Whilst ambling around on the web after seeing a post on reddit.com that piqued my curiousity, I happened on some work discussing "maximizers and satisficers", which, put crudely, says that there are two kinds of people. Those who, out of a group of options want the best one - maximizers - and those who just want something that will work - satisficers. Anyone who has been around programming languages more than, say, a week, will instantly recognize the above theme in the endless discussions of "which programming language is best?", or more generally, which "X" is best? I'd be willing to bet that programmers, and especially open source programmers, tend towards the 'maximizers' end of the spectrum - I don't want just any old X, I want the best one, dammit! Sometimes, this can be a good thing, as it leads us to continuously seek to improve things we come into contact with, or try new approaches, it can also be detrimental if your goal is simply to accomplish some task, rather than spending too much time fretting about finding the perfect tools to accomplish the task with. This also has ramifications for people designing or dealing with programming languages. One of the papers (the original?) on the subject (here), actually deals with the fact that maximizers, in their search for perfection tend to be less happy. Where satisficers are happy because they've got something that works, and they can go on to something else, maximizers have lots of room for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about their choices. In some instances, actually reducing people's choices makes them happier. Python's "one good way to do it" makes everyone happy, because both maximizers and satisficers know that they're doing things right, and don't have room to worry. Another example that I know well from my involvement in the Tcl community is "object systems for Tcl". For those who don't know Tcl well, it's an extremely flexible, extensible language, both in the language itself and in terms of its C API. So flexible, in fact, that you can write an OO system in Tcl itself, which has been done, or in C, which has also been done several times, leading to a proliferation of OO systems, and a never-ending stream of questions on the newsgroup about which is the best one? Perl's "there's more than one way to do it", despite apparently providing and pushing choice, may actually work well because it encourages people to be satisficers and use whatever works. I'm sure everyone can think of examples where too much choice causes doubts and hesitation. I think the lesson to be learned is that while it's important to encourage experimentation in order to explore possible solutions to problems, at a certain point it makes sense to consolidate and provide one or two recommended ways of doing something. That's not always possible (Linux distributions, for instance), and squashing competing ideas too early might cause friction with people generating innovation, so it can be difficult to accomplish, but I believe it's an important social aspect of software creation to keep in mind.

* helix wonders if erich ever gets tired of complaining Customer: I wish to complain about this developer what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very channel.
Vendor: Oh yes, the, uh, the German Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Customer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's complaining, that's what's wrong with it!
Vendor: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's discussing
Customer: Look, matey, I know a slasher when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Vendor: No no he's not complaining, he's, he's discussing'! Remarkable dev, the German Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful coat!
Customer: The coat don't enter into it. It's bitching.
Vendor: Nononono, no, no! 'E's discussing
Customer: All right then, if he's discussin', I'll debate with him! (shouting at the computer) 'Ello, Mister Perly Python! I've got a lovely fresh babel fish for you if you show...
(owner hits enter) Vendor: There, he replied!
Customer: No, he didn't, that was you spoofing an email!
Vendor: I never!!
Customer: Yes, you did!
Vendor: I never, never did anything...
[...]
Customer: 'E's not chattin'! 'E's vitriolic! This dev is no conversation! He has ceased to design! 'E's obsolete and gone to meet 'is makefile! 'E's a nagger! Bereft of constructivity, 'e breaks in pieces! If you hadn't set an autoresponder 'e'd not be replying to mails! 'Is patches are now 'istory! 'E's off the keyring! 'E's monologing. 'E's bitching, THIS IS AN EX-FLOSSDEV!! You get the idea. ;-) Apologies to one of the greatest comedians. No, Erinn, I'm not just complaining all the time. I actually worked quite a lot on OSS these days. But in some projects it feels much like you are the only one working there, probably a bit too much... just don't take my harsh critique too seriously, I'm actually a nice guy, just sometimes too involved with things. (But no, I'm not retiring or so. But facing exams soon.) On an unrelated note, I today uploaded the selinux-basics package to unstable, it contains some small niceties in setting up a SELinux system on Debian. But it's still far from completed, easy or documented.

Throughout the last couple of years, I've had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn't afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time. The long and short of it is, I've gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I'm not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I'm thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation. Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type "debt consolidation" into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently "debt consolidation" doesn't mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don't know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at "debt consolidation" sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff. The Scam The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I'm not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, "explaining" how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn't want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods. Here's the explanation he gave me: You've probably been paying your cards down already, so you've paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their "powerhouse lawyers". Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss. Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'm a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they'll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn't make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss. At this point, I've decided that I'm being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here's how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you "pay them now". In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900. I really didn't want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with "you can't borrow your way out of debt". Of course you can't borrow your way out of debt. That's stupid. I wasn't planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I'm not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me. He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: "What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?" His answer: "You stop paying your bills." On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages. The Scum About a week after my first bad experience with a debt "consolidation" company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as "Christian Financial Services" or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself. When I asked the same "worst situation" question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don't like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it. Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to "USA Debt Consolidation" or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it's good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it's name. The Sweet Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that's the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It's basically saying that you can spend money that you won't have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like. I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don't really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that's the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I'm savvy enough to do it. The Alternative There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating. My Choice In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I'm paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That's just for me though, to each his own. The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I'm outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.

On Heise’s security site HeiSec, Microsoft is advertising (in German) with a Flash animation of a rolling, black horse approaching the reader. Then suddenly a red gate closes and a text apprears:

Trojans must stay out.

If we translate this back to ancient greek history, it would say:

Microsofties must stay out

since Trojans were the inhabitants of Troy (German: Troja) and in the horse were the Greek aggressors. So I strongly agree. ;-) I really hate it, if people just reverse the meaning of something by abbreviating it (here by turning the adjective into a noun). And then not noticing it. The term Trojan Horse in computing is just one (unfortunately) often seen example… But no wonder that Microsoft doesn’t care about such things. They care about so less (e.g. stable software, secure operating systems, users, administrators, trust, etc.) except keeping their monopoly, making money and making even more money.

So I have now installable packages and tools for the mysterious, wondrous SERefPolicy. You can grab them at http://selinux.alioth.debian.org/experimental Note that I havn't tried using the policy yet. For example, the policy is missing dpkg and apt-get rules. So don't even think of running it on a production system, there is still lots of stuff to do. But I just, for the first time, managed to use "semodule", and actually add and remove modules from the modular policy. Yay! Now we just need to rewrite tons of policy in an even cryptier language, using even more M4 macro hell... ;-) Oh, and then we need to fix that Make bug effecting unstable, so we can actually build the new policy... ;-) We definitely need more people working on SELinux support in Debian.

Martin said:

Firefox and OpenOffice.org seem to be two flagship products of the F/OSS world. At the same time, they are probably the two best examples of programmes orthogonal to the Unix philosophy. Does that mean that the Unix philosophy is the wrong way? Holy Shit!

No, Martin, that doesn’t mean anything about the Unix philosophy. It only means Windows developers don’t have a clue about Unix.

I went to the cinema yesterday evening, and not having a clear idea of which film we wanted to watch, we decided for Manuale D'Amore, an Italian movie. It was great, funny almost all the time but with very emotive moments, all them mixed very well. The history is very simple. The movie introduces different couples that are in four different moments of their love: falling in love, the crisis, the traition and being abandoned. Every chapter is very well driven, and the actors play fairly well their roles. This movie, and the last one I watched, Los 2 lados de la cama, are good examples of European cinema very well made. In my opinion, if European cinema had followed this path more often, and with a bit more advertising, it will get more success than now, in which there are a lot of movies made trying to be different. P.S: I HATE people eating nachos in theaters.

Last Monday, Sarah and I visited the fine institution that is the California Department of Motor Vehicles, so that we could get ourselves California drivers licences. We had to do both a written test and a behind the wheel test. The written test was your standard multiple-guess exam (36 questions, maximum of 6 incorrect answers to pass). Annoyingly, all the material on the exam was not in the California Driver Handbook, which the handbook tried to make out was the case. Fortunately it was largely a case of common sense. I got two wrong. The funniest thing was that Sarah and I both got the same exam paper, and Sarah did her test just after I finished mine, and we were allowed to keep the paper, so she could see which two I got wrong. One of the more unusual things I found about the process was that they allocated me a licence number before I'd even sat the test. Last Thursday Sarah had her behind the wheel test, and today I had mine. It was pretty easy. No reverse-parking, no emergency stopping. I just had to drive around for 15 minutes. I passed without any faults. Given it took me four attempts to get my original licence in Australia, I was pretty pleased with this. (I failed my Queensland licence a number of times due to nerves). The other thing that I was amazed to discover was that I don't get the licence for another four to six weeks! They mail it out. The DMV processes over here are just mind boggling. The fact that you can't get a licence on the spot, and that it takes something like three months to get licence plates for a new car just blows me away. It's nothing like the process in Australia.

So my sister is working at a school where the computers are in a shocking state. All infected with viruses, spyware and malware. The machines either crawl along or are incredibly unstable. Some of them run some sort of virus protection program and I’ve seen one or two computers running two different anti-virus programs. On my travels I have seen countless infected Windows machines. It’s incredible! And the worse thing about it, is that the Free Software geeks and outfits can’t seem to capitalise enough on it. So what can I do? The Computer Scientist. Well, not a lot. For example all the Windows machines are in Korean. I can’t figure out how to change win32 language. Can you? Plus, I don’t want to re-install Windows. I want to deploy some Linux based solution. So what are the requirements? They need to :

• print timetables (via a crappy Epson inkjet) with something like Office
• be able to play macromedia based games
• use a browser

That’s it. It also can’t be more complex. No username or passwords please. We don’t want to have to train people to use a new system. Must be simple. Oh diddums. Can Director macromedia kid games be played in Linux? I don’t think so. Oh I wish these kids’ software was on a N64 or something. There is only like 10 PCs in this school and installing them with Linux would take quite a bit of my time. I need some sort of centralised control tower where I can control deployment of my own customized Ubuntu based distro. I know very well about SkoleLinux but it is simply too complicated. No need for email. Outsource to Gmail and hosted service. Must be simple. All I can think of will be complex and painful. Grrr…

Simple answer: because RSS and Atom are XML formats. So please generate valid output. Adhere to the standards! The RSS feeds of Planet Gnome and Planet Ubuntu, for example, are currently broken. (Planet Gnome due to a bug in Planetplanet AFAICT, Planet Ubuntu due to a broken RSS feed from Wordpress... Yes, you must escape single < characters in XML...) Templating systems such as the default templating of the Django Framework, or the popular Clearsilver templating engine are unfortunately not suited for XML output. Oh, and please never ever write XML using 'print' commands either. Use a proper XML writer, which can handle charset issues and escaping properly. Good examples for XML-enabled templating engines include TAL and METAL used by Zope (but available for a variety of languages), and KID (again python, used by the Turbogears Framework). Closely related is the "HTML fragments" issue, which basically is why I want XML to be used internally, too (you could also store StructuredText only, and convert it to XML just for transformation to the output): HTML fragments in my blog should be valid slices of an XHTML file, to avoid issues when generating both the web pages as well as when integrating the feed into other pages. With RSS, the HTML code is AFAICT escaped in one big data chunk, so it doesn't matter there. It probably does for Atom. So what a good blog tool (including a rewrite of planetplanet which has way too many bugs) needs to do is to parse it's input data (plain text, HTML provided by a web browsers WYSIWYG edit component, mail, structured text, XML, ...) and either reject broken entries or try to guess whats intended, but guarantee that the output is valid XML. Then generate proper feeds and output from that. Thanks to all those who already replied to my previous posting. One thing I was pointed at, and I'll probably look into is Apache Forrest. Although I likely will use KID instead, if I happen to write my own tool after or despite my upcoming final exams.

As regular readers of my blog should know by now, I’m a big fan of SaaS (software-as-a-service). I’d go so far as to say it’s the future of software. Like all things, though, SaaS has its drawbacks, the biggest of which are questions of reliability, as the recent outages of salesforce.com have made painfully clear to its customers. It’s great if your data lives on the network, but what happens when your data isn’t available, either because the network isn’t available or because the servers it lives on are down? (The rhetorical question brings to mind Leslie Lamport’s famous observation that “a distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable”.) Security and trust are important too. Prime example: saleforce.com’s less than forthright acknowledgment of the recent outages. Another: Just today, Google launched version 3.0 of its desktop search software, which gives users the incredibly useful ability to search their local documents from any computer in the world. Of course, it does this by storing the index (and, apparently, the documents themselves) on Google servers. Hmm. Do I really want my business plans stored somewhere on the web outside of my direct control? Then again, an increasing number of people keep their email on the web, so chances are, if I’m collaborating with someone, they’re already there. As much time as I’ve spent thinking about SaaS, though, this was a new one: A friend of mine managed to get himself locked out of his Yahoo account, and after hours on the phone with Yahoo support, he seems unable to convince the Yahoo bureaucracy he is who he says he is so they will let him back in. He even offered to fly to Sunnyvale to present his driver license. Apparently, the zip code Yahoo has on file is different than the zip code he’s had his entire life, and the support staff say they can’t unlock his account until he gives them the right answer, which he’s already doing. (Apparently, the best one particularly dim bulb in Yahoo customer service could come up with is that he call back each day with a different guess till he gets it right.) In short, there seems to be some sort of an immovable object/irresistible force thing going on, and he’s not sure how to break the deadlock so he can get back to his data. The most pressing problem is that he’s got some tax related information in his email account, and on the current path, there seems to be no way for him to get to it by April 15. So, I pose two questions here: First, if you work at Yahoo, how in the hell can my friend get his access back? As already stated, he’s spent hours on the phone to no avail. I’ve tried inquiries on the backchannel but have received no responses. Second, for the larger SaaS community, if our data lives on the network, what happens if Google, Yahoo and the like become the phone company?

Today I "quit" (formally) my math studies and became a computer science student instead. While my next term will officially be my 6th term in CS, I will be doing my finals and then start writing my thesis (which you usually do somewhere in your 9th-11th term). I have in fact been studying CS longer than that, but I also wanted to do math (mostly because CS was too boring for me most of the time, and math provided a higher challenge) - and instead of formally doing both (which would have required finding out specific formalities noone knows, and maybe paying some extra money) I went with math for a long time. Now that I was approaching final exams for both math and computer science, I had to decide: do math, do CS or do both. Being lazy (and wanting to finish as soon as possible now) I decided to pick the easiest - computer science. My diploma topic will be very mathematical, though - a special logic for reasoning on the web, so it's logic, web 3.0 and theoretical computer science combined. Sweet. I guess it really doesn't matter that I don't end up with two degrees, given all my other qualifications. :-)

Joel Spolsky: “Listen, I know that everybody is saying that the cool thing to do these days is Ship Early and Often, but when you ship half-baked ajax calendars that don’t do much and then get Scoble to go nuts about how great they are, well, you’re going to have a lot of people like me checking it out and realizing that, for example, no thought whatsoever has gone into printing, which is fine, it’s a 1.0 release, but you know what? I’m not going to look at 30 Boxes again — I’ve spent enough time evaluating it. G’bye. I’ve talked about this before — it’s the Marimba phenomenon — when you get premature publicity, lots of people check out your thing, and it’s not done yet, so now most of the people that tried your thing think it’s lame, and now you have two problems: your thing is lame and everybody knows it.” “Release early, release often” is a strategy that works because it allows for incremental improvement—you don’t have these “big bang” releases every few years where you try to anticipate what your users will want, because your users are telling you what they want every step of the way while the thing is coming together. That said, Joel makes some very good points, and companies following the “release early, release often” formula would do well to consider them. In short, for “release early, release often” not to backfire, its proponents need to do a better job differentiating between the users that want to actively participate in the development of a new product and the users that are simply looking to solve a problem, because that latter group is ultimately going to be disappointed if the thing isn’t fully baked.

As Robert Schuster stats in his blog we are looking for people who can help with porting issues of GCJ and other free runtimes for Java. For example we have problems with GCJ on arm, hppa, mips/el and m68k in Debian. I extend Robert’s offer to all architectures Debian supports. Earn a beer or another drink at your choice at FOSDEM.

Recently there was a discussion on whether BitTorrent should get some encryption (or obfuscation, more likely) added. Right now, you can filter out BitTorrent traffic with the following iptables command (note: this needs iptables 1.3.4 and a recent kernel):

iptables -I OUTPUT -j DROP -m string --string "BitTorrent protocol" --algo bm --from 0 --to 100

(Note: match is not optimized, the range of 0 to 100 and algo bm is arbitrary) The nice thing is, that this match is very unlikely to match non-Bittorrent traffic. Linux users can use it to filter out all BitTorrent traffic or mark it for speed restrictions. Network operators are very interested in filtering this traffic: it slows down more important traffic (and if you are e.g. using stochastic fair queing, the large number of connections for P2P filesharing will make it get a larger share than other apps!) and can cause costs. If you have mobile users, who e.g. connect their laptop to your network, they will occasionally use BitTorrent at home, and forget to disable it when they connect to your network. That's really bad, it happens and it's not like this is intentional "malbehaviour" or "sabotage"! So back to the original topic - obfuscating BitTorrent traffic. Let me explain what network operators might do when BitTorrent can't be slowed or filtered any more (Note that this already applies to some services such as Skype or Kazaa as far as I know): First of all, they might decide to filter all connections to non-standard ports. This effectively eliminates (most of) filesharing - but also e.g. Skype and some IM and chat services. Basically any non-standard service. (Note that "professional" VoIP services using SIP may still be whitelisted). Secondly, they could decide to slow down all connections to non-standard ports. This would make filesharing, Skype, IM etc. still possible, but for example file transfers via IM will be really slow. No video via Skype, probably, depending on the limits set in traffic shaping. Thirdly, they could disable all outgoing connections and require you to use proxies for that. Then you need to enable/disable your proxy all the time when switching networks, and you'll only be able to use a limited set of services. Again, Telephony via SIP is still technically possible, using a SIP proxy or by whitelisteing major SIP providers. Skype is no longer possible. IM needs whitelisting, and will likely be blocked, too. None of these options are very favourable for the users. So please do not support "obfuscated" Protocols such as Kazaa or Skype, or an obfuscated variant of BitTorrent. Stick with stuff administrators can set up policies for - and be nice to your admins. Tunneling via non-standard ports, hiding services will only get you into trouble, and probably even make innocent other users suffer. After all, filesharing - especially illegal downloading movies and music - is not THAT important, is it? So please make the important services not suffer from it. Thank you. Oh, and please use SIP, not Skype. Because your admin can whitelist your SIP provider if you tell him you need it for work or setup a proxy for that - and with Skype, he might be afraid that you become a supernode and cause high traffic costs. And then there is a much larger software choice for SIP, including many OpenSource solutions, including PBX software such as Asterisk.

Following up on my earlier post:

• Mark Hillebrand pointed me to some prior art on vidir, his mvedit is the same idea, with a different set of features including recursive directory lists and file name swapping, but not deletion.
• I noticed Mark also wrote a matchedit which "allows editing of regions of files that match a regexp in a single session"
• In the meantime, I've updated vidir, adding support for file swapping.
• Enrico Zini pointed out that his tagcoll is a true unix tool, that can process its own output and can probably be used for all sorts of things besides working with debtags. A good example of how to generalize an originally very specific problem.
• Colin Watson wrote about sponge, a tool no more complex than cat, that I am sure I have written in a line of perl at least twice, but never thought to save, and whose absence from the standard toolkit I've probably worked around hundreds of times.

This has only whetted my interest. Maybe the problem isn't that no-one is writing them, or that the unix toolspace is covered except for specialised tools, but that the most basic tools fall through the cracks and are never noticed by people who could benefit from them. So, to provide some more incentive, I'd like to start a collection of new unix tools. I've worked on this kind of thing before with my collection of biff-type filters and Debian's devscripts. Sometimes just bundling up a set of programs consistently can add to their value. I think it can here too, once a critical mass of tools is assembled. So, write more unix tools, and tell me about them so I can collect them into a package.