I'm still running upgrade testing of the Lenny Gnome and KDE Desktop, but have not had time to spend on reporting the status. Here is a short update based on a test I ran 20101118. I still do not know what a correct migration should look like, so I report any differences between apt and aptitude and hope someone else can see if anything should be changed. This is for Gnome: Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

apache2.2-bin aptdaemon at-spi baobab binfmt-support browser-plugin-gnash cheese-common cli-common cpp-4.3 cups-pk-helper dmz-cursor-theme empathy empathy-common finger freedesktop-sound-theme freeglut3 gconf-defaults-service gdm-themes gedit-plugins geoclue geoclue-hostip geoclue-localnet geoclue-manual geoclue-yahoo gnash gnash-common gnome gnome-backgrounds gnome-cards-data gnome-codec-install gnome-core gnome-desktop-environment gnome-disk-utility gnome-screenshot gnome-search-tool gnome-session-canberra gnome-spell gnome-system-log gnome-themes-extras gnome-themes-more gnome-user-share gs-common gstreamer0.10-fluendo-mp3 gstreamer0.10-tools gtk2-engines gtk2-engines-pixbuf gtk2-engines-smooth hal-info hamster-applet libapache2-mod-dnssd libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap libart2.0-cil libatspi1.0-0 libboost-date-time1.42.0 libboost-python1.42.0 libboost-thread1.42.0 libchamplain-0.4-0 libchamplain-gtk-0.4-0 libcheese-gtk18 libclutter-gtk-0.10-0 libcryptui0 libcupsys2 libdiscid0 libeel2-data libelf1 libepc-1.0-2 libepc-common libepc-ui-1.0-2 libfreerdp-plugins-standard libfreerdp0 libgail-common libgconf2.0-cil libgdata-common libgdata7 libgdl-1-common libgdu-gtk0 libgee2 libgeoclue0 libgexiv2-0 libgif4 libglade2.0-cil libglib2.0-cil libgmime2.4-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.24-cil libgnomepanel2.24-cil libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod-common libgpod4 libgtk2.0-cil libgtkglext1 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview2.0-common libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil libmono-addins0.2-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil libmono-corlib2.0-cil libmono-i18n-west2.0-cil libmono-posix2.0-cil libmono-security2.0-cil libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil libmono-system2.0-cil libmtp8 libmusicbrainz3-6 libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil libndesk-dbus1.0-cil libopal3.6.8 libpolkit-gtk-1-0 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libpt2.6.7 libpython2.6 librpm1 librpmio1 libsdl1.2debian libservlet2.4-java libsrtp0 libssh-4 libtelepathy-farsight0 libtelepathy-glib0 libtidy-0.99-0 libxalan2-java libxerces2-java media-player-info mesa-utils mono-2.0-gac mono-gac mono-runtime nautilus-sendto nautilus-sendto-empathy openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip p7zip-full pkg-config python-4suite-xml python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon-gtk python-axiom python-beautifulsoup python-bugbuddy python-clientform python-coherence python-configobj python-crypto python-cupshelpers python-cupsutils python-eggtrayicon python-elementtree python-epsilon python-evolution python-feedparser python-gdata python-gdbm python-gst0.10 python-gtkglext1 python-gtkmozembed python-gtksourceview2 python-httplib2 python-louie python-mako python-markupsafe python-mechanize python-nevow python-notify python-opengl python-openssl python-pam python-pkg-resources python-pyasn1 python-pysqlite2 python-rdflib python-serial python-tagpy python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch python-twisted-core python-twisted-web python-utidylib python-webkit python-xdg python-zope.interface remmina remmina-plugin-data remmina-plugin-rdp remmina-plugin-vnc rhythmbox-plugin-cdrecorder rhythmbox-plugins rpm-common rpm2cpio seahorse-plugins shotwell software-center svgalibg1 system-config-printer-udev telepathy-gabble telepathy-mission-control-5 telepathy-salut tomboy totem totem-coherence totem-mozilla totem-plugins transmission-common xdg-user-dirs xdg-user-dirs-gtk xserver-xephyr zip

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

arj bluez-utils cheese dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop ekiga eog epiphany-extensions epiphany-gecko evolution-exchange fast-user-switch-applet file-roller gcalctool gconf-editor gdm gedit gedit-common gnome-app-install gnome-games gnome-games-data gnome-nettool gnome-system-tools gnome-themes gnome-utils gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gnuchess gucharmap guile-1.8-libs hal libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavahi-ui0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcurl3 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdmx1 libdvdread3 libedata-cal1.2-6 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libexchange-storage1.2-3 libfaad0 libgadu3 libgalago3 libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnome-desktop-2 libgnome-pilot2 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtk-vnc-1.0-0 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgtksourceview2.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libkpathsea4 liblircclient0 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmozjs1d libmpfr1ldbl libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpisock9 libpisync1 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libraw1394-8 libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsensors3 libsexy2 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libspeexdsp1 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libsvga1 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libvoikko1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common rhythmbox seahorse sound-juicer swfdec-gnome system-config-printer totem-common totem-gstreamer transmission-gtk vinagre vino w3c-dtd-xhtml wodim

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

[nothing]

This is for KDE: Installed using apt-get, missing with aptitude

autopoint bomber bovo cantor cantor-backend-kalgebra cpp-4.3 dcoprss edict espeak espeak-data eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext ghostscript-x git gnome-audio gnugo granatier gs-common gstreamer0.10-pulseaudio indi kaddressbook-plugins kalgebra kalzium-data kanjidic kapman kate-plugins kblocks kbreakout kbstate kde-icons-mono kdeaccessibility kdeaddons-kfile-plugins kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window kdeedu kdeedu-data kdeedu-kvtml-data kdegames kdegames-card-data kdegames-mahjongg-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdessh kdetoys kdewebdev kdiamond kdnssd kfilereplace kfourinline kgeography-data kigo killbots kiriki klettres-data kmoon kmrml knewsticker-scripts kollision kpf krosspython ksirk ksmserver ksquares kstars-data ksudoku kubrick kweather libasound2-plugins libboost-python1.42.0 libcfitsio3 libconvert-binhex-perl libcrypt-ssleay-perl libdb4.6++ libdjvulibre-text libdotconf1.0 liberror-perl libespeak1 libfinance-quote-perl libgail-common libgsl0ldbl libhtml-parser-perl libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libio-stringy-perl libkdeedu4 libkdegames5 libkiten4 libkpathsea5 libkrossui4 libmailtools-perl libmime-tools-perl libnews-nntpclient-perl libopenbabel3 libportaudio2 libpulse-browse0 libservlet2.4-java libspeechd2 libtiff-tools libtimedate-perl libunistring0 liburi-perl libwww-perl libxalan2-java libxerces2-java lirc luatex marble networkstatus noatun-plugins openoffice.org-writer2latex palapeli palapeli-data parley parley-data poster psutils pulseaudio pulseaudio-esound-compat pulseaudio-module-x11 pulseaudio-utils quanta-data rocs rsync speech-dispatcher step svgalibg1 texlive-binaries texlive-luatex ttf-sazanami-gothic

Installed using apt-get, removed with aptitude

amor artsbuilder atlantik atlantikdesigner blinken bluez-utils cvs dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop imlib-base imlib11 kalzium kanagram kandy kasteroids katomic kbackgammon kbattleship kblackbox kbounce kbruch kcron kdat kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdeprint kdict kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kgeography kghostview kgoldrunner khangman khexedit kiconedit kig kimagemapeditor kitchensync kiten kjumpingcube klatin klettres klickety klines klinkstatus kmag kmahjongg kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmines kmousetool kmouth kmplot knetwalk kodo kolf kommander konquest kooka kpager kpat kpdf kpercentage kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec kregexpeditor kreversi ksame ksayit kshisen ksig ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksnake ksokoban kspaceduel kstars ksvg ksysv kteatime ktip ktnef ktouch ktron kttsd ktuberling kturtle ktux kuickshow kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kwordquiz kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libbind9-50 libbluetooth2 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0 libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libisccc50 libisccfg50 libiw29 libjaxp1.3-java-gcj libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3 libkdegames1 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 liblwres50 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a libmodplug0c2 libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libmpfr1ldbl libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 librss1 libsensors3 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libxalan2-java-gcj libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 lskat mpeglib network-manager-kde noatun pmount tex-common texlive-base texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended tidy ttf-dustin ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sjfonts

Installed using aptitude, missing with apt-get

dolphin kde-core kde-plasma-desktop kde-standard kde-window-manager kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-apps kdebase-workspace kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdeutils kscreensaver kscreensaver-xsavers libgle3 libkonq5 libkonq5-templates libnetpbm10 netpbm plasma-widget-folderview plasma-widget-networkmanagement xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-screensaver-bsod

Installed using aptitude, removed with apt-get

kdebase-bin konq-plugins konqueror

Whilst Tasks isn't exactly under active development, I'm still maintaining it because I actually use it (unlike certain other projects, ahem). So, Tasks 0.18 is released.

• Huge translation update, including several missing strings
• Add a "tomorrow" button to the date popup
• Support adding tasks from the command line
• Use "category" over "group" consistantly
• Ensure the entry is correctly styled
• Ellipzies categories in the combo box
• Correctly encode non-ASCII notes
• Fix compilation with GTK+ 2.18

Tarballs and more information as usual are available at the Pimlico Project web site. In related news, we're slowly migrating over to the GNOME infrastructure. We've migrated the source code, next up is the tarballs and bugzilla.

My testing of Debian upgrades from Lenny to Squeeze continues, and I've finally made the upgrade logs available from http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/debian-upgrade-testing/. I am now testing dist-upgrade of Gnome and KDE in a chroot using both apt and aptitude, and found their differences interesting. This time I will only focus on their removal plans. After installing a Gnome desktop and the laptop task, apt-get wants to remove 72 packages when dist-upgrading from Lenny to Squeeze. The surprising part is that it want to remove xorg and all xserver-xorg-video* drivers. Clearly not a good choice, but I am not sure why. When asking aptitude to do the same, it want to remove 129 packages, but most of them are library packages I suspect are no longer needed. Both of them want to remove bluetooth packages, which I do not know. Perhaps these bluetooth packages are obsolete? For KDE, apt-get want to remove 82 packages, among them kdebase which seem like a bad idea and xorg the same way as with Gnome. Asking aptitude for the same, it wants to remove 192 packages, none which are too surprising. I guess the removal of xorg during upgrades should be investigated and avoided, and perhaps others as well. Here are the complete list of planned removals. The complete logs is available from the URL above. Note if you want to repeat these tests, that the upgrade test for kde+apt-get hung in the tasksel setup because of dpkg asking conffile questions. No idea why. I worked around it by using 'echo >> /proc/pidofdpkg/fd/0' to tell dpkg to continue. apt-get gnome 72
bluez-gnome cupsddk-drivers deskbar-applet gnome gnome-desktop-environment gnome-network-admin gtkhtml3.14 iceweasel-gnome-support libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libgdl-1-0 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libmetacity0 libslab0 libxcb-xlib0 nautilus-cd-burner python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras serpentine swfdec-mozilla update-manager xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9 xulrunner-1.9-gnome-support aptitude gnome 129
bluez-gnome bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop finger gnome-app-install gnome-mount gnome-network-admin gnome-spell gnome-vfs-obexftp gnome-volume-manager gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gtkhtml3.14 libao2 libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2 libcamel1.2-11 libcdio7 libcucul0 libcupsys2 libcurl3 libdatrie0 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdvdread3 libedataserver1.2-9 libeel2-2.20 libeel2-data libepc-1.0-1 libepc-ui-1.0-1 libfaad0 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgda3-3 libgda3-common libgdl-1-0 libgdl-1-common libggz2 libggzcore9 libggzmod4 libgksu1.2-0 libgksuui1.0-1 libgmyth0 libgnomecups1.0-1 libgnomekbd2 libgnomekbdui2 libgnomeprint2.2-0 libgnomeprint2.2-data libgnomeprintui2.2-0 libgnomeprintui2.2-common libgnomevfs2-bin libgpod3 libgraphviz4 libgtkhtml2-0 libgtksourceview-common libgtksourceview1.0-0 libgucharmap6 libhesiod0 libicu38 libiw29 libkpathsea4 libltdl3 libmagick++10 libmagick10 libmalaga7 libmetacity0 libmtp7 libmysqlclient15off libnautilus-burn4 libneon27 libnm-glib0 libnm-util0 libopal-2.2 libosp5 libparted1.8-10 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler3 libpt-1.10.10 libpt-1.10.10-plugins-alsa libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l libraw1394-8 libsensors3 libslab0 libsmbios2 libsoup2.2-8 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libswfdec-0.6-90 libtalloc1 libtotem-plparser10 libtrackerclient0 libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxklavier12 libxtrap6 libxxf86misc1 libzephyr3 mysql-common nautilus-cd-burner openoffice.org-writer2latex openssl-blacklist p7zip python-4suite-xml python-eggtrayicon python-gnome2-desktop python-gnome2-extras python-gtkhtml2 python-gtkmozembed python-numeric python-sexy serpentine svgalibg1 swfdec-gnome swfdec-mozilla totem-gstreamer update-manager wodim xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga zip apt-get kde 82
cupsddk-drivers karm kaudiocreator kcoloredit kcontrol kde kde-core kdeaddons kdeartwork kdebase kdebase-bin kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdesktop kdeutils khelpcenter kicker kicker-applets knewsticker kolourpaint konq-plugins konqueror korn kpersonalizer kscreensaver ksplash libavcodec51 libdatrie0 libkiten1 libxcb-xlib0 quanta superkaramba texlive-base-bin xorg xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-core xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-evdev xserver-xorg-input-kbd xserver-xorg-input-mouse xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-video-apm xserver-xorg-video-ark xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-chips xserver-xorg-video-cirrus xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-dummy xserver-xorg-video-fbdev xserver-xorg-video-glint xserver-xorg-video-i128 xserver-xorg-video-i740 xserver-xorg-video-imstt xserver-xorg-video-intel xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-mga xserver-xorg-video-neomagic xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-nv xserver-xorg-video-openchrome xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-radeonhd xserver-xorg-video-rendition xserver-xorg-video-s3 xserver-xorg-video-s3virge xserver-xorg-video-savage xserver-xorg-video-siliconmotion xserver-xorg-video-sis xserver-xorg-video-sisusb xserver-xorg-video-tdfx xserver-xorg-video-tga xserver-xorg-video-trident xserver-xorg-video-tseng xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vga xserver-xorg-video-vmware xserver-xorg-video-voodoo xulrunner-1.9 aptitude kde 192
bluez-utils cpp-4.3 cupsddk-drivers cvs dcoprss dhcdbd djvulibre-desktop dosfstools eyesapplet fifteenapplet finger gettext ghostscript-x imlib-base imlib11 indi kandy karm kasteroids kaudiocreator kbackgammon kbstate kcoloredit kcontrol kcron kdat kdeadmin-kfile-plugins kdeartwork-misc kdeartwork-theme-window kdebase-bin-kde3 kdebase-kio-plugins kdeedu-data kdegraphics-kfile-plugins kdelirc kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdemultimedia-kfile-plugins kdenetwork-kfile-plugins kdepim-kfile-plugins kdepim-kio-plugins kdeprint kdesktop kdessh kdict kdnssd kdvi kedit keduca kenolaba kfax kfaxview kfouleggs kghostview khelpcenter khexedit kiconedit kitchensync klatin klickety kmailcvt kmenuedit kmid kmilo kmoon kmrml kodo kolourpaint kooka korn kpager kpdf kpercentage kpf kpilot kpoker kpovmodeler krec kregexpeditor ksayit ksim ksirc ksirtet ksmiletris ksmserver ksnake ksokoban ksplash ksvg ksysv ktip ktnef kuickshow kverbos kview kviewshell kvoctrain kwifimanager kwin kwin4 kworldclock kxsldbg libakode2 libao2 libarts1-akode libarts1-audiofile libarts1-mpeglib libarts1-xine libavahi-compat-libdnssd1 libavahi-core5 libavc1394-0 libavcodec51 libbluetooth2 libboost-python1.34.1 libcucul0 libcurl3 libcvsservice0 libdatrie0 libdirectfb-1.0-0 libdjvulibre21 libdvdread3 libfaad0 libfreebob0 libgail-common libgd2-noxpm libgraphviz4 libgsmme1c2a libgtkhtml2-0 libicu38 libiec61883-0 libindex0 libiw29 libk3b3 libkcal2b libkcddb1 libkdeedu3 libkdepim1a libkgantt0 libkiten1 libkleopatra1 libkmime2 libkpathsea4 libkpimexchange1 libkpimidentities1 libkscan1 libksieve0 libktnef1 liblockdev1 libltdl3 libmagick10 libmimelib1c2a libmozjs1d libmpcdec3 libneon27 libnm-util0 libopensync0 libpisock9 libpoppler-glib3 libpoppler-qt2 libpoppler3 libraw1394-8 libsmbios2 libssh2-1 libsuitesparse-3.1.0 libtalloc1 libtiff-tools libxalan2-java libxalan2-java-gcj libxcb-xlib0 libxerces2-java libxerces2-java-gcj libxtrap6 mpeglib networkstatus openoffice.org-writer2latex pmount poster psutils quanta quanta-data superkaramba svgalibg1 tex-common texlive-base texlive-base-bin texlive-common texlive-doc-base texlive-fonts-recommended xserver-xorg-video-cyrix xserver-xorg-video-imstt xserver-xorg-video-nsc xserver-xorg-video-v4l xserver-xorg-video-vga xulrunner-1.9

Thanks to Joey Hess for the request to set up tor bridges. I wholeheartedly agree, and recommend the video he points to. I've installed a Tor bridge at home, and recommend others to do so. For the most part, I'm not politically active at the moment - I'm doing a PhD Part-time, and thats consuming all my "spare" time, other than work and family. Just given a blog site, however, one subject strikes me as very important - free speech. Hence the side links to Amnesty International, etc. In Ireland this campaign has a particular focus at the moment - the Repeal of the Blasphemy Law. This law came into effect in Ireland this January. While the government claims that this law will 'never be used', its bad in several ways. Firstly, it promotes the ideas of censorship as a method of hiding social issues, and secondly it may actually be used, as pointed out in : <object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object>Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime from Limerick Blogger on Vimeo. Basically, with Europe-wide arrest warrants, if two European countries have criminal blasphemy laws, then someone may be extradited to face prosecution in another country. While the Irish government says they will never prosecute, they open the possibility of say, Irish citizens being extradited to Greece to safe prosecution for blasphemy. On a wider level, I recommend Index on Censorship. It keeps documenting the cost of censorship around the world, and has been instrumental in campaigning for Libel reform in the UK, which is ncreasingly important for open scientific discussion. Tags censorhip, free-speech, politics

Just a small few fixes, translation updates, and little features in Tasks 0.15.

• Add --edit-task
• Use gtk_show_uri if available
• Lots of translation updates
• Add magic patterns "in x days" and "in x weeks"

As usual, download from the Pimlico Project.

Warning: Don t upgrade root partition (/) or the partition in which /boot is placed unless you know what you are doing. More on this later.
Warning2: Make backups of your data. Last Friday I went on upgrading to ext4 my laptop. I decided to go first with /home partition, as / has also /boot and can give some problems if not handled with care. Upgrading it is quite easy, and fast, as the old data is not upgraded, only new files will be added using new features. First, I installed latest linux-image package to start using kernel version 2.6.28, which includes production ready ext4 support. After rebooting, I logged in as root so I could umount /home. The steps to upgrade are as follows:

# uname -a
Linux gimli 2.6.28-1-686 #1 SMP Mon Feb 23 03:13:24 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
# umount /home
# tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/home_partition
# fsck -pfD /dev/home_partition
# mount /home

You MUST run fsck. If not, ext4 won t mount your filesystem, so don t forgive this step if you re upgrading your / partition. You will see some checksums errors appear. Don t be afraid, that s expected, and that s why -p is added to fsck command, you it is not asking which action to perform in every error. Upgrading partition containing /boot
For upgrading your / partition you have to take into account what grub and klibc version you have installed. The former is need so grub can read your kernel image from filesystem, and the second is needed due a bug that made initramfs detect ext4 filesystems as ext3, and passing incorrect option to mount, which failed. Versions in Debian known to work are libklibc >=1.5.15-1 and grub2 (packaged as grub-pc). Make sure you have these versions installed before trying to go to ext4.
Also, as you have to upgrade having your partition unmounted, you will have to get a console before root partition is mounted. You can do that by passing mount=break break=mount to your boot options in grub. ENJOY!

Isotopp just pointed me to the blog of Ronald Bradford, a MySQL consultant, writing about a Drupal installation and some performance observations.

He observes a large table "watchdog":

Presently, volume and content is of a low volume, but expecting to ramp up. I do however find 90% of disk volume in one table called watchdog ;

Well, yes, the watchdog table logs system messages. No big surprise so far, I guess. So, turning off database logging (Administer -> Site building -> Modules -> turn off Database logging module) or reduce the maximum number of entries in the database log at Administer -> Site Configuration -> Logging and alerts -> Database Logging will reduce the size of the watchdog table.

Robert continues with some "page not found" errors. Of course these have to be fixed somewhere, either by editing the content or fixing theme related bugs. Not really a Drupal issue, I guess.

Then he mentions repeated SQL queries:

Looking at just 1 random second of SQL logging shows 1200+ SELECT statements.
355 are SELECT changed FROM node
[...]
There is plenty of information regarding monitoring the Slow Queries in MySQL, but I have also promoted that s it not the slow queries that ultimately slow a system down, but the 1000 s of repeating fast queries.

MySQL of course has the Query Cache to assist, but this is a course grade solution, and a high volume read/write environment this is meaningless.

There is a clear need for either a application level caching, or a database redesign to pull rather then poll this information, however without more in depth review of Drupal I can not make any judgment calls.

Drupal offers some kind of application level caching at Administer -> Site configuration -> Performance, so turning it on might already help, although I'm not sure whether that minimizes the SQL queries or to what degree.

Anyway, there are some more Drupal performance tips here:

1. http://drupal.org/node/97347


2. http://wimleers.com/article/improving-drupals-page-loading-performance


3. http://2bits.com/articles/drupal-performance-tuning-and-optimization-for-large-web-sites.html

Hope this helps... :-)

The phrase on this title is often attributed to Pancho Villa (1878-1923), Mexican Revolution leader. He had a fame of cruelty, killing suspects before even questioning them.
Today, it started as a very nice day. I had even time in the morning to find, fix, upload and send upstream a trivial bug in libgruff-ruby... At 11:00, I left the Institute as my father came to the city to do some paperwork... We sat having a cup of coffee in a restaurant near the office we had went to at around 12:00, and my phone rang.
And it was from work. That's never a good sign. My boss told me he was facing a massive virus infection, and decided to disconnect the firewall. I corrected him - that will do no good once the virus is in our system, if you want to disconnect anything, disconnect all of our switches.
Came back, and found him and my coworker stunned and not knowing what to do. He says, the antivirus alarm went off almost simultaneously on the two computers he had on his desk, and in few minutes over 15 computers all over the Institute were ill. The symptoms? Programs not showing up in the taskbar, copy/paste functionality b0rken, many programs misbehaved or just didn't open... They were grimly facing a complete recovery operation they have grown used to: The whole OS has become corrupted or destroyed, we will have to open the computer, extract the HD, install it elsewhere, back it up, reinstall OS and applications, restore the backup. Yes, I know too many extra steps are included here, but I have come to accept their ways of dealing with Windows. Nobody says dealing with Windows is fun. I like my work to be fun, so I stay clear of theirs.
I insisted on turning back one one of the switches, the one for the servers and my machine (and some more in the same physical area). OK'd. But they didn't want to switch on any other switch, so a traffic capture (tcpdump / wireshark) led nowhere - but at least it gave my my Google back.
They have configured the antivirus software we deploy to all of the Windows machines in such a way that it deletes upon sight any malware - And when they manually scan, they blindly hit Delete whenever anything is found as well. Of course, no infected binary was left alive for me to inspect, and the machines were dead. But I was able to glimpse at the name of the deleted file: rpcss.dll.
After googling a bit - Bliss! Joy! I found the answer. So here is the set of interactions, and how they led to this killing spree. Please remember I am a Windows newbie and speak just out of guesswork.

1. This is a fast-spreading virus. My friend Rub n at DGSCA suggest it might be related to this report submitted today; at Barrapunto there is a thread about another virus that appeared four days ago, infected 1.1 million Windows machines on its first day, and so far is around the ninth million. Update: Equivalent thread at Slashdot, for the Spanish-impaired.
2. The virus infects at least two copies of a system binary: %system32%\rpcss.dll and \Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386\rpcss.dll. Windows uses the second one to restore the first one in case it is damaged, if I understood correctly.
3. The antivirus does not detect the infection when the library files are written, but when they are linked, so it only spots it the next time %system32%\rpcss.dll is brought into memory.
4. This is a very common library - It takes care of, well, RPC. So, quite probably, this file will be linked again on the next program launch - or accessed when a running program requires anything not currently in RAM? Dunno. The thing is, the library gets linked.
5. The antivirus will happily tell you it has killed a threat! Your nice RPC library is now defunct. M talo, luego virig as!
6. So, of course, notifying the taskbar of a new window appearing, or clipboard actions, or whatnot will refuse to work.
7. Machine restart, full system scan requested. The antivirus finds de second copy of this library in the master directory (\Windows\ServicePackFiles\i386). The virus used this location so that Windows won't restore a clean version over it. But yes, it will fall again under the claws of the antivirus... I guess. Anyway, the antivirus offers to delete this file as well, and does so.
8. User is desperate. My coworkers are desperate. I am... mildly annoyed?

Once I found this line of thought... I went to a working machine, inserted my flash memory, and copied %system32%\rpcss.dll to it. Went back to a sick machine, and ran cmd. Then, it was just matter of copy f:\rpcss.dll c:\windows\system32, a simple reboot (it never hurts to reboot in Windows!), and problem solved!
Oh, as a side rant: I find it extremely annoying and sad that many people I know, sometimes with more experience as a computer operator/supporter than what I have of experience as a living human being, are so scared of using a command-line interface. They were dismayed at seeing no drag-and-drop and no copy/paste functionality were available! copy is not an option.
Anyway... Today was an experience on how a simple, mostly-harmless and quite-fertile virus is able to be terribly magnified by the presence of a trigger-happy antivirus.
Why won't they give themselves a chance to try something else? Say, GNU/Linux? :-/

Yeah, I'm the proud discover of CVE-2008-5187. It's my first time, it does mean something to me.

It's been nearly 10 months after the previous Tasks release, for which I profusely apologise. I wanted to fix one final bug before releasing, which sadly took five months to get around too... I eventually fixed it last night, so here is Tasks 0.14.

• Magic date parser when adding tasks
• Support libunique in the GTK+ port (Jonny Lamb)
• Support OWL window menus in the GTK+ port
• Save and restore the edit window size
• Add a clickable note icon (#548)
• Ellipsize the undo/redo menu items (#741)
• Make sure the date popup doesn't go off the screen (#752)

The most interesting change in this release is the magic date parser, which first landed back in March. This lets you use Google Calendar style descriptive tasks such as "release tasks today", "do shopping next tuesday" or "pay bills on 2nd". There are many patterns that are matched but I need two things from any users of Tasks.

1. Translations. At the moment there are only English and French translations for the strings, which are critical for the parser to work. Translators, please update the translations!
2. Feedback. The parser handles all of the natural language expressions that I thought would be useful. There are probably plenty more which are not handled, so if you find one which isn't handled (or is handled incorrectly) then please file a bug.

Oh, and one last thing. The OpenMoko and Maemo ports have likely bitrotted. New functionality has been added to the platform abstraction and I don't think those ports were updated. If someone actively uses Tasks on either Maemo or OpenMoko and is willing to test builds before release, please contact me.

Early details:

• Coming out in October.
• UK in early November, Europe by first quarter 2009.
• Simlocked to T-Mobile.
• Source code! When the phone comes out. Hopefully someone will use it to unlock the thing.
• 179$ - not bad.
• MP3's from Amazon.
• Market app built in.
• Neat use of Google Maps street view.

I'm sold, I want one. It might not be quite as flashy as the iPhone, but I want something open.

While all of Belgium is buzzing over the fact that now the iPhone is being sold here, in compliance with the law against coupled sales (i.e., not simlocked), I couldn't care less. Instead, I bought me something far more useful than a cell phone that wants to be a PDA. (occasionally, the poem is one of the better-known poems by expressionist poet Paul van Ostaijen, my favourite in the Dutch language) This is a Hanlin V3 e-book reader. I found that I was reading way too much text on the 'net, some non-fiction, but recently also fiction, to comfortably do so. I could print, but that's not very good for the environment. I could read some of it on my YP-T10, but not all of it. Hence, the ebookreader. This thing has an e-paper screen, meaning that it does not require power usage to retain an image on the screen, and that the quality of the display is much, much better than anything an LCD screen could hope to offer. Even from an angle: After having it for about two days, I must say I'm quite happy with it. Reading text on this device is way, way more comfortable than trying to read anything on my laptop, or something similar. Having said that, there are a few quirks with it, which I hope future firmware-updates will fix:

• the HTML parser doesn't parse HTML entities; having to read a text that goes like '&eacute;&eacute;n, twee, drie' rather than 'één, twee, drie' ('one, two, three' in Dutch) is rather annoying.
• the PDF viewer misses some glyphs. For instance, it has no support for ff or fi ligatures, perhaps even more (though I'm not entirely sure about that)
These two are really serious problems, and for a device that's meant to replace a book, there's no excuse for such problems.
• The HTML parser doesn't understand hyperlinks. I have a copy of the Perl CD Bookshelf, which has helped me on many occasions in the past. However, reading it on the device is not possible, because it does not come as one file, but rather an HTML file per section in the book; and given the slower speed of the e-book's screen, navigating through 300-odd files is not feasible if you don't have a general idea what file you're looking for. Having the ability to open the index file and somehow following a relative hyperlink in that file would fix this issue, but that's not currently possible.
• The device can zoom in on text; and when you read a PDF file, it will automatically try to produce the most optimal zoom size that will still show all of the text. Unfortunately, what the device thinks is optimal and what I think is optimal is not always the same thing; in certain cases, having the ability to fine-tune the zoom would be helpful. Also, this automatic zoom assumes that every page has the exact same lay-out; a LaTeX 'twopage' layout would require you to redo the zoom on every page turn, which is wasteful.
• The positioning of the buttons could have been better; and the fact that the 'next page' and 'previous page' do not swap their function when you put the device in landscape mode is somewhat confusing.

These are mere annoyances, however. It's an ebook reader, not a webbrowser; I can live with that. And while the zoom function in the PDF files is not perfect, it mostly does the job. And the positioning of the buttons is probably something that will be different for each and every person. I've found that just plain files are most easily read; the device does a decent job of auto-detecting headers and applying some basic markup; and if it gets confused, fidgeting with the text file until it gets it right is not too hard. In addition, the device comes with much more settings to apply to markup on text files than it does for either of PDF or HTML; e.g., one can change the zoom level in more settings, the line spacing, and a few more things. Additionally, the device also comes with an MP3 player, but I don't really plan on using it. First, I don't like MP3 files; second, the device has not much battery—only 950mAh, which is enough for weeks because of the low power-usage of the screen—and using it for MP3 decoding is a waste of battery; and finally, I have a perfectly good portable media player, so I see no point in trying to use this device for that particular purpose. But, well, I guess some people will like it. All in all, I do like the device. The attention to detail in the packaging is... heh. It even comes with a screwdriver to load the battery...

• Updated the debian packaging and debian patches of KDE4 to the 4.0.84 tarballs
• Pushed kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase-runtime and kdebase-workspace 4.0.84 to experimental
• Prepared the rest of the packages ready to be pushed to experimental when the auto-builders have built this
• Updated Arora packages to the 0.2 release

Ana guessed slightly wrong when trying to guess next update of kde4.1 in debian, but her howto still works. Give it a bit for the autobuliders to catch up though. But I guess I should find a rich uncle to give me newer hardware - my computer was only idle a few hours since friday evening. I do hope that plasma people soon reaches a stable ABI. And by the way:

Thanks to frisoftware.dk

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Update Added screenshots

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I spend a lot of time working in front of a screen (many hours in a dimly lit room) and eye fatigue is an issue. A consistent color scheme, especially one which is easy on the eyes, is important and it also helps to have way of doing that where the directives are not all scattered all over my Emacs-lisp setup. Enter Emacs Color Themes, available as the Debian package emacs-goodies. Aided with a HSL color picker, I set around trying to create a dark color theme for Emacs. It does not help that I am blue-green color blind, so subtle variations are often lost on me. I do want to use color contrast to increase productivity, but I also want to avoid the jarring angry fruit salad look, and so I am in the process of crafting a logical color scheme that is high contrast enough for me, without being too unpleasing. In circumstances where there a lot of related faces that can be viewed, for example, the Gnus group buffer, consistent and logical color choices are the only sane option. Gnus groups can be news (bluish) or mail (greenish), have states (large number of unread messages, normal, and empty). The large number unread groups have highest luminosity (appear brighter), and the empty one have lower luminosity (appear greyer), but have the same hue and saturation. Sub states and group priorities are rendered using a color series which has constant luminosity and saturation, and vary in hue by a constant separation so all the related groups have the same brightness ( mail,news / unread,normal,empty ), and a graded selection of foreground colors. It sounds more complicated that it looks. The eye is drawn naturally to the unread groups, and first to the mail, then USENET groups (which is my preference). Similar color variations occur for individual messages in a group; high scoring messages bubble to the top, and have a higher luminosity. This color schema has made me slightly faster at reading mail/USENET. In the message itself, quoted mail messages from different people are color coordinated, with high contrast between citations that are close to each other in the hierarchy, so it is less likely that one misunderstands who said what in a long conversation. The resulting scheme covers programming languages, Gnus, Erc, mail, org-mode, CUA-mode, apt-utils, bbdb, compilation buffers, changelog mode, diff and ediff, eshell, and more. This has allowed me to consolidate all my color directives into a single file, and is in a format that might be usable by others. See the wiki page for details about how to use and switch color themes in Emacs. Enjoy.

Been rather busy, so I haven't had a chance to continue recording the trip... We got into Zurich (albeit late), without incident. Immigration was the biggest joke ever. There was no paperwork at all, and we just handed our passports to the guy, who just looked at them casually, and waved us through. No stamp, no scan, no nothing. It was a bit disappointing really. We got our rental car, and drove around aimlessly for a bit, until the GPS got lock, and then headed for Prague. We went through Austria, where the guy at the border did give our passports a more thorough inspection, more because we were confused and were waving them at him. He also gave us a stamp. The woman from Hertz told us we needed to buy some sort of highway sticker for the car to drive in Austria (wow it's hard to type "Austria", "Australia" just keeps coming out from muscle memory), so we bought one of them and stuck it on the windscreen, and then promptly entered Germany. The autobahns in Germany are wicked! Everyone's screaming along at a ridiculous pace. The fastest I got up to was 180 km/h. The roads themselves were surprisingly quiet, and only two lanes. We stopped off for dinner somewhere in Germany, and finally arrived at the hotel in Prague at about 1am on Sunday morning, so it took about 7 hours instead of the 6 that we'd estimated. We got to bed by about 2am. I woke up at about 10am, then went back to sleep until about 2pm. We finally ventured out for a bit of exploration at about 3pm on Sunday. One observation about Czechs: they seem like a pretty dour bunch. Here we were wandering around, being all wide-eyed and touristy, smiling at everyone, and they'd just scowl back at you, no matter how hard we tried to get a smile out of them. After that initial wander, we discovered that there was a Metro station right across the road from the hotel in another direction, so we caught that to go and check out Prague Castle. The Metro system is another one of those great subway systems that I love. It ran regularly, so you didn't need to concern yourself with a timetable. The ticketing was a bit bizarre. It seemed totally honor-system based. There were no barriers to stop you getting in or out. It was fairly late by the time we got to Prague Castle, so we just wandered around the grounds, took a look inside Saint Vitus's Cathedral, and caught an orchestral performance in Saint George's Basilica, then headed back to the hotel. Everything at Prague Castle was pretty mind-blowing. The size of grounds. The view. Saint Vitus's Cathedral. The Cathedral was huge. When you stepped inside and looked up... words can't describe it. It was amazing. Unfortunately, we didn't bring a camera with us, so we don't have any photos from the Sunday excursion, but Sarah went back this afternoon, and her photos are here. I think the thing that struck me the most was that here were some seriously old buildings - older than my home country, and they were in amazingly good condition. They really built things to last back in the day. The weather so far has been pretty miserable, and if the forecast is anything to go by, will remain miserable until we drive out on Saturday. We've survived, language-wise. The default language of the hotel staff seems to be English, and most random people we've had to interact with seem to speak English. I feel really arrogant and rude just speaking in English to people without first asking if they speak English, but I'm also getting really sick of starting every conversation with "Do you speak English?" The printed language is by and large indecipherable. The currency, which in English is called a "crown" is crazy. One US dollar buys about 16 Czech Koruny, and the prices are ridiculous. A glass of wine at the hotel is maybe 250 CZK. Granted, the hotel prices are obscene, but seeing triple-digit prices for a glass of wine seems totally bizarre. The prices in general seem pretty steep. Sarah said she got a 2 koruny coin in change today. We've got no idea what you'd actually use that for. Last night, after the conference had finished for the day, we wandered off in a different direction again, and wandered through the grounds of Vy ehrad Castle. The Cathedral of Saint Paul and Peter has an amazing graveyard in it, including the grave of the composer Dvorak. We grabbed some dinner at a nearby restaurant, which was substantially cheaper than the hotel restaurants. Again, we forgot to take a camera with us.

Every since the Maemo Chinook beta was relased, people have been asking when we're going to make Pimlico packages available. I'll skip over the fact that Pimlico is open source, so building a package yourself is trivial (I suppose its a good thing that there are users who can't do that!). Now, Pimlico consists of Contacts, Dates and Tasks. Contacts doesn't have a Maemo port as such and the device already has an addressbook of sorts, so I tend to leave that until last. That leaves Dates and Tasks, both of which require an all-new Evolution Data Server to be built, because Nokia strip down EDS for Maemo and don't install the calendar component to save disk space. This generally shouldn't be a problem as we've been building replacement EDS packages for some time now which adds the calendar component and restores some functionality to the common libraries. So, Rob set about re-syncing our packaging with the Chinook EDS (there are several Maemo-specfic patches we obviously need to include) and started a build. Then our plan started to fall apart. To cut a long story short, the Chinook's Application Manager has an additional sanity check which wasn't in previous releases. The gist of it appears to be that a package foo from repository A cannot upgrade package foo from repository B. Or, libebook from maemo.org cannot be upgraded to libebook from o-hand.com. I can see how this can stop people accidently breaking their device by installing broken core packages, but it's also stopping us provide core packages with enhanced functionality. Never fear, we have a plan. It's not incredibly pretty and will take a day or so of tiresome recompiles to get working, but we'll get there. That said, we've all been busy and now it is the Christmas holiday... so I wouldn't bet on being able to run Dates and Tasks on your N800/N810 before the new year. As a reward for patience, however, there are Contacts 0.8 packages for Chinook in our repository. NP: Last.fm Recommendation Radio

I did the quarterly patch review and translation update of Contacts last night, and rolled Contacts 0.8. Nothing amazing in this release, sorry, all of the hard work by Thomas has gone onto the all-new blinging rewrite. NP: Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man

I'm pleased to announce that Tasks 0.12 is now available from the Pimlico Project. Hot new feature is undo/redo support, which lets you undo any change to the tasks. If an action is found which cannot be undone and then redone, please file a bug.

• Add undo/redo support (#312, #508, #510)
• Disable actions which require a selected task when no task is selected
• Port OpenMoko UI to the New World Order (Rob Bradford)
• Add a 24x24 icon (#475)

Yesterday I landed in Subversion a branch of Tasks I've been working on to remove all confirmation dialogs and replace them with infinite undo/redo. I'm really pleased with the end result, there are no more dialogs getting in the way and every action is undoable. To implement this I adapted MarlinUndoManager from Marlin by the most excellent Iain Holmes. The basic design is that the application has a global undo context. When an operation which should be undoable occurs, you start the context, add as many undoables as required, and then end the context. Allowing a single undoable action to consist of multiple undoables lets the application reuse fine-grained logic to build coarse user-level actions (in Tasks this is used to build the Remove Completed action from multiple Delete Task actions). To make integrating this into applications even easier, I wrote a GtkAction which reflects the state of an undo context, so it is trivial to add redo/undo to the interface. There is one remaining task left before this is ready to be released: undo support in the edit dialog entries. Once this is done, the next release of Tasks will be announced. I also plan to work with Iain on cleaning up this code and submitting it for inclusion into GTK+. NP: Money Jungle, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Max Roach

I recently came across three very well written and very thoughtful blog postings by Rick Cook (author of the Wiz Zumwalt Wizardry series):

1. Copyrights, Whack-the-Gopher, and SFWA — Why I Quit
2. The Economics of Theft: Son of Whack the Gopher
3. WHACK THE GOPHER III: The Return of the Mutant Grandson

The incident which kicked off these postings was an informal DMCA takedown notice posted by the Vice President of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Dr. Andrew Burt which was created by a process only slightly more sophisticated than using word search for “Asimov” and “Silverberg”. Unfortunately, this takedown notice erroneously included a junior high school teacher’s list of 300+ recommended books (which naturally contained the strings “Issac Asimov” and “Robert Silverberg”, an on-line published science-fiction magazine that referenced the science fiction author Isaac Asimov in a review, and a creative-commons licensed science fiction novel which had been deliberately published on the web for free distribution, and for which the author had explicitly forbidden the SFWA from taking any action on behalf of his books. The entire incident was wonderfully filled with irony — from the fact that an organization of writers who purport to write about what the future might bring given scientific and technological advances could so totally fail to get the Internet or understand that such a campaign might cause them to alienate their readers and fan base, to the the fact that Doctor Andrew Burt, Ph.D. is a professor in computer science at the University of Denver with a research interest in copyright and electronic piracy, could so incompetently foul up a DMCA takedown request and not understand that “grep” might result in false positives that would require human checking (”Andrew? Your alma mater is calling; they would like their degree back…”) One good thing that has come out of this whole mess is that it has been, as junior high school teacher Nick Singer put it, “a teachable moment”, and an opportunity for people to reflect about issues of copyright, the rights of authors, ebooks, and the Internet. This is a hard problem; I very strongly believe that (at the same time) “Art wants to be free; Artists want to be paid” (to use a phrased coined by a friend of mine, Jesse Vincent (blog here), to the point that I’ve been willing to put my money where my mouth is. So far the solutions for achieving this are nowhere near perfect, but they are certainly better than sending out shotgun DMCA takedown requests. In any case, Rick Cook’s thoughts on the subject are a worthy contribution to the subject. He says he’s going to do one more article on his blog proposing an economic solution to this problem; I can’t wait to see what he has to say on the subject.