Review: Sundiver, by David Brin

Series:	Uplift #1
Publisher:	Bantam
Copyright:	February 1980
Printing:	September 1995
ISBN:	0-553-26982-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	340

Sundiver is the first book of Brin's Uplift series, which I think it's fair to say are the books that made his reputation as an author. It's less well-known than the later sequels Startide Rising and The Uplift War for reasons that I'll get into in a moment. This was a re-read; I've read the first Uplift series before (and Startide Rising separately before that), but not in many years, and I wanted to re-read them and review them. I haven't finished doing that yet, several months after I re-read Sundiver, largely because this book wasn't as enjoyable as I remembered. The Uplift series is set in a heavily populated galaxy with a multitude of alien races. It follows the SF alien life pattern where the galaxy was well-populated and fully developed long before humans discovered it. The Earth is a relatively obscure backwater, and humans are expected to adopt to and follow the rules and restrictions that the other races had long-since established. This primarily means a complex and very formal system of caste and patronage: species brought to sapience by the technology of their patrons are expected to serve their patron races for millennia, and one's status in the galaxy is determined by the length of those patronage chains and the number of species one has fostered in turn. As is typical for stories of this sort, humans break the rules in unexpected ways. They have no known patrons, having apparently evolved sapience entirely on their own (although the galactic races are quite dubious of this theory). And they have uplifted two species to sapience (chimpanzees and dolphins) before their discovery by the rest of galactic civilization, although in fairly primitive ways and not properly by galactic standards. Set against this background, Sundiver is a science fiction puzzle story of a fairly old style. The protagonist, Jacob Demwa, is a scientific investigator who retired after a tragedy that killed his love. He's recruited out of that retirement and into this plot by an alien who is sympathetic to humans. A human exploration mission into the chromosphere of the Sun, treated as ridiculous by most of the galactics since the shared Library Institute certainly contains more information about stars than human technology could possibly uncover, has found strange and apparently sapient creatures living there: flocks of cattle-like creatures that are apparently being herded. There is no reference to such star-dwellers in the Library, which raises the possibility that humans have discovered something novel. That would be quite a coup against the galactics. But after the destruction of one of the solar exploration ships, it starts looking like these creatures are hostile. Jacob reminded me of a mix between a Larry Niven short story protagonist, working through the practical impact of a physics puzzle, and Isaac Asimov's Elijah Baley. What exactly is going on, both scientifically and politically, remains unclear for nearly the entire book. Both Jacob and the reader are constantly forming and then discarding hypotheses as events overtake them. The stakes are more interesting than a lot of science fiction novels: rather than survival or war, the stakes are prestige, influence, and status, with subtle but possibly vital effects on what position humans will take among the other species of the galaxy. All this sounds promising, and is why I remembered this book fondly. Unfortunately, re-reading it was a disappointing experience on several fronts. First, the characterization varies between trite and stereotyped. The aliens suffer from the standard alien characterization problem: each of them is an exemplar of their species, and all of the aliens feel like archetypes. While there are some twists in the inter-alien politics, one never gets a sense of the aliens as varied and complex societies in their own right. The humans are more varied, but that primarily means varieties of irritating. The worst is Peter LaRoque, a journalist who is set up as a villain of the story, and who is such an unremitting and over-the-top stereotype of everything possibly bad about journalists (and French people) that every scene containing him felt like someone scraping fingernails on a chalkboard. The other characters are a bit better, but not by much. Jacob himself has a bizarre, semi-mystical psychological problem from trauma that seems to give his amoral subconscious a life of its own. Brin appears to be setting this up to have major plot significance, but it never made any sense to me, didn't matter much in the end, and seems to mostly be an excuse for Jacob's hypercompetence. Sundiver's treatment of female characters also annoyed me enough to be worth a mention. The primary female character, Helene, is clearly intended to be a strong character with her own agency (she's both station commander and a starship captain), and Brin makes a lot of the humans switching to different words than male and female as a sign of a more egalitarian future. But this all feels skin-deep. The inevitable romance is all about Helene's attractiveness and ability to listen to Jacob, her logic is described as unscientific, and I got more and more annoyed by her portrayal as the book went along. She's not entirely without agency in the story, but she's much closer to a damsel in distress than the independent character Brin appeared to be trying for. It's hard to shake the feeling that she's being persistently belittled by the story. But this is a scientific puzzle story more than a mystery; characterization would be nice, but isn't strictly required. On re-read, the part of Sundiver that annoyed me the most was how much of a letdown the plot resolution was. I'm going to avoid any specific spoilers here, but I found the ending of both quite disappointing and a sign of the major problem with this series as a whole. The setup over-promises and Brin fails to deliver, a pattern that will repeat itself in this series. We get tantalizing hints of a new solar species, of revelations about the past of humanity, of deep galactic politics, and of vast knowledge contained in the Library that humans don't yet have access to. We get superficial archetypes for characters, politics that seem more like the bickering of children, plot twists that persistently take the story in more mundane and less interesting directions, and a sense of wonder, or lack thereof, that feels more like a Scooby Doo story than what I expect from science fiction. Some of the plot twists are unexpected and almost add some interest to the story, but don't make enough sense in the context of the story to be satisfying. And, of course, there's an climactic action sequence involving physical combat, as is required of all good Star Trek (original series) episodes. (I was waiting for Jacob's shirt to fall off.) The problem I have always had with Brin as a writer is that his ideas are far better than his ability to write characters and plots. In the hands of a better author, the Uplift universe background has so much potential. And I think Brin is a better author a few years later; my recollection is that both Startide Rising and The Uplift War do a better job of delivering on their promises. But Sundiver is deservedly forgettable. The good ideas rarely go anywhere beyond the obvious, the characters are irritating and often don't make sense, and the story is disappointing. I can't say I'm sorry to have read it, since my memory edited it down into a much better story, but I can only recommend it as background for later, better books. Rating: 4 out of 10

Today is the monday after FOSDEM 2014, and I'm slowly waking up. Being in charge of the video team, and after having spent a whole week preparing followed by a whole weekend stressing about, today is a day of slowly waking up from hibernation and returning gear to various rental companies. At FOSDEM 2013, we had recorded five rooms. Even though we did lose a few talks, I felt pretty good about the whole thing, and I think we did pretty well then. It had been my plan to increase the number of rooms to be recorded from 5 to a reasonably higher number say, 10 or so but someone convinced me to do all of them. I'll readily admit I was afraid. Scratch that, I was terrified. Petrified, that we wouldn't be able to pull it off. For previous editions, we'd kept the number conservative, since video work is a high-risk business: if something goes wrong with volunteers work (say, the heralding volunteer doesn't show up), you find a replacement, or you have a staff member introduce a speaker, and the show will go on. Not so with video work: if something minor goes wrong, you will most likely lose content. If something minor goes wrong in one devroom, I'll deal with it. If something minor goes wrong in 20% of devrooms, that's 4 to 5 devrooms, and I can't deal with it. Moreover, finding enough volunteers to manage the video for five rooms was a challenge last year; I couldn't even begin to imagine how to do so for 22 of them. We did work out a way that didn't seem too far-fetched, and that might work: why not look for volunteers from the devrooms themselves? But then, they couldn't be expected to have the required experience, so we'd have to do a lot of handholding. The week before FOSDEM, four of us sat down in an office in Mechelen, and started preparing. We had a lot to do; and when you do, more jobs keep being added to the pile; TODO lists tend to grow longer, not shorter. Installing servers, testing cameras, setting twinpact dipswitches, configuring laptops. Changing a few tests in the config management system, and having to go over the laptops again. Buying extra gear. Buying yet more extra gear, several times. Buying cardboard boxes when it appeared that the plastic foldable ones we'd ordered wouldn't make it in time, and unloading the pallet of them when it did, after all, so we could load them into the van with all of the other gear. Laminating instruction sheets. Receiving shipments of rented gear. Calling another supplier last minute when one of our other suppliers had contacted us to let us know one of their cameras that they'd promised us had broken down, and couldn't be repaired in time. Calling that last-minute supplier again when we found out that some of the cameras we'd rented could do HDV only (and not DV), and we needed to find more than the ones we'd already asked for. Discovering that his cameras were of the same problematic model and so also couldn't be used. The feeling of relief when he called me a few hours later and told me he'd managed to scrounge up enough cameras to help us out after all. And then it was time to go to the ULB and start setting up everything. On friday, we had a little bit of help, but did have to do most of it ourselves. After setting up everything in every room and testing as much as possible within the time constraints that we had, we picked up the most expensive bits of the gear, brought it down to a safe place, and went home. On saturday and sunday, for me it was mostly a matter of handing out gear to various devrooms, running around to fix various issues, and then in the evening receiving boxes back, using a checklist to ensure everything expected was in the box (and that things not needed would remain in the room, or be sent back). It was exhausting, to the extent that on saturday afternoon, I had to take a bit of time off so I could go and rest. I think it's safe to say that something like this hasn't been done before. FOSDEM is a huge conference; most conferences with multiple rooms don't have more somewhere between 5 and 10 of them. The fact that we have so many more, and the fact that we record all of them, puts FOSDEM video work in a class of its own, to the extent that the professional cameramen I talked to in order to get the right cameras would incredulously ask "what do you need that for?" when I gave them the numbers we needed. As such, I didn't expect, nor was aiming for, perfection. Unfortunately, with video work it is close to impossible to attain perfection; I have told multiple people during the event that I would be happy if we reached 85% of talks recorded at acceptable quality; and though it is much too soon to say for certain, my gut feeling tells m that we've probably achieved that. One thing we hadn't planned for was streaming. During the past three years, FOSDEM enlisted the help and sponsorship of flumotion to get streaming going. Unfortunately, that did not work out this year; and since we already had far too much on our plates with everything else, we decided to forego streaming and focus on recording, only. A few days before the event, however, Steinar Gunderson took it upon himself to fix that. While we couldn't support him a great deal, we could give him access to the secondary laptops (which weren't otherwise doing much anyway) on which he could then do his thing. This was mostly transparent to us; we did communicate to some extent (e.g., when a machine that had been down had fixed and was working again), but he mostly did his thing while we did ours. Full details, for those who want it, in the linked blog post. Today, then, I spent most of my time handling hardware: waiting for other members of FOSDEM to drive the van up to my office; waiting for the laptop rental company to retrieve most of the laptops; waiting for two of the camera rental companies to retrieve their cameras and tripods; driving over to the final camera rental company to return their cameras and tripods; and finally, driving up to the ULB to retrieve the last laptops who had been copying files all night. As I write this, some video files have already been uploaded to the FOSDEM video archive. However, these are extremely low-quality renditions of video snippets that need to be reviewed; they are not ready yet for public consumption. When those files exist, expect an announcement through the main FOSDEM website.

Fast Coexist has an interesting article about the art that Simon Beck creates by walking in snow [1]. If you are an artist you can create art in any way, even by walking in patterns in the snow. Russ Altman gave an interesting TED talk about using DNA testing before prescribing drugs [2]. I was surprised by the amount of variation in effects of codeine based on genetics, presumably many other drugs have a similar range. Helen Epstein wrote an interesting article about Dr. Sara Josephine Baker who revolutionised child care and saved the lives of a huge number of children [3]. Her tenacity is inspiring. Also it s interesting to note that the US Republican party was awful even before the Southern Strategy . The part about some doctors opposing child care because it s the will of God for children to die and keep them in employment is chilling. Jonathan Weiler wrote an insightful article about the problems with American journalism in defending the government [4]. He criticises the media for paying more attention to policing decorum than to content. Tobias Buckell wrote an interesting post about the so-called socialised health-care in the US [5]. He suggests that Ronald Reagan socialised health-care by preventing hospitals from dumping dying people on the street. I guess if doing nothing for people until they have a medical emergency counts as socialised health-care then the US has it. Kelvin Thomson MP made some insightful comments about climate change, the recent heat-wave in Australia, and renewable energy [6]. Iwan Baan gave an interesting TED talk about ways that people have built cheap homes in unexpected places [7], lots of good pictures. Racialicious has an interesting article by Arturo R. Garc a about research into the effects of concussion and the way the NFL in the US tried to prevent Dr. Bennet Omalu publicising the results of his research [8]. Stani (Jan Schmidt) wrote an interesting post about how they won a competition to design a commemerative Dutch 5 Euro coin [9]. The coin design is really good (a candidate for the geekiest coin ever), I want one! Seriously if anyone knows how to get one at a reasonable price (IE close to face value for circulated or not unreasonably expensive for uncirculated) then please let me know. When writing about Edward Snowden, Nathan says Imagine how great a country would be if if it were governed entirely by people who Dick Cheney would call Traitor [10]. That s so right, that might make the US a country I d be prepared to live in. Andrew Solomon gave an interesting TED talk Love No Matter What about raising different children [11]. Aditi Shankardass gave an interesting TED talk about using an ECG to analyse people diagnosed wit severe Autism and other developmental disorders [12]. Apparently some severe cases of Autism have a root cause that can be treated with anti-seizure medication. George Monbiot wrote an insightful article about the way that Bono and Bob Geldoff promote G8 government intervention in Africa and steal air-time that might be given to allow Africans to represent themselves in public debates [13]. Daniel Pocock wrote an informative article about racism in Australian politics and how it is bad for job-seekers and the economy (in addition to being horribly wrong) [14]. Aeon Magazine has an interesting article by Anne Buchanan about the difference between scientists and farmers [15]. She has some interesting points about the way that the lack of general knowledge impacts research, but misses the point that in most fields of study there is a huge problem of people not knowing about recent developments in their own field. I don t think it s a pipe dream to be well educated in humanities and science, but I guess that depends on the definition of well educated . Brian Cox gave an interesting TED talk titled Why We Need the Explorers about the benefits of scientific research [16]. Yupu Zhang, Abhishek Rajimwale, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote an interesting paper about ZFS corruption in the face of disk and memory errors [17]. One thing to note is that turning off atime can reduce the probability of a memory error leading to corrupt data being written to disk, run zfs set atime=off tank to fix this. The comedian Solomon Georgio celebrated Martin Luther King day by tweeting I love you to racists [18]. It s an interesting approach and appears to have worked well.

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/k4eojcn
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/pp8o7l6
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/pq9xo4w
• [4] http://tinyurl.com/kgsloep
• [5] http://tinyurl.com/olsjgtf
• [6] http://tinyurl.com/md4wn2c
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/iwan_baan_ingenious_homes_in_unexpected_places.html
• [8] http://www.racialicious.com/2013/10/16/the-unsung-hero-of-league-of-denial/
• [9] http://tinyurl.com/lmjf2vu
• [10] http://www.advogato.org/person/ncm/diary.html?start=446
• [11] http://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_solomon_love_no_matter_what.html
• [12] http://tinyurl.com/26zq53o
• [13] http://tinyurl.com/qem2lmd
• [14] http://progressivedirection.com/australias-war-on-brains
• [15] http://tinyurl.com/mtecglz
• [16] http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_why_we_need_the_explorers.html
• [17] http://research.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/zfs-corruption-fast10.pdf
• [18] http://tinyurl.com/nrr68po

To all who might be interested: The first meeting for organizing Debconf in Mechelen will happen next sunday, at 3:00 PM, in the NixSys offices in the Battelsesteenweg 455e in Mechelen, Belgium. It looks like some of those who were interested might not be able to make it at that that time. If you're one of them, and you would like your availability to be considered for the next meeting, please send me an email with your preferences (that meeting should probably happen in about a month or so). (First point on the agenda: set up a mailinglist, to make this sort of communication somewhat easier ;-)

I've been singing for a long time. The first time I was a member of a choir was when I was around 6-7 years old, and it was as a member of the children's choir 'De Lambertijnen' in Ekeren, Belgium. Not by coincidence, Ekeren is where I grew up. However, I didn't remain a member of 'De Lambertijnen' for very long. After a year or two, I was over the maximum age for members of that choir, and "promoted" to Carmina, another children's choir of the same association. I didn't like that choir as much, though, and only remained a member for about a year or so, before I left that choir; and for a few years, choral music was no longer part of my interests. Then, when I turned sixteen, I was in a school where choral music was part of the curriculum; and through class, I found out that singing in a choir is something I actually love. By that time I was too old to join Carmina again, so I joined the C-koren's youth choir "Cantilene" under Luc Anthonis, instead. Luc is one of Belgium's finest choir conductors, and so I remained a member until my 26th birthday when, again, I was deemed too old to remain a member of that choir. At this point, the next choir in line was "Con Amore", a choir that does not have an age limit, but which in practice consists of mostly people who are retired (or nearly so, at least). As a result, most people who leave Cantilene do not join Con Amore, instead ending their foray into choral music. I was no exception. However, a year and a half (or so) later, the C-koren were extended with a new choir, "Caljent ", who jumpstarted their membership by contacting ex-Cantilene members (me amongst them), inviting them to join this new choir. I have been a member since the first official rehearsal of Caljent , and have always enjoyed it; enough so that when I moved out of Ekeren some five years ago, into a flat in Mechelen (a 30 minute car trip away), I did not quit the choir. I can, however, not deny that since moving out, my connection to Ekeren has become fairly strained, and that there have been times when I felt it difficult to motivate myself into driving all the way there for a rehearsal on friday night. I felt that to be unfair towards the conductor and towards the other members of the choir, and so it is with mixed feelings that I decided a month or so ago to remain a member only until the last rehearsal before the summer break this year. That last rehearsal was today (well, technically yesterday by now); and so, after a "career" of almost 20 years of nearly uninterrupted membership (including one 5-year stint as a member of Cantilene's governing board), I am now no longer a member of the C-koren. That's not to say I won't be singing anymore in fact, I've already joined a different choir whose rehearsal location just happens to be right around the corner from where I live but it does certainly feel weird to be putting an end to my C-koren membership. Ah well, we'll see what the future brings.

For (at least) the third time, I managed to register for debconf before registration was actually open. Oops. I found out that unfortunately, it's not quite certain yet that there will actually be a debcamp this year and if there is going to be a debcamp, it won't be a full week. Pity. At any rate, I'll be there the whole time, whatever the duration of debcamp. Since Vaumarcus is closer to Mechelen than Edinburgh (by about 250km), this is going to be the closest debconf for me, ever. And if I could go to Banja Luka by car, I can certainly go to Vaumarcus by car. Anyone care to join me?

This post is a bit late, but still interesting: Last weekend, I held a Bug Squashing Party at my company's offices in Mechlin, Belgium. This is the first time I've attended, let alone hosted, such an event; so I'm not that experienced in figuring out what I can and cannot do with other people's packages yet. As a result, our success rate was a bit lower than I'd hoped for. Still we closed two bugs, figured out that one more bug required just some binNMUs, that one should probably be tagged wheezy-ignore (as it was tagged squeeze-ignore too, and hasn't seen updates since then), and touched three more bugs. Having said that, I did have a bit of a hidden agenda, in that I've been wanting to build a stronger Debian community in Belgium; we are ranked fairly highly on the Debian Developer per capita list, but us Belgian DDs never meet up, in contrast to DDs from three of the four countries that surround Belgium. In that, I did have some success, too; some local people showed up who'd never (directly) contributed to Debian before. While I'm not silly enough to think that just showing up to a BSP once makes you suddenly an active member of a community, it's still a good first step. Unfortunately, however, I did not manage to get any other active Belgian DDs to show up. Apart from myself, only Dutch DD Joost Van Baal and DD Emeritus Joost Damad were present. If I can't find a way to improve on that, I'm not sure this BSPing will have a long life in Mechelen. At any rate, though, I did have a lot of fun doing this. Surely that, if nothing else, counts as "success".

About a month and a half ago, I got an email from someone studying at the HELMo institute for higher eduction in Li ge, Belgium, inviting me to talk at their conference which was held today. In the email, they asked me to talk about "Debian and Open Source", which is such a wide subject that I could talk about it all day; and then they gave me 20 minutes to do it. So I picked "Debian", and focused a bit more on that, only to find out when I saw their schedule that they'd put "Open Source" there instead. Hrm. Oh well. The talk itself went pretty good. I believe I managed a good balance between introducing Debian to those who've not heard of it before, and explaining to those who have, how this Debian thing works (or is supposed to work). The fact that the audience consisted of first- and second-year IT students made this easier (in case you were wondering: the third-year students, who're supposed to graduate at the end of this eyar, organized the thing). I got some interesting questions afterwards (which is always a good sign), and only positive comments as well (which is even better). After me, Lionel Dricot held a talk which was titled "Pirate Party", but which could be summarized as his personal history into the open source world, followed by some parallels between the open source world and the pirate party.That, too, was an interesting talk, even if I'm not sure I'd vote for the pirate party (which isn't even possible in Mechelen, but ignoring that). All in all, a nice use of my time.

Ever since my company moved offices back in June, I've been wanting to do this: organize a BSP. It just hadn't happened yet. Today, I decided that unless I start actually making this a concrete plan rather than some vague idea, it isn't going to happen. So, here we go: during the weekend of the 15th and 16th of December, I expect some people to show up and help stamping out those pesky RC bugs. If you've been wanting to help Debian somehow but don't know where to start, this is your chance! Don't worry about not knowing how all this works; there will be Debian Developers attending who can help you out (two DDs have told me that they'd like to attend, and of course I will be there too). If you've got some experience in Debian packaging, your help would of course be all the more appreciated. Even if you can't make it the whole weekend, that's fine too! Just be there for as long as you can, and help stamp out those pesky RC bugs. The more people help out, the better!

Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They are ordered to do so and in some cases their salary is paid from the cash that they take. So they have a good reason to imagine that any large sum of money is drug money and take it. David Frum wrote an insightful article for NY Mag about the problems with the US Republican Party [2]. TreeHugger.com has an interesting article about eco-friendly features on some modern cruise ships [3]. Dan Walsh describes how to get the RSA SecureID PAM module working on a SE Linux system [4]. It s interesting that RSA was telling everyone to turn off SE Linux and shipping a program that was falsely marked as needing an executable stack and which uses netstat instead of /dev/urandom for entropy. Really the only way RSA could do worse could be to fall victim to an Advanced Persistent Attack :-# The Long Now has an interesting summary of a presentation about archive.org [5]. I never realised the range of things that archive.org stores, I will have to explore that if I find some spare time! Jonah Lehrer wrote a detailed and informative article about the way that American high school students receive head injuries playing football[6]. He suggests that it might eventually be the end of the game as we know it. Fran ois Marier wrote an informative article about optimising PNG files [7], optipng is apparently the best option at the moment but it doesn t do everything you might want. Helen Keeble wrote an interesting review of Twilight [8]. The most noteworthy thing about it IMHO is that she tries to understand teenage girls who like the books and movies. Trying to understand young people is quite rare. Jon Masters wrote a critique of the concept of citizen journalism and described how he has two subscriptions to the NYT as a way of donating to support quality journalism [9]. The only comment on his post indicates a desire for biased news (such as Fox) which shows the reason why most US media is failing at journalism. Luis von Ahn gave an interesting TED talk about crowd-sourced translation [10]. He starts by describing CAPTCHAs and the way that his company ReCAPTCHA provides the CAPTCHA service while also using people s time to digitise books. Then he describes his online translation service and language education system DuoLingo which allows people to learn a second language for free while translating text between languages [11]. One of the benefits of this is that people don t have to pay to learn a new language and thus poor people can learn other languages great for people in developing countries that want to learn first-world languages! DuoLingo is in a beta phase at the moment but they are taking some volunteers. Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for the Publishers Weekly titles Copyrights vs Human Rights [12] which is primarily about SOPA. Naomi Wolf wrote an insightful article for The Guardian about the Occupy movement, among other things the highest levels of the US government are using the DHS as part of the crackdown [13]. Naomi s claim is that the right-wing and government attacks on the Occupy movement are due to the fact that they want to reform the political process and prevent corruption. John Bohannon gave an interesting and entertaining TED talk about using dance as part of a presentation [14]. He gave an example of using dancerts to illustrate some concepts related to physics and then spoke about the waste of PowerPoint. Joe Sabia gave an amusing and inspiring TED talk about the technology of storytelling [15]. He gave the presentation with live actions on his iPad to match his words, a difficult task to perform successfully. Thomas Koch wrote an informative post about some of the issues related to binary distribution of software [16]. I think the problem is evenm worse than Thomas describes.

• [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xg4ArbQpsIU
• [2] http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/
• [3] http://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/7-ocean-friendly-eco-cruises-hitting-the-high-seas.html
• [4] http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/48571.html
• [5] http://longnow.org/seminars/02011/nov/30/universal-access-all-knowledge/
• [6] http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7443714/jonah-lehrer-concussions-adolescents-future-football
• [7] http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2011/12/optimising-png-files.html
• [8] http://www.helenkeeble.com/2011/08/08/repost-what-i-thought-about-twilight
• [9] http://www.jonmasters.org/blog/2011/11/30/on-citizen-journalism/
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html
• [11] http://duolingo.com/
• [12] http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20111205/49728-cory-doctorow-copyrights-vs-human-rights.html
• [13] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/john_bohannon_dance_vs_powerpoint_a_modest_proposal.html
• [15] http://www.ted.com/talks/joe_sabia_the_technology_of_storytelling.html
• [16] http://www.koch.ro/blog/index.php?/archives/153-On-distributing-binaries.html

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2. Links January 2010 Magnus Larsson gave an interesting TED talk about using bacteria...
3. Links January 2009 Jennifer 8 Lee gave an interesting TED talk about the...

Poor Sarah. Cat dramas always seem to befall us when she's in Australia. It looks as if Smudge has managed to escape the house. Being at work all day, it took me 24 hours to notice. Our friend Helen came over on Sunday night. Smudge was definitely around then, because she was climbing all over Liam. Helen used the downstairs bathroom before she went home, and I remember her having to shoo Smudge out because she was in there. I'm pretty sure she went home after that. If my memory serves, she saw herself out and I was in the kitchen cleaning up, so my current theory is that she escaped when Helen left. On Monday night, I had a lengthy video call with Sarah, who was at my parent's place setting up their new Mac Mini. I didn't realise until after that, when I was about to go to bed, that I hadn't been harassed by Smudge all evening. So I searched the house that night, and couldn't find her. Liam had already gone to bed for the night, so I hoped she was stuck in his room, and went to bed too. This morning, Liam and I both searched the house, and the immediate surrounds, without any luck. I called the Palo Alto Animal Services (I got the dispatch because the shelter hadn't opened yet), emailed the local neighbourhood association, and went to work. I called Palo Alto Animal Services again later in the day to report her missing to the shelter itself, and Betty-Ann there recognised my accent and name and asked me if I was Sarah's husband (Sarah used to volunteer there a lot, and we adopted Smudge from there), so they're now keeping a look out. Smudge is micro chipped, but wasn't wearing a collar. She's allowed in the back yard, because it's totally enclosed and can't escape, so she shouldn't be totally freaked out by being outdoors. Whenever she does escape out the front door, she usually makes a beeline to the right, which is mostly enclosed, but she can certainly get out of the complex. Unfortunately she often doesn't come when called, so for all I know she's in some obscure location 10 metres from the front door and I can't see her. My main concerns are that we're only two blocks from Highway 101, so if she does stray too far, she could get into serious trouble, and I'm also a bit worried about raccoons giving her grief. I spent some time tonight putting up posters in the immediate area and poking around bushes. I've left the two humane cat traps that we have out by the front door with some cat food in them, in the hope that she's roaming around and will walk into one of them. Oh and the other big concern I have is that Halloween is coming up. Shelters tend not to adopt out black cats around Halloween because bad things can happen to them. So now we wait. I'm really hoping she turns up safe and sound, soon.

Here's how I have created the beginnings of a profitable Kindle formatting and conversion service, LiberWriter, from scratch. Last Winter, I read one of the best business books I have read in a long time, Rob Walling's Start Small, Stay Small: <iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&amp;bc1=000000&amp;IS2=1&amp;bg1=FFFFFF&amp;fc1=000000&amp;lc1=0000FF&amp;t=dedasys-20&amp;o=1&amp;p=8&amp;l=as4&amp;m=amazon&amp;f=ifr&amp;ref=ss_til&amp;asins=B003YH9MMI" style="width: 120px; height: 240px;"></iframe> Rather than being a "big idea" book that includes one big idea and lots of stories to support it, it's a very practical book on how to go about creating a small online business. I've always been someone who loves to build things, from various open source projects, to diverse web sites that people have found valuable. However, I am not a "business guy". I'm not that good at making money, so the simple approach in the book is really better for people like me: make something and sell it. Advertising can certainly work, but it's so much harder to figure out the numbers compared with a product, where you can compare the cost of providing the product to the price people will pay for it. And that's just one thing; the book has tons of ideas about practical ways of going about putting together a profitable small online business. It's not a "get rich quick" book - part of the idea is that if you are looking at a niche that is fairly small, it will simply not be of interest to larger companies, so you aren't going to get outspent and outcompeted by them. In any event, though, at about the same time I read the book, I was poking around looking at Amazon's KDP, which allows you to self publish for the Kindle, and noticing how difficult the process is. The native format of Amazon's books is HTML with several XML files thrown in for good measure. Now, for someone technical, that's certainly not an insurmountable obstacle, but for many authors, it's a very unpleasant prospect. Granted, you can also manipulate a Word file to make it suitable for the KDP, but even that is something that many people dont' find to be a productive use of their time. They're authors, and they want to write. Having spotted a niche that looked interesting - I love to read, and I like the idea of helping out authors - I discarded the book idea I was looking at myself and did some writing of my own: source code for a project that would automate the process of converting and formatting Kindle books. The core of the system was a fun evenings/weekends project, and soon it was able to produce pretty good books. After "inflicting" the beta version of the system on several people, such as Rich Bowen (thanks again, Rich!), I got it beat into shape and started accepting the first paying customers. It's very exciting to have those first few people pay for something you made - it's a great feeling! Initially, my thought was to sell it as a way to write books directly for the Kindle, however, it soon became evident that 99% of people have already written their books with Microsoft Word, so what they were really interested in was a conversion and formatting system that would take a Word document, poke and prod, stitch and stretch it some, and output a nice looking book for the Kindle. One of the lessons from Rob's book was that stuff doesn't have to be perfect if it works. Initially, I had people putting their word documents into LiberWriter not with the smooth(ish) upload process we have now, but by cutting and pasting in their documents! As a computer guy, doing things in a hacky way is sometimes very unpleasant, but you know what? It worked, and it was easy for people to handle, so I ran with it until a better system was in place. Writing code was the easy part, and definitely within my "comfort zone". Some of the other things I've had to do have been much more difficult, and as a consequence, more of a learning experience. For instance, I realized early on that the process would never be 100% automatic, so I'd have to get some people to work on the books, with the idea being to provide them tools to make the process as simple, quick, and easy as possible. I'm always on the lookout for new things to script within the system. However, need people it does, and finding them and engaging them has been a difficult process. As per the book's suggestion, I've primarily used oDesk to find contractors, and have grardually begun to find some people who work really well. It has taken time, and has not been easy, though. I'm not an introvert, but in some ways I'm happiest when doing my own thing. Being the 'boss' is new. One of the tricky aspects of oDesk is that pretty much any job posting gets tons of responses, some of them from people who appear to have barely read the posting. One trick I learned is to request that the potential contractor creates an account with LiberWriter. Very simple and not a waste of time, and yet a majority of applicants ignored the request. Through most of the spring and summer, LiberWriter remained something strictly for the evenings and weekends, as I was busy with client work during the days, and with my daughter during the afternoons, but as August rolled around, I found some more time on my hands, and really started investing more energy in LiberWriter. It has been very rewarding to see a corresponding increase in the number of customers. We (at this point, between myself and the contractors, LiberWriter is a group, and no longer "I") also raised prices - another valuable piece of advice from the book, and... pretty much anyone who writes for people jumping into online businesses. As tech people, we often tend to aim low in terms of prices. Indeed, soonish, prices will likely go up again. Another challenge has been turning it as much as possible into a "productized service". Since Kindle books are fairly simple in what you can do with them, as long as you don't get too fancy, it's possible to automate *most* things, but not everything, so it's not just a product that people buy and it works and that's that; there's a human element involved, which means more communication, and more potential for things to go off the rails. I've been investing time in automating the workflow of the system, but have a lot more to do on that front. Also, one of the things our customers love about the service is being able to deal with "real people", something that is more difficult at Amazon. That's good for us in one way, but in the future, it will be critical to document things and make them as simple as possible to avoid generating unneccessary support requests, as it can easily take up a lot of time. Indeed, because LiberWriter does attract customers who are often not all that technical, making the user experience as easy and straightforward for them as possible (and then some) is extremely important. It can be exasperating once in a while, but I do my best to channel any frustrated energy on my part into making the site ever easier and ever more straightforward. In other words, instead of "how the heck do they not get that?!" it's "what can I do to make sure the tools and information they need are even easier for them to get?". There's lots to do on that front, but on the whole it's actually part of the project that I've grown to like a lot. Rather than dealing with other techies like myself, our customers are people who really benefit from what we offer because we can save them so much time and frustration. Marketing the system is fun, but another area where I have a lot to learn: I'm not a natural when it comes to marketing or selling. One thing that has worked well so far is finding forums where your target users hang out, and then.... spam them as often as possible? No way! Be yourself, and provide genuine help and value to people in the forums. By being on the level, and not trying to sell! sell! sell! people are friendlier and more receptive to your message. It can be time consuming, but I suppose it's the sort of thing where taking the wrong short cut could be very detrimental over the long haul. Without disclosing too much, I don't think I'll ever get rich from LiberWriter, but it is incredibly satisfying to have created and marketed a product of my own that goes beyond just selling my own time. LiberWriter doesn't bring in as much as consulting, yet, but it feels like much more of an investment, something that will have some momentum of its own, and of course it has been an incredible learning experience. I like programming, but being outside of my "comfort zone", doing stuff that's new and challenging is also a very positive part of the project. If things continue to grow the way they have been, I could envision depending on LiberWriter as my primary source of income in the very near future. That's a bit of a jump into the unknown in some ways, but I'd love it. I have worked very hard on it lately, and one of the things I am enjoying is always having new ideas about how to improve every aspect of the system, from customer service to the mechanics of the conversion process, to tracking the finances. In some ways it's tiring because I'm thinking about it *all* the time, but it's that "good kind of tired". It's been a tumultous summer, and in the past few weeks we (well, my wife much more than me!) had a new baby boy, and bought a house here in Padova. To keep things interesting for the future, I applied to the Startup Chile program with LiberWriter. I suspect they're more interested in startups with high growth potential, but I feel strongly that the approach outlined in Rob's book is one that people outside of Silicon Valley, without easy access to venture capital and the huge talent pool that area has, should consider, rather than trying to copy what makes Silicon Valley work like it does. Whether I get accepted or not, LiberWriter will continue to grow, and, I sincerely hope, thrive. A big thanks to all our customers, and to my wife Ilenia, and children, Helen and Daniel for tollerating all the time I spend with the computer. I wrestled a bit with writing this post, as I don't want to "jinx things", and I've only just got a small taste of "success", but I've always enjoyed reading about how "ordinary people" have managed to create their own small businesses, people like those behind Balsamiq, "Bingo Card Creator", and the like, and I figure that writing up my own experiences is a way of "paying it forward".

I was amazed this morning that it's only been a month since I moved house. So much has happened since. For reasons that I won't go into, I've had to move house. Since I like living in Mechelen, not too far from work, however, I decided to search for something close by. And I did find something close by; I moved to "just around the corner". Which is a bit silly, but then blame the bureaucrats. At any rate, I'm starting to feel at home in the new spot. It's a bit smaller and a bit more expensive than the old place, but it looks a lot better, and that more than makes up for it. And it's not like I needed the extra space in the old place -- I kept having this big empty spot in the middle of my living room, anyway. To make matters more interesting, I've been on stage three times and out of the country once in this past month: One wedding, two concerts, and a work trip to Cork. I guess that's why it seemed like so much more time. But that's over now, and recently I finally managed to make some time working on other projects. Today it was incorporating some patches (which turned out not to work entirely) and doing a release for nbd. That release was overdue by quite a bit; there were a few fairly serious bugs outstanding that I had commits for in the git repository already, I just had to get them out there. Oh well. A few weeks back I've also managed to work a bit on ipcfg some more. The reason it has been so long since the last time I worked on it was that I had started to realize there were several things wrong with it, and I wasn't sure how to best move forward. But then not so long ago I had an epiphany, and I've now started to reimplement the broken bits which is, well, most of it. But hey. Moving isn't fun. Glad it's over. Almost.

I like watching movies. So much so, that I have way too many DVDs. Not as much as some other people out there, but still enough. I used to buy my DVDs mostly at the local Extra Zone shop, but as that company has gone bankrupt, I now need to walk about twice as far, which doesn't happen as often. I guess it's a good thing for my budget, but anyway. I liked the shop, I liked the people, and I hate having to go elsewhere now. As the Extra Zone shop was located on the Bruul, the major shopping street in Mechelen, the location where they were was obviously rented out to some other parlor very soon. Now, as a result, every time I pass there I cringe. Not because I think back of the old shop businesses go bankrupt every day, there's nothing special in itself about that but because of the ads for the new shop. Spelling is hard, apparently.

Halloween was a blast. The aformentioned homebrew went down a storm: I think we finished about 25 pints. Apart from hangovers, everyone survived! My good friend Rob was kind enough to knock up a label for the brew. Thanks to Rob, Dan for the photo and Helen for putting on the party!

This friday, I had to go to a customer whose office is close to the Brussels South station. As I went back, I missed the train to Mechelen by a few minutes, and had to wait about 20 minutes (IIRC) for the next one. So rather than sitting there, doing nothing and twiddling my thumbs, I thought I'd go to the ticketing office and ask about prices. Since trains can only be booked about three months in advance to the actual trip, now is still too early to get a definite price. However, I asked for an estimate, and they were kind enough to get me one. Looks like a one-way ticket from Belgium to Madrid is going to be 150ish. Of course that doesn't get me to Caceres yet, but since I'll need to get from Madrid to Caceres whether I go there by train or not, that isn't going to make a real difference. I'm sure it's going to be cheaper if I book a flight with the likes of Ryanair or some such, of course, but 300 isn't too much of an inconvenience; and taking a train rather than a flight is much more appealing to me. So that's what I'll do.

With Debconf9 being on the european mainland this year, a plane flight isn't necessary. Since flying in cattle class isn't my idea of 'fun', I had been planning to take the train to Caceres this year. So, with the public announcement of debconf registration being open, I thought I'd look at train options. Short version: I think I'll be going to the train station and ask them there, rather than looking something up on the NMBS website. Long version:

Trajectory	Date	Departure	Arrival	Train
Mechelen -> Brussels North	2009-07-13	07:02	07:18	IR 3128
Brussels North ->K ln Hbf	2009-07-13	07:27	09:15	ICE 11
K ln Hbf ->Mannheim Hbf	2009-07-13	09:54	11:24	ICE 515
Mannheim Hbf ->Basel SBB	2009-07-13	11:36	13:47	ICE 375
Basel SBB ->Arth-Goldau	2009-07-13	14:03	15:45	IR 2177
Arth-Goldau -> Milano Centrale	2009-07-13	15:50	18:50	CIS 21
Milano Centrale ->Barcelone Estacion de Franca	2009-07-13/14	19:40	09:43	EN 11274
Barcelona Estacion de Franca -> Barcelona Sants	2009-07-14	09:43	10:28	Transfer
Barcelona Sants -> Madrid-Puerta de Atocha	2009-07-14	12:00	15:23	AVE 3122
Madrid-Puerta de Atocha	2009-07-14	16:40	20:02	TLG 194

And that's after asking to arrive 'around' noon on the 15th. Although I'd love to combine ICE ('Intercity Express', German high-speed trains), CIS ('Cisalpino', Italian high-speed trains), EN ('EuroNight', pretty much what the name says), and AVE ('Alta Velocidad Espa a', Spanish high-speed trains) in a single trip, I think I'll pass for this particular suggestion. And that's ignoring the fact that 5 minutes for a transfer in Arth-Goldau (a place I've never heard of before, let alone been in that train station) is rather tight, and that I don't know whether I'll be able to make it in 45 minutes from one train station to another in Barcelona without actually knowing the city. More soon.

From the local paper, yesterday, in a larger article about the bushfires roaming hither and yon:

While arsonists are allegedly responsible for the fatal fires in Victoria, it was "idiots" who laid the groundwork for a potential blaze in the Royal National park near Helensburgh yesterday. Rural Fire Service Illawarra manager Richard Cotterill said that despite a total fire ban being in effect for the Illawarra and most of southern NSW, weekend bushwalkers in the park lit a campfire and then left it to smoulder. Mr Cotterill said two trucks with about 10 firefighters tended to the bushfire hazard just before 1pm, after being alerted to the smoking logs by a resident. "Obviously someone has not taken the fire ban rules into account and we are just lucky that we haven't had any significant wind conditions being as hot as it is," Mr Cotterill said. "Something like that is obviously potentially very, very dangerous. You get a wind blowing embers into the bush and it is downhill from there. "It's a very stupid thing to do and obviously people don't realise just how dangerous it can be."

I like Richard. Nice bloke, works hard for the local area, speaks straight and doesn't mince words. "Idiots" indeed. Several thousand homes are threatened if the Royal National Park burns. We've got easier evacuation paths than a lot of the people down in Victoria had, but it still could have been pretty bad. Meanwhile, the weather up here has turned grey and cold, which will be a mixed blessing for the firefighters working up at Peats Ridge and Singleton, and down around Bega. It's a lot nicer to fight a fire at 24 degrees celsius rather than 40, but the misty rain we've had around home would be enough to make backburning impossible, whilst not being enough to really knock down the fire. The winds we got on Sunday night would have made life far more exciting than is comfortable, too.

Cute meme du jour:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Well, OK. Page 56, fifth sentence:

“The functions of other software interrupt service routines are quite variable; The I/O postprocessing interrupt service routine has a specific function to perform but is data-driven by the I/O request packets (IRPs) in its work queue.”

I know at least one of the slightly more than one people (I count too, right?) who read my blog (Hi, Ian!) might well realize what book this came from: VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, by Ruth Goldenberg and Lawrence Kenah. Yes, the book really was the closest to me - I have an overdesk shelf, and it was the furthest out. The book, by the way, is a fascinating read; I don’t know of any other book that lays out the design of an entire OS kernel in the really quite elegant way that this book does. I got mine signed by Ruth, too, which is pretty damn cool. One highlight of this book are the quotes at the beginning of each chapter - sometimes funny, sometimes profound, frequently both. I decided to list those from the first part here, for the enjoyment of both my readers.

For the fashion of Minas Tirith was such that it was built on seven levels, each delved into a hill, and about each was set a wall, and in each wall was a gate.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“By indirections find directions out.”

- Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2, i

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine.

William Wordsworth, She Was A Phantom Of Delight

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

What you want, what you’re hanging around in the world

waiting for, is for something to occur to you.

Robert Frost

“Time,” said George, “why I can give you a definition of time. It’s what keeps everything from happening at once.”

Ray Cummings, The Man Who Mastered Time

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Abraham Lincoln, Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864

‘Tis in my memory lock’d

And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1, iii

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne, The Sun Rising

It is equally bad when one speeds on the guest unwilling to go, and when he holds back one who is hastening. Rather one should befriend the guest who is there, but speed him when he wishes.

Homer, The Oddysey

I was alone and unable to comunicate with anyone. I did not know the names of anything. I did not even know things had names. Then one day, after she had tried a number of approaches, my teacher held my hand under the water pump on our farm. As the cool water ran over my hand and arm, she spelled the word water in my other hand. She spelled it over and over, and suddenly I knew there was a name for things and that I would never be completely alone again.

Helen Keller

A common way to debug a network server is to use 'telnet' or 'nc' to connect to the server and issue some commands in the protocol to verify whether everything is working correctly. That obviously only works for ASCII protocols (as opposed to binary protocols), and it obviously also only works if you're not using any encryption. But that doesn't mean you can't test an encrypted protocol in a similar way, thanks to openssl's s_client:

wouter@country:~$ openssl s_client -host samba.grep.be -port 443
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 /C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
   i:/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----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-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
issuer=/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=svn.grep.be/emailAddress=wouter@grep.be
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 1428 bytes and written 316 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
    Session-ID: 65E69139622D06B9D284AEDFBFC1969FE14E826FAD01FB45E51F1020B4CEA42C
    Session-ID-ctx: 
    Master-Key: 606553D558AF15491FEF6FD1A523E16D2E40A8A005A358DF9A756A21FC05DFAF2C9985ABE109DCD29DD5D77BE6BC5C4F
    Key-Arg   : None
    Start Time: 1222001082
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Host: svn.grep.be
User-Agent: openssl s_client
Connection: close
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 12:44:55 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_auth_kerb/5.3 DAV/2 SVN/1.4.2 PHP/5.2.0-8+etch11 mod_ssl/2.2.3 OpenSSL/0.9.8c
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
closed
wouter@country:~$ 

As you can see, we connect to an HTTPS server, get to see what the server's certificate looks like, issue some commands, and the server responds properly. It also works for (some) protocols who work in a STARTTLS kind of way:

wouter@country:~$ openssl s_client -host samba.grep.be -port 587 -starttls smtp
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=0 /C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
verify error:num=18:self signed certificate
verify return:1
depth=0 /C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
verify return:1
---
Certificate chain
 0 s:/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
   i:/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
---
Server certificate
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
MIIDBDCCAm2gAwIBAgIJAK53w+1YhWocMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAMGAxCzAJBgNV
BAYTAkJFMRAwDgYDVQQIEwdBbnR3ZXJwMREwDwYDVQQHEwhNZWNoZWxlbjEUMBIG
A1UEChMLTml4U3lzIEJWQkExFjAUBgNVBAMTDXNhbWJhLmdyZXAuYmUwHhcNMDgw
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eN7obSZTguM=
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
subject=/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
issuer=/C=BE/ST=Antwerp/L=Mechelen/O=NixSys BVBA/CN=samba.grep.be
---
No client certificate CA names sent
---
SSL handshake has read 1707 bytes and written 351 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
    Session-ID: 6D28368494A3879054143C7C6B926C9BDCDBA20F1E099BF4BA7E76FCF357FD55
    Session-ID-ctx: 
    Master-Key: B246EA50357EAA6C335B50B67AE8CE41635EBCA6EFF7EFCE082225C4EFF5CFBB2E50C07D8320E0EFCBFABDCDF8A9A851
    Key-Arg   : None
    Start Time: 1222000892
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
250 HELP
quit
221 samba.grep.be closing connection
closed
wouter@country:~$ 

OpenSSL here connects to the server, issues a proper EHLO command, does STARTTLS, and then gives me the same data as it did for the HTTPS connection. Isn't that nice.