It seems that despite having a very important work deadline today I am destined to be interrupted every five minutes. Unfortunately I need to concentrate to get this done. And while i managed to get "in the zone" earlier, now I cannot string two words together.

This seems to be a recurring theme recently, my productivity is horribly low because I get interrupted all the time for "can you just" jobs. I turn the phone ringer off and hide my email window and I get called on my mobile and get asked why don't you answer your phone?

Its not so much the time lost to answering the specific query or doing the job but more my context switch time to restore to my previous task becomes huge. Somehow my switching time is absolutely non linear and today it has become so large I have decided to dump state altogether.

Because I know I have to do the school run soon and the interruptions continue I have abandoned the critical task altogether for now in the hope I can get back to it fresh. Do others get this I wonder? or is it a personal fault I should strive to fix? I know I used to be able to deal with this sort of thing with much less trouble, maybe I am getting less flexible as I age?

Fortunately (umm, you know what I mean) the Entropy Key software has some cleanups required which is an easy job and does not matter if I get interrupted so I do have a productive task to complete.

Oh speaking of the entropy key Niel blogged something silly I created the other day. I had a senior moment and filked the children's nursery rhyme "If You're happy and you know it" slapping some guitar chords on it.

It seems I cannot simply leave well enough alone and last Friday night (with the help of Mark Hymers) I made it a whole lot worse. I present to you the score of "If you're happy with your ekey, blog your praise" for piano and guitar. In fact I wrote this out in rosegarden so it can be turned into a midi file etc. all the source files are available. It is released under a CC license so I suppose someone could put the lyrics back to the proper nursery rhyme and use it for something less tacky.

In a comment on my post about Designing Unsafe Cars [1] Noel said If you don t know how to make a surgery, you don t do it. If you don t know how to drive, don t drive. And if you don t know how to use a computer, don t expect anybody fix your disasters, trojans and viruses. Later he advocates using a taxi. Now I agree about surgery apart from corner cases such as medical emergencies in remote places and large-scale disasters. I also agree that it s good to avoid driving if you aren t very good at it (that would be much better than the current fad of sub-standard drivers buying large 4WD vehicles). But I don t think that people who lack computer skills should avoid using computers. When cars were first invented everyone who owned one was either a mechanic or employed one. Driving a car often involved being well out of range of anyone else who might know how to fix it, so either the car owner or their chauffeur had to be able to fix almost any problem. As the car industry evolved the level of mechanical knowledge required to own and operate a car has steadily decreased. I expect that a significant portion of drivers don t know how to top up the oil or radiator water in their car and probably don t know what is the correct pressure for air in their tires. To a large extent I don t think this is a problem, owning a car involves regularly taking it to be serviced where professionals will (or at least should) check every aspect of the car that is likely to fail. If I used my windscreen-washer less frequently I could probably avoid opening the bonnet of the car between scheduled services! When budgeting for car ownership you just have to include regularly spending a few hundred dollars to pay for an expert to find problems and fix them with of course the occasional large expense for when something big breaks. When the computer industry matures I expect that the same practice will occur. Most people will buy computers and plan to spend small amounts of money regularly to pay people to maintain it. Currently most older people seem to plan to have a young relative take care of their PC for them essentially free mechanic services. The quality of such work will vary of course, and poorly designed OSs that are vulnerable to attack may require more support than can be provided for free. Due to deficiencies in city design it is almost essential to drive a car in most parts of the US and Australia as opposed to countries such as the Netherlands where you can survive quite well without ever driving. When a service is essential it has to be usable by people who have little skill in that area. It would be good if driving wasn t necessary, I would be happy if I never drove a car again. The need to use computers however will continue to increase. So we need to make them more available to users and to support users who can t disinfect computers etc. The only skill requirements for using a computer should be the ability to use a keyboard and a mouse! This requires a new industry in supporting PCs. Geek Squad in the US [2] seems to be the organisation that is most known for this. I expect that there will be multiple companies competing for such work in every region in the near future, just as there are currently many companies competing for the business of servicing cars. We need support for free software from such companies. Maybe existing free software companies such as Red Hat and Canonical can get into this business. One advantage of having such companies supporting software is that they would have a strong commercial incentive to avoid having it break unlike proprietary software vendors who have little incentive to do things right. The next issue is the taxi analogy. Will software as a service with Google subsidising our use of their systems [3] take over any significant part of the market? Of course the car analogy breaks down when it comes to privacy, no-one does anything remotely private in a taxi while lots of secret data is stored on a typical home computer. Google is already doing some impressive security development work which will lead towards low maintenance systems [4] as well as protecting the privacy of the users to the extent that you can trust whoever runs the servers. My parents use their computer for reading email, browsing the web, and some basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet work. The mail is on my IMAP server so all I need is to have some way to store their office documents on a server and they will pretty much have a dataless workstation. Moving their collection of photos and videos of their friends and relatives to a server will be a problem, transferring multiple gigabytes of data on a cheap Australian Internet access plan is a problem.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2009/11/24/designing-unsafe-cars/
• [2] http://www.geeksquad.com/
• [3] http://abovethecrowd.com/2009/10/29/google-redefines-disruption-the- less-than-free -business-model/
• [4] http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/security-overview

I m back from Dallas, where I was invited at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Lucid. I spent a great week there ; the event was extremely well organized (by organizing them every 6 months, you are probably able to gather a lot of experience!). Of course, after all I had heard about people hugging each other all the time in the Ubuntu community, I was a bit worried, especially with the flu spreading! But there are lots of fantastic people around Ubuntu, and it was a very nice opportunity to be able to meet them all. Since it was my first UDS (I was at FOSSCAMP in Prague a few years ago, but didn t stay for UDS back then), I was not really sure of what to expect. I was very pleasantly surprised. UDS vs Debconf UDS is very different from Debconf. In Debconf, we do three different kind of things:

• we hack, mostly on our own, in the hacklabs
• during talks, we report on what we have done recently
• during some talks or BOFs, we discuss future (possible) changes

In UDS, the main focus is on the third point: most of the sessions are about discussing what will be implemented for the next release. All of the relevant developers are in the same room to discuss possible problems, and the outcome of each session is usually a detailed plan, with a list of action items. It s a very nice way to ensure that changes are well thought, and allows making large-scale changes in Ubuntu very easily (you don t spend weeks arguing about them on mailing lists). Of course, it s probably also helped by the fact that there s a company behind Ubuntu, with a set of large teams (kernel, foundations, desktop, etc), which helps transfering trust (not everybody feel like they have to participate in each discussion, even when they affect the whole distribution: the team in charge is trusted by the rest of the project). On the other hand (yeah, let s be negative for a while) it doesn t really help spreading information between Ubuntu developers: it s often a bit difficult to get the global view of what is happening inside Ubuntu, especially since lots of things are discussed on IRC. Collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu During the week, I mainly was interested on collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. There s a strong focus on doing the right thing wrt Debian (and also other upstreams). Then, of course, Ubuntu also has an agenda, which sometimes requires moving very fast on some things, or making compromises between technical purity and pragmatism. But the willingness to have common foundations between Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu Lucid will surely benefit both distros. Quality Assurance On the QA front, I am planning to do archive rebuilds for Ubuntu as well (fixing FTBFS is an easy way to start contributing to Ubuntu or Debian, and having those bugs fixed in Lucid would benefit Debian as well, by having patches already prepared). I also had a session with the QA team, where I gave an overview of what we are doing in the Debian QA group, to discuss opportunities for collaboration. The Ubuntu QA team focuses more on testing (with automated or manual testing) and bug triaging than archive quality that part is left to the MOTUs and the release managers. (About MOTUs, I liked how what they do was described as long-tail maintenance, landscape gardening or terraforming. That gives a good idea of what it s about). Ultimate Debian Database On the Ultimate Debian Database front, I did a plenary talk to try to demonstrate how UDD could be useful to Ubuntu as well, and, with Jorge Castro, we examined some metrics of Ubuntu s giving back to Debian. I also talked with the Launchpad team to try to resolve my long standing pretty please provide an export of Ubuntu bugs, so I can easily import them in UDD! issue. Ubuntu and ARM ARM netbooks and smartbooks (mix between netbooks and smartphones) are coming, and Ubuntu is clearly very well positioned to play an important role on that market. There was a whole track about ARM support, with lots of changes that will be done for Lucid. Let s all hope that Ubuntu-powered ARM netbooks win that market, so we don t reproduce the failures of the non-ARM netbooks. Distributed Development James Westby has been working on a set of tools to be able to work on Ubuntu packaging using bzr. The point is not to store the canonical source for Ubuntu packages in bzr (well, at least it s not the plan yet), but to provide a set of branches to make it easier to merge or cherry-pick from Debian. The resulting workflow looks extremely nice, with lots of syntaxic sugar. And even better, he assured me that his code is portable to Git ;)
Using his work, merging Ubuntu-specific changes in a new version of a Debian package basically means pulling from lp:ubuntu/foopkg, merging from lp:debian/sid/foopkg, and you are done!
As a bonus, we (Debian) would get bzr branches with the history of packages (kind of bzr-powered snapshots.debian.org).
James project is not completely ready yet, but should be very soon. It s already basically usable, apparently. Conclusion Ubuntu has clearly gone a very long way since 2004. Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop. With Cloud Computing and now ARM netbooks, Ubuntu has proven to be able to adapt to the current trends and attract a lot of visibility. It is great news for Free Software, but also proposes an interesting challenge to Debian: of course, it s nice that a Debian-based distro is in that position, but will Debian manage to stay relevant, or are we just going to be the technically-pure distro without many users that serves as a package supermarket for Ubuntu?

I recently almost died from a heart attack because after a really horrible crash (don't ask), Debian unstable on my laptop wouldn't boot anymore. The system hung at "Waiting for root filesystem...", and I was in panic mode as I feared I lost all my data (and as usual my backups were waaay too old). At first I was suspecting that something actually got erased or mangled due to the crash, either at the dm-crypt layer, or the LVM layer, or the ext3 filesystem on top of those. After various hours of messing with live CDs, cryptsetup, lvm commands (such as pvscan, pvs, vgchange, vgs, vgck) and finally fsck I still had not managed to successfully boot my laptop. I finally was able to boot by changing the initrd from initrd.img-2.6.30-2-686 to initrd.img-2.6.30-2-686.bak in the GRUB2 menu (at boot-time), at which point it was clear that something was wrong with my current initrd. A bit of debugging and some initrd comparisons revealed the cause: Both, the cryptsetup and lvm2 packages were no longer installed on my laptop, which made all update-initramfs invokations (e.g. upon kernel package updates) create initrds which did not contain the proper dm-crypt and lvm functionality support. Hence, no booting for me. I only noticed because of the crash, as I usually do not reboot the laptop very often (two or three times per year maybe). Now, as to why those packages were removed I have absolutely no idea. I did not remove them knowingly, so I suspect some dist-upgrade did it and I didn't notice (but I do carefully check which packages dist-upgrade tries to remove, usually)...

The LA Times has an interesting article about problems with Toyota and Lexus cars [1]. Basically there are problems where the cars have uncontrolled acceleration (there seems to be some dispute about whether it is due to engine management or the floor mat catching the accelerator pedal). When that happens the brakes don t work (due to the vacuum power-assistance for brakes going away when the engine is at full power) and a terrible crash seems inevitable. There are suggestions that the driver should shift the car to neutral and discussion about how the Toyota gear selection makes that difficult. Some years ago I was driving an automatic car on a freeway at 100Km/h and the engine stalled (due to a problem with the LPG system). I had become used to never touching the gear lever while driving so the possibility of moving the gear lever one notch to neutral didn t occur to me. With a dead engine in gear the car slowed rapidly which is quite dangerous when surrounded by 100Km/h traffic. Fortunately I was able to swerve into the emergency lane (across one lane of active traffic) before the car slowed much. That was in a relatively controlled environment with a gear shift mechanism that is a lot simpler than that which is common in some of the more expensive cars. According to Wikipedia the maximum speed limit in the US is 80M/h [2]. It seems to me that Toyota is being irresponsible by selling cars that can sustain 120M/h, while the probability of surviving a crash at 80M/h is quite low, it seems likely to be a lot greater than the probability of surviving a crash at 120M/h. Also if a car is out of control at 80M/h then the driver will have a lot more time to work out how to put the engine in neutral or turn it off the lower speed will extend the time available by more than 50% because bends in the road can be better handled at 80M/h. It seems to me that it would be a feature for the car owner to have the car limited to a speed that is not much greater than the speed limit. According to Wikipedia the highest speed limit in Australia is 130Km/h (in NT), but it s 110Km/h in all places where I have driven. If my car had a governor to limit the speed to 115Km/h and a switch to change the limit to 135Km/h in case I ever drive to the NT then it would not affect my driving patterns (I rarely drive on roads with a 100Km/h limit and almost never drive on roads with a 110Km/h limit) but it could reduce the probability of things going horribly wrong. Also one thing to note is that last time I checked car tyres sold in Australia were only required to operate safely at speeds below 190Km/h (118M/h), so a Lexus that went out of control at 120M/h in Australia might risk a tyre blow-out which admittedly would only make things marginally worse. A governor for the reverse gear would also be a good feature. Some time ago a granny got her foot stuck on the accelerator in a car park and caused serious damage to her car and a parked car after passing close by where I was standing. I don t think that there is a real need to do more than 5Km/h in reverse, limiting the speed would give pedestrians a better chance of escaping parking accidents. One serious problem with some of the Toyota and Lexus vehicles is that it apparently takes 3 seconds to turn the engine off in an emergency! I ve been driving for almost 20 years and experienced a number of dangerous situations, all of which were essentially resolved (for better or worse) in significantly less than 3 seconds. A 3 second delay is as good as a 1 hour delay for safety critical systems. Also if the accelerator and brake pedals are pressed at the same time then the brake should take precedence. It seems quite obvious that whenever both pedals are pressed hard then the driver would probably prefer hard braking to hard acceleration. If you look at industrial machinery (robots, lathes, etc) you will always see big red buttons (or whatever color is used for emergency stop in your region) that are clearly marked and obvious to the workers and to bystanders. Escalators have less obvious red buttons but they can still be shut down in an emergency. It seems to me that there are potential benefits to having an emergency shutdown button in a car, maybe in a position that is accessible to the front-seat passenger in case the driver is incapacitated. Such a shutdown button wouldn t do anything extreme such as fully activating the brakes (which would be very bad on a road that has high-speed traffic), but would prevent acceleration (with some sort of hardware control to avoid software problems) and maintain power to the brakes and the steering. One thing that needs to be considered is that people tend not to do the most logical things when in an emergency situation. It needs to be possible to do whatever is necessary to save your life without any great deal of thought. Pushing a big red button is easy, holding down the on button for 3 seconds or even navigating a gear shift to an uncommon setting is a lot more difficult. It seems to me that there is also an issue of driver training. If putting an automatic car into neutral and cruising to a stop was part of the test for new drivers then the results of such car problems might not always be so bad. But I don t expect there to be any serious changes to driver training or car design. People are too accepting of road deaths. Don Marti has expressed a plan to never buy a vehicle with an automatic transmission because of this issue [3]. But the number of new vehicles being sold with a manual transmission is steadily reducing. An automatic transmission allows better performance (F1 cars have used them for ages), better fuel efficiency (you could never make a manual Prius), a more comfortable ride (the Hybrid Lexus keeps winning the Australian Luxury Car of the Year award), and allows less skillful drivers. Unless Don wants to ride a moped or drive an old car then I expect that he will be forced to get an automatic transmission. Then of course he will still be at risk of other people having car problems (the LA Times article mentions a third party being killed after an out of control car hit them). Also I expect that the extra safety features that are implemented in luxury vehicles such as the Lexus would save a few lives, they should save enough to outweigh the number that are lost on the rare occasions when the car goes out of control. Other luxury cars such as the Mercedes S class have great safety features and don t have a history of going wrong in a newsworthy way. A second-hand S Class Mercedes was surprisingly cheap in the UK last time I checked, cheap enough to make it worth considering the importation of one to Australia. But my solution to these problems is to try and minimise my driving. A 1.5 ton Lexus driving out of control at the maximum speed possible in urban streets won t do much damage to a 20 ton tram.

• [1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-toyota-recall18-2009oct18,0,2352642,full.story
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_by_country
• [3] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/wiki/mlp/chromium/

Most librarians probably already know this, but maybe the programmers don t yet. A SirsiDynix Corp lobby paper against Open Source technologies escaped onto the internet. SirsiDynix is a competitor of our co-op with products that compete with Koha. They re also interesting because Sirsi bought another competitor (Dynix), essentially stopped its product line (something near impossible with Free and Open Source Software like Koha) to replace it with its own and has ended up a messy lawsuit with Queens Borough Public Library as a consequence of that all as I understand it. Late last month, someone leaked SirsiDynix s criticism of Free and Open Source Software which is missing references for key evidence and described on WikiLeaks as containing possible libel per se against certain competitors . The comments and links at thesecretmirror and code4lib wiki seem interesting dissections. I feel that this document is taking advantage of an opportunity presented by the biggest promoters of FOSS library management systems not speaking about freedom. As you can see from some comments on thesecretmirror, it s all about freedom. reflections Missing the point: It s time to talk about software freedom develops that point a bit more and gives a few links back to other statements of freedom which I d not seen before. Anyway, one of the points in the leaked document was that the US Department of Defense (DoD) restricts use of FOSS. Unluckily for SirsiDynix, on 16 October, a memo was published by the DoD CIO saying Defense: Open source software is more secure than commercial code. There s some analysis by David Wheeler discussed on LWN. Anyway, who would you believe about FOSS? An under-fire legacy private software competitor, or the Department of Defense? I don t like either that much, but there s not really a contest. DoD are willing to bet lives on it.

Update: TumbleDry has a good analysis of the Square Trade report [0]. It seems that there are significant statistical problems in Square Trade s analysis and a possible conflict of interest. Square Trade did a survey of laptop reliability and wrote an interesting article about the results [1]. One thing to keep in mind when reading them is that the usage patterns vary greatly by type of product (netbook vs laptop) and probably by brand. Their statistics indicate that netbooks are less reliable than laptops, but I think that my actions in taking my EeePC to places such as the beach are probably not uncommon a netbook is ideal when you might need access to a computer at a moment s notice. I expect that the reliability of my laptop has increased because I bought a netbook! Their statistics show that Lenovo is far from the most reliable brand, I wonder what the usage scenarios for such machines are. I ve been using Thinkpads happily for over 11 years. I have had many warranty repair jobs, I lost count long ago. But I don t think that this indicates a problem with Thinkpads, my use is very demanding, I have done a lot of traveling, and done coding in planes, trains, trams, and taxis in many countries. So instead of criticising IBM/Lenovo for having their machines break, I praise them for repeatedly repairing them no matter how they wear out in my use. The speed and quality of the repair work is very impressive. Based on this I have been strongly recommending Thinkpads to everyone I know who seems likely to wear laptops out through basically doing everything that a laptop is designed to do all day every day! Among people I know the incidence of laptop warranty repairs is probably about 100% as the number of systems that are never repaired are outweighed by the systems that are repaired multiple times. Generally Thinkpads seem fairly well built to me, I ve been surprised at how many times they didn t break when I expected them to. When articles like the one from Square Trade are discussed people usually cite personal anecdotes. My above anecdote covers just over 11 years of intensive use of four different Thinkpads. Of course it doesn t prove much about the inherent reliability of Thinkpads (I could have received through random selection either four Thinkpads that were significantly more or less reliable than average). But having dealt with the IBM/Lenovo service in a few countries I can confirm the quality of their repair work. Every time they have returned my machine rapidly, they never complained about my policy of giving them a system with the hard drive removed, and in all but one case they completely solved the problem on the first try. One time they forgot to replace a broken rubber foot and to make up for this they sent me a complete set of spare parts by courier they had repaired the other two faults without problem. Now comparing the reliability of rack-mount servers would be a lot easier. The vast majority of such systems are stored safely in racks all the time and tend not to be mishandled. My experience with servers from Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun is that apart from routine hard drive failures they all run well if you keep them cool enough. But of course as I haven t run more than a few dozen of any of those brands at one time I don t have anything near a statistically significant sample.

• [0] http://tumbledry.org/2009/11/20/when_information_overwhelms
• [1] http://www.squaretrade.com/pages/laptop-reliability-1109/

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

Since today for kfreebsd-amd64, and probably tomorrow for kfreebsd-i386 too, the gnome metapackage is installable on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. In the end, this should hopefully give a fully functional desktop for these brand new architectures (to be included in the Squeeze release), with a few notable exceptions:

• no power management support (DeviceKit-Power needs porting);
• no roaming/wireless support (no support for libiw);
• no Bluetooth support (insufficient support in the FreeBSD kernel);
• no webcam support (no existing kernel API).

Apart from that, everything is supposed to work. So, if you want this to mean something, what we need now is some people to test the whole thing and find out if it actually does. Do you feel like helping? Install Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on your favorite virtual machine, upgrade it to the latest sid version, and apt-get install gnome. For everything that s not as enjoyable as it should be, report bugs.

If you demand respect, you don't deserve it.

Such was the scene I arrived at on Wednesday last week at the municipal health center at Kyll , Jyv skyl , Finland. A queue extended a hundred meters beyond the door. It was not hard to guess what it was about, as it had been announced that the pandemic influenza A/H1N1 vaccine would be administered there to people in specific risk groups from 10 am to 3:30 pm. I should explain here the Finnish health care setup. There are three parallel systems a comprehensive public health care system maintained by the municipalities to standards set by the state, a network of private for-profit health care providers, and a national foundation dedicated to university student health care. Employers are required by law to provide a minimal level of health care to their employees, and most of them also provide, free of charge to the employees, access to near-comprehensive general-practice-level care; most employers buy this service from the for-profit providers. The public system suffers from resource starvation at the general-practice level but provides excellent care in the central hospitals that handle the difficult cases. Anyway, the H1N1 vaccine is only available through the public system and through the foundation free of charge if you qualify for the vaccine, and no amount of money buys it for you in this country if you don t. Thus, I and many others, normally cared by the employee services, found ourselves queuing up at a public health care institute. And clearly, the public health care system was overwhelmed on that first day. When I entered the queue, its tail was a traffic hazard. Fortunately, the queue moved faster than new people arrived thereafter, and the hazard ended. The queue moved surprisingly fast it took me one hour to advance the 100 meters to the door. Even so, this was a failure in the system there is no good reason to have people with underlying illnesses (and we all had them, to qualify for the vaccine) stand around in freezing cold weather for an hour! Once, a nurse came and asked us if any of us was 63 years old or older. Apparently no-one was, since no-one was asked to leave (they will be vaccinated later). Later, another nurse asked everyone in the queue outside to show their KELA cards KELA is the national health insurance system, and its card carries information about extra coverage one qualifies for due to underlying illnesses. Eventually, I reached the door. Two guards stopped anyone who tried to enter directly, sidestepping the queue, and let in only those who had legitimate business other than vaccination. The main hall was full of people, and I quickly realized that the queue took a full circle inside the hall to reach the multiplexing point. It took me another hour to slowly advance my way though the hall. At the multiplexing point, I was asked to wait a bit, and then I was assigned a vaccination room and a waiting number. Some twenty minutes later I was called in. The vaccination room I was assigned to was a nurse s office. Two nurses were there, one who would administer the vaccine, and another at the computer, to keep a record. I gave them my KELA card, and shed my coat and my outer shirt, and bared my left shoulder. I was quickly given the pandemic vaccine; there was no question I was qualified for it, not with my obesity being obvious. Then they asked what my diagnosis was. Prmarily I m here because of my obesity, I said. But I also have paroxysmal atrial fibrillation. That s not what your KELA card says, accused the nurse at the computer. The diagnosis is so new, I countered. There has been no time to do the paperwork for KELA. (And indeed, I later learned, it would come up in my next checkup in the spring.) They stared at each other. I can show you my prescriptions, I said, making no move for them. Stares. I stared back. Do you want the seasonal vaccine or not? asked the nurse with the injectors. I lauged briefly. I might as well. It had, honestly, never crossed my mind that I might qualify. She injected me on my right shoulder. You should stay in out there for ten minutes. I picked up my clothes and found the cafeteria with coffee and pastry. Then the real fun started. Next day, I woke with horrible upper back pain. The thermometer showed mild fever; but since i didn t have any respiratory symptoms, I decided to go to work. In the evening, turning in bed was excruciatingly painful. It took days for the pain to subside. I left the building three hours after I arrived at the end of the queue. What? You think that s excessive? So do I and many others; queuing feels so Soviet Union! But honestly, while it did take time, it worked. I am vaccinated; are you?

Whew! Is it karma or what? What makes me get involved in two horribly complex, two-week-long conferences, year after year? Of course, both (DebConf and EDUSOL) are great fun to be part of, and both have greatly influenced both my skills and interests. Anyway, this is the fifth year we hold EDUSOL. Tomorrow we will bring the two weeks of activities to an end, hold the last two videoconferences, and finally declare it a done deal. I must anticipate the facts and call it a success, as it clearly will be recognized as such. One of the most visible although we insist, not the core activities of the Encounter are the videoconferences. They are certainly among the most complex. And the videoconferences' value is greatly enhanced because, even if they are naturally a synchronous activity (it takes place at a given point in time), they live on after they are held: I do my best effort to publish them as soon as possible (less than one day off), and they are posted to their node, from where comments can continue. This was the reason, i.e., why we decided to move at the last minute tomorrow's conference: Due to a misunderstanding, Beatriz Busaniche (a good friend of ours and a very reknown Argentinian Free Software promotor, from Via Libre) thought her talk would be held today, and we had programmed her for tomorrow. No worries - We held it today, and it is already online for whoever wants to take part :-) So, I don't want to hold this any longer (I will link to the two conferences that I'm still missing from this same entry). Here is the list of (and links to) videoconferences we have held.

Tuesday 2009-11-17

• Debian-Women, by Margarita Manterola (Buenos Aires, Argentina) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Personal networks, by Isidro Maya Jariego (Sevilla, Spain) (.ogg file, IRC log)

Wednesday 2009-11-18

• Social networks, by Sof a Liberman Shklonikoff (Mexico City, Mexico) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• Open Social Education, by Dolors Reig Hern ndez (Barcelona, Spain) (PDF presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)

Thursday 2009-11-19

• Politics 2.0, by Txopi, Bilbao, Basque Country (ODP presentation, .ogg file, IRC log)
• OpenSocial, by Rodrigo Gallardo (Portland, USA) (.ogg file, IRC log)
• Informatic analfabetization, or why does privative software work towards analfabetization? (.ogg file, IRC log)

Friday 2009-11-20

• Education and cognition from Free Software, by Offray Luna (Bogot , Colombia)< (PDF material, .ogg file, IRC log)/li>
• EDUSOL's state / EDUSOL projects, by the EDUSOL organizer team (which attempts to be distributed ;-) )

As two last notes: Regarding the IRC interaction photos I recently talked about, we did a very kewl thing: Take over 2000 consecutive photos and put them together on a stack. Flip them one at a time. What do you get? But of course A very fun to view and interesting interaction video! We have to hand-update it and it is a bit old right now, but nevertheless, it is very interesting as it is. Finally... I must publicly say I can be quite an asshole. And yes, I know I talked this over privately with the affected people and they hold no grudge against me... But still - yesterday we had an IRC talk about NING Latin American Moodlers, by Luc a Osuna (Venezuela) and Maryel Mendiola (Mexico). One of the points they raised was they were working towards (and promoting) a Moodle certification. And... Yes, I recognize I cannot hear the mention of the certification word without jumping and saying certifications are overrated. Well, but being tired, and not being really thoughtful... I should have known where to stop, where it was enough of a point made. I ended up making Maryel and Luc a feel attacked during their own presentation, and that should have never happened. A public and heartfelt apology to them :-(

[The following story is fictional and does not depict any actual person or event, just like in Law & Order.] James filed an RC bug on a package, complaining that it attempted to execute an illegal instruction on a Netwinder, running Linux 2.6.xx. This was sort of an ironic hipster tribute to the olden times when buildd admins would actually do their jobs, keeping chroots clean and current, reviewing buildd logs, and filing FTBFS bugs where appropriate, except that he didn't actually do any of those things. 18 minutes later, Aurelien replied, asking for more information in order to debug the problem. Teh-oh said James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his Raggedy Ann doll. Stephen suggested that Aurelien contact Vince or Steve to get access to different Netwinders, and Aurelien tried to reproduce the problem on other ARM machines unsuccessfully. Could you tell me the exact kernel version on this Netwinder, and the one on europa, which seems to have the same problem? Aurelien asked James. Aaagh, they're trying to steal my precious bodily fluids! hissed James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his inflatable astronut. Also, the contents of /proc/cpuinfo would be nice. Aurelien added. We hates them, Clive Oven! James announced, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to his EASY-BAKE REAL MEAL Oven. The Netwinder you were talking about is europa, wasn't it? Could you tell us the kernel versions on europa and elara? There's no problem on other Netwinders, so it's probably a kernel issue. THE MARTIANS ARE COMING! James cried, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to a small band of subservient deaf-mute milkmen. It's been more than a week since this bug has been filed, and there has been no useful information provided at all. Can anybody help? asked Peter. HELLO. IS THIS THING ON? Could you have the elementary courtesy to follow up to the bugs you report? asked Pierre. Bromeliads.. I'll buy you some bromeliads, James muttered, but no one could hear him because he was talking to his ficus plant. Lo c looked around, slipped into a cave, sprinted through a maze of tunnels, and sped in a small nuclear-powered submarine to James's secret undersea lair. Rapping on the bulkhead three times, he uttered the code phrase and James let him in. After a conversation that took place strictly through pantomime, Lo c departed and James said, For fuck's sake, but no one could hear him because he was talking to a broken sonar antenna. Yo, James is busy, but he said that it's okay to downgrade the bug since it's not a problem with other Netwinders, reported Lo c. I never said that! I don't even know who that guy is! I'm going to convert him into a kangaroo! James sang, but no one could hear him since he was alone on a beach in Normandy. A month later, Riku wrote to Woody, Hey, we have this bug. Could you take a look? Sure, replied Woody, and he gave Aurelien access, and Aurelien debugged the problem in under an hour. Now everyone knows that europa and elara were running Linux 2.6.11. This is a breach of national security! declared James, but nobody could hear him because he was talking to the crushed skull of a kitten who had recently been sunning himself.

Some time ago, I made an attempt at a gvfs package with disabled HAL support. The latest upstream version allows to use DeviceKit-Disks instead, through the gnome-disk-utility library. This change was supposed to bring a lot of improvement, among which:

• improved LUKS support;
• better management of permissions, using ConsoleKit and PolicyKit 1;
• simpler software stack, getting rid of gnome-mount.

Unfortunately, it turned out as a real fiasco, since there is no support for IDE CDs using ide_mod in DeviceKit-Disks. Upstream only uses libata, and Fedora has no requirements for compatibility with kernels shipped more than 2 months ago. The change had to be backed out. What you don t know yet is that Michael Biebl is awesome. Not only did he find some ways to comply with Bastian s requirements, but he implemented IDE CD support in DeviceKit. Which was not really easy. So, I d appreciate if some adventurous people could test the experimental gvfs packages in which there is still DeviceKit support. Please look for any regressions in them, especially with regard to removable media handling.

I know it has been a long time since my last post. I am sorry about that, but life has it s complications every now and then (as you know)... Well, on to the article. Recently I had to reimplement in C a prefork server I wrote in Ruby for an internal project at Propus. Not that the Ruby version wasn t enough (after all, although being in Ruby, I was using Unix plumbing, much in the fashion Ryan tell us about in the now famous I like Unicorn because it s Unix article)... The problem is that, in one of our clients, the only version available for Ruby was 1.8.1. Yeah I know But we were not allowed to upgrade and, although it didn t seem at first, the same server presented a nasty memory leak in 1.8.1 that was not present in 1.8.7 and 1.9.1. I still don t know where the problem is I suspect some of the C-to-Ruby glues around TCP sockets might be blamed, but after a couple of days trying to figure it out, I decided it was easier just to reimplement it using C. It actually took less than a day to get the C version going nothing fancy and, apart from memory footprint, just the same functionality and about the same speed of the Ruby version. But it was enough to remind me I really don t like all the scaffolding one has to raise in order to make something useful in C. It s not just a matter of SLOC (of course, C version was more than 3 times longer than Ruby one)... I am talking about all the manual memory management, pointer operations and the disgusting experience of dealing with strings in C. I know some people are addicted to that sort of thing like heroin, but to me it just slows development. This experience made me think about learning a second compiled programming language. I do some Perl, a lot of Python and (of course) most of my work in Ruby, but those are all interpreted languages. For compiled languages I always resorted to C So I am officially looking for a language to learn. So far, the best candidates are OCaml (I got a little excited about JoCaml a few months ago, now I might get serious about it), Haskell, Lisp, Objective-C, Ada, and Vala. Of these, I ve been reading a lot about OCaml It seems a fine and expressive language, with decent foundations, object-oriented extension, broad standard library and (with JoCaml) concurrency Also it might give me the proper excuse to finally wrap my mind around a functional language! People keep me pointing to Java and Erlang Well for using Java I would much prefer using JRuby. Erlang, ITOH, has a weird syntax (at least to me) and it seems much of what makes it great will, eventually, be part of Ruby (or already is using libraries) either that or I ll just wait for Reia to be ready. Besides, neither can be compiled to native code (ok, that argument can be stretched both ways, so just ignore it). So, what do you think? Any advice?

This evening I investigated #555941 in libxml-filter-xslt-perl, and was able to downgrade it to "important". I'm working on a proper fix, but it's not RC any more. (Gunnar, I don't mean to make you feel bad! I've been inactive for a while myself - I'm just making up for lost time.) And now for conversation via blog! Clint, I'm inclined to agree about ego, fiefdoms and so on. But I'm unconvinced that personal relationships themselves are harmful. Actually, I was thinking more about "professional relationships" - I don't care much whether mentors take their mentees to an art gallery, provided they work with them over a period of time, and therefore get to know the quality of their packaging. (I was a bit careless in my phrasing last night.) Having said that, let's do that as well! Indeed, building relationships so that we don't flame each other to a crisp the rest of the year is the very reason we hold DebConf, right? (Apart from the beer. And the holiday.) I reckon the mentoring system would be more effective if we started thinking along these lines, and this in turn would help address the wider problem of resources within various parts of Debian. Maybe not directly, but it could free up other people to work on the complicated stuff. We could probably turn debian-mentors into a sort of "team" in its own right. (Apologies if someone's suddenly made debian-mentors active again behind my back.) And if I ever get approved by DAM (ahem), I intend to propose a deal to the debian-mentors list that each upload of an updated package will cost them one RC bug NMUdiff, and uploads of new packages will cost two. ;)

Sigh I am starting to fill up my annual report for my real-life work. You know, that chore you must do every year where you score little bullets next to each completed project and talk well about yourself. For my workplace, fortunately, I do not have to lie and convince people I am worth rehiring - As this year I achieved definitividad as a T cnico Acad mico Asociado C de Tiempo Completo at my University, I can say for sure I have long-term job safety. UNAM is the best place for me to work, and I am most grateful Even if I do want to advance for the future, even though I would strongly like at some point to start working in a real academic position My job is mostly operative, limited to keeping things running smoothly in our network and servers. I work in a social sciences (Economics) research institute, and even though I have taken on an interesting project that is viewed from the social sciences I do expect to finish with a very interesting product in the near future, my interest lies in computing as a science. Anyway, back on track This is the time of year to start evaluating many things, many factors, from many different sides. And yes, for me that involves measuring how am I faring in my involvement in the projects I most care about Specifically, Debian, but also several other Free Software projects, even if my involvement in them is mostly organizational. I am once again going through a tough period in my personal life, and the impact it carries is obviously deep. However, I am not fond of finding excuses for my underachievement or underperformance. And that's what I feel now. Even more when I see posts such as Zack's and Tim's status updates, and when I see that we continue to be on a history-high streak of RC bugs. Regarding the several teams I am (at least formally) involved with in Debian, I have been away from the pkg-perl group for far too long... It is still my first group when it comes to identifying myself with - Both as on a personal level, as I consider them as good friends and great people to work with, and I do feel the responsability to share the load with them, as maintaining >1300 packages (even if they are so highly regular) is just not an easy task. But for over a year, my involvement has been basically zero. I have been a bit more active on pkg-ruby-extras, maybe paradoxically as it is a smaller team and with less packages (as I know it is much less probable for somebody to keep my packages in adequate shape if I don't do it)... and also because I am working more with Ruby than Perl nowadays. And finally, about Cherokee, I decided during DebConf9 to redo the packaging to fully use DH7 instead of our old-style quasimanual style. I have had several bursts of activity, and am almost-almost-ready to do the first newstyle upload... But so far, have been unable to do so. Of course, keyring-maint: With Jonathan's help, I have come to terms with most of the processes. Both Jonathan and I have been swamped lately, but at least I think I am finally helping speed up the process instead of holding it down. We do, yes, have several pending updates - but are working our way up the queue, and I hope not to leave people waiting for too long. And yes, we have discussed several ways of documenting and automating several of the tasks we currently sustain, and that should come soon I have been also leaving maybe a bit too much responsability aside on EDUSOL, for which today we are entering the second week of activity, and I'm very sorry to see our server is just too overloaded to even reply to even answer to me And even lacking admin powers myself, I should have worked earlier on setting up redundancy on a more automatic way (as we have an off-site backup we can promote to live and redirect to, but I am unable to do this... Given that I am the techie person on board/the only "professional" sysadmin). This year I also quietly finished the bulk of the Comas rewrite. What? Comas? Still alive? Yes, and you can expect me to show it off to more people soon, and get it used for more conferences. I will talk more about it (and its motivation, and its current status) later on But basically, the only two things that Comas shares in common with the mod_perl-based system most of you got to know (mainly at CONSOL 2004-2008 or at Debconf 5 and 6, although I know of several other conferences which used it) and the current incarnation are The (most) basic database structure and the name. The project underwent a full rewrite, and is now a far more flexible, far easier to install, Ruby-on-Rails based application. And most important, it does no longer involve your name being Gunnar Wolf as a prerequisite for successfully setting it up ;-) Regarding DebConf, I have promoted a Central American MiniDebConf, and we are right on track for holding it in late March in Panam City. Everybody's invited, and we will have (surprise, surprise!) the very professional involvement of Mr. Anto Recio as local team, as it seems he didn't have enough with last year's DebConf9 and wants to suffer further. What am I lacking here? Motivation. I have been quite pessimistic, possibly turning some people away, even though we have a good first sampling of interested people's profiles and expectations. If you want to get involved, tomorrow (Tuesday 17-nov) we will have a meeting at Freenode's #sl-centroamerica, 17:00 GMT-6. Please note we do need involvement from the Central American communities, it is more than just a motivational issue. Last meeting it seemed Anto and I were the only people pushing the MiniDebConf - and frankly, that would be a basis for not even holding it. We need motivation from the very people involved in it! Anyway You can see I have (and it seems to be a constant in my life) a series of contradictions going on. However, the excercise of putting it all into writing helps me understand better where I am standing. When I started writing this post I felt much heavier, much more at a loss Right now I feel I want to refocus my energy on the same projects and teams I have been involved with, yes, but feel it at least more plausible. Hope so.

Some people are going on about personal relationships again. Personal relationships and ego are two things which I consider antithetical to free software ideals and goals, mainly because they tend to promote the justification of ownership and territoriality. In other words, they cause fiefdoms. Ironically, the same thing results from asociality.

I can't believe this happened. It seems the important presidential candidates have agreed for a face to face debate. I am leaning to thinking that the questions are prepared in advance, but that's better than no debate.

The debate will take place today, 14th of November at 15:00, but I am unsure if this will be broadcasted live since is not clear from the article.

Mircea Geoan challenged Traian B sescu to the debate, the later accepted but considered normal the liberal candidate should be there. Crin Antonescu accepted the challenge, too. Remus Cernea confirmed his presence, too. The funny thing is that Mircea Geoan will not participate.


So, I hope some television will broadcast this live at 15:00.