A couple of weeks ago, Lucas Nussbaum wrote about his experience at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Two things stuck out at me:

• "Ubuntu has clearly gone a very long way since 2004. Everything looks very well organized and polished, and gives the impression of a big machine that nothing can stop."

In the summer of 2004, my laptop (an iBook G4) ran Debian GNU/Linux on PowerPC. I tried out Ubuntu that autumn, and was very impressed. It's been five years since then. My desktop still runs Debian, and I'm proud to be a "two-distro" community member. At the same time, this juggernaut nature raises concern. When Ubuntu releases ship with significant flaws, I quietly sigh and wonder, Are we doing good service to the people coming to GNU/Linux for the first time and seeing Ubuntu? This bugginess has bit me a few times (even for upgrades between one release and the next), and it pushed a friend of mine to switch a lot of his computing to DragonflyBSD. Lucas points out that Ubuntu's done a fantastic job of becoming visible. A look at Google Trends shows that people search for "Ubuntu" about as much as they search for "Linux" at all. Richard Stallman complains when people refer to GNU/Linux as just "Linux." But today, the most popular name for an operating system based on GNU is probably "Ubuntu." For Stallman, having his hard work associated with someone else's "Linux" project must be frustrating. As a Debian contributor, it would be easy to succumb to the same feeling with regard to Ubuntu. Lucas is well aware of that. He asks,

• "Will Debian manage to stay relevant, or are we just going to be the technically-pure distro without many users that serves as a package supermarket for Ubuntu?"

Debian does have users! I was feeling a bit disheartened about my maintenance work on alpine lately, when out of the blue I received an email from a fellow at MIT asking me if I would accept some help with maintenance from him. Just seeing the note was a relief; it's very nice to be reminded that I have users to take care of. Debian is not as popular as Ubuntu on the desktop (or laptop), it's true. But technically sharp people do frequently still choose it. For example, the FreeNAS project recently announced a switch from FreeBSD to Debian (and a new name as coreNAS). But we could end up a "package supermarket". To stave this off, we must do good releases and make sure people know about them. Doing all that work takes us all time. We must recruit new contributors, help them find things to work on, and make sure they feel welcome. And sometimes-sloppy maintainers like me ought to fix our packages, and get help from others where necessary. I promise to work toward that.

Debian is primiarly organized into mostly one-person "projects," namely packaging a piece of software. But in the past few days on Planet Debian, there has been discussion about how existing packages in Debian need more help. Tim Retout wrote:

There's a huge role for non-DDs to play in getting fixes into Debian, but as far as I remember, the emphasis of the mentors documentation is on packaging rather than bug fixing.

I think this is a serious problem across Free Software. Open source contributors are grouped into projects. If you're burning out on what you're working on lately, or you are looking to become a new contributor, it's hard to know what projects need your help. As someone who knows Python and Debian packaging, it would be nice to be able to search Debian for Python-language packages that need help. I also think that Tim hit on a really important social point later in his post:

It seems to me that the mentor relationship works better when DDs get to know particular people

Tim's right that personal relationships make a big difference. I got serious about my NM application when I asked someone I already knew to sponsor my packages. But not everyone can be so lucky as to have a Debian Developer as a friend. And many projects aren't as friendly as Debian; there's no official mentorship available. I think that we need to start paying a lot more attention to personal relationships all across Free Software. (I'm working on a web tool in this space. Join me in #openhatch on irc.freenode.net to discuss it, or just stay tuned until I write it up tomorrow.)

Today is Monday, October 26. Someone at Yahoo will go home tonight and, on the way out, turn off geocities.com. Update: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:17:50 -0400 Geocities is finally offline. Pages say:

Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.

To commemorate it, I bought geociti.es. I intend to do what I can to keep the Geocities pages on the web. I am part of the Archive Team, an independent group of amateur archivists racing to rescue the web from destruction at its own hand. In late 1994, Geocities began offering free web hosting as Beverly Hills Internet. A decade ago, Yahoo bought Geocities. In December 1998, one-third of all web users visited the website. As recently as March 2009, 11.5 million unique visitors arrived there. Today, according to Alexa Site Info, Geocities ranks somewhere between the New York Times and the Washington Post in pageviews. And today, Geocities.com shouts:

GEOCITIES IS CLOSING ON OCTOBER 26, 2009.

Tomorrow, Geocities' website will be closed for good if Yahoo sticks to that promise. The amount the Archive Team has downloaded is around one terabyte. That's all we seem to be able to reach; many pages were deleted months ago when the archiving effort began. The archiving is continuing as I write this. Think of it. Fifteen years of history, memories for millions of people, the birth of a generation on the web. More personal embarrassment than all the POG games put together. It fits on an $80 piece of storage equipment -- at least, that's what we managed to find before Yahoo erases it all. Initially, when I met Jason Scott of the Archive Team, he told me he wanted to download Geocities and share it by mailing hard drives around. I told him I wanted to hoist it back on the Web. He came around, and we and the rest of the Archive Team have put Geocities back online. Geociti.es is not the greatest website in the world, no. This is just a tribute. P.S. Major thanks to John Joseph Bachir for the paperwork assist.

Some tens or hundreds of thousands of T-Mobile USA customers probably just lost the contacts, photos, and notes "on their phone" forever. Those data are primarily stored on servers run by Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft; rather, they were, until data loss destroyed them. Many customers' phones do not have a complete copy of their data; some have no data at all. T-Mobile texted the affected customers with a link to this message:

Personal information stored on your device - such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos - that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger.

Long story short: No backups.

The story is a sad one, told many times Microsoft chose to make no backups, reports Sidekick news website Hiptop3.com. It seems the team at Microsoft in charge of user data storage allowed an upgrade to the storage system with no backup in place. When the upgrade failed, the data was toast. This sad story of "no backups" is something that sysadmins -- myself included -- find ourselves in from time to time. Toward the end of 2006, the "Leafycaust" (disk failure with no backups at leafyhost.com) destroyed lots of data for Students for Free Culture. I had my own catastrophe in mid-2007 when two disks connected in RAID-1 (which is not a backup system) failed within two days of each other. (I now run nightly off-site backups for all the systems I maintain.) People who rely on computers ought to make sure the people responsible are doing those backups, and that the backups are actually usable. Students for Free Culture was a Leafyhost customer; T-Mobile is a Microsoft customer. It's somewhat humorous that Microsoft and Leafyhost provide the same level of assurance.

"im about to cry!" In the Hiptop3.com article above, users tell their own sad stories and give advice.

• "Since then, I ve cried twice."
• "Fortunately, through Facebook, I ve been able to contact one of my brothers who gave me my parents numbers."
• "im about to cry!"
• "For those of you out there who think your information is safe. Learn from this please. Store information online, on paper, on a phone, everywhere. Invest the time!"

Invest the time. It's good advice. Everyone: Please make backups. Don't trust any one thing - your IT staff, your personal computer, or your paid service provider, to keep your data safe. (For more technical readers: Don't rely purely on your DBMS, your filesystem, or one particular location. You know the drill; now practice it.) I'll conclude with a quote. This one is about the Leafycaust, but it could easily be about Microsoft/Danger:

Essentially, these notjobs burn through several thousand dollars of people s money for the service of deleting all their critical (and personal) data.

I end up traveling quite a bit. Sometimes I forget to tell friends in the places I'm going that I'm going to be there. This results in a tragedy: we end up missing each other! So now, when I'm going to be traveling, I'm going to write updates that you can easily follow. Here are some reasons you might want to subscribe:

• You want to know when I next go to India so you can tell me to bring back a ten-paise coin.
• You want to know when I'll be nearby so we can roast eggplant together.
• You want to impress me with advice on live music wherever I go.
• You're carefully avoiding me.
• You like receiving email.

To subscribe, here are your choices:

• Follow notAFoodTruck on Identi.ca, the Free microblog service.
• Subscribe to the notAFoodTruck email list.
• If you use Twitter, follow @notAFoodTruck.

(And thanks to Chris for suggesting I do this, and helping me give it a name.) Parker wondered how I'm keeping these all up to date. Here's what I do:

• I send an IM to update@identi.ca.
  • (Really, I use XChat or irssi to send an IRC message. For me, IM is mediated through BitlBee and ctrlproxy, but you don't have to know that.)
• Identi.ca posts to the Identi.ca feed.
• Identi.ca cross-posts that to Twitter.
• rss2email running on my server wakes up every hour, checks identi.ca's RSS feed, and sends an email if necessary.

"MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE PYTHON" "MUST HAVE EXTENSIVE DJANGO" -- A JOB LISTING.

Tim and my mother are both neonatologists at the Golisano Children's Hospital inside the University of Rochester. Earlier today, they had this conversation:

My mother: My son Asheesh is moving to Atlanta.
Tim: Is it for a girl?
My mother: I don't really know what the kids are doing as far as girls, but no....

In fact, I'm moving to Atlanta because Shotput Ventures funded me, Nelson Pavlosky, and my friend Raphael Krut-Landau to start a company to improve interactions in the open source / free software world. We get enough money to live in Atlanta from May 18 to August 6, and after that, we have to seek more funding. This has led to a series of ironies. The first is that I am working on a startup. The second is that I left San Francisco to do it. But I have already moved out of San Franisco, and I have left my job at Creative Commons. (Feel free to get in touch with me (outside my website's comments) about filling my shoes there.) Thanks, Nathan and Mike, for giving me the chance to contribute to CC, an organization and project that I have always had a great passion for. For a while, I may seem vague about the project I am about to undertake; it's because I still want to nail down some details between the three of us. When Nelson, Raphael, and I arrive in person, we're going to kick into gear. I've been chatting with a few of you over the past few months about ideas, and I do want to especially thank Karl Fogel and Mako Hill for helping the three of us think through what could be done. Some questions for readers:

• How could it be easier for new hackers to join the open source community?
  • What programs, like Google's Highly Open Participation competition or Google Summer of Code, actually stimulate the community?

• What could be done to make it easier for developers to highlight their contributions to Free Software?
• How could it be easier for end-users or businesses to pay for improvements to software they use?
• How could it be easier, as a developer, to find other projects to join? to find important or fun things to hack on?
• How could it be easier, as a developer, to get help from other hackers?

• What groups of users or developers are hidden because of the way we conceive of the community?

• How else can you imagine making life easier for developers or users in open source?

Feel free to email me (asheesh at asheesh.org) if you'd rather not comment publicly. I have a few ideas of my own, and I hope to be tossing them up for everyone to bat at soon! P.S. Noisebridge, I will miss you!

I prefer to host my own Internet services. Here is a quick summary of what I have found in the past two hours of my life:

• The (in)famous Gallery is working on a version 3 which looks quite nice. The only way to add photos is through a Flash tool that segfaults Firefox and Epiphany here.
• Coppermine Gallery looks like it's still stuck in 2001.
• phpWebGallery renamed itself to Piwigo, which looks nice. However, it does not automatically rotate photos when generating thumbnails.

It's 2009. Am I just going to use Flickr and call it a day? I selected these by looking through web photo gallery programs on freshmeat.net. I'd like a dynamic one so I can accept comments. It does seem there are some decent galleries for WordPress, in particular NextGEN Gallery. What do others in the autonomous world do? Am I supposed to write my own? (Waiting for Gallery3 is probably a good path forward, failing that.)

Ladies and gentlemen, it seems that Google has finally done it: they shipped Multics for 386 (and compatible). NoiseBridge, this evening: I descended the stairs after teaching my introduction to programming class and found Geoff Schmidt in our San Francisco hacker space. I sat next to Geoff and overheard a lovely conversation with Mike Kan. Geoff told the sad tale of a beautiful, efficient, and dead operating system: Multics. Multics was written in the 1960s as a fast operating system for many users to share an expensive mainframe. It posed design problems never seriously tackled before, and after a decade, it had a practically perfect implementation for each of them. To achieve speed, it expected help from the hardware: registers on the processor split memory into different "segments," creating safe zones for each program to run in. The segment system was powerful and secure enough that a running process could execute code from another without the operating system kernel getting involved. The result was a fantasy come true: protection rings creating legendary security, the flexibility of a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system, and all this at hardly any performance overhead. (Naturally, such perfection is the result of years of work at MIT. So is Geoff.) This perfection came at a price: while Multics was uniquely well-designed and well-integrated, it expected specific support from the hardware it ran on. Geoff's expression deflated, and he pointed out that another operating system arrived on the scene: UNIX. Anyone could study the UNIX source code, and it ran on whatever you gave it. UNIX (a joke on the name Multics) eventually won by being worse: it was slow, unreliable, and worst of all: incorrect. But anyone could read it and make it work on the computer he happened to have. By the mid-1970s, UNIX's dominance over Multics was clear. Geoff skipped forward a decade to the 1980s. Intel had wanted to build a CPU that could be used as a modern computer, and users had shown that the puny memory protection system offered by the 286 wasn't adequate. The chip designers went back to the drawing board, and they brought back features that Multics invented: segmentation registers and protection rings. When shown these powerful, complex features, today's operating systems mostly ignore these Multics tricks and do the least work possible to build a UNIX-like flat memory model. Mike interrupted and howled about how he can't buy a "real Macintosh" anymore; Apple's computers were once based on a simple architecture, but now they are built with the same complex Intel CPUs everyone else uses. But I am writing this because of the release of Google Native Client, a browser extension that allows your computer to securely run machine code written by untrusted people on the Internet. How can it achieve this fantasy? The Wikipedia article summarizes the native client research paper:

Native Client is notable for its novel sandboxing technique which makes use of the x86 architecture's rarely-used segmentation facility.

Seen on #freeculture.

<matt-> Oh crap.
<matt-> All of the WordPress plugins disappeared.
<matt-> paulproteus: ^
<matt-> Crap.  Now I made it worse.
<aphid> ..they reappeared?
<aphid> as chupacabras?

Asheesh Laroia explained how to use ssh as a SOCKS proxy if you re behind a firewall that allows you to ssh to some machine not restricted by it: ssh -D. (I don t know how common such firewall setups would be, but the one at my Uni does indeed allow ssh to the outside over authenticated wireless.) With -D, ssh will listen in a local port, and behave as a SOCKS proxy. Set it up like this:

  % ssh -N -f -D localhost:4444 external-machine.example.com

And then you can point your SOCKS-capable application at localhost:4444. Chances are, however, that the application you want to use doesn t support SOCKS (like, in my case, Git). You can use tsocks then, which LD_PRELOADS a library that will divert an app s TCP traffic through the SOCKS proxy. To use it:

  % cat >~/.tsocks.conf
  server = 127.0.0.1
  server_type = 5
  server_port = 4444
  % tsocks git pull

AIUI, this is better than setting -L forwarding because you don t need a forward for each host whose port you want to access. If you re interested in starting ssh in SOCKS mode from .ssh/config, the configuration item is DynamicForward.

I just received this email:

From: Greg Lindstrom
To: Tutorial List

Hello,

On behalf of the PyCon Tutorial Selection Committee, I'd like to inform you that you have been selected to present at least 1 tutorial at PyCon 2009 in Chicago. We had 50 proposals for the 32 available slots and many good proposals had to be rejected.

It means: I get to stand in front of people I don't know in Chicago and talk about web scraping! (Unless the talk is canceled because no one signs up.) So I guess it means I'll be going to PyCon 2009! It's in Chicago, from March 25 to April 2. If you'll be there, too, drop me a line!

I was happy to read Zack's post about adding machine-readable metadata for the Package Tracking System. Not only can one query it via SOAP, he also provides XPath recipes for how to screen-scrape data out of the web pages. He writes:

Well, on top of [SOAP] I've implemented something along the lines microformats, that just make a clever use of ingredients already available in XHTML like classes and unique identifiers.

This is awesome. In fact, as you can see when he links to the SOAP backend, the SOAP interface is implemented using that XPath screen-scraping! What I think would be even more awesome would be to present the data to a machine user of the web page as RDFa, "RDF in attributes." RDF (short for Resource Description Framework) is a standard for metadata statements. Although it is involved in early versions of RSS used for web site syndication, in general it has nothing to do with that. A sample few RDF statements might be:

• <http://www.asheesh.org> has license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>
• <http://packages.debian.org/alpine> has maintainer <http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=asheesh@asheesh.org>

RDF generally uses URIs to represent information (though you can still literal values like numbers where appropriate). This allows different users to create namespaced terminology. That way, when Debian defines what "maintainer" means, Fedora choose if they want to use the Debian term meaning "maintainer." If they do, then Fedora people and Debian people could use the same query (on a different set of data) to answer the same question. And if they choose to use a different term, the two data sets can co-exist; the namespacing prevents any conflict. As for the term URI: URIs ("Uniform Resource Indicators") are just like URLs, except that instead of names of locations, they are just identifiers. So it's true that every URI is a URL, but you aren't necessarily intended to be able to wget every URI; they're just names. Ben Adida and Mark Birbeck wrote a fantastic RDFa primer that explains the concepts and implementation, peppering it with diagrams where they might help. The key is that using RDFa gives you the ability to automatically interoperate with the world of RDF-aware tools, including query and reasoning systems, and it is architected in a way that anyone can add RDFa data to any page without possibly stepping on the toes of other extra-metadata technologies. (Microformats don't have most of these benefits.) Ben and Michael Hausenblas at W3C also wrote a document listing some further use cases for machine-readable web pages. When I have some spare time, I'd be happy to help. But first I hope to make Zack and others aware that there is a standard for machine-readable metadata, designed with use cases like ours in mind!

John Goerzen was surprised by a mouse pointer change. His mouse changed from X.org's class black mouse pointer to the new GNOME translucent set. Upset, he wrote:

I noticed that my beloved standard X11 cursors had been replaced by some ugly antialiased white cursor theme. I felt as if XP had inched closer to taking over my machine.

Windows users seem to place similar importance on that clicky thing. A recent PC Magazine article writes, "Few things are more important in Windows than the mouse pointers." Dave Taylor discussed mouse pointers once, showing this picture of Windows XP's mouse pointers: Windows XP's mouse pointer, then, doesn't look like the one John Goerzen got. They look like a bent version of the normal X11 pointers with inverted colors. Windows Vista's mouse cursors do look like GNOME's (via a BlogIsEverything post): For this reason, Windows Vista feels like a cheap knock-off of GNOME to me whenever I use it.

You're still administering geeks, right?

-- Quinn to Shannon.

I just got an email. (For background, Matt B. is my flatmate's name.)

From: Travis M.
To: Asheesh Laroia
Subject: Matt B. left the oven on!!

I am here in the park with Matt. He left the oven on, with a Flash Drive in there
no joke!

As it happens, this email was real, not malarkey.

sh-3.1 $ uptime
12:10:16 up 20 days, 18:54,  4 users,  load average: 680.29, 656.27, 636.17

Huh.

I tried terminator (thanks go to Nicolas Valcarcel for asking me to sponsor a Debian upload, thus forcing me to try it, and Asheesh Laroia for doing a lightning talk at debconf about it), but I’m not convinced.
- More keybindings are clearly missing. You can only switch terminals using Previous/Next keybindings.
- More features would be great, like the ability to switch the position of two terminals (so you could reorganize them).
- It has some small usability problems, like the fact that the config is text-based, not using gconf, that it’s not possible to change the config without restarting it, that the title bar doesn’t display anything useful most of the time, since it prefixes the current terminal’s title with “Terminator: “, etc. So, is there any other tiling terminals manager I should try, before filing tons of feature requests on terminator? My other requirement is that it mustn’t reinvent the wheel, but use the gnome-terminal widget. Thank you.

I have a face on Planet Debian! (Thanks to John Wright for setting it up for me!)