Search Results: "ema"

8 October 2008

MJ Ray: Nestle Boycott 20th Anniversary

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Nestle Boycott this week. The theme is “Change Nestl , Change the World”. This is one of few boycotts that I wholeheartedly support and participate in. While reading a report from the NI cooperative, I learnt of a new outrage by Nestle. Over in Canada, Wellington Water Watchers document a Nestle plant that is (as I understand it), taking drinking water for free, bottling it as “Aqua Fina”, trucking it to cities and selling it. (Thanks to whoever it was gave me the WWW link - I didn’t find the email, so please claim it in a comment if you want it.) You may remember that when Coca-Cola tried to do the same by selling contaminated Kent tap water as “Dasani”, it was widely ridiculed as Peckham Spring. Finally, “Dasani” was withdrawn from sale. It’s disappointing that Nestle’s Peckham Spring seems to be on sale in Canada, at a lower “manufacturing” cost than Coke’s UK one. Do we really want multinationals selling us our tap water in an inefficient way? No. Boycott Nestle.

Russell Coker: Future Video Games

I just watched an interesting TED.com talk about video games [1]. The talk focussed to a large degree on emotional involvement in games, so it seems likely that there will be many more virtual girlfriend services [2] (I’m not sure that “game” is the correct term for such things) in the future. The only reference I could find to a virtual boyfriend was a deleted Wikipedia page for V-Boy, but I expect that they will be developed soon enough. I wonder if such a service could be used by astronauts on long missions. An advantage of a virtual SO would be that there is no need to have a partner who is qualified, and if a human couple got divorced on the way to Mars then it could be a really long journey for everyone on the mission. VR training has been used for a long time in the airline industry (if you have never visited an airline company and sat in a VR trainer for a heavy passenger jet then I strongly recommend that you do it). It seems that there are many other possible uses for this. The current prison system is widely regarded as a training ground for criminals, people who are sent to prison for minor crimes come out as hardened criminals. I wonder if a virtual environment for prisoners could do some good. Instead of prisoners having to deal with other prisoners they could deal with virtual characters who encourage normal social relationships, prisoners who didn’t want to meet other prisoners could be given the option of spending their entire sentence in “solitary confinement” with virtual characters, multi-player games, and Internet access if they behave well. Game systems such as the Nintendo Wii [3] would result in prisoners getting adequate exercise, so after being released from a VR prison it seems likely that the ex-con would be fitter, healthier, and better able to fit into normal society than most parolees. Finally it seems likely that someone who gets used to spending most all their spare time playing computer games will be less likely to commit crimes. It seems to me that the potential for the use of virtual environments in schools is very similar to that of prisons, for similar reasons. Update: Currently Google Adsense is showing picture adverts on this page for the “Shaiya” game, the pictures are of a female character wearing a bikini with the caption “your goddess awaits”. This might be evidence to support my point about virtual girlfriends.

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7 October 2008

Kai Hendry: Marking up mail

Marking up email on the Web is not a pretty picture in 2008. What I look like on a telecon Notable mail archiving services: Random thoughts: Any other relevant RFCs, tools or tips I might have missed?

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: About the number of rc bugs

In addition to my last post, here some information about the current number of release critical bugs. Yes, it is true, that our official bug tracker lists the next release has still 264 bugs1. And some wonder, when Lenny will be released. It's a little bit difficult to work with that page, let's look at the unofficial rc bug thingy I already mentioned in my previous post. As you might have noticed it supports several filters mechanism the official bts don't have. At the very bottom of the detailed list you'll see the overall number of the bugs matching your selected filter. So let's have a look at the number of bugs, which are already fixed in the unstable branch and need to propagate to Lenny. Currently that are 118 RC bugs. Of those 264 preventing us to release, 118 are already fixed; the fix just hasn't arrived in Lenny, yet. Okay, but there are still 147 rc Bugs open in both Lenny and Sid. So let's take a look at them. By using the filters at the top, you can calculate, that 19 already have a patch. 14 are marked pending (so they are already fixed, but the maintainer hasn't uploaded the package yet). 15 of these bugs have been reported multiple times and have been merged. Oh, and 3 are about packages in non-free and contrib. Granted, for some of them, there is a patch, but the patch needs to be tested, or the bug has been marked pending by mistake. But still: If you ignore all these types of bugs, there are only 104 bugs left. one-hundred-and-four! Summary: So the only thing left (beside the points I mention in my previous post) to do, is to migrate 118 fixes to Lenny somehow, get the 33 fixes for the probably fixed bugs uploaded, and fix the remaining 104 bugs. Yes, that's still a lot of work to do... So let's get things rolling, shall we? 1: You might further notice, that the current stable release is affected by more than 700 bugs. However many of them are false counts, e.g. when a specific package doesn't build with a newer version of a compiler. The package in the current stable release is of course affected, so there it is kind of buggy. However, we can ignore these kind of bugs, since the newer version of the compiler isn't shipped in the current stable release at all. Those bugs should actually be tagged sid and lenny...

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl: What you can do for Lenny (Update #2)

You probably noticed by now, that Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 aka Lenny hasn't been released in September. Well, that's a shame, but very easy to explain: Too many release critical bugs. Well, it's pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC bugs will be fixed, and apparently our release team was a bit too optimistic :( The big question is: What can you do, to help release Lenny at least in this quarter? That's pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that the fixed packages are migrated to Lenny, do upgrade tests, document problems in the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn't it? For users Even as a simple user (aren't we all just users?) you may help getting Lenny released. Some things you can do: See? Even as a simple user without deeper technical knowledge you can help us getting Lenny in shape to be released. If you have technical knowledge: Very good! You might want to read the next section, too, and see what applies to you, there :) For maintainers It basically boils down to two things: If your packages have RC bugs open in Lenny fix them and take care, that the fix will propagate to Lenny. If your packages don't have RC bugs open, fix someone else's RC bug. Surely you don't think, the release team will fix the remaining rc bugs, do you? And surely you understand, that your shiny rc bug free packages are kind of useless, if they aren't released? To search for bugs to be fixed, take a look at the unofficial rc bugs thingy. The URL lists RC bugs open in both Sid and Lenny. Obviously they should be fixed ASAP. If no one takes care about these packages, they might be removed from Lenny (if possible). Again: Try to reproduce the bug, try fix it, upload an NMU (or send your patch to the bug report and search for an sponsor). You'll notice, that some of these bugs already have a patch. In that case, your job would be to test the patch, report that to the bug report and offer to sponsor an NMU. Another interesting list is the list of rc bugs open only in Lenny. These bugs have been fixed, but the fix hasn't propagated to Lenny, yet. Normally, the release team will grant freeze exceptions for these packages if possible. However, if the changes to the fixed version are quite grave or the package in Sid depends on a newer package than in Lenny that's not possible. In these cases look out for packages marked as need tpu upload or similar. Oh, and if you could refrain from upload new upstream versions of packages to Sid, you would make all our lives easier. Some reasons: And of course you should spend your time fixing rc bugs anyway ;) Update: Rhonda pointed out, that running rc-alert -d TU -o and will limit the output to bugs open in both Sid and Lenny, which is the more interesting list of bugs.

Miriam Ruiz: Apostasy in Spain

Data ordered by entry data is not a data file, and thus not protected by the law regarding personal data files, because it’s hard to do searches in them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the argument that the highest court in Spain (Tribunal Supremo) has used to prevent the Catholic Church from losing believers. Many children are automatically baptisted by their parents when they’re just babies, without having any decision in that, and thus they names are written down in the Church files^Wlists of baptisted people. That’s the numbers they will use later when asking for privileges for the Catholic Church, and that’s why it’s so important for them that all of us are counted as catholics, whether we are or not believers. Fewer than half of Spanish youth consider themselves Catholic, so it’s important for them to keep appearances to keep their power intact. In Spain thousands of non believers are demanding that the Church cancel their baptism records, in order to annul any official connection with Catholicism. And church leaders in turn have gone to the courts to try to stop parishioners deserting. The Tribunal Supremo seems to be taking a political side with their decision trying to vulnerate non-believers rights to artificially promote the Catholic Church. Apostasy is the formal religious disaffiliation or abandonment or renunciation of one’s religion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, considers the recanting of a person’s religion a human right legally protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “The Committee observes that the freedom to ‘have or to adopt’ a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace ones current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views […] Article 18.2 bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to their religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.”. Anyway, many religious groups and even some states punish apostates. For Catholics, the word “apostasy” signifies the desertion of faith, which had been one of the three unpardonable sins in the early years of the Church. AEPD, the national agency for data protection, is pondering now whether to appeal against the sentence. I hope they do. There are other legitimate subjects that could appeal against it, too. No one should be forced to belong to a Church they don’t believe in.

Russell Coker: The Security Benefits of Being Unimportant

A recent news item is the “hacking” of the Yahoo mailbox used by Sarah Palin (the Republican VP candidate) [1]. It seems most likely that it was a simple social-engineering attack on the password reset process of Yahoo (although we are unlikely to learn the details unless the case comes to trial). The email address in question had been used for some time to avoid government data-retention legislation but had only been “hacked” after she was listed as the VP candidate. The reason of course is that most people don’t care much about who is the governor of one of the least populous US states. Remote attack on a mailbox (which is what we presume happened) is only one possible problem. Another of course is that of the integrity of the staff at the ISP. While I know nothing about what happens inside Yahoo, I have observed instances of unethical actions by employees at some ISPs where I have previously worked, I have no doubt that such people would have read the email of a VP candidate without any thought if they had sufficient access to do so. If an ISP stores unencrypted passwords then the way things usually work is that the helpdesk people are granted read access to the password data so that they can login to customer accounts to reproduce problems - this is a benefit for the customers in terms of convenience. But that also means that they can read the email of any customer at any time. I believe that my account on Gmail (the only webmail service I use) is relatively safe. I’m sure that there are a huge number of people who are more important than me who use Gmail. But if I was ever considered to have a reasonable chance of becoming Prime Minister then I would avoid using a Gmail account as a precaution. There is a rumoured Chinese proverb and curse in three parts:
May you live in interesting times
May you come to the attention of those in authority
May you find what you are looking for [2] In terms of your email, everyone who has root access to the machine which stores it (which includes employees of the companies that provide warranty service to all the hardware in the server room) and every help-desk person who can login to your account to diagnose problems is in a position of authority. Being merely one of thousands of customers (or millions of customers for a larger service) is a measure of safety. As for the “interesting times” issue, the Republican party is trying to keep the issue focussed on the wars instead of on the economy. The problem with basing a campaign on wars is that many people will come to the conclusion that the election is not about people merely losing some money, but people dying. This could be sufficient to convince people that the right thing to do is not to abide by the usual standards for ethical behavior when dealing with private data, but to instead try and find something that can be used to affect the result of an election. Mail that is not encrypted (most mail isn’t) and which is not transferred with TLS (so few mail servers support TLS that it hardly seems worth the effort of implementing it) can be intercepted at many locations (the sending system and routers are two options). But the receiving system is the easiest location. A big advantage for a hostile party in getting mail from the receiving system is that it can be polled quickly (an external attacker could use an open wireless access-point and move on long before anyone could catch them) and that if it is polled from inside the company that runs the mail server there is almost never any useful audit trail (if a sysadmin logs in to a server 10 times a day for real work reasons, and 11th login to copy some files will not be noticed). One of the problems with leaks of secret data is that it is often impossible to know whether they have happened. While there is public evidence of one attack on Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account, there is no evidence that it was the first attack. If someone had obtained the password (through an insider in Yahoo, or through a compromised client machine) then they could have been copying all the mail for months without being noticed. It seems to me that your choice of ISP needs to be partly determined by how many hostile parties will want to access your mail and what resources they may be prepared to devote to it. For a significant political candidate using a government email address seems like the best option, with the alternative being to use a server owned and run by the political party in question, if you can have the staff fired for leaking your mail then your email will be a lot safer!

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6 October 2008

Chris Lawrence: Choosing the wrong denominator

Matthew Yglesias demonstrates innumeracy in action:
We got an interesting experiment this weekend as Bill Maher’s anti-religious screed Religulous and David Zucker’s right-wing satire An American Carol both opened. The two films were about tied in terms of total revenue but Carol was on three times as many screens, so basically Religulous was far more successful. I think this mostly reflects something I wrote about a couple of years ago — the moviegoing audience is very demographically similar to the Democratic Party voting audience. It’s disproportionately young, disproportionately childless, and tilted toward residents of big cities and away from residents of rural communities. Conversely, the audience for television news is demographically very conservative (older, white, and a bit more prosperous than average) which is one major reason TV news coverage tilts right. The big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against God is just a lot bigger than the big screen audience for what looks like a witless screed against Michael Moore.
Actually, since total revenue for both movies was about the same, it would appear that the “big screen audience” for crappy polemical Bill Maher movies is about the same as the “big screen audience” for crappy polemical David Zucker movies. Further, since I’d guess Carol probably played in theaters with lower ticket prices on average than Religulous, the former probably did a little better in terms of the total audience. Yglesias also makes the rather faulty assumption that the per-screen average revenue would remain flat as screens increased. This result only obtains if moviegoers don’t select theaters based on what movies are playing at them or if screens are very distant from each other geographically; while surely there are some people who just go to the movies to see something without deciding beforehand which movie to see, I doubt there are enough of these people to ensure Maher’s movie would gain a substantially larger audience, except in the relatively uncommon cases where the film just isn’t on at any theater in a metropolitan area and there is a substantial number of people who want to see it. Besides, all the discerning moviegoers were at Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist this weekend anyway.

Russ Allbery: Config management and bundle

Today, among all the other things I accomplished, I converted the rest of the system templates for the eyrie.org systems to Git and tweaked my personal configuration management system to make better use of Git's features to push data around. I was feeling on a productive roll, so I also wrote up the system I use. This system has a long history. The first commit in the underlying repository for my personal workstation is dated September of 1998, and the underlying system was already in use at Stanford before I started working here more than 15 years ago. It survived several major OS changes and several significant reorganizations and only recently has been replaced for day-to-day server management by Puppet. We still use bundle to do some of the initial system configuration inside FAI before the system is put together enough to run Puppet. Puppet is overkill for a few personal systems, so the system I'm using is based on our previous revision of our server template system, with some modifications to not depend on AFS and to make remote deployment of changes easier and simpler. It's not as fancy as some of the new ideas for managing all of /etc in a VCS, but it's been reliable and capable enough for me that the core of the system remains unchanged after ten years.

5 October 2008

Biella Coleman: The OpEd Project, take 2

I just got back from the OpEd project/workshop. In short, it was worth every penny and if you are interested in writing an OpEp and riding the public debate bandwagon, this is the perfect place to start. Why? Well, first because the world of punditry and debate needs more diversity and women and this project is fundamentally geared toward getting more women into the system and in a no nonsense, accessible, inspiring, and yet utterly pragmatic fashion. First, if you don’t know the stats concerning women, they are depressingly dismal. For example, 9 out of 10 submissions are from male writers and 88% of published pieces are from male authors (and this is matched by all sorts of other disturbing figures about the lack of women non-fiction writers, TV producers etc). In the OpEd field, the main problem, in short, is that women are not even trying. Today’s full-day workshop was enlivening and engaging. Catherine Orenstein, the founder and dynamic leader of the project, dusts away a lot of the mystery of this writing genre and equips participants with some basic skills and tactics to get you started (then, in my opinion, it takes a fair bit of work and persistence to master, just like any type of writing but it is not rocket science either). What I like most about the project is its utter pragmatism. Cathy knows that once there are enough women in the system, the project can close shop, for it will be other women who will take over the reigns and inspire other women to write them (and informally mentor them as well). It is well known, for example, that once there is a critical mass of women, let’s say in the work place, then these women are the point people for recruitment so that the company does not need to actively recruit women. I have heard this argument before and have had a number of personal experiences that confirmed this fact. Last year, for example, a student from my department was organizing a conference and he could not, for the life of him, find any female speakers or discussants, despite asking a number of them who declined because of other commitments. He had ran out of options, that is, until he talked to me. In less than a minute, I rattled off like 5-7 other possible choices and within a day, we had 2 on board. It is clear that women know other women (and many are friends) so the best person to go to to tap into are other women. In terms of the actual writing of an OpEd, I am not sure I will be writing one anytime soon in so far as I need to really pump out a few more academic articles as the future of my jobs depends on them. But I may write a draft version of one that I will hammer into finer shape if a timely news event arises. Otherwise, I look forward to spending more time on this genre, especially once my book is done and know that if I am going to stay in academia, I will for sure make space for this type of thinking and writing. Finally if you are interested in attending one of the public, women-only seminars and you know me, let them know you learned about the project through me, and you will get discount.

Biella Coleman: If you complain

One thing I am known to do is complain how the public/academic discourse surrounding/around technology/computers is overwhelmingly male (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Shirky and I can go on and on). But one day I realized that if I am bothered by it, I should do more than talk the (often) empty talk of complaint. So I decided to enroll in a day long training for writing OpEds, which kicks off tomorrow. I am not sure if engaging in public debate is what I want to do, mostly because of piling more work and time commitments on a very full plate but I am starting to explore what it means and what it may take to leave the Ivory Tower. Here is a little more info about the OpEd Project:
The OpEd Project - featured by The New York Times, Feministing.com and Katie Couric on CBS News - is an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate focus on targeting and training women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, online sites and other key forums of public discourse. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages - which are a source for all other media - deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space which is intended to showcase divergent opinions. It also means we are only hearing from a tiny sliver of the nation’s best thinkers. Imagine a baseball team of only pitchers - how well would it do?

Asheesh Laroia: Toasted flash drive

I just got an email. (For background, Matt B. is my flatmate's name.) 
From: Travis M.
To: Asheesh Laroia
Subject: Matt B. left the oven on!!

I am here in the park with Matt. He left the oven on, with a Flash Drive in there
no joke!
As it happens, this email was real, not malarkey.

Thijs Kinkhorst: Hopping to Ameland for a quick coffee

Our friend Jaap is besides a mathematical researcher also an aviator. Last weekend he took Erik, Judith and me on a flight from Hoogeveen (EHHO) in Drenthe to the island of Ameland (EHAL). It's a really nice experience to plan the flight on the map, fly over land, the Waddensea and the North Sea, hear the radio communications; and the check-in was a lot more relaxed compared to EHAM (Schiphol). On the other hand the on-board catering left something to be desired.

photo 1 photo 2 photo 3

all pictures are here

Biella Coleman: Slowly Blogging Away

The students in my Hacker Culture and Politics have now been at the question of politics and ethics in the world of hacking for over a month. I think a pretty solid foundation has been built and now we are getting into much nittier grittier issues, like intellectual property law. The latest entry is on IP and provides an excellent sense of what we talked about and what we covered in class and in the readings. I am excited to see the class blog develop, if nothing else, because it gives a pretty good sense of the topics we cover and what conversations we have. I used to find it frustrating to have classes literally vanish away after they were done and yet so much labor and time had been put in them! This type of blogging is important as it can provide a tangible and somewhat fixed medium for capturing and preserving what happened (and then free you from having to save boxes of notes that you can collect during college). I know there were a number of times I really really wanted to recall something from one of my undergraduate classes, but since I had finally thrown away the big old boxes of notes and readings from those days, there was no place to look. It was just not practical to lug my boxes of notes from place to place, move to move especially when I only wanted to take a look every few years for maybe one thing. With this type of blog, there is a record of what happened for everyone to share. That said, I am faced with a problem when I teach this class again. Since we provide what I think is a pretty decent account of what we are doing, I will most probably have to put down the blog for a period of time when I am teaching it again though of course the syllabus and readings will also change to some degree.

Biella Coleman: Slowly Blogging Away

The students in my Hacker Culture and Politics have now been at the question of politics and ethics in the world of hacking for over a month. I think a pretty solid foundation has been built and now we are getting into much nittier grittier issues, like intellectual property law. The latest entry is on IP and provides an excellent sense of what we talked about and what we covered in class and in the readings. I am excited to see the class blog develop, if nothing else, because it gives a pretty good sense of the topics we cover and what conversations we have. I used to find it frustrating to have classes literally vanish away after they were done and yet so much labor and time had been put in them! This type of blogging is important as it can provide a tangible and somewhat fixed medium for capturing and preserving what happened (and then free you from having to save boxes of notes that you can collect during college). I know there were a number of times I really really wanted to recall something from one of my undergraduate classes, but since I had finally thrown away the big old boxes of notes and readings from those days, there was no place to look. It was just not practical to lug my boxes of notes from place to place, move to move especially when I only wanted to take a look every few years for maybe one thing. With this type of blog, there is a record of what happened for everyone to share. That said, I am faced with a problem when I teach this class again. Since we provide what I think is a pretty decent account of what we are doing, I will most probably have to put down the blog for a period of time when I am teaching it again though of course the syllabus and readings will also change to some degree.

4 October 2008

Biella Coleman: If you complain

One thing I am known to do is complain how the public/academic discourse surrounding/around technology/computers is overwhelmingly male (Lessig, Benkler, Zittrain, Shirky and I can go on and on). But one day I realized that if I am bothered by it, I should do more than talk the (often) empty talk of complaint. So I decided to enroll in a day long training for writing OpEds, which kicks off tomorrow. I am not sure if engaging in public debate is what I want to do, mostly because of piling more work and time commitments on a very full plate but I am starting to explore what it means and what it may take to leave the Ivory Tower. Here is a little more info about the OpEd Project:
he OpEd Project - featured by The New York Times, Feministing.com and Katie Couric on CBS News - is an initiative to expand public debate, with an immediate focus on targeting and training women experts across the nation to project their voices on the op-ed pages of major newspapers, online sites and other key forums of public discourse. The lack of diversity on the op-ed pages - which are a source for all other media - deprives the public of robust, democratic debate, especially important in this space which is intended to showcase divergent opinions. It also means we are only hearing from a tiny sliver of the nation’s best thinkers. Imagine a baseball team of only pitchers - how well would it do?

Russell Coker: Getting Started with Amazon EC2

The first thing you need to do to get started using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) [1] is to install the tools to manage the service. The service is run in a client-server manner. You install the client software on your PC to manage the EC2 services that you use. There are the AMI tools to manage the machine images [2] and the API tools to launch and manage instances [3]. The AMI tools come as both a ZIP file and an RPM package and contain Ruby code, while the API tools are written in Java and only come as a ZIP file. There are no clear license documents that I have seen for any of the software in question, I recall seeing one mention on one of the many confusing web pages of the code being “proprietary” but nothing else. While it seems most likely (but far from certain) that Amazon owns the copyright to the code in question, there is no information on how the software may be used - apart from an implied license that if you are a paying EC2 customer then you can use the tools (as there is no other way to use EC2). If anyone can find a proper license agreement for this software then please let me know. To get software working in the most desirable manner it needs to be packaged for the distribution on which it is going to be used, as I prefer to use Debian that means packaging it for Debian. Also when packaging the software you can fix some of the silly things that get included in software that is designed for non-packaged release (such as demanding that environment variables be set to specify where the software is installed). So I have built packages for Debian/Lenny for the benefit of myself and some friends and colleagues who use Debian and EC2. As I can’t be sure of what Amazon would permit me to do with their code I have to assume that they don’t want me to publish Debian packages for the benefit of all Debian and Ubuntu users who are (or might become) EC2 customers. So instead I have published the .diff.gz files from my Debian/Lenny packages [4] to allow other people to build identical packages after downloading the source from Amazon. At the moment the packages are a little rough, and as I haven’t actually got an EC2 service running with them yet they may have some really bad bugs. But getting the software to basically work took more time than expected. So even if there happen to be some bugs that make it unusable in it’s current state (the code for determining where it looks for PEM files at best needs a feature enhancement and at worst may be broken at the moment) then it would still save people some time to use my packages and fix whatever needs fixing.

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3 October 2008

Christian Perrier: Why I think Foss.in/2008 is missing its target..

(long post, you've been warned) With his his 'Omelette Post' about FOSS.IN/2008 Call for Participation, Atul Chitnis, the FOSS.IN team 'leader' indeed sent an strong sign. For those who aren't aware of it, FOSS.IN is the longstanding major FLOSS event in India and, still (just like our beloved Debconf) only run by volunteers. Last year, along with Sam Hocevar, I had the chance to attend the event and share the groove of that big, huge, conference, with over 2,000 participants. Some other Debian fellows also made it in the past (Jaldhar, Bdale...). During the Debian Project Day as well as regular conference days, we had the great opportunity to meet with the people who currently participate in Debian (and Ubuntu) in South Asia, as well as first meeting some major contributors from other projects. For me, and, I think, of all people I met up there, this was a great *and productive* event. Maybe not productive at the moment it happened, but productive in terms of mutual awareness, knowledge and friendship. All people who attended such conferences (should I say "Debconf" or "FOSDEM"?) know what I'm talking about. The conference was still quite focused on "real" FLOSS contribution more than evangelizing or politics. And I think it succeeded in it quite well. This year, I already planned to not attend...mostly because such event, with the associated long travel time, is something I can't really fit in my real life right now. Also, because it conflicts with a planned Extremadura work session, indeed. Still, I would indeed not have attended it. Atul's post makes it clear: the even will only be about coding. The point is to put focus on people who code and we do 'real' code. Bug fixing is not coding. Translation effort is not coding. Work on support for complex languages is not coding. Actually, what FOSS.IN/2008 organizers are trying to do is a kind of big Debcamp. I'm afraid it won't work this way. From what I have seen in years of participation to Debian, things just don't come up this way. People don't sit down and code because they're invited to. And, still, are only "people who code" the only people that matter in a project? Debian is sometimes seen as one of the biggest FLOSS projects all around (probably shared with the Linux kernel). How many people in Debian just "sit down and code"? What about those people who maintain our web site, our archive, setup our infrastructure, our new maintainer queue, our communication channels? What about those dozens of people who nicely maintain packages and keep the link with upstream developers, or fix bugs.... Those people do not seem welcomed at FOSS.IN/2008. "Not only bug fixing" is said in this announcement. This, I don't get it. At all. Why would "bug fixing" be second class work? Why would it be more noble to "code" new stuff? Maybe Atul did not mean to say this. He wants to have Indian contributors in FLOSS to be more visible....but I don't share this. Indian contributors in Debian *are* visible. Giridhar Appaji Nag is visible, "my" translator crew is visible, Kartik Mistry is visible (he once was too visible, even, by maintaining a little bit too many packages...). Bug fixing is the most noble task I see in FLOSS development. This is what we need the most. I recently blogged about how I feel APT to be 'poorly' maintained (once again, that was not targeted to current APT maintainers). What I would respect deeply is to see a bunch of Indian contributors stand up and take this task over. Atul, that would certainly not be "outsourcing code/package maintenance" and, no, these are not things one can get involved with instantly. Really, I don't buy this vision and that saddens me. That saddens me mostly because I know the folks there. I know the FOSS.IN organizers and I have deep respect for them. I just think they're missing the target and are too ambitious: one cannot change an event so drastically by just saying it has to change..:-) And, really, I'm even more sad to see localization work be called a low-hanging fruit from a country where there are 22 official languages. Or take words such as "talk is cheap, show me the code" as $ DEITY 's Holy Word just because it was once said by Linus Torvalds (who said many stupid things). Code is just one part of FLOSS development. Certainly one of the important parts but still one part. What would have happened to FLOSS if only "coders" had been working on it all over those years? It would be something used by about 10,000 people all around the world, that's all. We should not make an opposition between those who code and those who don't. By the way, do *I* code? When I'm sitting at 07:00AM on a Saturday morning, hacking on Samba packages and try to have Samba 3.2.4 built with the set of patches we have on Debian....do I code? I'm not *producing* code....the code was produced by those wonderful Samba Team folks. Does Karolin Seeger code when she's releasing samba with such a precise and constant schedule as she's doing since early 2008? Or Ana Guerrero when she (not alone!) compiles dozens of KDE packages and organizes and bumps the maintenance of KDE in Debian for the best of our users. Or Miriam Ruiz when she picks up each and every possible free game and tries to get it in Debian, talks with upstream developers, help them to fiw their code to suit the severe requirements of the Debian policy? Or Clytie Siddall when she translates about every major FLOSS in Vietnamese (nor URL here, sorry)? All these folks are part of the FLOSS game. You want Indians to be part of FLOSS game? Then allow the potential Karolin, Ana, Miriam or Clytie to be part of Indian FLOSS game and don't try to make FOSS.in the place where you seek the future Indian Linus Torvalds and only him her. Talk is cheap, show me the contribution.

Michal Čihař: Gammu stable version 1.21.0

Good news everyone, after long time of inactivity and huge development over past month, new stable Gammu release is out. Since 1.20.94, there are only minor fixes in handling some corner cases in AT parser, but full list of changes since last stable 1.20.0 is quite long: You can download from usual place: http://cihar.com/gammu/, Binary packages will be available soon.

Adrian von Bidder: Microsoft contacting me

I recently received an email from Amy Wilcox from Murphy & Associates, representing Microsoft (the mail was sent from a Microsoft address, via smtp.microsoft.com, so it appears to be genuine.) They asked me to remove the ban for Microsoft search from my robots.txt because customers complained they couldn't find my site
First, cowards, they (the people complaining to MS) should have contacted me directly. I don't exactly hide my email address. Second: apparently they still did know about my site, else they wouldn't have complained to MS. In any case, I responded that the removal of this robots.txt entry would be a commercial opportunity for me if they cared to take me up on this offer. I will, of course, amend the omission of not putting a robots.txt on my new blog.fortytwo.ch domain...

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