Those of you who know me might be aware that I have a fondness for cool and neato hardware which is possibly a tiny bit above that of the average geek. I have more nodes on my ThinNet than on my TP network, for example. Back in February, I had the random idea to call SGI Norway and ask them if they had anything they were about to throw out. I knew that they were working hard on moving from MIPS to Itanium, so perhaps some hardware was disappearing along the way. Oslo didn’t have anything, but when I called Bergen I found out that they were about to throw out a large amount of hardware, including some really nice boxes like an Onyx2 deskside workstation, and some Origin systems. For those of you who aren’t into SGI machines, I can sum it up by saying that these are really cool computers: Big, noisy as hell, heavy, and in terms of performance, nearly on par with a normal desktop nowadays. In short, fantastic educational toys. So, this was in February, and we were making arrangements for transport to Oslo, until one day I stopped receiving mail. I didn’t think much of it; email is asynchronous, and I figured he was busy doing something else. I was certainly very eager to get at the machines, but didn’t feel like nagging at him either. Finally, recently I sent him a polite reminder, and I get the rather rude response: Diagnostic code: smtp;550 cuda_nsu 5.7.1 <****@sgi.com>: Recipient address rejected: THIS USER IS NO LONGER WITH SGI. CONTACT help@sgi.com IF YOU NEED INFO. I tried calling the Bergen office, but the number was out of service. So I call the Oslo office - and I am told the Bergen office has been shut down, and all the equipment has been thrown out. This is the bummer of the century, for two main reasons:

1. I’m not getting cool hardware that I was totally looking forward to getting,
2. Great hardware has now been ground up for use in car tires.

For some odd reason, the second reason is infinitely more grating than the first. I feel like a museum curator being forced to watch someone feed a Picasso painting to a paper shredder. This really, really screwed up my day.

Trying to upgrade a craptastic server that’s proving problematic under 2.6.18 to the Etch 1/2 kernel, not only is the machine extremely sloooooow to boot, but it turns out that it’s partly due to bnx2 now requesting a firmware file, whereas the firmware is built-in in the 2.6.18 Etch kernel. Of course, the machine has no working network access due to this, and, to make things even worse, the firmware file is nowhere to be found. No firmware-nonfree in etch-proposed-updates and it’s not in the firmware-nonfree package in unstable. You’d better hide your kittens, for Etch 1/2 makes me want to kill a large number of kittens.

Tonight, I converted the XML-Security-C package from Stanford's internal Subversion repository to Git and packaged 1.4.0, but unfortunately I can't upload yet because Xalan needs to be updated to build against the latest Xerces-C. (I'd NMU, but I should not be taking on more things right now.) This is the first of the three current Shibboleth packages, and I hope to tackle OpenSAML and Shibboleth SP tomorrow or Wednesday. An Alioth project for Shibboleth packaging now exists and the pkg-shibboleth-devel mailing list is being created. I've requested Git space on git.debian.org, and as soon as that's set up, I'll push the three existing repositories. Shibboleth 2.0 packaging will add at least three more packages (OpenSAML 2.0, Shibboleth SP 2.0, and another XML support library), possibly four if we have to package log4shib, but I still hope to use the standard log4cpp. And then there will be another couple of packages once the group packages the Shibboleth IdP and WAYF, which I hope someone with more Java experience can tackle. One of the main goals for getting this set up is so that people other than me can do more of the work so that I can work on other things. Like, for example, krb5 packaging. Bastian Blank started using the Kerberos server packages and posted a whole flurry of bugs, a couple of which are (somewhat arguably) RC, and I'm trying to absorb that and fix the ones I can ASAP. OpenLDAP is in desperate need of attention, but I don't feel as much responsibility for that. I said going in that I'd only have time to work on it in fits and starts, and just because no one else has any time to work on it either doesn't change that. However, I do need to find time to post an RFH, since it really needs an active maintainer, and I'll at least find time to upload the upcoming 2.4.9 release before lenny freezes more, since the current version has a ton of bugs. Frank Lichtenheld has been doing a lot of the work on Lintian lately, which is wonderful, but I still have at least 10 bugs and patches that I want to deal with as soon as possible for it and get another upload out. We're well over my magic threshold of 100 bugs, and a lot of the stuff that's in the BTS just needs to be reviewed and committed. And then there's Policy, which is just about ready for an upload, and where I owe several responses on bugs and discussion threads. It's in the best shape right now of the stuff on my hot list, but there really should be a new upload in May, and preferrably in the first half. The current goal is to get the two other RC bugs against the Shibboleth packages dealt with in the next couple of days, then do a krb5 upload before the end of the week, and then Policy and Lintian are back at the top of the list, insofar as work lets me concentrate on anything else. BTW, I have to say, the more I use Git, the more I'm becoming a convert. I still think I'd rather use quilt if I have complex merges. Ironic, given that that's supposed to be Git's strength, but I have fifteen years of experience merging patches and I really understand how quilt works. That may mean I'll change my mind when I become even more familiar with Git. But for the typical package with a small number of divergences from upstream, I'm getting the hang of managing those on branches and I think I like it. I've yet to see a good reason to use rebase instead of merge, though, at least as part of a Debian packaging workflow. So either I'm still not getting something, or many of the people using Git are way more obsessive than I am about their branch merge graphs (which is weird, because I tend to be remarkably obsessive about things like that). I suppose if I ever get to using git bisect, that may change my mind.

Physio:
I got to do cardio last Friday! Yay! For the first time it feels like I'm doing *real* exercise. 5 minutes on the elliptical and 10 on the bike. I've also gone from the yellow theraband to the red one on all my exercises. I've got another month at three times a week, and still every visit I'm coming away so much improved. The physio also mentioned that she's been going easy on me because until 8 weeks past the surgery, things aren't healed up enough to do real work. Well, we just passed 8 weeks, so I think tomorrow we'll be doing some actual weight training. We'll see how we go.

Techy stuff:
I'm hunting for something interesting to hack on. I've been digging a bit through the SoC lists, and I think I'm either going to just do a bunch of grunt janitor work on gcc, some hacking on eglibc to see if I can help make it small enough to seriously compete with uclibc, or I also emailed one of the Python folks who said that they were looking for an XMPP server written in Python 3.0. I got a cryptic reply of "Keep pinging me, I'll get some time eventually". So that might be a doomed project with people who don't actually care about the result. Too bad, I thought it might be a fun way to learn what's new in Py3k.

Other:
I've started going through and pruning back my friends list on Facebook. At first I friended pretty much anyone I'd ever met. I've come to use it to see how the people I care about in life are doing through their status updates, so I'm getting rid of people who's statuses I just don't care about. It seems kindof mean, but oh well. I'd really like the list to be made of people who, if they posted "I'm having a crappy day", I'd phone them up to chat with them and hear how things are going.

Leif's still cute. Angie's still sexy. Home life in that sense is pretty much the same as usual. We don't have people visiting us every weekend, but I'm well enough and we've gotten used to the shifted work loads that we're generally managing now. What we desperately need is a Roomba that will shampoo the carpets for around Leif's highchair. Ugh.

The local used bookstore actually has French kids books. Apparently the Barnes&Noble in Palo Alto also has a French section. So, we'll hopefully be able to teach Leif at least a little bit of French while we're on the opposite side of the continent. Yay!

Things have been strange lately. I've been taking an official indefinite vacation from Debian due to real life priorities making it impossible to participate in the project at the level that I want, which just led to frustration. Mainly, I just haven't had the time to work on X properly, so I'm leaving it to the rest of the XSF for a while. This makes me sad, but they've grown in to a fantastic team so I know they'll keep doing a killer job while I'm away.

I have had some time though, just not enough to follow two major projects like X.org and Debian, so I've been trying to leverage it in productive ways. Perhaps the most notable is that I've been spending most of my time coding Smalltalk using Squeak now that it's in Debian. Squeak has its flaws, but it's very fun to work with and Smalltalk is probably my favorite language at this point, displacing Ruby. This shouldn't be too big a surprise, since Ruby consciously inherits a lot from Smalltalk. Squeak is a good environment, but I don't feel too compelled to write desktop apps in it because they feel so displaced from the rest of the system. GNU Smalltalk will hopefully fix this in time. As a result though, I've been doing my first bit of web coding in a very long time. The main reason for this is the incredible Seaside framework built on Smalltalk. It's been a lot of fun to play with, and although it's very underdocumented, there's enough out there (especially with the new book) that I've used to get going. Right now I'm trying to learn AJAX techniques as well, which is something I never thought I'd be doing.

As a result of learning Smalltalk, combined with past experiences, I've been trying to learn emacs, and switch a lot of my text editing over there. I came to realize that the reasons I chose vim over emacs many years ago aren't really holding up any more, and now that I've got a lot more of both UNIX and coding under my belt that it's time to reevaluate the decision in a more intelligent way. Vim has been great to me over the years, but I found it constraining when trying to work on very large and difficult trees like the X server. I'm hoping that emacs will do a little better, since I like the way it handles multiple buffers better. Additionally, the purity of Smalltalk "all the way down" has made me appreciate the emacs architecture of lisp (almost) "all the way down" and I'm looking forward to making use of it. It's been a painful transition so far, given the years of muscle memory I'm trying to change. I've been avoiding viper mode to really try and learn emacs, which has made it even harder. I don't know if I'll end up using emacs after all is said and done, but at least I'll have a better idea of how the two major editors really compare for my own use.

With all these changes things have been a little strange lately. Debian was the rock that I've clung to over the past few years, and not being totally entrenched in it has felt unnerving. Combining that with very new and different ways of working has been a rather large change. One thing is for certain: it's been very good for me to take a break for a while and work on small things at my own pace rather than try to keep up with large projects. People burn out all the time in the free software community, and I think that disconnecting and working on small fun things is a great way to heal.

Please note: Until your email address is validated, your email is NOT viewed
by any human and will not be read. I’m currentlty getting a bit of backscatter - a lot of bounces - and also quite a few of these challenge/response messages. I am especially tired of those challenge/response sender verification thingies and I so often considering actually responding just to annoy the implementers of such systems. But … what do you do ?

I use Firefox (well, Iceweasel) from several machines. On a daily basis, at least three: my workstation at home, my workstation at work, and my laptop. I have wanted to have my bookmarks synced between all three of them for some time. I've been using unison to sync them, which mostly works. But firefox likes to store a last-visited timestamp in bookmarks.html, so if I have a browser open at more than one place, I get frequent unison conflicts.

I started searching for better alternatives again, and noticed that the new alternative del.icio.us plugin for Firefox supports a del.icio.us version of the traditional Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. I use that toolbar a lot, and anything I use in place of standard Firefox bookmarks absolutely must support something like it.

I imported my Firefox bookmarks (about 900 or so) into del.icio.us. They arrived OK, but flattened, as del.icio.us doesn't have a hierarchical structure like Firefox does. After a good deal of experimentation, I have mostly gotten it working how I want. I'm using the bundles mode of the extension toolbar in Firefox, and simulating subfolders by using certain tags. It works fine; not quite what I'd want out of it ideally, but everything else is so much better that I'm happy with it.

The social bookmarking aspects of del.icio.us sound interesting, too, but I haven't started trying to look at that stuff very much yet. Delicious also has a new "Firefox 3" extension that also is documented to work fine in Firefox 2. It has a few new features but nothing I care all that much about.

My main gripe at this point is that the Firefox extension doesn't allow me to set things as private by default. It also doesn't propogate my changes to the site immediately, which led to a considerable amount of confusion initially. On the plus side, it does do a synchronization and store a local cache, so I can still use it offline to load up file:/// links.

Some things about del.icio.us bug me. There are very limited features for editing things in bulk (though Greasemonkey scripts help here). It has a published API, but seems quite limited (I couldn't find out how, in their documentation, to add a tag to an existing bookmark, for instance.)

del.icio.us lets you export all your bookmarks, so you have freedom to leave. Also, if you poke around on freshmeat.net, you can find Free Software alternatives that actually emulate del.icio.us APIs and sites.

I also looked at alternatives, and it seems that the most plausible one is Diigo. But I'm going to refuse to use it right now for two reasons: 1) its Firefox plugin has nothing like the Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and 2) its hideous Terms of Service. If you go to their ToS and scroll down to "Content/Activity Prohibited", you'll see these gems:

6. provides any telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses;

7. promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous;

11. furthers or promotes any criminal activity or enterprise or provides instructional information about illegal activities including, but not limited to making or buying illegal weapons, violating someone's privacy, or providing or creating computer viruses;

So, in other words, they can delete me account if I bookmark the Amazon.com contact page, or if I bookmark the opinions of someone I disagree with. Good thing the Vietnam War protesters in the 70s didn't use Diigo, because they'd be kicked off if they wrote about their sit-ins at Berkeley. Also, I didn't even quote the other section that says they get to remove anything you post that they think is offensive, in their sole judgment. Goodbye, links to EFF's articles about RIAA.

Since we can't use last names, I guess it's just "Hillary" and "John" instead of "Clinton" and "McCain". Oh, and don't get me started about the folly of operating a social bookmarking site where you aren't allowed to post URLs. That's right up there with Apple releasing a Windows version of Safari that you aren't allowed to install on PCs.

Compare that to the del.icio.us terms and privacy policy and the contrast is stark indeed.

Perhaps a little more creepy than our playgrounds but certainly more vivid.

People rarely ask me about my amazing ability to remove fruitfly ovaries in under 10 seconds. "This skill makes me strangely attracted to you" they then inevitably fail to add, thus giving the lie to claims that a PhD in biology is a great way to impress women. In order to avoid future social embarrassment I have therefore decided to provide a step-by-step guide to removing ovaries from any fruitflies you may have to hand.

• Feed your fruitflies. Fruitflies like yeast, so give them a pile to munch on. A well-fed fruitfly is a happy fruitfly.
• A happy fruitfly is a fertile fruitfly, and has bigger ovaries. Since fruitflies are small, this makes your job easier.
• Knock your fruitflies out with carbon dioxide. When doing this, ensure that you don't knock yourself out with carbon dioxide.
• Separate your fruitflies into male and female flies. Female flies have larger abdomens and striped posteriors - male ones are thinner and have solid black markings.
• Dispose of the males. They don't have ovaries. Local laws may make it awkward for you to release animals from laboratory environments, so dump them into a bottle of ethanol. They'll probably die happy, to the extent that fruitflies can really be happy.
• Etherise the female flies. When identifying ether, try not to do so by smelling it.
• Once the female flies are thoroughly dead, transfer one to a small watchglass containing a quantity of phosphate buffered saline with a small quantity of detergent in it. Place this under a low magnification microscope.
• Grip the neck of the fly with a set of needle-nosed tweezers. Grip the very rear of the fly with another set of needle-nosed tweezers.
• Slowly move the tweezers apart. If you are lucky, the abdomen will split and you'll start pulling out internal organs. If you're unlucky, the head will come off. In this case you should move the first set of tweezers further down the body and try again.
• Continue pulling out internal organs until you find two objects that look like bunches of bananas. These are the ovaries, with each "banana" being an egg chamber containing an egg and associated support cells.
• (If your fruitfly contains no ovaries, it's not a female. Try again)
• Carefully separate the ovaries from the other chunks of tissue that are stuck to them, and transfer the ovaries to a tube containing phosphate buffered saline.
• Repeat until you run out of flies. Note that towards the end, it will become tempting to just tear the flies into small pieces rather than removing their ovaries. Bear in mind that the aim is to obtain fruitfly ovaries, not to kill flies. There are much easier ways of doing the latter.
• Dispose of the remaining bits of flies in accordance with any relevant legislation. Do not throw remaining bits of flies at coworkers.
• Fix the ovaries in formaldehyde and suspend in methanol. Freeze at -20 C.

See? It's all very easy.

(Note: This protocol involves chemicals known by the state of California to cause cancer, birth defects and general fucked-upness. Do not ingest methanol unless you want to demonstrate competitive inhibition in the form of a bottle of vodka. Value of fruitfly ovaries may go up as well as down. Do not taunt fruitfly ovaries)

I recently found out about a pretty funny site, passive aggressive notes and submitted one of my photos from japan. I loved the note because there was very little English signage in Japan but anything having to do with slackers, well, that must be in English, no?

If you are into tech, data, visualization, and some good art, (and are in NYC), it is well worth checking out Design and the Elastic Mind. It is only open for another week so take a peek if you have the time!

Just up on arxiv.org this week appeared Warming the early Earth - CO2 considered, by von Paris et al. Just a preprint, and i'm working through its 53 pages now, put its likely to put the cat among the pidgeons:

Abstract: Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere. However, geological evidence seemed to indicate that the atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Archaean and Proterozoic were far too low to keep the surface from freezing. With a radiative-convective model including new, updated thermal absorption coefficients, we found that the amount of CO2 necessary to obtain 273 K at the surface is reduced up to an order of magnitude compared to previous studies. For the late Archaean and early Proterozoic period of the Earth, we calculate that CO2 partial pressures of only about 2.9 mb are required to keep its surface from freezing which is compatible with the amount inferred from sediment studies. This conclusion was not significantly changed when we varied model parameters such as relative humidity or surface albedo, obtaining CO2 partial pressures for the late Archaean between 1.5 and 5.5 mb. Thus, the contradiction between sediment data and model results disappears.

The suspected composition of the eary Earth (the Archean, when life is believed to have started, 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), has alternated between CO2 and other reducing gases, such as methane. Originally CO2 was thought to be the main greenhouse gas, making life possible. However the high CO2 levels required were a problem; high CO2 levels would have created siderite (FeCO3) in the top layers of soil as iron interacted with CO2 in the oxygen-free air. Since then methane has top billing as the greenhouse gas responsible, with significant hydrogen levels a possibility. Over time, methane has come out on top. And thats what I wrote when I did my literature review for my PhD. Now I'm tidying it up a bit, and that section may be in for a rewrite. But what does it mean for our Climate change models of today? Tags climate, co2, thesis

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.

There are situations where you might want to redirect some audio you're playing on your local computer to another computer's speakers, potentially in a different room, or even anywhere on the Internet. One of many possibilities to do that is to use the Enlightened Sound Daemon (EsoundD, or esd). It ships with a program called esddsp (apt-get install esound-clients) which can redirect various audio sources. First, you have to start the esd daemon on a console on the remote host (the one which should output the audio on some speaker, for example 192.168.0.xxx) e.g. like this:

  $ esd -public -nobeeps -tcp

You can do this as regular user (no need to be root) if you have the proper permissions. You also need to allow connections on port 16001 in your firewall settings. Then you can redirect audio to that daemon from another computer. In this example I'm redirecting some music using various players:

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mpg321 -o esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp3
  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 ogg123 -d esd foo.ogg

This also works fine for videos, in which case you can redirect the audio (but not video):

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 mplayer -ao esd foo.mp4

For the video player Miro, I've recently documented this in the Debian package's README.Debian file. Basically you have to edit ~/.xine/config and enable audio.driver:esd there, then start Miro with

  $ esddsp -s 192.168.0.xxx:16001 miro

Audio will be emitted on the remote host, video remains on your local PC. Some programs may also support esd natively, in which case esddsp is not required, e.g.

  $ ogg123 -d esd -o host:192.168.0.14:16001 foo.ogg

“ This is like imposing the death penalty for relatively minor acts of misconduct.”

Some of the more powerful tools combine data banks of information with robust technological features. One such tool is the Cause Caller developed by Fred Benenson, an ITP graduate student who developed it for his thesis project. Here is some more information and make sure to check out the blog for even more:

The promise of a truly participatory democracy has never been clearer than digital media has made it today. The unique distributive nature of the Internet provides a platform that has the potential to deliver on this promise by facilitating better group action at lower cost,thereby encouraging actual participation in democracy. There have been many meaningful developments in bringing better information and actions to citizens looking to use digital networks to serve their political needs, but many useful tools and databases remain proprietary and costly while others remain too general or ineffective for political action. Cause Caller uses open source technology to deliver on the promise of a participatory democracy by taking the hassle and difficulty out of organizing phone banks. Users of Cause Caller can create individual causes and associate new politicians to those causes.

A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot in fact most of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them. Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no political consciousness, are too cool to care about the fine print and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment. While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/clich as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic). It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking free and open source software which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet. Ok, time for a rant now Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more. (end rant) It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia badge system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet. About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would storm AT&T and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and generative Internet and set of technologies we value. As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own. So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

With Hans Reiser convicted for murder, some seem to feel that reiserfs is more or less dead. Jason Perlow writes a very strange article on ZDNet to which I'm replying to it mainly because he alludes that Debian so far has failed to react. First, default installations of Debian create ext3 and not reiserfs filesystems (Please correct me if I'm wrong. I've just recently installed a fresh etch, but I didn't specifically look at the fs.) And even if it were reiserfs (v3), I don't see why a reaction would be called for now. The stability of reiserfs has come up every once, before the whole murderer story begun, and that the interaction between the reiserfs developers (including, of course, Hans Reiser) and the kernel team were always difficult has also been known for a long time. This is the kind of reason where I think it's appropriate for Debian to take steps (i.e. switching to a different filesystem), not a single event, where it is not even clear yet how the reiserfs (v3 and v4) efforts will move on. On to the technical stuff: Perlow tries, but doesn't really arrive at understanding the issues he's writing about. Reiser 4 is discounted without a single remark on its technical merits (I can't comment either as I have not looked at it so far.) Why he discounts ext4 is not clear to me (because it is not ripe for production use yet — but that's even more true of ZFS and this Linux-NTFS thingy he rambles about further down...) He discounts JFS2 because it hasn't got a new release for several years (is that bad in a filesystem?) but then touts ZFS as a great idea with minor licensing problems, without speaking of patents which is where the real problems lie (not to mention the fact that the Linux ZFS port probably is much less tested than ext4 or JFS.) And in a final jump into fantasy-land he mentions that NTFS might just be ideal for Linux, and Microsoft is said to have started cooperating nicely with the Free Software world, so all licensing and patent issues are certainly going away Real Soon Now™. At least for Novell, these issues shouldn't be a problem, I guess. Not mentioned by Jason are btrfs (which has a quite tightly coupled network filesystem brother, crfs and is in a very early state of development), and hammer, which comes from the BSD world and currently lacks a Linux port. Both efforts are probably more likely to replace ext3 or reiser on Linux than both ZFS and NTFS: no patent issues, no license issues, and the development is actually done by a community and not a single company. Update: Julien Blanche ha a much more succinct response to Jason Perlow. More intersting to read than mine, too.

Do you want know what is really stored in your gpg keyring? Or do you want to store your keyring into a VCS? Or you you want to be able to delete signatures or other data from a keyring without having to use gpg's absurd interface? If you do, then you might want to look into a little program I started for this purpose. It's still quite alpha, but for some uses should already work. And if you test now and give some feedback, it might develop more in a direction you need. To give it a test:

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.alioth.debian.org:/cvsroot/gpg2txt checkout gpg2txt
cd gpg2txt
./autogen.sh --configure
make
less README
man -l gpg2txt.1
./gpg2txt -o test ~/.gnupg/pubring.gpg
less test
./gpg2txt --recreate -o pubring.gpg test