In case anyone is relying on me to point them to the funniest episodes of The Show with Zefrank, this (today’s) is one, especially if you spend any time on Friendster or that odd new generation Myspace.com (when I was young, we had a public_html directory, and we knew how to set permissions on it! I also truthfully walked nearly a mile in freezing weather and snow uphill to get to the school bus). Apparently, The Show will be done for good in just under two weeks. Who knows where all the fans will go?

I originally was quite reluctant to post on Planet Debian about the DPL race, but hey, this is the campaigning period, anyway. My choice not to go into too much detail about what I'll do about Debian seems to spark some confusion. I initially thought of adding a rather verbose explanation for that to my platform; but as the initial version of my platform got quite long and convoluted, it got cut. Perhaps that wasn't a very good idea, so here goes: One observation I've made over the years is that DPL candidates often come up with all sorts of grandiose plans about what should be done to improve Debian. These plans are usually the result of some observation they've made, and consequently some thinking they've put in so as to come up with what they think is the most reasonable solution to the problem at hand. The only problem with this approach is that, if you're not involved in whatever you have ideas on, you'll probably end up suggesting things which the people that are involved do not think is a good idea to do. Which would consequently mean that you'll either have to do it all by yourself (since you can't force DDs to do something against their will, and we have a constitution to back that up), or that they convince you that it's not a good idea, and you end up not doing whatever you promised to do during your campaign anyway. First, this is silly. If you don't know whether you can or will keep a promise, you should not make it. But apart from that, it's also a problem; if you get elected mainly because you promise to do one thing and then don't end up doing it, or do something else instead, then you've got yourself a very good reason not to be liked in the community. Which isn't something a DPL should aim for, I believe. So rather than coming up with a detailed plan of all the things I'd do once elected, I decided to come up with a detailed plan of all the things that need work. The exact stuff that gets done about them would then be decided after having a chat (on IRC or otherwise) with the people involved, directly or otherwise, and after considering what other people's opinion on the matter is, if I know said opinion. Does that give me a carte blanche, as Julien suggests? Well, yes and no. Yes, because every Debian Developer who runs for DPL is essentially asking for a carte blanche; after all, the DPL has the ability to speak for the developer body, unless overruled by GR. No, because I don't think doing whatever I want and everyone else be damned is an even remote sign of maturity, and because I promised not to seek the controversy in making decisions (while not avoiding it at all cost either).

The first fruit of my work on Debian IA64 packages for Mondo Rescue are now on http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. It took a bit longer than I had anticipated and there was a bit of an interruption while I stayed on beautiful Norfolk Island for two weeks.

Everything should be fine and dandy apart from the fact that restores will currently miserably fail on IA64 because parted2fdisk expects an older version of parted than what Etch and Sid contain.

So, why publish IA64 packages at all if they don't even work, I hear you scream. Well, firstly I thought I give a bit of an update and show that things are actually moving forward. Secondly, maybe I'm lucky and someone is interested in helping out with getting parted2fdisk to work with newer versions of parted or (better) in getting mondo migrated to using parted natively on all platforms (pending Bruno's approval).

Other than that, the packages have a few user-visible improvements and fixes across all supported architectures and they bring the Debian packages a fair bit closer to upstream - see the changelogs for details.

As usual, check out the new packages, let me know if something doesn't (or does) work, get involved! ;-)

This little piggy was given the bottle and rocket-launched to space.

Yesterday evening I got back home from Linuxforum day 2. There was some nice talks, and I saw the Google geek herder fall off the stage. I also got a nice introduction to Qt. Finally I saw a spam fighting deathmatch. Among the serious competitors, a pseudo-icelandic guy also joined in. A short post-presentation (in danish though, but you might get the meaning of it anyway), but you might find the principles. Find it at YouTube. Anyways, there was funny presentations of policyd (with and without the -weight), dspam, annoyance filter, milter and postgrey. As it was most a matter of funny presentation and the technical details were more secondary, it was more a person than a product that won. The winner was Ralf Hildebrandt with .. something (policyd either with or without the -weight).
No open source events without beer, so there was after the spam contest, a couple of nice beer. It was basically a nice Linuxforum - and I am looking forward for next year. But it was also a bit ‘interesting’ if it was possible to get to linux forum, just like yesterday, because some violent criminals and spoiled younsters have tried to set large parts of the streets on fire in Copenhagen. PS.: Comments by anonymous hooligans will not be accepted.

New York Times: “WI-FI service is quickly becoming the air-conditioning of the Internet age, enticing customers into restaurants and other public spaces in the same way that cold ‘advertising air’ deliberately blasted out the open doors of air-conditioned theaters in the early 20th century to help sell tickets.”

The l10n NMU blitz campaign continues to give results and not only for French. I'm now reaching quite recent bug reports (about 30-40 days ago)....which were sent by some teams when I started this campaign, back in January. So the stats for these teams will improve strongly, namely the Czech team stats and a few others (Galician, Portuguese, Catalan...). On the ranking contest, Spanish is coming closer to Dutch for the 7th rank, mostly because many Spanish translations were pending in the BTS while much less Dutch ones were. Both these teams have strong QA processes so that slows them down when compared to 1-person "teams". Of course, the result is certainly definitely better. For the 9th rank, Portuguese should come before Brazilian as of today. Ditto for Galician/Catalan for the 14th rank. Another activity began yesterday: try to complete a few packages in testing. These packages have a complete translation for several languages in unstable but they don't qualify to enter testing. So, I will offer to upload l10n fixes through testing-proposed-updates as the release team seems to be OK with that. There's a chance that my own language reaches 100% for testing also, then. And, finally, I'm polishing a new project: proofreading ALL debconf templates, and bring more wording consistency, with the help of debian-l10n-english members. That will of course be a lenny project.

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a "beamer". He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it's a better option than the word "projector". The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it's pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn't be a problem.

One thing that has always surprised me is how few people talk to speakers after they have finished their lecture. A lecture might have many questions and the questions may be cut off, but when the speaker leaves the room they will usually do so alone.

When I give lectures at conferences I'm always happy to spend more time talking to people who are interested in the topic and disappointed that so few people choose to do so. It seems that other people have similar experiences, there have been several occasions when I have invited speakers to join me for lunch and no-one else has shown interest in joining us.

Usually the most significant factor in making someone offer a talk at a Linux conference is the opportunity to teach other people about the technology that they are working on. People with that motivation will take the opportunity to teach people at lunch, dinner, whenever.

Linux Conf Au has an event called the "Professional Delegates Networking Session" which is regarded by some people as the way to meet speakers (about half the delegates don't attend so the ratio of speakers to delegates is significantly better than at other conference events). But it seems to me that it's more efficient to just offer to buy them dinner. When I worked for Red Hat the maximum value for a gift I could accept was $100US, I expect that Red Hat has not changed this policy since then and that most companies that employ speakers at Linux conferences have similar policies. $100US is more than a meal costs at most restaurants that are near a Linux conference.

If I was a manager at a company that sent employees to a Linux conference I would first send email to some speakers who were working in areas of Linux development that were related to the projects that the employees were working on. I would ask the speakers if they would be interested in having dinner bought for them by my company and give them the option of bringing one or two friends along for a free meal (the friends would probably be people who work in similar areas).

Shell scripts are good for a lot of things. It's quick and easy to design shell scripts that take input from one program, pass it to another program, munge it for filenames, etc.

But there are a few drawbacks to shell scripts.

The #1 drawback, in my opinion, is that it is extremely difficult to get quoting and escaping right. I often see things like $@ in shell scripts (breaks if a parameter has a space in it). I also see people failing to check for errors properly (set -e helps that). It's also difficult to do a more modern style of exception handling (do a sequence of actions in a temporary directory, and always remove that directory, even if there's an error, but stop processing and propogate the error). Command-line parsing is esoteric and odd, even with getopt. That's not to say that it's impossible to make a secure shell script that handles filenames with spaces in them properly. Just that it's difficult, and makes using common operators like backticks difficult.

Awhile back, I toyed with the idea of making Haskell a shell scripting language. This week, I spent some time to make this a reality. I released HSH, a shell scripting environment for Haskell.

HSH makes it easy to run shell commands, set up pipelines, etc. straight from Haskell. You can either use simple strings to invoke commands (they'll be passed to sh -c), or you can specify arguments as a list (like exec...() takes), which eliminates the strange filename problems.

But the really cool thing is that HSH doesn't just let you pipe from one external program to another. It also lets you pipe to/from pure Haskell functions. Yes, you can pipe the output of ls -l straight into a Haskell version of grep. I've found it to be very nice, especially for more complex processing tasks.

I put these simple examples on the HSH homepage:

run $ "echo /etc/pass*" :: IO String
 -> "/etc/passwd /etc/passwd-"
runIO $ "ls -l" - - "wc -l" 
 -> 12
runIO $ "ls -l" - - wcL
 -> 12

In this example, wcL is a pure-Haskell line-counting function.

The results were surprising. According to SLOCCount, porting hg-buildpackage from a shell script to a HSH script achieved a 20% reduction in source lines of code. And at the same time, gained better error handling, better safety of filenames, better type safety (compile-time type checking), etc. Yet it does exactly the same thing in almost exactly the same way.

Even greater savings will occur too. I decided to reimplement a small part of sed just for fun, and that code is still in my tree. If I removed that and replaced it with a call to sed as in the shell version, that would probably buy another 5% savings.

I didn't really expect to achieve a reduction in lines of code. I thought that I'd be lucky to come close to breaking even. After all, who'd expect something other than the shell to be better at shell scripting?

I don't know if these results are generalizable, but I'm really excited about it.

MJ Ray said in Bad Tech: CGI Scripts and Line Endings, "Problem: CGI scripts uploaded with the MS Windows version of FileZilla over SFTP don't work until converted. Either there's some FileZilla settings wrong by default, or it just doesn't work." - the problem is that unlike with traditional FTP, which in ASCII mode would automagically translate line endings in to a sane format, SFTP (as far as I can tell) will always send them as binary, and thus if they were in DOS format before the transfer, they'll be in DOS format after the transfer. So, your choices are (other than the evil perl^M symlink)... Teach users about line endings - get them to do the equivalent of a :set fileformat=unix in vim before saving ;) (I'm not sure which editors out there let you set what line endings to use - might be worth finding out what the users use and looking it up) When they upload, rather than them uploading directly in to FTP space it hits an area that is checked every x minutes - that area is then copied to the right area with the transformation being done server side Something else.

We had one of the biggest snows of the year today in Montreal. The storm, which happened overnight and was supposed to let up around noon, still hasn't stopped. It's a practical white-out outside -- big fluffy flakes everywhere. The radio said we had more than 40 cm of snow, which is just amazing. I headed over to La ka this afternoon for an interview with Steve Faguy of the Montreal Gazette. I was pretty worried about going out, but as usual I was pleasantly surprised when I was outside. Snowy weather is pretty gentle, and although I was cold and wet when I got to La ka, it wasn't all that bad. I had a good talk with Steve about Wikitravel, Montreal tech scene, and the French Revolutionary Calendar. I'm looking forward to seeing the article when it comes out. tags: steve faguy la ka snow interview gazette

certifi.ca doing well I was glad to see a post about certifi.ca in the Solution Media Blog of Thomas Huhn. Thomas set up the extremely useful OpenID Directory, so his opinion is pretty valuable. I'm glad he's as enthused about certifi.ca as I am. tags: thomas huhn certifi.ca openiddirectory openid

Registration and privacy I think I have an account on every free OpenID service on the Web. I need lots of accounts for debugging purposes, and I also like to have an idea of what people are doing with the protocol. I checked out prooveme.com a few days ago. prooveme.com gives out OpenIDs with SSL cert authentication, like certifi.ca. It seems like an OK service, but I don't think they use SSL and certs the right way. I tested the prooveme ID on a couple of services, had a couple of errors, and that was that. So I was surprised to see this posting in the proovemeblog today:

• certifi.ca is another site doing certificated OpenID. Evan, the creator of certifi.ca is a subscriber of ours. We'll obviously be pleased if he carries on using us!

Now, I've been in wikis long enough to know that you have to AssumeGoodFaith when people post things in public forums, so I'll take this comment as nothing more than clumsy but good-natured ribbing. Ha ha ha. But: I haven't publicly said that I'd tested out the prooveme server. I'm not particularly embarrassed about it, but I hadn't had any reason to mention it to anybody, either. So the only way the poster could know that I'd registered for their service was to check their database records for my registration information. Publishing users' registration info without their consent steps over an important privacy line for me and, I think, for a lot of people. I'm not sure making a joke really justifies that kind of privacy invasion. I don't feel fairly treated, here. I partly blame myself: after all, I submitted personally-identifying information (PII) into a Web form on a site without an explicit privacy policy. I've gotten so used to OpenID providers being experienced with security and privacy issues that I made assumptions that turned out not to be the case. I've taken the incident as a wake-up call to put a privacy policy on certifi.ca. I hope that will communicate to users what I consider acceptable use of their data. And I'll make sure to check carefully for privacy policies whenever creating a new account in the future. For clarity: if I have an account on a Web service, that is not any kind of endorsement of their service, and doesn't necessarily suggest that I use that service regularly (or at all). I'm going to see what I can do to get my account deleted from the prooveme servers to avoid any misunderstanding in the future. tags: prooveme privacy openid

After ten (10) years, I'm leaving the ICQ network. I don't think I know anyone still on ICQ that I cannot reach by either Jabber or, less preferred, MSN Messenger. Reason for parting the network is the truckloads of spam that are shipped my way there daily, in fonts I can't even decypher, for services I do not want, and IM clients do not allow for easily clicking it away. It's a pity to lose my faithful UIN. 101662, thanks for the service. Uh-oh! Rrribbit

Today I was at the business day at linuxforum. The first exciting thing about the day was if it was possible to actually get there after violent criminals have been ruining Copenhagen all night long. My bus took a detour, but I ended up at the rigth place finally. Today there was talks and some companies have been running their booths. The most interesting talk today was Poul-Henning Kamps talk about varnish. Another interesting topic was how lego tried something new - work with the community around their mindstorms stuff with great success. Tomorrow it is a bit more techie-day where the local LUGs are having booths also, and with exiting talks about Qt programming and a spamfilter deathmatch.

While I’m not a Harvard student, I’m vaguely affiliated through some friends of mine with Harvard Free Culture, a local Free Culture chapter. They are, after all, just up the street. One of our newest projects is the Free Music Project. The goal, is, well, to gather together music under free licenses, both for just making a centralized collection of free music and for other specialized purposes, like providing music to go on OLPC laptops and school servers. So, go find free music, or if you’re an artist, re-release your music under a free license or record some new stuff. (If you’re in the Boston area, Antenna Alliance can help you get your music recorded for free. Who knows, maybe your music will end up on millions of laptops.

[ Yes, entry written for my Mexican fellows. My blog is in English. Don't rant about that, your pleads won't be listened ]
Damog just ranted (in Spanish) about too many people coming to Mexico City. I completely agree with him, but not with his conclusions. We are a ~25,000,000 people city, in a ~100,000,000 people country. The inequity we face every day is huge (Cd. Nezahualc yotl, among the poorest in the city, is the most densely populated region in the whole world, but you can easily spot over 2000 sq mt houses in Bosques de las Lomas or similar regions - And the whole Santa F region just scares me, it is an unknown planet I don't even want to think of). But what's really terrible is how living in this city changes our collective moods.
Sometimes it strikes me to understand how people in other countries can live in one town and work in another, over 40 minutes away. Well, for many years I worked at places over one hour away from home - and I didn't even cross the city. Mexico City is, or was last time I checked, 40x70km, and without enough adequate main ways. Of course, people get grumpy and aggressive while driving.
What's my answer?
Don't drive.
Seriously.
Yesterday, for example, I chaired three talks at Linuxworld Mexico. In friggin' Hip dromo de las Am ricas, a convention center located in one of the worst-connected pieces of land in Mexico. Usually, it would take me 40-90 minutes to get there by car, depending on the time of day and phase of Deimos against Fobos. Of course, it took me 70 minutes to go by metro+bus. I took two nice books (La regi n m s transparente, a beautiful book by Carlos Fuentes no Mexico City inhabitant should skip, and Laurence Rosen's Open Source Licensing). And I didn't get bored, and I didn't hate the people I was riding with. Even though I crossed the most crowded metro stations. Not only I saved a fair amount of money (MX$6.50 each way against probably something close to MX$120 between the gas and the parking fee of that unholy convention center), but I used my time much better. Some years ago, when I regularly travelled one hour back and forth to work, I learnt most of what I know today of Computer Science during the long time I spent sitting on small microb s seats. Not the most luxurious way of travelling, but still a very good way of moving around our messy city.
Of course, today I have learnt even more, and I want to advocate it: don't work far from your house, or at least, don't work far from a place reachable by Metro. Sometimes it sounds impossible, but really... How much do you value your time? Do you think that it's better to get MX$20,000 a month in a Santa F office than to get MX$15,000 in an office in Insurgentes? Do you think nobody will pay you decently if the offices are in Ermita Iztapalapa? Good work done brings a good salary. And seriously, the extra MX$5,000 in my first example is not worth the daily anger you will get by crossing the city to get to Nowhere Land and work for the corporate overlords.
I might be extremely lucky, but I work 3Km away from home. I come by bike every day. And yes, I was scared at first - Even in Ciudad Universitaria people drive aggressively. You have to take care where you drive. Taxi drivers are among the worst, as they are always in a hurry. And, yes, my elbow has an ugly scratch, as I prefered to stop and fall off my bike than to land over a car whose driver was in a hurry. I've just had my bike for ~6 weeks (after over 10 years of not riding one, and back then, just for a bit), but I'm confident enough to get off the safety of a protected University with no cafres driving their microb s as they damn well please. Last weekend I had a ~6km drive (Copilco-Miguel ngel de Quevedo-Loreto-Alta Vista-Copilco) using several high transit vialities (Universidad, Revoluci n, Insurgentes). I crossed three times the San ngel bus hub, which scared my ass as I approached - But it's perfectly doable, far easier than what I expected. It was fun. It is a decent excercise. And we need more people to take the streets with their bikes.
This morning I heard on the radio that Marcelo Ebrard (Mexico City mayor) is pushing a plan to boost bycicle usage in the city. Something similar to what has been done inside Ciudad Univeritaria, but -of course- in a larger scale: Useful ciclov as along the main roads, city-owned bike rental places (where you can rent your bike at one and drop it at another spot), all this well connected to the main Metro stations. In this interview (in this morning's 98.5 FM news program - sorry, I don't know who heads it... Mart n something IIRC) they said that today, ~0.7% of the trips outside home in Distrito Federal (where only 8 out of our 25 million people live) are carried out on bycicle, and they expect to raise it to 5% over the next six years. We will see about that, I can only wish this program best luck.
Damog complains that we drive like shit because dealing with too many people for too long pisses us off - Ok, Damog, here is the recipe: Don't get pissed off. Each of us will make a minor but tangible contribution. Don't drive so much. Quit your job so far away, get a decent (even worse paid) job closer to your house, closer to the university. You will be happier. Get a bike. Use it, you live close to UNAM as well. You will be happier. And we will be one step closer to total world domination. (yes, we the bikers, not we the Debianers ;-) )

Never mind the wheels what about the fuel ? Update: Morrisons have withdrawn unleaded petrol from suspected stations as a precaution. Well done! Meanwhile, last I heard, Tesco were still denying that the contaminated fuel was anything to do with them, while flushing their tanks. Hey, it's not their cars which are kangarooing.

NTL blocking web sites?

Is ntl blocking access to thepiratebay or was ntl's Norwich cache broken? (Is this ntl Virgin Media now?)

BBC NEWS World Europe Gorbachev wades into piracy row

How not to make friends and influence people, the Microsoft way. With the result that:

BBC NEWS World Europe Piracy case collapses in Russia

Well, that was always going to happen!

Microsoft standards bid faces failure - Computeract!ve

and while I'm grumbling about Microsoft (which I don't do very often, but I may have a pop at Vista in a week or so), here's Open XML failing to get fast-tracked.

Denmark mandates open standards by 2008

...but they've still got friends in Denmark's standards body.

Random thought: Roomba scare

Self-improvement for Vacuum Cleaners! Now that would be bad tech.

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

I always sign up for plain text if it's available. HTML-only is a big discouragement. HTML with a useless plain text part like that is nearly always deleted unread. Protx, this means you!

VOIP IP Telephony: Skype dumps you BIOS info and sends home!

Yet another way that Skype is evil. See also:

pagetable.com Skype Reads Your BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number

Internet phones have a lot to answer for, including my imminent router upgrade:

Bagel Belly Blog: Future proof

The browser-awkwardness of the current router's web interface is another reason I'm looking at OpenWRT-like replacements.

FastMail.FM weblog: More greylisting details

Greylisting seems good, but xbl is a terrible blacklist. I don't know how it works and it has often listed new ISP mail relays (which were not open relays or exploited). Avoid xbl.

debian.org and SPAM - MadBlog

Using RBLs to trigger greylisting seems like a good idea to me.

Sue them all.

Finally, this would be funny if it wasn't so silly. Advertisers: be careful of your music placements or you might start a bomb scare. Although, musical bombs? Wouldn't that be a bit of a Hollywood film stunt?

The following letter was published in the RACV Magazine. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria is a driver advocacy organization that provides roadside assistance and insurance. The fact that they published my letter means that the idea can't be totally wacky so I'll blog it. ;)

There have been many mentions recently in RoyalAuto about space-saver spare tires. Some manufacturers claim that they are to save weight which seems to be a benefit for the driver.

I wonder if most drivers really need a spare tire. For my own driving I only have a flat tire about every second year and I almost never drive outside the metropolitan area. Given how rarely I call for road-side assistance I think I would be better off without a spare tire and with the option of having the RACV deliver one for me if I needed it.

I expect that the time taken to deliver a spare tire would be greater than that required for a regular road-side assistance call, and that it might count for more than a regular assistance call, but given that the cheapest roadside assistance package has 8 calls a year I expect that most years I would still use less than half my quota of calls.

Not having a spare tire would save some weight (and therefore fuel) and would provide a little extra cargo space.

Also it seems to me that small cars are unlikely to ever be driven outside the area that is serviced by the RACV and similar organizations. For a small car the lack of a spare tire in the car design would offer a significant improvement to cargo capacity. If the RACV and other organizations endorsed and supported cars without spare tires then the car manufacturers could design small vehicles with more cargo capacity and less fuel use.