This summer, I ll be taking a bit of time off, moving back to San Francisco and starting a new job. I can t wait to get back to work. Here s why. Me and my data
I have a singular relationship with my data. I have a copy of every email I ve sent since I first got an Internet email address in 1994 (82,000 messages and counting). I have even older files downloaded from BBSes, and passed between friends on floppy disks. Chat logs, text messages, voicemail I hold onto them all. Anything which is relevant to me personally, I tend to save. This must seem banal to people who are first getting online today. In the age of Gmail and Flickr, it s easy to assume that all of your data will be preserved indefinitely, with little or no effort on your part. But for me, it has been hard work over the years, because I ve done it myself. I ve carried my data with me to countless new computers, operating systems, storage technologies, file formats and cities over the years. Everywhere I ve lived, I ve brought it with me. Physically. Really? Why do I do this? Why have I gone to such trouble for a collection of bits? Especially now, why is most of my data still at home?
One pragmatic answer is that I can simply do more with my data when I have a copy. I can work with it using any software I want, including software that I write myself. I don t have to worry about whether I can transfer it from one web service to another. I m never stuck using yesterday s services because my data is never trapped in them. My personal data is always available to me me, always raw, ready and waiting for the next wave of software to come along. When it does, I can load my data into it and keep going. The fact that Facebook and Google disagree over sharing their users data doesn t bother me in the least. Another reason is that I want to be in control of it. I decide who to share my data with, and when. Some of it, I prefer not to share at all, with any person or company, and I have that choice. Even if a powerful government wants to access my data, I am afforded certain protection under the law, at least in the countries where I ve lived. If I turned over my data to service providers, my choices and protection would likely be much more limited. I have a deeper emotional attachment to my data as well. Enfolded within that vast pattern of bits is some part of my self. By sharing my personal data with other people, I show them something of who I am. Increasingly, my personal data is part of my identity. This is more than just a state of mind: it s been shown that even our non-identifying personal data can reveal who we are. In other words, it s not just my data it s me data . Singly I m joining Singly because I want to take this concept much further, and combine people, data and software into a different shape with people at the center. Today, we are creating vastly greater amounts of personal data, and it s stored in many more places. We leave our trail on the Internet in the form of activity streams, messages and content, spread across different web sites, each with their own inscrutable terms of service and (if we re lucky) their own API. These disconnected silos prevent us from using all of this information effectively. Meanwhile, we want and need to connect with each other in more ways than ever before. We need applications which can connect us, through our personal data, to the services we need. Singly is building the technology to make this possible. It will be designed with the deepest respect for the relationship that we have with our personal data, and with a vision for truly personal computing. Singly is

• A team of passionate people, dedicated to a vision for personal data
• Building an open source data locker, which aggregates and stores your personal data from around the web and ensures that it s always available to you
• Enabling developers to create powerful distributed applications based on this data, without having to deal with the complexity of multiple web services APIs
• Providing secure hosting services for personal data lockers
• Hiring! We re looking for people with deep experience in security and cryptography, cloud infrastructure and user experience, as well as software engineering generalists

This opportunity is a great fit for my interests and experience. Singly aims to be the commercial part of a vibrant open source community, and I m looking forward to building on what I ve learned in Debian, Canonical and Ubuntu to help make it a success. I ll have lots more to say about it as time goes on. Meanwhile, if you re interested in following what we re doing, here s where:

• Singly: website, blog, Twitter
• The Locker Project: website, GitHub, Twitter, blog, IRC (#lockerproject on FreeNode)
• Me: Blog, Identica or Twitter

(this is a copy of an mail sent to ruby-core@ and ruby-talk@) Since the beginning of 2011, the Debian Ruby team has been working on several big changes. Those changes all are available in Debian unstable, some of them are also available in Debian testing, and they should all be available in the next Debian and Ubuntu releases. I think that it addresses most of the reasonable concerns about Ruby in Debian. Using alternatives to switch between Ruby implementations The alternatives system is now used to manage the ruby symlink and the other related symlinks, making it easy to switch between Ruby implementations (only Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.X at the moment) (see this mail for details). The default choice for Ruby is still 1.8, but this change will make it easy for us to make a switch to 1.9.X by default (likely by the release of Debian wheezy). Installing gems executables to /usr/local/bin Rubygems (both as a standalone package, and as shipped with Ruby 1.9.X) now install executables to /usr/local/bin. (The other files still get installed under /var, see this mail) Enabling gem update system gem update system has been re-enabled. Since upgrading rubygems to a version that may not have been properly tested with the rest of the Debian system may cause issues in the user s system, there s a big warning about that. The user can confirm and upgrade rubygems anyway by defining an environment variable. New gem2deb packaging helper There s a new packaging helper, named gem2deb, that makes it very easy to generate Debian source packages from Rubygems. We are in the process of migrating all ruby libraries packaged in Debian to that new helper. It will take some time, though (help is welcomed). Transition status: http://pkg-ruby-extras.alioth.debian.org/wheezy/ One big benefit of the switch to gem2deb for the Ruby community is that, in the process, we are enabling test suites at build time for each package and each Ruby implementation. This should make it easy to detect regressions in new interpreter versions. Ruby 1.9.3 We will switch to Ruby 1.9.3 ASAP (probably when it is branched off trunk, with a package first in Debian experimental). Since the Ruby compatibility version issue is likely to stay around, we will re-evaluate how we are dealing with it (to avoid the ruby1.9.1 package <=> ruby -v = 1.9.2 problem that confuses many users). This is likely by switching the package name to ruby1.9.3 (keep a ruby1.9.1 package for compatibility). The package containing the shared library will stay libruby1.9.1. Links

• Team website: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby
• Developer documentation about all those changes: http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Ruby/RubyInWheezy
• contact point: debian-ruby@lists.debian.org
• IRC: #debian-ruby @ irc.debian.org

Identity checks and trust The OpenPGP web of trust is composed of keys linked to each other by two things:

• identity checks: signing a key means that you verified the link between a key with user IDs, an official identity document with a photograph, and a person with a face;
• trust: on your public key ring, you manually decide who you trust to correctly check other people's identity.

With these two pieces of information, GnuPG is able to determine whether or not the key of someone you never met can trusted to belong to its alleged owner. Signatures Signing a key is usually a binary action: either you sign it or you do not sign it. Thus your signature on a key will give other people a rough identity check information and no trust information at all. In fact, the OpenPGP standard does allow to publish precise identity check and trust information on signatures, but unfortunately this is now enabled with GnuPG by default. These features are called certification level and trust signatures.Certification level To indicate how careful you verified someone's identity, run GnuPG with the option --ask-cert-level, or add ask-cert-level to your configuration file .gnupg/gpg.conf. When you make a signature with this option, GnuPG will ask you how carefully you verified the key owner's identity. According to the manpage gpg(1), the available levels are:

• 0: no indication;
• 1: personal belief but no verification, useful for signing pseudonymous IDs;
• 2: casual verification;
• 3: extensive verification.

Trust level You can also indicate how much you trust someone, sign his key with the command tsign instead of sign. GnuPG will then ask you three questions:

1. how far you trust him to verify other people's keys: marginally or fully (I personally only fully trust people that were trained or challenged by myself or by people I trust even more)
2. how far you allow him to make trust signatures on your behalf: usually answer 1; answering 3 would allow him to issue trust signature with level 2, thus allowing other people to issue trust signatures on your behalf (this features exists to implement pyramidal certification systems, but can be interesting for signing your own keys when you have several);
3. if you wish to restrict this signature to a domain: I have no idea of what this means so I give none.

Conclusion Although certification level and trust signatures are not very widely used, thanks to GnuPG's default settings, it allows to publish more information about your signatures, adding value to the web of trust at no cost, which I believe is a good think. Thus I think it is worth doing it. If you want to use these features with the caff wrapper, remember that it has its own GnuPG configuration .caff/gnupghome/gpg.conf. In addition it does not implement trust signatures natively: to use them, you have to abort the automatic signing, which gives you a GnuPG prompt, where you are then able to tsign, then exit to return to caff that will consider your trust signatures. Credits

• Wikimedia Commons for Saint Peter's key photograph, GFDL 1.2 licensed.

I wrote about some EFI implementation issues I'd seen on Macs a while back. Shortly afterwards we started seeing approximately identical bugs on some Intel reference platforms, and fixing it actually became more of a priority.

The fundamental problem is the same. We take the EFI memory map, identify the virtual addresses of the regions that will be required for runtime (mapping them into virtual address space if needed) and then call the firmware's SetVirtualAddressMap() implementation in order to let the firmware convert all its pointers. Sadly it seems that some firmware implementations call into sections of boot services code to do this, which is unfortunate because we've already taken that back to use as RAM. So, given that this is clearly against the spec, how does it ever work?

The tediously dull version is that Linux typically calls SetVirtualAddressMap() in the kernel, and everyone else does it in their bootloaders. The bootloader hasn't set up NX bits or anything, so it just happens to work there. We could just do it in the bootloader in Linux, but that makes doing things like kernel address space randomisation trickier, so it's not the favoured approach. So, instead, we can probably just reserve those ranges until after we've switched to virtual mode, and make sure the pages are executable. This ought to land in 2.6.40, or whatever it ends up being called.

(The alternative approach, of just never transitioning to physical mode, turns out to mysteriously fail on various machines. Calls to SetVariable() just give errors. We just don't know)

That still leaves the problem of SetVariable() on the test Mac trying to access a random address. That one turned out to be easier. There's 2MB of flash at the top of physical address space, and this was being presented as being broken into four separate EFI regions. While physically contiguous, Linux was mapping these to discontiguous virtual addresses. Apple's firmware appeared to assume that a pointer into one region could just be incremented into another. So because it's still easier to change the kernel than change Apple, 2.6.39 merges these regions to ensure they're contiguous.

Remaining problems include some machines seemingly not booting if they have 4GB of RAM or more and this Apple failing to communicate with its panel over the eDP auxchannel. Anyone got any idea how to dump the bios compatibility module out of a running EFI session?

Hello Planet Debian reader.

And now you re thinking, who is this crazy guy who does not even know how to write English (is my sentence wrong?). My name is Guillaume Mazoyer and I am the Google Summer of Code student working on Jigsaw with Tom Marble and Sylvestre Ledru. I blog from France and I plan to write my GSoC reports right here.

Maybe you don t know what is Jigsaw yet. If so, go read this wiki page, you should be able to understand the goal of my project. Here is the description:

Since the beginning of Java, the JVM is a big virtual machine will all the features incorporated in it. This JVM provides many features which are useful in only limited areas (Corba) or which are not used at all in some contexts (AWT/Swing are useless for a web server).

The goal of the jigsaw project is to provide a modular JVM.

This will provide many improvements in the performance area (startup, solving of the dependencies, etc) but also the size of the dependencies.

There are already some works done by upstream (Oracle) but it does not complain to the Debian standards. The target is Java 8.

The goal is this Google Summer of Code project is to package the current development version of Jigsaw into Debian.

Please note that this project is not only about packaging. This will probably implies some developments and contributions to upstream (upstream is aware of this effort). Updating javahelper to manage specifities of Jigsaw could be considered.

I m pretty excited to work on this project and the work has already started. Can t wait to go deeper and enjoy working on two things that I love: Debian and Java.

John W. Dean wrote in insightful series of three articles for Findlaw about Authoritarian Conservatives [1]. In summary there are Authoritarian Followers who follow their leader blindly and Authoritarian Leaders who do whatever it takes to gain and maintain power. The Authoritarian mindset lends itself towards right-wing politics. Mick Ebeling gave an inspiring TED talk about his work developing a system to produce art that is controlled by eye movements [2]. The development work was started to support the quadriplegic graffiti artist TEMPT1. Mick s most noteworthy point is that all the hardware design and software are free so anyone can implement it without asking an insurance company or hospital (this is one of the few occasions when a TED speaker has received a standing ovation during a talk). The Eyewriter.org site has the designs and source which is licensed under the GPL [3]. Morgan Spurlock (who is famous for Supersize Me ) gave an amusing TED talk titled The Greatest TED Talk Ever Sold [4]. He provides some interesting information about the brand sponsorship process and his new movie The Greatest Movie Ever Sold . Ralph Langner gave an interesting TED talk about reverse-engineering the Stuxnet worm and discovering that it was targetted at the Iranian nuclear program [5]. The fact that the Stuxnet environment could be turned to other uses such as disrupting power plants is a great concern, particularly as it has special code to prevent automatic safety systems from activating. Angela Belcher gave an interesting TED talk about using nature to grow batteries [6]. She is evolving and engineering viruses to manufacture parts of batteries and assemble them, the aim is to scale up the process to manufacture batteries for the Prius and other large devices at room temperature with no toxic materials. She is also working on biological methods of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen which has the obvious potential for fuel-cell power and also solar PV cells. As an aside she mentions giving a copy of the Periodic Table to Barack Obama and he told her that he will look at it periodically . Bruce Schnier gave a good overview of the issues related to human perceptions of security in his TED talk about The Security Mirage [7]. There isn t much new in that for people who have been doing computer work but it s good to have an overview of lots of issues. TED has an interesting interview with Gerry Douglas about his work developing touch-screen computer systems for processing medical data in Malawi [8]. This is worth reading by everyone who is involved in software design, many of the things that he has done go against traditional design methods. Mike Matas gave an interesting demo at TED of the first proper digital book [9]. The book is by Al Gore and is run on the iPad/iPhone platform (hopefully they will have an Android version soon). His company is in the business of licensing software for creating digital books. The demonstration featured a mixture of pictures, video, audio, and maps with the pinch interface to move them around. Dr Sommers of Tufts University wrote an interesting post for Psychology Today titled Why it s Never About Race [10]. It seems that there are lots of patterns of people being treated differently on the basis of race but for every specific case no-one wants to believe that racial bias was involved. The Register has an amusing article about what might have happened if Kate had left Prince William at the altar [11]. Fiorenzo Omenetto gave an interesting TED talk about synthetic silk [12]. He is working on developing artificial fibers and solids based on the same proteins as silk which can be used for storing information (DVDs and holograms), medical implants (which can be re-absorbed into the body and which don t trigger an immune response), and cups among other things. Maybe my next tie will have a no pupae were harmed in the production notice. ;) The CDC has released a guide to preparing for a Zombie apocalypse [13], while it s unlikely that Zombies will attack, the same suggestions will help people prepare for the other medical emergencies that involve the CDC. Salon has an interesting article by Glenn Greenwald who interviewed Benjamin Ferencz about aggressive warfare [14]. Benjamin was a prosecutor for war crimes at Nuremberg after WW2 and compares the US actions since 9-11 with what was deemed to be illegal by the standards of WW2. Eli Pariser gave an interesting TED talk about Online Filter Bubbles [15]. He claims that services such as Facebook and Google should give more of a mixture of results rather than targetting for what people want. The problem with this idea is that presenting links that someone doesn t want to click doesn t do any good. It s not as if the filter bubble effect relies on modern media or can be easily solved. Terry Moore gave a TED talk about how to tie shoelaces [16]. Basically he advocates using a doubly-slipped Reef Knot instead of a doubly-slipped Granny Knot. Now I just need to figure out how to tie a doubly-slipped Reef Knot quickly and reliably. Terry uses this as a mathaphor for other ways in which one might habitually do something in a non-optimal way.

• [1] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20070925.html
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/mick_ebeling_the_invention_that_unlocked_a_locked_in_artist.html
• [3] http://www.eyewriter.org/developer/
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/morgan_spurlock_the_greatest_ted_talk_ever_sold.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon.html
• [6] http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow_batteries.html
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_schneier.html
• [8] http://blog.ted.com/2011/04/29/fellows-friday-with-gerry-douglas/
• [9] http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html
• [10] http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201104/happy-birth-certificate-mr-president/why-its-never-about-race
• [11] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/28/operation_pumpkin/
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/fiorenzo_omenetto_silk_the_ancient_material_of_the_future.html
• [13] http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
• [14] http://www.salon.com/news/osama_bin_laden/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/05/13/nuremberg
• [15] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes.html

Hello everyone. Per tradition, I will use my first post to Planet Debian as a bit of an introduction. My name is Nathan Handler. I am Ubuntu Developer and a member of freenode staff. Currently, I am participating as a student in the Google Summer of Code program with Debian. I am working on Backend Tools and Infrastructure for DEX (aka dextools ) with Matt Zimmerman as my mentor. To quote the project description:

DEX is a new program designed to help improve Debian and its derivatives by merging in changes made downstream and encouraging discussions between the various projects. As this is a new project, most of the infrastructure does not exist (or is rather hackish and incomplete). This project will create the necessary backend tools and infrastructure so that all Debian derivatives can easily make use of the DEX project.

While I have not been great with updating my blog in the past, I am going to try and produce regular posts about my Summer of Code work. If you have any questions about DEX or are interested in getting involved, please check out the Get Involved section on the website.

The Alioth admins have been hard at work over the past few days to migrate Alioth to a new configuration split over a pair of servers. As a consequence, personal git repositories aren t working anymore for the time being. So, don t panic, the git repository will be back soon, one way or another.

What do Assholes do? Rusty just wrote a post titled If you didn t run code written by assholes, your machine wouldn t boot [1] about some of the anti-social tendencies demonstrated by programmers, including some that are implied to be fairly important. His post seems to imply that there are really great programmers who are anti-social and that we should just put up with it because of their great code. One of the problems with his post is that he doesn t define asshole . Holocaust deniers and all other Nazi supporters seem to clearly by assholes by any definition. People who have silly ideas about medicine and tell others seem to be merely misguided (although my dictionary gives stupid or irritating or ridiculous in the definition of asshole so technically they can meet the criteria). In the comments Rusty states that nuttiness is relative . While that is correct it doesn t seem to have much bearing on whether someone is an asshole. For example I know some very nice people who are utterly convinced by creationism. Is Anyone Essential to Free Software? Most projects have one person or several people in leadership positions, usually there seems to be a combination of project management and lead-programmer positions. Such people are obviously quite important to a project. But we have seen examples of people dying, being employed by Microsoft, retiring, relicensing the source in a bad way, and just losing interest without the project ceasing. It seems clear that in most cases when a project which has a significant amount of use has significant bugs and no maintainer then someone will step in. The cases where no-one takes over the project are often resolved by someone creating a competing project. If no-one takes over an abandoned Free Software project then it s a strong indication that the project wasn t particularly important anyway. I have no doubt that if any bug or missing feature made Linux systems stop booting then someone would fix it quite quickly. In a more general sense it seems that every time someone takes a position in a project that is of wide interest they are displacing someone else who might have done the job. When you volunteer to do significant work for a project you may be displacing someone who is more skillful than you this isn t necessarily a bad thing as there are plenty of other projects to work on, some of which require more skill. Growing More Programmers It seems to me that a large part of becoming a great programmer is facing great challenges. People who could be described as optimistic or arrogant will tend to take on more challenging tasks and therefore learn more. I m sure that there are a lot of people out there who have the potential to be great programmers apart from not taking on the challenging work, this seems to be an unfortunate waste of talent. Given a large enough population if someone leaves a senior position there should be someone else who can obtain the skills needed to take over. One advantage of this for Free Software development is that even if the best person to take on the challenge isn t living in the most convenient continent that won t be an obstacle, while with proprietary software development projects the teams are small and it s common that no-one else is capable of stepping up to a lead position. Another advantage is that when the lead developer leaves there are generally many candidates to replace them, all of whom can start work and be judged on the work that they do. I think that the best claims that can be made regarding essential people are not in regard to technical skill alone but to a combination of technical and people skills. Getting a group of programmers to work together is really hard but it s something that needs to be done for any significant project. Also the larger projects tend not to stand alone, being able to get changes included in other projects requires some skill. Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick gave an insightful talk at Google IO 2008 titled How to Protect Your Open Source Project From Poisonous People [2]. The first half of their talk is mostly about people who are misguided or difficult rather than what most people would consider poisonous and the second half is more about people who are actively poisonous and need to be removed. They advocate a community based on Politeness, Respect, Trust, and Humility. They describe in detail how the methods they advocate result in the members of their community being more productive, it seems obvious that those principles will lead to better career growth for people within the community and more friendly people wanting to join. When is being an Asshole OK? I once worked for a company that apparently had a team consisting solely of assholes. Apparently one asshole got promoted to management and after some internal transfers they ended up with all the assholes in the company on one team. I guess that when someone has negative interactions with everyone they won t notice the difference if they are put in a team where everyone is difficult. For a corporate environment that lacks a no jerks hiring policy this is probably a good way of improving productivity overall. I am not aware of any significant Free Software project that was comprised of mostly jerks although I have seen a few with dysfunctional environments that encourage the worst behavior from their members. The smaller Free Software projects have less need for people who can relate to other people. There are many useful Free Software projects which have only one developer, in most cases anyone can take the source code and use it without dealing with the author. But even for a single-developer project an asshole can cause some serious problems. One example I know of concerns a developer who had unclear licenses and started making legal threats in response to a request for a clear license. Another example is of a developer who released code that was designed to not work when one particular user compiled it and redistributed the binaries. Both of them caused some significant amounts of time to be wasted by people who were unfortunate enough to develop systems that interacted with the code in question, and even more time was wasted when some misguided people defended them in the inevitable flame-wars. Even for a project with only one developer it s still better for everyone if that developer isn t an asshole. One comment I ve seen related to this issue suggesting that some types of asshole behavior shouldn t be a problem an example that was cited is a colleague who cheats on a romantic partner. Jeremy Clyman (who is currently doing a Ph.D in Psychology) has written an interesting article about this for Psychology Today [3]. He reviews the movie The Dilemma which deals with someone catching their colleague s wife cheating. Jeremy analyses the psychological issues involved and how they can (among other things) impact the ability for such people to work. I once worked in an office where two married employees were very open about having an affair and we were all apparently expected to lie on their behalf if necessary, it really affected the quality of the working environment. Extreme Assholes There are lots of people involved in Free Software development who are difficult and many who are to some extent assholes. But some of them take being an asshole to the extreme, such as Holocaust deniers (an example which Rusty used). In the comments on his post the Westboro Baptist Church is also mentioned. It is possible to entirely disagree with someone on a contentious issue such as abortion but still be able to get along with them. But when someone supports a hate-based organisation such as the WBC or supports Nazis in any way then there will be many people who just can t tolerate them and no-one should be expected to tolerate such people. I have seen two instances where Free Software developers advocated pro-Nazi positions (one had an archive of neo-Nazi propaganda and the other claimed that Nazis were not responsible for the Holocaust). Neither of the pro-Nazi programmers was evicted for defending Nazis, but both of them ended up leaving the community in adverse ways after causing other damage in the mean time. I don t think it takes any great ability to predict the future to determine that someone who defends Nazis will eventually end up doing something that requires expulsion and drive away users and developers in the mean-time. There is no possibility that someone can support the Nazi or WBC ideology only when not associated with your project, it will affect all aspects of their life. When a Holocaust denier is allowed to be a member of a community it also sends out a message that members of the groups which were persecuted by Nazis aren t particularly welcome in the community. Helping Minor Assholes There are a lot of people who don t have malevolent aims but who unintentionally cause some difficulty (it seems that the truly malicious are a tiny minority). I don t think that excusing the bad things that they do on the basis of writing good code helps them in the long term. Many of the suggestions that Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick make seem likely to help people who don t want to be assholes and direct them towards positive involvement in the community. One trend that seems apparent is the non-linear response to certain types of bad behavior. There is often little difference in severity between something that gets almost no attention and something that results in a large and extremely hostile reaction. If someone persists in acting like an asshole for long enough it seems to be inevitable that they will eventually exceed some threshold for what is tolerated and get a very significant negative response. It would be good if things didn t need to get to that stage. I think that the most unfortunate aspect of Rusty s blog post is that most people will probably interpret it as encouragement to write better code as a way of getting a free pass for being an asshole. I know that this isn t what Rusty intended, but most people on the Internet don t know Rusty as well as I do. Conclusion Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick seem to have some of the best ideas for how to deal with these issues when you control a project, but most of us aren t in that position. Everyone can advocate better behavior. Extreme assholes need to be removed quickly and without a great debate about their contributions, freedom of speech, or other issues. Since considering this issue I ve been wondering about when one should avoid the lesser assholes and asshole-positive environments. People tend to adapt to their environment, so if you associate with assholes a lot then there s a good chance you will start to become like them. Is

• [1] http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=196
• [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-3E8pyjFo
• [3] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reel-therapy/201105/what-causes-the-dilemma

The recent Alioth migration (thanks, Alioth folks!) led to slight variations in the URL schemes for various VCS. I guess some migration path will be considered but in the meanwhile that seemed to be a good example for the nice git-config insteadOf trick. Here s the bottom of ~/.gitconfig:

[url "git://anonscm.debian.org"]
    insteadOf = "git://git.debian.org"
[url "ssh://git.debian.org"]
    pushInsteadOf = "git://git.debian.org"

And tada! debcheckout picks the appropriate service (anonscm for anonymous access), and one is still able to push (through ssh) without having to change the URL in each and every .git/config file (which would also lead to higher CPU usage when updating afterwards).

In February Borders went bankrupt [1], since then they have been in the slow process of closing down. Now Borders is trying to clear the last of their stock and offering 80% discounts off the marked price. I bought a book by Stephen Baxter and one by Peter F. Hamilton and those appeared to be the last two books worth buying (IMHO) on the almost empty sci-fi shelves, the books were a little tattered but at 80% discount I m not complaining. It s been almost four years since I last bought books, and I still haven t read all the free sci-fi stories and watched all the free sci-fi movies from the net which interest me [2]. So I m not planning to buy many more books unless I see something better than a 50% discount. Paul Wayper writes about the difficulty of buying ebooks [3]. It s ironic that some people have claimed that ebooks were part of the cause of Borders financial troubles given that they really aren t working well, not even for the most dedicated buyers. In related news Kobo (the company that runs the Borders ebook store) has assured customers that they won t lose the books that they own [4]. There are very few situations in which a company needs to assure customers that they won t lose property that they have paid for and received due to a corporate bankruptcy. As further evidence that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is a bad thing, Apple have shut down the iFlow Reader [5] so that they can monopolise ebook sales on the iPhone and iPad. This is a good reason to avoid restricted platforms (such as anything from Apple) and encrypted content. It seems to me that Cory Doctorow s scheme for giving copies of his books to libraries is a more effective way of donating in return for a free ebook [6] (which is rather similar to the buy one get one scheme that they used to run for OLPC). Hopefully Charles Stross will end up doing something similar to make Paul Wayper happy.

• [1] http://www.smartcompany.com.au/retail/20110217-borders-australia-and-angus-robertson-chains-collapse.html
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/09/23/dmca-and-sci-fi/
• [3] http://www.mabula.net/tbfw/blosxom.cgi/2011/05/23#2011-05-23-dear-charles-stross
• [4] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kobo_reassures_its_e-book_customers_after_borders.php
• [5] https://www.iflowreader.com/Closing.aspx
• [6] http://craphound.com/walh/contribute/give-a-copy

Well today wasn t as productive as I had hoped. After my Skype call with vorlon I had layed out certain things I wanted to get done today and only got half of them done. This was mainly due to the fact my computer died midday and I had to reinstall Ubuntu. Luckily I didn t lose any data (thank god for advanced partitioning). Guess tomorrow will be twice as much work but I don t mind. Well until tomorrow, ~Sam

Or how to get rid of Evolution without removing your whole system There is a complain I have heard several times from people after they installed Debian: I use Icedove/Thunderbird so I do not need Evolution: I tried to remove it but this would remove my whole system, that sucks! Explanation The reason behind this situation is that GNOME is installed by a meta-package, which is a dummy package that depends on each component of the official GNOME desktop, including Evolution. So it got installed as a dependency of that dummy package. This means that you, or rather, the Debian installer, never asked explicitly to install either Evolution or any other specific software: it came automatically. Now, you want to remove Evolution: very well, but this implies removing the meta-package, as you are removing one of its dependencies. But if you are removing this meta-package, there is no reason to keep all this software you did not asked for, so, as they got installed automatically, they are now removed automatically as well The solution So, do you still want to remove Evolution but keep the remaining of your GNOME desktop? Of course you will not keep GNOME , because GNOME includes Evolution, so strictly speaking GNOME without Evolution is not GNOME any more. Well, there is a solution: marking all the dependencies of the meta-package as manually installed, that is, faking that you installed them explicitly Aptitude is able to do that with its powerful search functions:

# aptitude unmarkauto '?reverse-depends(gnome)   ?reverse-recommends(gnome)'
# aptitude unmarkauto '?reverse-depends(gnome-core)   ?reverse-recommends(gnome-core)'
# aptitude unmarkauto '?reverse-depends(gnome-desktop-environment)'\
'   ?reverse-recommends(gnome-desktop-environment)'

What did we do? Well, exactly what is written: unmarking as automatically installed the packages that reverse-depend or reverse-recommend gnome or gnome-desktop-environment. In other words, those that are dependencies or recommendations of gnome, gnome-core or gnome-desktop-environment. Why these three packages? Because the GNOME environment that Debian provides by default is composed of several meta-packages: I shall let you refer to their respective descriptions for further information. Now, you can safely remove Evolution without pulling out your whole desktop system:

# aptitude remove evolution

The Debian kernel team regularly backports driver updates to the Linux kernel in stable releases to add support for new hardware, and I've prepared several updates intended for point release 6.0.2. Since the kernel team does not have a large collection of hardware on which to test driver changes, we would appreciate test reports from users. It is important to test not just that new devices are supported properly, but that there are no regressions in support for older devices. Changes I have updated these drivers to the versions found in Linux 2.6.38, modulo driver API changes:

• bna: New driver for Brocade Ethernet adapters. (#627699)
• e1000e: Add support for i82567V-4, i82579. Bug fixes for i82577, i82578, i82583. (#627700)
• hpsa: New driver for HP Smart Array controllers. It also supports some devices that are currently handled by cciss, but I have disabled that for 'squeeze'. (#627701)
• igb, igbvf: Add support for i82576-ET2, 82580, DH89xxCC, i350. (#627702)
• pm8001: New driver for PMC-Sierra SAS/SATA HBAs. (#627703)
• r8169: Add full support for RTL8168DP. Bug fixes for RTL8102E. (#627704)
• tg3, broadcom: Add support for BCM5717, BCM5719, BCM57765, and BCM50610M and BCM5241 PHYs. Bug fixes for BCM5755. (#627705)

I have also cherry-picked some small changes:

• bnx2i: Add support for BCM5771E
• wl1251: Add support for PG11 chips
• bnx2x: Add support for BCM84823
• ar9170usb: Add several additional USB device IDs

There are more drivers that I think should be added or updated (see #624794) but they will probably have to wait for release 6.0.3. Packages The source package and binary packages for i386 and amd64 are available on people.debian.org. They can be verified by the checksums in the signed changes file. The current packages are version 2.6.32-35~test1, but there may be further test versions before an official stable update. How to test For network drivers, I suggest the following regression tests:

1. If the driver tries to load firmware (only required for some chips), does this work once the firmware file(s) are installed?
2. Can you receive and transmit VLAN-tagged frames after creating a VLAN interface?
3. Does the interface work after suspend and resume?
4. Does the interface work after removing the cable for 10 seconds and reinserting it?
5. Does multicast configuration work? (IPv6 autoconfiguration or mDNS will cover this.)
6. Can the interface send and receive TCP/IP across a LAN at the same speed, before and after these changes? (Use e.g. netperf to test this, but don't forget to remove the netperf package after use.)
7. Are any warnings or errors logged by the kernel during the preceding tests?

For storage drivers, unfortunately I don't have a good idea of what tests would be suitable. In any case, please don't test on disks storing valuable data! Please send test reports to the bug reports linked above, stating the driver name, the PCI ID for the device you tested (from lspci -n) and any other device identification that the kernel log (for example, r8169 logs the 'XID' of the device).

<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;asins=B004IYISQW" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 8px;"></iframe> Many small business owners start a business with the idea of greater freedom in mind, yet end up chaining themselves to something that takes even more dedication than a regular job. This book discusses the dos and don'ts that business owners need to be conscious of in order to create a business that is independent of its owner(s) in order to be able to sell it. It does so in an easy to read format that's a bit of a gimmick - a fictional story illustrating the authors points. Like most business books, the core idea isn't that hard to explain. the book even includes a handy summary of the main points, which I'll paraphrase here:

1. Focus on one thing you can do really well; even a service business can be 'productized' by creating a standard service that is the focus of the business.
2. If your business revolves around one or two key clients, the risk inherent in that approach will lower the value or scare of potential buyers completely.
3. Put a process in place, from sales through production.
4. Don't "be" your company. If the company is all about you, what's a potential buyer really getting if you sell it and leave?
5. By focusing on products, you can charge up front rather than having poor cash flow. If you pay people to work on a project for 3 months, and don't get paid for another month, you are, by the end, out 4 months salary while waiting for the payment.
6. Say no to projects outside the scope of your business. Only by focusing narrowly can you really excel at what you do.
7. Spend time doing some research and calculations to estimate your potential market size; buyers will want to know this.
8. If you have a business that has sales people, hire at least two so that they'll compete with one another.
9. You want people who are good at selling products, not services; the latter will want to tweak your offering for each and every client, rather than selling it as-is and trying to find how it can meet the customer's needs that way, which is the best strategy for a product.
10. If you were previously running a more 'generic' services company, and you switch to a more productized approach, be prepared to take a hit the year when you switch.
11. Potential acquirers will want to see at least a couple of years of steady growth with the new model after making the switch.
12. If you grow, you'll need a management team that can work without you. Put an incentive system into place to reward their loyalty and results.
13. When looking for an adviser to sell your company, aim for one where you will not be the largest or smallest client.
14. If your adviser really only has one company in mind to sell yours to, they may be trying to sell you off cheap as a favor.
15. Consider how much you could grow with the resources of a buyer. Think big, and show them what kind of growth could happen with the right backing.
16. Think and speak like a product business with 'customers' rather than 'clients'.
17. Stock options are more complex than simpler options like bonuses that are paid out over a period of time, in terms of ways to give people an incentive to stay.

All in all, it was an enjoyable read, with solid points. Even if you have no intention of selling your business, thinking of the business itself as a sort of "product" that is not dependent on you to work correctly is a sensible way to go about creating and growing a business. He's certainly not, nor claims to be the first one to discuss this idea, and indeed references the well known E-Myth Revisited which focuses less on selling a business, and more on how to go about extricating you and your skills from the business.

This week, I continued triaging bugs in the samba source package. The result is interesting Many bugs are tagged "moreinfo", most of them being old bugs, many likely to be user error....or something fixed for quite a while. So, I expect the bug count to decrease again. Moreover, I did a call for translations 10 days ago, so about 10 bugs are indeed transaltion updates which will be closed in next upload. Samba upstream also released their 3.6.0rc1 version this week, and 53 hours after the annoucement, it landed in Debian experimental. I pushed tasksel 3.02 in git. Indeed, I upload it quite a while ago and forgot to push the release and tags. I'm not entirely used to git, as it seems..:-) On l10n front, I launched a Smith review for ntfs-3g and launched a call for translations matlab-support (and got thanks from maintainer). Finally, after last week push, the French team completed to translation of package descriptions for the top500 packages in popcon. As a consequence, I moved the target further and we nos have "Popcon600" on the stats page. French now reached rank 3 in the DDTP.

Today I was baptized and joined the Mennonite Church. I imagine this might surprise some of you for various reasons, so let me provide a bit of background. I ve had a lot of people, both in person and in comments responding to my blog post, express surprise with statements I have made. The view of Christianity that many people have is of a group that devalues scientific inquiry and places a lot of emphasis on things like opposition to gay marriage, evolution, and abortion, and enjoys political leaders that say bring it on. While I know some Christians that fall into that mold, there are quite a few that don t as well. Some churches, such as the one we attend, have a surprisingly diverse set of people and yet still function and get along well. Today they accepted me with joy. Nobody was concerned that I started my statement with a reference to ancient Greek philosophy, wound up suggesting that the church ought to make sure to make illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians, and prostitutes feel welcome, and embraced both religion and scientific inquiry, feeling them complimentary. Mennonites practice adult baptism rather than infant baptism. A traditional age for people to be baptized is during high school, though emphasis is placed more on the individual than their age, so it s not unheard-of for someone to do so a bit later in life as I have. Part of the baptism involves the candidate sharing their faith story. These are typically intensely personal, widely varied, heartfelt, and honest. Some people s stories involve struggles with depression, physical disabilities, or the place of religion in their lives, while others reflect little struggle at all. Mine involves letting go of a lot of things, and also seeing some things, such as serious intellectual inquiry or existential questions about God (such as is there a god? ), as a positive rather than a negative feature of a Christian life. But it also involves a recognition and deep respect for those that don t approach things in this way. Though given publicly in a church, baptism testimonies are rarely published or shared more broadly. But I m going to share mine here. I have edited it only very lightly to remove a few local references that wouldn t make sense out of the context of this community. This was delivered in front of a rather different audience than is likely to be reading this post, so if you have questions, do feel free to ask in the comments. But before I begin, I just have to pass along a joke a friend told me: John, you picked quite a day for your baptism the day after the rapture. Baptism Testimony John Goerzen May 22, 2011 Those of you that know me well will probably not be surprised that I will begin my Christian baptism testimony with a story about an ancient Greek philosopher, and also touch on the philosophical nature of truth. These are key parts of my story. As legend goes, Socrates famously said, I know that I know nothing in other words, he believed that nothing could be known with absolute certainty. The Greek Oracle thought to be infallibly wise said that Socrates, the man that thought he knew nothing, was the wisest man in all Athens. An interesting paradox, and one that sheds light on my own religious story. My story involves coming to grips with the understanding that I know very little, that no person can ultimately know much about God, and finding a way to make peace with that situation. Growing up in this community, I thought I knew some things about faith and Christianity. At a certain age, it all seemed so simple. We took the Bible to be literally true. We marveled in Sunday School at how the apostles could sometimes appear so blind. And, modeled both implicitly and explicitly, was this notion: the stronger our faith, the fewer inner questions or doubt we have about the nature of God, the literal accuracy of the entire Bible, or our relationship to God. Those I perceived held up as examples never seemed to question any of these things, and showed outwardly, at least complete certainty about them. Moreover, holding certain intellectual beliefs was key to Christian identity, and even more importantly, to eternal life. This model has quite obviously worked well for many people for many years. The good that has happened, and continues to happen, from people that have that kind of certainty is manifest all around us. And yet, it didn t seem to work out for me. I m not the kind of person that accepts a lot of things at face value. It is helpful to be able to examine and challenge ideas and even more helpful to have other people challenge my ideas. From well before I was in high school, I was questioning some things about the Bible, God, and religion in general. My thoughts ranged from the impact of evolution on religion to the apparently vengeful God of the Old Testament to the very existence of God. In the Christian context, I perceived having these questions as a personal failing, something that I ought to repress. The more I tried to repress them, the more troublesome they became. Why, for instance, should a loving merciful God decide whether to let us into heaven based on whether we hold certain intellectual beliefs? In high school, I participated in the catechism class here at this church, and was frustrated because it didn t tackle deeper meanings or the kinds of questions I had. I wasn t yet able to articulate all my thoughts and questions very well, and I probably had an overactive case of teenage cynicism. As a result, I didn t get baptized like most others my age did. As I learned more about the early history of Judaism and Christianity, I only found more reasons to question the model of faith I thought I had received the one in which Biblical literalism and a divine guarantee of sorts was key. More recently, I gradually became aware that the model of Christianity I had in mind was one of many views. Christians, Mennonites, and even this church are incredibly diverse groups, and in retrospect, I am surprised that it took me so long to realize this. Three major steps led me to baptism. The first step was the realization that, whatever our understanding of the literal accuracy of the Bible, literal truth is often inferior to metaphorical truth. As an example, many of us have read the works of Shakespeare. They are fictional, but the reason they have been revered for so many centuries is that they are true. They teach us things about ourselves and our world in a way that no history book can. By placing such an emphasis on literal truth in the Bible, I was missing out on the message right there for me. By concerning myself with creationism or evolution, I missed out on thinking about what the story in Genesis meant for the Jews, and what it could mean for me. Evolution ceased to be a threat to religion; it became simply a tool for learning about a different sort of truth than we get from religion. N. T. Wright mentions an incident that illustrates this point. A woman attending a religious conference asked the speaker, a prominent theologian, Is it true that the serpent in Genesis actually spoke like you and I speak? The theologian answered, It doesn t matter whether the serpent could speak. What matters is what the serpent said. The second step I took towards being baptized was realizing where the real core of Christianity lies. It s not some debate about Genesis, but rather the death to one s old self, and the rebirth and continual remaking of oneself in the example of Jesus. Given that, a lot of questions seem unimportant or even irrelevant. Good can be expressed in many ways, and if one person achieves a remarkably Christian life via a literal understanding of the Bible, and another via a more metaphorical reading, then it is my place only to affirm both and say that they both got it right. If we say that the task of remaking ourselves is like climbing a mountain, then what matters is not how we are climbing the mountain, but simply that we are climbing it. I used to equate faith with an intellectual belief. I have come to see that was a narrow view. Faith, to me now, is more about vision: do we see the world like Christ did? Where do our loyalties and our trust lie in God or in human institutions? What are our goals in life? We humans have failed to understand God, and probably always will. I too share in that incomplete understanding, but I have come to accept that it is OK. I know enough to know that I want my loyalty to lie in Jesus, to know what kind of vision of the world I want to have, and I have learned to accept that intellectual questions can even be a form of meditation, enlightenment, and prayer. The third step toward baptism was moving past my own shortcomings. For a long time, I thought I didn t believe the right things, didn t believe them strong enough, wasn t certain enough about God, didn t pray enough, didn t read enough, didn t understand enough, didn t love enough and ultimately, that I wasn t good enough. I request baptism today understanding that, despite the various imperfections I still have, and we all have, everyone is good enough and deserving of love and peace. God s love is for everyone. No exceptions! Following Jesus boils down to this: I too must be an agent of love and peace to everyone, without exception. My vision must be centered around the fact that we are to emulate the God that loves the entire world, sinners all, and therefore I should as well. I hope I can show others the kind of love that has been shown me. I hope, too, to share with this congregation and the global church in the vision of love. I hope that we can continually strive to re-focus on Christ s vision. As an example, we all know that many different viewpoints about whether homosexuality is sinful exist in Mennonite Church USA. These opinions are deeply held and personal for many, and have been discussed over and over and over. But ultimately, they aren t terribly relevant to the church s mission. The example of Jesus unites us all: he embraced everyone. He accepted criminals and prostitutes and showed them love and kindness. Our difficult task, which is also my difficult task, is to show this same love to absolutely everyone, regardless of our varying opinions about them and their conduct. The forgotten and repressed of our day perhaps criminals, homeless, Muslims, addicts, gays and lesbians, illegal immigrants, ethnic minorities, and still prostitutes deserve the love of Christ s church and all its members. My hope is that any one of the earth s 7 billion people could step through the doors of our church, or any church, and immediately feel Christ s love, and the unconditional, non-judgmental, welcome and love of Christ s followers, no matter what. This prayer from Ephesians 3 sums up my hope and my vision, for myself and everyone:

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being. I pray that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord s people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. And I pray that you will know this love that surpasses knowledge that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (3.16-19)

This week, I continued triaging bugs in the samba source package. The result is interesting Many bugs are tagged "moreinfo", most of them being old bugs, many likely to be user error....or something fixed for quite a while. So, I expect the bug count to decrease again. Moreover, I did a call for translations 10 days ago, so about 10 bugs are indeed transaltion updates which will be closed in next upload. Samba upstream also released their 3.6.0rc1 version this week, and 53 hours after the annoucement, it landed in Debian experimental. I pushed tasksel 3.02 in git. Indeed, I upload it quite a while ago and forgot to push the release and tags. I'm not entirely used to git, as it seems..:-) On l10n front, I launched a Smith review for ntfs-3g and launched a call for translations matlab-support (and got thanks from maintainer). Finally, after last week push, the French team completed to translation of package descriptions for the top500 packages in popcon. As a consequence, I moved the target further and we nos have "Popcon600" on the stats page. French now reached rank 3 in the DDTP.

What is CORBA? The wikipedia page says it all:

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard
defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) that enables software
components written in mutiple computer languages and running on
multiple computers to work together (i.e., it supports mutiple
platforms).

The standard was created twenty years ago, in 1991. The technology can be used in many programming languages: Python, Java, C++, C, etc. Hence you can write a software in your favorite programming language, exposing services that others will be able to call using a different language. (Nowadays you can do the same with WebServices. This article is about CORBA.) All CORBA specifications are available on [OMGSPEC]; latest version is [CORBA3.1]. [MCHALE] book is a very good way to learn CORBA.