(long post, you've been warned) With his his 'Omelette Post' about FOSS.IN/2008 Call for Participation, Atul Chitnis, the FOSS.IN team 'leader' indeed sent an strong sign. For those who aren't aware of it, FOSS.IN is the longstanding major FLOSS event in India and, still (just like our beloved Debconf) only run by volunteers. Last year, along with Sam Hocevar, I had the chance to attend the event and share the groove of that big, huge, conference, with over 2,000 participants. Some other Debian fellows also made it in the past (Jaldhar, Bdale...). During the Debian Project Day as well as regular conference days, we had the great opportunity to meet with the people who currently participate in Debian (and Ubuntu) in South Asia, as well as first meeting some major contributors from other projects. For me, and, I think, of all people I met up there, this was a great *and productive* event. Maybe not productive at the moment it happened, but productive in terms of mutual awareness, knowledge and friendship. All people who attended such conferences (should I say "Debconf" or "FOSDEM"?) know what I'm talking about. The conference was still quite focused on "real" FLOSS contribution more than evangelizing or politics. And I think it succeeded in it quite well. This year, I already planned to not attend...mostly because such event, with the associated long travel time, is something I can't really fit in my real life right now. Also, because it conflicts with a planned Extremadura work session, indeed. Still, I would indeed not have attended it. Atul's post makes it clear: the even will only be about coding. The point is to put focus on people who code and we do 'real' code. Bug fixing is not coding. Translation effort is not coding. Work on support for complex languages is not coding. Actually, what FOSS.IN/2008 organizers are trying to do is a kind of big Debcamp. I'm afraid it won't work this way. From what I have seen in years of participation to Debian, things just don't come up this way. People don't sit down and code because they're invited to. And, still, are only "people who code" the only people that matter in a project? Debian is sometimes seen as one of the biggest FLOSS projects all around (probably shared with the Linux kernel). How many people in Debian just "sit down and code"? What about those people who maintain our web site, our archive, setup our infrastructure, our new maintainer queue, our communication channels? What about those dozens of people who nicely maintain packages and keep the link with upstream developers, or fix bugs.... Those people do not seem welcomed at FOSS.IN/2008. "Not only bug fixing" is said in this announcement. This, I don't get it. At all. Why would "bug fixing" be second class work? Why would it be more noble to "code" new stuff? Maybe Atul did not mean to say this. He wants to have Indian contributors in FLOSS to be more visible....but I don't share this. Indian contributors in Debian *are* visible. Giridhar Appaji Nag is visible, "my" translator crew is visible, Kartik Mistry is visible (he once was too visible, even, by maintaining a little bit too many packages...). Bug fixing is the most noble task I see in FLOSS development. This is what we need the most. I recently blogged about how I feel APT to be 'poorly' maintained (once again, that was not targeted to current APT maintainers). What I would respect deeply is to see a bunch of Indian contributors stand up and take this task over. Atul, that would certainly not be "outsourcing code/package maintenance" and, no, these are not things one can get involved with instantly. Really, I don't buy this vision and that saddens me. That saddens me mostly because I know the folks there. I know the FOSS.IN organizers and I have deep respect for them. I just think they're missing the target and are too ambitious: one cannot change an event so drastically by just saying it has to change..:-) And, really, I'm even more sad to see localization work be called a low-hanging fruit from a country where there are 22 official languages. Or take words such as "talk is cheap, show me the code" as $ DEITY 's Holy Word just because it was once said by Linus Torvalds (who said many stupid things). Code is just one part of FLOSS development. Certainly one of the important parts but still one part. What would have happened to FLOSS if only "coders" had been working on it all over those years? It would be something used by about 10,000 people all around the world, that's all. We should not make an opposition between those who code and those who don't. By the way, do *I* code? When I'm sitting at 07:00AM on a Saturday morning, hacking on Samba packages and try to have Samba 3.2.4 built with the set of patches we have on Debian....do I code? I'm not *producing* code....the code was produced by those wonderful Samba Team folks. Does Karolin Seeger code when she's releasing samba with such a precise and constant schedule as she's doing since early 2008? Or Ana Guerrero when she (not alone!) compiles dozens of KDE packages and organizes and bumps the maintenance of KDE in Debian for the best of our users. Or Miriam Ruiz when she picks up each and every possible free game and tries to get it in Debian, talks with upstream developers, help them to fiw their code to suit the severe requirements of the Debian policy? Or Clytie Siddall when she translates about every major FLOSS in Vietnamese (nor URL here, sorry)? All these folks are part of the FLOSS game. You want Indians to be part of FLOSS game? Then allow the potential Karolin, Ana, Miriam or Clytie to be part of Indian FLOSS game and don't try to make FOSS.in the place where you seek the future Indian Linus Torvalds and only him her. Talk is cheap, show me the contribution.

A research conducted by Noel A. Card at the Universities of North Carolina and Kansas, that appears in the September / October issue of journal Child Development, challenges the popular misconception that indirect aggression is a female form of aggression. The meta-analysis is based on 148 studies of aggression in children and adolescents in schools, involving on the whole about 74,000 children and adolescents. Direct aggression is what we might call physical aggression, and indirect aggression includes covert behaviour designed to damage another individual’s social standing in his or her peer group. Based on the analysis, the researchers suggest that children who carry out one form of aggression may be inclined to carry out the other form. This is seen more in boys than in girls. The popular myth that girls are more likely to be socially aggressive has been proven wrong by this analysis, even though it has persisted among teachers, parents, and even among researchers, probably because of social expectations and recent movies and books portraying girls as mean and socially aggressive. They also found ties between both forms of aggression and adjustment problems. Direct aggression is related to problems like delinquency and ADHD-type symptoms, poor relationships with peers, and low prosocial behaviour such as helping and sharing, while indirect aggression is related to problems like depression and low self-esteem, as well as higher prosocial behaviour (perhaps because a child must use prosocial skills to encourage peers to exclude or gossip about others).

A couple of years ago Debian had to change the name of Firefox to Iceweasel because Mozilla Corp. was using their trademark to impose conditions on the software that were not restricted by the license. Now the problem is brought again to life for Ubuntu, with Mozilla forcing them to show an EULA before letting users start Firefox. Jeff Licquia explains the situation quite well, in any case. At first glance, having to add an EULA seems a small price to pay, but underneath the obvious there might be something really serious happening. Software licenses seems to be just one of the possible ways of restricting users’ freedom. We’ve already seen some companies trying to use different methods to restrict it: via software patents, tivoization, etc. It seems we might want to add the usage of trademarks to the list. According to the Free Software Definition, there are four types of freedom that users need to have to consider a program as Free Software:

• To run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0)
• To study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1)
• To redistribute copies (freedom 2)
• To improve the program, and release your improvements (freedom 3)

In any case, nowhere is said that those freedoms must be given just to end users. Distributions and such must also have these freedoms, including the freedom to modify the program and adapt it to their needs, and their users’ needs. While it makes sense that you cannot call a program Firefox just because it includes 10 lines from its source code, it also doesn’t seem tolerable to try to use trademark to prevent you from adapting the program to your needs and keep calling it free. Is it valid that an organization or company tries to restrict that freedom for you by using their trademark rights? Should a clause preventing that be added to GPL4? In any case, the final reason for the discussion seems to be much ado about nothing, as the EULA does not, and cannot, add any restriction to the usage of the program. First freedom (to run the program, for any purpose), remember?

Some time ago, when I packaged treeline, I wanted to make the package configure the environment so that .trl files would be automatically open with the program. That meant that the package had to configure the MIME types in the desktop to handle that, and assign the new MIME type the selected program. I tried a dozen of things at the time, based on a lot of howto’s that I found, without any success, so I decided to forget about it. This week I started packaging a new program: L ve, a 2D game development framework based in Lua and OpenGL. Many of the games developed for this platform are distributed as a zip file with the extension .love, so I decided I wanted to try again the MIME stuff. After many unsuccessful tries, I found a package that gave me some hints on how to do it: chemical-mime-data. After having a look at it, I was able to prepare a proof of concept that did what I wanted. It is supposed to work, at least, in GNOME, KDE and ROX. In case someone else is interested, here is the code:

• mime-example_0.1-1.dsc
• mime-example_0.1-1.diff.gz
• mime-example_0.1.orig.tar.gz

We’ve finally been able to make the latest version of Frets on Fire work properly and be playable, without the high CPU consumption levels that we were getting, among other annoying bugs. I’ve already uploaded the latest version of the package (1.2.512.dfsg-3) to Debian SID, I hope in time for getting into Lenny before the freeze. Lots of thanks to deavid (David Mart nez Mart ) for the patches, it wouldn’t have been possible without your help!

Katherine Lawrence and Marianne Schreiber, two women at Hewlett-Packard, used the term Glass Ceiling to to refer to invisible barriers that impede the career advancement of females. While on the surface there seems to be a clear path of promotion, in fact women seem to hit a point where there is no way to progress beyond. Carol Hymowitz and Timothy Schellhardt used the term again afterwards in the March 24, 1986 edition of the Wall Street Journal, which is considered by many people the starting point of the usage of that term. Even though the term Glass Ceiling was originally specifically applied to discrimination against women, its meaning has expanded to describe similar situations of other collectives. I was wondering whether there might be a Glass Ceiling in Debian too. I know some of you will be tempted to answer “no way!” or “yeah! of course!” without even thinking about it. Please don’t. Keep in mind that a Glass Ceiling situation is referred to as a “ceiling” as there is a limitation blocking upward advancement, and “glass” (transparent) because the limitation is not immediately apparent and is normally an unwritten and unofficial policy. Give a serious and deep thought about it before commenting. It’s quite likely that if you are too sure about what the answer might be, one way or the other, that you might be wrong. I just wanted to make us think a bit about it.

Russ Nelson announces that the newer version of Gnash has been released. I’ve already created newer packages for it, but I cannot upload them to Debian yet, as they’re blocked for the poppler, c-ares and ffmpeg transitions. I hope to have them uploaded soon. In any case, I’ve put them here, if someone wants to try them. As the backends for the rendering, widgets and media must be decided on compile time, there’s not much to do if you want to use the most uncommon ones. The most stable and conservative option is agg and GStreamer, but I’ve also added the possibility of using OpenGL, which would be better for hardware-accelerated machines. Versions for both GTK and KDE widget systems are compiled. In a week or so they will probably be in Debian, in time for Lenny. Improvements since 0.8.2 release are:

• Native fullscreen support (from AS) implemented.
• Long command-line options properly supported.
• View detailed movie information from GTK gui.
• Added an option in Preferences to initially display a movie as a blank (”Click here to start”) screen.
• Added “dump” GUI to dump a movie to disk.
• Improved Cairo rendering performance.
• Fix support for OpenOffice Impress SWF exporter (malformed..)

Ira Pramanick talks in her weblog about a mentorship program targeted towards middle and high school girls to foster in them a positive attitude towards computing. The program is called MAGIC, which stands for More Active Girls In Computing, and tries to address the issue of the low number of girls entering the computing and high tech world. As they say, it is a serious issue caused not by then lack of talent, but due to a bunch of discouraging factors that exist in our culture and society. Right now, women represent only about 28% of the technology workforce. I don’t know if a mentorship program dedicated to these girls would be enough to increase the number of women participating in the technology workforce, but it will probably help to improve the situation. It would be nice to import the project model into Spanish speaking countries if it’s successful. The Mentor Qualification Process is quite strange anyway. It might be that we europeans have cultural differences, but I find some of the questions there quite disturbing, like “Are you willing to be finger-printed and screened?”. I don’t exactly know what they might want such a sensitive data for.

Just to not confuse readers from Planet Debian, the mentioned baby is not Miriam Ruiz. Sorry. :)

baby is leaving
flying over the big sea
heading for some place I wish her good luck
and that she will come back soon
to my open arms

P.S.: Tiny bits changed after some nagging from baby. ;)

How could I express how happy I am? It’s raining cats and dogs here, but it’s such a lovely day! Congratz to the other new Debian Developers

After the unfortunate show that Microsoft and ISO provided us recently, ISO’s response is a FAQ note about ISO/IEC 29500 (OOXML, that’s it) in which they threaten Microsoft with the most severe of penalties if they’re tricking on as. Funny. In that statement, they try to answer all the issues that initially were concerns but that now has turned into proven facts about the OOXML standard and it’s approval, and to try to recover some of their lost credibility. It’s sad to be commenting on this, words don’t come easy, as if to say. Microsoft has already proven who’s the one in charge here, who owns the committees, who takes the decisions and in which terms, and nothing happens. It’s gonna take more than to publish a FAQ note saying how well you did it and to threaten Microsoft to behave or else. No one seriously believe you at the moment, you know? A funny thing is that ISO dismisses any responsibility about standardization, and relies on the market taking the decisions for them. Microsoft has said many times that they consider something positive and healthy to have multiple standards for the same, and let the market decide. Now ISO declares to think along the same lines: “After a period of co-existence, it is basically the market that decides which survives”. We don’t really need an organization for standardization for that, do we? We already have the market for that. Will ISO apply the same policy for every standard from now on? Like, say, having a couple of competing standards at least for every need, and let the market decide? ISO tries to recover from their credibility loss with this note (“the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market“), without much success at least in what I’m concerned. If they keep trying to convince with press notes instead of with real acts, no one is gonna believe them ever again.

People who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less. That’s what Justin Kruger and David Dunning (both of Cornell University) demonstrated in a series of experiments they carried out. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill, fail to recognize genuine skill in others and fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill. In one of their investigations, they discovered that 98% of university professors believed they were above the average, while that is obviously impossible statistically. Bright students, far above the others, considered themselves below their real skills, standard students saw themselves as above the average, while real bad ones were fully convinced of being among the best. In fact, the worse the person was, the most their conviction was that they were right. Even more, the most incompetent ones were incapable of realising the superiority of others, and they tended to think that the answers of the tests were the wrong ones, and not themselves. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”, quoting Charles Darwin. Most of the people react to this study with a smile, thinking about the incompetent people they know and how well this study describes them. It should be noted that everyone is incompetent about many things, and this effect affects all of us. How can a person realize that they’re wrong? The lesson that comes out of the study is that it’s really hard to find out, according to Dunning. His recommendation is not to trust just one’s own thoughts, but to ask for other’s opinions, especially before taking important decisions. Nobody should ever stop trying to improve and to learn, because it’s really difficult to know when to do it.

After the approval of OOXML as a standard by ISO, it seems that there are two months for appealing the decision. The European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust authority, will investigate whether OOXML, as the format is known, is “sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products”, as well as if there have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote. If national ISO bodies return evidence that Microsoft attempted to influence the votes to secure acceptance of OOXML, it would strengthen the Commission’s antitrust case. According to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), “Even if the votes were legitimately won, which I doubt, OOXML is not an open standard because it isn’t fully implemented on competing platforms, and its future shape is subject purely to Microsoft’s control”. “Granting ISO status to OOXML doesn’t begin to resolve the competition law questions the Commission is looking into”. Lets hope the European Union investigates and clarifies all this. “An appeal would have to be resolved before publication of a document as an International Standard”, said Roger Frost, spokesperson for ISO. In other words, if an appeal is filed, it’s conceivable that final publication of OOXML as a standard could be delayed. Lets hope ISO appealing process, if followed, is less irregular than the approval one. Maybe I can still recover my trust in ISO. Lest see how it goes.

Today is a sad day. Corruption has won over rationality. ISO sucks. I guess I lost all the trust I had on the standards organizations. OOXML is a standard covered by many patents, ambiguous enough for Microsoft to keep the real specs closed, far worse than the previous ISO standard for the same task (ODF), and approved in a very suspicious way, in a process full of irregularities, which I hope the European Union will investigate.

Some time ago I started developing a system to classify free games for Debian, based in Enrico’s DebTags. Up to now I’ve been able to develop a basic set of tags to classify the games, so it’s time to start tagging the games. I’d really like to get as much feedback as possible, especially from teachers, educators, parents and in general people that work with and study about children. The idea is not to develop a fully exhaustive system with a thousand tags. I believe that parents and tutors must check themselves the games before letting their kids play with them, and supervise them while they do if they’re little. This does not try to be a replacement for parents, but a helper to let them have a rough idea about where to look at the games in the repositories according to their own criteria. Being exhaustive is thus not as a priority as keeping the system simple and easy enough. I’ve designed the tags along 3 main lines:
1) Contents that might not be wanted by some parents, teachers or tutors.
2) Games too complex for some children’s cognitive and/or coordination skills
3) Educative contents and skills that the game might help to develop. Right now some of the tags are already being used by GoPlay!, a system to find games in Debian, but it a very alpha state. The purpose is to make it configurable so that parents can decide which tags are important for them. I hope to achieve that in the next version of the program. I hope that the overall scheme can be understood, but I plan to write a rationale about it as soon as I can, as well as develop some examples so that they can be easily understood. I know that the tags might be a bit subjective and probably a bit culturally biased. The former is not avoidable, there will always be some kind of subjectivity in these kind of classification, so I won’t fight the impossible to achieve absolute objectiveness. I’m trying to compensate that by allowing parents and tutors decide the subjectivity they want to have by selecting and priorizing the tags. About being multicultural, I cannot do that on my own, as I’m not that multicultural myself, so I won’t try to invent what other cultures might be worried about or not based on some fuzzy stereotypes I might have about them. If someone from a different culture steps forward and wants to help, they will be welcome. I prefer to rely on other people from different cultures help me to broaden the classification. Feedback is of course welcome and encouraged.

The first beta release for Gnash has finally been published. There are a lot of improvements in this version, and it now supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. Flash version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on. I’ve just uploaded it to Debian, so it will soon be available in the mirrors. YouTube of course works, but not all of the other video streaming web pages are supported yet. Don’t forget to install the recommended packages if you want to have the video streaming features available, as some plugins for gstreamer are necessary for that.

From Valladolid (VLL) to Charleroi Brussels (CRL) Fri, 22-Feb-08; Flight FR1912, Depart VLL at 17:25, Arrive to CRL at 19:35

From Charleroi Brussels (CRL) to Valladolid (VLL)
Sun, 24-Feb-08; Flight FR1911, Depart CRL at 15:00, Arrive to VLL at 17:00 I hope not to have problems with the flight this time! See you all there!

#466664 , not only a palindromic number, but also its digits sum 32!

As many people keep asking me about the state of the current packages of Gnash, I’ll give a quick overview of it. As Qt 3.3.8 has now entered Debian (it is triple licensed under the QPL, GPL 2 and GPL 3), the license incompatibility problem is already solved (Gnash is GPL 3, which is incompatible with strict GPL 2). I’ve added the code for generating the KDE-based flash player (Klash) and the Konqueror plugin again. The only missing bit right now is some kind of problem related to the usage of gstreamer, with the result that Youtube videos do not work right now. I hope to have that bug fixed soon, and to be able to upload the newer packages to the repositories.

HIZ’s games Tatan, ProjectL and ES (ii-esu) have finally arrived to Debian repositories: tatan, projectl, ii-esu. Even though I’ve had some packages available for them for some time, I finally had to remove the music from them, as it wasn’t DFSG-free. The games are great anyway. They’re japanese abstract shooters of the style created by Kenta Cho, and also coded in D language. We had to rename “ES” to “ii-esu” (more or less its phonetical translation in japanese, AFAIK) as “es” was too much a generic game for a package and the binary. The next ones in my Indy Games TODO list are Linley Henzell’s Excellent Bifurcation and Garden of Coloured Lights.