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A few months ago I was showing my friend Bruno Souza the work I had been doing with my childhood friend and robotics genius, David Hanson. I had been watching what David was going through in his process of creating life-like robots with the limited industrial software available for motor control. I had suggested to David that binding motors to Blender control structures was a genuinely viable possibility. David talked with his forward looking CEO, Jong Lee, and they were gracious enough to invite me to Hong Kong to make this exciting idea a reality. Working closely the HRI team (Vytas, Gabrielos, Fabien and Davide) with David s friend and collaborators at OpenCog (Ben Goertzel, Mandeep, David, Jamie, Alex and Samuel) a month long creative hack-fest yielded pretty amazing results. Bruno is an avid puppeteer, a global organizer of java user groups and creator of Juggy the Java Finch, mascot of Java users and user groups everywhere. We started talking about how cool it would be to have a robot version of Juggy. When I was in China I had spent a little time playing with Mark Tilden s RSMedia and various versions of David s hobby servo based emotive heads. Bruno and I did a little research into the ROS Java bindings for the Robot Operating System and decided that if we could make that part of the picture we had a great and fun idea for a JavaOne talk. Hunting and gathering I tracked down a fairly priced RSMedia in Alaska, Bruno put a pair of rubber Juggy puppet heads in the mail and we were on our way.
We had decided that we wanted RoboJuggy to be able to run about untethered and the new RaspberryPi B+ seemed like the perfect low power brain to make that happen. I like the Debian based Raspbian distributions but had lately started using the netinst Pi images. These get your Pi up and running in about 15 minutes with a nicely minimalistic install instead of a pile of dependencies you probably don t need. I d recommend anyone interested I m duplicating our work to stay their journey there: Raspbian UA Net Installer Robots seem like an embedded application but ROS only ships packages for Ubuntu. I was pleasantly surprised that there are very good instructions for building ROS from source on the Pi. I ended up following these instructions: Setting up ROS Hydro on the Raspberry Pi Building from source means that all your install ends up being isolated (in ROS speak) and your file locations and build instructions end up being subtly current. As explained in the linked article, this process is also very time consuming. One thing I would recommend once you get past this step is to use the UNIX dd command to back up your entire SD card to a desktop. This way if you make a mess of things in later steps you can restore your install to a pristine Raspbian+ROS install. If your SD drive was on /dev/sdb you might use something like this to do the job:

sudo dd bs=4M if=/dev/sdb   gzip > /home/your_username/image date +%d%m%y .gz

Getting Java in the mix Once you have your Pi all set up with minimal Raspbian and ROS you are going to want a Java VM. The Pi runs the ARM CPU so you need the corresponding version of Java. I tried getting things going initially with OpenJDK and I had some issues with that. I will work on resolving that in the future because I would like to have a 100% Free Software kit for this but since this was for JavaOne I also wanted JDK8, which isn t available in Debian yet. So, I downloaded the Oracle JDK8 package for ARM. Java 8 JDK for ARM At this point you are ready to start installing the ROS Java packages. I m pretty sure the way I did this initially is wrong but I was trying to reconcile the two install procedures for ROS Java and ROS Hydro for Raspberry Pi. I started by following these directions for ROS Java but with a few exceptions (you have to click the install from source link in the page to see the right stuff: Installing ROS Java on Hydro Now these instructions are good but this is a Pi running Debian and not an Ubuntu install. You won t run the apt-get package commands because those tools were already installed in your earlier steps. Also, this creates its own workspace and we really want these packages all in one workspace. You can apparently chain workspaces in ROS but I didn t understand this well enough to get it working so what I did was this:

> mkdir -p ~/rosjava 
> wstool init -j4 ~/rosjava/src https://raw.github.com/rosjava/rosjava/hydro/rosjava.rosinstall
> source ~/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/setup.bash > cd ~/rosjava # Make sure we've got all rosdeps and msg packages.
> rosdep update 
> rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y

and then copied the sources installed into ~/rosjava/src into my main ~/ros_catkin_ws/src. Once those were copied over I was able to run a standard build.

> catkin_make_isolated --install

Like the main ROS install this process will take a little while. The Java gradle builds take an especially long time. One thing I would recommend to speed up your workflow is to have an x86 Debian install (native desktop, QEMU instance, docker, whatever) and do these same build from source installs there. This will let you try your steps out on a much faster system before you try them out in the Pi. That can be a big time saver. Putting together the pieces Around this time my RSMedia had finally showed up from Alaska. At first I thought I had a broken unit because it would power up, complain about not passing system tests and then shut back down. It turns out that if you just put the D batteries in and miss the four AAs that it will kind of pretend to be working so watch for that mistake. Here is a picture of the RSMedia when it first came out of the box:

Other parts were starting to roll in as well. The rubber puppet heads had made their way through Brazilian customs and my Pololu Mini Maestro 24 had also shown up as well as the my servo motors and pan and tilt camera rig. I had previously bought a set of 10 motors for goofing around so I bought the pan and tilt rig by itself for about $5(!) but you can buy a complete set for around $25 from a number of EBay stores. Complete pan and tilt rig with motors for $25 A bit more about the Pololu. This astonishing little motor controller costs about $25 and gives you control of 24 motors with an easy to use and high level serial API. It is probably also possible to control these servos directly from the Pi and eliminate this board but that will be genuinely difficult because of the real-time timing issues. For $25 this thing is a real gem and you won t regret buying it. Now it was time to start dissecting the RSMedia and getting control of its brain. Unfortunately a lot of great information about the RSMedia has floated away since it was in its heyday 5 years ago but there is still some solid information out there that we need to round up and preserve. A great resource is the SourceForge based website here at http://rsmediadevkit.sourceforge.net. That site has links to a number of useful sites. You will definitely want to check out their wiki. To disassemble the RSMedia I followed their instructions. I will say, it would be smart to take more pictures as you are going because they don t take as many as they should. I took pictures of each board and its associated connections as dismantled the unit and that helped me get things back together later. Another important note is that if all you want to do is solder onto the control board and not replace the head then its feasible to solder the board in place without completely disassembling the unit. Here are some photos of the dis-assembly:

Now I also had to start adjusting the puppet head, building an armature for the motors to control it and hooking it into the robot. I need to take some more photos of the actual armature. I like to use cardboard for this kind of stuff because it is so fast to work with and relatively strong. One trick I have also learned about cardboard is that if you get something going with it and you need it to be a little more production strength you can paint it down with fiberglass resin from your local auto store. Once it dries it becomes incredibly tough because it soaks through the fibers of the cardboard and hardens around them. You will want to do this in a well ventilated area but its a great way to build super tough prototypes. Another prototyping trick I can suggest is using a combination of Velcro and zipties to hook things together. The result is surprisingly strong and still easy to take apart if things aren t working out. Velcro self-adhesive pads stick to rubber like magic and that is actually how I hooked the jaw servo onto the mask. You can see me torturing its first initial connection here: Since the puppet head had come all the way from Brazil I decided to cook some chicken hearts in the churrascaria style while I worked on them in the garage. This may sound gross but I m telling you, you need to try it! I soaked mine in soy sauce, Sriracha and chinese cooking wine. Delicious but I digress.

As I was eating my chicken hearts I was also connecting the pan and tilt armature onto the puppet s jaw and eye assembly. It took me most of the evening to get all this going but by about one in the morning things were starting to look good! I only had a few days left to hack things together before JavaOne and things were starting to get tight. I had so much to do and had also started to run into some nasty surprises with the ROS Java control software. It turns out that ROS Java is less than friendly with ROS message structures that are not built in . I had tried to follow the provided instructions but was not (and still have not) been able to get that working. Using unofficial messages with ROS Java I still needed to get control of the RSMedia. Doing that required the delicate operation of soldering to its control board. On the board there are a set of pins that provide a serial interface to the ARM based embedded Linux computer that controls the robot. To do that I followed these excellent instructions: Connecting to the RSMedia Linux Console Port After some sweaty time bent over a magnifying glass I had success:

I had previously purchased the USB-TTL232 accessory described in the article from Dallas awesome Tanner Electronics store in Dallas. If you are a geek I would recommend that you go there and say hi to its proprietor (and walking encyclopedia of electronics knowledge) Jim Tanner. It was very gratifying when I started a copy of minicom, set it to 115200, N, 8, 1, plugged in the serial widget to the RSMedia and booted it up. I was greeted with a clearly recognizable Linux startup and console prompt. At first I thought I had done something wrong because I couldn t get it to respond to commands but I quickly realized I had flow control turned on. Once turned off I was able to navigate around the file system, execute commands and have some fun. A little research and I found this useful resource which let me get all kinds of body movements going: A collection of useful commands for the RSMedia At this point, I had a usable set of controls for the body as well as the neck armature. I had a controller running the industry s latest and greatest robotics framework that could run on the RSMedia without being tethered to power and I had most of a connection to Java going. Now I just had to get all those pieces working together. The only problem is that time was running out and I only had a couple of days until my talk and still had to pack and square things away at work. The last day was spent doing things that I wouldn t be able to do on the road. My brother Erik (and fantastic artist) came over to help paint up the juggy head and fix the eyeball armature. He used a mix of oil paint, rubber cement which stuck to the mask beautifully. I bought battery packs for the USB Pi power and the 6v motor control and integrated them into a box that could sit below the neck armature. I fixed up a cloth neck sleeve that could cover everything. Luckily during all this my beautiful and ever so supportive girlfriend Becca had helped me get packed or I probably wouldn t have made it out the door. Welcome to San Francisco THIS ARTICLE IS STILL BEING WRITTEN

I've mentored a number of students in 2013 and 2014 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2014 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected in 2015. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreach Program for Women or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2015 or any future year. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google.

Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all open source projects meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back.

Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you.

This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian France mini-DebConf in Lyon, 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos.

Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions:

If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:

System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator

Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following:

Planet / Blog aggregation sites: these sites all have links to the blogs of many developers. They are useful sources of information about events and also finding out who works on what.
Developer profile pages. Many projects publish a page about each developer and the packages, modules or other components he/she is responsible for. Look through these lists for areas of mutual interest.
- my package list in Debian
- my package list in Fedora
Developer github profiles. Github makes it easy to see what projects a developer has contributed to. To see many of my own projects, browse through the history at my own Github profile

Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:

Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
Users: who will benefit from your work?
Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.

If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project.

Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

Near the beautiful Swedish town of Lindsborg, Kansas, there stands a hill known as Coronado Heights. It lies in the midst of the Smoky Hills, named for the smoke-like mist that sometimes hangs in them. We Kansans smile our usual smile when we tell the story of how Francisco V squez de Coronado famously gave up his search for gold after reaching this point in Kansas. Anyhow, it was just over a year ago that Laura, Jacob, Oliver, and I went to Coronado Heights at the start of summer, 2013 our first full day together as a family. Atop Coronado Heights sits a castle , an old WPA project from the 1930s:

The view from up there is pretty nice:

And, of course, Jacob and Oliver wanted to explore the grounds.

As exciting as the castle was, simple rocks and sand seemed to be just as entertaining.

After Coronado Heights, we went to a nearby lake for a picnic. After that, Jacob and Oliver wanted to play at the edge of the water. They loved to throw rocks in and observe the splash. Of course, it pretty soon descended (or, if you are a boy, ascended ) into a game of splash your brother. And then to splash Dad and Laura .

Fun was had by all. What a wonderful day! Writing the story reminds me of a little while before that the first time all four of us enjoyed dinner and smores at a fire by our creek.

Jacob and Oliver insisted on sitting or, well, flopping on Laura s lap to eat. It made me smile. (And yes, she is wearing a Debian hat.)

Crowdsourcing ventures with disruptive business models are a regular point of contention these days. In London, taxi drivers are threatening to create gridlock as part of an anti-Uber protest. In Melbourne, Uber drivers have been issued with $1,700 fines for operating without a taxi license. San Francisco city officials, despite being the birthplace of many of these ventures, are debating whether AirBNB should be regulated. An orderly society or an old-school protection racket? Just what exactly is it that established players in these industries are trying to achieve through their protests and lobbying efforts? In the case of apartment rentals, many people have sympathy for respecting the wishes of neighbourhoods over those of individual landlords. In the case of car pooling schemes, the arguments tend to come not from motorists at large but from those who are afraid of competition. Without competition, could things be any worse? Melbourne actually provides the perfect backdrop for this debate. Only a couple of years before Uber came on the scene, the government had made a detailed study into the taxi industry. One of Australia's most prominent economic experts, a former chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission spent 18 months studying the industry. One of the highlights of the incumbent system (and the reason I suggest Melbourne is the perfect backdrop for this debate) is the way licenses are issued to taxi drivers. There are a fixed number of licenses issued by the government. The licenses are traded on the open market so prices can go up and down just like real-estate. Under the rules of Australia's pension scheme, people have even been able to use money from their pension fund to purchase a taxi license as an investment. It goes without saying that this has helped rampant speculation and the price of a license is now comparable to the price of a house.

The end result is that no real taxi driver can afford a license: most of them have to rent their license from one of the speculators who bought the license. These fixed rental fees have to be paid every month whether the driver uses their car or not. Consequently, taxi drivers have cut back on other expenses, they are often criticised for failing to keep their cars clean and the industry as a whole is criticised due to the poor quality of drivers who don't even know their way around the city. The reason, of course, is simple: by the time some newly arrived immigrant has learnt his way around Melbourne he has also figured out that the economics of driving a taxi are not in his favor. Realizing there is no way to break even, they take other jobs instead. It was originally speculated that the government review would dramatically reduce or abolish these speculative practices but ultimately lower license charges have only been used for the issue of 60 new licenses, barely 1% of the taxi fleet in the city today. Furthermore, the new licenses were only available to existing players in the industry. Uber to the rescue? Uber drove into the perfect storm as they launched their service in Melbourne in 2013. Uber drivers get a significant benefit over their competitors in traditional taxis. In particular, as they don't have the fixed monthly payment to rent a taxi license, they don't have to work every day and can even take holidays or take time to clean the cars. These things may simultaneously benefit road safety and passenger comfort. Meanwhile, those people who speculated on the old taxi licenses have tried hunger strikes and all kinds of other desperate tactics to defer the inevitable loss of their "investment". The reality is that crowdsourcing is here to stay. Even if Uber is stopped by bullying and intimidation, the inefficiency of Melbourne's taxi system is plain for all to see and both customers and drivers will continue looking for alternatives. Other car-pooling apps based on barter or cost sharing will continue to find ways to operate even if the Uber model is prohibited. It is interesting to note that the last great reform of Melbourne taxis, under Premier Jeff Kennett in the 1990s, simply resulted in a change of paint with the aim of making them look like those in New York City. Disruptive services like Uber (with their numerous technology-powered innovations to save time and money) appear to be doing far more to improve the lives of passengers and drivers. The hidden cost That said, large scale schemes like Uber do also have a down side for customer privacy. Hailing cabs in the street leaves no records of your movements. This new model, however, is leaving a very detailed trail of breadcrumbs that can be used for both marketing purposes or extracted (lawfully or otherwise) by some third party who wishes to monitor a particular customer's past or future movements. This is the trade-off that arises when we benefit from the efficiencies of any cloud-based service.

I was super sad to know that Paco de Lucia passed a few days ago. It was shocking to know that he was so young (only 66 year old, if I am not mistaken). To share some of his fine work with his frequent collaborators John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola to people that may not otherwise know him or his work, I offered on a Facebook post to upload a bootleg of a show of the Guitar Trio (John McLaughlin, Paco De Lucia and Al Di Meola) with the entire performance (possibly out of order, as that is a bootleg, after all) ripped from a broadcast to Dutch TV station. This performance includes the exceptional Paco de Lucia prominently and the show has many songs from the "Friday Night in San Francisco" record, including the magnificent (IMVHO) "Mediterranean Sundance". The credits of the video are, of course, of the musicians. I only ripped, deinterlaced (remember, analog TV it was interlaced), denoised, encoded, and uploaded the video to youtube.

Nir Eyal Automatic customers: How to design user habits at WordCamp San Francisco 2012:

I came across this video by Nir Eyal about his model for analyzing and designing user engagement through habits. Successful services, he says, develop habits through triggers, actions, rewards and investments. A trigger is some kind of prompt that suggest an action promising a reward, these can be external (Twitter notification) or internal (boredom). Promising because our brains are wired for the thrill of search, of promise, rather than results. That s why we keep reloading the Twitter feed hoping for good tweets this time. Then comes the investment. Asking users to devote effort (following friends) in exchange of further rewards (better content) loads the value and triggers that will get the user to come back: direct messages, replies, suggested content. Or, simply put: the more you use Twitter, the more triggers and rewards you create, the more you hook yourself. This is really interesting as it is not limited to technology, the science behind it is actually nothing new. I m curious to see how this can be applied to Free Software and personal projects. Check out the abridged version linked above, and the longer workshop as soon as you have the time.

Five weeks ago, I started a new job (Security Engineer, Eventbrite). I accepted the offer on a Friday evening at about 5:30 PM. That evening, my new boss and I traded emails to help me figure out what kind of computer I'd like. Time was of the essence because my start date was very next day, Tuesday. I wrote about how I value pixel count, and then RAM, and then a speedy disk, and then a speedy CPU. I named a few ThinkPad models that could be good, and with advice from the inimitable danjared, I pointed out that some Dell laptops come pre-installed with Ubuntu (which I could easily swap out for Debian). On Monday, my boss replied. Given the options that the IT department supports, he picked out the best one by my metrics: a MacBook Pro. The IT department would set up the company-mandated full-disk encryption and anti-virus scanning. If I wanted to run Linux, I could set up BootCamp or a virtualization solution. As I read the email, my heart nearly stopped. I just couldn't see myself using a Mac. I thought about it. Does it really matter to me enough to call up my boss and undo an IT request that is already in the works, backpedaling on what I claimed was important to me, opting for brand anti-loyalty to Apple over hardware speed? Yes, I thought to myself. I am willing to just not work there if I have to use a Mac. So I called $BOSS, and I asked, "What can we do to not get me a Mac?" It all worked out fine; I use a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Debian for work now, and it absolutely does everything I need. It does have a slower CPU, fewer pixels, and less RAM, and I am the only person in the San Francisco engineering office not running Mac OS. But it all works. In the process, I thought it made sense to write up some text to $BOSS. Here is how it goes.

Hi $BOSS,

Thanks for hearing my concerns about having a Mac. It would basically be a fairly serious blow to my self image. It's possible I could rationalize it, but it would take a long time, and I'm not sure it would work.

I don't at all need to start work using the computer I'm going to be using for the weeks afterward. I'm OK with using something temporarily that is whatever is available, Mac or non-Mac; I could happily borrow something out of the equipment closet in the short term if there are plans in the works to replace it with something else that makes me productive in the long term.

For full-disk encryption, there are great solutions for this on Linux.

For anti-virus, it seems Symantec AV is available for Linux <http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO17995>.

It sounds like Apple and possibly Lenovo are the only brands that are available through the IT department, but it is worth mentioning that Dell sells perfectly great laptops with Linux pre-installed, such as the XPS 13. I would perfectly happily use that.

If getting me more RAM is the priority, and the T440s is a bad fit for $COMPANY, then the Lenovo X230 would be a great option, and is noticeably less expensive, and it fits 16GB of RAM.

BootCamp and the like are theoretical possibilities on Macs, but one worry I have is that if there were a configuration issue, it might not be worth me spending work time to have me fix my environment, but instead I would be encouraged for efficiency to use Mac OS, which is well-tested on Apple hardware, and then I would basically hate using my computer, which is a strong emotion, but basically how I would feel.

Another issue (less technical) is that if I took my work machine to the kinds of conferences that I go to, like Debconf, I would find myself in the extremely uncomfortable position of advertising for Apple. I am pretty strongly unexcited about doing that.

Relating to the self-image issue is that it means a lot to me to sort of carry the open source community with me as I do my technical work, even if that technical work is not making more open source software. Feeling part of this world that shares software, and Debian in particular where I have a strong feeling of attachment to the community, even while doing something different, is part of what makes using computers fun for me. So it clashes with that to use Mac OS on my main machine, or to feel like I'm externally indistinguishable from people who don't care about this sort of community.

I am unenthusiastic about making your life harder and looking like a prima donna with my possibly obscure requirements.

I am, however, excited to contribute to $COMPANY!

I hope that helps! Probably nothing you couldn't have guessed in here, but I thought it was worth spelling some of that out. Happy to talk more.

-- Asheesh.

Replacing my phone My first Android phone was a ZTE Blade (sold as Orange San Francisco here in the UK). It originally shipped with Android 2.1 but was upgradable to 2.3 thanks to CyanogenMod (or other unofficial mods). However there's little sign of an upgrade to 4.x; the apps I want to use are pushing the limits of its CPU, RAM and internal storage; and I've never got very good at typing on a soft keyboard. So it seemed like time to get a newer phone with a hard keyboard (and still with a SD slot). After a little research with the CyanogenMod compatibility list and some time looking at reviews, I settled on the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G, which was exclusive to T-Mobile USA but is being resold through eBay. It shipped with Android 4.0 but I immediately installed CyanogenMod 10.2 (Android 4.3). This was a bit of an adventure as I bought the Blade with CM already installed and wasn't familiar with the multiple steps that were necessary. Copying my data The last step, and the real subject of this entry, was to move my data across. Much of this was on a SD card which I could simply plug into the Relay. The internal files had to be backed up onto this card and then restored, using the recovery environment (ClockworkMod) on each phone. After rebooting the Relay into the full Android system, my apps and settings were mostly present but I was immediately confronted with a series of error dialogs reporting that 'Unfortunately, Dialler has stopped' - and the same for 'Clock' and 'the process android.process.acore' (whatever that is). What went wrong There are thankfully more detailed error logs in the filesystem, under /data/system/dropbox (this is for logging at the Java level; if a process is terminated by a fatal signal it's logged to /data/tombstones). There are several ways to get at them, but I used recovery mode and adb to get a root shell where I could easily read and write files as necessary. The Contacts (aka People) database upgrade fails with an SQLiteException, apparently because it doesn't account for upgrading from the schema used in 2.3:

Process: android.process.acore
Flags: 0x883e45
Package: com.android.providers.applications v18 (4.3.1-f963020e38)
Package: com.android.providers.contacts v18 (4.3.1-f963020e38)
Package: com.android.providers.userdictionary v18 (4.3.1-f963020e38)
Build: samsung/apexqtmo/apexqtmo:4.1.2/JZO54K/T699UVBMC5:user/release-keys
android.database.sqlite.SQLiteException: no such column: phonebook_label (code 1): , while compiling: UPDATE raw_contacts SET display_name_source=?,display_name=?,display_name_alt=?,phonetic_name=?,phonetic_name_style=?,sort_key=?,phonebook_label=?,phonebook_bucket=?,sort_key_alt=?,phonebook_label_alt=?,phonebook_bucket_alt=? WHERE _id=?
...
        at com.android.providers.contacts.ContactsDatabaseHelper.updateRawContactDisplayName(ContactsDatabaseHelper.java:5344)
        at com.android.providers.contacts.ContactsDatabaseHelper.upgradeToVersion504(ContactsDatabaseHelper.java:3580)
        at com.android.providers.contacts.ContactsDatabaseHelper.onUpgrade(ContactsDatabaseHelper.java:2261)
...

Clock fails somewhat similarly though it apparently didn't try to upgrade:

Process: com.android.deskclock
Flags: 0xc8be45
Package: com.android.deskclock v203 (2.0.3)
Build: samsung/apexqtmo/apexqtmo:4.1.2/JZO54K/T699UVBMC5:user/release-keys
android.database.sqlite.SQLiteException: no such column: incvol (code 1): , while compiling: SELECT _id, hour, minutes, daysofweek, alarmtime, enabled, vibrate, message, alert, incvol, profile FROM alarms WHERE (enabled=1)
...
        at com.android.deskclock.AlarmProvider.query(AlarmProvider.java:73)
        at android.content.ContentProvider.query(ContentProvider.java:744)
        at android.content.ContentProvider$Transport.query(ContentProvider.java:199)
        at android.content.ContentResolver.query(ContentResolver.java:414)
        at android.content.ContentResolver.query(ContentResolver.java:357)
        at com.android.deskclock.Alarms.getFilteredAlarmsCursor(Alarms.java:165)
        at com.android.deskclock.Alarms.calculateNextAlert(Alarms.java:344)
        at com.android.deskclock.Alarms.setNextAlert(Alarms.java:417)
        at com.android.deskclock.Alarms.saveSnoozeAlert(Alarms.java:510)
        at com.android.deskclock.AlarmInitReceiver$1.run(AlarmInitReceiver.java:49)
...

The media player fails with a NullPointerException:

Process: com.andrew.apollo:main
Flags: 0x98be65
Package: com.andrew.apollo v2 (1.1)
Build: samsung/apexqtmo/apexqtmo:4.1.2/JZO54K/T699UVBMC5:user/release-keys
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.andrew.apollo.MusicPlaybackService.stop(MusicPlaybackService.java:878)
        at com.andrew.apollo.MusicPlaybackService.openCurrentAndMaybeNext(MusicPlaybackService.java:1048)
        at com.andrew.apollo.MusicPlaybackService.openCurrentAndNext(MusicPlaybackService.java:1031)
        at com.andrew.apollo.MusicPlaybackService.access$1500(MusicPlaybackService.java:74)
        at com.andrew.apollo.MusicPlaybackService$MusicPlayerHandler.handleMessage(MusicPlaybackService.java:2337)
        at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:99)
        at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137)
        at android.os.HandlerThread.run(HandlerThread.java:61)

Fixing the problem Maybe I could have worked out how to upgrade the relevant databases myself, but I went for simpler solutions. The clock settings are easy to re-enter and most of the media player state is regenerated by scanning files on the SD card. So I just deleted those on the Relay:

  rm -rf /data/data/com.android.deskclock
  rm -rf /data/data/com.android.providers.media

The contacts were what I really cared about, and there are actually specific menu items in Contacts to export and import those (using VCF format), side-stepping the database upgrade. So I did:

Insert SD card in Blade
Open Contacts and export to VCF (I forget where this is in the menus but it was easy to find)
Remove broken Contacts database on Relay:
rm -rf /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts
Insert SD card in Relay
Move exported contacts to internal storage:
mv /storage/sdcard1/*.vcf /storage/emulated/legacy
Open People and tap the menu key, 'Import/export', 'Import from storage', then the filename

This may not include all data, and in particular it doesn't seem to include attached photos. But that was good enough for me.

With the news that Australia's 100mbit (and potentially gigabit) fibre to the home is to be abolished and replaced with a cheap 25mbps service using Europe's ADSL hand-me-downs (which will be obsolete in 5 years when the deployment is finished), I've had quite a few emails from people asking just how easy it is to move abroad.

The acoustic modem has a nice retro look Word has got out that I've been spending some time in Switzerland enjoying the world-beating rate of IPv6 deployment. That is not the only reason to leave Australia of course, nor is it the only criteria for people choosing which country will give them a better deal than either of the two non-choices we had in Australia's elections. A free $20,000 for leaving Australia The first good news is that any recent graduate with a big bad ugly HECS bill is only obliged to pay this extra tax when they earn a salary from an Australian employer and file an Australian tax return. Australians who live abroad are not automatically obliged to file tax returns and are not slogged with this extra tax for having attended university. If somebody just graduated and has this hanging over their head, or if they've just started working and seen how much is being deducted on the payslip, moving abroad could make a lot of sense financially. If you have any moral qualms about this, just reflect on the fact that while the Government intimidates students with the feeling that they have to "pay" for fulfilling an education that makes them into a productive member of society, thousands of would-be athletes are given money with no obligation to repay it. The easiest route: a second passport One in four Australians has a parent born abroad. Most of those people qualify for a passport from their parent's country of birth. In some cases this also applies to people with grandparents born abroad. With the European Union now spanning 28 countries and guaranteeing the rights of any citizen from any country to live, work and study in any of the other 27 countries, a passport from any of the EU countries gives a lot of choices, including places where I have lived myself such as the UK, Ireland, France and Switzerland. Europe's citizen-friendly immigration In other words, an Australian with an Italian parent can go up to the Italian embassy in Canberra, collect an Italian passport and immediately fly into London and start working there with no bureaucratic delays, invasive and degrading medical checks or other Government interference in their life.

London's nightlife is popular for Australians. The UK started rolling out their high speed 21CN many years before Australia started the NBN. The rights also transfer automatically to all family members (spouse and children) - an Australian with a second passport is not restricted to living in Australia simply because they are married to somebody who does not have a second passport. As long as they arrive together at a European airport, they can simply show a marriage/birth certificate (in any language) and cross the border immediately, enjoy the same rights as a citizen, including work, study, healthcare and better broadband. No paperwork is necessary, no cottage industry for otherwise unemployable immigration agents, these are basic human rights for those living in Europe.

Eiffel tower: potentially part of the wireless network for France's new 4G internet, potentially two to four times the fixed-line speed planned for Australia's crippled broadband Uncle Sam wants more Australians Although it is not widely known, the US has a fast lane for immigration from Australia. The regular programs for skilled visas in the US are usually exhausted every year, whereas 10,000 "E3" class visas for Australians are never fully taken in any year. Surely it's not that easy to go to the US? It is. To qualify, an Australian only needs a university degree and a suitable job offer. Although the visa is for 2 years, it can be renewed and Australians who meet and marry an American have in various cases have gained full residence or citizenship.

Anything is possible, you could even end up becoming a NASA Astronaut.

San Francisco, home to leading technology professionals and innovators from many countries. Some US cities such as Austin and Kansas City have let Google install fibre to the home, San Francisco could follow Working holiday schemes are not just for Britain Most Australians know somebody who went to London on a "working holiday" visa. These visas are not just for the UK and Australia has similar reciprocal programs with many other countries too. These rules for these schemes are rooted in the industrial age concept of workers with punch cards. Participants are typically limited to work 20 hours per week. Of particular interest for those in IT, such rules are hard to quantify for freelancers, web designers or creative people who earn their living charging fees per-project or undertaking management work without specified working hours. Although the visas are limited to 4 years, I've heard of Australians benefiting from the open borders of mainland Europe, spending 4 years in one country and then obtaining another 4 year visa for an adjacent country and travelling freely back and forth, building up a business and lifestyle of their own design. Singapore and Hong Kong Singapore and Hong Kong have become enormously popular destinations for Australians, particularly those with special skills in IT, finance, engineering and international business.

Singapore is respected as one of the cleanest and most orderly cities in Asia while embracing significant diversity in dining, shopping, leisure and lifestyle possibilities. They have recently boosted speeds to help people get a full 100MBit over fibre. A SIM card with high speed broadband charges SGD 7 (about $5) for 1 Gigabyte. These are not necessarily destinations that a graduate can easily move to. People are measured by their salary and the Government simply assumes that anybody earning a high salary is going to make a valuable contribution to society and they are given a visa in 1 or 2 weeks. Usually 3-5 years employment experience is required before making a move to one of these countries. The Not Ordinarily Resident (NOR) scheme gives some hints about the minimum salary level that ex-pats aim for, many earn significantly more with bonuses, stock programs and properly engineered tax-free offshore pension arrangements. These countries offer particularly low taxes (around 10%) and great technology. They have some rough edges too: like Europe, spouses are automatically given a visa too, but in contrast, their visa does not permit them to work unless they also work in a profession that is highly paid. Visas are issued quickly but they are also canceled very quickly if the job is terminated or the company goes bust. There have been various stories of people paying the typical 2-month deposit on an appartment in Singapore and then finding that it is forfeited when their job and visa are canceled and they have 4 weeks to leave. The bottom line is that people moving to these locations usually have a wide professional network and confidence to change their job quickly if necessary. Freestyle immigration and the visa run Not too long ago I was at a house party in Prague, Czech Republic, which is like a Paris of eastern Europe. Somebody introduced me to some Americans who I was told had similar interests in technology. They were operating an offshore web site and living very well. They had spent 10 years in Prague living on tourist visas. Authorities seemed quite happy for them to remain as long as they left every 3 months and spent 1 night abroad, a typical visa run. That could be as simple as a train journey to Vienna, Austria and an overnight stay.

Making a visa run in comfort and style with European railways. The Railjet train pictured includes free wifi, a lot cheaper than the $20 billion Tony Abbott plans to spend rolling out yesterday's technology in Australia When European countries abolished border controls, this system became much more convoluted for those who depend on the visa run. However, it remains common in many Asian and Latin American countries and many ex-pats live this way. Officials in many of these medium sized economies recognise the value of people bringing in money from offshore business (such as web sites) and using it to pay rent, food and local services. To make this effective, the ex-pats typically need to have an international private health insurance policy (high quality offshore policies can be found quickly with a search engine) and not aspire to work in a normal 9-5 job. Conclusion Young Australians might not want to just consider travel, it may even become unavoidable. The reality is, by 2020, one in three Australians will be a retired baby boomer and one way or another, whichever Government is in office will be unable to avoid taxing those of working age to pay for the health care and pension promises made to older generations. Serious expenditure on public infrastructure such as broadband or high speed rail appears to remain a pipe dream. Moving abroad, however, is just so much fun. Look at the way multinational companies make countries compete to attract their new factories and other projects: why should any individual citizen be any less demanding in choosing where they work, play and get the best value for whatever taxes they have to pay? Some people raise questions of patriotism or responsibility to the nation. Think again. The 200,000 Australians who live abroad or travel extensively make a significant contribution to Australia's international profile, engage in new trade initiatives, bring skills back to Australia and generally represent what our country is really about much better than some of those who are paid to do so.

I found the following news item; if you can read Spanish, you will most probably prefer the original version in the Proceso magazine's site. The subject? The federal police (PGR) and army arrest 17 artisans for making money out of Spiderman. The following translation is mine. Done past midnight, and being quite tired, and translated so this news item can reach a broader audience. All errors are mine (except those carried out by the security forces, that is).

June 13, 2013 Cuernavaca, Morelos. Policement from the General Republic Attorney (Procuradur a General de la Rep blica, PGR) and the Army entered and searched the "3 de mayo" neighbourhood, in the municipality of Emiliano Zapata, detaining 17 ceramist artisans that sold candies, dolls and pi atas shaped like Spiderman. This search was done on the evening of last Wednesday, around 16:00. Federal ministerial policement and army soldiers closed a street with several informal stores and detained workers taht were selling this Marvel Comics character, following said company's denounce. As a result for this operation, 17 artisants were detained, although the same day five of them were freed. The policemen also seized 12 bags of candies, pi atas, ceramics and wooden figures of the superhero. PGR closed down 11 stores where ceramics with this same figure was being sold, accusing the detainees of plagiarizing Spiderman's image, protected under the copyright law. The 12 that remained under detention were put at the Federal Justice's disposal, which prompted that this Thursday, around 10AM, hundreds of sellers of "3 de mayo" went out to PGR's building to demand their friends' freedom, who are facing a bail of up to 200,000 pesos (~USD$18,000). Outraged because they said they were treated as if they were part of a drug ring, hundreds of artisans closed intermitently Avenida Cuauhn huac, where the PGR representation in Morelos state is located. The artisans' pressure helped for the amount of the bail to be lowered from MX$200,000 to MX$16,000, and so they were set free. Francisco Fern ndez Flores, president of the Ceramists Association, criticized the operation because, he said, it was as strong as if they were "drug dealers". The artisans explained that they don't even make the Spiderman figures, they are made by the interns of the Centro Estatal de Reinserci n Social de Atlacholoaya (prision), located in the Xochitepec municipality, who offered them to the ceramists so they could be sold. "The Atlacholoaya inmates do them, we buy them to support them, and turns out we are the delinquents now", said Miriam Monroy, sister of one of the detainees. This information was contradicted by Jes s Valencia Valencia, responsible for Morelos' state prision system, who assured that in said prision no ceramics are done. Fern ndez Flores insisted though that from within the prision they are being offered pi atas, candies and "piggy banks" with Spiderman's shape. Jos Luis Pozo, vicepresident of the Ceramists Union, said that to avoid more such federal operations for copyright breaches, they have committed not to produce or commercialize Marvel superhero figures, and any other characters the authority demands. "We do commit to, from now on, those products singled out to us will not be commercialized", he said. Pozo said that the PGR operation caused losses not just to the detained producers and salesmen, but to over 200 ceramists that had to close their stores in solidarity with their friends. Acording to the artisans, the products were a success until the PGR came, seized the products and detained the salesmen.

And yes, the copyright insanity does not stop. Spiderman is by today a clear part of popular culture. Marvel brilliantly succeeded in creating such a popular icon that everybody recognizes, that everybody identifies with And that everybody should be able to recreate. We are not talking about brand protection. Marvel does not, and will never, commercialize pi atas, ceramics or wooden toys. And even if they were plastic-cast While Spiderman is still under the protection of copyright, as the Berne Convention defines it (and of course, as the much stricter Mexican laws agree), that does not mean that any and every product resembling a Spiderman should be protected. Many ceramists and pi ata makers will create unique pieces of art Ok, handicraft. But reading the copyright law more strictly, Spiderman is more treated as a trademark than as a copyright. And it is a trademark that should be declared as having passed on to the public domain.

I'll soon be disposing of the Nissan Leaf that we leased a few months ago, so I thought it a useful exercise to write about my experiences with it. I am not a car man. I am a gadget man. For me, driving is a means to an end, and I'm much more interested in what I call the "cabin" experience, than the "driving" experience, so this is going to slanted much more that way. That said, I found the Nissan Leaf a fun car to drive, from my limited experiences of having fun driving cars. I liked how responsive it was when you put your foot down. It has two modes of operation, "D" and "Eco". I've actually taken to driving it in "Eco" mode most of the time, as it squeezes more range out of the batteries, but occasionally I'll pop it back into "D" to have a bit of fun. The main difference between the two modes, from a driving perspective, is it seems to limit the responsiveness of the accelerator. In "Eco" mode it feels more like you're driving in molasses, whereas in "D" mode, when you put your foot down, it responses instantly. "D" is great for dragging people off at the lights. It's a very zippy little car in "D" mode. It feels lighter. I've noticed that it has a bit of a penchant for over steering. Or maybe that's just my driving. If I have floored it a bit to take a right turn into oncoming traffic, I've noticed slight over steering. That's about all the driving type "real car stuff" I'll talk about. Now to the driver's "cabin experience". It's absolutely fabulous. I love sitting in the driver's seat of this car. Firstly, the seat itself is heated (in fact all of them are). As is the steering wheel. Nissan has gone to great lengths to allow you to avoid needing to run the car's heating system to heat the car, as doing so immediately drops at least 10 miles off the range. Unfortunately I found the windscreen had a tendency to fog up in the winter rainy periods, so I'd have to intermittently fire up the air conditioning to defog the windscreen. Of course, in the summer months, you're going to want to run the AC to cool down, so the range hit in that situation is unavoidable. I've only had this car from late Autumn until late Winter so far, so that hasn't been an issue I've had to contend with. The dashboard is all digital, and looks relatively high tech, which appeals to my inner geek. It's a dashboard. It tells you stuff. The stuff you'd expect it to tell you. Enough said. The audio system is nice. It supports Bluetooth audio, so one can be streaming Pandora from one's phone, through the sound system, for example. Or listening to audio from the phone. There's also a USB port, and it will play various audio files from USB storage. I found the way it chose to sort the files on a USB stick to be slightly surprising though. I haven't invested the time to figure out how I should be naming files so that they play in the order I expect them to play. The ability to play from USB storage compensates nicely for the fact that it only has a single CD player. (We have a 6 disc stacker in our 2006 Prius). The car also came with a 3 month free trial of Sirius XM satellite radio. This was fun. The only dance music FM station in the Bay Area has a weak signal in Mountain View, and I hate dance music with static, whereas there was an excellent electronic music station that I could listen to in glorious high definition. As long as I wasn't driving under a bridge. There's no way I'd pay money for satellite radio, but it was a fun gimmick to try out. The navigation system is really, really good. I haven't bothered using Google Maps on my phone at all. It gives such good spoken directions, that you don't even need to have the map on the screen. It names all the streets. I couldn't figure out a way to get distances in metric. The telematics service, Carwings, is probably my favourite feature. This is what really makes it feel like a car of the future. Through the companion Android application, I can view the charging status (if it's plugged in) or just check the available range (if it's not plugged in). From a web browser, I can plan a route, and push the route to the vehicle's navigation system. If the car is plugged in, I can also remotely turn on the vehicle's climate control system, pre-warming or cooling the car. It's a little thing, but the door unlocking annoyed me a little bit. I'm used to the Prius, where if you unlock the boot (that's trunk, Americans), or the front passenger door, all the doors unlocked. This was a convenient way of unlocking the car for multiple people as you approached it. With the Leaf, unlocking the boot only unlocks the boot. Unlocking the front passenger door only unlocks that door. It requires a second unlock action to unlock all the doors. I've found this to be slightly cumbersome when trying to unlock the car for everyone all at once, quickly (like when it's raining). Another minor annoyance is the headlights. I've gotten into the habit of driving with the headlights on all the time, because I believe it's safer. In the Prius, one could just leave the headlights switched to the "on" position, and they'd turn off whenever the driver's door was opened after the car was switched off. If you try that in the Leaf, the car beeps at you to warn you you've left the headlights on. It has an "auto" mode, where the car will choose when to turn the headlights on, based on ambient light conditions. In that case, when you turn the car off, it'll leave the headlights on for a configurable period of time and then turn them off. This is actually slightly unsettling, because it makes you think you've left your headlights on. The default timeout was quite long as well, something like 60 seconds. The way multiple Bluetooth phones are handled is just as annoying in the Leaf as it is in the Prius, which disappoints me, given 6 years have passed. The way I'd like to see multiple phones handled is the car chooses to pair with whichever phone is in range, or if multiple phones are in range, it asks or uses the last one it paired with. In reality, it tries to pair with whatever it paired with last time, and one has to press far too many buttons to switch it to one of the other phones it knows about. Range anxiety is definitely something of a concern. It can be managed by using the GPS navigation for long or otherwise anxiety-inducing trips, and then one can compare the "miles remaining" on the GPS with the "miles remaining" on the battery range, and reassure oneself that they will indeed make it to where they're trying to go. The worst case I had was getting to within 5 miles of empty. The car started complaining at me. The charging infrastructure in the Bay Area is pretty good. There are plenty of charging stations in San Francisco and San Jose. I'm spoiled in that I have free charging available at work (including a building at the end of my street, so I never bothered with getting a home charger installed). I've almost never had to pay for charging, so it's been great while gas prices have been on the rise. The car's navigation system knows about some charging stations, so you can plan a route with the charging stations it knows about in mind. The only problem is it doesn't know if the charging stations are in use. If you use the ChargePoint Android app, you can see if the charging stations are in use, but then you have to do this cumbersome dance to find an available charging station and plug the address into the vehicle's navigation system. Of course, what can then happen is in the time you're driving to the charging station, someone else starts using it. I actually got bitten by this yesterday. Would I buy a Leaf again? Not as my sole car. It makes a perfect second/commuter car, but as a primary vehicle, it's too limited by its range. They're also ridiculously expensive in Australia, and Brisbane has absolutely no charging infrastructure.

Last Saturday, when the bus from Canberra pulled into Sydney's central station, I found myself feeling curiously nostalgic for this city, and particularly this bustling and somewhat seedy[1] neighborhood of Haymarket and Redfern.

I only spent 5 days in Sydney, but living in a shared house there, walking up to Central every day, and returning to the outskirts of the Haymarket every evening to slurp noodles or other asian food, I got into a routine. And got a sense of the place that goes perhaps a bit beyond the tourist sights.

Perhaps if I'd had more time I would have found a decent coffee shop that had both free wifi and abundant seating. They seem scarce in Sydney. I instead often got on the ferry to Manly when I wanted some sit down and code time.

One time when I was exploring the headlands above Manly beach, I noticed this sign.
Then I ran into this guy. Click him for an amusing video.

Anyway, Sydney is on my very short list of cities I'd actually enjoy spending some more time in some day, along with San Francisco, Vancouver, Oslo, and London.

[1] Depending on what's inside all the "VIP lounges" and "Thai massage parlours" on every corner that I did not explore, perhaps thoroughly seedy?

Lots of exciting things are happening with and around Rcpp. I just added a new page about Upcoming Events to the recently-created Rcpp site. This events page has lots to cover: an upcoming talk at Columbia on March 8 (details still TBD), a day-long workshop in New York on March 9, a possible participation at a CERN / ROOT conference in Switzerland on May 11-14, an upcoming talk in May in Milwaukee, and last but not least the tutorial by Romain and Hadley at UseR! 2013 in Spain. Phew! With that, a few quick words about the upcoming master class in New York. It will be a full day, covering an introduction and motivation, details about the core data types, tools for working with and and extending Rcpp and of course applications galore, including RcppArmadillo and RInside. I have done the same one day class format a few times before, most recently (with Revolution Analytics) in San Francisco in late 2011, and also as a two-part seminar at UseR! 2012. This time, we plan on providing cloud-hosted RStudio instances for participants. Better still, RStudio's own JJ Allaire will be on deck as well for RStudio --- and Rcpp Attributes --- questions. Details and registration information for the New York class are at this page.

I moved to Boston in 2005 at the same time that Aaron Swartz did and we were introduced by a mutual friend. Aaron was one of my first friends in Boston and we became close. When Aaron moved to San Francisco, I moved into his apartment in Somerville where he kept a room for a year or so. Mika and I still live there. His old posters remain on our walls and his old books remain on our shelves. Aaron s brothers Ben and Noah both lived with us and remain close friends. I have spent hours (days?) reading and thinking about Aaron over the last two weeks. It has been disorienting but beautiful to read the descriptions of, and commentaries on, Aaron s life. Although I suspect I may never feel ready, there are several things I want to say about Aaron s death, about Aaron s work, and about what Aaron means to me. 1. Aaron s Death The reaction to Aaron s death has been overwhelming and inspirational. At some point in the near future I plan to join some of the important campaigns already being waged in his name. There are many attempts to understand why Aaron died and many attempts to prevent it from happening to others in the future. Unfortunately, I am familiar with the process of soul-searching and second-guessing that happens when a friend commits suicide. I m sure that every one of his friends has asked themselves, as I have, What could I have done differently? I don t know the answer, but I do know this: Aaron was facing the real risk of losing half his life to prison. But even if one believed that he was only facing the likely loss of ten percent or even one percent of his life I wish that we all, and I wish that I in particular, had reacted with the passion, time, anger, activity, and volume proportional to how we have reacted in the last two weeks when he lost the whole thing. 2. Aaron s Work Of course, Aaron and I worked on related projects and I followed his work. And despite all the incredible things that have been said about Aaron, I feel that Aaron s work was more focused, more ambitious, more transformative, more innovative, and more reckless (in a positive sense) than the outpour online suggests. Although discussion of Aaron has focused his successes, achievements, and victories, the work that inspired me most was not the projects that were most popular or successful. Much of Aaron s work was deeply, and as it turned out overly, ambitious. His best projects were self-conscious attempts to transform knowledge production, organization, and dissemination. Although he moved from project to project, his work was consistently focused on bringing semantic-web concepts and technologies to peer production, to the movement for free culture, and to progressive political activism and on the meta-politics necessary to remove barriers to this work. For example, Aaron created an online collaborative encyclopedia project called the TheInfoNetwork (TIN) several years before Wikipedia was started. I talked to Aaron at length about that project for a research project I am working on. Aaron s work was years ahead of its time; in 2000, TIN embraced more of the Wikimedia Foundation s current goals and principles than Wikipedia did when it was launched. While Wikipedia sought to create a free reference work online, Aaron s effort sought to find out what a reference work online could look like. It turned out to be too ambitious, perhaps, but it taught many, including myself, an enormous amount in that process. When I met Aaron, he was in the process starting a company, Infogami, that was trying to chase many of TIN s goals. Infogami was conceived of as a wiki aware of the structure of data. The model was both simple and profound. Years later, Wikimedia Deutschland s WikiData project is beginning to bring some of these ideas to the mainstream. Infogami merged with Reddit as equal halves of a company with a shared technological foundation based on some of Aaron s other work. But when Reddit took off, Infogami was rarely mentioned, even by Aaron. I think that is too bad. Reddit got traction because it made the most popular stuff more visible; Reddit is popular, fundamentally, because popular things are popular. But popular is not necessary positive. For that reason, Reddit never struck me as either surprising or transformative. But what started as Aaron s half the company, on the other hand, aimed to create a powerful form of democratized information production and dissemination. And although Infogami didn t take off, the ideas and code behind the project found life at the heart of Open Library and will continue to influence and inspire countless other projects. I believe that Infogami s lessons and legacy will undergird a generation of transformative peer production technologies in a way that the Reddit website important as it is will not. 3. What Aaron Means to Me A lot of what has been written about Aaron speaks to his intelligence, his curiosity, his generosity, his ethics and his drive. Although I recognize all these qualities in the Aaron I knew, I ve felt alienated by how abstract some of the discussion of Aaron has been my memories are of particularities.

I remember the time Aaron was hospitalized and I spent two hours on the phone going through my bookshelves arguing with him about the virtues of the books in my library as we tried to decide which books I would bring him. I remember Aaron confronting Peter Singer intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival to ask if humans had a moral obligation to stop animals from killing each other. I lurked behind, embarrassed about the question but curious to hear the answer. (Singer sighed and said yes sort of and complemented Aaron on the enormous Marxist commentary he was carrying.) I remember 1-800-INTERNET.com. I remember talking with Aaron about whether being wealthy could be ethical. I argued it could not but Aaron argued uncharacteristically I thought that it could. Aaron told Mika she should slap him if he ever became wealthy. The very next day, it was announced that his company had been acquired and that Aaron was a millionaire. I remember the standing bets I had with Aaron and how he would email me every time news reports favored his claims (but never when they did not). And I remember that I won t hear from him again.

Aaron was a friend and inspiration. I miss him deeply and I am very sad.

Review: A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit

Publisher:	Penguin
Copyright:	2009
Printing:	2010
ISBN:	0-14-311807-2
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	319

A Paradise Built in Hell is a book with an agenda. Solnit's goal is to convince the reader that nearly everything we're shown in movies and popular culture about human behavior during disasters is wrong. Not only is destructive mass panic unusual verging on nonexistent, spontaneous cooperation and acts of startling courage and resourcefulness are commonplace. The heroes that we hear about afterwards are more the norm than the exception. Disasters are far more likely to bring out the best in people than the worst. They break down barriers and form spontaneous human communities that survivors remember for a lifetime. Rather than natural disasters leading inevitably to an exacerbating human crisis in the absence of strong authority, Solnit argues that they are an amazing human opportunity, and that the most negative and destructive human behavior during crises is not from untrained victims but from the panic of the elites who are supposedly responsible for protecting the public. I think her analysis and presentation is both deeply appealing and deeply flawed. The flaws involve extrapolation and generalization beyond the applicability of her research, and I'll say more about that in a moment. But the appeal is still surprising and satisfying, and I think there's a lot of truth in this book despite its one-sided presentation. I like to tell people, half-jokingly, that I'm an anarchosyndicalist. It's my political alliegance of the heart: the political structure that I know would never work, but that matches the world I want to live in. (I suspect much of the belief in libertarianism is of this form.) Now I have a book to point people at when they ask what the appeal of anarchosyndicalism is. The sense of spontaneous community, of bonding, of reaching out to other people to do something necessary, together, that Solnit describes here in the aftermath of a disaster matches that vision of a world without imposed economic authority, where people spontaneously collaborate to solve problems. A Paradise Built in Hell is structured by disaster, providing a tour of major disasters and their aftermath interspersed with extended musings on what the human reactions mean and how disaster communities functioned. The major disasters discussed are the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the Halifax explosion, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. Solnit moves through them in chronological order, closing the book with Katrina, which had (at least for me) the most infuriating and uplifting mixes of community bonding and elite panic. But both of those factors are present from the beginning in the 1906 earthquake: spontaneous human organization that (from multiple first-hand accounts) transformed people's lives mixed with a military reaction and elite panic that possibly did more damage to the city than the earthquake did. Elite panic is the dark side of Solnit's celebration of human altruism and spontaneous community organization. The primary picture she paints is of ordinary people responding with great courage and creativity and finding, in their reaction, a transformative experience and a sense of purpose that often becomes the most powerful and positive experience of their life. But this is at odds with a deeply-entrenched elite belief in mass panic, in the necessity of keeping information from the public to suppress their reaction, and in the need to re-establish "order." And with that, Solnit is absolutely scathing, and with some justification. Along with detailed accounts of these major disasters, Solnit also gives the reader a tour of the research literature on disasters, research that has shown that the panic and chaos that is at the center of practically every disaster movie ever made is essentially a myth. Mass panic in disasters is not only rare, it's close to non-existent. As you might expect, the handling of Katrina by both the government and by neighboring white communities is the subject of the harshest attacks. The material on Katrina presented here is enough to make anyone want to throw out the current playbook on how we react to disasters (and lest one think Solnit is unfair, her research matches very closely with other research and journalism on Katrina that I've seen from a wide variety of sources). But Solnit shows that this is a pattern: the combination of our media-driven belief in how people will react to disasters combined with the elite need to re-establish control plays out in many major disasters, and almost always negatively. Even in 9/11, the official response in some cases hampered and undermined an already-effective unofficial response. This is very interesting and has concrete implications for public policy around disasters. But where Solnit moves onto thinner anarchosyndicalist ice is the story that she tells about disasters as dramatic upheavals of the established social order that could point to a revolution in how we interact with each other. Solnit is deeply inspired by human altruism during disasters, and her enthusiasm is somewhat contageous, but it was useful to read this book shortly after Bruce Schneier's Liars and Outliers. I think Solnit, in her understandable eagerness to find a way to extend disaster behavior to general life, does not understand the relationships between what Schneier terms moral, reputational, and institutional pressures. And that's the core of why we need to both enable spontaneous human response in disasters and have organized first responders and supporting infrastructure, and why disaster communities will break down when extended beyond the disaster. When I first mentioned A Paradise Built in Hell to my mother, her first reaction was dubiousness due to her memory of the 1977 New York City blackout. There was a disaster that resulted in widespread looting and destruction, rather than the positive reaction Solnit describes. Solnit does have a cogent argument for why looting is poorly analyzed (we don't, for example, distinguish between breaking into stores to get desperately needed supplies and doing so for personal gain) and should not be a priority in a life-threatening disaster. But it's not completely convincing; in some disasters, particularly ones like the 1977 power outage that were not particularly life-threatening, the looting has been the most destructive part of the disaster. Schneier provides what I think is the missing piece, both to this and to why the wonderful behavior during disasters doesn't last into everyday life. During a life-threatening disaster, moral pressures are massively increased. Nearly all of us have self-images and moral beliefs that provide very strong incentives to help others and collaborate in the face of life-threatening emergencies, incentives that override other motives and lead to the sort of behavior that Solnit celebrates. But moral pressures have inherent limitations. That moral reaction applies most strongly to small groups (such as bands of survivors), and will start to break down as larger society re-establishes itself. And disasters, like a power outage, that are not immediately life-threatening will not provoke the same intensification of moral pressures: we don't have strong moral beliefs and internal stories about staying quietly at home during power outages the way that we do for saving people from burning buildings or pulling them out of rubble. Once larger communities have reformed and that short-term emergency reaction has dissipated, the need for institutional pressures (police, law, and formal authority structures) will return. I wish Solnit had been able to read Schneier's book before writing hers. I think his analysis structure provides a healthy dose of realism and perspective to her desire for a self-organizing communal world, and might have blunted her enthusiastic but somewhat unrealistic hopes for finding some key to a revolution in human organization in the heart of disasters. But if A Paradise Built in Hell is unlikely to lead to a radical change in how we organize societies, it should at least provoke a radical rethinking of some of our unnecessary pessimism about our fellow humans. The evidence is substantial and compelling: crisis brings out the best in people, not the worst, and the ordinary people who happen to be around are capable of becoming some of the most amazing disaster response teams that we can imagine. This has numerous mundane implications for social policy. We should consider simple training for the general public, for example, to strengthen that reaction, should allow for it in legal structures and training of first responders (around looting, for instance), and should do everything we can to kill the destructive myth that people cannot be trusted in disasters or that mass panic will be as much of a threat as the disaster. But the best part of this book is that it provides a concrete, well-documented, and well-defended reason to let go of some of our cynicism and to extend a bit of trust to our fellow humans. There sadly aren't earth-shaking implications for everyday society, but there is a wealth of evidence that shows that we're better people in the crunch than we believe we are, or that we expect of others. And the more that we can embrace the dissolution of boundaries and social hierarchies in the middle of disasters, the more we are likely to be surprised by deep human connection and a sense of shared, focused purpose. Solnit is a bit long-winded with her agenda, but that bright hope has stuck with me. Recommended. Rating: 8 out of 10

A new journey ahead

Changing jobs and moving to a new country... it's just the beginning.

On September 30th, 2012 I'm moving to Menlo Park, CA, USA because back in December 2011 I accepted a job offer as a sysadmin (the name is fancier: Operations Engineer) in Silicon Valley. Since then I'm working on the required documentation, so far everything had worked out. I'm starting at the new work on October 8th, and as I'm arriving on October 1st, I'll have a week to take a look around and get to know a tiny bit of San Francisco Bay Area.

In different levels and aspects it is a big opportunity for me, and I'm confident it'll be an unique experience, not only professional, which of course involves working in a bigger company with more complex scenarios and bigger challenges, and on the personal side, I'll live abroad, be an expat.

As you may imagine, I'm working on this process for more or less 10 months, but in the last 30 days it got more intense. Quitting my jobs, organizing my stuff, cleaning part of backlog (and finding out a have a huge to-do list awaiting for me). Spending quality time with family and friends, and also saying goodbye to them. Finishing some aspects of the move (travel tickets, temporary living).

It's new, it's different! I'm super excited and I do want to change a few things to make it easier for family and friends to keep up, make it easier to follow the news, which might help with the distance.

And now for something completely different! See you all pretty soon! :-)

There's been good progress in Fedora's implementation of UEFI Secure Boot, so time for a quick update.
Boot process signingThe infrastructure for signing the bootloader binaries is now implemented. pesign is in the archive and being used to sign shim, grub2 and the kernel. At the moment they're all being signed by test keys, and the private key is actually in the pesign package. This is, obviously, not intended for production use - it's just to ensure that we can build correctly signed images. We've proof-of-concepted signing via cryptographic hardware and will shortly be deploying new build systems dedicated to building the signed binaries. These won't be general access systems and will have a lightly modified mock configuration to ensure that the crypto hardware is available to the build chroots, but otherwise there's nothing special about them.

As far as signing with the Microsoft keys goes, we're in the final round of legal review of the appropriate agreements and will be migrating to a version of shim signed with their key in the near future.
Kernel modificationsThere's two main sets of patches for the kernel. The first is to automatically enable the locking down of various bits of functionality when secure boot is enabled, in order to prevent users (including root) from being able to modify the kernel at runtime. They've just been posted upstream and haven't been dreadfully received, though we'll probably be changing the name of the capability. The main thing that users will notice is that any X drivers that still need direct hardware access (which, on secure boot systems, should be zero - we've implemented native kernel drivers for all the hardware we expect to see there) will fail to work, as will setpci. The plan is for kexec to require that kernel images be signed, but that's requiring rather more reworking of kexec than expected so for now kexec will just be disabled.

The other lump of kernel functionality is the support for module signatures. That had been somewhat blocked based on a lack of consensus between patch authors and upstream, but an agreement got hammered out at Kernel Summit last week and so we should see progress there shortly. Right now we're still looking at modules being signed with a throwaway key, but the plan is still for keys in db (and MOK, if using the Suse approach) to be imported into the kernel keyring and used. That's dependent upon that code being written in time, though. It's definitely still a goal for F18.
Key managementWe're planning on using Suse's approach of permitting local key management at the shim level, and I spent some time discussing this with Vojtech last week. In combination with the above, this should provide a workable mechanism for permitting the end-user to install module signing keys.
General UEFI support improvementsWe've added support to grub to use the kernel's built-in UEFI setup functionality, although there's still some discussion with upstream to ensure that it's implemented in an acceptable way. This approach also makes it easy for us to obtain PCI ROMs via UEFI, which improves radeon support on a bunch of Macs. Finally, we've been hammering on some remaining UEFI bugs and are definitely at the point where the machines that don't work are surprising and the ones that do are the tedious expectation. This is far better than any previous release.
DocumentationStill has to be written, and that's probably where much of the my next month is going.
SummaryFedora 18 is still on track to have full UEFI Secure Boot support out of the box, and the Beta should be fully signed although perhaps still with our test keys.

For those of you who get sent to surprisingly expensive conferences, I'll be discussing some of this as part of a presentation on improving Linux support for UEFI at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco next Tuesday morning. Feel free to say hi if you're in the area.

comments

San Francisco skyline, Errol & Dani, Dani on cliffs at Mendocino, Sango on Hendy woods redwood

Since last November, I've been participating in and coordinating Iron Blogger: a drinking club where you pay $5 to a "beer" pool if you fail to blog weekly. The revival of Iron Blogger in Boston has been a big success. Even more exciting, however, is that Iron Blogger concept has spread. There are now two other Iron Blogger instances: in San Francisco coordinated by Parker Higgens, and in Berlin run by Nicole Ebber and Michelle Thorne. Yesterday, we convened a virtual meeting of the Global Iron Blogger Council (i.e., an email thread) and we all agreed a new on iron blogger rule that might sweeten the deal for jet-setting prospective Iron Bloggers: any paid-up member of any Iron Blogger club can attend meet-ups in any other Iron Blogger cities if they happen to be in town for one. Because We Are One. If you want to join us in Boston, we have some room through attrition. Rust bloggers, perhaps? If you'd like to join, you should contact me. And if you'd like to set up your own in a different city, the code is in git. One warning, however. As those of us that have set it up have figured out, the documentation for the software to run Iron Blogger is between poor and non-existent. If you do want to set up your own instance, please get in touch. I'm happy to give you some pointers that you'll probably need but, more importantly, I'd like to work with the next brave soul to put together documentation of the setup process along the way.

The Maker Faire is one of those awesome Bay Area things that always fills me with excitement and gets my imagination going. Zoe and I went again this year to check it out, as best we could within the time constraints we had to work within (opening time and her nap time, minus travel time). She definitely enjoyed herself. We took the Caltrain, because historically driving and parking has been a bit of a nightmare. The optimal train to get to get there before it opened (at 10am) was the 9:19 train from Mountain View, which was scheduled to get in at Hayward Park a little before 10am. It just so happened that there was a Giants game on in San Francisco today as well, and the train was absolutely packed. We only got a seat because one kind gentleman was getting off and explicitly gave his seat to us. One lesson learned: don't try and take the BOB stroller on the train. Even when collapsed, it's way too bulky. For future Caltrain outings, I'll take our City Mini stroller instead, as it folds much flatter. I also took our macpac Possum child carrier backpack, and Zoe was pretty happy to just sit in it for the bulk of the time. I think it had novelty value for her, as we haven't used it for a while. I probably could have gotten away without taking a stroller at all. I was very glad I took the backpack, as it gave her a much better vantage point for everything that was going on than she would have gotten from sitting in the stroller. There was supposed to be a free shuttle from the Hayward Park station to the Maker Faire, but there was a huge crowd waiting for it, so I decided to just walk. It didn't take too long. For the return trip, I think I exited from the wrong side of the fairgrounds, and couldn't figure out the shuttles, so I just walked to Hillsdale station. At least the return train wasn't crowded. Overall, using Caltrain to get in and out was successful. Zoe was very well behaved for the ~30 minute train ride each way. The Faire was quite a bit bigger this year, and has spilled out into the parking lot on one side. I'd heard stories that O'Reilly had quadrupled booth prices as well. Trying to abide by the program was too difficult, so we mostly just wandered through the main Expo hall and looked at various booths. I just did a full read through the website of all the exhibitors to see what I missed out on. Here's some of the stuff I saw in person, or discovered via the website:

there was a really excellent looking Dalek running around (way better than the photo on the page linked to here). I also learned that there's a whole Dalek-making website. Awesome.
RAFT (Resource Area For Teaching) had lots of really simple, low cost projects for demonstrating various concepts in physics and science.
Linux for makers was represented
This Arduino-controlled automatic fish feeder looked cool. I didn't get to see it in person, I discovered it while I was trawling through the list of exhibitors.
Shop-in-a-box. I'd have liked to have checked this out.
Build a bug habitat. I'd have liked to check this out out as well.
Solar bike trailer. My Dad would have liked this, as he has an electric bike. I imagine this wouldn't be all that hard to make. The trailer looked pretty long from the photo though, but hey, no pedaling.
The water causeway. Now this looks interesting. I would have loved to have seen this one in person. I love clean tech. There's a whole bunch of videos linked off the page for this.
Wave energy capture model. Another clean tech thing I'd have liked to have checked out.
Roominate looks really cool. Something for Zoe when she's a bit bigger.
There was a table extolling the virtues of growing your own algae for consumption (as spirulina) and bio-fuel. I'm interested in finding out more about the latter.
I saw some HEXBUG-related stuff near the Geekdad table. This looked like a dressed up version of the "take a toothbrush head and glue an electric toothbrush motor on the back" type project. I'm curious to see how expensive the kits are, as they looked like a lot of fun.
Ratduino sounds intriguing, but I can't find out much about it.
Urban scale wind turbines. One that I needed to have seen in person. Unfortunately I missed it.
GlueMotor looks cool.
Low-cost push-button clicker. I'd have liked to have found out more about this. If it's what I imagine it is, this could be quite revolutionary in the classroom.
Hardware Startup Showcase. I have ideas. I'd like to see them get out of my head and into existence. Turns out there's even a MeetUp group.
Kits by Kids. I'll have to check this out to see what sort of stuff I can do with Zoe when she's a bit older.

Kickstarter is really becoming huge in the maker community. There were heaps of exhibitors there with (mostly robotics) projects that were past the initial prototyping phase and were seeking funding on Kickstarter to go into mass production. Some of the talks I'd have liked to have seen:

Zoe was really well behaved for the entire expedition. I don't think she really gave me any grief at all. There was a brief period where she wanted me to carry her, but I managed to negotiate her back into the stroller after not long. I think her favourite was ArcBotics, which had a robot insect that would dance and wave at her. She kept asking for it to do more dancing.

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