If all goes according to plan, Helen, Ilenia and I will be in Vienna, Austria sometime in the next week or two, to register our daughter as a US citizen. As always, we're interested in meeting anyone local for alcohol/food/coffee/whatever, within the limits of our time there. Send email with a mobile number if you're interested in meeting up at some point. I'm not exactly a frequent traveler, but Ilenia and I both really enjoy meeting people when we go places, so I signed up for this to see if it helps put me in contact with people, either in places I go, or people visiting Innsbruck: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/davidnwelton

As I start this blog post, I'm on the train between Amersfoort and Osnabr ck, on my way to Kiel, where there'll be a meeting of the m68k porters, kindly organized by m68k kernel maintainer Christian Steigies. I took the 8:40 train in Mechelen this morning, and if all goes well, I'll be arriving in Kiel at 17:22 tonight. Some train trip... but I certainly prefer that to any flight. Anyway. The days of Debconf were very nice. Debconf is a lot of things to me. Travel. Hacking. Mao, evolving into a drinking game. Beer. Attending talks. Giving talks. Meeting people. Face-to-face non-flaming. Gesturing for an extra knife at luunch. Hangover. Whiskey. Talking to the person next to you—over IRC. Getting killed before knowing what the rules of the assassins game are. Filing bugreports in person. Pictures. Kilts. Streaming video. Not being sick, hopefully. Name badges. Flying. Sleeping. Yes, sleeping. Most of all, though, this year, Debconf was just great. Thanks. You know who you are. After debconf, I flew to Buenos Aires, where I slept for one night in a Youth Hostel somewhere downtown. They were affordable, but the bed wasn't great—the mattress sorely needed replacement. Since I had a day in BA, and since there were apparently not enough people on the schedule, I'd agreed to hold a talk, and came up with the idea of a 'debian secrets' talk—about Debian-specific commands, such as dpkg-divert and update-alternatives etc—so that people could learn how to use their Debian system more efficiently. As I was sitting in Andreas' talk, who was right before me on the schedule, suddenly Dag walked up to me and said hi. This was unexpected; Dag is a fellow Belgian, who's involved with the CentOS project, and who maintains a positively huge RPM repository at his site—if you maintain an RPM-based system somewhere, you'll probably know about that site. So while I recognized him, I immediately wondered what he was doing there. Turned out he was invited to hold a talk at the Free Software event to which Debianday was attached (and which would not start for another day or two), and that when he saw my name on the schedule, he decided to attend. Fun. He learned a thing or two from my talk, and was talking later about writing some tools for RPM-based systems that would perform the same or similar functionality implemented by some of the Debian tools I talked about. Great. We had a picture together (in front of the DebConf banner—hah) that I still should upload, and then went out for lunch together with some other CentOS guys. The talk itself seems to have been well-received, and I'm glad about that; I only gave it because there was a need for more talks, not because I felt confident I was very knowledgeable about that subject. In fact, I did have to ask on the debconf-discuss mailinglist for some input (which I received) so that I could make sure the talk would actually be useful to people. That helped a lot, I guess. After that, we played some mao in the lobby of the DebianDay venue. While doing so, I overheard Dag talking about CentOS, advocating it to some of the people there, which I must say felt pretty weird on a Debian event. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course. Except that Dag was supposed to be writing his talk slides. How did that work out, Dag? ;-) Eventually, I got in a cab to the EZE airport, and flew home. That wasn't fully without issue, but I did get there. And now, I've been, eh, overloaded. Still have to follow up on a question a customer asked me, but I've barely been home or at the office, just enough to sleep really. Should do something about that, I guess... Two days ago, I also managed to forget my camera somewhere. For 12 hours, I was worried, even though I had a pretty good idea of where it was; but since I'm getting quite good at taking pictures now, and since I really like doing so as well, I really didn't want to lose my camera. Fortunately, when I called this morning to the place where I thought I'd lost it, they told me it'd been found, and where to get it. In other words, it's safe, it's taken care of, Philip went to get it, and I just need to arrange to get it when I get back. Which is a relief. Let's not be so stupid anymore in the future... Finishing up now, a day later, and I'm at Christian's office, playing with his and my coldfire board. As it happens, it appears that Freescale has brought out a new BSP for these boards, so that's nice. Let's see whether we can get those to boot again...

Kris blogs about akademy being in Sint-Katelijne-Waver—which, since I moved to Mechelen, is my backyard, really—and wonders why nobody in the Belgian FLOSS community talked about it. It's not that I didn't know; Sune Vuorela, one of our Debian KDE developers, mentioned it to me a few months ago. He knew about our office in Mechelen, since he slept there at some FOSDEM a few years back. Of course, my first reaction was "oh, you'll pay me a visit then, right?", though I quickly realized "hang on, won't I be in Argentina then?" Turns out that's was the case. So I didn't bother blogging; perhaps I should have. Thing is, I've always felt like the Belgian FLOSS community is somewhat disjunct. It shouldn't be; we have a bunch of healthy and working community communication things, we have timely dinner meetings and drink meetings; and we even have a big important international developers meeting in the heart of our country. Even with that, I feel that more could be done. For example, I would probably like more unorganized social gatherings (say, more "lets-have-a-beer-now" type of meetings), and other things. Is this just me? I dunno.

Today, I went to the Ekeren district house[1] to get me a passport, in order to be able to fly to Argentina in about a month. As I was queueing at the desk, I realized that I'd forgotten some pictures of myself, so I left the queue, found the closest photo shop, and had them take some pictures of me. When I returned to the district house, gave them my new pictures and my identity card, with the request to furnish me a passport, the lady behind the desk told me that I apparently still had a passport. While no longer valid, I still need to hand that in before I can be given a new passport. Or, alternatively, I could go to the police office, tell them that I cannot find the passport anymore, and use the document they'd give me to get me a new passport. That, too, would work. So that's the option I decided to take. I quickly went to the police office, which is rather close to the district house; luckily nobody was queueing before me there. By the time I got back to the district house, it was about 14:50, while they close at 15:00. So I went ahead and started queueing again. Suddenly, I notice that my pictures were gone. For some reason, the idiots at the photo shop have deviced an "envelope" that does not hold the pictures -- they have three places where they can easily leave the "envelope". And that's exactly what had happened: no more pictures. So I ask the lady behind the desk whether she'd be willing to wait a few more minutes after their official closing time, so that I'd be able to go and look for them. She didn't mind. Unfortunately, I only found one picture. The other five were nowhere to be found... and with only one picture, the district office can't help me; they need two of them. So, now, I've not only lost an hour of my life, but I've also lost 8.00 for pictures that are now no longer useful to me. And I'll have to do all of this again, some time next week. Dammit. [1] although I don't live in Ekeren anymore, officially I do: the apartment where I live does not exist according to the Mechelen city administration. Before I can officially move there, the landlord needs to deal with that, which apparently involves quite some bureaucracy. For one thing, he needs 6—yes, six—copies of the building plans, along with a particular form with a particular number. Probably needs to jump through a number of hoops, too—I wouldn't be surprised.

This was meant to echo Jeff Bailey s Out and about!, where Jeff wrote about blood transfusion. Every country has its own values, rules, and methods for blood donation (be it about anonymity, retribution, etc.), but please consider getting informed, and donate. According to the tablissement Fran ais du Sang (roughly translated to: French Blood Institute), the key point is to donate again, possibly on a regular basis. Various possibilities in France: donate full blood (2 months delay between each, takes about 10 minutes), or selectively (plasma or platelets, 2 to 4 weeks delay between each, takes about a full hour). You can save lives. Will you do it? Many thanks to Helen for reminding me to write a note about important things.

When an emergency occurs in a critical piece of your infrastructure, problems are to be expected. I don't think anyone can argue with that. If you do have a piece of infrastructure so critical that the use of your services all over the country will be affected by it not being there anymore, you'll want to have emergency procedures in place; one of these procedures could be having a backup copy of your infrastructure standing by, allowing it to take over should the primary break down. If you have multiple instances of almost-but-not-quite the same thing, allowing another instance of said thing to take over your functioning should you break down might be a good idea, too. If the emergency that sparks the problem in the first place turns out to be "fire", it might be a good idea to investigate your infrastructure for fire safety; you wouldn't want the same thing to happen all over again in te near future on a different site. And if things go really bad, you will want to inform your users as much as humanly possible: in today's day and age, that would include posting something on your website, even if that's only reference to a phone number which people can call for more information. Welcome to the real world. Long live the NMBS... Not. Last year or so, some critical piece of infrastructure in the Brussels South trainstation burned down. As a result, trains were delayed and often cancelled for months afterwards. This clearly shows they did not have any emergency procedures in place; if they did, train services would have returned to normal after, at most, a few days. Granted, the piece of infrastructure that burned down last year was a power transfer station, which might be hard to replace, but still. Today, another fire burned down another piece of infrastructure; this time, it was the signalling station in Brussels North. The fire itself occurred around 16:30, and from 17:30 onwards, not a single train could enter or leave Brussels anymore. Right now, more than 7 hours later, it is still impossible to get from or to Brussels. Even here, in Mechelen, it seems impossible to get to Antwerp—the opposite site, but because almost all trains to Antwerp come from Brussels, well... And of course, the NMBS website mentions none of this. The only thing it mentions is the fact that there are "extra trains to the coast", because of the hot weather. As if anyone would be interested in taking the train right now... Huge companies. A PITA, that's what they are.

A little off-topic exercise conducted in the "eye of the storm", when Ilenia and Helen were still in the hospital: A post on Seth Robert's blog brings up the idea that many Chinese restaurants were opened as a way to go into business without competing with native male workers. The post made the rounds of several other online journals. That was the push I needed to get up and go collect a few statistics of my own, regarding an idea I've been kicking around for a while. My theory is that the number of restaurants of a given type, divided by the number of immigrants from that country might be an interesting way of guaging the popularity of the cuisine in question. In order to simplify things just a bit, I actually used data from Italy, for the following reasons:

• Most immigration to Italy is pretty recent, so it's not necessary to account for the length of time different immigrant groups have been present, and the effects that may have had on the diffusion of a given cuisine.
• Immigration statistics were readily available: http://demo.istat.it/str2006/index.html
• Italian the language almost completely corresponds to Italy the country (outside of a chunk of Switzerland, San Marino, and the Vatican), something that makes things that much easier.
• I speak Italian, so it was easy to find out all the information I needed

Unfortunately, finding out the number of restaurants of various types is far from an exact measurement, and since this is a quick fun project, I just went for Yahoo search (they deserve credit for keeping their search API open when Google's was closed) results on terms like "Ristorante Turco" (Turkish), "Ristorante Messicano" (Mexican), and so on. This was the most expedient means of gathering information quickly, but this approach does present a number of obvious problems, listed here in the hope that someone without diapers to change and a business to run might come up with some good answers:

• Some hits likely come from people talking about a restaurant that happens to be in a country, like "ristorante americano". "Nel tipico ristorante americano, ...." or in other words, "In a typical American restaurant", rather than an American-style restaurant in Italy, which is what we were looking for in the first place. This is probably also true of countries close to Italy, where people go on vacation and thus have occasion to write about their experiences in a "ristorante tedesco" (German), rather than going to eat in a German restaurant in Italy. Perhaps the search query could be improved in an attempt to eliminate this sort of false positive.
• Some restaurants probably are not known as, nor brand themselves with a country name, but instead utilize titles like "Middle Eastern", "Arab", "South American", "African", or others that do not correspond with any one country in particular. It would be possible to group countries together with other adjectives, and get statistics for these clusters as well.
• Measuring hits is measuring what people are talking about, rather than simply restaurants that exist, so if restaurants from a certain country are more talked about than others, that would muddy the statistics a bit. However, it seems reasonable that people would mostly talk about restaurants in proportion to their popularity, and I don't see a particular reason why there would be more talk of Vietnamese restaurants, say, than Thai restaurants, compared to the actual numbers.

That said, for a quick project, this approach seemed to work out ok, and the results appear credible. Obviously, the results also reflect people discussing certain cuisines, rather than an actual number of restaurants, but since it does reflect interest, we'll use the number in any case. Since the number of restaurants/interest in a type of restaurant was clearly not correlated directly with the number of immigrants, other factors must come into play. For instance, "ristorante giapponese" turns up 125,000 hits, but the stats say only 6873 Japanese nationals live in Italy. As above, hits don't mean actual restaurants, but clearly Japanese cuisine is not being popularized through immigration. Here's my guess: these statistics show, to some degree, what people in the host country actually like to eat. Food that tastes good means more restaurants. Things that aren't that popular mean few restaurants, even if there are many immigrants. To pick on one country, there are many Philippino immigrants in Italy, but very few search hits - and anecdotally, I've never seen a Philippino restaurant in Italy either, whereas even smaller towns like Padova have Chinese, Mexican (well, it's called that, even if it's a shadow of the real thing), Japanese, various Arab and middle eastern restaurants, and even a few less common things like Eritrean. And I know that many native and foreign restaurants employ Philippino cooks. Below is the chart I whipped up showing the number of Yahoo hits per immigrant. The Italian names shouldn't be too hard to figure out. A few tricky ones: Giordano-Jordanian, Giamaicano-Jamaican, Spagnolo-Spanish. If you're interested in numbers or source code, contact me.

These few days when Ilenia and Helen are still in the hospital are the eye of the storm for me. It's quiet at home and I actually have a few free hours when I'm not allowed to be in the hospital, or when they need to get some rest. One of the things I managed to do recently was some Javascript hacking in order to create a timeline for LangPop.com: http://www.langpop.com/timeline.html. It was fun, because most of the "heavy lifting" is done by Timeplot, and I just had to push the data into place. Of course, there isn't much interesting there because the site is relatively new, but it should be interesting to see how languages fare over time. I did some hacking on Timeplot to make it easier to host it on my own server, and to load a bit faster by stuffing it into one big ugly blob of Javascript. When I get a bit of time, I'll make my changes public, as I think they're fairly useful for anyone who wants to fiddle around with Timeplot some, and thus host it themselves. The other thing I did with the site was switch the X and Y axis of the charts, because that works out better in terms of screen space for the labels, with so many languages to keep track of.

I normally avoid topics of a personal nature in this journal, as it's meant for programming / business topics, however, I am extremely happy to announce the birth of our first daughter!

Long weekend of travel and family, and now we're back on our way to Montreal. I spent most of Thanksgiving weekend with my father's family in New Jersey, where he and my mom both grew up and where 4 of his brothers and sisters still live (and their kids, and so on). We left Montreal on Tuesday afternoon, had dinner in Albany, and got down to Newburg (New York) in the early evening. The next morning we spent several hours at the nearby Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, which was about as crass and consumeristic as it sounds. But the loonie is still strong, and it's nice to buy some clothes. I especially like buying things a few sizes smaller than what I had to get a few months ago. Wednesday night we got into Hillsborough, NJ, where my Aunt Barbara lives, and visited with her and her family. Barb has four great kids -- Phillip (16?), Maddy and Vicky (14?), and Nick (13?), who are all my cousins despite being at least 20 years younger than me. When Amita June was too tired to move we hit the hay for the night, and in the morning we all hung around playing Wii sports (even AJ!), and had a hearty dinner in the early afternoon. Then we went to my Uncle Paul's for dessert, coffee, and a nice 2003 Ramos Pinto Vintage Port that we brought along. Friday and Saturday we spent at my Aunt Helen and Uncle Marty's house in Highland Park (New Jersey). They have a great 100-year-old house right by the Raritan River, and it was really nice seeing them. We had dinner with Paul and his wife Eileen on Friday night, and we saw the lighting of the Christmas tree in Princeton. Today we started the two-day trip home. It's not really that long a drive -- about 6-10 hours, depending on the route and kind of weather -- but we like to split it up into two days, since we have a 2-year-old aboard. We stopped in New York (city)/Queens to see our friend Jen for brunch at a nice place called Quaint, where I got a good house-cured salmon and Maj had an excellent bowl of granola. Amita got some nice challah french toast, which she wolfed down with the help of her kind parents. Tonight we stopped in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts to sleep over. I like this part of MA, and the New York Times had a recent article about its bookish culture, called In the Valley of the Literate. We had a nice quick dinner at Bueno Y Sano in Northampton, and we'll stick around tomorrow for more shopping (books! Whole Foods!) and a little site-seeing before we head home. It'll be good to be back in MTL, though. I miss my bed, and we only have a few weeks there before we're off again to California for Christmas time. tags: travel thanksgiving newjersey amitajune shopping pioneervalley

Montreal SantaCon Speaking of Christmas, one of the things we'll be shopping for tomorrow is santa costumes. Friday, November 30th is SantaCon Montreal 2007. SantaCon is a world-wide anarchic cluster-together of goofballs and lunatics who go rampaging around their town from bar to mall to bar in full Santa costume (or Mrs. Santa, or elves, or reindeer, or something similar). Everyone's invited, nobody's in charge, and a fun time is had by all. SantaCon started in the 90s in San Francisco (like everything), but I never managed to go. I finally went to SantaCon in Austin in 2001, and had an amazingly good time. My pals at The Ministry of Truth have photo evidence here and here and here. There's nothing like overflowing a bar with 100 of your new best friends, all dressed like Santa, dancing and goofing off and having a good time. It brightens up everyone's day. Anyways, we'll be picking up Maj the beginnings of an outfit here on the US side of the border, so she'll be able to accessorize with her own bits and pieces. I'll probably pick up a couple of spares for friends in Montreal, too. I'm really looking forward to the event -- it should be a good time. There's a Facebook event for people who go for that kind of thing. tags: santacon montreal cacophony santarchy santacon2007 santaconmontreal2007

le Sans Fil to go municipal I was excited to read (via Steve Faguy) that our beloved local community wireless group, le Sans Fil will be providing wireless to many parks and open spaces around Montreal. This is great news for Montrealers -- the city had previous vowed up the street and back that it would never have a municipal wireless program of any sort. So good deal. It sounds like it's going to be a tough job -- I don't think wiring up outdoor spaces for wireless is anywhere near as easy as doing caf s or homes. And I think it's going to be tough to show value -- after all, people are only outdoors in parks in great numbers during the few warm months of the year here. And when people are out in parks, they're not usually checking their email -- they tend to do more outdoorsy things. But my guess is that park culture will adapt to the new resource pretty well. Congrats to SF -- I think they're a great organization that's up to this new challenge. tags: montreal ilesansfil muniwifi

If you live in a hotel for an extended period of time (which can provide significant career benefits - click on this link for details [1]) the issue of food price and availability is going to concern you. If you are in a decent hotel you will have a fridge in your room that you can use for your own food. A recent trend downwards in hotel quality has been to use fridges that are stocked with over-priced drinks that have sensors and automatically bill you if you move any of the drinks. A good hotel will have a fridge that either has space for your own food/drink or which allows you to temporarily move their stuff out. If you are staying in a hotel for any period of time and the hotel is not run by robots then you should have the option to negotiate the removal of all the over-priced drinks to provide you space for your own food. If you have such fridge space then you have good options for making sandwiches - which are cheap and healthy. In UK hotels (which incidentally tend to not have a fridge in the room if they are affordable) the standard practice is to have breakfast included as part of the hotel fee. If you are flexible about your eating then you can eat a large breakfast and have a minimal lunch to reduce expenses. Finally you have to consider how much you earn as an hourly rate (after tax) and compare it to the cost of food. For example if dinner at a cheap restaurant costs $10 and you earn $30 per hour after tax then you only need to save 20 minutes of your time by eating at the restaurant (as opposed to making a meal and washing the dishes) to make it economically viable. I have previously written about the efficiency of work [2]. I think it’s reasonable to assume (in the absence of any formal studies on the topic) that when your efficiency of working decreases due to over-work your enjoyment of your leisure time is also reduced on a per-hour basis (in addition to having less leisure time). I know that some people enjoy cooking and consider it a leisure activity (my sister seems to be one of them [3]). But if cooking isn’t something you enjoy then you will probably feel that eating out is reducing the amount of “work” time and therefore increases the quality of your life and the quality of your work. Finally for the time spent living in a hotel while searching for work (if you travel to another country without arranging employment first) the main financial factor is not how much you can save money on a per-day basis, but how quickly you can find work. The ability to accept a job offer from any region has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of time taken to find work and thus put you in a better financial position in the long-term. This benefit of living in hotels should significantly outweigh the extra expenses of eating out etc.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/14/more-about-living-in-hotels/


• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/11/02/increasing-efficiency-through-less-work/


• [3] http://helen.coker.com.au/category/food/

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My mother just asked me to get Google Earth (link to download page [1]) working on her machine so she can see where my sister [2] lives. So I download all 20 megs of the sucker (of course it had a horrible license agreement that precludes packaging for Debian or any other sane distribution) and ran it (under a different account of course because I don’t trust non-free software). It’s unfortunate that Google weren’t prepared to put in the extra effort of making Debian and RPM packages for it. When I examined the contents of the file there were sym-links from FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD to Linux and from amd64 and x86_64 to x86. So much for portability, just assume that everything is an i386 running Linux! The first problem I encountered is that it doesn’t support installing in text mode and demands X access, have the Google people never heard of sys-admins who do their work over low-bandwidth links and don’t use X? What happens if your sys-admin is using a braille terminal? When I enabled X by “ssh -X” I encountered the error below (Error 1). It seems that the installation program was not written with the X11 Security Restrictions in mind and only works with “ssh -Y“. The same applies to actually running the program once it’s installed. Finally it gave me a GNOME error dialogue about the Bitstream Vera Sans font not being installed. If they had made a Debian package then it could have depended on the package that provides the font in question. Now I’m left wondering which package provides it, and whether it’s even available (maybe they depend on non-free fonts). Once I got it working I found it to be incredibly slow on my Pentium-M laptop with 1.5G of RAM. I ran it on a Pentium-D desktop system in a Xen DomU (it’s only 32bit and I couldn’t figure out how to get the AMD64 version of Debian to run i386 programs without a chroot or a Xen instance). But it still wasn’t particularly fast. One problem is that the GUI is not well written, so I drag the Earth to rotate it from the initial view and the Earth moves slowly long after I have released my mouse button. Another is that my X server started using significantly more memory while it was running (and has not returned to it’s previous size). Google Earth is a really neat program that does some nice things. But I’m not going to buy a new Thinkpad to run it, and the experience of running it on a Pentium-D server is not that great either. I’ve just rm’d it from my laptop, I’ll leave it installed on the server but probably won’t run it often. I’ll try installing it on my mother’s computer (Celeron 2.4GHz with 512M of RAM) but I am not expecting it to run well. The machine is still new to her, I replaced her Pentium3 800MHz with 384M of RAM about a week ago. She never found the Pentium3 to be slow (and I don’t think that Google Earth is a good reason for an upgrade).

• [1] http://www.earth.google.com/download-earth.html


• [2] http://helen.coker.com.au/

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ALISS have posted papers from their conference on electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic landscape. PDFs are:- Librarians against plagiarism: how Imperial College London is using PRS and active learning to combat the cut and paste generation. Ruth Harrison and Julia Garthwaite. The practicalities of copyright in the online age. Helen Bartlett Copyright Manager, HERON. Copyright and data licensing, does electronic differ from print?' Richard Ebdon, Copyright Officer, The British Library. Rights and responsibilities: Copyright and digital images. Grant Young, Technical Research Officer, TASI - Technical Advisory Service for Images IPR and multimedia in institutional repositories: lessons from the MIDESS project (Management of Images in a Distributed Environment with Shared Services) Lesley Pitman Librarian and Director of Information Services, UCL SSEES Library. Irish Studies Online - a digital library of core resources for Irish studies. QUB. Norma Menabney, Queen University, Belfast. I've not finished reading them myself yet.

Got back from Debconf and realised I'd not grabbed any of my photos from my camera since February! So, I've stuck up quite a few sets this week: FOSDEM 2007, Gabriel (Dave and Helena's new son), my day out at Duxford with Dad, Ben and Adelina's wedding, some photos of the kilts and ceilidh at Debconf and finally a visit to Stonehenge. Phew!

...Paris in the springtime. I'm just back from a great afternoon wandering around the city under a nice and "just warm enough" sun. Sure we went to the touristic places as we were accompanied by my sister's family...but I always enjoy these places even when they're crowded the way they were today (Easter Monday is a holiday here). Always plan your visits to Paris in springtime...and, of course, don't forget warning /me when coming, in case we can spend a few time enjoying the city. There's nothing I like more than driving and accompanying friends here around. Just ask Kenshi, Helen, Karunakar, Jamil and the few others Free Software friends who shared a few moments with me in the city. We would of course invite our brand new shiny DPL who already impressed me with his first DPL post.

Since there are few topics about academic etiquette than get me as excited as the norms of citations, I was quite fascinated by Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on the topic, a discussion that spanned a summary of Helen Nissenbaums’ work on the subject to his own wrangling with how he should recognize others who have independently reached similar conclusions as his own. Citations fascinate me because they are one of the few tangible inscriptions that reveal just how much of our work is indebted to others; it is stimergic (and if you don’t know what that is, read Joe’s entry as his moral wrangling over citations had to do with this term, his use of it and the discovery that someone else came up with it also). Despite the fact that all disciplines use them, we use them slightly distinctly. Lawyers use them in lawyerly-like ways: they cite the crap out of everything (it is kinda annoying but kinda helpful) and this makes total sense: they are covering their asses (lawyers know how to do this well), they are following the logic of their own practice as case law is quite citational, and well, law professors usually have one if not two research assistants, and this I am sure helps them in covering their citational bases. Another big difference in practices of citations is between a conventions that includes the name of the person you are citing in the body of the text and those that stuff all that data in a footnote. I can’t stand the later convention, not only because it is a pain in the neck to have to go back to the footnote JUST to see who the heck the author is citing but I think the credit should be right there, springing off the page so that the politics of collaborative recognition are, well, very evident (and I do understand that if you are citing a buttload of folks, that sometimes it is just better to do that in footnotes and sometimes with history they are citing way to may folks to really do it effectively in the body of the text). Joe raises some fundamentally thorny questions of who and how do we cite given that we may come up with an idea with the power of our own little brains, only to find out (gasp) that others, past and present and very unknown others, say something similar. On the whole, I tend to try to make clear, as Joe did in the example he provided, where I am totally taking the idea from someone to apply to another idea of mine and where I have an independently crafted idea and I am citing others so as to support my own position, which usually only strengthens my own argument. And what I find is that just because a cohort of folks may be working on similar topic (open souce, hackers), since we do so from our own perspectives and methods, most of the research will be original, though not as much as we tend to perform to our superiors. Also I sometimes find myself with an idea, which I consider as my own, but where I am so in need of a citation because it is an idea that seems at an intuitive level to be right on but it is hard to truly substantiate with the data I have (I am in that position right now and am desperate to find someone who says what I say and thus have a means to support what otherwise seems like a lofty idea…) And in fact, one thing that bothers me about citations is that we don’t seem to take seriously that the date of publication may not just tell us when something was published but help us gauge if something can become “dated.” What I mean is that when (and I guess if) I publish my book on hackers and Debian, it will not be a reflection not of some timeless aspects of hacking but firmly based out of the time period (roughly 10 years give or take 3 or 4) that I was either researching and writing about the topic. And while you can and should cite folks who wrote stuff in the past because that stuff still matters (a lot of what Steven Levy says for example still holds water) a lot changes. And yet I can’t stand how folks then cite someone as wrong when in fact all that went wrong is that time does what it does best: MOVE FORWARD and social phenomenon change along with the passing of new moons. This is not as likely to happen in the hard sciences but sure as heck happens with anything in the so-called human realm (which is why it bothers me that the social sciences and humanities model our citational and journal practices so similarly to the hard sciences, when it seems there are enough differences to warrant more differences than there are but that is a whole other topic). So now I try to note where my analysis diverges because the context so radically changed and really leave critique for those things I can safely and fairly disagree with on its own terms.
Finally, Nissenbaum’s article seems so interesting (I have not yet read it but now will) because it confronts how our practices of citations may or may not (or should) change in the face of a proliferation of access to work due to electronic media (she flags: wildcat publisher, grey literature, preprints). But I have found that, at least in anthropology journals, and especially in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, authors are mostly citing other anthropologists, as if a whole scholarship on a topic was non-existent, which seems more odd today when it has gotten easier to mine and find this stuff. They only cite “non-anthro others” when these folks are so standard, it would look horrible not to do so, but there is not a move to branch out, which I find a real shame and why I sometimes get really down on disciplinary journals (and why I am quite content to be joining an interdisciplinary department). And to be clear, I don’t fault individual authors, it seems that this is the unstated expectation and if that is what is going to get you in a journal, and that is what gets you tenure brownine-points, then you do as everyone else does. And that brings me to the final point which is the problem with standards in citational practices. So for example in the field of science studies, everyone must and usually does cite Bruno Latour. And as Chris Kelty reminded us, there is *very* good reason to. But I find what happens is that once a person is flagged and gets cited ad nauseum (which is mostly a decent but not full proof baramoter for judging good work), it become self-perpetuating reality/cycle because everyone else is doing it and it seems weird if you don’t (and I have sometimes seen some articles just awkwardly cite famous people in their discipline when it made little sense to do because, I think of this phenomenon). So all of a sudden, it becomes all Microsoft-Windows like: you cite, they cite, and it becomes “standard” who you cite and you can’t seem to escape the default. But alas, there is always an escape hatch, because one of the gems in academia is discovering that one theorist or book relate x to y and z topic that for some reason everyone else overlooked (because they were busy citing Latour,) to bathe some topic in a wholly new light and then a whole group of folks become unfashionable and the cycle begins, yet again…. The solution? If we only had a couple of research assistants like the lawyers, well maybe we could branch out a little and cover our bases a little..

Dusk is getting pretty early this time of the year; a picture taken at 15:39 already has a low sun, with the sky getting kinda red around 16:28. Oh well. Two days ago, I had forgotten my laptop's battery charger at home. So when it was empty, I didn't stay at the office; instead, I took the train home. At that specific time. I did have my camera with me, though, and taking pictures on the train is fun. It's not easy to do well; most of the pictures taken on the train are bad, but there are some exceptions. Before I left, there was a nice light from the sun playing on the station platform. It took me a few attempts to get the exposure right (the first few were simply too dark), but this one has nice colors. While the train was waiting in Antwerp Central station, I was playing with the camera's settings a bit; amongst others, I had totally miscalibrated the white balance setting. When it left again, I forgot to set the white balance back to what it was supposed to be, so the next few pictures were blue and ugly. Except this one—that is, it's blue, but not ugly. When arriving home, I was greeted by this magnificent sky. I love this picture. I did take some more pictures on the train; but like I said, it's pretty hard to do that well; and while I didn't throw all of them away, I don't think most of them were well suited to be put online. click on any of the picture thumbnails to get larger versions.

I'm typing this entry in the Antwerp Central Station, after having missed three trains. When I go from Mechelen (where I work) to Ekeren (where I live), I have a few options: either I take a train at 48 past the hour, in which case I can stay on the train until I'm home; or I can take another train, in which I have to change trains in Antwerp Central. Unless I take the train at 11 past the hour in Mechelen, which doesn't call in Antwerp Central, so I have an extra stop in Antwerp Berchem in that case. Today, I just missed the 48' train when I arrived in the Mechelen station (as in, I saw it close its doors and leave), so had to wait for the next. Which was the 11' train. But it was a bit late. When I arrived in Berchem, the train was still a bit late, and my connecting train (which leaves at 33') was just leaving (as in, I saw it close its doors and leave). I took the next, which is only four minutes later. But those four minutes mean a great deal; when that train was coming to a stop in Antwerp Central on track two, I saw a train leaving on track 6. Take one guess which train I had to get. So right now, I'm waiting for the next train home, which is over an hour later than the previous one. Better not miss it, too, since it's the last one for today. I wish the NMBS would create some less frustrating timetables.