4 September 2006

Some Debian developers have finally decided that it's time to get things done and solve the trouble around cdrecord. They've taken the last version that was released really free and used it as basis for their own forked project. For years there has been discussions with the author of cdrecord and current upstream maintainer of the cdrtools package that lead to nowhere. Debian's stance on software in main is that the software and its build system, which usually contains of scripts written in different languages (shell, perl, make), need to be sufficiently free (i.e. compliant with the DFSG). Introducing a build system released under a license which is said to be not compatible with the GNU GPL and which Debian developers consider problematic with regards to the DFSG was not exactly helpful. Other GNU/Linux distributions also had problems with recent versions of cdrtools, some of them were still using older versions to bypass avoid problems. In the end this new project seems to be the only path out of this dilemma of disagreements over licenses. Hopefully, other vendors will join the effort so that they can benefit from the fork earlier and more easily, and also contribute code on their own. Whether or not it'll be accepted and used, the future will tell.

I recently wrote two two new Perl modules. The first is called Linux::Sysfs and is a library binding for libsysfs. It offers a convenient interface to sysfs (/sys). After releasing the first version of it for peer review and, later on, to CPAN, I received a lot of reports about test failures because of a missing or outdated libsysfs. Therefor I wished to have something like GNU autoconf for Perl modules. It would be possible to write something similar in pure Perl (someone actually tried it: Config::Autoconf), but compiling C programs from Perl in a portable way isn't much fun. Therefor I decided to write some Perl glue around autoconf and autoheader so those tools are easy to use from Makefile.PLs and such. I did so and the result is ExtUtils::Autoconf. It'll be on CPAN within the next few hours. Until then the current version is available from here. It currently has some documentation about using it from an ExtUtils::MakeMaker-based Makefile.PL. Instructions about how to use it with Module::Build and Module::Install are still missing. The Module::Install part will be done by an extension called Module::Install::Autoconf, which I'm currently about to write. For the Module::Build part I don't really have an Idea on how to do that, so any help from some Module::Build people would be very appreciated.

Thanks to a little glitch in planet, one of Lars' posts from 2004 came to my attention. In it, he proposes a test for language benchmarking:

Read text from the standard input and count the number of times each word occurs. Convert letters to lower case. Order the words according to frequency, words with the same frequency should be ordered in ascending lexicographic order according to character code. Print out the top N words, where N is a decimal number given on the command line. Each output line must contain the count, a space, and the word (in lower case), and end in an ASCII LINE FEED character. Output must contain exactly N such output lines and no other output lines.

A word contains only ASCII letters A through Z and a through z (convert upper case to lower case) and ASCII digits 0 through 9 and is not empty. All other characters separate words and are ignored except to notice word boundaries. Word boundaries only occur at the beginning and end of the file and at non-word characters. You may not assume a maximum length for the word, line, or input file.

He provides a tarball with sample implementations in C, Python, and Shell.

His C code is 183 lines long, Python 57, and Shell 11. The specs for this test seem particularly suited for shell.

I wrote a version in Haskell, commented and formatted approximately the same as his Python version, but using an algorithm more like the shell version. It comes in at 18 lines. Here it is:

import System.Environment
import Data.List
import Data.Char
custwords = filter (/= "") . lines . map (conv . toLower)
    where iswordchar x = isAlphaNum x && isAscii x
          conv x = if iswordchar x then x else '\n'
wordfreq = map (\x -> (head x, length x)) . group . sort
freqsort (w1, c1) (w2, c2) = if c1 == c2
                                 then compare w1 w2
                                 else compare c2 c1
showit (word, count) = show count ++ " " ++ word
main = do args - getArgs
          interact $ unlines . map showit . take (read . head $ args) .
                     sortBy freqsort . wordfreq . custwords

Taking a look at this, one thing that might strike you is the function composition in main. This takes the output from one function and feeds it into the next -- and the Haskell syntactic sugar for this makes it look a lot like pipes in the shell version. The interact call takes, as a parameter, a function that takes a string and returns a string. interact supplies stdin as the input and prints the output to stdout. Note that, since Haskell is lazily, this does not mean buffering up the entire input or output -- it is read and written on demand.

The rest of the functions are also standard in Haskell, and you can find them in the index to the library reference if you want to learn more.

I understand and agree that short code doesn't necessarily mean good code, but I think that Haskell provides a very elegant and expressive solution to many problems -- one that also happens to be remarkably concise.

Updated 9/4: Changed isLower to isAlphaNum to fix a bug, and removed unnecessary Data.Map import

In a recent post I mentioned that my scalp is adorned with 14 titanium staples. While some may think that I have them because an odd accident incurred during my recent move, I have them because I live in mole-ville and some of them were causing a small disturbance in the hood. Living here means I have a lot of moles on my body and well, these little masses of brown pigment, while they can be somewhat attractive, and unproblematic, can be unruly creatures that can change on short notice and cause a lot of problems. Now I usually don’t blog about personal things like my moles, but I thought it is worth writing about this as a public service announcement… So if there are any other readers who live in a crowded mole-ville, this is little reminder to check up on your moles, sooner than later. I have never had a problem with my moles and there is no history of problems in my family but I do have more than the average number of them. In fact, anyone who has met me knows this because they are all over my face, and there is one distinct one, under my left eye that is shaped like a tear, and often mistaken for dirt, more graciously as a tattoo, and most oddly as that black stuff that football players smear under their eyes. About a year ago, after one of my friends was diagnosed with melanoma (thankfully he is ok), I started checking my moles more frequently and did a full check at the dermatologist. All was ok and when I went to another dermatologist in February, all looked good. Then this summer, as I was running my hands through my hair, I felt a mole and started obsessing over it. I was pretty sure I did not have it a year ago as it was not on my chart and if was, it was probably flat and since I could feel it, it had changed, which is not a good sign… I was traveling most of the summer and it was first in South Africa where I had it checked in a fancy dermatological office in Durban. They dermatologist took a close look and said, looks fine but have it removed because you can’t track it. That made me feel a lot better so I enjoyed the rest of my time there and then as soon as I got back I saw a RN at a dermatology office in NJ (it is near to impossible to get a derm appointment without a month’s wait in the US but since they had RNs, I could see someone quick.. More on this in a second). This person also confirmed what the dermatologists in SA had said but also decided to remove it because I could not track it. A week later a pathology report came back that showed it was dysplastic and that the cells were changing, and thus considered abnormal. Some dermatologists consider this as pre-cancerous, some don’t, but it seems to be that there is more likelihood that this type of mole can turn into cancer. So the “treatment” is a full excision where they remove 1cm all around the mole. I got word of the report around the 8th of August and the only time they could fit me in for surgery was the 25th, a day after I was supposed to leave for Edmonton, which changed my moving plans (and explains why I arrived here so late, making getting my stuff complicated given school is in session and parking is tight). I then scheduled an appointment for a a full body check and removed another mole that once biposed was confirmed as dysplastic and though not as abnormal as the other, the recommendation was to also remove the surrounding dermis. Now, when I called the surgical coordinators, they could not fit me in another time slot to expand my appointment for 2 surgeries because they were “full” even though I explained I was moving away from the U.S. They said that it was up to the surgeon to decide whether to operate on the second area and since I was leaving to Canada the NEXT day, he would probably agree but no guarantees.
So of course, I wanted the stuff out because I was not sure how to go about getting the procedure done in Canada. My insurance does kick in the second I sign up and there is no Bull-Sh*t pre-existing clause stuff here but because I could not get an appointment in time, I would probably have to go to a medicenter that performed these operations and not all do. Though I was confident I could get it done eventually, it would take a lot of inquiring and after a 7 day drive and all that follows a big move, I decided it was not the thing I wanted to do. So I got to the office early on the 25th and one of the first things that comes out of my mouth when I saw the nurse was that I was leaving the next day to Canada and I did not know when I could get care there. Of course the first phrase that pops to mind for many Americans when you say Canada and health care is “socialized medicine” which most people in the U.S. associate with bad healthcare and long waits. Now on the one hand, I have to admit I, to some degree, share those fears, which is one of the reasons I wanted the extra dermis removed asap. On the other hand, I think that the claim is a big fat red herring because in fact for many Americans, they *do* have to wait a long time for many procedures (dermatology is classic for this, and even my first procedure took a 3 week wait and if I wanted to schedule the second one, it would have taken 5 weeks) or worse, they have no insurance, which KEEPS many people from going to a doctor in the first place. So American medicine is not necessarily “fast track” and in a dual sense: in the literal sense because HMO healthcare is like socialized medicine with capitalist prices, and because many people without insurance also probably avoid the doctors until they are in bad shape… And even though I have insurance, they would not pre-approve anything as I am in some awful pre-existing clauses because my insurance had lapsed for 2 months this year. And even though I have never had a problem with a mole in my life and did not even see one doctor in the 6 months before I got my insurance (which is when the pre-existing diagnosis would pertain to) and even saw a dermatologist in my HMO network in February who found nothing wrong, the insurance wants to make sure to add as many roadblocks as possible in the hopes of never paying up. Great. Now I am very grateful the nurse at the derm office proceeded to get the doctor to perform the 2nd surgery and he also was more than ok to do it. I wanted to give them big fat hugs after the procedure but you know, you just don’t do that type of move in your blue robe after the surgery. Before the surgery I naturally “hit” the net to gather a lot of information on moles, cancer etc… I join the millions around the world who–for better or for worse–use the Internet to supplement (some I am sure supplant) their doctor’s medical advice. In fact, a key part of my second project on psychiatric survivors looks at how patient communities are building a sphere of amateur but expert medical knowledge exchange. It is an enormous sphere of vibrant peer-to-peer knowledge production but one that many are uncomfortable portraying as such because it involves a lot more risks and ambiguities than exchange knowledge about, you know, how to get your blue tooth working…. But if we bracket the realm of alternative remedies (which admittedly is a HUGE part of this type of exchange), I think in fact, patients are pretty savvy and are engaging in risk-averse behavior by going on the net and illness forums. A lot of what is exchanged are warnings about side-effects, detailed accounts of experiences with procedures, and yet a lot of red flag raising that one’s experience may not match another persons but may be still helpful. It is a lot of information that often may be missed during the exchange with the doctor and derives from what is another type of expert knowledge: one’s bodily experiences with medicine, illness, and other related procedures. But I have to say that when researching melanoma and moles on the Internet, I was somewhat stumped. There is just too much variation out there to make informed judgments and abnormal but non-malignant moles have the same characteristics as melanomas. The Internet, in this case, seemed helpful to provide some baseline information and then just served to freak me out more than necessary so I turned away for the time being. For now I am just adjusting to the staples, which come out in another week. The procedure did not hurt much but the first week after the removal my head was much more sore than I had expected. Not so fun when on a marathon road trip, which is finally over!

Rapha l: I mostly agree with your post. Having something closer to a steering committee seems saner than having a single leader for projects such as Debian, due to a single person not able to fully follow everything such a large and diverse mass of people works on. I was among the supporters of Project Cabal^W^Wthe DPL team experiment, and of our 2IC role.
However, you state that a release should determine the time a DPL team (call it committee, cabal or whatnot. I like the title, in fact: "I am an Elected Member of the Whatnot of Debian". Whee!) - I disagree on this one. Like the fact DPL is not chosen for technical but for political work - The DPL (and so should the team) mediates between parties, brings order (controversial, sometimes) to discussions, pushes forward some controversial decisions, reports on the general status of the project - That should be the Whatnot Team work (hmmm... Should I file for trademark on that name?).
In any case... Were we to change our model towards this formal DPL team thingie, I advocate slow changes over strong ones - I prefer a board like this one to be replaced one person at a time, at rates not more frequent than one month, and having them there for a fixed amount of time.
Of course, this would lead to a mess on managing the voting, and each vote being less important for the developers. Besides, we have had DPL elections with as little as two candidates, and topping at seven IIRC - Do we have enough people interested in being responsable for our administrative chores? Would this scheme work? Or would it lead us closer to administrative stagnation? Quoting our not-very-beloved-but-anyways-wise dictator (for the 1876-1910 period) Porfirio D az: "If I want something done, I do it myself. If I want it to take some time, I appoint a delegate to do it. If I don't want it ever done, I form a committee".

I was in a multiple-car accident yesterday. I've been having to tell this story a fair amount in person and on IRC, so I thought I'd blog about it. Short version: it was a fender-bender. I'm doing fine, nobody was hurt, Michelle wasn't in the car, and 75% of the cars involved were driven away from the scene — including mine, by me. Want the long version? Well, I'm gonna tell it anyway. I had just pulled to a stop at a traffic light, heading northbound on Keystone Avenue where it intersects 106th Street, in Hamilton County. The line of cars at the light was pretty long, and people love to try hauling ass on the stretch between 96th Street and 106th. Apparently the person behind me was one of them. The line of cars stopped in the left lane (where I was) at the light was pretty long, and much shorter in the right — the cars over there were still moving at a good clip. I looked in my rearview mirror, thinking "if someone's trying to match pace with the cars in the right-hand lane, they're gonna need to brake pretty hard to stop." It was about 1815, so it was starting to get dark. A pair of headlights approach. Fast. Oh boy. I don't stop right up on people's tails, so if I'm hit, hopefully I won't go into the car ahead. I look forward again. Yeah, there's some room here. Screech. I didn't tense up; I felt a strange sense of calm and curiosity, as I'd never been in a car accident before. I bought my car, a Volkswagen Golf, in part because of its fairly good safety ratings. It has lots of air bags, and I always use a seat belt. Plus, in this instance I figured I wouldn't get hit a high speed. "Strange Deja Vu" by Dream Theater, from the Scenes from a Memory CD, was playing. Normally I listen to All Things Considered while commuting home, but I was annoyed because when I got in the car, I heard Nina Totenberg signing off a report, which means I'd just missed some Supreme Court coverage. Damn. Anyway. BONK. I got hit. Ouch. My teeth had chomped together too hard. Maybe they should install rubber mouthpieces in the doors of cars so you can grab them right before a crash. You know, car crashes never sound like the stock sound effects that have been around for about 50 years. I guess that's because they build cars to crumple these days instead of act like steel shrapnel bombs. Damn that Ralph Nader. My wreck doesn't sound cool and stuff. And I get to walk away, well, get back in the car and drive away, instead of my wife collecting on my life insurance policy. But I digress again. A middle-aged woman in a Honda Civic skidded into me, and knocked me into the Buick Park Avenue ahead of me, which in turn tapped the minivan ahead of him. I blinked a bit and tried to reorient myself, and then turned off the CD player. We all got out of our cars. The woman in back was very distressed, and immediately and repeatedly said the thing your insurance card tells you never to say after an accident. Oh well. Being a middle-aged woman, she'd probably have to wreck a school bus full of children — twice — before her premium would go up. Mine, on the other hand — we'll see. Called 911. Reported the incident. Tried to call my wife, but she decided not to answer. I later found out she was gabbing it up with my mom. Isn't it nice when your wife gets along with your mother? I COULD BE BLEEDING OUT ON THE COLD ASPHALT, BUT YOU TWO JUST KEEP ON TALKING. Michelle and I have the same model of cell phone, and we have call waiting with caller ID, so I know she knew it was me. Anyway, I try a couple of times, then give up and leave voice mail. Turns out the guy in front, in the minivan, was a Deputy Prosecutor for Hamilton County. He said something about being experienced in car wrecks, but I don't clearly remember it. Anyway, perhaps in part because he decided he was only "tapped" and didn't need to file an insurance claim, and perhaps in part out of professional courtesy, when the cops showed up, they let him go very quickly, so I didn't get any of his information. Everybody was fine, polite, and decent about the whole thing. The couple ahead of me, whom I got knocked into, didn't have their insurance info on them (or maybe this is a euphemism for "don't have insurance"). But, except for the deputy prosecutor guy, who was outta there, we all traded names, addresses, and phone numbers. I hope the Debian Project doesn't mind that I used my Debian Project Leader business cards for this purpose. These people (and the Carmel Police Department) now have my GPG key fingerprint. Uh oh. Anyway, that's about it. Appointment tomorrow with the insurance agent, to get help filling out INDIANA OPERATOR'S VEHICLE CRASH REPORT, State Form 38656 (R6/7-91) Stock 301 Effective 1-92, which has to be filed with the Indiana State Police within ten business days, or my driver's license will be suspended. Aww, yeah. Gotta move fast, because on Friday I leave for Mérida, Spain, to attend the 2nd Annual Open Source World Conference in Extremadura. Also have an appointment with the claims adjustor tomorrow. Then I'm hoping to just leave my car at the dealership so they can work on it over the week when I'm gone. My wife and my mom, those talkative two from a couple of paragraphs ago, will be coming along with me. My mom's got a jones to visit Spain, and I've had a jones to take my wife to Europe. We'll have a couple of extra days to see what Spain is like — I'll be there from 22 October to 28 October. I hope one day to visit Barcelona and hang out with some proper anarcho-syndicalists.

On 21 August, Don Armstrong, a Debian developer, accepted my offer to serve as my delegate in handling trademark issues vis-à-vis the DCCA. As an employee of a DCCA member company, I found it wise to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest. I should stress that any such perception would merely have been conjectural, however; at no point have I been asked by anyone to put my thumb on the scales, as it were, and deal with the DCCA or any of its member organizations in a preferential way. It is widely understood within the Debian Project that our existing trademark policy, originally formulated in 1998, is too vague, and has not scaled well to suit Debian's much greater degree of success and market penetration (on its own, and in the form of derivatives) seven years later. However, grappling with the issue has proven challenging for Debian's membership. I believe this is mainly because the Free Software hackers that comprise our organization have tended to self-educate to a far greater extent on copyright law, and even patent law, than they have on trademark law. Recently (within the past year or so), Debian gained access via its U.S.-affiliated charitable organization, Software in the Public Interest, Inc. to a pro bono legal counsel who understands the Free Software culture. Debian's difficulty with trademark management is not unique — we have been on the other side of this problem when dealing with the Firefox and AbiWord trademarks, since we customize the codebases of these software projects in our GNU/Linux distribution, but ship them with their names (and logos) intact. It so happens in these cases that the originators of the software (who hold the trademarks) approve of our modifications. One of the essential pillars of software freedom, however, is the user's right to make modifications that the authors or rights-holders in the software may not agree with. Free Software hackers can feel, with some justification, that it is misleading to uphold the freedom of a work on the one hand (by using a copyright license such as the GNU GPL), and take it away with the other (by asserting a trademark on some essential aspect of the work, such as its name). It is true that a work can be renamed, or descriptive text changed, to identify itself as distinct from an "official" version of the work, but this in turn, it is feared, can damage perceptions of the work through at least two mechanisms. Firstly, disclaimers about unofficial status may be unnerving to users who aren't schooled in the vagaries of trademark law, in which — at least in the United States — you are expected to aggressively defend your mark lest you lose a future infringement case you bring against a well-heeled defendant. Users may mistake strident proclamations of unofficial, unendorsed status in a piece of software as a warning that it is unsuitable for use, or has known severe flaws. Secondly, aggressive use of trademarks, or even just the tension observed above between giving with a copyright license and taking away with a trademark license, may lead some distributors to rename a work, obscuring its origins to the casual user. This can happen pre-emptively, before a distributor even knows whether the modifications they have made (or think they might make in the future) have met with any objection from the trademark holders in that work. The "freedom to fork" (i.e., make a derived version unendorsed by the original author) is an essential part of Free Software, and while Free Software hackers' sense of community generally leads them to eschew forking in favor of compromise and consensus, occasionally a fork ends up growing the userbase or improving the overall quality of the Free Software landscape. A hacker may fear that brash trademark assertions by an author constitute mere lip service towards the freedom to modify the work without changing its name, and may be tempted to fork it, leaving the trademark encumbrance behind. Even among those who do not guard their software freedoms quite so jealously, the fear can exist that a simple difference of opinion over some technical programming detail, such as choice of sorting algorithm or graphical toolkit, will escalate to the point where the trademark license on the work (implicit or otherwise) is withdrawn. This is the inverse of the previous situation — instead of a modifier choosing to fork a work, the original author of a work (or, at any rate, the holder of the trademark associated with it), can force the modifier to fork. The dilemma this imposes upon the people creating the modified versions — revert your existing change or be legally compelled to make an additional one — can rub people the wrong way. When forking occurs, for whatever reason, and even in the relatively benign case of "rebranding" to remove legally protected marks, the threat exists that the competitive strength of the corresponding software will be diluted. Imagine if each of four major GNU/Linux distributors rebranded their version of Mozilla Firefox, calling it instead things like "Lizardfox", "Hatfox", "Swirlfox", and "Hearstfox". How many users would deduce that the web browsers in question were all "really" Mozilla Firefox, each one with a fig leaf placed delicately over it so that the legally-minded types at the Mozilla Foundation and the distributors could wink at each other? Even the somewhat savvy GNU/Linux user may be more confused than one might expect, given that other names used for Mozilla's suite of applications include Sunbird and Thunderbird, yet there is an independent Free Software project called Firebird, which was established prior to the Mozilla Foundation's adoption of its product naming scheme. "What's in a name?", you may ask. They're important because they are simple labels we can use to refer to Free Software success stories. There's a lot of Free Software to talk about; the phenomenon of copyleft does much to ensure a competitive culture. It's difficult to achieve an unnatural monopoly in this environment, because anyone who steers a software project in a direction the users don't want to go has to cope with the prospect of seeing a group of those users organize their own community based around a derived version that does what they want. The hypothetical hydra-headed Firefox situation described above, however, is an example of false competition, because the distributors were compelled to distinguish their Web browsers for legal, rather than technical, reasons. In actuality, Mozilla Firefox is a good example of what's right about Free Software, not just because of its licensing but because a web browser is a familiar concept to nearly every computer user today. Free Software's early successes were more esoteric — GNU Make, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU C Library, GNU Emacs, and even the Linux kernel are not pieces of software that the general user can easily conceptualize. It is beneficial — to say nothing of convenient — to refer to the leading freely-licensed web browser as "Mozilla Firefox" rather than "a suite of mostly-compatible, similarly-named Web browsers shipped by the various GNU/Linux distributors". Those who seek to foment confusion and FUD about Free Software would doubtless capitalize on such a situation. These issues are challenging but not insuperable. A coherent policy will enable the community to establish a set of common practices, whereas now there are few conventions in the trademark arena. Ultimately, it is my hope that Debian will be able to promulgate a trademark policy that not only satisfies our needs, but serves as a model for others. To establish a successful policy, I suspect we need to build one up from basic concepts, and formulate explicit answers to fundamental questions.

• Why even have a trademark? Let's understand what protections the law affords and determine which, if any, are applicable to our endeavors. In the U.S., trademarks are managed by the federal government (rather than the states), and regulated by Title 15, Chapter 22 of the United States Code. International treaties result in trademark law being roughly similar across most jurisdictions in the developed nations, but there could exist important differences that we should learn about.
• What level of Debian involvement should be necessary for an "outside" organization to use our mark without a fuss from us? Should there be any situations where people essentially have an automatic trademark license, or should we use trademark law as an instrument to encourage (or compel) anyone trading in our name to contact us? We need to consider small-scale garage-based redistributors who simply move physical copies of our official ISO images as well as commercial derivative distributions.
• Is it feasible to apply the copyleft concept to trademarks? That is, is there some way we can turn the restrictive aspects of trademark law into a kind of compact that upholds the freedoms of a sharing community, while penalizing the activities of those who would prey upon that community?

Originally published 2005-09-14.
Updated 2005-10-15 to add licensing in comments.

Courtesy of FindLaw Legal News: WASHINGTON-President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Harriet Miers' religious beliefs figured into her nomination to the Supreme Court as a top-ranking Democrat warned against any "wink and a nod" campaign for confirmation. "People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Bush told reporters at the White House. "They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion." Courtesy of the United States Constitution, Article VI: ...all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. Oh, well, just so long as it's a criterion, not a test. I mean, it's only essential, not a qualification or something, right?

Since I got back from the Oldenburg Linux Developers' conference, I've had my attention on our security infrastructure. Despite only being there for one and a half days thanks to a badly delayed trans-Atlantic flight, I found the conversations and collaborative spirit heartening. The bad news is that what I had planned for a writeup got rendered obsolete soon after I returned to the United States. Things have been changing rapidly, but mostly for the better. We've got three machines in the DNS rotation for security.debian.org now, which is superior to the one we had before (you can use the command dig security.debian.org to inspect the DNS record). My thanks go to our security and system administration teams for recovering from the recent overload problem provoked by an xfree86 package security update. Being somewhat familiar with that package, I can understand how its large size combined with Debian's ever-growing userbase starved the security host of bandwidth. Secondly, while I was in Oldenburg, Joey Schulze gave me a lot of insight into what a challenge one particular package is — the thing sucks up at least half of his time, dwarfing all other stable security update efforts. You've probably guessed that this package is the Linux kernel. Due in part to its success, and in part due to OS kernels being inherently attractive exploitation targets, the Linux kernel is getting a significant amount of scrutiny from a security perspective. Taking Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an example, we can see two advisories in the past two weeks: one on 28 September and one on 5 October. The one on 28 September addressed eighteen (18) different vulnerabilities as catalogued by MITRE's CVE project, and the one on 5 October — that's one week later — addressed fourteen (14) vulnerabilities, of which eight (8) were distinct from the previous advisory. (There was some overlap because the earlier advisory was for Red Hat's Linux 2.4.x kernel series, and the latter was for the 2.6.x series.) Those Debian developers who have ever handled a security vulnerability in one of their own packages can likely imagine the labor burden this is. Then reflect that Debian ships and supports a lot more Linux kernel trees than Red Hat does — this only magnifies the problem. The good news is that a team of developers focused on stable kernel security updates has been established. One of its members said to me today that he has seen a "very positive increase in kernel-related security activity". It is too soon to declare this problem resolved, but I perceive no lack of talent or dedication on the part of our developers. I am there to assist them in resolving the organizational and workflow issues so that our users can see the fruits of their energy directly. Similarly, I'm interested to see how the security.debian.org round-robin arrangement holds up after a reasonable period of real-world loads, particularly since I expect kernel package updates to sock the machines about as badly as an X Window System update. These issues are not over and done with, so an announcement declaring these problems vanquished would be premature. At the same time, the developers and users at large need to know whether or not people have their attention on them. I am wary of leaders or managers who declare issues resolved too soon, or proclaim optimism that later turns out to be unfounded, and have sought to avoid this vice. I apologize if I have tacked too far in the opposite direction. I perceive progress in this area. Let me know what you think, what you need to see, and by what metrics you measure progress and accomplishment on the security front. You can reach me at leader@debian.org (the address is already blitzed with so much spam there seems little sense in obfuscating it). (After getting some feedback on this entry, it's my intention to post it with any applicable revisions to the debian-devel-announce mailing list; please take this opportunity to "patch" this "beta", if you're so inclined.)

Philipp Kern: to put it simply, you're right. I appreciate your frankness, and yours is exactly the kind of feedback I need to do a better job. The primary reason for transitioning DPL reportage from monthly reports to blog entries is because I have found that most things in Debian that require my attention do not unfold neatly on a month-to-month basis. The ongoing attention to stable security updates, for example, began in June, carried forward through DebConf, and brings me to Oldenburg this weekend. Activity tends to be "bursty" instead of steady, which makes sense given that most of us don't have salaried jobs we can dedicate to Debian (I don't, certainly — my day job just has some overlap with my avocation). The emphasis I placed on visibility, demystification of Debian processes, and reform of the ones that don't work well remain my focus. To that end, it seems logical to me that it would only compound a failure to issue monthly reports by withholding information until I do issue one again. I'm trying to keep people informed, and if the information I've been sharing via my blog entries about DPL matters is of little value, then I need to know that — please tell me. planet.debian.org, by virtue of its .debian.org address, is an official project resource, which is why I think it's a suitable forum to use for communication with Debian's developers and users. Similarly, I am acting in my elected position when I post to any other Debian mailing list, even though subscription to other lists by developers is not required, and I act in that position when I speak with the press. I expect to be held to account for my statements in those forums, and I suspect you'd agree that I couldn't avoid responsibility for them by claiming that I didn't make them to debian-devel-announce. Whether I have good reasons for falling behind on the monthly reports or not, and whether or not I still think now they are the best way to maintain visibility is beside the point. I fully expect, if I run for election against next year, for my rivals to make much of the failure. My primary concern, however, remains serving the membership of our organization, and the users of our distribution, as best I can. To that end, I have a question for you and others: should I re-post blog entries about leadership matters to debian-devel-announce, or is that needlessly duplicative? Along the same lines, is it desirable that I stop (or reduce) blogging in favor of emails to debian-devel-announce? Let me know what you think; post to the Planet, and/or mail me at leader@debian.org.

On Friday afternoon I'll be arriving in Oldenburg, Germany, for the eleventh annual Linux developers' conference. Historically, this conference has had a strong focus on non-x86 ports of the Linux kernel, boot loader development, the GNU toolchain, and so forth. At long last, it looks like this may be my opportunity to get my Macintosh Quadra 840AV out of mothballs and back into commission, thanks to Wouter Verhelst. I should be able to fit it into my luggage if I don't bring many clothes... :-) This year, however, in addition to that, a couple of mini-conferences are being piggybacked onto the Oldenburg meeting. These include the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam and the Debian Security Summit. The Java programming language is a divisive issue in the Free Software community, and has a degree of controversy that sets it apart from the usual language wars. The dominant factor in this controversy stems from what Richard Stallman refers to as the Java trap; with the specifications controlled, and the reference implementation kept unavailable on DFSG-free terms by, an industry consortium dominated by large corporations, a Free Software hacker might fear that using Java will consign them to either having to compromise their principles by using non-free class libraries (for example), or being doomed to chase the taillights of standards that could conceivably be tailored to disadvantage competitors. (Java is not alone in this respect; many people fear that Microsoft's .NET, despite being openly standardized through ISO/IEC, will in actuality be completely controlled by Microsoft.) Despite this peril, Java is attractive to GNU/Linux-using organizations. The Free Standards Group, developers of the Linux Standard Base, has received inquiries about a Free Java standard and implementation from organizations already committed to GNU/Linux. In my job, I've encountered an interest in Java from several customers and prospects. Intriguingly, these institutions are, by and large, very much aware of the Java Trap. They like the language, and are not strong advocates of Free Software, but they too are worried about vendor lock-in. They've seen the success of community-driven development as GNU/Linux moves from strength to strength, claiming territory formerly held by Microsoft and proprietary versions of Unix. Even if I can't persuade a customer to adopt a Free Java stack, I can exhort them to only code against Java standards that have seen a free implementation. That way, their development bets are hedged against any "madman theory" of the controlling vendor. Furthermore, this way they only code to standards that are seeing independent implementations, and they leave their engineers free to switch between varieties of development kit. Engineers like flexibility because it enables them to work more efficiently; sales people, marketing personnel, and strategists like efficient engineers because they make a firm more nimble. That's where the GNU Classpath and Debian Java DevJam comes in. Free Software Java enthusiasts want to see their implementations fully mature, and are working hard to make it so. The Free Software community has the opportunity to make its Java implementation not just an available alternative, but a compelling alternative to the proprietary ones on technical as well as licensing grounds. The recent release of GNU Classpath 0.18 shows just how vigorously this opportunity is being seized. Having mature software is only half the battle, however; that software has to be coherently put together and easy for the user and developer to manipulate. For many of these folks, it's not enough just to have good, Free Java virtual machines (like Kaffe and SableVM), class libraries (GNU Classpath), compilers and interpreters (gcj and gij, respectively, from the GNU Compiler Collection), and application servers (Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, and JOnAS, among others). They also want these technologies to be mutually integrated and easy to install and use. Good software and good packaging complement each other to drive adoption of the technology, and that's what the DevJam is all about. I'm glad to see that representatives of Debian's Java packaging team will be joining not just upstream authors, but their counterparts at Fedora, Ubuntu, and Gentoo in furtherance of this goal. I've approved a budget of EUR 2000, which Petter Reinholdtsen will administrate, to support the expenses of Debian's participation in the DevJam. We've received 1500 USD in sponsorship of this event from a corporate sponsor that chooses to remain anonymous. The other mini-conference I'll be attending is the Debian Security Summit. We're bringing together the heads of our Stable Security and Testing Security teams — the two Joeys, Joey Schulze and Joey Hess, as well as a bevy of other security-minded people, with the goal of revitalizing and streamlining our security processes. Several members of the Stable Security Team have gone dormant over the past several months (or longer), leaving an increasingly small number people to handle, as of Sarge's release, not one but two stable releases. This is because we do not terminate security support for our previous stable release (in this case, Woody), until some time has passed. We've had other challenges on the security front. We had what amounted to a security support hiatus for about three weeks in June, which caused much consternation. More recently, klecker.debian.org, which provides the security.debian.org has suffered some occasional availability problems, and it hasn't always been clear what's caused them. It's my understanding that we have new hardware in place that can serve in a backup, supplemental, or failover capacity. The general feeling at DebConf 5 was that our security apparatus was in need of attention to make sure it keep pace with the demands being placed on it. I've been in fruitful contact with Joey Schulze, Steve Kemp, and others over the past several weeks, and I look forward to a productive few days.

Last night at the "formal dinner"^* at DebConf 5, Anand Kumria presented me with a nice little tote bag that says "Debian: 10 years, 100 countries, 1000 developers, 10000 packages". It's a couple of years out of date now, but still pretty cool. Anand suggested that we give it away as a sort of prize. Since I was sitting across the table from former DPL Wichert Akkerman and we had two other former DPLs in attendance, Bdale Garbee and Ian Jackson, I thought I'd sweeten the item's collectibility by having all of us autograph it. This was swiftly done. After much dithering among my tablemates and I, and many ideas that fizzled regarding closed bugs or frequency of usage of the term "cabal" on the mailing lists, we ultimately settled on a method that was reasonably fair, if boring: the old game of "guess the unsigned 16-bit integer". We went outside and proceeded by binary search, disqualifying half the group at a time. The ultimate winner was Frank Lichtenheld, who guessed that the number was between 20k and 24k. ^*Fortunately, the dress code was not formal — the formality was that we ate from plates instead of cafeteria trays. ;-).

Troy Heber and I have been setting up a multi-architecture Debian build cluster - basically a bunch of machines we can build/test kernels on. We got our hands on a Sun Blade 1000 a while back, and I had a good excuse to try and install it today. Troy said he'd tried one of the d-i nightlies, but had problems with it, so I decided to try sarge. I burned a sarge CD (which is 2.4 only, surprisingly), but it hangs after printing "Remapping the kernel...". Unlike other instances google finds, it never prints "done". I found that the net boot flavor has a 2.6 kernel - I tried it, but I get an oops as soon as it tries to load the scsi driver (sym53c8xx_2). It leaves modprobe hung in the D state, and all further modprobes hang behind it. Hoping that the cdrom boot method was to blame, I tried netbooting the 2.4 kernel flavor. This went smoothly, at first. But immediately after configuring the network w/ dhcp, the keyboard goes to hell. Only the left ctrl key seems to work (which I discovered using the tried and true bang-all-keys method), and it behaves like an escape. I tried a non-sun USB keyboard, but it had the same problem. I dug up an old non-USB sparc keyboard, but the box won't boot w/o a USB keyboard connected and d-i won't respond to the non-USB one anyway. I guess I could try running d-i with the text frontend, or maybe preseeding the whole thing... I remember some keyboard remapping on my sparc32 box that occurred when I moved to a 2.6 kernel - I wonder if something in userspace is attempting to compenate for that change? But that wouldn't explain why it only happens post-dhcp. Also.. I wonder why d-i is all monochrome on this box? Kind of annoying to navigate the menus when I can't see which option is highlighted. Unfortunately, this box has no serial port - I'll have to try to dig up one of the four port serial pci cards we once had lying around & try to setup serial console, which is what we'll want eventually anyway. Another option, I suppose, is to try installing woody then upgrading to sarge..

I hadn't heard of Immaculate Machine before, so I downloaded the mp3s they had posted online. They sounded pretty awesome, so I made sure to show up early. Not since the last New Pornographers show have I gotten such good parking at the Gothic (the marquee in the back). Not only that, but some guy with an extra ticket sold it to me for $15 ($17 at the door). The night was starting out right. Just as I walked in and ordered a Gin & Tonic, Immaculate Machines started their set. They were pretty upbeat & rockin; I picked up their new CD. Destroyer played next. I'd listened to a number of tracks available from their site as well. A few of them were pretty good; I really liked the tracks with the horns - but they didn't bring them to the show. I like Dan Bejar's vocals on the New Pornographers albums, but I'm not much of a Destroyer fan. The New Pornographer's set was excellent. They started off with Twin Cinema & Use It - their first two singles off the new album. I always think its cool when bands get their singles out of the way; but that might just be me remembering a Rolling Stone article about the Breeders, and how cool the author thought it was that they started the set with Cannonball. The vocalist/keyboardist (and also Carl Newman's niece, it seems) played the entire set with them, as did the bassist from Destroyer. Dan Bejar came out for a few songs and seemed to be getting a bit a little tipsy near the end. A lot more people showed up than last time I saw the New Pornographers. But that's probably because they were competing with a Flaming Lips/Modest Mouse show the same night.

I've got mail through CAcert.org webmail (probably, CAcert Web of Trust -> Find an Assurer -> Email Me). It might be written in Japanese, but mail that I've received is encoded wrongly, so that I can't read the message. For instance, it includes the following line (od -c -t x1):

0000000   F   u   m   i   t   o   s   h   i 302 227   l  \n
        46 75 6d 69 74 6f 73 68 69 c2 97 6c 0a

MIME header of the mail says it is "text/plain; charset=UTF-8". If this byte sequence is decoded as UTF-8, "302 227" (in hex, 0xc2 0x97) would be "END OF GUARDED AREA (EPA)" (in UCS-2, it is 0x97), and "l" (in hex 0x6c). It doesn't make sense. However, the decoded byte sequence 227 154 (in hex 0x97 0x6c) could be read as in Shift-JIS. It does make sense. So, the mail was wrongly encoded, that is, encoded in UTF-8, not by each characters (in Shift-JIS), but by each bytes. Anyway, I can read the received mail by the following commands:

cat msg   iconv -f UTF-8 -t UCS-2BE   tr -d '\000'   lv -Is

Maybe, CAcert.org webmail just encodes Shift-JIS text in UTF-8 as if it were single byte character sequences. I hope it will be fixed. I'm not sure this is a bug of CAcert.org webmail or users web browser that post text in Shift-JIS (wrongly, should be UTF-8?). I've changed default language to English from Japanese for now. (Even in English, it seems that an user can send Japanese text through the webmail, though).