and to change some stuff in my life, and it looks like I finally heard the call. And doing sports is by far not the only thing I want to do very differently again, it's just the most visible atm and it's also quite easy to do. Also I can feel it in my legs today :-) Now I "just" need to keep going forward, change is a continuous process, and nothing to be done with. Ever. The day I stop changing myself, the day I stop learning, I consider myself to be dead. I'm glad I woke up, thanks for contributing to making me wake up and for bearing with me sometimes.

Whilst working on update-manager I have been wondering whether I should use gettext for localizing debug output and error messages sent to stderr.
As for debug output itself I basically do not see the need for providing a localized version for each and every message sent to stderr, but as far as error messages are concerned I am uncertain. The point is that update-manager (apart from its experimental text interface) is usually not launched from a terminal at all and so most users won t even see these messages ever. Also, I believe that every developer s English skills are good enough so that he or she is able to understand simple messages.
Error messages however might be useful to all users when they experience a problem with the software, but localizing those could make handling bug reports a bit harder, possibly having to translate the error message back to English before being able to see what has gone wrong. So basically I am asking you: What do you think? Is it worth localizing these messages? What is your experience with localized or non-localized error and debug messages? I would be glad if I could get some input from you, either as a comment to this article, via email to debian(dot)sp(dot)or(dot)at or through the update-manager-devel mailing list.

As I promised to keep you updated on recent developments on update-manager I am writing this article. Just as a disclaimer: I am not going to write about any recent developments here, but would rather like to point at a piece of code I added to update-manager that could be useful in other applications too. Now, as the title suggests there are sphinx-aware Enums in update-manager. Enums are common constructs in other programming languages like C and allow simple creation of constants with, for example, ascending values (first constant has value 0, second has value 1 and so on). Python unfortunately does not include support for Enums itself, but I found it rather easy to write classes that emulate such a construct. Nothing is new about Enums in Python and there are probably quite a few different implementations out there, but I believe mine is different. The sphinx-aware part means that my implementation automagically updates the docstrings of the created instances and thus allows sphinx autodata method to include sensible information in generated API documentation. I could go on writing about and praising my method, but I believe a short example gives you a better idea how my implementation works and what I wanted to achieve with this. Have a look at this page, which is part of update-manager s new API documentation. You should see rather well-looking documentation of the UpdateManager.Backend.RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS NegativeEnum, the defined constants, their values and some additional information about each value now. Still, nothing too fancy, HTML documentation generated from docstrings. What makes this special is the code from which it was generated:

RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS = NegativeEnum(
  BEGIN = "Started reloading package cache",
  DONE = "Finished reloading package cache")

This not only gives us a RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS enum, along with the RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS.BEGIN and RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS.DONE, but also some documentation, included in RELOAD_CACHE_STATUS docstring, that can be used by sphinx. You can find the Enum code, which is rather short and should be quite easy to understand, here. I hope you find this code as useful as I do.

Random bits:

• Philipp s now waiting for DAM, I m very happy to have recommended another new Debian fellow.
• That s this time of the year again. And to please Yoe: ADD 1 TO KIBI.
• After some time spent trying to fetch Blender sources and updating the packaging accordingly, 2.49 (release logs) finally got uploaded to unstable. Screenshot follows:

Russ Allbery has written about the hostile reactions of sci-fi fans toward the delay of a book release [1]. Russ makes some good points regarding the issue of whether paying $100 for some books entitles a reader to have the rest of the series written (in summary - no, the author owes the fans nothing). Russ also notes that when someone makes a public promise to do something (such as writing a book) they will probably be feeling bad about being unable to live up to that, and harassing them about it is not going to make them feel any better - or make them better able to do the work. Charles Stross has written a blog post about this topic, he makes some interesting points and the comments illustrate most of them [2]. One comment claims that the author of the delayed book in question flaunts his NFL watching while the same person also criticises the author for writing a blog. This level of contempt for the author amazes me. In case anyone is interested I watch The Bill and Desperate Housewives every week. Anyone who wishes to criticise me for watching soapies instead of documentaries is welcome to do so. But I will not make any apologies for spending some of my time doing things other than coding. If I watch Desperate Housewives instead of fixing a bug that inconveniences you then you just have to deal with it. I believe that taking a regular break from work is a basic human right, apart from which there is evidence to show that working excessive hours decreases the quality and quantity of work that is completed [3]. It seems to me that members of the free software community are in a better position regarding fans than most creative people, and that this is largely due to how transparent the development process is. The most influential members of the user (fan) base are software developers. While people will be disappointed when software is not released on time or has some bugs many users know what is involved and understand that no testing will find all bugs. Even some basic shell scripting can teach people the difficulties of programming and convince them to have a little more patience than they might otherwise have. So the typical user of free software will have some idea of what is required to write software while the typical reader of a novel has no idea of what is involved in writing a book. Another benefit for the free software community in this regard is the open development process. When users are unhappy about release delays (as some Debian users were before Lenny was released) they can easily look at the bug list. If a user is pushy they can be invited to fix some bugs themselves, if they investigate the matter and discover that the bugs are too difficult for them to fix then they will probably feel compelled to stop hassling the people who can fix the bugs. Complaints from users regarding the release process can be turned around with the software is late because YOU haven t fixed any bugs . Please note that submitting bug reports is NOT criticism, it is in fact helping the development process (particularly when the bug reports contain information on how to fix the problems). This exposes another significant difference between writing software and writing a book. Even if I was a talented author I would not be able to offer any assistance to an author who had trouble completing a work simply because I wouldn t have the same vision for the plot of a book. But it s not uncommon for software development projects to be forked if the users are unhappy with some aspect of how they work, and it s also not uncommon for a programmer to voluntarily give one of their projects to another developer - sometimes developers try and convince other people to take projects from them when they don t have enough time. Even without changing the ownership of a project, anyone can submit a patch. The patches that I have received from users of my software have generally been of a high quality and it has taken little work to merge them. A final difference is that any programmer can produce a private fork of a project. I have lost count of the number of times that I have produced custom versions of free software for my own personal use or for the use of my clients. Sometimes the modifications that I made were unsuitable for wider use (IE they broke things for usage cases that I didn t care about) so I just privately made the software do what I needed. This makes the upstream developer (or team) and other contributors irrelevant to fixing the problem in question. Now this is not to say that the free software community is perfect. But it seems that certain types of bad behavior that we see demonstrated in the sci-fi fandom circles are uncommon and the people who demonstrate them are significantly outnumbered by people who oppose such actions. Publicly criticising a programmer for watching the NFL in their spare time is akin to holding a sign saying kick me . As I am a fan of science fiction (and hope to write some in the near future) I wonder whether the sci-fi community could be changed to have a culture more like that of the free software community. The web site 365tomorrows.com publishes a short sci-fi story every day [4], they have been doing this for a few years now. They started out publishing work by a small team of authors with the aim of writing a story a day for a year. Now they also take submissions from users and they have a forum for budding authors to discuss their work. The site Protagonize.com is based on the idea of collaborative fiction [5]. I wonder whether the increasing number of sci-fi fans who join such forums will change the nature of the community. Maybe when a book is delayed the fans could take comfort in an increasing amount of fan-fiction based on characters from that book, I expect that the fan fiction will probably not impress all authors - and some may be offended by having their characters used in pornographic fan fiction. But that might just lead to a market shift towards authors who are not overly concerned about such things. When attending sci-fi book signings I ve noticed fans who appear to have stalking tendencies. I have been wondering how much of this is another symptom of the same problem and how much of it is due to science fiction attracting some people who don t understand the concept of personal space and who haven t considered the mathematics of interactions between famous people and fans - as one of many fans the famous person will not remember your fan letters or whether they have met you before, it s not possible. I look forward to the day when a well known author can have lunch with some fans after a book signing and not be afraid of weird fans. I wonder if Cory Doctorow [6] already has such cool fans, Cory seems to be one of the leaders in the new open way of writing and releasing sci-fi so it seems likely that he would be among the first to reap the benefits. I m sure that most authors would like to have lunch or dinner with their fans if they could be assured that the probability of getting stuck with a nutty fan was extremely low.

• [1] http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2009-02/016.html


• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/the_art_of_being_late.html


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/02/increasing-efficiency-through-less-work/


• [4] http://www.365tomorrows.com/


• [5] http://www.protagonize.com/


• [6] http://craphound.com/

Now being an official Debian developer I ve the possibility to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org for my Debian packages. But whereas I want to use that for all my official Debian packages I still want to use $DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org for my grml related packages. I m a lazy sysadmin and don t want to manually adjust my changelogs depending on the type of package (especially since this might be error-prone) so I needed a generic solution. Grml s Zsh configuration (Debian package grml-etc-core >=0.3.71) provides a solution for Zsh (version 4.3.3 or later): based on directories you can set your own profiles. Demonstration:

% cd /grml/git-grml
chpwd(): Switching to profile: grml
% echo $DEBEMAIL
mika@grml.org
% cd /grml/git-debian
chpwd(): Switching to profile: debian
% echo $DEBEMAIL
mika@debian.org

The configuration is pretty simple:

# define profiles based on directories:
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/grml/git-grml( / /*)'       profile grml
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/grml/git-debian( / /*)'     profile debian
zstyle ':chpwd:profiles:/home/mika/Customers( / /*)' profile customers
# configuration for profile 'grml':
chpwd_profile_grml()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export DEBEMAIL=mika@grml.org
  export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="mika@grml.org"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="mika@grml.org"
 
# configuration for profile 'debian':
chpwd_profile_debian()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export DEBEMAIL=mika@debian.org
  export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="mika@debian.org"
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="mika@debian.org"
 
# configuration for profile 'customers':
chpwd_profile_customers()
 
  [[ $ profile  == $ CHPWD_PROFILE  ]] && return 1
  print "chpwd(): Switching to profile: $profile"
  export TELEPHONE=[...]
  export MAIL=[...]
 

Kudos to Frank for implementing this lovely feature in grml s zshrc. Look for chpwd_profiles() in grml s zsh config for further documentation on this feature.

So I am struck by two opposing forces that characterize so much academic labor. Basically academics spend a lot and I mean mounds of time judging their peers. It happens informally ( blah is smart blah gave such a crappy talk at the MLA ) and formally (journal reviews, book reviews, letter of recommendation, tenure letters and it goes on and on). While there is certainly a middle ground in judgment in the form of constructive criticism (that which is neither too critical or full of praise), much of this labor is uber-critical and geared toward tearing down and scorching the intellectual earth you walk on. You should read some of the journal reviews! They are a window into some pretty seething nastiness, or at least it comes across as such. But thankfully scorn, which sometimes is pretty humorous, other times spot on, and other times, just pitiful, sits at the edge of full blown, often overblown, PRAISE. You can find it in journal reviews but it reaches its Whole Hog Glory in letters of recommendation. These letters are all about buttering up, buttering people up to present them as god s gift to earth or something similar. I rather enjoy reading and writing letters of recommendation because basically the content is the same (I know blah in this capacity, they are full of nothing but alien-like intelligence and total awesomeness, for these reasons, this is why they are perfect for your program) but the words and style, well, they are always different. And I frankly I just feel good reading them and writing them. Perhaps we have to praise so exuberantly to keep the two forces in cosmic balance.

So I am struck by two opposing forces that characterize so much academic labor. Basically academics spend a lot and I mean mounds of time judging their peers. It happens informally ( blah is smart blah gave such a crappy talk at the MLA ) and formally (journal reviews, book reviews, letter of recommendation, tenure letters and it goes on and on). While there is certainly a middle ground in judgment in the form of constructive criticism (that which is neither too critical or full of praise), much of this labor is uber-critical and geared toward tearing down and scorching the intellectual earth you walk on. You should read some of the journal reviews! They are a window into some pretty seething nastiness, or at least it comes across as such. But thankfully scorn, which sometimes is pretty humorous, other times spot on, and other times, just pitiful, sits at the edge of full blown, often overblown, PRAISE. You can find it in journal reviews but it reaches its Whole Hog Glory in letters of recommendation. These letters are all about buttering up, buttering people up to present them as god s gift to earth or something similar. I rather enjoy reading and writing letters of recommendation because basically the content is the same (I know blah in this capacity, they are full of nothing but alien-like intelligence and total awesomeness, for these reasons, this is why they are perfect for your program) but the words and style, well, they are always different. And I frankly I just feel good reading them and writing them. Perhaps we have to praise so exuberantly to keep the two forces in cosmic balance.