After registering children and alcohol drinkers, now they're going to fingerprint drivers at roadside checks, according to Motorists to give fingerprints [BBC News]. The report says

"Officers promise prints will not be kept on file"

but as Mark Wallace of civil liberties group the Freedom Association told them:

"I don't think we should be reassured by the fact that at the moment it's voluntary and at the moment they won't be recorded. Both of those things are actually only happening in the trial because the laws haven't been passed to do this on a national basis compulsorily and with recording."

ken lewis commented:

"My response to being asked for my fingerprints will be to say no and ask to prove my identity at the police station. That's non-violent resistance to this liberty-threatening move." "And that reminds me -- as a lurker on Planet Debian, I'm struck by the references to mailing-list flamewars. Why are people so keen on freedom able to discuss so violently that freedom?"

I'll be hacking on my hpodder program this weekend. hpodder is a full-featured podcast aggregator that runs on the command line, and has many features over other command-line podcatchers like bashpodder, and even over GUI tools like iPodder.

I originally envisioned hpodder to be something that I'd cron up and run in the background. But I have tended to run it in the foreground more than in the background. Some others have too, and the #1 requested hpodder feature is parallel downloads.

So I am working on that. I already have code working, in fact, that will parallelize both the hpodder update (downloading the feeds) and the hpodder download (downloading the actual episodes) commands.

Unlike ipodder, my code will make sure that no more than 1 thread will ever be downloading from a given server at a given time. ipodder had the terribly annoying habit of pointing all of its threads at a single server, thus pounding it while also providing little benefit for someone with a pipe fatter than the server's.

Before all this multithreaded stuff could be written, I needed to write my own status bar code instead of just letting curl display its own status bar. (That wouldn't work when there are 5 curls running at once)

I decided that I would write some generic status bar code, rather than something specific to hpodder. I took the apt-get status bar as an example, and whipped one up in Haskell and added it to my MissingH Haskell library.

But a status bar just begged for another feature: a generalized progress tracker. Something that could keep track of where a task (and its sub-tasks) are, calculate ETA, estimated time remaining, speed, etc. So I wrote that and made the status bar use it.

AND, a status bar begged for a generalized numeric formatter: something that could render 512 as 512, 2048 as 2K, 1048576 as 1M, etc. So I wrote that, and it's general enough that it can render into both SI and "binary" units by default (and others that users may want).

Finally, I wrote a function to take a number of seconds and render it in something friendly like 23m5s like apt uses, and shoved that in MissingH as well.

So now hpodder will have a status bar, and any other Haskell program can use the same status bar code in minutes because it's all generic. Or if someone just needs to render a number in megabytes, they can do that.

I really enjoy it when a program needs a solution that is generic enough to put in a larger library. I try to put as much of my Haskell code in MissingH as I can, so as to make it useful to others (and my other programs).

I'm working on some interesting project in Perl. I decided to make it fully OO, XP and other buzzwords-friendly. I just implementing some Registry Pattern which is just a Singleton Pattern. The Perl Design Patterns site is very useful, but I wanted more. The beauty of Perl is its flexibility. I'd like to call the class directly and by object. So it is my version:

  package System::Path;
  use File::Spec ();
  # Class attributes
  my %attrs = (
      home => undef,
      root  => undef,
      tmpdir  => undef
  );
  # Private constructor used by singleton
  sub _new  
      my $class = shift;
      my $self =   %attrs  ;
      bless($self, $class);
      $self;
   
  # Instance of singleton class
  my $Self;
  # Singleton constructor
  sub instance  
      $Self  = (shift)->_new;
   
  # Returns a string representation of the temporary directory
  sub tmpdir  
      my $self = shift;
      $self = __PACKAGE__->instance
          unless ref $self eq __PACKAGE__;
      return $self-> tmpdir 
          if $self-> tmpdir ;
      $self-> tmpdir  = File::Spec->tmpdir;
   
  # (...)
  1;

Then I can call: $dir = System::Path::tmpdir; or $dir = System::Path->tmpdir; or $obj = System::Path->instance; $dir = $obj->tmpdir; ...and each way is correct. BTW, they are great tunes on chillout@DI.FM radio at the moment :) "Sacred Cycles", "Greece 2000" and beautiful set of Marco Torrance vs. Xerxes... Oh my! :)

From Crikey: If a government wanted to figure out how best to defend the country, it wouldn t hold an inquiry into the air force. It would hold an inquiry into defence. So if a government wanted to figure out how to plan for responsible energy consumption in an age of climate change you d assume it would hold an inquiry into energy consumption. Instead, the Australian government holds an inquiry into nuclear energy.

The above really says it all. The Liberal government has decided that they want to get nuclear reactors regardless of what the citizens want. Surprisingly the Switkowski report was not very positive towards nuclear power. It concluded that producing 1/3 of Australia's electricity requirements would require 25 nuclear power plants, and that they would have to be built close to population centers, and mainly on the east cost. I guess that means about 8 reactors for Melbourne and about 10 for Sydney! It has been suggested that the federal government could force nuclear power on the states even if the state governments don't want it!

For those reactors to be economically viable a carbon tax is required (this means taxing all energy sources on the amount of carbon that they release into the atmosphere). The Liberal government has been opposing such a tax but now the report they commissioned recommends it.

The Victorian branch of the Liberal party seems to support such things. I have been walking past the office of Ted Baillieu (the leader of the Victorian Liberal party) on my way to work. He has a sign in his office window opposing wind power so I guess he'll be supporting nuclear power.

It's something to keep in mind at the election on Saturday. I'll be handing out how to vote cards for the Greens.

Dear Lazyweb, What is the JSF 1.2 XML-Syntax equivalent for

<img src="<c:url value='/static/foo.png' />" />

(this will make the URL relative to your application root, not to your web server; so if the app is installed in /foobar, the resulting URL will be /foobar/static/foo.png) My preferred solution would have a useful src= value so an XHTML browser can still display the page. Same for CSS stylesheets, links and similar. Please send me an email at erich@debian.org, I'll update the entry. (Comments are intentially not enabled.) Thanks. [Update: at least in apache myfaces, this should work (untested):

<c:url value="/static/foo.png" var="url" />
<img src="$ url " />

However, the template file won't render approximately in a regular browser. For easy-to-edit templates it would be nice to have an actual value in the src property. I have an idea how that could work with custom tags...]

What The Register doesn't tell you about the Nominet EGM today is the evil leftist elements that are controlling it. No less than 3 of the 5 board members present are left handed. Muhahahaha. We're taking over the world you know. Plus, it appears that deprived of the school market turkey twizzlers now have a new role being provided by hotels for conferences. And finally, once again, if you're a Nominet member, I hope you bloody voted.

I spent a good few hours fixing a security problem in the Debian Administration website over the past few days. (A theoretical hole, rather than one being actively exploited. Of course “theoretical” doesn’t mean it wasn’t real!) Now its time for everybody else to test/fix their sites Still behind, although less so than previously. Right now I’m in a happy daze after an amazingly wonderful romantic meal last night - and a fair amount of wine. I like to go eating out at posh restaurants once a month or so. That way it is regular, but still novel enough to be exciting. I guess I’m just a sucker for fancy food and people calling me Sir. (And only rarely adding “… you’re making a scene.”)

Working as much with the US as with the UK, Thanksgiving is always a noticeable holiday for me, even if I still have to work. If I had the luxury of the holiday this year, I'd be

1. Staying up all night to follow The Ashes. Sporting competitions founded in the 1880s don't have much regard for television and radio audience hours, alas.
   
2. Going to evensong at York Minster. The intimate and historic choir is an amazing experience at this time of year, as the candles take over from the weak winter sun.
3. Encouraging people to use the holiday to prepare their submissions for XTech 2007. Springtime in Paris and top technology seems like something to look forward to.

As it happens, I'll do No. 3 anyway and reluctantly miss out on the others. Happy Thanksgiving to my friends and colleagues in the US.

I skipped a week or two due to injury and lack of energy, but here are some more items for dwn. d-i etch RC1 was released, featuring a 2.6.17 kernel, easy setup of encrypted LVM, improved installation automation, and the return of installation floppies for i386, plus many other improvements and bug fixes. The improved NSLU2 support in this release in particular seems to be attacting a lot of attention. An RC2 with 2.6.18 is due soon. A release update was posted by Steve Langasek, it discusses an update of the timeline for release, calls for increased testing of etch, updates the release goals, and last but not least, unveils the codename for etch+1: lenny Changes are afoot to ftp-master.debian.org. While not yet officially announced anywhere, it's moved to a new, much more powerful server with terabytes of disk. Also, a new gpg key has been added that will be used to sign etch's release files for the lifetime of etch. Since this key isn't yet in the debian-archive-keyring package, there might be some minor issues when using apt, and debmirror is known to be broken by the unknown key. For now, the new key (6070D3A1) can be downloaded from subkeys.pgp.net. apt-zeroconf was announced by Franz Pletz. This is a decentralised apt cache that uses avahi to find other instances of itself on the LAN and share packages back and forth. Perhaps this will be useful at the next DebConf, which is now open for registration. The browser generally known as Firefox 2.0 has reached unstable as a new iceweasel package. Bug #354622 contains the sad backstory to this renaming.

So I am housed in University of Alberta Department of Philosophy as my supervisor is a philosopher and there is no seperate STS department. And this “academic housing” certainly has its advantages, like for example, learning about probably one of the most audacious (and frankly amusing) statments on religion ever… by Bertrand Russell:

My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a diseaese born of fear and and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilizaion. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknoweldge, but I do not know of any others. Bertand Russel. “Why I am not a Christian” p. 24

I am sure he turned over in his grave when his daughter said:

“He was the most fascinating man I have ever known, the only man I ever loved, the greatest man I shall ever meet, the wittiest, the gayest, the most charming. It was a privilege to know him, and I thank God he was my father.” Katharine Tait, My Father Bertrand Russell, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p. 202.

I'm sure there's a reason that the annotation file for this dataset uses an entirely different set of identifiers to the dataset it annotates, but for the life of me I can't think what it might be. Jolly vexing, regardless.

I took some time today to learn about OpenID. Is it just me or are these newfangled web protocols both much harder to learn and much more poorly specified than traditional internet protocols? Alternately, perhaps I'm getting too old. :-) Anyway, it's seems to be Not Evil, and I look foward to being able to log into wikis and other sites without having to register separately on each one. Although I note that it punts the spam and abuse problem to some as-yet unimplemented policy layer. After all, there's no mapping between an OpenID and an actual person, just between an OpenID and a web page somewhere. Although there is the potential for someone to do something interesting with an OpenID server that only gives out OpenIDs to people with verified gpg keys. As my own little gesture toward spreading OpenID, I've added an openid plugin to ikiwiki. There's a $5000 bounty for implementing OpenID support in free software projects, but I don't think I can collect on it, since it's limited to projects that have tens of thousands of users, and with 30 registered ikiwiki users, my userbase is a few magnitudes too small. Oh well.. FWIW, my personal OpenID is http://joey.kitenet.net/.

---

Update after some more hacking: Even nicer, ikiwiki can now be set up to use only OpenID for authentication, and not mess with passwords at all. I also added support for the MyOpenID.com affiliate program, which lets users jump from the wiki to creating an OpenID, and back smoothly. My personal wiki is now configured like this.

According to this article, also referred on Slashdot, an European Union project has been developed aimed to check if streets free of any traffic signal or other rules are viable. Seven cities and regions are involved, no one of them in Spain. And I hope things to stay as now. Perhaps this can work in those civilized cultures in which people try to respect others rights. But I am 100% comfident that this won't work in Spain. If people does not respect signal even if they are there and can be fined for not following them, I don't want to imagine what will people make if there are no signals and no rules. The most used motto will be: "And who the ***** are you to tell me that I can not do this?". yay!

In two weeks (Dec 3rd) there will be presidential elections in Venezuela. This will be the third time where Hugo Chavez, the current President, will be participating in the elections. The first time, in 1998, he won by 62%, then dropped to 59% in 2000 and currently some polls are giving him between 50 and 60 percent of vote intention. Since 1998, we’ve got a very active electoral movement and controversial situations which have raised very diverse opinions about our electoral system. If I recall correctly, in 1998 people voted using optic forms. In that moment, spanish Indra was the company in charge for the machines and most of the technology used in the elections. That was the time where the Supreme Electoral Council depended on the Executive power, i.e., the President. In 1999, Chavez proposed to rewrite the Constitution, and the National Electoral Council became an independent power. This Constitution was approved in two referenda in 1999, where touchscreen machines were used. In 2000, after the new Constitution was approved, new presidential elections were made. The same touchscreen machines were used and we made a transition between Indra and a multinational holding named Smartmatic. In 2004, after two millions and a half of signatures were gathered to recall Chavez presidency, the revocatory referendum was made, using the Smartmatic machines. Almost six million people voted to maintain Chavez in power. Of course, after eight years of the same party in the power, as well as other problems (namely a national strike and a Coup d’Etat in 2002), several ideas arised regarding the legitimacy of the election process.
Today, the National Electoral Council released a flyer in the press, where they try to issue these topics. I must recognize that, being a newbie voter, I was unaware of several of the things they published today. For example, 8 of every 10 venezuelans over 18 are signed for voting in the elections. That’s one of the higher percentages of public awareness about elections in Latin America, higher than, for example, Colombia. That means 16 million people are able to vote, and we’re used to get around 60 percent of participation. We do vote with touchscreen machines, and the results are completely computerized. The military guards all the equipment, and provides security to the randomly elected civilian which work as temporary personnel. Members of every involved party are present in all the election centers, as well as national and international observers. After you’re checked to vote, you have to give your fingerprint in a special biometric device. This is transmitted live, were possible, avoiding two people voting in the same day. After you vote, your finger is marked with silver nitrate, which goes away after two days or so. Of course, you’re only allowed to vote if you don’t have the mark in your fingers. The touchscreen machines prints a paper which you put into the traditional box. After the voting has concluded, more than half of the boxes will be opened and checked against the information in the machine. The boxes subject to this check are randomly selected, as well. A brief thought about the software used in the machines. In 2004 or so, we (the Free Software Community in Venezuela) struggled and made pressure to the National Electoral Council to reveal the code and publish it wide open. This has been achieved until some point, since every interested person or organization is allowed to take a peek at the code. Dozens of organizations have already done so and are impressed by the features that are now present in the code. Before the first vote is registered, the machine prints a zero-vote confirmation, and then subsequently randomizes the order of the votes registered in memory. Only after all the election centers are closed, the machines start transmitting information. This year, three hours past the closing time we’ll have the results. The final and most important, from my point of view, argument held to support our election system is the random queue organization at the election centres. The registry is sorted by ID number, the votes are randomly stored in the memory and the biometric device is used in a per-arrival basis. Therefore, since nobody takes the same time to vote, the queues will be unarranged therefore making it quite difficult to determine a possible vote sequence. This has been certified lately by the European Union, the Organization of American States and other organizations. Whoever wins this election, I’m quite confident about our election system. I just hope that other institutions in our Country start using reliable systems (for example, the national ID office) in order to give at least the feeling of being in a rightful State.

Yesterday we had a BOF at Kansai Open Source.Around 30people in the Kansai region gathered to meet.From Tokyo, Iwamatsu, Yamane, and I went there to represent Debian JP.

I read El Reg's article about the BCS complaining about the lack of IT skills. And found myself wondering once again what purpose the BCS actually serve. I mean, it's a great idea, a professional organisation that serves the needs of IT professionals. Except, what exactly are our needs? And what exactly does the BCS do? No one I know has been able to explain the point of them, and that include a few people who've been members. All their blurb sounds much more tailored to IT management than people who actually hack on stuff. What am I missing?

As if the underhand registration of children wasn't bad enough, this NO2ID newsletter describes another way to encourage people to submit to scanning:

"The scheme which is backed by the Home Office was first trialled in Yeovil but plans are afoot to expand the system to Coventry, Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, Gwent, Nottingham, Taunton and possibly Swindon. Drinkers must have their thumbprints scanned and supply their name, address and date of birth to enrol onto the system before they are allowed to enter licensed premises taking part in the scheme." "If you are in any of the towns affected, especially Yeovil, and are willing to do something then send an e-mail to phil@no2id.net (please put "pub fingerprinting" in the Subject).Don't get depressed, don't give in and get a home-brew kit - get angry and do something!" "PS. If anyone knows a pub that would like to take NO2ID beer mats, Newcastle NO2ID has created some with our logo on the front and key counter-arguments on the back, ideal for starting the discussions of the scheme that we need."

Not even our beer is safe from the ID State!

I've been pretty interested in making Web sites WebSoftwareFriendly for a while, so I'm pretty psyched to see that Yahoo and Microsoft have embraced the Google Sitemaps format. They've started a site for the format, http://www.sitemaps.org/ , which lists out the protocol, which seems to be unmodified from the original Google version. Sitemaps have been a necessary part of Web sites for years. Netscape -- back when it was a browser -- had an RDF-based sitemap format that had a brief flare of popularity just before Netscape went into its weird late-90s spiral. Then RDF people got really abstract and academic, and decided that sitemaps weren't what RDF was all about, and RDF sitemaps were forgotten. So sitemaps went off the air, and we've had to wait for a standard on the idea until today. Yahoo lets you submit sitemaps today, as does Google; Microsoft Live supposedly will support it sometime in 2007. One thing that's interesting is a new "ping" protocol, for when the site is updated. I'm not sure how well it works or if it's even implemented, but it's interesting to see it working. I think the weak part of this whole thing is that site owners have to submit sitemaps to each search engine; it would be nice if there were some sort of discovery, like an HTML <link> element, so that other types of Web software besides the big search engines would benefit. tags: sitemaps web software friendly yahoo microsoft google

Knowing when to hold 'em From O'Reilly's wrapup of the Web 2.0 Summit, I got a good link to some other Evan's Knowing When to Hold Em. It's a little discourse on the growth of Web 2.0 sites after they've been acquired. Evan Williams, the author and the guy who sold Blogger to Google, knows whereof he speaks. He has some graphs that show traffic for various Web 2.0 sites sloping precipitously upwards after their sale to some big company. The implication being, I guess, that the sites would have been more valuable to sell later. He also points out that few of the sites have benefited visibly from being acquired. I'm not sure the argument makes sense. Traffic is a cost centre as well as a potential source of revenue for companies. Keeping servers up, running, and cogent is hard work. Most small Web sites have been throwing labor and cash into their sites for a while, and the ability to keep such a site going into the Alexa top 100 is beyond most small companies. Paying for a lot of servers, developers, designers, sysadmins and bandwidth for another couple of years may make the site bigger and more desirable for acquisition, but it's a big risk to take. My favourite part of the discussion is that my friend Kevin Fox shows up at the end with some good points about when and how to invest. tags: web2con evan williams blogger traffic web 2.0 selling out

Free Software Java I've been programming in Java off and on since the first beta versions of the VM and JDK in 1995. The language has always had a certain cachet with the Open Source set -- the free-as-in-beer tools, good documentation, and cross-platform compatibility made it an Open Enough system, roughly equivalent to proprietary C compilers shipped with every Unix variant. Its release was roughly synchronous with the growth of the Web, and Java applet support in Netscape made the first round of rich client applications conceivable, if not exactly elegant. And then Java grew onto the Web server; and into other parts of the network; and then all of a sudden everything had to be Java. The system grew from this nifty little tool to The Enterprise Solution For Your Enterprise. Serious people worked on Java. I worked on Java when I needed to be serious. Java stopped being fun. Early efforts at getting Open Source Java VMs and development kits working were pretty successful, but they just couldn't catch up with the rapid pace of development on Sun's core product. But inclusion of the language in the Gnu Compiler Collection, the great JBoss J2EE system, the growth of Apache's Jakarta project, and the growing Java Community Process made Java less and less a regular product, built in a silo behind a corporate firewall, and more of an Open-Source-y project. So I guess it was inevitable that Sun would either Open Source its codebase, or end up irrelevant. They probably squeezed just about all they could out of it without going Free, so that's pretty impressive. I think Free Software advocates are supposed to be grateful about this; my main reaction is: why did you put everyone through all this crap for so long? You've wasted 12 years that could have gone into making Java really incredible. We'll see what happens. My main interface with the JVM for the last year or so has been through scripting languages like Rhino JavaScript engine (very fun) and Pnuts. Who's got time for Java programming any more? tags: java gpl jboss floss jakarta gcc jcp

Most of my fitness transition plan has been focused on exercise. Get more exercise and eat the same as you did before, and you will lose weight. This has to be true, based simply on physics. Back when I was using the Hacker's Diet, it worked like a charm. Then it was all about eating less calories, because I wasn't really keen on doing exercise in my olden days. It worked for a while. Unfortunately I got stressed and stopped countign calories, and weighing every day. I've started the weighing again, and maybe I can actually fire up gnuplot again and produce some pretty graphs like the one on the left.


I've had an iPod for approximately 5 years now. That puts me a bit ahead of the curve. I still remember seeing the original iPod commercial, and looking literally seconds later for how much it was, and seeing how much I could sell my old player on eBay for. Having been in the mp3 scene for a while at that point, I knew that it would turn everything on it's head. I got it and replaced my normal player for walking to and from class and listening while coding. Now I have a new iPod video, and it is the chief entertainment while I'm in the exercise room. At first I was just listening to my fairly large music collection. Then I started listening to podcasts again - they are about the right length, and I enjoyed them. Now I've harnessed the power of the video iPod to kill two birds with one stone: I'm watching my large collection of Anime at an hour a day. This means about 3 episodes if I skip the openings and endings. I also watch Heroes on Tuesday nights, after I transfer it from the TiVo. The only problem I'm having with this setup is that the screen is small, so I need to hold it fairly close to my face in order to read the subtitles.

Today marks one month on the diet and exercise regimen. I started on the scale at 344 and this week's average was 337, 7 pounds lighter. I'm going a little slower than my goal of 2 pounds per week, but I seem to be hitting the right buttons at least.

This week (Nov 10 - Nov 16):
Minimum: 335.5 (-2.5) (Nov 14)
Maximum: 339.5 (-0.5) (Nov 16)
Average: 337.2 (-2.05) (137.2 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2563 on 5 days
Average Calories per session: 512.16

So, after a lot of work to get the system up and running (and then changing it until others from the team liked it) we finally sent out the Call for Papers and Registration informations for DebConf7. Now, only about one hour later we already have 37 registered users in that system. Thats fast. A nice detail about the new system we use (except the complete change it means for everyone :) ) is that accounts you create now get re-used for all future DebConfs. No need to reenter your data every year. Additionally we (as in DebConf) can offer other Debian related events the ability to use this system for their stuff. That means - if you organize a Debian related conference and want to keep track of attendees, events/talks, manage a schedule, or just parts of this - contact me, it can be arranged easily. The advantage for your attendees/speakers is that they only need one account at one system, not one for every conference. And you as organizer get a fully running system for free. :)