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:

• Every Child a Maker
• "Kickstarters," Equity and the New Maker Pro
• Making Professional Makers - Career Tech Ed Instructors Talk Shop
• Manufacturing Open Source Hardware - Get Your Stuff Made!

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.

I am usually fortunate at conferences and aside from the obligatory "group photo" manage to completely avoid being in photos and videos of the event. However recently I attended the Linaro connect event in San Francisco and somehow got volunteered to be on a panel.

It has been months since I last put something here, so I think that requires a quick catchup.

Released a few hours ago, here is the monthly report of DPL activities for February 2012.

---

Howdy, dear Project Members,
here's another round of updates about what has happened in DPL land, this time during February 2012. Highlights Quit a bit of highlights for this month:

• The first item is not pleasant but important. Early February I've submitted to the attention of the Technical Committee the upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg to the archive. The Technical Committee quickly reached a decision. Shortly afterwards an upload to experimental has happened and discussions on -devel ensued. Please help out with testing.
• Thanks to IBM and OSUOSL we have some new fairly capable (virtual) machines for powerpc* ports. See the announcement for more info. In particular, please note the call for powerpc64 porters. If you're interested in contributing to such a port, please get in touch with DSA.
• Google Summer of Code project is up again. As usual, it is a good chance to get some work done and, more importantly, to let students who are passionate about Free Software discover Debian. I've delegated the task of GSoC admins --- thanks Ana, Gergely, and Sukhbir! A call for project proposals has already been sent out; there isn't much time left, so please hurry up and drop your ideas to the wiki page and contact the soc-coordination mailing list.
• A couple of important discussions have been going on on -project. The first is the old "trademark vs DFSG" discussion. I've posted there results from legal advice that I've sought on the matter, based on your suggestions. Then, I've posted a proposal on how to deal with trademarks issues in the archive.
• The second discussion is about Debian affiliation with OSI. We've been approached by OSI about that, as I've summarized on -project. Helped by the feedback received, I've decided to go ahead with affiliation and I'm now discussing with OSI representative the next steps.
• The long running work on software patent issues in the archive has been concluded publishing a policy on the matter. We now have a contact point and legal advice with whom we can discuss specific issues if/when they arise; hopefully that would help us to discriminate actual issues in the archive (if any) from the vast amount of FUD in the area.

Talks, interviews, and the like

• Following up Debian related talks at FOSDEM, I've been interviewed, together with Lars Wirzenius and Wookey, for The Register.
• I've took part at a FOSDEM panel session on comparing the organization of local user groups, ambassadors, and the like. We've mostly to learn from others in this area, but I've took the change to summarize what we currently have in a slide deck.

Sprints Plenty of sprints related news!

• DSA and the Groupware team will be holding sprints later on in March, while DAM / FrontDesk are having one right now co-located with the BSP in Moenchengladbach
• the video team sent out a report for their sprint back in November
• debbugs (AKA bugs.debian.org) hackers are organizing a sprint to get people interested in contributing to the code base up to speed. If you're, drop a line in the thread

It would be amazing to have an average of one sprint per month for 2012, and we're on good track for it. If you want to help, organize one for your team as documented on the wiki. Legal stuff

• Thanks to SPI, we've established contacts with the owners of debian.eu, domain we believe we legitimately own. As a first step they've set up HTTP redirection from debian.eu to debian.org (instead of a computer hardware shop, as it was before) and we're now discussing actual transfer of domain ownership to a Debian Trusted Organization.
• We've contacted the Japanese trademark office to transfer the "debian" trademark there to SPI. Thanks to the previous owners (all Debian developers or contributors) for agreeing to the move. Now "only" a nasty pile of paperwork remains to be done.

Appointments In addition to the GSoC admins delegation (see above), I've agreed with former secretary Kurt Roeckx to reappoint him as a secretary for another year. Many thanks, Kurt! Miscellaneous

• We have been invited to attend the OpenStack summit in April and have a presence there, free of charge. Loic Dachary, active member of the OpenStack packaging team in Debian, has agreed to go and represent Debian there. Thanks a lot to Stefano Maffulli for the invitation and to Loic for his availability!
• We are in the process of joining as a project, instead of relying on individual maintainers as in the past the ISC forum to get access to embargoed vulnerability information for important pieces of software such as BIND and DHCP. They've kindly offered us membership free of charge. I've submitted a draft of the membership agreement to SPI and I'm waiting for their decision.
• Steady progress on the front of periodic budget reports, thanks to the work of Martin Michlmayr. We've discussed at length during FOSDEM and agreed on procedures to query the state of Debian finances that work for both auditors and the DPL. Martin has also set up a shared ledger repository and already checked in into it a lot of money transactions for the past few years not from all trusted organizations yet, though. Have faith, we'll get there

Happy Debian hacking.

---

PS as usual, the boring day-to-day activity log is available at master:/srv/leader/news/bits-from-the-DPL.*

<style type="text/css"> @import "/pub/special-css/venk.css"; </style> My friend Venkatesh, pictured above, is going to bike four thousand miles, all the way across the continental US, from Baltimore to Portland. He's doing it to raise money for the Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults. I'm writing this because I want you to donate money to his cause. He's a DragonFly BSD developer, loves bikes, and your donation could make a big difference. I first met Venkatesh through the Johns Hopkins computer club, an ACM chapter. I was the head of the club, and he had just started his career at Hopkins. He was looking for advice on running Brickwiki, the LEGO encyclopedia. Quickly, I became his friend; in that time, I've learned the following things about him.

• He is friendly!
• He believes in science; beyond just writing sharp code, he likes to ask questions.
• He is melodramatically attracted to the power and complexity of biology. (The above quote about cancer are his words.)
• He wants to do something to make cancer less of a killer.

In the years since I graduated from Hopkins, I've been impressed by Venkatesh's ongoing curiosity and contributions to open source projects like DragonFly. I'm honored to have this chance to help him bike across the country for a good cause. Here is a quick word about the 4K for cancer effort:

Since 2002, groups of college students have undertaken a 70 day, 4000+ mile summer bike ride across the United States with the goal of offering hope, inspiration and support to cancer communities along the way. This past summer was our 10th year of cycling across the country as 76 volunteers rode along three different routes: Baltimore to San Francisco, Baltimore to Portland, and Baltimore to Seattle. Our riders raised a combined $476,000 to support organizations and individuals in the fight against cancer.

His fundraising goal is $5,000. Anything from $5 to $500 is a donation to an organization that helps young adult cancer surviers and their families get access to information and support resources. Can you help?

Paul Wayper writes about the merits of using toll transponders to pay for parking. I can report that I'm able to use my FasTrak tag to pay for parking at San Francisco International Airport, and it does indeed rock. I'm unaware of anywhere else accepting it as a form of payment though.

I ve written before about joining Singly and a little bit about the open source software we re building. There s now a bit more content on our website too, or you could watch my colleague, Jabber founder Jeremie Miller, talk about it on stage.
Suffice to say, it s pretty interesting stuff, and we need more interesting people to join the team in order to achieve our goals in the next year. In particular, we re looking for engineers to build highly flexible, resilient and performant back-end infrastructure using Ubuntu, and innovative, usable and beautiful front-end interfaces using HTML5. For full details and how to apply, check out the Singly blog or contact me directly. At this time, we have a preference for candidates in the San Francisco bay area, but are open to exceptional candidates from elsewhere.

Every year, on January 1st, new material ceases to be protected by copyright and enters the public domain. This means, every year, more knowledge, literature, paintings, music, movies and a long etcetera becomes collective property, instead of being artificially held by the current holders of their rights. As this image shows (source: http://publicdomainday.org/node/39 ), I have the honor(?) to live in the country with the longest copyright protection term in the world. Copyright in Mexico does not only last for 100 years It lasts for the natural life of the author plus 100 years. This means that the popular corridos that tell the stories of the 1910 revolution are still not in the public domain. La sucesi n presidencial, the book which Francisco I. Madero wrote to justify that a peaceful political change was needed for the 1910 elections, will not enter the public domain until 2014 (president Madero was killed during 1913). Does it make any sense to kidnap cultural, political or artistic works for over a century? Not only that: Material that is legally sold as public domain in other countries is illegal in ours. Take as an example the recordings of Enrico Carusso, the great Italian tenor who died in 1921. Over 15 years ago, I bought a couple of CDs with his recordings (even if the sources were quite low-quality, as they had been copied over from wax cylinders to magnetic tapes to optical media). I bought them surprisingly cheap, as they were genuine public domain. But they are still protected in my country. That means, I ilegally have some stolen(!) works of art which I lawfully bought outside my country. Copyright law needs to be revised to match reality. Technological advances have strongly changed reality since 1717's promulgation of the first copyright laws. The solution is not to extend the terms, but to rethink the whole process. (yes, this rant was mainly made as an excuse for me to copy this image and put it in a location I can easily refer to later. But I hope it is interesting to you!)

Our friends Andrew and Janice finally tied the knot last Sunday, in Langkawi, Malaysia. They're Aussies currently living in New York, and Janice is of Malaysian descent, so I think part of the reason was to accommodate some Malaysian relatives that wouldn't be able to travel, and the other reason was that it was going to mean a bunch of people had to travel anyway, so why not travel somewhere a bit exotic? As my sister is getting married later this month in Brisbane, we decided to spare Zoe two massive international flights in close succession, and Sarah and Zoe flew out a few days ahead of me, and went to Brisbane, and then Zoe, Sarah and her mum flew to Langkawi from there, and I flew there from San Francisco, with the plan being for Sarah and Zoe to hang out in Brisbane for the 4 weeks in between weddings. It was the longest amount of travel I think I've ever done. I hadn't sat down and calculated what the travel time was beforehand, and when I got on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and they said it was going to be nearly 14 hours just to Hong Kong, I nearly wept. The only good thing about it was I didn't have to wrangle a toddler as well. From there, I had to get to Singapore, with a several hour layover, and then another flight from Singapore to Langkawi. I left SFO at 1:20am on Monday morning, and finally arrived at about 7am (San Francisco time) the following day. I didn't even bother getting off the plane in Hong Kong, it was only an hour and a half layover. I think the layover in Singapore was 5 hours, and it was a separate flight. Singapore airport at least was pretty good to kill time in. It was funny, I was reading Wired while I was killing time in Singapore, and they had an article, which included a side bar on 10 Best Airports to Get Stuck In, and I observed that getting to Langkawi and back involved using 4 of them. The flight into Langkawi was more eventful than usual. I was dozing a bit as we were coming in to land, and I woke up to the sensation of taking off again. I wondered if we'd had an aborted landing? Sure enough, soon after, the captain got on the public address and said that they'd had to abort the landing due to bad weather in Langkawi. He had pretty bad Engrish, thanking us for our frustration and saying something about fuel, so I didn't get a lot of the details. We proceeded to circle for a while before finally landing. I think the flight ended up landing something like an hour or more later than scheduled. So that was mildly exciting. Langkawi airport was one of those little "walk across the tarmac" places. I think I stood the closest to an operating jet engine that I ever have, as another aeroplane taxied in to a stop between my plane and the terminal while I was walking to it. Loud. Anyway, that was all just me getting there. Sarah had a bit of fun getting to Brisbane on her own with Zoe. She's now too long to sleep in an in-flight bassinet, and doesn't seem to like sleeping vertically in the Ergo Baby Carrier (possibly she was too hot in it). I think she got a bit of sleep lying across Sarah's lap, but Sarah didn't get much sleep. I think there was similar fun for the Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur flight, but at least she had two laps to lie across for that one. Sarah, Zoe and Sarah's mum arrived in Langkawi earlier in the day on Tuesday, and I made it to the resort at about 10pm (local time) and pretty much immediately crashed for the night. The Westin Langkawi was just fabulous. I don't think we've stayed at a resort since our honeymoon, and this resort was a whole other level compared to Heron Island. The rooms were very comfortable, and the resort was very accommodating of a toddler. Their Kids Club menu was excellent. The breakfast buffet (included in our room rate) was the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever seen in a hotel. The only thing missing was bacon, being a Muslim country, but I can live without that. It was pretty easy to just fill up on breakfast, skip lunch and just have a light dinner. The on-resort dining prices were also very reasonable. The off-resort prices were even cheaper. The resort facilities in general were very comprehensive. Three pools. A children's play room. A well equipped gym and recreational area including squash courts. An extremely nice day spa. The thing I liked best about the whole destination wedding thing was all of the activities leading up to the actual wedding. The wedding was on the Sunday, and we had the Hen's and Buck's parties on Friday. Apparently Australia is the only place that calls it a Buck's party. The rest of the world calls it a Stag party, how about that? There was some last-minute changes to the Buck's party, and we ended up chartering this huge $2 million yacht for 4 hours and going for a cruise and doing some jetskiing and water sports. The captain was Aussie, so we all had a good chat with him. Apparently it's a corporate vessel, with an exclusive chartering arrangement with the Westin. On Friday night, we all went out to a seafood buffet dinner at the Yellow Cafe over at Cenang Beach. Most of the guys and girls already knew each other courtesy of the day's activities, so dinner involved a lot of meeting the other halves. What I really liked about all of the pre-wedding stuff was that by the time the wedding rolled around, you really felt like you knew a bunch of Andrew and Janice's family and friends, which I think made the whole thing feel a lot more intimate. Saturday was a recovery day. Sarah's aunties Glenda (who was in Singapore on business) and Vicki (who lives in Thailand) had joined us at the resort by this stage, so we were all knocking around together checking out the island. We took the cable car to the top, but unfortunately the sky bridge was closed due to the inclement weather. There was a lot of touristy stuff at the bottom of where the cable car was, and Zoe got to have an encounter with a very large python. She even tried to give it a kiss. One of the things that was surprising was how popular Zoe was with all of the locals and other Asian tourists. We could probably have charged for photographs. There was a little girl, who I thought was possibly a similar age to Zoe (turned out she was two and a half) and I asked her parents if I could take a photo of the two girls together, and no sooner had they sat down together and a virtual paparazzi materialised out of nowhere taking photographs. Similarly, all of the staff at the Westin were totally taken by Zoe, and wanted to touch her. To her credit, Zoe handled all of the extra attention pretty well. The wedding wasn't until 6pm on Sunday, so we did a 4 hour island hopping boat tour in the morning. That was a bit of an experience. It was nothing short of sheer bedlam trying to board the right boat at the wharf (I use the term lightly) and then the boat's captain had to arrange the passengers appropriately so as to keep the boat on an even keel. It was a narrow motor boat with a canopy cover over the back two thirds of it. First stop was Dayang Bunting Island, home of Pregnant Maiden Lake, where we stopped for 45 minutes. More bedlam ensued getting off the boat at the wharf there (there was veritable flotilla of tour boats all trying to load and unload at the same time). Monkeys abounded. They seemed incredibly tame. We were practically tripping over them. Zoe didn't seem to be as taken by the monkeys as I thought she would. It was a short walk up a reasonable flight of stairs to get to the lake, though some incredibly humid jungle, and once we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to do in the time we had available. So we dunked Zoe's feet in the lake a few times and then made our way back to the chaos at the wharf and got back on our boat. We stopped for a similar amount of time at another island with a pretty nice beach, and Zoe had enough time to a quick swim in the ocean with Sarah, and then we made our way back to the boat again to another spot where we watched sea eagle feeding. Heaps of eagles circling overhead would take turns to swoop down and grab fish and fly off again. It was impressive. I think I managed to snap some good action shots with the long lens. Then we had the wedding itself. It was on the beach out the front of the Heavenly Spa on the resort. Let me say, the Westin knows how to put a wedding together. The ceremony was as lovely as the location. For the reception, the one 5 bedroom villa on the resort was booked for the night. Dinner was a buffet on the lawn out the front (briefly delayed thanks to a rain shower) and then speeches and general partying happened around the terrace out the back of the villa. There were some beautiful speeches. Janice's brought a tear to my eye. Part of the whole package included something like a 10 person video crew that were running around capturing everything. It felt a bit surreal. It was definitely the most high-end wedding I've ever been to (sorry Scott and Julie, your "Wedding of the Century" has been eclipsed by the "Wedding of the Millennium"). Monday was a wind down day. Zoe mercifully gave us a sleep in until 8am. Our flights didn't leave until the evening on Tuesday, so after we checked out we went for a drive around the island to try and get Zoe to take a nap in the car. We ended up at the fruit farm, which to the best of my understanding is run by the government. Zoe had fallen asleep by this stage, and Sarah said she'd stay behind in the car and have a nap too. So her mum and I went on the tour. It was a fun little tour. There were only four of us on it. They drive you around the farm on the back of a truck and show you the various crops they have. They stop at a few places and give you a bunch of fruit samples, attempt to answer your questions, and take funny pictures of you. The favourite seemed to be to dangle a fruit on a knife up close in front of the camera while having the subject(s) in the background look like they're carrying an enormous fruit. We got back to the car to an upset Sarah and small group of locals milling around. Sarah had managed to lock Zoe in the car for about 30 minutes when she got out to make her a sandwich after Zoe had woken up from her nap. Fortunately the engine was running and the air conditioning was on, so there was no risk of Zoe overheating (on the contrary, she was a bit on the cool side). Some kind locals had somehow figured out which car rental company to call (it's possible there's only one) and someone came out with a spare key, so the crisis was averted just before we got back to the car. It's the first time Zoe's been locked in the car (it's pretty much impossible in the Prius) and it was just our luck that it'd happen in a foreign country! One of the saddest things about Langkawi was the amount of garbage floating around in the ocean, and washing up on the beaches. I was swimming in the ocean off the yacht while we were out on the Buck's party, and it was disgusting. The jetski was temporarily disabled due to sucking in something. We visited Black Sand Beach, which was supposed to be something of a tourist attraction. Covered in trash. Ian Kiernan would be sad. The captain of the yacht we were on for the Buck's party said it was all from Thailand and got flushed out of all the rivers and streams by the recent rain. Just goes to show how connected everything is. The house is very quiet without Sarah and Zoe, but my friend Liam is visiting from Zurich for a couple of weeks, so that's helping break the silence. I'm using the time to get a heap of things done that I don't otherwise get time to get done. Unfortunately the photos from the trip are only available on Facebook at the moment, but they'll eventually get uploaded here.

Just a quick note to remind everyone that the Rcpp class in San Francisco, which I am holding together with Revolution Analytics, will take place a week from today. We are happy to report that the number of registrations has met our initial targets. But as a number of open slots remain, we have decided to offer a few places at discounts of 25% for academics (with code acad1) and 50% for students (with code student). Course details are at the Revolution course page, registration is at the Eventbrite page. And just for completeness, here is what I wrote in the previous announcement:

The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. The one-day class will be offered in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details.

Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions. Or with suggestions for the after-party in San Francisco :)

After spotting an upload of mira, who in turn spotted an upload of abe (the package, not an upload by me aka abe@d.o), mira (mirabilos aka tg@d.o) noticed that there are Debian packages which have same name as some Debian Developers have as login name. Of course I noticed a long time ago that there is a Debian package with my login name abe . Another well-known Debian login and former package name is amaya. But since someone else came up with that thought, too, it was time for finding the definite answer to the question which are the DD login names which also exist as Debian package names. My first try was based on the list of trusted GnuPG keys:

$ apt-cache policy $(gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --list-keys 2>/dev/null   \
                     grep @debian.org   \
        	     awk -F'[<@]' ' print $2 '   \
                     sort -u) 2>/dev/null   \
                   egrep -o '^[^ :]*'
alex
tor
ed
bam
ng

But this was not satisfying as my own name didn t show up and gpg also threw quite a lot of block reading errors (which is also the reason for redirecting STDERR). mira then had the idea of using the Ultimate Debian Database to answer this question more properly:

udd=> SELECT login, name FROM carnivore_login, carnivore_names
      WHERE carnivore_login.id=carnivore_names.id AND login IN
      (SELECT package AS login FROM packages, active_dds
       WHERE packages.package=active_dds.login UNION
       SELECT source AS name FROM sources, active_dds
       WHERE sources.source=active_dds.login)
      ORDER BY login;
 login                   name
-------+---------------------------------------
 abe     Axel Beckert
 alex    Alexander List
 alex    Alexander M. List  4402020774 9332554
 and     Andrea Veri
 ash     Albert Huang
 bam     Brian May
 ed      Ed Boraas
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA Compatibility Key]
 ed      Ed G. Boraas [RSA]
 eric    Eric Dorland
 gq      Alexander GQ Gerasiov
 iml     Ian Maclaine-cross
 lunar   J r my Bobbio
 mako    Benjamin Hill
 mako    Benjamin Mako Hill
 mbr     Markus Braun
 mlt     Marcela Tiznado
 nas     Neil A. Schemenauer
 nas     Neil Schemenauer
 opal    Ola Lundkvist
 opal    Ola Lundqvist
 paco    Francisco Moya
 paul    Paul Slootman
 pino    Pino Toscano
 pyro    Brian Nelson
 stone   Fredrik Steen
(26 rows)

Interestingly tor (Tor Slettnes) is missing in this list, so it s not complete either At least I m quite sure that nobody maintains a package with his own login name as package name. :-) We also have no packages ending in -guest , so there s no chance that a package name matches an Alioth guest account either

So one my favorite fieldwork photos is the one above and I would love to include it in my book but I have no idea where I got it from much less who took it. The photo was taken during a San Francisco protest against the DMCA, and more urgently at the time, also calling for the release of Dimitry Sklyrov (and we were all listening to Richard Stallman who was giving a small speech and I am on the right hand side of the photo, furiously scribbling notes) I am looking for a high quality photo from one of the many Dmitry Sklyarov protests that were held in San Francisco or San Jose a photo that is either under CC license or given to me with formal permission to publish (I have forms to get official permissions). As I mentioned in my previous post, the book will be published with Princeton University Press with a CC license.

Together with Revolution Analytics, I will be offering two more one-day classes on the Rcpp package for seamless integration of R and C++. The format will follow the workshop Romain and I gave during the tutorial day preceding this year's R/Finance conference. The style will once again be hands-on, with copious concrete examples and solid coverage of most aspects of Rcpp and related packages such as RInside, RcppArmadillo and others. The eight-hour schedule contains about six hours of instruction, split into four sessions of around ninety minutes. This leaves ample time for both lunch and coffee breaks, and for informal discussions and Q+A. Two one-day classes will be offered: The first in New York on Saturday, September 28, 2011 and the second one two weeks later in San Franciso on Saturday, October 8, 2011. Please see the official course page for more details, concrete location info and maps as well as registration details. Feel free to contact me at the usual email address with questions.

One slightly unexpected effect of all the travel I ve been doing recently is that I get a real, visceral sense of place from some slightly surprising places when I see them on the big screen. Having an idea of how the place really is, how people behave, how the air feels, how the food tastes, how it smells, a sense of what s around the corner and beyond the camera. A sense of memory, not of imagination or of an idea of what a place should be. San Francisco is one place this happens for and is perhaps not so surprising it is a pretty distinctive place after all and the imagery was already familiar from countless movies and TV shows before I ever went there. What was a bit more surprising was a random suburban area in South Korea; Korea has had a real building boom amid all the growth it s had which has resulted in a certain look and feel to the architecture and the cities being very common though not distinctive of any once place. That s the space where a lot of the more real world Korean films are set, and it s the one I recognise. Don t think I ve ever seen a film that ventured into Itaewon ( ), mind you. It s a much stronger feeling of recognition than I get with anywhere in the UK, I think purely due to the surprise factor. Having a good picture of Edinburgh isn t a great surprise, finding how quickly I ve built one up of places on other continents much more so.

I was invited to be part of one of the panels to be present this Thursday (June 2) in a forum that promises to be interesting. The forum is organized by the Science and Technology comission of the Senate of the Republic (of Mexico ;-) ), Universidad Aut noma Metropolitana and Mozilla M xico. The day will be opened by Sen. Francisco Javier Castell n Fonseca and Richard Stallman; starting at 10:00, we will have thematic panels on:

• Education
• Government
• Industry
• Civil society

The full program (as well as details of interest of those that can physically attend) is attached to this post. I am looking forward to this forum. Not only it is a good opportunity to get our work known in one of those places where it matters, but it's also being organized by several interesting people I'm sure will have something interesting to contribute. And of course, we lacked time to build a better, more complete and more coherent proposal but there is a good probability we will have further such contacts. You might find interesting to read on the list we have been discussing; subscription seems to be open (although access to the archives is not Maybe it will be later on? In any case, I'm saving a mbox ;-) )

Attachment	Size
Activity program	352.37 KB

This summer, I ll be taking a bit of time off, moving back to San Francisco and starting a new job. I can t wait to get back to work. Here s why. Me and my data
I have a singular relationship with my data. I have a copy of every email I ve sent since I first got an Internet email address in 1994 (82,000 messages and counting). I have even older files downloaded from BBSes, and passed between friends on floppy disks. Chat logs, text messages, voicemail I hold onto them all. Anything which is relevant to me personally, I tend to save. This must seem banal to people who are first getting online today. In the age of Gmail and Flickr, it s easy to assume that all of your data will be preserved indefinitely, with little or no effort on your part. But for me, it has been hard work over the years, because I ve done it myself. I ve carried my data with me to countless new computers, operating systems, storage technologies, file formats and cities over the years. Everywhere I ve lived, I ve brought it with me. Physically. Really? Why do I do this? Why have I gone to such trouble for a collection of bits? Especially now, why is most of my data still at home?
One pragmatic answer is that I can simply do more with my data when I have a copy. I can work with it using any software I want, including software that I write myself. I don t have to worry about whether I can transfer it from one web service to another. I m never stuck using yesterday s services because my data is never trapped in them. My personal data is always available to me me, always raw, ready and waiting for the next wave of software to come along. When it does, I can load my data into it and keep going. The fact that Facebook and Google disagree over sharing their users data doesn t bother me in the least. Another reason is that I want to be in control of it. I decide who to share my data with, and when. Some of it, I prefer not to share at all, with any person or company, and I have that choice. Even if a powerful government wants to access my data, I am afforded certain protection under the law, at least in the countries where I ve lived. If I turned over my data to service providers, my choices and protection would likely be much more limited. I have a deeper emotional attachment to my data as well. Enfolded within that vast pattern of bits is some part of my self. By sharing my personal data with other people, I show them something of who I am. Increasingly, my personal data is part of my identity. This is more than just a state of mind: it s been shown that even our non-identifying personal data can reveal who we are. In other words, it s not just my data it s me data . Singly I m joining Singly because I want to take this concept much further, and combine people, data and software into a different shape with people at the center. Today, we are creating vastly greater amounts of personal data, and it s stored in many more places. We leave our trail on the Internet in the form of activity streams, messages and content, spread across different web sites, each with their own inscrutable terms of service and (if we re lucky) their own API. These disconnected silos prevent us from using all of this information effectively. Meanwhile, we want and need to connect with each other in more ways than ever before. We need applications which can connect us, through our personal data, to the services we need. Singly is building the technology to make this possible. It will be designed with the deepest respect for the relationship that we have with our personal data, and with a vision for truly personal computing. Singly is

• A team of passionate people, dedicated to a vision for personal data
• Building an open source data locker, which aggregates and stores your personal data from around the web and ensures that it s always available to you
• Enabling developers to create powerful distributed applications based on this data, without having to deal with the complexity of multiple web services APIs
• Providing secure hosting services for personal data lockers
• Hiring! We re looking for people with deep experience in security and cryptography, cloud infrastructure and user experience, as well as software engineering generalists

This opportunity is a great fit for my interests and experience. Singly aims to be the commercial part of a vibrant open source community, and I m looking forward to building on what I ve learned in Debian, Canonical and Ubuntu to help make it a success. I ll have lots more to say about it as time goes on. Meanwhile, if you re interested in following what we re doing, here s where:

• Singly: website, blog, Twitter
• The Locker Project: website, GitHub, Twitter, blog, IRC (#lockerproject on FreeNode)
• Me: Blog, Identica or Twitter

I'm participating in the MeeGo Summit FI that starts tomorrow, and I'm already in Tampere now, as you can see. The summit is at an interesting time, given that there is a huge amount of stuff happening around MeeGo while at the same time Nokia is balancing on what do both in the far future and what to do to ship the MeeGo device they've already promised. The summit is fully and overly booked for >300 attendees. There is also Finhack free software event happening alongside on Saturday at the same venue.


The company I work for, Nomovok's CEO illustrated the MeeGo situation extraordinarily well a little less than two months ago. I think it's one of the best insights you can get from anywhere in public at the moment. Now things are starting to really heat up. Of course the Big thing is the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in the end of May, but it takes nothing away from this being the major event both in the country formerly known as NokiaLandia, and also globally given the amount of MeeGo related talent here. Nomovok is teasing people with the SteelRat - a launchpad for MeeGo tablet creation and an UX, based on latest MeeGo Core - a beta of which will be available now in Tampere and first version in San Fransisco. Meanwhile we and others are investing in also the MeeGo IVI and MeeGo TV platforms, not forgetting about the handset industry that is more visible to many tech savvy consumers.


At the same time there is a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Ubuntu project (Ubuntu 11.04 upcoming, I'm already using it and reporting bugs), together with Linaro and other ARM players. As a founder of Ubuntu Finland I'm always eager to see if I can work there also on work time, not only on free time. And regarding ARM, Nomovok is the key player in having ARM on MeeGo as well.

Then on the completely other end of spectrum, I'm eagerly waiting for the GTA04 project to have my Neo FreeRunner(s) bumped up to modern specs. At the end of the day I'm still using over 2,5 year old phone myself, since I want to run the software that is both free and completely selected (and if I want, done) by me. With GTA04, I could choose between MeeGo armv7hl port, Debian armhf port or Ubuntu as the base distribution to use my software.

My trip to the Bay Area is coming to the end. It has been surprisingly productive. Here's some things I have done in the nearly two weeks I have been here:

• got acquainted with San Francisco
• interviewed for a job at a startup
• visited Stanford University & Berkeley University campuses
• visited Google Mountain View and San Francisco offices
• hanged out with folks from Google, from Twitter and from some very promising startups, also a Stanford professor, a researcher from Berkeley and a Berkeley undergrad student, among others
• hanged out with people from The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
• spent a day biking in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area

The interview at Munich seemed to go well. Well, at least, I had fun. We'll see how that turns out.

For now, I'm off again for another job interview, this time to Palo Alto. This will be my first time to the West Coast, so I have postponed the return flight for two weeks to familiarize myself with the proverbial area. If anyone's from around the San Francisco Bay Area, I would be very happy to meet over lunch/dinner/beer!

Rachel Botsman gave an interesting TED talk about Collaborative Consumption, various ways of sharing and redistributing objects to save money and reduce their environmental impact [1]. It s a pity that there isn t something like swap.com in Australia.P2P Car RentalAmong other things she mentioned P2P car rentals. The first company she listed is Drive My Car (link to the Australian site) [2] which has a good range of vehicles. They charge 16.5% as an admin fee, the rest is paid to the owner. Strangely they have a web page to estimate what you can get for your vehicle, but the rates that are returned by that page seem to be a lot lower than what cars are actually advertised for (I guess that the owner can ignore the recommendation and charge whatever they want). They deal in daily rentals and the owner may specify a minimum period 4 days seems common. There are no changes needed to the car and the car owner only has to pay $25 per annum to be listed.Relay Rides operates in Boston and San Francisco [3], they operate on a per-hour basis and require some sort of RFID unlocking device to be added to each car. The normal setup fee for a car owner is $250 but they currently have a promotion that waives that fee.Get Around is a beta service that presumably operates only in the US (they seem US centric and don t specify locations) [4]. They appear to offer per-hour rentals and require hardware to unlock the car. It seems that to get most of the useful information (prices etc) you need to sign up which is a mistake on their part.Whip Car advertises their service on a supposed relationship between the car owner and the renter [5], I ve met the people who live in about 10 houses of the 50 in my street, so if a random person in my street offered a car for rent then there would be a 80% chance that I don t know them but I guess if one of my neighbors had a car to rent at a low price I might be more inclined to get to know them. The information page says that drivers must have a UK driving licence which implies that they only operate in the UK. Why don t these people state clearly on their web site the country that they service? Their business model seems interesting, I can imagine a few people who live near each other pooling funds to buy a vehicle and then using Whip Car to control reservations and manage sharing the costs.P2P Rental of Other ThingsA logical extension of the Whip Car concept is to have a service which only mediates sharing between trusted parties. It would have a web site that manages bookings including issues such as the minimum time between bookings, charges a flat fee per item that is managed, and then gives a summary to all parties of what the use was. Ideally it would allow for bidding for peak times. This could work for cars, computers, cameras, holiday homes, or anything else which can usefully be transferred between different users.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption.html
• [2] http://www.drivemycarrentals.com.au/
• [3] http://relayrides.com/
• [4] http://www.getaround.com/
• [5] http://www.whipcar.com/