We get regular requests from Gmail-Users that don't receive their own mails back, when they post something on a mailinglist to which they are subscribed.

So if this happens to you, first check if your mail shows up in our mailarchive.

If it appears there (wait some time that the archive can catch up) your mail has been successfully posted to the list, and your copy has also been send and is most likely accepted by Gmail. But Gmail seems to drop that mail internally (or sort it in a spamdropbox?) maybe because From and Receipient-address are the same. (We get two or three requests of that kind per week, and everytime we investigated, we found this is the case)

If it doesn't appear in the Mailarchive and your mail has been accepted by our mailserver murphy.debian.org, you most likely have lost against our Spamfiltering. (Did you know that ControlExtension matches the string Rolex?).

Then feel free to report to listmaster@lists.debian.org and provide as much info about your lost mail as possible, helpful would be:

• your IP
• the time you send (including Timezone / difference to GMT)
• the Message-Id
• your from-address and the to-address

Keep flamemailing.

Academics in the humanities and social sciences often struggle with their writing. I just figured that as you did more and more, you got better and better. Well this recent post by Radical Tenure was pretty eye opening because she confesses about losing her writing groove (in part because of sh*t going down at her university) and then she gives a fascinating account about how blogging “saved” her. Now I am stunned because her writing is pretty darn succulent. Really. I love reading her( and am proud that she is a lady blogger too given how many males dominate the “famous” scene). Now I am more inspired because I think indeed writing, especially in very competitive environments, can be a torturous and fraught task. And while it may get easier, there are circumstances that may derail even the strongest of writers. It is great to see this confronted head-on, in ways positive, honest, inspiring. Here are the relevant bits:

Another reason being anonymous didn t work for me is really internal to Zen - er, Wesleyan, stultifying features of which I was trying to escape following the Unfortunate Events. Like being watched and talked about all the time and treated like yesterday’s news for having done the teaching and institutional work I was asked to do while struggling to find time for my scholarship even as other people were chosen to be groomed as “the scholars.” What happened to me during the last three years nearly destroyed me as a writer and an intellectual (I am actually not joking about this), and I had to start all over again, recreating a literary voice for myself and a confidence that I could command an audience with my thoughts and prose, from the ground up. It was either that or quit. ….
Do not dare feel sorry for me about this, and let me underline the point: I am a highly privileged, senior faculty member at a very wealthy institution, and many other bloggers are not. Furthermore, regardless of this messy coming-out period, my strategy actually worked. Because of this blog *and its audience*, I was able to start writing again, to finish articles that were lying about undone, to write a book review for the Village Voice, to write a book proposal, to get going on revising the book that various people and committees eliminated all over during the Unfortunate Events, to do a ton of research on a new project and to begin speaking about some critical reforms that might really help faculty on the right and the left enjoy their work as academics again. In other words: I Saved Myself. And I have been transformed into something more powerful as a result of my trials.

Ah, beautiful Sunday! This is the first day this week we've had a little peace around the house. It'll all go crazy on Monday, of course, but it's nice to have something like a day off. tags: sunday rest

BarCampMontreal2 I had a great time yesterday at BarCampMontreal2. It was pretty fortunate that my parents are visiting this week, because it meant that both Maj and I could go to the event together. We also had our friend and fellow Wikitraveller Jani Patokallio visiting from Singapore, so we brought him along with us. Jani's a community and technology hacker and he's a lot of fun, too. This was our first event in the new BarCamp venue at the SAT, and it turned out to be a good one. The space is really big, with about 3 huge spaces. We used the back room, which is wide enough for a lot of video displays, to good advantage. The front area became an informal caf and it was really great for personal talks -- isolated from the main presentation area. Damian DiFede gave a great talk about his Ajax-based MUD, Mujax. I think it looks really cool -- I hope he can get the kind of participation and content to make it a more immersive space. I gave the second talk. I'd really wanted to do a talk about The Keiki Project, our upcoming venture, but it was too soon for a real hands-on demo. So I'd planned to do a presentation about RDF and our use of Wikitravel:Turtle RDF on Wikitravel, but I kind of got too busy by the end of the week. So I ended up recycling my talk about Commercialization of Wikis (see Talks/SXSW07), which got a lot of positive feedback. I liked seeing Sylvain Carle's presentation on what he'd learned in Silicon Valley. Sylvain is one of the best presenters at BarCampMontreal -- he's a big goofball who loves his work and communicates that passion with intelligence and sincerity. For example, he themed his talk with songs by Quebec rocker Robert Charlebois. Candid and ingenious. Also great was Hugh McGuire's talk about lessons learned in development of the cool podcasting platform Collectik. His talk came down to one great point: that you have to be able to communicate the purpose of your Web site (or other project) in one sentence. He didn't do that for Collectik, and now he's trying to figure out how to. It's great hearing people talk about their mistakes. Maj gave a great talk about Wikitravel Extra, the new personal-opinion and -experience platform that we've built to complement the objective, consensus information in Wikitravel. I keep forgetting what a good public speaker she is. She did a good job talking about the needs we were trying to fill, and she demo'd the platform (flawlessly). I think she's got a good presentation to take to other conferences now (lucky dog). Another talk I found fascinating was Chris Car's discussion of his past project, MeshCube. The MeshCube is a tiny mesh networking tool that Chris and a partner developed in Hamburg. Chris talked about what worked and what didn't work with that project, showed off some cool hacks (mesh network robots!) and was (like Hugh) open about mistakes. Sitting in the middle of about 8 WiFi networks (in my home office) as I type this, I'm really interested in mesh networking and I was glad to hear from Chris why it doesn't currently work and what can be done to make it work. Probably the most important talk, for me, was Martine Pag 's discussion of what we need to do to bring more women to technology conferences. She did a great, fair overview of the topic, and then opened the floor to discussion. We had a really great, frank talk about -- both men and women -- and a lot of diverse points of view were expressed. I'm really appreciative of Martine opening up this discussion, and I'm glad we're going to be more proactive in the Montreal technical community about being inclusive of the really great women working in technology in this city. There were some other good talks, of course: apenwarr gave a good talk about the new, new way to have a startup; the mysterious and elusive Madame Woo talked about traveling alone; and Australian visitor Moomlyn gave a great description of lucid dreaming. There were good demos of Cake Mail and My Carpool Station. All in all a great set of presentations. I also liked meeting up with some of the people there. Patrick Tanguay gave a great lunchtime standup symposium about the state of Montreal's coworking space and where we're going from here. I also liked talking with Tamu Townsend, who I hadn't met before. Probably my best talk was with Sylvain and Martine about what the boundaries of BarCamp are. Why do we have talks about solo travel, digital photography, and lucid dreaming? Sylvain had a great answer: BarCamp comes out of the hacker ethic: that spirit of curiosity, humor, passion and playfulness that makes working on computers so enjoyable for so many. If someone can communicate that same passion and intellectual captivation with another subject, it's going to go over well at BarCamp, no problem. Well said!

Pros and cons Here are some things I liked and didn't like about BarCampMontreal2. First, things I liked:

• The people. Yet again, meeting up with my favourite technologists in Montreal. Many people I first met at BarCampMontreal1, and it was nice to see how our friendships have developed in the 6 months since then.
• Diversity. I was really glad that there were many more women at this vent than at previous ones. My guess is somewhere around 20-25%, which isn't anywhere near where it should be but a big improvement over the 5-10% we had at BarCampMontreal1. Special props to Hugh, whose invite to women was, I think, pretty helpful. And of course to all the women who took the extra step to show up at a majority-male event.
• The presentations. Almost uniformly really, really good. Some were just excellent.
• Lunch. Simple and easy, didn't get in the way of socializing.
• The Bar. I liked having the bar open at lunch. Having a beer with friends really changes the dynamic of the event; and SAT has a decent selection of brews and friendly barstaff.
• The screens. A-V was great this time around -- good job by SAT on this.
• The space. It was cool having the back room at SAT. It's a really nice place for this kind of event.
• Powerpoint Karaoke. A great idea (people have to give 5-minute presentations based on off-topic slidesets they've never seen before), but I think the scheduling was off. It would have been great to spread these out between other sessions during the day for comic relief, rather than clumped all together at once.

Second, things I wasn't happy about:

• Registration. It was really great being welcomed at BarCampMontreal1, and this was distinctly missing at our second event. We had a pile of nametags on the table by the door, and no other form of greeting. For a space like SAT, this just didn't work. I'm going to volunteer to help out with this step at future events, since it's so important.
• Coffee. I realize I'm a coffeeholic, but it would have been nice to have a coffee table out. It's nice to have on a rainy Saturday, and it gives shy people something to do.
• T-shirts. I think every BarCamp should be an event worthy of a t-shirt. Fred gave out some shirts left over from BarCampMontreal1, but it would have been nice to have new ones for this event, too.
• Tables. I realize they're expensive to rent, but dang, they're really great to have if you've got your laptop and other techno doodads. It changes the event from being a show to being a symposium.
• Schedule timing. The (very important) talk by Martine about women in tech conferences ran far over schedule and wiped a few talks off the board. I think that was a mistake. After it was done, the joke segment of Powerpoint Karaoke started. By the time it was finished, 60% of the audience was gone, even though there were 4 serious talks still to go. We need to do a better job with timing this kind of thing so we keep the energy going through the entire day.
• Too much noise from the caf area. As people drifted off from the main presentation area, the caf filled up, making for lots of loud chatter that drowned out the presentations. We should probably figure out how to fix this problem; it would be nice to stimulate this casual conversation while still being respectful to the speakers. Maybe more breaks (one in the morning and one in the afternoon)?
• <100% participation. It seemed like there were a lot of spectators this time around, which drags down the participative nature of the event. I think that asking registrants how they're going to participate when they come to the door is a great way to gently remind people that they're expected to be involved (we do this for Burning Man events sometimes). I think Powerpoint Karaoke and other exercises would be a great way to get better hands-on participation by people who didn't prepare talks. (I hope that MadameWoo does a talk in the future about how to do an ad-hoc talk at BarCamp.)

My net feeling about the event was extremely positive, and I'm making these notes not to criticize anyone but to remind myself to do something about them for the next BarCampMontreal. I think that we can continuously improve this event to be inclusive, stimulating, fun and exciting, and I hope we keep this great barcamp spirit going in this city for a long time. tags: barcampmontreal2 barcampmontreal barcamp

Now that the weekend is here, I've been catching up on the news of this weeks big astronomy announcement: the discovery of a possible "Super-Earth" exo-planet, Gliese 581 c. This is the first exoplanet likely to be within the so-called "Habitable zone" around its star, where life as we know it could be possible. Unfortunately the Irish Times "World Apart" weekend supplement article has been quite disappointing. Like Greg Laughlin at UCO Lick I get depressed when people give misleading information . It includes a very misleading "Artists impression" picture, simultaneously showing details we don't know and being incorrect about the few things we do know. Its easy to get annoyed at the concentration of facts that are guesswork or probably wrong in this article. Gl 581c is not 5 Earth masses: thats its minimum mass: due to radial velocity measurements, we can only measure M sin(i), where i is the inclination, currently unknown. It could easily be far more, and hence all predictions of what the planet is like become moot. Similarly, the radius is not necessarily 1.5 times Earths: thats a prediction, based on the mass, and current theories. Unfortunately, there is no mention that current theories of planetary size are coming under scrutiny as they fail to match other recent exoplanet discoveries. This makes other speculation about the planet such as the gravity on the surface quite misleading. The BBC News summary is much better: it refers to the radius as "the radius should be", rather than "is". But it too includes the incorrect picture. While its article is couched in more conservative language, it doesn't explain what facts it quotes are speculation and why they may be wrong. None of the media reports I have yet seen mention current missions, such as COROT, which is the most likely to find Earth-sized planets in the near future (launched late last year, it is due to finish its first observing run in April. Results awaited with anticipation). They also ignore Darwin and the The Terrestrial Planet Finder, the most likely missions to discover life on other planets, but currently sitting in funding limbo. Concentration on purely the known facts would of course make the news reports short and boring. Instead they should emphasise more of the work of the scientists involved: we teach science as a set of cut-and-dried facts that often bore school students and drive them away. Instead, when faced as the cutting edge of an important discovery like this, we could show how an amateur could be partially credited with getting this result; with the fact that, since the planet has a short "year" astronomers are already lining up to investigate transit measurements of it on May 7 and that with a magnitude of 10.6 (only 20 light years from Earth, after all) its within range of amateur astronomers to observe and determine its true size and details. How about getting people excited to get involved themselves?

Just recently, Rachele complained about a drop in quality at our neighborhood restaurant, Salute. No sooner did she complain than the restaurant changed name, ownership, and chef. Witness the power of the blogosphere! Geoffrey’s (link, anyone?) just opened this week is the old Roslindale location of Salute, having taken a three year hiatus from its last location in the Back Bay, and the South End before that. Back when I worked in the South End in the late 1990’s, it was one of my favorite lunch/brunch places, so I was delighted to discover they’ve reopened in Roslindale. We were the new restaurant’s first brunch customers ever. They open at 8am, and with a natural alarm clock that wakes us up at 6am (our daughter), we were prompt for the opening. The brunch was great. We shared a “DonutMuffin” as an appetizer. There was enough pleasure in that pastry to equal at least half a dozen commercial-grade donuts. I had a tomato, basil, and fancy-cheese-of-some-sort quiche with a side of fresh cantaloupe. It was a very generous serving with a thick tasty crust (no toast necessary!). I was particularly impressed with the volume of fresh basil, and the juiciness of the cantaloupe. Rachele has vegetarian eggs benedict (also delicious) and Esther had a side of heart-shaped waffles, which was just right for her. The coffee was definitely on the high end for restaurant coffee (which, somehow, seems to go on a different scale from coffee-shop coffee.) Next time I’ll try a cappuccino. All this for only $35 (including tip). The meal was comparable to (but slightly cheaper and more filling than) our other favorite brunch place, Bon Savor in Jamaica Plain. The owner/chef explained that they had moved out of the South End when the rent tripled. He’s keeping prices in the 1997-range, since the rent he is paying in Roslindale is comparable to what he paid in the South End in that era. (Although actually I’m sure other costs have gone up significantly). The Chowhound and Universal Hub folks are also pleased. Roslindale is certainly in need of a good brunch place — although I am fond of the Blue Star Diner conceptually, in practice the service has been poor and the food irregular. We will certainly be making fewer trips to JP for brunch now. The dinner menu also looks excellent, with several good vegetarian options. The chef also assured me the couscous dish is vegan. We were the only people in the restaurant in the opening hour. I predict in a month the place will be packed. If so, it will be proof of this blog’s influence!

I doubt I am the first one to wonder how a huge internet based company like amazon.(de at) can manage to be unable to send un-broken e-mails, however I just cannot resist. The regular plain text e-mails about orders (Bestellung erhalten/Bestellung versandt) are broken in a simple way, they are declared as Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ascii while actually containing Windows-1252 characters (Umlauts, Euro-character). I usually fix these in mutt with <Ctrl>-e. This week I returned an incorrectly labeled product back to Amazon and in return received a surprisingly broken mail, header and footer as UTF-8 while the core of the mail is Windows-1252 again. Looks like this in mutt

Guten Tag!
Wir grüßen Sie ganz herzlich und informieren  ine Erstattung zu der
Betreff genannten Bestellung.
Unsere Zahlungsabteilung hat Ihnen EUR 12,29 \374berwiesen.

etc...

Eugenics is considered to be a technology and social practice of the past, swept away in our closest of all things ugly and bad. But the past is, in fact, quite recent, especially in the Alberta region in so far as forced sterilization was only outlawed in 1972–yes 1972. If your physical body is here in Edmonton and are interested in the ways in which science and technology can has been placed on a truly “mad path” in the name of progress and how we are in danger of repeating the past via new genetic technologies, do check out this conference Eugenics and Sterilization in Alberta
35 Years Later . Free and open to the public, it kicks off tonight and continues all day tomorrow. The line-up of speakers is great and most important is that it includes talks by some of those who were caught by the very unfortunate web of eugenic laws.

Back in mid-2000, I set up my first Internet bank account. I have been using the same bank ever since. The whole notion of Internet banks has changed a lot since then, since virtually every bank offers varying degrees of online access these days. Lately I checked on banks to see if I was still using the best one. Here are my reviews of the two banks.

Internet Banks

Let's first talk about what makes a bank an "Internet bank" or "online bank". So many banks let you manage your account online now, that the distinction is blurry. But generally, I would say that unique features of Internet banks are:

• Significantly higher interest rates than traditional banks
• Ability to open an account online or by mail, and perform all banking functions without visiting the bank in person
• Free bill payment services
• Free self-initiated electronic transfers from your other bank accounts
• Immediate, real-time posting of transactions
• Your own bank never imposes a fee for using an ATM card at another bank's ATM
• Web access to account info, history, canceled check images, and statements
• Toll-free number for account basics (balance, transfer between your accounts at the bank, etc) over the phone
• Great telephone customer support
• An absence of outlandish fees

There are a few to highlight.

Real-time transaction posting is a great thing to have. If you go to the website and transfer money from your savings to your checking account, you can go to the ATM *now* and withdraw it, and when you get back to your desk, the ATM transaction shows up. There are none of these confusing "business day" rules with cutoff times that traditional banks seem to love. And none of this annoying "process all withdrawals first" business that large traditional banks (hello, Bank of America) love to do in order to screw with customers.

High interest rates. Don't even bother with an online bank if the savings interest rate is less than 3% (or checking less than 1%, in my opinion). It is almost impossible to find a traditional bank with these rates.

Note: if you're reading this after April, 2007, these guidelines may no longer apply due to interest rate changes.

Electronic transfers from other banks. Another great feature. A number of banks let you set up, and then initiate, electronic transfers to and from your accounts at other banks. This is usually free if you are using the feature to transfer money into your account, and with a flat per-transaction fee (usually about the same as a foreign ATM fee) for transferring money out.

Ability to do all business without visiting a branch. Not only should this be possible, but routine business (such as making deposits) should be easy to do without visiting a branch. You should be able to order new checks online.

Now let's look at the individual banks.

First Internet Bank of Indiana

FirstIB (they provide nationwide service, despite the name) is the bank I signed up with in 2000. I had found a bank in Dallas that I really liked, but when I moved to Indianapolis, I tried two and liked neither. They all seemed to have really poor interest rates, offer few useful services, and fees for so many conditions that it was hard to avoid them. (More on that in the traditional banks section below)

I looked at the online banking scene at the time, and wound up opening a checking and savings account with FirstIB. FirstIB started as an online-only bank, but recently acquired a bricks-and-mortar bank as well.

I found FirstIB's customer service at the time to be top-notch; I would dial their toll-free number, select *one* option from a menu, and a rep would answer *immediately*. (Take that, Bank of America, with your 45-minute hold times...) Since FirstIB was based in Indianapolis, I actually visited their offices a couple of times. They had a locked lobby. You picked up a phone, pressed 0, and went into the same queue that callers to the 800 number did, then just asked them to come to the lobby and transact your business. (They would not give out cash there, but could take new account paperwork and deposits and the like)

Their interest rates have consistently outperformed traditional banks, and they offer all the online banking amenities listed above. They did not offer online statements at first, but these days online statements are the norm (there is a fee if you want paper statements). Check ordering is accomplished using a linking with the Deluxe check printers. The web interface uses Digital Insight, and the ACH transfer interface uses CashEdge.

FirstIB will actually reimburse you, at the end of the month, for ATM fees that other banks charge you, up to $6/mo. They also provide an unlimited supply of free postage-paid deposit envelopes, and have a PDF of deposit slips that you can print out should you run out.

FirstIB's customer service has slipped in recent times. I know of some people that have been impacted by some errors that FirstIB has made (simply not processing paperwork that they should have processed). Wait times have gone up for the phone line, and a lot of the great "small bank" feel (where they actually knew their customers, and you might actually know the reps) is gone.

Presidential Bank, FSB

Presidential Bank is the bank I'm looking at now. I was initially drawn to them by their extraordinarly high interest rates (5.25% for savings!), but some other things have convinced me to use them.

Initially, I was suspicious. Presidential is a bricks-and-mortar operation that has been around for awhile, and was one of the very first Internet banks. Their website says that they started offering Internet accounts in 1995, and very much looks like it hasn't been updated since. (Thankfully, the account management interface is more modern). I almost thought the site was a fraud up front, a "too good to be true" deal with the high interest rates and bad-looking website. But after doing some research, realized that it is quite real.

Before setting up accounts with them, I had a few questions (such as whether or not transactions post in real time). Presidential has a simple email address for people that want to send in questions (unlike FirstIB's obvious queue system). I sent an email, and got a response an hour or two later, from a real person with a first and last name, and a personal e-mail address I could use to follow up. Nice. I also had occasion to talk to people on the phone. They were polite, speedy, and helpful.

So I set up my accounts with them. I activated the online access, bill payment, and money transfer features. All worked as expected. I did have a couple more occasions to call them after the account was set up (a more crucial test than the pre-account calls), and they remained helpful. Strangely, this bank, which seems to be a much larger operation than FirstIB, had a more small bank feel. Several times, as I started talking to a rep, he or she would say something like "Oh, I remember processing the setup paperwork on this account last week" or "I think I talked to you about this before?"

Customer service is one of those things you rarely need after the first month or so of an account. But with your bank, it is vital that the reps know what they are doing and are willing to help you when you call -- which Presidential is doing better than FirstIB these days.

Presidential does not rebate ATM fees like FirstIB does. They do provide a few deposit envelopes with your initial account setup packet, but they are not postage paid or unlimited. However, because Presidential's interest rates are so much better than FirstIB's, it doesn't take much in your account to more than balance out that difference. Plus, with so many retail stores offering "cash back" when you use an ATM or debit card, it isn't too bad to get cash for free with Presidential. (And, most employers offer direct deposit, so we rarely use deposit-by-mail) One other trick is to find some local bank and open a no-minimum free checking account with them. You can deposit checks there and withdraw cash from their ATM, and use Presidential's free incoming ACH to electronically transfer the funds to Presidential when you get too much in the local account. (Chances are that these local accounts will not pay any interest)

Presidential offers a few features FirstIB does not. First, they scan all your deposits (not just your canceled checks) and offer to let you view them online. Secondly, they automatically send you an email when they've received a bank-by-mail deposit (you can opt out of that, of course). Third, they let you view *all* of your old statements online (FirstIB only lets you view the last 6 months worth, though both have the complete history available in the web interface).

Like FirstIB, Presidential uses DigitalInsight for the web interface and CashEdge for the ACH feature.

Internet Bank Comparison Both banks offer two primary checking and two primary savings accounts. This table compares all four accounts.

Feature	Checking				Savings
	FirstIB		Presidential		FirstIB		Presidential
Account	Interest	Free	Internet Plus	Internet	Money Mkt	Reg	Premier	Internet
APY	1.26%	0%	4.50%	1.25%	3.90%	2.75%	5.25%	1.50-2.50%
Min Balance	$500	$0	$1000	$500	$4000	$1000	$0	$100
Min Method	Avg Daily		Daily		Avg Daily		Daily
Min to Open	$100	$25	$1500	$500	$100	$100	$5000	$100
Online Bill Pay	$0	$4.95/mo	$0	$5.95/mo (up to 10 payments)	Not available
ATM surchage rebate	$6	$0	$0		$0
Online Canceled Check Images	Free				N/A
Online Deposit Images	No		Free		No		Free
Email Deposit Notifications	No		Free		No		Free
Email Balance Alerts	Free
ACH policy	Free when initiated at other end; free for deposits when initiated at the bank's website; small fee for withdrawals when initiated at bank's website

Online options at traditional banks

As I mentioned, Presidential is a traditional bank that has offered Internet accounts for some time now. Some other traditional banks do that as well, but look carefully at them, especially if they're a big nationwide bank.

I looked at options from Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC USA, ETrade Bank, and some other large national banks. In general, these were just regular bank accounts with a web interface (HSBC and ETrade being somewhat of exceptions). Read the fine print and you'll find poor interest rates and traditional banking hassles (lack of immediacy in transactions, predatory posting practices, fees for just about everything).

Plus I can tell from personal experience that Bank of America customer service is downright awful. One example: they used to pressure me to open a credit card with them every time I visited a branch. I declined every time, and had to be forceful about it sometimes. Then one day, not long after a visit with a particularly annoying employee, I got a Bank of America credit card -- which I had specifically refused -- in the mail. Hmmmmmm.

They also, unlike any other bank I've ever used, charged a fee to receive wire transfers. Which they had not disclosed. Then, of course, they apply withdrawals before deposits, and caused an overdraft from the undisclosed fee, even though the wire transfer was a *deposit* that would have very easily covered it. That was the last straw for me. After nearly an hour on the phone with them, I got them to agree to reverse both the fee and the overdraft charge. THEN I said I wanted to close my account.

When traditional banks are better

There are a few situations where Internet banks don't work out so well:

Living paycheck to paycheck. If you are constantly running out of money, and it is vital that any deposits get posted *NOW*, you probably don't want an Internet bank (and wouldn't benefit from their higher interest anyway). When you mail in a check, it can take some time before you have access to the money; the postal service has to deliver it, and then most of your checks will be subject to the "non-local" availability policy and held for about a week (though interest will start to accrue immediately).

Not being able to meet minimum balances. Internet banks do tend to offer a variety of accounts, but if you aren't able to regularly maintain $500 to $1000 in your checking account or $2000 to $5000 in your savings, you will likely fall into a category with lower interest and fewer free benefits. These accounts may not have many benefits over traditional banks, and may in fact be worse in some ways. The interest rate gap won't make that much of a difference either. There are several online banks that offer savings accounts only, with high interest rates and low minimums, that you may want to investigate -- though you will have availability into your checking account measured in days, not seconds. Presidential's savings has no minimum, but requires $5000 to open. (They do have lower-interest savings accounts without that requirement) Watch out for FirstIB's accounts; you can open an account with less than the monthly minimum balance, and will run into fees unless you deposit enough to meet the minimums.

A minor maintenance release of random was just uploaded to CRAN. The only change is a correction on regular expression string: R 2.5.0 now warns that percentage signs should not be escaped. Not other code changes were made.

A minor maintenance release of random was just uploaded to CRAN. The only change is a correction on regular expression string: R 2.5.0 now warns that percentage signs should not be escaped. Not other code changes were made.

Thanks to Romain Francoise, I found and watched Martin Michlmayr's Release Management in Large Free Software Projects talk on Google Video's Open Source Speaker series. Martin: Thanks a lot, great talk. I've been following your presentations lately, as I've given some talks on this topic - Quality Assurance on Free Software Projects (Spanish only) - However hard I try to remain faithful to the subject, I end up giving a talk on what Free Software is and how its processes are naturally more prone to yielding better quality than propietary projects.
Anyhow, with this post I want to do basically three things:

• To cheer Martin for writing and presenting the topic. I've been refering to your work for a long time, and although my presentations are not formally papers and thus have no quotation value (in fact, they often don't have the references as anything more than comments in the source files, it at all), I should thank you frontally and publicly.
• To get some more attention to the topics presented. Your point is very interesting and important to be taken into account specifically for Debian: I'm not 100% with you regarding that time-based releases is the way to go, but the point you make when discussing GCC (IMHO) is an important one: A project can shift to time-based releases even if it does not release on time, and its general inner processes can become quite cleaner. I do think we witnessed this with Etch in Debian - The process was much more believable and peaceful (even with all the release-related mudfights) than with Sarge. I think it partly stems from what you point out: We aimed to release in December, and we failed to precisely meet the target - but having the date helped set the release goals to something believable, and not let Sid's unstability drift too far away. During Sarge's testing cycle, for a long time, few of us even cared to use testing at all, as it was... Something completely undefined.
• To get some insight on some points. Martin, in several of the projects you analyzed, there is a tendency to get to a six months release cycle. Many other projects also follow that cycle - There is a time-based project you didn't mention that is to me one of the inspirations of such model, and has proven to work for over a decade: OpenBSD. Yes, it lacks in many areas, and definitively not everybody can aspire to become an OBSD developer, but they have done high-quality six-month releases since they exist. However, speaking specifically for Debian: Would you like our project to follow such a schedule? For many reasons (including one you mentioned, the difficulty to support several concurrent versions, or just having oldstable versions be left too early with no support) I think we should aim for a 18 month cycle, 12 at the very least. Either I lacked attention when you went over that part or you didn't mention it - but why do you think such a short cycle is good for so many projects? What would you like Debian to do? (Of course, for answering this, you might be Martin, or somebody else entirely ;-) )

In the company I work for, most documentation is maintained in Word format. Except mine. I have a dokuwiki and am thankfully allowed this exception as I am the only Linuxer in the company. Since Windows systems need external documentation (being hindered by the absence of commentable text configuration files), there is a policy that all configuration data needs to be explicitly documented. I hate that idea, since documentation is always outdated, and documenting configuration changes doubles the work that needs to be done. After finding out that dokuwiki has a command line interface, I implemented a mechanism that can run from cron and keeps wiki pages of configuration files up to date on an automated basis. On the target systems (the ones that need to have their configuration documented), I installed a script which generates a tarball containing the relevant configuration files on standard output. For more sensitive data, the script could do some basic sanitazion such as removing passwords from the configuration files before putting them into the tarball. On the system running the cron job, the following script runs:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
set -C
set -u
JOBNAME=“update-wiki-firewall-config”
DWPAGE=“php4 /usr/share/dokuwiki/bin/dwpage.php”
TMPBASE=“/tmp”
SSHID=“$HOME/.ssh/$USER-passphraseless-$(hostname)”
REMOTEHOST=“remote.fqdn.example”
REMOTEJOB=“pull-netfilter-init-config-tar”
SHAREDIR=“$HOME/share/$JOBNAME”
WIKINAMESPACE=“pointer:to:namespace”
start=’/*BEGIN generated firewall rules */’
end=’/*END generated firewall rules */’
insert=’/*INSERT generated firewall rules */’
umask 077
if ! TMPDIR=“$(mktemp -d $TMPBASE/fwconfig.XXXXXXXXXX)”; then
        echo >&2 “ERR: cannot create temp dir in $TMPBASE”
        exit 1
fi
cd $TMPDIR
mkdir remote
ssh -i $SSHID root@$REMOTEHOST $REMOTEJOB   \
 tar --extract --gzip --file - --directory remote
mkdir workdir
touch workdir/rulelistfile
echo “$start” >> workdir/rulelistfile
for fwfile in $(find $TMPDIR/remote/rules/up -type f   sort); do
  MTIME=“$(stat --format=”%y“ $fwfile)”
  PROSEEXPLANATION="$( $fwfile sed -n '/^#::#/ s/^#::#[[:space:]]*//;p;q; ')"
  if [ -z "$PROSEEXPLANATION" ]; then
    PROSEEXPLANATION="netfilter-init internal code"
  fi
  rm -f workdir/newwikipage
   $SHAREDIR/wikipagetemplate \
    sed \
        -e "s PLHfilenamePLH $(basename $fwfile) " \
        -e "s PLHproseexplanationPLH $PROSEEXPLANATION " \
        -e "s PLHmtimePLH $MTIME " \
        -e "/PLHcontentsPLH/r$fwfile" \
        -e "s/PLHcontentsPLH//" \
  > workdir/newwikipage
  WIKIPAGENAME=“$WIKINAMESPACE:regeln:$(basename $fwfile .rul)”
  $DWPAGE checkout $WIKIPAGENAME workdir/wikipage
  if ! cmp --quiet workdir/wikipage workdir/newwikipage; then
    cp workdir/newwikipage workdir/wikipage
    $DWPAGE -m “new contents imported from $fwfile” commit workdir/wikipage $WIKIPAGENAME
  fi
  echo “  * [[$WIKIPAGENAME $(basename $fwfile)]] - $PROSEEXPLANATION” >> workdir/rulelistfile
done
echo “$end” >> workdir/rulelistfile
$DWPAGE checkout $WIKINAMESPACE workdir/contentspage.txt
 workdir/contentspage.txt \
  sed -e "\ ^$ start//\\*/\\* \$ ,\ ^$ end//\\*/\\* \$ d; "   \
  sed -e "\ ^$ insert//\\*/\\* \$ rworkdir/rulelistfile" \
  > workdir/newcontentspage.txt
if ! cmp --quiet workdir/contentspage.txt workdir/newcontentspage.txt; then
  cp workdir/newcontentspage.txt workdir/contentspage.txt
  $DWPAGE -m “new contents page” commit workdir/contentspage.txt $WIKINAMESPACE
fi
cd /
rm -rf “$TMPDIR”

Yes, this needs some more documentation and generalization. But it’s just a proof of concept that needs some polishing before being put into real life use. Here are the two template files for wiki page and contents page:

====== Firewallregeln PLHfilenamePLH ======
Last changed on target system: PLHmtimePLH
PLHproseexplanationPLH
<code>
PLHcontentsPLH
</code>

===== Dump of firewall rules =====
/*INSERT generated firewall rules */
/*BEGIN generated firewall rules */
/*END generated firewall rules */

The index page template relys on the HiddenComment dokuwiki plugin to be installed, or the placeholders show up in the rendered wiki page. The code uses the first comment line marked with #::# to generate a short explanation of the file being pulled into the wiki. dwpage.php is a fully-fledged command line interface to dokuwiki, committed new pages are fulled versioned as if entered through the wiki web front end. This way, the documentation in the wiki is guaranteed to be current and to fit the configuration found on the live system - it is directly pulled from the live system. Yes, rendering of the code is currently suboptimal. Working on it.

Long time no blog. Well, a long time for me -- it's been more than a week, which is pretty unusual. To be fair, I've been blogging on my Wikitravel Extra blog, since we were spending our week in Puerto Rico. We had a great time while we were there. Our last few days we spent in Luquillo, a colonial town turned beach resort northwest of Fajardo. It has a great beach and some of the best food shacks in PR, so we managed to really enjoy ourselves. We also took some time hiking in El Yunque National Forest, the only tropical rainforest in the US national forest system. (I've actually visited the temperate rainforest, the Quinault, in the Olympic National Forest). Probably my big regret is not getting to Culebra, which according to Biella and other sources is perhaps the highpoint of Puerto Rico. We just didn't manage it, but there's something to be said for saving good things for the next visit. tags: wikitravel travel puerto rico get-together07

Visit from my parents My mom and dad came for a week-long visit last night (less than 24 hours after we landed on the plane from San Juan. They're going to visit our new house and spend some time with Amita June. They're going to get to see some of the nicest weather in Montreal. The early spring is really the greatest time to be here. tags: amitajune mom dad montreal parents visit

BarCampMontreal2 We're coming up fast on BarCampMontreal2, the second BarCamp in the Montreal area. We've had two DemoCamps this year, which have been great for getting people interested in the *Camp idea. I think BarCampMontreal2 is going to be a real hoot. The event is going to happen Saturday, April 28th (that's 8 Flor al to you and me) from 9:30AM until the early evening. I'll be presenting and so will Maj. The list of registrants (BarCampMontreal2Registrants) reads like a Who's Who of the Montreal tech scene, including some more Debian and Ubuntu people this time around. Good deal! This will be the first BarCampMontreal at the SAT, on 1195 blvd. St.-Laurent just south of St. Catherine. The venue is huge, has great A-V equipment, and is definitely funky. Hopefully the bar will be open at some point. tags: barcamp barcampmontreal barcampmontreal2 sat event

Speaking of Camps I've been working pretty hard on our RecentChangesCamp event here in Montreal, RoCoCoCamp. It will be a 3-day event, 18-20 May 2007, hosted by the international wiki community but open to all people interested in creativity, collaboration, and building communities. Our list of RoCoCoCamp participants is getting quite long, and it looks like our RoCoCoCamp sponsors are going to help us cover the costs of the event. We've still got some people on our RoCoCoCamp invitation list who haven't gotten an invite; I've got some work to do there. I'm excited, though, that so many people are going to be there. We're going to have the project leads for the most important PHP wiki packages -- MediaWiki, PmWiki, PHPwiki and TikiWiki. It'd be great if something came out of that! And Earle Martin of OpenGuides will be there. We're trying to work out an RDF interchange format for our wikis, so I hope to work on that issue, too. Hopefully we'll find the sponsorship to make up our budget shortfall -- there are some Open Source developers and students that we'd like to give travel microgrants to. But I'm optimistic that more companies like Google, Atlassian, AboutUs, SolSeed Movement, Keiki, Wikia, and wikiHow will come through for us over the next few weeks. All in all I think it's going to be a really cool camp. tags: recentchangescamp rocococamp rocococamp07

Open Usability has a poll for the next default KDE theme or so. Oxygene or so.However it lacks options... the first real question "which icon [...] showing the menu with all applications" is lacking the "None is appropriate" option.The first icon has some windows on it. I don't want to configure windows. The second has a package on it, package manager. Next is a diary/notebook and a text editor. Looking glasses, the KDE logo, a computer and a help icon. I mean, there is nothing at all looking like an "applications menu" in there.Other questions don't fit into the usability category too much - for example, there is a poll about the 'back' button in the web browser. And there are like three regular left pointing arrows and one which is a reload turned the other way. I'd pick the other three; any of them is fine. But I have to pick one...Sometimes options are just stupid (e.g. offering a phone icon for email), and sometimes none is convincing (the chat icons, I actually find the 'small human figure' icons quite appropriate, but there was no such icon offered).Speaking of icons - I'd really appreciate some new Debian artwork. Our web site is looking like it's from the 90s. If it werent for '2007' dates occurring on the first page, it would look like it hadn't been touched since then. Ubuntu and Fedora have really nice pages (layout wise, I'm not talking about the contents which I didn't look at). Gentoo is as miserable as ours. OpenSuSE doesn't do language negotiation and looks somewhat odd. Probably too 'wikiesque'. FreeBSD just got a facelift last year. The artwork looks like 2003 style to me, and that the page has a 'monospace fonts' feeling might even be intentional. I certainly don't want the Debian website to look like a "web 2.0 beta" application, but some modern 'serious' design would be nice to have.

Gustavo’s advice to poll the Ubuntu patch archive for useful changes doesn’t have to be restricted to Ubuntu - for a long time I’ve regularly trawled at least the Red Hat/Fedora and SuSE packages for useful changes. The utility of doing this does vary with the package (typically inversely with the volume of upstream code changes that distributions tend to carry about) but for the time it takes to at least check to see if there’s anything interesting I find that it’s worthwhile. Doing this is no substitute for getting patches submitted properly with good documentation and extraneous changes stripped out. Personally I have always been fortunate in the people working on my packages in Ubuntu - I’ve almost always found that the changes that are applicable to Debian have been sent to me already by the person making them. I’d go so far as to say that most of the substantial patches I’m given come from Ubuntu developers. In the one case this hadn’t happened the person making the change was surprised and apologized that they’d forgotten.

This is the sum of the votes for the three fascist candidates at yesterday's French election. Not forgetting the 5.79 % of trotskist candidates, you can see how much the French like democracy. All in all, only 49.12 % of the French voted for a democratic candidate (christian-democrat, social-democrat, communist, green, post-globalization). Think about it before saying again that France is the country of human rights. This is confirming that after five years of Sarkozy and his omnipresent police - regularly pinpointed by Amnesty International - we're already the country of human half-rights.

BarCamp Montr al 2 is coming up soon. Yup, our second big full-day unconference is happening next Saturday at the SAT. We're bigger and better this time, and we'd love to have you show up. What is BarCamp Montr al? It's an unconference. It's a gathering of active, interesting people who want to get together and share our experiences. It's for individuals and groups, artists and technologists, young and old. Nominally, there's an Internet-technology feel because that's what BarCamps around the world have traditionally done. But because Montr al has such a vibrant arts scene, we've also got talks that are about anything and everything. So how do you participate? Well, you can't just be a spectator. Nope, unabashed consumption is not our way. Show up on Saturday and give a presentation on a project that you've been working on. Or show up a little early and help us set up. Or stay late and clean while chatting with the exciting people you've met. We want you to be part of our community. We've got fifteen-minute presentations ranging on exciting topics like:

• Taking good photographs
• Building Web 2.0 applications
• Online multi-player games
• Lasers
• East-asian culture
• Starting a company

Have you got something to say? Or something to show? I hope so. Now that I have you convinced, you're going to want to know how you (and your interesting friends) can attend BarCamp Montr al 2
Saturday, 28 April 2007
9:30 18:00
Societ des arts technologiques
1195 boul. St-Laurent
Free admission ( Sign up Upcoming Google Maps ) See you there!

Jazz pianist/composer extraordinaire Andrew Hill died yesterday. He was 75 years old. I love his music. I even gave a lecture on his music several years ago. I have a great regard for someone who follows his own logic, challenges the mainstream mode AND achieve artistic excellence. In many cases, so-called "avan-garde" are hard trying to do things different, but their results are not impressive aesthetically. Hill achieved both. And boy, he swang hard when he wanted. I'll miss him.

Tag this post with del.icio.us!