These guys could do at least 10 minutes of research before writing an article. The AWS APIs are already 'open source', you're allowed to write free-software tools that use them. They're out in the open, with no NDA or anything attached. Eucalyptus also exists, which is a pretty darn good reimplementation of EC2. The only real impediment to an 'open' (you meant free, right?) cloud is that you can't use ec2-tools with it unless you want to fight off a pack of female Amazon warrior-lawyers. I hear their punches can leave a mark.

I'm too lazy to send them an e-mail, and the Slashdot comments are already calling 'em out anyway.

An interesting opinion post in the NY Times describes the research on early education and how it can affect IQ [1]. Among other things children from poor families who are adopted into upper middle-class families tend to end up with higher IQ scores. The article notes that half the population in 1917 would be regarded as mentally retarded by today s standards - finally we have an explanation for WW1! Two Dominos employees tarnish the brand s image with a prank video on Youtube [2]. The next obvious step is for activists to seek jobs at such companies for the purpose of influencing companies. The animal rights protesters outside KFC stores haven t achieved much, but if they worked for KFC and made some nasty videos they would really encourage a change of action. I predict that chain stores will be spending a lot more on security and background checks for their employees in the near future. Cory Doctorow has written an amusing article titled Big Entertainment Wants to Party Like It s 1996 about how the entertainment industry is killing itself by conducting back-room negotiations about new copyright laws [3]. Nate Silver gave a TED talk about racism in elections [4]. The most interesting point was demonstrating statistically that people who don t meet people of other races tend to be more racist. It seems to me that the use of the X-Face: header in email and the use of HackerGotchi in Planets can help reduce the level of racism on the Internet. Cory Doctorow writes about his Geeky writing [5]. His idea for an organised system for donating books to libraries will hopefully be fully implemented soon - it should be easy to do and the incremental costs will decrease as the scope increases. Cory Doctorow writes about the perverse laws that protect criticism of copyright works but stifle praise [6]. In a similar note he has documented a plan for trademark and copyright holders to allow fans to create derivitive works while preserving the original rights AND sharing the profits [7]. So if Cory s idea became popular someone who wanted to create some art work based on a Coke bottle (which is trademarked) could pay the Coca-Cola company a reasonable rate, include an appropriate disclaimer, and things would work out well for everyone. Also this would allow small artists to develop new products that could be used by the large companies (I m sure that anyone who legally released an artwork that turned out to be an effective advert for Coke would receive a lucrative job offer). Bruce Schneier s blog has an interesting article about the poor quality of software used for breath alcohol detectors [8]. It s a great concern that innocent people are being punished due to bad software, but it s only a small part of the problems with the legal system. Mary Roach gave a TED talk 10 Things You Didn t Know About Orgasm [9]. Not as insightful as the usual TED talk, but strange and interesting.

• [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html


• [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/business/media/16dominos.html


• [3] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=175415


• [4] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nate_silver_on_race_and_politics.html


• [5] http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2009/05/cory-doctorow-extreme-geek.html


• [6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/13/cory-doctorow-copyright


• [7] http://www.internetevolution.com/document.asp?doc_id=176353


• [8] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/05/software_proble.html


• [9] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm.html

I've never particularly liked IRC because it is as intrusive as a telephone - flashing away and demanding attention. I much prefer email, which I can answer when I choose to allocate the time to handle it. I have a lot of different tasks ongoing and an interruption about a completely different topic makes it difficult to retain the train of thought required to pursue the original task. I've cut back on my IRC time since Christmas but I'm cutting back further.

It's part and parcel of managing my software work without it excluding other things I like doing too. The good weather is a great excuse to get away from the laptop/desktop, so I'll be doing a lot more impromptu hikes and day trips. I'm resurrecting other non-computer activities too - it's been too long.

So, don't expect to see me on IRC - except during a conference etc. If you need me, as ever, use email and preferably one of the many mailing lists to which I'm subscribed. If the query applies to any of my packages, a bug report is far better than an email or I could forget. (Telephone is for business/close friends only, again except during conferences.)

After a fairly tiring (though exciting) semester of teaching, I have packed my books, lots of files, and other things I Can t Live Without, and shipped myself via Jet Blue to Puerto Rico where I will spend my summer. My reason for being here is simple: I want to see my mother who continues to live in a state of minimalism at a nursing home with Alzheimers. Coming home is never easy. Seeing her for the first time after an absence of months is especially hard and expect will continue to be as such, so long as I have periods away from her like I do. I never imagined that I would live between two cities as I do, but in general I am grateful I have a job that allows me to bridge these two places. When I am in NYC, I am so ridiculously busy (being an assistant professor is not unlike being a medical resident and doctor except the tempo slows down during our summers, at least to some extent) that I don t for better or for worse have my mother always perched on my mind. But being here is a different story. Not only do I have to structure my own time (so my mind can wander easily into those nether regions), but the house I stay in is nothing but filled with memories of my mom, most especially from the last 4 years she spent here with Alzheimers Along with visiting my mom, most of my time will be occupied in front of the computer working on the first draft of my book manuscript, which is due on September 15, 2009, 2 days before my birthday. I think I can hack it given that I have lots of time on my hands and when I get into work mode I can get a lot done. But the first month or so is going to be really really rough. I always find the transition into stare at your monitor mode for the entire day sort of tough. Puerto Rico also has a host of magnetic distractions like the garden and the beach, which I don t love but in fact adore. I also don t really associate the tropics/this house/the summer with mental work, but I will spend the next few weeks reversing that association or else I will be in deep trouble! Right now I am setting up the office, struggling to find the right a/c unit for the space, and in a few days I hope to be writing away

After a fairly tiring (though exciting) semester of teaching, I have packed my books, lots of files, and other things I Can t Live Without, and shipped myself via Jet Blue to Puerto Rico where I will spend my summer. My reason for being here is simple: I want to see my mother who continues to live in a state of minimalism at a nursing home with Alzheimers. Coming home is never easy. Seeing her for the first time after an absence of months is especially hard and expect will continue to be as such, so long as I have periods away from her like I do. I never imagined that I would live between two cities as I do, but in general I am grateful I have a job that allows me to bridge these two places. When I am in NYC, I am so ridiculously busy (being an assistant professor is not unlike being a medical resident and doctor except the tempo slows down during our summers, at least to some extent) that I don t for better or for worse have my mother always perched on my mind. But being here is a different story. Not only do I have to structure my own time (so my mind can wander easily into those nether regions), but the house I stay in is nothing but filled with memories of my mom, most especially from the last 4 years she spent here with Alzheimers Along with visiting my mom, most of my time will be occupied in front of the computer working on the first draft of my book manuscript, which is due on September 15, 2009, 2 days before my birthday. I think I can hack it given that I have lots of time on my hands and when I get into work mode I can get a lot done. But the first month or so is going to be really really rough. I always find the transition into stare at your monitor mode for the entire day sort of tough. Puerto Rico also has a host of magnetic distractions like the garden and the beach, which I don t love but in fact adore. I also don t really associate the tropics/this house/the summer with mental work, but I will spend the next few weeks reversing that association or else I will be in deep trouble! Right now I am setting up the office, struggling to find the right a/c unit for the space, and in a few days I hope to be writing away

Set outside ourselves, we swim in an enigmatic, fiery element, no
longer knowing ourselves nor recognizing the most familiar of
things; we no longer possess any standard of measurement,
everything lawlike and rigid begins to shift, everything gleams in
new colours, speaks to us in new signs and characters.

Set outside ourselves, we swim in an enigmatic, fiery element, no
longer knowing ourselves nor recognizing the most familiar of
things; we no longer possess any standard of measurement,
everything lawlike and rigid begins to shift, everything gleams in
new colours, speaks to us in new signs and characters.

While I've only skimmed the available protocol draft and whitepapers, I do have a couple thoughts about wave. Firstly, I can imagine something like this supplanting not just email and instant messaging, but also web forums, blog comments, mailing lists, wikis, bug tracking systems, twitter, and probably various other forms of communication. (But not, apparently, version control systems.) While one might have an attachment to a few of those things, I think most of us would be glad to see most of them collectively die (especially twitter and web forums of course) and be replaced by a data-driven standard, with multiple clients, rather than their general ad-hoc, server-side generated nastiness. (The Project Xanadu guys would be probably be proud.) Secondly, while Google are making all the right noises about open protocols, multiple providers, etc, and probably only plan to lock in about five nines percent of users to wave.google.com before competing implementations arrive, wave is not a fully distributed system. Spec says:

The operational transform used for concurrency control in wave is [currently] based on mutation of a shared object owned by a central master. The wave server where the wave is created (IE that has the first operation) is considered the authoritative source of operations for that wave.

If the master server goes away, it sounds like a wave will become frozen and uneditable. There seems to be no way to change the master server after a wave is created, without ending up with an entirely different wave. (Update: The demo, around minute 70, seems to show a private modification to a wave being made on another server -- so I may be missing a piece of the puzzle.)

The concurrency control protocol will be distributed at some point in the future

How many centralized systems have been successfully converted into distributed systems? In a similar vein, after reading this whitepaper, I'm left unsure about whether it will be possible to respond to (edit) a wave while offline. Maybe, as clients can cache changes, but how well will conflict resolution work? It seems it would have to be done in the client, and there are some disturbing references here to clients throwing their local state away if they get out of sync with the server.

Since 2009-05-28 I m an official Debian Developer. Thanks to all involved people. Special thanks to Gerfried Rhonda Fuchs for being my advocate and a helpful package sponsor, to Alexander formorer Wirt for being a helpful package sponsor, to Christoph Myon Berg and Bernd bzed Zeimetz from the frontdesk and to Marc he Brockschmidt for being a great Application Manager.

Yup Over a month ago I was contacted by Norman Garc a (who I met via the various EDUSOL activities), and Ren Mayorga (who I met thanks to his Debian involvement) inviting me to join them for the First Central-American Free Software Encounter. I had insisted to several Central American friends on setting up such an encounter for several years, and I am really glad I was invited. So, if you happen to be near Central America between June 17 and 21, don't miss it! They are even organizing a bus (which still has place for more travellers!) going from Guatemala City, passing through San Salvador, Tegucigalpa and arriving to Estel , Nicaragua. I must also prominently thank Fernando Romo and Neocenter for kindly offering to sponsor my flight to Nicaragua. You rock!

It has been more than a month since I last wrote about my work on update-manager during this year s Google Summer Of Code and I am somewhat ashamed I wasn t able to provide you with updates more regularly. So first of all, yes, I did do some work and yes, there has been quite some progress. Basically both private and university stuff have kept me from writing and that s why I d like to start with this series of weekly updates today.
This series are meant to summarize what has happened during a week of writing code and give you an overview of what s happening. This first issue however will sum up the past month. So let me begin explaining what has happened since my last post. update-manager bazaar repository All code I have written so far is available through a public bazaar branch on launchpad.net. My branch s page can be found here and provides you with its history and of course instructions on how to obtain the code. The location is only temporary though, as I am going to move hosting over to alioth.debian.org. This is on my task list for next week. modular design I have ripped apart nearly all of update-manager and put it together in a more modular way, which should implementing new frontends or backends more easy, whilst also simplifying code maintenance. The new design consists of four major parts:

• The application class is responsible for parsing command line arguments, initializing all other components correctly and coordinate communication between the frontend and the backend.
• The backend itself is defined through the UpdateManager.Backend.BackendBase class and each implementation subclasses BackendBase. It is responsible for interacting with apt.
• The frontend is again defined through a base class, UpdateManager.Frontend.FrontendBase. This part of update-manager provides the userinterface, handles user input and starts operations accordingly.
• Lastly there is the distribution-specific part, which lives inside the UpdateManager.DistSpecific Python module and is defined by its own base class, DistBase.

backend implementation When I started working on update-manager it heavily relied on synaptic and used it to do the dirty-work. However, together with my mentor, mvo, I decided to drop synaptic support and rather concentrate on using python-apt. This means that the only backend implementation right now is a python-apt backend. The python-apt backend is currently a work in progress, but already includes some basic functionality. Right now it can (re-)load the package cache and package lists and is able to provide a list of packages which are upgradable to the frontend.
Whilst implementing these functions I noticed some shortcomings of python-apt itself, fixed those and got mvo included in his python-apt branch at launchpad. frontend implementation I started re-implementing the Gtk frontend as provided through current update-manager and right now it visualizes the package cache reloading process and provides users with a list of upgradable packages. However, that s pretty much all of the functionality it includes right now, which is why implementing more functions is pretty much on the top of my todo list. Additionally I have ported the text frontend, as included in Ubuntu, to the new modular system, and this frontend s code really shows how easy adding a frontend with the new modular design is. This frontend contains the same functionality as the Gtk frontend. distribution specific code The core described above does not include any distribution specific code anymore, which is the main focus of this project. The implementations of distribution-specific functionality contains classifiers for update categories for both Debian and Ubuntu, whilst I focused on getting things right with the Debian implementation for now. These classifiers allow the frontend to let the user know which kind of update they are about to install, like a security update, a recommended upgrade or a third-party (unofficial) upgrade. documentation As update-manager was poorly (read: hardly at all) documented I started documenting the API using sphinx. However, right now the generated documentation cannot be found anywhere yet. This should change as soon as an alioth project for update-manager has been created. next week s tasks I would also like to provide you with my task list for the coming week. The list, ordered by priority, is:

• Register an alioth project and move the bazaar branch to bzr.debian.org
• Generate an HTML version of the API documentation and put it on alioth.
• Implement changelog-fetching for the Debian-specific module and make use of that from within the code and the Gtk frontend.

As you can see this list is rather short. This can mainly be attributed to a few university assignments, and instead of providing a long list of tasks which I probably won t be able to finish I rather keep the list short and hopefully get things not on this list done too.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the hard sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me. I understand why existing journals can t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the hard sciences or soft , have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples. So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also socio-cultural in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

Something I have been thinking a lot about lately is why social science and humanities journals have been slower to move toward the land of open access in comparison to the hard sciences. There are a few obvious reasons but there are others which are still a mystery to me. I understand why existing journals can t easily pry away from established relations and obligations so I am not all that surprised that these journals, whether in the hard sciences or soft , have not gone open access. But perhaps newly minted journals are in better position to start right off the bat with an OA agreement. This is what the International Journal of Communication recently did and I am sure there are other examples. So today I was disappointed to find out that the following new Anthropology journal theJournal of Legal Anthropology has seemingly gone down a traditionalist copyright route. But I don t just want to point fingers here as I know editors are often in a very difficult position when seeking sponsorship and support for a new journal. That is, achieving OA, I understand is no walk in the park. And yet given their mission and given that it is a legal journal, it also makes sense to have some sort of open format:

International in scope, we hope it will be accessible beyond a specialist legal anthropology area and, in practice, both widen what is understood within the discipline of anthropology as legal and position the legal as also socio-cultural in terms of contemporary anthropology. The journal is produced by anthropologists interested in making anthropology accessible (translatable) in other settings and disciplines, and by legal practitioners with support from academics working in human rights, conflict and related areas

A walled garden is not suited for the flowers of access to grow. But perhaps they tried and failed. If this is the case, it would also be good to learn of these experiences, which can be used in future cases to pave the path toward greater access.

Free as in pie. Might have to start a gluten free version.

Free as in pie. Might have to start a gluten free version.

With more vacation time, longer (paid) maternity leave, and decent and affordable child care, I am sure this scenario would be different.

With more vacation time, longer (paid) maternity leave, and decent and affordable child care, I am sure this scenario would be different.

Hola all,
So this is my first blog post since UDS started (although I have been doing some work microblogging this session around (I find that if I treat it like multicast IRC using gwibber, it suddenly makes more sense to me). We're now three days into UDS, and working hard on defining what Ubuntu karmic will be, and I must say I am excited with the way things are shaping up to UNR discussions, to the Android Execution Environment (and if anyone has any questions on it, please direct those emails to Michael Frey and Debbie Beliveau as they are the people behind it, despite Slashdot's reports on the subject).

There are loads going on, including Moblin (which you'll see this afternoon), Android (same), ports kernel handling, and loads of other cool things come up. I'll comment on some of the more interesting things as time goes on.

In other news, as of late last night, I'm officially an upstream KDE developer with SVN commit writes. I've written an email detailing my plans for working on KDE to kde-core-deveonl, where is it is happily stuck in a moderation queue, so hopefully those involved in upstream KDE development will soon learn of my intentions :-).

I'll write more later,
Michael

Guess its my time to post something about my feelings on Jaunty.

The Good:
* armel successfully birthed
* powerpc well on the way to be well maintained
- Kernel and installer work mostly done by TheMuso (thanks :-))
- Image testing by the people of #ubuntu-ps3, myself, and TheMuso
- powerpc, and powerpc+ps3 both in the release annoucements for Kubuntu and Xubuntu :-)
* Kubuntu upgraded to KDE 4.2
* Xubuntu upgraded to Xfce 4.6
* PowerPC FTBFS rate in main very low. ia64, and sparc looking more improved.

The Bad:
* SPARC, ia64, and HPPA remain fairly foobar w.r.t. to the installer and kernel

The Ugly:
* The drama over notifications and update-manager

All and all though, I think its been a fairly good cycle. Looking forward to karmic.