It seems that I managed to send out bounces for some mails waiting for me in my TODO folder... don't know how I did that. All those messages where delivered succesfully (and most of them quite some time ago) and where stored in a local Maildir-folder. I don't know what went wrong... well... I was playing with mbsync, but I was still in the read the fine manual state... so I still don't know what was going on. So: Sorry for the noise; as soon as I find out what happend, I try to not do it again ;)

As I've talked about in this space in the past, I've been coming to some conclusions about free software (open source, or whatever you want to call it): the economics of it, like anything else, are rooted in scarcity, and if you don't have a bit of that scarcity yourself, you have a lot less leverage This line of thought comes from the age-old question "how to create free software and make money at it?". This is a very important question for me, because I enjoy hacking on free software very much, and would love nothing more than to spend my days doing so. Creating new things, though, rather than working as a "system integrator" and tying pieces together with the smallest amount of glue possible. It's obvious that there is plenty of money to be had for people who simply use free software for their own ends. But what are those ends? We live in a world of scarcity - not everyone can have a fancy car, the nicest house in town, or the fastest computer. Market economies work via the exchange of scarce goods and services. If you have nothing to trade, you have nothing. Now, free software is worth something. Worth a great deal - that is beyond the shadow of a doubt. But since anyone can make a copy, there is no scarcity - once it's out there, you can't trade for it. So... where does this leave our potential free software creator? Let's think about some of the ways around this problem.

• You could, as some have argued, decide that since software has aspects of a public good, and decide that it should be provisioned by the government. Computer users pay taxes and there is a ministry of software that pays people to work on infrastructure type projects like the Linux kernel, Apache web server, and the like. Whether you like this idea or not probably depends on what you think of governments, free markets and so on, and thus becomes a much broader debate, but suffice it to say that it's not going to happen soon, because free markets do provide software, so most governments aren't likely to fiddle with the system in radical ways.
• Work on contract to create custom systems for clients. This works, up to a point. Since the initial system doesn't exist, there is your source of scarcity. The client wants it, and won't get it - free or proprietary - unless they pay you. It's also worthwhile to think about the "chain" of trade in this case. Where does your client get their money? If you're writing free code that will simply become a cog in their proprietary system, the actual money comes from the scarcity they have created, so while you may be writing free software, in one sense, you're simply offloading the burden of creating scarcity to someone else, who is then able to pay you for your time. The other possibility is that your client works in the "real world" of scarcity directly - they sell books or beer or cars or something else where the product is, by its nature inherently scarse. In this case, they still have the leverage - you work to help their business, but they are the ones in the driver's seat. Your work isn't worth much without their scarcity-based business. And they're not very sensible if they pay you for things that aren't directly related to their business. So it's going to be harder to create something new and interesting from scratch.

I've alluded to it in the past, but consulting operations have several problems, especially when considered from the point of view of someone who wishes to create software:

• The more time you spend putting existing pieces together, the better you are doing financially, because you can finish the project quicker, in less time, and so have more of a margin. These sorts of business will tend towards system integration, rather than the creation of new things. That's not a bad thing, and I mean no disrespect to those who are in that business, but it's not really what I want to do, and it certainly doesn't answer the question of how to write new free software and get paid to do it.
• When you create a one off solution that is not completely tailored to one client, if you make something that's proprietary, and know you can sell it to a few more people, perhaps you can beat the free software guy on price, because you can afford to sell yours at a lower price, knowing you'll spread the costs of producing it over a few clients. If the free software guy manages to sell the same free thing to several clients, you have to ask how 'free' the software is in the sense that it is apparently controlled tightly enough that these other clients can't come into possession of it on their own. Once, again, scarcity.
• It's not a business that 'grows' as well as having a proprietary product, because it's very linear. To make more money, you have to add more people (of uncertain quality, I might add). With the proprietary product, on the other hand, you could likely sell 100, 1000 or 1000000 copies with a workforce of the same order of magnitude. This leaves you a bit more breathing room - if you're a consultant, the minute you take a break, be it a vacation, or even go to sleep, you're not making money because you're not engaged. That's sort of a scary prospect as one ages, and needs to dedicate time to other things in life. At 20, I could spend all day every in front of the computer. At 30+, now I have a wife. Maybe there will be kids some day. A successful product-based business would allow me time for those things that a billable-hours business might put more constraints on (of course, there are obviously no guarantees that any business will be successful, but for the sake of argument, we'll treat failure as failure and not worry about it more).

So, there you have it. In one way or the other, to make money at something in the long run, you are going to have to find and sell a product that people cannot effortlessly get for free.

Dear Lazyweb, in late 2001, I bought a shiny new computer to replace my VHS VCR and to finally help me in getting my last 200 hours worth of music form analog audio tapes into the digital domain. I have to admit that I have failed to do this. While the TV ambitions were originally spoiled with the rotten Windows TV software that came with the Hauppauge PVR PCI card, audio with windows used to work rather decently. Until I decided to ditch Windows and to use Linux. Which looks like a mistake. Not even the audio stuff works any more. I have bought a new TV card and a new sound card, but all I currently get (with the old sound card, btw) are audio recordings that sound way too fast. I would like to use my DAT deck as a A/D-converter and to feed the resulting 44.1 kHz 16 bit stereo data stream to the computer via optical S/PDIF. I couldn’t get the emu10k card I bought to listen to its optical entry, so I swapped it back to the cm8738-based Nightingale Pro 6. Since toying around with the IEC switches in command-line ALSA mixer, I can hear what’s being put in on optical S/PDIF correctly playing on the PCs analog output. However, when I use arecord -Dhw:0,2 -f cd foo.wav to actually record from the optical S/PIDIF input, the Result sounds way too fast. Otoh, both aplay and file(1) say that this is a 44.1 kHz 16 bit stereo WAV file. Up to now, neither Usenet nor the ALSA mailing list have been helpful in debugging this. Oh dear lazyweb, who can help? In the current situation, I am really really tempted to shell out money - either for a new Windows license, or for a Mac. What should I do?

Ok, now that was lame. Anyway, I’ve just upgraded perlis to Feisty Fawn at the wake of some 1169 MB worth of packages. An apt-get autoclean is therefore in order. I’ve also yet to test hibernation and resume, but knetworkmanager definitely impressed me. Too bad it doesn’t have ifupdown integration yet (which I’ve just done to wlassistant now, pending testing and REVU.) Just about the only snag I got caught while upgrading was a file overwriting of some .pngs by adept. Since I was upgrading using adept-updater I had to work around using dpkg -i --force-extract and resuming the dist-upgrade using aptitude. I was told in #kubuntu-devel that it will had to be fixed later, and even though I may be able to fix it, it’ll be hard finding a main component sponsor since it’s a weekend. :/ Oh well, life exec()s on. Anyhow I’m too early for upgrade testing (which is on the 8th,) but the outlook for dist-upgrades looks good. And, I’ve other stuff to ponder about, like finishing Philosophy and Procedures 2 of my NM application…

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we were in Thailand, I met Theppitak Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things, mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved. He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts, input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a bit about the writing system and how it is related to other systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet server for schools and businesses) and do lots of translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration plate recognition system, English to Thai machine translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai speech conversion. They were also working on some medical imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose company develops this online map for Bangkok.. Also posted some photos from our trip through Thailand.

Well, not really, but some people might think so, or feel intruded on... To back up a bit, and put that in context, I'm currently contemplating ways of making Stuff To Do, my web based todo list/time tracker/work organizer more able to track when a user is active. Currently, it marks you as active if you do anything at all in its web page. The reason I adopted this approach is that I want the program to help the user out, not make the user a slave to the program (ok, switching tasks, hit start..stop...stop stop start stop start start...bleagh!). However, even this approach relies on the user keeping the window open, and visiting it every now and then, which is less likely if you get 'in the zone' and are concentrating on your own work. A couple of methods for dealing with this come to mind:

• Platform specific binary that can be installed to keep track of when the user is active. This would be the most accurate way of determining that information, but also the most intrusive, and probably the least convenient for end users, who would have to install something on their machines.
• A reminder. Instead of tracking the user, try and get their attention to come back to the web page and let the app know they're still alive. Not very appealing, because the concept of "bug the user so they pay attention to me", which is not in keeping with the "be unobtrusive" philosophy of the system.
• A small pop-out window with "active?" javascript code embedded in it. On Linux (Gnome's window manager at least), you could even set this little window up to follow you around the desktop in order to register the fact that you're active. Advantages: web based, more accurate than the current system. Cons: annoying window following you is....well, annoying. Having a little window open all the time might be an annoyance as well.

Thoughts? Would you use any of these, or consider any or all of them too high a price to pay to keep track of your hours?

I spent most of the day yesterday travelling from Montreal to Portland for RecentChangesCamp 2007. I got a pretty decent last-minute ticket with flyer miles from Aeroplan, but the flight took me through Washington (D.C.) which was probably 2-3 hours out of my way. The first leg of the flight was great -- one of those nice puddle-jumpers with leather seats and lots of legroom. I got into Dulles and had time for an impressive (for airport food) pair of crabcakes at the Tidewater bar and restaurant. I shared a table with Mary Beth from Albany (New York), who was en route to Beijing to adopt a 1-year-old baby girl. We had a pretty good talk. The second leg was brutal, though. It was three big guys in a three-seat row on a crowded 6-hour flight. (Just before they closed the doors, the guy in the aisle seat scooted over to an open seat in the adjacent row. We all laughed at dodging the bullet of having to sit on top of each other... then the family who had those seats made a last-minute rush for the plane, and aisle-guy moved back to Elbonia with us. We sat in sullen silence for the rest of the flight. Gar.) I managed to distract myself by reading The Good Earth and watching Marie Antoinette (2006 film), which was actually really good. I'd heard about the soundtrack -- New Wave -- and thought it'd be an anachronistic distraction from the period, but it turned out to fit very well. Between the two I managed to keep myself from going insane. I got a nice Mazda 6 from Hertz at the airport and after missing the 84 turn-off and driving 20 miles out of my way (and back again) I got to my hotel for the weekend. The Jupiter Hotel is a remodeled cheap-o motel on Portland's hip East Side. The rooms have been stripped of their clown paintings, fly-specked wallpaper and floral-print bedspreads, and replaced with a spare, pleasant d cor reminiscent of a smart European DJ lounge or an Ikea catalog. Free Wi-Fi, full-length chalkboards on the doors for doodlers, organic soaps and shampoo. French press for morning coffee. Branded jimmy-hat with a big J on it next to the bed. Isn't that sweet? The place reminds me a bit of boutique hotels like the Hotel Palomar in San Francisco, but it doesn't quite have the full high-end feel. After all, if you look at it through squinty eyes, the room is a cinder-block motel cell, and the nice look doesn't quite hide that. But a regular room rate starting at $79/night is hard to beat. There's an outdoor fireplace, pleasant grounds, and lots of bare hewn logs around the lot. The adjacent Doug Fir Lounge has impressively medium-name music acts and a really nice post-modern ski-lodge look. I'm a bit worried about noise tonight (the complimentary earplugs in the bedstand have be concerned), but my room is waaaay in the back of the lot, away from the lounge, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The Doug Fir also has a restaurant, and I'm sitting there right now writing this entry. I just had a very tasty smoked-salmon eggs benedict (b n dictine, for you Montrealers out there), and once I finish this sentence and my surprisingly decent decaf, I'm off for RCC07. tags: RecentChangesCamp2007 portland dulles travel jupiter hotel doug fir lounge hotel

Second generation package manager I have created many prototypes for advanced package manager features. Erich Schubert also made a tag cloud prototype. Recently, I wrote:

We have lots of interesting, usable metadata; we have algorithms; we have prototypes; we have ideas for lots of cool, implementable features. The question is, are we able to write applications that just combines what is needed from all this treasure to provide the right interface(s) for our base(s) of users?

Most of the back-end code is already implemented in Python, and I'm thinking of putting it together into a working prototype for a new concept of a file manager. This could be even implemented quickly, if someone joins me who is good at:

• Python;
• a Python GUI toolkit like pyGTK, wxPython or pyQT;
• Debian.

What follows is a sketch description of what I have in mind. The user

Debora is 34, working as a web designer in a small enterprise. She has a laptop running Debian which she uses both for work and at home. She likes Debian for the wide range of software, that allows her to be always able to access the best tools for the job, even in a highly changing environment like the one of web design. At home she enjoys the various tools for photo editing and management, and of course, having a husband and a 6 years old son, the selection of games.

The tasks

• Looking for new software
  • "Is there an application that can do X?"
• Looking at what is installed
  • "Let's see if this package does what I need"
  • "What was that nice package I installed yesterday?"
• Removing things that are not needed anymore
  • "Let's get rid of the cruft"

Looking for new software Use the smart tag search for searching: it allows a Google-like search interface, which afterwards allows categories to be used to semantically refine the results. This last step is conceptually very simple, as it maps to a sequence of "more like this" and "less like this". The search results can be sorted using popcon suggestions, that are very effective at showing software not in the system that many other people use. Looking at what is installed Let's see if this package does what I need Given an installed pacakge, show the contents of its bin/ directories and showing manpages as the details for the bin/ file: thanks to the Debian Policy, executables are all in /(usr/)?s?bin/ and they must have manpages. For packages that are tagged as interface::3d, interface::text-mode or interface::x11, allow to run them directly from the interface. Also show the contents of /usr/share/doc/pkgname and /usr/share/doc/suggested-and-recommended-pkgnames and allow to open documentation with the appropriate software. If there is an html directory which contains an index.html, only show that and not all the other HTML files. Find info documentation and allow to open it into a proper info browser. If there are manpages that don't have a corresponding executable, show them as extra documentation. What was that nice package I installed yesterday? List installed packages sorted by when was the last time they have been installed. Let's get rid of the cruft

• Of course, track auto-installed packages like aptitude and debfoster are doing.
• Also allow to list packages that have been auto-installed satisfying Recommends: lines.

There are also some "unusefulness" scores one can compute, but I haven't yet been playing with them yet:

• Popcon scores (show less popular installed packages first)
• List packages marked as <OLD> in the local popcon scan (and then, by increasing atimes): those are the packages that are installed but are not being used.
• Use negative popcon suggestions, that is, find out a way to compute the opposite as what is found here.

Task filter Have a look at the popcon suggestion page: there is a "Suggestion type" box. Of course the same idea can be used in a package manager to restrict it to a significant subset of the packages. More filters, as you can imagine, can be easily created. This is how it is implemented:

case "any": $filter = "'!role::shared-lib'"; break;
case "gui": $filter = "'!role::shared-lib && role::program && (interface::x11   interface::3d)'"; break;
case "devel": $filter = "'!role::shared-lib && devel::*'"; break;
case "game": $filter = "'!role::shared-lib && role::program && game::*'"; break;
default: $filter = ""; break;

The same filter can be gived to Debtags:

debtags search '!role::shared-lib'
debtags search '!role::shared-lib && role::program && (interface::x11   interface::3d)'
debtags search '!role::shared-lib && devel::*'
debtags search '!role::shared-lib && role::program && game::*'

Conclusion As I said:

There is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach.

So?

wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip link set eth0 up
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
195.144.77.32/28 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 195.144.77.43
wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip route add default via 195.144.77.33
RTNETLINK answers: Network is unreachable
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
wouter@anything:~$ apt-get --purge remove network-manager

Yes, this really happened, and no, there were no pauses between the different commands except for the time needed for me to type them out.

Milton Country Park

This park near Cambridge is under threat, partly due to council mismanagement.

Climate change prompts Cabinet change in Canada - CNN.com

Carry on flying, says Blair - science will save the planet Special Reports Guardian Unlimited Politics

Weston and Worle News: Recycling Service Branded Rubbish

"A Weston resident has branded the town's recycling service rubbish and joined calls for it to be investigated.Carolyn Jones, who moved to Weston Village from south Gloucestershire 18 months ago,..." I've had to telephone and get Biffa to come back after they missed my collection every time since New Year. What's going on?

Linux Ecology-HOWTO

Nuclear Power?

Cycle Parking Farcility of the Month

CTC - Cyclist who refused to stay in the gutter wins

So you are allowed to cycle on the roads in Telford, despite what the police there think. More coverage:

Cyclist's conviction thrown out : Shropshire Star

BBC NEWS England Shropshire Cyclist wins road blocking appeal

Cycle-lanes - epetition reply

A relevant reminder from Tony Bliar's office that cyclists don't have to use useless cycle lanes.

Trains Swindon - Melksham - Westbury - SLASHED by the DfT and First

Campaign site about the government-enforced cuts to Great Western services in the Wiltshire/Somerset/Bristol area.

EDP24 - Dangerous driver in cyclist death jailed

BBC NEWS England Norfolk Tired motorist jailed over death

High-res plans of the TdF London stages

Defining a grammatical structure for configuration files is a bit of a headache. The most easy way to get something to work is probably using INI files, but they’re somehow very limited for setting up configurations that are not quite trivial. The next obvious file format to look at are probably XML files, which are extremelly powerful for defining data structures, and are really fashion. While this might probably be the best choice when programming in certain languages, like Java or C#, especially if you use editors that are XML-oriented, it might not be the best for me. I’ve also seen that some projects read their configuration from script-languages files, such as lua. This might be quite interesting if you also allow embedded functions in that language in your code, for defining event responses, macros, or conditional configurations. Some other projects define their own grammar, maybe using Flex lexical analyser and GNU bison. I’ve recently come across JSON, which is a lightweight data-interchange format that is defined from a subset of the object literal notation of JavaScript. It is text-based and easily readable by humans, and suitable for representing objects and other data structures. There are libraries for reading these kind of files from many languages, and even though it seems to be very oriented towards structured data transmission over network connections (serialization), it might be useful for describing the initial setup of a program. I plan to use json-c from C. Lets see what comes out from there.

This has been a little overdue, but here it is. Lots of less than glamorous stuff has been going on in the XSF, and a few more exciting things are in the pipeline.

Among the less glamorous stuff, our resident release junkie/alpha porter, Steve Langasek, fixed #392500 which was our major RC bug on the alpha arch. Aside from that bug, there's been a whole host of bug triage by our newest team member, Brice Goglin. Brice has taken on the unenviable task of going through the massive list of bugs owned by the XSF. I've been traditionally less than responsible about handling bug reports like I should, and Brice is dealing with the mess I've left behind. Before he started, we were at over 2000 outstanding bugs, and as of this writing we're down to 1646 bugs, which is a huge amount of work. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making our little corner of the BTS usable for mere mortals. Aside from that, there's been an enormous amount of small cleanups and bug fixes by the whole team, most notably Julien Cristau (who's been doing more actual release management than yours truly), Thierry Redding, and Drew Parsons. Perhaps most important among these are miscellaneous last minute driver fixes that will enable a fair number of people to actually run Etch without backports. Michel D nzer has continued to be his usual awesome self, responding to the tough DRI bugs that the rest of us are terrified to approach.

Some of the more exciting stuff from a user perspective has been the various updates and new packaging going on. Thierry has taken on mesa, which is an incredibly daunting task, and he's done and incredible job of it so far. He and Julien cooperated on getting the newest mesa release, 6.5.2, in to experimental. That's a huge step on the way to getting the 7.2 release in to the archive. Thierry has also packaged up the newest compiz and some additional plugins ported from beryl, both of which are waiting in NEW right now for our overworked ftp masters to find time to have a look at them. Speaking of beryl, we also have that more or less complete and packaged. Our second-newest XSF member, Shawn Starr, has taken on beryl, and done a great job of getting the packages ready for experimental. They came back from review with a few minor comments, so he's busy getting those last issues resolved, so beryl should be winging its way over to NEW again for re-review soon. Finally, Josh Triplett and Jamie Sharp, who are both Debian and XCB developers, have put XCB in to experimental for you to test and play with. Expect to hear more about this when the Lenny development cycle starts.

The other huge thing that's been going on, and what I've been devoting most of my time to (aside from reading all the mail from Brice's bug triage), is transitioning the XSF over to git. Thierry has written major chunk of infrastructure to help move us over. I've done most of the conversion locally, and have been putting things up on git.debian.org as I go. As of now, we've got a very large chunk of X in git now, and using svn for those bits is officially closed. I'm hoping to complete the move in the next two weeks or so. If you want the above software that's not yet in the archive (beryl, compiz, compiz-extra, etc) you can clone it from the git repositories and build away. The other major thing that I've been doing is writing up a XSF git policy. This required a lot of input from the team, and we had to come up with a reasonable way of working the archive so that we could easily work with an upstream that was also using git, which as far as I know is a unique situation right now. It's in pretty good shape right now and we're just starting to put it in to real use. I've proposed a talk for Debconf on the XSF roadmap for Lenny, and I'll be sure to talk about our experiences using git if it gets accepted. In addition, we've all been learning the ins and outs of git, which is a whole other post in itself. I think that the XSF will end up being a really good resource for people in Debian who are looking to use git, as we'll have a lot of real world experience with a tool that relatively few people actually seem to know. Since I think git usage will only grow in the future, hopefully this will end up being valuable for Debian as a whole.

Playing with popcon data Check out http://people.debian.org/~enrico/popsuggest.php. You can upload there the popcon results of your system and have them compared with all the other submissions. It will show the results grouped by the most relevant tags found in your system, and you can filter the results based on various package types that map to debtags expressions. Credits also go to Eric Evans, for the continuous very useful and supportive discussions during all the development. As I said, there is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach. Some random notes taken during the development:

• The popcon dataset is on gluck in /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/popcon-entries
• Local popcon scan results are in /var/log/popularity-contest
• I now generate and publish aggregate frequency information
• Here are two links about TFIDF
• Here is some more literature about computing similarities; the Jaccard Index seems to be made exactly for Debtags tag sets.
• Xapian has python bindings documented in /usr/share/doc/python-xapian/bindings.html and the full C++ API documentation is also useful

The growth of new Open Content projects continues to amaze me. I really admire how the wiki technique makes it possible to combine the microcontributions of thousands or millions of people across the Internet and make high-quality, usable reference works for everyone to share and enjoy equally. What we'd normally think of as staggeringly audacious becomes manageable and realizable using wikis. I'm mostly waxing poetic here about a new project for creating a Free event calendar for the entire planet. Wikevent is built using the ubiquitous and reliable MediaWiki software, but with a ton of add-ons and features to make organizing an events calendar reasonable. There's a good mix of calendar-oriented interface, geographical interface, and a nice dose of Microformats thrown in for good measure. Wikevent is still in its early stages, but it doesn't take much imagining to envision a great future for it. Managing event calendars -- everything from the Beck concert in your city to the meeting of the local Interlingua club -- is a daunting task for local media. As its API and data feeds mature, it's reasonable -- nay, probable -- that Wikevent feeds could power the events calendars for local weekly newspapers, radio stations, TV, and community Web sites. I think it will make a good data source for community-oriented sites like Upcoming.org or Eventful. Wikevent plans to use a lot of metadata to allow slicing its database in different ways for different kinds of people. The entire database is available under the extremely liberal BSD-like Creative Commons Attribution license. Because it's such a nice complement to a travel guide, we've started adding Wikevent links to Wikitravel guide articles on our English version (and, soon, other versions too). There's more crossover, of course: the site's founder, Mark Jaroski, and community powerhouse Andrew Haggard, are both longtime Wikitravellers. I'm looking forward to seeing how this new Open Content project continues to develop. tags: wiki wikevent mediawiki mark jaroski andrew haggard cc event calendar

Jyte Speaking of cool new sites, I was glad to see in Scott Kveton's blog news of the new Jyte project. Jyte is a fascinating social network that uses the OpenID authentication system for the identity infrastructure. I think this is really interesting -- using OpenID for social networks is really a good idea, and opens up the process a lot. Another interesting point is that Jyte lets you make arbitrary assertions about yourself or, really, anything that has an URI. Other users can approve or disapprove the assertion, giving it more validity. For example, I've made an assertion that I'm the founder of Wikitravel: http://jyte.com/cl/evan.prodromou.name-is-the-founder-of-wikitravel That assertion has been backed up by 3 other people (so far), giving it a little bit more authority. Or, as Chris Dawson put it, http://jyte.com/cl/jyte-is-hot-or-not-for-nerds I think that the claims system is pretty intelligent -- a great way to make statements about yourself or others. It works like ClaimID, but with more latitude in what you can make claims about. tags: jyte openid claims assertions kveton janrain

I am not a big watcher of T.V. (though I do manage to get my fix of the daily show, colbert, and more recently heroes, thanks to the good ol’ internet) but i am a big fan of good commercials. Because a good commerical is, let’s face it, hard to pull off. You have like less than a minute to say something and more important, have it be memorable; and that is why 98% of ads are creative disasters. But I really appreciate the other 2% and try to see the movie that displays all the best ads of the year, which I did this past weekend. And my favorite of them (that I can find on the internet anway, in less than five minutes) is Big Ad because it is so meta and so riding/riffing off the popularity of the LOTR aesthetic… (there was an especially wacky and wonderful Thai one, in 3 parts, for a face cream cleanser, but I cannot find it…)

I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up:

• Debian Quality Assurance, Free Software World Conference 3.0, 7-9 February 2007, Badajoz, Spain. I will briefly give a summary of QA activities in Debian and of the work accomplished at the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura in December 2006.
• Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices, FOSDEM, 24-25 February 2007, Brussels, Belgium. I will mainly talk about installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100, both very interesting devices.
• Compiler testing using Debian as a real-world testcase, Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo, 15-18 April 2007, San Jose, California. I will talk about the work I did testing GCC 4.2 and Osprey by compiling the entire Debian archive on Itanium (and other architectures).
• Release management in free software, Google, 19 April 2007, Mountain View, California. I will present some results from my research. I'll probably present good and bad practices found in large free software projects.
• I'll probably tour Norway in May to talk about my research on release management but details have not been finalized yet.

I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn't get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well.
I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we were in Amsterdam, but that was back in 1996. Since then, I cannot recall using a bike - So, of course, I was quite shaky and afraid to begin with. I must admit, I envied Nadezhda, as she seems to be natural - While I was still trying to get the bike moving without crashing into something, she was literally making circles around me.
On Sunday, we went for a short ride in the main circuit of UNAM. On Monday night, we went most of the way to the gym/running lanes where we go to make our excercises - Yes, mostly uphill, and I managed! (she had already done that road earlier the same Monday). Thursday and Friday, I rolled early to do my excercise, and we basically crossed each other on the way. On Saturday, finally, we came all the way to the new Institute.
Sunday was amazing: We went with her family (two sisters, one brother and five pedalling nephews, plus one nephew in a basket in his mother's bike) along the Ciclopista. The Ciclopista goes on the path that used to be the Mexico-Cuernavaca railroad, and starting at Contreras, it goes uphill to cross the Ajusco/Chichinahutzin ridge. I cannot find a decent map, and I don't have a clue on what distance we rode, but it was just great - We crossed basically all of the Magdalena Contreras part of the Ciclopista and part of Tlalpan, until maybe 500m past the market at Calle 8. Of course, after the ride, we feasted with quesadillas at the market, plus some tacos of a delicious chicharr n prepared by Nadezhda's mother. It was a long ride anyway - I got quite tired, and the way back (fortunately, downhill) was still long. We had promised the four year old nephews to take them to the zoo that same day, although we counted on them being tired by that time - Well, a child's will is stronger than being tired, so we still went to Chapultepec to dive in a sea of people and look at some nice animals ;-)
...Finally, yesterday and today I have come by bike to the Institute. There are a couple of hard parts, and I still have not mastered the techniques for being an effective rider, but the way back is just delicious. Besides, yesterday I made 15 minutes on my way back, today it was 20 minutes coming here - almost the same time that going by car! Oh, and on the way back, I get to enjoy a beautiful view of my beloved volcanos, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl. And, as Mauricio already pointed out, thanks to the light rains we had in the previous days... They just look amazing, covered in snow from their very bases.
Not much to add to it... But I'm delighted :)