Do you run a colocated server somwhere? Do you regularily work on it as root? Do you often have several consoles running? Do you sometimes not pay attention to the host information on the prompt? Do you shut down other computers, as your own? Then I strongly recommend you:

dpkg-statoverride --update --add root root 644 /sbin/halt

(To whom it concerns: Sorry for the downtime.)

To try and make it easier for non-Francophone Anglophones to understand this complaint and response in English, an attempt at translating the email is below. Errors are all mine:-

Our community (Debian) has a defect: the noisiest (and evidently the most extreme) are always the most visible. It is very regrettable that the people who say they represent Debian at JDLL, who are always only some of the 70 French developers of a thousand-developer project with many thousands of contributors, can have given you this totally false image. Their provocation was totally purile, even if the subject is a true subject of discussion. Unfortunately, this sort of position will always exist. I hope simply that the people who have been shocked by this childish behaviour and the also-totally-purile comments appearing in 24 hours on various blogs will have the intelligence not to fall in the same trap as their opponents, notably the easy amalgamation. Extremism doesn't always win in Debian (and not even as often as that), compare the last votes: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00018.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00017.html and so on. I would appreciate it if this appears in your blogs to temper a little the unacceptable comments that you have received from certain people... and I allow myself to give you respectively meetings at the next Solutions Linux to discuss all this calmly over $BEVERAGE. [ENDS]

I think posting the above without making it clear that it is a one-man initiative and apparently sent without consulting those criticised was downright sneaky and always going to offend. The daft acts of people at JDLL cannot be corrected honourably by more daft acts! The message also seems to me to suggest that it's somehow extreme to object to the Mozilla Corporation using trademarks to stop Firefox and friends being freely-modifiable free software (by requiring inclusion of material with no copyright permission to modify) and to try to dictate what goes into distributions. Unlike the firmware problem, Mozilla's trademark terminators are an obvious and active practical problem for debian maintainers and downstream. I hope the Mozilla fans who were upset by such a "childish" non-obvious reminder [JPEG, 70Ko] about the MozCorp trademark offensive will bring MozCorp into line. If not, I hope that the next time is better satire that informs more people and avoids the "purile" tag.

I believe that adding blogging technology to bug tracking systems (such as the Debian BTS and the Red Hat Bugzilla) offers significant benefits for users and developers.

It seems that there is only one significant difference between the features offered by blog software and the features required by bug trackers, blog entries are owned by the person making the post (the owner of the blog) and BTS entries are owned by the package owner. This is a minor technical difference, adding the ability for anonymous users (or users who have authenticated via an email address or other method) to create new entries in a blog owned by someone else is a minor feature change. Once the entry is created only comments would be accepted, and comments could be made in the usual manner with moderation etc.

The benefits of using blogging software (or extending current BTS systems) would be to have RSS feeds of bug reports and comments on bugs, include a single feed of all bug reports (IE blog entries) and updates (IE comments on blog entries) for a single blog (IE package) - this functionality doesn't seem to be common in blog software but surely will be soon.

This would allow Planets of recent bug reports in distributions or in areas. EG a SE Linux planet installation could syndicate the bug feeds for packages in Fedora and Debian as well as other sources of SE Linux information. The SE Linux bug feeds could include all bugs with the selinux tag in all blogs on the BTS, thus a single Planet configuration could easily cover all new development and debugging.

Another configuration possibility would be to have a single blog for all bugs in a distribution and to have tags for each package, this would become messy though as tags have to be used for issues that are not specific to packages (EG a "selinux" tag would list bugs in all packages that relate to SE Linux).

Tags could be changed by any user (possibly with some restrictions), and there could be special tags for release-critical bugs or for bugs in different stages of QA (for example the Red Hat Enterprise Linux approval process could be managed by adding certain restricted tags to the bug - this would also allow getting a feed of all bugs that have passed certain approval milestones). This would make it easy to get a list of all bugs in a certain approval category.

Current BTS systems such as the Debian BTS and the Red Hat Bugzilla could be extended to syndicate content. As they already have web interfaces and support automatically sending updates by email it should be easy to add the basic level of such support to them. But it might give a better result to go the other way and modify a multi-user blog system such as Wordpress-MU to have extra features for bug management.

BTS systems typically have bug ID numbers that increase sequentially while blog software typically gives something like http://blog.example.com/YYYY/MM/blog-entry-name.html when it's often more convenient to have something like http://bug.example.com/number. Of course it would not be difficult to have a little database that allows creating sequential numbers to map to arbitrary URLs in a similar manner to tinyurl.com. This could be either integrated into blog software (so that it says "bug #1234 has been created" or be available on demand (click a link to get a sequential number assigned). Incidentally using characters and digits for the short name of the bug (as done by tinyurl.com) would allow four characters to represent 1679616 bugs, this is enough for all bugs in the Debian and Red Hat bug databases combined. With tinyurl type technology there is nothing preventing us from having a single system creating unique IDs for all bugs in all distributions of Linux with a four character index (which is easier to remember than the 6 sigit numbers used in Debian and Red Hat at the moment).

I realise that most blog software will store the entries in a database which has sequential numbers assigned. So doing a database lookup to convert a human-readable URL into a sequential index when we have just done another database lookup to convert a sequential index into a human readable form is inefficient, but that's the way of things, computers do things inefficiently so that humans can work in ways that are efficient for them.

Note that throughout this post I refer to the Planet aggregation system, but really any of the aggregation systems can be used. One of the benefits of this is that people can use mailing lists, Google's reader, Planet, or any other reader they wish with the feeds. RSS feeds can be read by many programs and the user gets to choose which works best for them.

Catching up on blogs, emails and Debian mailing lists I see that nothing really important has happened while I was off-line: the dunc-tank caboodle escalated and died down when the majority voted that it was not worth the commotion, some people got upset at some other people and decided stop working on Debian because of that, Mozilla went even more bonkers about its trademarks. The dunk-tank scandal ended just like I thought it would. As one could imply from my eternal unstable concept, I do not see making releases as a the main thing that Debian contributes to the society - it is more about the integration and cross-empowerment of all the packages that Debian has. In that context, making a release is a not the most important job in Debian, but it need to be done from time to time. Release management combines technical and social challenges - there is not much of novelty in it (I imagine). So, from this perspective, there is nothing bad in money being paid to do this mundane and hard work, if we really, really need to release in a specific time frame (IMHO the only reason to release Debian in 2006, as opposed to 2008, is the Lars tattoo bet). If we return to “release when its ready” paradigm and aim for about one release every 2-3 years (and I see nothing really wrong with that) then paying release manager will not be needed. Money is about getting things done on a schedule. It does not make things good (or bad). It does not make thing important (or not). It make things go by the schedule (unless you pay by the hour). It is the obvious solution to releasing Debian in December. Now two questions need to be answered - will it work? and do we really want to release in December? The second thing - in any group of 1000 people anyone can easily find a lot of people that he would not love/not respect/disagree with/disregard/hate and be unable to work with. It is no reason to stop working on Debian, unless one does it only to be universally loved. It is inevitable that we will need to learn to do what we like to do without paying attention to the irritations. And about the trademarks - in Debconf 5 in Helsinki I was giving a talk at the Debian Day, just after I helped to win the first big fight against software patents in EU, and Branden (who was GPL at the time) asked me what do I think Debian should do about its trademarks. Both then and now I strongly think that trademarks and any other litigation inducing concepts (except enforcement of GPL) have no place whatsoever in free software. I think Debian should lead the way and give up the “Debian” trademark. And Mozilla should follow the lead. So what if there is a pron site “Debian chicks”? You will not solve that with litigation anyway (at least not in a year or two) and why should we really care? So what if some one make a distro and calls it SuperDebian? If someone will really think that it is related to Debian but better (especially despite warnings to the contrary), then that someone will really deserve to get the trojan planted in that distro. And again, against a well prepared criminal, litigation will not help much. So, did I miss anything?

(For the non-french readers, yes, there is an obvious grammatical error in the title of this post. This is a reference to a news story that happened years ago. Bubulle is Christian Perrier’s nickname, btw.) So, here it is, I am rethinking my involvement in the Debian Project. And it’s all Bubulle’s fault. I am not leaving the Project, because Debian is far more important to me than some rude bashing from Bubulle. It is a fact that Bubulle and me have agreed to disagree on a number of topics, it’s also a fact that we are both committed to Debian. In the past few weeks, a number of things happened, and we both said things we probably regret (at least I do). I do not like this paternalistic tone he sometimes demonstrate in mailing-list postings. I totally hate that, to be frank. But I can pretty much deal with it as long as it’s not aimed at me. He tagged one of his debconf-notes-are-evil-and-useless-crap-please-remove-it filed against one of my packages as “not-fixed” even when I explained that it is not a bug and the note really is what I want. It implies that I am not fixing bugs, which is something I cannot accept. Debian bug reports tend to have the very first priority in my todo list. So far, I can deal with that. But what I cannot deal with, is this mail from Christian to Paul Rouget (the moron who first posted the photos of the Firefox/Iceweasel posters from the JDLL last saturday, vomitting on us, and the comments were even worse). Sorry, the mail is in french, I don’t know how well Google Translate performs on this one but you should give it a try. This is purely insulting. Christian did not even contact me, he did not even try to get the facts straight, and it looks like my last post, in which I explain what happened during the JDLL, was totally useless. So, congratulations Christian. I’m perhaps not the most active DD, but I’m quite active nonetheless. Well, that is, I was quite active and reactive. This is likely to change starting today. I’m not going to drop any packages. I’m not going to disappear. I’m not going to let Debian France down. I’m not going to let my packages rot in the archive. But I’m going to be noticeably less active and reactive. Next time you talk to me, it’d better be to apologize for this mail you sent to Paul Rouget. I /quit from both Freenode and OFTC on monday evening. I probably won’t come back. I feel way better already without being on these two networks, without reading Rapha l Hertzog blatantly lie about dunc-tank, without reading a whole lot of other crap. I’m taking a much-needed break. Fuck you. Pierre Habouzit, Josselin Mouette, Denis Barbier, Sam Hocevar, and others (you all know who you are): thank you, you guys rock. And GO GO GO dunc-bank !

All the time since the Debian I18N conference in Extremadura I was moving around, staying in temporary places having temporary accesses to restricted Internet connections. Finally yesterday I got everything back - a permanent place to stay and a good permanent and unrestricted Internet connection there. Now I just need to compensate for the productivity loss that it is causing me P.S. There have been two bugfix releases of SBackup since my last blog post about it - bugs such as “having no regexes skips all files” and “always do incremental upgrades because we can not count” are fixed. Priority of SBackup process is reduced and configuration files are managed explicitly.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to take laptops on planes following the supposed terror threat in the UK which has been debunked by The Register and other organizations. There is an interesting eWeek article about this that contains the interesting quote "The built-in locks don't yet meet TSA specifications because they cannot be opened using the TSA master key" when reviewing a laptop case. Creating a master key is not that difficult and is explained in this PDF file. Theft by baggage handlers is quite a common occurance (see this google search for details).

So baggage handlers can easily reverse-engineer the TSA master key, steal laptops from baggage, smuggle drugs, and put bombs in baggage if they are so inclined.

There have been a number of cases of laptops containing sensitive financial, medical, and military data being stolen. Now someone who wants to steal data merely needs to work as a baggage handler and copy the hard drives of laptops before loading them. Data is more valuable if no-one knows that it has been stolen.

It would be ironic if an airline employee had their laptop hard drive copied and sensitive information about airport security was lost because of this.

After a recent mailing list discussion about computer security I'm going to be quoted in someone's .sig so I think that I need to write a blog entry.

Here is an article about a 2001 case of a man who was arrested for pedophilia and spent 9 days in prison: http://www.xatrix.org/article.php?s=3549 .

This article on The Register has links to a few other articles and describes how a man has been found guilty due to the apparent actions of a hostile program on his machine (and served 20 days jail time).

Rumor has it that pedophiles are really disliked in prison and that they are often attacked by other prisoners. Even spending a few days in prison as a pedophile could be enough to get raped.

Run the latest version of the OS for your PC with all security patches. If you buy a second-hand machine reformat and reinstall as the first thing that you do just in case the last owner had kiddy porn (even though they may not have known of it).

In the game show The Weakest Link competitors get voted off, usually not on whether they are weak but on whether the other contestents consider them to be a threat. It's mildly amusing as a TV game show but not funny at all when carried out on an airline.

Recently a flight from Malaga to Manchester was delayed because two passengers were considered to be suspicious by other passengers (either 6 or 7 passengers refused to get on the plane because of this). The passengers were thought to be speaking Arabic (as if there was anyone on the plane who would recognise Arabic when they heard it) and because they were wearing coats and looking at their watches. The two men in question had been searched twice and found to be clean, but a bunch of idiots on a plane thought they knew better and demanded that the passengers in question be removed.

Lessons to be learned from this for travelling to/from coalition of the willing countries:

1. Avoid the urge to check your watch when your flight is being delayed unless you are white. Non-white people who do what white people do in this situation are considered to be terrorists.
2. When travelling to a cold place (such as Manchester) you want to have a coat to wear when getting off the plane. The airline staff won't allow you enough hand-luggage space to store a coat so you will want to wear it when getting on the plane. This is fine if you are white, but if not white just deal with the fact that you will shiver when disembarking.
3. Learn to speak English for your travels. If you speak another language you will be considered to be a terrorist.
4. Whatever country you visit, stick to major cities as much as possible. Smaller cities have more racists and nationalistically bigoted people, there probably wouldn't have been a problem on a flight to London.
   

Also just avoid the coalition of the willing countries in your travels as much as possible. There are much less problems in this regard when the government doesn't depend on terrorism hysteria to justify going to war on the basis of lies.

I have recently purchased a large quantity of fair trade chocolate. Fair trade means that the people who produce the products will be paid a fair price for their products which will enable them to send their children to school, pay for adequate health-care, etc. Paying a small price premium on products such as coffee and chocolate usually makes no notable difference to the living expenses of someone in a first-world country such as Australia, but can make a huge difference to the standard of living of the people who produce the products. Also fair-trade products are generally of a very high quality, you are paying for the best quality as well as the best conditions of the workers.

I will share this chocolate at the next LUV meeting, hopefully the people who attend will agree that the chocolate is both of a high quality as well as being good in principle and that they will want to buy it too.

The Fair Trade chocolate I bought cost $6.95 per 100g. I went to Safeway (local bulk food store with low prices) to get prices on other chocolate to compare. Lindt (cheaper Swiss chocolate) costs $3.09 per 100g and has a special of $2.54. The Lindt and the Fair Trade chocolate are both 70%, but the Fair Trade chocolate is significantly smoother, has a slightly better aroma, and a better after-taste. So the Fair Trade chocolate costs slightly more than twice as much as Lindt, but I believe that it has a quality to match the price. Then I compared the price of a cheap chocolate, Cadbury Old Gold chocolate is also 70% cocoa and costs $4.29 for 220g, this makes it between 3.5 and 4.4 times cheaper than the Fair Trade chocolate. But if you like chocolate then Cadbury products probably aren't on the shopping list anyway. I believe that the Fair Trade chocolate I bought can be justified on the basis of flavor alone without regard to the ethical issues.

All Linux users know what it's like to have their quality of life restricted by an oppressive monopoly. We are fortunate in that it only affects us in small ways, not in our ability to purchase adequate food and health care. As we oppose software monopolies that hurt us in the computer industry we must also oppose monopolies in the food industry that hurt people in third-world countries. The fair trade programs are the best way I know of doing that. Hopefully after tasting the chocolate many LUV members will want to buy it too.

I'm currently working for a company that in the past has not embraced new technology. One of my colleagues recently installed a wiki which did a lot of good in terms of organizing the internal documentation.

The next step is to install some blogging software. What I want is to have every sys-admin run a blog of what they are doing and have an aggregation of all the team's blogs for when anyone wants to see a complete list of what's been done recently. The security does not have to be particularly high as it's an internal service (probably everyone will use the same account). The ability to store draft posts would be really handy, but apart from that none of the advanced features are really needed.

Also it would be handy to be able to tag posts. For example if userA did some work on the mail server they would tag it with SMTP and then at some future time it would be possible to view all posts with the SMTP tag.

I've done a search on google for this topic and there are many pages comparing blog software. But all the comparisons seem based on Internet use, they talk about what versions of RSS are supported etc. But I don't need much of that. An ancient version of RSS will do as long as there is a single syndication program that can support it. Performance doesn't have to be great either, I'm looking at less than a dozen people posting and reading and a fairly big Opteron server with a decent RAID array.

For the minimal requirements I could probably write blog and syndication programs as CGI-BIN scripts in a couple of days. They wouldn't support RSS or XML but that's no big deal. But I expect that if I use some existing software that someone recommends in a blog comment it will be faster to install and have some possibility of future upgrades.

In regard to my post yesterday about Planet Debian I received the following response:
James Purser said I'm betting that your feed is an atom feed. We had the same problem on PLOA with Jeff and Pias feeds when they switched to atom. Planet needs to be upgraded.
Well I am using an atom feed, so this probably explains it. Sorry for the inconvenience to the Planet Debian readers, I guess that things will stay the way they are until it is upgraded.

Also when viewing my blog entry in Planet Debian I realised that much of a spam message had got pasted in to the URL field for the Planet Debian link. Oh the irony that I only found this embarassing error because of a bug in the Planet software.

This brings me to another issue, Security Enhanced X. With SE-X (before you ask, I didn't invent the acronym) you can use SE Linux to control communication between windows on an X desktop. With a modification to the clipboard manager (klipper in the case of KDE) every piece of data that's copied from an application will have a security context assigned to it and this context will be checked against the context of an application that is to be the target of a paste operation. Klipper will also have to support relabeling clipboard data. Therefore if I want to cut text from my email client (Kmail) and paste it into Firefox then I would have to relabel it with the appropriate MCS categories. This would permit me to paste text from an email into a web form with a few extra mouse clicks, but would prevent me from accidentally pasting the wrong text. Keeping in mind the fact that there are many more embarassing things that could be accidentally pasted into a blog entry than the contents of a spam this doesn't seem overly difficult.

PS Before anyone jumps to conclusions. When I receive GPG encrypted email or other material that should be kept confidential I try and avoid cutting it, and if I have to do so I clear the clipboard buffer afterwards. Keeping spam a secret is not really a priority to me so I didn't take adequate precautions in this case.

One new technology for saving fuel in cars is the 6 stroke engine. This is an engine that has two power strokes for every intake of fuel. The first power stroke is from the fuel burning, the second is from water being injected into the cylinder and boiling rapidly using steam for power. A significant amount of the weight of a car or truck engine is the cooling system. With water being injected into the cylinder after every burn the engine will require no other cooling, this can mean a weight reduction of up to 500KG for a truck engine! It is claimed that this technique can "improve a typical engine s fuel consumption by 40 percent". Note that this technique could be combined with the technology in a Prius for even greater efficiency.

Simon Richter wrote an interesting response to my blog about clean energy. I'm guessing that the part of Germany he's from is similar in some ways to Amsterdam (where I used to live).

In Amsterdam tiny cars are used a lot more than they have been in most places. There is the Smart Car but there is also a tiny car that can only seat one person (I'll update this entry with a link if someone provides me one). The tiny car appears to weigh ~200Kg, has a maximum speed of 30Km/h, and is narrow enough to fit in bike lanes. Such cars will take little petrol and can be used for shopping. The short-distance car idea is being used by many people already in northern Europe.

Simon suggests having a standard baggage container that fits in all cars. I don't think that would work as there are many different design factors (parking space, cargo capacity, and aerodynamics) which force designers to choose different shapes.

I think that a better idea would be a standard baggage trailer that could be towed by any small car. It should not be difficult to design a trailer that can be safely towed at 30KM/h behind a tiny car. The supermarkets could rent such trailers to shoppers for a nominal fee. Then most shopping trips could use the cargo capacity of the tiny car, but when buying supplies for a party you could rent a trailer from the supermarket.

Another option is having shops deliver goods to you. I have observed an increasing number of people doing this at my local supermarket. Of course you would still need to take ice-cream home yourself and maybe milk and meat too.

Electric scooters are also a good option for travel. Unfortunately in Australia there are few good options for securing them at the moment. As an electric scooter is light enough to be carried it needs to be chained to something secure. In the Netherlands this wouldn't be a problem as the bicycle infrastructure includes plenty of bike racks to which you can chain your bike, scooter, etc. Of course the Netherlands is entirely flat so there's no need for an electric scooter. Melbourne has a lot more hills and most people aren't fit enough to ride a bike so scooters are needed to replace cars.

Regarding depersonalised cars. That would require a significant social change as currently cars are extremely personalised. One thing that I had been thinking about is the idea of sharing cars with neighbors. For example if you have an apartment building and there are a few people you trust then you could share a tiny car for going shopping. Sharing a car used for driving to work or for entertainment would not work well as the car would spend most of it's time in use (or at least parked somewhere away from home). Sharing a car that's used for small journeys would be much easier as such a vehicle would spend most of it's time at home.

In Australia most families have two cars. One is used a lot (spends maybe 70 hours a week away from home) and the other is used much less (maybe 10 hours a week). Instead of owning two cars it would be possible for families to own one car and share another.

Regarding the Pebble Bed Reactor, could the people who advocate it please read the Wikipedia article. The limiting factor is not thermal expansion (solids do not expand nearly enough) but the Doppler effect (fast neutrons are not as effective at triggering fission). But in spite of that issue, let's not consider an untested new reactor design to be the savior of nuclear energy. I think that most people who read my blog have a science or engineering background and know from experience that new technologies often don't work too well in the first version. When a new CPU has a bug it's usually not a big deal. When a new OS or application has many bugs it's often expected (expecially when the OS or application comes from a monopolist). But if a new design for a nuclear reactor turns out to have a bug then it will be a more serious issue.

I'm getting sick of blogger. The main thing is that I'm simply not a user. Taking what someone else gives me and just putting up with any failings doesn't suit me at all. I can deal with bugs in things I control (such as Linux distributions) because I can fix the bugs I consider important at any time.

So now I'm looking for a serious blogging program. Wordpress was strongly recommended to me after my previous post on the topic of blogs, but that was in regard to a simple blog program for Intranet use. I am now after a blog program that is designed for Internet use, it must have good security, support multiple users (some of my friends will probably want to use my blog server machine), and not be overly difficult to customise (I am resigned to the fact that I will have to learn another programming language - probably re-learning PHP or Java as that is where web programming is at nowadays).

One thing that I want to do is to have the main web page that displays all recent posts display each post in a frame with a separate Adsense section. The topics of my posts vary a lot so I want to have adverts that match.

Another feature I want is to have multiple RSS feeds with different settings. One use for this is to have tags for each post to specify which channel(s) the post will end up on, another is for Adsense for feeds functionality which I want on for some feeds but off for others. I also want to generate multiple feeds for different syndication services. Ideally a syndication service such as Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia would use a unique feed for sucking it's own data and also have a unique feed address advertised on it's site for the users (if this isn't supported or desired at the syndication level then I can do tricks in the web server to serve different content for different IP addresses). That way I can track use by the different services, work around bugs in syndication services that matter to me, and change settings for post summaries, etc to suit the syndication service.

In terms of HTML editing I only need the most basic functionality. I would be entirely happy to write blog entries in raw HTML, my friends would probably desire line breaks to be converted to paragraph or break tags and basic linking functionality, but they could probably deal with entering bold and italic tags themselves (the few of my friends who couldn't manage this would probably only want to write plain-text in paragraphs).

I also want to run my own syndication software. I guess I have to consider blog server and syndication server at the same time as there may be some dependencies (EG having them both written in the same language might be handy - I don't want to re-learn BOTH Java and PHP). The syndication software would ideally automatically collect the feeds from other syndication services that I specify (although I'm sure I could write a simple Perl script to scrape them from the Planet web sites). Then I want to provide an RSS feed of that content for anyone who wants it.

Please let me know via email or comments if you have any suggestions about which software to use.

At the start of the year I suffered a minor injury to my left eye. This brought my vision down to slightly below average for my age. A doctor and an ophthalmologist both thought that my vision was good enough at this level and that I don't need glasses. But the ability to use a small font means that I can have more text on screen and thus do my work more effectively. Since about March I have worn glasses all the time. Regardless of what the experts say I want to have good vision all the time and there is a significant difference between my vision while wearing glasses and that without.

It's often recommended that people get their eyes tested about every 2 years from when they are in their late 20's and also get a test done a few months after any eye injury. I strongly support such recommendations for anyone who works in the computer industry. Even if your vision is slightly less than it could be it will make a difference to your work. I have not found glasses to cause me any inconvenience, I'm sure that it would be bad for children to wear glasses but for adults the only potential issue is when playing sport (which is less demanding on your vision than reading an 8 point font on a typical monitor). I am constantly amazed by TV and radio adverts which say "do you wear glasses, if so then you must have considered LASER eye surgery". Glasses are fine (IMHO) and I will not consider having a LASER or other dangerous object pointed at my eyes unless I am in danger of death or blindness!

The testing apparatus that an optometrist uses is interesting to inspect if you like machines. It is a device with a huge selection of levers for inserting different lenses in front of your eyes until they discover the combination that gives you the best vision. If you get your eyes tested make sure you get the optometrist to explain everything, you can learn many interesting things.

Recently, I have had a further eye problem. Recently my central vision went blurry with a shimmering affect for about 40 minutes, but the peripheral vision was OK. An ophthalmologist diagnosed this as a migraine, apparently I got a very mild one with only a minor visual affect but no headache etc. One thing that is apparently possible when experiencing migraine related vision impairments is the ability to act on visual information without consciously knowing it (EG catch a ball without seeing it).

A migraine is a better diagnosis than I had feared. The movie Super Size Me (the topic of tomorrow's blog entry) contains an interview with a main who describes a diabetic vision problem that sounded similar to mine. Migraines don't cause permanent problems while diabetes can, and diabetes requires lots of unpleasant blood tests and injections.

Apparently migraines are often triggered by physical events or food items. If you suffer one then it's recommended that you write down as much information as possible about the previous 24 hours to help track down the cause. If you experience something similar to what I describe then do not take this blog entry as medical advice, instead rely on a doctor and whichever specialist they refer you to. But do write down everything that happened prior to the medical problem (keeping an accurate diary can't do any harm).

The Wikipedia entry on Migraines has a lot more interesting information, but don't take it as medical advice either. One particularly interesting thing in the Wikipedia article is the note that migraines may be caused by not having suitable glasses, or prevented by wearing special glasses.

The idea was not mine, but nobody seemed to do it, so I just did it and created openghana.org: It is meant to be a common domain name and portal for the various Free Software related groups in Ghana, especially Linux User Groups, and I hope it causes synergy effects. We are also thinking what services can be provided on that site. At the moment, there is planet.openghana.org, a blog aggregator with blogs from various members of the Ghanaian Free Software community.

Currently, there are two LUGs on openghana, but I hope that others will join as well.

During the past years, I have usually kept outside of heated arguments, but since I slipped on debian-private today anyway, I might as well go all the way and write a proper opinion, disguised as an outside view to simulate objectivity. Intellectual Icebergs Episode 10 talks about "Scales of Superiority". Simplified, we have a set of fields that we consider important to us, and where we will go to great lengths (and be irrational about it) to achieve a state where we can feel superior to others. To a large extent, that is what drives us on. If you think ballroom dancing is fun, you pick it up as a hobby, but if you place your "scale of superiority" in this field, you will go beyond that, and train every day, until you finally win the competition. Obviously, this is highly irrational to someone who is just not that "into it", but as they are generally not offended by you secretly sneering at their inferior dancing skillz (because they could hardly care less), this is not a problem. Now, inside Debian, we also have our scales by which we measure our success. For some of us, it is suitability for a particular field or work, for others it is rating by others. Debian has been suitable for a lot of tasks (since it is the universal operating system, after all), and has been held in high esteem for quality, so both camps were happy. So, what has changed? I believe that the biggest change was the advent of Ubuntu, and specifically, the community's reaction to it. A lot of people we considered our peers jumped ship, claiming that Ubuntu was "better". If you only cared about whether Debian was suitable for your needs, then your reaction was probably "good riddance". If you cared about peer rating, you were in hell now, as someone else was getting all the attention (and, since that is what your brain cares about really, all the MOTAS). In short, Debian's status as the superior distribution, your "herd" as the supreme rulers of the land of stability, your entire self-worth as defined by your "scale of superiority" was challenged. This is the situation we're in. Half of us feel threatened by Ubuntu, half of us do not, and to each group the behaviour of the other is completely irrational. Most of the behaviour we have seen in the past years is a direct result from this. The discussion about Ubuntu "not giving back patches" in the proper way was seen as an attempt at building a competitive advantage over Debian. That Ubuntu ships non-free drivers for hardware that is unsupported otherwise is a direct threat, because it allows them superiority in the field of hardware support. Now, with "LTS", they have even challenged our status as the distribution with the longest (heh) security support, while Debian shows severe stamina problems. That my girlfriend runs Ubuntu on her laptop is a direct threat to my masculinity, because I am unable to "perform" a network install on her laptop via wireless LAN. "I am sorry, dear, I have no idea why this device is unsupported, I never had any problems with that before." So we are looking for ways to regain our confidence. Some of us seek superiority by shifting their scales, claiming that while we're not as sexy as Ubuntu, we at least do not tie our users to our desktop, where they have to do kinky stuff to get to a harddisk, with us it is straight fsck, mount, umount. Some of us are trying to recreate Ubuntu's success by copying their methods (mandatory team maintenance, paying core developers) in the hope of eventually surpassing them. I can see that Debian also shares the goal of being a strong "contender" on the desktop, because "universal" simply includes everything, so I can understand that some developers are feeling threatened here. But I think I should ask you to get a broader view here. We are not measured by the number of one-user-only desktop installs we have. While it gives some short term satisfaction, it is not the same thing as a long-lasting installation on an university cluster and watching the users grow from nano to vi users. Debian is behaving as if it had a massive midlife crisis. I think we should try to remain calm here. Because Debian with a wig will not look young, it will look ridiculous, and in the long run, Ubuntu will either grow up, try to become another Debian (which makes them redundant), or they will stay in their niche and score the desktop users, which need not bother us at all, because they are bad in the sack anyway. I'm now going to turn myself in to Dr. Freud, and you go and get laid.

Wow, I finally found a way to make Google Analytics. Above the graphs that don't display (I have no flash), there is few icons beside the word Export. The first icon is text, so I can get all the nice aggregated data out of Google Analytics using the text output.

I've spent the entire day on PlanetPlanetPlanetPlanet. It's been fun to code with WvStreams again. A demo page has Simon and myself on it. If anyone is curious to look at the source code, it's available with either 'bzr get http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~ja2morri/bzr/ppppplanet/' or as a tarball

For complete speed freaks, this aggregator is about 10x faster than PlanetPlanet.