It's been a long time since I last took some time to read
First Monday A great online publication, if you are not familiar with it, that I would categorize (and no, I'm not probably well-informed in it to be authoritative) as dealing with social, psychological aspects of the cultural shifts the online world has brought upon us (often dealing with topics related to Free Software communities, the reason I first met the publication). Firstmonday is an Open Access champion from early on. It follows an approachable but academic format (this means, it
is peer-reviewed, its articles give extensive lists of references, and the articles are not the short reads we have got used to finding on the net, but, quoting from their
audience profile,
English is not the first language of many First Monday readers; A large percentage of First Monday readers are not a part of academia; Cultures, educational backgrounds, and fields of study vary greatly among First Monday readers.) This means, it's at least a great publication for me to follow :)
Anyway After a long time not following it, I have just read
Reading revolutions: Online digital text and implications for reading in academe, by Barry W. Cull; First Monday, Volume 16, Number 6 - 6 June 2011 Nice, interesting read. As I was planning on telling about the article to a couple of friends more into the subjects than myself, I'll comment+quote some bits on it. Before going any further: The article makes several references to Maryanne Wolf. No relation to her I'm not lulling my (two? are you both still reading?) readers towards her work ;-)
The article talks about the differences social, even dips into some physiological aspects that the activity of
reading is sustaining due to the shift from an activity done mainly from books (or other similar printed material) to the computer screen. Of course, we all know from our own experience many of the basic traits Shorter attention spans, a different reading pattern (skimming instead of reading; browsing through several related items instead of in-depth reading a single text as a knowledge unit).
The article begins with an overview of reading and humankind. Cull quotes Maryanne Wolf's phrase,
despite the fact that it took our ancestors about 2,000 years to develop an alphabetic code, children are regularly expected to crack this code in about 2,000 days . An interesting point I never thaught of is the start of reading as a purely mental activity, detaching reason from verbalization, ~1200 years ago:
Interestingly, these early scribes first did their work by reading out loud to themselves. Not until the ninth century did monastic regulations begin requiring silent reading. By the thirteenth century the practice of men reading silently and alone became commonplace. This shift to silent reading was a profound change, one that Darnton suggested involved a greater mental adjustment than the shift to printed text
.
One last important point in this older history, that I'm quoting because I know I'll need the reference later on for one of my texts is about reading as a social activity Yes, also related to the quietness I just mentioned:
Interestingly, with the democratization of the printed text, there was a return to reading aloud. Reading was a solitary silent process only for the educated elite who could afford to buy books. For the rest of the population, as Darnton pointed out, reading was a social activity which took place in workshops, barns, and taverns [and] while children played, women sewed, and men repaired tools.
After this introduction (obviously one of the most interesting parts to me), Cull gives numbers showing how reading is evolving (in the USA and Canada), and quotes some prediction on how the future will end up adapting. Of course, I live in a place with a very different society, so I cannot comment much. Then he confronts some studies regarding specifically
leisure reading, as it is a much more trustable factor than just literacy (in a world as highly literate as ours is, many people only read when they have to and have never or very seldom experienced the pleasure of reading just for the sake of it), bringing into the discussion the Internet (and computers in general) usage patterns.
I found also very interesting the next section, regarding the pattern changes many libraries are facing now, specially academic/research-oriented libraries:
For several millennia, right up until just two decades ago, the central role of a library was to collect and house physical texts: from clay tablets, to scrolls, to printed books (Battles, 2003; Manguel, 2006). While printed text remains essential to most academic libraries, today s libraries have also become a core conduit via which researchers access scholarly texts online. Just within the last few years, Canadian academic libraries, in a situation similar to libraries throughout the Western world, have reached an interesting tipping point librarians now spend the majority of their collections budgets on electronic instead of printed texts.
( )
Libraries are convinced that digital text, now in its infancy, is likely to have a long future. Not only do they purchase electronic texts, but most academic libraries have also become publishers of electronic texts, whether they are digitizing large portions of their book holdings, or focusing on scanning a relatively small number of archival documents from their unique special collections.
And yes, doing some work with our Institute's library, I can confirm this trend.
About e-books: I have got quite into that topic since the Kindle won my heart (and my money!) half a year ago. The little device completly changed my reading habits, I have read lots more since I carry it. And yes, I have never considered a full tablet-like device The article talks long about the difference, about the disadvantage that multitasking means to the human brain (oh, do I suffer from it!) I liked this snippet, quoting Steve Jobs a couple of years ago, regarding an Apple e-book reader question:
When Apple was rumoured to be working on an e book reader a few years ago, CEO Steve Jobs expressed his lack of interest: It doesn t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don t read anymore, he reportedly said, continuing by stating that 40 percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don t read anymore (Markoff, 2008). Nicholas Carr (2010) has summed up Apple s involvement in the tablet phenomenon this way: Jobs is no dummy. As a text delivery system, the iPad is perfectly suited to readers who don t read anymore .
The issue for me is, I
do enjoy reading, but I am an information addict. I know that if I have parallel information flows, my attention will surely dilute between them. Of course, as I read this article on-screen, it was hard for me to take the needed discipline not to be distracted by IMs or IRC highlights during the whole reading (which was also as an excercise for myself ;-) ). I am surprised to see this on student preferences (and even more surprised to see this data comes from my university):
In a study of students at the Universidad Nacional Aut noma de M xico (UNAM), the majority of students preferred print, and 63 percent reported that they could bear reading a document on a computer screen for no more than one hour (Ram rez Leyva, 2003). When it comes to course textbooks, a marked student preference for paper over e books has recently been found (Woody, 2010).
As we approach the end, it talks about another important topics I have often tried (and often failed) to communicate to my users: That of
paratext, the meaning of the different texts, covers, items, layouts, etc. that are not part of the text itself but do shape the way we face it. To some of us, this seems obvious. To others, it is so hard to understand
It closes with two more topics I will refer to. One is the permanent connectivity. All the time, more people are connected virtually all of their waking time. This affects not only learning habits but priorities.
Will this near constant access to information interfere with students desire to comprehend and remember information, necessary to the educational process of turning it into knowledge? Author and university business school lecturer Don Tapscott recently suggested that students might not have to stress about the details those you can check
Finally, regarding the continuity and ellaboration found in texts that are each time more common He quotes Maryanne Wolf:
I am worried about kids who are immersed in digital culture. They will get to college and they will have been Twittering so much that they won t have the patience to read those really long cognitively convoluted and complex sentences. They may not have developed those rich networks which are required in order to read at a high level of sophistication. The effort is what we are going to lose. They are becoming not so much a lazy reader, but an atrophied reader
As you can see, not only this post is meant to tell my couple-of-interested-friends to read the article, but it's mainly meant as a mental placeholder for myself. I will be surely refering to some of these items.
Last week was a rather slow week. I did some work on allowing the dashboard to store and process information that does not come from the BTS. This exposed a few issues with the way we were storing and presenting information. After talking to Matt, we decided that the dashboard should deal with task objects. These tasks would contain basic information such as a name, person assigned to it, status, and possibly a link to a bug. This means that we would be able to start up a new DEX project by simply choosing a project name and creating a basic text file containing a list of tasks (package names, patches, bugs, etc).
I also have been trying to get a hold of some people who participated in the last DEX project. I am interested in getting some more feedback about what went well, problems they encountered, and tools that might have made things easier. I am also talking to some people who are currently working on starting up new DEX projects to try and make dextools align with as many workflows as possible. If you fall into either of these categories, I would really appreciate it if you contact me.
There is also a new wiki page that I created so that it is easier for people who are not interested in me or the Google Summer of Code to quickly see what dextools is about and monitor its progress. I will be adding more information over the next few days.
Currently, I am continuing to work on the dashboard and talking to people about their DEX experiences. I have also begun working on some scripts to generate graphs that will go on the dashboard. These graphs will allow us to quickly check our progress on different projects. They will also allow us to see and acknowledge individuals working on the tasks. I will add more information about these graphs to this blog and to the dextools wiki page.
Haven't been in my new home that long and through a long chain of contacts, my neighbour was finally able to contact me. (Just goes to show that having Debian friends nearby who like board games turns out to make some things JustWork.)
I was laid off a couple of months ago, and have been thinking about
what I want to do next. Actually, I've mostly been writing code for
my pet projects, but earning a living again is occasionally on my mind.
I would, very much, like to earn a living while deveoping interesting
free software that I would like to use myself.
There's a bunch of options available:
It s been a few months since 
Today is 
Since my laptop features 
We downloaded a total of 8 
As usual many people requested travel sponsorship to attend DebConf 11 and
are now waiting eagerly on the outcome of their request. We are sorry,
that we can t give you much details yet. To give you an idea of the
time line, here is a small explanation of the process.
About 100 people requested travel sponsorship. In total that would about
50 000 Euro. Problem is currently we don t exactly know, how much money we
may spend on travel sponsorship ourselves (By the way: If a potential
sponsor is reading this, please 
DECLARATIVE DIVERSIONS
======================
Introduction
A diversion is when it is possible to have dpkg not overwrite a file when it
reinstalls the package it belongs to, and to have it put the file from the
package somewhere else instead.
Declarative diversions involves a new control file with a declarative
syntax which dpkg will parse and process directly as part of the package unpack
and removal phases, eliminating the problems resulting from non-atomic
handling of diversions.
Topics
There are a number of topics involved in implementing this kind of project
* What syntax do we use for the new control file?
* What dpkg does with the control file
* How do we handle diversions to a non-existant directory?
* How do we order unpacking a new package which adds a diversion?
* How do we order unpacking a new package that removes a diversion?
* How do we order removing a package which had a diversion?
* How do we handle errors?
* What happens to dpkg-divert?
Details - Control File Syntax
-
It will conform to RFC2822 style with the following format:
* Divert-From:
* Divert-To:
* Blank lines and lines beginning with # will be comments
Divert-To will be optional and if it is ommitted then files being diverted
will have their filename changed to file.distrib
The above style has it s advantages, one of the main ones being that there is
no need to escape whitespace within filenames. It also allows for more commands
to be added at a later date.
Details - Control File Handling
-
Within control.tar.gz the file should be named diversions
This file is then copied to /var/lib/info/$package.diversions
We need to store the control file for the currently-installed package so that
we can detect declarative diversions that have been removed from the control
file between versions (On-disk version and the to-be-unpacked version).
If there is no previous version of a control file then all current diversions
within the package are left in place and any new ones declared within the
control file are added.
If there is a previous version of the control file then the diversions
listed within the file are compared with the diversions currently in place.
If a diversion exists that is no longer listed in the control file then it is
removed. If there is a diversion listed in the control file that doesn t
currently exist then it is added.
Details - Handling Diversions to non-existant directories
-
Diverting files to directories that don t exist can cause a number of problems.
If the package does not own the directory it may be left orphaned on
removal of the package
The package is responsible for ensuring the availability of the target
directory in the unpack phase.
If a declarative diversion attempts to divert a file to a folder that neither
exists already on the filesystem at unpack time, nor is shipped within
the package, dpkg will return an error at unpack time.
Details - Ordering Requirements
-
=>Unpacking a new package that adds a diversion
*1. Check if package has a previous diversion control file
*2. Copy control file to tmp directory
*3. Calculate diversions to be added
*4. Unpack folders
*5. Add diversions
*6. Unpack files
*7. Copy control file to /var/lib/dpkg/info/$package.diversion
*Performing diversions this way avoids trouble with creating folders and
accidentally overwriting the wrong version of files.
*Another major problem would be extracting a new version of the file and
overwriting the old one.
*This might cause the wrong version of the file to be diverted and the
package to break.
=>Unpacking a new package that removes a diversion
*1. Check if package has a previous diversion control file
*2. Copy control file to tmp directory
*3. Calculate diversions to be removed
*4. Check if dropped diversion results in a file conflict and abort the
unpack if it does.
*5. Unpack folders
*6. Unpack files
*7. Remove old files no longer needed in the package
*8. Remove diversions
*9. Copy control file to /var/lib/dpkg/info/$package.diversion
*If a package has no previous diversion control file then no diversions
will be removed and existing diversions can only be removed using
dpkg-divert.
*If removing a diversion results in a file conflict then dpkg will return
an error at unpack time before anything is unpacked and the unpack
is aborted.
=>Removing a package which had a diversion
*1. Remove files
*2. Remove diversions
*3. Remove folders
*4. Remove control file at /var/lib/dpkg/info/$package.diversion
*This ensures that all files, diversions and folders are removed correctly
Details - Error handling
Errors in diversions will have to handled with a great deal of care due to
the fact that if they are not the package could be broken.
This means that a great deal of checks must be done to ensure that all the files
can be diverted properly before any actual diverting takes place. If they can t
the package installation/update must be stopped and rolled back to avoid the
package being installed incorrectly or broken.
Details - dpkg-divert
-
When we impliment the new diversion method we should keep the current
dpkg-divert. This allows maintainers to catch up with the new method without
breaking their packages. It also allows maintainers to perform some operations
that aren t support by the new method.
All current functionality of dpkg-divert will be left intact for use by
sysadmins and for maintainers to catch up with the new system. The two
systems will work together without directly conflicting with each other.
Example Usage #1
The file to be diverted is /usr/share/foo
It needs to be moved to /usr/share/bar
The syntax of the control file would be:
#Start File
Divert-From: /usr/share/foo
Divert-To: /usr/share/bar
#End File
Example Usage #2
In this example the maintainer doesn t want to move the file to any specific
folder
The syntax of the control file would be:
#Start File
Divert-From: /usr/share/foo
#End File
This would divert the file to /usr/share/foo.distrib
Footnotes
-
RFC2822 Guide:
* 
(First posting to Pl net Commandline! Tag: pcli)
Vutral asked in IRC how to synchronise two shells environment
while they re running. As you may know, POSIX systems cannot change
a process environment vector after it has been started, only the
process itself can. Well, 
When soliciting for opinions, recently, I discovered that the python-based