Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria to transform dunes into architecture [1]. The concept of making a wall across Africa to stop sand dunes from overtaking farm land is obviously a good one, the idea of using bacteria to convert sand into sandstone to do so cheaply is also good. But making that into houses seems a little risky. I wouldn t want to live under shifting sand with only bacteria generated sandstone to protect me. Cory Doctorow gave an interesting speech titled How to Destroy the Book , here is the transcript [2]. He talks about how much he loves books and described his opposition to the DRM people who want to destroy the book culture. Sendmail has a DKIM Wizard for generating ADSP (Domain Signing Policy) records [3]. If I knew that ADSP records were so easy to implement then I would have used them a year ago! Loretta Napoleoni gave an insightful TED talk about the economics of terrorism [4]. Apparently the US dollar used to be THE currency for international crime, when the PATRIOT act was passed it s anti-money-laundering provisions encouraged many shady people to invest in Euros instead and thus led to the devaluation of the US currency. It s also interesting to note that terrorist organisations are driven by economics, if only we could prevent them from making money Ryan Lobo gave an interesting TED talk about his photographic work [5]. The effectiveness of the all-women peace-keeping force is noteworthy. The part about the Liberian war criminal who has become an evangelical Christian and who now tours Liberia begging forgiveness from his victims (and their relatives in the case of the people he murdered). Should someone like that be permitted to remain free if his victims forgive him? Charles Stross has an appealing vision for how Apple and Google can destroy the current mobile telephony market [6]. I can t wait for the mobile phone market to be entirely replaced by mobile VOIP devices! James Geary gave an interesting TED talk about metaphors [7]. The benefits of metaphors in poetry are well known (particularly in lyrics), but the impact of metaphors in influencing stock market predictions surprised me. Shaffi Mather gave an interesting TED talk about his company that makes money from fighting corruption [8]. Instead of paying a bribe you can pay his company to force the official(s) in question to do the right thing. Apparently the cost of doing so tends to be less than 10% the cost of the bribe if you know what you are doing. His previous company was an ambulance service that charges what the patient can afford is also interesting. John Robb wrote an interesting article about lottery winners and griefers [9]. He suggests that publishing the names, addresses, etc of rich people will be a new trend in Griefing. One thing I ve been wondering about is the value of the HR database at a typical corporation. A single database typically contains the home addresses, phone numbers, and salaries of all the employees. It would be very easy to do an SQL dump and store it on a USB flash device to carry out of the office. Then it could be sold to the highest bidder. They could probably make a market in the private data about rich people in the same way that there is currently a market for credit card data maybe they have already done this but it s kept quiet to stop others from implementing the same idea. Michael Smith wrote an interesting article for the Washington Times about home schooling and socialisation [10]. It seems that people who were home schooled as children tend to be more academically successful and involved in civic life as well as being happier and having career success. Richard Seager wrote an interesting article for American Scientist about ocean currents and heat transfer from the tropics [11]. It seems that when the ocean currents shut down the UK and other parts of northern Europe won t be getting a mini ice-age. Ian Lance Taylor (most known for the gold linker) has written a good summary of the situation in regard to climate change and what must be done about it [12]. The Wrath of the Killdozer article about how one angry man converted a bulldozer into a tank [13]. This wasn t a big bulldozer (every mining company has bigger ones) and he didn t have any serious weapons (only rifles). Imagine what terrorists could do if they started with a mining vehicle and serious weapons Simon Singh has written about being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association [14]. The BCA didn t like his article criticising chiropractors for claiming to be able to treat many conditions unrelated to the spine. Remember, chiropractors are not doctors all they can do is alleviate some back problems. See a GP if you have any medical condition that doesn t involve a sore back or neck. Avoid uppity chiropracters who claim to be able to cure all ills. Nicholas D. Kristof wrote an interesting article for the New York times about how happy the people in Costa Rica are [15]. He claims that the Costa Rican government s decision in 1949 to dissolve it s armed forces and invest the money in education is the root cause of the happy population. Maybe if the US government would scale back military spending the US population could be as happy as the Costa Ricans. While there are good arguments for having some sort of military, there are no good arguments for spending more money on the military than the rest of the world combined (as the US does).

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
• [2] http://thevarsity.ca/articles/23855
• [3] http://www.sendmail.org/dkim/wizard
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/loretta_napoleoni_the_intricate_economics_of_terrorism.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ryan_lobo_through_the_lens_of_compassion.html
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/12/21st_century_phone.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/james_geary_metaphorically_speaking.html
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/shaffi_mather_a_new_way_to_fight_corruption.html
• [9] http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/01/journal-ultimate-griefing-in-a-lottery-economy.html
• [10] http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/13/home-schooling-socialization-not-problem/
• [11] http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.999,y.0,no.,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx
• [12] http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/296
• [13] http://www.damninteresting.com/the-wrath-of-the-killdozer
• [14] http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340
• [15] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/opinion/07kristof.html

Having stupidly, and very painfully, ruptured a ligament in my foot (while getting off a bus. Not drunk, no sports whatsoever.) I was less mobile than I wished to be and could finally make some time to watch Nikita by Luc Besson (I've not seen much he was involved in; L on was one of the exceptions which I like very much. I've got the DVD of The Fifth Element right here, so no need to chastise me that I haven't seen that one yet.) But back to Nikita: you may know that I like strange movies for some values of strange. Nikita obediently starts off in a very dark mood. And then suddenly turns into quite a normal secret service thriller with a romance element. I liked both parts of the movie very much, but it took me a bit by surprise at first. I also like fun stuff, and so I've watched my first three episodes (9 to 11) of Kottan ermittelt, wonderfully silly Austrian whodunnits from the late 70s/early 80s. If you don't speak german (and understand it well, even I have difficulties understanding some of the Viennese dialect), you just don't know what you're missing. Or if it is translated (don't know): probably like watching Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis in German. Which I did, because my french is not that good, but I'll have to watch it again en fran ais, just to get the Authentic Expierence of this wonderful movie. Update: Speaking of a foot, and of movies: I don't think I've mentioned My Left Foot on my blog so far. The biography of Christy Brown, a cripple who grows up in a poor Irish working class family to finally become a famous artist. I found it just a bit corny (hmm. Not sure if that's the right word here, shows up for kitsch in any case), but still very impressive.

I have direct knowledge (through observation or first-hand reports) of the following use cases for Netbooks:

1. System administrator s emergency workstation something light to carry when you might get an SMS about a problem.
2. A really small laptop for a serious technical user, can be used for programming and other serious tasks. Only someone who is really dedicated to the hobby of computing would choose a system with a tiny screen for their main computer so that they can take it everywhere.
3. A computer for a child. Children are less demanding about some aspects of their computer experience, no-one wants to buy a really expensive toy for a young child, and children find it difficult to carry full size laptops.

1 and 2 are the options that interest me. But it would be good if the extensive children s toy market could drive economies of scale and reduce the expenses of my hobby and profession. I have found my EeePC 701 to provide adequate CPU performance (Celeron-M 630MHz) for light compiling tasks and I have used it for some Debian development work. The SSD that is built in is very fast and OpenOffice load times compare well to my Thinkpad T41p because of it. The main problems I have with my EeePC for sysadmin and coding tasks are the small keyboard (which can t be fixed the overall size of the machine needs to remain small), the small screen (which could be expanded without changing the case size), the low resolution screen (which has been fixed in newer netbooks), and the fact that my 3G dongle sticks out and is likely to get broken. More recent Netbooks address these issues while having the trade-off of being heavier and larger. There are also some tasks which are generally not performed on a Netbook but that could be if it was properly designed. Here are some examples of things that I think should be done on a Netbook:

1. Basic image editing and blogging something that a lot of people do on smart-phones nowadays. It can be done more effectively and with less effort on a general purpose computer I can t imagine the GIMP or Inkscape running on a smart-phone.
2. Reading electronic books. The number of people who want a Netbook but don t want to read electronic books would be quite small as would the number of people who only want to read electronic books and never want to use a general purpose computer while travelling. No-one really wants to carry both a Netbook and an ebook reader at the same time.
3. Watching movies.
4. Everything that you might want to do on a terminal in an Internet cafe those machines are always 0wned, just say no for security reasons.
5. Games. The Nintendo DS has two ARM CPUs running at 66MHz and 33MHz and a combined screen resolution of 256*384*18bpp [1] and the Sony PSP has a 333MHz MIPS R4000 CPU and a screen resolution of 480*272*24bpp [2]. The original EeePC had more CPU power and more screen resolution than the DS and the PSP so it IS suitable for games even though it won t run the latest 3D games. There are lots of great games like Wesnoth that don t require much video performance.
6. Educational Software. Portable educational devices include the awful V.smile system for young children [3] and the educational software for the DS (I ve seen a demonstration of a training program in rapid completion of basic maths problems for elderly people and presume it s not the only educational software on that platform).

Image editing requires a color screen of high resolution. Effective blogging requires a platform with a resolution that compares to the typical web user according to Hitslink 1024*768 is the most popular resolution of web browsing systems at 28.34% and the most popular resolution that is less than 1024*768 is 800*600 at 3.28% [4]. So even the most casual blogger will have an incentive to get a screen that is of higher resolution than all but the latest Netbooks. The recently released EeePC 1201 has a screen resolution of 1366*768 which should be barely adequate for those tasks. Reading electronic books requires a reasonable resolution. Based on my experience with the 1400*1050 display in my Thinkpad it seems that a resolution of 1366*768 would be barely adequate for reading an academic paper that has two columns in a small font. But as the original Kindle had a resolution of 600*800 and the latest Kindle has a resolution of 824*1200 [5] it seems that perhaps the epaper displays are good enough to allow reading the text at a lower resolution. A display that can draw little or no power when idling (as epaper does) is simply required for an ebook. The Pixel-Qi hybrid displays are claimed to offer the best features of TFT and epaper displays [6] but they haven t been released yet. I think it s reasonable to assume that someone will achieve that Pixel-Qi is attempting and that it will become the standard display for a Netbook. Watching movies and playing games (even games like Wesnoth) requires better video performance than epaper can deliver, we just have to hope that Pixel-Qi release something soon. Watching movies and reading ebooks are both things that are best done without a keyboard in the way. The Always Innovating Touch Book [7] seems like a good solution to this problem. It s a tablet PC that can be connected to a keyboard base if/when you desire. It should also be good for web browsing and reading email while on the move, I find that my EeePC is unreasonably heavy and awkward for typing email while walking. Intel CPUs are not particularly energy efficient. As there are ARM CPUs with clock speeds as high as 2GHz and with as many as four CPU cores it seems that the ARM architecture can provide as much CPU power as is required. Debian currently supports two versions of the ARM CPU, if another one became commonly used it wouldn t be that difficult to run Debian build servers for it. Given a screen resolution equal to the latest Kindle, CPU power greater than the early Netbooks, and the ability to run a free software OS the range of educational and gaming software should be adequate. So it seems that the ideal netbook would have a detachable keyboard and base and a touch-screen in the computer part. It would have a Pixel-Qi display (or equivalent) with a resolution of 1400*1050 or better. It would have USB, Gig-E, Wifi, and Bluetooth connectivity and the ability to have an internally mounted USB dongle (as the Always Innovating Touch Book does). I think that this is not overly difficult to achieve it is basically an Always Innovating system with a better display. Update: Another criteria is the ability to start operating quickly when requested. Even mobile phones are often limited in their utility by the time that is taken to activate them (I can t get my mobile phone to take a photo in much less than 7 seconds after removing it from my pocket). The Always Innovating system is apparently always in suspend to RAM mode when it s not being used so that it can start quickly. That combined with fast application load times and a good menu system could allow turning the system on and launching an application in less than 2 seconds. If I was buying a Netbook right now the only thing that would stop me from buying an Always Innovating device is the shipping delay. But as my EeePC is working quite well I m not going to buy another system unless I am going to get significant benefits such as a high resolution PixelQi display.

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_DS
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psp
• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/07/07/awful-computers-for-kids/
• [4] http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=17
• [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle
• [6] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/pixel-qi/
• [7] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/11/always-innovating/

I keep almost all of my notes and to-do lists in plain text files, so I can edit and search them with Vim, grep, and other standard Unix tools. I often indent lines in these files to create a simple outline structure, and use the autoindent and foldmethod=indent options to make Vim into a simple outliner. To get useful output when searching through these outline-structured files, I wrote a simple grep replacement. Given a text file with a Python-style indentation structure, ogrep searches the file for a regular expression. It prints matching lines, with their "parent" lines as context. For example, if input.txt looks like this:

2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
    Visit with family.
2009-01-02
  Grocery store and library.
2009-01-03
  Stay home.
2009-01-04
  Back to work.
    Remember to set an alarm.

then ogrep work input.txt will produce the following output:

2009-01-01
  New Year's Day!
    No work today.
2009-01-04
  Back to work...

You can download ogrep from the outline-grep repository on GitHub, or just read the literate Haskell file. The code is almost trivial (40 lines of code, plus imports and comments); I'm publishing it just in case anyone else has a use for it, and because some of my friends were curious about how I'm using Haskell. I've now written a few "real-world" Haskell programs (compleat was the first). I'm finding Haskell very well suited to such programs, though this particular one would be equally easy in a language like Perl, Python, or Ruby. This is a one-off tool to fill a gap in my workflow; there are no configuration options or useful error messages. It would be fairly easy to extend it, though. For example, it might be handy to have an option to include children (as well as parents) of matching lines. I recently realized that ogrep often works for searching through source code too, which might generate some more unexpected use cases.

I have to admit, I was a bit lazy in my RC bug squashing efforts during the last two weeks. anyway, a short summary:

• #489351 hlbr: "hlbr: upgrade fails if not started"
  close, already fixed
• #526674 cwidget: "FTBFS with GCC 4.4: missing #include"
  add info to the bug report
• #548480 nxcomp: "build failure with gcc-4.4"
  apply patch from BTS, upload to DELAYED/2
• #560617 src:libio-socket-multicast6-perl: "libio-socket-multicast6-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add build dependency on netbase and upload (pkg-perl)
• #562582 squidtaild: "fails to install, trying to overwrite other packages files"
  close, already fixed
• #564358 src:libhttp-body-perl: "libhttp-body-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  grab patch from upstream bugtracker, upload (pkg-perl)
• #564369 src:libnet-twitter-perl: "libnet-twitter-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add patch and upload (pkg-perl)
• #564402 src:libhtml-formfu-perl: "libhtml-formfu-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload package fixed by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #564411 src:libdatetime-format-iso8601-perl: "libdatetime-format-iso8601-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add info to the bug report (pkg-perl)

There s been a fair deal of talk on the intertubes lately about prettifying the boot process. The first I saw was a post from Lasse Havelund regarding a proposal for Ubuntu Lucid, and the second was regarding a forked version of GRUB2 called BURG, which adds some theming abilities. A tiny bit of research revealed that despite the existence of BURG, the regular upstream GRUB2 project already has graphical theme support, courtesy of a Google Summer of Code project by Colin Bennett (albeit with a few less features at time of writing). Since Lasse had gone to the hard work of actual design, I decided to try my hand at chopping his design up into a usable GRUB2 theme, and the result can be seen here. I ended up speaking with the upstream GRUB2 team (which has certainly lead to a strange alliance in one case) about Colin s GSOC themes, and as it turns out, the main reason there s no theme supplied with GRUB2 is that Colin s themes use non-Free elements (proprietary fonts like Helvetica are used heavily). Since I had learnt the theme format to a basic degree in doing my Ubuntu theme, I proposed making a genuinely Free theme starting with a Debian theme, and moving on to a generic GRUB2 theme afterwards. As I went along, I found a handful of bugs and feature oddities, which have almost all been fixed with incredible turnaround by Vladimir Serbinenko, the current maintainer of the gfxmenu code (there remain some questions regarding RTL support in themes, and how to gracefully deal with different aspect ratios) and I want to extend my thanks to him for his help. However, at this point in time, I m pleased to announce a theme I d consider ready for public consumption. It s obviously not perfect, and it uses the old visual style from Debian Lenny, but it s a fully Free starting point, which hopefully can be deconstructed by others seeking to make their own themes. It ought to scale fully to any 4:3 resolution. And it may explode and eat your disk on any version of GRUB2 Experimental other than r1499. Generally, the README is a good starting point. Oh yes, an URL. Try http://retro.apebox.org/grubthemes/ I ve been speaking with some folks on deviantART regarding using their Debian-themed wallpaper in future releases of my themes package, but for now, this should be enough for gfxmenu to get a little more exposure and a little more testing. And, hopefully, shift artist focus back from the theme-incompatible BURG fork to the real GRUB2 project.

Yesterday was ~30C in my area, today was well over 30C during the day (although cooler in the evening). They forecast 33C for tomorrow in Melbourne, but that means where I live it will probably be about 36C (it s always a few degrees hotter than the overall forecast for the city). Monday is predicted to be 41C and Tuesday may be 32C. I turned off my SE Linux Play Machine this morning and will probably leave it off until at least Tuesday evening. The hardware I use for the Play Machine is fairly energy efficient, but it s in a confined space with some other electronic stuff so it s best not to take chances. I ll probably leave it offline for about half the duration of January and February. I miss Amsterdam and London weather.

Wow. I just stumbled over the SIL Fonts, which I haven't heard of before. Looks like an absolutely great project. Not only are these fornts released under an open license (I haven't read it myself, but many of these fonts are in Debian...), but above all I really liked the selection of supported systems with icons by each entry: The Old Windows 3.1 Windows flag stands for tested on Windows , the very old rainbow colored apple for tested on Mac , our official (and current :-) familiar swirl not only for tested on Debian, but for Debian package available . I mean: while it's not uncommon today to see some kind of Linux support in software (or other downloads), explicit Debian support is not that widespread. And seeing this side by side with the two very outdated logos for the two other mainstream OSs (and Ubunut not even being mentioned on this page) is ... what, exactly? Wishful thinking? An ironic comment on how the (conputing) landscape should look like? Made me smile, in any case.

We're not huge users of Caltrain, because frankly, it sucks. It's way slower than driving to San Francisco, and by the time you've paid for two return tickets, you might as well have driven and paid for parking. That said, we do use it from time to time. One of the things I noticed when we first moved over here was this intriguing box on a pole, to the side of the normal ticket vending machine. It looked all battered and faded, kind of like a deprecated form of ticketing that had been phased out years ago. Except it looked too high-tech to be phased out. Fast forward to four years later, and we're using Caltrain to get back from SFO after returning from Atlanta for Christmas, and there's this "Don't forget to tag off" TransLink poster inside the carriage. I'm now officially intrigued. I did some browsing of their website on the journey home. How could this be? Hong Kong's MTR has the Octopus Card. London's Tube has the Oyster Card, and the Bay Area has TransLink? Why the hell isn't this thing being pimped out more? It's awesome! I mentioned it to a co-worker the other day, who's been in the Bay Area for 7 years, and he'd never heard of it. So I signed up for it for myself and Sarah, and two cards promptly arrived. If you sign up with an autoload of $20 or more, there's no cost for cards at all. So from now on, whenever we need to ride Caltrain (or BART or Muni, which are the public transport networks we're ever likely to use) we can just wave these cards at something and never have to worry about a ticket ever again. It's awesome. Apparently VTA is coming on board with it later this year, so that'll round things out nicely. It sounds like it's been an epic implementation, starting back in 1999, and still rolling out ten years later. Better late than never. The added bonus will be for our visitors. When they come, we can just give them these cards, and they won't have to deal with BART's utterly confusing (for casual riders) fare system. One of my favourite things about Hong Kong was the MTR and the Octopus Card. Now we just need awesome mass transit for the Bay Area. Somehow, I think that's going to take even longer than TransLink.

renovate

v 1: restore to a previous or better condition
  2: make brighter and prettier

remodel

v 1: do over, as of (part of) a house
  2: cast or model anew

I much prefer the term renovate to remodel. Remodelling to me feels more like tearing down internal walls and changing the actual layout of the place. But we're in America, so remodelling it is. We've had a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) scope creep. It started with just wanting to get some Ethernet cabling installed, then we decided to get recessed canned lighting (the whole lamp thing over here drives us nuts), and then we discovered that acoustic ("popcorn") ceilings are a haven for dust mites (we're both allergic) so it made sense to get the ceilings redone while they were putting the lights in. We're also getting the light switches replaced, and new childproof power outlets. We also got the electrical panel upgraded. Removing popcorn ceilings is somewhat hilarious. They put down plastic everywhere, then have at it with a garden hose, and then it just scrapes off. The ceilings they've completely finished already look a million bucks, so we're very happy with the decision to do that. The Ethernet cabling installation caused a lot of wall carnage, so we're going to get the walls repainted as well. Then we can get the carpets cleaned and stain proofed, and then we can start thinking about trying to move some non-essential stuff in. Hopefully it'll all be done by next weekend. The kitchen cabinets have a six week lead time, so the kitchen remodelling will have to be done while we're living there. Unfortunately some unexpectedly time demanding stuff has come up at work, right in the middle of this, so Sarah's had to do the bulk of the running around to sort out contractors for all of the work, and I've been stuck at work until all hours, 7 days a week. To cap it off, I've managed to come down with a cold, and feel quite crappy. NyQuil consumption is ensuing.

The Tool Factory closed its doors on 31st December 2009. As you may remember, our co-op is one of few LLP co-ops and we mentioned 2amase LLP in our case study as one of the others. 2amase were closely linked to The Tool Factory LLP. Their goodbye message lists multiple reasons for the closure, but a key part seems to be a dispute between members about the copyright of their proprietary Business Plan Writer tool. I think there s a strong resonance between cooperative principles and free and open source software, so I m not suprised that proprietary software development has contributed to failure of a co-op, but it s still a shame. Goodbye and best wishes for the future to The Tool Factory workers. I hope to promote links between cooperatives and free software more in 2010. New Co-operatives UK head Ed Mayo mentioned it in his first speech, so the time seems right. If you d like to help put on some co-op FOSS events, leave a comment here or get involved in this open co-op discussion, please.

I m glad to see that some things never change; in this case, it s the low quality of local news reporting in Laredo. Pro8News breathlessly reports that Mexican drivers are less likely to be ticketed since less than 25% of parking tickets in Laredo are issued to Mexican-licensed vehicles. This story just begs to be placed on a research methods final as one of those identify all of the problems with this analysis questions. Bonus points for invoking Bayes theorem.

Mark this one down as another in the long list of "duh" once you realise what is going on! Bug report comes in about a long running daemon that has stopped logging. lsof reports the log file is now named logfile~ and further more is deleted! This happens after a system upgrade scenario, so of course I go off digging through a multitude of scripts and what-not to find the culprit... Have you got it yet? Try this... vi is very careful and renames your existing file, so that if anything goes wrong when writing the new version you can get something back. It's a shame the daemon doesn't know about this! The kernel is happy to deal with the rename, but when the backup file is unlinked you're out of luck. Confusingly to a casual inspection your log file looks like it's there ... just that nothing is going into it. (oh, and if you tried that, you might like to restart syslogd now :) Moral of the story -- overcome that finger-memory and never use vi on a live file; you're asking for trouble!

For a long time it has been obvious that in all cases anti-piracy technologies discourage purchases and in many cases encourage piracy. I first discovered the significance of this in about 1991 when I attended a public lecture by a senior employee of Borland and a member of the audience claimed that the Borland product he bought didn t function correctly due to anti-piracy measures. The Borland employee firmly stated that Borland did not use anti-copying technology on any of it s products, didn t have any plans to do so, and the problem in question must have been caused by something else. Of all the hostile questions that were asked, this was the only one that caused the speaker to appear agitated so it was obviously an issue that was considered to be important within Borland. In the late 80 s anti-piracy measures were mostly based around creating floppy disks that couldn t be easily copied (violations of various aspects of the disk formatting standards). This meant that you couldn t make a backup copy of the data, so it wasn t uncommon for people to seek pirate copies of their commercial software for daily use to avoid wearing out their valuable original floppy disks. Then the dongle was invented and people who bought software sometimes sought pirate copies so that they could use their printer and their commercial software without having to change plugs on their PC. But in those cases the benefits to uncrippled software to the users were small. Now a large part of the battle on copy protection concerns DVDs. If you had a DVD of a recent movie and an MP4 which would you rather watch? Would you prefer to be forced to watch some anti-piracy rubbish for a couple of minutes at the start of the movie (with fast-forward disabled) or would you prefer to just start watching it? Would you prefer to be able to pre-program the sections of the movie that you watch (as some parents desire to skip the sex and/or violence in movies for their teenagers) or would you prefer to be forced to watch the movie straight-through with only a manual fast-forward to skip sections? Would you prefer to have a DVD that can t be played properly on many (most?) computers because of the CSS encoding or an MP4 that plays on everything from PCs to mobile phones without an issue? Would you rather have 100 movies in the spare space on your laptop hard drive when you travel and 1000 movies on your desktop system or the much smaller number of boxed DVDs that you can store? I think that in most cases a pirate MP4 will give a better experience than a DVD. So the question is, why pay for a DVD when in most cases you get a lesser experience than you will get from a MP4 file downloaded by bittorrent? One reason for buying the DVD is to support the film industry. But I doubt that such a profitable industry will get much sympathy in today s economy. Another reason is the morality, some people consider piracy to be theft (it isn t by definition theft requires that for at least a moment the property be completely in the possession of the thief) and therefore avoid it. One technical reason for buying a DVD is the fact that it may have multiple languages supported, it will have subtitles, it may have an audio track with the creators giving a commentary, and it may have extra scenes that were cut from the main release. I believe that work on adding subtitles to the video file formats is a work in progress, so it s only a matter of time before the DVD rips include all this extra data. Really the content creators should focus on making a product that meets the needs of users and that they want to pay for. Pirating books is technically possible, but almost no-one does it. Some successful authors such as Charles Stross freely publish significant parts of their work and Cory Doctorow freely publishes all his work in electronic form. Books just work well, they meet the needs of users and people want to buy them. Sure they can sell them second hand, lend them to other people, and it s technically possible to pirate them, but they remain profitable. On my documents blog I have a page of links to free short stories that I liked [1] and a page of links to free books [2]. It seems to me that creators of other copyright content should consider how they can be of service to their customers. We are all familiar with corporations and misguided individuals who get whiny about the supposed losses due to piracy. Bruce Everiss has unfortunately joined this trend and demanded the disconnection of Internet users based on unproven accusations of game piracy [3]. I don t know whether the game buying experience sucks as badly as the DVD buying experience, but based on the reports of locked-down consoles that have to be cracked before they run Linux I expect that the modern game industry is doing at least as badly as the movie industry. They need to provide things that users want! One thing to note is that a Windows or console game player who uses pirate games will probably buy some games at some future time, while someone like me who uses free software both by principle and because it gives a better user experience will probably never pay for a game (I haven t got time to play all the free games so I probably wouldn t even buy a Linux game).

• [1] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-short-stories/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/fiction/free-books/
• [3] http://www.bruceongames.com/2010/01/05/304149300-stolen-from-activision/

BidRivals.com is an interesting new auction site, their business model is that you buy bids for $0.80 each. If you want to bid on an item it costs you $0.80, then if you win the auction you pay for it. Every bid increases the price by 2 cents. So if you see an auction with a current price of $2.00 that apparently means 100 bids have been placed IE $80 have been spent. Currently a Canon EOS 50D Digital SLR camera + a lens is on auction, it has a buy it now price of $2,499 (the same price that Harvey Norman advertises) and the bidding is at $163 and climbing so the auction site has apparently made almost $6,500 in revenue and the product has not been sold yet! The auction also has no fixed end time, it seems that about 10 or 15 seconds are added to the clock every time someone bids, and the autobidder will kick in when 4 seconds remain. So there will probably be an autobid every 6-11 seconds somewhere between 300 and 600 bids per hour at a cost of $0.80 each every item that is running with autobids will generate something between $240 and $480 in revenue without being sold! Now if you don t win the auction (or give up trying to win) then you can buy it for the difference between the cost of your bids and the product price. In the case of the camera in question if you had made 500 bids (which would be quite easy with the autobid feature) then that would be $400 worth of bids, and given a choice between losing that $400 and using it as a down-payment on the regular retail price I think that most people would choose to buy the product. Of course if you buy it from Harvey Norman you save the delivery fee and probably get more options if you want to return it I ve never had to return something to Harvey Norman but I m assuming that it would be a lot easier than returning an item to an online store! I don t consider this to be a real auction site. I believe that a real auction has genuine bids of a value that is determined by the bidder, the auctioneer (or auction software) may decline bids that are too low in value or which have too small an increment. Bidding in an auction generally costs the bidder nothing the only exception I ve personally seen is auctions which have a printed catalogue in which case you pay for the catelogue, a fixed fee which is small when compared to the auction prices. It seems to me that a significant portion of the revenue (possibly the majority of the revenue) of BidRivals is from the bidding fees, and the other significant portion of the revenue would be comprised of profits made from auction customers who opt to buy the item at it s list price to avoid wasting the money that they have put in to bids. The actual prices of the items are small by comparison. Note that I am not accusing BidRivals of doing anything illegal (such as running a gambling system), I am merely stating that I don t believe that they offer a good deal for customers. While they aren t strictly a gambling site, it seems that one could get lucky and make a single bid (costing $0.80) at the right time and get a $2,499 camera for $170 (or whatever it ends up selling for) while others may spend hundreds of dollars in bids and get nothing other than a potential down-payment on the full $2,499 price. That s a lot more luck than I want in any of my purchases! I recommend not doing business with them or anyone like them.

5 years ago I founded my own company Freexian SARL with the goal to make a living out of my free software experience. I marketed the company as being specialized on the Debian distribution in the hope to combine my Debian work and my professional work. Given that Freexian is still alive I think I met the first goal. My free software experience allowed me to complete many projects: a large number of development projects for embedded devices running a custom Linux distribution (usually built with debian udebs), the development of a Debian derivative (SLIS) and some recurring tasks of remote system administration. However, even if I use Debian daily for all my work, very few of the projects that I complete for customers have direct results in terms of improvements for Debian (except some bugreports and some related fixes). And even when I m able to contribute something back to Debian, it s usually not in areas that I care about. My focus within Debian is on the technical and organizational infrastructure of the project: as a dpkg/dpkg-dev maintainer I try to improve the packaging infrastructure, as a QA member I maintain the Package Tracking System to ease collaboration, as an Alioth admin I ensure all DD can host VCS repositories for their Debian related projects, as a developers-reference co-maintainer I try to share good packaging practices, etc. Given this bias, it s difficult to find customer projects that would let me contribute in those areas. Thus I think I need to try another approach: the simplest solution would be to find sponsors for some of my own Debian-related projects (if you have something else to suggest, please leave a comment either in the blog or by mail). That said finding sponsors looks like a difficult task in itself. While I can imagine (for example) a company using Debian on embedded devices that would like to sponsor the rewrite of update-alternatives in C in order to get rid of the perl dependency in the dpkg package (if you know such a company, get in touch with me!), I don t see who would have an interest in sponsoring the time that I need to contribute new sections to the developers-reference manual. But who knows maybe I should just try and publicly solicit sponsorship for some of the projects that I care about. In any case, suggestions and comments are welcome! Partagez cet article / Share This

The MirBSD Midi-ISO (bi-arch manifold boot) and NetInstall for both i386 and sparc have been upgraded to the 20091226 snapshot (sorry for the delay). A separate news announcement will be done when a full ISO (MirBSD + MirGRML) is done. Other than that, I have fixed a couple of things all over the place, jupp for example. The planned release of mksh R39b is still not done though, as I m only human as well, and too much hacking isn t something one can do without relaxing some in between. On the Debian front, my RCBD #1 was continued, here s #1 results:

• Carry over from day #1
• bug #552791 acorn-fdisk Copyright file does not contain verbatim copy of the license or a pointer to one
• bug #562647 gidentd Does not work with ipv4 after recent change in netbase
• bug #558812 dietlibc incorrect license in debian/copyright
• bug #531937 autossh FTBFS on mipsel due to missing -fPIC
• New ones
• bug #563522 acorn-fdisk cleanup patches
• bug #563525 gidentd cleanup patches

Explanations: I did go overboard during the first patching session, but I suppose this is what the NM learning period is for too. The autossh maintainer said thanks and will probably integrate my patches, so I don t need to NMU. I could close the dietlibc bug. The other two didn t look as good, I had to separate the fix for the RC bug (and other required fixes, such as ftp-master rejects there were none though) and my other fixes; I submit the former as NMU diffs again and pointed Zack to the .dsc files, and opened the aforementioned two new bugs with the rest of the diffs, so the proper maintainers can take and apply them. There s questioning if gidentd should be removed (see the PR for more); the acorn-fdisk upstream (arm-fdisk it s called there) is not actively developing but will receive patches; the autossh maintainer said thanks but I didn t yet hear back from upstream. The binutils as intel_mode bug was fixed upstream and in experimental for my case, but I had to reopen things because the variant documented in binutils-current still doesn t work, so others (who use the new, more intel-like, syntax) don t run into it. Luk sent me a request to do more mipsel-FTBFS-due-to-toolchain-bugs workarounds. Will do (but can t promise to do so before the upcoming BSP. Robert Millan incorporated something like manifold-boot into GRUB 2, after I described it to him (the debian-bsd@ people are currently sorting out some heisenbugs with it, though). Now there s three variants (but then, this helps spotting bugs that don t appear in all implementations). sendmail 8.13.4 is out, I wonder when OgreBSD will upgrade I could do it myself again, but this time it s not that urgent. Still waiting for the TLS extension, though

RCBW - #17 Given that my "most blogged" Debian activity since last summer has been RCBW, what else could be my first post of 2010 if not a RCBW update? With further ado, here are this week squashes by yours truly:

• bug #559898 - flowcanvas - fixed in unstable, tag as needed
• bug #562503 - man-db - downgrading severity (RC-ness was in zlib, which is now fixed)
• bug #541610 - docbook2odf - switch dep away from (now gone) libxml-sablot-perl
• bug #528088 - ttf-aenigma - fonts are actually free, as detailed in debian/copyright
• bug #544113 - tiger - remove dep on essential package (bonus: misc deps/debhelper fixes)
• bug #561466 - ttf-beteckna - rebuild against fixed defoma (thanks Julien Cristau who spotted a wrong fix of mine)
• bug #561470, bug #549987 - halevt - add missing dep on policykit (bonus: QA upload with misc fixes)

No particular remarks, but a long overdue tip of the week: the turmzimmer BTS interface is a great tool for bug squashing. Still, it has a issue with comments which can slow down some activities, but which you can help getting better! First of all you should know that comments are per-package and not per-bug (which might not be obvious, especially since often packages listed on the page have just one bug per-package). That means that you should generally mention the bug you are referring to when you post comments, unless the comments are really package-specific. Additionally, old comments are persistent, so you might get baffled by old comments that "invalidate" current issues. So, if you notice a comment that predates the actual bug numbers, please remove the comment by editing it and stating "no comment" in the form. Ah, happy new year (in case you care about sharp, calendar-based time partitions).