Order Without Law is a fantastic book by Robert Ellickson published in 1991. In a way, the book is an in-depth case study of the irrelevance of law. Subtitled, "how neighbors settle disputes," Ellickson shows how people solve complicated problems in an archetypal area of liability law without knowledge of the law. Ellickson shows that even when people know exactly what the law says, they often ignore it in favor of community norms and, in his examples, models of "neighborliness." Specifically, the book is about how neighbors in northern California settle disputes related to damage caused by roaming cattle, how neighbors construct and share costs of fences, and how, although the law is frequently debated in relation to classifying land as either open or closed to free grazing, the law tends to take a back seat to unwritten norms in the way that problems are actually solved. There is order and a shared understanding of rules in Ellickson's account; it just has very little to do with the law. As part of his description, Ellickson goes into some detail about the types of damage that cattle cause. For example, Ellickson describes how bulls, will often break down barbed wire fences and go on rampages impregnating heifers, eating vast amounts of food, and destroying crops and equipment. When I was on a long bike trip through northern California a few weeks ago, I was sitting under a tree waiting for my cyling partner to catch up. A giant black bull nearby noticed me. Shorting, mooing, and shaking ribbons of slobber from its mouth, it lumbered toward me. Only a rather weak-looking barbed wire fence separated us. All I could think about was Order Without Law.

The latest terrible story about a voting machine is here. In summary: 19,000 registered voters, 5,352 ballots cast, 144,000 votes counted by the machine. Does anyone remember the bug in Intel chips that came out something like 10 years ago? It looked (at least at first) like it would only affect a few people under very rare circumstances, but the media totally freaked out and Intel was forced to fix the problem (as well they should). Have we become so numb to bad software that we don't care when the machines we are using to help decide elections have such awful bugs in them? Does anyone notice when the bugs aren't so terribly obvious (negative votes, 138,000 delta from actual votes to counted votes).

A couple of weeks ago I updated my Debian Sid setup on the MacBook to use disk encryption; this post is to document what I did for later reference. The system was configured for dual booting Debian or Mac OS X using refit and grub2 as documented on the Debian Wiki; I don't use the Mac OS X system much, but I left it there to be able to test things and be able to answer questions of Mac OS X users when I have to. The Debian installation was done using two primary partitions, one for swap (I used a partition to be able to suspend to disk without troubles) and an ext3 file system used as the root file system. The plan was to use the Debian Installer to do the disk setup and recover the Sid installation from a backup once the encrypted setup was working OK. Backup for later recovery My first step was to install all the needed packages on the original system; basically I verified that I had the lvm2 and cryptsetup packages installed. The second step was to backup the root file system; to do it I changed to run level 1 and copied the files to an external USB disk using rsync. My third step was to boot into Mac OS X to reduce the space assigned to it; I had a lot of free space that I didn't plan to use with Mac OS X and I thought that this was the best occasion to reassign it to the Debian file system. Encrypted Lenny installation Now the machine was ready for the installer. As I formatted the system a couple of weeks ago I used a daily build of the Lenny Debian Installer, now that Lenny is out I would have used the official version. I booted the installer and on the partition disk step I selected the manual method; I left sda1 and sda2 as they were (the Mac OS X installation uses them) and set up sda3 and sda4 as follows:

• sda3: 256 MB, use as ext3, mount point: /boot
• sda4: 86 GB, use as physical volume for LVM

Note that I decided to put /boot on a plain ext3 partition to be able to use grub2 as the boot loader (if we put the kernel on an LVM logical volume we need to use lilo as the boot loader). Once sda4 was adjusted as LVM I entered on the LVM setup and created a LVM Volume Group (VG) with the name debian, using sda4 as the physical volume. Once the VG was defined I created a couple of Logical Volumes (LV):

• root: 82 GB
• swap: 2 GB

I left some space unallocated to be able to create LVM snapshots (I use them to do backups, I'll post about it on the next days). Once the LV were ready I finished with the LVM setup and went back to the partitioner to configure the Logical Volumes:

• debian-root: use as physicals volume for encryption
• debian-swap: use as pascal volume for encryption, encryption key: random

Once both encrypted volumes were ready I entered on the Configure the encrypted volumes menu and the installer formatted the volumes for encryption and asked for the debian-root pass phrase. Back on the main partitioning menu I set up the debian-root_crypt encrypted volume:

• debian-root_crypt: use as ext3, mount point: /.

I didn't need to touch the debian-swap_crypt, it was configured automatically as swap because I choose a random encryption key. At this point I was finished with the partitioning; to finish I installed a minimal system and rebooted to try the system. As I had changed the disk layout I had to re-sync the partition tables from refit; once that was done I was able to boot from the newly installed system. Setting up suspend to disk I was using s2disk to suspend the system; to test if it still worked with the new setup I installed the uswsusp package and adjusted the resume device on the /etc/uswsusp.conf to /dev/mapper/debian-swap_crypt. After my first try I noticed that the resume step failed with the encrypted swap partition because it was using a random key, which means that the swap contents are unrecoverable after a reboot. Looking at the cryptsetup documentation I found that the solution was to use a derived key for the swap partition instead of a random one. The command sequence was as follows:

# disable swap
swapoff -a
# close encrypted volume
cryptsetup luksClose debian-swap_crypt
# change the swap partition setup on the /etc/crypttab file
sed -e -i 's%^debian-swap.*%debian-swap_crypt /dev/mapper/debian-swap debian-root_crypt cipher=aes-cbc-essiv:sha256,size=256,swap,hash=sha256,keyscript=/lib/cryptsetup/scripts/decrypt_derived,swap%' /etc/crypttab
# open the encrypted volumes with the new setup
/etc/init.d/cryptdisks start
# enable swap
swapon -a
# update the initrd image
update-initramfs -u

After executing all those commands the suspend to disk system worked as expected. Recovering the original system If I were going to reinstall the system completely I would have finished here, but in my case I wanted to recover my original system setup (except the minimal changes required to use the encrypted passions, of course). To recover my old installation I backed up some files (/etc/fstab, /etc/crypttab, /etc/uswsusp.conf and the current /boot contents to be able to boot in case of failure with my old kernel) from the current installation, after that I recovered all the files from the initial backup (except the ones just saved) using rsync again and regenerated the initrd images of my old kernels:

update-initramfs -u -k all

After that I rebooted and everything worked as on my original installation (except for the disk encryption, of course).

June is the last month before summer holidays, and at this phase in my study, courses take a lot of time: practical assignments, seminars to give, multiple exams. And mid-June, I'll be attending DebConf in Edinburgh, including delivering a talk about Mole, the subject of my Google Summer of Code project. In the period of April/May students participating in the Summer of Code project had the time to get more familiar with the project they were going to work for. Because I'm already somewhat familiar with Debian, I opted to organize an Etch release party together with some friends, because, well, what better way is there to get to know the community? During the past two weeks I've been really starting with the project. I updated the wiki page, added a new development page where I keep track of my work listing the subtasks I'm working on and their status. The first month will be mostly work on the internals, but starting with the second month I'll also be working on the web interface, meaning that there should be some stuff to show off. At the moment I'm refactoring some bits of Mole that are currently implemented in a hacky way, in order to make it all as extensible as it should be. This includes defining a config file format for mole tables, so that it's no longer necessary to modify the python code for new tables. It also involves some better way of stacking tables to each other, so that the package file extraction code can be moved away from the core of mole into a separate worker to keep mole itself pure and simple and generally applicable. I'll post irregular updates to my blog. I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you again this Thursday, when I'll arrive in EDI!

For a while now, the last four or five months at least, I have been using planetplanet for RSS and Atom aggregation, or in english, reading a bunch of websites on one page. Planet is a bit of a hog, mainly in the disk acresses. This is a bit of a problem on hades, whose disk's aren't wonderful. Dan has been nagging me to use rawdog for a while, so this morning it floated to the top of the todo list, and stealing his config and one line of shell gave me a sorta working instance with the same feeds:

grep "^\[h" ~/usr/planet/lupin/config.ini   sed "s/\[//"   sed "s/\]//"
  awk ' printf("feed 1h %s\n", $1) ' >> .rawdog/config

I'm going to leave it for a bit to see if I like it, and to sort how I want it laid out, but its now in cronand planet isn't, so the worse abuser of hades should be gone.

I always wanted to write a short howto for Debian package maintainers, how to write a manual page in GROFF. This is useful for short documents (for longer documents, docbook/docbook-xsl can be a good choice). I already have written some parts. However, here is the first part of hints. More might follow later. The delimiter in the NAME section The name section is (probably) the only place, where exactly one hypen-minus \- must appear. The hyphen-minus is the delimiter between the command name and one-line description.

.SH NAME
foo-bar \- foos the template foo-what-bar

Typical mistakes regarding paragraphs Using a .PP macro directly following a .SH or .SS macro is useless. This macro should be used between paragraphs:

.SH OPTIONS
The program follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with
two dashes ( \-').
.PP
A summary of options is included below.

Options/File descriptions To describe options or files it s usually useful to make use of the .TP macro.

.SH OPTIONS
.TP
.B \-f, \-\-force
Force the execution of the specified command.

.SH FILES
.TP
.I ~/.foobar
Per user configuration file.

To create more than one intended paragraph the .IP macro can be used.

.TP
.B \-f, \-\-force
Force the execution of the specified command.
.IP
This option has no effect in conjunction with \fB\-\-foo\fP.

Avoid hyphenation in URLs/URIs/paths Usually we don t want URLs or URIs to be hyphenated. This can be done using the \% sequence. Typical examples:

A short tutorial is available online at \fI\%http://foo.tld/some/path/here/manual.html\fP.

On a Debian system the complete text of the GNU General Public License
version 2 can be found in the file \fI\%/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL\-2\fP.

Referencing persons and their mail address The common markup is to write the person name in bold letters and the mail address in roman letters is put into angle brackets. It s usually a good idea to mark where the mail address starts and ends. We can use the \& sequence as shown in the following example:

\fBDaniel Leidert\fP <\&daniel.leidert@wgdd.de\&>

I released a new 0.9.7.2 version of DAViCal yesterday. This reflects quite a lot of stability and small fixes for some subtle problems, and quite a lot of work with the iPhone, adding the possibility of a simpler configuration experience for iPhone users. One long-standing, but less obvious problem (well, less obvious to me) was the handling of usernames with odd characters in them. In the round-trip these needed to be urlencoded, and that wasn't happening correctly in all places, but it hopefully is now. People who want to use e-mail addresses in usernames, or spaces in calendar names, or both, etc., should all work now. One newer problem I've been seeing the effects of a little recently is that PHP 5.3 deprecates call-time pass by reference, which I had used in a few places. That's fixed now, so it should be OK to upgrade to PHP 5.3 without breaking DAViCal or having to explicitly turn those warnings off. The iPhone is a curious beast. Lots of people love them, and it is about the only mobile device that supports CalDAV (though I'm hoping the Nokia N900 also will), so it's important to support it as transparently as possible regardless of my personal loathing for it's horribly locked down state. It was pointed out to me that it is possible for it to be configured by entering three pieces of data (domain name, username, password) so I decided to make DAViCal support that process. In order for it to work for you you will need to have DAViCal running on an SSL server on port 8443, which isn't too big a deal. You can also plain http on 8008 which it will also attempt after prompting when the SSL connection fails. You'll also have to enable mod_rewrite and use some rewriting rules like the example on the wiki. For myself, I use the free SSL certificates from CACert.Org so I had to browse to their root certificate page and load the class 1 and class 3 certs into the iPhone before it would talk happily to my DAViCal server. I'm hoping to continue with reasonably frequent incremental releases of DAViCal for the rest of the year, hopefully with 0.9.7.4 sometime in late October. What will be included there might also depend on how productive my visit to CalConnect XVI is in three weeks too, and I'm looking forward to that.

Thanks to those nice people at Novell, Mojito (everyone's favourite social aggregator, as used in Moblin) now has Facebook support. We now support Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, MySpace and Twitter any requests for the next service? NP: Cold Water Music, AiM

The NYT has an interesting article about research into treating insomnia over the internet [1]. I wonder how many other psychological issues can be effectively treated over the net. From next year all Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate sold in Australia will be made from fair-trade cocoa [2]. Cadbury Dairy Milk Chocolate is the most popular type of chocolate sold in Australia so this is a significant market shift. For a long time Cadbury has sold fair trade chocolate under the name Green and Black. Of course we now have to wait for Cadbury to use fair trade cocoa in all their other chocolate varieties. Mike Rowe gave an interesting TED talk about the value of manual labour [3]. He suggested that there should be a PR campaign for skilled manual labour jobs and noted that his observation (through his work on his Dirty Jobs TV series) was that the people who do some of the less popular jobs appear to be happier. The GapMinder.org web site has some interesting analysis of statistical information on countries and regions [4]. It is based on the work of Hans Rosling who is well known for his high quality TED talks [5]. Unfortunately the web site requires Flash, I will probably try it out with Gnash some time. Miru Kim gave a TED talk about her work photographing herself nude in abandoned buildings and industrial spaces [6]. Among other things she photographed herself lying naked on a pile of bones in the crypt underneath Paris which is fairly dangerous. I ve visited the crypt, it s an interesting experience but I was very careful to touch nothing you never know which of the bones came from victims of smallpox and other nasty diseases. Strangely they have an ongoing problem of visitors stealing bones, when I visited there were several bones at the exit that had been confiscated from visitors some of which had mummified flesh attached Steinar H. Gunderson wrote a good description of the basics of how the TCP protocol works [7]. He also links to a web page he wrote that will measure your potential TCP throughput and give you information on the link. This is really handy if you are behind some sort of firewall and want to know what is being done to your TCP stream when it s in transit. Apparently Christian couples tend to use a shared email account to reduce the risk of cheating [8]. It s hardly a surprise that Christians have a much higher divorce rate than atheists and agnostics [9]. The NY Times has an interesting article about iPhones overloading the AT&T network [10]. Recently I ve been having some problems sending MMS with my Three phone, some relatives who use Three have been having connection problems in certain areas with marginal signal quality, and the download speed of my Three data connection is significantly reduced (used to be ~70KB/s, now I m lucky to get 20KB/s). I suspect that the new smart phones that are being sold are largely to blame. But the up-side is that when they engineer their network to work properly with the smart phones then my Internet use (ssh and basic web browsing) will work really well. Michael Tieman wrote an interesting blog post about software patents which compares them to Land Mines [11]. Of course this analogy falls down badly while the US is still leading the world in manufacturing land mines. Rebecca Saxe gave an interesting TED talk about how brains make moral judgeents [12]. In her research she did some tests with using magnetic pulses to decrease the function of the region of the brain that allows people to judge the others and she was able to significantly affect the results of judgement tests. Brendan Scott analyses the netbook wars and concludes that it has been a significant loss for Microsoft [13]. ArsTechnica has an analysis of the real word-processing requirements [14], they suggest that in most cases MS-Word (and other word-processor) documents could be replaced with HTML or Wiki pages for a better end result.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/health/11slee.html
• [2] http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25985054-29277,00.html
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.html
• [4] http://www.gapminder.org/
• [5] http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/miru_kim_s_underground_art.html
• [7] http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2009-08-30-11-33_trying_to_understand_tcp_performance.html
• [8] http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/christian-couples-share-email-accounts-to-stay-faithful-20090907-fdaw.html
• [9] http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html
• [11] http://opensource.org/node/465
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
• [13] http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/netbooks-microsoft-a-turning-point/
• [14] http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-word-1983 2009-rest-in-peace.ars

Live-initramfs is a fork of Ubuntu s casper for use within Debian. Nowadays several Debian based live systems are using live-initramfs to build an initramfs suited to boot live systems. Besides debian-live and all its users that s at least Grml (and its derivates) and FAI. I m maintaining live-initramfs for Grml so I know the limitations of live-initramfs. Yes, it has some design flaws but upstream finally decided to take the time to redesign it. That s why I m posting this: I would like to see even more Debian based systems adopting live-initramfs (hello Sidux!). This would improve compatibility with regards to similar bootoptions and features as well as better cooperation among the teams. Of course this will be possible only if live-initramfs is capable of handling all the necessary customization and configuration tasks that different live systems require nowadays. So this are my current considerations regarding the redesign of live-initramfs:

• support all currently available bootoptions (for a clean upgrade path and wide adoption of live-initramfs 2.x)
• provide a possibility to use the rootfs from exactly the device that the kernel/initramfs is booting from (this is especially important if users have several similar systems on their usb drives)
• scan removable devices always before any harddisk devices by default
• provide a bootoption which displays the currently executed code:
  • avoids panic on user s side if something takes longer than usual, so let s inform the user instead
  • debugging is essential if anything fails, though:
  • rebuilding the initramfs with set -x isn t a solution for normal users
• bootoption toram should run some free memory checks
• support custom hooks via something like hooks/live-custom (so other distributions don t have to patch live-initramfs for adding additional stuff)
• consider inclusion of Grml s patches (at least what you think might be interesting for you)
• split scripts/[live-bottom] into a separate package:
  • provide just the core files for booting in live-initramfs package, move debian-live specific stuff to a separate package
  • but please don t just drop 23networking for PXE booting
• write messages through a clean interface:
  • so no /dev/console workarounds are necessary to get around the file descriptor hacks
  • support keeping the system completely quiet (for example for bootsplashes)
  • support custom failure messages (debian-live won t have much fun if they receive distribution specific bugreports)
  • allow customization of the messages so every system can use its own look and feel for the boot messages
• provide status bars wherever possible:
  • when searching for the squashfs file this can take a while (quoting a Grml user: cdrom -> ie -> activex -> fast ethernet -> OOB -> IDE -> Grml ), so optionally display which device is scanned
  • toram is annoying without any status information (displaying progress is possible e.g. using rsync)

If you re interested in adopting live-initramfs in your distribution/system feel free to contact me (mika [at] debian.org). If you do have any further wishes for the redesign please let me know so I can forward them to upstream.

Matt, not only Perl can do it, but is part of the standard POSIX extended regexes (see regex(7)). Here I check for 7-letters palindromes:

perl -lne '/^(.)(.)(.).\3\2\1$/ and print' /usr/share/dict/words
grep '^\(.\)\(.\)\(.\).\3\2\1$' /usr/share/dict/words

Tags: Planet Debian, programming

I just had a need to match a regex where there were two occurances of the same string, and it would be really, really nice to make sure that both occurances were actually the same (rather than both being different strings that just happen to match the same regex). Just to be funny, I tried this:

  /([a-z0-9\.-]+).*\1/

And knock me down with a feather, it worked! This is using Ruby's regex handling, but I'd be stunned if Perl didn't also handle this case. The world just got a little bit awesomer today.

I've been on a Sci-Fi kick. I just finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I've read a few of her books before, but I really liked this one a lot. It reminded me a of some of Daniel Quinn's ideas. I picked it up sorta randomly because I'd read a couple of her books before. I had it sitting on my desk at work, and a few people said, "Oh, you're reading that? That's one of the best books I've ever read". Of course, I got it used for $3.50 at Powell's. I wonder how they get away with reprinting such books for $15. One interesting aspect of the book is that one of the languages used doesn't really express possessives. So instead of saying, "my book" it was always rendered as "the book". I didn't really notice this until near the end. When I did notice it, was when Le Guin wrote, "the mother" instead of "his mother". This didn't seem quite right to me, because it doesn't represent the relationship between "him" and "mother", but it's not really Le Guin's fault... there's no convenient way to represent this in English without using the possessive form. Perhaps "the mother of the man," but that still seems a bit possessive. I believe this is also true of Russian and Spanish at least. One way to look at it is that humans are so focused on possession that we don't have a convenient way to express relationships. But we are certainly not saying, "The mother that I own." Another way to look at it is that the so-called possessive case expresses more than just possession. In fact, it sometimes means possession and sometimes not. If my mother fell off her horse and I had to rush back to Ohio to visit her, and someone asked me why I was going, I might say, "Because she's my mother!" Not possessive. But clearly, it is sometimes possessive, particularly in romantic relationships. Jealousy is possible in all forms of relationships, but is probably most clear in romantic ones. "Why did you go to the prom with him when you're MY girlfriend?" This reminded me of the "object" formulation in object-oriented programming languages. (Didn't know that I was going to say THAT, did you? Ha!) In a language like Java, you say something like "the car's first wheel's last screw", "car.wheel[0].screw[3]". In Haskell, you also have aggregate types, where one type is composed of others but to access them, instead of saying, "the car's wheel" we say, "there's a relationship between cars and wheels. It doesn't matter what the relationship is, but the function from cars to wheels is called "wheels". So we have "last $ screws $ first $ wheels car". That is, "the last screw of the first wheel of the car"... actually that's clearer than "the car's first wheel's last screw" isn't it? There we go. I've once again proven that Haskell is morally and technically superior to C++. Randomness Here is an article linked from Slashdot about how people are giving up on the internet because of spam and spyware. The article doesn't mention GNU/Linux or Firefox. I just took one of those quizes that you've all been doing, and I was pretty disappointed.

I think someone should volunteer to set up "Planet Haskell" or "Functional Planet" (which would include other languages) ala Planet Debian, Planet Gnome, Planet Lisp (which is made with secret alien technology), Planet Perl, etc. These sites are "Blog aggregators". Basically they just collect the RSS feeds of the community and post their blogs to a web page in a cute format (the gnome one is especially cute, but you probably could have guessed that). There are already sites like The Haskell Sequence and Lambda the Ultimate which have a similar purpose, though not quite the same. There's already software out there for this, so nothing new needs to be written. I think we need a volunteer to set this up somewhere? Preferably someone with their own server, and we'll worry about setting up the DNS later :)

I suffer from an in ability to successfully monitor multiple sources of information. For example, I rarely check on lists that I have procmailed out to their own folder. If its a list I need to stay on top of, I have to dump it to my primary inbox. For one list, I even dump messages to my inbox *and* keep a copy in a subfolder. That way I can keep on top of what's going on, but also keep a low-barrier-to-delete since I know I have an archival copy. I do think its important for me to check e-mail regularly, but there is some part of my brain that considers e-mail to be a time sink, and prevents me from going beyond what it considers the bare-minimum: Inbox messages. Another instance of this disorder struck me with RSS. There are web pages that I check every day, and not all of them have RSS feeds. I played with a few different RSS readers a while back, and decided that straw was my favorite. But I could not get myself in the habit of bringing up a second application. Later I started using Firefox, and I thought I'd have better luck with something like Sage. But even that was easy to avoid because it requires actually opening up the sage panel. I would either never check it or, in times of boredom, check it too often. Since then I've given up on RSS readers. These days I've stolen an idea from Alex Chiang and just keep a bookmark folder called "daily" and one called "monthly". Every morning I hit the "Open All in Tabs" item in the daily folder, and quickly ctrl-w through pages w/ no new content. My daily folder includes things like bug reports I'm monitoring for activity, gitweb views of files where I'm waiting for a fix, blogs, parcel tracking, comics, wiki watch lists, etc. Since a few of these pages are rather important, I always remember to do it and therefore force myself to browse the others as well. Most days I spend less than 10 minutes "wasting time" going through them. Its strange to both be aware of poor working habits, yet know from years of experience that I'll be more successful if I work around them rather than trying to retrain myself.

Lately, while using the Twitter web interface with Javascript turned on, I've been redirected to a Privoxy error page whenever I click on an external link:

Request for blocked URL

Your request for http://twitter.com/link_click_count?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&linkType=web&tweetId=1234567890&userId=12345678&authenticity_token=f5920ebf56bfa111c54bb9f86814cafa76de00fa was blocked.

Block reason: Path matches generic block pattern.

Looking a little closer at the blocked URL, I noticed that for every external link you click, Twitter logs the destination URL, the originating tweet and your user ID.

So what can you do to opt out of this tracking?
Disable JavascriptThis is by far the easiest solution. You can simply install an extension like Noscript and use Twitter with Javascript turned off. That's what I do most of the time since the website is mostly usable without it.

A very fortunate side-effect of using Twitter without Javascript is that you can avoid a number of the worms which propagate through that service from time to time.
Use Privoxy to disable the link counterFor those times when I have to enable Javascript on the site, I use Privoxy, a great privacy-enhancing web proxy, to alter the Javascript code executed when clicking on external links. This effectively disables the extra tracking and takes me directly to the intended URL.

First of all, make sure you have this line in your /etc/privoxy/config:

filterfile user.filter

then, add this filter to /etc/privoxy/user.filter:

FILTER: twitter-link-count Disable the Twitter link tracker
s@twttr\.countClick=function@twttr.dsbldCountClick=function@Uig

and finally turn this filter on for the affected URLs (/etc/privoxy/user.action):

  +force-text-mode +filter twitter-link-count   
.twimg.com/.*/javascripts/twitter.js

Switch to IdenticaIf you want to avoid similar privacy problems in the future, you can also switch to an Open platform which respects your basic freedoms.

The main contestant in this space is Identica. It's a great alternative to Twitter and has a lot of interesting features (like groups and XMPP integration) which are not yet available on Twitter.

The StatusNet developers have kindly released their source code under the AGPL and their goal is to build the most open micro-blogging system out there.

So go over there now and claim your username!

1.1.14 is definitely worth blogging about. While I was updating the gtk-doc stuff to update the documentation that is available in our website I was thinking that this is probably the release with the largest amount of API addition I have seen in my time as a contributor to the project! Before I start talking about the new APIs, though, let me talk of something that went under the hood: Xan has patched WebKitGTK+ to override libsoup s connection limits, so that our limits match those of other modern browsers - we now allow up to 60 connections total, and 6 per host. People have been reporting load performance improvements for some sites! We have an initial set of APIs to deal with the data that was loaded to render the page, represented by the new DataSource object. This allows you to peek at the source of the HTML that was rendered, for instance. In the near future we will have ways of getting the data and other information for each resource that is downloaded to compose the page. Jan Alonzo has spent quite some time studying, implementing and perfecting this API, with some help from me and Xan. One initial piece of the larger API to control resource loading is already there, as well. The WebView will use the new resource-request-starting signal to let you know that a request is about to be sent, and allow you to modify headers, or even the URI that is going to be fetched. For some, the greatest news here is that this allows a basic implementation of AD blocking, which is now supported in Epiphany with the WebKit backend, as of version 2.27.92, released today! This is something I have been looking at in my Collabora time for some time now, and working along with Xan and Jan, we finally seem to have figure out the API interactions correctly. There s more to come regarding resource loading tracking, in the near future. That would already be a lot, from my point of view, but there s a whole lot more. A new contributor, Martin Robinson, has arrived proposing new API pieces for an important HTML5 tool: web databases, which brings with it the concept of SecurityOrigin. Jan has exposed API to put the WebView in view source mode, Xan has given us undo/redo support for editable content, and Zan Dobersek has done some overall improvement of our HTML5 media player. That s a lot of change for a release, which also goes to show we still have quite a gap to fill, but we are being able to move forward and fill them quite quickly. If you want to help out, pick something in your area of interest, and send us patches!