It seems there is a long standing tradition to post a “Hello Planet” entry when being added to a new planet. Well Hello http://planet.debian.org , My name is Brandon Holtsclaw, and have done a bit of Debian and Ubuntu work over the last few years ( and hopefully will continue to do-so ). Only my posts taged with “planet-debian” are fed here so hopefully I wont spam totaly “unrealated to debian” things. Thanks Mako for getting me all setup. If you would like to see all my posts or know a little bit more about me you can follow these few links ( or drop me an email ):
http://www.imbrandon.com/
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=brandon@imbrandon.com
https://launchpad.net/~imbrandon Nothing more to see here … move along.

After posting about filtering accuracy I got to thinking about the test I was using. It appeared to me that there should be no errors in the mails that crm114 had already been trained upon but here I was, coming up with errors when I trained the css files until there were no errors, and then used a reg exp that tried to find the accuracy of classification for all the files, not just new ones. This did not make sense. The only explanation was that my css files were not properly created and I thought to try an experiment where isntead of trying to throw my whole corpus as one chunk at a blank css file, I would feed the corpus in chunks. I cam up with an initialization script to feed my corpus to a blank css file in 200 mail chunks; and, while it was at it, renumber the corpus mails (over the years, as I cleaned the corpus, gaps had appeared in the numbering). I have also updated the retraining script Voila. I am getting a new set of css files which do not appear to show any errors for mails crm114 has already learned about in other words, for mails it has seen, the accuracy is now 100%, not 99.5% as it was a couple of days ago. While it is good news in that my classification accuracy is better than it was last week; the bad news is that I no longer have concrete number on accuracy for crm114 anymore the mechanism used now gives 100% accuracy all the time. The funny thing is, I recall going through this analysis a couple of years ago, where I predicted that one could only check for accuracy with a test corpus that had the same characteristics as real mail inflow, and which had not been used for learning. That wold mean I would have classified testing corpus that could improve the efficiency of my filter, but was not being used to provide accuracy numbers I have gone for improving the filter, at the cost of knowing how accurate they actually are.

A nicely placed movie about a bleak future, and how people cope with despair and desperate times. While it did not quite come together in the details (anything outside of England was a big unknown blur), and the London of 2027 seemed not much different from any current day city under semi martial law (technology, for instance, seems to have frozen at todays levels), it was still fast paced, and enjoyable, and anyway, this is not primarily a sci-fi flick. Recommended.

Yes, this is about a movies based on a comic based on a movie from the 50 s. And they did a wonderful job of conveying to comic book feel and yet, though you could appreciate the abstract, stylized presentation of the comic, most of the movie still came straight from Herodotus. The training of the Spartans, the throwing of the Persian emissaries into a pit and a well this cleaving to the historic details was a pleasant surprise. The history channel presentation is recommended for the perspective it brings to the tale. There were some poetic licenses the whole bit about a highly placed Spartan traitor was made out of plain cloth; and the current convention wisdom is that Leonidas went to Thermopylae because of his religious beliefs, and conviction about the sacred prophecy of the oracle at Delphi, not because he thought Persia would destroy Greece (remember, Xerxes won, and sacked Athens). Indeed, there was little concept of Greece at that point. Indeed, the whole stick about the last stand at Thermopylae saving democracy seems suspect the stand bloodied Persia s nose, and delayed them by perhaps 5 days in an advance that took the better part of a year that the Greeks knew about. No, it was the combination of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, Plataea over the course of half a century that ensure that the no name David of the Greek city states survived against the Goliath of Persia. And, then, of course, came the boy wonder out of Macedonia. Highly recommended.

Apparently some people worry that Gforge may be abandoned, or on the verge of being superseded with the proprietary "Gforge Advanced Server" rewrite. Let it be known that I for one have no plans to switch to Gforge AS, for all the reasons you'd expect from a free software user and advocate: I don't have access to the source code (it's made illegible by some sort of industrial PHP obfuscator), I can't hack it because the license doesn't allow me to, I can't audit it for security flaws, I can't adapt it to particular needs, etc. Since a significant part of my income comes from maintaining Gforge instances for clients, with local modifications for their particular needs, it's an economical necessity that Gforge stays free. And evolving. Right. Having said that, I guess I have to show concrete evolutions in addition to principles and ideals. So what changed recently?

• I believe the Gettext transition is now more or less complete. The initial bulk of it was done during the summer, but a few odds and ends were still dangling, such as plural forms here and there. The translations should now also be used in the appropriate place (no more receiving an email in Dutch even though you're French, simply because the person who clicked on the button that triggered the email was Dutch). I'm trying to bring the French translation to completion, but it's a long and boring task, so it'll happen gradually. As for other languages... "patches welcome".
• I've started using IPv6 at home, with a dual IPv4+IPv6 stack and hostnames that resolve to both kinds of addresses. The problem is that neither Gforge nor its packaging were designed with IPv6 in mind, so the Apache virtual host didn't listen on the IPv6 address, and even when it did, Gforge wouldn't understand IPv6 addresses in its session code. All that has been fixed, and you can now run Gforge on a dual-stack server.
• Lots of "undefined variable" PHP warnings have been fixed (not only by me, by the way). They probably weren't harmful by themselves, but they were signs of sloppy coding.
• The FCKeditor plugin now uses FCKeditor as provided by the Debian package, rather than its own (outdated and unmaintained) copy.

All this has committed and uploaded to Debian. As usual, please test and report failures. Plans for my foreseeable future include:

• Making the clean-and-working Mediawiki integration plugin public (the delay is not due to technical reasons).
• Using placeholders in SQL queries, to reduce the risk of SQL injections. This probably means a full audit of all the places in the code where queries are made, so it may take some time.
• Maybe a full audit for HTML injections and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, too. Probably a long and boring task too.
• Switching to ucf for management of config files.
• I'm still toying with the idea of switching to dbconfig-common, too. But since I'm not sure it's going to be good enough, that's not very high on my priority list.
• I'm pondering whether I should try to make a live-CD with an installed Gforge. Or maybe a fully automated installation with debian-installer and preseeding. That may debunk the misconception that Gforge is hard to install.

Places where help would be most welcome:

• Translations! I can do French, I fixed a few strings in Spanish and Japanese, maybe I can do some minor fixes in German too, but that's not good enough. Of course, translators should be aware this is not a small task: gforge.pot contains about 2200 strings. But even reading and fixing (or removing) the obviously incorrect translations would help.
• Packaging for RPM-based systems. I fear that aspect of Gforge has been all but abandoned, and I don't think there are any working RPMs around.
• Testing, testing, testing. Gforge is rather versatile, and a big piece of software. I don't use all the features myself, so bugs are likely to lurk in those places I don't see often enough.
• I know some of you out there have a locally patched Gforge installation. You know you'll have a hell of a time porting those patches to the next version when you upgrade. Why not share them, so everyone profits from them (and you can then profit from the patches from the other users)?

There. That was the news. Now for a bit of trivia: it's amazing how having a metric of one's productivity gives an incentive to increase it. I found mine on Ohloh, which provides code and license analyses and statistics on free software projects, as well as statistics on commits by contributors. They even have a shiny widget with a scrollable timeline showing commits over time, as well as comparative commit graphs. My obvious personal goal is to get up to the first position among the contributors, but of course I wouldn't complain if the current top committer stayed ahead by springing back into activity.

Serious server rooms have large (and expensive) air-conditioning and filtering systems. Most “server rooms” however are not like that, often it’s just some space in a store-room, sometimes near printers (which are a source of air pollution [1]). The servers that are stored in serious server rooms have air filters as a standard feature. For small server installations it’s often a desktop PC used as a server which has no filters (and often lacking other server features such as ECC RAM). Recently Dell in Australia started selling low-end PowerEdge servers for $450 plus delivery (similar machines to the $800 Dell servers I previously blogged about [2]). Also refurbished machines from HP and IBM can often be purchased at auction for similar prices. Even if you have a proper server with filters on all air inlets it’s still a benefit to have reasonably clean air in the server area. A few years ago I bought four Sunbeam HEPA [3] air filters for my home to alleviate allergy problems. I’ve had one running 24*7 in my main computer area for most of the time since then. As well as wanting to keep my machines free of dust I have the extra issue of machines that I buy at auction which often are filled with dust - the process of cleaning them frees some dust in the air and it’s good to have a filter running to remove it. Excessive dust in the air can prevent cooling fans from operating and cause damage to hardware and loss of data. Of course the really good servers have fan speed sensors that allow the CPU to be throttled or the machine to be halted in case of severe problems. But for desktop machines you often only have the temperature control mechanisms that are built in to the CPU and sometimes machines just start having memory errors when the fan malfunctions and the machine gets hot. As one of the biggest problems facing server rooms is heat dissipation I decided to measure my air filters and see how much electricity they use (it seems reasonably to assume that all their energy eventually gets converted to heat). I’ve now got a blog page about power use of items related to computers [4]. My air filters take 114W when on the highest speed and 13.9W when on the lowest. Initially I was a little surprised at the figure for the high speed, but then I recalled that the energy required to move air is proportional to the speed cubed. I’ll just have to make sure I don’t leave an air filter on overnight in summer… I’m now going to recommend such filters to some of my clients. Spending $400 on an air filter is nothing compared to the amount of money that a server failure costs (when you have expensive down-time and pay people like me to fix it).

• [1] http://www.computeractive.co.uk/computeractive/news/2195474/laser-printer-research-worrying


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/25/designing-computers-for-small-business/


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepa


• [4] http://doc.coker.com.au/environment/computer-related-power-use/

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Yesterday I went with Nadezhda to the always interesting teatro/bar el Vicio. as she found that Klezmerson were going to play there. We tried to get some more friends to join, but gave too short notice, and ended up having a great night out just by ourselves. Just as a side rant: I just hate that places I want to refer to, and I want other people to get to know, have Flash-only sites! You can read some more things about Klezmerson at -ugh- their MySpace site, even get some of their music there.Their name give away their basic lines: Klezmer and son. The common line to all of the songs they performed is a strong Klezmer feel. Benjam n Shwartz and Mar a Emilia Jimenez (violin/keyboard and flute respectively) are responsible IMHO for most of that spirit, as their instruments are the most traditional ones, and they carry the melodies. But the rythms they play to are plain crazy and extremely well engineered - Cuban son, Colombian cumbia, jazz, rock, and... Well, I'm not a musician. But I really, really enjoyed them. Of course, bought their CD as well.Congratulations to a very surprising and unexpected band!

My girlfriend has to use Windows, because university she studies does not give her another option. Now she got some crap on which she should do some statistics. This crap is being called SAS. I have not yet seen how does it look like, but I already enjoyed funny hours with it's installer. As I'm currently on the other side of world, I have to do all remotely... The basic problem is simple: I do not have much space on C: drive and it does not provide option to install on another drive. First she tried to install it herself, the setup fucked up so much, that it deleted NTLDR and friends from root folder, so Windows didn't boot up again. Fortunately there is also Debian on that machine, so she booted to it, I installed ntfs-3g and restored needed files from Windows XP installation CD (the recovery console did not work, don't ask me why). So great, after about one hour we have back working Windows! Now I still did not have idea what is the problem. However the failure appeared when the crap was trying to install some special JRE it has included. When I started the installer for this JRE manually, it showed that there is not enough space. Why the hell did not the original installer show this? Well I did some cleanup on the disk and I got 1GB of free space. Hope that it will be enough. No. Somewhere near 58% installation is fucked up again with error -2147483648. Wow nice number! Looking at disk space, it's down to few kilobytes. So again the same problem! Okay, let's clean it up more and hopefully installer will resume. But I should not hope for anything good from this installer. The only option it now gives me is to reboot. Reboot, start again installer and let's see what will break this time. Now it found out that some Microsofts runtime is missing. Why it was not missing last time? Okay, let's install it and (of course) we need another reboot. System started up, installer launched and it seems to go on quite well, only the last few percents are taking incredibly long, but the crap seems to finally installed and it even runs! Few questions: Why they do not check for required space in installer? Why do they force me to disable anti virus during installation? Why does not remote desktop from Windows work? Why is there such mess in Windows, especially in Windows folder? Why are temporary files located all over the disk? As last but not least thing I would like to thanks everybody who made ntfs-3g and VNC work, I would never fix this without these tools.

For a geneaology project of my familiy, I generated this fairly straight forward drawing of my Grand-Grand-Grand-Grandfather s descendants (click for full image): Unfortunately, this representation does not give any information about when someone lived, or how long. I tried to add this information to the graph, and I coudn t think of anything better than drawing each person as a rectangle whose upper edge lies above the parent s rectangle, and whose height and vertical possition represent the life span. This is the result (here you really have to click for a full view): This is obviouly not very helpful. Does anyone have a better idea how to draw this?By the way, these graphs are generated using haskell and the cairo bindings provided by gtk2hs very handy, as I also get svg output and pdf output for free.

First step of the ultimate organization steps of the trip to India for FOSS.IN, I went today to the Embassy of India in Paris to leave my visa application. I left home at 06:20 to get one of the few trains running because of our strikes. Got two buses relatively easily from the station to the Embassy, then I arrived there 8:30 with already about 40 people before me in the queue. Discussion with fellow people in the queue...and I learned that there was no certain chance that I could actually *enter* the embassy to leave the form, my passport, my photos and the 50 bucks^W euros needed for a passport to India. I entered the embassy at....11:00 when their doors opened (we've been told that strikes in French transport are the reasons for the employees to be late.....I really wonder *how* *we* got there, indeed. Apparently, all people applying for visas live in Paris 16th. Then I got a nice ticket with a number on it (215 for the record) and began waiting in a small romm packed with dozens of people. First number called: 170. Three hours later, I finally got the pink receipt which gives me the right to worry about my passport getting lost and, hopefully, get it back on Monday with a visa for India on it. It's 14:45 while I'm writing this and I'm simply on my way back home after losing a full work day for a stupid administrative piece of paper. Have to be back on Monday 16:00 to get the visa back. Someone was saying in the queue that some days, you can wait up to 23:00 to get your passport back. It is terribly sad that this visa system still exists in some countries (not even blaming India for this: we (European Union) do exactly the same for citizens of India, forcing them to visit the French/spanish/German/whatever Schengen country in Dehli or Mumbai, to get a visa for EU. And I can really imagine what mess it can be as well. It was however interesting to see that all this crap was happening with laughs, good stories and friendly atmosphere with all the other French people waiting. Who says that French people are harsh and rude? Or is it already the influence of India on us? Anyway, Sam Hocevar told me yesterday he plans to come tomorrow for his application. Good luck, Sam and don't forget any of the requirements as well as a good coat, something to read (or your laptop to hack, with some spare batteries....and, no, no hackable WiFi around). Note that the 50 euros *have* to be cash money. So, India, here I am....nearly..:-)

CHRISTOPHER MCKINLEY asked:

"I live on the costa blanca spain. I have been told that bbc and itv are to start broadcasting a free to air service which we will be adle to pick up on a small dish. It's scheduled to start in Feb/March 2008. Could you tell me if this is true?"

No, I can't tell whether that's true. The BBC/ITV Freesat service is expected to start in 2008 and I think March is meant to be when Channel 4's Sky encryption contract finishes, so I guess that's where that date comes from. That seems highly probable to me. Then again, Freesat has been advertised as launching in 2006 before. However, I doubt that BBC and ITV will move off of the Astra 2D spot beam that they moved to when they went free-to-air and back to the wider beams needed for small dish reception on the Costa Blanca. So, it will still not work for you. Sorry. (I'm not too cross about that, because the main terrestial Spanish channels seem to be encrypted on satellite.)

I'm glad to note that there's been a lot of movement over the last few weeks for the Montreal Coworking space. Patrick Tanguay, who's been organizing the project, let me know recently that we're closing in on a space. Which is just fantastic. Coworking is a loose term for a number of different ways of working together. The term is most commonly used for a kind of shared office where participants pay for either a fixed space (their own desk) by the month, or they pay for the use of a pool of free spaces (shared desks) on a daily or part-time basis. There are the kind of office resources, like WiFi, conference rooms, printers, copiers, etc. that you expect from an office, but unlike most shared-office situations, there's also an emphasis on community and communications. It's a great kind of work environment for people who would otherwise work at home or in caf s, such as freelancers, contractors, and startuppers -- or for people visiting from out-of-town. I've been to a couple of the Bay Area (California) coworking spaces -- the one at Citizen Space in San Francisco and the one at SocialText in Palo Alto. Both were convenient, fun, and social -- a good place to get some work done. Patrick's been working on a Montreal coworking space for a while -- talking to the City and neighbourhood development organizations -- and he's settled on a space in Mile End. It looks pretty fantastic. You can see the pictures and a map at the Montreal Coworking Web site. I've been working out of the house for about 5 years, and I really like the freedom and convenience it affords. That said, I'm really looking forward to having a more formal environment to work in than my home office. It's great here, and I feel very comfortable, but it would be nice to be out of the house. I also tend to meet with contractors and partners at local caf s, which can be distracting -- I'm looking forward to having meeting rooms. There's a 5 7 ("sank ah set" -- it's what we call a cocktail party here in Montreal) planned for people who'll be involved in the site planned for this Wednesday, November 21, at Bar Inc. (250 Mont-Royal Est). I won't be there -- we'll be in New Jersey by then -- but I hope others interested in the coworking take the chance to go. tags: coworking montreal patricktanguay

JS-Kit and data portability I've been a big fan of JS-Kit since I heard about it. I featured it in my list of 10 Web APIs for LinuxWorld, and I use it on my own personal site for comments. But one thing that concerns me, and that I've asked for clarification from JS-Kit about, is data portability. If they went out of business (heaven forfend), or if I figured out another cool way to do comments on my site, I'd like to be able to migrate old comments to the new system I'd build/use/buy. But as far as I can tell, there's no interface to download all comments on a site (either in HTML or some other structured format). I think this is going to be a key issue for people building Web sites with UI widgets in the future. It's a really, really useful way to make sites, but I don't think many developers are going to be willing to invest in a platform with no "insurance" that they can be flexible in the future. Sure, it's free of charge, and it seems kind of mean to use the poor JS-Kit folks and then move on to someone else -- but realistically it's an option you need for development. tags: widgets js-kit dataportability webapis

One-liners Some other stuff I'm thinking about today:

• On the "upcoming events" front, we've got some plans to make BarCampCanada1 happen here in Montreal in May 2008. I'm not sure how that's going to shake out, but I'm excited about the possibility of a nationwide BarCamp.
• I'm interested in Heather Ford's and Jimmy Wales's 50 parties idea - having fifty parties in one year to bring together local Free Culture people. I think we should have a party here in Montreal. Maybe in the Spring...? Maybe to coincide with BarCampCanada1?

tags: 50parties montreal barcamp barcampcanada1

This is a nice little bit of shell magic I discovered today:

trap true TERM
kill -- -$$

The first line means that when the shell receives a TERM signal, it executes true. The normal behaviour would be to kill the process, so this means that the shell is immune to people sending a TERM signal to it. The second line sends a TERM signal to the process group (- is the modifier to indicate a the process group of the PID, not just the PID) of the current process ($$). The end result? Everything spawned by this script which hasn't gone and re-parented itself is killed: the ultimate in cleanup. NP: Dedications, Klimek

There is an interesting web site WorseThanFailure.com (with the slogan “Curious Perversions in Information Technology”) that documents amusingly failed projects. The name used to be TheDailyWTF.com but changed due to the idea that for some projects success (interpreted to mean limping along in production) is worse than failure (being scrapped and re-written). I’ve created a new category WTF [1] on my blog to document such projects, both ones that I have personally witnessed and ones that friends and colleagues have seen. In the 90’s I spent some time working on an OS/2 GUI program to be the front-end for a mainframe backed system used by call-center workers. The first thing that they did was to develop a file naming scheme, they decided that all source files should be in the same directory (not unreasonable), but that 8.3 should be the limit of file name lengths in case there was a need to port the system to Windows 95. The fact that porting a program which did little other than display a GUI and talk to a S/390 server to a different OS was difficult (given the large amount of platform specific GUI code) was lost on them. Then they decided that the first two letters would be “FE” in case the source was merged with another bank project (of course the bank had many “Front End” systems talking to mainframes - so even this didn’t guarantee that they would be free of name clashes). Characters 3 and 4 were to represent the section of the program, and as the 3 character extension was one of “.h” or “.cpp” that left exactly 4 characters to name the file - we may as well have numbered the source files. Eventually one of the guys started making jokes about the file names by trying to pronounce them as words and that convinced a majority of the developers that the files should have long human-readable names. As the NMAKE expert (they insisted on not using unsupported software such as GNU make) it was my job to fix all the file names. The bank had an internal users’ group for the C++ development environment, but the contractors were not invited to attend. You might think that it would make sense to have the most skillful C++ programmers attend the meetings and share their knowledge, but apparently attending such meetings was a perk of being a permanent employee. What do you do when you have a C++ development project running behind schedule and a permanent employee who has had no prior exposure to C++ and wants to learn? One manager believed that assigning the junior programmer to the project is a solution to both problems - it was good for teaching the programmer C++ in a hurry but not so good for the deadline. There was a lot of excitement related to the back-end development. The mainframe guys assured me that CICS could never handle bad data and it totally wasn’t their fault if my program sent bad data to them and the region crashed. The first CICS region crash occurred when the mainframe guys told me to make the unused space in text fields “empty” - to a C programmer this means filling them with the 0 character but it killed the CICS region (apparently “empty” means filled with spaces to CICS programmers). A later region crash came when they told me to change the field length for the account name everywhere that it occurred - they told me that they wanted the change immediately - so I changed a macro definition, ran “make”, and sent a transaction with the changed size. Apparently “immediately” really meant “after we have spent an hour of software development changing magic numbers throughout our system”. I’m assuming that COBOL has some facility that roughly compares to C macros for defining field lengths and that it was the programmers not the language that was at fault. When the project became seriously behind schedule they hired some expert programmers from another country to help with the development. The experts decided that we needed to redesign the system (not that it had been designed in the first place) to use a “model view controller” architecture. When the real business logic is all on a S/390 and the only logic in the front end is to combine the contents of some screen-scrapes from a virtual 3270 terminal into a single GUI dialogue (with the first screen occasionally getting data from the IVR system) the benefits of MVC seem rather small. The new MVC version of the system was dubbed “phase 2″ and there were a series of deadlines for changing over from “phase 1″ which were missed. So the original team of developers continued on their project without any help from the “experts”. The last report I heard (some time after leaving the project) was that Phase 1 had gone live in production while Phase 2 was still being developed (at that time Phase 2 had a year of development and Phase 1 had about 15 months). The lesson to be learned from this is that management should only hire people that they can control. If you hire a consulting company and then let them do whatever they want (as opposed to solving the problem that they were hired to solve) then at best they will do no good and they may just slow things down. One of the more memorable incidents was when the project manager was talking to his 2IC, he said “I think we’re really breaking ground, [pause] I’m breaking wind and we’re breaking ground”. My desk was a few meters from where the wind (and ground) were being broken, I unfortunately was able to verify that wind was being broken but was not as certain about the ground. I did learn some useful things during this project, one was the fact that sample code from library vendors should not be trusted and ideally should be read from a print-out not pasted into the project source tree. The CTI library vendor had buffer overflows in their sample code. Another useful thing was the coin-tossing method of dispute resolution. If two good programmers have a disagreement about how to implement something tossing a coin is a quick way of resolving the dispute - this only works with two good programmers (in which case either idea will work). The project in question was messed up in many ways. I may write another post in the WTF category about it.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/wtf/

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I liked the book. Sure, it is The Lord of the Rings meets Star Wars , but, the book had a nice flow and it was written by a fifteen year old, fer gawds sake. The very fact that he can turn out a page turner of a book when others of his age can t string together a grammatical sentence spelled correctly is amazing. Overall, derivative, unoriginal, and simplistic though the book is, it has an original charm a very good book for children, and one that adults can read through as well. So I went to this movie with high hopes. What a let down. This was merely a notch above the Beowulf debacle. Lack luster performances, bland, drudge of a movie, with all kinds of interesting elements and nuances from the book removed. Crude, unimaginative, ham handed performances all around. The plot line, which did not follow the book, was dumbed down, there were implications that the Elven princess was a potential love interest (faugh), and the refreshing pace of the book fell off to a plodding soporific caricature. It is an offense to the book, and to the author. I was going to point out the differences between the movie and the book; and why they difference made the movie worse, but after 30 or so items this post would have gotten to be too big. And, having written it, I have the release of the rant, so I no longer have to include it here. Anyway, Wikipedia says that the film came in at #235 in the all time worldwide box office chart but was met with dismal critical reviews, scoring only a 16% composite score on Rotten Tomatoes I feel sorry for you if you suffered through this, as did I.

I've been getting really interested in the new crop of Linux-based operating systems for mobile devices. I got a Nokia N800 earlier this year, which I've found really useful -- although a little frustrating, too. And I've been following the developments on OpenMoKo with great interest, too. So last Monday, when Google Android came out, I offered to give an experienced developer's opinion of the development kit for Network World. I spent most of the afternoon trying out the SDK, checking out the documentation, watching the presentation videos, and working on sample applications to get a feel for it. I'm pretty impressed with Android, and I think it's got a good shot to become the Open Source mobile application platform. I think that whoever wins in this space has the chance to shape how all mobile phone platforms work in the future, and to take a good chunk of the market. Opening up the phone platform to allow a real marketplace of third-party apps is, I believe, going to be a huge advantage for whoever can make it work. I think the main two contenders in the area are well ahead of Android so far, but they're really going to have to capitalize on that lead in the next 8-10 months before the first Android handsets are set to hit the market (late 2008 -- although we'll see about that schedule). And I'm not sure they've got the means and commitment to do it. Nokia has been screwing around with the N series of Internet tablets for a while. Which is great -- the operating system is clever, the GUI ("Hildon") GTK-based, and development in Python on the platform is a breeze. The basic tools -- media player, RSS reader (ingenious), Web browser, email, etc. -- work well. However, for unexplained reasons, Nokia hasn't put a damn phone into the thing. If there is a similar device that does everything that the N800 (or N810) does, plus has a phone in it, which one are people going to buy? It seems obvious to me. The other interesting OS is OpenMoKo, which I think is a great project with exactly the right goals. However, there's been some disappointment in the enthusiastic community around the OS as schedules have slipped and the developer preview devices shipped without a functioning dialer app. These two projects will have to fight uphill against the fear, uncertainty and doubt generated by the Android announcement and SDK release, even to stay in the game. And, to be fair, Google's announcement was masterful: classic vaporware -- for a product that won't be shipping for at least a year. But they got a pretty solid list of partners for the platform to sign on (albeit with only vague requirements for support). Best of all, they released a one-two punch of a bunch of developer information videos with tantalizing views of a nice-looking potential device, and a good SDK with tons of documentation and developer tools. It even includes an emulator that looks like a little phone. Awww! Android is slick, it's deep, and it's well-designed. The architecture is smart and sophisticated without being too clever for its own good. It's built on conservative -- maybe a little too conservative -- twin pillars: Java and Linux. For hardware providers, there's Linux's tried-and-true driver framework. For applications developers, way up at the top of the stack, there's good ol' boring Java, with new and smart APIs targeted specifically for mobile device apps, all on top of a new virtual machine called Dalvik that (supposedly) optimizes the hell out of Java bytecode. I was really impressed that the emulator emulates much more than just the Java APIs -- you can build ARM binaries in C that run on the thing. Very nice. Am I still going to get an OpenMoKo device? Maybe. But I'm going to continue playing around with the Android SDK, and looking for early developer versions of Android-supporting devices? Oh, yeah. Oh, and the article I did the research for is here; strangely it ended up on ComputerWorld rather than NetworkWorld. OK for me, though. tags: android google mobile linux article java

More about me and my cool life So, I talked yesterday (Journal/27 Brumaire CCXVI) about how much weight I've lost in the last few months, which has been great. Another thing that's been going on for me is that I've started using the Getting Things Done process for scheduling my tasks and my time. I've never been particularly good at managing my time, but at least I've always known that however late or irresponsible I might be, my brother Ted would always be later. But when I visited San Francisco in August, Ted was really doing great. Friends and family kept telling me how responsible and down-to-earth Ted seemed lately. And whenever he had an idea for something to do, he wrote it down in his little Sidekick device. Ted showed me how the GTD system worked for him, and so I went out and bought the book and started reading it. I have been doing GTD for a few months now, and I've found it really satisfying. I don't worry as much any more about little things that I should be doing -- they're all captured in my system. It's really gratifying. I don't know if I've been quite as successful as Ted in improving my personal productivity, but I do know that I'm feeling a lot better about things and about myself. Which is really all that matters. tags: gtd gettingthingsdone tedprodromou productivity

Skating away Maj, Amita June and I went ice-skating today. It was AJ's first time out on the ice, and she really enjoyed it (most of the time). We had a couple of spills, mostly because it was really my first time skating with a 2-year-old, and partly because it was her first time skating with anyone. We went to the indoor rink near our old house on rue Cartier at the corner of Marie-Anne. Pretty soon we'll be able to go outside on the pond at Parc Lafontaine. Maj isn't really a big skating fan, but she seemed to have a good time this time around. Which made three of us. I think we've got the makings of a Sunday-afternoon family tradition. We'll see, at least. tags: iceskating amitajune maj

More one-liners

• I'm glad to see that the Mister Wong logo contest I talked about a while ago (Journal/21 Thermidor CCXV) has borne fruit. The top 12 logos look pretty good.
• Maj and I have been catching up on season 3 of Deadwood lately. Great show, nice to see that season three is as solid as previous ones.
• We've got RecentChangesCamp coming up in San Francisco in February 2008 (I think). Anyone interested should get involved at http://aboutus.org/RCC2008 .
• What's the best alternative to the Sitemaps protocol for people who are into RDF? I'm thinking you could just make a hugantic RSS 1.0 feed -- after all, it is the "RDF Site Summary" format. Best of all, most search engines consume RSS as a recommended feed format. I'm going to try it with Vinismo and let you all know. The downside: I'm not sure many processors will handle a 100,000-item RSS feed very well.
• Norman Mailer died just as I got around to reading the copy of ''Oswald's Tale'' I stole from the Driskill Hotel last year at South by Southwest. I can't help feeling responsible.

tags: 1l misterwong deadwood recentchangescamp rss1.0 rdf sitemaps

At this month’s meeting of the Linux Users of Victoria [1] I gave a talk titled Everyone Should Blog (unfortunately the title was missed in the meeting announcement). I’ve been meaning to write about this but was finally prodded into writing by a ProBlogger post about overcrowding in the blog market [2]. Darren (the ProBlogger) suggests that the blog space is overcrowded, blogs are being sold for unreasonably high prices, and a bust similar to the dot-com bust may occur. I agree that there is some over-commercialisation, and that for Darren’s core market (people who want to make money directly from blogging) this is a serious issue to consider. However I believe that there is a lot of scope for more blogs. Firstly all of the services in the social networking space seem to have some feature that resembles a blog in some way (the online diary if not the RSS feed part of the definition). I have previously blogged about some ideas for an open social networking system [3]. A reform of the social networking scene should have the possibility of adding even more users and having them all be bloggers. While not everyone is capable of writing a blog that is of interest to a large audience, everyone who is capable of writing is capable of writing (or contributing to) a blog that is of interest to some people. The next potential area for expansion is in sales/marketting blogs. An example of this is car sales, it seems that every web site run by a car manufacturer only has information on the current model and at best only has information on prices of second-hand cars. There is a real need for authoritative information on older cars, it helps customers and it helps the car companies. If Ford was to provide good information on the cars they manufactured a few years ago it would increase the chance that I would buy a second-hand Ford and if enough people made similar decisions then it would increase the prices of such cars (basic rules of supply and demand). Increasing the second-hand price increases the price that people are prepared to pay for new cars and also allows them to buy a new car sooner - both of which are benefits to the manufacturer. It wouldn’t be difficult to use a blog server for all the information on new cars, you could have a front page that lists the available marques and links to the posts announcing the latest models of those marques. With a small amount of work writing a theme you could have Wordpress giving an appearance that’s almost indistinguishable from any of the major car companies web sites - apart from the fact that every car’s technical data would have a permanent URL of the form www.carcompany.com.au/2007/MARQUE/CODE which would be obviously a permanent link (unlike the Java servlet and ASP URLs you currently see) and therefore would encourage deep links by enthusiasts. This would also give RSS feeds for free (I would be interested in adding RSS feeds for several of the Australian car companies to my Planet installation if possible). A final benefit is the issue of ethics. When car companies remove data about cars they sold the previous year you have to wonder whether they have unreasonable price increases or whether the new cars have some specs that are lesser than the current cars. The general trend is slow and steady increases in features and performance at each price point, the number of people who are more likely to buy from an ethical (trustworthy) company is probably greater than the number of people who will look for details to nit-pick (and such people will find out anyway). Another use for blogs is for public events. It’s not uncommon for people to want to get some background information on an event that they attended years ago. If all the information was archived in the blog of the organisation that hosted the event then it would be easy for everyone to access. This would give additional promotion opportunities for the hosting organisation at almost no cost. Anyone who is announcing a future event should have an RSS feed for new information related to it, then as information is released all the interested people can see it in their favourite feed reader. Many people refuse to subscribe to announcement lists due to fear of spam and the fact that it is often inconvenient or impossible to unsubscribe (sometimes a list server regards unsubscribe requests as spam). Corporations have many potential uses of blogs, Google announces news about all their products via blogs and Microsoft has a good recruiting blog. Smaller companies can still achieve some of the same benefits via blogging. Also it’s well known that a blog which provides useful information about products in a field (not just the products being sold) can really attract potential customers who then react to the adverts in the blog. The same technique can be used by job seekers. Blog well and mention that you are looking for work and you will get offers of interviews. There is also no shortage of political and lobbying blogs as well, they don’t tend to convince the opposition but they are good for converting people who are ambivalent about an issue. As the people who read blogs get older (and therefore richer and more influential) such blogs will become increasingly important. I think that I have demonstrated the potential for a significant number of new blogs, some of which would have large subscriber bases and a lot of influence (which means a lot of potential profit for the Problogger crowd). Have I missed any major areas for developing new blogs?

• [1] http://www.luv.asn.au/


• [2] http://www.problogger.net/archives/2007/11/18/leveraging-the-power-of-blogs-in-an-overcrowded-market/


• [3] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/18/better-social-networking/

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This should really be titled A movie vaguely representing Beowulf, but all sexed up with various salubrious elements . Hrothgar was treated much better in the original; and all the blatant and gratuitous sexuality brought in into the movie was a turn off. But then, I might be in the minority of the audience who had any familiarity with the poem. The characters in the movie seemed two dimensional caricatures (the only compelling performance was from Grendel s mother). And the changes made to the story line also lost the prowling menace of the latter years of the king of the Geats. After watching Hollywood debacles like this one, I am driven to wonder about why Hollywood writers seem to think they can so improve upon the work of writers whose story has stood the test of time. Making Beowulf into a boastful liar and cheat (even in the tale of the sea monsters his men imply that that they knew their lord was a liar) in an age where honor and battle prowess were everything I mean, what were the producers thinking? Most certainly not a movie I am going to recommend. I had not researched the movie much before I went into the show, and it was a surprise to me to see that this was an animated movie a la Final Fantasy , and while I was impressed with the computer graphics (reflections in general, and reflections of ripples in the water were astounding), the not a cartoon but not a realistic movie experience was a trifle distracting, and detracted from telling the tale. I like IMAX 3d, and the glasses are improving.

Yesterday I've uploaded a shiny new upstream version of tuxmath. Besides many bugfixes, new "crystal" icons, hall of fame, a demo mode, being able to track completed lessons and better configuration options (you can create your own lessons now), this version also finally supports localisation. Yay!

But, as this feature is really new, there are only translations for dutch, czech, norwegian bokm l and nynorsk available. So if you have a moment to spare, please consider translating those 84 strings, which are probably 20-30 unique strings, the rest being variations. (Divided by 3, divided by 4, etc...)

Please file them as wishlist bugs against the package. Thanks!

When advogato.org was still cool I signed up to it. It was an interesting research project in skill metrics (determining the rating of people’s coding skills by the votes of others and weighting the votes by the rating of each person), and it was nice to be rated Master soon after I joined. I still use it on occasion for the blog syndication feature (when I find a good blog on Advogato I add it to my Planet installation). When orkut.com was really cool (when every time I had dinner with a group of people someone would ask if they could be an “orkut friend”) I signed up to it. It was interesting for a while but then most people got bored with it. Now there is Facebook and MySpace for social networking for social purposes and LinkedIn.com for business related social networking. I periodically get invited to join those services but have not been interested in any other than LinkedIn. I can’t join LinkedIn because their mail server is regarded as a SPAM source by my mail server but their web server refuses to provide any information on why this is (the rejection was apparently long enough ago that it’s rolled off my logs). The problem with all these services is that I am expected to sign up with each of them and go to a moderate amount of effort in writing up all the data in the various web pages. Writing it is a pain, keeping it up to date is more pain, and dealing with spam in “scrap-book” entries in Orkut is still an annoyance which I don’t want to multiply by four! So far the only step I’ve seen towards addressing this issue is the XFN - XHTML Friends Network [1] project. But that seems to be of fairly limited scope (just referring to the friendship status of people in a <A HREF link). I believe that the requirements for social networking are:

1. Personal data about each person, some of which may only be available to friends or friends of friends.


2. The user owns their own data, has full control over where it’s sent and the ability to request people who receive it to keep some parts of it secret.


3. Ability to send email to friends of friends (determined by the wishes of each friend and FOAF).


4. Ability to get a list of friends of friends.


5. Incorporation of a standard format for CVs (for business social networking).

I think that the only way to go is to have a standard XML format for storing all personal data (including financial, career, and CV data) that can be used on any web site. Then someone who wants to be involved in social networking could create an XML file for a static web server (or multiple files with different content and password protected access), or they could have a server-side script generate an XML file on the fly with a set of data that is appropriate for the reader. The resulting social network would be entirely distributed and anyone could write software to join in. This covers item 1 and part of item 2. For sending email to friends of friends it would be good to avoid spam as much as possible. One way of doing would be requesting that friends publish a forwarding address on their own mail server in a manner similar to SRS [2]. SRS include the ability for such addresses to expire after a certain period of time (which would be convenient for this). In fact publishing SRS versions of friends email addresses would be a good option if you already use SPF [3] and SRS in your mail server. This covers item 3. The XML format could include information on how far the recipient could transfer it. For example if my server sent an XML file to a recruiting agency with my CV it could state that they could distribute it without restriction (so that they can give it to hiring managers) with the possibility of some fields being restricted (EG not tell the hiring manager what I used to get paid). For my mobile phone number I could send it to my friends with a request that they not send it on. This covers part of item 2. The URL for the friends file would of course be in the main XML file, and therefore you could have different friends lists published from different versions of your profile (EG the profile you send to recruiting agencies wouldn’t include drinking buddies etc). This completes the coverage of item 2. Then to have a friends list you have a single XML file on a web server that has the public parts of the XML files from all your friends. This means that getting a list of friends of friends would involve getting a single XML file for each friend (if you have 100 friends and each friend has 50 unique friends on average then you do 100 HTTP operations instead of 5,000). Minimising the number of web transfer operations is essential for performance and for reliability in the face of unreliable web servers (there is no chance of having 5,000 random web servers for individuals all up and accessible at the same time). This covers item 4. Item 5 is merely a nice thing to have which allows more easily replacing some of the recruiting infrastructure. As any such XML format will have several sections for arbitrary plain text (or maybe HTML) for describing various things the CV could of course be in HTML, but it would be good to have the data in XML. I posted this in the “blog” category because blogs are the only commonly used systems where end users do anything related to XML files (the RSS and ATOM feeds are XML). A blog server could easily be extended to do these social networking systems. As with a blog users could run their own social networking server (publishing their XML files) or they could use a service that is similar in concept to blogger which does it all for them (for the less technical users). Then an analogy to Planet, Technorati, etc in the blog space would be public aggregation services that compare people based on the number of friends they have etc, and attempts to map paths between people based on friends. This could also include GPG [4] data such that signing someone’s GPG key would cause your server to automatically list them in some friend category. The XML format should also have a field for a GPG signature (one option would be to use a GPG sub-key to sign the files and have the sub-key owned by the server). I don’t have any serious time to spend on implementing this at the moment. But if someone else starts coding such a project then I would certainly help test it, debug it, and contribute towards the XML design.

• [1] http://gmpg.org/xfn/and/


• [2] http://www.openspf.org/SRS


• [3] http://www.openspf.org/


• [4] http://www.gnupg.org/

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