Have been feeling rather unwell for the past couple of days, so I decided, while I feel like death warmed up, how could hacking at Valgrind possibly make it worse?

I took Tilman Sauerbeck's extended version of Dave Airlie's valgrind-mmt, and cleaned up a couple of minor bits -- changed the offset to be specified in hex, added support for repetitions (e.g. 'repeated 255 times', instead of the same line 256 times over), and also added support for the in*/out* family on AMD64, which was quite entertaining as I've not really touched either assembly or Valgrind before. Got it working in the end, despite libVEX's best efforts to frustrate me, and ended up feeling slightly better as well. Huzzah.

Anyway, 'sudo valgrind --tool=mmt --offset=0xc1000000[0] /usr/bin/Xorg :0 -ac > x.log 2>&1' will trap all MMIO accesses made by X or its VBIOS, provided you run the BIOS through x86emu instead of lrmi.

Postscript: spent a few minutes after writing this trying to figure out if there was anything I should've said, and didn't. Now, hours later, I realise there was one minor detail omitted: the URL. gitweb is just there, and the anonymous clone URL is git://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/valgrind.

[0]: Get the base address with lspci -v. Your video card should have two PCI regions, of which one is big (your main video memory), and the other one is 32 or 64kB (the MMIO space, i.e. the bit you want).

Due to the extreme stupidity of the bank that holds my money whenever I have some, we were unable to pay my main domain name (gwolf.org) together with two others - I mean, the fscking bank mixed up the secret questions/answers, and we were unable to confirm our identity in order to pay to my favorite registrar (do you know they sponsor Debconf? I've been their customer for at least five years, and they rock).
As of this Sunday, gwolf.org went off the net. Of course, being it a sunday, it was impossible to get a human in the right area of the bank.
I must really thank Nadezhda: Despite being quite busy today, and after spending a couple of frustrating hours Sunday night trying to reach somebody, she managed to take the needed steps. Our domains are back to life.
If you sent me a mail during this weekend, please send it again.

München (Munich!) has a great swing scene - alive and kicking. Lindy Hop [wikipedia], Balboa [wikipedia], Boogie Woogie [wikipedia] (~ East Coast Swing) and Rock'n'Roll [wikipedia] (the acrobatic version) all over the place. Since starting dancing (RnR some years ago, Lindy a year ago, all just socially until about half a year where I took on the others as well and started going to some real trainings), they've become an essential part of my life that I wouldn't want to miss. If you happen to come to Munich, here are some links for you:

• Swing and the City, the homepage of Christine von Scheidt, a world class dancer and trainer as well as judge in some contests gives Lindy Hop classes that are excellent.
• The Cord (Sonnenstraße, very central location in Munich) has a great cosmopolitan flair and a swing night every monday, often with live music (which may or may not be great for dancing). Cat and Chris of 'Swing and the City' give teaser classes there, too.
• Salon Erna at Optimolwerke (near Ostbahnhof, also quite central, at the big party areal in Munich) is the home of Swing on Sunday. There is a beginners class as 19:30 with changing trainers and topic (usually Lindy Hop). While a bar like Cord, there are mostly dancers here.
• Swing it! is organizing social dancing events with livebands about once a month. Unfortunately, the previous location closed down (not due to Swing It, which got the place really crowded), but they'll hopefully find a new home soon.
• Boogie-Bären is the dancing club I'm in. They have four Lindy Hop classes on Tuesday, two Balboa classes on thursday and Boogie Woogie classes on most days.
• Near Fürstenfeldbruck (north-west of Munich) there is the Tanzfabrik Überacker where Fabi and Gino will take good care of you; I learned a lot from them in their classes at Salon Erna. They got me addicted to Lindy Hop. :-)
• Keep on Swinging, is the home of Fabi and Chrissi. They are giving occasional workshops at the Tanzfabrik
• If you are at the university for some time, got to the University Sports Programm. It's exceptionally cheap (like 7.50 EUR for a term for a regular student), and that includes lots of sport offers, such as a Rock'n'Roll and Boogie Woogie class. Thats where I started dancing before going to Berkeley, discovering Lindy Hop there and continuing it in Munich later on.
• Claudia and Horst, who also teach at Boogie-Bären, also give classes in Freising, north of Munich.
• And of course World of Swing: Markus and Bärbel are very well known dancers and trainers. If you are into swing, you probably have seen or met them already. They are giving Balboa and Boogie Woogie-Classes and organizing large dance events such as Rock that Swing or the "Munich Balboa Weekend".
• In summer, there will hopefully be a weekly dance event in Hofgarten park again, at the Diana temple.

P.S. My personal favourites / recommendations: Go to Cord or Salon Erna to see how much fun the community is, then take classes with Swing and the City or Keep on Swinging.

Romain Francoise mentions Yahoo Pipes. Well, I played with Yahoo pipes like one or two weeks ago; and while I was impressed with their Visio-Like UI, I was lacking pretty much all functionality I wanted to try... My goal was simple: run a query on Google Blog Search (which will have the result available in RSS), and then grab all URLs out of that stream. But I didn't find any 'filter' in Yahoo Pipes which allowed me to extract the URLs (or any part of the text, actually) from the blog entries. I don't want to remove whole result entries, but I just want to extract certain text chunks from their body... (there might be multiple, so the regexp module isn't an option either). I could do that with Python in a few lines, actually.

I've started using Yahoo Pipes today, and it's pretty cool. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "milestone in the history of the Internet", but there are a few interesting use cases. Say for example if you're an avid reader of Planet Debian and you don't like the French Revolutionary Calendar, then you can use Pipes to filter out entries whose title matches a French Revolutionary month and enjoy a 100% revolution-free Planet. Or you could split matching entries into a separate feed, or just use regexp replacement to translate them into something else, etc. The possibilities are endless.

There's also a handy Babelfish module, so you can create a pipe that takes Planet Debian, translates it to French, then back to English. Hours of fun!

As the first step in moving my automated d-i install testing away from the dilab and over to emulation, I've added support to the d-i regression tester (digress) to use qemu for serial-console based CDROM installation tests. It was fairly straightforward to do that, since digress already supported bochs and hercules. I don't currently have an enourmous fast machine I can run qemu on. Actually, all of my servers, including my only amd64 server, have xen on them, which isn't ideal in combination with qemu (no kqemu..). So I thought I'd put this out as a howto, in the hope that lots of people will set up their own automated tests. If you do, please mail me and let me know, and I will aggregate all the tests together into a nice status page. Here's how to set it up:

• sudo apt-get install qemu subversion libexpect-perl expect lockfile-progs
• sudo apt-get install kqemu-modules-2.6.18-4-686 # or similar, using unstable
• sudo modprobe kqemu
• svn co svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/d-i/trunk/scripts/digress
• Now edit digress/schemes/qemu/common, and set ISO to point to the CD image you want to test. You may also want to tune QEMU_DISK_SIZE, QEMU_EXTRA_PARAMS, STAGE_1_MAX_TIME, STAGE_2_MAX_TIME, and USER_PASSWORD. digress's README has more details about all the config options.
• Also edit digress/schemes/qemu/d-i, and change "url=kodama" to control where d-i will download its preseed file from. Until qemu bug #414342 is fixed, it can't support colons or slashes in the url to the preseed file, so the example is taking advantage of the default url guessing in d-i, which will look in eg http://kodama/d-i/etch/./preseed.cfg. Put in your hostname and set up a preseed file. digress/preseed.cfg is a reasonable starting point.
• To start a test, run ./test-harness qemu d-i
• The test will proceed automatically; digress will hit Enter at any prompts. Your preseed file should take care of any other choices.
• To cron the test, run cd ~/digress; ./daily-tests qemu d-i (be sure to update the CD image too). This will drop logs into digress/logs, and if you put that directory up on the web, I can produce a nice status page.

(Wonder if I should make a package of digress?) A few ideas for things to test:

• netinst iso
• businesscard iso
• netboot mini iso
• true netboot (qemu -boot n)
• gnome desktop install
• kde desktop install
• xfce desktop install
• web server install
• lvm
• raid
• small disk
• lowmem
• amd64
• lilo
• all kinds of fun combos of the above, like lowmem gnome+web server install on lvm

Just got finished with my "power presentation" at South by Southwest. I think it went really well, but I went over in my time and didn't have enough time for questions in the end. I've been fussing over this presentation since we landed in Houston. I had an outline and a lot of notes but I hadn't really put the two together. I've been trying to carve time out to work on the presentation, but between the logistics of travel and various requirements of child care, I've been really scratching. It came together yesterday and last night, which was great. I went through the presentation a few times this morning and after lunch, so I felt very secure in it by the time I gave the delivery. I got good feedback afterwards; people seemed to have liked it. I've put my slides up at Talks/SXSW07. Hopefully people will enjoy reading them. tags: talk sxsw07 wiki speaker

SxQC Yesterday afternoon we got together all the Montrealers and Quebeckers who are here at SxSW for a little hangout session in the registrants' lounge in Brush Square Park right outside of the Austin Convention Centre. I was pretty amazed at how many people were here -- I think there must have been 15 people speaking French around the table. It's great to see Montreal taking its place at the table at events like this. As the technology scene in Montreal becomes more confident and more mature, I expect that we'll be more of a presence -- alongside San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City and Boston as technology centres in North America. tags: montreal sxsw07 quebec

Twitter at work I'm so psyched that I finally got my personal twitter account set up today. I set up a Twitter account for Wikitravel a little while ago for keeping people up-to-date on technical issues on the site. But now I've got http://twitter.com/evanprodromou , too. Why am I so excited? Because I was able to know almost immediately about the birth of my friends' second daughter, Anoushka. Congratulations to Mark and Allegra on such a beautiful little girl, and congrats to Anoushka on picking such great parents. You're gonna be just fine, kid. tags: allegra mark twitter anoushka

I was honoured to be on the ETech 07 programme committee. Alas, I can't get there this year due to the very enjoyable reason of recent parenthood. Nevertheless, here are some of the talks I'd earmarked to attend.
Creating Addictive User Experiences (Kathy Sierra)Is it possible to say too many good things about Kathy Sierra? Any project or product built with attention to her advice about empowering users gets a huge head start to popularity and success. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with Kathy last year on a training course, and it was great to see the passion and commitment from her writing runs through her as a person, even behind the scenes.Applied Web Heresies (Avi Bryant)I'd go to this one out of insatiable curiosity. I believe that web conventions enable rapid application design (c.f. REST in Rails) but here's an argument that not following them also reaps rewards. Attend this talk prepared for involvement. I've never met a Squeaker without attitude.
Making Offline Web Applications a Reality (Zimbra)A short product talk, but taking web apps offline is an area to watch. Even if you don't think offline is that important to you, many of the same principles apply to application mobility. Take that key app data off onto your phone, watch or memory stick.Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control (Charles Armstrong)More user-facing stuff. How do you give a user of a large nondeterministic piece of social software the idea that they're in control? This is an important topic to me: note how many pieces of social software fall by the wayside right away. For some, it's lack of utility, but that's influenced too by the degree of engagement and control a user feels.
No Program Left Behind: Liberating TV from the Tyranny of the Ephemeral (Tom Loosemore)There is no good reason not to listen to Tom Loosemore. Especially when he feels strongly about something. The idea of this talk is a "vision of a cheap consumer device sitting under your TV that will capture, store, and share all TV, forever." The TV industry sure needs its visionaries.
Patterns: From Fabrics to Fabrication (Dale Dougherty)Dale was responsible for getting my XML career off the ground, and you can find him at work behind some of the smartest things O'Reilly's done over the years. Make magazine was one of those, and now he's moving on to Craft. Design patterns for, er, real designs.RFID Guardian: A Personal Platform for RFID Privacy Management (Melanie Rieback)
Jamming bad RFIDs. Having just taken delivery of an RFID-enabled passport, this is starting to come home to me.Super Ninja Privacy Techniques for Web App Developers (Marc Hedlund)Despite the cute title, lots of good stuff here. Expectnation is going to end up with a truck load of user registrations, and their privacy is important to me. I imagine there'll be some good debate in the Q&A session for this talk.JavaScript: It's Happening All Over Again! (James A. Duncan)I've recently got the JS bug, thanks to JQuery. It's actually a fun and malleable language to work in. I'd go to this talk looking for fellow travellers and hints, though I'm a bit skeptical about Zimki itself.

• ETech 2007 registration
  

It's been a good few days on our trip to South by Southwest. We flew out of Montreal on Tuesday afternoon with temperatures around -22C and got to Houston that evening with a temperature of 77F. Nice. We stayed in a Best Western near the airport in Houston, but with the Houston Rodeo currently going on, we didn't see much point in staying in the overcrowded city. So yesterday morning we did a nice drive from H-town to San Antonio, with a stop in Schulenberg for lunch at the Oakridge Smokehouse. We checked into the Quality Inn and Suites - Northwoods just inside the 1604 loop, and took a well-deserved nap before going for a stroll on River Walk and getting dinner at Casa Rio, right on the water. This morning we drove from San Antonio to Austin, with lunch in New Braunfels. Great Mexican food at El Tapatio, which was nice. After negotiating Austin's perpetually crappy I-35 traffic, we checked into the venerable Driskill Hotel right by the Austin Convention Centre and 6th Street, and took a break for a while. To top off our driving week, we headed up to Pflugerville where our friends Armand and Barbie Geddyn live -- operators of Austin's local SubGenius clench, the Ministry of Truth. Fun folks, and we got to do some grilling (fresh shrimp from the coast) and hang out with old pals. Tomorrow is the first day of registration for SxSW, and we're going to have a Quebecker meetup at the Registrants' Lounge at Brush Creek Park at 4:30PM. Should be a good time. I still have to put the finishing touches on my presentation for Saturday afternoon, so I'll probably spend tomorrow in the hotel room or in a nearby Internet caf . My presentation is at 3:35PM on Saturday; I'll post the slides here and on SlideShare after it's over. tags: travel sxsw07 minitru austin houston san antonio schulenberg new braunfels

CACert on certifi.ca I've had some good feedback from CACert users on certifi.ca this week. The OpenID server now supports CACert certs, and it's a pretty active community, so folks have been very supportive. Thanks to all for your feedback and help. tags: cacert certifi.ca

Yesterday I received a Fulong Miniature Computer from China. This device is produced by Lemote and is based on the Loongson chip, a MIPS-like CPU developed in China and previously known as the Godson. The Fulong mini-PC has a Loongson 2E CPU running at 666 Mhz, 256 MB RAM and a 2.5" 40 GB hard drive. There are the usual I/O ports, such as USB, PS/2, Ethernet, audio, VGA and TV out. The Fulong mini-PC ships with a customized version of Debian. I'm really excited about the Loongson because it promises to make MIPS available on the desktop. In fact, the folks at Lemote already have a laptop based on the same motherboard used in the Fulong mini-PC. Lemote is also trying to establish a community around the Loongson. They have given 400 devices to partners and 600 to Loongson fans and developers in China. It seems that the community is quite active, but it's hard to tell because I don't read Chinese. Fortunately, there is a blog where regular updates about Loongson are posted. For now, I have taken some pictures of the Fulong, but in the coming months I look forward to integrating Loongson support into Debian.

It seems to be the current popular meme around: Programmer Personality Test. It is based of the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and has been changed to relate to programming personality type. My results:

• You’re a Doer: You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
• You like coding at a Low level: You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.
• You work best in a Team: A good group is better than the sum of it’s parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.
• You are a liBeral programmer: Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

It's official! If all goes well, Ilenia and I should be settling in to an appartment in Innsbruck, Austria by April 2nd. She has been hired to work with Andreas Villunger's group, which is a great opportunity for her, and also for me to work on some things that are not yet public... We've got a lot of good friends here in Padova, and not seeing them very regularly will be the hardest part of leaving. However, Innsbruck is only about 4 hours away, and Ilenia managed to find us a place on short notice that has a guest bedroom, so we hope to have lots of visitors!

I was reading the brochure about the BMW 530i Touring (which seems to be the BMW name for what is known as a "Station Wagon" in Australia or an "Estate" in Europe). I looked at the brochure on the "Touring" because I am interested in a Station-Wagon - the Sedan version of the 5 series is almost the same in every way other than size and shape.

Here are some of the interesting features:
Adaptive headlights, they turn in to a corner when the car is cornering (showing where you are about to go instead of showing you the scenery off the road) and the high-beam switches off when an oncoming vehicle is detected.

Head-up display for speed, navigation, and other driver-relevant information.

Park distance control (PDC). Gives audio and visual alerts when you are about to hit something at low speed.

Eight air-bags of which only the necessary ones will inflate in a collision, and the inflation power will be determined by the severity of the collision.

Dynamic stability control (DSC), traction control, corner brake control, and more. Described as "all of the known features of DSC".

Seat-belt pre-tensioners in the rear and pyro-technic tensioners for front seat belts.

Rain sensor that turns on headlights, and optional head-light washers.

According to it's brochure the 7 series has bumpers that regenerate their original shape in collisions of speeds up to 6Km/h and a tire defect indicator. Apart from that there doesn't appear to be much benefit over the 5 series apart from more luxury features.

To get the PDF files from BMW Australia (without following my links which BMW will probably break soon) you have to fill in a form with "contact details". To enter that form you need a browser that works with their javascript (which means not Konqueror) so that you can enter your postcode and be prompted with a list of suburbs that match the post-code. The second-last page of that process allows you to download PDF files and it seems to indicate that your data will not be stored if you don't continue past the stage where you download the PDF files. It would be good if BMW could get smart and make their PDF files as easy to download as Mercedes does.

In terms of safety features it seems that the 7 series offers little over the 5 series. By comparing the brochures it seems to me that the Mercedes S series (as described in my previous blog post) has many more safety features than any BMW. Assuming that the BMW documents are accurate they don't seem to compare well with the Mercedes S class. From a quick search on drive.com.au (the best web site for buying used cars in Australia) it seems that the Mercedes keeps it's value better than the BMW - other people apparently share my opinion of the relative merits of the cars.

In future posts I'll summarise the features of some other cars that I consider interesting.

One of the many things I'm working on in my copious amounts of spare time is setting up the server that HP donated Linux Australia after I think linux.conf.au 2006. Said server has iLO, which facilitates remote power management and remote console, both things I want to have working on this server before it goes into production. Jon's been madly poking holes in his firewall for me so I could access the iLO stuff. I'm already liking it better than Dell's BMC, because it has things like SSH, although the whole thing hasn't been without some adventures. I fiddled around via the web interface and added an account for myself and an SSH key. Then I tried to SSH in, and promptly got stuff like

buffer_get_ret: trying to get more bytes 4 than in buffer 0
buffer_get_int: buffer error

straight after what looked like a successful connection, and then the SSH connection got terminated. I did a pile of Google searching, and found people had to disable environment variable sending, and agent forwarding to get this to stop happening. Interestingly, I can't find a way to disable SendEnv on a per-host basis with OpenSSH, if it's been set in /etc/ssh/ssh_config, which is kind of annoying. So after solving the problem of gaining SSH access to the iLO, I then battled with the remote console. The host already had a throwaway Linux installation on it, but the remote console kept freaking out about the console being in graphics mode. I figured this was because it was using a frame-buffer. No problem, I just needed to boot with vga=normal. Problem was, GRUB was configured with hiddenmenu so I had 3 seconds to hit Escape before it charged off and booted up. Not that big a deal you'd think, except to get out of the remote console and back to the iLO prompt, you have to hit Escape (, so the iLO eats Escape keys for breakfast. After having a bit of debate with some mainly Red Hat-oriented sysadmins on #sage-au, it turned out that RHEL has a patch so that GRUB accepts any key, not just Escape to present the menu. That was no use to me, as the box wasn't running RHEL. And all I was asking for was if anyone had any iLO experience, no whether or not "any key" was the equivalent of Escape. Sheesh. It turned out that I needed to press Escape twice in that initial 3 seconds, with probably sufficient pause between the two presses for it to register properly, in order for an Escape character to be sent to GRUB. Fun.

Mailing lists of big and successful open source projects are these days flooded with clueless requests from newbies which obviously have not spent a second getting acquainted with the tool or with the basics of the underlying protocols. I’m going to publish some of the “best” of these messages in irregular intervals her, tagges with “best-of-mailing-list”. All articles tagged appropriately can be seen as blog entries. There is also an RSS feed.

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a "beamer". He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it's a better option than the word "projector". The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it's pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn't be a problem.

One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.

When I give lectures at conferences I'm always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.

Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.

Linux Conf Au has an event called the "Professional Delegates Networking Session" which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don't attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it's more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.

If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).

Hi from Chemnitz! As expected it's great here. As usual. :) My two talks went really well. They were mostly freely improvised since I was kind of slack regarding their preperation, but I got very positive feedback on both and plan to expand them for future events. There's still a lot of visitors walking around. The debian booth is well visited with questions in all ranges, babelbox is running merily on the demo machine in rotation with bb, which never ceases to fascinate people. ;) My saturday was really busy. I walked over here around 8:30, had breakfast and gave my first talk. After a two hour break I gave the other one and ever since then I've been switching from one conversation to the next without pauses. Most of these conversations were with "strangers" who visited my talks and wanted to tell me about projects and ideas of their own, their personal experiences with Linux and Free Software or give further suggestions for my talks. I've really enjoyed these conversations, though they got a bit tiring after a while since for some reason people always catch me when walking somewhere, and so most of these long conversations were held standing and my legs are pudding now. In a few minutes (hopefully) the social will start and I hope it will be as good as last year. I plan to take things a bit easier tomorrow, visit other peoples booths, take some pictures and maybe even visit a talk or two. The rest of this day will hopefully be spend having some more inspiring conversations, enjoying good food and drink and continuing to try to coax Noel into relinquishing to me his old Debian shirt, that he grew out of. (Small Debian shirts are such a rare and precious good!)

We had one of the biggest snows of the year today in Montreal. The storm, which happened overnight and was supposed to let up around noon, still hasn't stopped. It's a practical white-out outside -- big fluffy flakes everywhere. The radio said we had more than 40 cm of snow, which is just amazing. I headed over to La ka this afternoon for an interview with Steve Faguy of the Montreal Gazette. I was pretty worried about going out, but as usual I was pleasantly surprised when I was outside. Snowy weather is pretty gentle, and although I was cold and wet when I got to La ka, it wasn't all that bad. I had a good talk with Steve about Wikitravel, Montreal tech scene, and the French Revolutionary Calendar. I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out. tags: steve faguy la ka snow interview gazette

certifi.ca doing well I was glad to see a post about certifi.ca in the Solution Media Blog of Thomas Huhn. Thomas set up the extremely useful OpenID Directory, so his opinion is pretty valuable. I'm glad he's as enthused about certifi.ca as I am. tags: thomas huhn certifi.ca openiddirectory openid

Registration and privacy I think I have an account on every free OpenID service on the Web. I need lots of accounts for debugging purposes, and I also like to have an idea of what people are doing with the protocol. I checked out prooveme.com a few days ago. prooveme.com gives out OpenIDs with SSL cert authentication, like certifi.ca. It seems like an OK service, but I don't think they use SSL and certs the right way. I tested the prooveme ID on a couple of services, had a couple of errors, and that was that. So I was surprised to see this posting in the proovemeblog today:

• certifi.ca is another site doing certificated OpenID. Evan, the creator of certifi.ca is a subscriber of ours. We'll obviously be pleased if he carries on using us!

Now, I've been in wikis long enough to know that you have to AssumeGoodFaith when people post things in public forums, so I'll take this comment as nothing more than clumsy but good-natured ribbing. Ha ha ha. But: I haven't publicly said that I'd tested out the prooveme server. I'm not particularly embarrassed about it, but I hadn't had any reason to mention it to anybody, either. So the only way the poster could know that I'd registered for their service was to check their database records for my registration information. Publishing users' registration info without their consent steps over an important privacy line for me and, I think, for a lot of people. I'm not sure making a joke really justifies that kind of privacy invasion. I don't feel fairly treated, here. I partly blame myself: after all, I submitted personally-identifying information (PII) into a Web form on a site without an explicit privacy policy. I've gotten so used to OpenID providers being experienced with security and privacy issues that I made assumptions that turned out not to be the case. I've taken the incident as a wake-up call to put a privacy policy on certifi.ca. I hope that will communicate to users what I consider acceptable use of their data. And I'll make sure to check carefully for privacy policies whenever creating a new account in the future. For clarity: if I have an account on a Web service, that is not any kind of endorsement of their service, and doesn't necessarily suggest that I use that service regularly (or at all). I'm going to see what I can do to get my account deleted from the prooveme servers to avoid any misunderstanding in the future. tags: prooveme privacy openid

[ Yes, entry written for my Mexican fellows. My blog is in English. Don't rant about that, your pleads won't be listened ]
Damog just ranted (in Spanish) about too many people coming to Mexico City. I completely agree with him, but not with his conclusions. We are a ~25,000,000 people city, in a ~100,000,000 people country. The inequity we face every day is huge (Cd. Nezahualc yotl, among the poorest in the city, is the most densely populated region in the whole world, but you can easily spot over 2000 sq mt houses in Bosques de las Lomas or similar regions - And the whole Santa F region just scares me, it is an unknown planet I don't even want to think of). But what's really terrible is how living in this city changes our collective moods.
Sometimes it strikes me to understand how people in other countries can live in one town and work in another, over 40 minutes away. Well, for many years I worked at places over one hour away from home - and I didn't even cross the city. Mexico City is, or was last time I checked, 40x70km, and without enough adequate main ways. Of course, people get grumpy and aggressive while driving.
What's my answer?
Don't drive.
Seriously.
Yesterday, for example, I chaired three talks at Linuxworld Mexico. In friggin' Hip dromo de las Am ricas, a convention center located in one of the worst-connected pieces of land in Mexico. Usually, it would take me 40-90 minutes to get there by car, depending on the time of day and phase of Deimos against Fobos. Of course, it took me 70 minutes to go by metro+bus. I took two nice books (La regi n m s transparente, a beautiful book by Carlos Fuentes no Mexico City inhabitant should skip, and Laurence Rosen's Open Source Licensing). And I didn't get bored, and I didn't hate the people I was riding with. Even though I crossed the most crowded metro stations. Not only I saved a fair amount of money (MX$6.50 each way against probably something close to MX$120 between the gas and the parking fee of that unholy convention center), but I used my time much better. Some years ago, when I regularly travelled one hour back and forth to work, I learnt most of what I know today of Computer Science during the long time I spent sitting on small microb s seats. Not the most luxurious way of travelling, but still a very good way of moving around our messy city.
Of course, today I have learnt even more, and I want to advocate it: don't work far from your house, or at least, don't work far from a place reachable by Metro. Sometimes it sounds impossible, but really... How much do you value your time? Do you think that it's better to get MX$20,000 a month in a Santa F office than to get MX$15,000 in an office in Insurgentes? Do you think nobody will pay you decently if the offices are in Ermita Iztapalapa? Good work done brings a good salary. And seriously, the extra MX$5,000 in my first example is not worth the daily anger you will get by crossing the city to get to Nowhere Land and work for the corporate overlords.
I might be extremely lucky, but I work 3Km away from home. I come by bike every day. And yes, I was scared at first - Even in Ciudad Universitaria people drive aggressively. You have to take care where you drive. Taxi drivers are among the worst, as they are always in a hurry. And, yes, my elbow has an ugly scratch, as I prefered to stop and fall off my bike than to land over a car whose driver was in a hurry. I've just had my bike for ~6 weeks (after over 10 years of not riding one, and back then, just for a bit), but I'm confident enough to get off the safety of a protected University with no cafres driving their microb s as they damn well please. Last weekend I had a ~6km drive (Copilco-Miguel ngel de Quevedo-Loreto-Alta Vista-Copilco) using several high transit vialities (Universidad, Revoluci n, Insurgentes). I crossed three times the San ngel bus hub, which scared my ass as I approached - But it's perfectly doable, far easier than what I expected. It was fun. It is a decent excercise. And we need more people to take the streets with their bikes.
This morning I heard on the radio that Marcelo Ebrard (Mexico City mayor) is pushing a plan to boost bycicle usage in the city. Something similar to what has been done inside Ciudad Univeritaria, but -of course- in a larger scale: Useful ciclov as along the main roads, city-owned bike rental places (where you can rent your bike at one and drop it at another spot), all this well connected to the main Metro stations. In this interview (in this morning's 98.5 FM news program - sorry, I don't know who heads it... Mart n something IIRC) they said that today, ~0.7% of the trips outside home in Distrito Federal (where only 8 out of our 25 million people live) are carried out on bycicle, and they expect to raise it to 5% over the next six years. We will see about that, I can only wish this program best luck.
Damog complains that we drive like shit because dealing with too many people for too long pisses us off - Ok, Damog, here is the recipe: Don't get pissed off. Each of us will make a minor but tangible contribution. Don't drive so much. Quit your job so far away, get a decent (even worse paid) job closer to your house, closer to the university. You will be happier. Get a bike. Use it, you live close to UNAM as well. You will be happier. And we will be one step closer to total world domination. (yes, we the bikers, not we the Debianers ;-) )