Thanks to all the people at LCA2013 in Canberra; it was a blast! So good to see old friends and chat freely on what s hot and happening. Radia (known for STP, TRILL), Sir Tim (the web) and old friend Bdale (Debian, SPI, Freedom Box) were inspiring. As was Robert Llewellyn (Kryten, Red Dwarf), who was a complete pleasure he wandered back and talked for a while with the volunteer video crew. Hats off to Pia for organising the TBL tour, to Mary Gardner for being awarded the Rusty Wrench, and to the team from PLUG (Euan, Jason, Leon, Luke) who stepped up to help with the video team and to Paul who graciously accepted the help. Next up LCA2014 Perth! Y all come back now.. it s been a decade.

On praising people, and on success This morning I was pointing out to friends how excellent is mako's post on Aaron Swartz, and I thought it'd be nice if we didn't have to wait for people to die before telling the world how awesome and inspirational they are. Then Russ posted an article about work, success and motivation and I went to tell my friends how awesome and inspirational he is. I, too, see myself as somehow successful, and I, too, don't identify in the usual stereotype of success. I don't want to stop being a craftsman to become a manager, I don't get a high from having power over other people, I don't define my value in terms of my profits. At a glance, people don't see me as successful, until they get to know me better. They they realise that I'm not at all unhappy about my life. I have a job that I like, I write Free Software and it gets used and appreciated, my colleagues are friends, who respect me and my opinion, and I respect them and theirs. I can work from home. In fact, I can work from everywhere as long as I have my laptop with me. I can sustain a long distance relationship because I can work from the house of my partner when I'm visiting. Two days ago I worked from the bar of a farm on top of a hill, because I was on the road, it was close by, and what the hell, it's a wonderful place to be. To me success means that I can care about the quality of my life, that I have the luxury of caring about little things that make my day, of trying to make good ideas sustainable, of working a bit more when I'm on fire, and of working a bit less when there's something wonderful in the world to see, or someone interesting in the world to meet. Russ, the way I read your article, you are questioning what "success" means, and you are spot on. People should be able to define "success" as whatever works for them and pursue it freely. Only then success becomes something that is worth praising when it is achieved. Only then it becomes inspirational. I like how you managed to put into words something that has been for a long time in some corner of my mind and I hadn't yet managed or bothered to bring into the spotlight. You have the insight and the confidence of seeing something in an insightful but non-mainstream way, and say "you know what? That actually makes sense." Sometimes I read your post, nod a lot and realise how important something actually is, how that is actually such an important part of myself. And now that you took it out for me to see it, I can appreciate how valuable it is, and make sure I don't accidentally lose it. Thanks! That's another one I owe you. It's just the kind of thing I shouldn't wait before letting you know.

I moved to Boston in 2005 at the same time that Aaron Swartz did and we were introduced by a mutual friend. Aaron was one of my first friends in Boston and we became close. When Aaron moved to San Francisco, I moved into his apartment in Somerville where he kept a room for a year or so. Mika and I still live there. His old posters remain on our walls and his old books remain on our shelves. Aaron s brothers Ben and Noah both lived with us and remain close friends. I have spent hours (days?) reading and thinking about Aaron over the last two weeks. It has been disorienting but beautiful to read the descriptions of, and commentaries on, Aaron s life. Although I suspect I may never feel ready, there are several things I want to say about Aaron s death, about Aaron s work, and about what Aaron means to me. 1. Aaron s Death The reaction to Aaron s death has been overwhelming and inspirational. At some point in the near future I plan to join some of the important campaigns already being waged in his name. There are many attempts to understand why Aaron died and many attempts to prevent it from happening to others in the future. Unfortunately, I am familiar with the process of soul-searching and second-guessing that happens when a friend commits suicide. I m sure that every one of his friends has asked themselves, as I have, What could I have done differently? I don t know the answer, but I do know this: Aaron was facing the real risk of losing half his life to prison. But even if one believed that he was only facing the likely loss of ten percent or even one percent of his life I wish that we all, and I wish that I in particular, had reacted with the passion, time, anger, activity, and volume proportional to how we have reacted in the last two weeks when he lost the whole thing. 2. Aaron s Work Of course, Aaron and I worked on related projects and I followed his work. And despite all the incredible things that have been said about Aaron, I feel that Aaron s work was more focused, more ambitious, more transformative, more innovative, and more reckless (in a positive sense) than the outpour online suggests. Although discussion of Aaron has focused his successes, achievements, and victories, the work that inspired me most was not the projects that were most popular or successful. Much of Aaron s work was deeply, and as it turned out overly, ambitious. His best projects were self-conscious attempts to transform knowledge production, organization, and dissemination. Although he moved from project to project, his work was consistently focused on bringing semantic-web concepts and technologies to peer production, to the movement for free culture, and to progressive political activism and on the meta-politics necessary to remove barriers to this work. For example, Aaron created an online collaborative encyclopedia project called the TheInfoNetwork (TIN) several years before Wikipedia was started. I talked to Aaron at length about that project for a research project I am working on. Aaron s work was years ahead of its time; in 2000, TIN embraced more of the Wikimedia Foundation s current goals and principles than Wikipedia did when it was launched. While Wikipedia sought to create a free reference work online, Aaron s effort sought to find out what a reference work online could look like. It turned out to be too ambitious, perhaps, but it taught many, including myself, an enormous amount in that process. When I met Aaron, he was in the process starting a company, Infogami, that was trying to chase many of TIN s goals. Infogami was conceived of as a wiki aware of the structure of data. The model was both simple and profound. Years later, Wikimedia Deutschland s WikiData project is beginning to bring some of these ideas to the mainstream. Infogami merged with Reddit as equal halves of a company with a shared technological foundation based on some of Aaron s other work. But when Reddit took off, Infogami was rarely mentioned, even by Aaron. I think that is too bad. Reddit got traction because it made the most popular stuff more visible; Reddit is popular, fundamentally, because popular things are popular. But popular is not necessary positive. For that reason, Reddit never struck me as either surprising or transformative. But what started as Aaron s half the company, on the other hand, aimed to create a powerful form of democratized information production and dissemination. And although Infogami didn t take off, the ideas and code behind the project found life at the heart of Open Library and will continue to influence and inspire countless other projects. I believe that Infogami s lessons and legacy will undergird a generation of transformative peer production technologies in a way that the Reddit website important as it is will not. 3. What Aaron Means to Me A lot of what has been written about Aaron speaks to his intelligence, his curiosity, his generosity, his ethics and his drive. Although I recognize all these qualities in the Aaron I knew, I ve felt alienated by how abstract some of the discussion of Aaron has been my memories are of particularities.

I remember the time Aaron was hospitalized and I spent two hours on the phone going through my bookshelves arguing with him about the virtues of the books in my library as we tried to decide which books I would bring him. I remember Aaron confronting Peter Singer intellectual founder of the modern animal rights movement at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival to ask if humans had a moral obligation to stop animals from killing each other. I lurked behind, embarrassed about the question but curious to hear the answer. (Singer sighed and said yes sort of and complemented Aaron on the enormous Marxist commentary he was carrying.) I remember 1-800-INTERNET.com. I remember talking with Aaron about whether being wealthy could be ethical. I argued it could not but Aaron argued uncharacteristically I thought that it could. Aaron told Mika she should slap him if he ever became wealthy. The very next day, it was announced that his company had been acquired and that Aaron was a millionaire. I remember the standing bets I had with Aaron and how he would email me every time news reports favored his claims (but never when they did not). And I remember that I won t hear from him again.

Aaron was a friend and inspiration. I miss him deeply and I am very sad.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor has a very good blog post. You should read it. It includes a thoughtful rebuttal to some of my earlier thoughts about activism. I think I'm developing a richer understanding of where I see boundaries here, but after my last post, I also realized that by focusing on the specific details of what should have been a minor alleged crime, I'm derailing. Swartz did so much else. I made a note to come back to the more theoretical discussion in six months; now isn't the time. Now is the time to celebrate open content and all of the things Swartz achieved. (But thank you very much to the multiple people who have pointed out flaws in my reasoning and attempted approach.) Hopefully, it's also an opportunity to keep the pressure on for a saner and less abusive judicial system that doesn't threaten people with ridiculous and disproportional punishment in order to terrify them into unwarranted plea bargains. The petition I mentioned has reached nearly 40,000 signatures and passed the threshold (at the time it was posted) for forcing a White House response. Probably more importantly, it also seems to be creating the feedback cycle that I was hoping to see: the popularity of the petition is causing this story to stay in the news cycle and continue to be written about, which in turn drives more signatures to the petition. I'm not particularly hopeful that the Obama administration cares about the vast and deep problems with our criminal justice system, but I'm somewhat more hopeful that they, like most politicians, hate news cycles that they don't control. The longer this goes on, the stronger the incentive to find some way to make it go away, which could lead to real disciplinary action. A key committee in the US House of Representatives is starting a formal investigation. One of my local representatives has proposed modifying the US federal law on computer fraud and abuse to remove violations of terms of service from the definition of the crime. (I don't have much hope that this will pass when proposed by the minority party in a fairly hostile House, but the mere act of proposing it keeps the news focus on.) Glenn Greenwald has a (typically long-winded) round-up of news in the Guardian. Note that both Greenwald and Declan McCullagh link directly to the petition in articles in mainstream news outlets. One thing that slacktivism can do is perpetuate a news cycle until it gets more uncomfortable for people in power. It's still nowhere near as effective as the types of activism that Swartz was so good at, but in this specific case I think one gets a reasonable return on one's five-minute investment of effort. I'm going to stop talking about this now, since other people are a lot better at this sort of post than I am. But one last link: the medical community has a related open content problem, and theirs is also killing people. Possibly people you know. If all of this has inspired you, as it has me, to care even more about open content, be watching the push for open access to clinical trial data. More background is in Ben Goldacre's TED talk.

I just returned home from Aaron Swartz s funeral in Chicago. Aaron was a good friend. The home I ve returned to is an apartment that was Aaron s before it was mine, that I have lived in with Aaron during several stints, and that I still share with many of his old books and posters. Although, I ve spent what feels like most of the last five days reading things that people have written about Aaron, I m still processing and digesting myself. Right now, I m very sad and at a loss for words. While I reflect, I wanted to share this video recently put online by Finne Boonen. The video was made in 2006 at a Web 1.0 Elevator Pitch Competition held at Wikimania 2006 about a year after that both Aaron and I moved to Cambridge and met. The goal of the contest was to pitch Web 1.0 DotCom business ideas to a team of real Web 1.0 investors like it was still 1999. Aaron and I formed a team along with SJ Klein (who I traveled to the funeral with this week), and Wikimania general counsel and interim executive director Brad Patrick. The video shows how as Danny O Brien has reminded us Aaron was funny. He came up with many our teams best lines in addition to checking our Web 1.0 boxes for tech guru and Stanford dropout. Our pitch for 1-800-INTERNET.COM is in the video below. The transcript was done by Phoebe Ayers in Facebook and the video is also available in WebM. <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NzFjWY6Fd_g" width="420"></iframe>

SJ: You know, Mako and I had some pretty good ideas for improving connectivity to the internet, and we think we can reach 90% of the world s population. So think about this. You re sitting in a Starbucks, and you need to connect to the internet. But you can t, because there s no internet. But what is there, near every Starbucks? There s a payphone! You pick up the payphone, and you call . 1-800-INTERNET. You can connect to our bank of researchers on our fast T1 connections and get any information you need! So, we don t actually have 1-800-INTERNET yet, we have 1-800-225-3224, so the first thing we need to do is buy the number. So here s Mako, who is our web designer from UC Santa Cruz and Bradford, our financial guru, and Aaron, who s handling all of our technical implementation. But Mako, you should explain the earballs. Mako: So, so, so yeah, so most people on the Internet are going for the eyeballs, but they ve just left all of these earballs. So I have some experience in web design, and it s true that this isn t really a website, but we still need good web design. So, so, I ve actually got a really experienced team, we can go into later, and we have some really great earcons not icons, but earcons.. And it s going to be all together, not apart like some of the websites. It s going to be together. Brad: so how does this work technically? Aaron: Well, I mean, so I only spent one year at Stanford but that s Ok, because there are new developmental technologies, we re going to throw away all that old stuff, we re going to use really reliable and efficient well-designed code that everyone can clearly understand, and write the whole thing in Perl. I know this is a risk, but I am confident that Perl is going to destroy those old C websites. No one will write websites in C anymore once we do this, it s going to be so much faster, and so dynamic, everythings going to be like, on top of everything. It s going to be great. Bradford: So here s the business model. It s really really simple, and it s a really really great idea. It s all about the licensing. Because what we re going to have are these underlying audio ads, While you re on the phone you re going to hear this subliminal advertising message. And the way it works is really really cool, because it s really really low volume, it s high impact! And it s even better, because we license it, and the way it works is when a caller calls 1-800-Internet, they re hearing the ad, but so is the representative, so we get to bill em twice! So that s it: All: 1-800-INTERNET.COM

We did not win and I still believe that we were robbed.

I was upset to learn about Aaron Swartz's death last week. I continue to be upset about his loss, and about our loss. He didn't just show promise of great things to come in the future -- he had already done more work for the public good than many of us will ever do. I'd only met him IRL a couple times, but (like many others) i had encountered him on the 'net in many places. He was a good person, someone i didn't need to always agree with to respect. I read Russ Allbery's posts about Aaron and "slacktivism" with much appreciation. I had been ambivalent about signing the whitehouse.gov petition asking for the removal of the prosecutor for overreach, because I generally distrust the effectiveness of online petitions (and offline petitions, for that matter). But Russ's analysis convinced me to go ahead and sign it. The petition is concrete, clear (despite wanting a grammatical proofread), and actionable. For people willing to go beyond petition signing to civil disobedience, The Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator is an option. It makes it straightforward to potentially violate the onerous JSTOR terms of service by re-publishing a public-domain article from JSTOR to archive.org, where it will be accessible to anyone directly. As someone who builds and maintains information/communications infrastructure, i have very mixed feelings about most online civil disobedience, since it often takes the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack of some sort. DDoS attacks of public services are notoriously difficult to defend against without having huge resources to throw at the problem, so encouraging participation in a DDoS often feels a little bit like handing out cans of gasoline when you know that everyone is living in a house of straw. However, the JSTOR Liberator is not a DDoS at all -- it's simply a facilitation of people breaking the JSTOR Terms of Service (ToS), some of the same terms that Aaron was facing charges for violating. So it is a well-targeted way to demonstrate that the prosecutions were overreaching. I wanted to take issue with one of Russ' statements, though. In his second post about the situation, Russ wrote:

Social activism and political disobedience are important and often valuable things, but performing your social activism using other people's stuff is just rude. I think it can be a forgivable rudeness; people can get caught up in the moment and not realize what they're doing. But it's still rude, and it's still not the way to go about civil disobedience.

While i generally agree with Russ' thoughtful consideration of consent, I have to take issue with this elevation of some sort of hyper-extended property right over the moral agency that drives civil disobedience. To use someone else's property for the sake of a just cause without damaging the property or depriving the owner of its use is not "forgivable rudeness" -- it's forgivable, laudable even, because it is just. And the person using the property doesn't need to be "caught up in the moment and not realize what they're doing" for it to be acceptable. Civil disobedience often involves putting some level of inconvenience or discomfort on other people, including innocent people. It might be the friends and family of the activist who have to deal with the jail time; it might be the drivers stuck in a traffic jam caused by a demonstration; it might be the people forced to shop elsewhere because the store's doors are barricaded by protestors. All of these people could be troubled by the civil disobedience more than MIT's network users and admins were troubled by Aaron's protest, and that doesn't make the protests described worse or "not the way to go about civil disobedience." The trouble highlights a more significant injustice, and in its troubling way does what it can to help right it. Aaron was a troublemaker, and a good one. He will be missed. Tags: aaronsw

I got some feedback that the analogy I used in my last post was a bit confusing, and indeed I blew the phrasing of the analogy (also now corrected). So let me try this again, since I think there's a subtlety here that may be missed. I should note for the record that my understanding of what Swartz did that started the process is apparently somewhat based on the description from the prosecution, so it may not be the complete or accurate facts. Since there will now be no trial, we may never find out what the defense was, and whether those facts would be challenged. So it may be best to think of this as a hypothetical. We never established, or will establish, in court exactly what happened. Swartz was, generally speaking, charged with two things that I consider quite distinct, at least from an ethical perspective. Most of the focus is on the copyright part: downloading JSTOR articles with an intent (never acted upon) to distribute them to the world. There are a bunch of reasons why this may or may not be justified, which are tied into the origin of those articles (many of them were publicly funded) and the legitimacy of copyright licensing agreements. I think there is significant room to hold a variety of opinions on this, although I don't believe that "crime worth 35 years in prison" is even remotely close to justifiable under any interpretation. However, there is a second part of what he was charged with, and that's primarily what I was commenting on, not the copyright part. He allegedly hooked up a laptop in an unlocked MIT wiring closet without permission and then used MIT's network and JSTOR license to download information. This is, to me, a subtlely but entirely distinct act from the question of whether taking JSTOR's data was ethically or legally wrong. Whether or not one believes that JSTOR's copyrights are not legitimate, it's still not okay to use someone else's network and license or to trespass in their wiring closets without permission. (I work in central IT for a university, so this strikes closer to home.) And this is where the analogy came in, which I flubbed. I had originally said that this was akin to "traipsing into someone's barn or backyard shed without their permission and taking some of their tools because you want to use them." The word "taking" was wrong; it falsely implies that you weren't going to return the tools. I had been thinking "taking and then returning" when I wrote that, and the important second part didn't make it into the post. So let's try this again: Swartz's actions at MIT, as I understand them (and many things could change this, such as a revelation that he had MIT's prior permission), are akin to going onto someone's property and into their barn without permission, borrowing their hedge trimmer for a while because you want to use it, and returning the hedge trimmer without any damage when you're done (and without them noticing it was gone). I'm quite fond of this analogy, since I think it clearly establishes two things:

1. Most people are going to be unhappy about this happening and will intuitively feel like it should probably be illegal. Not everyone; there are folks who don't believe in personal property, or at least wouldn't extend it to tools in a barn. But most people will feel that someone should ask first before they come borrow your tools. Even if they don't damage them, even if they return them before you notice they're gone, you might have wanted to use the tool at the same time or they might have damaged them without intending to, and they should just ask first. It's common politeness, and depending on the circumstances, someone who doesn't ask and is covert about borrowing tools might be worth calling the police over.
2. There is absolutely no way in any reasonable moral system that doing this should result in 35 years in prison. Or even 10, or even 1. Yes, most people would consider this a crime, but most people would consider it a minor crime. It's the sort of thing where you might have to impose some consequences just to make sure the message of "knock it off" is delivered firmly, but someone doing this is rude and inconsiderate, not evil.

The JSTOR copyright stuff is more complex to analyze and is more politically divisive, but for me the key points are (a) Swartz never released the data, and (b) JSTOR declined to press charges. To me, that means the deeper copyright questions, which are quite interesting, were never actually reached in this particular case. The crime that did apparently happen was the trespass at MIT, for which I think the above analogy is the right way to think about it. The point I do want people to take away from this is that one should not overlook the trespass at MIT even if one wants to celebrate the undermining of the copyright regime and doesn't believe JSTOR's data should be considered their private property. Social activism and political disobedience are important and often valuable things, but performing your social activism using other people's stuff is just rude. I think it can be a forgivable rudeness; people can get caught up in the moment and not realize what they're doing. But it's still rude, and it's still not the way to go about civil disobedience. For both ethical and tactical reasons, involving bystanders in your act of social activism without their consent is a bad approach. ETA: The problem, of course, with discussing all of this is that while it's relevant and possibly even somewhat important in the broader sense of how our community acts going forward, it also doesn't capture the fact that this was only one incident in a remarkable life. One of the worst problems with the abusive prosecution of Swartz is that it blew this incident completely out of proportion. A moment of arguable judgement should not dominate one's life or cast a shadow over all of one's other accomplishments; the prosecution tried to make it do just that. That's part of what I'm arguing, but ironically that partly feeds into the lack of proportionality in the discussion. I've gotten kind of far afield here, so let me go back and say explicitly: Swartz was a remarkable person who did much to admire and respect, and the world is a worse place without him.

Normally, I'm not that much of a fan of the slacktivist trend of signing pre-canned petitions, signing things that political organizations send in the mail, and so forth. It takes very little effort and therefore carries very little weight. A lot of those efforts are more exercises in helping the signers feel better about themselves. But there is the occasional exception. Most of you probably already know about the death of Aaron Swartz. For those who aren't familiar, see Larry Lessig's article. Swartz suffered from depression (and, seriously, fuck depression it's an awful, horrible disease), but there's little doubt that the ongoing federal prosecution using the full weight of the US district attorney's office to hound him for what amounts to political trespassing was part of what led to his suicide. As it happens, I personally believe that Swartz committed a crime, and probably should have paid some consequence for it (on the order of a fine or some community service). Hooking your devices up to someone else's network without their permission and messing around in their wiring closets (locked or not) is, for me, akin to traipsing into someone's barn or backyard shed without their permission and using some of their tools because you want to use them. And whether or not one likes the current copyright regime (and I don't like it at all), MIT is still in the awkward position of having to work with it. Abusing their license for your political goals is effectively recruiting them into your activism without their permission, and as I've mentioned before, I have a mild obsession with consent. It was a crime. However, it was a minor crime, and that's where this whole situation went completely off the rails. One aspect of a justice system is fairness: uniform application of the laws to everyone. However, another aspect of a justice system is proportionality: punishments that fit the crime. Without ever having been convicted, Swartz was already punished completely out of proportion to what he actually did, both financially and emotionally, by prosecution by the US attorney that went far, far beyond zealous into actively abusive. This despite the fact that the owner of the academic papers that he was downloading as an act of open access activism stated they did not want the case to proceed and asked the US government to drop the charges. I don't think what Swartz did was right, or legal. However, the correct reaction was "look, involuntarily recruiting MIT as an accomplice to your act of civil disobedience is not okay don't ever do that again." Not "you are evil and should be locked up in prison for 35 years." And I'm completely fed up with the disproportionality of our justice system and the practice of ridiculous over-charging of crimes in an attempt to terrify people into bad plea bargains. Which brings me to the slacktivism. This is exactly the sort of situation where popular opinion matters. US attorneys who have lost the faith and support of the population they serve won't keep their jobs. And no one in government particularly wants this case to be splashed across the front pages, or to have to answer questions about the appropriateness or proportionality of the prosecution while people are mourning a dead young man. If we make it clear enough to the Obama administration that people are watching, that this matters, and that we're angry about it, not only is it quite likely there will be consequences for this prosecutor, but it may serve as a deterrant for other prosecutors in the future. There is a petition on WhiteHouse.Gov to remove the district attorney for prosecutorial overreach, and for once taking five minutes to create an account and clicking on a petition may be both useful and appropriate. Taking disciplinary action here is, unlike with a lot of petitions, something that the Obama administration can actually do, directly, without involving the rest of the dysfunctional US government, and without making new law. If you are a US citizen, please consider going to this site and signing it to say that this matters to you and you believe this prosecution was excessive and inappropriate. Please note: you do not have to believe that Swartz died solely or even primarily because of this prosecution to do this. We'll never really know the complex factors behind his death. But this was a burden that he shouldn't have had to deal with. Please also note that you do not have to think he was justified in his behavior to sign this petition. This is not a question of whether what he did should be legal or was ethical. Rather, even assuming it was illegal, it's a question of appropriate punishment and proportionality of response. Whether or not you agree with his political cause, there simply was not enough damage done, to anyone, to warrant this kind of aggressive prosecution. And the direct victims agreed, which was the point at which the district attorney should have scaled way back on their actions or dropped the matter entirely. Not doing so was an abuse of office and position, and that should have consequences. ETA: Corrected "taking" to "using" in the analogy about tools. I was actually thinking "taking and then returning" when I wrote that, but only the first word made it into the post, and ended up creating a confusing parallel with theft that wasn't intended.

Aaron was an inspiration to me personally, politically, and professionally ever since we met (ice cream and word games with a small group in a bank vault at Herrell's in Harvard Square) several years ago. I don't understand how things got to this point, but I know I'm angry along with Lessig. I'm so sorry for all of his family and friends; all the rest of us can do is try to make even a tiny sliver of the difference he did.

Review: Passion Play, by Sean Stewart

Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	1992
Printing:	December 1993
ISBN:	0-441-65241-7
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	194

Diane is a shaper: an empath, a sort of telepath, who sees emotions and the actions of others in the form of patterns and stories that she is nearly compelled to follow. She uses that skill as an investigator, a semi-official adjunct to the police who can read crime scenes and motives and hunt down criminals with uncanny ability. That makes her almost socially acceptable, but a shaper is still not something it's safe to be, something best kept hidden. Diane's world is one of theocracy, of dominance by aggressive religion, and even shapers working with the police are not exactly okay. This is Sean Stewart's first novel. He's since gone on to write many other books, one of which I've read and quite enjoyed (Nobody's Son) and another (Galveston) that won several awards, although he's probably most famous for his work on the ilovebees ARG. Passion Play won a minor award itself: the Aurora for the best Canadian SF novel of the year. I found it surprising as a first novel, since it's sharp, focused, and very short. Usually first novels are stuffed to the gills with ideas and plot, as if material had built up for years and exploded in the first book. Passion Play doesn't have that problem; if anything, it errs on the side of telling too little. This is, at its heart, a mystery. A famous actor died in the middle of a play. It was possibly suicide, possibly an accident, and possibly murder; the events of the death are quite ambiguous. But the actor is very important in Redemptionist politics, which warrants an investigation, and then Diane's shaper instincts start finding a pattern and a story in the death. The rest of the cast and crew form the obvious set of suspects, and have the normal mystery novel variety of flaws, foibles, strong personalities, and possible motives. I'm not much of a mystery novel reader, and to be honest I had some trouble tracking all of the characters and remembering Diane's suspicions about each one. But the details of the mystery are less important to this book than Diane herself. Shapers are not exactly stable. The patterns they see are all-consuming, the experience of others' strong emotions acts like a sort of drug, and shapers can burn themselves out. They can fall into a spiral of seeking stronger and stronger emotions until they can't feel anything at all. That's the core conflict of the book: Diane is slowly losing herself. She has a tenuous existence at the outskirts of a society that has inculcated her with an inflexible set of religious beliefs and an uncompromising attitude towards law and justice, but it's not a stable existence, she knows it, and she doesn't know what to do about it. She knows that the pattern of this particular death is deep and powerful, but she can't stay away from it. This is an unusual, and sometimes disturbing, focus for a story. It's risky, unconventional, and doesn't quite work. I think some of the failure is because of first novel problems, but most of it is due to character problems. In the first novel problems category, Passion Play is a bit too choppy and a bit too disjointed. I think Stewart was trying hard to keep the story focused, fast-moving, and tight, but the introduction of the world background is not particularly smooth, and Diane's first-person account of her emotional state is a bit too labored. The plot wants to build in a smooth arc towards its climax, but the writing and scene-setting jerks and jumps instead of flowing. But the larger problem for me is that there aren't enough interesting characters in this book; specifically, there aren't enough to show all sides of Diane's character. Stewart tries, by introducing Jim early in the book to serve essentially as Diane's friend (and she's desperately in need of one), but he's too much of a non-entity. He serves some plot purposes, but he doesn't have a strong enough voice and character to hold his ground against Diane and balance her obsessive internal monologue. And, other than Jim, all the other characters in the book (with the possible exception of the murder victim) are playing bit roles. They're not bad characters, but they don't feel fully real to either Diane or to the reader. It's very easy to put them into boxes that they never break out of. This does support the feeling of narrative inevitability about some parts of the book, but I think it would have been stronger with more conflict, more open challenging of Diane's perspective. I would characterize Passion Play as interesting but flawed, and ultimately a minor work. I'm not sorry I read it, but neither would I have missed much if I'd gone through life without reading it. It has a few interesting ideas, and a bravely unconventional narrative resolution, but it felt choppy and off-balance. Unless you love Stewart's writing and want to read everything he wrote, or unless you (like me) has a quirk about reading all award winners, this is probably best skipped over in favor of Stewart's later work. Rating: 6 out of 10

Finally a year with real snow again. Winter started rather late this year, I was still hiking at above 2000m end of November with zero snow there. First day of snowboarding was December 21st. Starting from there we never had too little snow. At home we topped out at 175cm, and had more than 125cm for a long time. Start of February was very cold, I had to skip a good day of good weather as I got a tiny bit of frostburn on my nose. (1200m of descent was a little to much at below -20 C.) A very warm end of March/start of April neverless quickly killed the snow here down at the bottom of the valley. There is still lots of snow in the mountains, although the ski-lifts have closed April 15th. Judging from the number of snowboarding days the season was a bad one. It started late and ended early (31st of March). In spring I simply need good weather to have fun. - Cloudy nights are too warm, the slope does not freeze properly, which is perfect only for breaking one's leg. Nevertheless if I could choose between a repetition of 2010/11 or 2011/2012, I would always go for the latter. :-) On a sidenote, my local hill has switched from www.hoehenmeter.com to www.skiline.cc to provide statistical information. Here is the balance sheet:

	2005/06	2006/07	2007/08	2008/09	2009/10	2010/11	2011/12
number of (partial) days	25	17	29	37	30	30	25
Dam ls	10	10	5	10	16	23	10
Diedamskopf	15	4	24	23	13	4	14
Warth/Schr cken	0	3	0	4	1	3	1
total meters of altitude	124634	74096	219936	226774	202089	203918	228588
highscore	10247m	8321m	12108m	11272m	11888m	10976m	13076m
# of runs	309	189	503	551	462	449	516

So, in 2002 I attended my first SPUG meeting. Also in attendance were Randal, Tim, J.P. (I think) and quite a few of the other usual suspects. The guest speaker was the inestimable Dr. Damian Conway. This night might be the single most important event in my career as a builder of the internets. I was already set in my ways regarding my operating system, and I knew enough perl to get by, but I wasn t in touch with any users groups until then. The crown jewel of the night was Damian s recital in full of his poem, I Am The Very Model of A Poster To CLPM (sung to the tune of that song from Pirates of Penzance). I must admit that I d never heard of CLPM and that it all sounded like gobble-de-gook at the time. If I recall correctly, this happened just after he took about 10 minutes to teach us all to pronounce the name of then-Pumpking, Jarkko Hietaniemi. This was the same year that the following video was made <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XkU_GQVOCqo" width="420"></iframe> With that in mind, there s one more thing I need to share with you before disclosing the lyrics. This piece was developed during a time when it was common for members of the perl community to flame one another on news feeds, take their anger and frustration out on newbies and generally be the bane of most of the internet. I like to think that it helped to shape me into a kinder, gentler perl programmer, debian user and general netizen over the years. I would also like to think that it will do the same for future members of our communities. And so, without further ado, Damian Conway s

---

I Am The Very Model of a Poster to CLPM Now everything I need to know about the Perl community
I learned in kindergarten when I was a little lad of three
And in these next few minutes I ll relate those five apothegm
For I am the very model of a poster to c.l.p.m. The first truism I was ever taught upon my mother s knee
Was that our dad s a better dad than their s could ever hope to be.
His name is Larry Wall, and that s determinism nom native
Since of the mural attributes he demonstrates proof positive. He s eight feet tall and ten feet wide; of granite-like solidity.
He wards us from the serpent s tabs and coffee bean s stupidity.
He guards us from that Gallic tower s B&D urbanity,
And makes sure we don t see sharp code that might cut loose our sanity. He watches over each of us, like Odin of the Norse belief
The stern All-Father figure and, at times, the comical relief.
So, if you vaunt our patriarch s supreme linguistic acumen,
You are a model sychophantic poster to c.l.p.m. The second tenet that I learned concerns, of course, the fairer sex
And why they are in short supply, while geek-boy JAPHs are multiplex.
As every schoolboy knows each conversation has single aim:
To raise one s own significance, whilst razing others down in flame. And thus good men and true who hold this principle as sacrosanct
Will all pursue beligerence as though they were from Mars. Or tanked.
It is the tenor of your newgroup posts that she from Venus flies:
Because most threads devolve into comparisons of ..meanness, guys. When every post affronts their own collaborative sorority
It must exasperate them, for it renders the majority
Of female Perl geeks absent, till we re forced to rename blonde Dutch men
To act as female models of a poster to c.l.p.m. The third grand aphorism that was drummed into my youthful head
Was: if you can t say something nice about someone, you should instead
Say every nasty thing you can impart, imagine, or invent
In any public forum that it happens you should both frequent. This goes especially for the young, and new, and shy, and innocent.
To flame a newbie is a joy, t will make you feel omnipotent.
To watch them squirm and bleat and bleed and scurry back into their hole,
The surge of ecstasy it brings is worth the way it eats your soul. So never hesitate to turn the wrath of your vocabul ry
Upon the hapless supplicant for Perl epistomology
And if you flame each FAQ, and every question that s beneath you then
You ll be the very model of curmudg nly R.T.F.M. The next point I should like to make s the obverse of the previous
For while it s true that to be newbie is a sin most grieveous
It ain t as bad as being old and greyed and staid and tedious
And sitting at the keys all day dispensing thoughts invidious. What right have you to tell me not to ask about my CGI???
I thought that Perl was all about website development, and I
Expect that you d extend to me the simple human courtesy
Of dropping everything so you can do this homework now for me. The Internet exists so I need never read the manual
And so my inane questioning can form a stream continual
While pleading for an email since I never read this group, as well
As posting them in jeopardy, in caps, and in HTML. The rule I learned in kinder that explains where this approach springs from
Is fundamental to a certain class of Gen-X hackerdom
The single principle that guides their Internet activity
Is: me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, ME! So if you are prepared to treat the Net as your god-given right
And suck the newsgroups dry like some goodwill-devouring parasite
And use them as a help-desk and a perldoc substitute, well then
You are the very model clueless poster to c.l.p.m. The final precept that my pre-school inculcated in my head
Is one I would commend as antithetical to all I ve said.
It is a noble concept that once used to garner more elan
The idea that, when I grow up ..I want to be a fireman. The fire-fighter s job s to help, despite the inconvenience
And spare the inexperienced the cost of their own ignorance
And put out fires when the flames ignite the common living space
And through it all maintain an air of competence and skill and grace. And this, my friends, I recommend to all of our community
That rather than a careless match or carefully lit incendiary
You spray out knowledge, patience, and a gentle stream of good advice
And save the newbies from themselves, and oldies from their prejudice. And be yea more as Larry is, a fire-Wall against the threat
Of ignorance and arrogance, with both of which we re still beset.
For if you choose to help your fellow JAPHs instead of scorching them,
You ll be the next burnt offering we spit-roast on c.l.p.m. ;-) [edit]

For the year of 2011, I finished and reviewed 60 books. This is a huge milestone for me; it's the first time since the second year I started doing this that the number of books I read actually increased. This gives me more confidence that I've stabilized the year-by-year decline in my reading. I did that while substantially increasing the amount of time I spent enjoying video games, which was another major goal of the year. Only two books received a 10 out of 10 this year, one fiction and one non-fiction. The novel was Jo Walton's Among Others: the best book I read this year. It's a delightful look at the process of finding a place for oneself in the world and features one of the best protagonists that I've seen. The non-fiction book was Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, which means that both of Stewart's books that I've read have received 10 ratings. The Prince of the Marshes is his look at his time spent in the provisional government of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think it should be required reading for anyone expressing an opinion on what the US and other western powers should or should not have done in Iraq. It lays bare the difficulties, confusion, and frequent stupidity of going into someone else's country and trying to fix it, and I think seriously calls into question whether this sort of international intervention can ever work. Other fiction highlights of the year were Kelley Eskridge's Solitaire, a startling and deep look at identity and social connection, and Mira Grant's Feed, a zombie apocalypse story that completely overcame my deep dislike of zombie apocalypse stories. Feed should have won the Hugo in 2011, despite some unbelievable politics and a bit too much cheering for bloggers. This was the year for excellent protagonists, with all three of my top-rated fiction books featuring unique and memorable characters who left a deep and lasting emotional impact. The two other non-fiction standouts were both a bit dry, but if you have the patience and attention, they reward persistance. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a deserved classic that gave me an eye-opening perspective on the long history of interactions between intellectualism and populism in US politics and culture. David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible is a wonderful history of Islam as it related to Europe and filled in some large gaps in my knowledge of world and religious history. 60 books a year, or five books a month, feels like a comfortable and sustainable level, although I'm going to keep my formal goal at a book a week (52 in the year) to give myself some leeway to either get distracted by video games or by other projects. My reading did concentrate more than usual in science fiction and fantasy this year, and I'd like to add more mainstream fiction and more non-fiction. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

Rapha l Hertzog recently announced a new dpkg-buildflags interface in dpkg that at long last gives the distribution, the package maintainers, and users the control they want over the build flags used when building packages. The announcement mail gives all the gory details about how to invoke dpkg-buildflags in your build to be compliant; but the nice thing is, if you're using dh(1) with debian/compat=9, debhelper does it for you automatically so long as you're using a build system that it knows how to pass compiler flags to. So for the first time, /usr/share/doc/debhelper/examples/rules.tiny can now be used as-is to provide a policy-compliant package by default (setting -g -O2 or -g -O0 for your build regardless of how debian/rules is invoked). Of course, none of my packages actually work that way; among other things I have a habit of liberally sprinkling DEB_MAINT_CFLAGS_APPEND := -Wall in my rules, and sometimes DEB_LDFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND := -Wl,-z,defs and DEB_CFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND := $(shell getconf LFS_CFLAGS) as well. And my upstreams' build systems rarely work 100% out of the box with dhauto* without one override or another somewhere. So in practice, the shortest debian/rules file in any of my packages seems to be 13 lines currently. But that's 13 lines of almost 100% signal, unlike the bad old days of cut'n'pasted dh_* command lists. The biggest benefit, though, isn't in making it shorter to write a rules file with the old, standard build options. The biggest benefit is that dpkg-buildflags now also outputs build-hardening compiler and linker flags by default on Debian. Specifically, using the new interface lets you pick up all of these hardening flags for free:

-fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Wformat-security -Werror=format-security -Wl,-z,relro

It also lets you get -fPIE and -Wl,-z,now by adding this one line to your debian/rules (assuming you're using dh(1) and compat 9):

export DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS := hardening=+pie,+bindnow

Converting all my packages to use dh(1) has always been a long-term goal, but some packages are easier to convert than others. This was the tipping point for me, though. Even though debhelper compat level 9 isn't yet frozen, meaning there might still be other behavior changes to it that will make more work for me between now and release, over the past couple of weekends I've been systematically converting all my packages to use it with dh. In particular, pam and samba have been rebuilt to use the default hardening flags, and openldap uses these flags plus PIE support. (Samba already builds with PIE by default courtesy of upstream.) You can't really make samba and openldap out on the graph, but they're there (with their rules files reduced by 50% or more). I cannot overstate the significance of proactive hardening. There have been a number of vulnerabilities over the past few years that have been thwarted on Ubuntu because Ubuntu is using -fstack-protector by default. Debian has a great security team that responds quickly to these issues as soon as they're revealed, but we don't always get to find out about them before they're already being exploited in the wild. In this respect, Debian has lagged behind other distros. With dpkg-buildflags, we now have the tools to correct this. It's just a matter of getting packages to use the new interfaces. If you're a maintainer of a security sensitive package (such as a network-facing daemon or a setuid application), please enable dpkg-buildflags in your package for wheezy! (Preferably with PIE as well.) And if you don't maintain security sensitive packages, you can still help out with the hardening release goal.

Hope a few of my readers got it from the title of this blog post. And maybe many others didn't. So let's talk about "Stop Making Sense". You're warned: nothing to do with free software...or running, this time. This is all about music. Music from the 80's. "Stop Making Sense" is indeed, in my opinion, one of the best achieved musical movie. It is simple: it features a gig by the Talking Heads, back in 1983, when this band was among the most innovative ones that ever appeared in the late 70's. And I finally managed to take time to actually buy the DVD and see it again as I didn't see it since 1985. For many people, Talking Heads is the incredible person that's David Byrne. That's certainly true for some parts (and this is what lead to their split in 1991), but the movie really gives credit to all members of the band, either the "regular" ones (Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison) or the tour musicians (Bernie Worrell, Alex Weir, Steven Scales, Lynn Mabry, Edna Holt). The construction of the movie is simple: it just starts with Byrne bringing a music box on an empty stage, with his acoustic guitar and playing an incredible tense "Psycho Killer" (there are so many different version of that mythical piece but this one is among the best). Then Tina joins for a not-so-often played "Heaven" and brings her so inimitable bass line (I count Tina among my very favourite bass player, immediately after Tony Levin). At the end of the piece, the crew quietly brings a full drum set, then Chris Frantz joins, smiling as ever, and the rhythm increases with "Thank you for sending me an angel". Then Jerry Harrison joins, to make the original Heads line-up for a really funky "Found a Job", where Jerry shows that he was THE Heads lead guitar (and Tina is still keeping the foundations so strong). Continuing the increasing tension, the rest of the musicians join for Slippery People, then Burning Down the House ("Who's got a match?"). All this culmminates in a crazy joggin on stage during "Life During Wartime" and Byrne performing incredible and stellar movements on stage. THis one surely makes the band entirely exhausted. How can they survive this? The few next songs are a little bit less stunning (oh, well, "Making Flippy Floppy" still features a dream bass line)...until a really special "Once in a Lifetime" that...has just to be seen (SAME AS IT EVER WAS), then a break where....the Tom Tom Club (namely Chris, Tina and the rest of the band) perform a giant "Genius of Love", so funky. All this is indeed meant for Byrne to prepare for his top appearance, in "Girlfriend is Better", in a giant suit, that makes his head over his long neck yet more...strange. This leads to a crazy "Take me to the River" which has always been the top of the Heads shows during the 80's and a tireless encore on "Crosseyed and Painless". The movie ends up and you nearly never had a breath. So, yes, if you think you enjoy the Heads music and have never seen that movie, just try doing it once. That's how music was in the 80's..and, doh, these folks were so good! By the way, all parts of the movie can be seen on YouTube in case you just want to see what *I* enjoy. Ah, and yes I share the love of the Heads with Danese "we never meet often enough" Cooper, by the way. We once made a promise ourselves to sing Psycho Killer in karaoke if we're happy (and drunk) enough to meet again before we're too old for this..:-).

(Photo credit: Obey Arthur Liu; originally on Picasa, license.) Three weekends ago, I participated in a Debian bug squashing party. It was more fun than I had guessed! The event worked: we squashed bugs. Geoffrey Thomas (geofft) organized it as an event for MIT's student computing group, SIPB. In this post, I'll review the good parts and the bad. I'll conclude with beaming photos of my two mentees and talk about the bugs they fixed. So, the good:

• Attendance. As Luke put it, when he arrived, there was hardly anyone there. Then people showed up! And then mentorship and pedagogy happened! In all, 14 people attended, seven of whom are active in Debian or its derivatives (Ubuntu, Debathena).
• We took photos. Arthur took a wide panoramic photo, and I snapped a few good ones, too. (Thanks to Jessica McKellar for letting me borrow her camera.) Here's my full photo set.
• Good, free pizza. Props to geofft for ordering from Beauty's, and props to SIPB for picking up the tab.
• We fixed bugs! I mentored two new Debian contributors through their first release-critical bug fix. Both of them said they would attend similar events in the future. One of my mentees is now idling and asking questions in the #debian-mentors IRC channel.
• The Debian Events team republished the event. MadameZou posted the event to debian.org, giving it a nice stable URL.
• geofft made a good list of bugs to work on. He worked from the release-critical bug list, categorized the bugs by expected difficulty, and made somee short notes about how to fix the bug. This turned out quite useful.
• People printed music to the speakers. If this sounds weird, you should read the SIPB documentation for how to use Gutenbach (written by Liz Denys).
• We had a good ratio of developers to newcomers. This was hugely helpful; from what I saw, new people rarely waited very long for their questions to be answered. Thanks to Luke Faraone, Sam Hartman, Obey Arthur Liu, Karl Ramm, and Christine Spang from Debian, and Geoffrey Thomas from Debathena, for sharing knowledge.

The event was a success, but as always, there are some things that could have gone more smoothly. Here's that list:

• We hadn't prepared for people to do Debian development on Ubuntu. In particular, it took Luke and me about half an hour to come up with a pbuilder command line that worked.
• We didn't contribute to Ubuntu, just Debian. I actually think this is fine, but geofft did originally want people to work on both. He was disappointed, and we could have managed to do that if we had done more prep.
• We could have reached more prospective attendees. I know earlier in the year, daf organized a highly popular Debian packaging tutorial elsewhere on campus. I didn't see any of those people at the event, and I think some would have attended if they had known about it.
• Some people wanted a bit more context. In particular, attendees asked me about what makes a bug release-critical and what it means to do a non-maintainer upload. We could have taken some time to explain these to the whole group; instead, we dove right into hacking. Because we had so many mentors, I think people did get their questions answered, but we can't sustain that if the event grows in size.
• Mentees didn't always get high-quality help. geofft suggested Jessica work on one bug, and when she had a question, she asked Luke Faraone. Luke wasn't familiar with the bug, and he skimmed it, not realizing that the bug changed issues midway through the bug log. As a result, his initial help was unhelpful. After Luke, Jessica, and the bug were on the same page (so to speak), Jessica received clear, sound answers to questions.

Still, it turned out well! I did three NMUs, corresponding to three patches submitted for release-critical bugs by my two mentees. Those mentees were: Jessica McKellar is a software engineer at Ksplice Oracle and a recent graduate of MIT's EECS program. She solved three release-critical bugs. This was her first direct contribution to Debian. In particular:

• #636201: While updating the package for multiarch support, the maintainer of wildmidi presumably made a typo. A single character was missing from a "Replaces:" declaration in debian/control. This bug caused upgrades to fail. Sam Hartman uploaded an NMU based on a patch Jessica prepared.
• #626420: The scribus-doc package failed to build from source due to a missing build-depends entry. This one was super easy, and served as a good test package for setting up and using pbuilder.
• #565000: The switch to gcc-4.5 left hubbub unable to build from source due to new GCC warnings that made -Wall fail on the source, although it would succeed with earlier versions of the package. This led to long philosophical discussions about the particularly most reasonable fix: removing -Wall, or adding a more specific exception.

Jessica has since gotten involved in the Twisted project's personal package archive. Toward the end of the sprint, she explained, "I like fixing bugs. I will totally come to the next bug squashing party." Noah Swartz is a recent graduate of Case Western Reserve University where he studied Mathematics and played Magic. He is an intern at the MIT Media Lab where he contributes to DoppelLab in Joe Paradiso's Responsive Environments group. This was definitely his first direct contribution to Debian. It was also one of the most intense command-line experiences he has had so far. Noah wasn't originally planning to come, but we were having lunch together before the hackathon, and I convinced him to join us. Noah fixed #625177, a fails-to-build-from-source (FTBFS) bug in nslint. The problem was that "-Wl" was instead written in all lowercase in the debian/rules file, as "-wl". Noah fixed that, making sure the package properly built in pbuilder, and then spent some quality time with lintian figuring out the right way to write a debian/changelog. That's a wrap! We'll hopefully have one again in a few months, and before that, I hope to write up a guide so that we run things even more smoothly next time.

The Acetarium, where I live, runs what we like to think of as the world's smallest artistic residency program by hosting artists, social scientists, hackers, and free software and free culture folks for periods of 1-3 months. Our most recently graduated resident, Noah, built a lawn scrabble set on the Media Lab ShopBot and held a Scrabble picnic this weekend with some former Acetarium residents and others. I don't really like playing Scrabble, so you can see me working on an essay (and verifying words) in the background. Thanks to Ben Schwartz as I yoinked these pictures from his blog.

I would have probably dismissed as not realistic enough for even The Daily Show this kind of story, had someone suggested it a few months ago: Rupert Murdoch s corporation (owner of FOX News, Wall Street Journal, News of the World, etc) would have been found to have illegally accessed other people s voicemails. These included voicemails from a cellphone belonging to a recently-murdered girl, which interfered with the police. And they had also bribed Scotland Yard officers for information, and actively covered it up. The story would close one of Britain s biggest newspapers, and force the resignation of various government and Scotland Yard officials. That it would lead to the first high-profile investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of an American corporation bribing British officials. That one of the central figures in the scandal would suddenly die at a young age. That there was a question of how the former editor of Murdoch s newspaper whom he steadfastly defended until one day he didn t would be taken from jail to testify before Parliament. That CNN would live stream a hearing of a British Parliamentary subcommittee instead of the news conference given by the President of the United States. And that during this committee hearing, some guy would attack Rupert Murdoch who, until then, looked like he had a few drinks too many the night before with a shaving cream pie. And that Rupert Murdoch s newspapers and TV channels would portray News Corp. as a victim of the liberal press in all this, and that they should just be left alone. So maybe the last one was believable, but my goodness. Just when it couldn t get any stranger, a SHAVING CREAM PIE?!

On Friday, June 24, the last day of Open Source Bridge, I won a scarf! It says, "Open Source Citizen." I wasn't the only one. The attendees nominated people who "made an extra effort to help others and share their knowledge," and the conference committee chose the three people they felt exemplified this. The winners were Sumana Harihareswara, Igal Koshevoy, and me. In case you don't know Sumana, she's the new Wikimedia Volunteer Development Coordinator, a friend, and a commenter here at Asheeshworld. In the photo of her and her new scarf, you can also see Ward Cunningham. I suggest reading her wrap-up about the conference, and checking out the notes from her talk. I haven't met Igal, but I've learned he's a fixture of the Portland tech scene. He's user number one on opensourcebridge.org and one of the original contributors to calagator, the most important event calendar in the Portland tech world. That's just a brief summary; follow him on Twitter to keep in touch. I started the conference a little shy, not wanting to introduce myself to people, so I hung out with Sumana. She talked to everyone she could find, and there I was standing next to her. On the first day, it was only because of Sumana's outgoingness that people knew who I was. On the second and third days, I was involved in two sessions: a panel on open source communities and a talk about the OpenHatch training missions. I was extremely honored to be chosen. There were so many other spectacular people I met for the first time, like Valerie Aurora, Jacinta Richardson, Brian Aker, and Alex Linsker. These are all people with three crucial traits: they're extremely knowledgeable, friendly, and opinionated. I'm glad I had a chance to attend and meet them! Photo credits: Thanks to Noah Swartz for the photo of me. Sumana's photo comes from her post to wikitech-l. Igal's comes from his Open Source Bridge user profile.