This Monday, state secretary Bijlevelt of interior affairs finally decided that any current type of voting computer is not safe enough for elections. This decision is not a surprise for anyone who's followed along with the wedonttrustvotingcomputers.nl action group, but it's the first time the government has acknowledged the full problem. This means that on the next "election" at October 10th here in Utrecht, already the red pencils will be recovered from their long time storage. Most interesting about this whole discussion is the question I only see asked sparingly:

What problem are voting computers trying to solve?

As a data point: on the last general elections, the Amsterdam district finished their counts of pen-and-paper voting before midnight on election day.

Just as I stepped up to the V&D department store watches-department to get my watch repaired, the background music played Time Stood Still. Nice.

This weekend I prepared my first Debian Security Advisory that was released under my own name: DSA-1370. More is to follow, of course. We hope to take this opportunity to improve the documentation of the process. The cooperation with the other team members has been good so far, thanks for that (especially Moritz). Of course my first advisory contained an error making an update necessary: I uploaded the package for sarge to stable-security, not oldstable-security... made me think whether there would be use for a kind of lintian-for-DSA's. For anyone interested in helping out with Debian's security: working on the Security Tracker is a great way to help and has a low barrier of entry. Provide information on whether issues apply to Debian, file bugs against the packages, provide fixes or NMU's...

Japanese professor and free software advocate Masayuki Ida is in The Netherlands, and yesterday gave a lecture about his activities in bringing free software to several Asian developing countries. It was interesting to learn what the state of technology is in a country as Vietnam, and why specifically free software is very welcome to change it. They are not interested in the pricing aspect, since a Windows CD is $1 there. Free software allows and stimulates its users to gain a much better technical understanding of a system, and there's a dire need for people with technical knowledge in the country. By using free software, they are making bigger leaps in their technological development. The professor wanted to do something typically Dutch afterwards, so a couple of us took him on a bicycle ride from Amsterdam to Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, along the Amstel river (known for naming both Amsterdam and a beer brand). He was friendly and very interested in how education works in The Netherlands. We once lost the professor - as it turned out we'd passed a windmill, which none of us locals even noticed, but the professor did and wanted to take some pictures of it. After a stop for a beer we returned to Amsterdam, delivering the professor at his next appointment (a bit late).

Next week, Debian will turn 14. The celebration of this here in Holland means nothing specifically other than a good occasion to get together and have a drink. It will traditionally take place in Breda, organised by our good friend Geertje Stappers, on Thursday the 16th. See the wiki page for this and other celebrations.

This Saturday, 17.00, Nederland 1. preview (flash)

Michal iha asks about a mobile phone usable in Japan. When I went to Japan this spring, I've researched some options. Renting such a phone in The Netherlands was about 50/day (!). However, when you rent it upon arrival in Japan, it was only 500/day, ~ 3. It worked perfectly and is very affordable for shorter trips. See NTT DoCoMo for details. Apropos phones, I've got a new mobile phone: the Nokia 6300 to replace my previous 6310i. Transferring the data on it worked great with the help of gnokii. The only question was how to get rid of my old phone responsibly. Stiching AAP, a sanctuary for monkeys, offers the possibility to send the phone to them for free. It will be recycled and AAP gets a bit of money for it. A real "win-win" situation.

Erich Schubert reports about a Serendipity issue he found. Thanks Erich for researching that and thanks upstream fox quickly fixing it. I'm glad to report that I've just uploaded the fixed version to unstable, and that Sarge and Etch are not vulnerable.

Today I tried to cancel my phone line from KPN, the national phone company. First, their website has this text:

Misschien ben je teleurgesteld of vind je een dienst te duur. Dat vindt KPN erg jammer, maar vooral vervelend voor jouw.

Apart from the blatant spelling error, it says that "KPN regrets this, but especially feels sorry for you." The pretense that their services are so great, they need to feel sorry for me canceling... Next up I call the mentioned number. After selecting the right option, the voice tells me: "An error has occurred." (in English!) and the connection is terminated. This is a reproducible problem. As a telephone company, they cannot make their own voice response system work. I'm not sure who they should be feeling sorry for...

I voted for further discussion rather than accepting the Debian Maintainers proposal. My opposition is that it's a new procedure while I think the existing structures should be able to handle the people that want to contribute to Debian. The proponents intend to solve the following problems.

NM takes too long

Agreed that it takes too long (useless waiting is a waste of time) but creating a new procedure does not fix it. Apparently there's a group of people that want to develop software for maintaining a keyring group-wise, and want to do the work actually maintaining such a keyring. Great. My suggestion would be to apply their technology and time to the existing DAM position so the work can be shared and we can reduce the waiting time.

Some people do not want to go through NM

NM is not as complicated as it is sometimes regarded, and a large part of it can consist of actually contributing to Debian rather than answering boring questions. I do not see it as a bad thing that uploading on your own requires some commitment.
There has been talk about people only interested in a small set of packages. There are already many specialised teams which those people would be welcome to join. I've also yet to see a significant number of people having trouble to find a sponsor. Sponsoring is a bit less convenient, sure, but not unbearable. Extra checking also has added value for Debian.

Some people do not want to associate themselves with Debian

Fine with me, but I don't think we need to facilitate an entire procedure for the less than a handful of people that chose to resign as DD but still want to upload. Sponsoring works for them.

I support sponsoring, and I think Rapha l Hertzog was right to introduce it. It works. With sponsoring on the one hand and being a DD on the other, we have two avenues of contribution that complement each other quite nicely.

Today we've released DOMjudge 2.0 after nine months of hard work. We've named it 2.0 because we think this is a major jump in the development of DOMjudge. There are many smaller changes, but the most notable improvements are the vastly enhanced jury interface, much more and better documentation and a dropped requirement on a shared filesystem between judgehosts. DOMjudge is a programming contest jury system for use in contests such as the ACM ICPC. We are using it for the upcoming Northwestern European Programming contest, and it has been used at several other universities aswell. It's nice to hear that someone is also using it as a base for their Google Summer of Code project to develop an automated assignment grading system.

For part of Stage 11, I watched the new Tour live coverage on Sat.1 who bought the German rights. When Sat.1 is busy, Pro7 will cover it. The two stations are owned by the same company, along with Kabel1, N24 and 9Live. The coverage was OK - the same French pictures as everyone else, but fewer extra features than ARD/ZDF. Commentary was a bit pedestrian, but that's like ZDF. I like Eurosport's commentary much more. International Herald Tribune reports that Eurosport's ratings tripled for stage 10 which is unsurprising. Eurosport and Sat.1 both seem to be on the same ~30% of German DVB-T as well as DVB-S. In comments on my last post about this, Thomas asked:

"You don't read German papers, do you?"

No. I've not even tried to buy one since moving to this village.

"I do, and I'm neither outraged nor surprised. It is a fairly logical step in light of the debate and the public reception of the tour, cycling pros, and Team T-Mobile in particular."

Is it public reception? Around 50% of those polled by ZDF disagreed with the decision (according to the IHT link above). Given all the ZDF spin on this, that's shockingly low. Is this driven by the silly debate of Bundestag members, rather than public opinion? (I've still not forgiven them for booting Eurosport off of ZDFvision. CDU seem to like messing ARD/ZDF about.) Are German papers in a feeding frenzy? In some days, they'll move onto football or boxing or something else. Get this in context: it's not like the old scandals where we had pro teams or wives being caught with car boots full of drug kits.

"I'd also bet that T-Mobile will quit as a sponsor."

It didn't seem like that from TV interviews, but I guess they wouldn't say yet. I think if they were going to jump ship, they would have done it after last year's worse problems. AIUI, their contract expires 2010 anyway and I wonder whether all the good publicity from their tour outing in England will help them stay until then.

"Some things belong in pharmacology textbooks and not on TV screens."

Does this mean drugs or incomplete drug tests? ;-)

"If I paid German TV fees, I'd be outraged that this comes that late. But then, I know better and don't have a TV in the first place."

Oh, well! Then I guess nothing would convince you to watch the tour! Philipp Kern commented:

"they did not threaten for a year actually. After the big doping scandal some months ago they explicitly announced that they will drop the Tour de France if a new doping case pops up. Granted, the person in question did dope before the Tour."

We don't know that yet - only one sample has been tested so far and even then, this test is controversial and has been successfully appealed against before. It's only a case. Also, maybe it wasn't the TdF, but here's a comment about ARD in 2006 threatening to drop cycling (scroll to 25.10.).

"The argumentation is that the Tour should not be a contest of the best doping substances like it could have been the last years. But I am probably biased because I don't watch the Tour, or sports in general."

No more biased than ARD/ZDF's producers, it seems. In an interview on itv4, a ZDF producer said they would drop any sporting event with a doping problem like cycling. So, if ZDF have dropped cycling for 1 in 189 participants being accused of doping, then if any footballer is accused of drugs offences, they cannot show any matches involving them. If you want to take football off ZDF, you know what to do... Thijs Kinkhorst reports in "Too much testosterone" that NOS also continues coverage, like our itv. Good on them. Let's applaud any drug cheats getting caught and punished, after we're reasonably sure.

Metro, the free newspaper distributed at train stations, has published an article about the Korenslag television show last Thursday. To my great surprise, they used two photo's to illustrate the article - photo's taken directly from my web site. This without any contact, or without any credit. I've sent them an email expressing my dissent with this and I've asked them to come up with a solution for this situation. If they'd asked beforehand I'm certain that they would have gotten my permission if they'd put a photocredit as they do with nearly every other photo in their newspaper. I'm curious what their response is going to be. Here's a scan of the article, the original photos are here: 1, 2.

Patrick Sinkewitz has tested positive for testosterone, and German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF have instantly canceled reporting on the tour except for more doping "news". The Germans broadcasters are going out of their mind in their witchhunt. Luckily the rest of the world seems more sensible. A.S.O. asks whether they're supposed to stop doing tests if apparently one positive is enough for ARD and ZDF to cancel everything. Manager Luuc Eisenga of the T-Mobile team asserts that newspapers will keep on reporting about business news even if one company is accused of fraud. Dutch public broadcaster NOS says: "We're here to report on what happens in the tour, not to exercise moral judgement over it." I'm happy that I can just continue to watch the tour even if one cyclist crosses the line.

It cost me a small fortune in text messages, but Dekoor are the winners! (what's this?)

Dekoor, a student choir which includes our friend Jense, from Utrecht participates in a television show Korenslag, a pop-idol like contest for choirs. As we've been devoted fans of Jense from the "Miracle Man" up to now, we attended the semi finals of this program. Being in the audience of this show that is broadcast live on national television is an experience in itself. An "applause master" instructed us when to be silent, when to applaud, and when to go absolutely crazy. To which we faithfully complied. During the show Dekoor did very well in our unbiased ears, although the others did okay too. Although we SMS'ed a fortune to vote for Dekoor, the choir "Re-Flax" got the popular vote. Quite to my suprise because they were the least original and dynamic of the four, in my opinion. Luckily the professional jury was again impressed and decided that Dekoor must go to the finals together with "Re-Flax". Unfortunately the finals are decided by popular vote (eur 0,60 per vote) which might work against them. So remember, next Thursday, 20.30 Nederland 1: the finals. Vote Dekoor! P.S. I made some pictures aswell.

Yesterday the first concert of 24 Leeways at Cees' Place. Nice work guys.

I spent a good part of this morning trying to find out with several people why oh why the networking of a Dell Poweredge 2950 with Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC wouldn't work using Debian Etch. Tried several drivers, compiled non free drivers but no luck. Only to find out that the bnx2 driver that comes with the stock Etch kernel maps Gb1 to eth1 and Gb2 to eth0 (inverted). Simply plugging the network cable over made the network run! It's even documented at the Dell website.

Alex Hudson commented:

"Similar comments about another W3C WG: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1181118077&order=-1&count=1 W3C should be about authoring material for the web. It seems at the moment, they're more concerned with the stuff that happens after authoring - e.g., how stuff relates in "the semantic web". IMHO we still don't have any powerful tools for authoring either, so the idea that authoring tools will automate many of the "bolt on accessibility" tasks is pretty naive."

After implementing pingback, I have some respect for hixie. It's disappointing but not surprising to read those comments. Not sure what is meant by powerful authoring tools there. My tools are powerful, but I know they're not easy for new users. As I'm getting old and cynical, I'm not sure whether power tools can ever be correct and truly easy - just look at the pigswill spewing out of some Web 2.0 sites. niq sent me a link to the WCAG Samurai Errata and commented:

"The problem with WCAG 2, as with WCAG 1, is precisely that it's a Work of Committee, and seeks to represent too many irreconcilable viewpoints and egos. In some cases, even the ideas behind it are inconsistent. Many (myself included) regard accessibility as being about ensuring a reader with a physical disability can make use of a site (think Steven Hawking). That's also what HTML is designed to support. Others are concerned with the mentally impaired, also a worthy cause, but one that becomes counterproductive when its advocates fail to distinguish between a site that's inherently inaccessible because it presents a complex and challenging subject, and one that's unnecessarily difficult due to poor presentation. Add the two together, blend in some stupidity, and you get "accessible" sites full of classic "friendly" little illustrations like a "helpful" government booklet, and a horribly intrusive "alt" to explain each pointless "ethnic mummy and child" picture."

I think a Work of Committee could be useful, as long as you have the right committee. Thinking about that, I found the group membership list and I'm not sure that's the right committee. For example, I think the ex-Adobe Google-worker must surely have an irreconcilable conflict of interest (inappropriate use of Adobe's Flash and PDF formats and Google's Web Apps have done more than many to harm accessibility in the past IMO), yet is a leading light of WCAG 2.0 - maybe that's why it's gone so dark? Update: Thijs Kinkhorst comments:

"As I read in the draft, suggestions are still possible until the 29th, not the 27th of June."

I'm sure that's different to the email which started me writing this, but please go comment and see if we can make WCAG-2.0 useful.

Leiden Lammenschans
Tiel Passewaaij
Capelle Schollevaar
Hoorn Kersenboogerd
Houten Castellum