Friday - The Party Good food. Good times. (Though, I have to admit it was considerably more interesting when it got dark and the torches were lit and we tried to avoid melting the beach ball.) Helpfully labelled drinks. Saturday - The Graduation Good music. Good speeches. (<plug> yes, this is me </plug>) Saturday - After We Are Graduated In which I pose with the superintendant. In which I pose with my brother outside in the blinding sunshine and blazing heat, while thinking about the cool water that happens to be behind us. In which I pose with my parents and brother in a moderately more forgiving environment at home. In which I pose with my brother and grandparents, who could probably stand in for an alternate Matrix cast, and kick your [posterior]. At least in this picture. In which my cousin Mark discovers that my stole is kinda fun. In which a good friend of mine gives me a freaking awesome shirt. I will now proceed to summarily disappear off the face of the ‘net from sometime tomorrow until late Monday or so, in which I Move To Cambridge.

I stepped out the front door Monday morning at 2AM. Our house was a bit warm and stuffy, and I expected a nice, cool breeze. But instead I got a blast of... slightly warmer and stuffier air. Summer must be here.

Terah and I were setting out on a train trip. The train east out of Newton, KS leaves at 3:01AM. We got our bags loaded and set off to the station.

Not long after we got on the train and to our room, the train started moving. Terah fell asleep right away. It's hard for me to fall asleep so quickly the first night of a train trip. The excitement of the upcoming trip keeps me awake. Plus, once I wake up, I usually stay awake. Even if the alarm woke me up at 1:20AM.

This time, I lay awake remembering my ancestors, who migrated from Russia to Kansas in 1874. Some of our trip will follow the same route that they took 132 years ago.

In the train, you hear what sounds like a distant train whistle fairly frequently. It's from the locomotive on our train, but sounds distant because the passenger cars keep the noise out.

We slowed a bit, went around a gentle curve, and the whistle sounded again. Off to one side of the train were the lights of a small town. It's Peabody, KS -- where my ancestors arrived in the middle of the night back in 1874. They were excited to finally be at the end of their journey -- which had taken months and spanned oceans and railroads on two continents. So excited, in fact, that they set off to find their new land in the middle of the night rather than wait for dawn. But how did they cover those 15 miles at night? Did they rent horses and wagons from someone? I couldn't remember, trying to sleep here in the middle of the night.

I'm still awake. I come to a pause in my thoughts and notice the train's horn again. Somewhere ahead, there is a dirt road crossing the tracks. Nobody is there, but the train is sounding its horn to keep them away anyway.

I think back to 1874 in Russia. Not everybody in the Mennonite settlements there left. Those that were too old, too weak, or that couldn't make the trip for whatever reason stayed behind. For most, when they left Russia, they were saying goodbye to their families for the last time. They would never have the opportunity to see them again.

Then their trip began. Through rickety Russian railroads, to long days at sea, then through New York, and on the railroad again, stopping some points along the way. They'd never seen what would be their new home. And there was no going back if it wasn't to their liking. I can only imagine how hard that must have been for this group of German-speaking immigrants from Russia. And how anxious and exciting it would be to finally get off the station and head to their new home.

This group of settlers made quite the impact on Kansas. They brought their "turkey red" winter wheat with them from Russia. This wheat turned Kansas into the world's leading wheat producer. And it helped rescue the ATSF railroad from the precarious financial situation it was in. That was a good move on the railroad's part -- they were the ones that sold land to the Mennonites in Kansas, recruited them to settle in the area, and even built them temporary housing for their first winter in Kansas.

And that's the same railroad we're taveling on now, as I hear the crescendo and then the WHOOSH of a passing train just a few inches from ours.

By now its 4AM. I think back to the train station in Newton, which we left behind just an hour ago. I remembered how earlier in the 20th century, after the Mennonites were well-established in Kansas, they would send off missionaries to other parts of the world -- China or India especially. Those that went off served two 7-year terms. They departed from the Newton train station, just like we had. They probably waited for the train to carry them away in the same room we did. But they knew they wouldn't see their friends, relatives, or home for 7 years.

When missionaries would leave, a large group of church members would accompany them to the station. As the train approached, the people there would start singing their favorite hymns -- a capella, in German. The sound filled the old station, and followed the departing family out onto the platform as they boarded their train. The people leaving weren't the only ones to miss their friends and relatives. Those staying behind would also go 7 years without being able to talk to the missionaries that were departing.

A light flickers by the window. Maybe a yard light, or a small town, or the back side of a warehouse somewhere. Off in the distance, the horn sounds at another crossing.

Time for some sleep.

After a very tasty breakfast of gorditas in the market, I sat through talks all of Thursday morning, which were all quite good. They were visionary talks, talks about where Debian was going to go, and what we can do to get it there. After a brief lunch, we returned for the talk of debugging debian-installer. I've been lugging around my laptop, jamaica, through the entire conference. It's an old A20m, which means that it's a rather bulky looking thing, that is quite heavy. What makes it noticable is that it's been epoxied together, after having been dropped one too many times. People marvel that GNOME runs reasonably on it. Anyway, during the talks, my wireless card decided it didn't want to work any more. Pulling it out and letting it cool down seemed to get it responsible again. Strange. After the afternoon talk on how to find security problems within Debian, I went back to the hotel to change. You see, we were going to a Formal Dinner. I had not packed for a formal dinner, thinking that all functions would be casual at the very most. Still, I pulled out a pair of pressed slacks, an ironed shirt and a colourful tie. When I left my room, it became apparent that Formal actually meant "clothes without any holes". We all packed into the coach buses from yesterday and drove into town. This was actually quite difficult for the drivers, because the streets were very narrow and the buses were incapable of turning around corners. I think it took us fifteen minutes to park, which mostly consisted of doing a 30-point turn. We disembarked and walked into a large building. Two of the walls were made of stone, the rest were made of stucco. There was a small stage presiding over a floor full of fold-up tables which were arranged in a Debianesque spiral. I decided that I was going to be at the nexus of activity, so I sat down at the central table and reserved a seat for AJ. As people seated themselves and started talking, there was a sudden commotion. Holger was running towards AJ with a plastic crown, deposited it unceremoniously on his head, and continued sprinting past. This drew applause and photographs, along some cheering of "Long Live the DPL!" AJ looked decidedly uncomfortable. It's probably for the best that Debian isn't a monarchy. Our evening got more and more interesting. A mariachi band came in the door and started playing. Soon after they started singing, rain began to fall. This made lovely sounds on the tin roof above, which made me a little sleepy. Right about now, a brawl sprang up near the front door. There was some shoving involved and quite a bit of yelling. Soon, the combatants were separated and some of them left the building in anger. All this time, the musicians were playing louder and louder. As the music crescendoed, the rain fell harder and the wind blew stronger, until we had to close up the shutters to keep the water from blowing in. And the band kept trying to play over the rain. Then, slowly, the roof began to spring leaks. We were lining up for food then, and by the time I got to the buffet table, water was pouring into the trays. I managed to get something reasonably dry and scurried back to my seat. Which was wet. After I got some food inside of me, I experience the final act that capped our evening. We were chatting a bit about the strange weather we were having indoors when suddenly, water started cascading down one of the walls. It made a tremendous roar and the floor of the building quickly flooded. As I was photographing the events, the lights suddenly went out with a pop. We were plunged into darkness. I made my way back to my seat and someone eventually found the fusebox. The lights were restored, one by one, and it was soon time to leave. I don't know how the organizers of next year's Debconf are going to be able to top this: ceremony, live music, fisticuffs over a woman, an indoor waterfall, and drama. This was a night we're all going to remember.

Half a year ago yesterday, I stepped off a plane in the United States. It's been an eventful 6 months, as can be seen from reviewing my blog, and I thought I'd summarise the top 10 things I like and dislike about living in this country as opposed to Australia. Ten things I like about living in California:

1. Plenty of sunshine Love the sunshine. It was a bit wet in winter and early spring, but I'm told that it should be pretty much rain (and cloud) free for the rest of the year. Daylight saving also helps make enjoying the copious amounts of sunshine easier, it doesn't get dark until well after 8pm.
2. The public transport options, particularly in San Francisco are vast Particularly in San Francisco, your options for getting around the city are huge. You've got the BART, the Muni (which covers about three distinct forms of public transport in itself), and the VTA overhead electric and petrol powered buses. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, you've got the Caltrain, and VTA light rail and buses.
3. Petrol pumps You need never darken the door of a petrol station. Everywhere has pay at the pump (with plastic of course), and the pumps all have the automatic latch, so you don't even need to stand at the side of the car holding the handle while it fills up.
4. Free parking This was a big change, coming from Canberra, which has a love affair with pay and display parking. Even the multi-storey and underground carparks in the downtown areas are free.
5. Pedestrian crossings that countdown No excuse to get skittled because you thought you could make it in time. You known exactly how long you've got before you'll get mowed down before you step off the side of the road.
6. The postal system Saturday delivery. Every mailbox is an outgoing mailbox (just put the little flag up).
7. Right turns on red This is a real time saver. I can't see why Australia couldn't adopt this for left turns. The only downside is you can spend so much time looking to your left for a break in the traffic to dart out in, that you miss your green arrow (but that's what the guy behind you and his horn is for).
8. Corporately run rental apartment complexes Instead of having an apartment complex where individual landlords own each apartment, the entire complex (and they tend to be larger) is owned by a mega-corporation that employs half a dozen people to maintain it and run it as a business. The upside is they tend to have better facilities, an onsite office (great for receipting packages delivered during the week), onsite maintenance (some places even have a service-level agreement). This offers some economies of scale that you wouldn't otherwise have.
9. At least the perception of a low cost of living I haven't done the sums, and it's probably partially because the bills come monthly instead of quarterly, but all the utility bills seem fairly low and reasonable. Dollar for dollar, petrol is also cheaper, even though it's jumped a dollar a gallon in the time we've been here.

Of course, one must take a balanced look at these things... Ten things I don't like about living in the United States:

1. The currency Not a big fan of the notes. I miss the one and two dollar coins, and the distinctiveness between each denomination. I figure that vending machines over here must be so much more expensive because they have to have a note reader, and even then, the treasury decides to produce some new oddball note that half of the readers don't recognise... I blame tipping. If there were no tipping, the utility of one dollar bills would diminish enormously.
2. The government bureaucracy As my blog records, I haven't exactly had a smooth run with the system over here...
3. The banking system The banking system in general is woeful by comparison. The cheque (or check) still reigns supreme, whereas it's nearly obsolete in Australia. There's no such animal as BPay (and oh how I miss it). In fact, the equivalent system here often involves the bank cutting a cheque on your behalf and mailing it to the biller. How ridiculously antediluvian is that? Oh, and I miss vaguely decently authenticated electronic payments. I've been at cafes were I've paid by credit card, and haven't even had to provide a signature. Given that the credit card is actually a debit card, it's pretty disturbing how easily someone can clean out your bank account.
4. Ex-tax pricing I'm so glad that when they introduced the GST in Australia, they required by law that all prices include it. Most prices here don't, but the occasional food outlet does (like Subway for example), so it's sufficiently confusing that you can't budget for how much you're going to actually fork out.
5. ATM fees The ATM fees are more in your face. Instead of the bank charging you a fee at the end of the month for every transaction conducted at an ATM that isn't theirs, the ATM itself tacks on an extra amount to the withdrawal and effectively skims the money. I've seen fees as high as $5 a transaction, but $2 is fairly common. It's kind of weird seeing an ATM withdrawal of $42 on your bank statement... So having a bank account that doesn't charge you feeds for non-bank ATM withdrawals is all well and good, but it doesn't stop the ATM from charging you.
6. Inaudible pedestrian crossings Oh, the number of times I haven't been paying attention and missed the walk light at a pedestrian crossing... In some places, they do make noises like birds, or talk to you when you can walk, but they're definitely not the norm.
7. The road surface For the highways, they seem to have gone for quantity and not quality, or they're too busy to take offline to resurface. Either way, the road surface quality is pretty poor.
8. Sugar Everything is loaded with sugar. Absolutely everything.
9. Alcohol labelling Light beer is low calorie, not low alcohol. I miss Australia's concept of "standard drinks". Makes it very hard to drink and drive responsibly.

So I need to write a report. I can’t write it in HTML because it will print badly from a browser. And editing HTML can be a pain. There is princexml but that costs a couple of hundred dollars. I don’t want to edit in ODF because then I would have to use a hunk-of-crap WYSIWYG editor like Openoffice. Hell no. Also I have no experience of how ODF maps to the Web. Pretty badly I’ll assume. There is stuff like textile, markdown and reStructuredText, but what’s the point? They only seem to generate good HTML. So we are still left with the printing beautifully to A4 problem. Ok there is good old “tex”. But really I don’t want to go back there! Do I really have to use latex? It’s just so heavy and you can’t publish to HTML easily. Argh! Docbook. Hell no. It’s a dark art to control how the formats finally look. Trust me, I have experience. I had this thought that there must be some good mediawiki/wikipedia article printer tool. Maybe I can write this in mediawiki with the help of mozex and vim. Oh no. The Debian package is still b0rked on 1.4. Argh… I just wish there was a better mapping between the web and office formats like odf.

... and already liking it. Though, first things first, some notes about the trip so far: The plane from vienna took off 50 minutes late due to weather reasons. It was quite nice, though, and I hope that some of the night pictures of town lightnings are usable. At least the delay reduced my waiting time at the madrid airport quite a bit. Which brings me to that airport. It's... HUGE! I mean... erm, it has signs telling people that it will take 25 minutes to the gate that the plane to mexico will be leaving. And that is including the trip on some underground train they have that it doesn't take you much longer than that... But appart from that, I arrived on the gate area before midnight so I was able to order some drink at the starbucks. At least some shop that knows how to let people enjoy the waiting time. :) The plane to mexico left on schedule at 1:50, so it was completely dark outside when we started. And almost the whole trip, up until about the last 20 minutes or so of the 13 hour flight, it was completely dark outside, because we were travelling ahead of the sun. So it wasn't too bad, being able to get some good sleep, at least as good as possible on a plane. Having arrived in mexio airport with a short delay and waiting a bit for my suitcase I finally met up with Frans Pop, because I was too scared of getting lost without any sense for the spanish language yet. We took one of the prepaid official taxis to the bus that will take us the rest of the trip. The taxi drive was really... well, interesting. It was the fastest trip I've ever seen in any car in city area, but the bad thing: I can't even tell you how fast we were at times because the speedometer was b0rked and displayed only zero all of the time. I guess taxi drivers are most the same all around the world, but this one definitely mastered the art. The bustrip wasn't anything notable, besides a bit tiresome due to the air in the bus, the partly monotonous vegetation outside and that I was sure to not be able to watch the movie to the end, besides that the sound was too silent. :) Finally arrived at Oaxtepec, which turned out that our hotel seems to be in some sort of recreation area, maybe even a bit of themepark... At least it has some rollercoasters, at least they showed them on the video. We'll see. I at least tried out the pool already, it's not even feeling cold for me. Not have met all the people yet that are rumoured to be around already, but I guess it might happen at lunch, which is expected soonish. Due to network not working though this blog post will have to wait until afterwards.

I thought that yesterday (Thursday) was Friday up until I noticed it was still Friday when I got up this morning. Had to check 2 computers to believe that. I hate it when that happens, but ok, it happens. So, I fell asleep really early this evening, just as it was getting dark, glad to finally see the end of the Friday. Only to wake up at 9:30 pm, and it's still freeaking Friday. Aaargh!

Today, I witnessed somebody attempting to read a magazine on a dark bus via the light of their cell phone. Makes me wonder what OLPC will end up causing.

ij, thank you for keeping me anonymous, but I'll stand up for what I did.

I removed your link to your page detailing your installation report because it was clearly the wrong place for it. Every packager uses installation reports to understand and fix bugs in our packages, and the X Strike Force is no exception. As such, your page was pretty clearly a page for bug reports. The last thing I need, as a maintainer, is bug reports scattered about the system in places where I can't deal with them properly. I constantly refer to the BTS while working on my packages so that I know what needs to be done. Bugs in the wiki page are background noise that I'll forget and this is a barrier to actually getting them fixed. You do want bugs fixed, right?

The reason why I deleted your page is because having it up encourages people to file more massive installation reports on the page in liu of using the BTS, thus making the problem expand out of control. Also, your page added nothing to the 69to7 page that justified having yet another page for users to go to in order to figure out what's wrong with their system. Adding the relevant information from your page to the 69to7 page would have been sufficient. I know you did what you did in good faith, and I appreciate that you're trying to help, but in this case I thought it wasn't the best decision from the point of view of one of the people actually doing the bug fixing.

As for your rant about feedback, I do appreciate feedback. I've opened up the XSF website to the wiki, I've promoted the 69to7 page, I've re-established the #debian-x irc channel, I've been vocal on this blog with comments enabled about what's going on, and I've been very visible as an XSF member on #debian. All of this in order to keep people out of the dark and get their feedback. This is, by the way, in addition to all the normal means of communication in Debian including private mail, mailing lists, #debian-devel irc channels, and the BTS. And I love a lot of the feedback I've gotten and I've tried to respond with positive work that results in better X packages. But maybe you'll take on something really huge one day yourself and understand what it's like to be drowning in feedback. Perhaps then you'll understand why I'm trying to keep the bug reports manageable.

Finally, if you have serious problems with the term "abuse", then I'm sorry. The wiki should be a resource for users to share information about using and understanding Debian, not for filing bugs, and thus using it for filing bugs suggested the word to me. Hopefully you'll be a little more forgiving of this overstressed maintainer in the future.

Just today, in a bathroom really quite near....

I woke up this morning. I used the toilet. I flushed it. There was the satisfying sound of a toilet, well, flushing.

Then there was the very unsatisfying sound of the toilet not refilling its tank. I tried a faucet -- sure enough no water. Obviously, the ants were at it again. (Read this story from yesterday for how they disrupted our water supply once before.)

So, now I have to rush out there and fix the well before I can get to work. This time, I'm going to be prepared. I found a can of insecticide, a metal file, and head out there. Sure enough, more ants had been killed in the pressure switch. I cut the power to the switch, cleaned off the metal contacts, and sprayed insecticide everywhere I could. I restored power, and there was a satisfying faint hummmm as the water pump whirred to life.

So then all I had to do was cut power again for a moment as I did a final cleaning and reassembly of the switch and headed back inside.

All was fine until this evening. I noticed somewhat low water pressure. I tried to be optimistic -- "the pump's probably kicking on right now." But no. Once again as I flushed a toilet, the toilet tank didn't refill.

By now I am MAD. These ants are going down. I was a few minutes late to work because of them, and now I'm going to have to go out to the well in the dark to fix them. So I again grab my tools, and this time I find the stickiest thing I can -- some tape. I figure I'll wrap it around the post the pressure switch is on, sticky side out, and trap them on their way up.

So I turn on the flashlight and head out to the well house. I open it up. And hmm -- different problem this time.

The power is off entirely. The little twerps have somehow applied 20 pounds of force to the power lever and cut it out!

I'm sure there is no way that I would have forgotten to turn the power back on this morning, in my thirsty trying-not-to-be-late-for-work semi-tired daze...

All I can say is: it amazing how much water you can store up when you have two pressure tanks. Terah even ran the dishwasher today.

Sometimes there's e-mail that makes me quite angry. I then write a reply, and it is often a very angry reply. A flame. A scathing argument that annihilates the argument, persona, ancestry, future, and in fact entire existence of whoever angered me. Much of my best writing happens this way. Nobody ever sees these e-mails, though. The flamees will never know how utterly, totally, excruciatingly helpless they would have been under the scalpel that is my e-mail. I'll know, and I'll be quite smug about it, too, sitting in a dark room with my laptop in my lap, giggling. Not entirely unrelatedly: David Nusinow, you are owed a drink of your preference. No giggles for you, only respect and understanding for mistakes.

• East Campus is full of pyros (”could you please put out the carpet?”).
• Microwaving motherboards is actually not a very smart thing to do.
• Always bring multiple printouts of your GPG fingerprint to hacker parties (if you don’t have business cards with it).
• There are lots of fun toys in the Media Lab.
• Train conductors don’t actually read your tickets.
• Trains are almost always late.
• Falling down staircases in the dark at concerts hurts.
• It’s important to Love Your Beaver.
• MIT will kick your ass, get used to it.
• When you lose your phone card PIN, you have to go back to the same store you bought it at.
• It would have been smart to leave extra space in the suitcase for all the extra stuff I brought home that I didn’t bring there…
• Fear the ever-expanding Wiki People in the seedy underbelly of boston-soc!
• Acetarium parties don’t have ending times.
• The MIT Press loading dock sale is a veritable treasure trove.
• Best. Hack. Ever.
• Nothing ever works out quite as planned. Solution: plan less.

Dear readers, I am looking for a new terminal emulator. I use aterm since several years, but it lacks of UTF-8 support, and I would like to switch away from ISO-8859-1. But *the* feature of aterm I can't live without is fading: aterm becomes darker when it loses focus, and I really love that. So I am looking for a terminal emulator like aterm with UTF-8 support. Any recommandation welcome. Update: rxvt-unicode supports fading and UTF-8. Thanks to ptitlouis for the advice!

Please, if anyone recalls or can find a more globally orchestered manouver to protect a business model as it is happening with the recording industry (with laws being introduced in as many countries as it is being done), ping me.

For my hispanohablantes readers: this post is written in english since it’s gonna be syndicated into Planet Debian. Expect a post in spanish later in the day. If you can understand spoken spanish, I recommend you to hear the Free Software talk of M.Sc. Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Debian Maintainer) which ends noting several benefits of using Debian GNU/Linux. Available here. Update: other posts in spanish are already available in Planeta Linux Venezuela. Yesterday we (SOLVE, a Venezuelan Association of Free Software Users, Developers, Cooperatives and Entrepreneurs) had the opportunity to assist to a Free Software vs. Privative Software forum. This doesn’t sound amazing, indeed. But if you take into account that the Forum was held in the National Assembly (or House of Representatives, anyway I’ll call it AN) it gets better. Now, get this idea: the AN is having a forum to discuss a Law, and it’s listening to the parts involved. Let it sink for a minute. But what if the AN is also bringing this parts to a table to actually write the Law? This is how laws are made in our Country now (Damog always says we are terribly nationalistic. It may be true, indeed.) Anyway, we were there around 10 AM, in the Protocolar Room of the AN. The event was full-house, featuring two thirds of people supporting proprietary software (students between 17 and 20 years from the countryside and big entrepreneurs -and Microsoft, of course-) and one third of people supporting free software, including people working in the Government, students, cooperatives, developers, etc. The session was opened by Representative Luis Tasc n, which once was a great supporter of Free Software (now it seems the same for him, anyway he’s doing a great job changing the law-making roadmap) and the speakers were: Microsoft, the National Center for IT, Cavecom (the association of big software enterprises in Venezuela) in the Dark Side and Felipe P rez Mart (from SOLVE) and Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich (Sim n Bol var University) in the White Side. Kudos for IBM, in the Gray Side with Black Spots. The session of talks was incredibly amusing. The speakers started to change their opinions based on the last talk. So, this way, Berrizbeitia (Director, CNTI) tried to discuss Tascon (Representative), the Microsoft Brazilian guy tried to oppose Berrizbeitia, the guy from Cavecom fighted Microsoft (this guy was a complete moron, by the way: when he was told that a group of venezuelan people had developed translations into wayuunaiki he said that was useless since we only have 800 wayuu - native americans) the IBM-boy tried to say they were the best, Felipe Perez (SOLVE) tried to dismantle Berrizbeitia’s talk and finally Ernesto Heranndez-Novich roundkicked them all. The kids from Microsoft (wearing MSDN and VisualStudio shirts) said that Microsoft is a good company which is open-source and gives the code for free. I argued some of them that they were working free for Microsoft. They “hadn’t see it that way”. They also said the plain-ol’-good excuse that “free software was weaker since everyone can see it’s code”. They were changing their strategies and opinions sistematically as the Forum evolved. They argued no compatibility, security problems, and finally they arrived to their real reason to oppose Free Software. Several girls and boys (Daddy’s Boys, as we say to them) were arguing “no free speech” in the Country (which was amusing since this is the first time the National Assembly is writing the laws with the People) and that the Law was going to make them lose their years of University studies. Then, the most accurate of the interventions came, made by Rogmar Marin from Venezuelan Patents and Author Rights Office. He said that this event was all about the people controlling the State, not the State controlling the people. He cited two articles from the draft and the 3390 decree explicitly saying that Free Software was mandatory for Government (in the Decree it says the “National Public Administration” and in the Law it says the “National Public Power”) so he said that they were not going to lose their “bicoca” (a popular form to say “rivers of money”) since they still can program in whatever they want, just that the State has the right to decie the best for their people, and the best for their people was Free Software. This was the whole quid of the event. This is not about Free Software vs. Proprietary Software. This is not about Linux vs. Windows. This is not about IBM vs. Microsoft vs. Venezuelan Companies. This is about the best for the People (which is the maximum interest of the AN) and, in this case, the People was represented not only by the intellectual-closed-circles of Free and Proprietary Software, but by Ana Maria Morillo, from the Cambalache community in Puerto Ordaz, at the southern part of the Country. She said that their Community had absolutely no access to technology. They were poor and humble, and willing to learn. CVG Telecom, a State-based telecom company, installed a Nudetel (no, it’s not an ethic-relaxed phone operator. It stands for Telecommunications Endogen Development Kernel) in their Community, using Free Software. This was their first approach to technology and computers. They didn’t even know how to turn on a computer. Free Software helped them to approach the reality of computers. They felt prepared to use a computer, and proud of themselves. When they used privative software in other places, they needed to adapt to that technology. This demonstrates that Free Software is as easy as any Software. You need to adapt to it. The difference with Free Software is that you are free when you use it. The people from Cambalache appreciate that. Felipe Perez Marti talk was really good. He slapped Microsoft and opposed very roughly to the “technological neutrality” position of the CNTI Director, Jorge Berrizbeitia. Technological neutrality is a neo-liberal, right-wing doctrine which is the technological counterpart to laissez faire, laissez passer. The problem is that (Felipe is an economist, and a great mathematician) technological neutrality isn’t actual neutral. It happens under the conditions where the Smith’s “Invisible Hand” Theorem is valid, so, in a scenary of technological neutrality, the powerful always wins. So, Microsoft wins. He also noted the recent study funded by the United States Homeland Security and carried on by Carnegie Mellon, Coverity and Symantec, which stated that Proprietary Software had between 20 and 30 bugs per TLOC (thousand lines of code) while FOSS had only 0.434 bugs per TLOC. The Microsoft guy seemed astonished by the “discovery” and the students were offended by this. Great. What next? We brought CD’s for people, made Debian evangelization to several “disident” students, made a great cheer to every Free Software supporter, brought signs and SOLVE shirts. While the Microsoft dudes where more than twice times us, we were a coherent group which stayed until 1930 (they left at 1600, you know, it’s a Micro matter of Soft) and held great arguments, sometimes slapping the student’s moral, but definitely making our voice be heard after tenths of years being discriminated by companies, Universities and the Government. As a Debian Project volunteer, what’s your opinion about this? Is the State violating Free Speech taking this decisions? Does it have the right to take it? Is Free Software the best solution for the corporate environments of the Government, taking into account that it handles the citizen information? What are your general comments about this?

(Hmm, it's time for my bi-yearly DST rant. Here goes.) One of the many lame excuses given for daylight savings time is that it cuts down on crime, since more crime occurs after dark. This might be true of violent crime, since fewer people will be out after dark, but what about other crimes? It's interesting to think about ways that criminals could exploit possible confusion, broken data-keeping, etc around the discontinuity caused by daylight saving time changes. Q: Where were you on the night of October 30th 2005 between 1 and 2 am?
A: Well, I was at this bar with my friends that whole hour, I have an alibi. Ok, that's a bit easy to catch (although there's a real life story of a similar trick being used to avoid manslaughter charges), but what about more subtle cheats? All-night workers last night could pretty easily cheat their employer out of an hour's pay, for 2 am to 3 am. Conversely, if they're not careful, their employer might cheat them next fall. The only people I've ever heard discuss this are all-night radio jockies, but those guys love to hear themselves talk enough that an extra hour to do it in is not a problem to them. I'll bet that a fry cook would rather get some extra sleep. But this is still small, er, potatoes. For really nice exploits you have to take advantage of explicit failures of technology. One such failure is in the way Windows manages daylight savings changes. Unlike Unix, which elegantly flips between two time zones, such as EST and EDT, but still keeps counting each second from Jan 1st 1970, Windows actually changes the clock. Despite a brainwashed nation that has been taught that moving the hands back or forward is the right thing to do, in the world of computers, it's bloody stupid. A google for "daylight savings windows bug" turns up a million or so hits caused by this behavior, describing problems like this:

Windows reports erroneous file modification times, which change according to daylight savings.

And this:

When Windows NT automatically adjusts for daylight savings time, the times on files on Windows NT file system (NTFS) partitions and the events in the event logs are retroactively shifted by one hour, even though the files and event records were created before the daylight savings time change.

Now, I think there's all kinds of potential for criminal fun in file modification timestamps being wrong, and log files having innaccurate times. Throw in the odd backup that fails to run due to being scheduled to run at a time that never exists, and the time slip begins to seem like an ideal time for shady activities. (And a very poor time to be in a hospital hooked up to windows-controlled life-support equipment. Double-dose of morphine, anyone?) True story: A year ago I was at a fancy hotel, which was burgalarised. This hotel had electronic locks on the doors, which logged when the doors were opened, and by whom. The techies whose possessions were stolen were able to use this information, plus what they knew about when the theft must to have occurred, to narrow down the suspects to one or two hotel employees who opened the door at the right time. If those logs went to a machine running windows and the theft occurred during England's change to DST, it's quite possible the logs would have been useless. It's not too far from this kind of scenario to something suitable as an entry in Schneier's movie-plot terrorist threats contest. Although it's worth noting that the airline industry deals with timezone changes all the time, so if they have any sense, the DST change is not an exceptional event for them. One of the interesting things about plane travel to me is the way a plane in flight between timezones is a space in which no defined time zone exists. But I digress.. I suspect that the real source of fetile bugs related to DST is in the interstices between operating systems where programs have to deal with the peculuarities of multiple OSes to behave correctly. Such as this unison/linux/windows bug. Put different systems together and they fail in myriad ways, and there's room in the cracks for criminal activity. Thing is, I don't have a very good criminal mind, at all, so if any of the slightly weak approaches I've detailed above is feasable, it seems to me there must be some terrific scams, techniques, etc, that people who are good at thinking that way, and have the right motivation can use.

Wow. Crisp morning. Temperature dropped to -3 C last night and we didn't turn the heat on in the house. I *love* this temperature. When it's sunny out and the morning is so cold that I have to wear my Birkenstocks around the house. I used to get up at 6am and bike to school in this weather. Then the day will warm up nicely to 8 or 10 degrees. Not quite t-shirt weather, but really close. There have even been birds singing outside the last two nights.<br /><br />And next weekend we have daylight savings time, so it will even be dark when I wake up. I'm excited!