Starting with cupt 0.5.2, I'm able to use debdelta for upgrading my packages. Usually it saves 30-50% of traffic costs for me, which is already good.

Several days ago I felt service was in outage because no new deltas were available, but today it saved 96% of traffic! I guess the reason is change of default delta algorithm on Andrea's site with deltas, but hey, whatever, 1MiB instead of 27MiB! Debdelta rocks.

So, 20 days passed after the first announcement, and here is the list of changes since then:

Cupt entered Debian unstable. Please report any bugs and suggestions to Debian BTS. Also, you may use #cupt channel on irc.debian.org if you want to discuss something.

New features implemented include:
- resolver reasons tracking (-D, --show-reasons)
- new 'changelog' subcommand
- new 'copyright' subcommand
- 'policy' subcommand called without arguments now prints release data available, like 'apt-cache policy'
- '--no-remove' option
- '--no-auto-remove' option
- support of 'dpkg::pre-invoke', 'dpkg::post-invoke' APT options

And, of course, many bugs fixes.

Cupt is experimental re-implementation of APT suite from scratch using Perl .
It consists of Perl modules and console front-end to them.

Why?

- to finally avoid some bugs in APT design;
- to introduce some useful features;
- to make an extensible and readable codebase;


What infrastructure does Cupt use?

It uses the same APT infrastructure, e.g. index files, deb cache archive
files, configuration files. It understands some of widely used APT options.


What useful features has Cupt already?

- full-case strict dependency problem resolver;
- command-line and APT-like option name checker;
- case-sensitive search;
- pinning by source package name;
- pinning by package groups using shell-like patterns;
- configurable 'depends' and 'rdepends' subcommands;
- 'satisfy' subcommand.

What features will Cupt have in future?

See incomplete roadmap.


Why is it 'experimental'?

Because not all important functionality is implemented yet:
- 'update' action;
- cooperating with debconf;
- working with source packages;
- translated package descriptions;


Why Perl?

- I like Perl
- code conciseness
- code extensibility
- several useful libraries available


Can I use Cupt along with APT?

Yes, you can mix apt-get/apt-cache/aptitude/etc. with cupt without bad consequences.


Can I build a Debian package for Cupt?

Yes, go to repository, checkout it and build the Debian package as usual.


What's the status of Cupt in Debian?

It's currently in the NEW queue, but don't rush to try root-required actions because it's still experimental.


Who am I?

The man who had been contributing to the APT.

Next semester I am teaching a new undergraduate course tentatively titled Technology, Society, and Media: The Body under Transition, in Movement, and under (Massive) Transformation(s). As designed, the course should address technology and media in fairly broad stokes (which I do) but I narrow and control what is a truly unwieldy subject by framing the issues/readings in relation to the human body. Generally speaking, we will interrogate the ways in which technology engenders or erases bodily/human possibilities/capacities and especially the ethical and political ramifications that precipitate from the use/abuse of technology. We traverse a wide range of topics from the telegraph (and how it was used to speak with the dead) to the role of human enhancement technologies of today, to questions of surveillance and privacy, among many other topics. I am pretty far along with the syllabus and pretty happy with it. So far I think I have struck a nice balance between fun/light/accessible readings and some which are bit more theoretically dense. I am still looking for one or two pieces, perhaps one on tattoos and body modification and another about karaoke. If anyone knows any great articles on these topics, do pass along the information. I am probably most excited about the cluster of issues that address eugenics (and most students know next to nothing about America s central role in unleashing the Eugenics movement), disability rights activism, human enhancement technologies, and transhumanism. Considering human enhancement in light of previous efforts to enhance our population brings into relief the similar and distinct ethical issues that haunt this field. One of the most hot button issues of today concern the use of human enhancing drugs. The prestigious journal Nature has just published an editorial on the topic of cognitive enhancement drugs,Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy, which is a fairly interesting read and covers some of the main controversies. For me, however, the interesting issue is not only whether human enhancement is right or wrong though this is certainly important but what our embrace of these drugs tell us about the conditions under which our bodies live and labor. That is, I think we are actually missing out on posing some other important questions simply by framing this int terms of human enhancement. I suspect, and this is where ethnography would really help out, that many people turning to enhancement drugs may not be medically sick, in the technical sense but I don t think they are healthy either. Many who turn to these drugs feel pretty worn, pretty exhausted, pretty frazzled (the perfect word, I think, is agotado, Spanish for exhausted) and use these drugs as crutches, as band-aids, as an elixir to help out one preserver in tough work circumstances. I am sure there are folks who take these drugs feel fine and are just trying to push their limits and capacities but I troll many many many patient support sites and it also seems to me that many people live under a state of low-grade chronic state of unwellness. Given the pace of society, given what and how we eat, given the extraordinary rates of depression in our society ,given the fact that babies are born with 200 + chemicals in their bodies (what a way to start out life) I am skeptical that enhancement really captures what is going on with these drugs. I have not yet come up with the right term, but I am trying to come up with a phrase that would reflect the ways in which these drugs are not used as therapies for a discrete condition (Type 1 diabetes) but how they are a collective response to a state of low grade chronic unwellness that seems to mark the lives of a whole lot of people. This, I think, would be one responsible approach to human enhancement technologies that would contextualize their use within a much broader frame, one that is attuned to how bodies have been made, remade, and limited under actual material conditions of labor and life in the 21st century.

So in my first year Human Culture and Communication class we will soon be having a class on disability and communication. I wanted to show a video on eugenics to provide some historical context but I just found out that all decent videos (or ones that I have seen and thought were decent) have been pulled down.
The one I am looking for in particular is a 10 minute video by Liam Dunaway. I find it beyond despicably pathetic that an educational video, under 10 minutes long, is not available for people to watch. For x’s sake, if one cannot easily circulate this type of video, whose whole purpose is to educate, why even bother make it? These are times when I find copyright completely totally, fully, and also absolutely ludicrous. If you are going to make a 10 minute video on a political/educational subject like Eugenics, and you don’t consider freeing it up, then there is something really contradictory driving your creative desires. update: I wrote the filmmaker and got the word that someone had uploaded the video on their account and inappropriately connected himself to the video and so the film maker has uploaded the same video here

Since I blogged about it, a few things happened around APT maintenance. First of all, it seems that more people got interested in the package. Many even *discovered* that one of our key packages was not that actively maintained. Not everything is really settled, far from that. There is no strong team yet...but some hype happened. A wiki page has been setup (I'm offline right now...just search on wiki.debian.org). Eugene V. Lyubimkin started bug triaging activities and will need help and encouragement (or cookies). Michael Vogt gave some indications about how to contribute to APT. Things happened. And I don't even know if that done by Debian Developers, Debian ontributors or Debian Maintainers. Things just happen and that's good. This is going to help us release lenny, while the two giant threads currently running on -project and -devel will not.

Sure, Martin, you started a meme (by the way, I roughly guessed you naming scheme which is a nice one). I wish I would have named my machines this way: patrick, bob, sandy, eugene, plankton, carlo, gary, puff, pearl, etc. (easy to guess for people who went to Debconf's day trips). Indeed, I haven't because I named the first ones too long time ago. So they're named kheops, khephren, mykerinos, snefrou, saqqarah, merenptah, amenophis, sethi, djedefre. Easy to guess. PS: 'carlo' is only for French-speaking users. For en_*, thata would be squidward.

Init Seven, my favourite Swiss ISP, has offered to collocate one of my machines in their racks with native IPv6-connectivity. I am now searching for a name for this new host. A recent discussion has made me curious about how many people can deduce my host naming theme from the set of names of currently operational machines under the madduck.net domain:

albatross, bell, brick, cigar, cirrus, clegg, diamond, echo, embryo, eugene, fishbowl, gerald, gnome, lapse, lust, mother, pict, pig, piper, pulse, seamus, sheep, time, vera, wall.

If you know what ties this list together, please help me christen the new machine! Update: the responses have been overwhelming, 183 people have written in so far, and 149 of them knew what s going on (though some admitted to cheating with a search engine). Thanks to everyone! In addition to the common theme, which most guessed correctly, I have a few other restrictions, mainly that the words have to be singular names or nouns, and that they have to feel right . Here are the suggestions I ve received which passed my filters, in decreasing order of frequency:

emily, lucifer, fletcher, lunatic, arnold, flesh, gig, bike, moon, brain, hand, balloon, hope, alan, marmelade, wing, heart, summer, thunder, sam, tropez, sky, stethoscope, khyber, lotus, jugband, cymbaline, remergence, dawn, hell, desert, worm, eclipse, dog, sysyphus, julia, scarecrow, sun, overdrive, vizier, matilda, eiderdown, babe, pillow, funkydung, atom, fore, shout, breast, domine, swan, charade, grantchester, money.

Curiously, I forgot about worm and wing, which are in use, so those are out. Some of them are not candidates because I d mistype them all the time ( stethoscope , cymbaline , sysyphus , remergence , scarecrow , eiderdown , marmelade , grantchester ). Some just don t seem right ( tropez , shout , overdrive , flesh , breast , sky , jugband , eclipse , lucifer , money ) Some are not appropriate as hostname for computers ( brain , heart , damage , hell , lunatic , babe ). Those who suggested machine were referred to my SMTP servers greeting banner. I have to scratch fletcher and desert because of their source. I have to do the same to thunder , unfortunately. And I ought to retire pulse , although not really. Noone suggested grimble and crumble . As there are so many, and so many more, I am changing my rule to significant, enigmatic, and memorable singular nouns and names , which brings us down to:

arnold, gig, bike, moon, alan, khyber, lotus, julia, sun, vizier, matilda, atom, domine, swan, charade, grimble, crumble.

Given that list, I think I will be launching gig, khyber, lotus, charade, vizier, domine, and/or swan in the near future. Or if it s a pair, it ll be grimble and crumble. Thanks all, this was fun. PS: you may use the same naming scheme for your hosts, but you take full responsibility in case you and I ever have to fuse networks in any way. NP: Riverside: Out of Myself

I managed to get my hands on a HP Media Vault mv2120, a nice ARM based NAS device, a few months ago with the intentions of porting Debian to it. Unfortunately, I have been really busy lately and most of my time was spent on adding support for the QNAP TS-109/TS-209 and TS-409 (which required a lot of generic work to get Marvell Orion support into Debian, a new SoC used in many NAS devices, including the QNAP TS-x09 and HP mv2120). There were a number of things that had to be worked out before Debian would run on the mv2120. The good news is that Marc Singer and Eugene San have done all of the heavy lifting in the last few weeks in figuring out how the mv2120 works and that now it's just a matter of putting everything together for Debian to work. Here are the issues that had to be worked out:

• Figure out how the rescue mode works and how to construct a rescue image that the device can boot: I knew that the mv2120 had a rescue mode that can be activated by keeping the the power and reset buttons pressed when starting that would request a rescue image via the network. This rescue mode can be used to start the Debian installer. Eugene San figured out how to construct a rescue image that the mv2120 would accept. Marc Singer has also written a tool, uphpmvault, to serve such rescue images from Linux.
• Figure out the best way to make one image that contains the kernel and ramdisk: the mv2120 only loads a kernel and no ramdisk, but a ramdisk is needed to start Debian. I discussed some really ugly hacks with Marc Singer to get the mv2120 to accept an image consisting of kernel and ramdisk but Marc wanted to try something else first. u-boot, the boot loader used on the mv2120, can accept something called a multipart image which can consist of a kernel and a ramdisk. When Eugene San heard that we were trying to load a multipart image, he went ahead and figured out how to construct an image that the mv2120 would boot.

Now that these two issues are resolved, I simply need to put everything together and add support for the mv2120 to a number of debian-installer components. We already have Orion kernel images in unstable that support the HP mv2120 (along with a number of other Orion based NAS devices) and the rest shouldn't take too long.

One of the most interesting debates concerning new technologies is whether human enchantment technologies have any reseamblance to the older practice of eugenics. One of my favorite articles on this subject is by The Case against Perfection, which simply stunned my students (and they are pretty hard to stun). Recently, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a couple of articles on the topic, and I wrote a response to one of them, (which as you will see, irked me some) here. While I agree with the author that medical genetics is not eugenics, it is still worth our while thinking through today’s genetic and reproductive technologies through the eyes of historical instance of eugenics.

I am affiliated with a project whose origin is the northern parts of Canada, although whose members span the globe called What Sort of People Should There Be?. The idea behind this nifty and catchy title is to get a bunch of researchers in various fields, from disability studies to philosophy and everything that comes in between to start asking a series of questions about the role of human enhancement today and eugenics in the past, all within the context of thinking about the experience and politics of disability. I am super excited about the project because it spans the past and present to confront what it means to be human, how we value variation, how we seek to support or erase difference, and lastly something close to my academic heart, the role of technology in facilitating and dampening the politics of possibility and hope when it comes to disability. The project has recently launched an multi-author blog and I will be posting there from time to time. If you are interested in this topic, do come by for a visit. I am sure you won’t be disappointed. My most recent post is here and it covers an interesting article in the New York Times on Mad Pride, which oddly enough is in the Fashion & Style section.

Around the end of 2006 I come up with the idea of setting up something I called font-machine: a collection of scripts / utilities, intended to improve quality of fonts by defining and implementing automatic tests able to catch errors and provide screenshots. Some pioneering work on this area was done a while ago by Miriam who set up a page showing how fonts currently in Debian look like. I did something similar focusing on the fonts used by the Debian graphical installer (will write a separate post to describe the way it works). I'll start describing the tools which I've used more frequently; of course my preference goes to the ones which can be run non-interactively: those that can be invoked inside shell scrips and keep your CPU busy! fntsample is probably one of the programs I've used more frequently during the last months: it was written by Eugeniy Meshcheryakov, who also made it available as a Debian package, and creates really nice and professional PDF / PS charts showing all the glyphs contained in a particular font file. The following code snippet shows how you can use fntsample to create pdf charts for each of the ttf files contained in ttf-dejavu package (will often refer to this package since I maintain it :-) ):

font="http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-dejavu/ttf-dejavu-core_2.23-1_all.deb"
deb=$(basename $ font )
wget $font
dpkg -x $ deb  $ deb/.deb/ 

outdir="out"
mkdir $outdir
for ttf in $(find $ deb/.deb/  -name '*.ttf') ; do
pdf="$(basename $ ttf    sed -e "s \.ttf$ \.pdf ")"
fntsample -f $ ttf  -o $ outdir /$ pdf  -l > $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline 
pdfoutline $ outdir /$ pdf  $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline  $ outdir /$ pdf 
done

Note that PDF files will have useful outlines (aka bookmarks) courtesy of the pdfoutline tool shipped with the fntsample package. Results are IMHO very imperessive! PS: looking at the above chart for Cyrillic, I've just noticed the glyphs are ordered as to read "SEX"... I did not choose that particular chart snippet on purpose!

First time I had read the Bible
It had stroke me as unwitty
I think it may started rumor
That the Lord ain't got no humor Put me inside SSC
Let's test superstring theory
Oh yoi yoi accelerate the protons
stir it twice and then just add me, 'cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling From the maelstrom of the knowledge
Into the labyrinth of doubt
Frozed underground ocean
melting - nuking on my mind Yes give me Everything Theory
Without Nazi uniformity
My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice, it's instant family! I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling My brothers are protons
My sisters are neurons
Stir it twice dlja prekrastnih dam... Do you have sex maniacs
Or schizophrenics
Or astrophysicists in your family
Was my grandma anti anti
Was my grandpa bounty bounty
Hek-o-hek-o-hej-o
They ask me in embassy! 'Cause I don't read the Bible
I don't trust disciple
Even if they're made of marble
Or Canal Street bling And my grandma she was anti!
And my grandpa he was bounty!
And stir it twice
And then just add me!
Partypartypartypartypartyparty
now afterparty...

That's the Supertheory of Supereverything, by the gypsy-punk Gogol Bordello. I was really surprised to find their Super Taranta! at a local music shop. Of course, five minutes later, we were heading home with our shiny and oh-so-very-green purchase. Highly recommendable!BTW, does anybody else think that Eugene Hutz is Larry Wall's evil twin? (No, and I don't only mean it because of their choices in background colors)

For those who want to see NYC streets turned into more humane, hospitable and especially bike-friendly places, this blog is for you. I love NYC because of its active street life but there is certainly almost endless room for massive improvement and these folks are pushing just for that. And for those involved in disability rights activism, Stop Eugenics looks like a good (and important) new blog.

One of my dissertation thesis advisors, Christopher Kelty, is teaching a superb looking course at Harvard this fall on networks. The only thing I would add to that syllabus right now is a book by a department colleague, Alexander Galloway, who just published a book with Eugene Thacker The Exploit. And while I have not read more than a chapter, what I like about it is its experimental style. They open this book with the following orientation:

It is our intention in this book to avoid the limits of academic writing in favor of a more experimental, speculative approach. To that end, we adopt a two-tier format. Throughout Part I, “Nodes,” you will find a number of condensed, italicized header that are glued together with more standard prose. For quick immersion, we suggest skikking Part I by reading the italicized sections only…. In this sense, we hope you will experience the book not as the step-by-step propositional evolution of a complete theory but as a series of marginal claims, disconnected in a living environment of many thoughts, distributed across as many pages.

The good thing is while the form is experimental, at the sentence level, things are quite clear. I have often had the experience of reading experimental work whose content was the experiment but not the form, and basically I did not understand a thing. In this case, it is the form that achieves their desire to explore and present their marginal claims. Annemarie Mol in The Body Multiple also uses a two-tiered experimental approach that is just fantastic, especially since her writing is especially accessible.

Growing up in Eugene, Oregon, which like Berkeley or Boulder could have the label "People's Republic of" applied to it, I always thought of "business friendly", as something along the lines of helping huge corporations avoid laws against pollution, or other antisocial behavior. Only after moving to Europe did I begin to get an idea of what the very positive side of "business friendly" is in the US. Truth be told, all countries tend to protect their 'big players' to some degree, be it the US propping up creaking airlines after September 11th, Italy finding various clever ways to get around rules about funding Fiat and Alitalia, or France finding it in their 'national interests' to discourage a potential bid for Danone (yogurt!) by PepsiCo. Some are better or worse (the UK has been pretty good about not interfering), but there is a tendency to want to intervene. Leaving be the discussion over whether those sorts of policies are good, bad, or ugly, the biggest difference between continental Europe and the US is the ease with which new companies - 'startups' can be created and enter a market. As a first hand example, I decided this summer to create DedaSys as a real company in order to better separate my business and personal financial dealings. Were I to do that in Italy or Austria, we would be talking about fees upwards of 3000 Euros (about 4000 dollars at market rates), which is a great deal of money for something that is not making a lot of it at this point in time. Contrast this with what it took to create a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Oregon, my home state. To have things done up professionally, it's certainly possible to lay down a bit of cash there too, but by trading my time for money, and with the assistance of some nolo.com books about the creation and maintenance of an LLC, I was able to register DedaSys with the state of Oregon for the grand total of 55 dollars, and was actually able to complete the process remotely from Austria prior to going home on vacation, where I did the only thing I needed to do in person: open a bank account. So it costs 1% of what it costs in Italy or Austria to open a company that provides limited liability... a very impressive difference, especially to a small, new company that does not have the connections a Ford or a Fiat will likely have to enable it to deal with all the other paperwork, rules, and regulations to deal with. Add to that a culture of greater risk taking (meaning also more acceptance of failure), better funding opportunities, and... one comes to the conclusion that Paul Graham is right. It's a pity, because the people in Europe are top notch. In Italy alone, I know a bunch of really bright hackers. Granted, some of them aren't interested, and are probably better off not starting a company or otherwise dealing with the business side of the equation, but it's always nice to have that opportunity. In closing, here is another example of bureaucracy in action, from my personal on line journal about life in Italy, and now Austria, which I recently revamped by moving it to the Typo platform: Confronting the bureaucratic beast - registering an Italian domain Two months to accomplish what can be done in ten minutes with a .com!

So, I forgot to mention that I had a great evening last Thursday. In the afternoon, Niko and I met with Marie-Claude Doyon to talk about a new project we're working on. I think it's going to be pretty fun. That evening, I met up with Eugene Eric Kim and Seb Paquet at La ka, which was really great. I brought Niko along because we were having fun and thought it would be good to take a walk along av. Mont-Royal. It was great hanging out with EEK and Seb. There's something about talking to people who are as deep into wiki as I am that's really satisfying. It happens too seldom in my life -- just around conferences, really. Eugene got a shot of the four of us together. tags: laika eugeneerickim sebpaquet niko

Gymnophobia i.never.nu sounds a lot like "I'm never nude". I'm just saying. tags: never-nude i.never.nu

Ilenia and I are looking for tickets to go "home" (Eugene, Oregon) this summer. We've had pretty good luck with Lufthansa in the past (as opposed to Air France, which lost a huge bag of my stuff), so we turned to them first to look for flights. I like the page they have for prices/dates, which gives you a nice way to look around for a better price without stabbing randomly at dates: Big long Lufthansa URL However, the maddening thing is that the prices change frequently. Not every day, but often after even 5 minutes! They bounce around up to 100 euro at a time. I understand the theory behind price descrimination, but this is the classic case where the customer ends up feeling like they're being made fun of and goes elsewhere. United, in our case, which offers a cheaper price for the same plane (they're Lufthansa's partner and thus share flights).

Eugenics is considered to be a technology and social practice of the past, swept away in our closest of all things ugly and bad. But the past is, in fact, quite recent, especially in the Alberta region in so far as forced sterilization was only outlawed in 1972–yes 1972. If your physical body is here in Edmonton and are interested in the ways in which science and technology can has been placed on a truly “mad path” in the name of progress and how we are in danger of repeating the past via new genetic technologies, do check out this conference Eugenics and Sterilization in Alberta
35 Years Later . Free and open to the public, it kicks off tonight and continues all day tomorrow. The line-up of speakers is great and most important is that it includes talks by some of those who were caught by the very unfortunate web of eugenic laws.

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:

• Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
• Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
• Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  
• Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
• Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  
• Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
• Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
• Ru e Zeno, for comments and suggestions
• Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
• Nicolas Fran ois (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
• Javier Fern ndez-Sanguino Pe a, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  
• anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
• silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing

Updates:

• David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work