Someone on Hacker News asks about the future of programming languages, and I realized that it's a pretty interesting topic. Here's my take on it: Programming languages are about people, and the compromises they may or may not make in order to communicate their intentions to computers. The technology in question may change, but there will likely always be people involved, and as long as that's true, looking at the problem through the lense of economics provides useful results. Therefore, looking at programming languages pretty much requires that you look at the economics of them:

• Network effects are important, but obviously don't squeeze out smaller languages entirely. I.e. it's good to be able to get libraries, find people to hire, books to read, friends to chat with about problems, etc... This means that future languages will have to seek out a critical mass of users.
• Since the times of Fortran, languages have been getting more efficient in terms of programmer time, because programmer time stays the same or gets more expensive, while computer time keeps getting cheaper, and language implementors keep getting better at making things fast under the hood. This means that languages of the future are likely to let you do more with less, all else being the same.
• Learning a programming language will continue to be a fairly involved process for most people, meaning that for many, it's more efficient to learn a few languages well and use them for as much as possible, rather than to try and find the 'perfect' language for each problem. This rewards general-purpose languages, compared to niche languages. This also rewards flexible languages that can be used in many different environments.
• Computers are only going to become more and more important, meaning that more people are going to want to develop the skills to work with them. Not all of them will be experts, and many may not know much, but have a vision for how a program could solve a particular problem in a field they are knowledgeable about. This means a low barrier to entry is important, because those novices will pick easier languages, become progressively more competent in them, and thus (network effects) contribute to their diffusion. Case in point: PHP. Future languages should be capable of solving hard problems, but should also make it easy to get started solving simple problems too.
• Working on languages is lots of fun, so even though there aren't necessarily monetary rewards, people will continue to play with and explore new ideas. I don't see there being a limited supply of new languages in the future.
• The costs of switching from established languages will continue to be high, so future languages will still need to interact with "legacy" languages like Cobol, Fortran, C, Java, and so on, that are so widely established in industry that systems written in them will be with us for a long time yet.

I wrote this in a hurry. Have I missed anything? How do these factors apply to languages you see emerging?

Back when Linux kernel 2.6 was released, one of the immediate benefits that I noticed was how beautifully responsive my desktop had suddenly become. As it turned out, Linus figured out that he would create a buzz to accompany kernel 2.6's release by having a default clock rate of 1000Hz. However, the excitement was short-lived and kernel defaults were soon brought back down to a more conservative rate of 250Hz, allegedly because some peripheral chips could not handle such a high frequency bump without producing an increased amount of processing errors. Adding insult to injury, Ubuntu defaults eventually dropped another responsiveness enhancement, kernel preemption, allegedly because the goal was to have a one-size-fits-all kernel shipping with Ubuntu and preemption was detrimental to the kernel performance when the host is used as a server, which was a problem because Ubuntu had somehow decided to shift its focus from the desktop market towards the more lucrative server market. While there is nothing wrong with universally-safe kernel defaults or with a corporate decision to shift a distribution's focus towards more lucrative markets, it nonetheless left me pondering what would be the best way to get a 1000Hz kernel with preemption on my desktops, without constantly having to crank out my own kernel packages. As such, I was wondering if there would be enough traction from desktop users to justify producing such a kernel and to make it available as a post-install option from the Ubuntu repository? PS: I'm already aware that a specialized Ubuntu kernel is available to cater for the needs of audio production, but my understanding is that it has power management disabled, because it can interfere with the real-time operation of MIDI devices, while normal desktop users would definitely want to have power management enabled.

It ain t what you don t know that gets you into trouble. It s what you know for sure that just ain t so
attributed to Mark Twain

There is a lot that I don t know about what goes on in my organization. This isn t only because I can t observe everything, or because it s too complex, or because I make mistakes. These are all true, of course, but they re also obvious. Much more devious is the way the flow of information to me is distorted. It s distorted by me, and by the people around me, whether any of us are aware of it or not. This is most apparent in considering how people feel about their managers: this is why I have a deeply flawed view of what it s really like to work for me. My theory is that power bends information like gravity bends light. The effect is more pronounced with people of greater mass (more authority), and lessened with distance (less direct influence). The more directly you influence someone else s fate, the more it is in their self-interest to be guarded around you. This means that the people closest to you, who you receive the most information from, may have the most difficulty being open with you, especially if it s bad news. It also means that the higher your standing in the corporate hierarchy, the more influence you wield, the more people are affected by this. Pretty scary, right? Some managers respond to this terrifying reality by trying to collect more information. They ll quietly cross-check what people are telling them, asking people in different levels of the organization, routing around managers, hoping to get the real story . This usually backfires, because it signals distrust to the people involved and makes the distortion worse. Another common response is to check in constantly, trying to monitor and control the work as closely as possible (so-called micro-management). This is even worse; not only does it signal distrust, but managers who do this become more personally attached to outcomes, and lose perspective on progress and quality due to information overload, self-enhancement bias, and neglect of managerial work. The more it becomes your work rather than the team s, the harder it is to see it objectively. So what s a better way to respond to this phenomenon? Here s what I try to do:

• Accept it You ll never have certainty about what s happening, so get used to it, and don t let it paralyze you. Learn decision making strategies which cope well with information noise, and allow you to experiment and adapt.
• Admit it Everyone else knows that you have this distortion field around you. If you pretend it isn t there, you ll appear deluded. Acknowledge that you don t know, don t understand, and can t control.
• Trust The more you trust someone, the more they trust you. The more someone trusts you, the more confident they can be in telling you what they think. Be grateful for bad news, and never shoot the messenger.
• Delegate Enable people with a less distorted view of the situation to make local decisions. Don t make people wait for information to propagate through you before acting, unless there is a clear and sufficient benefit to the organization.

I was inspired to think and write about this today after listening to Prof. Robert Sutton s speech at the California Commonwealth Club, which Lindsay Holmwood shared with me.

A few months after starting the NM process, I have just been accepted as a Debian Developer. My account name is simply: julien I have been a Debian user for about 10 years now, and have begun contributing to Debian in 2005. I have then been accepted as a Debian Maintainer in 2007. This post is mainly to thank:

• all my sponsors: Christoph Haas (haas) , Lo c Minier (lool), Free Ekanayaka (freee), Maximiliano Curia (maxy) and Micah Anderson (micah),
• my advocate: Matthijs M hlman (matthijs)
• my AM (who actually make it happen in a really short time frame, thanks a lot to him): Xavier Oswald (xoswald)
• all people who helped me during the process, to name a few: Christoph Berg (myon), Enrio Zini (enrico), Peter Palfrader (weasel)

Also thanks to all people who have already sent their congratulations, it makes me very proud!

Now that we have KMS, it happens things go bad enough that when X goes down, one can no longer access any console to see what happened. Mainly, one can distinguish between two cases.

• The good one: the machine is still accessible over the network. Unfortunately, that requires having a spare machine to ssh into the first machine, but that means one can run dmesg, look into X logs, possibly run X inside gdb and see where it breaks (because glibc s backtrace isn t exactly an excellent tool to get the idea of what s going on and that s the tool used in X to print a backtrace in the log through a signal handler).
• The bad one: the machine is no longer accessible over the network. Likely, the kernel is in such a bad shape that one is never going to know what happened. Usually, writing logs to disc didn t happen, so logs won t magically show up at next reboot.

I m going to discuss the second case. There s a nice tool in the kernel which makes it possible to send kernel logs over the network. It s called netconsole. As far as limitations are concerned, one shall note that it s UDP only, and over Ethernet (in other words: no wireless). The good news is that it can usually make the last crucial lines available. Let s call the crashy machine a patient and the logging machine a doctor. One should keep in mind that if something goes wrong while configuring the netconsole module, it can be unloaded at anytime through:

sudo modprobe -r netconsole

Easy case: on a local network Here s an example: Patient s IP is 192.168.0.1, doctor's IP is 192.168.0.2. Doctor setup What one needs on the receiving side: only netcat. A tiny warning, there are several implementations. Here s the appropriate syntax:

# netcat-traditional:
nc -l -u -p 6666   tee ~/netconsole.log
# netcat-openbsd:
nc -l -u 6666   tee ~/netconsole.log

The nc command is handled through the alternatives system, one can use update-alternative --config nc to pick the appropriate one if several netcat-* packages are installed. To list the current one, an easy way is readlink -f $(which nc). Using tee means that incoming messages are going to be printed, both to the standard output and to the specified file. Running as non-privileged user is sufficient. Patient setup Now, to have the patient send stuff to the doctor, a simple modprobe is needed:

sudo modprobe netconsole netconsole=@/,6666@192.168.0.2/

What happens here? One requests the netconsole module to be loaded, and one specifies the parameters. Details can be read in the Linux kernel documentation (Documentation/networking/netconsole.txt), but concentrating on the points of interest here:

• 192.168.0.2: The doctor s IP.
• 6666: The UDP port to which packets are sent. 6666 is the default and can be omitted.

That s all! On the doctor side, one should see something along those lines:

[2920549.188090] console [netcon0] enabled
[2920549.188102] netconsole: network logging started

Slightly harder case: over internet Because one might not have a second machine handy, it s also possible to go through a router and send stuff across the internet. Here s an example: Patient s IP is 192.168.0.1, connecting to internet through a router, which IP is 192.168.0.254. The doctor, available over the internet, is 192.0.32.10. Doctor setup Exactly the same as in the previous case. The main issue one can run into is firewalls at this point. That s why one may want to switch from the default 6666 port to another one which wouldn t be filtered. One can think of 53 (DNS), but that means running nc as root since it s a privileged port (below 1024). Patient setup Routing is also possible, but that requires an extra parameter: the MAC address of the router. To obtain it, one can use the arp command:

/usr/sbin/arp 192.168.0.254

Supposing it returned the 01:02:03:04:05:06 address, loading the module becomes:

sudo modprobe netconsole netconsole=@/,6666@192.0.32.10/01:02:03:04:05:06

Now, if you re running into firewall-related issues, you can change the source for the UDP packets. The default is 6665, but assuming you want to send from an unfiltered 1234 port, that becomes:

sudo modprobe netconsole netconsole=1234@/,6666@192.0.32.10/01:02:03:04:05:06

Hello World. I am very pleased to announce apt-offline, version 1.0. This release adds a Graphical User Interace to apt-offline. Big thanks to Abhishek Mishra and Manish Sinha who did all the development work to make this GUI happen. Help: I was wondering if there is a logo for APT that I could use in the big blank space on the main window. Apart from the GUI, there are a bunch of bug fixes in this release (which have already been made available for the Squeeze release also). I look forward to your feedback and comments on the GUI front. Note: The GUI in its current form is basic and does not provide all the features that are available in apt-offline.

Last week I was on my first Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N), I wanted to attended this summit for couple of reasons: 1. Developer, I m part of Debian Java, working on Eclipse IDE, and as you re developing Debian, you re automatically developing Ubuntu, no? 2. DebConf11 main organizer, I really wanted to see how it s all done on corporate level, for instance we re going with hotels instead of student dorms and so on. 3. Migration to Linux infrastructure, make contacts and have some talks on this topic, because after DebConf11 in Bosnia a lot of institution will most probably open doors to open solutions such as Linux. I went to this summit without any expectations or plans, just said I ll play it by ear. This years UDS was held in Orlando, Florida before Orlando I was planning to stay in NYC for couple of days, therefor my whole plan was to get to NYC, then Orlando then head back home I NYC I spent couple of days here with my cousins and friends, as always NYC never fails to surprise me, and I ll always stop by even if it s only for couple of days I wanted to meet up with couple of Debian people as well, but unfortunately my schedule was too tight so Caribe Royale, Orlando Please note that this whole trip was crazy (in a good way) starting from Sarajevo; on my flight from NYC to Orlando I see a guy that s sitting in front of me is wearing Canonical Landscape tshirt, I approach him and it turns he was Jamu Kakar working on Landscape. Since my luggage was late we had conversations from Debian over Ubuntu to Java to everything pretty much. While we were still at the airport, we bump into two more people going to UDS. As we got to hotel, same moment we walked out of cab there he was Jorge Castro, was he there just to smoke a cigarette or whatever doesn t even matter, what matters is that even before walking into hotel building I knew where reception, my tower and bar was, everything I needed to know at that moment Hotel where everything was held was Caribe Royale and even though I looked at their website I thought there was no way it s all going to be that nice, to my delight it was exact replica. Place is All-Suite Hotel and Convention Center , which meant that both accomodation, venue and everything else was in one place which is 15 minutes later after I checked in, I was at a bar talking to Jim Baker about Java, Jython and Python, exact things I wanted to talk about at that given moment. What I said in these last couple of paragraphs sounds pretty cool eh? Well to me this whole UDS was just like this, everybody was so accessible and open for discussion, from Jono Bacon walking around offering candy to UDS reception staff Michelle, Marianna and others who were always there whether you had a complaint, problem or a praise. I really should stop mentioning names, because I ll forget somebody, and since it s just not fair because I had a feeling everybody was just there for you, whatever it was you needed. Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-N) Ubuntu, Debian, DebConf, differences? Even though I said I ll play it by ear, from very beginning I thought I d be complete outsider, being part of Debian and all. Quite contrary, I was everything but outsider, and even more there was plenty of Debian people there, including current DPL Stefano Zacchiroli, Colin Watson, Riku Voipio just to name few. There was also a Debian Healt Check plenary. But overall, there are differences between DebConf and UDS. One of the things is that you can attend UDS remotely I m not sure how much is this doable on DebConf, but then again vast differences are that UDS is filled with BOF s (as we would call it in Debian) meetings of different teams, I attended a lot of these, and most of them end with some kind of conclusion. While each day there was (only?) an hour of lectures on various topics, which on DebConf we would characterize maybe even as speed talks . However, everything was high paced, and it all ended up on You think that s a problem? How do you think we could solve it? . I had a feeling even if I didn t say something out loud that someone would hear me and approach me to discuss it. Everything was straight forward, all in goal to resolve certain issue or a problem, which I absolutely loved. Fun It wasn t all work, even though Orlando doesn t seem to be my kind of city from what I saw, it s way too magical for my taste There was a lot of places where you could go to enjoy yourself. Good people at Canonical even offered me free ticket to Disney World, there was a lot of destinations to visit and transpiration was also organized by Canonical. Unfortunately I missed the notorious UDS party on Friday because I had to head home early, but possibly I ll make it next year Even though, hotel was that great and to be honest you didn t have to leave to look for party. My favorite was Universal City Walk, one night I decided to go to see Blue Man Group, best part of it was that I got pulled up on stage by one of the members and was part of one of the acts! This is definitely something everyone should see during his life, one moment you re laughing like a lunatic, while other moment you re just having goose bumps from the performance itself. Amazing stuff. After all I wrote here along with the pictures, is there even anything else I need to say? I believe that even if I didn t play it by ear, this whole trip would exceed all my expectations in every possible sense. Because that s really what happened, those three reasons I was going to UDS for? Far more happened than that. All I can say in the end is that I ll move closer to having a part in Ubuntu development, and yea, I ll try to be regular on UDS from now on See you in Budapest? If all these photos weren t enough, you can find official group photo as well as personal set of photos can be found on: UDS-N photos by 2010 Sean Sosik-Hamor

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu / Skolelinux DVD, which is supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu working using this DVD. The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created a patch for debian-cd in BTS report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space. A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that those needing these applications are few and can get them from the Debian archive. Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages were using most space. A few large packages are well know; openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB. The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package. I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the free X driver should work. With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the DVD more useful again.

Tomorrow I won't have to deal with it getting dark at a soul-crushing 5:30 pm. Nor will I have to wake up blearily an hour early in the spring. Instead I will be enjoying my new, custom time zone. It's "JEST", for "Joey's Eastern (non)Standard Time", and in JEST, there is no spring forward or fall back stress. The folly of daylight savings time (Ben Franlin's best prank ever) really becomes apparent when you have solar power. It's bad enough that the sun is setting at 6:30 without compounding that by an hour. By keeping my clock set so the sun sets in midwinter at 6 pm, I will maximise what little light there is, and minimise time spent using batteries in the dark. Of course, it helps that I'm my own boss, and that most of the people I work with are probably not in a nearby timezone anyway, and that most things are done asynchronously. Since JEST is an hour ahead of local time here in the winter, I will, at worst, tend to be running early. So I only have to change my clocks one time -- and by "change", I mean create a custom timezone in Linux. Here's how to do that.

1. Make a custom timezone file. The standard one for North America is a bewildering 3000 lines of special cases, conflicting legistlation, and historical weirdness, but I only need one: echo "Zone JEST -4:00 - JEST" > JEST.zone
2. Compile and install it to somewhere; I put it in ~/.zoneinfo zic JEST.zone -d ~/.zoneinfo
3. Set TZ to use it. Also TZDIR if it's not in the system directory. export TZDIR=~/.zoneinfo TZ=JEST

Update: Turns out it was easier than I thought, just setting TZ=FOO+4 will make date display a timezone "FOO" that is 4 hours behind GMT. So all I need is to set TZ=JEST+4 Result:

date: Sat Oct 30 21:43:39 JEST 2010
date -R: Sat, 30 Oct 2010 21:43:39 -0400

Previously:

• daylight savings time idiocy
• DST: no power saved
• daylight savings crime
• fall back day

In the comments of the article explaining how to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package, I got asked if it was possible to apply a patch only in some distribution. And indeed it is. The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists. So what s the best way to use this? Debian should always provide debian/patches/series, they are supposed to provide the default set of patches to use. Any derivative cooperating with Debian can maintain their own series files within the common VCS repository used for package maintenance. They can drop Debian-specific patches (say branding patches for example), and they can add their own on top of the remaining Debian patches. It s worth noting that it s the job of the maintainers to keep both series files in sync when needed. dpkg-source offers no way to have stacked series files (or dependencies between them). If you want to use quilt to edit an alternate series file, you can temporarily set the QUILT_SERIES environment variable to vendor.series . Just make sure to start from a clean state, i.e. no patches applied. Otherwise quilt will be confused by the sudden mismatch between the series file and its internal data (stored in the .pc directory).

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My fellow Republicans and I got a nice early Diwali present on Tuesday. ~65 seats in the House ~6 in the senate, ~18 governorships and control of ~20 state legislatures. (Some races haven't been formally called yet.) A few disappointments though. no majority in the Senate and Harry Reid and Barney Frank were not defeated. Still overall its an election to celebrate. Here are a few thoughts. The Election System Is An Embarassment Once again there are several races where the outcome is in doubt because of technical problems with voting. Whatever politics we have, can we agree that it is damn stupid that we still can't get something as simple as counting ballots right? Prediction: The 2012 Republican presidential candidate will come from the Tea Party. While I may be a Republican, I am also a Cosmopolitan East Coast Elitist so the Tea Party didn't move me much. There were a couple of cases (NY and DE atleast) where their candidates were subpar and cost us victory but the best of the new Republicans also came out of this movement. I would rather vote for one of them than Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Gingrich etc. (With the exception of Sarah Palin who is just too polarizing I'm afraid.) The Tea Party itself will subside in a few years as all populist movements do. (Ask the Hope'n'changers.) Young People Are Dumb Part of leftist mythology is the idea that one day "the kids" are going to rise up against the mean old corporate overlords. It ain't going to happen. There was a huge upsurge in first time voters in 2008 but that was because Obama was a novelty act not because they had suddenly discovered the merits of Keynesianism. Now Obama is old and busted so they won't vote anymore. (Not until they have kids and a mortgage sometime in the future.) They'll spend time make cool ironic signs for the Rally to Promote Comedy Central but even the prospect of legalizing pot won't get them to the polling booths in sufficient numbers to defeat the oldies. Why? Because young people are dumb. Prediction: War With Iran If you're President Obama what do you do now? Bipartisanship? Yeah right. Look at what happened to Rep. Cao of Louisiana, the only Republican to vote for Obamacare and one of only two GOP congressmen to lose on Tuesday. Obama actively campaigned for his challenger. Any of the new Republicans who try and compromise with the President will end up under the bus sooner or later as they well know. The President could go full retard with the socialism (progressivism, liberalism whatever. It's all the same.) All his initiatives will be shot down but he can claim to be a martyr to the party of No. (Who will be joined in the Senate by Lieberman and whatever centrist Democrats who are up for reelection in 2012.) But this seems to be the path to a one-term presidency to me. Maybe that's what he wants. He could retire comfortably to the deanship of some Ivy League law school and make a lucrative killing on the rubber chicken circuit. But lets assume he wants to get back in the White House in 2012. One way to get back in touch with the voters is to start getting serious about foreign policy which has either been a joke (Remember the reset button?) a travesty or just copied from the Bush administration. In particular the Obama administration has completely failed in stopping Iran from gaining nuclear technology, sponsoring terrorism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and oppressing its own people. War with Iran would enhance his standing with Conservatives (hey it works for me!) most liberals would go along with it and the extreme Code Pink type loonies can safely be ignored. I say it happens before November 2012.

Today, Zoe is six months old. The last three months certainly feel like they've taken their time, but a lot has happened. Developmentally, she's doing great. She's now in the 70th percentile for height (up from around the 25th percentile), and 31st percentile for weight (up from the 25th percentile). She cut her bottom front teeth a few days ago. Crawling is imminent, I'd say. She can already scoot around in reverse, and by a combination of shuffling and rolling, doesn't seem to be having problems moving around the floor. We started her on solids at five months, and she's taken like a duck to water to pureed pumpkin, sweet potato, beans, zucchini, apple, pear, banana and avocado. Speaking of water, she's also decided she likes to drink water from our glasses whenever she sees us doing it. Hilarity usually ensues, closely followed by a change of outfit. She's sleeping well, only waking up once a night under normal circumstances, and that wake-up is getting later and later. She loves her baths. She usually lets out a series of loud sighs as soon as we put her in the bath. She got her first cold a couple of weeks ago. It coincided with her first day in ad hoc daycare, but Sarah and I were both sick as well, so I think it's more likely that she caught the cold from us than from daycare. She's still battling it, but it hasn't really bothered her all that much. She's just a bit snotty. The NoseFrida has been very handy for dealing with this. She had her six month shots today, and seems to be tolerating them fairly well. Sarah says she hardly even cried when she got them. She continues to be a remarkably happy baby. She always wakes up with a smile, she really only fusses if we keep here away for more than a couple of hours, or haven't fed her on time. Even with this current cold she has, she's still stayed very happy. We feel incredibly lucky to have such a wonderful baby. The next big adventure is to try a babysitter.

About a month ago, at the end of August, I finished a 10-day Vipassana meditation course. This was probably one of the more extreme activities I have ever participated in, and it's well worth a blog post. I found out about the course in a ridiculously trivial way, by following a link in a Reddit comment (I wonder if I could track down that comment...). The website referenced by the comment contained (almost) no new-agey mumbo-jumbo and looked legit in general. I also appreciated the fact that this was a relatively serious and intensive course, which should be enough to form a reasonably founded opinion on meditation in general. When learning sporadically, in small bits, it is hard to say whether the material itself is no good, or you just do not understand it yet and need to study more; I was quite skeptical towards the practice, but wanted to give it fair trial. I was quite impressed that there was a course available in Lithuania, a few hours by train from where I live. Finally, the course was free (by tradition Vipassana is taught without monetary compensation). I went ahead and signed up for a standard introductory 10-day course. Vipassana (also called insight meditation) is a meditation technique allegedly coming back from Gautama Buddha himself (well, all the traditions like to claim that origin...). It has been experiencing a renaissance, partly due to an organization set up by a meditation teacher S. N. Goenka which has founded meditation centers all over the world. The essence of Vipassana is a method of teaching your mind to act instead of merely reacting to outside stimuli such as pain, anger of other people or hardships. The technique provided is to monitor your sensations, watch them with equanimity and suspend any reaction, and slowly it sinks in that all things are temporary and you can choose what to react to and how. That's the basic idea; I don't want to go deep into exposition of Vipassana as there is plenty of information about that (also at the same time the information is almost useless because you have to experience it to really understand it). Instead, I will sure some of the more personal remarks and experiences. The course took place in an cottage near Kretinga, housing around 50 people. The living conditions were absolutely great, and this would have been a true holiday if not for the regime and the rules. The day would start very early, at 4 AM (ending at around 9:30 PM), and we'd do about 12 hours of meditation in total inbetween, with occasional breaks, but the most gruesome part is that no communication at all was allowed with anyone except the manager of the camp (and the teacher during a specified time). That gets to you after a few days, but still, there are people around you, so it's bearable; on the other side, the senses (touch, smell) become very acute. The food was taken care of by volunteers (students who have finished the course), and I could say it was quite good actually. The goal, of course, was to keep the environment from interfering with meditation, and I think it was done very well. The presentation of the actual technique also did not disappoint. Each day a new step would be introduced, with the whole day to practice before moving on. Looking back, the pacing worked well. Every day in the evening there were lectures on theory. They were somewhat informative, but also sometimes annoyingly primitive and verbose. The little mistakes, holes in logic and slight doses of mumbo-jumbo almost drove me nuts by the middle of the course, until I learned not to react to them. Despite the shortcomings of presentation, the simplicity and lucidity of the practice and lightness of theoretical baggage really appealed to me. The whole organisation in general gave the impression of complete transparency, with no strings attached, no financial interests in play and no agitation for further involvement. While there are many meditation techniques, I am happy that I've gone with Vipassana in particular for one reason: Vipassana meditation uses no artificial tools to help you concentrate, such as mantras, visualisations, counting, etc. Such methods make concentration much easier, but they also create a dependence on the methods themselves. I appreciate the purity of Vipassana in this regard. Not everything in the practice is roses though. First, a particular worldview supported by Vipassana is presented as "scientific" and supposedly "the right way to live", and if even if you don't agree, "the truth" of Vipassana will become obvious to you with time. This is a distinctive mark of ideologies. The thing that makes everything break is the reincarnation, which is generally assumed as true, even if it's not shoved down the student's throat. Every rationalization of a world view has a "white lie" (usually related to the concept of eternity somehow) at the core, and in this context reincarnation is it. Given what we know now about the relationship between the mind and the body, reincarnation is absolutely ridiculous and completely untenable, and that breaks all "moral" reasoning for practicing meditation as opposed to doing something else. I'm not the first to bring up this problem, there's plenty of material about it online. The second slippery idea is that the concept of "negative happiness" is central in Vipassana, that is: happiness is defined as lack of suffering. This point is not that unreasonable actually, from personal experience I could indeed call the state of non-suffering happiness, but there is definitely something missing when compared to the state of mind when I'm truly, positively happy. Whether you consider that something important or not, it's definitely there. Third, Vipassana suggests that it is only you who is at fault when your inner state is disturbed; the world affects you as much as you let it, and in order to find happiness you should learn to control the "interface" rather than the outside world, which will usually not behave as you want. This may be correct, but sometimes it could just be easier to fix the world rather than change yourself, and I have the suspicion that it this is much more frequently the case in the modern world compared to the pre-modern environment. (This is one of the points which break when reincarnation is rejected, as with reincarnation you have the whole eternity to fix yourself.) While the complaints are serious, they do not mean complete rejection of Vipassana but rather integration among the various other techniques available. The actual meditation technique is still great for gaining and maintaining mental composure, reducing anxiety and improving well-being. Now, if I could only get used to meditating regularly... If you have the chance, I highly recommend you try out an introductory 10-day course. There is little to lose and a lot to gain. And if you do go ahead, I have two hints. First, do not even think about leaving the course before it's over. Any hardships are temporary and will be overcome quickly. Second, use the time with the teacher, those interactions were very helpful to me. Also, given the "noble silence", talking to someone once in a while will not hurt.

During my recent trip to Massachusetts for CalConnect XIX I passed back via New York, surfing a few nights on the couch at the Washington Cube Garden¹. This was just enough time for my new Davis VantagePro2 to arrive by UPS ground (phew!) causing me much consternation, as the box was about twice as wide as I expected it to be. On opening it I discovered that the reason for the size was the physical dimensions of the rain gauge, leading me to realise that I had actually bought exactly what I wanted: a high quality weather station. Also leading me to wonder how the hell I was going to get it halfway around the world with me the next day. Unfortunately that extra wide carrying case was in no way going to fit inside my suitcase. Fortunately it came with a handle. And those wonderful people at Air New Zealand gave me a Koru Gold upgrade for a 50th birthday present, so it was time to put it to the test... Travelling on the subway out to JFK was it's own little adventure, but I made it out to terminal 5 and wandered around a bit before concluding I needed to be in terminal 7. Once I was in the right place I found the fancy people's check in counter and the nice lady there was only too happy for me to carry it to New Zealand, though she did aver that perhaps the security scanners would be dubious. Not a hitch there though: I guess they're used to letting everything through that's not specifically denied, so weather stations are fine because nobody would be silly enough to even think of doing that... Being Koru Gold really helped at this point though, because it enabled me to queue jump use the priority boarding line when getting onto the plane, and every airline in the US seems to have gone all-out for this "checked baggage costs more" approach, so the planes all fly with empty baggage holds and totally overstuffed overhead lockers. If this progresses I shouldn't wonder that the planes will get so top-heavy they roll over, but through the miracles of priority boarding I was able to commandeer all the locker space I needed before anyone else had even made it past row 40. I confess that I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite such plain sailing getting through LAX. I mean we all know what reputation this delightful little exit port has. In the event it was totally anitclimactic. If it has a handle on it, and it's about the same size and shape as a largish carryon then it's fine. There have been no recorded stabbings with wind vanes anyway - at least on aeroplanes - so clearly they are perfectly safe. Finally back in my country of birth, thinking I was home free, I breathed a sigh of relief transferred my bags and nipped off to the Koru lounge for a much needed shower and change of clothes after I snuck the station through another scanner. By now the handle had broken, so it was looking decidedly more 'box' like and less 'carryon' like, and when I eventually rolled up at the gate with my boarding pass the attendant made a valiant attempt to relieve me of it, but she was too slow and I danced around her and swanned up the gangway to take my seat. I was slow, this time, having missed the first boarding call, and all overhead lockers were crammed full. There was no seat in front of me to put the weather station under. Fortunately a nearby cupboard proved fit for purpose and it was secreted there and we were underway. At this point the guy two seats over said "didn't I see that weather station in New York?". Of course being bright yellow does make it a little conspicuous I guess, and I'm not renowned for my own inconspicuousness myself. So that's how I got my new weather station home, and you can see right away that doing things the easy way would never even occur to me. Possibly this is why I run Linux: there just isn't enough challenge when you run a different operating system. On Windows someone has always written a program for your new weather station, and a Mac user wouldn't be seen dead with it because it's black and beige and comes in a bright yellow box! So now I had to find some code to write. I looked around and very rapidly discovered that some software called vproweather was available, which would happily talk to my weather station and download the data from it, write web pages, stuff it into a MySQL database and so forth. All, obviously, far too easy, so I thought aha! I could convert that to PostgreSQL, and then I would be happy and relax with the thought of a job well done. So I downloaded the code in question an impressive several hundred kb of C code, cranked open a text editor and started to crawl through it and see where I could add the magic pixie dust to make it work with PostgreSQL. But it was not to be. My eyes glazed over or scales fell from them or something, and I realised that this particular edifice was beyond my help. Back to square one. I downloaded the Vantage Serial Protocol docs from the Davis Instruments website did some quick googling and decided I should write a module to talk this protocol. And I should write it in Perl (it was a Thursday, and Perl always seems more sensible on a Thursday, and not because of Douglas Adams, either). I beavered away into the night. Rain threatened, so I raced outside and installed the new weather station on the roof in the hopes that it's magnificent rain collector would collect. I raced back inside and was able to count the first (and so far, only) tip of the bucket. And so I now release upon the world Davis::VantagePro my first perl module. Well, the first one I care to share with the world, anyway. I have stressed it with very little testing, lumbered it with no planning or design whatsoever and so I feel it only fair that I should cast it upon the world with very little thought for it's survival or existential goals.

¹ I seem to recall one night we came up with some fantastic names for Micah & Biella's Washington Square apartment, but I couldn't remember any of the good ones and had to slap a new one on there. I should also mention my stay at the Acetarium in Boston, which was a fabulous few days, but it would pad this blog post needlessly, and I've already done that.

Dato pointed out on my post yesterday that I had omitted to link to the Ikea catalogue. And then it hit me - I am completely failing to monetize this blog! (Sadly, Ikea aren't in a position to give me any kickbacks right now.) Since my money would be spent on innovative Swedish design in any case, I present a new microdonations system: Flattr-pack. I'll add a "Flattr-pack this!" button to everything I write, and then you can send me furniture with one easy click. Unlike other systems, this has the advantage that no one will be taking a 10% cut of your donations. Awesome! Or maybe not. For those who don't know what I'm on about, Flattr is a website that lets you donate small amounts of money to other websites. It has been proposed to use this site to support free and open source software (FOSS). Now a quick modern anthropology lesson: in a 1998 essay titled "Homesteading the Noosphere", Eric Raymond conjectured that FOSS society is a gift economy; your reputation is proportional to how much you give away. At first sight, microdonations drop neatly into this system; after all, the users are giving money away, right? And yet somehow, I don't think those users are gaining much in terms of reputation. Not in the same way as if they reported bugs, say; joined a localization team; or even just turned up to conferences and volunteered to sit on the front desk. Both types of activity could be described as "donations" - but in one case, the donation benefits the whole community around the project, and in the other it goes to just a few top developers. It's a plain old exchange economy in disguise. I do hope that those users are not dissuaded from making the more generous donations just because it's more convenient to whip out a credit card. That would not be in their long-term interests, or those of the community as a whole. I fear this scheme could also incentivize some oddly inefficient behaviour; writing blog entries purely for their donation potential, say, or even content-free search-engine optimization posts. Speaking entirely personally, I do not plan to join in.

I recently added a solid-state drive to my desktop computer to take advantage of the performance boost rumored to come with these drives. For reliability reasons, I've always tried to use software RAID1 to avoid having to reinstall my machine from backups should a hard drive fail. While this strategy is fairly cheap with regular hard drives, it's not really workable with SSD drives which are still an order of magnitude more expensive.

The strategy I settled on is this one:

• continue to have all partitions (/, /home and /data) on my RAID1 hard drives,
• put another copy of the root partition (/) on the SSD drive, and
• leave my /tmp and swap partitions in RAID0 arrays on my rotational hard drives to reduce the number of writes on the SSD.

This setup has the benefit of using a very small SSD to speed up the main partition while keeping all important data on the larger mirrored drives.

Resetting the SSDThe first thing I did, given that I purchased a second-hand drive, was to completely erase the drive and mark all sectors as empty using an ATA secure erase. Because SSDs have a tendency to get slower as data is added to them, it is necessary to clear the drive in a way that will let the controller know that every byte is now free to be used again.

There is a lot of advice on the web on how to do this and many tutorials refer to an old piece of software called Secure Erase. There is a much better solution on Linux: issuing the commands directly using hdparm.

Partitioning the SSDOnce the drive is empty, it's time to create partitions on it. I'm not sure how important it is to align the partitions to the SSD erase block size on newer drives, but I decided to follow Ted Ts'o's instructions anyways.

Another thing I did is leave 20% of the drive unpartitioned. I've often read that SSDs are faster the more free space they have so I figured that limiting myself to 80% of the drive should help the drive maintain its peak performance over time. In fact, I've heard that extra unused unpartitionable space is one of the main differences between the value and extreme series of Intel SSDs. I'd love to see an official confirmation of this from Intel of course!

Keeping the RAID1 array in sync with the SSDOnce I added the solid-state drive to my computer and copied my root partition on it, I adjusted my fstab and grub settings to boot from that drive. I also setup the following cron job (running twice daily) to keep a copy of my root partition on the old RAID1 drives (mounted on /mnt):

nice ionice -c3 rsync -aHx --delete --exclude=/proc/* --exclude=/sys/* --exclude=/tmp/* --exclude=/home/* --exclude=/mnt/* --exclude=/lost+found/* --exclude=/data/* /* /mnt/

Tuning the SSDFinally, after reading this excellent LWN article, I decided to tune the SSD drive (/dev/sda) by adjusting three things:

• Add the discard mount option (also know as ATA TRIM and introduced in the 2.6.33 Linux kernel) to the root partition in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sda1  /  ext4  discard,errors=remount-ro,noatime  0  1



• Use the noop IO scheduler by adding these lines to /etc/rc.local:

echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
echo 1 > /sys/block/sda/queue/iosched/fifo_batch



• Turn off entropy gathering (for kernels 2.6.36 or later) by adding this line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 0 > /sys/block/sda/queue/add_random

Is there anything else I should be doing to make sure I get the most out of my SSD?

Last night, I finally got my temperature sensors going, including a nice and shiny munin plugin giving me pretty graphs. So far, I only have a sensor in the loft, but I'll spend some days putting sensors in the rest of the house as well. Robert McQueen asked me on twitter how this all was set up, so I figured I'd blog about it. The sensors I'm using are the DS18B20 ones from Dallas Semiconductor. You can probably buy them from your local electronics supplier, but mine charges around 75 NOK a piece, so I just bought some off Ebay. It takes a bit longer, but I paid about 1/10th the price. For logging, I'm using my NAS, which is just a machine running Debian, an USB to serial adapter and an serial-to-1-wire adapter. Thanks a lot to Martin Bergek for the writeup and the ELFA part numbers for diodes. Since I'm lazy, I ended up just writing a plugin for munin. It uses owfs, which I downloaded from mentors.debian.net. I also offered sponsorship for it, assuming a few small issues are cleaned up, so hopefully you can install using just Debian in the near future. owfs is fairly easy to work with, and the plugin uses the aliased names if you provide aliases, so you can know what the temperature in a given location is, rather than having to remember 64 bit serial numbers.

The AEIOU Foundation The AEIOU Foundation [1] is a support and advocacy organisation for people on the Autism Spectrum, note that they clearly say Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on their About page, some of what they write would be less wrong if it was claimed to apply to only non-verbal Autistics or people claimed to be Low Functioning Autistic (LFA). But in regard to the Autism Spectrum they just don t seem to know much about it, a lot of their web pages seem to be based on the assumption that anyone who is on the Spectrum will be lucky if they can ever live independently. However it seems that most people who can be diagnosed with an ASD have typical social skills by the standards of the IT industry and can get by without any special assistance. The entire site seems to be written about people on the Spectrum by people who know little of their experiences and contains hardly any information that matches what I ve read from various people on the Spectrum (of course there are a wide range of experiences that differ greatly). They have a link to Autism Related Sites which starts with Autism Speaks (the Wikipedia page about Autism Speaks is worth reading note the section about immunisation research which has been repeatedly debunked and the section about legal action against a young autistic blogger). There are many good reasons why Autism Speaks is so widely hated among people on the Spectrum. I think that recommending Autism Speaks is a sign of willful ignorance of almost everything related to Autism. In their page about describing Autism to NTs they say Imagine if you suddenly woke up in a foreign country, did not speak the language and had no way of effectively communicating with the people around you . I ve been diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome by a psychologist who considers that to be the same as High Functioning Autism (HFA) and I ve visited more than a few countries. I find the comparison of the Autistic experience to visiting another country to be so strange that I don t even know where I would begin if I was to comment on where it went wrong. Finally they have a scrolling bar listing their advertisers at the bottom of ever single page on their site. If someone was going to design a web site specifically to annoy people on the Spectrum then such a scrolling banner would be a good place to start. Now they probably do some good things to help families with children on the Spectrum. But their ability to do good is really hindered by the lack of input from people on the spectrum, Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg (leader of the Vermont Chapter of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network) wrote an interesting post about AEIOU and noted that none of the people who run AEIOU are Autistic [2]. The Communication Shutdown Someone got the idea that Neuro-Typical people (NTs) should try and understand what it s like to be on the Spectrum which is a reasonable idea. But they decided that the way to do so is to have them refrain from Internet based socialisation and not use Facebook and Twitter for one day. It seems to me that most people on the Spectrum primarily socialise via the Internet, so ceasing Internet based socialisation is likely to make their experience less like that of people on the Spectrum. I m getting a mental image of a bunch of NTs deciding to go to a night-club for their Internet free evening and then imagining that they are somehow empathising with the experience of people who can never enjoy a night-club. As an aside, a web site which has anything at all related to disabilities shouldn t rely on Flash the Communication Shutdown site totally fails in this regard. No Stereotypes Here has an interesting analysis of this situation, among other things they comment on the irony of having someone ask them to stop using twitter as part of this campaign [3]. One thing that they suggest is for NTs to have a day without any communication at all. Some Suggestions for People who Want to Understand As a communication exercise, try going shopping without speaking, just use hand gestures. For bonus points try doing so in a foreign country where you don t know the language so you need bidirectional non-verbal communication with some luck you can complete a transaction without the shopkeeper realising that you are a foreigner. This won t actually give you much of the Autistic experience, but it s a good exercise in understanding how communication works. Someone who wanted to know the down-side of being on the Spectrum could find a sports bar where most patrons support one team and then enter the bar while wearing a jersey indicating support for an opposing team. I don t recommend doing this because it really wouldn t be fun, but for a quick approximation of the experience it would probably work well. It seems to me that paying $5 to a charity and then boasting about doing so on your Facebook page for a day is an easy thing to do. A harder task would be to spend a day reading about the experiences of the people in question and then giving $5 to a charity that is well regarded by the target group. Another possible way of gaining some understanding would be to have a party where everyone brings their laptop and uses only electronic communication no speaking at all. This is in fact fairly close to what some of the Geekier (possibly Autistic) members of the IT community do.

• [1] http://aeiou.org.au/
• [2] http://www.journeyswithautism.com/2010/10/22/speak-up-on-november-1st/
• [3] http://nostereotypeshere.blogspot.com/2010/10/real-communication-shutdown.html

So, I m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition. I met lots of people, and it was great to be able to finally put faces on names from the french free software community. I gave two talk there, the first one on Debian and Ubuntu (slides), the second one on Debian Quality Assurance (slides), which both went well (I think). I also hacked a bit:

• I added tags and claimed by to UDD Bugs Search.
• I worked on my piuparts replacement (which really needs a sexy name ; I m open to suggestions), processing the results, making some improvements to the script, and filing 16 RC bugs.

If you want to help me, here are some easy tasks that need takers (it s unlikely that I ll be able to tackle them anytime soon):

• One missing thing in UDD Bugs Search is information about the deferred/delayed queue. Unfortunately, the ftp-masters status information is not available in a machine-parseable format.
  • Improve dak code to also export the data in a machine-parseable format (JSON, YAML). I was told the changes are to be done in dak/show_deferred.py.
  • Write the corresponding UDD importer (actually, that s a 30 mins job for me, so I could easily find time to do it if the data was available).
  Update: done!
• Another missing thing is comments (as on bts.turzimmer.net). I don t really have good ideas about how to implement them, so if you want to tackle that with your own idea, go ahead. (It s probably easy to setup a copy of bugs.cgi on alioth if you are not a DD). The CGI is in Ruby.
• Help me process the logs of my piuparts replacement, and file the bugs. I don t have any good scripts to automate bug filings yet. You need a good understanding of packages dependencies and maintainers scripts, but it s a good way to learn, too. (I would need to regenerate the full results first, so talk to me if you are interested)

One of the other things I d like to do is discuss ways to improve the synchronization of UDD (currently, it s synchronized at arbitrary times, while we could sync Sources+Packages just after dinstall, for example).