There was another upsurge in discussion of Android GPL issues last month, triggered by couple of posts by Edward Naughton, followed by another by Florian Mueller. The central thrust is that section 4 of GPLv2 terminates your license on violation, and you need the copyright holders to grant you a new one. If they don't then you don't get to distribute any more copies of the code, even if you've now come into compliance. TLDR; most Android vendors are no longer permitted to distribute Linux.

I'll get to that shortly. There's a few other issues that could do with some clarification. The first is Naughton's insinuation that Google are violating the GPL due to Honeycomb being closed or their "license washing" of some headers. There's no evidence whatsoever that Google have failed to fulfil their GPL obligations in terms of providing source to anyone who received GPL-covered binaries from them. If anyone has some, please do get in touch. Some vendors do appear to be unwilling to hand over code for GPLed bits of Honeycomb. That's an issue with the vendors, not Google.

His second point is more interesting, but the summary is "Google took some GPLed header files and relicensed them under Apache 2.0, and they've taken some other people's GPLv2 code and put it under Apache 2.0 as well". As far as the headers go, there's probably not much to see here. The intent was to produce a set of headers for the C library by taking the kernel headers and removing the kernel-only components. The majority of what's left is just structure definitions and function prototypes, and is almost certainly not copyrightable. And remember that these are the headers that are distributed with the kernel and intended for consumption by userspace. If any of the remaining macros or inline functions are genuinely covered by the GPLv2, any userspace application including them would end up a derived work. This is clearly not the intention of the authors of the code. The risk to Google here is indistinguishable from zero.

How about the repurposing of other code? Naughton's most explicit description is:

For example, Android uses bootcharting logic, which uses the 'bootchartd' script provided by www.bootchart.org, but a C re-implementation that is directly compiled into our init program. The license that appears at www.bootchart.org is the GPLv2, not the Apache 2.0 license that Google claims for its implementation.

, but there's no indication that Google's reimplementation is a derived work of the GPLv2 original.

In summary: No sign that Google's violating the GPL.

Florian's post appears to be pretty much factually correct, other than this bit discussing the SFLC/Best Buy case:

I personally believe that intellectual property rights should usually be enforced against infringing publishers/manufacturers rather than mere resellers, but that's a separate issue.

The case in question was filed against Best Buy because Best Buy were manufacturing infringing devices. It was a set of own-brand Blu Ray players that incorporated Busybox. Best Buy were not a mere reseller.

Anyway. Back to the original point. Nobody appears to disagree that section 4 of the GPLv2 means that violating the license results in total termination of the license. The disagreement is over what happens next. Armijn Hemel, who has done various work on helping companies get back into compliance, believes that simply downloading a new copy of the code will result in a new license being granted, and that he's received legal advice that supports that. Bradley Kuhn disagrees. And the FSF seem to be on his side.

The relevant language in v2 is:

You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License.

The relevant language in v3 is:

You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License

which is awfully similar. However, v3 follows that up with:

However, if you cease all violation of this License, then your license from a particular copyright holder is reinstated (a) provisionally, unless and until the copyright holder explicitly and finally terminates your license, and (b) permanently, if the copyright holder fails to notify you of the violation by some reasonable means prior to 60 days after the cessation.

In other words, with v3 you get your license back providing you're in compliance. This doesn't mesh too well with the assumption that you can get a new license by downloading a new copy of the software. It seems pretty clear that the intent of GPLv2 was that the license termination was final and required explicit reinstatement.

So whose interpretation is correct? At this point we really don't know - the only people who've tried to use this aspect of the GPL are the SFLC, and as part of their settlements they've always reinstated permission to distribute Busybox. There's no clear legal precedent. Which makes things a little awkward.

It's not possible to absolutely say that many Android distributors no longer have the right to distribute Linux. But nor is it possible to absolutely say that they haven't lost that right. Any sufficiently motivated kernel copyright holder probably could engage in a pretty effective shakedown racket against Android vendors. Whether they will do remains to be seen, but honestly if I were an Android vendor I'd be worried. There's plenty of people out there who hold copyright over significant parts of the kernel. Would you really bet on all of them being individuals of extreme virtue?

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When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example. I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again. One last thing, Debconf11 is just over and you will see that Debconf4 has had a big influence on Marga. My advice is simple: next time there s a Debconf on your continent, make sure to take a few days off and come to meet us! It really gives another picture of the Debian community. Now let s proceed with the interview. Raphael: Who are you? Margarita: I m Margarita Manterola, a Software Developer from Argentina. I work developing software in Python in a Debian-friendly company during the day, and teach programming at a local university during the evenings. I m married to Maximiliano Curia who is also a Debian Developer, most of our Free Software work has been done together. I only maintain a handful of packages in Debian, I m more interested in fixing bugs than in packaging new software. I ve also been a part of the organizing team of many of the previous Debian Conferences. One of the biggest commitments and the biggest success of my participation in Debian was being part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Margarita: I started using Debian around 2000. Soon after we had learned the grips of general GNU/Linux usage, Maxy and I started giving an introductory course at our local university, and became quite involved with the local LUG. At some point in 2002/2003 I became a Debian Bug Reporter : most of my friends would report bugs to me, and I would then write them in the proper form to the BTS. I would also be very attentive about reporting any bugs that I might encounter myself trying to create good bug reports. The turning point in my participation in Debian was DebConf4 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Being so close to Argentina meant that we felt specially invited to be there, and Maxy and I decided to go to DebConf for our honeymoon. We didn t really know much about DebConf dynamics, but we were really eager to learn more about Debian and become more involved. What happened was that meeting with DDs from all over the world transformed our lives, we became part of the Debian family and wanted to be more and more involved. Soon after that we both started maintaining packages and not long after that, applied to become Developers. The Debian Women project also meant a lot to me. I felt encouraged all along the way, encouraged to learn, to ask questions and to lose the fear of making mistakes. I became a Debian Developer on November 2005. Since then, Debian has always been one of the most important things I do in my life. Raphael There was a Debian Women BoF during debconf. What are the plans for Debian Women in the upcoming months? Margarita: I was not there in person, but thanks to the awesome work of the video team, and of Christian Perrier s typing efforts when something failed, I was able to experience much of what was discussed. One of the many points that came up during the BOF is that many people Want to help but don t know where to start or how to go about it. It s a challenge for the Debian Women project to find a way to allow these people to become involved in Debian through Mini projects or something like that. Another of the subjects that was brought up was the Debian Women mentoring project, which has been going on for quite a while now, but lacks enough publicity. So, we need to reach more people about it, and maybe also improve it with some templates, similar to the New Maintainer templates, so that mentees that don t know where to start have some sort of general path to follow. Raphael: You created very useful diagrams documenting how package maintainer scripts are invoked by dpkg. How did you do it and was that a useful experience? Margarita: I did those diagrams to be able to answer one of the questions in the NM templates, regarding the order of the maintainer script execution. Answering the question in text was basically copying and pasting the part of the Debian Policy that explained it, which wasn t really too clear for me, so I decided to go and make a diagram of it, so that I could really understand it. I did it by the best of all debugging techniques: adding prints to each of the maintainer scripts, and testing them in all the different orders that I could think of. It was a useful experience at the time, because I learned a lot of how maintainers scripts work. I didn t expect the diagrams to become so famous, though, I only did them to answer one NM question, that I assumed most other people had already answered before Raphael: You participated in a DPL election. This is a big commitment to make. What were your motivations? Margarita: As I said, I was part of the organizing team of DebConf8, in Argentina. Which was quite a success, a lot of people enjoyed it and praised the good work that had been done by the local team. During said DebConf8, I had a dream (it was almost a nightmare, actually): I woke up and just like that, I was the DPL. I spoke to some people about this dream and to my complete surprise many said that I should actually do it. After giving that possibility a year and a half of thoughts, during the 2010 campaign I was talked into participating myself as a candidate, and it was a very interesting experience. However, I m very glad that Zack got elected and not me, I think he makes a much better DPL that I would have made. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Margarita: I think the main problem that we have is our communication, both inside the project and outside the project. Most of us are very technical people, our skills lay in the technical part of Debian (preparing packages, fixing bugs, writing software, administering systems) not in the social part. And thus, we lack a general empathy that is quite needed when interacting with people from all over the world. Raphael: Do you have wishes for Debian Wheezy? Margarita: Not particularly. I do want it to be a great release with good quality, stable software. I would also like to keep making Debian more and more universal with each release, making it more user friendly, more accessible, and more robust than any other previous release. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Margarita: I admire a lot of people in Debian. There s a lot of people that contribute a lot of time to Debian, amounts of time that I can t begin to understand how they can afford. I admire Stefano Zacchiroli, our current project leader. And Steve McIntyre, the project leader before him. Also Bdale Garbee, who s also been a DPL in the past. Making this list I realize that Debian has been blessed by quite a number of great leaders in the past. I admire Holger Levsen, for his contributions to the DebConf video team, that have made it possible year after year for the whole project to participate in DebConf remotely. I admire Steve Langasek and Andreas Barth (etch is still my favourite release). I admire Christian Perrier for his work on internationalization. I admire Joerg Jaspert for the incredible amounts of time that he puts into Debian. And actually, I could go on admiring people all night long. I admire so many people that this interview could become a very boring list of names. I guess it s better to leave it at saying that Debian is lucky to have quite a lot of excellent hackers around.

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Thank you to Marga for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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Christian is a figure of Debian, not only because of the tremendous coordination work that he does within the translation project, but also because he s very involved at the social level. He s probably in the top 5 of the persons who attended most often the Debian conference. Christian is a friend (thanks for hosting me so many times when I come to Paris for Debian related events) and I m glad that he accepted to be interviewed. He likes to speak and that shows in the length of his answers but you ll be traveling the world while reading him. My questions are in bold, the rest is by Christian. Who are you? I am a French citizen (which is easy to guess unless you correct my usual mistakes in what follows). I m immensely proud of being married for nearly 26 years with Elizabeth (who deserves a statue from Debian for being so patient with my passion and my dedication to the project). I m also the proud father of 3 wonderful kids , aged 19 to 23. I work as team manager in the Networks and Computers Division of Onera the French Aerospace lab , a public research institute about Aeronautics, Space and Defense. My team provides computer management services for research divisions of Onera, with a specific focus put on individual computing. I entered the world of free software as one of the very first users of Linux in France. Back in the early 1990 s, I happened (though the BBS users communities) to be a friend of several early adopters of Linux and/or BSD386/FreeBSD/NetBSD in France. More specifically, I discovered Linux thanks with my friend Ren Cougnenc (all my free software talks are dedicated to Ren , who passed away in 1996). You re not a programmer, not even a packager. How did you come to Debian? I m definitely not a programmer and I never studied computing (I graduated in Materials Science and worked in that area for a few years after my PhD). However, my daily work always involved computing (I redesigned the creep testing laboratory and its acquisition system all by myself during my thesis research work). An my hobbies often involved playing with home computers, always trying to learn about something new. So, first learning about a new operating system then trying to figure out how to become involved in its development was quite a logical choice. Debian is my distro of choice since it exists. I used Slackware on work machines for a while, but my home server, kheops, first ran Debian 1.1 when I stopped running a BBS on an MS-DOS machine to host a news server. That was back in October 1996. I then happened to be a user, and more specifically a user of genealogy software, also participating very actively in Usenet from this home computer and server, that was running this Debian thing. So, progressively, I joined mailing lists and, being a passionate person, I tried to figure out how I could bring my own little contribution to all this. This is why I became a packager (yes, I am one!) by taking over the geneweb package, which I was using to publish my genealogy research. I applied as DD in January 2001, then got my account in July 2001. My first upload to the Debian archive occurred on August 22nd 2001: that was of course geneweb, which I still maintain. Quite quickly, I became involved in the work on French localization. I have always been a strong supporter of localized software (I even translated a few BBS software back in the early 90 s) as one of the way to bring the power and richness of free software to more users. Localization work lead me to work on the early version of Debian Installer, during those 2003-2005 years where the development of D-I was an incredibly motivating and challenging task, lead by Joey Hess and his inspiring ideas. From user to contributor to leader, I suddenly discovered, around 2004, that I became the coordinator of D-I i18n (internationalization) without even noticing You re the main translation coordinator in Debian. What plans and goals have you set for Debian Wheezy? As always: paint the world in red. Indeed, this is my goal for years. I would like our favorite distro to be able to be used by anyone in the world, whether she speaks English, Northern Sami, Wolof, Uyghur or Secwepemcts n. As a matter of symbol, I use the installer for this. My stance is that one should be able to even install Debian in one s own language. So, for about 7 years, I use D-I as a way to attract new localization contributors. This progress is represented on this page where the world is gradually painted in red as long as the installer supports more languages release after release. The map above tries to illustrate this by painting in red countries when the most spoken language in the country is supported in Debian Installer. However, that map does not give enough reward to many great efforts made to support very different kind of languages. Not only various national languages, but also very different ones: all regional languages of Spain, many of the most spoken languages in India, minority languages such as Uyghur for which an effort is starting, Northern Sami because it is taught in a few schools in Norway, etc., etc. Still, the map gives a good idea of what I would like to see better supported: languages from Africa, several languages in Central Asia. And, as a very very personal goal, I m eagerly waiting for support of Tibetan in Debian Installer, the same way we support its sister language, Dzongkha from Bhutan. For this to happen, we have to make contribution to localization as easy as possible. The very distributed nature of Debian development makes this a challenge, as material to translate (D-I components, debconf screens, native packages, packages descriptions, website, documentation) is very widely spread. A goal, for years, is to set a centralized place where translators could work easily without even knowing about SVN/GIT/BZR or having to report bugs to send their work. The point, however, would be to have this without making compromises on translation quality. So, with peer review, use of thesaurus and translation memory and all such techniques. Tools for this exist: we, for instance, worked with the developers of Pootle to help making it able to cope with the huge amount of material in Debian (think about packages descriptions translations). However, as of now, the glue between such tools and the raw material (that often lies in packages) didn t come. So, currently, translation work in Debian requires a great knowledge of how things are organized, where is the material, how it can be possible to make contribution reach packages, etc. And, as I m technically unable to fulfill the goal of building the infrastructure, I m fulfilling that role of spreading out the knowledge. This is how I can define my coordinator role. Ubuntu uses a web-based tool to make it easy to contribute translations directly in Launchpad. At some point you asked Canonical to make it free software. Launchpad has been freed in the mean time. Have you (re)considered using it? Why not? After all, it more or less fills in the needs I just described. I still don t really figure out how we could have all Debian material gathered in Rosetta/Launchpad .and also how Debian packagers could easily get localized material back from the framework without changing their development processes. I have always tried to stay neutral wrt Ubuntu. As many people now in Debian, I feel like we have reached a good way to achieve our mutual development. When it comes at localization work, the early days where the everything in Rosetta and translates who wants stanza did a lot of harm to several upstream localization projects is, I think, way over. Many people who currently contribute to D-I localization were indeed sent to me by Ubuntu contributors .and by localizing D-I, apt, debconf, package descriptions, etc., they re doing translation work for Ubuntu as well as for Debian. Let s say I m a Debian user and I want to help translate Debian in my language. I can spend 1 hour per week on this activity. What should I do to start? Several language teams use Debian mailing lists to coordinate their work. If you re lucky enough to be a speaker of one of these languages, try joining debian-l10n-<yourlanguage> and follow what s happening there. Don t try to immediately jump in some translation work. First, participate to peer reviews: comment on others translations. Learn about the team s processes, jargon and habits. Then, progressively, start working on a few translations: you may want to start with translations of debconf templates: they are short, often easy to do. That s perfect if you have few time. If no language team exists for your language, try joining debian-i18n and ask about existing effort for your language. I may be able to point you to individuals working on Debian translations (very often along with other free software translation efforts). If I am not, then you have just been named coordinator for your language I may even ask you if you want to work on translating the Debian Installer. What s the biggest problem of Debian? We have no problems, we only have solutions We are maybe facing a growth problem for a few years. Despite the increased welcoming aspects of our processes (Debian Maintainers), Debian is having hard times in growing. The overall number of active contributors is probably stagnating for quite a while. I m still amazed, however, to see how we can cope with that and still be able to release over the years. So, after all, this is maybe not a problem Many people would point communication problems here. I don t. I think that communication inside the Debian project is working fairly well now. Our famous flame wars do of course still happen from time to time, but what large free software project doesn t have flame wars? In many areas, we indeed improved communication very significantly. I want to take as an example the way the release of squeeze has been managed. I think that the release team did, even more this time, a very significant and visible effort to communicate with the entire project. And the release of squeeze has been a great success in that matter. So, there s nearly nothing that frustrates me in Debian. Even when a random developer breaks my beloved 100% completeness of French translations, I m not frustrated for more than 2 minutes. You re known in the Debian community as the organizer of the Cheese & Wine Party during DebConf. Can you tell us what this is about? This is an interesting story about how things build themselves in Debian. It all started in July 2005, before DebConf 5 in Helsinki. Denis Barbier, Nicolas Fran ois and myself agreed to bring at Debconf a few pieces of French cheese as well as 1 or 2 bottles of French wine and share them with some friends. Thus, we settled an informal meeting in the French room where we invited some fellows: from memory, Benjamin Mako Hill, Hannah Wallach, Matt Zimmermann and Moray Allan. All of us fond of smelly cheese, great wine plus some extra p t home-made by Denis in Toulouse. It finally happened that, by word of mouth, a few dozens of other people slowly joined in that French room and turned the whole thing into an improvized party that more or less lasted for the entire night. The tradition was later firmly settled in 2006, first in Debconf 6 in Mexico where I challenged the French DDs to bring as many great cheese as possible, then during the Debian i18n meeting in Extremadura (Sept 2006) where we reached the highest amount of cheese per participant ever. I think that the Creofonte building in Casar de C ceres hasn t fully recovered from it and is still smelling cheese 5 years after. This party later became a real tradition for DebConf, growing over and over each year. I see it as a wonderful way to illustrate the diversity we have in Debian, as well as the mutual enrichment we always felt during DebConfs. My only regret about it is that it became so big over the years that organizing it is always a challenge and I more and more feel pressure to make it successful. However, over the years, I always found incredible help by DebConf participants (including my own son, last year a moment of sharing which we will both remember for years, i think). And, really, in 2010, standing up on a chair, shouting (because the microphone wasn t working) to thank everybody, was the most emotional moment I had at Debconf 10. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? So many people. So, just like it happens in many awards ceremonies, I will be very verbose to thank people, sorry in advance for this. The name that comes first is Joey Hess. Joey is someone who has a unique way to perceive what improvements are good for Debian and a very precise and meticulous way to design these improvements. Think about debconf. It is designed for so long now and still reaching its very specific goal. So well designed that it is the entire basis for Joey s other achievement: designing D-I. Moreover, I not only admire Joey for his technical work, but also for his interaction with others. He is not he loudest person around, he doesn t have to .just giving his point in discussion and, guess what? Most of the time, he s right. Someone I would like to name here, also, is Colin Watson. Colin is also someone I worked with for years (the D-I effect, again ) and, here again, the very clever way he works on technical improvements as well as his very friendly way to interact with others just make it. And, how about you, Rapha l? I m really admirative of the way you work on promoting technical work on Debian. Your natural ability to explain things (as good in English as it is in French) and your motivation to share your knowledge are a great benefit for the project. Not to mention the technical achievements you made with Guillem on dpkg of course! Another person I d like to name here is Steve Langasek. We both maintain samba packages for years and collaboration with him has always been a pleasure. Just like Colin, Steve is IMHO a model to follow when it comes at people who work for Canonical while continuing their involvment in Debian. And, indeed, Steve is so patient with my mistakes and stupid questions in samba packaging that he deserves a statue. We re now reaching the end of the year where Stefano Zacchiroli was the Debian Project Leader. And, no offense intended to people who were DPL before him (all of them being people I consider to be friends of mine), I think he did the best term ever. Zack is wonderful in sharing his enthusiasm about Debian and has a unique way to do it. Up to the very end of his term, he has always been working on various aspects of the project and my only hope is that he ll run again (however, I would very well understand that he wants to go back to his hacking activities!). Hat off, Zack!I again have several other people to name in this Bubulle hall of Fame : Don Armstrong, for his constant work on improving Debian BTS, Margarita Manterola as one of the best successes of Debian Women (and the most geeky honeymoon ever), Denis Barbier and Nicolas Fran ois because i18n need really skilled people, Cyril Brulebois and Julien Cristau who kept X.org packaging alive in lenny and squeeze, Otavio Salvador who never gave up on D-I even when we were so few to care about it. I would like to make a special mention for Frans Pop. His loss in 2010 has been a shock for many of us, and particularly me. Frans and I had a similar history in Debian, both mostly working on so-called non technical duties. Frans has been the best release manager for D-I (no offense intended, at all, to Joey or Otavio .I know that both of them share this feeling with me). His very high involvment in his work and the very meticulous way he was doing it lead to great achievements in the installer. The Installation Guide work was also a model and indeed a great example of non technical work that requires as many skills as more classical technical work. So, and even though he was sometimes so picky and, I have to admit, annoying, that explains why I m still feeling sad and, in some way, guilty about Frans loss. One of my goals for wheezy is indeed to complete some things Frans left unachieved. I just found one in bug #564441: I will make this work reach the archive, benefit our users and I know that Frans would have liked that.

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Thank you to Christian for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook.

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As mentioned earlier this week, I changed the server for my hoster from server4you to Hetzner. Because the contract for my old server is still running until the 14th of April, I thought I can make some good use of it by running an Tor exit node on it. Tor, The onion router is a world-wide network of server to anonymize network connections, and used for example by freedom-loving people in repressive countries, or by Facebook users in repressively proxied university networks Naturally, such a system is also used by people with lesser motives, and after nearly one week of running the server, some complaints were reaching server4you a honeynet supposedly detected botnet activity from my IP address, another company hired by Paramount Pictures claimed that someone downloaded Iron Man 2 over BitTorrent via my server. These were forwarded to my by server4you, demanding an explanation. I explained that I am running a Tor node, that such things are unavailable, and that neither I nor server4you is going to be held responsible. Nevertheless, they insist that I should stop whatever I am doing (I am not sure if they really understood what tor is), and when I said that I won t, they decided to unilaterally and immediately end my contract by tomorrow. Thus a powerful exit node that might have made life better for Tor users is doing to disappear again. They will not reimburse the advance fee that I had paid in advance and made a non-specific threat about further claims they might have. So server4you was, at least in my case, not only an unreliable and inflexible provider, they also prefer to cut off their customer s server just because of two complaints by third parties. I conclude that this is not a hoster that you should trust important services to. And I am not a unique case: There are reports of similar server shut-downs by server4you (in German).

I finally took some time to finish my color contrast corrector. It's now able to compare two colors and to tell if they are readable when used as foreground and background color for text rendering. If they are too close, the code corrects both colors so to they'll become distant enough to be readable. To do that, it uses color coordinates in the CIE L*a*b* colorspace. This allows to determine the luminance difference between 2 colors very easily by comparing the L component of the coordinates. The default threshold used to determine readability based on luminance difference is 40 (on 100), which seems to give pretty good results so far. Then it uses the CIE Delta E 2000 formula to obtain the distance between colors. A distance of 6 is considered to be enough for the colors to be distinctive in our case, but that can be adjusted anyway. That depends on reader's eyes. If both the color and luminance distances are big enough, the color pair is considered readable when used upon each other. If these criteria are not satisfied, the code simply tries to correct the color by adjusting the L (luminance) component of the colors so their difference is 40. Optionally, the background color can be fixed so only the foreground color would be adjusted; this is especially handy when the color background is not provided by any external style, but it the screen one (like the Emacs frame background in my case). Here is an example result generated over 10 pairs of random colors. Left colors are randomly generated, and right colors are the corrected one. <style type="text/css"> </style>

bg: DarkSeaGreen4 fg: gray67 ->                             fg: #4a6b4b bg: #cccccc
bg: SlateGray4 fg: forest green ->                          fg: #9faec0 bg: #005700
bg: grey13 fg: grey36 ->                                    fg: #131313 bg: #6c6c6c
bg: MediumPurple2 fg: honeydew ->                           fg: #9e78ed bg: #f0fff0
bg: grey43 fg: chartreuse3 ->                               fg: #5e5e5e bg: #79de25
bg: linen fg: DeepPink2 ->                                  fg: linen bg: DeepPink2
bg: CadetBlue4 fg: blue1 ->                                 fg: #6c9fa4 bg: #0000e1
bg: gray33 fg: NavajoWhite3 ->                              fg: #525252 bg: #cfb58c
bg: chartreuse1 fg: RosyBrown3 ->                           fg: #9cff38 bg: #b28282
bg: medium violet red fg: DeepPink1 ->                      fg: #9c0060 bg: #ff55b9

All this has been written in Emacs Lisp. The code is now available in Gnus (and therefore in Emacs 24) in the packages color-lab and shr-color. A future work would be to add support for colour blindness. As a side note, several people pointed me at the WCAG formulas to determine luminance and contrast ratio. These are probably good criteria to choose your color when designing a user interface. However, they are not enough to determine if displayed color will be readable. This means you can use them if you are a designer, but IMHO they are pretty weak for detecting and correcting colors you did not choose.

(a review of Homer s Iliad)

Here, therefore, huge and mighty warrior though you be, here shall you die. - Homer (The Iliad)

And with that formidable quote, I begin my review of The Iliad. I shall not exhaust you with a rehashing of the plot; that you can find on Wikipedia. Nor shall I be spending page upon page of analyzing the beautiful imagery, the implications of our understanding of fate and destiny, or all the other things that compel English majors to write page after page on the topic. Nor even shall I try to decipher whether it is a piece of history or a piece of legend. Rather, I intend to talk about why I read it: it s a really good story.

Sing to me, O goddess Muse, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus, which brought countless ills upon the Acheans.

As I d be reading it, I d think to myself: Ah ha! Now here we finally have a section of the story that doesn t speak to modern life. Perhaps it was a section the fear of being enslaved or butchered by conquerors, or about pride leading both sides to fight a war they need not have, or a graphic description of a spear going clear through someone s head or neck. And then, I d have to sit and think. Are we really so far removed from that? Here we are, in a supposedly civilized world. We use remotely-operated drones to drop bombs on people, and think it naught but regrettable collateral damage when the brains and intestines of dozens of innocent victims are scattered about, killing them, all for the chance of killing one enemy. But we aren t the only ones to blame; we live in a world in which killing the innocent is often the goal. People fly airplanes into skyscrapers, drop atomic weapons to flatten entire cities, and kill noncombatants in terrible numbers. And for what? A little power, some prestige, some riches, some vengeance, some wounded pride? Slavery is not dead, either. We that can happily afford Internet access most likely abhor the thought. What, though, can we make of the fact that people are starving in this world in record numbers? That our actions may literally wipe some nations off the map? Are those people as free as we are? Do our actions repress them? I suspect you can t read the Iliad without being at least a bit introspective.

Fear, O Achilles, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable

One of the great things about reading the Iliad is that I can learn about the culture of the ancient civilizations. Now, of course, one can read about this in history books and Wikipedia. But reading some dry sentence is different from reading a powerful story written by and for them. I know that the Iliad isn t exactly a work of history, but it sure shows what made people tick: their religion, their morals, their behavior, and what they valued. I feel that I finally have some sort of insight into their society, and I am glad of it.

The day that robs a child of his parents severs him from his own kind; his head is bowed, his cheeks are wet with tears, and he will go about destitute among the friends of his father, plucking one by the cloak and another by the shirt. Some one or other of these may so far pity him as to hold the cup for a moment towards him and let him moisten his lips, but he must not drink enough to wet the roof of his mouth; then one whose parents are alive will drive him from the table with blows and angry words.

There are gory battle scenes in the Iliad, but then there are also heart-wrenching tender moments: when Hector leaves his wife to go fight, for instance, and worries about the future of his child if he should die. That s not to say I found the entire story riveting. I would have liked it to be 1/3 shorter. The battle just dragged on and on. And yet, I will grant that there was some purpose served by that: it fatigued me as a reader, which perhaps gave me a small sense of the fatigue felt by the participants in the story.

Why, pray, must the Argives needs fight the Trojans? What made the son of Atreus gather the host and bring them?

A question that was never answered, for either side: why are we so foolish that we must go to war? One tragedy among many is that neither side got smart about it until way too late, if ever they did at all. I read The Illiad in the Butler translation, which overall I liked. Some of these quotes, however, use the Lattimore one. This completes the first item on my 2010 reading list. I leave you with this powerful hope for the future, written almost three thousand years ago. Despite my criticisms above, we have made a lot of progress, haven t we? What a beautiful ideal it is, and what a long ways we have yet to walk.

I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man s heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

Sing to me, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, that one day his story may speak less to our hearts, for then will we have outgrown it.

Contained in the recent billionth-spam report from Project Honeypot is the revelation that The volume of spam drops approximately 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year s Day. (Thanks to Raphael for the pointer.) Happy Christmas to those of you who celebrate it

This is a question that Project Honey Pot's report answers.

They have released a report of the analysis of not only spam messages, but also of the harvesters behind spam.
Available with a simple overview the complete report provides some rather interesting details.

Do spammers take holidays?
The volume of spam drops approximately 21% on Christmas Day and 32% on New Year's Day. Saturday is the quietest day of the week.

And for those sending mails to public mailing lists, the BTS, etc:

How much harm does a harvester visiting my site do?
You can expect to receive 869 spam email messages every time a harvester picks up your email address from a website online.

The interesting bits are really worth the five-ten minutes it takes to read the complete report, enjoy it (and yay, it is CC-BY).

Following zack's suggestions, I've been looking at RC bugs in my sparetime. In two days (well, two evenings really), I've been able to cope with a good number of bugs:

• #543063 - ann: FTBFS: /bin/sh: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7 RFS!)
• #527823 - elisa-plugins-bad: FTBFS: rm: cannot remove
  /build/user-elisa-plugins-bad_0.3.5-1-amd64-0hSRfJ/elisa-plugins-ba
  d-0.3.5/debian/elisa-plugins-bad//usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/*.
  pth': No such file or directory (DELAYED/2 RFS!)
• #536924 - gai: FTBFS: gai-private.h:66:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/10)
• #537019 - gimp-dcraw: FTBFS: Unrecognized switch --build-strip (DELAYED/2)
• #536945 - hdate-applet: FTBFS: hdate_applet.c:21:35: error: libgnomeui/libgnomeui.h: No such file or directory (DELAYED/7)
• #519056 - im-sdk: FTBFS with glibc 2.8 (DELAYED/2 RFS!)
• #536964 - im-sdk: FTBFS: Package libglade-2.0 was not found (RFS! - see above)
• #543083 - libcsoap: FTBFS: aclocal-1.10: not found (DELAYED/7)
• #543036 - honeyd: FTBFS: configure: error: dumbnet-config not found (closed, unreproducible)
• #543045 - farpd: FTBFS: configure: error: libdumbnet not found (closed, unreproducible)
• #536967 - glunarclock: FTBFS: configure: error: Library requirements (libglade-2.0 >= 2.0.0 ) not met (0-day)
• #521942 - jabsorb: FTBFS: Missing Build-Depends on servlet-api and commons-httpclient (0-day)

I must admit that some of them (didn't count them, might also be the greatest part of them) already had patches, and I just prepared the NMU. For others, there were other FTBFS's other than the ones filed, and those were fixed too. It would be extra cool if some DD uploaded the remaining 3 NMUs! I also had time to release and package syslog-summary 1.14, but, not being DMUA yet, I'd need a sponsor for that too (but I'll probably ask my AM, since this upload sets DMUA). Happy RC-bug-squashing! Your friendly neighborhood hanska

A short update on some friends of mine.First of all, Patrick F. Riley - I worked with him on some projects when I was visiting the UC Berkeley, one of which was a predecessor to his latest thing: LiveDash. It's really cool: it allows you to search almost in realtime in TV feeds. It also live-indexes Twitter, blogs, news sources etc.Secondly, HoneyWish (currently only available in German) is a service for a "honeymoon travel gift list" thing. It works like the traditional gift lists, except that instead of putting all kind of household stuff on it, there are all the parts of the honeymoon trip on the gift list. This makes much more sense these days: people tend to get married later; they might even be sharing a house for some time before getting married. So they don't need much silverware anymore, but they for sure will enjoy their honeymoon trip - so what could be a better gift for them?Third, Amiando a web-based ticketing and event management service. Founded already some years ago by some friends, it has been growing and coming along nicely. Every now and then, it won some award, many of them in the "top startup" category.There are of course many more projects of friends I'd like to point out, but these three definitely are highlights.

I took the package of blackberries from the freezer, where it had sat, neglected since I picked them from my fecund vines in August. They had some frost on top; it didn't seem that the wait could have improved them. But, I figured, let's do this right. No store-bought pie crust, made my own with lots of love, and no little trepidation, since pie crust is not my strong suite. Put it back in the fridge to rest as I melted the frozen berries. Added some honey, then worried I'd sweetened it too much. Seemed too runny, so added some flour. Spent what seemed a long time criss-crossing strips of the pastry on top. Which, now that I look at it, doesn't seem to be quite the way it's typically done, but whatever. 45 minutes later, it came out, and bliss, it's the most perfect pie I've ever made. Crust acceptably flaky, berries just the right mix of tart and sweet. But mostly, it tastes of summer and care, and the wait seems to have been worth it. So that's my Debian release pie.

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On the software side of things, I didn't do anything much toward making this release happen. Indeed, I have forgotten most of what I put into the mix earlier. (Something to do with armel, and firmware, and maybe boot menus?) It was a nice change to sit back and watch and not worry (much) about doing anything myself. I think that someone fell asleep in his chair while running the CD builds and had to get a wakeup call early this morning to finish. Dedication. Seems like there should be a better way, but you can't argue with the result. Previously: Easter Etch, Releases and Such, Where was I When ..

Some of you might be wondering where I ve gone (my last post was on 2008-11-18), but I have a short explanation for that: I got married! Yes It was on November 22nd, in a non-religious ceremony among the majority of my close friends and family. Brenda and I are together for more than 6 years already, so it was about time! After the party we went on honey moon to Bariloche (Argentina), undoubtfully one of the most beautiful parts of the planet, for one week. We were back just Monday and back to real life just now. Pictures of the party and the trip will follow

We're heading off on a vacation, the first real "put our feet up" kind of vacation since our belated honeymoon a couple of years ago. Our ultimate destination is the Seychelles, a tiny set of islands off the east coast of Africa, near Madagascar. Sarah's aunty and uncle live here. Her uncle's the deputy commissioner for the United Nations Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. Getting there is pretty heinous. We're flying to Houston, then to Dubai, then to the Seychelles. Originally we were leaving tomorrow, but Sarah noticed that we only had an hour to transfer in Houston, and when she checked with the airline, they agreed (despite them booking the entire trip in the first place). So now we've changed to a flight today, with a night in a hotel in Dubai. Emirates only fly to the Seychelles a couple of times a week, so we really don't want to miss the Dubai-Seychelles leg. The flight from Houston to Dubai is 15 hours. That's worse than San Francisco to Sydney. Not looking forward to sitting on a plane for that long. Flying on September 11 is an interesting experience so far. It seems that the airlines are "randomly selecting" all passengers who aren't US citizens for secondary inspections at the security checkpoints. I was vaguely aware, but had largely forgotten, that if they print SSSS in the bottom corner of your bording pass, then you've been randomly selected. The TSA guy was very apologetic, as he proceeded to completely dismantle our carry-on luggage. The other fun aspect is that hurricane Ike is busy making its way towards Houston. It's not supposed to make landfall until Saturday, but since they've already evacuated some cities south of Houston, I'm really hoping it doesn't bugger up our flights. We're in the Seychelles for 10 days, and then we're going to spend 3 days in Dubai on the way back. It'll be during Ramadan, which is apparently an unpopular time for Westerners, so all of the hotels are nice and cheap. It looks like it's going to be pretty hot as well.

/me has moved to Paris Well, this is not really an "I'm moving" post, but rather a "I've moved" post: starting from past Tuesday I'm now living in Paris. I will be working as a post-doc in the mancoosi project, which is a wonderful occasion to merge my research work with my free software enthusiasm. I've also submitted a talk proposal about mancoosi for DebConf8, ... it will be a good occasion to chat about it if you are interested. My office is in the PPS lab, which was already quite packed of Debianers, /me is just one more, happy to join the crowd! The first day of shopping in Paris forces me to post a picture on the very same lines of Enrico's "how to freak out a French person". Mine below can be titled how to freak out an inhabitant of Modena: Here you are: balsamic vinegar flavoured with figs or honey ..., tasty eh? (dedicated to gareuselesinge) PS unfortunately at home I'm still without network connectivity (unless you count poorly working, up 1 random hour per day, stolen wi-fi as connectivity), so I won't be able to work on Debian et al. a lot from home in the next few weeks.

Reading MJ Ray's post on planet.debian.org and the interesting news of how spamers "crack" CAPTCHA's I keep thinking solutions like the one offered by projecthoneypot.org might be the feature of anti-spam technologies.

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Please let me know if you see other successful ways to reduce spam or encourage good comments.

I would say using projecthoneypot's http:BL API could help (even tough I haven't actually tried it).

But the statistics and available IP data give a good impression of the system :D

I've even suggested to collaborate and use http:BL at b.d.o but at the moment there has been no reply.

I recently found a forgotten half-bottle of Tobermory 10 year old, in the back of a cupboard. Here are a few tasting notes about this long-forgotten friend. This whisky is a light straw colour, quite thin in consistency. However, its insipid appearance belies a splendid if subtle flavour. With overtones of honeyed vanilla, it’s a sweet and faintly floral whisky. There is little aftertaste but I can forgive this in a delicate whisky of this nature.

In a previous post, I had recommended the 4130 NIST-Traceable Temperature Controller to control the temperature in a slow cooker. Unfortunately, that particular controller has a range that tops out at 60 degrees C / 140 degrees F, which is enough for cooking beef for long periods of time, but not enough for say, cooking duck confit, which for which a sous vide temperature of 80 degrees C is recommended. In addition, the 4130 is pretty expensive; almost $150. It’s possible to add a resistor to change the range of the 4130, but the temperature displayed by the controller is no longer correct, and you have manually create a conversion table between true temperature and the temperature as seen by the controller. I’ve recently come across a cheaper and better possibility, the Ranco ETC-111000-000 Temperature Controller which is only half the price and comes with a much larger working range (-30 to 220 degrees F). The price with the AC cord already wired in is $75; and the version which just has a 120VAC SPDT relay is only $60. A bit more about food safety. There has always been a lot of concern about bacteria growth and botulism, for good reason — and so therefore the recommendations for cooking temperature have a lot of safety margin in them — to the point now that the USDA recommends that steaks be cooked to at least 145 degrees F, which is well within what had traditionally been called “medium”, and chicken to at least 165 degrees F, which is enough to really destroy taste and texture. Sous vide cooking, especially some of the more low temperature variants, have raised a lot of concerns, to the point where a few years ago New York City (temporarily) banned it, causing a great outcry in the foodie community, since many top restaurants use sous vide techniques. First of all, any recommendation about internal temperatures and food safety that doesn’t also factor in time is massively oversimplifying the problem. Here is a table taken from “Food Safety Hazards and Controls for the Home Food Preparer”, published by the Hospitality Institute of Technology in 1994:

Temperature, F	Time, 5D kill	Time, 6.5D kill
130	86.42 minutes	112.34 minutes
135	27.33 minutes	35.53 minutes
140	8.64 minutes	11.23 minutes
145	2.73 minutes	3.55 minutes
150	51.85 seconds	1.12 minutes
155	16.40 seconds	21.32 seconds
160	5.19 seconds	6.74 seconds
165	1.64 seconds	2.13 seconds

This table lists the time to reduce bacteria concentrations of Salmonella and E. coli from 100,000 to 1 (5D) or 3,162,277 to 1 (6.5D). The FDA and USDA recommend cooking hamburger to 5D destruction. Since it is extremely unlikely for there to be more than 100 Salmonella organisms per gram of meat, a 5D kill will reduce Salmonella concentrations to no more than 1 organism per kilogram. So whether you cook a piece of meat to an internal temperature of 165 degrees for 1.64 seconds, or hold it at 130 degrees for 90 minutes, the effect on Salmonella and E. coli bacteria will be the same.Of course, one concern is that in many forms of cooking, particularly oven roasting and grilling, the temperature of the food as it heats up may not be even; so how do you guarantee that all parts of the food product has been brought up to the requisite 165 degrees? One way that recipe authors, fearful of liability concerns, have done so is to tell people to cook meat to much higher internal temperatures, to provide that extra safety margin at the expense of dessicated, horribly tasting turkey or chicken. But the advantage of sous vide cooking is by immersing the food in a water bath, the excellent heat conductivity of water helps guarantee that the entire body of meat will get raised to desired temperature relatively quickly. (How quickly depends on the thickness of the meat, obviously). So if you hold a roast beef that has been vacuum packed in a Foodsaver bag for five or six hours, there should be no question that all of the common bacteria has been inactivated, and that amount of time at 130 degrees F should be sufficient to inactivate 99.9 percent of all botulism toxin molecules (not there should be any in a fresh piece of meat, of course!) However, sous vide temperatures are not enough to kill bacterial spores, in particular C. botulinum, which is responsible for botulism. This requires temperatures far in excess of boiling water at sea level. For example, home canning protocols recommend holding the food product at 250 degrees F for at least 15 minutes. This is an issue in the restaurant business because very often food would be cooked sous vide, and then stored in the vacuum sealed bags for potentially weeks (yes, you could be eating an extremely expensive meal at a top-end French restaurant that had been cooked several weeks ago, and reheated just before serving; yummy, no?). If the food packages aren’t cooled quickly enough, and then allowed to warm to the danger zone, it’s possible that in the anerobic environment the C. botulinum spores could germinate and then start producing toxin. But, if you are cooking home sous vide where you are serving the food right after it has been cooked, this shouldn’t be a concern.