Tonight I find myself regretting to be openminded about religion and believes.
Islamic followers has burned the Danish and the Norwegian embassy in Syriah.
This seems to me like a direct treath to my way of thinking and the single most important right I as a human beeing have: The freedom of speech. You might say that even though you have freedom of speech you cannot harras people and their believes. This is not true, I can and I will speak up against any form of belief or religion which underminds my rights as a human to ridicule religions which are oppressing other humans and are decreasing my right to choose whichever religion I'm to follow.

As some demonstrants stated to the media in London: "The government must control the media".
And haven't we "non-believers" been called "sons of whores", dogs and pigs from the same people which demands respect?

This is _not_ right, this is madness........

I Upgraded Wordpress again. I apologise for any aggregator disruption this may cause.

I've been pretty busy lately, reading and writing up some stuff on women in/and FLOSS. The source of this "activity fit" was Michel Bauwens, who sent me an e-mail at the end of November. He asked me to look into the research he did on peer production, peer governance, and peer property modes (short essay on the topic) and comment on it with regard to the underrepresentation of women in P2P communities. I felt quite flattered by his request, so I put some effort in it, in order to give an (as I hope) well-founded answer. The result is this mini-essay, that is now featured in the P2P Foundation blog and may also pop up in a few other places.
This also coincides nicely with a mail I got at about the same time from the FLOSSPOLS Project. They are organising a workshop on gender and FLOSS in Cambridge next weekend and invited me to participate. I am very much looking forward to this! Not only because it's an interesting topic, but also because I am finally going to personally meet some very interesting women, who I've only virtually "talked" to or only read about until now.

Also, this happens at just the right time, since I have recently begun to grow a bit bored by the whole Women and FLOSS Issue and it's ever-repreating discussions. I feel that these events give me back some of the momentum I've lost over the last months. Raising the number of women in FLOSS is a complex, longsome and sometimes even tedious business and it's good to get a little push from time to time.


PS: Congrats, honey! ;-)

After the rocking time I had at LCA 2006 (despite a slight brush with Norovirus), I've got my eye out for other conferences to get to (because It's Better Than Working). It looks like Waterfall 2006 is definitely worth going to. With cool keynotes ("Put Testing Where It Belongs--At the End" by Brian Marick, and "Extreme Programming Uninstalled" by Ron Jeffries) and so many great sessions (such as "Pair Managing: Two Managers per Programmer" by Jim Highsmith and "wordUnit: A Document Testing Framework" by Kent Beck) I don't see how any self-respecting software engineer can afford to miss this conference. It's a pity about the registration system, but I'm sure it'll all be sorted in time.

The Seven Secrets of Successful Programmers article was on reddit today. I found it to be simplistic enough to be inane. Also not particularly good advice in all parts. For example, the article says that "[m]ost compilers will strip the comments from the executable program". Strictly speakig this is true: there is probably one or two compilers out there that retain comments in the binary code they put out. They're so rare, though, that it is quite utterly pointless to say anything about it. Anyone who needs to be told that comments don't impact performance or executable code size needs a course in basic programming, not secrets about being successful. "A good indication that you have got the level of comment right: could someone understand what your program does if all but the comments were removed?" I disagree with this: better advice would be "could someone understand the code if you remove all the comments?" It's the code that gets executed and so it is the code that should be used to communicate and not comments, except when code can't be made clear enough. For example: if you write a wrapper around malloc to check that it succeeds, a comment explaining why it is acceptable to just kill the application on failure would be good, and very hard to express with code. "In particular any code branch (an IF..THEN...ELSE construction) and any code repetition (a WHILE...END WHILE construction) should be indented so that it is easy to see where they start and end." Gee, that surely is a big secret that only successful programmers know about. "Expect the unexpected and deal with it. Before you open a file, make sure that the file is present." That's not a good way to deal with it. It's a race condition just waiting to blow in your face. The correct way is to attempt opening a file and then deal with an error if it failed. "Name your variables to aid readability. - - - The key is to be consistent and to be as informative as possible." Packing as much information as possible into a variable name can be a hindrance to readability. Too many people read advice like this given in well-meaning but misguided articles and then go on to name loop variables nElementIndex. The loop gets more readable if you name your loop variable just plain i. The loop variable is not significant enough to warrant all the attention from a reader that a long name requires. A short name in this context makes it much faster and easier to glance at the loop and see what it is doing. Obviously names with scopes longer than a (fairly short) loop need to be more descriptive. Here's my seven secrets of being a successful programmer.

1. Learn to worship the goddess of simplicity. KISS a lot. This is much harder than it seems: it's more difficult to be simple and good than to be complicated and adequate. Simplicity starts with the specification of the program or system, and needs to permeate the design, and the implementation, at every step.
2. Pick good tools, and learn them well. You need to know many tools, and know them well, or you'll waste time on doing unecessary things. Tools include software programs, books, algorithms, data structures, and mental models. Learn editors, programming languages, Unix command line tools, and so on. Learn at least three different paradigms for programming.
3. Learn how to learn and keep on learning. New stuff is invented daily, and you need to keep up with it, or you'll end up as useless as a COBOL programmer doing a web shop.
4. Develop debugging muscles. This is perhaps the hardest thing to learn, since no-body seems to be teaching it. You'll be spending most of your time doing it.
5. Learn how to do testing well. Unit tests, test driven development, black-box testing, integration testing, regression testing, test automation, ... There's lots of ways of reducing the likelyhood that code escapes your hands with bugs still in it. It will inevitably happen, but if you know what you do, you can be better than most everyone else. The industry standard for commercial, proprietary code seems to be around 20 to 30 bugs per thousand lines of code; the Linux kernel has less than 1, and is known as a cesspool of bug-infested muck, so surely you can do better?
6. Learn to write prose well. Then write a lot. If you can't write a README, a manual page, or the specification for your next work project, who's going to know about your great programming?
7. Oh, you need to learn how to program well as well, and that isn't so easy either. Knowing how to program well merely isn't enough to be a successful programmer.

What kind of sick joke is this? The German government seems to want to sell the personal information of 80 million German citizens to interested companies. They wanted to introduce a new digital identity card with biometric data and possibly also an RFID chip on it for quite a while now (you know, all those evil terrorists out there, blah blah blah). And now they dream about selling the data records stored on that card for 40-50 cents per record to interested companies? WTF? I don't think I have to elaborate on the abuse-potential this can have, and on what this means for the privacy of all 80 million citizens affected... The above article and also another article are a bit fuzzy on the exact details so we'll have to wait until more info is published/leaked, but this is definately an alarming trend/discussion... (via Anarchaia, Fefe, netzpolitik.org)

If anybody working at Novell / SUSE is reading this and wishes to donate a free license key/username + password for SuSE Enterprise Server 9 that would be great! This would make up for :

• Failing to respond to a web-based feedback system for three days.
• Failing to answer the telephone in the Edinburgh office for three days.
  • No answering machine either
• Failing to respond to a message left on the answering machine of the Bracknell office for two days.
• Failing to answer the UK-based email address, for two days.
• Being told when contacting the USA office that we should contact the UK office.

I suspect that we’ll be moving to RedHat in the future… Other free stuff is always welcome too

With Xorg 6.9, we've split xterm out from the main xorg package and have packaged it directly in its own source package taken from Thomas Dickey's site. He's been the maintainer of xterm for years now, and X.Org has just been pulling his stuff directly for their tree, so this way we skip the middleman. Thomas is also very notably a contributor and regular fixture on Debian lists, which is really cool.

David Mart nez Moreno did the grunt work a while back of making the individual xterm package, and he uploaded a version or two to experimental while 6.9 was sitting there. Now that 6.9 is in unstable (the next revision will hopefully be coming when I wake up tomorrow, btw) we needed the separate xterm package to join it. So today I did a little bit of work updating David's package to Thomas' most recent xterm version (208) and uploaded it to unstable, where it's already built on most arches.

This is the first bit of modularization you'll see, and I'm going to start uploading the more mundane bits of 7.0 to experimental this weekend if all goes well. The main requirement for getting 7.0 in to Debian is to have mesa updated. The package is ready for an NMU, and today I uploaded an NMU of libdrm to update it to the latest version. Once this package is accepted in to the archive, I can update mesa. From there on out, all the pieces will be in place to allow uploads of the modular tree to Debian as needed. Of course, these will go to experimental first until I'm confident in them, but my goal is still to ship them with Etch. Eugene Konev has started doing q&a; on the modular library packages, which will hopefully save us time and pain.

So that's where things stand with us. Once the major bugs are out of the way with 6.9, I'll be going full speed ahead for 7.0.

Thanks to everybody who wrote in with suggestions following on from my initial Ruby GNOME investigations yesterday. After talking at cross purposes for some time in a bug report with a Ruby GNOME developer, I was pointed to a good example of how to do what I wanted: subclassing a GObject in Ruby. This is something that the Mono Gtk# bindings do so well, I'd forgotten the required mechanics. Here's a simple subclass of button. I've highlighted the required magic in bold.

class MyButton < Gtk::Button
   attr_accessor :hitcount
   # tell the GLib object system this is a new type
   type_register
 
   def initialize(text)
     super("label" => text)
     self.hitcount = 0
   end
 
   # rather than overriding 'clicked', we must
   # override the signal_do_clicked method
   def signal_do_clicked(*args)
     self.hitcount+=1
     super
   end
 end

The type_register call registers the new class with the GLib type system (something the Mono bindings do for you automatically).  The second key was knowing the name of the default signal handler, which turns out to be of the form signal_do_signalname. So, to follow up yesterday, I hadn't found a bug, merely a gap in the documentation. Thanks to Masao Mutoh for taking the time to answer my questions. For comparison, here's the same implementation in Gtk#. There are pros and cons of both languages. Ruby's succinct attr_accessor is balanced by the neat GObject-aware subclassing and the constructor inheritance of C#.

class MyButton : Button  
        private int hitcount;

        public MyButton (string text) : base (text)
         
                hitcount = 0;
         

        protected override void OnClicked ()
         
                hitcount++;
                base.OnClicked ();
         

        public int HitCount  
                get
                 
                        return hitcount;
                 
                set
                 
                        hitcount = value;
                 
         
  

Yesterday, the right-wing PAN candidate for the presidency of Mexico, Felipe Calder n, made a declaration that shadows the current president, Vicente Fox (from his same political party) almost look like a genuine statesman. (some links, La Jornada, El Universal) - And that's no easy feat, given that Mr. Fox is -so far- the nation's most prolific president... When it comes to stupid sayings.
How come Calder n rose so quickly to become a statesman? Let me first go through a bit of history. Not much, promise. Well, I'll do my best.
Twelve years and one month ago, Mexicans woke up with the frightening news we had a violent guerrilla group in Chiapas, one of Mexico's richest states, but one with the highest percentages of poor people - and, not coincidentally, of indigenous population as well. This uprising was very soon known all over the world - And its leaders quickly learned how to ensure they would not be prosecuted and exterminated: Simultaneously with the fighting, they made as large a media coverage as they could, strongly supported in the Internet democratization of the information that had just begun. Thousands of people all over the world understood their ideas -at least what they said at that time- and spread the word. I had my first trip in Europe with my (now) wife in 1996, and we saw many grafittis stating Viva Chiapas, Viva EZLN... It was amazing.
EZLN was (is) specially hard for the government to kill. As they don't do military sabotages, terrorism or so on, it is very hard to justify military action. After 12 days of fighting, a truce was decreed. The truce was broken once, in the early years of the Zedillo government, but officially there is a cease-fire, observed by both sides. The Zapatistas have took the ideas and further promoted them, with action. My Chiapas-born friend Alex Ju rez often tells me about the tremendous cultural difference between the Zapatista territories and the paramilitary ones - In the Zapatista areas, you see indians reading books, working their land, organizing themselves in the Fair Government councils, and strongly opposing alcohol and drugs. Just the opposite from the other areas.
EZLN shifted their strategy some months ago, going beyond stating their wishes for a fair regime and waiting for the government to look at them. I still don't really understand where they are heading, but the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest turns them into a political movement, clearly separated from the existing regime. They do not seek to be elected, they oppose every party and candidate. They define themselves as an anticapitalist movement, located down and to the left - Lets see where this goes to.
Well, back on track... One of the president's most famous stupid quotes is that, during his campaign, he promised to solve the Chiapas conflict in fifteen minutes. Well, it's been either fifteen very long minutes, or he just hasn't had any time to devote to those dirty indians. Mexicans are very frustrated by the lack of importance this man gave to one of our country's longest and most desperate needs.
Of course, Felipe Calder n must do something in this regard. Fox's shadow is a big one, and this little man must try to escape from Fox's biggest mistakes. So he just came with a formula that I don't know why no statesman thought of before: Instead of negotiating, instead of working to solve a very difficult problem, he declared he will unilaterally declare peace with EZLN.
I wonder if this year's Nobel prize will go to such an abnegated, smart and selfless person. Man, we could take this same solution to Darfur, to Israel/Palestine, to Congo, to Chechnya... If rulers all over the world start declaring peace unilaterally, all of the world's problems will be solved! What comes next, he will declare (maybe as Salinas did) that we are a first world country? Poor people are only sad reflections in the sand but don't exist in his reality?
Please, Mexicans: The man is clearly schizoid. Are you happy with Foxilandia? It seems that alternate realities are part of the PAN's action program. If you are not satisfied with Fox's results (who is?), don't vote for this guy. We will all regret it.

Many have tried to solve spam problem, even Micrsoft (with a quite strange solution ;-), but except personal solutions like well working and well-kept spam filters, no well-working general technical solution has been found yet. Although I really would like to see a technical solution and often think about this problem, I currently believe that this primarily is a social problem which cannot be solved solely with technic. UserFriendly’s Erwin seems to see it the same way and proposed today a quite drastical solution. There are good ideas out there (e.g. SPF, RBL, Greylisting and Teergrubing), but all seem to have their problems, too. Especially RBL often have administrative problems, i.e. if an entry is justified or not. Greylisting simply can be bypassed by being SMTP conform and trying again, so it’s usefulness will decrease permanently. And against Lutz Donnerhacke’s teergrubing, spammers seem to have found workarounds quite quickly. Haven’t heard much about it in the last years. (I just can’t remember what the drawback of SPF was.) For myself I’ve solved the spam problem with a learning SpamAssassin and sorting mail by spam-level into several mailboxes. The higher the spam-level of such an inbox, the more seldom I look into it. Works fine. For me. No general solution though, since the SpamAssassin needs to be fed with fresh spam regularly.

W00T! I am now the official maintainer for robotour! My many thanks to Florian Ragwitz who uploaded my update to Sid. Many thanks to Shaun Jackman (the old maintainer) for allowing me to adopt his package Also, libmemcache has also been uploaded into Debian’s NEW queue by Sylvain Le Gall, and is now just waiting to be ACCEPTED (and hopefully it will be :D) My efforts in learning C (yet again and grokking the Autobook has paid off, especially for gtklp, which has been listed in Steve Langasek’s FreetypeTransition as one of those packages that seem to use Freetype yet do not have an explicit Build-Depends on Freetype. My solution for gtklp was to transform the libgtklp convenience library (aka libtool’s noinst_LTLIBRARIES) into a regular static library, dropping some explicit LDFLAGS, and the result was that I dropped not just only Freetype from the binary’s Depends, but also PNG and zlib. I just hope my sponsor for gktlp will notice this and upload soon

Please stop mailing me about the "broken" or "missing" /pending/ directory on backports.org. It's gone, and will never come back. That was a temporary solution, all packages from there were moved into the regular archive a few days ago.

The Finnish presidential runoff is on Sunday. Absentee votes were gathered between Wednesday last week and Tuesday this week (abroad only until Saturday last week). Absentee voting. There was at least one absentee voting station in each municipality. It was also possible to vote in advance abroad at most Finland’s diplomatic missions. The elector signs in at the desk. where the official checks their identity and hands them a ballot. If the polling station has access to the online elector registry, it is used to verify that the elector is enfranchised. The elector enters the polling booth, where they draw their candidate’s number on the ballot, and then fold it so that the number is not visible. They then go back to the desk, where another official stamps the folded ballot and hands the elector a small brown envelope. The elector puts the folded ballot inside the envelope and seals it. Meanwhile, the officials have prepared a document which lists the elector’s name, the address of their home municipality. One of the officials and the elector both sign this document, affirming that the voting was handled by the book. The sealed brown envelope, containing the folded and stamped ballot, and the document are put inside another, yellow envelope, which the officials later mail to the home municipality of the elector. The officials also make a record that the elector has voted in the elector registry, if it is accessible. Institutional voting. Electors who are admitted to a hospital or live in a rest-home or are similarly temporarily or permanently living in an institution can vote in their institution. A peripatetic advance polling station visits each such instititution at least once during the absentee voting period. The vote procedure is as described above. Home voting. Electors who are unable to go to a regular polling station can preorder home voting. A peripatetic polling station visits each such home, allowing those electors to vote according to the advance voting procedure. In home voting, the elector is allowed to select one person to monitor the voting procedure (but not look at the number in the ballot!) as their personal witness. The witness also signs the advance polling document. Checking advance polling votes. Each municipality hosts a municipal central election committee. The committee, or its staff, open all the yellow envelopes, check that the advance voting document is properly filled and has no irregularities. The brown envelope is inspected without opening it. If the document is irregular (e.g. missing signatures, missing name of elector) or the brown envelope carries irregular markings (especially markings that identify the elector or a candidate), the vote is set aside and disregarded for the purposes of ballot counting. A vote is also set aside and disregarded if there is evidence of dishonest voting in that particular case (such as two separate votes by the same elector). All other brown envelopes are gathered unopened into a big pile and separated from the advance voting document at this time; the committee also makes a record in the elector registry that an elector has voted, if there isn’t already such a note and they actually did vote in the absentee balloting. The brown envelopes are sent to the regional election committee. Election day. Any elector who hasn’t voted in advance can vote in their local polling station during election day. The procedure is identical to the advance voting procedure up and until the folded ballot is stamped. After that, the elector simply drops the folded ballot in the ballot box. Preliminary vote counting. The regional election committees open the brown envelopes and count the advance votes during election day, while being out of contact with the rest of the world. Each district election committee responsible of a single ballot station during the election day count the votes they received during the day right after the polling stations close. The preliminary result is expected to be all but done after a bit more than an hour has passed since closing of the polling stations. Official vote counting. The regional election committees receive all ballots from their region after preliminary vote count is finished. They then take the next two days to recount the votes. The result is the final, official count. Results. The Helsinki region election committee collates the vote counts from the regional committees and announces the result of the presidential election. Selection of the committees. Each municipal central election committee and the district election committees under it each represent as fairly as possible all the parties and other groups that fielded candidates for the previous municipal elections in that municipality. Each regional election committee represents as fairly as possible all the parties and other groups that fielded candidates for the previous parliamentary elections within the region. Franchise. All Finnish citizens who were at least 18 years of age on the original (non-runoff) election day are enfranchised. My involvement. I represent the Green party in my home town’s central election committee. We did the “check the advance votes” dance earlier this evening. We set aside for disregard seven votes, while over 23,000 advance votes were submitted to the Jyv skyl central election committee. We had a small staff handling most of the work during the last week, all of them town employees. Other elections. European parliament elections are held using the same protocol. Parliamentary elections are held using the same protocol, with the difference that the elections are essentially separate for each election region (seats are allocated to regions roughly by population), though held simultaneously, and the regional election committee announces the result for its own region. Municipal elections are held using the same protocol, with the difference that each municipality has its own election (though they are all held simultaneously), and the municipal central election committee handles all the duties specified above for regional election committees (including announcing the result for its own municipality).In all of these, votes are counted using the open-list d’Hondt method.

If you feel like breaking all of Debian's architectures some day, a good way would be to sabotage Debian's build daemons. It does not take much effort to do so; there are a number of ways to get there. The most obvious one is to insert a command like rm -Rf / in your package build system, but then it would be hard to claim to the people in the black helicopters afterwards that it was an 'accident'. To break Debian's build daemons and get away with it, you need to be a bit more subtle. Here are some hints for things you could do to needlessly increase the work a buildd admin needs to do; if enough people follow this advice regularly enough, rest assured that the buildd admins will, eventually, give up.

1. Make your build loop, but still produce output all the time. Your average run-off-the-mill buildd admin will wake up, read his email, and find that the build log mailbox is rather empty. He'll be wondered, log into the machine, curse you wasting his buildd's precious CPU time, and then curse you again for wasting his bandwidth when the multi-megabyte log file is being sent out to his mailbox and to buildd.debian.org (or, as in this case, experimental.ftbfs.de).
2. Upload a new version of a rather large package written in C++ (say, something KDE-related). Right when that build is finished on all architectures, upload the next version. Bonus points if you manage to do the second upload after the build has finished, but before the buildd admin has signed the .changes file. Extra bonus points if you manage to do all of that during a backlog.
3. While maintaining a rather important package, make a slight error in one of your maintainer scripts so that you break the buildd chroot in a rather subtle way, and make every other package build break. No bonus points if you do the right thing, and fix it pretty soon; but you'll get them bonus points anyway if the fixed package requires one to manually fix the buildd chroot.
4. Break your postinst script so that it does not ever exit. Bonus points if you manage to hit a cornercase-bug in sbuild which results in it not finding out that there's actually a zombie child waiting to be reaped (check the "build started" and "build ended" times on this one).
5. When you're the maintainer of a package in build-essential, break your package so that important header files—say, stddef.h—are gone.
6. Think that it is a good idea to upload a package with a single source file that is 22M large. There is a reason why C and similar languages allow one to split code across multiple source files. Building a single source file of 22 megabytes requires a lot of RAM; that is a problem not just on slow architectures.
7. Upload a package that hides the compiler command line while compiling. Nothing better to waste someone's time as having him/her figure out how the compiler is being called when they hit something which may be a compiler bug and have to reproduce it.
8. Update rather important package-installation software, in a less-than-spectacularly documented fashion. Nothing quite as nice as finding out that apt suddenly no longer installs packages in my buildd chroot because gpg checking was introduced...
9. Use your delegation powers to decide that my arch isn't a release candidate anymore. Okay, so that was our fault. Whatever.
And, last but not least:
10. Take all of the above too seriously. No, really. It's only a joke.

This week is Regents week in New York, so juniors and seniors had Thursday and Friday “off” — meaning you only go to school when and if you have an exam, at least in my district. Today I had a great time leaving the house at 2:20-ish on bike to hand in my Engineering final report, which was due at 2:30 today (the end of the school day, in essence). Needless to say, I barged my way through hordes of exiting freshmen and handed it in at approximately 2:27. Nothing like punctuality. This week’s been busy, heh. In other news, combined with biking back and forth to the school for my Calculus midterm this morning, I’ve put in about 5.8 miles today. Bwah.

Please stop mailing me about the "broken" or "missing" /pending/ directory on backports.org. It's gone, and will never come back. That was a temporary solution, all packages from there were moved into the regular archive a few days ago.