As a little side project I got interested in adding a MicroID extension for MediaWiki. MicroID is a teensy little format for asserting that the owner of a particular Web user account is also the owner of another account (like an email account or an OpenID). Adding support to MediaWiki means that Wikitravel users can verify their accounts with claimID or other similar services. Fun stuff, relatively easy, and useful for everyone -- the best kind of hacks. tags: microid mediawiki wikitravel identity openid

Confidential to Mako So, one thing that makes a Web site WebSoftwareFriendly is making sure (as best as possible) that each page has one and only one URL. It makes it easier when doing summaries and statistics and such for Web software to know that one page has One True Identity. Otherwise, it divides that page&aposs count of hits, incoming links, citations, etc. etc. between the two (or more) different URLs. The Web software then has an incorrect view of the world and is less useful for human beings. Planet Debian is a site like that. You can get to the same front page either through http://planet.debian.org/ or http://planet.debian.net/ . It may be a good idea to use a 301 redirect (moved permanently) to tell browsers and other Web software that one or the other URL is the definitive one. (I&aposm partial to the .net one, but not for any good reason). The following code somewhere in the Apache configuration for Planet Debian should do the trick:

RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^planet\.debian\.net [NC]
RewriteCond % HTTP_HOST    !^$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)         http://planet.debian.net/$1 [L,R=301]

It just says, "If the client requests an URL that doesn&apost use our preferred hostname, redirect them with a 301 HTTP code to the same URL at the right hostname." Web software like blog aggregators, Firefox (or Iceweasel) extensions, or any other software that does HTTP stuff at a low level will benefit. tags: mako planet debian websoftwarefriendly nosey

Geograph Quick link here: the Geograph British Isles project is totally cool. Creative Commons-licensed photos for every map square in the wt:United Kingdom and wt:Ireland. Their coverage is already quite good. tags: geo geograph photos cc

Recently I mentioned that I hate releasing software. It's true, and I've decided that the first part of fixing it is to tackle the presentation of software to the world.

My current scheme of darcs.complete.org for repositories plus bare directories on my gopher (yes, that gopher) site leaves a lot to be desired. There is no bug tracker, there are few screenshots, there is no consistency. It is also not easy to empower others to work on them directly.

At the same time, I am the sole or primary contributor to most of them. These are not huge kernel-sized projects. These are smaller, bite-size projects. So I don't want or need a lot of overhead. I've been thinking about my options.

• I could just use sourceforge.net. I poked around there today, and all the advertising there is a real eyesore. Plus I figure that if anyone is getting paid for all my hard work, why should it be some random people that no longer write free software? On the other hand, it would be an easy way for my projects to gain visibility. Or I could use alioth, and give up both the advertisements and the larger visibility. But I don't like giving up control over my site's appearance, or behing beholden to others for backups, uptime, etc.


• I could use trac. It's nice, and is the only option that supports darcs, and has a very cool wiki integrated into everything (even parsing out keywords from changelogs). On the other hand, downloads are -- at best -- attachments to wiki pages. There is no download manager. And you have to set up a separate trac instance for each project. That is a non-starter for me. If I can't see all my bug reports at one place, the bug tracker will be too annoying to use.


• I could use gforge or savane. These are the sourceforge forks. Neither seems to be as resource-hungry as I expected, and debs are available for both. I could just install them locally and use them for my projects, though that seems like overkill. Plus, like SourceForge and Alioth, they have a crappy web-only bug tracker. I'd rather use something like RT that works by email. (Though RT is too resource-intensive to run on my server). However, web-only is better than nothing so I could hold my nose and use it.


• I could write my own. But I'd rather not, if there's already something workable out there.

Is anyone else thinking about this? What are your thoughts?

First day of Brumaire -- the foggy month -- today, and the Montreal weather seems bound and determined to fulfill the promise of that gray name. The day of pomme (apple), which reminds me that we&aposve wanted to go apple-picking in the Autumn since we arrived in Quebec a few years ago. But something seems to push us inside on October and November days. Locals say that the best way to confront Winter is face-first, getting outside and being active in the snow. I&aposm not sure; it&aposs never worked out that way for me. We had snowfall a couple of days ago; in the middle of a rainstorm big wet clumps of snow started falling from the sky. I was working out at the gym around the corner from our house, and people in the weight room went to the windows to watch the snow fall. Halloween is the traditional day for the first snow for Montrealers; more than a week early was kind of fantastical, like a long-odds horse winning a race. tags: montreal weather brumaire quebec

Mo&apos blogging I can&apost say why, but my production has dropped off precipitously on this blog in the last week or so. Partly it&aposs had to do with an increased workload; also, being out of town for two long weekends in wt:Hudson (New York) and wt:Halifax (Nova Scotia) threw me off my pace. And I&aposve felt some pressure to cover these trips and other things going on in my life, which has kept me from writing short sharp posts. But mostly I think it&aposs a case of keeping up a feedback loop for myself. When I&aposve made a blog post, I watch for responses on Technorati or Planet Debian. I add one more thing or one more post. I get in the habit of blogging and then it comes more naturally in short bits and movements. I guess it all comes down to the typical but hard-to-remember suggestion: if you want to do something, you have to do it. tags: blogs

BarCampMontreal Montreal&aposs BarCamp event turned out to be even better than I anticipated. I got up late on Saturday morning and I wasn&apost at the downtown location till quarter to 10. It was held in Fred Ngo&aposs swing dance studio, Cat&aposs Corner, on the power-centre block of 400 Ste.-Catherine. The studio had tables and chairs and a reception area set up, and it turned out to be a great venue -- lots of room and a big feeling because of the mirrors on the walls. I got there just in time to catch Chris Hand of Zeke&aposs Gallery give an excellent talk about collecting art and participating in art culture in Montreal. Not only was it extremely informative, but it charged me up to be more involved in Montreal&aposs art scene. It also set a great tone for the rest of the day -- talks at the event ranged from alternative voting systems to art and research projects to technology surveys to demos of new products and Web sites. It kept the entire thing really fun and refreshing -- different parts of your mind used at different times. I was glad to see that Heather Kelley and Damien had come; I&aposd made a point of inviting them, so it was good to see their faces. They did one of the first presentations, about their upcoming games-and-art event, GAMMA, at SAT on 9 November 2006, straddling the gap between the industry-oriented Montreal International Games Summit and the gamer convention Festival Arcadia, not to be confused with Montreal&aposs other top export, The Arcade Fire. Man, games are hard. Anyways, they demo&aposd a game they&aposre developing for GAMMA in which the gameplay action responds to arbitrary musical input; they&aposve got several teams of developers who are putting together games to fit this criterion. Interesting concept, fun and cool. There were a ton of great discussion, but I think my favorites for the day have to include Hugh McGuire&aposs talk about the excellent Librivox project; Anne Goldenberg&aposs presentation on Wikigraphe, which I&aposd seen before but which continues to boggle; Austin Hill&aposs discussion about raising money and building Zero Knowledge; and Sylvain Carle&aposs talk about successful consulting. The best part of the talks was that I came away feeling smarter and with new projects I wanted to work on. S bastien Pierre&aposs demo of data-mining del.icio.us tags in revealicious made me think hard about wp:data clustering algorithms (something I&aposve wanted to work on for a while). Patrick Tanguay gave a great talk about co-working setups in other cities, with the aim of starting one here in Montreal. As a near-independent worker who&aposs getting tired of his home office, this was a pretty fascinating idea, and I&aposm hoping to follow-up. And Simon Law&aposs talk about Web 2.0&aposs negative influence on Open Source software gave me a lot to chew on for my visit to the Web 2.0 Conference coverage I&aposm doing for Linux World. All in all, I thought the event was the best that BarCamp has to offer. Montreal has such a rich technology and Internet culture, and some of the smartest people in town were at the event. All our major tech sectors were covered, and people interested in hacking, yakking, and entrepreneurship were in a nice balanced attendance. We were all in one room together, which kept up a good atmosphere, and we had only 15 minutes per talk, which kept things well-varied and interesting. If I had any criticisms, it would be merely that I can think of so many people I wish had been there. There are a lot of women involved in Montreal technology and Internet culture who weren&apost in attendance, and Montreal&aposs majority francophone community was underrepresented. But I think those are outreach problems that need to be handled for the next time around. Fred Ngo is already talking about BarCampMontreal2, which may or may not be coordinated with RecentChangesCamp. Yesterday&aposs Montreal Gazette had an article called Geekfest comes to town which featured a photo of Heather and Damien in the print edition. Simon Law got an excellent BarCampMontreal photoset on Flickr, and also invited me out to take photos together (fun). There&aposs a BarCampMontreal post-mortem for those interested in a follow-up discussion. tags: montreal barcamp barcampmontreal

N Dollars... American! One of the funny things about Canadians is that when they talk about a large amount of money, they suffix the dollar amount with the word American to let you know that it&aposs really a large amount of money. Like, "I just ordered this t-shirt online and it cost me thirty-five dollars... American!" or "He moved to New York and now he&aposs making 85 thousand dollars a year... American!" It&aposs less of a punchline than it used to be -- American dollars used to trade at about 1:1.5 or 1:1.6 to the loonie, but now it&aposs hard to find 1:1.2. Still, Canadians talk about American dollars like D&D players talk about platinum pieces. They&aposre just a qualitatively different currency. I note this because I joked about in previewing Austin Hill&aposs talk at BarCampMontreal, and he did note that they raised $80 million American for Zer0 Knowledge. I had to stifle a laugh during the talk. Austin writes - Hi Evan. Yeah that&aposs funny. I may have mispoke - we raised $55 million american which at the time was important to distinguish because that was $80 million canadian. Just wanted to be clear. Loved your presentation BTW tags: dollars canada american

Project Blackbox Everybody&aposs all abuzz about Sun&aposs innovative design in their new Project Blackbox. It&aposs a datacentre that&aposs built into a big shipping container; whenever you need a datacentre you can just ship one of these blackboxes to wherever you need it. I have to admit that it&aposs an amazing piece of in-your-face metaphor. I mean, when a company is shipping tech jobs overseas, they can make it all the more poignant by actually taking the jobs and putting them in this big shipping container and stenciling "JOBS" on the side and packing it on a cargo ship and sending it off into the sunset. And you don&apost really use these big containers unless you&aposre shipping something faaar away. If your job is in that box, man, you can just kiss it good-bye, because baby it&aposs gone. Maybe the best way to ship out one of these jobs containers would be to have a big bulldozer that comes through the middle of town, crushing the community infrastructure under its treads, and then picks up the big shipping container full of tech jobs and carries it off to a big ship in the harbour (rolling over some more schools and houses and small businesses) and then sends it off to somewhere crazy and foreign where they keep monkeys as pets as a matter of course. In any case: good job, Sun. I hope this works out great for you. tags: jobs sun blackbox shipping container project blackbox

Just a few weeks ago, the world heard the news of the tragic school shooting at an Amish school in rural Pennsylvania. A deranged man entered the schoolhouse, bound and gagged female hostages, brought along torture equipment, and shot 10 of them. 5 died, and the remaining 5 are believed to still be hospitalized.

Back in 1990, a deranged man committed a series of murders near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. The story mentions 5 people that were killed.

Both were tragic situations. Both men killed people that had their whole lives in front of them. Both shook an entire community.

But look at how the communities responded. The Amish responded like this:

CNN reported a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: "We must not think evil of this man."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts," he told CNN.

The Amish have reached out to Roberts' family. Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

An article in a Canadian newspaper the National Post stated that the Amish have set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. (Wikipedia)

In addition, the Amish invited the Roberts family to attend the funerals for the Amish girls he killed.

Gainesville reacted this way:

Dianna Hoyt, Christa Hoyt's stepmother, said Rolling's execution has been eagerly awaited by the victims' families. Some will be inside the prison to witness it. . .

Sadie Darnell, who was the police department's media spokeswoman at the time and developed enduring friendships with the victims' families, said Rolling's execution still matters, even if it also provides him more of the notoriety he sought.

"Retribution . . . is important because it represents that our society is holding that person accountable," said Darnell, now a candidate for Alachua County sheriff. (CNN)

We've all heard of murders that have taken place lately. Usually they are accompanied by calls by politicians, victim's family, and sometimes even clergy to kill the perpetrator. In the days after 9/11, there were reports of anybody that looked Middle Eastern being attacked in several different places around the country.

I have never understood this great desire for revenge. How does that help anyone?

What the Amish did was right religiously and morally. They truly followed the New Testament call to love your enemies and forgive. It is not easy to follow all of Jesus' teachings, and nobody said it would be. But they are doing it, and they have already begun healing. Reports are that the Roberts family has become friends with several of the Amish in the area, and they are working to help each other out after this horrible tragedy.

Even putting religion aside for a moment, the Amish actions are quite simply the right thing to do. By spreading love instead of hate, and friendship instead of revenge, they have succeeded in making sure that no cycle of violence starts there.

In contrast, 16 years later, the families of the victims in Florida still aren't healing. They are still angry and bitter. They are still seeking revenge. They hope that their lives will get back to normal after the murderer is killed. But after 16 years of stewing about it, will they really? And what about the family of the murderer, whose lives certainly must have been a mess for the past 16 years? They will now lose a family member. Does anyone care about them, or will they now turn angry at society and possibly spread the pain more?

Imagine what would happen if so many more people around the world took the Amish perspective -- to forgive those that wronged us. How long must it be before we can forgive? How far back do we spread our hate? Do we still hate those that were involved in 9/11, or can we forgive them? Do we still hate the Germans for what their ancestors did in World War II, or can we forgive them? Do we hate politicians with whom we strongly disagree, or think are liars? Do we still hate all those that have wronged us personally -- someone that stole something from us or the sadistic boss?

Knives, electric chairs, and bombs do not buy reconciliation. They can not "win over" the hearts of others. They do not make our lives easier. Hate brings more hate, and more resentment.

Forgiveness is not easy. We all hope that we will never be involved in such a tragedies as these. But let us follow the example the Amish have shown -- forgive for all things, big or small, important or not, painful or not.

Only then will we be at peace with ourselves, and only then will we have the chance to be at peace with our neighbors.

I've finally caught up on all the backlog of email to mirrors@debian.org, and I've been added to the webwml group, so now I need to go through all of the outstanding mirror submission bug reports, and figure out which ones are still valid for acting on. There were probably less than 20 legitimate emails in the 12 months of backlog, and one metric crapload of spam.

Cool, I'm heading to Spain for the QA meeting in Extremadura in December. Not quite so cool is that I'll be flying out two days after getting back from a holiday in Australia. I suspect I'm going to be totally shagged by the time I get back. $DEITY only knows what timezone my body will be in. Better get my QA pants back on again.

Gosh, I thought our own Republican gubernatorial candidate Kerry Healey had hit rock bottom with deceptive, racist, scaremongering television ads — e.g., this one (“What kind of person defends a brutal rapist?”) and this one (“Here’s a question: have you ever heard a woman compliment a rapist?”) (commentary). Hopefully it will backfire. But now, via the trademark blog, this in Tennessee. Update: and now this.

One of my longstanding frustrations living in Boston is the lack of artisanale espresso sources. Starbucks is, of course, ubiquitous (I think there are four within a block of where I work), and at least espresso drinks there aren’t bad, but there is little-to-no artistry involved. They aren’t aiming for perfection, they’re aiming for absolute consistency, mass appeal, and caffeine. Ever since Starbucks started opening in strip malls and grocery stores like Safeway, I’ve doubted whether they even care about maintaining an image of serving an elite population. This article presents some good background on the art of espresso, but apparently the only place it’s happening in Greater Boston is on the other side of the Charles River, which might as well be Prince Edward Island. (See also this article about Murky Coffee, my and Steve’s favorite coffee place in DC). I’d love to support Emack and Bolio’s, my neighborhood coffee shop, but the coffee and espresso there are inconsistent at best. I don’t get the feeling that the baristas there get a lot of training. Or that they even consider themselves to be baristas (according to Wikipedia: “one who has acquired some level of expertise in the preparation of espresso-based coffee drinks,” or “a professional who is highly skilled in coffee preparation, with a comprehensive understanding of coffee, coffee blends, espresso, quality, coffee varieties, roast degree, espresso equipment, maintenance, latte art, etc.”). Hey, while I’m talking about Starbucks, I should mention that Google Maps is wrong. There is no Starbucks at 1510 Centre Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. It’s nearly a mile away from the real Starbucks at 1810 Centre Street, that has the same phone number. Wouldn’t you think Google could have figured that out? Can someone tell them? Anyway, I recently discovered the Channel Cafe (deserving a PageRank boost), just a brisk 8 minute walk from my office down Summer Street across the Fort Point Channel, actually has quite respectable espresso and espresso drinks. I first went there for lunch several months ago and the place was mostly empty — more recently, there seems to be a line up the steps every day. (The cafe is in the basement of art gallery space and is owned by one of the Fort Point artists.) Aside from excellent espresso, they have a great menu, especially for vegetarians, with entrees such as baked tofu with pan steamed vegetables, peanut dipping sauce, jasmine rice, mandarin and oranges, and basil and ricotta ravioli with fresh tomatoes, zucchini, sweat pea and mint coulis, and parmesan cheese. All for under $10, which is a bargain in the greater financial district. I’m afraid the line up the stairs may soon be out the door… It’s a good sign for the burgeoning Seaport District, though.
(…more espresso art…)

This morning I got back to an article that has been on and off my work-plate for a year now, one that I have to turn in to a discussant for my 4S panel as well for an edited collection of articles on the intersection between art, activism, and biopoltics. Part of my efforts meant attacking a virtual “stack” of articles and one of them was one of best journalistic articles I have read in a long time. Exceedingly clear prose is combined with good references, hard numbers and just the right amount of passionate verve to make reading actually fun and not just another nameless, faceless cog in the academic research wheel. The article mentioned a couple of interesting studies that while sadly not linked from the article (but I am going to take that was an editorial and not authorial decision), they were pretty much cake to find by doing a little poking and prodding on the Internet. So for example, one of them was published on PLoS Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature and stands pretty strongly on its own right. But what is even better are the long list of citations (many with links) that would otherwise be frankly, a *total* time consuming bitch to find like the correspondence between the FDA and pharmaceutical companies: # Food and Drug Administration Division of Drug Marketing Advertising and Communications (1997) Effexor warning letter. Rockville (Maryland): Food and Drug Administration. Available: http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/june97/effexor.pdf. Accessed 14 October 2005. Total gems given to you right there on a silver plate. That is what I love about Internet based research… On the other hand, this extreme access is not always so peachy. The amount of data now available can be experienced as a totally mind-numbing, frightening, chaotic infolanche (as one of my old adivsors liked to call it), which translates into a lot of academic hunting and gathering not to mention all the sorting, sifting, cataloging, and then of course trying to remember what the heck you have just amassed in the first place, even with the aid of tags and all I am not sure if things have gotten easier or harder because this is all I personally know but what I do know is that there are times when I just love the hunt, losing myself for hours, following links, gathering articles, enlivened, exicted about research and there are others when the woolly mammoth of infomartion gets the better of me.

Yesterday, I had a chance to talk about Extremadura i18n meeting at Tokyo Debian monthly meeting. This meeting was organized by Junichi Uekawa and wonderfully 20 or more people came and filled the meeting room (awesome!), thanks! My paper is included in this PDF [in Japanese]. I picked up and spoke some themes from what we discussed at Extremadura; i18n task force, Pootle system, and language-pack/tdeb. PO-based translation has an advantage and a disadvantage. The tools support PO are mature and PO is very useful for the short messages. But using it for documents, such as manuals or Web pages is not so useful. Especially translating to Japanese sometimes add/delete/reform sentences. Some attendees suggested that we would always use the original XML (or something) format for translating/reviewing and have PO format in the central database. Masayuki Hatta pointed the license of translation. For example, Japanese is completely different from English, both words aren't always correspond 1 on 1... Translators use their creativity power. He said translators would have a copyright for their translation instead of original author. When I talked with Warren Togami was Fedora US leader last month at Tokyo, he said his project asked to agree "translation license agreement" to all translators. If we Debian or Debian-JP apply a central translation system like Pootle and use its translation memories, it's time to consider making similar license. Although current idea of Tdeb is still under the development, most attendees loved that idea rather than language-pack. For me, the goal of this meeting was not only speaking my experience report but recruiting more people for i18n/l10n working also. I'd like to recommend Nabetaro-san for next i18n meeting attendee instead of me, and Noritada Kobayashi for next of next. I strongly suggested attending next Debconf to them also. They are hardly working for Debian i18n/l10n in Japan. I hope attending such meetings expands their personal connections and motivations. There were two other sessions at the meeting. Matsuyama-san demonstrated creating Flash on Debian by using ming, and Junichi talked about profiling apt-get by oprofile tool. Both topics were interesting for me.

As posted to debian-devel-announce and debconf-announce (and partially written by Holger): On behalf of the DebConf6 video team I'm proud to announce the DebConf6 DVDs! They include all formal sessions from Debian Day and DebConf, plus the group photos, the video team BoF, and some documentary videos made by Gabriella Coleman. They are divided into

• 2 discs with all English sessions, DebConf sessions, and extras (1, 2)
• 1 disc with all Spanish sessions and all Debian Day sessions

(there is a small overlap between these). The DVD images are now available for download along with the source videos, as are the software and menu design used for them. You can also order DVDs to be shipped to you in a nice box. Many thanks to the sponsors, organisers and other people who made DebConf6 a fun and productive event to be remembered. See you at DebConf7 in Edinbourgh - or maybe DebConf8 in your town! Finally, I apologise for the delay in producing these discs. We ran into a number of technical problems along the way but it's primarily a result of discouragement and procrastination on my part. However I believe that the VideoLink software is now sufficiently reliable and that next year's DVDs need not be so dependent on me.

I've now purged xmms and bmp from all the systems I use in favor of the all-singing, all-dancing Bongo, which I packaged for Debian a few weeks back. It's great to finally have a decent media player for Emacs, it fills a gap in my computing life I've had for a long time (no, I don't like EMMS, thank you). And Bongo's upstream author is very responsive to feature requests, having implemented all of my suggestions so far!

I also hacked together a logo for Bongo using letters from the Malayalam script, some of them are close enough to Latin letters to allow nice exotic looking logos at minimal cost.

In unrelated news, my productivity has surged upwards since I left all Debian IRC channels and unsubscribed from some Debian mailing lists a few weeks ago. Silence feels wonderful, sometimes.

Dear Lazyweb!

I would like to find the symbolic solution for XT0, YT0, dSX, dSY, qX and qY to this set of equations, in a numerically stable way:

XT0 + real_X1*dSX*Cos[qX] + real_Y1*dSY*Sin[qY] == own_X1,
YT0 - real_X1*dSX*Sin[qX] + real_Y1*dSY*Cos[qY] == own_Y1,
XT0 + real_X2*dSX*Cos[qX] + real_Y2*dSY*Sin[qY] == own_X2,
YT0 - real_X2*dSX*Sin[qX] + real_Y2*dSY*Cos[qY] == own_Y2,
XT0 + real_X3*dSX*Cos[qX] + real_Y3*dSY*Sin[qY] == own_X3,
YT0 - real_X3*dSX*Sin[qX] + real_Y3*dSY*Cos[qY] == own_Y3


Mathematica seems to not come back at all when asked for a solution, Maxima (in Debian) refuses cooporation, Maple produces a solution by approximating Sin and Cos with polynoms (which is not good enough for the whole range of [-Pi .. +Pi] and furthermore is not numerically stable.

This is for finding the parameters for the transformation between two different coordinate systems of maps. The real_* and the own_* coordinates are three identical points on both maps. A numeric solution (with simulated annealing from the gnu scientific library) exists but seems to be not exact enough. See also http://www.posc.org/Epicentre.2_2/DataModel/ExamplesofUsage/eu_cs35.html

Article in Science (abstract, full text) on how women’s math performance is affected by whether they are considering genetic or experiential accounts for the stereotype of women’s underachievement in math. Stereotype threat is when exposure to a self-relevant stereotype (e.g., regarding something like gender or race) causes someone to behave in such a way that perpetuates the stereotype. The authors of this article wanted to determine whether the causes given for women’s underachievement in math (namely, genetics or experience) affected women’s math performance, i.e., whether stereotype threat was affected by the causes given for that stereotype. (Note that the study was NOT intended to address the question of whether there are innate sex differences in math performance.) To test this, women were given a math test, then an essay to read, and then another math test. The essay either claimed that math-related sex-differences are genetic, experiential, or don’t exist. The women who were given essays stating that math-related sex-differences don’t exist or are due to experience significantly outperformed women who were given essays that claimed genetic causes. Interesting, huh? (Thanks to Julia for pointing out the article.)

I was kind of thinking of starting blogging again (after having blogged only two entries here). I also wanted my own blogging software; not this livejournal thing. I want to be able to edit my blog entries with emacs, the easy way, and keep it all in a git or darcs repo. I want to be able to choose my own editing language; whether it be markdown, textile, rd or whatever.

Of course I thought of Joey's nice ikiwiki. The only problem is that I don't like its commenting system. I want people to be able to comment easily. I like comments. It is probably possible to extend ikiwiki to make it easier to do comments, but it's not something I want to do right now.

I took a look at this weird thing called hobix. I liked the design and the fact that it is written in ruby, but the author seems to be on LSD. And all this blahhrhrg whsyyythe thing, though marginally amusing, is not the kind of solid documentation I'm looking for.

Yes, I know, there are tons of blogging engines out there. I just don't _like_ them. I hate PHP, and I hate SQL databases (with a possible exception for SQLite). I just want something simple, dammit.

But I'm tired now, and my neck hurts. I will look more another day.

Update: I forgot to mention that I've tried pyblosxom, and it really looks most similar to what I need. I just thought it was a bit complicated to set up with the features I wanted. But maybe it was just me being lazy.

Although I like the idea of a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, I never fell in love with Ion because the default keybindings weren’t really intuïtive (to me). A few months ago I noticed, that ratpoison is also a tiling and completely keyboard focused window manager, only with much more intuitive usage: If you know screen and it’s keybindings, you also know ratpoison and it’s keybindings: Just exchange Ctrl-A with Ctrl-T. This sounds perfect for usage on my low performance laptops, where I have small screens and usually also no virtual desktops in use. There’s only one thing which annoys me in ratpoison: If I use a mostly mouse driven application like e.g. a webbrowser with ratpoison, I have no problems to click on links, even if the webbrowser is not in the so called “current frame”. But if e.g. click into an input field, I usually notice much too late that while the mouse works fine in the browser, keyboard focus is still in some other window. Currently they all use flwm, the Fast and Lite Window Manager. So what I would need is a tiling and keyboard focused window manager but with “focus follows mouse” politics. And since the laptops on which I intend to use such a window manager, all have a touchpad or thumbstick, the mouse there counts as keyboard focused, too somehow, doesn’t it? :-) I wonder, if an ion3 could be configured to use the same keybindings as ratpoison. That would probably fulfil this desire. On the other hand, there are browsers which are fine without mouse. lynx or links2 for example, so the focus problem I have with ratpoison wouldn’t occur. But what if I need or want a keyboard driven and full blown webbrowser? Ok, Firefox as well as Opera are not that bad in keyboard only use, but they still are focused on the mouse using user. But Gecko wouldn’t be Gecko, if there wasn’t some Gecko based browser with this features: On the ratpoison website I found a link to a very interesting Firefox plugin which makes Firefox a complete new browser, a keyboard driven webbrowser named Conkeror. It has no toolbars at all, no (visible) tabs, no menus, no nothing — it shows only the website in fullscreen, a status line and a multipurpose command line — exactly like the mini-buffer of GNU Emacs. But not only the layout, even the keybindings are very emacsish: C-x C-f opens an URL in a new buffer -eh- tab, C-x 5 C-f opens an URL in a new frame (window), C-x C-v opens a new URL in the current tab (buffer) with the current URL as editable default value, C-x b switches to another tab, C-x k kills -eh- closes a tab, C-x C-b lists all open tabs, l goes back (remember the Emacs info reader, eh?), C-g quits accidently requested dialogs or stops loading a web page, Ctrl-s and Ctrl-r give you forward and backward i-search, C-n, C-p, C-f and C-b scroll, etc. Even M-x works, e.g. will M-x revert-buffer reload the web page. (Unfortunately Esc-x doesn’t work. Yet.) And for vi freaks, there is even M-x use-vi-keys. There’s even one lynxish keybinding: \ lets you view the source. And although it’s one of the strangest webbrowsers I saw yet, I somehow like it and also would like to see it in Debian as package, since it is the perfect companion for ion or ratpoison. Looking through apt’s package cache as well as the wnpp bugs, I haven’t found any hint on somebody already packaging it, so I’ll have a look on it and on how to to package a Firefox extension for Debian. BTW: While looking through the wnpp bugs, I found bug #335459, which is the ITP flock, an also Gecko based browser with a lot of cool features for blogger who like social network tools. Another nice thing I found today in Debian was the xfonts-artwiz package whose small fonts are very suitable for small resolution screens, especially if a tiling window manager is used with a e.g. 800×600 resolution. Unfortunately they aren’t available in a charset with German umlauts. Apropos tiling window managers: Anyone tried pconsole with an automatically tiling and resizing window manager? I wonder if it’s usable. At least on MacOS X with its cascading window positioning algorithm, pconsole is a pain. — But even without cascading windows, MacOS X is a pain for keyboard users. Just think of its default behaviour when using the tab key inside a form mask: It will skip all buttons, all checkboxes, all radio buttons and all select boxes. Argh!

Joe Reagle who is thick in dissertation writing on wikipedia, has written a very thoughtful note on how he is handling his citations. Given that so many of them are from online source snad thus more like moving targes than the steady, bound book and journal article, they require different conventions.

Many moons ago, when I started my project on F/OSS I imagined that it would stay within the purview of anthropology, hacking, science and technology studies to bleed only a little bit into legal studies and only because I was dealing with the fraught politics of intellectual property law. As it turned out, the Law, with a capital L, as on object of analysis and site for the production of cultural value, turned out not to be peripheral but utterly central… And since, I have pretty much stayed within the territory of legal studies, vastly interested in the more invisible cultural and political effects of the law. Recent obsessing on this topic has led to a nascent thesis about law, discrimination, politics , and civil rights that I am looking to substantiate (so if anyone has any citations or helpful hints, do pass along) and it is this: When there are positive changes made in the law, it can come with various political costs. And the one I am interested in, is how, given other conducive conditions, legal changes that look awesome on paper, can work to undermine its potential by breeding a type of complacency of (in)action, largely because it seems as if the worst of the problems have been fixed. So if we look to the American legal context of 1960s and 1970s as a prime example, it is clear there was a heck of a lot of turmoil in the arena of civil rights, much of which, many liberals and progressives would say, led to positive legal transformation. During this period the content of many laws were purged of overt discrimination that, for example, which led a lethal blow to segregation and started to dismantle some of the worst pieces of scaffolding of mental health law (just to cite a few examples). At one level while we may easily recognize these changes as laudable and even perhaps “progressive,” the effects of it may be less so. Once legal content is purged of the ugly, this can breed an ugly form of complacency, in which the problem seems (re)solved, so people no longer feel guilt and attention is diverted away from any number of things, like: 1) new problems not necessarily addressed in the law 2) the rise of new laws or 3) the fact that the law is empty unless actively applied. I have yet to read anything directly related to this theory or apply it myself but it is something that has been on my mind for a couple of years now. But after talking about this topic from a friend, I decided to finally take crack at The Law in Shambles a Prickly Paradigm Press pamphlet by Thomas Geogheghan, a labor lawyer from Chicago. While it did not specifically address the issue I am raising (though it got pretty close in a number of places) I got more than I had bargained for; it is truly incisive (though frighteningly depressing) look at the current state of the law, and also, like so many of the PPP’s, much more fun to read than any most academic book or articles. For those who don’t know the PPP publish a series of short pamphlets and it was started by the legendary anthropologist, Marshal Sahlins, who is also known to be a little prickly himself (but it softened by his humor). They are often written by academics on contemporary topics of political interest (read: very biased) in a manner that is a lot looser and free wheeling than any article or book that would come out of an academic journal or publishing house. The PPP allows its authors to unbuckle a few notches off the sometimes uptight, constraining academic belt of writing and the result is often impassioned, funny, and yet remarkably astute essays. If Montaigne were around today, he would surely be proud of his essayistic legacy. The title of the book sums up the the topic at hand. His explanation as to why the (American) law is in disarray has not to do with the law in the abstract but with the total disintegration of a certain class of institutions and a specific class of law (namely unions , the law of trusts etc.). As institutional supports from the New Deal have been thrown out the door, it is the individual, largely through tort law, who has had to wield the fury of the law, in defense of a slew of individual rights and to defend themselves against new forms of attack (the worst being lawsuits brought forth by “charitable institutions” like hospitals). While the law is conceived as something we are all equal under, of course, it is access to the law, which makes all the difference in terms of making it a viable (or not) as social tool. With the demise of the unions, he argues, came the death of certain type of contract law in employment, and the stellar rise of tort law, which conceives of wrongful acts not as breaches of contract (which would apply to all persons under the contract) but as matters of personal injury. Whereas in the past unions would arbitrate contract law, wielding the power of numbers so that individuals were not burdened and burned with the expense (of time and money) of the law, with tort the law becomes formalized, conceived, and imagined in highly individual terms (even when grouped into class actions, it becomes a matter of proving personal injury), the effect of which, he argues is meaner and more complex than contract for four reasons 1) The name of the legal game is to discover motive, which is about as confusing as it can get and thus more arbitrary 2) It is more expensive than old contract law 3) Cases rarely go to trial (didn’t really get the importance of this point) 4) Because its focus is on motive and intense and subjective states, everything is open to scrutiny, so that I can force you to tell me everything what is in your secret heart. Not to mention in your tax returns. The result is torts produced a bitter, dog-eats-dog Hobbesian, legal world, which in turn makes for experiencing the law as an arbitrary force. This individualization of the law through tort also intersects with many other changes such as the demise of regulatory power that add more fire to the disintegration of the law and the subsequent experience of law and life as arbitrary. And it is this chapter (From Administrative Law to No Law, The Rise of the Whistleblower and Trail Lawyer) which got me a little closer to my own point that I brought up above. For example, he writes:

Once, when I filed suite to get the Labor Department to enforce the child labor laws for 16- and 17-year olds, kids whom they do not even pretend to protect, I got nowhere. I met with the Solicitor who told me: Look, suppose I agree with you. How would I ever get the money to enforce it? He was right. If I had won and they had issued regulations, it would have only been worse. In Labor, as in agency after agency, we have a vast complex body of law which would take mandarin to learn that no one enforces.. The law is there. On paper. Indeed, it is a lot of paper. How much paper? Fifty volumes, in paperback in total. I know because I counted. But as to big chunks in these volumes, there is no one there to enforce it. p. 48

Lots of paper I think can make people comfortable in thinking that famous Virginia Slims Slogan, We’ve come a long way, Baby, when it fact, it can often just means what it literally looks like, “Damn, that’s a buttload of paper.” There is a lot more packed into this tiny book, covering the deep gulf between left and right, the stagnation of an old constitution that is impossible to revise, the loss of accountability in all branches of government, the redrawing of districts, and the slight expansion and curbing of of majoritarian voting in the last hundred years. It gets a little shrilly by the end, but you know, it is all pretty upsetting stuff and it is good to shrill from time to time. Though he never refers to neoliberalism, capitalism, or postmodernism, this book is also a great companion to a class of this literature on the rise of fragmentation and instability in social and cultural life brought forth by changes in the economic system (thinking here of David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, etc). In fact, I think it does a much better job than at relaying how it is that vast sectors of society experience fragmentation, instability, and frustration.

The one thing about agreeing to dedicate my time exclusively to Debian for a month is that it means there are loose ends that had to be tied up first -- loose ends that in my case took until October 11th to tie up, leaving me no time to keep up on Debian in the meanwhile... But hey, it only took me until Saturday to get a handle on my email again (more or less), and until Monday to clean up the list of RC bugs so that it pretty accurately represents what we need to finish up for the release. And hey, it's really not too bad, when you consider that of the 299 RC bugs listed on turmzimmer.net as applying to etch, only 104 of them are more than 10 days old, which means we can expect a pretty sharp decline in this count as our maintainers diligently fix the hidden RC bugs that dunc-bank have been helpfully reporting for us. :) And of those 104 older RC bugs, about 10% or so are already fixed in unstable as part of one of two transitions: the Xorg 7.1 transition and the apache 2.2 transition, so that's where I'm focusing my attention right now -- along with tackling the "low-hanging" bugs, the ones on my own packages... There are other transitions we still need to pay attention to, such as ghc6 (fixes wrong code generation problems on alpha), libraw1394 (lib transition that blocks a few other RC bugfixes), and linux-2.6 (newest kernel wanted for best upstream security and hardware support), but other than that, we're pretty darn close to having the right set of packages for release. The freeze is looking closer every day!

To try and make it easier for non-Francophone Anglophones to understand this complaint and response in English, an attempt at translating the email is below. Errors are all mine:-

Our community (Debian) has a defect: the noisiest (and evidently the most extreme) are always the most visible. It is very regrettable that the people who say they represent Debian at JDLL, who are always only some of the 70 French developers of a thousand-developer project with many thousands of contributors, can have given you this totally false image. Their provocation was totally purile, even if the subject is a true subject of discussion. Unfortunately, this sort of position will always exist. I hope simply that the people who have been shocked by this childish behaviour and the also-totally-purile comments appearing in 24 hours on various blogs will have the intelligence not to fall in the same trap as their opponents, notably the easy amalgamation. Extremism doesn't always win in Debian (and not even as often as that), compare the last votes: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00018.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/10/msg00017.html and so on. I would appreciate it if this appears in your blogs to temper a little the unacceptable comments that you have received from certain people... and I allow myself to give you respectively meetings at the next Solutions Linux to discuss all this calmly over $BEVERAGE. [ENDS]

I think posting the above without making it clear that it is a one-man initiative and apparently sent without consulting those criticised was downright sneaky and always going to offend. The daft acts of people at JDLL cannot be corrected honourably by more daft acts! The message also seems to me to suggest that it's somehow extreme to object to the Mozilla Corporation using trademarks to stop Firefox and friends being freely-modifiable free software (by requiring inclusion of material with no copyright permission to modify) and to try to dictate what goes into distributions. Unlike the firmware problem, Mozilla's trademark terminators are an obvious and active practical problem for debian maintainers and downstream. I hope the Mozilla fans who were upset by such a "childish" non-obvious reminder [JPEG, 70Ko] about the MozCorp trademark offensive will bring MozCorp into line. If not, I hope that the next time is better satire that informs more people and avoids the "purile" tag.