The annual Debian developer meeting took place in Portland, Oregon, 23 to 31 August 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive. Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates. We ve gathered a few articles for your reading pleasure: Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive. Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered. Noah Meyerhans adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors. Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly. Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator. Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13. Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year. Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file. Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor. Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph s in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance. Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game. Fran ois Marier s shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian. Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing. Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen. J r my Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations. Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable. Jonathan McDowell s summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone s ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the State of the ARM BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM s DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK. Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf. Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian. Harlan Lieberman-Berg s DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor. Ana Guerrero L pez reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.

Review: Fantasy & Science Fiction, September/October 2011

Editor:	Gordon van Gelder
Issue:	Volume 121, No. 3 & 4
ISSN:	1095-8258
Pages:	258

Another review of a magazine that I finished quite some time ago. Apologies for any inaccuracies or lack of depth in the reviews. There wasn't much in Charles de Lint's reviews in this issue that interested me, but Michelle West covers a great selection of books. Two of them (The Wise Man's Fear and The Quantum Thief) are already on my to-read list; the third, The Postmortal, sounded interesting and would go on my list to purchase if I didn't already have so many good books I've not read. Otherwise, this issue is short on non-fiction. The only other essay entry is a film review from Kathi Maio, which is the typical whining about all things film that F&SF publishes. "Rutger and Baby Do Jotenheim" by Esther M. Friesner: Baby is a former pole dancer with a toy poodle named Mister Snickers, which warns you right away that this story is going to involve a few over-the-top caricatures and more use of the word "piddle" than one might ideally want. Rutger is a mythology professor who tolerates her for the standard reasons in this sort of pairing. They're travelling across country to Baby's sister's wedding when their car breaks down in Minnesota, prompting an encounter with frost giants. As you might expect, this is a sort of fractured fairy tale, except based on Norse mythology instead of the more typical Grimm fare. The fun is in watching these two apparent incompetents (but with enough knowledge of mythology to clue in the reader) reproduce the confrontation between Thor and Utgard-Loki. The fight with old age is particularly entertaining. If you've read any of Friesner's other stories, you know what to expect: not much in the way of deeper meaning, but lots of fun playing with stereotypes and an optimistic, funny outcome. Good stuff. (7) "The Man Inside Black Betty" by Sarah Langan: This story comes with a mouthful of a subtitle: "Is Nicholas Wellington the World's Best Hope?" It's also a story that purports to be written by a fictional character, in this case one Saurub Ramesh (with Langan credited as having done "research"). It's told in the style of first-person journalism, relating the thoughts and impressions of Ramesh as he interviews Nicholas Wellington. The topic is Black Betty: a black hole above Long Island Sound. Wellington is a scientific genius and iconoclast with radical theories of black holes that contradict how the government has been attempting to deal with Black Betty, unsuccessfully. The structure here was well-handled, reminding me a lot of a Michael Lewis article during the financial collapse. Langan has a good feel for how journalism of this type mixes personalities, politics, and facts. But it's all setup and no story. We get some world building, and then it's over, with no resolution except pessimism. Meh. (4) "A Borrowed Heart" by Deborah J. Ross: Ross starts with the trappings of urban fantasy transplanted into a Victorian world: supernatural creatures about, a protagonist who is a high-class prostitute, and sex and a sucubus by the second page. It evolves from there into a family drama and an investigation, always giving the reader the impression that a vampire will jump out at any moment. But the ending caught me entirely by surprise and was far more effective due to its departure from the expected path. Well done. (7) "Bright Moment" by Daniel Marcus: The conflict between terraforming and appreciation for the universe as we find it is an old story pattern in science fiction, and Marcus doesn't add much here. I think the story would have been stronger if he'd found a way to write the same plot with a pure appeal to environmental beauty without the typical stakes-raising. But he does sprinkle the story with a few interesting bits, including a pod marriage and a futuristic version of extreme sports as a way of communing with nature. (6) "The Corpse Painter's Masterpiece" by M. Rickert: This is typical of my reaction to a Rickert story: shading a bit too much towards horror for me, a bit too cryptic, well-written but not really my thing. It's about a corpse painter who does the work of an informal mortician, improving the appearance of bodies for their funerals, and the sheriff who brings him all the dead bodies. It takes an odd macabre twist, and I have no idea what to make of the ending. (4) "Aisle 1047" by Jon Armstrong: Armstrong is best known for a couple of novels, Grey and Yarn, which entangle their stories in the future of marketing and commerce. One may be unsurprised, then, that this short story is on similar themes, with the intensity turned up to the parody point. Tiffan3 is a department-store saleswoman, spouting corporate slogans and advertising copy while trying to push customers towards particular products. The story follows the escalation into an all-out brand war, fought with the bubbly short-cut propaganda of a thirty-second commercial. For me, it fell awkwardly between two stools: it's a little too over-the-top and in love with its own bizarre alternate world to be effective satire, but the world is more depressing than funny and the advertising copy is grating. More of a curiosity than a successful story, I think. (5) "Anise" by Chris DeVito: Stories that undermine body integrity and focus on the fascinated horror of violation of physical boundaries aren't generally my thing, so take that into account in this review. Anise's husband died, but that's not as much of a problem as it used to be. Medical science can resurrect people via a sort of permanent, full-body life support system, making them more cyborg than human. "Anise" is about the social consequences of this technology in a world where a growing number of people have a much different relationship with their body than the typical living person today. It's a disturbing story that is deeply concerned with the physical: sex, blood, physical intimacy in various different forms, and a twisted type of psychological abuse. I think fans of horror will like this more than I did, although it's not precisely horror. It looks at the way one's perception of self and others can change by passing through a profound physical transformation. (5) "Spider Hill" by Donald Mead: I liked this story a lot better. It's about witchcraft and farm magic, about family secrets, and a sort of coming-of-age story (for a girl rather than a boy, for once). The main character is resourceful, determined, but also empathetic and aware of the impact of her actions, which made her more fun to read about. I doubt I'll remember this for too long, but when skimming through it again for a review, I had fond memories of it. (6) "Where Have All the Young Men Gone?" by Albert E. Cowdrey: Cowdrey in his paranormal investigation mode, which I like better than his horror mode. For once, the protagonist isn't even a lower-class or backwoods character. Instead, he's a military historian travelling in Austria who runs across a local ghost story. This is a fairly straightforward ghost investigation that follows a familiar path (albeit to an unusual final destination), but Cowdrey is a good story-teller and I liked the protagonist. (7) "Overtaken" by Karl Bunker: This is the sort of story that delivers its moral with the force of a hammer. It's not subtle. But if you're in the right mood for that, it's one of the better stories of its type. It's about a long-journey starship, crew in hibernation, that's overtaken by a far newer and faster mechanized ship from Earth that's attempting to re-establish contact with the old ships. The story is a conversation between the ship AIs. Save this one until you're in the mood for an old-fashioned defense of humanity. (8) "Time and Tide" by Alan Peter Ryan: Another pseudo-horror story, although I think it's better classified as a haunting. A wardrobe recalls a traumatic drowning in the childhood of the protagonist. As these things tend to do in stories like this, reality and memory start blurring and the wardrobe takes on a malevolent role. Not my sort of thing. (3) "What We Found" by Geoff Ryman: Any new Geoff Ryman story is something to celebrate. This is a haunting story on the boundaries between the scientific method and tribal superstition, deeply entangled with the question of how one recovers from national and familial trauma. How can we avoid passing the evils and madness of one generation down to the next? Much of the story is about family trauma, told with Ryman's exceptional grasp of character, but the science is entangled in an ingenious way that I won't spoil. As with Air, this is in no way science fiction. The science here would have fascinating and rather scary implications for our world, but clearly is not how science actually works. But as an insight into politics, and into healing, I found it a startlingly effective metaphor. I loved every bit of this. By far the best story of the issue. (9) Rating: 7 out of 10

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page: See you in Chicago in May!

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

Although Don Norman was discussing designers attitude to user errors I assert the same is true for programmers when we use static program analysis tools.

The errors, or rather defects in the jargon, that a static analysis tools produce can be considered low cost well formed bug reports available very early in the development process.

When I say low cost it is because they can be found by a machine without a user or fellow developer wasting their time finding them. Well formed comes because the machine can describe exactly how it came to the logical deduction leading to the defect.
IntroductionStatic analysis is in general terms using the computer to examine a program for logic errors beyond those of pure syntax before it is executed. Examining a running program for defects is known as dynamic program analysis and while a powerful tool in its own right is not the topic of discussion.

This analysis has historically been confined to compiled languages as their compilers already had the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of the code available for analysis. As an example the C language (released in 1972) had the lint tool (released in 1979) based on the PCC compiler.

Practical early compilers (I am generalising here as the 19070s were a time of white hot innovation in computing and examples of just about any innovation in the field could probably be found) were pretty primitive and produced executables which were less good than hand written assembler output. Due to practical constraints the progress of optimising compilers was not as rapid as might be desired so static analysis was largely used as an external process.

Before progressing I ought to explain why I just mixed the concept of an optimising compiler and static analysis. The act of optimisation within those compilers requires program analysis, from which they can generate defect reports which we all know and love as compiler warnings, also explaining why many warnings only appear at higher optimisation levels where deeper analysis is required.

The attentive reader may now enquire as to why we would need external analysis tools when our compilers already perform the task. The answer stems from the issue that a compiler is trying to reconcile many desirable traits including:

• Produce correct (expected) output from the source code for the target processor
• Produce output which will execute using the smallest amount of resources possible (not just CPU time but memory access and cache usage)
• Generate output in a reasonable amount of time.
• Have a reasonable cost (both developer time and research into new methods) to implement the compiler itself.
• Produce useful diagnostics

Using static analysisOnce the analysis has been performed and a list of defects generated the main problem with this technology rears its ugly head, that of so called "false positives". The analysis is fundamentally an undecidable problem (it is a variation of the halting problem) and relies on algorithms to generate approximate solutions. Because of this some of the identified defects are erroneous.

The level of erroneous defect reports varies depending on the codebase being analysed and how good the analysis tool being used is. It is not uncommon to see false positive rates, even with the best tools, in excess of 10%

Good tools allow for this and provide ways to supply additional context through model files or hints in the source code to suppress the incorrect defect reports. This is analogous to using asserts to explicitly constrain variable values or a type cast to suppress a type warning.

Even once the false positives have been dealt with there comes the problem of defects which while they may be theoretically possible take so many steps to achieve that their probability is remote at best. These defects are often better categorized as a missing constraint and the better analysis tools generate fewer than the more naive implementations.

An issue with some defect reports is that often defects will appear in a small number of modules within programs, generally where the developers already know the code is of poor quality, thus not adding useful knowledge about a project.

As with all code quality tools static analysis can be helpful but is not a panacea code may be completely defect free but still fail to function correctly.
Defect DensityA term that is often used as a metric for code quality is the defect density. This is nothing more than the ratio of defect to thousands of lines of code e.g. a defect density of 0.9 means that there is approximately one defect found in every 1100 lines of code.

The often quoted industry average defect density value is 1, as with all software metrics this can be a useful indicator but should not be used without understanding.

The value will be affected by improvements in the tool as well as how lines of code are counted so is exceptionally susceptible to gaming and long term trends must be treated with scepticism.
Practical examplesI have integrated two distinct static analysis tools into the development workflow for the NetSurf project which I shall present as case studies. These examples show a good open source solution and a commercial offering highlighting the issues with each.

Several other solutions, both open source and commercial, exist many of which have been examined and discarded as either impractical or proving less useful than those selected. However the investigation was not comprehensive and only considered what was practical for the project at the time.
clangThe clang project is a frontend to the LLVM project providing an optimising compiler for the C, C++ and objective C languages. As part of this project the compiler has been enhanced to run a collection of "checkers" which implement various methods of analysis on the code being compiled.

The "scan-build" tool is provided to make the using these features straightforward. This tool generates defect reports as a series of html files which show the analysis results.


Because the scan-build takes in excess of eight minutes on powerful hardware the NetSurf developers are not going to run this tool themselves as a matter of course. To get the useful output without the downsides it was decided to integrate the scan into the CI system code quality checks.

Whenever a git commit happens to the mainline branch and the standard check build completes successfully on all target architectures the scan is performed and the results are published as a list of defects.

The list is accessible directly through the CI interface and also incorporates a trend graph showing how many defects were detected in each build.

Each defect listed has a detail link which reveals the full analysis and logic necessary to cause the defect to occur.

Unfortunately even NetSurf which is a relatively small piece of software (around 200,000 lines of code at time of writing) causes 107 defects to be emitted by scan-build.

All but 25 of the defects are however "Dead Store" where the code has a value assigned but is never checked. These errors are simply not interesting to the developers and are occurring in code generated by a tool.

Of the remaining defects identified the majority are false positives and several (like the example in the image above) are simply improbable requiring a large number of steps to reach.

This shows up the main problem with the scan-build tool in that there is no way to suppress certain checks, mark defects as erroneous or avoid false positives using a model file. This reduces the usefulness of these builds because the developers all need to remember that this list of defects is not relevant.

Most of the NetSurf developers know that the project currently has 107 outstanding issues and if a code change or tool improvement were to change that value we have to manually work through the defect list one by one to check what had changed.
CoverityThe coverity SAVE tool is a commercial offering from a company founded in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The results of the original novel research has produced a good solution which improved on analysis tools previously available.

The company hosts a gratis service for open source projects, they even provide scans for the Linux kernel so project size does not appear to be an issue.

The challenges faced integrating the coverity tool into the build process differed from clang however the issue of execution time remained and the CI service was used.

The coverity scanning tool is a binary executable which collects data on the build which is then submitted to the coverity service to be analysed. This tool obviously relies upon the developer running the executable to trust coverity to some degree.

A basic examination of the binary was performed and determined the executable was not establishing network connections or performing and observably undesirable behaviour. From this investigation the decision was made that running the tool inside a sandbox environment on a CI build slave was safe. The CI system also submits the collected results in a compressed form directly to the coverity scan service.

Care must be taken to only submit builds according to the services Acceptable Use Policy which limits the submission frequency of NetSurf scans to every other day. To ensure the project stays within the rules the build performed by the CI system is manually controlled and confined to a subset of NetSurf developers.

The results are presented using the coverity connect web technology based defect management tool. Access to the coverity connect interface is controlled by a user management system which precludes publicly publishing the results within the CI system.

Unfortunately NetSurf itself does not currently have good enough JavaScript DOM bindings to support this interface so another browser must be used to view it.

Despite the drawbacks the quality of the analysis results is greatly superior to the clang solution. The false positive rate is very low while finding many real issues which had not been previously detected.

The analysis can be enhanced by use of collection configuration and modelling files which remove intended constructions from consideration reducing the false positive rate to very low levels. The ability to easily and persistently suppress false positives through the web interface is also available.

The false positive management capabilities coupled with a user interface that makes understanding the defect path simple make this solution very practical and indeed the NetSurf developers have removed over 50 actual issues within a relatively short period since the introduction of the tool.

Not all of those defects could be considered serious but they had the effect of encouraging deeper inspection of some very dubious smelling source.
ConclusionsThe principle conclusions of implementing and using static analysis have been:

• It is a powerful tool which aids programmers in improving their software.
• It is not a panacea and bad code can have no defects.
• It can suggest possible defects early in the development cycle.
• It can highlight possibly problematic areas well before they affect a programs users.
• The tool and the infrastructure around it have a large impact on the usefulness of the results.
• The way results are presented has disproportionately significant impact on the usability of the defect reports.
• The open source tools are good, and improving, but coverity currently provides a superior experience.
• Integration into a projects CI system is beneficial.

Seven hours ago I was handing out how to vote cards for the Greens at the 2013 Australian Federal election. I was hoping that either we would have a Labor/Greens coalition or an outright majority for Labor. Unfortunately we got a Liberal majority in the lower house and it looks like some extreme right wing groups may get into the senate (replacements for Family First the anti-Gay party). For some reason the polling station where I was working only had volunteers from the three major parties (Greens, Labor, and Liberal) while other polling stations in the same electorate had volunteers from smaller parties such as the Sex Party and the Socialist Alliance. The volunteers from the Liberal party ate McDonalds outside the polling station and afterwards McDonalds rubbish was left on the ground, the above picture isn t particularly clear because I took it after 6PM when the polls closed. The Liberals didn t care enough to put their rubbish in a bin, it s an externality for them, if they get enough seats in the senate they will surely take the same approach to governing Australia. The Labor people didn t take the effort to clean up the Liberal mess even though it wasn t particularly difficult to do so, I think that s the type of attitude that led to this election defeat. In the case of the McDonalds rubbish in question I put it in the bin so that when the primary school kids return on Monday their school won t be too messy after the election. But in the case of the mess that is being made in Australian politics it will take many more Greens votes to allow us to clean it up.

Review: Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2011

Editor:	Sheila Williams
Issue:	Volume 35, No. 4 & 5
ISSN:	1065-2698
Pages:	192

Williams's editorial this issue is about the tendency of SF to take a rose-colored view of the world, which on the surface seems odd given the tendency of recent SF towards dystopia. But she makes a good point that the portrayal of the past is rose-colored, linking that into the current steampunk trend. She doesn't take the argument quite as far as I'd like, but I'm glad to see editorials raising points like this. I'm inclined to think that a lot of the rose-colored frame of the past is because few of us want to read about real historic conditions at any length, even for edification, because the stench and discomfort isn't fun to read about. Silverberg's column is another discussion of programmatic plot generators, which mostly makes the point that plot ideas are the easy part of writing. James Gunn contributes an extended biography of Isaac Asimov that probably won't be new to long-time genre readers but may fill in some details (although it politely sticks to mostly flattering material). Spinrad's book review column is one of his better ones; it looks at two novels by China Mi ville and two by Ian McDonald and explores differences in world-building. Spinrad predictably makes the case in favor of science fiction with rules and against the New Weird, but the discussion along the way was worth reading. "The Day the Wires Came Down" by Alexander Jablokov: Speaking of steampunk, here's an example. There is even an airship, although the primary technological focus is suspended street cars. Jablokov postulates a city-wide transportation network of suspended carriages called telpher cars, along with a city built around the telpher cables: stores on roofs, windows displaying merchandise to passing cars, and even a history of heated competition and dirty tricks between competing telpher networks. The story is set, as the title would indicate, on the last day of the network. It's being shut down for cost, with some hints that progress is destroying something precious. There is a plot here, revolving around some mysteries of the history of the telpher network and the roles of several people in that history. But the story is primarily a celebration of old technology. It's a rail fan's story recast with a steampunk technology, featuring the same mix of fascination with mechanics and a sense that the intricate details are falling out of common knowledge (and perhaps usefulness). As a story, it's a bit slow-moving, but I enjoyed the elegiac tone. (7) "An Empty House with Many Doors" by Michael Swanwick: This is a very short story, more of an emotional profile, involving a man's reaction to the death of his wife. Oh, and parallel universes. It's sort of the inverse of Niven's classic "All the Myriad Ways." Similar to Niven's story, I found the idea vaguely interesting but the conclusion and emotional reaction unbelievable and alien. (5) "The Homecoming" by Mike Resnick: Resnick tends to yank on the heart-strings rather sharply in his stories, so I knew roughly what to expect when a father comes home to find his son is visiting. A son who, rather against his father's wishes, has been significantly altered to be able to live with aliens. Throw in a mother with serious dementia, and you can probably predict what Resnick does with this. Still, most of the story is a two-sided conversation, and I thought he succeeded in doing justice to both sides, even though one of them was destined to lose. (6) "North Shore Friday" by Nick Mamatas: Illegal Greek immigrants, a family-run system for getting them married off before the INS catch them, government psi probes and eavesdropping on thoughts, joint projects between computer and religion departments, secret government experiments, and even ghosts... this story is a complex mess, with numerous thoughts stuck into small boxes and scattered through the surface story. It's one of those stories where figuring out what's going on, and even how to read the story in a sensible way, is much of the fun. If you find that fun, that is; if not, it will probably be frustrating. I wished there was a bit more plot, but there's something delightful about how much stuff Mamatas packs into it. (6) "Clockworks" by William Preston: This is a prequel to Preston's earlier "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down". Like that story, it's primarily a pulp adventure, but layered with another level of analysis and thoughtfulness that tries to embed the pulp adventure in our understanding of human behavior and the nature of the world, although this one stays a bit more pulp than its predecessor. As with Preston's other story, we don't get directly in the head of the Old Man (here, just called the man, but identifiable from clues in both stories as Doc Savage); instead, the protagonist is a former villain named Simon Lukic who the man hopes to have fixed by operating on his brain. The undercurrent that lies beneath a more typical pulp adventure is the question of whether Lukic is actually healed. I think there was a bit too much daring-do and human perfection, but it's a perfectly servicable pulp story with some depth. (6) "The Fnoor Hen" by Rudy Rucker: If you've read any of Rucker's work before, you probably know what to expect: a mind-boggling blizzard of mathematically-inspired technobabble that turns into vaguely coherent surrealism. (You can probably tell that I'm not much of a fan, although the clear good humor in these stories makes it hard to dislike them too much.) There's a mutated chicken and some sort of alternate mathematical space and then something that seems like magic... I'd be lying if I said that I followed this story. If you like Rucker, this seems like the sort of thing that you'd like. (4) "Smoke City" by Christopher Barzak: At the start of this story, I thought it was going to be an emotional parable about immigration. The progatonist lives two lives: one in our world, and one in the Smoke City of industry, a world of hard labor, pollution, and little reward, with families in both. But nearly all of the story is set within Smoke City, and the parable turns out to be a caustic indictment of industry and its exploitation of labor. I kind of wish Barzak hadn't used rape as a metaphor, but when the captains of industry show up, I can't argue with how deeply and accurately the story shoves in the knife. There isn't much subtlety here, but it's still one of the better stories in this issue. (7) "A Response from EST17" by Tom Purdom: I'm very happy to see Purdom's writing appearing regularly. His stories are always quiet and matter-of-fact, and at first seem to miss emotional zest, but they almost always grow on me. He lets the reader fill in their own emotional reactions to events, and there's always a lot going on. This story is a first-contact story, except that the "humans" here are not human at all. They're automated probes sent by two separate human civilizations, with different programming and different governance algorithms, and they quickly start competing negotiations. The aliens they've discovered similarly have factions, who start talking to the different probes in an elaborate dance of gathering information without giving too much away. The twist is that this pattern has replayed itself many times in the past, and information itself can be a weapon. I enjoyed this one from start to finish. (7) "The One That Got Away" by Esther M. Friesner: Friesner is best known, at least to me, for humorous fantasy, and this story is advertised as such from early on. The first-person protagonist is a prostitute in a seaside town. She's bemused to finally be invited over by a sailor who's been eyeing her all evening, but that sailor has something else in mind than normal business. For much of this story, the fantasy element is unclear; when it finally comes, it was an amusing twist. (7) "The Flow and Dream" by Jack Skillingstead: This is a mildly interesting variation on the old SF story of hibernating humans (on a generation ship or elsewhere) waking up to a transformed world. Here, it's not a ship, it's a planet, and the hiberation was to wait for terraforming rather than for transit. The twist comes from an excessively literal computer and the fun of putting together the pieces. Sadly, the story trails off at the end without much new to say. (5) "Becalmed" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: "Becalmed" takes place immediately before "Becoming One with the Ghosts" and explains the incident that created the situation explored in that story. The first-person protagonist of "Becalmed" is a linguist, an expert in learning alien languages so that the Fleet can understand the civilizations that it runs across. But something went horribly wrong at their last stop, something that she's largely suppressed, and now she's confined to quarters and possibly in deep trouble. As is the ship; they're in foldspace, and they have been for days. "Becalmed" is structed like a mystery, centered around recovering the protagonist's memories. It's also a bit of a legal procedural; the ship is trying to determine what to do with her and to what degree she's responsible. But the heart of the story is a linguistic and cultural puzzle. This is another great SF story from Rusch, whose name on a cover will make me eager to start reading a new magazine. I love both angles on the universe she's built, but I think I like the Fleet even better than the divers. The Fleet captures some of the magic of the original Star Trek, but with much more mature characters, more believable situations, and a more sensible and nuanced version of the Prime Directive. Rusch writes substantial, interesting plots that hold my interest. I'd love to see more like this. (8) Rating: 7 out of 10

Yesterday I was discussing in an online board how to break a decision deadlock in life. There are real deadlocks, but I don t think they are very frequent most of the time, doing a pros and cons analysis is enough to decide what to do. Sometimes our judgement is impaired by lack of objectivity or by our inability to see things from a different point of view (it s hard to think straight when everything seems to be falling apart around you); talking to a friend or relative can help in these situations. But there are times when nothing helps. When you are really stuck and nothing seems to break the deadlock. At these times I give it one or two days, sleep on the issue and if I cannot come up with a decision I assume the alternatives are equivalent to me and just flip a coin. Of course, this will do if you can postpone the decision, giving yourself (and your inner self) time to decide on a course-of-action. But is there some way to speed up the process? During the discussion, someone came up with a rather smart quote by Rothstein character in Boardwalk Empire TV series:

Flip a coin. When it s in the air, you ll know what side you re hoping for.

I found it an interesting way to give your inner self an ultimatum: decide or luck will decide instead. I ve never did it like that, for I would not flip a coin unless it s my last resort. Being such a clever psychological idea, I doubted it originated in the TV series itself, so I went on pursue of the original idea. I found a Danish poet and mathematician called Piet Hein, who wrote a poem about it circa 1969:

A PSYCHOLOGICAL TIP Whenever you re called on to make up your mind,
and you re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you re hoping.

And also, there are a Donald Duck comic called Flip Decision circa 1953 that introduces Flipism philosophy, which supports a rather radical anecdotal variant: make all decisions by flipping a coin. Piet Hein or Rothstein character idea is much better than Flipism, of course. Does anyone knows any older sources of the same idea?

I have no idea if the literal translation carries over, but to be on the safe side: I like what I've seen up to now. First impressions are always the most honest (and I may have sketchy access to the Internet at best in the coming days) so here goes. I haven't even been here for 24 hours so take everything I say with a sack of salt.

• I was told, repeatedly, that Russians tend to keep even more to themselves than us Germans; unless they see a reason to open up, that is. By and large, that seems to be true. Thankfully, "a reason to open up" seems to include "these guys look lost and I want to practice my English". This led to a Russian asking me what the best German beer in a random supermarket was while I ended up with what he thinks is the best Russian beer. Yay.
• As expected, most Russians don't speak even the tiniest shred of English. Sometimes, they even keep talking in Russian after you've made it clear again and again that you don't understand them. The same thing happened to me in the middle of nowhere in India; it's strange, but I suspect (I don't know!) that some people are simply not very firm with the concept of different people speaking different languages and that someone can't speak their own.
• Moscow's Metro system is very nice
  • They have a circle line. Why doesn't Munich have a circle line? Again: why doesn't Munich have a circle line?
  • All lines have two dedicated tracks, one for each direction
  • Trains arrive and leave every few minutes. I don't think we waited more than two minutes for the subway today, even though we saw the prior train depart. The monorail has longer waiting times, but I'd say that's five to ten minutes, tops.
  • Once you figure out how their signs etc. work, it's very simple and quite efficient to follow them:
    • Every line has a color. Follow the colored bars on signs.
    • Once you reach the color/line you want, look at the tunnel walls. There's an arrow depicting the stations in the direction of this tunnel; your station is marked red. Below every station where you can board other trains, there's a list of possible destinations right underneath the station name. The newer trains have the same arrow (sans transit lists) with a blinking indicator of where you are.
  • The tunnels are deeply underground. I knew those tunnels were designed to function as atomic bomb shelters if the need arose. Now I believe that this would actually work.
  • One big minus is that people in a wheelchair or similar are SOL. Escalators, stairs, uneven ground, gaps and height differences between station floor and train, you name it. Everything that shouldn't be there is there and plenty. Things that should be there are not. Accessibility does not seem to be a concern at all.
• Labour must be incredibly cheap. Every escalator has its own operator, watching the moving stairs in theory and a tablet/smartphone in practice. You have one person selling metro tickets and right beside that someone who watches the ticket-checking gates.
• The local McDonalds (we needed a trusted default) is swarming with employees. It looks chaotic, but it's quick. Also, they put tons of onions and different sauces into and onto stuff. Me gusta.
• Once you start getting the hang of converting Cyrillic into Latin characters in your head, you can read the words out as if they were German. People will understand you without problem. Useful, that...
• There seems to be a social or religious agreement to not inflate car tires properly. I have literally never in my life seen so many cars zipping around with half-flat tires.
• (Many) Russians are tall. I am used to being the tallest person around; I will meet someone taller every few weeks or months, in Germany. Today, I saw three people who were taller than me; two of similar size. Again, this is literally the first time in my adult life that this has happened in such a short time.
• Stuffing things into your checked-in shoes to save space is good. Not removing a piece of cloth from a shoe and not realizing it while walking all around Moscow... hurts.
• Before buying anything at a street stall, ask for the price; also, carrying a calculator to show numbers to others is useful.
• Blueberries don't seem to be very special. While Nordic countries tend to have saner prices than Germany, Russia is cheap when it comes to blueberries.
• All food that's been imported from Germany is priced insanely high. 20 for a box of cheap chocolates? Check. 50 for four packets of dried fruit? Check.
• As an amusing aside, the supermarket was swarmed with and subsequently deadlocked by Chinese (yes, they spoke Mandarin as far as I could tell) who were stockpiling chocolate in ridiculous quantities. We were in line for about 45 minutes; the store, a two-story, higher-end location, ran out of change. As we paid by card, that didn't affect us other than the long waiting time. Chocolate in China must be really bad, really expensive, practically unavailable or a mix of the three. I guess we will find out in two weeks :)

So, this story begins in January 2001, when I applied in the Debian New Maintainer Process. I wanted to maintain Geneweb, which I was using to publish my genealogy research results. And I wanted to keep it up-to-date while upstream was doing a quite fast development. Moreover, I quickly noticed that Geneweb had big trouble in respecting the way data is organized on a Debian system, and respect the FHS. How to have weveral users able to publish their data on the same server without compromizing the overall system security, etc. Upstream development didn't really care about that. Daniel de Rauglaudre is an excellent genealogist and developer but he was not interested in making Geneweb clean "the Debian way". For instance, at that time, it wasn't easy to setup a server, where genealogy databases could be published without having to manually launch a daemon in user mode at each reboot. Arranging this was indeed my first contribution. I contributed a few patches to make it easier to turn Geneweb into something FHS-compliant...and I developed init scripts and an organization allowing one to have shared databases after system reboots. That was rapidly a great introduction to Debian maintainer scripts and even security-related challenges. And all this....because I needed it. Basically, in 2001, the geneweb package adopted the organization it still has in Debian and Ubuntu, 10 years later:

• daemon optionnally launched at boot time, listening on a configurable port
• daemon running with an unprivileged account
• local group of users allowed to "publish" their data by putting files in /var/lib/geneweb (should now be moved to /srv, I guess)
• related maintenance of this with debconf (including keeping local modifications made *out* of debconf, which is sometimes neglected by maintainers)

While doing so, I was going through the New Maintainer Process. The Debian developer who had signed my key was Sam Tardieu, of of those longstanding "Freenix" dudes I was sometimes hanging around. I don't remember who did write my advocacy. Michael Mattice was my first Application Manager. Interestingly, here are the three first questions he asked my as part of the Policy and Procedures check :

• Firstly, can you explain the key points of the Social Contract and DFSG?
• Donald Knuth, author of TeX, insists that no-one has the right to modify the source code of TeX, and that any changes must be made using "change files" (a sort of patch file). Furthermore, any modification of TeX which produces something which fails the "trip test" (a regression test suite) may not be called TeX. So how come TeX (in the guise of tetex-*) is in main?
• What is Debian's (current) approach to non-free software? Why?
• Debian was offered a Debian-specific license to package a certain piece of software (I forget which). Would we put it in main?

Mike actually asked the questions on February 17th and I probably answered immediately. Unfortunately it seems that I lost my answers. Maybe they are in some archive somewhere. Would be interesting to see how I ended giving an answer about the TeX exception.:-) Immediately, Mike moved to the Tasks and Skills step and checked my geneweb and lifelines packages (I already prepared a package for that other genealogy software). From my records, he found a few lintian warnings, which I probably made my best to fix, then later on, on March 12th, he answered me that thigns were OK and he was marking the T&S step as passed...handing things over to the NM database, asking me what username I wanted on debian.org (obviously, you know what I answered to this!). Then nothing happened..:-) I was not that impatient, but finally, around June 27th, I politely mailed NM Frontdesk (I guess) to get news...and I got a very quick answer by Martin Michlmayr. Martin was indeed worried about the situation (he told me I was on his radar....fun as, many years later, as many DDs, Martin probably went on mine because of pending localization work..:-)) Finally, Martin decided he was not entirely happy with the (maybe too short) processing for P&P and proposed me (very politely, you know how Martin is!) to do it again. So, some more questions...:-) Here, I have the answers. Really fun ro read. Hang on, pure bubulle style, very verbose!

• Q: Do you know (and can you explain) the difference between free speech and free beer? Is Debian mainly about free speech or free beer? My answer: Free speech means that one is able to say what one wants, without any constraint. No one can tell you what you should say. Mozilla is free software. A free beer, on the other hand, is a beer that you don't be charged for. You may drink a free beer but maybe cannot be free to choose the beer you want to drink...:-). Internet Explorer is a free beer. By chance, we french-speaking people have two different words for this (libre and gratuit). Some people have even adopted "libre software " for being used instead of "free software".
• Q: The e-mail client pine is in non-free. Can you tell me the difference between main, contrib and non-free? My answer (typos and horrible English not corrected...): Packages in main are OK with Debian Free Software Guidelines (which defin what is considered "free" by Debian) and all other requirements of the Debian Policy. Packages in contrib are OK witgh DFSG bu may break some other constraints. For instance, they may be wrappers for non-free packages (the old netscape wrappers were good examples. The setiathome package is also another example as it requires the download of the setiathome client which is not free, because source code is not available). Very buggy packages may also be placed into contrib instead of main (a QA requirement). Pakages in non-free are not conform to DFSG. Simply speaking they are not "free software" as defined by DFSG. Some of them because their licence prohibits redistribution, or redistribution of derived work (the french package of Bernard Gaulle fot Latex could fall there).
• Q: Do you agree to uphold the Social Contract and the DFSG? Answer: Yes I do (wow! I'm back 16 years down to my wedding day...:-)) (Doh, already kidding with fellow DDs)
• Q: If you are accepted as a Debian developer, you will get accounts on the Debian machines. Have you read the Debian Machine Usage Policies (DMUP) at http://www.debian.org/devel/dmup ? Do you accept them? My answer: I did read the DMUP and I fully accept them.
• Q: What are Non-Maintainer Uploads (NMUs) and when would you do an NMU? Answer: This is an update for a package which is done by someone who is *not* the official package maintainer (I guess I give the correct english definition : I read the translated dev. reference....). First of all, a NMU should be done after trying to get in contact with the official package maintainer. I don't know if this is the awaited answer, but this point looks important to me. This is the only way for verifying that (s)he is not working on the same problem. NMU's are the most welcome during freeze phases when they correct bugs rated "severe" of higher. They are also welcome when they come from Debian Security Manager(s) for correcting security-related bugs. Another NMU source are those which are needed for ports to work. As a recent, and probably not very experienced package manager, I would probably be very prident with NMU's anyway...:-)
• Q: Tell me 3 different methods to close a bug in the BTS. Answer: Well, If I have properly understood Dev. Reference, there are two recommended methods and a third which is discouraged :
  1. properly use the debian/changelog file (by adding "Closes: Bug#xxxxx" statements in it). The bug will automagically be closed by the archive maintenance software
  2. by mail by sending the .changes file to xxxxx-done@bugs.debian.org, xxxxx being the bug number
  3. by sending a "close" command to control@bugs.debian.org
  The latter should never be used, says Dev. Reference. I must admit that I don't know why it is still mentioned. There is certainly a good reason. I'm not aware of another method...
• Q: What would you do if a bug was reported against your package and you are not able to fix it yourself? Answer: First, I would double check with upstream author(s) if this cannot be fixed by him/her/them.... Then, I would probably ask for help and/or advice in debian-qa if the bug is critical, grave or serious. If it is normal, I would ask on debian-devel or maybe think more about possible solutions.... If the bug still cannot be fixed and is "severe" or higher, I would either consider orphaning it (not being able to fix it may mean that I do not have the skills for maintaining it properly) or having it adopted by someone else. I don't think there is a unique answer there. The key point for me is certainly "ask for help in debian-qa". (OK, not the best answer ever...)
• Q: You've just heard about this great program and would like to package > it, what would you do? Answer: First, check on the WNPP page. The purpose here is avoiding having two people working on the same package. Then, assuming no on,e works on it, open a bug against wnpp speudo-package with a copy to debian-devel. The "bug" should include a short description of the package and what I intend to do for packaging. The URL for downloading sources for the program should be given. The subject of the bug report is normalized. The bug report should be of the "wishlist" class. When the new package is ready and uploaded for the first time, it should include the appropriate statement for closing the wnpp bug.
• Q: Do you know what 'lintian' is? Why is it useful? Answer: It is a set of tools for making automatic checks of packages. It may detect some bugs, common errors, Debian Policy violations and so on. This is a very useful tools for polishing packages. For instance, in my "geneweb" unofficial package, the last remaining lintian report is about the creation of a /var/geneweb directory which violates Debian Policy.
• Q: What does version 3.4-2.1 mean? What Debian control file would you put this in? (Hint: NMU). Answer: This is the Debian package of version 3.4 of program "foo". The current package version in the distribution was -2 and someone made a NMU of this package. This would be put in debian/changelog
• Q: You have a package in contrib, why would it have to go there? What could you do (in theory at least) to get it into main? Answer: The package in consistent with DFSG but other constraints are not respected. The most probable reason is being dependent of "non-free" packages (there may be other reasons but none comes to my mind at this time....). In that case, I should try to make it independent of these packages. For instance, trying to replace a "Depends: netscape-base" line by a "Depends: www-browser" line...if it may be done, of course!
• Q: If you had a file in your package which usualy gets changed by a user for local settings, how doyou make sure your next version of the package doesn't overwrite it? Answer: By putting its name into the debian/conffiles line. By the way, I guess you're meaning "changed by a local system administrator for local settings" here, don't you? (hey, answering a question with another one, good trick, man...)
• Q: What would you do if you wanted to retire from the project and let other developers maintainer your packages? Answer: The correct term is "orphan" the package. Make a bug report against wnpp (with a normalised subject starting with O, see Dev. Ref). The bug severity is "normal". If this is an important package for the distribution, the bug should be of "important" severity and the bug report should have a subject beginning with RFA (Request For Azdoption). In that case, an announce in debian-devel is also asked. In both cases, a new package should be uploaded with Debian QA Group as maintainer.

What a bunch of questions..:-). Reading my answers ten years after, I see that some answers are somehow naive but, after all, they're not so bad. I really remember spending hours in writing them (my English was somehow more shaky at that time) The last question was: "Please tell me about about yourself and what you intend to do for Debian". Here, Martin opened a big can of worms..:-) So, you'll learn about this in the next episode..:-)

Donald Trump you magnificent bastard, you did it. You actually did it. What you did is irrelevant and counterproductive but still gold star and a tick for perseverence. In possibly related news, SETI is closing down their radio telescope array. I don't think I'd want to show this planet off to the neighbors either.

The Abel prize for 2011 has been awarded to John Willard Milnor.[1] In response to a query from Dr. R. Ramachandran who writes about Science and Science Policy for The Hindu'' newspaper group, I wrote the following short piece which others may find interesting as well. Milnor is well-known for his work on topology and geometry. He has also made significant contributions to algebra and even number theory. In addition, he has written a number of books which are loved by graduate students in Mathematics all over the world. One of the striking early results of Milnor was the example he gave of a seven dimensional space which is topologically a sphere but its geometric (differentiable) structure is different. This was the first example of an "exotic sphere". A nice way to state his main result (due to Ajit Sanzgiri) is that "Groups of homotopy spheres are homotopy groups of spheres". Milnor received the Fields' Medal in 1962. In addition, the work of a number of later Fields' medallists such as Donaldson, Thurston, Mori and Voevodsky can be seen as having roots in the work of Milnor.

---

[1]The last time I wrote about the Abel Prize was to contribute to a guest post to Rahul Basu's science blog: The Far Side. Unfortunately, Rahul is no longer among us. This post is dedicated to the memory of Rahul Basu.

Choosing a PhoneI was considering renewing my Three contract and getting a HTC Desire HD [1]. What I need is a phone that is good for being a ssh client on 3G networks, has a good camera, and has all the fancy Google Apps.In the comments Lon recommended a Norwegian review of phone cameras which gave the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 a much better review than the HTC Desire HD [2] the Xperia was the highest rating Android camera phone while the Nokia N8 was the best overall.Also the Xperia is a lot cheaper, I can get it on a $29 monthly cap from Virgin as opposed to $44 per month from Three. So just on hardware and price the Xperia beats the Desire HD.One of the advantages of the Xperia from Virgin being cheap is that my wife and I can use the same model of phone. This avoids having to solve two sets of phone related problems and also allows us to do things like swap batteries between the phones based on who can most conveniently charge their phone.The Need for RootBut one problem with e Xperia is that the CyanogenMod images for rooted Android phones can t be installed on an Xperia because the boot loader hasn t yet been cracked [3]. I would like to run CyanogenMod so I can get wireless proxy support, and support for tunneling IP over DNS, ICMP, and OpenVPN.The Three web site claims that they have 3G phone and net access in Bendigo, but on a recent holiday my phone said that it was roaming all the time and I couldn t get net access. I ended up having to use McDonalds Wifi net access which had ports such as 22 blocked and thus forced me to use Iodine IP over DNS to get proper net access. To avoid having to talk my mother through rebooting servers in future I need to have a mobile ssh client that can use all possible protocols. I could carry my EeePC with me all the time, but sometimes it s good to travel light.OTOH, as I feel compelled to fiddle with all my computers it would probably give me a more reliable mobile experience if I was unable to mess with my phone.Why Buying a Phone Outright Isn t ViableA $29 monthly plan is probably the cheapest plan that will do for anyone who uses a phone regularly, I have had a Three $29 plan for the last four years which allows up to $150 of calls to be made in a month and typically use about $60. So any plan which doesn t have such a cap will have to be no more than half the price of Three on a per-minute basis to compete. If I m going to pay $29 per month ($696 over a 24 month contract) then I can use a free phone. If I was to buy a phone then it would cost at least $500 for anything that I like and maybe a lot more.Buying a phone independently of a contract would about double the cost of owning a phone. It s really not a viable option.Therefore I am compelled to buy a phone that is on offer from a Telco. Things like the Nokia N900 are nice devices but as the Telcos don t offer them I can t consider them.No Discount if you Don t get a PhoneThe annoying thing is that the Telcos don t offer a discount if you choose not to get a phone. Obviously buying the hardware costs them some money, so a $29 cap with a phone included should have a matching offer of something less than $29 if you choose not to get the phone from them. I currently have a $29 per month contract with Three, I can renew that for another two years at the same rate and get a half-decent phone for free or I can renew for two years on a $19 per month contract and get a low-end phone for free but I can t get a price that is lower than $19 per month if I decide to keep my current phone.If Three was to offer such a discount then I would consider buying a phone outright over the net and staying with them. But as it is they don t provide good deals for buying a phone and give me an economic incentive to go to another provider. So I will probably use Virgin when my contract runs out in January.Locked PhonesMany Telcos still sell locked phones on a contract. When that happens it s really difficult to get a phone unlocked as the Telco employees usually aren t very helpful. There are a variety of web sites claiming to generate unlock codes for phones, most seem to charge $10 or more for this service and the free ones have a very small range of phones, so getting the unlock code from the Telco seems to be the only option for a phone at the end of it s contract period as it s not worth enough to justify the $10 expense.While some Telcos sell unlocked phones on plans the ones that lock their phones have a chilling effect on the industry. Most people don t test whether their old phone can be used with a different provider they just throw it out the phone stores conveniently provide bins for old phones that are apparently recycled for some good cause.ConclusionIf you make serious use of mobile phones (EG being ready to fix errors reported by Nagios 24*7) then choosing a new phone and plan is one of the most difficult things there is to do. All the plans are quite complicated and every Telco offers a different set of phones. The Telco web sites are usually poorly done, most of them don t have an option to search for Android phones or for phones with a certain minimum resolution they usually don t even state the resolution and use terms such as WQVGA which don t even have a fixed meaning in pixels. When it comes to choosing a plan most Telcos don t have a clear comparison of the different plans, writing your own spreadsheet comparing plan costs is a good idea.The fact that Telcos such as Virgin and Three/Vodaphone allow free calls to other people using the same company makes it even more tricky. I have to discuss my phone plans with several relatives as there is a good incentive for everyone to use the same provider.I think that we need government regulation on the way that phones are bundled. The market for phones that aren t associated with Telco contracts has been destroyed by the anti-competitive behavior of the Telcos.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2010/11/17/mobile-phone-sysadmin/
• [2] http://www.amobil.no/artikler/norges_beste_kameramobil/79081
• [3] http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

After I finished an re-read my epic post describing my first day and a half at Debconf10 I suddenly realised that if I continue to describe the rest of 13 days here in such style and verbosity this would become a book, a boring one at that, so I decided to limit myself to 2 posts for Debcamp and then a post a day for the Debconf. But about the first half of the Debcamp week there are things that are as usual and there are things that are not. Let s start with the usual bits: more people arriving every day, evening parties are getting more and more fun and wild (or so people say) and the Internet and power at the hacklabs magically becomes more and more reliable day by day, the cabling mess grows organically trying to spread out evenly and not overload any individual socket, extension cords with non-local plugs appear and spread the load some more, people stress out, volunteer, crash out and repeat. All in all nothing can stop the freight train of few hundred Debian developers determined to have fun. With out own DFSG-free definition of fun. (But this year we appear to be running very close to the edge on volunteers if we run out of those, there will be a train-wreck, so please volunteer!) Now off to the unusual stuff. The City is well it is cool and very, very impressive. It is not terribly different to me at least I am used to such structure of the city: grid based layout of the downtown city (with some parks) and then branching out to separate, but different across-the-river districts and then sprawling out to slightly chaotic suburbs. Riga is very much like New York in the design. The difference is that New York is 10-20 times larger: the areas are 10 times larger, the buildings are 3-4 times higher on average, the streets are 2-3 times wider and yet have more traffic and there are far, far more shops, shows and restaurants. Also there is the subway. It is a great thing in that it hides the size of the city take a bus downtown once, to find out what I mean it takes ages to drive the distance that takes 20 minutes on the subway. I like this city, I am getting a feeling, that I could live here without much problem for me. So far I ve only had this feeling in Riga and Berlin. On the other hand this is USA. I ve so far only encountered one bad thing about it, but it is a pretty big one food. Basically all food that I ve tried so far in the USA has been crap. It was tasty salt, sugars and fat took care on my brain thinking it s food, but underneath that it was pretty crap: there was no texture, no content, no soul. The John Jay cafeteria where we are eating lunch and dinner is better than the most other options, because it is an all-you-can-eat buffet where you can choose your poison and it was also the place where I had the best piece of food in USA so far a slice of pepperoni pizza, that had a bit of taste behind the fat. Also, surprisingly, the fast food options (McDonalds, Burger King, ) are better than the equivalents in Europe, far better. In fact the fast food is cheap and in some cases tastes better than regular food, so there is no wonder why people might prefer it in some situations. So it is easy to see how people just accept shoving bland fast food or bland all-you-can-eat food into their mouths and not think much about it and thus become fat and put undue stress on their health. I expect the average weight of Debian developers to increase by 5 kg by the end of the conference. If you want to prove me wrong, running with bubulle would help you a lot with that. Events downtown. New York is a huge city with a lot of events going on every day, so everyone should be able to find something of interest for them. For me it was the free tickets for tapeings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I got into both of those and for me The Colbert Report was by far the better experience. For one you can not get into Daily Show without a ticket (some tickets show up on the web site on the morning of the shoot around 11am), while 18 people from the stand-by list at Colbert Report got in. At The Daily Show you stand in a live line with ticket holders in one line and stand-by line separate. If you have tickets and arrive around 3pm you should be fine any later than that and you risk to be standing outside even with a ticket. You find that out around 4.30pm when they hand out physical tickets you have one, you get in. If not you might rush over to Colbert Report where a more humane system is used a staffer takes down your name and email on a numbered list and then you can walk around until 5.30pm then they let the ticket holders in and after that call the names of stand-by people that get in. The Colbert Report studio is brighter, more colourful and closer to the action, also it is very rare that cameras block the view from the audience (which is common on The Daily Show). It might have also been my luck when I got on the most boring The Daily Show episode I can remember, ever. The best joke was a woman asking John is she could get a ticket for her friend in August. The warm-up act and crowd control at The Colbert Report was also way better: Colbert staff was hyper, security was ever-present, warm-up was funnier and very engaging (he grilled me for several minutes and I replied making the audience laugh very hard explaining that Latvia was like India of Eastern Europe in regards to IT exports) and Colbert himself was very gracious talking to us out-of-character before the show for a good 10 minutes. Location, location, location. The talk rooms and event rooms and hacklabs are spread out across multiple buildings and there is a lot of other activities going on in those buildings besides Debconf, so moving between place might be confusing for the first day or two. Also the rooms are quite dark that might cause a noise problem for me and the video team as we ll have to up the sensitivity settings on our gear. The video team is working on fixing that by throwing a bit more light on to the speakers. Elevators are wicked fast, but can also be confusing, because the ground floor is on a different number for different buildings it can be G, 1 or even 4. Usually on campus there is a star next to the level with the exit. The dorms. I am in the Carman building and it looks like its interior has not been updated since it was built large ceramic bricks with very visible gaps (for the interior walls), raise-to-open windows, huge aircon fans that take up the whole bottom of the window, plumbing from the 60ies (at least). The security is weird on one hand you have to give your room card to the guard when entering the building, but on the other hand the room cleaning crew can simply forget to close your door after they are done. Like this Thursday I returned to the dorm just before lunch only to find the door of my room open. No one was around and nothing was missing, but it s still worrying. In any case I am steadily uploading photos from Debconf 10 to my Flickr page and new stuff should show up every day.

Well, I made it to New York, along with my brother. Yesterday we walked down most of Manhatten Island - we've been staying in the youth hostel on 103rd street, and made our way on foot as far as Battery Park. Along the way, we visited McDonalds (twice) and Starbucks (was that two or three times?), both featuring free wifi and air conditioning. We went up the Rockefeller Tower as well, and got a few photos out of that. It's really quite warm here. It's shorts and sandals weather (just like last year in Spain), and I'm tired of walking in sandals. Interesting differences from the UK: the New York Times crossword is quite different from what we call crosswords. I think Monday's one is meant to be easiest, so perhaps starting with Saturday's was not a good plan. There are water fountains dotted around the city, which is awesome. This morning I went running around Central Park. Except it's tougher than it looks - I'm not sure whether it was the humidity, or the inclines, or not eating anything before setting out... I ended up walking most of the second half, and it took half an hour more than I thought it would. I ran counter(anti-)clockwise - I think it would be better to go clockwise, because there's a hill in the corner with a steep side that I'd prefer to run down rather than up.

I have been a developer with Debian since 2001 but my work has decreased steadily as my career and home life get busier. I think I'm at a point where I need to create a clean break and take a step away. But here is my problem: I am the only and founding DD on the NVIDIA packaging team. There is a DM now that works on libvdpau but despite attempts to have more DD's join, only Debian users have answered the call on a part-time or patch submitting basis. So does anybody want to take to the packaging of these babies before I mostly likely orphan them? Andres Mejia would of course keep libvdpau. Thank you for your attention.

Note: This post written March 13, and posted after our return. Yesterday was a day of travel. We said goodbye to Jacob and Oliver in the morning. We had thought a lot about how to tell Jacob what was happening and when to tell him. Ultimately, he doesn t really understand time or distance very well yet, and we know that he worries about the unknown. So although he knew about the visit to Indiana for awhile, he didn t know that Terah and I would be going somewhere until th emorning. He wasn t pleased, but seemed to take it well. We told him that we re going to a hotel in Germany and reminded him of other times we ve gone to a hotel. I also reminded him that sometimes a babysitter comes to our house while Terah and I go somewhere else, but we always come back later. That seemed to help. We got to the Indianapolis International Airport in plenty of time for our flight. They have built a completely new terminal building; the old one we were familiar with is now abandoned. The new building is beautiful, sunny, open, and even inspiring. I was impressed. Newark Liberty International, on the other hand, had all the ambiance of a Greyhound station across from the county jail. It reminded me a lot of Chicago Midway, which I used to go through regularly: dark, a bit run down (water stains on the ceilings), and nowhere near enough seating in the gate areas. We wound up standing for an hour before our flight left (late). The food court in Concourse C was something special. As we were witting there, Terah remarked on the constant stream of passengers that walked up to the food court, glanced around, and made a look of THESE are my choices? Which was our exact reaction a few minutes before. Yep, it s the first food court I ve been in where McDonald s was the upscale choice. The sit-down Mexican Cafe had hamburgers with mexi-fries as its main attractions. Terah tried out the dodgy pizza place while I tried out the even more dodgy Chinese/sushi place (I was not silly enough to try sushi there). Ultimately we decided that perhaps the point of the food court was to make us eager for airplane food. The choices in Indianapolis sure put that to shame: TGI Fridays was a real gourmet option compared to the choices in Newark. I was really a bit embarrassed; Newark is a major international airport, and many visitors to the United States will be greeted by a foul-smelling food court and a dingy airport. Yay for being welcoming? Well, really we had a good day of travel and I shouldn t be ragging on the Newark airport so much, so I ll say something positive: there s a pharmacy right behind the food court, which is probably a very convenient location to meet the needs of many diners. Anyhow, our flight left Newark about an hour late, at about 7PM Eastern. As I write this, it s about 7:30 CET (1AM Eastern) and our plane will be on the ground in about an hour. I m excited for the coming week! I got some sleep on the plane, but not a lot. I m hoping that I will have the energy for a good weekend.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas gave an exciting demonstration of new augmented reality mapping software from Microsoft that combines video (including live video) with static mapping data and pictures [1]. This is a significant advance over current mapping systems such as Google Earth but it s not released yet either. It will be interesting to see whether Google or Microsoft gets this released first. The New York Review of Books has an insightful atricle by Garry Kasparov about human/computer chess [2]. It s surprising the degree to which a combination of human and computer chess playing can give a good result. Amateur human chess players plus regular PCs can beat grandmasters with computers or high-end computers with human help. It s apparently the quality of human-computer interaction that determines the quality of play. But the article contains a lot more, I recommend reading it. Daniel Kahneman gave an interesting TED talk about the difference between experiential and memory happyness [3]. As the concept of the moment is so short (about 3 seconds) apparently most people try to optimise their actions for the best memories of being happy. But to do so requires some different strategies. For example a two week vacation gives a memory that s not much different from a one week vacation. Therefore it seems that you would be better off staying in a five star hotel for a week than a four star hotel for two weeks, and eat dinner at a Michelin Star restaurant at least once per holiday even if it means eating at McDonalds on other occasions due to lack of funds. Temple Grandin gave an interesting TED talk The World Needs all Kinds of Minds [4] which mostly focussed on teaching children who are on the Autism spectrum. She is concerned that autistic children won t end up where they belong in Silicon Valley . Anupam Mishra gave an interesting TED talk about how the people of India s Golden desert built structures to harvest and store water [5]. Some of their ideas should be copied in Australia, due to mismanagement and stupidity Australians are failing to survive in much more hospitable places. Michael Tieman wrote an insightful and well researched article about the OSI s rejection of the IIPA s attacks on Open Source [6]. This is worth reading by anyone who wants to make a business or social case for free software. Mark Shuttleworth wrote an interesting post about the new visual style for Ubuntu and Canonical [7]. Apparently this includes the creation of a new font set which will be available for free use. Divorced Before Puberty an informative New York Times article by Nicholas Kristof about the links between treatment of women and terrorism [8]. The New York Times has an interesting article on Human Flesh Searches on the Internet in China [9]. It s basically crowds targetting people to find private information and harass them (similar to what some griefers are known for doing on the English-language part of the Internet). But they seem more interested in vigilante justice than lulz. The New York Times has an informative article about the Cult of Scientology (Co$) [10]. Among other interesting news it suggests that the number of cult victims in the US has dropped from 55,000 to 25,000 in the 2001-2008 time period. Senator Xenophon has called for an inquiry into the crimes committed by the cult and a review of it s tax-exempt status [11]. As always Xenu.net is the authoritative source for information on the Cult of Scientology AKA the Church of Scientology. The New York Times has an interesting article about formally studying the skills related to school teaching [12]. It largely focuses on Doug Lemov s Taxonomy of Effective Teaching describes 49 techniques that improve school results and some other related research. The article also mentions that increasing teacher salaries is not going to help much due to the large number of teachers, it s only professions that employ small numbers of people that can potentially have their overall skills improved by increasing salaries. Andy Wingo wrote an interesting article about Julius Caesar [13] based on the book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People s History of Ancient Rome by Michael Parenti. It seems that Caesar was more of a populist than a despot. Interesting article in The Register about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) [14]. Apparently one 3.5TeV proton beam has as much energy as a British aircraft carrier running at 8 knots.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/blaise_aguera.html
• [2] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
• [5] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/anupam_mishra_the_ancient_ingenuity_of_water_harvesting.html
• [6] http://opensource.org/node/511
• [7] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/308
• [8] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/opinion/04kristof.html
• [9] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html
• [10] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/us/07scientology.html
• [11] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/18/2745765.htm
• [12] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html
• [13] http://advogato.org/person/wingo/diary/336.html
• [14] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/19/lhc_3_point_5_tev/

Last night, in two different instances I read the claim that the England s first copyright act, the statute of Anne passed in 1710 was never intended to protect authors but to protect the reproducers like printing houses and presses investing in authors implying that printing houses loved the act. After pouring through hundreds of pages of Adrian John s history of piracy, that statement is pretty off and in fact I don t think the Statute was really about printers/booksellers or authors but the public. While licensing had all together lapsed for a period before this statute was passed, and the printing houses and book sellers were indeed clamoring loudly for an official recognition of property in literary works, they wanted a perpetuall right in literary property rooted in common and natural law. Like I am talking here about forever, not like a measly, paltry 14 years. They were not exactly thrilled at this statute (in fact, they were downright pissssssssed off) for it severely limited how long they held a property right over books. In fact, so pissed were they, they challenged the statute, went to court in 1769 (Millar v Taylor) and got what they wanted: a perpetual right to literary work. It took s a fiery Scot and bookseller by the name of Alexander Donaldson (I kind of think of him as the RMS of booksellers; he was quite a rabble rouser) to challenge Millar and he finally got his day in the highest court of the land in 1774 in Donaldson v Beckett and the outcome was that a perpetual right in books was tossed out the window. The court ruled that copyright was a limited statute. One of the lords in the case even stated Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated. Adrian John s explains the significance of this case in the following way: Copyright, they decided, was not a right of man at all. Indeed, it was almost the very opposite: an artifact, and one that replaced a prior right established by an author s work of creation. . . In terms of revolution principles, liberty won out over property Again the printers booksellers (minus the pirate ones) were not happy a bunch. Unfortunately the subsequent history is one we all know well, one in which booksellers and others with vested interests in copyrights pushed to extend property rights in all sorts of ways to get to where we are today (obviously with a lot of different historical developments), a land, time, period where perpetuity may not be forever but it is long enough to nullify the very public domain envisioned by the first copyright act. However, I think it is nonetheless important to recognize how radical in many respects the first copyright act was: given what the book printers and sellers wanted (and they were a powerful bunch). For those interested in learning more about Alexander Donaldson, I would check out his Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, where he rails against the London booksellers for being monopolistic and calling for a limited property right in books.

Last night, in two different instances I read the claim that the England s first copyright act, the statute of Anne passed in 1710 was never intended to protect authors but to protect the reproducers like printing houses and presses investing in authors implying that printing houses loved the act. After pouring through hundreds of pages of Adrian John s history of piracy, that statement is pretty off and in fact I don t think the Statute was really about printers/booksellers or authors but the public. While licensing had all together lapsed for a period before this statute was passed, and the printing houses and book sellers were indeed clamoring loudly for an official recognition of property in literary works, they wanted a perpetuall right in literary property rooted in common and natural law. Like I am talking here about forever, not like a measly, paltry 14 years. They were not exactly thrilled at this statute (in fact, they were downright pissssssssed off) for it severely limited how long they held a property right over books. In fact, so pissed were they, they challenged the statute, went to court in 1769 (Millar v Taylor) and got what they wanted: a perpetual right to literary work. It took s a fiery Scot and bookseller by the name of Alexander Donaldson (I kind of think of him as the RMS of booksellers; he was quite a rabble rouser) to challenge Millar and he finally got his day in the highest court of the land in 1774 in Donaldson v Beckett and the outcome was that a perpetual right in books was tossed out the window. The court ruled that copyright was a limited statute. One of the lords in the case even stated Knowledge has no value or use for the solitary owner: to be enjoyed it must be communicated. Adrian John s explains the significance of this case in the following way: Copyright, they decided, was not a right of man at all. Indeed, it was almost the very opposite: an artifact, and one that replaced a prior right established by an author s work of creation. . . In terms of revolution principles, liberty won out over property Again the printers booksellers (minus the pirate ones) were not happy a bunch. Unfortunately the subsequent history is one we all know well, one in which booksellers and others with vested interests in copyrights pushed to extend property rights in all sorts of ways to get to where we are today (obviously with a lot of different historical developments), a land, time, period where perpetuity may not be forever but it is long enough to nullify the very public domain envisioned by the first copyright act. However, I think it is nonetheless important to recognize how radical in many respects the first copyright act was: given what the book printers and sellers wanted (and they were a powerful bunch). For those interested in learning more about Alexander Donaldson, I would check out his Some Thoughts on the State of Literary Property, where he rails against the London booksellers for being monopolistic and calling for a limited property right in books.

Review: Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel

Publisher:	Apress
Copyright:	2009
ISBN:	1-4302-1948-3
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	601

Coders at Work is a collection of edited interviews by Peter Seibel (probably best known previously for his book Practical Common Lisp) of an eclectic and excellent collection of fifteen programmers. It opens with an interview with Jamie Zawinski (one of the original Netscape developers) and closes with Donald Knuth. In between, the interview subjects range in programmer generations from Fran Allen (who started at IBM in 1957) and Bernie Cosell (one of the original ARPANET developers) to Brad Fitzpatrick (LiveJournal founder and original developer). Techniques and preferences also range widely, including two people involved in JavaScript development and standardization (Brendan Eich and Douglas Crockford), a functional programming language designer and developer (Simon Peyton Jones), language designers and standardizers such as Guy Steele, and people like Dan Ingalls who have a different experimental approach to programming than the normal application development focus. All of the interviewees are asked roughly the same basic questions, but each discussion goes in different directions. Seibel does an excellent job letting the interview subjects shape the discussion. Two things immediately stood out for me about this book. First, it's huge, and that's not padding. There are just over 600 pages of content here, much of it fascinating. The discussions Seibel has are broad-ranging, covering topics from the best way to learn programming to history and anecdotes of the field. There's some discussion of technique, but primarily at the level of basic approaches and mindset. One typical question is how each programmer organizes their approach to reading code that isn't familiar with them. Each interviewee is also asked for book recommendations, for their debugging techniques, for their opinions on proving code correct, and how they design code. The participants are so different in their backgrounds and approaches that these conversations go in fifteen different directions. This is one of the most compelling and engrossing non-fiction books I've read. Second, the selection of interview subjects, while full of well-known names in the field, is not the usual suspects. While I'm interested in the opinions of people like Larry Wall and Guido van Rossum, I've already heard quite a lot about how they think about programming. That's material that Coders at Work doesn't need to cover, and it doesn't. Many of the interview subjects here are people I'd heard of only vaguely or not at all prior to this book, often because they work in an area of programming that I'm not yet personally familiar with. Those who I had heard of, such as L. Peter Deutsch, I often knew in only one context (Ghostscript in that case) and was unfamiliar with the rest of their work. This gives the book a great exploratory feel and a lot of originality. There is so much good material here that it's hard to give a capsule review. This is a book I'm highly likely to re-read, taking more detailed notes. There's entertaining snarking from Jamie Zawinski and Brendan Eich, fascinating history of the field (including in gender balance) from Fran Allen, and an intriguing interview with Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang), who seems to have a far different attitude towards languages and libraries than the other interviewees. Every interview is full of gems, bits of insight that I now want to research or play with. A couple of examples come to mind, just to provide a feel of the sort of insights I took out of the book. In the interview with Joshua Bloch, who does a lot of work on library APIs, he mentions that empathy is one of the most important skills for designing an API. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of the programmer who's going to use the API and understand how it will feel to them. This came up in the context of a discussion about different types of programmers, and how programmers can be good at different things; the one who can do low-level deep optimization may not have that sense of empathy. Another example: Bernie Cosell talked about how he did debugging, and how he got a reputation for being a fantastic debugger who was able to fix just about anything. He confessed that he often reached a portion of the code that he didn't understand, that seemed too complex and tricky for what it was attempting to accomplish, and rather than trace through it and try to understand it, he just rewrote it. And after rewriting, the bug was often gone. It wasn't really debugging, but at the same time it's close to the more recent concept of refactoring. Several of the interview subjects commented on a subjective feeling of complexity and how when it gets too high that's a warning sign that code may need to be rethought and rewritten. A third example: I was fascinated by the number of interviewees who said that they used printf, assert, and eyeballs to debug rather than using any more advanced debugging tools. The former Lisp developers would often bemoan the primitiveness of tools like gdb, but many of them found that print statements and thinking hard about the code were usually all that's needed. (There was also a lot of discussion about test suites and test-driven development.) The general consensus was that concurrency problems were the hardest to debug; they made up a disproportional number of the responses to Seibel's question about the hardest bug the programmer ever had to track down. I could go on giving similar examples at great length, but apart from the specific bits of wisdom, the strongest impact this book made on me was emotional. Coders at Work is full of people who love programming and love software, and that enthusiasm, both in general and for specific tools and ideas, comes through very clearly. I found it inspiring. I realized while reading this book, and I suspect I'm not alone among programmers in this, that I largely stopped learning how to program a few years back and have been reusing skills that I already have. Reading Coders at Work gave me a strong push towards finding ways to start learning, experimenting, and trying new techniques again. It also filled me with enthusiasm for the process of programming, which immediately helped my productivity on my own coding projects. This is obviously a book whose primary target audience is practicing programmers, and while it doesn't go too far into language theory, I was relying on remembered terms and structure from my master's degree for a few of the interviews. I think it's approachable for anyone who has a working background in programming and a few languages or a CS degree, but it might be a stretch for someone new to the field. But even someone without any programming knowledge at all would get a lot out of the anecdotes and snapshots of the history of software development. Coders at Work is also full of jumping-off points for some additional research on Google or additional reading in other recommended books. I only have one complaint, which I have to mention in passing: for such a large book full of interesting ideas and book recommendations, the index is wholly inadequate. I tried looking up five or six things in it, including the source of some of the book recommendations that are collected in an appendix, and I struck out every time. It's very hard to find something again in 600 pages, and more attention paid to the index would have been greatly appreciated. But, despite that, for people within the target audience, I cannot recommend this book too highly. Not only was it full of useful information, at the level of programming above the code details that's often the hardest to talk about, but it's consistently entertaining and emotionally invigorating and inspiring. It made the rounds of tech blogs when it was first released, to nearly universal approval, and I can only echo that. If you're a practicing programmer, I don't think you'll regret spending a few weeks reading and thinking about this book. Rating: 10 out of 10