There is a lot of discussion and speculation about The Singularity. The term seems to be defined by Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity Is Near” [1] which focuses on a near-future technological singularity defined by significant increases in medical science (life extension and methods to increase mental capacity) and an accelerating rate of scientific advance. In popular culture the idea that there will only be one singularity seems to be well accepted, so the discussion is based on when it will happen. One of the definitions for a singularity is that it is a set of events that change society in significant ways such that predictions are impossible - based on the concept of the Gravitational Singularity (black hole) [2]. Science fiction abounds with stories about what happens after someone enters a black hole, so the concept of a singularity not being a single event (sic) is not unknown, but it seems to me that based on our knowledge of science no-one considers there to be a black hole with multiple singularities - not even when confusing the event horizon with the singularity. If we consider a singularity to merely consist of a significant technological change (or set of changes) that change society in ways that could not have been predicted (not merely changes that were not predicted) then it seems that there have been several already, here are the ones that seem to be likely candidates: 0) The development of speech was a significant change for our species (and a significant change OF our species). Maybe we should consider that to be singularity 0 as hominids that can’t speak probably can’t be considered human. 1) The adoption of significant tool use and training children in making and using tools (as opposed to just letting them learn by observation) made a significant change to human society. I don’t think that with the knowledge available to bands of humans without tools it would have been possible to imagine that making stone axes and spears would enable them to dominate the environment and immediately become the top of the food chain. In fact as pre-tool hominids were generally not near the top of the food chain they probably would have had difficulty imagining being rulers of the world. I’m sure that it led to an immediate arms race too. 2) The development of agriculture was a significant change to society that seems to have greatly exceeded the expectations that anyone could have had at the time. I’m sure that people started farming as merely a way of ensuring that the next time they migrated to an area there was food available (just sowing seeds along traditional migration routes for a hunter-gatherer existence). They could not have expected that the result would be a significant increase in the ability to support children and a significant increase in the number of people who could be sustained by a given land area, massive population growth, new political structures to deal with greater population density, and then wiping out hunter-gatherer societies in surrounding regions. It seems likely to me that the mental processes needed to predict the actions of a domestic animal (in terms of making it a friend, worker, or docile source of food) differ from those needed to predict the actions of other humans (who’s mental processes are similar) and from those needed to predict the actions of prey that is being hunted (you only need to understand enough to kill it). 3) The invention of writing allowed the creation of larger empires through better administration. All manner of scientific and political development was permitted by writing. 4) The work of Louis Pasteur sparked a significant development in biology which led to much greater medical technology [3]. This permitted much greater population densities (both in cities and in armies) without the the limitation of significant disease problems. It seems that among other things the world-wars depended on developments in preventing disease which were linked to Louis’ work. Large populations densely congregated in urban areas permit larger universities and a better exchange of knowledge which permitted further significant developments in technology. It seems unlikely that a population suffering the health problems that were common in 1850 could have simultaneously supported large-scale industrial warfare and major research projects such as the Manhattan Project. 5) The latest significant change in society has been the development of the Internet and mobile phones. Mobile phones were fairly obvious in concept, but have made structural changes to society. For example I doubt that hand-writing is going to be needed to any great extent in the future [4], the traditional letter has disappeared, and “Dates” are now based on “I’ll call your mobile when I’m in the area” instead of meeting at a precise time - but this is the trivial stuff. Scientific development and education have dramatically increased due to using the Internet and business now moves a lot faster due to mobile phones. It seems that nowadays any young person who doesn’t want to be single and unemployed needs to have either a mobile phone or Internet access - and preferably both. When mobile phones were first released I never expected that almost everyone would feel compelled to have one, and when I first started using the Internet in 1992 I never expected it to have the rich collaborative environment of Wikipedia, blogging, social networking, etc (I didn’t imagine anything much more advanced than file exchange and email). Of these changes the latest (Internet and mobile phones) seems at first glance to be the least significant - but let’s not forget that it’s still an ongoing process. The other changes became standard parts of society long ago. So it seems that we could count as many as six singularities, but it seems that even the most conservative count would have three singularities (tool use, agriculture, and writing). It seems to me that the major factors for a singularity are an increased population density (through couples being able to support more children, through medical technology extending the life expectancy, through greater food supplies permitting more people to live in an area, or through social structures which manage the disputes that arise when there is a great population density) and increased mental abilities (which includes better education and communication). Research into education methods is continuing, so even without genetically modified humans, surgically connecting computers to human brains, or AI we can expect intelligent beings with a significant incremental advance over current humans in the near future. Communications technology is continually being improved, with some significant advances in the user-interfaces. Even if we don’t get surgically attached communications devices giving something similar to “telepathy” (which is not far from current technology), there are possibilities for significant increments in communication ability through 3D video-conferencing, better time management of communication (inappropriate instant communication destroys productivity), and increased communication skills (they really should replace some of the time-filler subjects at high-school with something useful like how to write effective diagrams). It seems to me that going from the current situation of something significantly less than one billion people with current (poor) education and limited communications access (which most people don’t know how to use properly) to six billion people with devices that are more user-friendly and powerful than today’s computers and mobile phones combined with better education as to how to use them has the potential to increase the overall rate of scientific development by more than an order of magnitude. This in itself might comprise a singularity depending on the criteria you use to assess it. Of course that would take at least a generation to implement, a significant advance in medical technology or AI could bring about a singularity much sooner. But I feel safe in predicting that people who expect the world to remain as it is forever will be proven wrong yet again, and I also feel safe in predicting that most of them will still be alive to see it. I believe that we will have a technological singularity (which will be nothing like the “rapture” which was invented by some of the most imaginative interpretations of the bible). I don’t believe that it will be the final singularity unless we happen to make our species extinct (in which case there will most likely be another species to take over the Earth and have it’s own singularities).

• [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_is_Near


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasteur


• [4] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/11/is-hand-writing-necessary/

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On Sep 23rd I had an accident coming back home from work, and I've been hospitalized until this afternoon, with no internet access.

Nothing too dramatic, but my right knee is broken, so I got to stay put for another month or so.

I'm spending this period away from my home, hence even from my usually Debian box (with my tools, GPG keys, and so); that said, my contribution to Debian in these days will be a little bit "restricted".

I'll be catching up with emails soon: I already saw some needing an input from me, so just wait a little longer and I'll be back to you.

Don't worry, I'll be back!! :)

It's been really strange coming back from DebConf then Extremadura and having to fit my code time around paid work and housework and general stuff again. I keep wondering why I'm not getting things done and then realising that I've only got so many hours a week nowadays compared to the entire week during the worksessions. What makes it worse is the short gap between the conferences. I misjudged the length of time without income and didn't make any days available for paid work between DebConf and Extremadura. OK, it was only about a week but it was a further week without income followed by the week getting to and from Spain.
I'm now doing extra days to recover from the extra time without income and it makes the contrast even more noticeable. The tiredness from the extra work then makes it hard to get started on what I thought I'd get done. I've done a little bit on emdebian-tools and apt-cross, I've done a little bit on a few RC bugs and I've not done a load of stuff I thought I would have done by now.
If you're wondering why something I said I'd do has not been done, file a bug and I'll get to it. (The bug lists for buildd.emdebian.org or emdebian-tools are my main ToDo lists, if it appears in that list of bugs, I'll not forget. If it appears in an email, I probably will forget.)

So last week, a relative commented to me that a solicitor sent a letter in reply to an email. I suggested that it might be because the email reply address was on one of the major free web email providers. “What’s wrong with my webmail?” So I explained… First of all, as far as I know, no Big Webmail service supports encrypted email (and there are complications in how you’d provide such a thing on webmail anyway) and it can be fairly easy to trick the webmail service into giving access to other people. My relative was sceptical, but within a day, US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo mail was cracked and splashed across the news. (By the way - gov.palin counted as a personal email address? Huh? Her name isn’t “gov”.) Even without passwords going astray, there’s no telling that the intended recipient is the only person reading the email. Here’s a fun paragraph from the Google Mail Terms:-

“Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents to provide the Gmail service to you and to improve our services. The Gmail service includes relevant advertising and related links based on the IP address, content of messages and other information related to your use of Gmail.” (emphasis added)

The Electronic Privacy Information Center suggests this includes wiretapping. There’s finally a growing awareness that free webmails are not safe, built on artificial anti-competitive encouragements like “you need a Yahoo!ID to subscribe to this yahoogroup” (no - the old “stick -subscribe after the group name, before the @” still works, just like it did before they bought it from egroups). Internet Psychologist Graham Jones writes:-

“It’s time to review your online security and think about whether you actually need Google and its like at all. Probably not.” (source)

I agree with that. Both of my phone companies (The Phone Co-op agency and 3) include webmail - although I have some personal domains (for long-term contactability), those webmails are fine for lists and short-term use. The sort of thing most people seem to use Big Webmail for. The other main point in my argument was that free webmails are unreliable, thanks to tactics like Yahoo’s shoddy anti-spam attacks on other mailservers. There’s no telling whether the email will get through such bad behaviour and delivery-receipts are unreliable. I can quite understand why a solicitor won’t send email to the likes of hotmail, even if I think it’s just as probable that the solicitor doesn’t “get” email. “Oh” said my relative. I think she’s still using Big Webmail though.

A case of a former friend impersonating someone on facebook was decided during the summer: Applause Store Productions Ltd. & Anor v Raphael [2008] EWHC 1781 (QB) (24 July 2008) . The victim was awarded thousands of pounds in damages. As I write this, there’s still no response on facebook’s news page, but I wonder whether Firsht will be to UK social networking what Godfrey was to UK Usenet. A bit of a wake-up - a reminder that the internet isn’t a consequence-free playpen. I know that more than most - my youthful indiscretions are plastered across the web, if you know where to look. Fortunately, cooperative associates seem to understand that people learn over time and don’t hold decade-old mistakes against me. Talking of not holding old mistakes against people, LinkedIn is profitting from an influx of bankers since the banks started going bust. That’s going to change the society behind their network - for better or worse? All of the big name networks seem to be having some growing pains, like the breakdown of the Facebook metaphor and I think the “walled gardens” are ripe for replacement. I’m still listed there at present, but I’m using my account on the cooperativemagazine NoseRub server to monitor it and most of the stuff posted to facebook is taken from my websites. I’d like to make NoseRub import and export more things in more formats, but will anyone pay for that work? Otherwise, it keeps falling down my priorities because it’s in PHP and I don’t find that much fun. Maybe I’ll replace it with something more amusing in Scheme or Perl. Aside: is there a good bot that produces an RSS feed of jabber/XMPP presence messages?

It started harmless when Thomas asked on Linux User Group Switzerland mailing list if someone knows a tux-shaped alarm clock. But the topic of that thread quickly moved to two other things in tux shape: the Tux Droid, a device similar to the Nabaztag, but needs a Linux host with USB, and ACME Systems’ Tux-Server, a ETRAX CRIS based Foxboard inside a tux-shaped case. We found out that Telion, the Swiss importer for Foxboards, also imports ACME Systems’ Tux Case — although the Tux Case is not mentioned on their website. Even better: They had a few old Tux Cases in stock which don’t fit anymore on current Foxboards since the position of the power socket changed. (So only one hole in the case was missing.) And they wanted to get rid of them quite fast: They offered us the Tux Cases for 10 CHF (6€) each instead of 28 CHF each (17€) if we buy all of them. Of course we couldn’t reject this offer and bought all five remaining cases. Another part of the thread was about performance. Although ETRAX CRIS is used by its inventor AXIS in many of its products (they’re famous for the Linux based web-cams) many were not sure if the board’s performance would be sufficient for their ideas. Another disadvantage of the ETRAX CRIS architecture is that no mainstream Linux distribution supports it. Another point was the Foxboard’s price (169€, ca. 268 CHF). Bones just mentioned that an NSLU2 costs only about 100 CHF (60€). Probably on IRC someone (probably Bones, too) wondered if it’s possible to fit a NSLU2 into such a quite inexpensive Tux Case. We took Wikipedia’s picture of the NSLU2 board, compared the size of the USB ports on that picture, compared them with real-life USB ports and found out the size of the board that way. And when I got my Tux-Case I noticed that the NSLU2 board really could fit into the Tux-Case. Since I’m already building a bigger NAS-like home server, I have no use for another, much slower NAS. But since I more or less gave up the also ARM-based Thecus N4100, another ARM-based machine in my hardware collection wouldn’t be bad. So it didn’t took long and the idea was born to build the NSLU2 board into a Tux-Case and let the website tux.ethz.ch run on it. (I inherited its administration from Beat and it’s currently just a virtual host on one of our webservers.) Then it would be a server named Tux, serving Tuxes, looking like a Tux and running Tux’ operating system Linux. :-) I ordered an NSLU2 at Brack for 117.60 CHF (ca. 70€). Played around with the original firmware for a moment, but it’s horrible from a security point of view: You can’t even change the admin password (default: “admin”) if no USB harddisk is attached. And no, a USB stick doesn’t suffice. So I didn’t wait long and tried to install Debian’s “armel” (ARM, Little Endian) port on it. But the NSLU2 refused the “new firmware” with the error message “Upgrade: no enough free space.”. While this is not in the Debian specific NSLU2 FAQ, it is mentioned in the general troubleshooting FAQ. As described in there, first upgrading to the most recent firmware version and then uploading the Debian installer worked fine. After I had successfully installed Debian Lenny on a pqi 4 GB USB sticked into the NSLU2 and verified that everything is working fine, I opened the NSLU2 case and checked if it really would fit into a Tux Case. It does, but very, very close. You’ll have to drill some holes and the ethernet socket will stick out Tux’s shoulder, but everything else should fit perfectly after a few mounting parts inside the Tux Case have been removed. As a proof of concept I laid the NSLU2 board on the Tux Case’s back: So later the LEDs will be in Tux’ one shoulder while the network socket will be in his other shoulder. And the USB stick will be inside his paunch via a USB hub.

I just got a new bug titled Very weird translation template, need comments in .pot file to clarify, and giggled to myself. I was wondering how long it would be for this bug to be filed. The problem is that whilst most of the translatable strings in Tasks are pretty boring: "Tasks", "today", "Priority" and so on, all of a sudden the template goes a bit mental:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<month>\\w+) (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)?$"

Apparently the average translator doesn't think that learning PCRE-style regular expressions, and reading the source that uses this string to understand how it is to be used, is appropriate. [note: this is sarcasm] Maybe I should have added some translator comments to clarify exactly what I meant by this. These monster strings (all in koto-date-parser.c) are GRegex regular expressions which are used to parse the user's input to try and extract meaningful date information. To translate these strings you'll need to have a basic understanding of regular expressions: if you don't then skip them and hopefully someone who does will finish the translation. If you know regular expressions then translating these strings is easy, honest. The golden rule is to never translate the words which look like this: (?<foo>. These are markers which identify portions of the input (such as task or month) and need to remain in English, although they can be moved around if required. The rest of the strings are translatable. I'll give an example using the French translation by Stéphane Raimbault. First, the string in English and a worked example:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:by due on)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:st nd rd th)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

First, we have a sequence of any characters identified as task, which magically expands to be as many as possible. This is optionally followed by one of the words "by", "due" or "on". This is followed by one or two digits identified as day followed by "st", "nd", "rd" or "th". Finally a sequence of characters which is identified as month. If the user had entered "pay bills on 2nd june" then task would be "pay bills", day would be "2", and month would be "june". Tasks can then turn "june" into a month number through other translations, and it now knows what date the user entered. In French, this translates as follows:

"^(?<task>.+) (?:pour pr vu pour le)? (?<day>\\d 1,2 )(?:er e)? (?<month>\\w+)$"

See, I said it was easy! All I need now is a legion of translators who understand regular expressions enough to correctly translate the new Tasks... [this, again, is sarcasm] Luckily, plans are afoot to move the Tasks source to the GNOME Subversion server, so the full fury of the GNOME translation team can attack this. NP: Trailer Park, Beth Orton

I would like to add some clarifications to the debate on linux sound APIs that happened last friday on planet. First, despite being portrayed as such, I am nothing like an OSS zealot. I was just recently surprised that OSS developpement still exists and that no one cares. Hence, my initial motivation for my post was to correct false informations, not to advocate for any solution. Now, since the debat has been opened to the issue of linux sound APIs, I feel like adding my two bits. In particular, unlike Josselin, I don't believe that the debate is irrelevant. I, too, would like that we consider two levels for sound APIs:

• Low level, decidated to some specialized applications
• High level, used for simple sound applications, in particular in a desktop environement.

However, there are few points that are missing in Josselin's claim:

• This distinction was not an initial design for ALSA. ALSA was aimed at being both low level and high level, in particular with the pcm virtual devices. However, the lack of documentation and the absence of any high level programming interface for the high level pcm virtual devices just made this goal totally fail.
• Desktop environements didn't agree on a common standard. Even though there seems to be some solutions that are emerging now, like pulseaudio, this is not at all a standard yet. For instance, all graphical mixers I know about only support ALSA.

So, yes, I believe there is still a debate which should not be closed be throwing away idealistic solutions, but by discussing the real issues and trying to settle real solutions. Lennart also commented on previous message that he had adressed most of the remarks concerning the initial guide. In particular, he notices that OSS4 does a lot of audio processing in-kernel, objecting that this means that OSS4 will never be part of the official kernel. This is true, but it doesn't mean there are no life outside of the stock kernel. Here, again, it is a matter of liberty of choice. If some audio applications are better suited for OSS4, then I don't see why we shouldn't provide this alternative.

I want this book. The problem is I don’t want to pay $324.79 for it either. Looks like a great collection of essays. It has one of my favorite articles on the history of intellectual property by Carla Hesse, which you can download for yourself here. In a mere 20 pages she conveys not only a general history of IP law in Europe and the United States,(which she actually makes riveting) but captures the philosophical contradictions and problems that have marked and marred IP as it has traveled from nation to nation and as it has grown in scope and depth in the last 200 years. I cannot recommend it enough.

I’m practically 4 courses away from finishing my degree (the course I failed in June, I passed a couple weeks ago). 4 courses which I loathe, but that I’ll get done this year. After them, I still have to prepare something akin to a “final project”, but that doesn’t worry me much, since it’ll be something I enjoy. Apart from these 4 courses, I also have to take a couple non-computer science ones, whichever I want. I’ve decided to go for French lessons, since I’ve always wanted to learn French. I’m very excited for this. Today was my first day. I had some previous, incredibly rudimentary notions of French already, but that didn’t help not to find it a bit daunting at first: there’s so much to learn. (I can’t remember at all how I felt when I started studying English, but alas, I was a kid, when you’re taught stuff you know zero about.) I decided, though, to look it from a positive note, and make a pleasant experience out of it: not everyday one has the opportunity to dive into something completely new. I remained excited for the rest of the class, and I’m sure my classmates thought, “Why is this guy stupidly smiling from time to time?” (These are courses designed for freshmen, and I felt out of place. It seems 8 years it’s a lot of time.) Incidentally, my sister speaks French, and she’s lent me some books and dictionarys from her time as a student. Some of these were books from Le Petit Nicolas series; I had read all of them during my childhood, in Spanish. I glanced through the French versions, and recognizing every single picture in them as something I had already seen, albeit fifteen years ago, was a very weird feeling.

Although I doubt there are any French historians who read this blog, there may be a few IP historical wizards who can help me answer the following question about Denis Diderot, the editor and one of the main writers of the famous Enlightenment Encyclopedia, who apparently was a pro-copyright kinda guy. According to this Carla Hesse article, Diderot, who participated in the emerging debates around idea of copyright, argued that products of the mind are more uniquely the property of their creator than land acquired through cultivation (Hesse, p. 34). She furnishes us with the following quote from Diderot that captures this moral sensibility:

What form of wealth could belong to a man, if not the work of the mind. If not his own thoughts … the most precious part of himself, that will never perish, that will immortalize them? What comparison could there be between a man, the very substance of a man, his soul, and a field, a tree, a vine, that nature has offered in the beginning equally to all, and which the individual has only appropriated through cultivating it

My first questions is, if this is the case, did he differentiate between the literary efforts of, lets say a novel, which he wrote as well, and his Encyclopedia whereby the former would be eligible for copyright protection (as it has to do with personal thoughts and originality) whereas the later would not because it was less about originality and more about cataloging human affairs, actions, and knowledge (though of course it did require work of the mind). Another more simple way of putting this is: did he desire/seek copyright protection for the Encyclopedia? It is also worth noting that a good chunk of the Encyclopedia documented the practical arts or in other words, craft. As Richard Sennet describes it in his amazing book on craft making as follows: It volumes exhaustively described in words and pictures how practical things get done and proposed ways to do them (2008: 90). Remember too this was a project of collaboration and he apparently collaborated with many scientists as well. So the subject matter was a domain of knowledge whose utility, so to speak, could come to fruition if it had an ability to be passed on person to person, generation to generation. This makes me want to know even more than I do (and I do want to know) whether he viewed copyright as appropriate for a literary work that basically described the practical arts and which was also created through the hands and minds of many (though he did did seem to sweat and labor more than anyone else.). Any thoughts? Answers?

I ve previously ranted about the Lufthansa website. Trying to help out a blind friend obtain some assistance from Miles & More, the Lufthansa frequent flyer programme, I can confidently say that the two companies have a common origin and probably read the same customer service guidelines, which must be somewhat along the following lines:

• require your customers to fill out a web form by not providing any alternate contact information;
• make your website inaccessible to screen readers, so that visually disabled people cannot get in touch with you;
• require full contact data to be filled in before the contact form can be submitted, even if the customer is logged in and the system thus has access to all the data;
• auto-reply to ever form submitted with a mail that assigns a case number to your request, but provide no information on how to use that number: no link where I can inquire about the status of a case, and no means to post follow-up information;
• send this email from do-not-reply@miles-and-more.com to emphasise how customer-oriented your company is and how well you have understood the potential of email;
• when (if) you eventually send a real reply, send it from service@miles-and-more.com, which gives the impression of a real email address, and quote the case number in the subject, along with the first line of the customer s original request, like this: Re: To Whom It May Concern (#17 (#1729700) / (#M1449889) . For extra bonus points, use non-matching parentheses;
• try to ensure not to take into account any of the data provided with the original request and prefer stock replies to useful content;
• do not give the name of a person, but sign the email with something like Miles & More Service Team ;
• refuse all mails sent to service@miles-and-more.com with a note telling people to use the web form to provide feedback (with a cryptic link) and that your email is not being forwarded or read;
• when the customer uses the cryptic link to provide follow-up to the open case, possibly under the impression that the reply will be associated with the original case, assign a new case number and ensure that another team member answers the email with pretty much exactly the same information as the last reply you sent. Under no circumstances assume that the customer has already asked a given question before and couldn t make sense of or wasn t satisfied with the answer provided in the last round.
• should a customer enquire about alternative means of contact, tell them they can send regular mail via the post office, and that you are sorry that at the moment , you cannot reach the company by email.

If you follow the above guidelines carefully and possibly add a twist here or there, you can rest assured that you ll fit in quite perfectly with most of your competitors and companies in many other fields. You ll understand that the customer is evil and you have to protect your company and your customer service staff from them, by making it extraordinarily difficult and inconvenient to reach them, and ensuring that they won t get any further than the computerised guard at the front door. It s not like they are your most important asset. Interestingly, neither Swiss, SAS, nor Thai have read these guidelines. I hope they will never find them. NP: Porcupine Tree: The Sky Moves Sideways

At 1900 BST tonight (30 September), you can take part in an international development webcast by one of my cooperatives, with guests from the Cooperative College, the International Cooperative Alliance and the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Center. Sadly, they’re still clueless about free software, so you may need to put mms://195.10.247.9/a83e447e-68fb-453a-9f0c-8b3fe5b382b9 into a standalone video player if your browser keeps on demanding Microsoft Silverlight like mine does. Drop them an email and suggest that the Bristol Wireless cooperative do better webcasts or something like that.

Dear lazyweb,
for my soon-to-be ex-job I need a single core CPU for some mathematical optimization software that is licensed per core. We have a single core license and therefore a single core or a dual core would be sufficient. The CPU should have as much power as possible with as mach L2 cache as possible and it should be 64bit. 19" rack equipment (1 RU) would be nice.

Any suggestions for the hardware?

I'm wading through my email and saw a recent announcement about the miniconfs that have been accepted for linux.conf.au 2009, and Debian was conspicuous in its absence. That's a bit of a shame.

Looking at KDE4 and related technologies, a few things about data storage hit me. Not that I know anything about it, but that does usually not prevent me from trying to be clever about it. Several parts needs to either index, cache or store data. Apps

• Strigi indexes your harddisk, just a index. No real data
• Akonadi caches your data, especially email/contacts/calendar items, but also in the future probably instant messaging logs, notes and others
• Nepomuk handles and stores tags on files and other data
• Amarok indexes your music collection and stores related info, including statistics

Among these, there is probably many other, but these I just noticed. How do these apps store their things As the smart reader has guessed, all these uses different storage methods. Strigi Indexes your data and store it in a clucene on disk format. If you remove your strigi indexes, all you lose is the cpu time used to generate it.
Strigi is not a KDE thing, but the KDE libraries depends on it. Akonadi Caches your PIM data and make it available easily for applications. Akonadi does not itself keep the data. Akonadi people has evaluated SQLite, but found it insufficient. Akonadi people also evaluated MySQL/Embedded, but did also have issues with that, so they ended up using a full MySQL server.
Akonadi is not a KDE thing, but it originates from KDE and is used by the KDE Pim libraries. Nepomuk Handles and stores metadata and tags on files, emails and other data. The nepomuk data is all in RDF format. Nepomuk uses Soprano for storage and soprano has pluggable backends.
One Soprano backend, probably the most used, is a Redland backend, which too slow for effective nepomuk usage, but is a C++ thing. Redland internally can use Berkeley DB or MySQL. The usage in Soprano is Berkeley DB format.
The other Soprano backend is using Sesame2, a java rdf storage. Quite some people are against this because it is java. Internally, it seems that it is using its own ondisk format, but is much more effective than the Redland/BDB backend, and the recommended one to use. Amarok Indexes and plays your music and does statistics over it. The amarok people have evaluated SQLite and found it not good enough for the job. The amarok people are going for MySQL/Embedded for now. Overview All in all, we have a clucene index, a full MySQL server, a BerkelyDB or custom format and a MySQL/Embedded used. I wonder how much communication between these projects there have been regarding the choice of storages. Wacky ideas Now that I already in the beginning said that I didn’t know enough about what I was talking about, I also feel well suited to make suggestions for the future. What if …

• Amarok hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database process
• Amarok skipped the concept of databases and let Strigi index the music and stored the metadata and statistics in Nepomuk
• Soprano Redland backend hooked into the Akonadi MySQL database instead of a BerkeleyDB file

That’s it for now, next up, maybe, interesting places to use plasma.

Emacs CVS has an interesting new feature: it now accepts a --daemon command line option which makes it start up as a Unix daemon; it detaches from the controlling terminal, starts up a new process session, goes to the background, starts an Emacs server and just waits for connections. The user can then use emacsclient to create new frames (console or graphical) for the background Emacs, using the new multi-tty abilities of Emacs 23. Since frame creation is virtually instantaneous, this makes the editor start up much faster than in the usual case (and a lot more so if you have an extensive configuration). Also, if your X session goes down, the editor is still running in the background with your buffers and applications, safe from harm. Very neat! (Get it from the usual place if you run Debian.)

(Note: this new --daemon mode is a cleaner replacement for the old screen-based preload-emacs script that was distributed with the multi-tty branch.)

I am a big fan of zotero as it has helped me manage my research, especially collect, tag, time stamp, and keep web pages that are likely to vanish. I can’t recommend it enough. I have yet to use its bibliographic functionality and apparently it is this functionality which has made it the subject of what what looks like a pretty questionable law suit. It has been a while since a IP lawsuit has really caught my attention (only in so far as it was the same old thing, not because it was not important) but this one definitely has caught my attention (and caught me off guard as well as I never really associated End Notes with Zotero, in so far as they seem to work pretty distinctly). I am eager to see how an academic institution, George Mason in this case, will react. I just hope they stand firm and also get some great legal team to help out.

Five years ago today, I became a Debian Developer! My account was created just a few weeks after Debian's 10th birthday and we recently celebrated the 15th, so I've been around for about a third of the project's life. In that period, we released sarge and etch, had two compromises, approximately 300,000 bugs were filed in the BTS, Ubuntu was created, three DPLs came and went, dunc-tank was launched and subsequently abandoned, and the Debian Maintainer status was created (among other notable events).

For me personally there have been ups and downs, but mostly it's been fun. I'm still proud of taking part in what is perhaps the largest volunteer project to date, and one that can produce a distribution of outstanding quality and versatility. The Debian community is huge, diverse and sometimes frighteningly technical, but always focused on making Debian (both the product and the project) better for everyone; it's worth being part of it if only for the amazing melting-pot of cultures and (sometimes antagonistic) technological philosophies.

I think that after fifteen years Debian is still relevant both as a basis for derivative distributions, and as a product for end users. I like to think that I've played a part, however insignificant, in Debian's success in the past five years and I hope that I'll be given the chance to continue contributing in the future. Rock on, Debian!