Recently I noticed that some parking spots in the city area are reserved for car sharing. There seems to be two car sharing companies operating. Flexicar [1] costs $50 to join, has a $10 per month membership fee (which includes one hour of driving at a value of $12), and costs $12 per hour or $80 per day to drive a car plus $0.15 per Km if you drive more than 100Km in a day. They also have pre-paid plans which bring all the guesswork and complexity of mobile phone bills to car rental. Also they give discounts to members of the City Rewards [2] program which are greater than the membership cost, so anyone who plans to join them should join City Rewards first. To use a car you phone up or use their web site to make a reservation. Then you find the car you reserved at it’s designated location and swipe your card across the windscreen to unlock the doors (presumably it’s an RFID card). The glovebox has the key for the ignition as well as fuel cards for any fuel you use a BP, Shell, and Caltex petrol stations (presumably if you run low on petrol when not near those ones you end up paying). All you pay is the rental rate and any tolls for toll roads you use. When someone doesn’t return the vehicle to it’s designated spot on time there are penalty rates, which may include the cost of a taxi fare for the next person who had booked it. It seems like a really good idea that can save significant amounts of money for people who live in the central areas (the costs of maintaining and insuring a car are significant, as is the depreciation on a new car as an asset). The competitor is Charterdrive [3] which costs $25 to join (less than Flexicar but the same once you consider the discount), the same $10 per hour for 8:30AM to 5:30PM hours, and then cheaper rates for evenings and weekends. $25 for a night (5:30PM to 8:30AM the next morning) is good value if you want to drive home from work and then return the next day (if you work late then you might expect to pay $30 or more for a single taxi ride to get home). The weekend rate of $90 for 5:30 Friday to 8:30 Monday is also quite competitive, I expect that there are many people who only use a car on the weekend who could benefit a lot from this. $90 per weekend for 40 weekends a year (some weekends you would stay home or just use public transport) is $3600, insurance, registration, and basic maintenance of a car that you would want to own would cover most of that. Charterdrive does charge $0.20 per Km though for all journeys (with a discount rate of $0.15 per Km for long journeys on some plans), as opposed to Flexicar only charging $0.15 per Km for distances in excess of 100Km per day. Charterdrive seems to be a newer company and has a far smaller presence. But it’s business model seems a little different and the focus on renting cars for people to drive home means that some people might benefit from being members of both companies. The $0.20 per Km makes Charterdrive more expensive more expensive for most city use, and the discounts offered for Flexicar seem to make it cheaper for use during business hours. Charterdrive states that they have a deal with Red Spot Car Rentals [4]. It is not stated on their web site if you want to use one of their cars and they are all in use, I wonder whether a Red Spot car would be provided for the same price. Flexicar however claims that they aim to have a ratio of cars to members sufficient to make such things unlikely. Maybe it would be prudent to join both organisations so that if one had no vehicles available then you could use the other? In one city car park that I often pass the Flexicar and Charterdrive parking spots are adjacent so there would be no difference in convenience in terms of which one you use. I wonder whether they will continue getting adjacent spots. If many people join both organisations then it would be more effective if they don’t get adjacent spots to get better aggregate coverage. I think that at the moment the main challenge for both companies is to grow the popularity of the car-sharing business. I expect that the real competition for who gets the biggest slice of that business will happen in a few years time. Update: There is another Australian car-share company in operation named GoGet [5], interestingly I discovered their existence when I reviewed the Google advertising on this post… GoGet has a significant presence in Sydney, a small presence in Melbourne, and is only making a start in Queensland. Their hourly rates are significantly lower than the others (as little as $4.40 per hour) but distance rates are as high as $0.35 per Km. One significant benefit is that they have plans for two or three drivers which could allow an entire family to sign up on one account. If you drive less than 20Km in an hour (which would not be uncommon in city driving) then GoGet would be cheapest.

• [1] https://www.flexicar.com.au/


• [2] http://www.thepegasusgroup.com.au/com/cityrewards/index.htm


• [3] http://charterdrive.com.au/


• [4] http://www.redspotrentals.com.au/


• [5] http://www.goget.com.au/

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It's a bit strange. Still. Writing this personal part of my blog, opening some of my most inner thoughts to the wild public. Though, so wild it doesn't seem to be. To be honest I can't remember having received any bad feedback on my personal stuff, only positive, supportive ones. (Or, there was one. Though, it wasn't related to the core of the personal section but someone thinking it would be "cool" to misinterpret some statement therein and try to hurt me with it. It only made me laugh at them, trying to "use" it as an argument.)
No bad feedback might be related to that I don't have comments enabled because I don't want to have a moderation system that would make it look like I filter out bad comments but I also don't want to open it up to SPAM. And people who propably usual leave scathing comments don't consider it convenient to address me directly, via any IM system, including emails. Anyway, opening in that way has quite some benefits: For a start, it helps me myself to keep track of things that happened. Secondly, it hopefully helps others that are in similar situations to see that they aren't alone out there and that one can survive with not hiding it. But last but not least some people address me and provide me with interesting links on the topic. I think they shouldn't be just hidden in my personal mailbox so I am going to offer them to a broader audience here. I won't show the names of who sent them along, I'm not sure if they would like being connected to the topic. But they can be assured of my blessing for offering them to me. First link I like to hand out is an article from advocate.com about a pregnant husband. Yes, this was no typo and the reason why I haven't posted it right the next day because I received that link on March 31st. I can just wish all the best to Thomas, Nancy and their yet unborn girl. Looking forward to see baby photos. :) The second article I got sent lately is When Girls Will Be Boys. It is about the transition story of Ray and acceptance problems. Pretty long but definitely worth reading. Again, thanks to the people who offered me the links to the articles, I truly appreciate them—and I hope some of the people reading my blog will too, or at least that it might change their perception and opinion on "such people".

We escorted Sarge to its last home. 3.1r8 is done, thanks to all the people who made it possible. A big thanks goes to James Troup, our ftpmaster of the day doing all the grunt work of getting a new point release out of the door. To bring in a more personal feeling of who makes this all possible, here is a list of people contributing uploads to 3.1r8 (mostly people from our fabulous Security Team):

• Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta
• dann frazier
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway
• Florian Weimer
• Gregory Colpart
• Julien Cristau (who is glad that he finally got rid of xfree86)
• Luk Claes
• Martin Pitt
• Michael Koch
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Patrick Schoenfeld
• Roland Mas
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Steffen Joeris
• Thijs Kinkhorst

I would also like to thank dann frazier, Luk Claes, Martin Zobel-Helas and Neil McGovern for helping with the preparation of the point release.

I uploaded xulrunner 1.9~b5-1 yesterday, and today was webkit’s turn, with an upload of svn revision 31841, which happens to be the last revision on trunk as of writing. Thanks to Mark Rowe, the most problematic crashers I experienced with webkit while preparing this upload have been fixed in revisions 31821 and 31787. This had the side effect to delay the upload enough that we now have the benefit of improved SVG animations support, and CSS gradients. For those who like numbers, you can take a look at the Sunspider results for xulrunner 1.9~b5 (running mybrowser ; very similar results to what I got with 1.9~b4), and Sunspider results for webkit r31842 (when you compare to previous results for webkit r27674, there are significant improvements). For another kind of numbers:

~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9... filterdiff -x b/debian/* -x a/configure diffstat tail -1
36 files changed, 507 insertions(+), 291 deletions(-) Compared to:
~/git/xulrunner$ git diff upstream/1.9...1.9+b4-1 filterdiff -x b/debian/"*" -x a/configure diffstat tail -1
53 files changed, 932 insertions(+), 466 deletions(-)

~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream... filterdiff -x b/debian/* diffstat tail -1
1 file changed, 4 deletions(-) Compared to:
~/git/webkit$ git diff upstream...0+svn27674-4 filterdiff -x b/debian/* diffstat tail -1
17 files changed, 61 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)

Somehow, I prefer to work on webkit…

It's been a long time since I've written on my blog; longer than I'd like. I really want to get back in the swing of it, if only to keep this entire site from bitrotting interminably. My Alexa ranking has dropped to like >1M, which in my Web-addled state means that my personal worth has dropped, too. I know, I know. tags: blog me alexa

Conference of the Americas: Cancelled I was sorry to see that the Wikimedia Conference of the Americas, scheduled for mid-May, has been canceled. There was some controversy when this conference was announced last fall; it partly originated from a bid by the Atlanta Wikimedia community to host Wikimania. I'm kind of sad to see that it's not going to happen. I like Atlanta a lot, and I think there is a really good case to be made for regional (or at least continental) Wikimedia conferences. I hope this isn't a nail in the coffin for such a regional event in North America. On the flip side, it'd be really nice to see a more detailed explanation of what happened; of what future plans for the COTA are; and just generally a little more communication. tags: cota atlanta wikimedia wikimania wiki

Elsewhere in wikidom That all said, things are looking really cool for Wikimania over the next 12 months. I'm really glad to see that my South American home-away-from-home, Buenos Aires, won the chance to host the 2009 Wikimania event. With 2008's event in Alexandria, Egypt, I think we've got some seriously interesting ground to cover Wikimedia-wise. Also of importance: if you haven't received an invite yet, get yourself over to RecentChangesCamp 2008. The wiki unconference will be happening for the first time in the Bay Area (California). We'll be meeting over May 9-11 in the offices of SocialText in Palo Alto. I can't say enough good things about RecentChangesCamp. It has been instrumental in my understanding of wikis and my connection with the worldwide wiki community. If you are at all interested in wikis or related concepts, you should think hard about coming to this conference. tags: wikimania recentchangescamp rcc2008

Brain bits

• I think microrevie.ws is pretty cool. I got the 100th review today! Yay for me.
• Speaking of twitter stuff, I dig twittermap, but I don't always remember to update. IWBNI there was a portal to/from Fire Eagle.

tags: microreviews hreview twitter twittermap fireeagle

My cousin Greg Coker has created an eBay auction for Football cards with the proceeds going to a charity that protects animal welfare (I can’t remember the name - I’ll update this post later). He also has a bunch of other eBay auctions of football cards going which are not for charity. The charity auction is held in association with SEN (Sports Entertainment Network - a sports talk-back AM radio station) [1]. This afternoon Greg was interviewed on SEN about football cards in general. He gave a good talk, he could probably do some professional radio work if he was interested. Greg’s cards are from the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL (Australian Football League) [2]. The cards used to be sold in “milk bars” (small stores that sold a variety of junk food and some essential food items including milk - most such stores are closed now as they have been replaced by petrol stations and supermarkets) and each pack of ~5 cards had some crewing gum included (which Greg often discarded because he didn’t like it - he should have given it to me, I was not so fussy). The back side of the cards had a jigsaw picture which I have never seen anyone complete (I expect that Greg has assembled at least one jigsaw as he has some sets). Probably the way the cards were collected, traded, etc is very similar to sports based cards from other countries (such as baseball cards in the US). On the animal front, I’ve had a mother cat and four kittens move into the shed in my back-yard. The mother cat has no collar and is not known by anyone in the area so she appears to have been dumped by her owner when she got pregnant. There are four kittens, one is ginger, one is black, and two are mottled part black and part ginger. They are all healthy and friendly and the kittens are all really cute. The kittens have become used to being patted and handled by humans so it will be easy to make them household pets. If an owner is not found for them then they will probably all end up being put to sleep (unfortunately I can’t keep them so I’ll have to deliver them to the local council). If anyone in Melbourne, Australia wants some free cats then I would be happy to deliver them. I’ll supply as many cats as desired. I can’t give away the mother until the kittens have been given away, so if you want the mother cat (dark coloured) then you may have to wait for a while. Judging by the date that I first noticed them (when they were walking around, had their eyes open, and ate solid food) the kittens would have to be at least 7 weeks old. It’s recommended that kittens not be given away before they are 8 weeks old and given that it will probably take a week to organise anything I expect that anyone who reads I don’t think that there is any risk of giving them away too early. Please let me know by email or a comment if you are in the vicinity of Melbourne, Australia and want a new pet (or several new pets).

• [1] http://www.sen.com.au/


• [2] http://www.afl.com.au/

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In my opinion, the protests in London and Paris were great.China wants to use Olympia for promoting itself. All this is just a huge image campaign. This is why we should remind people on how cruel that regime is and how little it cares for human rights.Human rights are more important than the olympic torch.Turning a chinese PR campaign into a PR disaster is good.This is not about sports. Sports is what you do at home, not what is on TV. When I go dancing with my friends, that is sports. When I sit in front of the TV, it is not. I will not be watching the Olympics. When IOC representatives talk about it all being "only about sports" they lie - it's all about money.This is not out of disrespect for the athletes, but I cannot tolerate China using the Olympics as image campaign for being an equal member of the international community. All the new stadiums and so on - they're trying really hard to give the impression of a new china - when they actually have not changed at all.We need to signal China that if they want to be treated equally, they need to adhere to the same standards as all others - respecting human rights is the bare minimum, free elections and democracy are the next important step then.P.S. Please also do not buy Olympia swag. It's reported to be manufactured at less than half of the minimum wage even in China! It's pure exploitation!Note that I'm talking about a consumers' boycott, not an athletes' boycott. I do think that the athletes go there for the competitions.P.P.S. I don't think the Olympic games are fair anyway - I believe that many athletes are using doping (just the detection methods are insufficient). Otherwise we would not see new world records each year. And I believe the IOC is corrupt and maybe actually criminal; all they actually care about are their revenue streams, not the sports either.P.P.P.S. This blog is representing my own opinion only. Therefore it does not have or need a comment function. Use your own blog if your opinion differs.

Martin, sorry for calling you Madduck on the debian.ch-mailinglist. Luckily I didn’t use that name during our meeting in Zurich last week. *pfuh* To take part in the pdo-game with my own name (being Michael Prokop ;-)): as many of you might know I’m known as Mika in the community. The name was invented for me around 1999 (IIRC) by a greek flat collegue who liked to call me “Mika” - refering to Mika H kkinen (for whatever reason). From that on several people started to call me that way. I’m signing mails “to the community” with that nick since many years as well as using it in usenet and on freenode (IRC); on OFTC (another IRC network) I’ve to use mikap instead because mika was registered by another user already. Outside “the community” I’m usually known as Michael, good friends also use Michi and the family of my girlfriend uses Michl when the sister of my girlfriend (named Michaela and known as Michi as well) is present. Oh, and during grammar school I was AKA Proke.</secret> So calling me Mika is perfectly fine because it’s a kind of uniqueness for me. There might be just too many Michaels around and at least in Austria my nickname is everything but common. Quoting the marketing department: Great trademark! Oh and my speech parser knows to handle Michael, Michi and Michl as well - though it strongly depends on the situation, place, environment,…. Oh but using Proke is like talking to /dev/null - you’ve never heard of that name, ok?

Emacs

One thing I do a lot is select a region of text, then have it replaced with the output of a command. The most common job is sorting a number of lines, such as "use XX:YY;" lines in perl scripts. Finally having gotten annoyed enough about how clunky shell-command-on-region was I wrote my own lisp function:

• replace-region-command-output

Only after that did I discover M-x sort-lines. D'oh. Still I guess my solution is more general, and less difficult to use. (I find the use of the Emacs prefix troublesome to type; since you have to do it in advance - I almost always forget.) I also learnt of M-x list-matching-lines yesterday. Thats a new discovery which really rocks. (I can use "^sub " to find a list of subroutines, etc.)

NEW-queue

This could be improved, and fleshed out a lot if there were any interest. But its neat as-is:

#!/bin/sh
#
#  Dump packages in the NEW queue.
#
#  This could be improved, perhaps:
#
#  --show-names --show-dates, etc.  Or just show all info in a table.
#
wget --quiet -O-  http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html   \
 perl -ne 'print $1 . "\n" if ( $_ =~ /^<td valign="top" class="sid">([^<]+)<\/td>$/ )'

I thought there was something similar in the devscripts package, or contained within debian-goodies but apparently not.

ObQuote:Battle Royale

• Virgin is testing the use of babassu oil and coconut oil blended with regular jet fuel in commercial flights [1]. They have flown with 20% bio-fuel and tests indicate that they could use up to 40%. This is a difficult problem to solve as most bio-fuels either have problems with vaporising at low pressures or becoming too viscous at low temperatures, it’s good to see some progress on this.

Interesting Rolling Stone article about the US government encouraging idiot “terrorists” [2].

Cory Doctorow predicts a poor future for hardware e-book readers [3]. For my personal use a laptop is better for reading. In most cases when I’m going to do some reading I’m likely to want to write notes or be in a situation where I need my laptop for other purposes. So a laptop plus an e-book reader would be more weight and more battery problems than having just a laptop.

On page 2 of this article about what might happen if the source code to Windows was released freely [4] I am quoted. One thing I should note is that I have nothing against OpenSolaris, it’s merely one large project for which I could inspect the source if I didn’t have legal advice to the contrary. The situation of OpenSolaris may have changed in recent times, but I have not felt the need to seek further legal advice as there seems no real benefit in viewing the source. There is no shortage of GPL source that I would like to read if I had the time…

Location Independent - a blog about working from no fixed address and how to live on the move [5]. Should be of interest to all the people who seem fascinated by my living in hotels for ~18 months.

Martin Luther King Jr’s letter from a Birmingham jail [6]. Inspirational and it is also relevant when considering the positions that churches take today on moral issues. I found the link from The Reid Report blog [7] which is an interesting analysis of US politics.

Scientific American has an article about high altitude destroying brain cells [8], apparently this can happen even when there is no noticable injury and it is permanent. It seems that it would be a good idea to try and locate conferences to minimise air travel by delegates and speakers…

• [1] http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/travel/coconut-jet-fuel-thats-nuts/2008/02/25/1203788223183.html


• [2] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18137343/the_fear_factory


• [3] http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/03/cory-doctorow-put-not-your-faith-in.html


• [4] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/17132/1090/1/0/


• [5] http://locationindependent.com/blog/


• [6] http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html


• [7] http://blog.reidreport.com/


• [8] http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=brain-cells-into-thin-air

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Mutt has a built-in feature for search the body of emails in the current mailbox (see ESC-b) but it's also possible to make this extremely fast by plugging-in external tools. Here's a quick description of my mairix setup.

After installing the package,

apt-get install mairix

create a .mairixrc in your home directory containing something like:

base=/home/username/Mail
maildir=inbox:archives*:sent*
mbox=debian*:jokes
mfolder=search
database=/home/username/Mail/.mairix_database

(This assumes that you store your mail in ~/Mail and that you want the search results in a new ~/Mail/search maildir folder.)

Then you need to run mairix once to index all of your emails:

mairix

which you will of course want to run regularly. I created this cronjob in /etc/cron.d/mairix-username:

17,37,57 * * * * username /usr/bin/on_ac_power && /usr/bin/mairix

(To avoid waking up the hard drive needlessly, I prefer to restrict the indexing runs for when I'm running on AC power. Take that out if you're not running it on a laptop.)

Finally, the last bit of setup is in ~/.muttrc:

macro index \eb 'c=search'<enter><shell-escape>'mairix ' 'Enter Mairix search term'

which makes mairix take over the ESC-b shortcut.

If you use GPG, you should also add this to your ~/.muttrc to make sure that mairix can see all of your messages by saving them as clear text:

set fcc_clear=yes
bind index s decrypt-save
bind pager s decrypt-save

I thought the spanish region of Extremadura had 4 million inhabitants and 200000 computers running GNU/Linex, a custom Debian distribution.

I was wrong. It's 1 million inhabitants and ca. 100000 computers running Linex - which is a much better ratio :-)

The exact number is not really known, because about 2000 computers (or so, details...!) don't provide data back for some unknown reasons. Probably a configuration detail.

Details are sooo important, and I love that. But at the same time, details are irrelevant (100000 or 102000...), I love that too.

Personally, I think the Debian Edu developer gathering the last 3.5 days here in Extremadura was very productive and fun. It was so productive, there were so many fun, interesting and insightful discusssions, that currently I can only think of one detail, I want to mention here, which really isn't a detail, but something bigger. I'm very very happy about the work which was put into bug 311188 here, mostly by Winnie. #311188 is just a meta bug, the juice is in the details, all the bugs which are blocking this bug.

And as you are probably interesting in this detail, why we care so much about this bug, let me explain: the blocking bugs of that bug will prevent upgrades from Lenny to Lenny+1 from working without problems for Debian Edu installations. That's why we care - it's only a detail, but an important one.

And now I'll run to get a last drink from the hotel bar, instead of correcting details in this post. Thank you, Cesar y Jose, for arranging this great meeting and everybody else, who makes Debian a fun thing to work on details and the great picture!

Mutt

Fran ois Marier has recently been posting some interesting entries about the Mutt mail client upon his blog. His tips are pretty basic, but that doesn't make them less useful. So here's my tip of the day: reply_regexp. When you're viewing a mail, and you choose to reply it the subject of that mail is the basis of your message's subject. For example given a message with "Subject: hello" your reply will typically have the subject "Subject: Re: hello". This is real rocket science here, people. Imagine you're using SPAM filtering which tags messages it isn't sure about with a prefix "UNS:". Suddenly things don't look so hot, as you might end up with a mail with the subject:

Subject: UNS: Re: Hello

Reply to that mail, whilst being half-asleep, and what do you get? You get this:

Subject: Re: UNS: Re: Hello

Bad. Ugly. Wrong. The following snippet in my ~/.muttrc file correctly deals with this case:

set reply_regexp="^(((UNS:[ \t]) [rR][eE]:[ \t])*)+"

Neat. Cool. Nice.

Advertising

I've paid for some advertising upon the LWN.net site. (No link, I'm not trying to game things here.) I didn't know what to expect, but I was willing to risk the expenditure as a way of saying thanks to them for their great content. (Because of my Debian Project membership I get a free LWN subscription, as do all developers. see here for details if you're a developer without a subscription.) I've paid $30 and that has given me a months run of my advert, with clickthroughs hovering around 1%. Not horribly bad at all! I probably won't repeat the experiment for the forseeable future, but I'm glad that I did it at least once. If you have something appropriate for a Debian-based audience don't forget you're welcome to advertise upon the Debian Administration website for free - See the Advert FAQ for details.

ObQuote: The Craft Update: jquery was accepted yesterday. Today I uploaded a new version to more closely align it with the javascript-policy.

Today I woke up and found that nenolod.net expired. What? I hadn’t even received any expiration notifications from them. So, I immediately renewed and transferred to another registrar, and they sent me an e-mail with some hilarious excerpts begging me to stay with them:

GoDaddy.com, Inc. delivers superior value. Here’s how: 1. Guaranteed renewal price
2. Risk-free, money-back guarantee transfers
3. More FREE, value-added services with every domain
4. Consistently lower prices
5. Best-in-industry live customer support, 24/7
6. Fast, easy bulk domain transfers and registrations
7. Just-right, affordable hosting options
8. Superior domain search and management tools
9. Fierce protection of your personal information
10. Unique, valuable and innovative software and services

I’m not sure why I need any of these in a domain registrar. After all, it’s just a domain. I don’t think I will be missing these guys much. So if anyone was trying to send me mail and it didn’t go through, sorry about that.

I've been using git for a while, like it a lot, and finally decided it's time to move all my Debian packaging work over from CVS. After a frustrating few hours trying, I gave up on trying to use git-cvsimport. It generates mangled repositories even for simple packages like sudo. The git-import-dsc tool in the git-buildpackage package works fine as far it goes, but I'd really like to preserve my history. So, after some consultation on IRC, I took a look at parsecvs. It didn't quite work out of the box, either, but looks promising, and the author showed an immediate interest in the problems I'm having and offered to help. So, perhaps I'll be able to use it before long... In the meantime, a while back I offered to help Gudjon I. Gudjonsson restructure the sdcc packages so that a DFSG compliant version can return to main with a full version under a different package name going in non-free. This is all necessary because some of the assemblers provided in the package have a non-commercial use clause in the license, and there are also license issues with the HTML documentation. I care about this because sdcc is a build dependency for gnuradio, which I maintain for Debian (it uses the 8051 toolchain to build downloadable code for the USRP, etc). While waiting for parsecvs to get some love and attention, I sat down this evening to restructure sdcc and move it to git. I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, though there's a bit left to do before uploads happen. Gudjon and I decided to use the collab-maint facilities on alioth.debian.org for collaboration, which took me a little head-scratching to figure out, but looks like a perfect fit for our needs. I updated the wiki page about Git on Alioth with a few of my learnings as I went through the process. Using git branching to handle non-DFSG-compliant upstream sources is pretty obvious, the notes in the git-buildpackage documentation helped. Using pristine-tar to capture the deltas required to regenerate orig.tar.gz files from the git repo is amazingly cool. It's hard to believe how much friendlier the world seems when you don't have to drag a bunch of tarballs around with you to do useful work! And git-buildpackage has suitable options to make using it pretty automatic. Great stuff! It's likely to be a few days before I can get back to this, finish up, and upload the results of this restructuring work. In the meantime, I'm writing this entry largely to offer my compliments to everyone involved in making git-buildpackage, alioth, and collab-maint work so well. Special thanks to Joey Hess, whose pristine-tar package is another in a long line of absolutely brilliant tools that contribute to making my life easier! I'm going to end up using it a lot.

Chronicle

I've made a new release of the chronicle blog compiler, primarily to allow the "Subject:" header to be used for new blog subjects. (That allows new entries to be automatically posted via email, with an appropriate procmail setup. I'll add one as an example shortly.)

RSS Utility

Whilst on the subject of RSS creation (huh?) I've written a tiny utility which will create an RSS feed from a list of text files. It will also create an index.html file to match. To see why this is useful you could view my recent changelog. I think there is a need for a small tool to read files and create feeds from them - like mod_index_rss does, but without messing with Apache. If there is any interest I'd be happy to release the code, as-is it doesn't use a template..

Anonymous Hosting?

Online privacy is important. Mostly when this is discussed it is in the context of client-side anonymity. Looking at it from the other side, though, How do you host a website anonymously? You could register the domain via a proxy, or with bogus details. But if you host the site yourself the IP address may be traced to the hosting provider, and that may be used to trace back to you. So, the alternatives? Well you could use a hosted site such as livejournal / wordpress / googlepages / etc. But pretty surely they'll be able to trace content back to you - and if you don't host it there's a high chance they'll just pull it if you talk about "bad things". (I guess you could use TOR for uploading / your connections there.) So, going back to the question. How can you host something, easily accessible to the world, without risk of your identity/association being discovered?

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I'm, obviously, ignoring FreeNet. Two reasons for that:

• It's slow, has no search-engine goodness, and is unproven.
• It requires an atypical client. Aunt Milly won't be able to surf Freenet...

I almost think the best way forward would be to write a site which was a proxy for a file-sharing protocol, then link people to items that way. Relying on the swarm to host the files.. The downside is that you'd have to have a convincing argument for when RIAA comes calling, suggesting that you're sharing their stuff too. If it wasn't a general purpose proxy then the deniability is gone, and if it is you're at risk of general copyright infringement claims. Hard problem. Shame.

ObQuote: HellRaiser

on 2007-04-03 I applied to become a Debian Developer; that means that today's my first anniversary of being in the New Maintainer process.

(details on the past & future steps & stages of my NM process can be found on my NM page).

After the April fools joke that wasn't, the hangovers have cleared and OOXML has passed. Unless it is successfully appealed, it will become standard in 2 months. Thankfully, it is being appealed. If you can, lobby your national standards authority to appeal and stop this. All around the blogosphere, people have been slating ISO for passing this. While a lot of irregularities happened to pass it, for which the ISO should be ashamed, we need to be aware of one thing: ISO is on the good side, folks: we want standards. Most people who are involved in ISO, want good standards. Microsoft don't. Those on ISO committees felt worldly wise about corporate lobbying: they'd seen it before. They were used to companies lobbying them to rubberstamp their technology as an international standard. But Microsoft were playing a different game. They don't want standards. They already have their monopoly. They don't even want their formats to be standarised. They want to be able to change them every release, and force another sale of Office 2010,etc. What they want to do is trash the idea of standards, and they're succeeding. ISO was used to being the battleground, the referee. Instead it was the target, and didn't know how to cope. This battle is like the Celts fighting the Romans. Used to cattle-raids-as-warfare, they hole up and defend themselves when the Romans come marching in, and expect the Romans to give up in a day or two when their 'cattle raid' fails. Instead the Romans dig in for the long siege, and win, while the Celts look on puzzled, and lose. We need to retake ISO and defend it. I set up the iso-codes project within Debian several years ago to minimize the number of country and language lists out there. Now with OOXML it appears we have to also track the Microsoft list, and incompatabilities, as OOXML requires it. Ditto with DrawingML instead of SVG, and a wholew host of other standards. Standards committee work is hard and boring. But if we don't get involved theres a lot of boring coding ahead, just tracking Microsoft. Time to join the National standards committees, somehow. Or should we lobby ISO to join as an international body? Tags standards, iso, ooxml, iso-codes

After the approval of OOXML as a standard by ISO, it seems that there are two months for appealing the decision. The European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust authority, will investigate whether OOXML, as the format is known, is “sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products”, as well as if there have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote. If national ISO bodies return evidence that Microsoft attempted to influence the votes to secure acceptance of OOXML, it would strengthen the Commission’s antitrust case. According to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), “Even if the votes were legitimately won, which I doubt, OOXML is not an open standard because it isn’t fully implemented on competing platforms, and its future shape is subject purely to Microsoft’s control”. “Granting ISO status to OOXML doesn’t begin to resolve the competition law questions the Commission is looking into”. Lets hope the European Union investigates and clarifies all this. “An appeal would have to be resolved before publication of a document as an International Standard”, said Roger Frost, spokesperson for ISO. In other words, if an appeal is filed, it’s conceivable that final publication of OOXML as a standard could be delayed. Lets hope ISO appealing process, if followed, is less irregular than the approval one. Maybe I can still recover my trust in ISO. Lest see how it goes.