When I started firefox 2.0 for the first time, well, my reaction was "woah, it's amazingly fast", meaning that it took it really less than 10seconds to launch, like its predecessor. But my joy ended way too soon. After many releases, firefox is still completely unable to be a decent application in many trivial points, that separately are completely insignificant, but put together make me freak out:

• When I launch [edit->preferences] that dumb browser launches its configuration window on THE OTHER SCREEN, yeah I run a dual head setup (who doesn't nowadays ?) and that stupid browser opens the window on the screen when I don't have the focus. My WM is obviously set up to launch applications to the screen that has the mouse in it, every single other application I tested do the same, only firefox manages to start that screen elsewhere, unbelieveable.
• After years, firefox is still completely unable to have decent configuration of key bindings, so that a decent Unix-like configuration could be set up. For example, in every Unix application I use:
  • ^K/^U kills the current edit like to the end/the start. in firefox it goes to the google search/shows the source. Note that "show the source" when you have a newly opened tab, that you are in the location bar, with the empty page underneath, showing the source is completely stupid anyway.
  • ^Q does not quits, it just does nothing, to quit firefox you need to ^W the last opened tab. Okay, I got used to that, except that I use mouse gestures on my desktop, I use down, then left to quit an application, and down, then right to just close a children window of an application. Guess what, I always get confused with firefox, whereas it works great with ANY other application I use (daily or not).
• When I click e.g. on get new extensions, whereas my browser is configured to open new pages in a new tab, it always insists to fork a brand new window. gosh, how stupid is that ?
• After years, it's still unable to respect the usual unix X DPI settings, and insists to think my monitor is under 96DPI, whereas for some personnal reasons I've forced it to be 75DPI. Result is, fonts in web pages are incredibly small and unreadable. In firefox 1.5 there was an obscure way to force it to use the system default (WTF is that not the default setting ?!) now it's gone, and I just can't find the setting in the crazy about:config page.
• In the same vein, when I open a new tab, it resets the font adjustment I did to my own displeasure, instead of opening a new tab with the same Text size. Hey guys, if I zoomed in once already, do you think opening the tab with liliputian fonts again is a great idea ?
• After years when you do back and that you just posted a form, you still go back to an empty form. Konqueror returns to the form like you submitted it, which allow you to fix a typo in a form and avoid to fill it from scratch again for crappy sites that forgot what you typed when just one of the fields was wrong.
• Konqueror has a very nice way to deal with accesskeys: when you hit Control it shows tooltips near links that do have accesskeys, to let you know which are available (and you just need to type the letter to activate it), and moreover it automatically assigns accesskeys (trying to use letters from the link if available) to links in their apparition order in the page, so that even non accessible pages, can be browsed without touching the mouse. Instead of that, firefox still use the braindead alt+accesskey logic that totally conflicts with the menu et al shortcuts. People, god, what are you thinking ? do you sometimes look the good ideas that float around ?

But you know what's the worse ? I've had a SINGLE firefox instance to type that blog post. a top revealed me that this instance ended up with:

• 268m of virtual memory ;
• 191m of mapped pages ;
• 76m of "RES" memory ;
• 14m of code segment ;
• 134m of data;
• 22m of shared memory.

Guys, what are you writing ? I remember days when a browser could run in less than 16megabytes of RAM. Oh yeah, I do use firefox a lot for web developpement, it has a lot of very nice and full featured extensions (like the web developper one). But please, with the years, none of the itchy and frustrating problems of firefox have been fixed, making it completely unsuited for my daily use. Firefox is completely poorly integrated in the standard Unix environment, and its memory consumption is a real shame^[1]. Well, at least firefox is now vista-ready I presume. EDIT: just for the sake of it: children, close your firefox when you go to sleep, else it makes your computer explode. I've let a firefox run for more than 10minutes now, at least it's what my kernel pretends, and I dare to belive it. firefox now is the most greedy application on my system, it eats no less than 10.8% of my 1Go of RAM. with that incredible result:

3  PID %MEM  VIRT SWAP  RES CODE DATA  SHR nFLT nDRT COMMAND
 12524 10.8  309m 209m 108m  14m 180m  23m  287    0 firefox-bin

So my recomendation of the day: children, don't do this at home!!!

I'll be hacking on my hpodder program this weekend. hpodder is a full-featured podcast aggregator that runs on the command line, and has many features over other command-line podcatchers like bashpodder, and even over GUI tools like iPodder.

I originally envisioned hpodder to be something that I'd cron up and run in the background. But I have tended to run it in the foreground more than in the background. Some others have too, and the #1 requested hpodder feature is parallel downloads.

So I am working on that. I already have code working, in fact, that will parallelize both the hpodder update (downloading the feeds) and the hpodder download (downloading the actual episodes) commands.

Unlike ipodder, my code will make sure that no more than 1 thread will ever be downloading from a given server at a given time. ipodder had the terribly annoying habit of pointing all of its threads at a single server, thus pounding it while also providing little benefit for someone with a pipe fatter than the server's.

Before all this multithreaded stuff could be written, I needed to write my own status bar code instead of just letting curl display its own status bar. (That wouldn't work when there are 5 curls running at once)

I decided that I would write some generic status bar code, rather than something specific to hpodder. I took the apt-get status bar as an example, and whipped one up in Haskell and added it to my MissingH Haskell library.

But a status bar just begged for another feature: a generalized progress tracker. Something that could keep track of where a task (and its sub-tasks) are, calculate ETA, estimated time remaining, speed, etc. So I wrote that and made the status bar use it.

AND, a status bar begged for a generalized numeric formatter: something that could render 512 as 512, 2048 as 2K, 1048576 as 1M, etc. So I wrote that, and it's general enough that it can render into both SI and "binary" units by default (and others that users may want).

Finally, I wrote a function to take a number of seconds and render it in something friendly like 23m5s like apt uses, and shoved that in MissingH as well.

So now hpodder will have a status bar, and any other Haskell program can use the same status bar code in minutes because it's all generic. Or if someone just needs to render a number in megabytes, they can do that.

I really enjoy it when a program needs a solution that is generic enough to put in a larger library. I try to put as much of my Haskell code in MissingH as I can, so as to make it useful to others (and my other programs).

One feature I’d like to see at Netflix: a “standing order” for films that match particular criteria. For example, I would be happy to have Netflix automatically add any Pedro Almodóvar film to my queue as soon as it enters the Netflix universe (Volver looks interesting). I also wouldn’t mind any film rated four stars by Roger Ebert to be dropped into the queue. You could even ask Netflix to add anything that its collaborative filters give a top rating based on your past preferences. Then you would just sit back and be surprised at what arrives for you. Rather than “opt-in,” the system would become “opt-out” — similar to those discount CD clubs that were popular in the 1980’s, where you had to tell them if you didn’t want the pick of the month. (I built the bulk of my CD collection in that era by taking advantage of the occasional “3 for the price 1” deals.) The difference here is that you are actually likely to want the pick of the month. A related feature would be “add all” matching a certain criteria with a single action — for example, all Hitchcock films. This is pretty much how I select films anyway. Knowing that a film is directed by Robert Bresson or Akira Kurosawa (two of my favorite directors) tells me a lot more than a plot synopsis. I’d actually rather know nothing about the film itself in advance.

Introduction: This guide will walk you through the creation of an encrypted filesystem using LUKS. LUKS is the Linux Unified Key Setup and is a standard format for linux hard disk encryption. It has a lot of interesting features such as using a key on a removable disk, keeping multiple keys, and more. This is the technology used by the Debian Installer (since etch beta3) and is quickly becoming a standard in the linux world. Who this guide is for: This guide is for anyone who wants to secure their data using an encrypted partition. While it is tailored to users of Debian, it should apply elsewhere in the linux world. This guide is intended to add an encrypted device to an existing install, if you are contemplating a fresh install, the Debian Installer will configure encrypted filesystems for you. Ready? Then let’s begin Prepare the partition (or other block device) to be used This can be a partition on disk, a logical volume in LVM or some other block device. For this example, I created a 40 GB volume in LVM.

• For a physical partition, you would need to have an entire partition available on disk. Instructions for this can be found from many other sources
• For LVM, create a partition like this
  lvcreate -n crypto_test --size 40g asimov-vol

Install cryptsetup This utility provides an interface into the code in the linux kernel that handles encrypted block devices. It’s packaged for Debian in both testing and unstable, stable has an older version and I don’t know whether or not it will work in the same manner.
apt-get install cryptsetup Set up encryption on the partition: This initializes the partition for encryption and sets the initial key. People not using LVM will want a path like /dev/hdxY where hdxY is the partition on their hard drive that will be used for encryption. Important! This command will wipe out anything on that partition

cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test
WARNING!
========
This will overwrite data on /dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test irrevocably. Are you sure? (Type uppercase yes): YES
Enter LUKS passphrase:
Verify passphrase:
Command successful.

Congratulation! You now have an encrypted block device! However, it’s not quite ready to use. Open and map the device: This opens the device (prompting for a passphrase) and maps it to a block device in /dev/mapper. This can be used like any other block device, and the encryption/decryption is transparent. The first path (/dev/mapper/asimov–vol-crypto_test) is the encrypted partition you set up earlier. The name (crypto_test) is the name of the volume, the block device will be mapped as /dev/mapper/<name>.

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test crypto_test
Enter LUKS passphrase:
key slot 0 unlocked.
Command successful.

Create the filesystem of your choice on the device: This is just like setting up any other block device. I use ext3, others may prefer different formats.
mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/crypto-test Add the definition to /etc/crypttab: /etc/crypttab is a list of encrypted devices that are mapped on boot. The format is <map name> <path to device> <key file> <options> Since we’re using a passphrase, we don’t have a key file.
crypto_test /dev/mapper/asimov--vol-crypto_test none luks Create a mount point: This is where the encrypted device will be mounted on your filesystem.
mkdir /mnt/crypto_test Add the device to /etc/fstab: /etc/fstab tells the computer where to mount different devices on the filesystem. The format is
<source path> <mount path> <type of filesystem> <options> <mount options options> <dump frequency> <fsck pass> More information can be found by reading man 5 fstab. You will want to add a line like this: /dev/mapper/crypto_test /mnt/crypto_test ext3 defaults 0 2 somewhere in this file. Update the initial ramdisk. The initial ramdisk is used to jumpstart the boot process and load modules for the kernel that it can’t load itself (such as drivers for block devices that contain the modules it uses). I’m not sure if this is needed or not, but I wanted to be on the safe side.
update-initramfs -u -k all Congratulations Now your encrypted filesystem is completely set up! Reboot the system and you will see it prompt you for your passphrase during the boot cycle. Once the password has entered, the encryption is completely transparent. If you want to use your encrypted filesystem before rebooting, simply type mount /path/to/mountpoint.

This morning I came across Michael Berube’s response to Jodi Dean’s critique of Berube’s book What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education… It is a fascinating interchange worthy of a close read or two but without first-hand knowledge of the book, I hesitate to pledge my allegiance on either side. But I will hopefully to do so. The only thing that surprised me was that there was no mention of the grand master of the critique of liberalism, Stanely Fish… Not sure why but he seems like an obvious place to start. These ppst happened to really captured my attention this morening given I found them after reading the Chronicle of Higher Education piece Input or Intrusion? which examines the recent attacks against scholars deemed as “anti-Israel/pro-Palestine,” including against Nadia Abu El-Haj who happened to be on my dissertation committee… It will be very interesting to see how this all pans out and I am sure many of us are watching closely. And as an added bonus, here is a student’s thoughtful perspective on the Berube book.

So I am housed in University of Alberta Department of Philosophy as my supervisor is a philosopher and there is no seperate STS department. And this “academic housing” certainly has its advantages, like for example, learning about probably one of the most audacious (and frankly amusing) statments on religion ever… by Bertrand Russell:

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a diseaese born of fear and and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilizaion. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknoweldge, but I do not know of any others. Bertand Russel. “Why I am not a Christian” p. 24

I am sure he turned over in his grave when his daughter said:

“He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him, and I thank God he was my father.” Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 202.

Well, I finally got around to doing it -- I signed up for an i-name on 2idi. i-names are a universal identification format for the Internet -- kind of like OpenID, but a lot more centralized and a lot more authoritative. My i-name, for example, is =evan.prodromou -- a brief little string that doesn't really say that much. But you can make it an URI with an "xri:" prefix, and it can be resolved at http://xri.net/=evan.prodromou is the canonical link to my blog, and =evan.prodromou/(+work) is the canonical link to my work. I can change the forwarding when I change blogs (or work, or whatever). It's a neat system, and I guess it's pretty complimentary with OpenID. OpenID 2.0 will support i-names for login, although I'm not sure how well it works. I'm going to be upgrading Wikitravel to use the new OpenID libraries soon, so it'll be i-names capable... and I'll need a testing account, of course. tags: i-names openid identity

ikiwiki supports OpenID Ikiwiki is a wiki/blog/CMS engine by the unstoppable hacker Joey Hess. He just announced that he's made an OpenID plugin for ikiwiki. I think that's pretty cool. tags: ikiwiki joey hess openid plugin

My friend Jonah has written a provocative post that asks how the example of free software can be applied to the environmental politics as to create a free energy movement. His suggestion is a good one and it centers on the clear and accessible provision of information of labeling so as to create the conditions for meaningful choice and action. There is a line of critique launched against free software and the free culture movement accusing it of being myopic, privileged and limited. It is composed of a lot of well educated, white (many boys), honing in on liberating a set of artifacts software, music, movies etc, that are seen not to have all that much consequence in the world, compared to other more pressing matters, like famine, genocide, global warming, disease etc. I think this is somewhat of a negative critique that actually misses the point about why so many folks are attracted to the free culture movement in the first place and why it should be considered in a more positive light as a model for other forms of politics not because of its content but because of its form (and this is what Jonah basically says). In a world in which the mere thought about how to change the world is utterly paralyzing, seemingly futile, and just completely depressing, open source and free culture, by providing a set of tools along with a political message, has broken through the armour of apathy many of us are strangled by. It provided an opening to practically engage in politics, and thus allow many to taste the fruit of political action. And it is the taste, which keep people coming back to try to change the conditions of life. So the lesson to draw from free software is less whether its politics are radical or important enought, but that it provided an avenue and framework for alternative action. And it is this abililty to build the capacity for empowerment, which is one of its greatest virtues.

In two weeks (Dec 3rd) there will be presidential elections in Venezuela. This will be the third time where Hugo Chavez, the current President, will be participating in the elections. The first time, in 1998, he won by 62%, then dropped to 59% in 2000 and currently some polls are giving him between 50 and 60 percent of vote intention. Since 1998, we’ve got a very active electoral movement and controversial situations which have raised very diverse opinions about our electoral system. If I recall correctly, in 1998 people voted using optic forms. In that moment, spanish Indra was the company in charge for the machines and most of the technology used in the elections. That was the time where the Supreme Electoral Council depended on the Executive power, i.e., the President. In 1999, Chavez proposed to rewrite the Constitution, and the National Electoral Council became an independent power. This Constitution was approved in two referenda in 1999, where touchscreen machines were used. In 2000, after the new Constitution was approved, new presidential elections were made. The same touchscreen machines were used and we made a transition between Indra and a multinational holding named Smartmatic. In 2004, after two millions and a half of signatures were gathered to recall Chavez presidency, the revocatory referendum was made, using the Smartmatic machines. Almost six million people voted to maintain Chavez in power. Of course, after eight years of the same party in the power, as well as other problems (namely a national strike and a Coup d’Etat in 2002), several ideas arised regarding the legitimacy of the election process.
Today, the National Electoral Council released a flyer in the press, where they try to issue these topics. I must recognize that, being a newbie voter, I was unaware of several of the things they published today. For example, 8 of every 10 venezuelans over 18 are signed for voting in the elections. That’s one of the higher percentages of public awareness about elections in Latin America, higher than, for example, Colombia. That means 16 million people are able to vote, and we’re used to get around 60 percent of participation. We do vote with touchscreen machines, and the results are completely computerized. The military guards all the equipment, and provides security to the randomly elected civilian which work as temporary personnel. Members of every involved party are present in all the election centers, as well as national and international observers. After you’re checked to vote, you have to give your fingerprint in a special biometric device. This is transmitted live, were possible, avoiding two people voting in the same day. After you vote, your finger is marked with silver nitrate, which goes away after two days or so. Of course, you’re only allowed to vote if you don’t have the mark in your fingers. The touchscreen machines prints a paper which you put into the traditional box. After the voting has concluded, more than half of the boxes will be opened and checked against the information in the machine. The boxes subject to this check are randomly selected, as well. A brief thought about the software used in the machines. In 2004 or so, we (the Free Software Community in Venezuela) struggled and made pressure to the National Electoral Council to reveal the code and publish it wide open. This has been achieved until some point, since every interested person or organization is allowed to take a peek at the code. Dozens of organizations have already done so and are impressed by the features that are now present in the code. Before the first vote is registered, the machine prints a zero-vote confirmation, and then subsequently randomizes the order of the votes registered in memory. Only after all the election centers are closed, the machines start transmitting information. This year, three hours past the closing time we’ll have the results. The final and most important, from my point of view, argument held to support our election system is the random queue organization at the election centres. The registry is sorted by ID number, the votes are randomly stored in the memory and the biometric device is used in a per-arrival basis. Therefore, since nobody takes the same time to vote, the queues will be unarranged therefore making it quite difficult to determine a possible vote sequence. This has been certified lately by the European Union, the Organization of American States and other organizations. Whoever wins this election, I’m quite confident about our election system. I just hope that other institutions in our Country start using reliable systems (for example, the national ID office) in order to give at least the feeling of being in a rightful State.

Recently I read an amazing review of patient advocacy and health (counter)movements by Steven Epstein from the STS program at UCSD. It is still a draft but bound to be published in the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies and when it is, anyone who works in this area will gain so much from reading the review. It was stunningly broad yet highly specific. He is able to synthesize an enormous literature on patient advocacy, a field that has seen a blizzard of activity, especially in the last twenty years. Along with providing points of entry and departure into the field, he also examines who the burgeoning interest in the field of STS. What I found interesting is that there is very little work being done on a topic I happen to know a lot about, lyme disease and whose politics I have been following since at least 1999. I am not sure why the lacuna but it is an odd disease dripping and screaming with controversy and seems to stand apart from many illnesses, in part because of its odd dual existence. On the one hand, it is an illness that the medical establishment totally recognize as real (and thus in some respects is unlike the class of syndromes from MCS to chronic fatigue, which another STS researcher, Joe Dumit provocatively describes as illnesses you have to fight to get ). But that is only half the picture because mainstream medicine tends think that lyme is not only easy to diagnose but also to treat, so much so that if a person thinks they have lyme (even after a round of antibiotics or lacking diagnostic markers), the are either seen as suffering from something else (and usually then told they have one of those highly contested syndromes), or more often just crazy. So it exists dually: at once recognized but only narrowly, so that in another form, that of chronicty, lyme cannot exist. It is this dual quality of lyme that defines and shapes its politics and just recently, new developments have fueled the controversy. Namely it follows from the Infectious Diseases Society of America new guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of lyme, published last month. In a nutshell, they basically re-reduce lyme to a very easily diagnosable and treatable illness, calling for even more strict guidelines for its diagnosis than now exist. They sanction a small range of blood tests and thus totally nullify the role for clinical diagnosis, which even the CDC had acknowledged as vital in times past. Unsurprisingly this has thrown the chronic lyme community in a total tizzy and they have not taken this sitting down. A petition has been launched and protests have been planned. And amid the controversy, politicians have already heard the call to arms. In the state where lyme is a famous entity for it was first discovered there, Connecticut, its Attorney General is calling for an anti-trust investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America, in essence for using their clout and prestige to legitimate a gold standard in diagnosis and treatment, when it seems far from obvious that this should be the standard. According to the LDA press release:

The national non-profit Lyme Disease Association (LDA), representing more Lyme disease patients than any organization in the United States, applauds Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal for beginning an investigation into the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) Lyme disease guidelines development process. In an unprecedented move, the Attorney General’s office filed a Civil Investigative Demand (CID) to look into possible anti-trust violations by the IDSA in connection with exclusionary conduct and monopolization in the development of the Lyme guidelines

What I find so interesting is that this latest chapter in the grungy and torrid politics of lyme encapsulates the very nature of the politics of lyme, which really is about the agency of bacteria and in the Latourian sense. If Pasteur had to put a lot of effort into making credible the bacteriological model of disease as Brunto Latour covers in The Pasteurization of France and if there was plenty of future prostelyzing needed to bring credibility to the bacteria to more general publics, as Nancy Tomes illustrates in The Gospel of Germs, well now, I think we are in an era where we think we have such intimacy with the biological ins and outs of bacteria, it is almost impossible for the scientific community to imagine bacteria as such complex organisms that they can be in fact very difficult to diagnose, eradicate and treat. It is just no longer part of the basic conceptual universe of most doctors and medical researchers to think of bacteria in this way. The LDA press release acknowledges this very fact in the following way:

The October 2006 guidelines do not acknowledge that a complex bacterium such as the Lyme disease spirochete could possibly survive in the body and the brain, evading the immune system and short-term courses of antibiotics.

For many lyme researchers and doctors, since lyme is a bacteria and we know how to treat those pesky critters, it is frivolous to even imagine or contemplate otherwise. I would call this a hubris that arises not from the arrogance of doctors and the medical establishment but following the heels of success that medicine has indeed had with conquering the bacteria with antibiotics. Even new forms of poweful and highly resistanant TB are still treatable with a potent cocktail. That is, at a cultural level, I understand the blinders. At a political level, however, because people are suffering and because it is plausible that lyme can exist chronically, it is imperative to unseat this cultural comfort borne from past success to get the ball of research rolling anew. I think bacteria (and parasites for that matter as a recent smattering of articles demonstrate) are a lot more savvy creatures that should be treated as novel, wondorous creatures, once again. I would dare say the medical establishment, by refocusing energies on that which they think they have solved, would find themselves quite surprised. updateHere is an article discussing the issues.

In the past, I have suggested that it was a mistake to make a state-based fsfe-uk mailing list instead of a language-based fsfe-en list. The discussion resulting from a call for Welsh and Irish help is a pretty sad example of some reasons why.

It's getting around that time of year when kids start singing little annoying songs and thinking of the toys that they will be getting in slightly more than a month. In my family, when everyone gathered for thanksgiving, the younguns were expected to have a list which could be disseminated throughout the family with everything they wanted. This avoided some of the more clich gifts such as sweaters and socks. But who's to say that grownups can't have a little fun as well? It's rather easy to use del.icio.us as a holder for your whole Christmas list. If you find something you want, just add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks with a special tag - I'm using “xmaslist2006”. Using del.icio.us gives you a few advantages over the traditional list:

• A nice URL which you can give to friends, family and anyone else who might want to give you something - mine, for example, is http://del.icio.us/jamuraa/xmaslist2006. It's very readable and could even be memorable to someone who uses del.icio.us themselves.
• You get to put comments by each item, which may persuade perusers of your list to get a certain item, or point out synergistic items like the Two iPod things you want.
• The list can be updated by yourself, meaning there's really no deadline for your list to be finished. This also adds a little bit of non-repeatability - if I know that someone else already bought their gift, I can buy something added recently for a better chance of uniqueness.
• You get to keep your list around, letting you get those things you wanted with the plethora of gift cards that you received, buy the things you REALLY wanted yourself, or even carry things over to next year.

Things on the list need not be completely techie - if you're just looking for a nice sweater, you can add a general page or a representative item with a comment on it. Perhaps include your sizes as well, especially for items which come in a large number of sizes like pants. With any luck, you'll get just what you want this year.

/me on the Relevance of CDBS Whoa, people discussing about CDBS, I can't help joining them. My position: I love CDBS. I started switching my packages to CDBS an year ago or so and nowadays I've almost finished. I understand that people not knowing CDBS might have trouble fixing bugs in my packages, but that's life and it's the same as having to fix a bug in a software written in a programming language you are not fond of. It's just a matter of setting a minimal standard: today people in the NM have to learn debhelper, tomorrow they will have to learn CDBS too. I think it's worth the effort, because CDBS, if used extensively in our archive, has the benefit of providing a single place where to massively make changes to potentially all packages of the archive. That's a huge win for QA in Debian. The same does debhelper, but it only takes care of technical aspects in the packaging process while CDBS also takes care of behavioural aspects. Of course CDBS has drawbacks and nuisances (the available hooks for examples are not properly standardized nor documented IMO), but I think it's a step in the right direction. In Debian we should push more and more toward the possibility of making changes in a centralized/batch manner, so that when maintainers tend to get MIA we have a quick and easy way to take over their unfulfilled duties. Collaborative maintenance is a social step in that direction, CDBS is a technical one.

In some mailing list discussions recently some people demonstrated a lack of knowledge of the economics of a shop. Having run a shop for a few years (an Internet Cafe) I have some practical knowledge of this. I will focus on small businesses in this article, but the same economic principles apply to large corporations too.

When running a shop the main problem you have is in managing stock. There are two ways of getting stock, one is to have wholesalers give it to you for a period in which you can try to sell it and you pay for it when it's sold, this is probably quite rare (I don't know of an example of it being done - and probably no retailer wants to talk about it in case they lose it). Often retailers consider themselves to be privileged if they are permitted to pay for hardware one month after they receive it! The more common way of getting stock is simply to buy it and hope you can sell it in a reasonable period of time (often the wholesaler will offer to buy the stock back at a 10% discount if you can't sell it).

To buy stock you need money, this can come from money that has accrued in the business account (if things are going really well) or from a mortgage taken out by the business owner if things aren't going so well. For small businesses things usually don't go so well so the money used to buy stock is borrowed at an interest rate of about 7% or 8% (I'm using numbers based on the current economic conditions in Australia, different numbers apply to different countries and different times but the same principles apply). The ideal situation is when there is money in the company bank account to cover the purchase of all stock, this means that the cost of owning stock is that you miss out on the 5.5% interest that the money will get in a term deposit.

Almost all stock has a use-by date of some form. Some items have a very short expiry (EG milk used to make hot chocolate in an Internet cafe, some have a moderate expiry date (computer systems become almost unsellable in about 18 months and lose value steadily month after month), but in the computer industry nothing has a long expiry date.

Let's assume for the sake of discussion that you want to run a small computer store that is open to passing trade (this means that you must have stock for an immediate sale). Let's assume that all items of computer hardware lose half their value over the period of 20 months at a steady rate of 2.5% of the original price per month (I think that most computer hardware loses value faster than that, but it's just an assumption to illustrate the point).

The next major issue is the profit margin on each sale. If you can make a 20% profit on a sale then an item that has lost 10% of it's value while gathering dust in your store will still be profitable. However the profit margins on computer sales are very small due to having a small number of major manufacturers (Intel, AMD, nVidia, ATI, Seagate, and WD) that have almost cartel positions in their markets and there being little to differentiate the stores apart from price. I have been told that 3% profit is typical for retail computer hardware sales by the small companies nowadays! Now if the stock will lose 2.5% of it's value per month, you pay 0.5% interest per month and you make a 3% profit then if an item remains in stock for a month then you lose money. So on average (by value) you need to have stock spending significantly less than a month in your store. Cheap items such as low-quality cases and PSUs can stay in stock for a while. More expensive items such as new CPUs and the motherboards to house them must be moved quickly.

What's the first thing that you do to reduce stock? You can keep stocks low, but there is a limit to how low you can go without losing sales. The next thing to do is to not stock items that customers won't often buy or items where there is a similar item that you can stock as a substitute. The classic example of this is hard drives, a customer will want a certain capacity for a certain price - if their preferred brand is not in stock they will almost always take a different brand if it has the same capacity at the same price. Stores often advertise prices on multiple brands of hard drive in each capacity, but often only try to keep one brand in stock.

Of course this is a problem for the more fussy buyer. If you want to buy two identical parts from the same store on different days you might discover that they don't have the stock on the second day and that they instead offer you something equivalent. Not only do retailers have issues with managing their investment in stock but wholesalers have the same problem. So if a retailer runs out of WD drives and discovers that their preferred wholesaler has also run out of WD drives then they just buy a different brand - most customers don't care anyway.

There are some companies I deal with that have a business model based on services. One of them sells hardware to customers at cost, but charges them for the time spend assembling them, transporting them, etc. The potential for a 3% profit on the hardware isn't worth persuing, they prefer to just charge for work and also save themselves the sales effort. Another company I know operates almost exclusively on the basis of ordering parts when customers request them (but still make a small profit margin on the sales), this means that the customer can be invoiced as soon as the hardware arrives. The down-side to this is that wholesalers have the same stock issues and they sometimes have excessive delays before the wholesaler can deliver the hardware.

Dell is the real winner out of this. As they operate by mail-order they don't need to have the stock immediately available, they have a few days to deliver it which gets them time to arrange the supply. They can also have a central warehouse per region which reduces the stock requirements again. A 3% profit on items that rapidly decrease in value makes it almost impossible to sustain a small business. But an organization such as Dell can sustain a successful business at that level.

Of course the down-side for the end-user is that Dell doesn't want to have too many models as that just makes it more complex for the sales channel. Also they have deals with major suppliers which presumably give them deep discounts in exchange for not selling rival products (this is why some brands of parts are conspicuously absent from Dell systems).

10 years ago there used to be a small computer store in every shopping area. Now in Australia there are a few large stores (which often only have a small section devoted to computers) and mail-order. There seems to be much less choice in computer hardware than there was, but it is much cheaper.


PS I've attached a picture of day 39 of the beard.

Dear Lazyweb,

Today I had a philosophy class and we discussed hermeneutics. But I didn't understand a thing. Not that I ever understand much of what my philosophy teacher says, but I just don't get hermeneutics.

Yes, I've looked it up on Wikipedia, and I've read about it in a book. But I still don't understand. The language used to describe hermeneutics is complicated and weird, and just doesn't make any sense to me.

What I've grasped so far is this: Hermeneutics is a methodology and/or epistemology used in the humanities and, to some extent, the social sciences. Hermeneutics is about interpreting texts. A text can be a literary text or something else (like a film, painting, or perhaps even reality). When you read a text, you need to read it several times and perform "close reading" of the parts. A text consists of the parts and the whole, and somehow they relate to each other, and you need to understand the parts to understand the whole and vice versa (I have no idea what this means). Hermeneutics is also some kind of way of describing reality (epistemology) which differs from the natural science in that it seeks to understand things rather than explain them. In the natural sciences, or the logical positivist tradition, knowledge is sought by explaining cause and effect (at least that's what my teacher says). Proponents of hermeneutics argue that this method does not apply to the humanities. Hermeneutics also employ something called the "hermeneutic circle", which means that you understand a text better the more you read it.

But I don't understand this method. What's so special about reading a text several times? What's the deal with close reading, why is it that good? What kind of knowledge is gained by this method? How does it differ from simply reading a text any number of times and then write an essay about what you think and feel about it? The parts I understand about hermeneutics are only trivialities. Also, there seems to be some kind of rules when you read the text. Like, you need to observe the characters one time, and the plot the second time, etc. Who decided that? Why is it necessary to follow these particular rules, if they exist?

Most importantly, exactly why is hermeneutics a scientific method? To me it looks merely as a practice of reading texts and writing essays about them. These essays are of course subjective; they don't generate any objective knowledge in the natural scientific sense. I'm not saying that it's wrong to write about literature, I just don't understand why a certain method of doing it is considered more scientific than any arbitrary method. In the natural sciences, there are criteria of intersubjectivity, independent testability, verifiability, falsifiability, etc. I see nothing of the like in hermeneutics; I don't know any of its scientific criteria. Apparently you need to refer to specific parts of the text in order to justify your statements (opinions? theories?), but it is a rather vague criterion, and I don't understand the rationale for it.

Another thing is the epistemological side of it. Somehow, hermeneutics is a general theory of knowledge. How that could be I don't know. Why would, for example, a close reading of a text give us the answer to questions like the distance to a particular star or human effect on global warming? Maybe that's not what hermeneutics is intended for. But if it is claimed to be a general theory of knowledge, it should be able to answer those questions in some way.

Maybe all this is just me being stupid or zealous. Or maybe I'm not thinking clearly -- I'm suspecting that I've not been thinking clearly lately. Perhaps I'm refusing to understand out of mere distaste or frustration. My classmates suggested something in the line of that. Perhaps it's because I've read physicist Alan Sokal's brilliant satirical article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and I am now allergic to the language used by academics in the humanities.

If someone could enlighten me on these issues, that would be much appreciated.

I m running a computer club at the school in Ghana where am volunteering as a Free Software advocate at the moment (as you probably know already). At first I tried to spread a little bit of general hacker attitude by introducing an internal wiki and blog, and by explaining what Free Software is. Then some students indicated interest in a programming course, so I held python lessons in the club (Sessions 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10). Unfortunately, interest was declining over time, and while the first lessons had over ten participants (not to speak of the 20 at the very first one), it soon fell to around four. There was also some fluctuation, students leaving, others joining (and then of course lacking the lessions from the earlier sessions).So today, with four students who only recently joined, I started something new: I introduced the game infon, by fellow entropianian Florian 'dividuum' Wesch. It is a networked battle area where bugs compete over food and fight each other. Suitable for the computer club makes it the fact that the bugs are not directly controlled, but the players write their intelligence (using the simple language lua) and only upload code to the server. They can even do this while the game is running and it was a very fun game to play at GPN5 in Karlsruhe. You can read my infon-tutorial, and it s mostly non-SOSHGIC specific.I got them far enough to type the code that I presented as an example, to get it running, and to extend it slightly. I am only hoping that they will dig in a little bit deeper until next week. I think that you can only be successful in learning programing or similar things if you spend some time doing it besides the classes, and I did not see that happening when I was doing python. Maybe I was going too fast or the text-only way of doing it was discouraging, but I did expect them to starting having their own ideas at least after we were programming a simple text-based maze in the club.

iCommons's code of conduct states: "iCommoners employ open and transparent governance and processes" The iCommons mailing list replies: "You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected." iCommons are good with words, but not so good with deeds. See more examples from Creative Commons in How to not run a consultation and iSummit. At least iCommons lists aren't doing the silent rejection trick from notconsult. A small step forwards...

Another example of similar problems with Wikipedia's randomly-biased editing was given in Toto, I Don't Think We're in Wikipedia Anymore [Adam Rosi-Kessel's Fair and Balanced Weblog]. I didn't try editing Wikipedia back in 2001, so I can't comment on whether this is a recent problem, as suggested, but it is a problem.

Long day today (yesterday, actually, but I'm post-dating this in the interest of chronological flow). The baby's having a hard time coming off of West Coast time; she got up late and took a loooong nap till half-past three. Which was fine, because I needed the time to work on my NSLU2, which needed some attention. The NSLU2, or "Slug", is a tiny Linux computer from Linksys, about the size of a two packs of Marlboros laid side-by-side. My brother Nate gave me one last year for Christmas (thanks, nate), and I've been using it for network backups, but on our trip to SF Nate showed me that he's running all kinds of wild services off of his. So I decided to start shifting over some responsibilities to the little bugger. Which was just about time. Sometime during our trip to San Francisco, my main home server started having fan problems; it kept overheating and shutting itself down. It's going to take some time to diagnose the problem, but I figured that this was as good a time as any to move the critical services over to the Slug. The main one that needed budging was DNS. Maj's main domain, as well as my two .san-francisco.ca.us domains, run from home, because it's too hard to get the registrar to change them. The Unslung system I use for the Slug has a BIND package, which is a good thing to run, anyways. I was running MaraDNS on the big server, because I always root for the underdog, but there wasn't a MaraDNS package for the Slug. So I rewrote my zone files and things are up and running now. I don't know what else I'm going to put on there. Jabberd? Asterisk? A home wiki? Just not sure. tags: nslu2 slug unslung baby

Blah blah blah When the baby got up, we went to our local Loblaws, out towards the end of rue Rachel across from Canadian Tire. It's a pretty fantastic place to buy groceries -- it's the old CPR Angus Shops, a repair and maintenance facility for the Canadian Pacific Railway. The building is huge, with giant cranes and beams still attached to the roof. Amita and I grabbed a crapload of groceries and brought them home to Maj, who'd just had a massage at the centre around the corner and was feeling really good. She'd rented Tristram Shandy, the 2005 movie based on the 18th-century level-twisting novel. Me and Amita June made some baked potatoes, and we all watched the movie, and a good time was had. tags: tristram shandy loblaws angus shops movie maj amitajune

H****e en vrac One thing I always want to buy when I'm at the store in Quebec is the quite commonly available communion wafers. Yeah, really! big ol' 5-inches-diameter communion wafers, in the snack section next to the Doritos and the Humpty Dumpty potato chips. Quebec society has a had a precipitous secularization -- from around 90% church attendance in the 1950s to less than 10% today. But Catholicism still infuses all parts of life. For example, in Quebec, you cuss by using words from the church, including, of course, hostie ("the host"). So I can't figure out why hostie are a tasty snack treat. Is it a deliberate snub to the sacrament of communion by a secular society? Or did the practice antedate the Quiet Revolution, and did the formerly religious Quebecois eat communion wafers for fun? Or is it just a snork-snork funny thing to do, when the name of the food is actually a naughty word? I dunno. I'm fascinated, but not enough to buy a big bag of communion wafers to eat. (They're never cheese- or BBQ-flavored, by the way; they have a pristine seriousness to them.) More info solicited. tags: hostie quebec snack food

Opinity One of the services mentioned in the Web 2.0 Summit infrastructure workshop was Opinity. Opinity seems to be a distributed reputation system, kind of like claimID but with a little more soft information. I think it looks pretty cool, and I'm glad to see another addition to the growing OpenID identity provider market. tags: openid opinity identity reputation

I don't know why, but debmirror (or Perl ?) fails to work with Solaris. For example this code

     while(($res = $gunzf->gzreadline($line) > 0) 
           && !($line =~ /^$/))   
       $buf = $buf . $line; 
      

read the full buffer instead of reading a block of text separated by empty spaces...
Multiline matching (m//m) fails to work too. So I rewrote almost the full Packages.gz parser in a dirty Perl way for a friend, and it works. I 0\/\/N3d you, fucking OS. And there's people wanting to port Debian to that, good luck