[Reposted from debian-publicity.]

I started a page on the wiki to assemble a timeline of the interesting events of 2007: Timeline2007.

Please help me complete it! I've collected events from the News section of the website, times.debian.net and the -devel-announce and -project lists. I may have missed some important items, so feel free to add your own.

• Steal This Film, Part II: the Internet makes us into copiers
  Awesome, features interviews with Eben Moglen, Yochai Benkler, Brewster Kahle (founder of The Internet Archive), Seth Schoen and Fred von Lohmann (EFF) and many others. Many of the themes covered in the movie can also be found in Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture if you're interested.
• Nintendo Wii hacked -- homebrew games ahoy!
  Had to happen sooner or later.

Linus on the value of documentation:

You seem to put a lot of trust in a piece of documentation.

Do you realize how those pieces of paper are written? They are written by people who have absolutely *nothing* to do with the actual implementation, and whose job it is to write documentation. And while the people who actually do the programming etc are supposed to help them, the two parties generally detest each other.

Technical writers hate the "real engineers" for not helping them, and the "real engineers" tend to dislike having to be pestered to explain their stuff and have to read through some document that isn't meant for them, but that they need to sign off on.

In other words: please do *not* expect that the documentation actually matches reality. You seem to think that the documentation came first and/or is quite accurate. That's not at all likely to be true.

(link)

Awesome as always.

• We've Got Your Number, Europe
  Hmm...
• The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid
  (see also my previous post on the same subject)
• Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness

To avoid having ugly fonts on a brand new Debian install:

• dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config and answer No to the question about bitmapped fonts.
• Install ttf-bitstream-vera.

(In related news, installing Debian on the Dell XPS M1330 is totally boring, because everything just works. Even the remote control.)

• Quantifying the Performance of Garbage Collection vs. Explicit Memory Management
• Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?
• BMW uses Internet Protocol (IP) to network automotive controllers
  Still experimental, but it's pretty cool and it makes a lot of sense!
• Not Unexpected

Expanding on my previous post, this time with a graph:

The first package to add a Vcs field was amule on June 7th, 2006. And it was Bzr.

• Comic for 30 Nov 2007
  We all want the hats.
• Visual Dictionary.
  Neat.
• 'When Someone Beeps You, You Know the Reason'
  Read the full paper if you have the time, interesting stuff.
• Exciting Future
  Can't wait!

• Many Worlds, Most Strange
  I first read about the many-worlds theory in The Hollow Man, one of my favorite Simmons novels.
• Making Mario
• My column on Facebook s coming social meltdown

It's been a while since I last posted about emacs-snapshot, so here's a summary of the latest changes:

• New packages: nXML, remember.el, bubbles.el (a Same Game implementation), doc-view.el (to view PDF/PS/DVI files in Emacs), ...
• Many commands now have useful minibuffer defaults (accessible using M-n).
• M-q, M-$, TAB now operate on the region if it's active and transient-mark-mode is enabled.
• diff-mode now does word-level highlighting of hunks.

warkitting: a combination of wardriving and rootkitting, where an adversary maliciously alters a router s configuration over a wireless connection.

(from this paper)

• Evolution of the heart emoticon <3
• Ethnicity's Role in Social Networking
• The GNU Configure and Build System
• Caja: Capability Javascript

Andrew Bird == 100% pure talent.

Many thanks to everyone who sent in their thoughts on my post about vi and CTRL-[. Here's a quick summary of the comments I received on my blog and by IRC/email:

• The vast majority of the people who commented use the Esc key.
• Very few people use CTRL-[ (4 out of ~70).
• Many people use keyboard layouts where CTRL-[ is difficult to type (French, German, Finnish, Swedish, Spanish, ...)
• A few people have moved Esc elsewhere, such as the Caps Lock key (and here's how to do it, thanks Mark).
• A better alternative is to use CTRL-C, which works on all keyboard layouts. It doesn't do the exact same thing as Esc/CTRL-[ because it doesn't check for abbreviations; dato notes in a comment that this can be remedied in Vim with inoremap <C-c> <Esc><Esc>.
• Some people use the Esc key because it's hard to miss, being physically apart from other keys. Some people, on the other hand, complain that Esc is error-prone on laptops because it's too close to F1, or just awkwardly placed.
• Everybody helix! (not to be confused with the helix wind turbine)

As a closing note, a followup question from reader Laurent C.: :wq, :x or ZZ? :)

As many of you probably know, the vi editor has two main modes, and switching back to command mode requires sending the Escape character. This can be achieved either by using the Esc key (the top left key on most keyboards) or by using CTRL-[. The latter has the advantage that the [ key is much closer to the home row than the Esc key, and is thus faster to type. Despite that, pretty much all the vi users I know still use Esc, and I wonder why. I've heard that on some keyboard layouts (like the French azerty), CTRL-[ is actually impossible to type, but in my experience many Free Software people (like me) use the US layout even though it's not their local layout.

So if you have a few seconds, I'd appreciate your feedback (via a comment on this post, or an email). You have the following options:

• #1: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor, and I use CTRL-[.
• #2: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but I use the Esc key even though CTRL-[ is easy to type on my layout.
• #3: vi (or a derivative like vim) is my main editor but CTRL-[ is too hard to type on my layout.
• #4: I use another editor as my main editor.
• #5: I have no idea what you're talking about, but I wish to state that I will vote for helix in the 2008 DPL elections.

Thanks!

• Is It Time for 64-bit on the Desktop?
  As unbelievable as it may seem, Windows XP and Windows Vista do not support PAE, and the only way to use more than 3GB of RAM is to install the 64-bit version of Vista...
• Hollywords
  I like the English version of genre. The original is a totally boring word, at least for a native speaker.

• Smart Women are Scary
• Shivering
• HELIX WIND TURBINE: Small Wind Gets Smart

I'm thrilled to find out that Facebook has a group named The CTRL-X R K appreciation society; I'm member #4. C-x r k is one of my favorite Emacs commands.

Top posters in a few Debian-related Planets:

$ planet-scores.sh 
Planet Debian-FR :
     19 Rapha l Hertzog
      4 Roland Mas
      3 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      2 Gr gory Colpart
      2 Alexis Sukrieh

Sometimes I think this should be renamed Planet Buxy.

Planet Debian-FR (utilisateurs) :
     10 Julien Candelier
      8 Emilien Macchi
      4 Guilhem Bonnefille
      3 Shams Fantar
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Olivier Berger (perso)
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Jean-Baptiste H tier (djib)
      1 Eric Veiras Galisson

Newly added contributors to that planet have all their recent articles aggregated, not only the ones they wrote since they were added.

Planet Debian :
     40 Christian Perrier
      2 Russell Coker
      2 Raphael Geissert
      1 Wouter Verhelst
      1 Steve Kemp
      1 Romain Francoise
      1 NOKUBI Takatsugu
      1 Michal  iha 
      1 John Goerzen
      1 Joey Schulze
      1 Gerfried Fuchs
      1 Fathi Boudra
      1 Enrico Zini
      1 Emanuele Rocca
      1 Dirk Eddelbuettel
      1 David Welton
      1 Christine Spang
      1 Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
      1 Adam Rosi-Kessel

Planet "Christian loves rugby".

debian-community.org :
      4 Holger Levsen
      3 Andrew Donnellan
      2 Evgeni Golov
      1 Wolfgang Lonien
      1 Rapha l Hertzog
      1 Martin Albisetti
      1 Marcos Marado
      1 Jean-Christophe Dubacq
      1 Cord Beermann
      1 Benjamin A'Lee
      1 Andreas Putzo
$

I know I have an encoding problem on some planets, but that script is a very basic curl+shell+sed+grep+recode+sort+uniq pipeline, and I only use it for the amusement value. Maybe I'll recode it with a proper RSS parser some day if I feel utterly bored.