Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young man in your 20s, trying to make your way in the world. You are married and have a young daughter, just old enough to start to talk. You live in a run-down neighborhood, long passed-over by any economic advances. What schools you had access to barely taught anyone much. The few jobs you can reach have fierce competition, even though the pay is low. You worry about your health, but even more about that of your wife and child. Finding food is a constant concern. Although you are still healthy now, and you are willing and able to be a hard worker, there is simply nobody hiring people in your area. Not to mention the gunfights that erupt between gangs or drug dealers. Oh, and did I mention that your wife is 4 months pregnant?

Your top priority is to do your best to keep your family safe. You're afraid that your whole family will starve, or be killed by an errant bullet. You've tried for a long time -- it seems like forever -- to do everything you can think of, with no success. Finally, you decide that the only way you can have the hope for a better life is to move somewhere where the economy is better, and the drug dealers are fewer.

But moving hundreds or thousands of miles away is no easy task when you have no money to move. Somehow, with some luck, ingenuity, and tenacity, you have finally managed to find a way. You have no job offer in your new town, but conditions are so bleak at home that you just can't risk staying there. So the three of you move 1500 miles away.

You arrive with no money, no apartment, and don't know anybody. But you're a hard worker, and have talked yourself into a job. It pays what passes for minimum wage in your new home, but it's a fortune compared to what you made before. It's backbreaking work, and you work long hours. But soon you can afford a cramped apartment, and keep your refrigerator stocked with food. What a luxury!

Pretty soon your new baby son is born. You can afford to feed him, your daughter, your wife, and yourself, every day. When you're really lucky, you even have some money left over to send to your brother back home, who is still struggling to make ends meet there. You seem to have climbed the first rung on the American Dream ladder.

Years pass. Your old home becomes a memory; your daily life revolves around new struggles now. Your oldest child is in school, your wife finds part-time work sometimes too, cleaning houses for rich people. You've been laid off several times, your income isn't guaranteed, and the others in your new home don't take kindly to strangers -- and they still think you're one. But it's better than flying bullets and never knowing where your next meal will come from.

Then one day, while you are at work, federal agents show up. You are arrested and taken to jail. Agents show up at home, too, arresting your wife. It turns out that they realized you entered the country illegally from Ecuador those years ago. Meanwhile, your wife wonders what will happen to your son that was playing in a neighbor's yard while she was arrested, or to your daugther that was at school.

After months in jail, with little contact with each other, and poor medical care, the government decides to deport you to Mexico. Why Mexico? Well, it's cheaper, and there's no documentation showing where you came from. Apparently you "look" Mexican, and they don't believe your story.

After months in jail with no income, you are once again bankrupt. A government bus takes you to Mexico and drops you down someplace there, with your wife and your oldest child. Your younger child was born in the United States, and so is an American citizen and can't be deported. But the government isn't going to give him a free ride on a prison bus (and Mexico wouldn't take him anyway, since everyone knows he's American). You have no idea where he is. You have no idea how you're going to find food in Mexico, no idea how to find your son, no idea where to find refuge from the ever more prevalent drug dealers. Meanwhile, the Americans think you're scum because you wanted to protect your family, and it's going to be much more difficult to get back in to try to reunite your family.

This story is based on true events.

It's truly easy to demonize illegal immigrants, isn't it? Easy to round them up by the thousands, easy to build a bigger fence, easy to lock them away.

Sometimes it seems like this nation built on freedom, supposedly on Christian values, has lost sight of compassion for the lowly. In this country, we would throw in jail parents that didn't do everything humanly possible to find food for their children. We also throw in jail parents that grew up in other countries that are just doing the same.

How sad that we have people going on TV, suggesting we round up millions of Americans that happened to come here illegally, breaking up millions of families, creating an immense foster child problem, a human tragedy on a mass scale. How incredible that some of these people on TV wear the title "senator" or "candidate for president". How stupid do they think we are, suggesting that a poor South American family would somehow be able to navigate the arcane American immigration system and wait the 15 years to get here legally, if they manage to come up with all the necessary money somehow?

Politicians have been pushing our buttons for too long. We aren't a nation of selfish hoarders; we came together through tough times, survived the Depression, put in place the Berlin Airlift that saved countless lives in West Berlin. But the thought of someone with darkish skin coming to this country and building highways is enough to send some people looking for a rifle.

I hope that we will someday do better.

My slug was temporarily bricked for a few days due to a mistake on my part. Fortunately, numerous write-ups by Martin Michlmayr and others helped me. Here I am adding one more source of the same information!The following assumes that you have a backup.img which contains bootable Debian firmware for the slug but has the wrong kernel and initrd. One can probably use the Debian firmware that is the Debian Installer image otherwise --- but I have not tested this!Moreover, I also assume that you have the full system installed on a USB disk which you have mounted on your regular desktop at /mnt.

Copy the kernel and initrdWe just create an new "recovery" directory and copy boot/ over from the mounted USB disk.

mkdir recover; cd recover
cp -a /mnt/boot .

At this point you can un-mount the USB disk and keep it ready to connect it to the slug.

Extract the files from the slug imageNext we extract the files from the slug backup image into another directory.

mkdir files; cd files
slugimage -u -i ../../backup.img

(Here you must use the actual path to the backup image file)

Replace initrd and vmlinuz by new onesWe first pad the initrd

dd if=../boot/initrd.img of=new-ramdisk ibs=4M conv=sync

(here you must you the actual file name of the initrd.img that you want to use to boot the slug) ... and then swap bytes

devio '<< new-ramdisk; xp $ 4' > ramdisk.gz 
rm new-ramdisk 

Next we swap bytes for the kernel as well

devio '<< ../boot/vmlinuz; xp $4' > vmlinuz 

(again you must use the actual file name of the kernel image in place of ../boot/vmlinuz above).

Actually build the imageThis is just a single command

slugimage -L apex.bin -r ramdisk.gz -k vmlinuz -p -o ../../new.img

Put the slug in "firmware upload mode"

1. Put the slug off and disconnect everything from it.
2. Connect an ethernet cable ¹ between your desktop and the slug. Connect the power plug for the slug but do not switch it on yet.
3. Push a pin into the hole marked RESET at the back of the slub. Keep the pin pressed, while pressing and releasing the power button on the slug. Wait with the pin pressed until the top light on the slug turns red and the instantly release the pin.

You slug is now reset and waiting for a firmware upload.

Upload the firmwareOn your desktop run the command

sudo upslug2 -i ../../new.img -d eth0

(Here ../../new.img should be replaced by the path for the image created above and eth0 should be the name of the ethernet interface on the desktop to which you connected the other end of your lan cable.)This step takes a short while but shows you some progress information.

All systems "Go!"If all went well you have rejuvenated your slug. You can now reconnect your USB disk to your slug and the system should boot as usual.

---

1. You may need a cross-over cable if your desktop lan card is really old. ↩

There should be a website to coordinate cinema-dates. I don't like going to the cinema alone and have, in the past, frequently missed viewing films rather than go alone. This is a habit I'm growing out of, but I still think it is better to go with a friend or two. In the near future I'm going to view the last Indianna Jones movie, and the Sex & The City film. I have partners for both of those. But after that? There are a few films which I can't immediately think of who I'm going to lure away with me. I could either :

• Go alone, regardless.
• Randomly ask people to come

If there were a site that had list of upcoming films, and allowed you to express interest in going to see them that would be a fantastic idea. (Obviously location based). I'd not even assume "dating", because I think in my life I've had a first-date at a cinema once. When I was about 14. Because it just doesn't work - you can't talk during, (and back then we couldn't go to the pub afterward to discuss the film. I think we did anyway ;) For bonus points you could allow people to rate the films, or even each other. Hmm. Somebody write it for me? I've got too much on my plate ..probably ObQuote: Se7en

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. -- Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

I bought an HCL MiLeap X for Shruti (who is in the tenth standard) and the IMSc purchased an eeePC for "general use". Now that I have both machines in front of me, it seems like a good time to review them.

SimilaritiesLet's be clear that we are not comparing "jamun" to "aam" (or apples to oranges, if you prefer); these machines have quite a few similarities. Both are aimed at young students who are starting to use the computer for "real work" for the first time. Both the machines run GNU/Linux, and have similar dimensions and features --- even the prices are close. However, we are here to "raise the differences and not bury them"!

Physical appearanceThe eeePC is marginally lighter and more compact. The MiLeap appears to be more rugged though I didn't dare drop either machine to check!The eeePC has a rectangular touchpad which appears to have only one button but in fact this button has a left and right! The MiLeap has two regular buttons and a circular(!) touchpad.The MiLeap is bulkier but has a nice handle to lift it by. The eeePC can be carried like a book and has a matt finish.Both were proclaimed "cute" by Shruti and Sudeshna; I depend on their opinions in such matters!

Hardware featuresThe eeePC scores over the MiLeap X in terms of hardware features. The former has a web camera, a VGA out and one additional USB port. At the same time, the remaining features of both devices are likely to be adequate for most users --- 900 MHz low power processor, graphics adapter, wireless, ethernet, smart card reader. The eeePC has 4GB storage to the 2GB on the MiLeap, but the larger base software install on the eeePC means that the user has about the same amount of working area on both machines.The extra hardware features on the eeePC do give value for the 10% extra that one pays for the eeePC; the latter costs Rs. 17K to the MiLeap's Rs. 15.5K.

SoftwareThis is where the difference between the two is most striking. The MiLeap comes with a pre-installed "classmate" version of EduBuntu. The net result is that this looks and feels like a regular GNU/Linux system configured with software appropriate for educational use.The eeePC on the other hand has a completely icon-driven interface where even getting a terminal is not easy (Ctrl+Alt+T). However, this is just the icing on top of a regular icewm cake. The applications that actually run are just the regular ones --- not customised to fit in with the point-and-click interface.The eeePC terminal has really small fonts and is a regular xterm so that fonts are not as easy to fix as they are for the Gnome terminal used by EduBuntu on the MiLeap. Overall, EduBuntu applications which are based on Gnome are more consistent with the interface than the mix and match between KDE, Gnome and icewm that has been attempted by Xandros; the latter has a lot of promise but needs more work!It was easier to install software on the MiLeap since the EduBuntu repository is significantly larger than Xandros' repository as used by eeePC. In particular, on the MiLeap we installed nethack-qt since that is Shruti's favourite game and openvpn which is needed for us to connect to IMSc from outside the LAN.The installation of the MiLeap is that of Intel's ClassmatePC on which it is based. The entire installation is on a squashfs filesystem image. The base system is used via unionfs at run time on both machines. This makes for easy "reset to default".Suspend-to-ram does not work on the MiLeap; it should be fixed by installing the Linux 2.6.25 kernel.

PhilosophyI have long believed that un-prejudiced minds (like children) will take more readily to GNU/Linux than the hordes of "experienced" (mostly adult) computer users who have well-formed opinions about "user-friendly" software and how particular applications should behave.The "standard" GNU/Linux interface actually encourages exploration and the "tune-it", "tinker" and "fix-it" approach to learning about computing. It is not a sealed box with a "do-not-tamper" sticker. (This tinkering attitude is further enhanced by the approach taken by the designers of the Sugar interface for the XO Laptop.)Since both the systems are based on GNU/Linux (and Debian derivatives no less!), I am nothing short of thrilled at how far things have come. However, will the interface of the eeePC actually encourage exploration? Perhaps the EduBuntu interface of the MiLeap will prove too daunting for a novice. (Shruti does not classify as one since she used GNU/Linux "forever".) Only time will tell ...As Larry Wall has famously said: "There's more than one way to do it!" These devices certainly prove the truth of that assertion within the GNU/Linux world.Devices like these could push GNU/Linux into mainstream usage much more effectively than the "battle for the desktop". Hence, it is perhaps not surprising the both MicroSoft and Apple are trying hard to get into the game. However, it is only GNU/Linux that can comfortably provide a plethora of applications in less than 2GB! Until small solid state disks become significantly cheaper, those guys will have to wait.

This made my day! Here's an excerpt if you're too lazy to click on the link: "Als humanos, tambien nations, after seine geborn, become bambinos und grow adult. Aber als humanos, sommige nations never become adult und necessite psychiatrico help", dixit once Sigmund Freud aan Herr Kanzelier Otto Von Bismarck attemptante de le convince que Germania eine tumultuosa puberty was traversante.
Otto Von Bismarck ignored die wise parolas des fader des psychanalyse und wat happened aan Germania next, wir know mucho well.
Die freudiana diagnose noch todag applicable und validissima est, by exemplo, por wat Grosse Britannia betreft. Eine nation die encore play mit kleine soldatos und make carnaval parades out des season, mature est suremente nicht.
Wat pushe flegmaticos aged britannicos de dresse in hooliganicos costumes und parade mit tambouros und trompettes in der nordirlandico landscape? Sicheremente eine mucho neglected mentale desease.
Eine people waar hombres can wel dress in skirts, waar animals habe more rights dann mensen, waar man drive op de wronge side des strada, must echtemente seriose problemas van personnality habe. Eine people die nicht only play cricket und darts, aber les regarde tambien op TV, bastante insane must definitamente esse.
(...) There are more texts in this, er, language, on the Europanto main site. Edit: fixed link

I would not blame the people I speak to regularly for getting some kind of fatigue regarding Nine Inch Nails. It seems like a week hasn't gone by this year without something happening: a single, an album, or tour dates. It didn't come as much of a suprise that a new album was released in it's entirety this monday gone. ID3 tags in previously-released singles said "watch nin.com on 5th of may". It wasn't even that suprising that the whole album was free, either. What was a suprise, to me at least, was that this album is fantastic. I'd heard two tracks prior to the album being released (although one only by a few days). Whilst I enjoyed them, they were pretty safe, lyrically and musically. They didn't push any boundaries. They also did not forshadow the album at all. This album is the best Nine Inch Nails release this century. It's too early to tell whether it stands higher in my estimation than 1999's The Fragile. If so, it's the best release since 1994. I had not even considered this a possibility. I also think it's the best album to present to someone who isn't familiar with their work to see if they'd like to look for more. It has a good range of tracks covering loud, aggressive, introspective, instrumental, dancable, dark and delicate. I'm now starting a self-imposed ban on listening to the album, so as to not overdo it too much so early on. Regardless, I can still hear The four of us are dead playing over and over again in my head. This is a strong candidate for my favourite NIN song ever. It made me think of what the Cure should be writing. Each track in this release (like each of the 36 tracks in the last album) have their own unique embedded picture in them. There is scant software in Debian that can handle these, unfortunately. I think "tagtool" can add and remove art. Amarok copes admirably. Rhythmbox doesn't, unless you apply this patch, which is stagnating in gnome's BTS, unfortunately. For the lazy (with 32bit x86), here's a tarball of a recent-ish rhythmbox rebuilt with this patch. I'd supply a Debian package but I didn't feel like building the documentation at the time. I haven't found a single program for the n800 that can handle the artwork.

I’m getting more and more annoyed by web sites that have style-sheets with tiny little fonts and widths specified in pixels rather than percentages (or ‘em’ units). Almost every web site i visit these days seems to have a style sheet written by some idiot who thinks “if it looks good on my screen using my eyes then it’s perfect for everyone”. WRONG Specifying widths in pixels is NOT for text. It’s for images, you morons. For one thing, small fonts suck if you have a large, high-resolution monitor. or if you have bad eyesight. or if you’re getting older (I was helping my mother find a house to buy a few days ago and the real-estate web site we were searching was basically unreadable for her - she could see the house pictures but I had to read out the text, and even I found that difficult because of the tiny font). For another thing, if you have a wide-screen monitor and a browser window to suit it, then a fixed-width column of 560 pixels or so looks really bloody stupid in the middle of a huge expanse of empty white space, even with another column or two at the sides for meta-stuff. There are tools, like the Stylish and NoSquint plugins for Firefox/Iceweasel that help you make a site more readable, regardless of what the so-called “designer” perpetrated. But, cool as those tools are, they just should not be necessary. And I, as a user of the web site, shouldn’t have to spend 5, 10, 20, or more minutes reading and understanding their style sheet so i can hack up a tweak for it JUST TO MAKE IT READABLE. They’re the designers, that’s their job, not mine. That’s what they’re (presumably) getting paid for - and yes, the commercial/professional web sites tend to be far worse offenders than the amateur sites. Web designers should have enough bloody sense to make their sites look good in ANY font size, at ANY window width. It’s not hard. In fact, it’s easier and much less work than hard-coding pixel sizes. I’m not a web designer, nor am I anything remotely like an expert in CSS or style sheets. I’m a systems geek. But if I can figure this stuff out, when it’s not even my job to do so and i have no intrinsic interest in the subject, then why the hell can’t they? Don’t they take pride in their work? Don’t they care that visitors to their web sites will think they’re clueless morons for perpetrating yet another squint-eyed monstrosity on the web? Don’t their employers give a damn? To summarise:

1. text widths in style sheets should be specified in relative units such as percentage or ‘em’ units.
2. font sizes should be specified in ‘em’ units, if you must specify them at all.
3. all other non-image/embedded-media sizes should also be specified in ‘em’ units.

Doing those three simple things will ensure that your web site looks good to all visitors, no matter what size screen/window they have, and no matter what font-size they have to use to be able to read it. end-of-rant. PS: My own hacked-up theme/style-sheet for this blog is far from perfect….but I did take the time to make sure all the widths and font-sizes were relative. If there are any CSS bugs feel free to point them out and i’ll fix them ASAP…like I said, I’m far from an expert in CSS. Syndicated from Craig Sanders' Errata: Tech Notes and Miscellaneous Thoughts fixed-width style sheets suck

On one computer I am taking care of, I suddenly started getting:

$ ps2pdf fa_808.ps fa_808.pdf
/usr/bin/ps2pdfwr: line 45: exec: gs: not found

What's wrong?

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
ls: cannot access /usr/bin/gs: No such file or directory
$ wajig find-file /usr/bin/gs
ghostscript: /usr/bin/gs
$ wajig list ghostscript
ii  ghostscript                                             8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret
ii  ghostscript-x                                           8.61.dfsg.1-1               The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpret

That is really weird, the file /usr/bin/gs is simply missing, even though I have the ghostscript package installed. Ok, let's reinstall it:

$ wajig reinstall ghostscript
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libwine-capi libstdc++5 libopenal0a xgnokii libglut3 libcapi20-3
  libggi-target-x lib64gfortran2 libsvg1 lib64gomp1 libggi2 libgii1
  libgii1-target-x libxine1-gnome cups-pdf lib64objc2
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  akregator gs kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy kappfinder karm
  kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data kdelibs4c2a
  kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources kdepim-wizards
  kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer kmplayer-common
  kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgnutls26 libgs8 libilmbase6 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
  libopenexr6
Suggested packages:
  kdeaddons-doc-html ntpdate ntp-simple perl-suid egroupware ffmpeg xawtv
  gnutls-bin
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  digikam kde-amusements kde-core kdeaddons kdebase kdebase-kio-plugins kdepim
  kmail kmailcvt kmplayer-plugin knights konq-plugins konqueror
  konqueror-nsplugins korn smb4k
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gs libgnutls26 libilmbase6 libopenexr6
The following packages will be upgraded:
  akregator ghostscript kaddressbook kaddressbook-plugins kalarm kandy
  kappfinder karm kate kcontrol kdebase-bin kdebase-data kdelibs-data
  kdelibs4c2a kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdepim-kresources
  kdepim-wizards kdesktop kghostview kicker kitchensync kleopatra kmplayer
  kmplayer-common kpersonalizer ksplash libarts1c2a libgs8 libkcal2b
  libkdepim1a libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkonq4 libkpimidentities1 libktnef1
36 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 16 to remove and 683 not upgraded.
Need to get 53.1MB of archives.
After this operation, 42.9MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Oops, unstable is broken at the moment. Ok, what now? Well, snapshot.debian.net comes to rescue again. Find "ghostcript", version "8.61.dfsg.1-1" and here we are:

$ wget http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2008/03/02/debian/pool/main/g/ghostscript/ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb
$ wajig install ./ghostscript_8.61.dfsg.1-1_i386.deb

And all is fine now:

$ ls /usr/bin/gs
/usr/bin/gs

When I look at how people are using the net, I see a spectrum... At the low end, there are users who browse, and maybe post stuff to sites like flickr or youtube or wikipedia. When I hang out with these people, I'm struck by them being often quite smart, savvy, capable (and young), and wasting a lot of their time and inginuity fitting what they want to do into these narrow and (mostly) corporate-controlled and censored channels. And being limited by it in ways that they're not fully aware of. If you're in this group, please, please consider finding a way up the spectrum. At the high end are tecchies like me, we have at least one and often multiple servers, sometimes even in different countries/continents. We can write and run our own software with full control. This excellent advogato article calls it the "sovereign" level. We're not exactly kings when you look at who controls things from DNS to the internet backbone, but we're as close as it's practical to be without running your own wires. And we're statistically vanishingly few these days. So the middle is more and more interesting. For one thing, being king is expensive. So some of us move down a level, to virtual servers with xen or the like. Maybe we can't build our own kernel on our server anymore, but we don't have to worry about maintaining spinning disks and fans. And some people move up to this level too. One path is learning about running linux on a personal machine and then using an easy and cheap provider like slicehost. But still, users at this level are rare. The other interesting level (and the one I've not explored much myself) is a step up from the low end, where you have some form of inexpensive shared hosting, but can at least run your own code. This level seems quite a mess, there is no standardisation, everything has to be set up by hand, unless you use prepackaged control panel type things that probably take away most of the empowerment available at this level. A lot of people reach this level, but it's still fractions of a percent. So there seems quite a hump up from the lowest end of the empowerment spectrum to using shared hosting. How to encourage people over that hump is an interesting problem.

---

I've been playing with using some power tools from the top, sovereign level down in these murky shared hosting depths. Decided to see what kind of stuff I could accomplish for $5. Although it ended up costing only 2 cents for hosting so far. Amazon and google's hosting servives look interesting, but need things to be designed explcitly for them. And those companies are too big already. NearlyFreeSpeech.net is more flexible, funky, and has a cheap pay-as-you-go pricing that's ideal for little things that will only use a few dollars of bandwidth. So, I got ikiwiki working there (and documented how), along with a git backend, so my wiki's sources can be cloned to elsewhere for backups and development. Some things I hope to do later include:

• Allowing ikiwiki aggregation to be kicked off via the web. There's no cron jobs on these systems so you have to use something like webcron. (Which I dreamed up last night, but am happy to see someone else already implemented.)
• Implementing Madduck's idea to trigger ikiwiki mirrors via the web. So you can set up a cluster of mirrored wikis on disparate shared hosting.
• Using Amazon s3 to store wiki pages and handle file serving.

Apparently it is a political suicide in USA to make people think. Obama’s ex-preacher Jeremiah Wright is the most sane US preacher that I’ve ever heard. If you read or listen to his sermons in full length and go beyond the Fox News presented soundbites, he is 99% right. The US has long been doing extreme violence to countries around the world, so it is no wonder that such violence came back to US. Russia had the same problem with Afghanistan and Chechnya. If you try to put yourself up as ‘world police’, some people will disagree. Then he damned America’s _government_ for letting Americans down by not caring enough about the people. The only thing that I would smile and shake my head at was the statement that American government invented HIV. I doubt even they have such resources. Read this transcript for example, the sermon is just a great sermon that urges the people think for themselves. And what people put this sermon down for? Using a word ‘Negro’? Having an issue with some specific politicians? He is a pastor, pastors are meant to have a strong opinion a vision and to project that for the congregation to see. “I’m not going to stop thinking just because I love Jesus” is the summary of that sermon if you ask me. And that is the most positive religious message I’ve heard from that side of the pond for a long time. You can agree or disagree with rev. Wright, but you can still go to his sermons and enjoy it because he makes you think. I would talk to most racist bastard, serial killer or even Hitler himself if he could tell me something that would provoke my mind to think and thus improve myself. You don’t have to agree with people to benefit from speaking to them or from listening to what they have to say. Even if someone is 100% wrong and misguided, if his speeches can make you think of some good idea, it is worth it. And rev. Jeremiah Wright is not 100% wrong, from what I’ve heard he is on the money most of the time and only some of his statements I would disagree with. And he is a great speaker. If I would have not been an Obama supporter, I would become one because of Wright. Or because of the very accurate observation by Obama that in hard times people in rural USA cling to trusted values such as guns and religion. There is nothing wrong with that. I am amazed how such true statements can be so turned by US press and can actually reduce Obamas rating. I was starting to believe that not all is lost in the US, but if Obama does not get elected, well … it is all lost in the US. PS. How this related to Debian? Or software is the best choice for the society in the long term. However, that is only true if we assume that people behave rationally and use it, improve it and contribute back improvements for the public good. If the general population is made weary of rational thinking and starts thinking in soundbites and slogans, then there is a ceiling to free software expansion and the whole free software movement can eventually be crushed in the interests of homeland security with strong corporate commercial software backing. (Only government approved software is allowed to run with mandatory government approved back-doors and hardware verification to prevent cyber-terrorism or something, thus also forbidding any compilers and interpreters outside government controls.)

I did some 'playing' with Hecl the other day, to see what it might look like if implemented in a slightly different way, and I thought I'd share what I was thinking about. Keep in mind that

1. I haven't thought this through completely:-)
2. It's not something I'm going to just rush out and do in the near future. It's definitely a Hecl 2.0 sort of idea.

My notion was to make use of the ClassCommand feature to have at least simple types be hooked directly to the relevant Java types, and dealt with through methods, rather than commands. For instance:

$i + 10

instead of

+ $i 10

Where $i is, in the first case, a Java Integer, rather than a Hecl type. What it would be doing internally is something like this:

1. $i is recognized as the object to act on.
2. It's an Integer, so the corresponding ClassCommand is looked up and executed with + and 10 as arguments.
3. The classcommand for Integer has a + method that accepts an argument, in this case, 10, which is added to the value of $i, and returned as a new Integer.

Without a "real" (where real also means bloated, memory and space hungry) parser, Hecl is never going to have a C-like syntax - you still wouldn't be able to do foo = 1 + 2 + 3 - but this just might make a significant amount of people more comfortable with Hecl, which would be a good thing. You could do something like this:

set i 1
while   $i < 1000000    
    set i [$i + 1]
 

instead of

set i 1
while   < $i 1000000    
    set i [+ $i 1]
 

I actually built a really simple HeclInteger class that implements < and + as methods to Integer ObjectThings, in order to test out this idea, and it seems to run about as fast as the regular Hecl version. I welcome any thoughts or comments on the idea.

For the past couple of days, one of my e-mail addresses has been some spammer's choice for forged From: lines in their spew. So, as invalid addresses aren't high on a spammer's list of priorities, I get all the bounces. The fact that MTAs, in this day and age, don't have SMTP session recipient validation is unpleasant. However, with ISPs requiring all outgoing e-mail to go through their own servers, I can kinda see where that can break down. I still don't like it, but I'll live with it. In amongst all the bounces, though, there's a lot of other, really obnoxious, crap. So far, I've had five "please click this link / reply to this e-mail so it'll go through" (AKA "please filter my spam for me")[1]. I've also had a large number of e-mails saying that my e-mail was blocked or unwanted or whatever, from spam filtering programs themselves. What I haven't got any of, as far as I can determine, is any e-mail from enraged recipients saying "stop sending me this crap!" or anything of that nature. The only conclusion I can reasonably draw from this data is that users know that source addresses are forged and there's no point replying to them, but the people whose job it is to write, maintain, and run spam software don't. That's downright embarrassing. Not a single user was dumb enough to assume that I really sent the e-mail, but IT "professionals" who deal with spam for a living are. If you are in any way involved in the production, sale, or use of an anti-spam product that hasn't realised that the from addresses of spams are universally forged, please shoot yourself in the head. Really. I'm sick to death of people who should know better doing the most stunningly stupid things regardless. If you don't know that your software is spamming the rest of the world, then you're still on the hook. What other dumb shit is your system doing that you know nothing about? On the other hand, if you do know that your spam filter is contributing to the noise, you're even worse -- no spam has a real source address. If your software or system spews crap because some clueless manager told you to do it, then you need to grow some courage and ponder on the words of Napoleon:

A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister, when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.

In other words, if you did it and you know you shouldn't have, it's still your fault, regardless of why you did it. Take some responsibility for your actions, for fucks sake.

---

[1. Every single one of which I was more than happy to confirm -- if you want other people to do a job for you, you have to deal with the fact that some of them might not do it in quite the way you expect. I encourage anyone else who thinks that an anti-spam system that requires the rest of the world to filter your inbox is stupid (even disregarding the likely problems of infinite loops if everyone had a challenge-response inbox) to do the same.

As some of you might have noticed, I have uploaded a bunch of new packages to my experimental repository, all of them related to digital photographic workflow. Most of them are based on existing packages, but built from a VCS snapshot to benefit from newly supported hardware and new features.

• ufraw was updated to support my Sony DSLR-A700 camera - packaged based on the latest release available in sid.
• hugin package in unstable is outdated - I have based my package on Debian PhotoTools member Cyril Brulebois’s work. It seems that some legal questions have been raised, preventing the package to be updated in the official archive.
• autopano-sift fixes FTBS and other bugs in Christian Marillat’s package and proves working well with hugin. I will e-mail him a patch with the amendments I have worked on.
• enblend needs to be built from VCS to work with current hugin snapshots. The package is fully based on the package available in sid.

Though I use these packages on a regular basis, they haven’t been thoroughly tested as official packages would be, and might still contain bugs or errors. Please report any problem you might have. I will try and update these packages when time allows it. VCS snapshots might be unstable, or even non-usable. As usual, use these non-official packages on your own risk. Also note that these packages are currently only available for amd64. I will eventually build i386 packages if requested.

Sometimes strange things happen. This tuesday I had been to a simply great concert again: Grossstadtgeflüster. They were wearing nice white jumpsuits with finger-color handprints on them, the playlist was mostly really great, good mix of their first and from the great new album. But what was the most interesting part is that they announced another concert on the following tuesday. I just dropped to the floor because well, yet another of those "coincidences", because well, next tuesday is my birthday. Again. Deja Vu, anyone? On wednesday I had been to the next concert: Mono & Nikitaman. I never have seen the WUK that crowded, the hall was totally packed, people were even standing through the doors into the pre-hall. And even though they are rooted in Reggae it was in no way slow or soft. Greatly carrying along, hard to keep ones feet still. Only drawback when having two great concerts in two subsequent nights: Your neck and back starts to hurt and requests its toll. *ouch*

So I wrote an entry on my tumblelog about what s going on with my life currently. Since Tumblr s feed doesn t get pushed immediately, I showed the post to my co-worker and friend Chris, before it hit the planets: - So, yeah I have my blog since it s syndicated on Planet Debian and other small feed aggregators -I said. - But do they really care about your bike, your chess games or you attending that conference? -he asked-, I mean, I do care, but people? - Well -I replied after a quick thought-, I think that s how personal blogs work. After a deeper thought I just realized that indeed no one cares and deleted the entry before it was pushed to the feed, updating it on FeedBurner, etc. It was a nice awakening.

---

But on a bit more interesting (for people) things, The Perl Foundation is currently requesting comments on the projects they received for grant requests. My proposal is there, Solidifying and Extending the Blog Normalize project . I do think there are some other more deeper projects, of course, but I think B::N is also an interesting one and the amount requested is not as big for other projects, so it d be nice to give it a try. I believe B::N is a good idea that could be enhanced nicely. I proposed the idea to the TextMotion developers yesterday on IRC (since that s one of the CMS there would be a connector for -as of the grant proposal-). After deeper discussion, CMSs will not make translators for a lot of projects into theirs, but B::N would, so maybe we could make some sort of webservice that CMSs could call on their installation phases. That, or the user at the end could actually do the conversion himself locally. Having the proper information, one could be able to get from TextMotion to Wordpress, to Blogger, to Joomla, to Tumblr, to MovableType and to TextMotion again, making a transparent circular transformation. Some of this is currently possible with the few code I ve written for it, currently in CPAN (and a bit deeper proof of concept); if you are interested, please leave your comments on the Perl Foundation blog entry. And review others too. At the end, I might end up doing the project myself, but if some money is granted to do so, why not apply to it, that d just speed it up.

John writes about PDFs and the problem of embedded fonts that are missing due to restrictive licencing. Font designers usually distinguish between "embedding" and "using" a font, prohibiting the former in their licence agreement. The difference is that when a font is "used", all information about the text is lost, and only rendering instructions remain (usually a set of Bezier curves). PDF allows you to annotate a rendered page in various ways, among other things, it allows you to specify that a certain region should be interpreted as a specific text. For example, OCR tools working with PDF files start with a file containing just the image data, and add the textual information, so you end up with a file that looks like the scan, but has selectable text. While that is certainly not legal advice, so far it has been considered acceptable to ship a PDF file with pre-rendered text and an annotation that facilitates copy&paste (which you also need with embedded fonts to allow selections to see ligatures like " " as two distinct characters). These files may be slightly larger than they would be with an embedded font, but have the advantage of looking exactly the same everywhere and at the same time, being trivial to render as the rasterizer does not need to understand anything about text layout. tl;dr: if you have a document that people should be able to see exactly the way you intended it, please include the text curves if you may not embed the font directly, and provide selection hints.

Tonight I'm going to enjoy a nice long sleep after attending The Beltane Fire Festival yesterday evening. I did manage to sort out an SSL certificate yesterday, before I went out. A lengthier process than expected because the SSL-registrar was annoying and mailed the admin address listed in whois for my domain; rather than an address upon the domain itself. I guess they can't be blamed for that, and the registrar did forward on the request when begged, so it wasn't the end of the world. For reference I used godaddy.com; who sold me a 3 year SSL certificate for about £25. Today I've been mostly catatonic because I had only two hours sleep last night. But one good piece of news was receiving a (postal) mail from Runa in response to the letter I had sent her some time ago. ObQuote: 300