Following Adam's suggestion about Pandora, I spent a the rest of the afternoon, evening and this morning listening to music old and new. Pandora's suggestions around Madeleine Peyroux were particularly nice as they lead for example to Sam Philipps which was new to me. I can already see this leading to increased spending on new cds... Recommended.

Last week I helped Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter kick off their book release party in New York City. The book Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software is the first academic book length piece on free software proper that among other things examines the repercussions of such elements as language use (free software vs open source) and licensing (such as non-copyleft licensing). Here are my opening remarks, which don’t give justice to the book but give a small taste of what is in there. Samir and Scott are computer scientists, philosophers, and political thinkers and bring these positions and perspectives to bear in their work. While I tend to avoid the discussion on the differences and divergences between free and open source software and licensing (just because I ask a set of questions that tend not to go into that territory), they spend a hefty about of time on this sort of engagement And what is so useful about their approach is that it is technically detailed and carefully analyzed, clarifying the stakes involved in choosing a certain set of licensing over others, or the political implications of language use. Along with this focus, there are many other threads they unpack and one of my favorites is on the aesthetics of code, which I discuss with some detail in my opening remarks with the help of one of my favorite literary writers, Susan Sontag. The conversation that followed was lively, in part because there were a number of people in the audience who are also very familiar with FOSS (Somewhat unbelievably, there were 3 anthropologists there who study free software, myself, Jelena Karanovic, and Anita Chan). And I think one of the most interesting questions was launched by Anita who asked the authors what they meant more precisely by the promise of FOSS as well as liberation. The conversation that followed was too rich to recount here, but something that I raised and I do think is important is the relationship between the buzz word of the last few years, Web 2.0 and FOSS. Web 2.0 is related to FOSS in so far as Web 2.0 refers to a suite of technologies that allow for the creation of user-generated content and collaboration. FOSS refers to a development methodology that is based on promiscuous sharing of code and collaboration. The similarities, however, end there because much of the Web 2.0 infrastructure is proprietary. FOSS by definition is non-proprietary. But I think that soon we are going to see more Web 2.0-like companies open up their infrastructure entirely or at least important components. One example of a new technology that is Web 2.0-like and is entirely free software is a activist networking tool crabgrass that is pretty impressive (I have used it to coordinate my move and am using it now to coordinate a collaborative grant). It is still under development but once released, it will be a great boon to any group that needs to collaborate and organize and coordinate:

Crabgrass also provides a public advocacy centric view of content so that people can learn more about issues and organizations through social relationships. Blog tools, voter guides, petitions, event organizing tools, and action alerts are being added to the functionality of the platform. Crabgrass integrates wikis, asset repositories, task lists, calendars, polls, and meeting schedulers into one tool which allows groups to manage their internal organizing.

The other technology that I am excited about and that I have already written about is Kaltura. As I mentioned, Kaltura is important because it lowers the bar for collaboration, providing tools to facilitate video editing. But what I find as interesting and as significant is that they are perhaps the first large-scale Web 2.0 company that is actively seeking to enter the territory of FOSS and in this respect, once they do so, they will lead the field, not simply for technical reasons, but because they choose to make and engage with open source technologies. Bringing Web 2.0 within the orbit of FOSS and brining FOSS within the orbit of Web 2.0 can only work to bolster each other, and this is where I think, at least part of the promise of FOSS lies.

For once, Clint blogged on something that I can understand. I don’t buy everything he says, but in the case of DSA, the part where he says “you cannot have a functional and respectable subgroup if it maintains autonomy like that” is a real problem. The leadership problem I mentioned is real. And it can theoretically be solved by undelegating one of the problematic side of this DSA-internal dispute. But which one? Given the unwillingness of Joey to discuss the problems, he makes an easy target… which would leave DSA up to Ryan, James and Phil. But is that a desirable thing? If DSA is perceived as being an “autonomous” group which is not involved in Debian’s main discussions and which is somewhat disconnected from Debian’s day-to-day life, it’s largely due to the behavior of James and Ryan. E-mail communication with them is very difficult as they’ll respond only if they really care about something. And despite the setup of the request tracker, they have barely been able to make proper usage of it… the idea was to use RT tickets to track everything that DSA does but they don’t use it as such. For example, James setup a “wikiadm” group and he never reported anything to the related ticket (#194) (I did it myself once I found out). Also there’s an internal ticket about the replacement of ftp.debian.org (that I created because ftp.d.o ran out of space regularly) and AFAIK Jeroen has been in touch with James to setup that replacement, but nothing got reported to the tracker. Ryan promised me once to put his DSA TODO list in the tracker so that other people can jump in and help out. He never did. So while Joey is definitely a pain for DSA, at least he’s a visible participant of the team and he interacts with the community. James and Ryan are not, they interact only through private channels and do not share their opinions or their vision of Debian.
I believe this is a real problem. On the other hand, most of the interesting changes in the last months are the results of James’s work. But he’s also implicitly blocking addition of new members as long as the leadership problem is not solved. I tried to fill the communication void of the DSA team by various means. I follow everything as closely as I can so that I can report changes on other channels, mailing lists when needed. I made efforts to document stuff on the wiki page, etc. But this is not a long term solution, the communication issue must be fixed within the team. The path ouf of this mess is still not very clear, but something is going to change soon. Not quite sure what though. What would you suggest? And if you were DPL, what would you do? Since private discussions and negotiations lead nowhere, it’s tempting to bring the issue in the public area. In theory, they have no way to escape discussions and they’ll have to communicate their grudges against the other side if they want to have some fair judgment between both parties. Unfortunately, given the habits of James and Ryan, they probably won’t participate in any public discussion and either resign or stay where they are waiting for any decision… Comments welcome. Partagez cet article / Share This

Pia writes about the difficulty in getting young women and young people in general into the computer industry [1]. While I agree that having more women in the computer industry would be a good thing, I have difficulty believing some of the claims that Pia makes. For example the claim that “[girls] are more career focused earlier in their school life“. I chose my career when I was about 11 years old [2] and several of my friends made similar decisions at similar ages. I would be interested to read anecdotal evidence from women in the computer industry about how old they were when they decided on their career and if their friends did the same, a reference to any research on this topic would also be useful. I tend to believe that boys are more career focussed at all stages of their life but have little evidence to support this idea. One fact that seems obvious is that the idea that “if you don’t succeed in your career then you can always marry someone who does” is almost non-existent among boys. It seems likely that such ideas have a statistically relevant affect on the focus on career of boys vs girls. Also the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that the MEDIAN income for women is significantly lower than for men [4], I find it difficult to imagine that girls could be more career focussed from a younger age and yet get significantly lower pay (note the fact that it’s median not mean income is very significant as it removes the “glass ceiling” effect). Phillip Greenspun writes about why there are so few women doing scientific research [6] and makes some good points about why scientific research is generally not well paid and therefore a university student would choose a career in some other area and suggests that it’s a macho thing that guys enter such competitive fields for relatively low wages. Maybe some women correctly assess the costs and benefits of a career in scientific research and then make the mistake of equating Computer Science to other branches of science. But the median income suggests that although there may be some valid reasons for avoiding science that would only cover a small portion of the problem (the difference in median income can not be explained by misplaced attempts to maximise income). One problem that is significant is the quality of school education for girls. Not only is there the issue that boys may crowd-out girls for some subjects that are supposedly traditionally for boys (such as all science) but even girls schools aren’t as good as they should be. Some time ago I was talking to a teacher at an all-girls school, the school was moderately expensive and parents were paying the extra money presumably to give their daughters educational opportunities that they might miss in a co-ed school. However the school did not teach hard maths (”Maths B” was the official name at the time) and only taught the easy maths (official name “Maths A” and unofficial name “Vegie Maths“) because they didn’t have many girls demanding it (which is probably difficult to measure if you don’t offer it as a reasonable option) and the girls who wanted to study it could always move to a different school. So the choice facing girls at the exclusive school in question was “skip the subject that is most useful for further studies in most science subjects” or “go to a different school and miss most of your friends“, this sort of decision would surely discourage some potential female computer programemers. Also I think that the difference between boys and girls in regard to studying computer science has a lot to do with the fact that given a choice between missing most of their friends and missing out on something related to computers would be a no-brainer for most boys. Paul Graham’s article about Nerds has some interesting points to make in this regard - maybe the problem is that girls aren’t Nerdish enough [5]. Pia also writes about parents and teachers advising children not do study IT because of a perceived lack of jobs. I think that the problem here is not just bad advice, but also a bad tendency to take advice. Someone who wants to study in an established field which changes little over time (law and accounting spring to mind) probably should take careful note of the advice that they are given - things haven’t changed much in the last few decades. But someone who wants to study in a field that changes rapidly and where every year has new and significant developments (of which the best example is the computer industry) should probably be quite skeptical of all advice - most advice about the computer industry concerns how things used to be not how things are. Finally when considering whether to accept advice you should consider who is offering it. For example advice from a hiring manager should be carefully noted (as the manager will tell you precisely what factors influence their own decisions on hiring). Advice from people who are successful in the industry should also be noted. Advice from a school career advisor who gets paid about 1/3 what any 25yo can earn in the computer industry should be entirely ignored. I wonder whether being hesitant to ignore advice is a problem for girls in this regard. When I was in year 11 I had to take a subject related to career planning. It covered some things that were of minor use (such as writing CVs) and had an assignment of writing a fictional CV for yourself a few years after leaving university. I received bad marks for preparing a CV that involved changing jobs as companies went bankrupt or projects failed due to bad management, I was told that if your employer fails in the market it makes you look bad! However my fictional CV did bear some resemblance to what really happened… In terms of what industries have jobs available, the best advice I can give students is to actively do some research of their own. It’s not difficult to get the jobs sections of some newspapers and do a quick scan to see how many positions are open in a field, and it’s even easier to do some searches on online jobs sites (which usually tell you how many positions posted in the last X days match your criteria). For example I just visited jobserve.com.au and found 1724 Engineering jobs and 5622 IT jobs advertised. If you compare this to the university intake (I visited the Swinburne university courses list [3] and found 25 IT courses vs 29 Engineering course) it seems that the ratio of Engineering graduates to jobs is not likely to be as good as that for CS graduates. Of course it may be that all the other universities have hardly any Engineering courses and balance the ratio out (but I doubt it). In any case this would be a good way of injecting some facts into a discussion of the relative merits of different career choices and avoiding it being an issue of parents/teachers not liking computers vs children liking them. Determining the relative pay rates of different industries is a lot more difficult (and requires a significant amount of work), some recruiting agencies publish statistics - but those stats only apply to the positions that they fill (which is a sub-set of the actual positions). Finally as a piece of advice for children, try and find a job that you enjoy. If you earn $30K doing something you enjoy then you’ll probably be happier than if you earn $100K doing something you hate. Also if you enjoy your work then you will probably be able to take the extra steps needed to become successful - often it’s not a choice between having fun or making good money but a choice between fun and good money or the absence of both. If someone tells you to avoid doing what you love and instead do something boring for some unsubstantiated belief that there would be more money in it then be a nerd and tell them that their opinion is not relevant (it does tend to make teachers angry though).

• [1] http://pipka.org/blog/2007/10/09/getting-girls-and-gen-y-into-it/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/08/23/the-start-of-my-computer-career/


• [3] http://courses.swinburne.edu.au/


• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs%40.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/96e08af8f4178a45ca257306000d4fd4


• [5] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html


• [6] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

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On the topic of "why so few scientists are women", I recently came across a rather thought-provoking article (thanks Erinn). It's worth a read, especially for anyone (man or woman) that's thinking about heading into academia.

To follow up on yesterday’s MBTA philippic, I received a response from the T’s customer service regarding my complaints. Although it doesn’t give me hope that things will improve, it’s nice that they have at least hired someone to write personalized, polished replies. At least they can do that right:

Dear Mr. Kessel, Thank you for your email concerning service on the Needham Line. The past couple of months have been difficult for our passengers, and I want you to know we are very sorry for the inconveniences this has been causing. The causes of these delays have ranged from signal and mechanical issues to long stops boarding passengers at stations, and even track work on other lines. I know that it may seem odd that trains on other lines can impact your trains, but I assure you that is true. The Franklin, Needham, Providence, and Stoughton lines, as well as Amtrak all share the rail between Hyde Park and Boston. All it takes is one delayed train in this area to cause a cascading effect that delays other lines. There’s also the fact that trains may come in from one line to go out as another. For example, a train on the Worcester Line comes to Boston, and either the train set, or the crew (sometimes both) head out as an outbound Needham train. If the inbound is late from Worcester, then the outbound Needham will be late, which also means that its “turn,” the next inbound, will be delayed. In response to your comment about the doors not all being opened, even with a full compliment of conductors, crews are not able to staff every door, and especially at ground level stations we want to ensure that all customers are able to board and detrain safely. This is why conductors do not open all doors to the train. I contacted our Mechanical Department, asking that the PA system on train 625 be checked out to make sure everything is working properly. Please know that delays in service are not something that we take lightly, and all departments are committed to working together to ensure that our customers receive timely, safe, and reliable service. Once again, I am sorry for the inconvenience this has caused you. Thank you for writing. Sincerely, Linda Dillon
MBCR Customer Service Manager

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Here are some random links.

• An amusing article about women in science.
• The Museum of Victorian Science.
• Lacing methods, you know, for shoes.
• Imagine that I am chronically cortically aroused. Now imagine that I am wearing my robe and wizard hat.

Via Anomaly Television: The video "This Fortean Island" is a seemingly random mixture of "cultism, death, UFOs, Bohemian Grove, Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Freemasonry, and necrophilia", with Discordianism being the connecting element. You can watch it on Google Video or get it as an AVI.

I got a call from one of the researchers from ABC news this evening. Apparently they are planning on doing a segment on Hans Reiser on their 20/20 show, and the researcher knew enough that there were some serious technical inaccuracies with the script (at the level of “so when Hans was creating reiser4, was that software; was he writing a program?” and “does the program run on the hard drive?”), and so they were looking for help on some technical issues on a background basis. She didn’t take any quotes from me; what she needed was help understanding the technical issues around filesystems and Linux. I tried to help explain what a filesystem was that would make sense to a lay person in 15 seconds; I have no idea whether the researcher got it, and whether she’ll be able to make changes in the script that will be vaguely coherent. We’ll see. I spent a lot of time working with Joshua Davis, providing background material for his Wired article, and he still got a bunch of the technical details wrong. The 20/20 researcher did ask me some silly questions such as “whether we were surprised when murder charges were filed against Hans?” Well, yes. What did she expect me to say? “Oh, yes, were always worried someone would get hurt…” Not! Sigh…. I might not agree with Hans’s filesystem design principles or his tactics in trying to get reiser4 accepted, but I always respected him as a fellow open source programmer. The researcher mentioned to me that Hans had done a talk at Google that was available at the Google Video site. Out of curiosity, I took a look at it. It was interesting; the last time I had seen Hans was in 1999, at the Linux Storage Management Workshop in Darmstadt, Germany that was organized by Matthew O’Keefe at Sistina Software. Compared to how he looked back then, and the picture of him in the Wired article, taken a 10-12 months after his talk at Google in February, 2006, I was struck by how much heavier (and older at least compared to my memory of him, which was much closer to this picture from his resume) in the Google Video. I also remember him as being a much more dynamic and energetic speaker, and I was struck by how slowly he spoke, with lots of long pauses and “umms” and “ahhs”. He seemed to be a much better public speaker in Darmstadt, but in the Google talk he seemed very tired as he gave the talk. One of the questions that the researcher asked me was whether I thought he was a genius or not. I told her that I thought he was quite bright in terms of raw intelligence, but that his Social IQ wasn’t as high as you might want for someone to be successful in gathering volunteers to work on an Open Source project, and in working with others in an Open Source development community. Looking at the video, I think that is very much true. He was a terrible public speaker, but some of the points he made about optimizing B-tree algorithms made sense. I might disagree with his philosophy over filesystem design and benchmarking, and I might not be terribly impressed by his social skills, but in terms of being a talented computer scientist, he was and is that. Is he guilty of the crime that he has been accused of? I have no idea. But from looking at his talk and knowing what I know of him, I have the sense of a greek tragedy. He’s been working on some of his ideas since his undergraduate days in UC Berkely in the early eighties — which he entered after finishing his 8th grade. And as research ideas, I think he might have gotten some very interesting results out of trying some of the things that he wants to do around operating system namespaces. (I think they are doomed in a production system descended from Unix, since application programmers are unlikely to rewrite their programs to take advantage of reiserfs’s performance characteristics — which would mean instead of using a Unix-like configuration file, treating a directory hierarchy containing the configuration information like a Windows registry. Still, as an academic, Plan 9-like system, I could have seen it has being a potentially very interesting Systems Research effort.) Unfortunately, his skills at public speaking and his ability to work with other people have handicapped him, and I know that has frustrated him deeply. So I have a lot of sympathy for him, and I hope that he is innocent, and will be found innocent. But only time will tell…. Anyway, according to the researcher, they are currently scheduling their segment about Hans on 20/20 on October 19th. I’m sure that schedule is subject to change, but it’ll be interesting to see how they treat Hans in their coverage. Hopefully it will be fair, and not overly sensationalistic, but unfortunately my faith in today’s TV edutainment-focused news program isn’t terribly high. My impression was that the research wanted to do a good job, but she was burdened by a very tight deadline, and in the end, the decision of what goes on the air and what doesn’t won’t be up to her. So we’ll see.

Phil and I managed to catch up with Linus when he was at the kernel summit in Cambridge last month. We gave him a Debian T-shirt at the time, as Phil blogged at the time. Barton George was one of a number of Sun people who came along to Debconf, and he picked up an Etch T-shirt while he was there too. Apparently he's quite keen to wear it in public too... :-) Any more action shots out there?

Seriously. Now that we have been using the request tracker for quite some time, it’s even more obvious that the DSA team is not up to its task. Use login “guest” and password “readonly” if you want to check the RT tickets linked in this article. The facts

• 65 public tickets open (and 5 private tickets)
  • Want to help and seek input from DSA? No response.
  • Want to help and you provide patches and/or solutions? Many are still waiting.
  • Security updates? Who cares…
  • Backup of ftp-master (ries)? No reply (though ftp-master stuff is mirrored on merkel)…
  • New alpha machine? No movement despite the fact that we still have no DD-accessible porter machine.
• 68 tickets closed. Here are some unscientific and manual stats (I counted one each time that someone was involved for the work or for closing the ticket):
  • 27 for James Troup (elmo)
  • 26 for Phil Hands (fil)
  • 13 for me (buxy)
  • 3 for Martin ‘Joey’ Schulze (those I manually forwarded him)
  • 3 for Ryan Murray (neuro)
  • 3 for Matt Taggart (taggart)
  • 2 for Josip Rodin (he handles tickets concerning the mirrors until they have a dedicated queue in the RT)

Note that myself and Matt do not have the needed rights to fix most of the tickets, so we provided help on a best-effort basis. Otherwise we would have done more. The communication problem It’s a multi-level problem. Each of the members has some problems with one or more other members. Joey’s behavior has been part of the recurring problems mentioned: he doesn’t use the RT, doesn’t read the DSA email alias and doesn’t follow the DSA IRC channel but he still does stuff very regularly without reporting anything and obviously problems happen. Ryan and James tried to impose him a rule to document what he does, without success apparently. On the other side, as far as I know, Ryan and James also don’t impose themselves to document everything in a central changelog. Joey has refused to provide me an explanation for his behavior. He just reminded me that he holds grudges against James and Ryan because as ftpmasters they didn’t cooperate well with him while he was stable release manager. In general, outside of all personal griefs that they might have, the DSA members do not communicate very much (at least not on their own official channels). Some examples have already been given concerning the request tracker, but it’s not much more effective on IRC. Most of the traffic on the channel is made up by local admins fixing the problems themselves without any intervention by any DSA. I also use the channel to regularly ping some DSA about simple issues and/or stuff that they usually handle. It used to work somewhat but lately fil has been busy (with the kernel summit and other conferences) and I simply got no answer at all… for example I pinged elmo, neuro and fil several times in the last weeks in the hope that they handle the tickets of the security team (#150, #157, #164) without results. There’s room for improvement. The leadership problem The team has no designated leader and every time that there’s a decision to take, they are blocked. Joey wouldn’t communicate and give his opinion, Ryan is extremely requiring and perfectionist, there’s not much room for compromise… A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Joey and elmo were friends. It’s even Joey who gave root rights to elmo. Nowadays, it’s rather James that is sort-of leading the team but he’s fed up of the situation and hasn’t managed to get out of this mess. He refuses to take drastic measures by himself because he’s not clearly the leader and doesn’t solicit a decision of the Debian leader (or the project) because he believes that the DSA team is not under the scope of the constitution! This can’t last any further. We’ll have to do something about it. Stay tuned.

Recently my iRiver [1] H320 had some milk based drink spilt on it. I’m not sure what the drink was (I discovered it when my iRiver stopped working and the drink was dry) but it smelled like coffee or hot chocolate when I washed it off (I considered tasting it but decided that knowing exactly which drink had damaged my iRiver probably wouldn’t help me fix it). The initial problem was that no buttons other than the play button (which is also used to turn it on) worked. When I first discovered this I had no way of hitting the reset button so my iRiver played until the battery ran flat. I tried to disassemble it by removing the five tiny phillips-head screws from the sides, but that didn’t make any part of it loose. I tried using a small amount of force on the front piece of plastic and broke two of the clips that hold it in place while getting another two loose without breaking (but there were still at least four clips to go). Then I realised that the problem was that the keys were physically sticking and that maybe if I washed the keypad out I might get it to work. So I spent some time in a cycle of dripping water into my iRiver, pressing the buttons to get some of the nasty stuff dissolved, and then using a towel to soak up some of the water with milk or whatever. After repeating this for a while the buttons all seemed to work well apart from the play button which kept registering presses when I wasn’t touching it. This meant that it always automatically turned on and then played a song in a stuttering manner as the play button is also the pause button and it paused and played as rapidly as it could. Finally I left it in the sun to dry for a few hours, which seemed to do some good. The play button mostly works now. Also it seems quite easy to get water between the front layer of protective plastic and the layer behind (which actually houses the keypad). So I have several large drops of water spread out between the layers which move around as I squeeze it. I think that if I get that dried out before algae can grow then everything will be fine.

• [1] http://www.iriver.com/

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I had an anonymous comment on the last post which claimed:-

"Theora support has low priority in free software projects because it's simply a bad codec. It has been marketed as "patent-free" but it's questionable how true that is. The patents over trivial functionality probably cover it too, and on the other hand the real "inventiveness" and validity of the more actively enforced patents covering better codecs is also questionable. The main reason Theora users are unlikely to be sued is that limiting free alternatives to such low-quality codecs already ensures they're not a competitive threat. If you want better free software encoding try FFmpeg or MEncoder with x264. The patent threats over that are more aggressive, but moving to Theora is not a good way to avoid them."

I'm not inclined to believe this for various reasons. In particular, I've seen good Theora results (higher quality for smaller file size than most), I've not heard of any credible patent threat to Theora and this claim was made anonymously (why?). Is anyone willing to support the above claims with their name? Alex Hudson commented:

"Tangentially related to your Ogg woes, the issue of software patents came up recently on the WhatWG discussions for a new HTML tag called 'video': http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-June/011981.html Whether or not Apple's excuse is reasonable (submarine patents made more unlikely by existing licensing pools? Not sure about that argument....), it does seem Ogg faces an uphill struggle when you'd think supporting it is effectively no cost."

(2007-09-17: 3 comments)

Because I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the lack of trackback support, prohibition against Javascript, etc. I’ve decided to set up a Wordpress installation on my private machine. For now, I have things set up so that posts made on my Wordpress blog will get mirrored onto my LiveJournal account. I may do some friends-locked posts still on LJ, but my general philosophy is to not post anything I might consider private on a blog, friends-locked or no. So we’ll see how often I make use of that option.

Because I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the lack of trackback support, prohibition against Javascript, etc. I’ve decided to set up a Wordpress installation on my private machine. For now, I have things set up so that posts made on my Wordpress blog will get mirrored onto my LiveJournal account. I may do some friends-locked posts still on LJ, but my general philosophy is to not post anything I might consider private on a blog, friends-locked or no. So we’ll see how often I make use of that option. Originally published at Thoughts by Ted. Please leave any comments there.

Nice to see the British Computer Society finally run Linus to ground after 7 years, so that they could pin the Ada Lovelace Medal on him, but I reckon he looked even more pleased when he got a new T-Shirt:

Perhaps this conversation is a sign that we've been in the country for awhile:

"Terah, if you ever drive the pickup..."

"Why would I ever do that?"

"I don't know, but if you ever do, I just want you to know something. The reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel..."

At this point I had to wait for her laughter to die down.

"As I was saying, the reason there's a towel connecting the brake pedal to the steering wheel is that, unless you park facing uphill, the brake lights stay on all the time and will drain the battery."

More laughter followed.

I didn't even have the chance to tell her to remove the towel before she starts the truck. Oh well, guess she'll figure it out.

On the other hand, perhaps this is a sign that we haven't been in the country long enough:

Today as I went to lunch, I saw a long, narrow, light gray line across the door on my car. I was pretty annoyed that somebody would have pulled keys or something across it to do that. But as I got closer, I realized it was just a spider web. Terah and I park our cars a few feet apart, and every week or so there will be a spider web connecting the two of them when we go out in the morning.

In the last week, I have been witness to and part of many conversations and probably one of my favorite ones was about coffee. My friend reasoned that coffee is as wonderful as it is because of its dependability (unlike, for example, your relatives). You know that for a moderate sum of money, you can drink a drink that makes you happy, alert, and, for some of us, allows us to face the rest of the day on an even keel. It is pure comfort that derives from a form of almost ritualistic dependability. This morning, as I was sipping my coffee, I came across a short blog post by Stanley Fish who certainly does not make me as happy as my morning cup of joe, but I do admire him for his dependability and consistency when it comes to reporting on matters of liberalism. For over 20 years he has dependably written on the quandaries and limit of liberal political ideology and his most recent installment, which focuses primarily on a new book by Paul Starr, is no different. Well, his conclusion strikes just a little differently than the tone of some of his previous works. In the past (or perhaps in some of his longer academic works), Fish’s solution to the problem of competing ideologies is that there are no solutions, just incommensurable ideologies and you gotta sort of duke it out, and the strong man/woman/group wins (see Terry Eagleton for this characterization of Fish’s work. But the ending to this piece is subtly different, a tone and stance I rather prefer: So again, what to do? Lilla s answer is pragmatic rather than philosophical (and all the better for that). All we can do, he says, is cope ; that is, employ a succession of ad hoc, provisional strategies that take advantage of, and try to extend, moments of perceived mutual self-interest and practical accommodation. We need to recognize that coping is the order of the day, not defending high principles. Now there s a principle we can live with, maybe. What I like about his ending is that it acknowledges there are times when compromise is possible, where a common meeting ground can be forged, however provisional these may be. As someone interested in the politics of consensus and accommodation, I think it is important to recognize that human beings are not simply molded by one set of values but are are often dwelling within various systems (of sometimes contradictory) values. And it is because of this multiplicity that forms of accommodation and consensus emerge and can emerge, signaling a more hopeful politics that derive not from abstract adherence to precept such as tolerance, but from the far messier realm of actual life experience.

Thanks to Philipp Hug and Patrick Winnertz, virtualbox is now available in Debian. I have just installed my first virtual machines, and I am now able to run Windows 2000 or Ubuntu from my Debian box. I was using Qemu until now, but the performances (despite the Kqemu accelerator) were quite bad, and I simply couldn’t run any Linux 2.6 based distributions with the kqemu active. Setting up virtualbox is really easy, just run aptitude install virtualbox virtualbox-source, compile the vboxdrv module (I have used module-assistant), add your user to the vboxusers group, and that’s it! I only had to download manually the guest additions iso image from http://www.virtualbox.org/download/1.4.0/, as the VirtualBox manager wasn’t able to find it automatically. You can launch the VirtualBox manager from the graphical menu and set up your first virtual machine.

In the recent online article heise online - IFA special - Force-Feedback-Weste mit Kitzelattacke, Heise News (a german IT news site) had a really nice caption under one image showing a new force-feedback vest by Philips. The image looks like this:

The german caption is: “Philips’ Force-Feedback-Weste erm glicht t dliche Kitzelattacken in PC-Shootern.”
Translation to english is: “Philips Force-Feeback-Vest allows deathly tickling-attacks in PC-Shooters.” (Means First-Person-Shooters). Nice. That’s at least a pleasant way of dying: Being tickled to death. Of course, the article itself clears up the misunderstanding: The vest is more tickling than “punching” the player, even if his game-ego is killing most ferociously.