People who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less. That’s what Justin Kruger and David Dunning (both of Cornell University) demonstrated in a series of experiments they carried out. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill, fail to recognize genuine skill in others and fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill. In one of their investigations, they discovered that 98% of university professors believed they were above the average, while that is obviously impossible statistically. Bright students, far above the others, considered themselves below their real skills, standard students saw themselves as above the average, while real bad ones were fully convinced of being among the best. In fact, the worse the person was, the most their conviction was that they were right. Even more, the most incompetent ones were incapable of realising the superiority of others, and they tended to think that the answers of the tests were the wrong ones, and not themselves. “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”, quoting Charles Darwin. Most of the people react to this study with a smile, thinking about the incompetent people they know and how well this study describes them. It should be noted that everyone is incompetent about many things, and this effect affects all of us. How can a person realize that they’re wrong? The lesson that comes out of the study is that it’s really hard to find out, according to Dunning. His recommendation is not to trust just one’s own thoughts, but to ask for other’s opinions, especially before taking important decisions. Nobody should ever stop trying to improve and to learn, because it’s really difficult to know when to do it.

After the approval of OOXML as a standard by ISO, it seems that there are two months for appealing the decision. The European Commission, Europe’s top antitrust authority, will investigate whether OOXML, as the format is known, is “sufficiently interoperable with competitors’ products”, as well as if there have there been any irregularities or attempts to influence the debate or vote. If national ISO bodies return evidence that Microsoft attempted to influence the votes to secure acceptance of OOXML, it would strengthen the Commission’s antitrust case. According to Thomas Vinje, legal counsel for the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), “Even if the votes were legitimately won, which I doubt, OOXML is not an open standard because it isn’t fully implemented on competing platforms, and its future shape is subject purely to Microsoft’s control”. “Granting ISO status to OOXML doesn’t begin to resolve the competition law questions the Commission is looking into”. Lets hope the European Union investigates and clarifies all this. “An appeal would have to be resolved before publication of a document as an International Standard”, said Roger Frost, spokesperson for ISO. In other words, if an appeal is filed, it’s conceivable that final publication of OOXML as a standard could be delayed. Lets hope ISO appealing process, if followed, is less irregular than the approval one. Maybe I can still recover my trust in ISO. Lest see how it goes.

Today is a sad day. Corruption has won over rationality. ISO sucks. I guess I lost all the trust I had on the standards organizations. OOXML is a standard covered by many patents, ambiguous enough for Microsoft to keep the real specs closed, far worse than the previous ISO standard for the same task (ODF), and approved in a very suspicious way, in a process full of irregularities, which I hope the European Union will investigate.

Some time ago I started developing a system to classify free games for Debian, based in Enrico’s DebTags. Up to now I’ve been able to develop a basic set of tags to classify the games, so it’s time to start tagging the games. I’d really like to get as much feedback as possible, especially from teachers, educators, parents and in general people that work with and study about children. The idea is not to develop a fully exhaustive system with a thousand tags. I believe that parents and tutors must check themselves the games before letting their kids play with them, and supervise them while they do if they’re little. This does not try to be a replacement for parents, but a helper to let them have a rough idea about where to look at the games in the repositories according to their own criteria. Being exhaustive is thus not as a priority as keeping the system simple and easy enough. I’ve designed the tags along 3 main lines:
1) Contents that might not be wanted by some parents, teachers or tutors.
2) Games too complex for some children’s cognitive and/or coordination skills
3) Educative contents and skills that the game might help to develop. Right now some of the tags are already being used by GoPlay!, a system to find games in Debian, but it a very alpha state. The purpose is to make it configurable so that parents can decide which tags are important for them. I hope to achieve that in the next version of the program. I hope that the overall scheme can be understood, but I plan to write a rationale about it as soon as I can, as well as develop some examples so that they can be easily understood. I know that the tags might be a bit subjective and probably a bit culturally biased. The former is not avoidable, there will always be some kind of subjectivity in these kind of classification, so I won’t fight the impossible to achieve absolute objectiveness. I’m trying to compensate that by allowing parents and tutors decide the subjectivity they want to have by selecting and priorizing the tags. About being multicultural, I cannot do that on my own, as I’m not that multicultural myself, so I won’t try to invent what other cultures might be worried about or not based on some fuzzy stereotypes I might have about them. If someone from a different culture steps forward and wants to help, they will be welcome. I prefer to rely on other people from different cultures help me to broaden the classification. Feedback is of course welcome and encouraged.

The first beta release for Gnash has finally been published. There are a lot of improvements in this version, and it now supports the majority of Flash opcodes up to SWF version 7, and a wide sampling of ActionScript 2 classes for SWF version 8.5. Flash version 9 and ActionScript 3 support is being worked on. I’ve just uploaded it to Debian, so it will soon be available in the mirrors. YouTube of course works, but not all of the other video streaming web pages are supported yet. Don’t forget to install the recommended packages if you want to have the video streaming features available, as some plugins for gstreamer are necessary for that.

From Valladolid (VLL) to Charleroi Brussels (CRL) Fri, 22-Feb-08; Flight FR1912, Depart VLL at 17:25, Arrive to CRL at 19:35

From Charleroi Brussels (CRL) to Valladolid (VLL)
Sun, 24-Feb-08; Flight FR1911, Depart CRL at 15:00, Arrive to VLL at 17:00 I hope not to have problems with the flight this time! See you all there!

Around the end of 2006 I come up with the idea of setting up something I called font-machine: a collection of scripts / utilities, intended to improve quality of fonts by defining and implementing automatic tests able to catch errors and provide screenshots. Some pioneering work on this area was done a while ago by Miriam who set up a page showing how fonts currently in Debian look like. I did something similar focusing on the fonts used by the Debian graphical installer (will write a separate post to describe the way it works). I'll start describing the tools which I've used more frequently; of course my preference goes to the ones which can be run non-interactively: those that can be invoked inside shell scrips and keep your CPU busy! fntsample is probably one of the programs I've used more frequently during the last months: it was written by Eugeniy Meshcheryakov, who also made it available as a Debian package, and creates really nice and professional PDF / PS charts showing all the glyphs contained in a particular font file. The following code snippet shows how you can use fntsample to create pdf charts for each of the ttf files contained in ttf-dejavu package (will often refer to this package since I maintain it :-) ):

font="http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/ttf-dejavu/ttf-dejavu-core_2.23-1_all.deb"
deb=$(basename $ font )
wget $font
dpkg -x $ deb  $ deb/.deb/ 

outdir="out"
mkdir $outdir
for ttf in $(find $ deb/.deb/  -name '*.ttf') ; do
pdf="$(basename $ ttf    sed -e "s \.ttf$ \.pdf ")"
fntsample -f $ ttf  -o $ outdir /$ pdf  -l > $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline 
pdfoutline $ outdir /$ pdf  $ outdir /$ pdf/.pdf/.outline  $ outdir /$ pdf 
done

Note that PDF files will have useful outlines (aka bookmarks) courtesy of the pdfoutline tool shipped with the fntsample package. Results are IMHO very imperessive! PS: looking at the above chart for Cyrillic, I've just noticed the glyphs are ordered as to read "SEX"... I did not choose that particular chart snippet on purpose!

#466664 , not only a palindromic number, but also its digits sum 32!

As many people keep asking me about the state of the current packages of Gnash, I’ll give a quick overview of it. As Qt 3.3.8 has now entered Debian (it is triple licensed under the QPL, GPL 2 and GPL 3), the license incompatibility problem is already solved (Gnash is GPL 3, which is incompatible with strict GPL 2). I’ve added the code for generating the KDE-based flash player (Klash) and the Konqueror plugin again. The only missing bit right now is some kind of problem related to the usage of gstreamer, with the result that Youtube videos do not work right now. I hope to have that bug fixed soon, and to be able to upload the newer packages to the repositories.

HIZ’s games Tatan, ProjectL and ES (ii-esu) have finally arrived to Debian repositories: tatan, projectl, ii-esu. Even though I’ve had some packages available for them for some time, I finally had to remove the music from them, as it wasn’t DFSG-free. The games are great anyway. They’re japanese abstract shooters of the style created by Kenta Cho, and also coded in D language. We had to rename “ES” to “ii-esu” (more or less its phonetical translation in japanese, AFAIK) as “es” was too much a generic game for a package and the binary. The next ones in my Indy Games TODO list are Linley Henzell’s Excellent Bifurcation and Garden of Coloured Lights.

Guess what happens if you recommend free software in Yahoo! forums? Your message might just be deleted for violating their Community Guidelines or Terms of Service. Someone got a computer from a friend that had some serious problems with Windows. They had none of the disks (XP or restore) and were asking for recommendations. Amanda Kerik’s suggestion was to install Ubuntu or Kubuntu instead. It seems that they didn’t like that suggestion in Yahoo! Answers, as they simply deleted it. Might it be that Yahoo! simply loves Microsoft too much?

I’ve prepared newer packages for Gnash, and put them available online (source packages here). I cannot put them in Debian yet, due to license uncertainties. Gnash is GPLv3, and so is Konqueror’s plugin. KDE is a mixture of licenses ranging from GPLv2 only, LGPL, GPLv2 or above, BSD. Nothing GPL3 there anyway, AFAIK. Qt used to be GPLv2 only, and even though it seems to be GPLv2 or above now, I’ve been told that the version in Debian is still GPLv2 only. GPLv3 and GPLv2 only are not compatible, and thus Gnash cannot be legally distributed in Debian yet, so if anyone wants it before this is sorted out, no other choice than getting them from outside of the official repositories. Another possibility would be to package everything but Konqueror’s Kparts plugin for the moment.

The story seems to have started with Damog supporting sexism and xenophobia in Debian, followed by Bernhard’s comment about that not being tolerable under Debian’s flag. Aigarius replied kinda shocked that stopping verbal abuses and violence would be censorship. AJ clearly explained the reasons why that shouldn’t be tolerated in Debian, but Aigarius seems to keep thinking that poor jerks are being discriminated when they’re not allowed to insult us. Wouter seems to be tired of the whole topic. Am I missing any chapter? Now my turn: We are on the right way. Since the Debian-Women project started, we have being able to achieve a friendly and non-sexist environment inside Debian, which is something that I’d really like to keep. It doesn’t really mind that a couple of people try to go back to a hostile environment. Trolls just do exist, I guess, but they are not representative of the general feeling of the people inside Debian. Damog, I won’t get the fuck out of here, like it or not. It seems to me that it’s just a couple of you who are happy to be in such an aggressive environment as the one you’re promoting. For what I know, most of Debian people are happy to live in peace. You don’t have social life? You don’t like it? That’s your problem, dude, but don’t ask us to leave ours. I respect you, you know I have always done. I’m just very disappointed with your comment. Really. Making fun of other people’s problems and traumas is simply bullying. I hope you think about it. For the rest of Debian, keep up the good job. Right now my feeling is that the level of sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, hostility and unfriendliness in general inside Debian development’s world is below the average in the Free Software world. It’s nice to be there, and I’m really proud of belonging here, which is something I cannot say about every group in Free Software. I’d like to keep it that way. Sorry for the aggressiveness in this weblog entry.

Some small portable MP3 players also allow reproducing images and videos (does anyone know why they call them MP4 players?), but they need the latter to be in some funny format called SMV (for devices with SigmaTel chipset. Other devices use different formats, such as AMV for devices with Actions chipset, MVS for those with Sunplus chipsets, MTV, DMV or ASF). SMV seems to stand for “SigmaTel Motion Video”, and was developed by SigmaTel Inc to allow users to transform common PC video files and watch them on their portable multimedia players (PMP). I’ve been trying to find out how to convert videos to this format for a while, to be able to watch them in a small gadget I bought some time ago, but haven’t been able to do so from Linux yet. All the converters seem to be privative, and just for Windows, although they seem to work with wine according to some reports I’ve read on the net. I’m not putting any closed-source software in my lappy anyway, so that’s not an option for me. I recently found a web page of someone developing a conversion tool for SMV called smvconv, based on mplayer and ffmpeg and released under a MIT/X11 license. It’s just a small C program and a shell script, and seems to be in a very preliminary stage, but the most important part is that he has also published the structure of SMV files, which seem to be, in fact, quite a simple format composed of some headers, a WAV audio file and some JPEG frames: An SMV file has three sections, concatenated together:

1. An IMA ADPCM .wav file, with header.
2. An SMV header.
3. A number of .jpeg files, with headers, each prepended by a 24-bit (3-byte) little-endian value representing the size, and buffered at the end with nulls, so that they are at predictable locations (the jpeg modulo). SMV is a constant-bit-rate format, but the underlying format (jpeg) is not. Proprietary encoders -according to smvconv’s author- probably make up for this by encoding at various qualities until a jpeg of the proper size is made.

The SMV header is a magic string in ASCII (”SMV002000″) followed by a number of 24-bit (3-byte) little-endian values representing the width, height, header length (in 3-byte words, starting with some magic “002″), some apparently constant value (1), the jpeg modulo, fps, number of frames. some apparently constant values (a 1 and a 0), the number of frames per jpeg, and 4 padding values (65793 == 0×010101). The default qualities seem to be 35kBps (”High”), 25kBps (”Medium”) and 16kBps (”Low”). Lets hope to have some working converter soon, so we can use this feature in those cheap players. I don’t remember where I put the USB connector for mine, but as soon as I find it -it seems to be non-standard, so no way to replace it with a new one, AFAIK- I’ll start experimenting with it.

I'm back (again) but I'm not feeling 100% well (again). I'll write about the various events I attended and share the pictures as soon as I get bluetooth file transfer working (is that obex?) but here are some sites I commented on recently:

When is it going to be the norm for JavaScript?

Never, I hope.

Down with the Press Release!!

I wonder if I didn't like this because open letters aren't very common here.

Print before you think! - Atomo64's Blog - by Raphael

Reposting the old psnup -2 trick... works in Mozilla-based browsers, at least

How Old Are ProBlogger Readers? Poll Results

I whinge about ProBlogger's misuse of bar charts again...

How Much Money Do Bloggers Earn Blogging?

and again... guess I should stop doing that. But histograms ROCK. Excuse me - I'm still ill...

blog.aksw.org Blog Archive Open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org

I've seen a couple of these cooperative free software funding ideas recently. Here's one...

Information Unlimited A proposal for user-driven commercial free software development.

and here's another...

gmane.org.fsf.europe.discussion

and here's a little background on the first.

Sustaining Alternative Media - Bristol Indymedia to Bristol Social Forum

It's just too damn awkward to contribute to BIMC.

Miriam Ruiz: Journalists avoiding writing about Free Software?

Since when have journalists avoided writing about stuff because of criticism? Sounds like an excuse to me.

Issues Forums in the UK, Meet Tim Erickson in November at London E-Democracy 07 Conference E-Democracy.Org - Project Blog

I did meet Tim. Which was nice.

Labour: Queen's Speech - full statement

I saw this site advertised on TV after the speech, visited it, asked a question. No answer. 'nuff said. I asked a question on another page and it was deleted unanswered. Control freakery at its best.

ConservativeHome's ToryDiary: Cameron takes Tory message of social justice to Labour heartlands

My question about the surprising Conservative Cooperative Movement announcement. No answer. Are all the political parties similar? Do any of them have any answers?

BBC Internet Blog - Linux Figures

Part one of the reaction of the BBC director who thought they only have 600 Linux users.

BBC Internet Blog - Open Standards

Part two of the reaction "The BBC is committed to open standards [...] wherever possible" - yeah, tell that to their satellite system and the Ceefax-killers! (Warning: may contain Andrew Suffield...)

BBC Internet Blog - Operating System Figures

Part three - explains just how their analysis system got the numbers so horrendously wrong. "All of the BBC's regular reporting mechanisms use the User Agent string" - D'oh!

Patents are the best way to improve development, and software inventors have just the natural right to their algorithms and designs. Research and Development in industry wouldn’t just work without patent protection, and technology improvements would just stop, right? Well, I’m not so sure of that. Key arguments against software patents, stolen from Pieter Hintjens’ article:

• The economic evidence shows that software patents damage the software sector.
• They conflict directly with copyright law, creating uncertainty and risk for innovative firms.
• They are harmful to free software and open standards, both increasingly vital technologies.
• They promote litigation, especially from incumbents against startups, and patent trolls against product producers.
• They prolong monopolies, historically in the telecoms market, and more recently in desktop computing.
• They were instituted both in Europe and the USA by subterfuge, by dominant software firms and patent advocates, without proper economic analysis or legislative study.
• The time it takes to grant a patent, its lifespan, and its overall costs don’t match the needs of the software industry.
• Software patenting enables an arms race where litigation wins over innovation and small innovative firms are excluded.
• They are barely linked to real achievements, but instead to speculative claims for how technology might be used.
• Their proper examination is impossible–too little documented prior art, too little time to examine, and strong economic incentives to grant, not refuse, software patents.

Gkismet is a GTK GUI fontend for Kismet wireless sniffer. It is helpful because it allows you to display more data to the screen at once than the curses client shipped with kismet itself, and is conveniently useful to connect to multiple instances of kismet. There are however additional system requirements and a graphical environment in order to run it. I needed gkismet for myself, so I decided to properly package it. I’m not sure if I want to put it into Debian, as it seems to be unmaintained upstream (“Rather than trying to fix the problem with unbalanced quotes in Kismet data I am going to wait and see if I can re-write the whole thing in Java.”). In any case, I thought it might be useful for someone else, so there it goes.

I’m really happy today, what more can I say?

Ian Lance Tailor started a discussion that has in the meantime reached Planet Debian via Miry and Giacomo. The single-threaded memory model is the only sane choice for languages that are as close to the "metal" as C and C++ are. For a multi-threaded model to work, the compiler needs to have intrinsic knowledge of "locking", and it needs to emit the appropriate code around all accesses to variables that cannot be accessed atomically (which also means that signal handling does not work — the signal might arrive in a critical section). Java uses such a model. In the language, there is the "synchronized" keyword, which can be used either as a modifier on a method definition (locking the object the method is called on), or before a block (locking an explicitly specified object). The lock is recursive, so calling another "synchronized" method on the same object works fine, leaving the last one finally unlocks the object. Memory consistency is achieved by flushing the object before unlocking (so accessing an object that another thread may use without locking it is still undefined behaviour — but class authors can avoid that by allowing access only through "synchronized" methods). I doubt we want the same in C/C++. For one, it adds a recursive lock to each instance of a class or struct, whether needed or not, since the compiler cannot rule out that some code might want to use this object as a lock. Also, the object inclusion and inheritance rules are quite different, as Java does not have inclusion, and only allows simple inheritance. Basically, if I were to emulate Java's rules, I'd need a "virtual" base class to provide the lock, which is a lot of extra overhead since every derived class now needs to keep the offset to the most derived class. The other two big show stoppers are the "intrinsic" knowledge of locking that the compiler must have (it needs to know how to embed a recursive lock into an object, which is an operating-system dependent structure as it stores some thread identifier for the current holder of the lock) and that it becomes a lot more difficult to write signal handlers, as you need to avoid any code that might implicitly lock some object (which is true already, but there is no implicit locking). Java can do that, as they have a virtual machine that provides locking primitives and object lookup (so they can keep the lock separate). There is a change to the memory model I'd like to see though: the concept of an I/O buffer that behaves like regular memory (so load/store coalescing/reordering is allowed), but will be flushed before volatile accesses and re-read afterwards (optionally, with finer grained control). This would work for both hardware accesses (where the volatile access triggers some hardware) and for "hosted" environments (where the compiler assumes that system calls perform volatile accesses), and still allow most optimisations like writing in the hardware's natural bus width. If you want to write reliable multi-threaded code with current compilers, there are two simple rules:

1. any data structure shared by multiple threads needs to be marked volatile
2. any access to a shared data structure needs to be guarded by a lock

The accesses to the shared data structure are ordered with regard to the locking functions and cannot be optimized out, which is exactly what you want. The appropriate mental model is that anything that is not declared volatile (or handled by a platform locking primitive) cannot be seen by the other threads.

On debian planet. I read the C and multithreading post of Miriam Ruiz, but I don't agree with some conclusions:

First of all, I don't agree with Linus. C standard doesn't allow such optimizations. One of the driving point of C standard (and thus C) is that compiler should do what a programmer write, without much optimization, i.e. C should remain a low level language. It was iterated also for the principles of new C1X standard.

Second point. Volatile is not the right solution. volatile means that a variable should be read every time it is accessed, so the variable should not be but in registers (remember the nearly obsolete register keyword).

The problem of multi threading is not only that variables could changes (but this is a fact also of
single thread programs, when you write a signal handler [which are specified in C standard and which are handled correctly]), but for semaphores there are "barriers", i.e. you should not move read or write across such barriers.

What do volatile have with barriers? Nothing. If you read the standard (you can check also only the one page C appendix), you see that C specify what are the "standard" barrier, and they are nearly in all obvious points (i.e. a ";" is also a barrier), so moving instructions is "illegal" for C.
Ok. volatile had few other barriers, but across ";" there is already a barrier, so volatile is not the solution of barrier problem (AB locking).

References: see C wiki and C standard.