The idea of breaking programs into functions was taught to some of us with the metaphor of "divide and conquer." That is, make several smaller problems and solve those instead. This approach is now so deeply ingrained that I can just think "partition and solve" which is of course a much more positive and accurate description. One might think of the "partition your program into functions" principal as "the divide and conquer" principal. But of course, they are both instance of the more general "partition and solve". I dare say that "partition your program into functions" is even a more pure and accurate instance of the principal. Evolution may also be an instance of the principal. Different species evolved to solve different problems, or to solve the same problem (survival) in different ways. Of course, when you partition a program into functions, you also define those functions' relationships to each-other. Just because you're partitioning doesn't mean that the problems are not related. When people see several competing projects in the "free software community" trying to solve the same problem, some might say, "Good. We have divided them, now we will conquer them!" In their marketing material (or more likely press-release ranting) they will say that a house divided against itself will not stand [1]. Such people are probably purposefully ignoring the "partition and solve" principal. They ignore the fact that different projects have chosen different paths to solve different problems. They ignore the relationships between the projects, and that we feed each-other much more often than we actually compete. But no good programmer will ignore the relationships between her functions. Even within the Debian project we have lots of different goals. A truly gifted project leader will hopefully not see Debian as a house divided, but rather a very ripe partitioning looking for someone to define the problem that we solve together. A leader should help to define, create, or encourage the relationships that make that solution happen. peace,
isaac
[1] Oh no, I've contradicted the Bible and praised evolution in the same essay! Well, not really. The fallacy is not with the Bible's assertion about the house divided against itself, it's in the interpretation of "the free software community" as a single house. And also, I believe God created evolution :)

I've been on a Sci-Fi kick. I just finished reading The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I've read a few of her books before, but I really liked this one a lot. It reminded me a of some of Daniel Quinn's ideas. I picked it up sorta randomly because I'd read a couple of her books before. I had it sitting on my desk at work, and a few people said, "Oh, you're reading that? That's one of the best books I've ever read". Of course, I got it used for $3.50 at Powell's. I wonder how they get away with reprinting such books for $15. One interesting aspect of the book is that one of the languages used doesn't really express possessives. So instead of saying, "my book" it was always rendered as "the book". I didn't really notice this until near the end. When I did notice it, was when Le Guin wrote, "the mother" instead of "his mother". This didn't seem quite right to me, because it doesn't represent the relationship between "him" and "mother", but it's not really Le Guin's fault... there's no convenient way to represent this in English without using the possessive form. Perhaps "the mother of the man," but that still seems a bit possessive. I believe this is also true of Russian and Spanish at least. One way to look at it is that humans are so focused on possession that we don't have a convenient way to express relationships. But we are certainly not saying, "The mother that I own." Another way to look at it is that the so-called possessive case expresses more than just possession. In fact, it sometimes means possession and sometimes not. If my mother fell off her horse and I had to rush back to Ohio to visit her, and someone asked me why I was going, I might say, "Because she's my mother!" Not possessive. But clearly, it is sometimes possessive, particularly in romantic relationships. Jealousy is possible in all forms of relationships, but is probably most clear in romantic ones. "Why did you go to the prom with him when you're MY girlfriend?" This reminded me of the "object" formulation in object-oriented programming languages. (Didn't know that I was going to say THAT, did you? Ha!) In a language like Java, you say something like "the car's first wheel's last screw", "car.wheel[0].screw[3]". In Haskell, you also have aggregate types, where one type is composed of others but to access them, instead of saying, "the car's wheel" we say, "there's a relationship between cars and wheels. It doesn't matter what the relationship is, but the function from cars to wheels is called "wheels". So we have "last $ screws $ first $ wheels car". That is, "the last screw of the first wheel of the car"... actually that's clearer than "the car's first wheel's last screw" isn't it? There we go. I've once again proven that Haskell is morally and technically superior to C++. Randomness Here is an article linked from Slashdot about how people are giving up on the internet because of spam and spyware. The article doesn't mention GNU/Linux or Firefox. I just took one of those quizes that you've all been doing, and I was pretty disappointed.

I think someone should volunteer to set up "Planet Haskell" or "Functional Planet" (which would include other languages) ala Planet Debian, Planet Gnome, Planet Lisp (which is made with secret alien technology), Planet Perl, etc. These sites are "Blog aggregators". Basically they just collect the RSS feeds of the community and post their blogs to a web page in a cute format (the gnome one is especially cute, but you probably could have guessed that). There are already sites like The Haskell Sequence and Lambda the Ultimate which have a similar purpose, though not quite the same. There's already software out there for this, so nothing new needs to be written. I think we need a volunteer to set this up somewhere? Preferably someone with their own server, and we'll worry about setting up the DNS later :)

I'm pleased to report that my review of the Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming through Multimedia just got published on Slashdot. As I point out in the review, it's not a new book, but still very relevant.

Yay, newsbeuter 2.0 was just released! I am way too lazy to summarize all the new features and bugfixes, It's just to many of them. Here is the changelog:

Added more flexible dialog handling
Improved position handling in article list (fixes #112; thanks to Isaac Good)
Fixed a lot of bugs (#102, #111, #117, #130, #131).
Added ability to specify a list of OPML URLs when using OPML as URL source.
Added config option "keep-articles-days" to optionally keep articles only for a limited number of days.
Added config option "bookmark-interactive" to indicate that the configured bookmarking command is interactive.
Don't display authentication information in URLs (fixes #121).
Replaced mrss with new RSS/Atom parser.
Added ability to search for text from the article view.
Added basic support for Yahoo Media RSS.
Made article view pager configurable.
Improved HTML rendering of links and underlined and bold text.
Added ":source" commandline command to (re)load configuration files.
Implemented "pipe-to" key to pipe articles to external commands.
Implemented backtick evaluation for configuration files.
Extended filter language with "between" operator.
Added "age" attribute for articles to filter them for relative age (in days).
Extended "set" commandline command to toggle boolean variables and reset configuration variables of all types to their default.
Added ability to configure local files as feeds.
Added a "random-unread" key to go to a random unread article.
When opening articles from a search result dialog, make search phrase stand out in article view.
Persist commandline and search history.
Implemented commandline completion.
Improved help dialog so that it now shows unbound functions.
Added ability to sort feed list and article list by interactively choosing the sort method.
Improved and extended conditional HTTP download handling.

The full release annoucement by ak is available on: http://newsbeuter.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/newsbeuter-20-released/

Also just uploaded the package to Debian unstable.

Ok, here we go again. I do hope somebody, somewhere is finding these posts of some use. *g*

• Changeling: I ll confess I m not very fond of Angelina Jolie, and I watched this movie exclusively because it came from Clint Eastwood. I gave it 5/5, which may be a tad too much, but that s how I felt right after it finished. It s not a light movie, but I do think everybody should give it a try when they find themselves in the mood.
• One Fine Day: This romantic comedy doesn t have much of a high rating on IMDB, and maybe I m too fond of George Clooney myself, but it pleased me enormously. Thanks to Marc HE Brockschmidt for having recommended it to me in the first place, though probably you shouldn t bother if you can t stand the genre at all. Ah, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
• Sling Blade: I was left deeply in awe by this movie, and even more so when I found out the director, writer and main role are all the same person, Billy Bob Thornton. One of the things that pleased me the most was the ending, because I found it included a good share of food for thought, particularly regarding how the characters would get on with their lives afterwards, which is not shown. Again, not a light movie, I ll reckon.
• Sideways: I enjoyed this movie a lot, and I should watch it sometime again, because I think I didn t scratch it enough. Which is great, because it s rather difficult combining hilarity with reflection. Viva la escena in the fast food restaurant.
• Tiempos de az car: I ve comitted to watching some more Spanish films, and this one is the more remarkable of those I ve seen as of late. This is a bittersweet love story spawning more than 30 years, and has Ver nica Forqu and Charo L pez in wonderful supporting roles. I should watch more films of Charo L pez.

Isaac watched Love Actually recently, and I oooh ed quite a bit when he told me, because that movie has one of my favourite or should I say powerful scenes of all times for me, and recalling it brings me instant joy and often instant tears. I think these three (spoiling) minutes are so powerful because, albeit they are fully anticipated for the spectator, they come as a complete surprise to both protagonists (obviously to her, but also to him, given the dialog that takes place once she gets down the stairs; that tiny dialog is in fact the most powerful bit of it all).

Patio Maravillas is a self-managed government-independent social center in Madrid, placed in a squatted building that long ago belonged to school. The place currently belongs to a Real Estate company, Grupo 2 Reunidos. According to the law, the place has to be used for providing services to the community, which hasn t happened for 10 years. Nobody knows what plans they do have for the building, but there are suspicions that it might be related to property speculation. Nothing new on the horizon. The police are throwing them out of the building tomorrow morning, incidentally coinciding with the opening of the Foro Social Mundial (World Social Forum), for which Patio Maravillas was going to be one of the hosting buildings. Madrid isn t really known for supporting social movements in general, and has a conservative government, so feel free to think that the coincidence is not random. Patio Maravillas has been giving courses and workshops to the community since July 2007, and is very well considered and supported by different organizations. Supposedly whatever happens tomorrow will be without violence, but knowing how the Spanish Police behaves in this situations that is not very likely. The event will be streamed and probably recorded, and information will be twittered, so hopefully nothing serious will happen. I really hope the best for them. I d love to be able to be there with them, but as it is really not possible for me, I m giving them all my support from here. Good luck! Keep up the good work!

Many people ask me why there are such few female hackers. While I think this is an important/interesting question (that is also extraordinarily hard to answer), there is another one which has captivated me for much longer, which is the followingL why are there such few females represented in the academic/activist world of free software/free culture, etc.? It seems like every turn I take, there are books galore, talks galore, essays galore being written by men with females sprinkled on top, like some confectionery after thought. Take for example Joi Ito s recent photograph collection, Free Souls (women are represented in the beautiful array of photographs) but in the essays which reflect on freedom/free culture/the souls of freedom, there is (I think, correct me if I am wrong), not a single female voice, despite the fact that there were clearly females authors/activists that could have potentially contributed.

Essays 1. Lawrence Lessig
Foreword by Lawrence Lessig
2. Christopher Adams
Share this book
3. Joi Ito
Just another free soul
4. Howard Rheingold
Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies
5. Lawrence Liang
Free as in Soul: The Anti-image Politics of Copyright
6. Cory Doctorow
You Can t Own Knowledge
7. Yochai Benkler
Complexity and Humanity
8. Isaac Mao
Sharism: A Mind Revolution
9. Marko Ahtisaari
Intelligent Travel

Now, am I overreacting here; or is this reason for worry?

My workmate Josh just discovered this isaac@cooper:~
% host 69.69.69.69
69.69.69.69.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer the-coolest-ip-on-the-net.com.


Every Democrat was pretty sure Al Gore was going to win in 2000. Most polls said John Kerry was going to win in 2004. And yet both times they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just remember how you felt then and try your best so it doesn’t happen again. There is so much at stake … the US and the world can’t afford 4 more years of a Republican US President. Even if the GOP seems to be defeated, shattered and panicking, Republican voters always end up voting for their guy on election day, while Democrats have great problems closing the deal. It has to be different this time. We need Obama to win tomorrow, and we need him to win big. And a Democratic wave to get a filibuster-proof Senate majority and a comfortable victory in the House of Representatives, so they can enact a progressive agenda in the upcoming years and restore some of the damage from the last two Bush terms. We also need a solid ‘no’ to Proposition 8 in California and similar ones in other states, so no excuse to stay at your place just because you are in one of the bluest states. I would like to ask you to do your best tomorrow, but probably Larry Lessig does a better job at it. Once we are past this, the hard work starts, trying to hold every elected representative accountable, draft better candidates for future elections, spot DINOs, …, but for now, let’s focus on tomorrow. I am hoping for the best, and I wish I could do more about it, but it’s up to you Americans. Do the right thing and leave everything on the road, you don’t want to regret it tomorrow.

Just read this Techcrunch post about the Android/Google/HTC/T-Mobile phone and loved the last paragraph:

But remember, in the end this is not really about Android versus the iPhone. It s about Web phones versus the brick in your pocket. Simply matching the iPhone on many of these features especially Web browsing and email is going to be enough to help redefine the mobile market. The table stakes have just been raised. From now on, phones need to be nearly as capable as computers. All others need not apply. I welcome our new cool future phones

Some months ago I came across Sketch Engine. Sketch Engine is a website that offers a collection of pre-loaded corpora in several languages and the ability to automatically extract collocation information from them among other things. You can get a 30-day free trial account if you want to check it out, the point is that I thought it was really cool, but it was a bit pricy, 55 euros/year for an individual and 1080 euros/year for a site (up to 50 employees and students) and these were the academic licenses!!! And I don’t even have any real need for it So I thought it would be an interesting project to do something similar, albeit just focusing in the ‘word sketching’ part, as described in this paper. After a weekend I got it working although I didn’t devote any second to make it look good as you can appreciate: Collocations and other stuff. For now only the corpus of the state of the union addresses is loaded, with almost 400000 words. You can select that corpus, click on sketch and get the sketch of any word, for example, the ‘word sketch’ for problem. We can see that the adjective used more times with ‘problem’ is ’serious’, although if we look at the relative frequency it’s ‘complex’. The verb which has ‘problem’ as object more times is ’solve’ followed by ‘approach’, ‘address’ and ‘deal’. You can also click on the numbers to see the actual sentences in which these words appear, for example, ’serious problem’. So how does it work? First of all it does part of speech tagging using Apertium. Once the text is POS-tagged we apply a set of ‘regular expression’-like rules to identify the relation between words, such as:

*DUAL
=a_modifier/modifies
2:[tag=adj] [tag=n] 0,2 1:[tag=n] [tag!=n]
This rule expresses the relation between adjectives and the nouns they modify, matching sentences like ‘the red ball‘ and ‘the red football ball‘. Each relation is stored in the database with extra info about position in the text. Once the database is created accessing it to display the sketch and concordance information is really simple. The site and auxiliary tools were written in around 1400 lines of Python/Django. I am still not sure about what to do with this, if there is anyone interested on adding some corpora to it, continue development or anything else, please let me know.

It’s been almost a week already since I arrived to Adelsried. I am going to work here for two weeks and a half (according to the initial contract at least). That means I can’t go to Akademy in the end, too bad The town is quite small, with around 2000 inhabitants, and not much social life, except for the hotel where we are hosted. The hotel is great, probably the best I have ever been to. Great swimming pool and jacuzzi, really friendly staff, nice rooms with big and comfy beds, a magnificent “biergarten” where we have some drinks and dinner every night, delicious food, bikes to ride for free, … Despite the lack of social life, the town is beautiful, first of all it’s in the middle of a natural reservation, with dense forests completely surrounding the city. Every house has a gorgeous garden with loads of flowers and some interesting decorations. The highlight is this really high pole in the city center with loads of coats of arms, and a pine on top of it. Hilarious The work is pretty good too, bleeding edge stuff, really good working environment, nice and international workmates and free drinks And today I uttered my first full sentence in German since lots of years ago!!!

A workmate called my attention today upon the fact that when you search for ‘ebox’ or ‘ebox-platform’ in Google you get some sponsored links from our fierce competitor, Untangle. Here is a screenshot of the ad:

You can see a full screenshot of the search too. On one hand, I am kind of honored about the fact that a California-based company which has raised almost 20 million dollars in venture capital and has over 30 employees is targeting us (a self-funded company) in such an explicit way, it must mean we are definitely on the good track On the other hand, this reminds me of the time when Ximian started to play with KDE keywords … yeah, we both are developing an open-source product, but one of us doesn’t care about ethics that much. BTW, we have a new shiny website

I am a huge political junkie and I have been closely following Europe and US politics for more than 5 years. After this time and several disappointments, I have to admit that Obama is the first truly inspirational politician I have seen (listen to the Yes We Can song based on his New Hampshire speech). Some of his detractors dismiss his speeches as lousy, empty or vague, but you just have to listen to a couple of them to see that he is genuinely smart (such as the one about faith and atheism or the interview at Google). He doesn’t only take the right stance on most issues that I care about (Iraq, foreign policy, ethics, net neutrality, …), but he does it in a sincere way. Obama just gets it. I have got this impression from watching several of his speeches and interviews, but Marc Andreessen had the chance to spend an hour and a half with him a year ago and got the very same feeling. The main argument against Barack Obama nowadays is his alleged lack of experience. “Watch how I run my campaign”, Barack said to Marc when inquired about that. It’s obvious that running a primary campaign isn’t the same as being POTUS, but being the president’s wife isn’t exactly the same either. So if we compare the Obama and Hillary campaigns we can easily see Hillary’s experience as an “old school” politician. She overstates, lies, accepts loads of money from lobbies (because “they represent people too”, haha), resorts to fear-mongering (”Obama is not a muslim, …, as far as I know”, 3 a.m. ad), sides with McCain if needed to get some extra votes, surrounds herself with nitwits, … . To summarize, she uses every dirty trick she has learned in these years in Washington, and that’s exactly what I am so sick of right now. On the other hand, Obama’s campaign hasn’t just been one of the best organized and executed campaigns I have ever seen, but also the cleanest one. He has managed to overcome double-digit Hillary leads in most states without having to resort to any of these experienced politician’s dirty tricks. If I have to trust one of both to run a country, the decision is obvious. If I didn’t manage to convince you, I hope Lawrence Lessig and xkcd’s Randall Munroe do. Obama is leading and almost there, he just needs the final push. Please, do the right thing.

I have just watched The Wire’s last episode. For those who don’t know about it, The Wire is the greatest TV series ever created (Salon and Slate back me on this). It’s been acclaimed by critics, but widely disregarded by audience. I’ll never forget Jimmy McNulty, a troubled Irish American dipsomaniac murder detective (played by brilliant Brit Dominic West) or Omar Little, a Robin Hood-like stickup homosexual man in west Baltimore. The rest of the deeply portrayed characters of the show are great too, but above all of them, the real starring role belongs to Baltimore. I am sure Baltimore’s reality goes way beyond this show, but I don’t think a show can get more real than The Wire. Each season focuses on a different topic, such as drug-dealing, unions, politics, the press, always keeping the police department around. The story arcs are really long and complex, The Wire is not the kind of show you can enjoy watching a single episode of, but more like, as its own creator - a former Baltimore Sun journalist - put it, a “66 hour movie”. Well, I could keep praising it for hours, but lots of people have done that already, even Barack Obama loves it (:P, let’s ride the hype). Praise available in Spanish too Besides, Eliot Spitzer has made wiretaps really popular again these last days Really, you must see it.

… I used to write in this blog about random things. Let me check what I have done lately … well, first of all I spent 10 days in San Francisco in November, I had a really great time, we spent most of the time there but also paid a visit to the Googleplex, Stanford, Berkeley, … and went several days to the Yosemite National Park, a great trip overall Besides that I gave up one of my jobs (the boring and not challenging one …) two months ago (although it seems like it was ages ago) and started working full-time in my company. In addition, I spent New Year’s Eve in London to begin the year in a different way Right, that was all

Last weekend I had the chance to attend the Open aLANtejo conference, in beautiful vora, Portugal. I went there to give a presentation about Open Source Game Development and had the chance to meet interesting people that I knew through somebody else or just from the community lore To be honest I had a really better time than I expected Some of the speakers were the Bitrock people, Jono Bacon (Ubuntu Community Manager) and Juanjo from Igalia. I’m really looking forward to meet up again. The organisation team was also really helpful and passionate about the event, so if you get invited, don’t think twice about going

I love traveling but I have to concede that having aKademy-es in my own city (and five minutes away from my home) is quite convenient It will be great to meet again with the Spanish KDE crew. As Albert said, we’ll have talks, coding and party, and as a local I’ll try to make sure the latter is properly taken care of See you here!

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.