This has robbed me of several days of my life, so I want to bring Google juice this this problem. IF you have a Pylons or TurboGears application or anything else that uses the fantastic EvalException WSGI middleware for web debugging of you web program and have the following symptom: * on a crash the traceback page shows up, but it has no css style and no images
* http://127.0.0.1:5000/_debug/media/plus.jpg returns a 404 (where 127.0.0.1:5000 is the path of your application) with Nothing could be found to match _debug The problem that you are facing in this case is the enviroment variable PYTHONOPTIMIZE or apache_wsgi option WSGIPythonOptimize. Unset them both or you debug environment will not work!

Among the many columns and lesser sections of my favorite national newspaper I enjoy reading the Centenaria column Notes published one hundred years ago in Mexico City local newspapers. A couple of decades ago, we started having policletos on the streets "Polic as bicicletos". Cops on bikes. I don't know if we had policletos as a continuous presence before that, but I do remember it being somewhat controversial in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Anyway, this snippet (and sadly I cannot capture the 1910 writing style in English) was a joy to read:

January 18, 1910 Good results of using bicycles for surveillance As we have come to know, the service the first-class policemen are doing on bike, mainly during night time, has yielded great results, as the street policemen often fell asleep and woke up upon hearing a horse approaching, which does not happen anymore because the first-class policemen make much quicker rounds, and before the street policemen even think of it, their superior is standing in front of them. It also seems that robberies, so frequent during the nights, have ceased because the burglars, hastily breaking the locks, are caught by the bike-riding policemen, given the machines barely make any noise, and besides, they cannot run away because they are chased with no effort.

I'm due a new laptop; my Portege R200 is over 4 years old now, I find it much slower than my desktop (no surprise; P-M 1.2GHz/1.2GB vs Core 2 2GHz/4GB), it's had a new battery and it has an annoying whine on the screen unless you press the side in just the right way. It's still better for long periods of use than my EEE 901, which is why I keep it. In particular I'm off to LCA2010 in January, along with some associated travel beforehand, and I'll want more than the EEE for that, but probably not a brand new laptop. Which meant that when the R200 started throwing disk errors recently I wasn't particularly happy.

Having decided it wasn't worth buying a new 1.8" drive I looked for alternatives. eBay offered plenty of options for 1.8" IDE to CF adaptors and I picked up a Kingston 32GB CF card from eBuyer. I copied across the data from the old drive using a USB adaptor, frobbed grub sufficiently that I got it installed on the CF, then swapped out the drive for the adaptor + CF. I had to do the swap a few times; the first I forgot to have a kernel with ext2 support (the HDD was ext3, but I went back to ext2 for the CF). The second I'd done my usual trick of forgetting to populate /dev with things like console and sda* (ie enough to get to the point where udev will run). And then grub needed some prodding to boot without intervention. I got there in the end and I'm currently writing this from said laptop.

I've made a few changes to the Debian install in an attempt to make things smoother; basically the same tricks people have been using on EEEs or other slow SSD devices. No swap, Iceweasel synchronous toolkit writes disabled, filesystems mounted with noatime, /tmp on tmpfs, various daemons that I don't really use disabled. It's still noticably slower than with the HDD, particularly on writes. However it's quieter and as long as it lasts for the next 3 months I'm happy (plus after that I can reuse the 32G CF card somewhere else, which I couldn't have done with a 1.8" HDD as easily).

Now, back to eying the Lenovo X200s (ugly, trackpoint but 1440x900 display, good battery life) and Toshiba R600 (slower, lower res but pretty and trackpad).as potential replacements. Maybe there'll be something even shinier in 12" by next year...

Meet the Italian income agency The Italian income agency decided to publish online all the income levels for each and every single citizen and company in the country. I did not manage to see the actual data, because the entire income agency website was swamped with request and timing out all the time. You should have heard the comments of my accountant, who every day needs to access other parts of the website for work. That service is supposed to have been taken offline now, after the Italian privacy watchdog issued a polite What The Fuck! Why Didn't You Tell Us Anything About This? sort of note. The minister defended himself by saying "I can't see what is the problem, it's the same in all the world: if you want proof just watch any American TV series". What a wise man. I should watch some of The Greatest American Hero again. Since I could not see the actual data, I could not verify if what people were saying was actually true, that is that income information were published together with the full home address, providing a nice shopping list for house robbers, kidnappers and the other kind of professionals that would politely wait next to your door for you to come home late in the night. But fear not, the website was protected from bots: it used a captcha. Not only that: in order to comply with standard accessibility rules, the website used a perfectly accessible captcha: You can't get more accessible than that: the captcha is displayed in plain text, so any accessibility technology will be able to read it. Plus, anyone can easily copy and paste it into the text box. And if someone needs to do it often, it's even trivial to write a script that does it for you! But it's unfair to say that it was just plain text: it was cleverly encrypted:

<div class="educaptcha"><label for="educaptcha">I<!-- id9113507 -->nser<span>ire </span><span>nel c</span><span>ampo</span> di <!-- id5058508 -->v<span>erific</span><span>a suc</span><!-- id2643358 -->ces<span>sivo i</span><!-- id2500023 -->l valore <span>695</span><span>8571</span>4<!-- id3588853 -->:</label>
<input id="educaptcha" type="text" name="ucaptcha" value="" maxlength="10" size="20" /></div>

For your convenience, here is the version cracked with a malicious :%s/<[^>]\+>//g in vim. If you do not speak Italian, you can still look for this phrase in the screenshot above:

Inserire nel campo di verifica successivo il valore 69585714:

The meaning is of course:

Insert the value 69585714 in the following verification field:

It's been a fun day for Italians online.

Rick Falkvinge (leader of the Swedish Pirate Party) has written his predictions about an economic crash in the US [1]. Predicting that the US economy will crash is no great stretch, it’s gross failures seem obvious. The Pirate Party [2] is a one-issue political party that is based on reform of intellectual property laws. It derived it’s name from the term Software Piracy [3] which originally referred to using software without paying for it, but in recent times has been broadened in scope to cover doing anything that copyright holders don’t like. The term “Piracy” is deprecated in the free software community based on the fact that it’s unreasonable to compare armed robbery and murder on the high seas (which still happens today and costs between $US13,000,000,000 and $US16,000,000,000 per year [4]) with copying some files without permission. But that battle has been conclusively lost, so it seems that the mis-use of the term “Piracy” will continue. The majority of the acts which are considered to be “Piracy” are well accepted by the community, the acts of the music industry in taking legal action against young children have only drawn more public support for the “Pirate” cause. Such support is increasing the changes of the Swedish Pirate Party getting a seat in parliament at the next election, and has caused the major Swedish parties to change their positions on IP legislation. Now Rick’s background related to Intellectual Property issues causes him to analyse the IP aspects of the current US problems. His claim is that the US economy was trashed during the Vietnam war, has been getting worse ever since, and that the US position on IP legislation is either intentionally or accidentally helping to finance the US while it’s production of useful things is steadily decreasing. He also claims that some multi-national financial customs (such as using the US dollar for the international oil trade) is propping up the US currency and effectively allowing the US government (and the US residents) to borrow money from the rest of the world. Dmitry Orlov’s presentation titled “Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US” [5] provides some interesting information on what happens during an economic collapse. He also has some specific advice on what can be done (by both governments and individuals) to prepare for an impending collapse. However he doesn’t mention some issues which are important to people like us (although not as important as food, water, and shelter). On my document blog I’ve got a post with some ideas of how to run an Internet Infrastructure after a medium-scale collapse of the economy as we know it [6].

• [1] http://www.falkvinge.com/2008/03/why-us-is-collapsing.html


• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_party


• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_piracy


• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate


• [5] http://www.energybulletin.net/23259.html


• [6] http://doc.coker.com.au/internet/running-net-after-collapse/

Share This

When you live in NYC and have a demanding job, you tend to ignore the city (at least I do), that is until guests descend upon your place. And since a Large Family Clan has recently landed in my apt, I have spent the last few days trekking north, south, east, and west, across bridges, in parks, and memorials, eating, drinking, and passing out at night after the constant flurry of activity. Yesterday we headed pretty much as far north as you can go to pay a visit to the lovely Cloisters sitting high on a cliff. The Cloisters provides stellar views of the Hudson at the same time as it transports you back in time when a lot of energy was put into scribbling religious material on paper in really stunning and ornate ways. I have not paid a visit to the Cloisters since my undergraduate days and after yesterday’s stroll, I am sorry I waited until the frigid winter to do so. It is an *incredibly* serene place, especially the inner courtyard gardens, and if you need serenity (and I think anyone who lives in NYC, needs to counter the low-grade and high-grade exposure to constant noise with some noiseless environments), this is the place to go. We then made our way to the Columbia area to check out the campus, St. John the Divine (currently under renovation), and so I could pick up a book being held for me at the Book Culture bookstore (which I wish was a lot closer to me than it is)… It was nice to escape the blustering winter conditions and browse the rows of books in a warm and well lit environment. But after purchasing Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Digital Age, parts of which I am hoping to teach next semester, and flipping through the book, my new found serenity was replaced by some serious offense when the only index I could find was an author index. There was no subject index in sight, which at the time left me totally surprised!! Anyone who is in the business of using books as research tools knows the index is —-> indispensable. And a well indexed book is much appreciated (never mind what a non-existent index does). In fact, I felt like I stumbled on some rare object because I don’t think I have ever seen an academic book published in the last 30 years not sporting this useful tool and I wonder if 1) I have a bunk copy 2) The editors/authors forgot to include it and just pushed out the book anyway 3) This was a willful choice made for reasons hidden to the reader. I think I may have to contact Duke University Press and let me know they momentarily robbed me of my serenity

The short story: we lost the baby. "Cord accident". The long story: Sarah woke me up at about 2:30am on Tuesday morning in a panic because she'd woken up herself at about 2am, and realised that she hadn't felt the baby move since about 8am the previous day. I had a quick feel, but couldn't feel anything like his usual vigorous kicking, and eager to put her mind at rest, called Labor an Delivery at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital to see if we could come in. They said we could, so we jumped in the car and got there at about 3:25am. They hooked up Sarah to a fetal heart monitor, but after anxious minutes, they couldn't pick up anything, so they got out the ultrasound machine. It was pretty obvious from that that there was no movement. We'd lost him. So from about 4am onwards, we, well, tried to come to grips with the fact that we'd lost our baby. That we'd been robbed, 13 days from the finish line, and that we weren't going to be bringing a baby home to all the stuff we had ready for him there. The doctors briefly mulled over whether to have a C-section to deliver Joshua, as was the plan, or induce. Apparently it's psychologically better for the mother if she delivers naturally, since she doesn't have the constant reminder for 6+ weeks while she recovers from the C-section. However, the doctors decided that as nothing had really changed from a delivery point of view, and they wanted to do a C-section for reduced strain on Sarah's heart, they opted for a C-section. They managed to get a free operating room slot in the Stanford ORs, so they transferred Sarah over there, and they started performing the surgery at about 10am. Joshua was delivered sometime around 10:15am. I got to see him and hold him while we were still in the OR. He was perfect. 4 pounds 12 ounces. He didn't look that small. We were wondering if he was going to make 5 pounds or not. Maybe he would have by the 17th. I brought him around to show Sarah while she was still on the table, but it was hard to get him up to a good position that she could see him from, and she was a bit zonked out from all of the drugs. They finished up at about 10:45am, and took her to the recovery room, where they didn't really want me, so one of the nurses from Labor and Delivery took me back to Lucile Packard, to spend some time with Joshua. There she let me hold him for a while, and look at him, and take some photographs. Then she weighed him and measured him, and took some more photographs. The nurse was really compassionate about the whole thing, and it felt like we were there for a good couple of hours, which was good, because apparently Lucile Packard and Stanford don't really inter-operate very well, and whilst physically transferring a patient just involves wheeling them down a corridor, getting all the paperwork sorted out is a completely different story. So while Sarah was only supposed to spend an hour in recovery, she spent three hours there, because they were waiting on paperwork to release her, then waiting on a room to be available, then the right people weren't talking to each other, so they didn't know they didn't know that a room was available from midday. I forget what time we actually got out of recovery. The doctors, being the overcautious bunch of people that they are, wanted to keep Sarah in the Cardiac Surveillance Unit for 24-48 hours so they could check on her vitals post-delivery. They let us out of there late today. We're currently in a general ward. I thought they said it was for gynaecology patients (they didn't think it'd be terribly considerate to stick us in with all the other recovering mothers and their babies), but there's some male patients in here too, so I'm not sure what this ward is. In terms of coming to grips with things, they brought Joshua up to our room for pretty much as long as we wanted yesterday, and Sarah was more with it by then, so she could hold him, and we could take more photographs. It's been really hard. I was awake from when Sarah woke me up in the morning until about 10pm that night. Fortunately I was able to get a cot in the room with Sarah, so I could stay the night there. I'm staying here tonight as well. The obstetrician that delivered Joshua said that his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice and once around his body, and was pretty tight around his neck. They can't say for sure that that's what happened, but it's a good enough explanation for us, and we're not going to have the little guy cut up for an autopsy, which may not tell us anything anyway. So we're taking some small comfort from the fact that we're able to make a healthy looking baby, and that Sarah's heart performed fine throughout the pregnancy and delivery, and that this was just one of those so very unlucky accidents. Apparently babies get their umbilical cords wrapped around their necks all the time, and most of the time it's not a problem. So we know that he didn't have any birth defects, and it wasn't because of something Sarah ate, or because Sarah got sick or anything. It's just plain bad, rotten luck. We'll most probably try again, but the next pregnancy is going to be hell. It'll be like walking on egg shells the entire time. Clearly, your baby isn't out of the water until he's screaming in the delivery room. There's a lot more I want to write, but I also want to get this finished and get some sleep, so here's a brain dump of what's been going through my head for the last 48 hours:

• Dammit!
• Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!
• We only had 13 days to go
• We just had the baby shower on Saturday!
• We just bought the last few things at Babies 'r' Us on Monday. He was probably dead by then.
• We were so ready. We'd gotten everything. We bought a cool jogging stroller! We bought a super-awesome safety table of a high chair.
• I never thought my Tuesday would end up like this when I went to bed on Monday night
• He looked so perfect. We've been robbed. He's been robbed.
• The little bugger was too active for his own good
• We were supposed to be having our Caesarian class the next day
• Should we try again? Can I handle seeing Sarah go through all the pain and suffering of another C-section?
• It's just not fair!
• I wouldn't wish this on anyone
• This sucks
• This just isn't fair
• We'll get through this

We've been very grateful for the near endless stream of visitors, phone calls and SMSes, and flowers. It's helped us not dwell on things, especially given all of our family is so far away. Sarah's Mum, who was going to arrive in 5 weeks, is now arriving on Friday, so that'll be good for Sarah. Sarah will hopefully be discharged on Friday or Saturday. We're planning on cremating Joshua, as it just doesn't seem right to bury him over here and then someday move back to Australia and leave him all alone. Current thinking is we won't have a funeral service. Here's what I emailed to the people we were going to send the birth announcement to:

Hi everyone, It is with heavy hearts, that we have to tell you that rather than announcing Joshua's birth on the 17th of September, we have to say that yesterday, we learned that we lost him, 13 days before he was to be delivered. Sarah woke me yesterday morning at about 2:30am, because she'd woken up at about 2am, and realised that she hadn't felt Joshua moving since about 8am the previous day. She tried a few things to get him moving, but they didn't work, so we hurried into Labor & Delivery at the Lucille Packard Children's hospital. There, they confirmed the worst, no heartbeat. Yesterday morning at about 10am, Sarah had a c-section so the doctors could deliver little Joshua. He was absolutely perfect, weighing in at 4 pounds 12 ounces (2.15 kilograms) and 26.7 centimetres (10.5 inches). Yesterday was a very long day. Sarah is currently recovering in the Cardiac Surveillance Unit (CSU) of Stanford Hospital (her aorta has been absolutely fine, the doctors are just being their usual cautious selves). It's a little bit up in the air as to whether she'll spend the entirety of her recovery in the CSU, or if she'll be transferred back to the Post-Partum area of Lucille Packard after 24 hours. (We hope that she does get transferred back, as the CSU isn't really used to dealing with post-c-section patients, particularly ones that have lost the baby). The obstetrician that delivered Joshua said that his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck twice, fairly tightly, and once around his body. So whilst we'll never know for sure, it looks like it was a cord accident. That's a good enough explanation for us, so we're not going to have him autopsied. That's about all I can report at the moment. If you'd like to speak to Sarah, you can either call home and I'll try to keep Sarah's extension forwarding to her hospital room, or you can call my cell phone. I've got it on vibrate all of the time, and I'll answer if we're not in the middle of something. If you're calling from Australia, my extension at home will let you connect to my cell phone. If you're local, and would like to visit, we'd love to see you, just call ahead to check where we are. It's going to be hard, but we'll get through this.

To Blog, or Not To Blog...

Amazon: in the hands of a few

Thinking about writing something for a while, about my Debian work or about my daily stuff, sometimes you lack the time or the motivation to do so, I should kept this more up-to-date so people can follow a little bit what's going on with me... specially considering that I try to keep this diary neutral about non-technical subjects, but hey! it is somewhat hard to be neutral in every single situation. Anyway, I found that I should help to spread the word from a Brazilian colleague, Sulamita, she posted about democracy (or the lack of it) today. Two videos, about the Amazon Forest area and some of the crazy things we find in Brazil. You can watch the Brazilian Portuguese version or the English one.

A lot of people are not aware of some of the political problems that Brazil faces in the last 10 years, it is not like it doesn't exist before, but it is getting worst and worst and, for a while, I've been wondering...

A lot of friends want to leave Brazil as soon as they can, I love Brazil but I can understand their motivation.


• Where do you find the desire to stay when you look around and you can't find fairness and equality? And if you look to the houses or places that should protect people, you realize that there is no protection?
• How do you keep the passion for a country with huge levels of corruption in public government, in police forces, in your law makers? And day after day, corruption schemas, robbery and law abuse are noticed on the television?
• What to do when you realize that the perception of the disloyal advantage is shared among your colleagues and that the feeling of failure dominates a great part of the population that could actually do something to change?
• Can anybody, or group of individuals, feeling alone, work to change that? How? Specially when you look around and although you know there are people willing to help they need to take care of their lives (money, food, family)?

Or should I ask: Where's the love? (Black Eyed Peas Lyrics).

And before somebody thinks that the entire Brazil is lost, that we are under a Civil War and that monkeys and other animals are walking on our Jungle streets in the middle of the cities, no it is not... yes, we need help; yes people need to join forces; yes, we need to find ourselves and fix it; but it is still a great country to live, and yes, I love it!

Thanks: beraldo and sysdebug. And I'm happy to discover that advogato upgraded my status, I'm now a Journeyer.

This is an updated translation into English of the one-question interview with pjorge (based on Darren Rowse’s one-question interviews idea) in which Javier Candeira (Barrapunto co-founder and editor among many other things, and a good, loved friend of mine) comments about an interesting game of his creation that’s being exhibited in Barcelona and that deals with the fears many parents have towards the Internet and the new enterntainment technologies and videogames. The game code will be released as GPL, even though the game data will have a non-free Creative Commons (with a non-commercial clause). The game has a really interesting approach, and mixes the concept of pinball games with that of graphics generated with “paper dolls” techniques, to try to make people think about the ideas mainstream media are pushing, and the way they try to tell everybody how to raise their kids. You might like it or not, but it will probably won’t leave you indifferent. That’s what art is about, in fact, isn’t it? What is ‘El rei de la casa’? ‘El rei de la casa‘ (an expression that in Catalan and Spanish means “the precious child”) is an exhibition and a videogame. The exhibition deals with the cultural construction of the idea of childhood, and can be visited until September 24 in the Palau de la Virreina in Barcelona. From there. Among other works, in the exhibition there are photos by Loretta Lux and Bego a Egurbide, paintings by Marc Ryden, Kiki Smith and James Reilly… it’s really worth a visit. The videogame is a commission from Andr s Hispano and Marc Roig, curators of the exhibition. They wanted to portray Internet and videogame arcades (or cybercafes, which are their modern equivalent) as one of the “new forests”, these places where parents don’t dare allow their children go alone for fear of the dangers (real or imagined) that may lie in ambush. The Internet has entered into the collective imagination, and one of the memetic niches that it has crept into is that of the bogeyman, the scapegoat that bears the brunt of all the evil that happens in society. It is enough to look at the news programmes from right-wing TV stations with their adversative Internet coverage: “it’s good, but…”. All over the media you see headlines like “gang of pedophiles arrested who sold child pornography *on the internet*”. They conveniently skip that pedophiles filmed those poor kids *in a flat*, and that they did it *on a bed* and used *videocameras* just like those used by the reporters now sounding the alarm. But no, what’s bad is *the Internet*.
The other theme that we wanted to touch on with the pinball game is how videogames are presumed to corrupt childhood. When pinball games were introduced, the North American authorities laid down the law: it was an infernal machine that incited gambling and even lust. From the religious right to the secular left, every moral guardian has denounced the supposed harmful effects of videogames on childhood: because of them children and teenagers engage in murder, robbery, truancy, bad school grades and even untidy bedrooms and doubtful personal hygiene. For this reason, the “new forest” of the Internet and videogames had to be a videogame, proving once more that games are cultural vectors, a form of artistic, political or commercial expression like any other. It also had to be a videogame about the a triangle: on one side the children, on the second one the children minders (parents and society at large), and finally the Great Scapegoat: the Internet. After many abandoned and reworked proposals we arrived at the present design for the game: an emulated pinball game presented on a panoramic TV screen, and having two levels: one set in the real world and named after the exhibition, and a second one set in a more or less conventional cyberspace. This second level is called “Prey of the Net”, and portrays the vision of the Internet that a Fox viewer may have: you have Spam, game-playing killers, kids making more money than their parents, S&M gear, dildos… in short, everything that is scary and nothing that is comforting, at least to some. All the illustrations for this pinball, both on the gameplay field and on the scoreboard, are by Mauro Entrialgo. For the scoreboard I asked him to prepare a set of drawings similar to KISS dolls (like the cut-up dolls that kids still played with in the last century). Thanks to these dress-up dolls the scoreboard shows more than the score (which grows randomly anyway); it also portrays the state of the boy or girl protagonist of the game. I say “boy” or “girl” because in the game, just like in real life, you have a 50/50 chance of starting the game of life with either sex. The fist level, ‘El rei de la casa’, portrays the stress that families feel when facing children’s media consumption. The targets trigger lines from the parents: “All day in front of the Idiot Box!” when you hit the tv, or “without a degree, you are nothing” when you hit the school. There are four targets on the right, which can be reached shooting the ball with the left flipper (the one representing the parents): school, museum, church and reading. On the left, and reachable from the right flipper, representing the kids’ id, are the TV, the kid’s peers and the videogame console; at the top of the playing field, towering above it, the internet-enabled computer. As the ball hits the different targets, the scoreboard dresses the kids in a housecoat, a leather jacket, and gives them a mortarboard or a saint’s halo. They are the pride of their parents, kids still not perverted by the Internet. It is cheap symbolism, I confess, two-dimensional sociology, but that was also something we aimed for. After all, pinballs have always been complicated allegories rather than complex ones. In a first design I planned to make computer accessible only under certain conditions, but that is not something that would have work in this exhibition: some people just play and play (which gives me an immense joy), but other people can’t or won’t give it much effort. It’s best to make it easier for everyone, so they can send the ball into the next level even without meaning to. The second level, “Prey of the Net”, is accessed when the player puts the ball through the PC’s screen. Here the character on the scoreboard keeps smiling while the game dresses them in a straightjacket, S&M headgear, or leaves them in their underwear, with their hands full of money, playing cards, bloody knives and sex toys… to their parents’ horror. The player has no fixed goal here, only to make the ball go through the pachinko and the spinning spider. These elements work as an atrocity generator and a rebuke distributor. Parents’ voices scold the player, faced with the horrors of the Internet. But the star is the scoreboard. Mauro rocks. Right now the code and content for downloadable game are done, and the people responsible for the ISO are giving it the final touches. It will be a bootable liveCD with some Debian variant that (hopefully) will run on any PC bought in the last two or three years. We will treat the computer as a games console, which may or may not be symbolic (if you want it symbolic, we can make it symbolic!). The game itself is under the GPL license (the pinball part is based on Henrik Enkvist’s Emilia, which is packaged in Debian), and only the graphic resources will be under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. The music is also under a non-free Creative Commons license because of the status of the original samples, but I recommend you download it and play it because its author is none other than man, the Barrapunto founder and sometimes editor.

The URL http://linuxresource.lemonup.com/ currently has a mirror of my blog. Disregarding the DMCA take-down notice I sent them a week ago (which is also mirrored on their own site) they have again copied the content from my site without permission (I only allow non-commercial use). But this time they go even further and claim copyright over my text! This is going way too far. Now I’m going to ask their ISP to deal with them. Update: Their site is now offline. Their ISP acted quite quickly and less than 3.5 hours after my complaint the entire site was offline (not only the section that had my posts). I suspect that it was the fact that they mirrored blog posts such as this one which made it appear to be willfull infringement which got such a fast response - but the only response I got from the ISP was to say that they would do what seemed right and not comment to me about it due to privacy reasons. This is not an ideal outcome. I would much rather have had them respect my license terms without such measures. I only contacted their ISP because the first take-down request took four days to complete (after receiving a response on day 0 so it wasn’t four days of holiday for the operator) and because they then mirrored my site again under a different URL. I am still unsure of whether this was a genuine mistake (as claimed by the operator) due to lack of communication between multiple people involved in running the site, or whether they just didn’t think I would catch them. I don’t have any malice towards the operators of lemonup, I have already offered some suggestions that may help them in future business ventures and would be happy to make some more suggestions if asked. In response to a comment. The traditional meaning of the word pirate is violent acts at sea that don’t have state sponsorship, this usually involves armed robbery but the main criteria is violence without state sponsorship. The slang use means anything which goes against the wishes of a copyright holder.

I have become painfully aware of the fact that I cannot concentrate on anything for more than fifteen seconds before I am distracted by something. This ofcourse results in a severe decrease in productivity. I’ve also noticed this is a very common issue.
A list of things that distract me include IRC (Admit it, you too.), shiny objects, music containing lyrics, lack of sleep.
To do list; Cut down on IRC, spend one or two hours a day in a silent room with no shiny objects, sleep at normal hours.
I will lock myself in a work environment for one hour a day to do something 100% productive, and gradually increase the time as I get used to it.
How long will I be able to keep this up I wonder? PS: I have noticed that there are no decent laptop bags out there. I’m looking for something casual that can be used for everyday use as well as containing a laptop, that suits a 12″ laptop and is preferably not bigger than that, and that most importantly does not scream “HEY I HAVE A LAPTOP” (You’re just asking to get robbed). Inform me if you know of any.

According to my neighborhood newspaper (the Roslindale transcript), there has been a rash of late-night home burglaries in the area lately. Although the paper calls them “robberies,” they are probably more accurately burglaries (and thefts). Common law burglary requires breaking and entering the dwelling of another during the night with the intention to commit a felony therein; robbery requires taking property from a person by force. (Modern statutory definitions of burglary typically do not require the “night” element). In any event, my point is not to quibble with the legal terminology, but rather to question the preventitive measures. From the article:

Captain James Hasson of District E-5 said that this robbery does not fit the mold of the Bellevue Hill break-ins. … Hasson said he was very shocked because Rendall Road is a beautiful, quiet neighborhood that doesn’t normally see violent crimes. He added that there have been extra patrols of the Bellevue Hill area and there will now be extra patrols of the Rendall Road area.

On a much smaller scale, this response is similar to the air travel liquid ban that occurred shortly after the foiled transatlantic bomb plot from last August. Obviously a complete ban on liquids will make it less likely that a terrorist will concoct a liquid explosive plot, but does nothing to actually deter attacks overall. Similarly, once a house on a particular street has been burglarized, adding additional patrols on that street might make another attack on that street less likely, but I don’t see how it makes the community as a whole any safer. More likely this response makes the community less safe. Assuming the total amount of police protection hasn’t changed but just been reallocated, there are now other areas with less coverage. Even a dumb criminal should be able to figure out to avoid heavily policed areas. Unless you actually live on the street that is now getting the additional protection, I would not be reassured by this news.

Ajax, when used properly, can be a great user experience. Badly written ajax however can be a pain. Often huge javascript libraries are loaded, it makes your browser and system slow and sometime you just end up staring at an spinning animated gif for "Loading ...". Good Ajax makes the application snappy, responsive, fast, and avoids screen flicker. But with your traditional "get new HTML page" model, error handling is done by your browser. DNS issue? Your browser will say server not found. Connectivity issues? Browser will inform you of the timeout. Slow connection? our browsers throbber [wikipedia] gives you an indication something is happening. With AJAX, it's up to the authors of the Ajax application to do proper error handling. And many AJAX application have serious issue here. User proofing Ajax application [A list apart] is a good article on some basics on how to improve your Ajax applications. Ajax is in the need for some software engineering for QA. Right now, it's so much low level hacking there, it makes you expect 90% of Ajax applications have serious usability and reliability issues.

Well, I seem to have managed to change my web browser, to epiphany. With all the recent firefox/iceweasel ugliness, it's nice to get away from that. I am also pleased with the clean and small footprint layout that I managed to configure epiphany to use (after installing some extensions), and with its speed and UI improvements. I especially like the bookmark managing; tagging bookmarks makes sense, the Most Visited menu is great, and typing in bookmark names to access them, and search terms for google/wikipedia is quite convenient. Nearly the only thing I'd like to change is the throbber icons. The default one is too subtle, I like firefox's spinning tab load icons.

Anthony Towns will be Debian’s next project leader. I am not happy with that outcome at all. With just a tiny margin, aj has won over Steve. Steve was not my favorite candidate as well, but he’d be better than aj, who in my opinion stands for the cabal that is running Debian from their positions of power for years now. Only 421 DDs have cast their vote, which is 43.3128% of all possible votes. Voter participation has thus been lower than the historic low Germany’s state Sachsen-Anhalt recently had in its Landtag election. More than half of the DDs do not seem to be interested in who makes Debian’s external policy and who represents the project to the outside. On the other hand, debian-vote sees a number of people who are not currently allowed to vote, but regularly contribute to Debian. It looks like the people who could vote don’t, while people who do good things to Debian are not allowed to vote. Bad. But, IMNSHO, the really bad thing is the new DPL itself. I think he has won the election with saying that he will increase Debian’s speed. On the other hand, he is member of ftpmaster, the team that might be one of the biggest causes for Debian’s slow speed. He is generally regarded to be close to the “Cabal”, which of course does not exist. I don’t see how the speed increase is can be accomplished giving this background. However, the vote can easily be interpreted as a vote of confidence in the Cabal, which in itself is a good thing. It shows that even the voting DD’s are comfortable to be ruled by the secret club of most senior DDs. I don’t have to like it, but I’ll have to live with it. aj is also one of the founders of #debian-tech, an IRC channel which has been created as a “nice” channel for technical discussions. The channel has a very strict code of conduct, and people are being removed from the channel if they do not comply. I am really really really afraid of this “be nice or else” attitude being extended to other Debian communications media during aj’s term. Being robbed of the right to speak one’s mind might adversely affect many people’s motivation to spend time with Debian in the future. In a nutshell: This is a sad day for Debian. But, otoh, every project gets the leadership it deserves. And it looks like Debian didn’t deserve any of the better candidates. jftr, I voted 63571824 Be warned: I have a bad history of mis-judging new DPLs just after their election. A year ago, I was quite happy about Branden being elected, and was convinced that things would change during his first term of DPLship. I really believed that he could remove the Cabal from the power, and that Debian would change to a more co-operative environment. I surely hope that I am as wrong this time as I was a year ago. It’ll be more positive this time.

I like simplicity. I want things to be as simple as is sensible, but no more, and because of this, I tend not to particularly like web browsers. Web browsers are extremely complicated beasts, and to a large degree this is for stupid reasons, like having to support any kind of broken markup. I think the world would be better if web browsers would simply not display pages with broken markup. However, web browsers also have other things that irritate me, even if ever so slightly. For example, there's way too many buttons and other elements in their tool bars. Compare the following four screenshots of Mozilla, Firefox, and Epiphany, with their default configurations in Debian, with the version of Epiphany that I have configured myself. Now, I admit that I'm a bit of a power user, and don't need quite as much hand-holding as a novice, but still, does anyone need a bookmarks button in the toolbar? People who make bookmarks often will quickly learn to type control-D, and those who do it only rarely don't need a toolbar button, they're happy enough with a menu entry. And why do Firefox and Mozilla need a button called "Latest Builds"? How is that interesting to anyone except Mozilla developers? Me, I prefer my setup. Four buttons plus the URL box. All buttons are easy to hit with the mouse, no need to hunt and seek the right location. Besides simplicity, my configuration saves on vertical space, which is pretty important for us laptop users.

Thursday 23^rd March: Friday 30^th March: In the space of seven short days, they've managed to go from hard-line right-wing, give us tax cuts, don't "throw it away" on the state; to full-on fund the NHS more "Daily Express Crusade" your childen are All Going To Die. If these headlines were in The Onion they'd be a fine example of tabloid spin and use of language. But they are serious, and I hate this paper. NP: g tis Byrjun, Sigur R s

Today's Daily Express front page: That nasty Brown throwing away your money on state spending, such as the NHS, schools, pensions... A week later the same paper will be moaning about the state of the NHS, another pension crisis, or how education standards are falling. Actually, that's wrong. Another paper will moan about that, the Express will just have Diana Exclusives. NP: Trouser Jazz, Mr Scruff