It has been more than a month since I last wrote about my work on update-manager during this year s Google Summer Of Code and I am somewhat ashamed I wasn t able to provide you with updates more regularly. So first of all, yes, I did do some work and yes, there has been quite some progress. Basically both private and university stuff have kept me from writing and that s why I d like to start with this series of weekly updates today.
This series are meant to summarize what has happened during a week of writing code and give you an overview of what s happening. This first issue however will sum up the past month. So let me begin explaining what has happened since my last post. update-manager bazaar repository All code I have written so far is available through a public bazaar branch on launchpad.net. My branch s page can be found here and provides you with its history and of course instructions on how to obtain the code. The location is only temporary though, as I am going to move hosting over to alioth.debian.org. This is on my task list for next week. modular design I have ripped apart nearly all of update-manager and put it together in a more modular way, which should implementing new frontends or backends more easy, whilst also simplifying code maintenance. The new design consists of four major parts:

• The application class is responsible for parsing command line arguments, initializing all other components correctly and coordinate communication between the frontend and the backend.
• The backend itself is defined through the UpdateManager.Backend.BackendBase class and each implementation subclasses BackendBase. It is responsible for interacting with apt.
• The frontend is again defined through a base class, UpdateManager.Frontend.FrontendBase. This part of update-manager provides the userinterface, handles user input and starts operations accordingly.
• Lastly there is the distribution-specific part, which lives inside the UpdateManager.DistSpecific Python module and is defined by its own base class, DistBase.

backend implementation When I started working on update-manager it heavily relied on synaptic and used it to do the dirty-work. However, together with my mentor, mvo, I decided to drop synaptic support and rather concentrate on using python-apt. This means that the only backend implementation right now is a python-apt backend. The python-apt backend is currently a work in progress, but already includes some basic functionality. Right now it can (re-)load the package cache and package lists and is able to provide a list of packages which are upgradable to the frontend.
Whilst implementing these functions I noticed some shortcomings of python-apt itself, fixed those and got mvo included in his python-apt branch at launchpad. frontend implementation I started re-implementing the Gtk frontend as provided through current update-manager and right now it visualizes the package cache reloading process and provides users with a list of upgradable packages. However, that s pretty much all of the functionality it includes right now, which is why implementing more functions is pretty much on the top of my todo list. Additionally I have ported the text frontend, as included in Ubuntu, to the new modular system, and this frontend s code really shows how easy adding a frontend with the new modular design is. This frontend contains the same functionality as the Gtk frontend. distribution specific code The core described above does not include any distribution specific code anymore, which is the main focus of this project. The implementations of distribution-specific functionality contains classifiers for update categories for both Debian and Ubuntu, whilst I focused on getting things right with the Debian implementation for now. These classifiers allow the frontend to let the user know which kind of update they are about to install, like a security update, a recommended upgrade or a third-party (unofficial) upgrade. documentation As update-manager was poorly (read: hardly at all) documented I started documenting the API using sphinx. However, right now the generated documentation cannot be found anywhere yet. This should change as soon as an alioth project for update-manager has been created. next week s tasks I would also like to provide you with my task list for the coming week. The list, ordered by priority, is:

• Register an alioth project and move the bazaar branch to bzr.debian.org
• Generate an HTML version of the API documentation and put it on alioth.
• Implement changelog-fetching for the Debian-specific module and make use of that from within the code and the Gtk frontend.

As you can see this list is rather short. This can mainly be attributed to a few university assignments, and instead of providing a long list of tasks which I probably won t be able to finish I rather keep the list short and hopefully get things not on this list done too.

I wonder what this means. Is it a reference to the ftp and release teams thinking that they are entitled to block packages from being uploaded to unstable? Is it a reference to the core team members thinking that they are entitled to operate without transparency? I cannot guess.

Guess its my time to post something about my feelings on Jaunty.

The Good:
* armel successfully birthed
* powerpc well on the way to be well maintained
- Kernel and installer work mostly done by TheMuso (thanks :-))
- Image testing by the people of #ubuntu-ps3, myself, and TheMuso
- powerpc, and powerpc+ps3 both in the release annoucements for Kubuntu and Xubuntu :-)
* Kubuntu upgraded to KDE 4.2
* Xubuntu upgraded to Xfce 4.6
* PowerPC FTBFS rate in main very low. ia64, and sparc looking more improved.

The Bad:
* SPARC, ia64, and HPPA remain fairly foobar w.r.t. to the installer and kernel

The Ugly:
* The drama over notifications and update-manager

All and all though, I think its been a fairly good cycle. Looking forward to karmic.

New version of simple todo manager called Ukolovnik has been just released. The only updates are in translations (added French, German and Russian translations) and locales setup.

Yesterday I finally found some time to analyze all filesystem message dumps for Nokia phones. I always hated way Gammu used to decode these messages, because in most cases decoding was almost same function just with added some random offsets. After some time looking into the dumps, I finally came out with description of the format. It it still not complete, but it allowed to simplify the code a lot while fixing bugs with some messages previous solution did not catch. Now I hope I did not miss anything and new code will not introduce new regressions.

So, I'm considering a backup system that has as its goal to let you backup all your data from third party websites, easily. The idea I have for its UI is you enter in the urls for all the sites you use, or feed it a bookmark file. By examining the URLs, it determines if it knows how to export data from each site, and prompts for any necessary login info. The result would be a list of sites, and their backup status. I think it's important that you be able to enter websites that the system doesn't know how to handle yet; backup of such sites will show as failed, which is accurate. It seems to almost be appropriate to have a web interface, although command-line setup and cron should also be supported. For the actual data collection, there would be a plugin system. Some plugins could handle fairly generic things, like any site with an RSS feed. Other plugins would have site-specific logic, or would run third-party programs that already exist for specific sites. There are some subtle issues: Just because a plugin manages to suck an RSS feed or FOAF file off a site does not mean all the relevant info for that site is being backed up. More than one plugin might be able to back up parts of a site using different methods. Some methods will be much too expensive to run often. As far as storing the backup, dumping it to a directory as files in whatever formats are provided might seem cheap, but then you can check it into git, or let your regular backup system (which you have, right?) handle it.

---

Thoughts, comments, prior art, cute program idea names (my idea is "?unsilo"), or am I wasting my time thinking about this?

When starting with Python or just when you haven t read PEP 8 you usually fall into some frequent mistakes. Mostly because you take your experience in other languages to Python and your mind gets confused with the new conventions (or something like that). Some of these errors and their explanation:

• if a == None:
  Really common. None is a singleton, so you can (well, actually, have) to compare to it like if a is None or if a is not None .
• if (condition):
  This is not really pythonic, if doesn t take () around the condition in python, () purpose is grouping, you can use them in an if but only to clarify a really complex condition or similar stuff. Please don t clutter code with unneeded characters.
• if len(list):
  This is a misunderstanding of Python way of things, any empty sequence (string, list, tuple) is False. So if you want to make sure a list is empty, just check if it s False. Same for tuples, and in some ocassions for strings.
• if type(obj) is type(1):
  This is killing kittens, there s a builtin function for this purpose, it s called -surprise- isinstance(object, type). For example isinstance(123, int)

Read more about this and other conventions in PEP 8.

A few dud universes can really clutter up your basement. - Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning. . . was the Command Line

What a fun read. It s about technology, sure, but more about culture. Neal takes a good look at operating systems, why we get emotionally involved with them, and why Windows is still so popular. He does this with a grand detour to Disneyland, and a hefty dose of humor. The above quote was from near the end of the book, where he imagines hackers creating big bangs from the command line. He starts out the book from some anecdotes from the early 1970s, when he had his first computer class in high school. His school didn t have a computer, but they did have a teletype (the physical kind that used paper) with a modem link to some university s system. But time on that system was so expensive that they couldn t just dial in and run things interactively. The teletype had a paper tape device. You d type your commands in advance, and it would punch them out on the tape. Then when you dial in, it would replay the tape at high speed . Neal liked this because the stuff punched out of the tape were, actually, bits in both the literal and the mathematical sense. This, of course, led to a scene at the end of the schoolyear where a classmate dumped the bin of bits on the teacher, and Neal witnessed megabytes falling to the floor. Although the book was written in 1999, and needs an update in some ways, it still speaks with a strong voice today and is now also an interesting look at what computing was like 10 years ago. He had an analogy of car dealerships to operating systems. Microsoft had the big shiny dealership selling station wagons. Their image was all wrapped up in people feeling good about their purchase like they got something for their money. And he said that the Linux folks were selling tanks, illustrated with this exchange:

Hacker with bullhorn: Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon! Prospective station wagon buyer: I know what you say is true but er I don t know how to maintain a tank! Bullhorn: You don t know how to maintain a station wagon either! Buyer: But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music. Bullhorn: But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep! Buyer: Stay away from my house, you freak! Bullhorn: But Buyer: Can t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?

That doesn t mean that Stephenson is just a Linux apologetic. He points out that the CLI has its place, and has a true love-hate relationship with the text-based config files (remember XF86Config before the days of automatic modelines? Back when you had to get out a calculator and work some things out with pencil and paper, or else risk burning out your monitor?) He points out that some people want to just have the thing work reasonably well. They don t want control in fact, would gladly give it up if offered something reasonably pretty and reasonably functional. He speaks to running Linux at times:

Sometimes when you finish working with a program and shut it down, you find that it has left behind a series of mild warnings and low-grade error messages in the command-line interface window from which you launched it. As if the software were chatting to you about how it was doing the whole time you were working with it.

Even if the application is imploding like a damaged submarine, it can still usually eke out a little S.O.S. message.

Or about booting Linux the first time, and noticing all sorts of cryptic messages on the console:

This is slightly alarming the first time you see it, but completely harmless.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. . . Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish. For page layout and printing you can use TeX: a vast corpus of typesetting lore written in C and also available on the Net for free.

I love these vivid descriptions: programs secretly chatting with us, TeX being a corpus of typesetting lore rather than a program. Or how about this one: Unix. . . is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic. Yes, my operating system is an oral history project, thankyouverymuch. The book feels like a weird (but well-executed and well-written) cross between Douglas Adams and Cory Doctorow. Which makes is so indescribably awesome that I can t help but ending this review with a few more quotes.

Because Linux is not commercial because it is, in fact, free, as well as rather difficult to obtain, install, and operate it does not have to maintain any pretensions as to its reliability. Consequently, it is much more reliable.

what really sold me on it [Debian] was its phenomenal bug database (http://www.debian.org/Bugs), which is a sort of interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption. It is simplicity itself. When had a problem with Debian in early January of 1997, I sent in a message describing the problem to submit@bugs.debian.org. My problem was promptly assigned a bug report number (#6518) and a severity level (the available choices being critical, grave, important, normal, fixed, and wishlist) and forwarded to mailing lists where Debian people hang out.

That should be our new slogan for bugs.debian.org: Debian s interactive Doomsday Book of error, fallibility, and redemption.

Unix is hard to learn. The process of learning it is one of multiple small epiphanies. Typically you are just on the verge of inventing some necessary tool or utility when you realize that someone else has already invented it, and built it in, and this explains some odd file or directory or command that you have noticed but never really understood before.

I ve been THERE countless times.

Note the obsessive use of abbreviations and avoidance of capital letters; this is a system invented by people to whom repetitive stress disorder is what black lung is to miners. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins, like stones smoothed by a river.

It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or honoring diversity or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing ) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities.

The stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone the original command-line interface

Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it s explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army.

Available for free online, or as a 160-page book from Amazon.

Take the following URL:

http://my.server.tld/wow/summary/2009/05/21/?style=boxed

and imagine the following Python function:

def summary(request, year, month, day):
    response = HttpResponse()
    // do something
    return response

If you see a relation between the two, then Django is for you. The missing part is a URL mapping, a list of regular expressions, which transforms a URL into a keyword list, and maps it to a function (a HTTP view, as it s called):

(r'^wow/summary/(?P<year>\d 4 )/(?P<month>\d 2 )/(?P<day>\d 2 )/$',
    mysite.wow.summary,  'additional':'information' )

You do not have to use keyword arguments, positional parameters will work as well, and you can do anything you like within the powers of regular expressions, but the result is always along the same lines: When someone visits the above URL, Django calls the above summary( ) function (defined in the modules mysite/wow.py) and passes an object encapsulating the request, along with the components from the URL as parameters:

summary(request, 2009, 05, 21,  'additional':'information' )

It then renders the return value. The function can also throw an exception if it need to communicate e.g. a 404 error. Very clean, and there are even generic views if your data doesn t need any massaging, of if you just want to do standard things like generate PDFs. This is the core idea of Django, which I ve gathered from one talk and four hours of invested time. It s a truly thin layer, and its elegance made me bouncey. The QUERY STRING of the request will be passed in the request object, along with all the other CGI variables you re familiar with. Django provides a large number of helpers and shortcuts to save you from having to do the ugly work, including topics such as internationalisation, syndication, authentication, file uploads, and caching. In addition, Django gives you an object-relational_mapper to map the data into, and manage the data definition within your favourite RDBMS, a templating language designed to fit in with the whole philosophy, and widgets to work with forms. You do not have to use any of those. You are free to use any other Python module for the task, just as you can use all of the other features of and modules written for Python. This is particularly powerful in the context of the middleware layer. There s also a large number of pluggable applications and snippets for re-use. The only concern I have at this point is whether features like tagging are going to find their way into the framework, because tracking numerous external plugins for a site and keeping them working across versions reminds me of the nightmares I had with Zope and Plone (I stopped working with (and on) those before I had a chance to dive into version 3 of each). The fact that Django leaves data storage to other tools (in fact, it s entirely up to you) makes those nightmares seem further distant. All in all, I am excited to have had a chance to take a brief glance at the software, and I am looking forward to doing more with it. Unfortunately, it looks like it will take quite some time to wade through existing plugins and design the rest of an application that can finally replace the horrific dung-pile that is my homepage.

Some might dread the feature of read notifications supported by certain MUAs; some call it an invasion of privacy ; and yet, it can also be useful in certain situations: When a message is read or seen in a MUA supporting this extension, the programme emits a notification back to the sender saying something along the lines of your message was read on . This is good to know, especially in times when you cannot wait for the failed-delivery-notification that follows four to five days of unsuccessful (but furious) attempts of some delivery agent, assuming it doesn t get trashed as spam. Such a read notification is logically a reply to the original message, isn t it? The RFC 680 proposed in April 1975 defines the header References as a way to point to other correspondence which this message references . This header, along with In-Reply-To (defined in the same RFC), is commonly used in every-day mail traffic to refer to previously exchanged messages, and enables mail readers to thread separate messages together into coherent conversations (it takes a human to remove the coherence, the technical aspect is infallible). Cut. Microsoft was also founded in April 1975, and it took them 20 years to barely manage to squeeze through the Internet door without the proverbial foot in it. They published a browser and several e-mail programmes, and it always appeared as if they tiredlessly tried to be different from the rest, attempting to form a clique of users, a Microsoft league in which to increase their revenue through network effects. Sounds bad, is bad, but yet again, they managed, through unimaginable feats of entrepreneurial genius and ruthless behaviour. Cut. In 1982, STD11 declared the aforementioned In-Reply-To and References headers as standards. At that time, Microsoft software didn t even know what a computer network was. Cut. Does it come as a surprise that read notifications sent by Microsoft e-mail programmes, such as Microsoft Outlook do not make use of either of these standard headers to tag read notifications they send? Instead, Microsoft pushes Thread-Topic and Thread-Index, which are undocumented and thus probably only work in a Microsoft-only context. How am I supposed to assume anything else than Microsoft actively trying to oppose standards. Anyone who boycotts standards is hindering progress and should be left behind. It s good to see that the Internet society seems to follow that trend more and more. Update: I found a way to extract the data to recreate the In-Reply-To with procmail. I don t see a way to do the same for the References header. Also, I ve only verified that this works for message disposition notifications from Outlook 2003, although I expect it to work for other, similarly crippled MUAs too.

Yesterday was my first appearance as a sardine in Zurich s public transport vehicles, as part of a campaign by the Swiss group for sustainable mobility, umverkehR, which I support: We handed out flyers and answered questions, and the general reaction was very positive. The fact that we got covered in Switzerland s most popular newspaper, 20 Minuten will add greatly to the reconnaisance factor, so that in the months to come, us sardines will be immediately recognised, hopefully provoking thought and chat over the roots of the campaign. Most of us know the sardine as a dead fish perched into a can with many others in a way to minimise space. Human-sized, walking sardines are a great way to increase awareness of the issue of over-crowded public transport. It was fun to see even the Really Serious Newspaper Readers unable to suppress a smile. Talking to friends about the campaign, I ve often been met with expressions of how absurd such a campaign is in Switzerland, possibly the country with the best public transport system world-wide. I agree, but that doesn t mean that we should not keep working on further improving it. If you ve ever been stuck in a commuter train during rush-hour, standing around in stifling heat and jealously eyed those that managed to grab a seat before you, you ll probably agree that even in Switzerland, we could be doing it better. These days, with the financial crisis weighing heavy on everyone s budgets, and with environmental concerns on the rise, we are witnessing a never-before level of readiness of the public to make sustainable choices. Confronting those people with stuffed trains doesn t reconfirm those decision. Instead, it will make those people crave their air-conditioned cars and possibly switch back to polluting the air with exhaust and noise, because it surely is more comfortable to sit in your own cool car than it is to be perched in public transport like a sardine. Thus, umverkehR s message goes mainly to the politicians: prioritise public transport in your future mobility plans, keep the prices affordable, and help get people off the road in the interest of our environment. You can see more pictures in the gallery and a short film on Youtube. We have a separate sardine blog, a Facebook account and there s even a chance for you to win travel coupons: all you have to do is submit an original photo of anything to do with over-crowded public transport by e-mail or MMS to sardine t umverkehr.ch by October 2009. You can browse all submissions on Flickr. I hope that we can spread the idea as far as New Zealand and the countries between. There are always chances in any crisis. NP: Porcupine Tree: Stupid Dream

The monthly board meeting of Software in the Public Interest will take place on irc.oftc.net #spi tonight (Wed 20 May) at 20:00 UTC. The meeting announcement was posted and there are indeed minutes to approve, a financial report, and a report on official correspondence related to DebConf10. For the 27th meeting in succession (feels like it anyway), I may be without a stable network connection during the meeting because I ll be at another event, raising the FOSS banner for TTLLP while speakers tell everyone to proprietarise everything (based on the preview essays). Even so, watch the comments below this article for a link to the summary when posted. In other news, the Koha foundation is still going through its birth pangs. I ve suggested associating with SPI in the meantime, so the project could manage assets better, but it s just not happening. I feel partly it s due to misconceptions about SPI and its activities, but there also seems to be some blind faith in private companies. I heard a quote about the current UK Parliament crisis which seems relevant to the situation: He is behaving as if he is just running this gentlemen s club. What we need to do is ask people to be involved.

Here comes the new 4096 bit RSA key, replacing the old (2002) 8CA99047 1024 bit DSA key:

pub  4096R/29C0FFEE 2009-05-18
  Key fingerprint = 9590 8AA6 E4F7 BAA7 8BD6  C148 F1A6 9BE4 29C0 FFEE
uid  Obey Arthur Liu <arthur@milliways.fr>
uid  Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@ensimag.imag.fr>
uid  Obey Arthur Liu <graffit@graffit.net>
uid  Obey Arthur Liu <obey.liu@lzb.fr>
uid  Obey Arthur Liu <arthur.randolph@gmail.com>
sub  4096R/15D7FD9B 2009-05-18

In other news, I found a great flatshare on Riedmattstrasse in Kreis 3 in Z rich with a fellow Google summer intern. Thanks to all (Jeroen, Martin, Jaroslavs, Giacomo..) who gave me pointers about finding accomodation in Z rich. I m looking forward to a great summer there. * It did involve generating about 40 millions gpg keys on a few tr s badass computing clusters UPDATE: Come on guys. Of course I followed basic key management rules. The clusters which generated the actual final keys were under my direct control and the particular slice which generated this published key is on my desk.

I used to hate that question, particularly in high school, when showing my interlocutor the cover of whatever book I was tearing through was almost certain to end that conversation cold. Maybe that's part of why I switched to reading ebooks as soon as it was practical? Anyway, these days I'm happy to let you know what I'm reading; I just added my 1000th book on GoodReads. The easiest way to explain GoodReads is that it's like Netflix's movie rating and recommendation system, except it can't automatically know what you've got checked out, and it doesn't really do many recommendations, sadly. But it's good about showing you what friends are reading. In other words, it's a social networking site around books. One of several, though the others I've tried seemed clunkier, or too flashy. Goodreads is fairly easy to use, though the UI could use some work in a few places. It's not been especially burdensome to note when I start and finish each book. The best part is that it can keep track of books I want to read. Rating things on a five star system is not something I'm particularly good or consistant at, nor something I want to spend much time on, but I have painlessly rated about 500 books so far, as well as importing 500 more, unrated, from a list of books I read a decade ago. (500 others from that list failed to import.) I'd like to get a high percent of the books I've read recorded there, so I can a) get a grip on just how many books that is (guessing in the 3 thousand range?) and b) avoid accidental rereads and maybe remember some good books I've not read in a while. Of course, as when using any service that silos my data these days, I have to worry about getting it back out. For at least the most important bit -- the list of books, dates, and ratings, GoodReads has a good data export capability, though it's a bit hard to find (hidden here) and not ameanable to automated backups. (Aside: Is anyone working on a one-stop utility that can automatically back up your data from all web silos? Needed.) For the past six months or so, I've been in a bit of a dry spell for finding good new fiction; reading formal book review sites wasn't working for me (most reviews spoil books for me, or just turn me off to them); and ebooks cut down on that library serendipity. I think using this site is helping to break the drought for me, and I'm curious: Whatcha reading? PS: Thanks to whoever sent me the The Design of Everyday Things (your name wasn't listed). I especially like that it's a used copy. Had that on my wishlist and been wanting to read that forever!

One day, I would love to teach a class on the culture and politics of technology and ditch all of the academic pieces and replace with a string of novels and fictional short stories. Though it may be a few years before I can pull this off, I am already compiling my list and there is naturally a healthy serving of science fiction (along with Kurt Vonnegut, who I adore). Perhaps one my favorite science fiction authors is Philip Dick who edges his readers close to delirum and sometimes insanity and all through mere words. But one of my favorite writings by PD comes not from his fictional fun house but from a regular (and staid) letter composed of a simple and elegant description of what makes science fiction so e(special):

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at
Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf
story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the
idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all,
it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the
reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader s mind so that the mind,
like the author s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not
do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read
it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being
set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea
in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a
collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and
enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science
fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. Philip Dick (in a letter)
May 14, 1981

Truth be told, I don t really know much about science fiction outside of the classics but I look forward to reading more and slowly am adding a few pieces to my collection. And when I need to find out something about sci fi, I turn to Sumana who is pretty well schooled in its ways. She has recently co-edited a new anthology of science fiction stories including one on hardware hacking and faith that some of you might enjoy.

One day, I would love to teach a class on the culture and politics of technology and ditch all of the academic pieces and replace with a string of novels and fictional short stories. Though it may be a few years before I can pull this off, I am already compiling my list and there is naturally a healthy serving of science fiction (along with Kurt Vonnegut, who I adore). Perhaps one my favorite science fiction authors is Philip Dick who edges his readers close to delirum and sometimes insanity and all through mere words. But one of my favorite writings by PD comes not from his fictional fun house but from a regular (and staid) letter composed of a simple and elegant description of what makes science fiction so e(special):

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at
Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf
story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the
idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all,
it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the
reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader s mind so that the mind,
like the author s, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not
do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read
it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being
set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea
in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a
collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and
enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science
fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. Philip Dick (in a letter)
May 14, 1981

Truth be told, I don t really know much about science fiction outside of the classics but I look forward to reading more and slowly am adding a few pieces to my collection. And when I need to find out something about sci fi, I turn to Sumana who is pretty well schooled in its ways. She has recently co-edited a new anthology of science fiction stories including one on hardware hacking and faith that some of you might enjoy.

I managed to break the LCD on my HP r717 digital camera a while back, but couldn't find anything that excited me as a replacement, so have been doing without and borrowing my son's camera from time to time. That changed recently... my new camera is a Casio High Speed EXILIM model EX-FC100BK. I've never been able to get the timing right to take photos of our rockets leaving the launch rails. I manage to get passable videos from time to time, and a lot of pictures of smoke trails... but WOW, the ability to take a burst of high-resolution still photos at a fast frame rate (some of which are even before the shutter release gets fully pressed!) completely and totally rocks my world! I just put a few of the best frames I captured at Saturday's launch up on Flickr. Enjoy!

A good weekend work:

Day changed to 16 Mai 2009
NEW queue: 216

Now:

8 new source packages / 8 new packages in total.

Little statistic: Today: 23 reject, 104 accept. Yesterday: 11 reject, 107 accept At the end today both Mark and Mike helped or it would have stopped somewhere around 20. We also had a new trainee check his first few packages and generally getting it right. Working together in NEW, 3 people at the same time, even during (most of) dinstall - something that feels weird to an oldtimer like me. Until recently NEW always was just one person due to various problems you can manage to get when 2 people deal with one package. Or when a package gets copied into the accepted queue at the wrong time. (And some others) So I recently went and modified our tools to allow NEW to be done by multiple people. We now take locks per source package, do not copy directly into the accepted queue and only block during a very short timeframe of dinstall now. Something like 10 til 20 minutes instead of up to two hours (multiply that by four and you get 8 hours which we had been locked out of NEW in the past. Now its less than one (two) hour(s) a day). Whats left in NEW today is stuff waiting for various things to happen, like uploads of rejected dependencies, replies from the maintainer to our questions, such things. Saturday we also removed the last 2 of the first 3 ftptrainees (trainees, not slaves as that function got called earlier. Somehow someone somewhere found that a little offending. Tsk. :) ). All of them had less time for FTPTeam work than any existing team member, so not much point in adding any of them or continuing the training. At the same time we added one new trainee, lets see how that goes. As written above the first steps did work out good, but there is a lot to learn. :)

Switzerland voted today for the introduction of biometric passports, with 50.1% for and 49.9% against, one of the closest votes since 1848 (according to NZZ). While the news don t fill me with glee there are too many unanswered questions around the digital passports one aspect of the decision surprised and even shocked me. I do not like biometric passports, because I like to know when my data are consumed, and by whom. The German government assures that only authorised parties can access those data, and published information about the security features of the German biometric passports, but I am unconvinced that those are adequate to protection for the 10 years of validity of the passport. Furthermore, I could find absolutely no information on who the authorised parties are, or which regulations cover who will become authorised in the near future. If that was properly addressed, e.g. by leaving it up to me and only me to decide who gets access, then the digital passport could actually be a good step forward, streamlining border control and making travel easier. But there is a completely different avenue of concern, no matter who gives permission to whom to consume whose data: how are they used, and where, and how long are they stored, and for what? Again, I cannot find any regulations. Instead, my question to the German Department of the Interior was answered (!) along the lines of it being up to each country to decide themselves over the use and storage of the data. In this light, it makes little difference that the German procedure for the digital passport does not permit the issuing bureau to store the data, while Switzerland s strategy is to build a central database of all these personal details (this is what shocked me). It might make you wonder what use the Swiss government is hoping for, and you might feel uncomfortable with your government building up an even tighter database of its people. But I d much rather have my data stored in Switzerland than consumed and stored every time I enter another country, because when I compare the style of governance of Switzerland to pretty much anything else out there, I am glad I get to live here (even though I am not Swiss and cannot vote). Yet, it s a worrying step in a direction of the glass human , of a society in which personal privacy is unknown and everything is part of the system. These are totalitarian visions, and it s doubtful whether we ll ever actually get there (so far, I don t think any state has come up with the information management strategies required to properly store, make use, and read sense out of the massive amounts of information), but the trend is clearly visible. In the end, however, what worries me the most is how relaxed people treat their personal information these days. Look at the infamous social networking sites, or other Web 2.0 gimmicks and you really start to wonder how headless people can be these days. I cannot immediately paint a scenario where it might be dangerous to push all kinds of information about yourself to the masses, but the mere idea of that is scary in and of itself. I d prefer to have the choice with whom to share what data. The biometric passports, despite the advantages they might bring, are one step away from that, because they empower the government to make that choice for you. I don t consider that progress at all. Update: NZZ reports that the issue is not closed. In the cantons of Grishuna and Lucerne, people are challenging the vote and a recount or even re-vote seems possible. I will post an update as soon as I know more. Then, I would also like to address some replies I ve received over the real problems behind the digital passports, because it cannot be just the central data storage it s not like your government doesn t already have all that, and I can t imagine how your fingerprint could be used against you.

Russel, I agree that some porn sites are facing interesting technical challenges, but I wouldn't suggest using them as example for anything, just like a talk about the challenges of torture is always inappropriate in a human society.

Porn is, except for self made porn and some other corner cases, abuse and oppression. Simple as that.

And please, before you try to argue against that simple statement, read the lyrics of no answer for a dancer from one of my favorite bands, consolidated, and think for more than ten minutes. If we were living in really free societies, porn could be fun.

Which reminds me of a quote from Rebecca L. Eisenberg: "A truly radical view of pornography recognizes that we are what we consume -- and if we are going to alter the face of society, and destroy Victorian and religious notions like gender altogether -- as I believe we must -- we must be willing to evaluate and change every aspect of our lives, including the images we feed ourselves as we fuck, as terrifying as it sounds. Like it or not, revolution is a scary concept." The complete text where this quote is from can be found online on her webpage.

P.S: If you hear me playing "the internet is for porn" (this musicalsong) or remember me doing so - can you now see the great irony? I would have hoped you've seen it before. Or at least wondered, what the hell I was doing.