Via Jamie, an interview with an amazing espresso artist. As I’ve wondered before, it would be interesting to know if anyone has ever attempted to protect their copyright in espresso art. On further reflection, I think espresso art should meet the “fixed in a tangible medium” requirement, at least as much as ice sculptures which also tend to lose their form over time. I assume ice sculptures can be protected, although could not find an example in a quick search. I suspect the copyright office would accept a photograph as “identifying material” for the purposes of a registration deposit on a cup of espresso, as in the case of sculptural works. Be sure to check out the embedded video — it eliminates any concern that the espresso art photographs might have been digitally enhanced.

Sometimes it happens, that items that are handeled by the German Mail (Deutsche Post) get damaged by their technical installations. When this happens, the item is put into a transparent plastic bag, together with a letter excusing the accident and telling the recipient how to file a request for investigation. So far so good. Unfortunately the envelope that got ripped in that case included two pendants that fell out and got lost. I didn't expect this to be much of a problem, but when I tried to file my request at the mail office it turned out, that there is no form for that kind of incident. The regular form used for requests for investigation assumes that the whole shipment got lost. There is no way to indicate, that it is not an envelope that is missing but merely its content. Trying to exlpain that to the lady there also wasn't successful. Except for repeatedly telling me that I had no right to claim compensation when posting things via regular mail (I know!!) she wasn't of much help. In the end I filled out the form as good as possiblei, gave comments where necessary and the lady promised me I would at least get a confirmation from the service centre. So today, after waiting for more then two weeks I finally got a letter from the service centre. Guess what it said:

"Dear Mister(!) Reichle.
The investigation can not be carried out at the moment, since the information you provided is not complete. Please complete and correct the information according the missing item ..."

And now, guess how I got it. Ripped, in a transparent plastic bag.

David, though I feel your pain with this, I think the PHP5 code is much closer to what other languages do and is therefor the following the “least surprise” rule. However, breaking existing code with a compiler/interpreter upgrade is of course a bad thing. But in this very special case, I think that the plus side puts in more weight than the negative side. When reading PHP code others wrote (which is what I do with PHP most of the time, with just a few hundred lines of PHP code ever written by myself), I always wondered why

$f=new Foobar();
$a=$f;
$a->do_something();
if ( $a->fetch() != $f->fetch() )
echo “they differ\n”;


would ever print anything. At least until I hit myself with the php-cluebat again, remembering that $a=$object assigns a copy of $object to $a, not a reference like most other languages tend to do.

To CEO's, Wellink and members of the parliament: I cannot agree [nl] more [en]: please stop this discussion [nl] about hedge funds or other shareholders actually exercising their rights. If you sell your company on the stock market you get a lot of cash. But you also sell control to random interested parties, that's what being publicly traded means. You'll have to live with that situation, it's called the market. Thank you for your attention.

I'm excited to see that wikiHow now lets people log in with OpenID, and also provides identities to all wikiHow users. (I'm not sure what wikiHow project members are called -- my best guess is "wikiHowards", but I'm pretty sure that's not right.) wikiHow is a great company, and the people I know there -- Jack and Travis -- are personable and smart. I think wikiHow is a great example of a conscientious company participating well in Open Content and the wiki world; I think implementing OpenID is one example of their good wikizenship. One of the things I really wanted with implementing the MediaWiki OpenID extension was that we'd get really portable identity across wikis; that someone who'd established a reputation on Wikipedia could expect some respect for that reputation on Wikevent or Wikioutdoors or whatever. I think there's some danger to that model -- so many wikis today are implemented on wiki farms like Wikia or Pbwiki. I think some wiki farm companies see value in corraling their users into only using wikis on their servers, rather than in participating in the larger wikisphere. (You can occasionally even see this attitude in the Wikimedia community, although obviously that community is more self-governing and evolved about Free Culture and peer-to-peer processes.) That attitude is short-sighted, and wiki hosting companies that insist on maintaining identity silos are probably going to pay for it in the future. It's a competitive market; people have a lot of choice, and nobody wants to be fenced in. If there's been one lesson of Web 2.0, it's that openness is a competitive advantage. Good karma pays off in intense customer loyalty. And, yes, I'll stop using wiki-prefixed neologisms now. Sorry about that. Anyways, I'm really glad to hear that wikiHow is joining the OpenID network. I hope it continues to work well for them. tags: wikihow openid wikisphere wikizenship wikineologism

Rands in Repose I continue to find it mind-boggling that this gay alien is also a well-known blogger about software. Yeah, I know, I know, Jerkcity guys: they're just cartoon characters. They're not people. But still. In ancient times, I did an interview with Rands for Pigdog Journal. I guess that's a long time ago, though. tags: rands jerkcity interview pigdogjournal

Not quite spongeworthy So, there was an article in Slate about Wikipedia biographies over the weekend about how saddy-sad it is when your biography is deleted from Wikipedia (and how writing an article about Wikipedia can save that biography quite well). I've seen a lot of such breast-beating in blogs and such lately. I think it's important for folks to remember that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a wiki-about-everything. Some people, places, and things meet an encyclopedia's requirements for notability (see Wikipedia:Notability (people)); others don't. That's just the way it is. But just because your bio isn't on Wikipedia, doesn't mean you can't have an Open Content, wiki bio preserved for posterity. I've written about WikiBios before, but I have to insist that it's one of the most awe-inspiring projects I've seen: a biography for every human. Every human. That's all they do. Yeah, their sample text is a little bit trivial, but I think looking beyond that, you can see a pretty amazing possibility for a project. Maybe Timothy Noah and all the other people who are teetering on the edge of being spongeworthy for Wikipedia should take some time to build out their WikiBios page. Get friends, colleagues and family to contribute, and really build out a high-quality bio. If at some period in the future WP deigns to include them, then the bio is right there -- GFDL-licensed, no less. Anyways, here's Evan Prodromou's WikiBio. Feel free to fill it out. tags: slate wikipedia timothy noah wikibios

BarCampAustin While I'm thinking about BarCamps -- I'm a little nervous about my presentation at DemoCampMontreal1 -- I'm finding out that BarCampAustin is going to be the same week as South-by-Southwest Interactive 2007. Which, really, makes a lot of sense. I'm going to try to show up for Friday morning -- it'll be interesting to bounce back and forth between SxSW and a BarCamp. tags: sxsw barcamp barcampaustin

Thanks to Mako, my weblog (at least part of it) is now syndicated on Planet Debian! I thus ought to introduce myself: I’m Julien, 28 years old, living in the North East of France. I already (co-)maintain a bunch of packages in the official archive, and try to actively report bugs. I also used to acting as a translator for the French l10n team, which I will resume once time allows it. I may plan to enter the New Maintainer process in the next couple of months. I take this as an occasion to thank all my sponsors and co-maintainers (Christoph, Free, Cl ment, Micah and Lo c) for their interest in working with me and for their patience. I hope being on Planet Debian will allow me to better integrate into the Debian community.

As promised, the slides from my FOSDEM talks about Automated Testing of Debian Packages and Use of Grid Computing for Debian Quality Assurance are available.

• Automated Testing of Debian Packages
• Use of Grid Computing for Debian Quality Assurance (paper also available)

Don’t hesite to ask questions or post comments. The videos for both talks should be available so you can laugh at my frenglish, but I haven’t heard of an ETA yet.

I just finished signing all the keys from the FOSDEM KSP. Importing keys I received:
Mutt is nice. You can tag all messages with ‘t’, then use ‘;’ (tag-prefix) and ^K (Ctrl + K) to import all signatures. (Thanks Myon + sam for the tip) Signing keys:
caff (featured on debaday last week) has some useful info in /usr/share/doc/signing-party/, especially the README.many-keys and README.gpg-agent files.

I recently came across two old and unrelated writings about law, both of which are worth reading, especially for people with strong opinions but no formal training. The first is this piece, entitled Seven Ways in Which Code Equals Law (And One in Which It Does Not), by recently-appointed New York Law School professor James Grimmelmann and EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. Several observations are particularly appropriate for the slashdot crowd (and, to a lesser extent, certain members of the Debian community and others who grew up on a diet of BASIC, Pascal, and then C and later perl). I especially like this bit about “hacking the law”:

Some people, seeing this connection, and remembering the values of good code, try to improve the legal system by treating it as a computer. People come to me with ideas for hacking the law. The government says that cryptography is a weapon, they say, but the Bill of Rights says we have the right to bear arms. So that means we have a Constitutional right to use cryptography. But the legal system isn t a computer. If you can t convince a judge that what you re proposing is consistent with the values underlying a law, your argument will go nowhere. People go to jail every year because they think they ve found a way to hack the Sixteenth Amendment. The income tax is illegal, they say, or, The income tax is voluntary, see, it says so right here, and then they get convicted of tax evasion and sent to jail. We did convince several judges about the Constitutional dimension of cryptography, but the claim started from the values of the First Amendment, not a mechanical reading of its words. It s a category mistake to treat the legal system as just another architecture with its own specialized language. Code and law are different ways of regulating; they have different textures. All of those people who are required to make the legal system work leave their mark on its outcomes: they make a certain amount of drift and discretion almost inevitable. Code doesn t have such a limit: it can make perfectly hard-nosed bright-line rules and hold everyone in the world to them. Code is capable of a kind of regulatory clarity and intensity that law can only state, never really achieve.

I don’t entirely agree with the other article, entitled What I Ate For Breakfast and Other Mysteries of Judicial Decision Making by outspoken Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski (unofficial site maintained by Aaron Swartz, wikipedia entry). For example, I think critical legal studies has resulted in some interesting insights, some of which actually have practical applciation. Still, Judge Kozinski makes an important point about the numerous factors that act as a check on discretion in judicial decisionmaking:

It is popular in some circles to suppose that judicial decision making can be explained largely by frivolous factors, perhaps for example the relationship between what judges eat and what they decide. Answering questions about such relationships is quite simple - it is like being asked to write a scholarly essay on the snakes of Ireland: There are none. But as far back as I can remember in law school, the notion was advanced with some vigor that judicial decision making is a farce. Under this theory, what judges do is glance at a case and decide who should win - and they do this on the basis of their digestion (or how they slept the night before or some other variety of personal factors). If the judge has a good breakfast and a good night’s sleep, he might feel lenient and jolly, and sympathize with the downtrodden. If he had indigestion or a bad night’s sleep, he might be a grouch and take it out on the litigants. Of course, even judges can’t make both sides lose; I know, I’ve tried. So a grouchy mood, the theory went, is likely to cause the judge to take it out on the litigant he least identifies with, usually the guy who got run over by the railroad or is being foreclosed on by the bank. This theory immodestly called itself Legal Realism. Just to prove that even the silliest idea can be pursued to its illogical conclusion, Legal Realism spawned Critical Legal Studies. As I understand this so-called theory, the notion is that because legal rules don’t mean much anyway, and judges can reach any result they wish by invoking the right incantation, they should engraft their own political philosophy onto the decision-making process and use their power to change the way our society works. So, if you accept that what a judge has for breakfast affects his decisions that day, judges should be encouraged to have a consistent diet so their decisions will consistently favor one set of litigants over the other. I am here to tell you that this is all horse manure. And, like all horse manure, it contains little seeds of truth from which tiny birds can take intellectual nourishment. The little truths are these: Under our law judges do in fact have considerable discretion in certain of their decisions: making findings of fact, interpreting language in the Constitution, statutes and regulations; determining whether officials of the executive branch have abused their discretion; and, fashioning remedies for violations of the law, including fairly sweeping powers to grant injunctive relief. The larger reality, however, is that judges exercise their powers subject to very significant constraints. They simply can’t do anything they well please.

Finally, I will link, but not embed, this video of the Anna Nicole Smith court order, for an entirely different perspective on the legal process. You almost don’t really want to have to see this stuff.

I try to evade reading/hearing/watching weather forecasts whenever possible, however I cannot escape them all time. If I do not I am usually annoyed. If you think about it that is not surprising, probabilities are against me. Usually I have preferences how I would like the weather to be to start with (Currently: A little bit below zero with snowfall from monday to thursday, snowfall stops on friday - to allow grooming - and sunshine with temperatures slightly below zero on the weekend.) and the weather forecast announces something else. Depending on the weather I get I end up with this frustration matrix

wish	forecast	weather	frustration
a	a	a	no
a	a	b	yes
a	b	a	yes	(unprepared due to unfavorable forecast)
a	b	b	yes

The outcome is even worse than could be expected since the weather forecast itself is biased, announcing "possible snowfall of up to 30cm at 1000m elevation" even if there is just a 10% chance for more than 5cm.

I must say I disagree with John a lot about git rebase. git-rebase is the most nice feature I've ever seen float around in a SCM, and is part of the things I love in git. I mean, I do not disagree with the fact that it cannot be used in every single case. It is indeed meant to be used in private topic branches. git-rebase is meant to be used in a workflow where you have a topic branch (meaning some non releaseable nor push-able work) and that you still want to keep up with others work. With other SCM's, you have to update your working repository, wich in many cases generates nasty conflicts, hard to deal with. Especially in svn e.g.. With git, you commit your work, pull the remote branch, and then rebase ontop of it. It makes a lot of sense, and when your topic branch is indeed ready, you can push it upstreams, and the next rebase will merge the bits that have been accepted automatically. I just can't think of a simpler way. Btw, we use svn at work, and I do use git-svn instead of svn to be able to develop my own patches without fearing conflicts in the same way I did before. I know I will benefit from the powerfull git merging capabilities and help at any stage, even if I did not pulled the svn for a long time. That makes the developpement much more sane, as I only try to push coherent changes, hence on a less regular basis. You could not do that without git-rebase. In that sense, git-rebase is anything but evil.

We went to Scotland on a family holiday this week (brave or stupid, answers on a postcard). You would not believe the number of puns you can get from the simple town of Ayr. For example, R: “You should have turned right there!” Me: “Oh well. To Ayr is human.” I shall spare you the rest: if your mind isn’t already overflowing with similar appalling jokes, you’re no friend of mine. Whilst in Ayr, I came across a marvellous whisky shop, Robbie’s Drams, and bought a bottle of Laphroaig quarter-cask and another of Smokehead. This article, or what remains of it, is to describe the Laphroaig quarter-cask whisky. Should you wish to avoid the Flash-animated website, here’s a precis. Tales are told of a time when the business of Laphroaig was carried on less than legally and it was useful to carry away smaller casks when the Excise men were coming than the more conventional full-size casks. Over the past few years, they have tried their best to recreate the whisky that would have been drunk as Laphroaig a couple of centuries ago: quarter-sized casks, slightly higher strength and an older filtration model. The effect of the smaller barrels is to increase the surface area to volume ratio substantially, so more flavour will enter the whisky from the barrel. Thus, they bottle it much younger than their standard ten-year-old offering. To smell it, a sweet smell hits the nose — perhaps toffee apple. On the taste, there is an initial earthy sensation followed quickly by a brief flash of kedgeree, leaving the smoky aftertaste of turmeric at the back of the throat. This is a much more subtle whisky than Laphroaig’s ten-year-old: thinner and less oily, and with a much more delicate, though still substantial, peaty hit. Because it’s not chill-filtered, the whisky becomes delightfully cloudy when water is added. I recommend that you try it both with and without additional water: many of the flavours become more muted with water, but a creamy taste comes to the fore. In summary: if you can get your hands on a bottle or two of this, it’s well worth doing so. An excellent whisky. I should also say that even if you’ve disliked other Laphroaigs in the past, give this a shot. It may just be your way into the other delights from the Laphroaig distillery.

Today I was musing about different version control systems and merge algorithms. I've been thinking specifically about how I maintain Debian packages in Darcs. I tend to import upstream tarballs into one branch, and maintain the Debian packages in another, simply merging when a new upstream is released.

Now, there seem to be two prevailing philosophies on how to handle merges in this case. I'm thinking here about merges back to upstream. Say I want to contribute my Debian patches to them.

1. Commit "clean" patches upstream. Don't have a bunch of history -- the fixing typos commits, the fixing bugs commits, or the merging to track new upstream releases. Just something like a series of diffs against the current head.
2. Bring across the full history, warts and all, and keep it around permanently.

git encourages option #1, with its rebase option. Darcs encourages option #2 (though some use its amend-record option to work more like #1).

As I got to thinking about it, it occured to me that git-rebase would be very nice if you are going to use philosophy #1. In short, rebase will remove your local patches from a repo, update it to the latest upstream, then re-apply your local changesets -- aborting to have you fix any conflicts. This is as opposed to a more traditional merge, where you add the upstream changesets to your local branch and then commit new changesets to resolve conflicts. (So a rebase would be totally useless in situation #2)

I got to thinking about this, and started wondering what would happen to people that I'm working with that in turn work off my branches. And sure enough, the git-rebase manpage says, "When you rebase a branch, you are changing its history in a way that will cause problems for anyone who already has a copy of the branch in their repository and tries to pull updates from you."

I maintain, therefore, that git-rebase is evil and should be avoided. It only works for a situation where someone maintains a private branch of a project, never shared in any way except to submit patches to an upstream. Forget it if you have a team maintaining that branch, or want to post that branch online for others to help with (as I do with my Debian darcs package). Even if you keep it private now, do you really want to adopt a work process that forces you to keep it private forever, or else completely change how you work?

And this brings me back to the original question of patch philosophy. Personally, I dislike philosophy #1. I'd much rather have the full history of a change, warts and all. Look at the Linux kernel example: changesets that introduced bugs that made it into the official tree have their fixes documented, but changesets that introduced bugs that were fixed before being merged into the official tree could be lost to the public due to rebasing by submitters. Is that really what we want? I don't think so.

With Darcs, tagging is very cheap and it is quite trivial to write an "apply a changeset bundle" script that makes a before tag, applies a series of patches, and makes an after tag. One could then run a darcs diff between the two tags to see the net effect on the repository, or could still look at the individual patches. (Or, you can avoid tagging and manually specify the "from" and "to" patches.) I find that a much better model: you can have it both ways. I'd think that most modern VCSs ought to support some variant on that, too.

And I think that git-rebase should be removed on the grounds that it encourages poor version tracking practices.

So last year as I entered the job market, I posted less “personal” blog entries and have more or less kept with the tradition except with the occasional post, especially when it concerns my mom. Right when I moved to Canada, I broke with this tradition and wrote a longish entry about my moles which I thought of as a public serive announcement to get people to go on mole patrol, because really, that is the only way to deal with recalcitrant moles. Of course, I am on constant mole-patrol and a day before I left Puerto Rico, as my sister moved her hair away from her neck to pull it back, I noticed a funky looking mole. Now, it was not all that weird but a little weird and I was like, go go go to the dermatologist and check it out. It took a few weeks to get an appointment and then they took it out, bioposied it, and indeed, there was melanoma. Everyone was shocked because, well it is shocking news to get and if anything, I thought the mole would have abnormal cells like mind did. She thankfully was pretty calm throughout the whole process (I attribute it, in part, to the fact that she does not spend too much time on the Internet, where you can arm yourself with a lot of good, but often downright frightening information). A few days ago, after a battery of tests, we found out that the melanoma was very small and contained and they had taken everything out. So for now, we are on the clear but it means constant mole partrol for her and I… Melanoma runs in families and as kids we also ran around on the beach so this issue is not going to go away. But I guess it is good that I had my scare in August, otherwise I would have never given her mole a second thought. I probably would not have made myself stare as I did at her hidden moles, every chance I had. So anyway, again, go to your dermatologist and check your moles. Or at least go on mole patrol. It is well worth the hassle…

After a couple of months' hard work, I've posted the schedule for XTech 2007. And, though I say so myself, it looks good. You can read more about the schedule itself over on the XTech web site, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there. The people bit  After the call for participation, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations. Each proposal contains an abstract of at most 500 words. I enlisted a small army of reviewers (69 in all) to help, and assigned four or five reviewers to each abstract. 829 reviews were assigned in all. The reviewers work blind, so they don't get to see who the proposer is.
After the review, I read every score and proposal, and created a shortlist of the best scoring proposals plus those that had spuriously low scores given their quality. From this shortlist the hard graft of preparing a draft schedule started. We had already decided in advance on our usual format: four parallel tracks of browsers, core tech, applications and open data. I then filled in the schedule, aiming to create themes for days, or at least for the 2-session blocks. The draft schedule and details of those shortlisted but who missed the cut were circulated among the committee. After some iteration and feedback the final schedule emerged. Picking tutorials was a little different, as this is done by myself and the committee directly. The constraints on choice are more commercially-oriented. Experience has shown we need mainstream topics that people will be happy to pay for. Even so, each year we try to include one emerging topic. Last year, it was Rails. This year, it's OpenStreetMap.
Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule. The mechanics of it all A glib reading of the above would make it all sound quite simple. And this year I'm pleased to report that it was a lot simpler than previous years. We have been able to use Expectnation from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.  Expectnation's my super startup that's taking up the time that XTech and fatherhood don't! I'm about to tell you why it's wonderful, so please forgive a little pride.
Gathering the proposals was easy once the CFP had been set up inside Expectnation. I set up three calls: one for presentations, one for tutorials, and a secret one that the public doesn't get to see. (We always need a secret one for people who have very good reasons why they didn't make the public deadlines.) The review phase Recruiting reviewers was done by Expectnation's request system. This lets me send a request to a large number of people simultaneously, and collect their responses via the web app. (Previously, this had involved email, spreadsheets and wasted time.) The chart you see to the right shows the breakdown of the response to this request. If a reviewer said 'yes', they added a note to say which types of proposal they would review, and signed up for an account in the system. I then passed through every paper assigning four or five appropriate reviewers. A quick search each time allowed me to look for the right reviewers, and ensure no one reviewer got overloaded with work. Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is "reviewers with work to do". I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing. Every reviewer then logged into Expectnation, saw the proposals they needed to review, and used the interface to efficiently score the proposals. One big lesson here is that it needs to be very efficient if you want to get the best reviewers, who are often the busiest. Another wizzy graph enabled me to keep track of the reviews, and the mailroom let me send out a reminder to those reviewers who hadn't finished their work yet, when the time for the close of reviewing drew near. Picking the papers Expectnation lets me sort and filter proposals pretty flexibly, so I went through the papers for each track in turn, ordered by their review score. Anything scored 3 or higher (4 is best, 1 is worst) was almost certain to be shortlisted. I read all the reviews and the abstract, and moderated any score that was unusually low (for some reason, reviewers rarely overrate proposals!) The next step was to set up the empty grid, shown in the top half of the diagram to the right. Here I added the empty time slots to the rooms we had, and assigned putative tracks to each of the rooms (they can be swapped around later if needed.) After that, the scheduling can start, shown in the second half of the picture to the right. Each empty slot can be assigned a paper from the shortlist for the relevant topic. That way it's easy to "paint on" talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference. Once it was time to finalize matters, I mass-marked all the scheduled papers as accepted, which automatically sent a notification to the presenters, using the same request system as for reviewers. When a speaker confirms, their proposal status changes and they appear in the final public grid. From there, I am able to use the mailroom again to inform speakers of the information they need to know. Additionally, speakers can log into the system at any time to see when they've been scheduled to speak.
Gridding out the conference in Expectnation is probably the biggest timesaver of all. Previously this involved a lot of sketching on paper or a spreadsheet, and a lot of manual work notifying people, and then more work creating the timetable to go on the web site. Now, both the grid and a full web of abstracts and speaker details are generated automatically. What next? As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation. What's next for XTech is the process of publicising the conference among attendees, recruiting session moderators, and also the writing of papers by the presenters. As the conference draws nearer, the attendee-level interactive features of Expectnation will kick in, allowing personal scheduling and rating of sessions. What's next for Expectnation is that we're ramping up to our 1.0 launch. We're working with a handful of early adopter customers right now, and are always interested in new use cases. As we get nearer the end of the first tranche of engineering work, we're going to gear up the publicity effort and start explaining to the world why we're special. As usual, I'd love to hear questions, feedback and suggestions.

While we're fixing some network problems, here is a musical interlude^W^Wset of links...

Explaining Debian at parties

'Do not try to convince people to try it out or you will become a support hotline. Instead, tell them about LUGs and mailing lists (and how cool it can be) and put the challenge on them: "if you try it, those are your support channels. Are you up for it?"'

Index of /~joerg/templates

Explanations of some common reasons for getting REJECT from ftp-master.

gravityboy: Politics

"If we're going to make interactions between developers more civil and friendly and less personally hostile then we need a different kind of stick. Maybe a carrot of sorts is in order too?"

Consensus and community review in open source and open standards Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

'this is quite a stretch with respect to the normal dictionary meaning of "consensus"'

Social Drag

How many Debian Developers are dressed in Social Drag?

debian Gender Research

More research to add to the surveys page

#354950 - ITP: gauche-readline -- A readline-like library for the Gauche Scheme implementation - Debian Bug report logs

Contemplating sponsoring again.

The joys of English cuisine are abomination in God's sight Ted Walther's Private Diary

Blast from debian past: Ted Walther's gullibility for stereotyping is an abomination in God's sight and those foods are hardly typical English. For instance, the only one on his PS list that I've eaten recently is flapjack (not flapjacks, which is something else and not English AFAIK) and I can only remember eating five of the list in the last year. Also, the linked site seems to concentrate on processed pap from multinationals and supermarkets, rather than real trad English food. Example: "Yorkshire puddings are basically a bread type product. You can use them in place of dinner rolls." Why not make 'em a bit harder, cook 'em a bit longer and you can use them for cobbling the street instead? Yorkshire pudding should be a baked batter with a soft middle and a crisp puffy edge. Nothing like bread. And don't get me started about the pasties. Honestly, if you learn about food from such sources, no wonder you'd think it an abomination.

Re: Position Statement to the Dunc-Tanc "experiment"

"had somebody wanted to kill (or inflict maximum damage) to the project, he couldn't have done any better than the current DPL"

Releas-o-meter

Interesting idea - why no cron-run copy on the web?

EUPL v 1.0 revokable ?

One that may appear in a future 'bits from debian-legal' - it seems the EU are popularising a type of termination clause. Yay.

Future of Debian Weekly News

As I hoped, Joey is explicitly calling for sponsorship for DWN production.

DPL 2007, Current Candidates

still don't have a title is keeping a list of DPL candidates, so I won't put one up this year.

#411041 - request for debian-l10n-persian mailing list - Debian Bug report logs

Tell all your persian-speaking friends to show their support!

Interprete I cite, you cite, I rant

Lack of references is a problem on lists like debian-legal where explaining everything again can drive you insane and still not convince some people.

Lucas Nussbaum's Blog State of software for Suspend to RAM/Disk ?

More tips on the "Will I Work Or Not?" suspend problems.

only on debian-devel - she.geek.nz

> Am I mistaken or this is a flame on how to flame ?

Miriam, coroutines have the same problem as threads, futures and all the other interesting concepts out there: they are perceived as a magic bullet when they are merely one tool in the great toolbox. Whether a tool is appropriate depends on the job. Postgres, for example, handles each connection in a separate process, which adds a lot of complexity to their internal structures as all concurrent accesses need to be handled properly. However, SQL's transaction and isolation semantics make a single-threaded implementation almost as hard to implement, so the correct answer was to use threads. The biggest problem with threads is data consistency, and this is where almost all negative examples originate: some variable was not declared volatile, some lock not held long enough, some set of locks taken in the wrong order. A rule of thumb should be: if your threads need to interact, then you should not be using threads. If you have to compute something which will take longer, it is absolutely fine to start a new thread, but then you will have to protect the inter-thread communication appropriately. What is appropriate depends on the problem again; in most cases it will be message queues which allow the other thread to handly the request when it is in a safe state. Coroutines come in at a point where "you should not be using threads", by essentially allowing me to write a producer-consumer model as if it were threaded, and then letting the compiler build a nonthreaded version from that. In the C++ world, most algorithms can not be combined directly because they are written as a consumer/producer loop and cannot be suspended -- coroutines will make that possible.

I’ve been seriously thinking about leaving Brocade for a few months now. They’ve always been great to me, and I’ve enjoyed working there. But I’ve been there for nearly five years, and it was my first real job out of college, so I’ve decided I want to try something different. I especially want to get out of the storage sector; even though Brocade is really a networking company, their primary business (and everything I’ve ever worked on here) has been Fibre Channel, which is really only used for storage. I’ve been monitoring jobs.joelonsoftware.com, and in early January (just after I had gotten Lisa a new Series 3 for Christmas) I saw a listing for TiVo. So I decided to apply. After a phone screen and two on-site interviews with a variety of people, they offered me a job, and last Wednesday, I accepted. My last day at Brocade will be next Friday, March 2, and my first day at TiVo will be Thursday, March 8. It’s finally been announced at Brocade; otherwise I would have posted this sooner. It’ll be nice to work on something that I actually use again. (I’ll be working on the TiVo service for Comcast DVRs.) It’s easier for me to be self-motivated when I’m working on something that is potentially going to benefit me, outside of just the usual compensation. That’s the whole motivating factor of open source, at least in theory, right? I know it’s why I worked on gaim. Also, it’s a lot easier to explain to people. Telling people I work on a Fibre Channel Router, if they don’t know anything about storage, is just gibberish, and trying to explain it is aggravatingly time-consuming. Anyway, wish me luck.

I just submitted my talk proposal for YAPC::EU, which will be held in Vienna in late August. The topic? Integrating Perl in a wider distribution: The Debian pkg-perl group.
I took part in YAPC::NA (Yet Another Perl Conference - North America) in 2001, in Montreal, and YAPC::EU (you guessed right: Europe) in 2002, in Munich. While in Munich, I met Debian's Erich, Weasel and the late Jens. It is a very nice conference with all kinds of Perl-heads, apt for different experience levels. the talk I am proposing will be about what do we work for in Debian, how can we get a better synergy from our upstream group and (oh, this point is quite itchy - specially in strongly opinioned communities such as Ruby's! Perl people are quite nice to play with, however, but still...) what do we (as Debian maintainers) request from them in order for life to be smoother.
Of course, I only submitted the talk. The CFP has just been launched, and so far, mine is the fourth talk offered - It can still be rejected (as it is not really related to Perl development, the heart of YAPC), but I guess it will be deemed interesting by the Perl monks reviewing them.
In any case, hope to see you in Vienna as well!

The other night I was rocking out to a newly acquired swath of rock and techno from the 1970s and 1980s when Mako pinged me on IRC to chat about my recent blog post, the outcome of which the was his following blog entry. And indeed, I made the associations and links very quickly to gesture to the absurdity of how these example are collapsed and under the umbrella of IP law and as a move to argue for maximalist positions. He took the time to explain how certain folks, like Pat Choate in Hot Property used these very examples to argue for more not less protection. Does anyone know of a case of people using these types of examples to argue the opposite or differently as I think can also be done?? (that is aside from Mako’s wonderful post)