Washington s Blog has an informative summary of recent articles about corporate psychopaths [1]. Including the fact that some banks deliberately hire psychopaths. Anu Partanen wrote an insightful article for The Atlantic about the difference between Finnish and American education systems [2]. It seems that Finland has achieved great educational success by aiming for equality with no private schools and giving the teachers and principals enough responsibility to do the job properly. Ramona Pierson gave an interesting TED talk about how she recovered from being run over by a drunk driver with the help of the residents of a senior citizens home [3]. Quyen Nguyen gave a very interesting TED talk about the use of fluorescent dyes in cancer surgery [4]. They can make cancer glow one color and nerves glow with a different color which makes it a much easier task to remove ALL the cancer without cutting the smaller nerves. James Fallows wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic about the experience of having his wife s Gmail account cracked [5]. She stored EVERYTHING in her Gmail account so this was a lot worse for her than for the typical Geek who doesn t use such accounts for storing much. James describes what the attacker did, how they did it, and what needed to be done to recover. When running a mail server it s worth considering what you would do to help a user who was attacked in that way. Charles Stross has written an interesting blog post trying to predict some future psychological and social changes [6]. Matthew Wright of Beyond Zero Emissions has written an informative article about how solar panels on home roofs save everyone money [7]. Mikko Hypponen gave an interesting TED talk about different types of online attack and how they can affect us [8]. Among other things he describes how online attacks can result in people dying. Scott Rickard gave an interesting TED talk about using maths to create SONAR pings without repitition and also the worst music ever created [9]. I found it entertaining to watch Michael Lindel (the director of chamber music for the New York Symphony) play the music, he obviously didn t enjoy that performance. Sheena Iyengar gave an interesting TED talk about the way people make choices [10]. It s useful for anyone who is going to prepare a set of options for someone else to choose from. ASD Aid is a project that uses Lego to encourage kids on the Autism Spectrum to socialise [11]. They have training manuals for using Lego in therapy. Unfortunately they have not been supported by the Lego corporation. Bilal Bomani gave an interesting and informative TED talk about NASA research into renewable aviation fuel [12]. The most interesting thing to me was the way that they were aiming for a sustainable lifecycle that didn t use resources that coule be used for food and which required minimal input once it was started. Alain de Botton gave an interesting TED talk about Atheism 2.0 [13]. He suggests that we adopt some ideas from religious organisations including lectures (sermons), celebrations, and rituals. It s interesting to think of a technology conference as a pilgrimage. Homaro Cantu and Ben Roche from Moto restaurant in Chicago gave an interesting talk about some of the unusual foods that they have produced [14]. If I visit the US again I will try and go to Chicago to eat there!

• [1] http://tinyurl.com/7lwx3z7
• [2] http://tinyurl.com/dyec99u
• [3] http://www.ted.com/talks/ramona_pierson_an_unexpected_place_of_healing.html
• [4] http://www.ted.com/talks/quyen_nguyen_color_coded_surgery.html
• [5] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/1/
• [6] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/01/world-building-302-psychology.html
• [7] http://beyondzeroemissions.org/media/releases/solar-programs-pay-themselves-and-reduce-cost-electricity-120117
• [8] http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_online_attack.html
• [9] http://www.youtube.com/v/RENk9PK06AQ
• [10] http://www.ted.com/talks/sheena_iyengar_choosing_what_to_choose.html
• [11] http://asdaid.org/
• [12] http://www.ted.com/talks/bilal_bomani_plant_fuels_that_could_power_a_jet.html
• [13] http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_atheism_2_0.html
• [14] http://www.ted.com/talks/homaro_cantu_ben_roche_cooking_as_alchemy.html

Related posts:

1. Links March 2009 Cory Doctorow has written a column for The Guardian titled...
2. Links February 2012 Sociological Images has an interesting article about the attempts to...
3. Links January 2012 Cops in Tennessee routinely steal cash from citizens [1]. They...

One of the nice things that I've been involved with since starting to work at ARM in Cambridge is setting up newer, faster machines to help with the armel port. We have six machines hosted in the machine room here now:

• abel is a porter box
• arnold, alain, alwyn and antheil are running buildd software
• arne is a hot spare (currently on my desk, but ready to go back in the rack any minute now)

All of these machines are Marvell DB-78x00-BP development boards, each configured with a 1GHz Feroceon processor (ARM v5t), 1.5GB of RAM and a 250GB drive attached via SATA. They're nice machines, reasonably powerful yet (as with many ARM-based machines) they draw very very little electrical power even when working hard. These very boards were used for a while by the folks at Canonical to help build the Ubuntu armel port, but now we've got them. In terms of configuration, these machines are not quite fully supported in Debian yet, though. The kernels we're using are locally-built, based on the Debian linux-source-2.6.32 package but with a .config (marvell.config) that's tweaked slightly to add the support for these boards. There aren't any source changes needed, so I'm hoping to get support added directly in Debian, either as a new kernel flavour or (preferred) as a patch to an existing flavour. I've had conflicting advice about whether the latter is possible, so I'm going to have to experiment and find out for myself. UPDATE 2010-09-28: I've tested, and it seems that the boards will need a new flavour after all, as the config is incompatible with the closest other config (kirkwood). Ah well... I had no end of trouble trying to get make-kpkg do the right thing, so on advice from Ben I built the kernel using "make deb-pkg", a standard target in the Linux kernel's build system: fakeroot make -j2 deb-pkg DEBEMAIL=93sam@debian.org DEBFULLNAME="Steve McIntyre" KDEB_PKGVERSION=buildd23 Annoyingly, that wouldn't work when cross-compiling either so I had to build the kernel natively. To make the resulting kernel image package install properly (and, just as importantly, allow for future easy upgrades for the DSA folks), I also needed the following tweaks to the Debian system:

• depmod:
  • Need to make sure that depmod is run so the new kernel can find and load modules at boot. Added trivial script in /etc/kernel/postinst.d/depmod to do this.
• initramfs-tools:
  • Needed to copy the file /etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools into place from my amd64 machine; I'm guessing this would be there automatically on a new-enough version of initramfs-tools on the armel machines, but we're still using Lenny as a base system for now even if I'm using a Squeeze-based kernel.
• flash-kernel:
  • #594878: support for these boards. Hector did most of the work, and I've worked on it a little more.
  • #550584: kernel postinst hook script (/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-flash-kernel) to create uImage and uInitrd files from the kernel zImage and the initramfs.

Finally, I've tweaked the uboot config on the machines to use the uImage and uInitrd files that are generated:

Marvell>> setenv IDE ide reset
Marvell>> setenv loadkernel ext2load ide 0:1 0x2000000 /uImage
Marvell>> setenv loadinitramfs ext2load ide 0:1 0x3000000 /uInitrd
Marvell>> setenv bootboth bootm 0x2000000 0x3000000
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd setenv bootargs \$\(bootargs\)\;$(IDE)\;$(loadkernel)\;$(loadinitramfs)\;$(bootboth)
Marvell>> saveenv

And that's it, as far as I can see. I'll now wait for people to tell me what I've got wrong above... :-)

My girlfriend and I were out picking up a cake at the bakery last week, when my phone rang:

• Hello, I'm calling about your application. I just spent the last hour discussing your case with my boss and there's just one thing that bothers us: do you ever intend on paying your residual taxes?
• I received those payment slips right after I became unemployed and, as you know, living off unemployment benefits in this country's most expensive city doesn't exactly leave anyone with money to spare...
• Say no more! Moving to the capital for this job was a real shocker. The rents are so bloody expensive here! Anyhow, do you intend on taking care of those residual taxes as soon as you get a job?
• Yup, just like I said in my application.
• Alright, then I guess that everything is in order. We can start processing your application today. We obviously cannot make any promise about how long that's gonna take, but I would think that the decision should come fairly soon.
• Wow! That's excellent news! Thanks again for your help!
• You're welcome, sir. Have a nice day!

Without knowing, at that moment, I had just become a citizen of the country in which I have been living for the past 12 years. It was only yesterday, upon receiving the decision in the mail and looking at the date on the certificate that I realized that, when I got the phone call, the decision had already been made and the bureaucracy was only looking for reassurances that I fully intend upon acquitting my civic obligations as soon as humanely possible. To say that reading the decision was a highly emotional moment is an understatement. Trying to explain the intensity of this moment to my girlfriend, I compared it to the day when a teenager reaches adulthood. This instant brought a similar feeling: suddenly, the whole EU opens its doors to me and I'm free to decide how to best use the opportunities it offers. What next? For now, completing this government training to become a bureaucrat. Funnily enough, becoming a citizen resolved the whole issue of background checks, which also suddenly triples the number of possible venues for the on-job part of the training. In my case, it looks like I'll be spending the next few months at the Ministry of Employment and Entrepreneurship, working on EU projects that fund R&D efforts and export sales ventures in each member state. After that, I'm not sure. On one hand, I'd like to apply for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' KAVAKU recruitment program for future diplomats. On the other hand, that ministry is extremely picky about whom it accepts and it's not particularly known for favoring naturalized individuals. This being said, our current Minister recently published rather ambitious plans to completely reform the Ministry by bringing in seasoned professionals from the private sector who could efficiently promote Finnish know-how and products abroad, rather than hiring more of the same Public Administration graduates, so, who knows? Maybe the time is right for someone like me to join the ranks of the Finnish diplomacy? An other option that I'm considering is to permanently move to Estonia. When my last job there ended, I was left with the feeling that I could have accomplished a lot more, if only I were in a legal position to move there, rather than commute a couple of times a week. Beyond the pioneering work that myself and my diplomat friends at the Estonian embassy did in Turkey, there was a demand for us to perform the same magic in other countries of interest to Estonia. Unfortunately, not being in a position to be on-site and no longer having a job that paid for me to be there often enough meant that I had to pass on that opportunity. Now, seeing how one of my friends recently left the diplomacy and is open to new challenges, I'm wondering if now might be a good time to resume our operation and prepare our next campaign? Wow... So much to think about, now that a whole continent opened its doors to me. Hienoa! Olen suomalainen.

I hope that some of you, outside the French Cabal, are able to understand French. I would be sorry if you missed the whole fun of this. The story starts at http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2010/05/msg00178.html. In short, someone apparently named "Alain S<shhhhdonttellmyname>" mailed the debian-l10n-french mailing list to request for a message written in march 2006 by someone else whose name is also S<shhhhdonttellmyname> to be removed from the debian-*user*-french mailing list archives. "Someone" then politely answered him with http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2010/05/msg00179.html, trying to use as less irony as possible. At least, this "someone" refrained himself to explain that, doing so, yet another copy of Mr S<shhhhdonttellmyname> name was being replicated over dozens of servers all over the world, also exposing that he's probably living in Antony, Bourg La Reine, Chatenay Malabry, Chevilly Larue, Fontenay Aux Roses, Fresnes, L'Ha Les Roses, Le Plessis-Robinson or Sceaux, in France. Later on, this "someone" received many private mails from that Mr S<shhhhdonttellmyname>, which got automatically and gradually classified as spam. Funnily, a few days later, that "someone" received another mail from another person, posting from the very same IP address and requesting for such removal again. That "someone" being Very Evil and a little bit pissed off answered with http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2010/06/msg00136.html which is untranslatable. So, this is why I hope you can read French. Have fun.

Starting about a year ago, I started following the release of videos from TED events. If one looked interesting, I would download the video to watch later. In this way, I accumulated a substantial collection of talks which I never managed to watch. I spent a Saturday evening working my way through the list. These are my favorites out of this batch.

• Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory exploring the subtle and evasive nature of happiness, how we can study it, and the surprising way in which it manifests in our lives
• Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success a critical look at how we evaluate ourselves and others, and how this shapes our social constructs
• Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity an insightful questioning of commonly held and accepted ideas about the creative process, and how they could be changed for the better
• David Logan on tribal leadership a taxonomy of tribal groups in modern society, and how leaders influence them
• Eric Dishman: Take health care off the mainframe a radical perspective on health care, and how technology can help to transform it into a more decentralized and personal system
• Erin McKean redefines the dictionary a humorous and accurate look at lexicography: where it came from, where it is and where it needs to go
• Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action deriving design inspiration from natural systems
• Jill Bolte Taylor s stroke of insight a riveting first-person account of a stroke from a brain scientist: funny, bizarre, transcendent and awesome
• Margaret Wertheim on the beautiful math of coral coral reefs, non-euclidean geometry, general relativity and more unfold from a global community art project
• Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds a look at different types of mental capacities within the autism spectrum, how they create our perception of the world, and how they can be nurtured in young people

I normally don't relay security announces for GForge or FusionForge on this blog, but I will make an exception this time: Alain Peyrat found several places in the code with insufficient input sanitizing, which can cause cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (CVE-2009-3303). It's been fixed in the 4.7 and 4.8 branches as well as the trunk of FusionForge (and in Debian Sid and Squeeze), and updated Debian packages for GForge 4.5 and 4.7rc2 have been released for users of the Etch and Lenny distributions. The reason I make an exception for announcing this here is to remind people that I appear to be the only one maintaining code for GForge 4.5. I do that for two reasons: first, because I'm the maintainer of the package in Debian, and Debian Etch has GForge 4.5, and Etch is supported for security fixes; second, because I also admin/maintain an instance for a client of mine, so I need to backport the fixes anyway, and making them public is no bother. Both of these reasons are going to vanish sometime in the not too distant future: security support for Etch will end in February, 2010, and I hope to have migrated my client's forge to FusionForge 4.8 by then too. A direct consequence is that I will probably stop maintenance for GForge 4.5 in the coming months (at least I'll stop doing it in my free time). So if you're still using GForge 4.5, you should really consider upgrading to something supported, either GForge AS (free download from the GForge Group) or FusionForge (free as in Free Software). Both have an upgrade path. Obviously I think FusionForge is a better choice, but my position is probably biased.

Here's another round of the semi-regular bulletin about FusionForge. First item: FusionForge 4.8.1 was released this week. It's not exactly an important update, but the 4.8 branch had been accumulating fixes over time and we felt that it would be good to push these fixes out. If you don't encounter particular problems, there's probably no need to upgrade in a hurry. A follow-up for the rewrite of the SCM subsystem: I now consider the Bazaar and Git plugins complete. The missing part, in both cases, was a proper integration of a repository browser and the collection of commit statistics; since one of my clients wants to use Bazaar and another one wants Git, both features have been completed recently. The code still lives on a branch based off 4.8 (for people who need a 4.8-based instance), but it's also been pushed into trunk so the next release will have it natively. Another branch I've been working on (for clients) was about making the Mediawiki plugin able to handle one wiki per project rather than one shared wiki. This is now possible with yet another 4.8-based branch, where the wiki creation is completely automated. A nice feature is that the FusionForge identification is used as a basis for Mediawiki, with different groups on the wiki depending on project membership and role in the forge. That allows specifying wiki permissions in a simple way, for instance to say that only project members can create new pages, authenticated users can only edit existing pages, and non-authenticated users are read-only. This code will be pushed to trunk in the coming weeks. Thanks to Alain Peyrat, we now have a buildbot running Hudson for unit tests and a few other things. The coverage isn't complete yet, but we hope to increase it as time passes. It's already proven useful, by ensuring at least correctness of PHP syntax, encoding and line-endings. I think that's about it for this time. Business as usual.

Executive summary To avoid confusion with the proprietary versions of GForge (known as GForge Advanced Server, GForge Express Edition and GForge Community Edition), the free/libre/opensource codebase will from now on be separately maintained under the name FusionForge by the main developers of the free GForge 4.x codebase. Since this is mostly a renaming, the migration path for existing users will be smooth. Longer version, with details After the initial forking from the Sourceforge codebase, the development of GForge has long been hosted, and many enhancements directly developed, by the GForge Group (GForge, LLC), with regular contributions from outsiders. The results of these evolutions were public and free, subject to the GNU GPL. In parallel, the GForge Group wrote a proprietary re-implementation of GForge, which it sold under the name "GForge Advanced Server", or "GForge AS" for short. This re-implementation added some features for "the enterprise", but was not contributed wholesale to the GForge codebase under a free license. Although some of the features were contributed to the public, the GForge Group concentrated its efforts on its (proprietary software) business model, with more versions appearing, such as "GForge Express Edition" and more recently "GForge Community Edition". As a result, it became increasingly harder for the public to know which version was which without doing extensive research (indeed, some users mistakenly installed one version instead of the other). A consequence was that the free software codebase suffered from a loss in visibility, which lowered its momentum to the point that there haven't been any moderately important releases since the (currently stable) 4.5.x series was announced in late 2005. So, in order to clarify things, avoid further confusion, and regain some of the lost momentum, it was decided by a group of leading contributors that the free software version of the GForge codebase would from now on be developed under the FusionForge name, and its development would be hosted on FusionForge.org. So is this a fork? Well, we don't know yet. It could arguably be called one, since we're taking the code and running away with it under a new name. However, we believe it's not a fork unless both roads continue their own way (more of a oddly-shaped bend). What happens to the GForge codebase developed by the GForge Group at gforge.org remains to be seen, although for the sake of our users we will backport security fixes to the gforge.org Subversion repository (at least for the 4.5.x series and the unreleased 4.6 and 4.7 pre-series) for some time. The bulk of the development will move on to FusionForge and the repositories at FusionForge.org, though, and users are encouraged to migrate at their own pace. Since we're basically continuing the evolution rather than starting from scratch, the migration path should be rather smooth. So why the FusionForge name? Because there were actually lots of locally-patched versions of GForge (and Sourceforge), and we felt it was a waste of resources that should be fixed. It seems many people and organisations took these codebases at some point in time and evolved them for their own needs. Sadly, many of the changes were not contributed back or even published, so lots of efforts were duplicated. Fortunately, many of the people managing these locally-patched forges are now realising that "out-of-tree" patches and features require quite some manpower to maintain. Some formal inter-project discussion is already taking place, and we hope to achieve actual merging of most of the interesting features that have been developed here and there into a common base that can be reused locally with minimal changes. We'd like to "un-fork" as much as possible. We also expect that, by using standard components and tools, we'll facilitate the work of potential contributors, thereby reducing the risk of a new era of fragmentation. And who are we anyway? We're Christian Bayle, Roland Mas and Alain Peyrat, long-time contributors to GForge and responsible for over 95% of the commits over the past two years, as well as a few relative newcomers. Christian and Roland have been maintaining the Debian packaging since the "Debian-SF" era, and Alain has been focusing on code quality. The three of us have, for various reasons, a vested interest in maintaining a lively codebase in a healthy ecosystem. What are our plans? Our short-term goals, as currently planned, include:

• pushing a stable FusionForge release out of the door;
• cleaning up and auditing the database schema to ensure consistency and increased performance;
• merging in new plugins, in particular for new version control systems;
• continuing streamlining the installation process to make it more portable across distributions.

Longer term goals are less well defined, but we're thinking about the following:

• increasing code quality by the use of modern automated tools;
• encouraging a lively stream of external contributions, to reduce the gap between the official version and the locally-patched ones;
• defining an explicit governance model and release process for the FusionForge project;
• as a consequence, a more frequent and predictable release schedule;
• increasing data portability and interoperability with other forges, to reduce lock-in for users and projects.

Some of these items should be facilitated by our switch to a distributed version control system and a new coordinated workflow. Also, the Debian i18n team has been kind enough to offer to host our translation effort on their Pootle server, which means translators will have a much easier time doing their job. We hope to hear from users and contributors alike in the near future. For more information, we can be reached via our fusionforge-general mailing-list (see our lists), which is also suitable for general discussions. We can also be found on IRC (#fusionforge on the Freenode network).

Alain Williams just sent me a link to the Atheist Bus Campaign which was started to raise £5,500.00 GBP in order to buy adverts on the sides of busses in London. As I write they have raised £111,832.43, so over 20 times what they needed for the London busses. I'm so impressed with this that I gave them £100.00 Update: I note the campaign's page, where among other things they link to a clip from the BBC's Have I got news for you which is rather amusing about this, particularly the last joke. Also, Justgiving's blog seems in awe about how this has taken off. As they mention, there's even a wikipedia page about this.

In a nutshell: I'm extremely tempted to dump Finland and move to France. 6nergies This business networking evening was simply amazing. How about a discussion on the phonetic niceties of Northern versus Central and Southern Vietnamese accents, as a conversation starter? How about another one, on ethnic versus national identities, as the icing on the cake leading towards a business card exchange? Lovely, isn't it? So was the girl... Xin c m n, ng Mai! I however had the nasty surprise of realizing that I no longer speak French to a native level, when Alain did my video profile. Oh, the hesitations... Saaks mie puhuu suomee siin videoesittelyzz ? Eik ha? H ? The Food From Italian pizza to Japanese street noodles you name it, they have the real thing, cooked by expats. No way in hell you'll ever find that quality in Helsinki, especially not for that cheap! The Book Heaven France gave the world this wonderful language book collection called Assimil and the FNAC had them all... minus Le Lithuanien sans peine, whose publication appears forever delayed. Still, as recently found out, they even offer material in languages other than French. Combien vous gagez que le duc de Novgorod-la-Grande aura r ussi assimiler la langue de Moli re avant Debconf7? The People Courteous, smily and easy-going; the exact opposite of the average Finn. What more can I say? The Crossroad Of course, resetting the citizenship counter to zero is not exactly my idea of fun, but then again I have a strong feeling that my 8-year venture into Finnish society has pretty much come to a full circle, so... Y'a-tu quelqu'un dans la r gion parisienne qui cherche un commercial avec une forte exp rience de la gestion de produits bas s sur du logiciel libre et de l'exportation vers la Scandinavie et les pays baltes? En bonus: le ons de joual [en] [fr] gratis, tabarnak! The Paradox Visiting the South Karelia on the Senate Square event and feeling homesick for my adoptive hometown of Lappeenranta, as I kept on running into familiar faces who are still thankful after all these years that I dared become fluent in what they speak out East (which differs tremendously from normalized Finnish). Isn't life ironic, sometimes?

Busy day yesterday; the first day of RoCoCoCamp, and the first day seeing a lot of friends and friendly faces from out of town. I was out of bed at 6AM yesterday. I stopped at St. Viateur Bagel on Mont Royal and got 10 dozen bagels -- enough for our expected crowd. I got to SAT at about 8AM, just in time to start the coffee machines. The big percolators I rented for the event require about an hour to make coffee, so if people were going to be coming in at 9AM, I really wanted to get them started by 8. Alain Bernardeau from computation.to got there soon after, and set up the spare computers his organization is lending us. Brandon Sanders, Mark Dilley and Nathan R also came in early, looking for work to do. I got them all into the job of setting up the food for breakfast. By 9AM we were trucking along, and I figured I'd go try a cup of joe, which should be ready. But all I got from the carafe was cold water. The percolators draw so much current that they'd blown a circuit. Guillaume, the SAT tech, and I tried about 8 different ways to keep them running, but nothing worked. Finally he put them on the 220V industrial circuit, which they didn't blow. Awesome, but at 9:30AM, with almost everyone there, we had no expectation of coffee for another hour. Yikes! But by the time people started filtering into the circle for starting the event proper, coffee was rolling and I was much relieved. Our facilitator, Deborah Hartmann, gave a great bilingual introduction to Open Space Technology and got the ball rolling. I always have a moment of dread during the beginning of a Open Space event: what if this is the time that Open Space doesn't work? But it did, again, which is great. The first session I went to was Zach Copley's, about consensus-supporting software features. Brandon Sanders had some great cases from AboutUs's adult content policy. We shared a lot of Wikitravel's culture, too. I also stopped in to talk about Wikitravel:RDF with Reini Urban, who was demoing Semantic MediaWiki. It's a neat project, and it's a different tack than I've taken with Wikitravel. I'd like to see the two approaches harmonized at some time in the future. Lunch came quickly, and we had far too much to eat. I spent a lot of time talking to Simon Law about possibly using Open Space in some way for BarCampMontreal. I think it's a good idea -- it's growing to a point where our current format is straining under the load. We also talked about ubiquitous wikis and the cool browser Amaya, where Web pages are in edit mode by default. It's a good idea. After lunch I had a chance to hang out with Earle Martin of Open Guides and talk about wiki and the geospatial web. Mark Jarowski of Wikevent was there, and together we've decided to hammer out a RDF vocabulary for exchanging RDF data about business listings. It's the kind of productive talk I like having. I also spent some time with Jack Herrick talking about wiki entrepreneurship. Jack had a prepared presentation about wikiHow's business experience, which was really great, and provided a great case study for talking about commercialization of wikis in general. With Angela Beesley and Ray King around us, we had most of the interesting wiki content businesses represented. Pretty neat. It was a really productive first day, but by the time we got around to 5PM I was exhausted. Maj, Zach, Mark, Niko and I all went to our new house at 4690 rue Pontiac to meet Allegra and their two daughters, No ma and baby Anoushka. We got pizza and had beers and sat on our new couch and had a good old time. Technorati's rocococamp tag shows a lot of other positive responses on the Web: Matt Forsythe's sketches from RoCoCoCamp, NathanR's continuing paranoia, CITIZENShift (which quotes me, when I was talking about wiki entrepreneurship), and Patrick Tanguay.

I'm off to SAT again this morning. Should be a fun one, and I hope to get a little more time to myself before the event starts today. tags: rocococamp barcamp barcampmontreal recentchangescamp wiki wikitravel

I see that Jari Urpalainen has written an CalDAV Apache module to support some basic CalDAV functionality. Excellent. Meanwhile my own CalDAV server is going through a period of stabilisation before I start in on some of the handling of "Principals", probably next month. And CalDAV has become RFC 4791 now too.

Note from Ken Hughes: Hey guys you remember Novell. The tall leggy blonde that stayed up at the buffet in every man's face? You knew she was for sell....standing there with all her Yast hanging out! I am glad we stayed away from her! She has caught Mono from a contact with Microsoft! The payback will be greater than she can bare......she will be back to cry on each man's shoulder. Just kick her to the curb. Oh, me? I have a excellent girl named Debian. We just hang out with our friends and work it! Where is my copy of GPLv3 do you know?

Note from alain Baeckeroot: This agreement is a trojan for soft patents (like ooxml). As pointed on groklaw, as both disagree the contract is null.

Note from Jacek Krysztofik: MicroSoft is a good name for those who have not created anything of their own in the software. Since the days of DOS, which was bought and redistributed on a fraudulent license, they have bought and stolen many technologies (IE is Mosaic). They have not even improved the products they gained that way. It is gruesomely stupid to give something good to that company of talent-lacking greedy impotents. They will claim as their own and degrade it and so everyone but them will lose.

Note from Anthony Dodson: I praised Novell for opening the code to Ximian Connector, YaST, and other programs. I now rescind my praise. Novell is SCO to me.

:(

Hey, somebody used a photo I took of the Papineau mural in Papineau metro station in a discussion of the prison Pied-du-Courant. They even gave me proper attribution, per the license under which the photo was published. As an American I have a shamefully bad understanding of Canadian history. Example: when I first moved to Montreal, I had to get my local land-line phone service set up. When I was asked for my address (in English -- I didn't even try doing this stuff in French back then), I answered: "Avenue Papineau. That's P-A-P-I-N--" the operator cut me off. "I know perfectly well how to spell 'Papineau', sir," he said, icily. Oops. I'm trying to get caught up. I've been reading a ton of wp:Pierre Berton books, but I still don't have the whole story as integrated into my own mental processes the way I know, say, American history almost instinctively. Like, even though I know the story, I continue to boggle that wp:Louis Riel keeps popping up in various apparently unconnected historical contexts and era. It's like, "Wha? Louis Riel again? Didn't they shoot him four or five chapters ago? Why is he still here?" I guess it just takes time. Or maybe it's something I'm never going to understand, like why there were two teams called "Roughriders" in the CFL for so long. I dunno. tags: papineau flickr louis riel bell canada me

Talk about your busy days Busy, busy day today. Alain Desilets, a researcher at the National Research Council and a really smart person when it comes to wiki, came to Montreal today for Wiki Wednesday. We had lunch with Alain and fellow researcher Julie at nearby Ty Breiz restaurant, a neighborhood landmark that makes fine crepes and cider and good garlicky salads. We talked about improving wiki interfaces to make it easier to translate between multiple language versions of a page (like you see on Wikipedia and Wikitravel), and came up with some interesting solutions. Then it was off to Wiki Wednesday proper, at which Alain presented his translation projects and also some collaborative fiction ideas for children. Very cool stuff! It was a real celebrity event: Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, Sebastien Paquet of SocialText, Marc Laporte of Tiki CMS/Groupware, Anne and Antoine, organizing the RoCoCo 2007 event, and lots of other folks too. Anne and Antoine also presented their brilliant image-only wiki, Wikigraphe. It lets people upload images as a replacement for pages, then build "hotspots" on the images that link to other pages -- which are in themselves images. It's a destruction of the tyranny of text in the wiki world -- and fun to watch. Sylvain Carle compared it to drawball, but I think they're different. Much followup talk on RoCoCo 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- so glad to have wiki friends around the world coming here, to my favorite city. Lots to do between now and May, but I think we can get it done and have a fantastic wiki (and wiki-like) event. Wiki Wednesdays are such excellent events -- kudos to Seb Paquet for organizing them in Montreal, and also to SocialText for such a good idea, and Robin Millette and gang for hosting. tags: wiki wednesday alain desilets ty breiz sunir shah seb paquet sylvain carle anarcat marc laporte rococo

CC Salon Montreal On top of that, we had the Creative Commons Salon Montreal tonight at Am re de boire on rue St. Denis. The Salon is developing internationally as a way for CC-related people to interact, chat, and have fun in cities around the world, and Montreal has too many CC folks to be left out. Tina Pipers, co-chair of Creative Commons Canada, is on the faculty at McGill, so we're lucky to have such a heavy hitter in the area to chat with us. (Also, I found out tonight she's Greek! Good for us.) Tonight was expecially great since Maj and I talked about Wikitravel and our new project, Crossroads, to create Open Content travel opinion, stories, blogs, photos, etc. It's just getting off the ground, but it was great to share our vision with some people who really understand the idea of content sharing and an information commons. The discussion after our talk was great. I couldn't drag myself to YULblog, though, after 6 hours of talking... I had wanted to go to get people interested in BarCampMontreal, but Sylvain (one of the event organizers) was already going, so I felt justified in sitting it out. But when am I going to get to another Yulblog? I just don't know. tags: cc cc salon cc salon montreal tina pipers wikitravel crossroads travel barcampmontreal yulblog

Searls ha ha Searls's 4th Law: No matter what car you want to rent, what you'll get is a Chevy Cavalier. Man, I love the wp:Chevrolet Cavalier. It's a fun car to drive, and it just says "rental car". Which mean, y'know, "vacation" and "distant lands" and "irresponsibility". How can you not love that car? Not to mention that someone has to straighten out Doc Searls on Elements of Style Rule #1: Form the possessive singular of nouns with 's. This includes singular names that end with s... like "Searls". There are a few exceptions for ancient names ending in -is/-us/-es, but those are few. To paraphrase: I knew Achilles; I served with Achilles; Doc Searls, you are no Achilles. tags: searls doc searls chevy cavalier elements of style

UFO Beliefs Hey! I'm back on Technorati. Rockin'! After like 3 months complaining to their customer service Web form and getting 0 (= zero) response, I finally canceled my blog claim and started a new one. The software picked up on my site right away. Problem solved! It would have been nice to hear, you know, one tiny peep out of Technorati about my 8-10 bug reports, but I guess they're pretty busy. tags: technorati listing bug reports

Two of our good friends here in Montreal are Kate and Morgan. She's a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Rutgers, working on her dissertation here, and he's a game designer. They're from Australia originally, and they just got married Down Under about 4 weeks ago. Her dad and stepmom live in North America, though, so they're thoughtfully holding a wedding party next weekend for Kate and Morgan's American friends and family at their home in wt:Hudson (New York). We've driven through the area a few times in the past, but we haven't really stopped for long. From what Kate says, Hudson's a pretty town and early October means lots of leaf-peeping opportunities. Not that Montreal's any slouch in that respect right now, but it will be nice to see other people's leaves, I guess. There's also a Firefighter Museum and a Shaker Museum. I also just finished The Island at the Center of the World, a historical book about the 17th-century Dutch colony of New Netherlands (now New York). The main settlements were in the Hudson Valley between Manhattan and Albany (New York), so I'd like to find a nice one to stop at and look around. The drive down is about 4-1/2 hours, and I think we'll be OK doing it in one hop, even with the baby strapped down in the back seat. We're heading out on Friday evening, spending Saturday checking out the sights, then parties on Sunday and Monday (a holiday, Columbus Day, in the US). Monday night Maj got us tickets to see Massive Attack here in Montreal, so we'll be zooming back up highway 87 Monday afternoon and if we can avoid problems at the border in wt:Plattsburgh we'll be rockin' out (a bit) that evening. tags: kate morgan wedding party hudson massive attack leaf peeping

Parallel distrihoozit The discussions on the cc-licenses list over the last week have gotten increasingly heated. At heart is the very emotional issue of DRM (AKA TPM) technology, and to what extent its use is compatible with Open Source and Open Content. It's been a real shame -- several pages-long posts that really try to hammer a point into the head of someone who's just not listening since they're busy writing their own 10-page-long email. It's become impossible to read and some wiser heads have asked for a cooling-off period. Thankfully so. There is very little time left to continue this discussion. I really sincerely hope that people who are interested in seeing Commons licenses that are compatible with Debian and other Free Software pop in and say something to that effect. Cool heads who can state things in simple English are particularly welcome. The list allows posting to subscribers only -- kind of a damper on one-time posts -- but subscription only takes a second, and you can disable your subscription immediately after you're done. tags: cc debian cc-licenses public review cc3.0

Busy Wednesday Ahead 2007 is going to be the year of wiki in Montreal. We're having two of the main wiki conferences -- RecentChangesCamp and Wikisym -- here in Montreal next year. And I guess it's time for the local wiki, open source, open content and "open other" community to start getting ready. At least in the wiki world we're taking the first steps. Wednesday 4 October (uhh... I mean, Duodi 12 Vend miaire) we're having Montreal Wiki Wednesday at 8655 rue St-Denis (metro Cremazie). Alain Desilets and Sunir Shah, who are both working on Wikisym, will be coming, as well as Anne Goldberg (principal organizer of RCC) and the inimitable Seb Paquet, who runs everything in this town. 15h-18h, fun times ahead. tags: wiki wiki wednesday wikisym montreal rococo

CC Salon Montreal But wait there's more! On top of WW, we're going to have a big Creative Commons Salon Montreal on Wednesday night, too. This will be the second time we've had a get-together in Montreal for CC so far, and I think it's going to be a good one. Maj and I are going to give an informal talk about Wikitravel and its CC license which has worked so well for us. I'm really gung-ho on the CC Salon idea. It's a great way to engage the interesting, fun part of CC -- and it's all about the fun, right? CC Salon Montreal is happening 4 Oct at 18:30h at L'am re boire, 2049 rue St. Denis (a mere 66-block walk from Wiki Wednesday!). Should be a good time. (On top of all this, I'll probably stop at YULblog on the way home, just to make the Web maven's trifecta for the night. tags: cc cc salon montreal salon

The European Union wants to tax SMS and e-mail messages (see digitoday news in Finnish). Or at least the French MEP Alain Lamassoure has suggested that, it seems. The tax would be 1.5 cents per SMS, and 0.00001 (one hundred thousandth) cent per e-mail. Current prices in Finnish operators seem to be around 7-10 cents per SMS message. A 1.5 cent tax on top of that seems pretty high. Collecting it would be simple: all SMS messages go through operators. For e-mail, however, the thing is going to be a nightmare. Much e-mail goes not via operators, and there is no good way of tracking it. This could be fixed (from the tax collecting viewpoint) by requiring all e-mail servers to be registered for proper accounting (nevermind freedom and privacy). Update: This paragraph is rubbish, due to my inability to calculate simple things; I'll keep it here in the interest of historical accuracy (randomly changing already published log entries is impolite, to say the least). Anyone operating a busy mailing list will want to move it outside the EU. Even at such a low price, a list with a thousand subscribers and a hundred messages a day is going cause a tax burden of around four hundred euros a year. A company might be willing to pay that; a free software project would probably not.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Via Ihan kiva el m