I've been critical of the almost abusive terms in the user agreements of most user-harvesting-based services (sometimes called Web 2.0) for a while now. There are quite a few services that I simply won't use because their owners want me, all my web "content" (whether explicitly posted to their site or not), my first born child, or similar. There are even more sites where I'm careful not to put much beyond the bare minimum and try to make sure that I keep backups of nearly all of it. Usually that means keeping a copy of the input, as getting my data back out of most sites is a pig. So far, when I've criticised aggressive user agreements, I've felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. It's been heartening to spot two user-harvesting services geting some abuse over the last week or two. First, the Swift online community platform for conferences has been attacked by both David Lee King and librarian.net for its over-zealous user agreement demands. Particularly "nice" is the feature where one rule of Swift club is that you don't talk about Swift club (see last paragraph of David Lee King's post). Swift's owners have responded. I'll watch and see whether it improves enough to get a follow-up post from either blog. Secondly, the Phorm advertising system has faced hard questions from both Open Rights Group and Sir Tim Berners-Lee over its mysterious user tracking. Phorm hasn't yet replied properly about their potential to harvest user-generated content (web histories and so on) without consent, as far as I can see. If you know anyone on Talk Talk, BT or Virgin, tell them to start planning the exit route. If you'd like to refer them to our agency for The Phone Coop that would be great. I suspect the owners of The Phone Coop would get quite vocal if it ever tried to track users like this and a comment on the ORG post suggests someone else has asked Are we seeing the start of a user-harvesting backlash?

I must admit that I feel slightly uneasy about this, because it blurs the distinction between maintaining a package and forking it even more than it is already. Some improvements have long been necessary, since we really need to handle more archive formats, or the situation where upstream ships five tarballs and two patches, however I think the quilt support is a step in the wrong direction. There is nothing wrong with quickly fixing a problem in a package so Debian users do not have to wait for the fix to be incorporated into an upstream release; however for that we don't need a sophisticated system to keep patches separate and forward-port them to new upstream releases easily. Let's face it: the quilt integration into the build process exists because we expect to maintain these patches for months. On the other hand, there is an effort to synchronize these changes between distributions. The question to me is: if all the distributions can agree that a certain change has to be made, why cannot this change be committed upstream? Is Debian failing to submit patches, or are our patches just unacceptable because they break every configuration except ours? I can absolutely see the need for a tool to assist in forks, ideally one that will allow us to easily submit these patches to upstream developers easily, and ideally so they can pick them up with a minimum amount of hassle. Now why does this entire discussion sound so incredibly familiar?

Before I start on this, note that SPI's next board meeting is next Wednesday at 1900 UTC on irc.oftc.net #spi and logs should appear here and on spi-general less than a day after. I expect the agenda will appear here. Last Tuesday morning, someone asked about SPI holding copyrights. On Tuesday afternoon, I answered with the policy and the only practice example I found. SPI's policy is fine. SPI's practice seemed unclear. On Wednesday morning, I clarified that reply to one board member and made a suggestion to one who seemed to want to ask a lawyer. On Sunday afternoon, after a staggering number of posts which weren't really getting anywhere, I tried to drag it back to the practice example a bit rudely, but that's the level the discussion had fallen to by then. It didn't go down well. It seems rude is fine from other people, but not me. Damn baggage. There was a sequence of posts telling me that SPI members weren't even allowed to ask about this task. I replied to one on Tuesday morning and took the useful bits off to debian vote. Yesterday, I lost my cool, really, and posted too much, replying to all the stupid posts suggesting that you can only ask if you wear the right hat, and one or two particularly ugly personal attacks. Sorry about that. Meanwhile, over on IRC, a draft solution to the problem has been developed/found. So all's well in the end. I give big thanks to Jimmy, Sam and Lucas in particular and a big apology for responding to the mailing list abuse.

Windows knows about uint32_t. You are cordially invited to guess whether the same is true for uint16_t. Why they have chosen to ship debug info only for the non-debug version of their C and C++ libraries is also slightly beyond me.

Pierre Habouzit reported bug #470000 on Saturday March 8th instead of taking care of Habouzit Jr. Shame on him. Double shamre: that was an RC bug. He really should hijack that gromacs package which sounds to me as a special version of EMacs for the Groland country (fr_FR joke). As bug #460000 was reported as of January 11th 2008, we're still keeping the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 10th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I still plan some MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. I also expect the lenny release to speed that up. See you around May 10th for bug #480000! PS: has anyone tried to plot compute the number of bugs we *close* in the same amount of time?

Debian includes a package called “vrms - virtual Richard M. Stallman” which report the non-free packages you have installed on your Debian system. Running vrms on my workstations gives the following output:

makholm@makholm:~$ vrms
              Non-free packages installed on makholm
gcc-4.2-doc               documentation for the GNU compilers (gcc, gobjc, g++)
gcc-doc-base              several GNU manual pages
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-plugin          The Java(TM) Plug-in, Java SE 6
xsnow                     Brings Christmas to your desktop
  6 non-free packages, 0.4% of 1487 installed packages.
makholm@makholm:~$

Sun Java is a know evil and somebody really ought to reimplement xsnow, but having the virtual RMS declare GNU documentation non-free is a nice touch. Yeah, I know about the problems with GFDL. Update: Known problem: #221807, #297506, and #364971

Here’s the free-to-air satellite details for the first big French cycle race of the year. Please add any updates in the comments, particularly any RAI or ITV coverage. Sun 09.03 Prologue: Individual Time Trial Amily (5 km) France 4 13:40 - 15:00 (live?); France 3 15:00 - 15:35 (live?); ZDF 16:15 approx -17:00, in ZDF SPORTextra (highlights?); Eurosport 23:30 - 0:15 (highlights); Mon 10.03 1st stage: Amily-Nevers (185 km) Eurosport 15:00 - 16:45; France 4 15:25 - 16:35; Tue 11.03 1st stage highlights: Amily-Nevers (185 km) Eurosport 14:30 - 15:00; 2nd stage: Nevers-Belleville (201 km) Eurosport 15:00 - 16:45; France 4 15:25 - 16:35; Wed 12.03 3rd stage: Fleurie-Saint tienne (165,5 km) Eurosport 14:30 - 16:15; France 4 15:25 - 16:35; Thu 13.034th stage: Mont limar-Mont Ventoux (176 km) Eurosport 15:30 - 16:45; France 4 15:25 - 16:35; Fri 14.03 5th stage: Althen des Paluds-Sisteron (172,5 km) France 4 15:25 - 16:35 (live); Eurosport 17:15 -18:00 (highlights); Sat 15.03 6th stage: Sisteron-Cannes (206 km) France 4 15:25 - 16:35 (live); Eurosport 17:15 -18:15 (highlights); Sun 16.03 7th stage: Nice-Nice (119 km) France 3 15:05 - 16:55 (live); Eurosport 20:00 - 21:00 (highlights); Mon 17.03 7th stage highlights: Nice-Nice (119 km) Eurosport 13:15 -14:15 All times CET. France 3 and 4 are at 5 west (in French), Eurosport is at 19 east (German digital, German and English analogue) and ZDF is at 13 and 19 east (in German). Sources: France 4 Sport, Eurosport.DE, ZDF

Enrico, you were probably looking for std::cout << (std::stringstream() << "foo" << std::setw(8) << "bar").rdbuf() << std::endl; which is a WTF in itself.

The indomitable Vincent Danjean continues working on getting the new yaz into debian. It seems the upstream licensing problems are resolved and it's all modBSD now. Now we just need to fix the apparently-absent maintainer problem. See bug 463116 for the current situation.

I was a bit surprised when a letter from UEA arrived with a new logo on it. It looks like someone turned up the brightness until the thin parts of the letters started to vanish. IE+1? What's that then? There's confirmation on UEA's wikipedia page which includes the above logo. Ironically, the letter I got looks like it doesn't conform to the linked guidelines. I think this change weakens UEA's links with its alumni a bit, don't you? The old logo was everywhere while I was there. I'm going to miss the square logo with rounded reflex blue letters. Maybe I should stock up on UEA mugs, although a gold-on-blue UEA mug looks a bit wrong.

Two or three days ago, there was a discussion on dpatch, quilt and all the other patch management systems on #debian-devel. My opinion still stands: if you change upstream source, then it better be in a way that upstream finds acceptable. But if I expect my changes to be merged quickly, why do I need an elaborate scheme to manage them? Or is a significant percentage of our upstreams unresponsive enough to warrant a fork?

I had a call last week from one of our customers that a self-managed server had been attacked and email wasn't running smoothly on it any more. The exploited web app (old version of mambo IIRC) had been repaired and there didn't appear to be a shell-gaining exploit, so what was wrong? Looking at the mail queue gave a clue. I couldn't see anything at first. Nothing. No output. Eventually, qmail-qstat returned and reported over 50,000 emails in the queue, which is pretty high for that webserver. Poking around the mailserver found lots of examples of a few types of spam. I stopped outgoing mail so I could clean up. I don't use qmail much. It hasn't been free software for long and the default upstream packaging (which was being used on that server) isn't very friendly IMO. So, I had no idea how to remove messages from a qmail queue, like exim -Mrm or postsuper -d. I looked at the qmail man pages and the qmail binaries. Nothing. I looked at the qmail FAQ. Nothing. I asked a LUG IRC channel. Something, but no answer. With some web searches, I found mailRemove.py - why is this not in qmail and not even a FAQ? No clear contact details on the FAQ, either.

On Saturday 1 March, I attended the Constitutional Review Roadshow at Explore@Bristol (pictured). The review is trying to develop the rules for the Cooperative Group after its merger with United. The event wasn't at all what I expected or hoped for. There were relatively few individual members there. I don't know the split, but most of the 60 or so attendees seemed to be elected members of some sort and this was the first chance they'd had to comment since the open consultation ended last year. Some of the elected members had travelled from the Eastern and South East regions. The initial slide "Purpose of Today" stated three aims:

1. bring members up to date;
2. give members the opportunity to ask questions;
3. and aid members in preparing their formal feedback.

I don't feel the event really brought us up to date or aided in preparing formal feedback, because the roadshow appeared to summarise a report which hasn't been published. Some of the elected members had seen it the day before, but no copies were available to use at the event, so we were pretty much in the dark for some aspects. The event didn't give us much opporunity to ask questions either, despite its length. I was expecting more of a consultation event, which was reinforced when I entered the room and saw seats gathered around tables. I did not expect an hour-long lecture followed by three hours or so of whole-group question-and-answer, broken by lunch. Even with the competent chairing (AFAICT), that was an amazingly inefficient way of working, with some people being cut short, but still leaving some people not being heard. It can be summed up by the chairman commenting

"I do not want this to turn into a discussion"

while the big screen next to him said "questions and discussion"! Headlines from the review: similar elected structures to current Group structure, but regional board nominated by individual members; merge regions to produce six new regions (West Midlands and North West, Wales and South West, London and South East, Eastern England and East and South Midlands, Yorkshire and Humber and North East, Scotland and Northern Ireland); add management and non-executive directors to national board; no clue how to fix diversity problems; no view on fees or job spec until structures are defined. I'll go through the slides in detail and post the questions and answers if anyone leaves a comment asking for them. Otherwise, I think I've lost enough time to this for now.

A few months ago, I asked a set of questions on development mailing lists of a few GNU/Linux distributions. This resulted in very interesting discussions. As promised back then, all the answers from all distros I contacted can be read on the web or as an mbox file. Also, Freedesktop.org kindly agreed to host a mailing list to ease discussions between distributions, and act as a central point of contact. You can subscribe, and post to distributions at lists dot freedesktop dot org. This mailing list is for people involved (or interested) in the development of distributions. Questions that are on-topic are both technical and social/organizational issues, like:

• How do you achieve graphical boot in your distro? Do you use some kind of dependancy-based or events-based boot?
• How do you package both ruby 1.8, ruby 1.9 and jruby, or handle KDE vs KDE4?
• Do you use a system that gives a limited set of rights to new contributors?

Off-topic stuff obviously include trolling about which distribution is the best one, or user support. Don’t hesitate to forward this announcement to all interested parties. Let’s make this mailing list something useful together! Also, I really apologize for procastinating announcing this list for sooo long. I’m really good at procastinating interesting stuff, it seems.

John Penrose said:

"[...] the credit union movement in this country is exactly the kind of excellent initiative that [...] fulfils many of the necessary and vital functions that she has mentioned and is aimed at those at the bottom of the income scale."

Source I've emailed him a thank-you and been told that ABCUL will explain to Fiona Mactaggart how they're working to increase coverage and capacity. I've noticed credit unions in the south-west expanding their areas, or merging in order to serve more members. I think we've also got a credit union rep on the board of Cooperatives-SW again. Yay. Now, back to coding.