On Sunday I checked out from the hotel and enjoyed the breakfast, basically the same as the first picture here. Which is cool, the best way to start a day is with a good breakfast in the morning.



At Google I finally met with Bart Massey, who works at the Portland State University where I was an intern (in 2005) and also he was sponsoring one SymPy GSoC student in 2007.


Then we started to port SymPy to Jython with Philip Jenvey. I first installed openjdk-6, which is in Debian main, then checked out Jython svn, typed "ant" and it just worked. This is so awesome, that we finally have a truly opensource and fully working java implementation in Debian. Philip fixed some bugs already, so SymPy imports just fine. Most of the tests run, but also quite a lot still fail.

We managed to isolate two bugs: issue 1158 and 1159. Then there was an annoying recursion bug, that took us several hours to dig into and I then had to leave at 6pm without a clue. But Philip kept saying, I just need to look more at the java stacktraces that Jython was generating and I'll figure it out. And he did! The next morning he filed an issue 412 in the PyPy tracker, because they seem to have the same problem. There are subtle differences in how to handle __mul__ and __rmul__ methods that are not well documented, so it works in CPython but fails in Jython/PyPy. I think we can fix that in SymPy too in the meantime, so I am very excited, because it seems SymPy will work on top of Jython soon.

There was also a git vs hg session with both hg and git developers. Since I recently switched from hg to git for all stuff where I can choose the vcs, it was very interesting for me. And I must say I am glad I switched. Mercurial works fine enough and with the recent rebase feature I think it is usable, but git just has a bigger momentum at the moment and it just doesn't get in my way.

During the day Steve sent an email to the GSoC list that Dirk forgot his jacket in the hotel room, so I said to myself, haha, that's a pity. And then I realized, oh shit, I left my jacket there as well. They didn't have it in the evening when I stopped there, but fortunately they sent me an email yesterday that they found it, so I'll stop there on my way back.

We also took couple of group pictures, here is just my lame attempt (I am sure people will soon post better ones):


On Monday morning I met with Fernando Perez, the author of ipython, he know works with Jarrod. Then I rented a car and came to visit Brian Granger and his family in San Luis Obispo.

We went to the beach in the evening:





And had a dinner together. Brian showed me his options pricing example he did with SymPy, so I made him create an issue 1175 with the code.
Then we played with the parallel stuff that Brian contributed to ipython and we tried sympy with it and to our disappointment, we found pickling bugs in sympy, it works with protocol 0, but not protocol 2, see the issue 1176 and 1177. This almost smells like a bug in Python itself, but I need to investigate that later more deeply.

Today is Tuesday and we'll work on doing atomic physics calculations with sympy. See also Brian's email to the sympy list about it.

On Saturday morning I met Steve McIntyre and Dirk Eddelbuettel, Steve took us by car to Google. Well, it was overwhelming.

For example we met there two other Debian developers, Jeff Bailey and Daniel Burrows. There are developers from all the famous projects, like git, Wine, Turbogears, Jython, ... There are still people I wanted to meet but didn't manage yesterday, need to fix that today. My plan is to get SymPy running on top of Jython, or at least do some more progress to take the advantage, that Philip Jenvey from Jython is here. Also I wanted to fix some RC bugs in Debian when Steve is here, to make some progress on my NM finally. We'll see how it goes.

There was also an excellent presentation from people behind Android. One thing I was curious if it's going to run native C applications, like Python and it seems it will happen eventually, all the sources are out there, so someone just needs to push it forward. Another very cool thing they did that I was always looking for is Gerrit for reviewing patches (see review.source.android.com for example how it looks like) -- basically a fork of Guido's codereview, but it has many nice features, like automatically applying the patch to the git repository as a new topic branch and one can then easily pull it, as well as review it over the web interface. When I get back to Prague I am going to install this for SymPy.

Nice how some people (on purpose?) try to misunderstand everything. And love to flame. (Yes, it was my mistake to not explain the meaning of we right at the top - or in that mail at all -, sorry.) Lets address a few of the issues:

• The whole thing adds more bureaucracy to NM and makes it harder to become a Developer. Entirely wrong. In fact it makes it a lot easier to enter the project. Imagine the old, current, way:
  • Get DM for your package(s), signing SC/DFSG and get advocate(s).
  • Get a DD to check your package and upload it with some obcure extra flag to allow you to upload it yourself. Sometimes, except for those bugs which block you from it.
  • Or alternatively do all your package work through a sponsor, always searching for one for even the smallest bugfix.
  • At some point you want to get a “real Developer”, so you apply as NM
  • Get another advocate to speak for you
  • Wait until you get an AM assigned.
  • ID check
  • P&P (lots of questions, including SC/DFSG/DMUP)
  • T&S (again lots of questions and also Package checks)
  • Wait for FrontDesk (usually fast)
  • Wait for DAM (usually fast these days)
  • Hello new DD.
  This can easily take up weeks, if not months and means lots of double work, especially for the new maintainer. Now imagine the new way:
  • Apply at nm.debian.org
  • Get one or more advocate(s) to speak for you
  • Wait until you get an AM assigned.
  • ID check, together with SC/DFSG/DMUP
  • Small P&P, with the size entirely depending on what the NM-Committee wants to see, so probably just the few bits about Debians philosophy.
  • Yay, you are DC or DM now (whatever you wanted).
  • In case you selected DM, to get a package into the list of (source) packages you are allowed to upload, every NM-Committee member can now do that, after they did a little check of it Which means your AM will set an initial list of them when he/she approves you, every NM-Committee member can then adjust it whenever needed. And as every Developer can easily become a member of that committee, basically everyone can do this.
  • Let the time pass, get packages uploaded, be a member of the Debian community, whatever you want.
  • Want to do more / have more rights? Say so in your nm.debian.org page[1]
  • An AM will be assigned again, to check that your request is valid and should be granted, depending on what you want (DME/DD). Which should be along the lines of
    • passed the minimum waiting time?
    • has shown enough proof that they know what it means to be a DME/DD? (Ie. knows how to deal with packages, users, votes, whatever applies). Assuming one took the DM way and wants to get DD, this could be done by something as simple as a package check and then listing a number of URLs showing the DAMs the work the applicant did in the past. (Like, preparing lots of patches for RC bugs, doing lots of good maintenance within their own package / package teams, lots of documentation written, things translated, whatever). The exact action needed will IMO highly depend on the applicant. The goal should be to clearly show that they know what they do. How that is proved is something the AM can decide (and the NM Committee can give hints / examples). The question to answer is “Can a person that hasn’t dealt as close as you with the applicant fully support the statement Yes, this applicant should have the DD/DME status! or not?”. Currently this is achieved by using the template questions.
  • The AM approves your request
  • Wait for FrontDesk (will be easy, so fast)
  • Wait for DAM (will be easy, so fast)
  • Hello new DD/DME
  This means you can pass the last step within a day (or two, add the usual delays that you always have in a medium that E-Mail is :) ) Granted, currently the time it takes to wait for an AM is just too long. We do not have enough AMs. I think thats partially due to the amount of work required as AM and partially due to the level of knowledge we require from AMs. I do think that this will get better in the future, thanks to the changes, as the work an AM has to do will be vastly different from today. [1] This, of course, needs to be coded in some way.
• The DAMs can’t just decide this, they must ask everyone. Well, IMO the changes proposed are within the rights of the DPL’s delegation (and constitution) gives to the DAMs (and for the upload thing, Ftpmaster). This is account (archive) management. This is not taking away rights like voting, getting delegated, standing for DPL or starting a GR. This only opens a new, much easier, way to join Debian. And leaves everyone the option to join Debian in a non-technical, not package-bound, way. Yes, every DD can start a GR to override this, if they want to. This is part of the constitution and a way to let the project decide if it does not like a decision a delegate did.
• This has to be stopped by a GR now, we can’t accept it. Or it should be discussed at length later. Keep in mind that this is not yet implemented, and won’t be for a bit more. It needs work on multiple places to be done first. And we sure will modify this including good suggestions/constructive critic. (Changes needed are some for the nm.debian.org interface, within dak to allow the new style for DM or keyring-maint to take the keyring, to name a few examples. This will take time.) But feel free to do the GR, as written above this is your right as a DD. This is IMO the way to go if you oppose the proposal because you do not want to make it easier to join Debian. Or because it does not go far enough (small steps anyone?) or for whatever other reason But then stop whining how hard it is to join Debian and that one should change this, please, you just lost every ground for it.
• Debian is about packaging only and we should not welcome more people that do not do package works and everyone should have the same full set of rights. Err, sure.
• The naming should be changed Hrm, maybe. I don’t think its so complicated, but well, why not.

There are many more things on the mailing list, but this post is already a little to long, so lets stop for now. I might blog more later on and reply to a bit more. I might also try and reply on the mailinglist, but erm, thats a HUGE thread already… What I won’t reply to are those few people who wish me to die or suffer from something painful. Sorry, I have to disappoint you, none of this is on todays agenda. Comments: 5

So I usually don’t announce my publications on my blog and for various reasons. The main one is that I am more than a little embarrassed that some of them are behind walled gardens (but being I am a junior prof, I am not in a position to negotiate otherwise). Otherwise, some of my pieces are semi-jargony (in the academic sense) and may not be of interest to readers who I think are more geek than academic. Finally, the process of publishing is so slow, so long, and so painful, I try not to think about it, much less write about it, if I can help it. But I decided to announce this
piece , which is on hackers (surprise surprise) as it might be of interest to some readers and because people can download it for free here for the rest of the month (but registration is required ) Co-written with Alex Rex Golub, I am pretty happy to see in print although it is far more academic in its tone, argument, and language than most of everything else I have written. This is in part because the article is more theoretical than ethnographic (hence the journal, Anthropological Theory) and tackles the question of liberalism alongside hacking. It seeks to demonstrate that these can be talked about 1) together and in cultural terms 2) that we we can identify some cohesive elements to hacking and liberalism, in part by placing them in conversation with each other 3) and yet we can also locate plurality and diversity within liberalism and hacking as well. This is a lot to tackle and cover in one piece under 35 pages and I am sure it could have been pulled off better but I think it is is a decent start to thinking about these questions. If you are interested but are allergic to academicalese, sticking to the Introduction, the Hacker Ethical Practice: Three Examples section, and Conclusion, will give you a taste of the arguments while avoiding most of the jargon. The irony of this article is that even if it hits at some pretty theoretical issues, it was provoked by a mundane conversation and disagreement I had with one hacker, Karl Fogel, over another hacker, Kevin Mitnick. After returning from the hacker conference, HOPE, I had dinner with Karl and told him about Kevin Mitnick’s keynote speech, which I found particularity enjoyable and entertaining. After calling Mitnick a hacker, Karl responded with the following: Kevin is not hacker. He is a cracker. Though I think I convinced him that cracker may not be the best word for him (and he convinced me there are differences between hacking, noting perceptively that his primary motivation seemed to be getting access to something he wasn’t allowed to have access to that is, it was more about breaking the rules and the thrill of crossing a social line, than about learning a technical system. ), I decided that I wanted to write a piece that squarely addressed tensions and differences among hackers instead of whitewashing them away as most authors, journalist, and even some hackers do.
Although most of the time, it seems like it is the Karl-type hackers who accuse the Mitnick-type hackers of not being true and authentic, recently I have been in a few situations where the tables were turned. For example, last year I was having coffee with a 2600-type who insisted that hacking on Linux was not hacking at all (not innovative enough, according to his world view). Another example I came across was in a recent Phrack issue where the prophiled hacker, the Unix Terrorist, takes a swipe at (well honestly at everyone and everythin) but when he is talking trash about who is and who is not a hacker, he singles out F/OSS developers:

Linus Torvalds isn’t a hacker! Richard Stallman isn’t a hacker! Niels Provos
isn’t a hacker! Fat/ugly, maybe! Hackers, no! And what is up with
the use of the term “cracker”? As far as I’m concerned, that term
applies to people that bypass copyright protection mechanisms.
Vladimir Levin? HACKER. phiber optik? HACKER. Kevin Mitnick? OK,
maybe a gay/bad one, but still WAS a “hacker.” Hope that’s clear.

Of course, one can play the game of defining the authentic hacking (and it makes sense for many to do this!) but my interest as an anthropologist has never been to draw a bright and clear boundary between good hackers and bad hackers. or “real and fake hackers,” but instead to describe and grapple with the tension points and internal ambiguities among hackers (my whole course is designed around this theme, in fact). This is not to say that anything goes in the world of hacking (that is, I don’t consider any computer break in a hack; I often just call it a crime) but if there is a group of people calling themselves hackers and thinking to some degree of the ethical implications of their actions, as an anthropologist, this is enough “social evidence” to start asking some questions about the political and cultural significance of their actions.

Wow this Joe the Plumber phenomenon really seems to have Democrats spooked as they are now scrambling to find any possible dirt on the guy who dared to question Dear Leader. One might think people with a solid 6-10% lead wouldn't need to be so desperate but Adam is probably well aware of the Democratic partys penchant of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. A lot of these progressive types are still nursing resentment for the "swiftboating" of John Kerry and wary that it will happen again so todays strategy is pre-emptive douchebaggery before Karl Roves evil minions can sully the pristine reputation of their fair candidate. What they don't realize is that calling Kerry an America hating traitor worked because there was reasonable evidence that he threw his medals away, and made speeches denouncing his country which are typical of acts people associate in their minds with America hating traitors. The 527s exaggerated but the exaggeration would not have worked if there was not an element of truth behind it. Now no one is disputing that Obama actually did make the "share the wealth" remark. Whether the person he said it to is a republican plant or some other sort of nogoodnik is immaterial. Obama is a redistributionist and that is precisely the reason why liberals want to him to be president. And how pathetic is the "dirt"? He owes backtaxes? Gee I wonder why someone who already owes money would be apprehensive about having to pay more? A lot of people owe money at one time or another and even have liens placed as a result. Perhaps it is relevant to mention that for someone in public office (like oh, say, Charles Rangel who I'm sure Adam will discuss in his next post.) but for a private citizen? Isn't that one of the "chilling effects on free speech" we were going to be subjected to in Bush's America? The other one one was how is not a real plumber. Apparently he is not licensed but, sit down for this one, it is actually possible to do work without a piece of paper from the government. Really! I've seen it happen. Is it always a good idea to ignore licensing regulations? Well they often serve to protect the public from malpractice but then again they often prop up cartels. Here in the NY/NJ area plenty of people of all political persuasions seem to be willing to take the risk of hiring unlicensed plumbers and other tradesmen because at the end of the day, it's the, you know plumbing, that makes you a plumber nothing else. And none of this has any bearing on Obamas policies or what they mean for America. So if you like socialism and think its what America needs, feel free to make the case to the voters and perhaps they will agree with you or perhaps not. But stop with with the ad hominems against people who point that out.

Jacob T. Levy on his introduction of photos at his eponymous blog:

I hear that the interwebs are now capable of handling things that aren’t even text. (In my day, we browsed the interwebs on lynx in UNIX and read e-mail on Pine and we liked it!)

Heh; while my first exposure to true Internet access (in the summer of 1992, before the invention of the img tag and widespread use of the web) was rather more slick due to the wonders of NeXTSTEP, the ancient ancestor of Mac OS X, even that was an incredibly texty experience by today’s standards. Over the intervening years, I’ve certainly spent my fair share of time with lynx and Pine and their more modern siblings (elinks and mutt).

My parents found it strange that I spend considerable time in the night doing "some Linux thing", so the other day I explained to them what Free software is and we talked about copyright and licensing. I was very happy that they were able to appreciate it. I also gave a Debian Installer demo. While there are a bunch of Indian languages supported in the Debian Installer, (Telugu) isn't one of them. They noticed it and motivated me to work on te_IN translation for d-i and promised to help me. So the three of us have been discussing translation strings. I have been committing changes slowly and intend to complete this activity in a few months. Lack of interest in translation meant that I never gave much thought to it but I see that translating software is rather difficult and it is an activity that would benefit a lot from two or three people doing it together. I found a glossary at swecha.org but there are a bunch of problems

• Computing terminology is context sensitive and one word doesn't fit all uses.
• A lot of words in the glossary are rather contrived.
• Most words can be understood only by the elite of the Telugu speaking world.

I am using these simple guidelines for translation:

• Use language that is used in the newspapers today. Most people who can read would be used to this and understand it best. e.g password would be rather than .
• Do not invent words. If a certain computing term or a word doesn't have an equivalent colloquial Telugu word, use the English word written in Telugu script. Include the English word in paranthesis next to it. e.g. Registering modules... would be (modules) ...
• If a translated Telugu word sounds complex or ambiguous in the translation context, include the corresponding English word in Telugu as well as English in parentheses next to it. e.g Partitioning scheme: would be ( [partitioning]) :

A few resources that I have been using:

• lekhini - a browser based tool for transliteration based on RTS.
• en2te and uchicago.edu's Charles Philip Brown Telugu to English dictionaries.
• J. P. L. Gwynn's Telugu to English dictionary hosted by uchicago.edu

I will have to find a good quality comprehensive Telugu general knowledge book or an official A.P. govt. document to translate ISO 3166 codes etc. The Manorama yearbook would've been great, unfortunately Telugu is not one of the few languages it is published in. I will also bring my copy of Sankaranarayan's dictionary from my next month Hyderabad visit. If you have suggestions on any of these (pointers to guidelines, resources that are DFSG free and I could copy from etc.) that would make doing this easy for me, please do let me know. Naidu does good one-off Telugu string translations in Launchpad (so does praveenkumarg, btw), and Naidu has promised to do some of the work as well as review. If all goes well, I will try and create a debian-10n-telugu sometime in the future.

I received some feedback on my previous BeID post, where I explained how to log in to a remote system by use of your digital ID card. Philip and Guy both claim it possible or likely that the crypto keys on eID cards are stored on a system of the government somewhere and that you therefore should not be using them. I find this to be jumping the gun a little. Security is always a trade-off; indeed, if you want to hide stuff from the government, then using eID-based authentication might not be a very good idea. However, there are other cases where eID-based authentication really is the correct option; and it is nice to know that this kind of thing is possible. Security always is a trade-off; and if you make an informed choice, there's nothing wrong about giving someone else access to your server. The fun bit is that Philip actually advocates carrying a clear-text printout of a list of still-valid passwords. Now that, I feel, is unacceptable, security-wise. Personally, I'd rather use a smartcard that only some secret government agency might be keeping copies of rather than a list that any random thief might make use of. The question really boils down to this, I think: how likely do you think it is that someone else will be able to get at your password by guessing or stealing it?

• Using a password that's related to your person or someone near you, or is based on a dictionary: rather likely. There are scripts out there that will guess these passwords. Don't use them.
• Using a printout of a list of one-time passwords: somewhat less likely (they can't be guessed by script), but still not very hard (wallets get stolen by the hundreds every day, and it usually takes a while before one notices)
• Using smartcards with keys generated by someone else: somewhat unlikely (there may be a few people who know my private key, but one can't be sure of that; and, color me naive, but I tend to trust the government to abide by its own laws—for the most part—laws that prevent this kind of behavior)
• Using strong password: rather unlikely, provided you take care of them.

What I mean by that last bit is that you should always generate your passwords with a tool that generates fully-random passwords ('pwgen -s', for example), and never write them down in cleartext anywhere. That of course makes it slightly hardish to memorize them; what I do is to store the password encrypted to my GPG key on my laptop, and I memorize the password by changing it on a remote server that I need to access fairly often (Debian's systems will do), but leaving my GPG passphrase and laptop password as is for the time being. Every time I need to log in to the remote server, I first try to remember the passphrase. If I can't remember it, I look it up in the encrypted file (again taking care not to store the file on disk). Once I start being able to log in to the remote server without having to look it up in the file, I change all my other passwords. This process usually takes a few weeks. Then, the only way someone can get my password is either by coercing me or by killing me and disecting my brain. And then still. Unfortunately, in the real world, I realize that many people do not wish to go through all this trouble just to get a secure login, and instead just choose a weak password. I guess that's why I think the next best thing might be slightly better than using strong passwords...

I want this book. The problem is I don’t want to pay $324.79 for it either. Looks like a great collection of essays. It has one of my favorite articles on the history of intellectual property by Carla Hesse, which you can download for yourself here. In a mere 20 pages she conveys not only a general history of IP law in Europe and the United States,(which she actually makes riveting) but captures the philosophical contradictions and problems that have marked and marred IP as it has traveled from nation to nation and as it has grown in scope and depth in the last 200 years. I cannot recommend it enough.

Here are some slides and examples I used for a kernel course I developed (some time ago now). The course was aimed at C developers who wanted an introduction to both general UNIX-style user-space and Linux kernel development with a focus on embedded systems issues. The course is aimed at two 8-hour days, and is pretty packed in even then. The first day is user-space development and kernel building, focusing on things like make, autotools, advanced gcc, getting cross-compilers working, configuring the kernel and building. The second day we get into kernel internals; building up a kernel module to produce some simple proc nodes, take data, crash and debug, etc, look at internals like concurrency and the driver model, and focus on USB quite a bit. Here is a tarball of the entire thing, including the examples. Hopefully these can help out anyone tackling the design of such a course.

• Day 1
  • Linux philosophy, people and processes
  • UNIX build environment
    • Makefiles, Autotools
  • Executable and Linker Format
  • Advanced GCC
  • Linker, Dynamic Linker, Shared Libraries
  • Cross compilation toolchain
    • Building toolchains on Debian
  • Kernel development process
  • Source control, patches, GIT, Quilt
  • Configuring and building a kernel
  • Cross compiling kernel
  • initrd, initramfs, init tools

• Day 2
  • Kernel source layout
  • Kbuild, Kconfig
  • Syscalls (x86-32)
  • Kernel view of userspace
  • Virtual Memory
  • Getting data in/out kernel
  • Crashing, Oops, backtraces
  • Various tools
    • systemtap, kprobes
    • perfmon, oprofile
    • valgrind
  • Basic constructs
    • Concurrency, locks
    • Interrupts, sleeping
    • Atomic access
    • Memory allocation
  • VFS layer
  • /proc
  • Char and block devices
  • Driver model
    • sysfs, kobjects
    • buses, devices
  • USB Overview
    • Protocol overview
    • Registering drivers
    • uevents
  • Useful development paradigms
  • Unit testing

Five years ago today, I became a Debian Developer! My account was created just a few weeks after Debian's 10th birthday and we recently celebrated the 15th, so I've been around for about a third of the project's life. In that period, we released sarge and etch, had two compromises, approximately 300,000 bugs were filed in the BTS, Ubuntu was created, three DPLs came and went, dunc-tank was launched and subsequently abandoned, and the Debian Maintainer status was created (among other notable events).

For me personally there have been ups and downs, but mostly it's been fun. I'm still proud of taking part in what is perhaps the largest volunteer project to date, and one that can produce a distribution of outstanding quality and versatility. The Debian community is huge, diverse and sometimes frighteningly technical, but always focused on making Debian (both the product and the project) better for everyone; it's worth being part of it if only for the amazing melting-pot of cultures and (sometimes antagonistic) technological philosophies.

I think that after fifteen years Debian is still relevant both as a basis for derivative distributions, and as a product for end users. I like to think that I've played a part, however insignificant, in Debian's success in the past five years and I hope that I'll be given the chance to continue contributing in the future. Rock on, Debian!

Russell writes about the iphone. I think he's missing a few things.

The open nature of the PC wasn't inherently what brought it greater success. The open nature of the PC meant that it could spawn an ecosystem of third party hardware vendors, sure. It also meant that it could be cheaply cloned by other manufacturers, ensuring competition that drove down the price of hardware. The net result? x86 is ubiquitous, sufficiently so that even Apple use a basically standard[1] x86 platform these days. Low prices and the wide availability of software that people wanted to run bought the PC the marketplace, with Microsoft being the real winners. Apple hardware remained more expensive for years, and the compelling MacOS software was mostly limited to areas like DTP. Nobody else had any incentive to buy a Mac.

Now, let's look at the phone market. Third party hardware vendors? No real distinction between the iphone and anything else. Sure, anything remotely clever has to plug into the dock port, but developing something to work with that also gets you into the ludicrously huge ipod market. Other phone accessories are either batteries, chargers or headphones. That's really not going to be what determines market success.

Competitive cheapness? When you have a multivendor OS like Android or Windows Mobile, you might expect there to be more opportunity to compete to undercut each other, offering equivalent platforms for less cost. But that's missing something. In the same way that the home computer market has basically consolidated towards PCs, the phone market has already consolidated. Your smartphone has an ARM in, probably along with an off the shelf GSM chip and some 3D core (generally something from Imagination, though in Android's case Qualcomm seem to have come up with their own core - I haven't been able to find out if it's derived from something else). There's no realistic way to make a phone with equivalent hardware functionality and quality to the iphone and sell it for significantly less money. And if you figure out how to, Apple get to take advantage of the same price reductions in their next generation hardware. And, being Apple, they'll probably find some compelling wonderful design feature that costs them nothing extra but makes you want it more anyway. So hardware competition probably isn't going to be what determines market success.

Which leaves two things - advertising and applications. Apple are good at marketing. This is unfortunate, because I'd really rather live in a world where everyone running MacOS was running Linux instead, but we seem to suck in comparison. The good news is that Microsoft also seem to, so maybe we'll have our act together some time between now and Apple crushing us to death. So, assuming current trends continue, Apple's marketing probably isn't going to kill the iphone. Which leaves one thing: applications.

The obvious argument against the iphone's success is that, as a closed software distribution platform, it's less attractive to developers. I don't think that's true. If we look at the console market, the gp2x was hardly a PSP killer. Or a DS killer. You could possibly argue it was a Gizmondo killer, but only if you ignore the Finnish mafia. Being an open platform doesn't immediately result in you killing closed platforms. You need developers, and you need applications. Otherwise nobody's going to buy your hardware, even if it costs $10 less than an iphone and has a few extra bits of plastic. What attracts developers? An attractive development environment and a revenue stream. Android has one real thing going for it here - it's not tied to Objective C, and so there's probably a larger number of potential developers. But let's be realistic. If you're a competent developer, you can move from C++ or Java to Objective C without too much effort. And if you're an incompetent developer, you're not going to be deciding the future of a platform.

Apple have made it easy for people to write applications that share the iphone's delightful[2] UI. There's almost active encouragement to write beautiful programs that integrate well. Sure, the platform limitations bite you in weird ways (like the no background running thing), but Apple have come up with hacks to smooth most of those over. The iphone is a wonderful device to develop for. Sufficiently delightful that there was a huge developer base even before Apple had released the SDK. What does that tell you? Developers actively want to write for the iphone. In fact, they wanted to even before there was a real revenue model. Mindshare means a lot.

What are we going to see in response from Android? To begin with, uglier applications. I'm sure that'll get better over time, but right now the Android UI just isn't as well put together[3]. It's functional, even attractive. But it's not beautiful. And lowering the bar to developer involvement means the potential for more My First Phone Application. Windows Mobile and Symbian have huge numbers of applications. They're mostly dreadful lashups of functionality you'd never want and a UI that's ugly enough to make you want to stab out your eyes, coupled with a nag screen asking for a $10 donation to carry on using it assuming it hasn't crashed before it got that far. To be fair, a lot of iphone stuff isn't much better. But proportionately? Right now the Apple stuff has it. I never want to see another listing of Symbian freeware.

At the moment, Apple wins at providing compelling applications. They may be a gatekeeper between the developer and the user, but right now that's not causing too many problems. Well. It wasn't. The recent fuss about Apple dropping applications because of perceived competition with their own software is an issue. If a developer is going to spend a significant amount of time and money on an application, they want a reasonable reassurance that they're going to be able to ship it. And, right now, Apple's not giving that. It remains to be seen whether this has long term consequences, but there's some danger of Apple alienating their developer base. If those developers move to another platform, and if they create compelling software, Apple might stand some real competition. At the moment? Apple has the hardware, the OS and the applications. They have the potential to take over broad swathes of the market. But they also have the opportunity to throw it away. And that's what's going to decide the success of the iphone - a closed platform is not inherently a problem, but it gives the vendor the option of removing one of their key advantages. If Apple get through this with their developer popularity intact, I don't see the open/closed distinction as having any real-world importance at all.

The relevance to Linux? We're not going to succeed by being philosophically better. We have to be better in the real world as well. Ignoring that in favour of our social benefits doesn't result in us winning.

[1] It's slightly more legacy free than a "genuine" PC - there's no i8042, and things like the gate A20 hack aren't implemented. But it'll boot DOS (given enough effort), so hell, it's a PC

[2] And yes, I genuinely do think that the iphone's UI is better than anything else on the market. There's no reason someone else, including us, couldn't have got there first. But we didn't, and now everyone gets to play catch up. Shit happens

[3] I have no idea where Apple gets its UI engineers from, but someone needs to find the source and start waving huge piles of money to pick them up first.

Dear American: I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude. I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transactin is 100% safe. This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We can not directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred. Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may speedily transfer your commision for this transaction. After I receive that information I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds. Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson **** The source of this? A former U of C graduate anthropology classmate. This actually may be the original source, or like all really good spam, somewhat (seemingly at least) sourceless.

Thanks to Wolfger for pointing out an HTTP 500 while trying to greet me by comment. :D I totally forgot about upgrading Net::Akismet to the new version that comes with my patch, as described previously. All the while I was thinking Net::Akismet was doing too good of a job keeping out comment spam, when it may as well have kept out all comments :( But its my fault, really. Among other things, Jerome has finally started a new grassroots group for the OLPC effort here in the Philippines, fresh from the success at the recently-concluded SFD. There's now an IRC channel up too, with logs available locally (text-only, until I can set up a web and fileserver frontend.) I'm personally interested on running a port of Inferno and perhaps help out on the TODOs for it.

To this… (and I know there are readers of the blog in Manchester and close by who just may be interested in the a one-day seminar and evening lecture on the 1858 cable and later transatlantic communications link). Full details below. ***
2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the first communications link laid beneath 1600 nautical miles of the Atlantic Ocean. That telegraph cable was the first in a series of cutting-edge technologies enabling fast and accurate communication between Britain and the United States of America, linking the old and new worlds. To mark the occasion, the IET in conjunction with the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, are holding a one-day seminar and evening lecture on the 1858 cable and later transatlantic communications links, including wireless and satellite, on Tuesday 28th October 2008. Both events are open to the public and admission is free of charge, but pre-booking is a must. The programme is given below. Both events will be held in the Cardwell Theatre, MOSI and there will be a small exhibition on the history of transatlantic communications to accompany the event. To register for the seminar and/or the lecture, please contact Anne Locker (details given at the end of the email). SEMINAR 1000-1030 Arrival and coffee 1030-1045 Bob Martin-Royle :Chairman s welcome, introduction and overview 1045-1115 Neil Barton: First steps to transatlantic - crossing the Irish Sea 1852-1854 1115-1130 Donard de Cogan: Background to the 1858 telegraph cable 1130-1145 Pauline Webb: John Pender and Manchester s contribution 1145-1215 Donard de Cogan: Insights into the landing of the 1858 cable 1215-1230 Pat Wilson: Lord Kelvin s contribution to submarine telegraphy 1230-1300 Questions and discussion 1300-1400 Lunch 1400-1430 Bob Martin-Royle: Marconi and the first transatlantic wireless links 1430-1515 Phil Kelly: TAT1 (includes film) - the first telephone cable 1515-1545 Tea 1545-1615 Des Prouse: Telstar - the birth of transatlantic satellite communications 1615-1630 Transatlantic communications: the present and future 1630-1700 Questions, discussion and closing remarks EVENING 1800-1830 Light refreshments 1830-1930 Nigel Linge: An interactive public lecture on The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable - the birth of global communications 1930- 2000 Questions and closing remarks Regards, Anne Locker
IET Archivist The Institution of Engineering and Technology
IET

Savoy Place
London
WC2R 0BL
United Kingdom

A couple of years ago Debian had to change the name of Firefox to Iceweasel because Mozilla Corp. was using their trademark to impose conditions on the software that were not restricted by the license. Now the problem is brought again to life for Ubuntu, with Mozilla forcing them to show an EULA before letting users start Firefox. Jeff Licquia explains the situation quite well, in any case. At first glance, having to add an EULA seems a small price to pay, but underneath the obvious there might be something really serious happening. Software licenses seems to be just one of the possible ways of restricting users’ freedom. We’ve already seen some companies trying to use different methods to restrict it: via software patents, tivoization, etc. It seems we might want to add the usage of trademarks to the list. According to the Free Software Definition, there are four types of freedom that users need to have to consider a program as Free Software:

• To run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
• To study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)
• To redistribute copies (freedom 2)
• To improve the program, and release your improvements (freedom 3)

In any case, nowhere is said that those freedoms must be given just to end users. Distributions and such must also have these freedoms, including the freedom to modify the program and adapt it to their needs, and their users’ needs. While it makes sense that you cannot call a program Firefox just because it includes 10 lines from its source code, it also doesn’t seem tolerable to try to use trademark to prevent you from adapting the program to your needs and keep calling it free. Is it valid that an organization or company tries to restrict that freedom for you by using their trademark rights? Should a clause preventing that be added to GPL4? In any case, the final reason for the discussion seems to be much ado about nothing, as the EULA does not, and cannot, add any restriction to the usage of the program. First freedom (to run the program, for any purpose), remember?

Sometimes you're just flat out wrong. While I can understand your position of 'all fear-mongerers and religious fanatics should just commit suicide', I do not agree with it. However, this time, the girl you refer to didn't actually commit suicide because she fell in any of those categories. Had you actually read that BBC story you link to in some detail, you'd have found that:

• The girl was sixteen years old. While old enough to understand danger, it usually isn't old enough to understand the intricacies of science.
• She took her own life after watching a sensationalist TV channel that was spreading the lie that the LHC would cause the earth to crack up

Now I agree that ignorance to science is something that should be advocated against; but if the facts of science are misrepresented through a TV channel that is only interested in its own profits, are those who do believe their only source of information then to be blamed? If the only data you get are outright lies, is the world then indeed a better place because it got rid of one "mis"believer? I think not.

For about eight years, I was a very happy WindowMaker user. It was very lightweight, aesthetically pleasing, and I had interiorized its behaviour and keybindings so much, I didn't feel I'd ever switch away. I periodically tried (forced myself even!) to use any of the other, more en vogue environments... Experimented using Gnome for a week, KDE for a week, XFCE for a week (so I would have enough time to learn their ways)... And always came back to my good, well-known wmaker.
In 2006, when we held DebConf6 in Mexico, I saw how other people worked with ion3. I fell immediately in love with it. Not because it is prettier, snappier or has nicer widgets than other window managers - but because it is enormously more usable. Quoting Tuomo Valkonen, the ion3 author,

Ion is not perfect and certainly not for everyone, but neither is any user interface. Usability is subjective.

Using a keyboard-oriented, tiling window manager represented -for the first time in 20 years (I had my first contact with a Macintosh in 1986)- a radical user interface change. For my way of working, I just don't need a desktop, I don't need having a background space or overlapping windows. What I need is a way to functionally organize the windows I have open at any given time, quickly switch between them (and not depending on the mouse, please!), maximizing screen space and all that. ion3 was godsent.
Now, in 2007 there was (yet another) huge flamefest. Valkonen basically does not want distributors distributing any version of ion3 that's not the latest, and introducing changes not approved by him - He basically demands ion to be non-free. So, it was moved to the non-free section of Debian where only Womble decided to keep giving it support. And, of course, by September 2007 Julien Danjou announced he had written another window manager: Awesome.
My main motivation for switching away from ion3 is that... I don't want to use non-free software. But I was very comfortable with ion3. It was only after I saw many other people using Awesome at DebConf8 I decided to bite the bullet and switch. It looked at least as comfortable as ion3.
But... Well, I cannot come up with better phrasing than what Joey said when he switched to Awesome, almost exactly a month ago. When changing between the mainstream window managers, the differences are mostly cosmetic. But with these really different window managers... I cannot but reproduce Joey's words:

I wish I had a good analogy to explain to my nontechnical readers what changing to a new window manager is about.
One way to think about it is that it's like driving a car down the road, and suddenly swapping the steering wheel and brakes out for a tiller and gear shifter. And having to downshift for braking until you learn that the brakes moved to the turn indicator lever. By trial and error.
But that's really only part of it. Another way to look at it is adopting a new philosophy. Or, in some cases a cult. (In some cases, with crazy cult leaders.) Whether they use Windows or a Mac, or Linux, most computer users are members of a big established religion, with some implicit assumptions, like "thy windows shall be overlapping, like papers on the desktop, and thou shalt move them with thy mouse".
So, changing to a new window manager is a process of being dumped into a different environment, where nothing works like you've come to expect, and trying to construct a mental model that you can use to make sense of it. But it's also a process of modifying that environment to behave the way you like.
And when done whole-heartedly, this doesn't just mean trying to make it like the environment you were used to before. It means trying to absorb the underlying philosopy of the window manager, and think up new ways of doing things, inspired by that philosopy, and modify the environment to allow doing those things.
So ideally, "I switched to a new window manager" doesn't mean "my screen has some different widgets on it now". It means "I'm looking at the screen with new eyes."

So, what's so different?
Besides learning some new keybindings (expected, of course), Awesome has several suggested layouts to help you organize your workflow, usually (although not always) consisting of a main area and a side area, tiled side by side (or one above the other, or several stranger ways). This sounds rigid, but it is incredibly comfortable - and I've only been an Awesome user for three days!
But what sets Awesome apart from basically anything else is the concept of tags. Whey you see an Awesome session, you recognize something similar to the very well known workspaces concept we have had in any Unix-like environment for many years, right? Well, but they are not workspaces. They are tags. What is the difference?
When I work with workspace, each of my windows can be in a different workspace. So in one, I'll have my mail-related stuff. In another one, I might be browsing. In another one, I have my development things, and I might be following some logfiles in yet another one.
Awesome allows you to use tags for categorization in much a more flexible way.
For example: I am mostly a web-oriented developer. I usually need four things when developing a system: A browser, Emacs, the log for my development server, and a console where I can peek and poke at my objects and interactions. Of course, cramming them all into the same screen makes no sense - It would be better to follow the good ol' desktop metaphore, and just switch the focus and raise the window, right?
In Awesome, I can have them all set to the maximum screen size - _and_ use the most common combinations as well. Each of the windows can be tagged to more than one workspace (and yes, this is immensely more flexible than the always visible hint on traditional WMs).
To begin with, I'll give each major process a tag to itself, to work full-screen. Emacs is on tag 1, my browser on tag 2. The log and the console share a terminal (i.e. via screen or terminator).
This console by itself is not too useful, so I'll set it to tag 4, and we will go back to it later.
So if I'm building a view or following online documentation, I will add tag 3 to both Emacs and the browser.
I'm also setting tag 4 to the browser - That allows me to use it next to my terminal, following the results of my website-clicking.
And, of course, tag 5 will be set to Emacs and to the console, so I can quickly check any quick API-related question that does not need the documentation or look at a newly written method.
By the way, have you noticed CapsLock is the most stupid key invented, ever? Ok, I gave a good use to it: It's called Mod4. Imagine it is just an extra Ctrl, Alt or Meta key.
So, Mod4-1 gives me Emacs. Mod4-2 gives me the browser. Mod4-3 gives Emacs+browser, Mod4-4 gives browser+console, and Mod4-5 gives Emacs+console. And, of course, the handy Mod4-0 gives me all of my open windows tiled side by side.
Even this is a pattern of being a newbie, I know - I could keep 4 and 5 free, and just tag several simultaneous tags to be active. How? Switch to tag 1 exclusively (Mod4-1), and activate tag2 as well (Ctrl-Mod4-2). There, I have Emacs and browser side by side. Want to get the console instead of the browser? Simple. Ctrl-Mod4-2 (toggle off tag 2), Ctrl-Mod4-3 (toggle on tag 3).
Anyway - As you can see, I am excited at finding a very new and nice tool to help me work better. Today I was playing a bit with the Awesome widgets, but that's something to be talked about later.
In Debian, we are at a crossing point: Awesome is just reaching ion3's popularity. And I'm adding my two main machines' votes to Awesome.
This is Awesome. Quoting (yes, one last quote) the official Awesome site, This gonna be LEGEN... wait for it... DARY!.