From Berne, the Swiss capital, hails a band I really like by the name of Z ri West. The name itself is a pun: the folks from Berne love their city (rightfully so!) and join the rest of Switzerland in looking down a bit upon Zurich, which is metropolitan and hip and has often been considered the real capital of Switzerland. Located west of Zurich, Berne is thus Z ri West , and by using this name, the Bernese band ridicules the Zurich folks a bit. Well, that s my interpretation anyway and I make no claim over its correctness, and I surely don t want to get mixed up in local politics! Where was I? Oh yeah: Z ri West (Flash-using homepage] make rock music, and they re good with their instruments. The result are groovy and melodic sounds, which everyone in Switzerland knows. What I find particularly amazing about this band are their lyrics. Kuno, the singer, sings almost all songs in the Bernese dialect, which I ve learnt to the point of understanding it, though I can t speak it yet. It s a beautiful dialect, and Kuno displays magnificent control over it. When I say beautiful, I do not only mean its sound, but also the way it allows one to express thoughts, situations, feelings, etc.. It s very lyrical, often poetic, but always very much to the point. It sounds natural, yet not at all blunt. In addition, Z ri West s songs display no haste. Again, this is a bit ironic since the Bernese are said to be slow, but what I mean is that the band is unafraid to take their time to recount what they have to say. Forget 4/4 beats and verse-chorus-bridge-verse-chorus, it s a lot more as if the band shaped the music around the story they re telling. (Of course I have no reason to claim that the Bernese are actually slow. According to my dear (Bernese) friend Isabel, they are just considerate to give the rest of the world enough time to parse and understand their sophisticated verbal and non-verbal output). I won t be able to convey all of the lyrical beauties of their music to you, but what I want to do is translate my favourite of their songs, which is based on a story by Peter Bichsel and it s called America does not exist . Keep in mind that their version rhymes, which I won t be able to achieve in the translation. I ll try to keep the flow though. Imagine a jazzy, slightly Latin groove to it. And it s sung, not spoken.

This is the story of Colombo
not the one from the TV show
but of a guy who once lived in Spain
and who was a bit of a freak
capable of nothing
and always telling weird stuff
without giving it much thought
until one day someone told him: you ve got to learn a trade
you have to live your life
nobody takes you for real like this
and most just laugh about you
what are the options
he asked - what do you do
I m an explorer - the other guy said
I sail my ship out to the sea
through the various parts of the globe
that sounds very interesting - I d like that too
and so Colombo said - I ll become a famous explorer And he told it to everyone
and everyone just started laughing
and he said: just wait and see
and the people didn t believe him
and he got sulky
and the people almost died laughing
and he left the town
and hid somewhere in the forest
where he remained for 13 weeks - 13 weeks in the shrubs
and the people searched and felt ashamed
and noone knew where he might be
and noone laughed anymore when suddenly on a wonderful morning he was back
then everyone rejoiced
and when he said: i told you so
I discovered a new land
it s out there somewhere in the sea
then everyone listened
and was kind to him
and tried hard to make some dreadfully serious faces The explorer from the first verse
Amerigo Vespucci is his name
just happened to be in town
and said: good for you, but I won t believe you until I see it myself
and went off to set sail immediately
and after exactly 13 weeks and a day and a night he was finally back
and the people all went down to the port
and Colombo was nervous, almost ill because he had lied
and he was horribly frightened
and pale
and looked noone in the eyes But Vespucci smiled and stood in front of the people
and blinked at Colombo and told that he had found it
and Colombo was so glad that he didn t tell on him
and called out Amerigo Amerigo and the people joined in And Colombo became famous and until the end of his days
he was never actually sure and never dared to ask
whether America really existed
over time, more people went there and when they came back
they told stories and they tell the same stories until today
and noone knows anything more than he knew before
and everyone saw exactly the same
and that sounds very dodgy
and tastes a bit like screenplay and Hollywood America doesn t exist
they never found it
America doesn t exist
it s all just a tale
America doesn t exist
it s all lies and made up
America doesn t exist
America is just a rumour

NP: Z ri West: Z ri West

Following Martin's post on the subject, since I created my prompt, I've updated quite a lot. It only showed the branch before, now it does so even when I'm on a detached head or something, and also shows when I'm in the middle of a rebase or a merge. You can see the zsh-fu for this. For example, when I'm in the middle of a rebase on my paid work repository, it looks like:

 (10:34) <~/dev/mmsx master <rebase -i>> 
 [artemis]                                                 (~/dev/mmsx/Build/)

With nice colors I cannot really show without a screenshot that I'm too lazy to do :) This is a recent addition that I shamelessly took from the contrib bash prompt in git-core package. And to be frank it's really needed, because it's cheap tests (basically looking for magic file names) and that it can tell you if you forgot to end a rebase or a merge, which can happen if you have been disturbed in the middle of it by a colleague for example. I liked the '*' idea from Martin to show if the tree is dirty. Sadly it's not an option. Martin, to do that, you can do:

 unclean=
 git diff-files --quiet && git diff-index --cached --quiet HEAD --   unclean='*'

But this is a very expensive operation. On the glibc git repository, it takes seconds with cold cache (and it's not very surprising because it basically has to stat(3) a lot of stuff). And not having a shell for seconds is a bit extreme. PS: I know my prompt only supports git, but:

1. I barely care about other VCSes as I only use git and sometimes svn for packaging ;
2. when I have to use svn it's for cheap stuff where I don't really need the prompt help.

I was excited by Pierre s idea to add Git branch information to the Zsh prompt and even more so when I saw Mike implement support for multiple VCSs. Unfortunately, Mike s a Bash user, and so I took it upon myself to port the idea to Zsh. The file 60vcsprompt is sourced from my .zshrc, which sets psvar[1] through psvar[3]. Those are then used in 80prompt (also sourced from .zshrc) when setting $PS1. My prompt follows the same principle as Mike s and puts the branch name at the repository root location in the repository path. In the following example, ~, ~/code, and ~/code/netconf/netconf are three separate Git repositories, while ~/code/unionfs-fuse and ~/code/unperish are maintained with Mercurial and Bazaar respectively:

lapse:~ master % cd code
lapse:~/code master % cd netconf 
lapse:~/code master netconf% cd netconf
lapse:..e/netconf/netconf master % cd src
lapse:..etconf/netconf master src% git checkout no-threads
Switched to branch "no-threads"
lapse:..nf/netconf no-threads src% cd ../../../unionfs-fuse 
lapse:../unionfs-fuse hg:default % cd ../unperish
lapse:..unperish bzr:unperish@159 %

You ll notice that unlike Mike s prompt, mine s limited to a maximum length of 25 characters. However, the repository root path is kept at least 10 characters long, so the prompt might get longer than 25 characters if you descend deep into a repository s subdirectories. I couldn t easily figure out how to add support for other version control systems, so if you do, please feed back the patches! And the same goes for suggestions and improvements. One of the next things I am planning to implement is an indicator for when your working tree contains uncommitted changes, e.g.:

lapse:..etconf/netconf master src% touch foo
lapse:..tconf/netconf master* src%

So watch those files. NP: Gazpacho: Bravo

A common rant against Launchpad is that it s closed: the code is proprietary, and Canonical doesn t give raw access to the data they collect via the interface. Anyway, other people have taken up this issue, and it s not the point of this post to do so. I ve heard two argument why Launchpad is closed: first, it s a test bed for a product, which Canonical hopes to market to commercial entities to manage their own release cycles. And second: it s purposely cross-project and tries to integrate and link between them. Thus, lots of instances of Launchpad would defeat the point. I ll address these points in turn, starting from the back: While I won t deny a pre-trend towards (back to) mainframe-like computing, with Google, Amazon, and others providing rent-a-computer-cycle services. In addition, environmental concerns cast clouds over the 400W heating appliance under your desk, which happens to run your word processor and browser when it doesn t lose track of its countless spare cycles. Yet, I maintain that centralised services, such as Launchpad are a thing of the past. If you ask me, Launchpad got it wrong, even though it s light years further than its predecessors. It features pleasant graphics and obviously has had lots of smart thinking and experience shoved into it, but it s still centralised. It might be a business case, but it s not what the world needs. We ve seen massive growth of decentralised approaches to classic services, from file sharing to version control, from number crunching to simple web browsing, and yet, there s Launchpad, single point of entry (and failure) to the world of data surrounding Free software (at least if you follow their vision). What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof. Obviously, this wouldn t render itself well to the (traditional) software business model Canonical seems to strive for, so they re unlikely to go down this route. But we could. It would be a non-competitor. Update: thanks for the copious feedback I ve received. Among them was a comment by [Elliot Murphy]](http://launchpad.net/~statik), who speaks of us and thus leads me to believe that he s part of the Launchpad team:

We re definitely listening, and we still have lots more improvements we want to make. Our goal is collaboration, not centralization: thats why we build bazaar, are working busily on doing two-way integration with other bug tracker systems, and are building the best API we can. Our goal in the team is to make it trivially easy for you to get all the data that you put into launchpad back out through the API, data portability is very important. There is no big evil business model, but it would be socially irresponsible if we did not work toward making launchpad self-sustaining. It has been a long road, but the launchpad team is steadily working toward a distributed model, one step at a time.

While it s definitely nice to hear that data portability is a concern to them, I don t see Debian using Launchpad without the ability to run it on our own servers. I m definitely curious to hear more about the distributed model the team is pursuing. I certainly don t have a problem with self-sustainability, but in the Free software world, I do wonder what that is supposed to achieve. Release early, release often, anyone? Update: Philip Newborough took up the issue and has received a number of noteworthy replies. It made me very happy that he sees my post as a rant about Launchpad which is not lambasting Canonical for their proprietary Launchpad software; I wasn t aiming for any lambasting. NP: Nine Inch Nails: Further Down the Spiral

Readers of my blog may recall that I don t take it well when someone takes my breakfast from me, especially something as good as Bircher M esli. Today, on my way to Limerick for some intensive Ph.D. work, I decided to try again and put a container with 300g of this beloved food into my hand luggage. Noone noticed. And now I am happily fed and enjoying the increased sense of security on this airplane. NP: Pulp: We Love Life

This morning, at Zurich airport, I was greeted by massive banners saying: We welcome the fans of the future European champion Does this mean that Switzerland won t be champion, or that Swiss fans generally arrive by plane? Bloody football championships! I still have 6 days in which I don t have plans outside of the country. Help! NP: Gazpacho: Firebird

Dear all: I am not interested in social networking sites. Please don t give them my email address for their invitation letters and email address database. In general, don t give them anyone s address without the person s consent. You never know what kind of abuse might happen with the addresses they collect. NP: Gazpacho: Bravo

Last night, my flatmate asked the question of whether it is possible to do anything in a selfless way, or whether everything one does can be traced back to one s own interests. I am not fit for these kinds of philosophical arguments anymore, so we pursued another topic instead. Today I am sitting on a Swiss flight and am being bombarded by commercials on the stationary television screens they use for safety instructions and the onboard entertainment. Swisscom purchased advertising space, and there they proudly let us know, in German, English, and French that 1 million kids in Switzerland jump for joy as Swisscom brings free Internet access to their schools. Simply so. (sic). When I read this, I first though: why the heck are Swiss schools still in need of Internet connections? Why do we tolerate an economy or situation in which the Internet isn t ubiquitous yet? And then, my mind suddenly made the connection to last night s discussion on selflessness: even though Swisscom is trying to communicate that they re being selflessly good by providing access to the school s, they obviously aren t, or they wouldn t be using the factoid for advertising. The curious aspect is that I wouldn t normally have absorbed their message or linked it to last night s discussion. The reason that I did is because of the gross errors in their English translation. The German einfach so , which I think they translated wrongly, suggests that they did something without any particular reason. I am not a native English speaker, but simply so doesn t exist, and it (thus) doesn t have that meaning. Dear Swisscom, and all other companies who think that English is hip, or who actually want to reach out beyond the borders of four-language-Switzerland: consider employing someone who can speak the language to help with your marketing. Even if you want to let the world think that what you do is without commerical interests. NP: The Flower Kings: Unfold the Future Update: initially, I criticised Swisscom for using jumping for joy , which makes no sense to me. Apparently, however, it s an idiom. I should have checked, especially since I am criticising the use of a language non-native to me. Thanks to the various people who wrote in for kindly pointing out my mistake.

When I got in to my hotel room last night, it was brightly illuminated and the TV was on with music and a message to greet me. The first thing I did was turn it off, along with most of the lights. Later, I asked at the reception when they turn on the lights. I was expecting them to have a central switch for each room that the receptionist could flip when the guest finished checking in and has started to make way towards the room. Not so. The guy behind the desk told me that housekeeping sets it all up. So my lights have been on and the TV blasting for the entire afternoon and evening. That did not make me feel at home. It made me cross. NP: The Pineapple Thief: 8 Days Later

We received an interesting contribution to Hecl recently: Martin Mainusch put together a Hecl interface to kxml, and also sent in some demo code that fetches and parses weather forecast information. I thought it was pretty cool: Note that it's not compiled into the default build, so you have to change a property from 0 to 1 and recompile, and...being new there might be some issues, but still, it's nice to have that to let people play around with simple "web service" type things that use XML. Of course, another strategy might be to have a 'proxy' server that fetches the actual XML, and returns a tagged Hecl list so that Hecl can parse it directly, but that requires a server and has more overhead.

I am very excited to announce that Jonathan Roes has successfully applied to the Google Summer of Code 2008 and will be working on netconf over this summer. With his help, I am confident that netconf 1.0 in Debian lenny is no longer a dream. Jonathan is a soon-to-be computer science graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and his application was (by far) the most convincing of the ten I received. He has several years of programming and Linux experience and it s quite obvious that he has understood the philosophy of netconf. I am looking forward to working with Jonathan! NP: Underworld: Second Toughest of the Infants

*Ahem*... I'm soooo excited! After 884 days, I just became a DD. It was almost two years and a half of much work, learning, patience, struggling to keep the morale up, and more work. In fact, Debian is already taking almost all my free time since months ago, something I don't regret at all. I was able to do most of the things I wanted to do, even without an account, including: DebConf organisation, team-maintaining packages (sorry pkg-perl folks, dc8 didn't leave me much time lately), some QA work, coding tools, etc. But this small feat has a huge symbolic importance to me, now the project as a whole is recognising me as a full member; many people already did individually, but sometimes you need the "official" stuff. So thanks to all the people that helped me during the way (sorry for the omissions!): maxy, for introducing me to Debian, marga for encouraging me to apply to NM —and all the moral support—, des for the help and the sarcasm, damog for being my first AM, even if we had our problems, ana for being my second AM and being so supportive, the Perl-lings for being such a nice bunch of people to work with and to learn from. Thanks also to all the nice people I've met along the way (dudes!), you make Debian a nicer place. Update: There was another paragraph that I butchered after noticing that the actual process in the last 24 hours was different than what I thought. But anyway, my thanks to Sam, Myon and Ganneff for their respective help in this process. Also, I don't want to forget to thank Ganneff for the trust he'd put on me during this time. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Debian

A bug was reported on linux-parisc@ last week, that “ls -l” was whinging about “Operation not supported” once per file. Easy, I thought, I’ll just break out strace, figure out which syscall it is, and Bob’s your uncle, we’ll have it fixed. Not so, unfortunately, as strace was bloody broken. upeek: ptrace(PTRACE_PEEKUSER,2606,4294967292,0): Input/output error Again, no big deal, some kernel change must have broken ptrace(2) on me. git logs didn’t shed any light on it, so I pulled an old strace binary out of an etch chroot and tried that, which failed as well. Wonderful. But… curious… it still works inside the chroot. At this point I was a little bit beyond annoyed, but the fact that it worked in the chroot was a big clue. Anyway, long story short, strace decides to assume that you can have up to 32 possible syscall arguments (wtf?#1) which is all well and good and generally harmless. However, it also decides to yank MAX_ARGS of them out with ptrace(PEEK_USER, …) if strace is unaware of the syscall prototype. Again, this would be mostly harmless, on every other architecture. On parisc though, argument registers count down from %r26 through %r20, which is the syscall number. Instrumenting the PEEK_USER path through sys_ptrace in the kernel made it pretty obvious when a consecutive request was suddenly 0xfffffffc (which is 0-4, especially suspicious given the previous values of 4, 8, 16…) that I needed to find a loop in ptrace. Searching through all the HPPA specific syscall code found it quickly,
for (i = 0; i < tcp->u_nargs; i++)
    if (upeek(pid, PT_GR26-4*i, &tcp->u_arg[i]) < 0)
        return -1;

where “i” is 0 .. u_nargs, which is set to either the known number of syscall args, or MAX_ARGS (which, remember, was 32.) There, the culprit found, and with a simple one line fix, strace works again. In case you’re curious, the reason things worked inside the chroot, is because the syscall being strace’d was dependant on libselinux being loaded.
syscall_298(0x400e0fbc, 0x58, 0xfb444310, 0, 0x409878ac, 0x409878ac) = -1 (errno 2)
Which is statfs64. The moral of the story here? strace is out of date and doesn’t yet support recently added syscalls. Also, the code quality is pretty atrocious. Oh, and the problems with ls? getxattr was returning -EOPNOTSUP because the filesystem doesn’t support
xattrs. Or, more correctly, because that config option was disabled. This seems to be causing laughs on the buildds too. Doesn’t anyone check errno anymore? Now back to our regularly scheduled hacking. –
wtf?#1: Generally speaking, more than 5 uint32_t syscall args is frowned upon, since that makes the poor register-starved i386 pass args on the stack.

Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the modern marathon: It was during the London 2008 Olympics that the marathon was run for the first time for the 26 miles 385 yard, or 42.185 km, distance. And it so happens that I was there to run the 2008 edition of the London Marathon. Pretty nice weather at the start and finish: sunny, not too hot, occassional clouds. But being London, we still managed to get drenched for about 30 minutes. Overall, the conditions were good -- or else Martin Lel would have had a hard time for a new course record. The course is pretty nice, right from the start in Greenwhich all the way to the spectacular finish in Westminster. Crowd support was good too, if only a little uneven. But the second half of the race, and particularly the last miles in the back from Canary Whard through the City to Westminster past Parliament and Buckingham Palace were awesome. Lots of people, lots of noise. Oh, and I even saw the leaders in a group of five, including Lel and Hall as the course had parallel 'out' and 'back' tracks around miles 13 for me and 22 for them. I had planned to take it easy and not try to run too hard, and aimed for a time of around 3:25 and then finished at 3:24:41. A little less 'even' than I had hoped, but still a very satisfying result. And for once the legs aren't all that shot afterwards :) And the whole weekend was nice as I got to stay with friends in the southwest of London. Staying up late on both ends of the trip suppressed the jet lag fairly well. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

Of course, this post is about the results for the recent Debian Project Leader elections. Although I've written quite a bit about politics in my country, I cannot sadly hold any hopes for decent electoral (or post-electoral, or political in general) results here in Banana-land. All hail our de-facto president, BTW.
Anyway, on to happier realms. The DPL elections are over. Voter turnout was low, as Manoj pointed out, but it's not as low as I feared. And, /methinks, not only because of the shortened period - but because this was generally an easy-going election, with three quite good candidates. As CMOT pointed out in my previous posting on this topic, many people would have voted 111- (which means, for the casual reader, any of them is quite OK with me). Debian elections are voted with a very interesting system, the Condorcet method. Developers don't vote just for their favorite option, but rank all of the available options (including none of the above, or NOTA) according to their personal preference.
The final numbers are very worth noting - Excuse me for hot-linking the image, but I know many non-Debian people read this:

What is so unique this time? First, as I anticipated on my previous posting, all of the candidates are above NOTA. Not only that, they are all well over NOTA, with the smallest distance being 237 votes (out of a 401 total votes received).
Second, something very positive as well, the distance between the three candidates is quite large this time. In 2006, the distance between first and second place was 6 votes (reason for which, together with the proximity in their platforms of course, Steve was appointed Second in Command or 2IC by AJ). In 2007, Steve was (again) second place, eight votes under Sam. Looking a bit into the history, in 2003, the closest election we have had, Martin beat Bdale by four and Branden by 11 votes... No, the distance is not really that important in the end, as we are quite far from having political quarrels over vote results - But still, having nice, clear numbers feels much better. And as I said in a previous message as well, it somehow speaks of Debian being a more mature, stable project.
Anyway - Congratulations, Steve! Best wishes for a stressful year, quite probably full of travelling, presentations and work in general!

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.


[kyle@phobos ~]$ history awk ‘ a[$2]++ END for(i in a) print a[i] ” ” i ’ sort -rn head
151 ls
126 cd
107 vi
104 screen
104 git
68 cvs
49 make
39 sudo
39 ogg123
28 ssh


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?

• 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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Yes, I too would like to explain that my name is 'Wouter', and not 'Yoe'. I've always considered nicknames a necessary evil—'wouter' usually being taken on most IRC networks I connect to, and 'retuow', as some have suggested, being far too silly—and one which I prefer not to be reminded of if at all possible. No, please don't ask why. That being said, I must ask: Martin, if you're only mad on IRC, why does your hackergochi refer to your nickname, and why are your blog and hostname named after it, too? I find it helps people limit their use of my nickname to IRC if I do so, too.