We've got a walk-in wardrobe in the master bedroom of our new place, and the existing fittings were pretty crappy, so as part of the repaint, I ripped out the old stuff, and we bought some new elfa stuff from The Container Store. We did the initial design a couple of weekends ago, and went back today to actually buy the stuff. The whole process is pretty slick. You rock up with your measurements of the space, and a designer fiddles around with some special CAD software and does up a design for you, and that spits out a pick list of all of the bits you need, as well as what needs to be cut to custom lengths. A couple of hours later, you come back, and they wheel out a cart load of bits and pieces, you put it in your car and head home to put it all together. I was initially a bit worried about the assembly, but it's even easier than IKEA. You get tailored instructions for your design, and the only point at which it anchors to the wall is at the top, and then everything hangs from there, so it's pretty hard to screw it up, and it's all adjustable. Added bonus: in an earthquake, it moves with the tremors instead of toppling over or ripping itself out of the wall. I'm very impressed by the product, and absolutely love the result. It only took us a couple of hours tonight to slap everything together.

I m unaware of any free tool to perform OCR on a PDF and embed the resulting data in the PDF itself so it is text-searchable. If anyone knows of one, let me know. In the meantime, I use Acrobat Professional for this essential functionality. High resolution PDFs produced by my scanner (HP Officejet Pro L7700) usually give the following error when I try to perform Acrobat OCR: This page is larger than the maximum page size of 45 inches by 45 inches. Surprisingly, there doesn t seem to be any way to resize the page size of a PDF within Acrobat. It s possible to print to a new PDF of the correct size, but this operation cannot easily be batched. If I apply the crop tool to resize the page in Acrobat, I get this error: Page size may not be reduced. Many report these issues in Adobe s forums. The most common responses suggest reconfiguring the scanner or buying a new one. I found nothing quick and easy after some googling for a simple ghostscript recipe to perform the batch pre-processing necessary to allow Acrobat to do the OCR. It s not hard to do, just a bit of a trial-and-error pain to get the right switches. For posterity, then, here is a simple command-line to make this happen (here under Windows, but could obviously easily be adapted for any other platform). First, download the latest ghostscript for your platform (at this time, 8.64 for Windows). Then: gswin32c -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=OUTPUT.pdf -dPDFFitPage INPUT.pdf And a simple inelegant script to batch process (again, under Windows/cygwin, but easily adaptable). Feel free to make more elegant:

#!/bin/bash
for x in "$@"
do
echo -n Processing $x ...
if [ ! -e "$x" ]
then
echo File $x missing. Exiting.
exit 1
fi
if [ -e gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf ]
then
echo Tempfile gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf exists. Exiting.
exit 1
fi
if ( gswin32c -dQUIET -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sPAPERSIZE=letter -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf -dPDFFitPage "$x" )
then
echo Success.
mv gs_shrink_to_letter.pdf "$x"
else
echo Error occurred, exiting.
exit $?
fi
done

After converting your PDFs as above, you can then apply Acrobat batch OCR without a hitch.

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets "Polic as bicicletos". Cops on bikes. I don't know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read:

January 18, 1910 Good results of using bicycles for surveillance As we have come to know, the service the first-class policemen are doing on bike, mainly during night time, has yielded great results, as the street policemen often fell asleep and woke up upon hearing a horse approaching, which does not happen anymore because the first-class policemen make much quicker rounds, and before the street policemen even think of it, their superior is standing in front of them. It also seems that robberies, so frequent during the nights, have ceased because the burglars, hastily breaking the locks, are caught by the bike-riding policemen, given the machines barely make any noise, and besides, they cannot run away because they are chased with no effort.

Quodlibet is a GTK+ audio library manager / player. In Debian, it makes up four binary packages: quodlibet, quodlibet-ext, exfalso, and quodlibet-plugins. It's big/popular enough to get a few bugs filed against it and for people to yell when things break, but not so big as to be overwhelming. Since the previous comaintainer has been inactive for some time, I've been thinking that it might be nice to have a comaintainer again. During my academic term at MIT or if I'm on vacation, I don't get to things as quickly as I should. The package has also gone through a period of inactive Debian maintainers and a period of inactive upstream maintainers, so it's accumulated a fair number of ignored bugs in the BTS. And in general, having others to fall back on is a good thing, as long as it doesn't lead to no one taking responsibility. So, here's a deal: I want a comaintainer. There's a catch, though: this person doesn't need to be already involved in Debian. In fact, I'd prefer it if she weren't. If you have a good grasp on the English language, enthusiasm for Debian, and a willingness to learn some technical skills, contact me, preferably via email, and let me know who you are. Quodlibet is written in python, but I'm explicitly not saying that you need to know python in order to help out. You'll gain the benefit of having someone willing to answer your questions and direct your efforts and an automatic sponsor for uploads you prepare. I can't say I have a ton of time to put into mentoring someone, but I'm willing to put in some, so hopefully such an arrangement will turn out well for all parties involved: you, me, upstream, and Debian.

In a comment on my post about (relatively) Cheap Net Access in Australia [1] sin from Romania said Somebody needs to whack the aussie ISP in the head with a cluebat. The prices that you pay are insane . In Eastern Europe you have optic fibers from Germany and other western European countries that carry vast amounts of data. As the demand for capacity increases it s not THAT difficult to lay more fibers. You also have competition between different companies that lay fiber. To get data to Australia you must lay cables under the sea, this is expensive and can t be done quickly. Therefore all international data transfers are expensive to cover the expense of laying the cables. I don t think that we have any real competition in the market for International connectivity from Australia either. Now the links between Europe and the US aren t cheap either, but I believe that there are economies of scale (as well as shorter distances) that make them significantly cheaper than the links to Australia. Also a good portion of the traffic that you generate as a customer of a European ISP will stay within Europe as there are heaps of good sites in Europe. The number of people living in Europe who speak English as their first language is more than twice that of Australia. The number of Europeans who communicate in English almost as fluently as the native speakers (such as about half the population of the Netherlands) is also quite significant. I expect that the amount of English-language material on the net that is published from the EU is more than three times greater than the quantity published from Australia. People who speak languages that have a more limited geographic spread (IE anything other than English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) will have a higher portion of local traffic which is therefore cheaper for their ISP. So based on the relative population sizes we should expect to have Australians making a higher portion of their Internet bandwidth be expensive international data transfers than that of Europeans. Then of course there is the issue of server costs. Running servers in Australia is horribly expensive, while user access to the net is merely annoyingly expensive, the costs of hosting servers are significant and usually the offers have slower hardware and slower transfers (particularly to the important US and EU markets). My blog is hosted in Germany because the company that was offering me free hosting in Australia encouraged me to host it elsewhere due to the price. Also hosting in Germany gives me slightly lower ping times to the US and significantly lower ping times to Europe. As about half the readers of my blog are based in the US, a significant quantity of the readers are based in the EU, and Australia only contains a small portion of the readers the overall experience for readers of my blog is improved by having it hosted outside Australia. It would be better to have it hosted in the US (where most of my readers are located) but I was offered free hosting in the EU. It would be nice if there was a cheap and easy way of getting a mirror of my blog running in Australia with Geo-DNS so that people using Australian IP addresses would get a local server. Putting the static images on an Australian server would be trivial, setting up Geo-DNs would be painful and probably increase reliability issues later on but isn t insurmountable (I have root on both DNS servers). The Debian blog gives some basic information on how to setup GeoDNS [2]. Then I would need to set up a MySQL slave for Wordpress data and modify Wordpress to send it s writes to the master server which is probably impossible for me unless someone else has already written a Wordpress plugin for this, I m really not good at PHP programming. Another possibility would be one of the Wordpress cache plugins that maintain static files to avoid needless database lookups. Until/unless I do such things, every Australian reader of my web site (and those of my friends who do similar things to me regarding hosting) will slightly tilt the balance of Internet transfers in favor of expensive data from foreign servers instead of cheap content from local servers. Sometimes it just sucks to live on an island.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/01/15/cheap-net-access-australia/
• [2] http://dsa.debian.org/dsablog/2009/06/Setting_up_GeoDNS_for_security.debian.org/

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we ve been very interested in it. OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools. At the same time we ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions Now that this works, we ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn hmmm well, we ll see. Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link. Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually. Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.

Two weeks ago I filed #563195, which reads:

the current maintainer welcomed me into the usplash maintainance team, because they are busy with other stuff. Unfortunatly, I'm too busy to give usplash the attention it needs as well.

So I still plan to spend some work on usplash, but I definitly also need help, thus I'm filing this bug.

My basic idea is to upload to experimental based on the upstream version ASAP and frequently, and then upload to unstable once it works ;-)

If you are interested and able to jump in, please reply to this bug.

That's all still the case. The area where help is most welcome atm is to actually make the latest upstream version work without upstart again, as far as I could see on a quick look, upstream has removed support for other initsystems... once we have a working package again, attacking the bugs in the BTS is next.

RC squashing news In the last two weeks I didn't progress as usual with RC bug squashing, even if I've some squashes to share:

• bug #545235, bug #560502 - k3d - add missing #include for gcc 4.4 (patch from Ubuntu)
• bug #552791 - acorn-fdisk - fix debian/copyright (sponsored NMU for my NM Thorsten Glaser)
• bug #527371 - qemu-kvm - remove extra stuff (fix FTBFS when built twice in a row)

The reason for my under-activity are that for a week I'd relatively scarce network connectivity, which is a badly needed good for RCBW. Then, this week, I got swamped by various tasks at the university (including co-authoring a paper with Lucas, more on this (hopefully) in the future). My residual RCBW time has been devoted to write a page about RCBW where I've tried to summarize my initial motivations and the main points of the initiative, which I consider established by the first 18 weeks of activity. Starting from next week I'll be back with daily squashes. In the week-end ... drum roll ... I'll be attending the BSP in M nchengladbach, hosted by Credativ; I'll personally be kindly hosted by bzed which I thank already for that and for the BSP organization. See you there (!?)

It has been quite some time since my last post. I have been involved in quite a few things and the last part of 2009 which left no time for anything else. At the begining of 2010, just to set things on a good tone from the new year, I went on a snowboarding vacation to Austria to Kitzb hel.

Presidential campaign and pure irrationality in Romania

I got involved in Remus Cernea's presidential campaign, which was quite a success, considering the media blockade he was subject to. Unfortunately, Romanians seem to more and more indoctrinated, idiotic and gullible, probably thanks to newer generations that come through public schools after 12 years of religious indctrination and media promoting stupidity, non-values, ignorance and so on.

The more I live in this country, the more I realize how I don't feel like fitting in, because I refuse to be a mindless sheep, a moron, listening to anything the news at 5 say (those living in Romania know what I mean). I obstinately form my own ideas and question everything.

Significant event in my life

In September 2009 a life-turning event took place in my life - don't worry, is nothing bad, is pure good - and my eyes opened entirely. I have bacame a sponge trying to know more and more and this has helped me see the world with new eyes, from a new perspective, without lies or preconceptions.

Now I am thingking freely.


I am sorry for not going into details, but I have my reasons. Those who have the eyes and brains to understand what I am talking about, surely have understood by now what has happened to me ;-) .

Snowboarding vacation

At the begining of this year I went with my wife and some friends to Austria for a vacation. Kitzb hel's slopes and conditions were very good (bad points were only due to a couple of areas where snowboarders had to open at least one binding).

<iframe frameborder="0" height="350" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://www.openstreetmap.org/export/embed.html?bbox=12.2575,47.3556,12.5092,47.5304&amp;layer=mapnik" style="border: 1px solid black" width="425"></iframe>
View Larger Map

Weather was good and snow was icy only late in the afternoon. I was quite suprised to see stores close at 6pm, but overall, it was a well deserved vacation and I enjoyed it very much. My wife's skills on the board got better, although the third day some beginner skyer broke one of the bindings of my wife's snowboard and she had to use a rental instead. The rental was a quite new Burton board and Otilia got used to it and liked to the extent that we decided the next board we buy (for either of us) will be a Burton.

Did it worth it to drive 1500 km (roughly 1000 miles for the metric system challenged people :-P) for this vacation? Definitely! Did I enjoy the drive? Well, let's just say that the 950km from Kitzb hel to the Romanian border were made in approximately the same time it took us to make the last 550km to Bucharest, while 110km of those last were on the A1 "highway".

I'll probably put some photos from my vacation somewhere on the intenets, but don't hold your breath :-P .

Instead of conclusions

I know I promissed a lot of people to take care of some things like Wormux and some kernel bug debugging and I didn't kept my promise. I appologise, yet I don't expect anyone to accept my appologies. I am still unsure when I'll get back to that. I still care for Debian, yet the day has only 24 hours and I have to use at least 7 of those on sleep.

Eclectic paper: SEcure GOogle DOCumentS Two days from an important Google announcement, privacy awareness is steadily increasing in the media. The old mantra that "despotic governments might use your data in unexpected way" sounds more real than last week, and recent movies ring different bells in our heads. That event has prodded me to (finally!) blog about yet another eclectic paper of mine, co-authored with my old friend Gabriele D'Angelo, and which I'm going to present at the forthcoming ACM SAC conference. The paper is titled Content Cloaking: Preserving Privacy with Google Docs and other Web Applications and poses (again) a rather simple question: why should you trust Google to faithfully store your Google Docs data? What if roles in the recent Google-vs-China issue were inverted? The proposed solution (Content Cloaking) then simply implements transparent encryption and decryption in the payload which is sent back and forth between your browser and the Docs backend. Trying to access your Docs data without a decryption layer and the needed key will then just show garbage, for both humans and Google harvesters. Of course you lose something, like full text search which is performed server-side by Google, but at least you're back in charge again: it is you who decides to which extent trading-off your privacy with offered services. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided (and of course is free software!) as an extension for the Firefox browser, but is now out of date wrt Firefox mainline and was not really production ready anyhow (let's say it was master-thesis-implementation-quality ...). Still we, the authors, stand behind the idea even if we don't have the energy to maintain a production-quality implementation. So, Dear LazyWeb, If you are interested in the topic and you've development cycles to spare, please drop me a mail and I'll be happy to point you to all needed details to resurrect the implementation (or create one from scratch, which should be pretty easy and quick if you're familiar with extension development).

A new version of RQuantLib (a package combining the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language) is now out at CRAN and in Debian (where it depends on the 1.0.0 beta of QuantLib that is currently in the NEW queue with its new library version). This RQuantLib release works with either the current release 0.9.9 as well as with the just-released first beta of QuantLib 1.0.0. This versions brings a few cleanups due to minor Rcpp changes (in essence: we now define the macro R_NO_REMAP before including R's headers and this separate non-namespaced functions like error() or length() out into prefixed-versions Rf_error() and Rf_length() which is a good thing). It also adds a number of calendaring and holiday utilities that Khanh just added: tests for weekend, holiday, endOfMonth as well dayCount, date advancement and year fraction functions commonly used in fixed income. Full changelog details, examples and more details about this package are at my RQuantLib page.

At the end, I made it: the book is in pre-order phase!! yayyy

I'm at the end of reviewing chapters, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel :)

Probably I'll be able to sleep more than 4/5 hrs at night and have additional spare time to work on the projects I've neglected in these months

I m developing a huge backlog of things to write about, going back as far as a couple of posts inspired by the Kerberos conference in October. However, those require more effort putting together the post, so I m going to focus on something more recent. Part of running a business even a small business like Painless Security is dealing with the administrative and bookkeeping. The normal solution seems to be Intuit s Quick Books. When I set up the company, I looked into that. However, Intuit s accessibility story starts with give up, and goes down hill from there. Apparently, screen reader vendors have offered to work with Intuit to help them, but have been turned down, or at least that s the strong implication I get from reading blogs from these accessibility vendors. So, I d definitely rather not give Intuit my money. I m also looking for a bit more than the minimum in accounting software. Keeping the books in order enough to pay taxes would be easy. However I want to be able to understand where I m making money; I want to be able to figure out if the fixed price contracts I enter into end up being good ideas. I want to understand how expensive community projects Painless Security gets involved in like Debian and IETF work are both in terms of direct costs and opportunity costs. I want to understand what sorts of work ends up being the most profitable. All of these are fairly typical management questions; solutions to varying degrees are understood. however it means I m actually going to use an accounting product more than just to track my invoices and prepare taxes. I decided to see what the open source world was like in this space. I started with Ledger SMB. Ledger SMB s main claim to fame is that it tries to be better than SQL Ledger. Being better than SQl Ledger is definitely a good thing. It worked well enough to generate invoices and income statements. It nominally had facilities to track the sort of per-project information I m looking for, but the facilities are not near good enough. Also, there were some issues things like the fact that total debits didn t particularly need or tend to sum to total credits got old after a very short while. Also, facilities for correcting mistakes were unfortunate. You could either operate in a mode where you could delete a transaction, or a mode where you reverse transactions. Deleting transactions in practice meant deleting most of a transaction; balances became out of sync and half of the transaction tended to stick around using some interfaces but not other interfaces. Database cleanup was almost always required. In principle, reversals are better. However, there is no facility to indicate that you re not expecting payment on a reversed invoice. The receivables/payables account balance out because of the reversing transaction, but both the reversing and reversed transaction end up becoming over-due. Hey, can you please send me some anti-money to clean this up? The code was dreadful; the goal was to have better abstraction than SQL Ledger. Perhaps that was achieved, but man that leaves a lot to desire. Now, I m playing with Open ERP. It wants to grow up some day to be a competitor to SAP R3. In a way that sounds good, although it does mean there s a high complexity cost. There s a lot of functionality. There s reasonably good separation between view and model (and possibly even controller). The code is often clean, although the random blocks of commented out code with no explanation cause me to cringe. Many aspects of the system seem incredibly well designed; you can approach the system through a web client, graphical client, two different RPC mechanisms, XL and Open Office plugins. However, there s this mix of missing stuff and completely broken that causes me to wonder whether I m going to be sad. First, there appears to be basically no support for the US. All addresses are European format and are hard coded. Each individual report needs to be changed. Recently, I found cases where as best I can tell debits and credits are just reversed. I ve found a case where backing up the database succeeds but generates a zero length file. I almost lost data through that last one. There s a complex set of mechanisms to deal with units-of-measure for products for example, some jobs billed in hours, some are billed in days. However other parts of the code just add quantities. Playing around with this I am reminded again that I really enjoy thinking about these sorts of problems. An interesting ERP project could be fun to work on. for example, I bet handling ERP needs for some cloud-centered company would be a lot of fun. Also, as part of looking at Open ERP, I ve more or less developed the necessary scripts to migrate a simple service company from Ledger SMB to Open ERP. There are limitations of course, but if this would be useful to you, drop me a line.

There s a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of system administrators. Unless you re one, it s probably hard to grasp the full weight of it. This week has been full of reminders for me. This afternoon, shortly after lunch, I got word that people were having trouble with phones. A few minutes of testing showed that calls within our city were working fine, but it was completely impossible to place or receive long-distance calls. A little while later, a local newspaper s website indicated that numerous cities over a multi-county region, all served by the CenturyLink local telephone company, were out of service in this manner. I figure that represents hundreds of square miles, or a patch of rural Kansas roughly the size of Los Angeles. Adding to the problem was the fact that emergency 911 services are accessed via these long-distance lines that were down. For roughly three hours, 911 was completely down across this entire area. What s more, many cellphone towers and Internet access options were also taken down, since they feed from these same lines. This adds up to a situation that could very easily cost lives due to delayed response of emergency medical, fire, or police services. In the end, the problem was traced to a bad controller card on a Titan 5500 owned by AT&T. Now, here s the system administration angle: If you worked for the phone company and had to troubleshoot a problem that you knew had taken down emergency services for thousands of people, what kind of pressure would you be feeling? Would you be able to keep your cool? I m glad that I don t have that kind of job. I also wouldn t like to be the engineer (or, more likely, accountant) that decided that they didn t need any more redundancy to provide good service to the area. Especially considering this is the second time in the last year or two this has happened. But, ironically, yesterday I signed a purchase order for a new Asterisk PBX (corporate phone) server. When selecting a machine for that task, I am always completely conscious of the responsibility on my shoulders: several hundred employees rely on the machine that is ultimately my responsibility to select. Our own access to 911 would be cut if the machine were to go down. I never forget that the correct operation of the systems that our team sets up and deploys could help save someone s life, and that a malfunction could cost the company dearly in terms of revenue, productivity, image or worse. Nearly four years ago, we switched from an analog PBX, with outsourced support, to a digital VOIP system running Asterisk. Note that we use VOIP in-house, but do not use it externally. Anyhow, I can not say that the Asterisk PBX has been 100% perfect; I doubt that this could be honestly said of any PBX of any complexity. I can say, though, that it saved us well over $100,000 AND has proven far more reliable than the system it replaced. Outages are exceptionally rare and brief now. Plus we have internal expertise to fix it, rather than having to wait for a technician to be dispatched from a city 2 hours away to fix anything. I know I don t have the resources to build a perfect PBX that will never go down (if such a thing is even possible), but I take my responsibility regarding a reliable PBX extremely seriously. We used to have a frequent problem: someone would call 911, then hang up. We suspected this was often on accident maybe people hit 9 for an outside line, then misdialed their number. In any case, 911 dispatch would then call our main office, saying they got a hangup. A person or team would then go across our entire campus making sure nobody was in distress that nobody had managed to dial, then passed out, for instance. With Asterisk, I was able to help this situation. Whenever somebody calls 911 now, two emails are generated: the first contains details about the call, such as the extension number that called and the duration of the call. This goes to all people that are likely to receive a callback from 911. It may not always pinpoint the source (as with somebody using a wireless phone), but almost every time will give us a very good idea where the call came from. The second email is a recording of the call, and serves as an additional clue, but goes to fewer people. I am aware that email isn t a perfect medium, but: it let us make a dramatic (albeit imperfect) solution to a problem that very few institutions our size are able to address nearly so well. There s a lot of weight on our shoulders: keeping the accounting system up, the Internet links up, the web store or the sales phone lines, the shipping systems or the document archives up. These things going down can spell deep trouble in many ways. And sometimes the systems we maintain might save a life. Such as this morning, when someone was feeling symptoms of a heart attack, used our phones to call a colleague for help, that person called 911, and an ambulance was dispatched. I know the system worked exactly as it should, because I had two familiar emails from Asterisk in my mailbox this morning when I got to work.

NZZ Folio, the monthly that comes with my newspaper, had this topic in its January edition, sparking a few thoughts about capital punishment. Why am I against capital punishment? Primarily, because no justice system will ever be safe (make no mistakes, know no abuse.) Then there is the fact that life is something special and isn't ours to take away, but on the other hand, we assume that it's ok for us to judge that somebody should be locked in the rest of his life, and I'm not quite sure how big that difference is. Ok, I one thought. Everything else I was going to write was just technical stuff on the execution of death penalty, which I have established I'm against. This engineer's brain can't stop thinking yes but what if ...

The Cherokee web server project is hosting the Cherokee Summit 2010 in Madrid, Spain on May 7th and 8th. The summit will be focused on high-performance and scalable Web technologies. I truly believe this is a major opportunity for hackers, developers and administrators looking for the new alternatives on the Web to bond and share experiences to benefit each other's projects and enterprises, and keep up to date on this field. If you are interested on attending, proceed to the registration site (it's free of charge but seat-limited) and see you there in May!

The DSPAM team have just announced their first official release, one year after the project was taken over by the Community. You can download the sources from the SourceForge project. Unofficial Debian packages are being built right now, but will only be uploaded to my repository after a bit more testing, during the week-end I guess.
They are meant to be uploaded to the official Debian archive once they are considered as ready by the pkg-dspam team. Hopefully, they will be part of Squeeze.

Thanks to Joey Hess for the request to set up tor bridges. I wholeheartedly agree, and recommend the video he points to. I've installed a Tor bridge at home, and recommend others to do so. For the most part, I'm not politically active at the moment - I'm doing a PhD Part-time, and thats consuming all my "spare" time, other than work and family. Just given a blog site, however, one subject strikes me as very important - free speech. Hence the side links to Amnesty International, etc. In Ireland this campaign has a particular focus at the moment - the Repeal of the Blasphemy Law. This law came into effect in Ireland this January. While the government claims that this law will 'never be used', its bad in several ways. Firstly, it promotes the ideas of censorship as a method of hiding social issues, and secondly it may actually be used, as pointed out in : <object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object>Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime from Limerick Blogger on Vimeo. Basically, with Europe-wide arrest warrants, if two European countries have criminal blasphemy laws, then someone may be extradited to face prosecution in another country. While the Irish government says they will never prosecute, they open the possibility of say, Irish citizens being extradited to Greece to safe prosecution for blasphemy. On a wider level, I recommend Index on Censorship. It keeps documenting the cost of censorship around the world, and has been instrumental in campaigning for Libel reform in the UK, which is ncreasingly important for open scientific discussion. Tags censorhip, free-speech, politics

I find myself opening a shell and typing "man ascii" more than I would like. More recently, I've found myself looking (with no success) for a equivalent web page that isn't ugly -- sometimes a browser tab is just more convenient. Yesterday, I decided to stop searching and just write one myself: man ascii. (I was a bit surprised that this domain, and all the variants of it Joker came up with, were available!) I think it gives me everything I got out of ascii(7), but I would love any bug reports.