Search Results: "coven"

9 January 2024

Louis-Philippe V ronneau: 2023 A Musical Retrospective

I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on, this will probably be an annual thing :) Albums In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection nearly 2 albums every three weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them. I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital copies weren't available. Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly O !) and Metal dominate my list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montr al Skinhead/Punk concert scene. Concerts A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month... Here are the concerts I went to in 2023: Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have discovered the Montr al underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram and adopted en masse Gancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net is pretty much all I could ask for :) That's it for 2023!

31 May 2022

Russ Allbery: Review: Maskerade

Review: Maskerade, by Terry Pratchett
Series: Discworld #18
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 1995
Printing: February 2014
ISBN: 0-06-227552-6
Format: Mass market
Pages: 360
Maskerade is the 18th book of the Discworld series, but you probably could start here. You'd miss the introduction of Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, which might be a bit confusing, but I suspect you could pick it up as you went if you wanted. This is a sequel of sorts to Lords and Ladies, but not in a very immediate sense. Granny is getting distracted and less interested in day-to-day witching in Lancre. This is not good; Granny is incredibly powerful, and bored and distracted witches can go to dark places. Nanny is concerned. Granny needs something to do, and their coven needs a third. It's not been the same since they lost their maiden member. Nanny's solution to this problem is two-pronged. First, they'd had their eye on a local girl named Agnes, who had magic but who wasn't interested in being a witch. Perhaps it was time to recruit her anyway, even though she'd left Lancre for Ankh-Morpork. And second, Granny needs something to light a fire under her, something that will get her outraged and ready to engage with the world. Something like a cookbook of aphrodisiac recipes attributed to the Witch of Lancre. Agnes, meanwhile, is auditioning for the opera. She's a sensible person, cursed her whole life by having a wonderful personality, but a part of her deep inside wants to be called Perdita X. Dream and have a dramatic life. Having a wonderful personality can be very frustrating, but no one in Lancre took either that desire or her name seriously. Perhaps the opera is somewhere where she can find the life she's looking for, along with another opportunity to try on the Perdita name. One thing she can do is sing; that's where all of her magic went. The Ankh-Morpork opera is indeed dramatic. It's also losing an astounding amount of money for its new owner, who foolishly thought owning an opera would be a good retirement project after running a cheese business. And it's haunted by a ghost, a very tangible ghost who has started killing people. I think this is my favorite Discworld novel to date (although with a caveat about the ending that I'll get to in a moment). It's certainly the one that had me laughing out loud the most. Agnes (including her Perdita personality aspect) shot to the top of my list of favorite Discworld characters, in part because I found her sensible personality so utterly relatable. She is fascinated by drama, she wants to be in the middle of it and let her inner Perdita goth character revel in it, and yet she cannot help being practical and unflappable even when surrounded by people who use far too many exclamation points. It's one thing to want drama in the abstract; it's quite another to be heedlessly dramatic in the moment, when there's an obviously reasonable thing to do instead. Pratchett writes this wonderfully. The other half of the story follows Granny and Nanny, who are unstoppable forces of nature and a wonderful team. They have the sort of long-standing, unshakable adult friendship between very unlike people that's full of banter and minor irritations layered on top of a deep mutual understanding and respect. Once they decide to start investigating this supposed opera ghost, they divvy up the investigative work with hardly a word exchanged. Planning isn't necessary; they both know each other's strengths. We've gotten a lot of Granny's skills in previous books. Maskerade gives Nanny a chance to show off her skills, and it's a delight. She effortlessly becomes the sort of friendly grandmother who blends in so well that no one questions why she's there, and thus manages to be in the middle of every important event. Granny watches and thinks and theorizes; Nanny simply gets into the middle of everything and talks to everyone until people tell her what she wants to know. There's no real doubt that the two of them are going to get to the bottom of anything they want to get to the bottom of, but watching how they get there is a delight. I love how Pratchett handles that sort of magical power from a world-building perspective. Ankh-Morpork is the Big City, the center of political power in most of the Discworld books, and Granny and Nanny are from the boondocks. By convention, that means they should either be awed or confused by the city, or gain power in the city by transforming it in some way to match their area of power. This isn't how Pratchett writes witches at all. Their magic is in understanding people, and the people in Ankh-Morpork are just as much people as the people in Lancre. The differences of the city may warrant an occasional grumpy aside, but the witches are fully as capable of navigating the city as they are their home town. Maskerade is, of course, a parody of opera and musicals, with Phantom of the Opera playing the central role in much the same way that Macbeth did in Wyrd Sisters. Agnes ends up doing the singing for a beautiful, thin actress named Christine, who can't sing at all despite being an opera star, uses a truly astonishing excess of exclamation points, and strategically faints at the first sign of danger. (And, despite all of this, is still likable in that way that it's impossible to be really upset at a puppy.) She is the special chosen focus of the ghost, whose murderous taunting is a direct parody of the Phantom. That was a sufficiently obvious reference that even I picked up on it, despite being familiar with Phantom of the Opera only via the soundtrack. Apart from that, though, the references were lost on me, since I'm neither a musical nor an opera fan. That didn't hurt my enjoyment of the book in the slightest; in fact, I suspect it's part of why it's in my top tier of Discworld books. One of my complaints about Discworld to date is that Pratchett often overdoes the parody to the extent that it gets in the way of his own (excellent) characters and story. Maybe it's better to read Discworld novels where one doesn't recognize the material being parodied and thus doesn't keep getting distracted by references. It's probably worth mentioning that Agnes is a large woman and there are several jokes about her weight in Maskerade. I think they're the good sort of jokes, about how absurd human bodies can be, not the mean sort? Pratchett never implies her weight is any sort of moral failing or something she should change; quite the contrary, Nanny considers it a sign of solid Lancre genes. But there is some fat discrimination in the opera itself, since one of the things Pratchett is commenting on is the switch from full-bodied female opera singers to thin actresses matching an idealized beauty standard. Christine is the latter, but she can't sing, and the solution is for Agnes to sing for her from behind, something that was also done in real opera. I'm not a good judge of how well this plot line was handled; be aware, going in, if this may bother you. What did bother me was the ending, and more generally the degree to which Granny and Nanny felt comfortable making decisions about Agnes's life without consulting her or appearing to care what she thought of their conclusions. Pratchett seemed to be on their side, emphasizing how well they know people. But Agnes left Lancre and avoided the witches for a reason, and that reason is not honored in much the same way that Lancre refused to honor her desire to go by Perdita. This doesn't seem to be malicious, and Agnes herself is a little uncertain about her choice of identity, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. I felt like Agnes got steamrolled by both the other characters and by Pratchett, and it's the one thing about this book that I didn't like. Hopefully future Discworld books about these characters revisit Agnes's agency. Overall, though, this was great, and a huge improvement over Interesting Times. I'm excited for the next witches book. Followed in publication order by Feet of Clay, and later by Carpe Jugulum in the thematic sense. Rating: 8 out of 10

31 July 2017

Daniel Silverstone: F/LOSS activity, July 2017

Once again, my focus was on Gitano, which we're working toward a 1.1 for. We had another one of our Gitano developer days which was attended by Richard maw and myself. You are invited to read the wiki page but a summary of what happened, which directly involved me, is: Other than that, related to Gitano during July I: I don't think I've done much non-Gitano F/LOSS work in July, but I am now in Montr al for debconf 2017 so hopefully more to say next month.

29 November 2015

Matthew Garrett: What is hacker culture?

Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar (an important work describing the effectiveness of open collaboration and development), recently wrote a piece calling for "Social Justice Warriors" to be ejected from the hacker community. The primary thrust of his argument is that by calling for a removal of the "cult of meritocracy", these SJWs are attacking the central aspect of hacker culture - that the quality of code is all that matters.

This argument is simply wrong.

Eric's been involved in software development for a long time. In that time he's seen a number of significant changes. We've gone from computers being the playthings of the privileged few to being nearly ubiquitous. We've moved from the internet being something you found in universities to something you carry around in your pocket. You can now own a computer whose CPU executes only free software from the moment you press the power button. And, as Eric wrote almost 20 years ago, we've identified that the "Bazaar" model of open collaborative development works better than the "Cathedral" model of closed centralised development.

These are huge shifts in how computers are used, how available they are, how important they are in people's lives, and, as a consequence, how we develop software. It's not a surprise that the rise of Linux and the victory of the bazaar model coincided with internet access becoming more widely available. As the potential pool of developers grew larger, development methods had to be altered. It was no longer possible to insist that somebody spend a significant period of time winning the trust of the core developers before being permitted to give feedback on code. Communities had to change in order to accept these offers of work, and the communities were better for that change.

The increasing ubiquity of computing has had another outcome. People are much more aware of the role of computing in their lives. They are more likely to understand how proprietary software can restrict them, how not having the freedom to share software can impair people's lives, how not being able to involve themselves in software development means software doesn't meet their needs. The largest triumph of free software has not been amongst people from a traditional software development background - it's been the fact that we've grown our communities to include people from a huge number of different walks of life. Free software has helped bring computing to under-served populations all over the world. It's aided circumvention of censorship. It's inspired people who would never have considered software development as something they could be involved in to develop entire careers in the field. We will not win because we are better developers. We will win because our software meets the needs of many more people, needs the proprietary software industry either can not or will not satisfy. We will win because our software is shaped not only by people who have a university degree and a six figure salary in San Francisco, but because our contributors include people whose native language is spoken by so few people that proprietary operating system vendors won't support it, people who live in a heavily censored regime and rely on free software for free communication, people who rely on free software because they can't otherwise afford the tools they would need to participate in development.

In other words, we will win because free software is accessible to more of society than proprietary software. And for that to be true, it must be possible for our communities to be accessible to anybody who can contribute, regardless of their background.

Up until this point, I don't think I've made any controversial claims. In fact, I suspect that Eric would agree. He would argue that because hacker culture defines itself through the quality of contributions, the background of the contributor is irrelevant. On the internet, nobody knows that you're contributing from a basement in an active warzone, or from a refuge shelter after escaping an abusive relationship, or with the aid of assistive technology. If you can write the code, you can participate.

Of course, this kind of viewpoint is overly naive. Humans are wonderful at noticing indications of "otherness". Eric even wrote about his struggle to stop having a viscerally negative reaction to people of a particular race. This happened within the past few years, so before then we can assume that he was less aware of the issue. If Eric received a patch from someone whose name indicated membership of this group, would there have been part of his subconscious that reacted negatively? Would he have rationalised this into a more critical analysis of the patch, increasing the probability of rejection? We don't know, and it's unlikely that Eric does either.

Hacker culture has long been concerned with good design, and a core concept of good design is that code should fail safe - ie, if something unexpected happens or an assumption turns out to be untrue, the desirable outcome is the one that does least harm. A command that fails to receive a filename as an argument shouldn't assume that it should modify all files. A network transfer that fails a checksum shouldn't be permitted to overwrite the existing data. An authentication server that receives an unexpected error shouldn't default to granting access. And a development process that may be subject to unconscious bias should have processes in place that make it less likely that said bias will result in the rejection of useful contributions.

When people criticise meritocracy, they're not criticising the concept of treating contributions based on their merit. They're criticising the idea that humans are sufficiently self-aware that they will be able to identify and reject every subconscious prejudice that will affect their treatment of others. It's not a criticism of a desirable goal, it's a criticism of a flawed implementation. There's evidence that organisations that claim to embody meritocratic principles are more likely to reward men than women even when everything else is equal. The "cult of meritocracy" isn't the belief that meritocracy is a good thing, it's the belief that a project founded on meritocracy will automatically be free of bias.

Projects like the Contributor Covenant that Eric finds so objectionable exist to help create processes that (at least partially) compensate for our flaws. Review of our processes to determine whether we're making poor social decisions is just as important as review of our code to determine whether we're making poor technical decisions. Just as the bazaar overtook the cathedral by making it easier for developers to be involved, inclusive communities will overtake "pure meritocracies" because, in the long run, these communities will produce better output - not just in terms of the quality of the code, but also in terms of the ability of the project to meet the needs of a wider range of people.

The fight between the cathedral and the bazaar came from people who were outside the cathedral. Those fighting against the assumption that meritocracies work may be outside what Eric considers to be hacker culture, but they're already part of our communities, already making contributions to our projects, already bringing free software to more people than ever before. This time it's Eric building a cathedral and decrying the decadent hordes in their bazaar, Eric who's failed to notice the shift in the culture that surrounds him. And, like those who continued building their cathedrals in the 90s, it's Eric who's now irrelevant to hacker culture.

(Edited to add: for two quite different perspectives on why Eric's wrong, see Tim's and Coraline's posts)

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9 December 2014

Wouter Verhelst: Playing with ExtreMon

Munin is a great tool. If you can script it, you can monitor it with munin. Unfortunately, however, munin is slow; that is, it will take snapshots once every five minutes, and not look at systems in between. If you have a short load spike that takes just a few seconds, chances are pretty high munin missed it. It also comes with a great webinterfacefrontendthing that allows you to dig deep in the history of what you've been monitoring. By the time munin tells you that your Kerberos KDCs are all down, you've probably had each of your users call you several times to tell you that they can't log in. You could use nagios or one of its brethren, but it takes about a minute before such tools will notice these things, too. Maybe use CollectD then? Rather than check once every several minutes, CollectD will collect information every few seconds. Unfortunately, however, due to the performance requirements to accomplish that (without causing undue server load), writing scripts for CollectD is not as easy as it is for Munin. In addition, webinterfacefrontendthings aren't really part of the CollectD code (there are several, but most that I've looked at are lacking in some respect), so usually if you're using CollectD, you're missing out some. And collectd doesn't do the nagios thing of actually telling you when things go down. So what if you could see it when things go bad? At one customer, I came in contact with Frank, who wrote ExtreMon, an amazing tool that allows you to visualize the CollectD output as things are happening, in a full-screen fully customizable visualization of the data. The problem is that ExtreMon is rather... complex to set up. When I tried to talk Frank into helping me getting things set up for myself so I could play with it, I got a reply along the lines of...
well, extremon requires a lot of work right now... I really want to fix foo and bar and quux before I start documenting things. Oh, and there's also that part which is a dead end, really. Ask me in a few months?
which is fair enough (I can't argue with some things being suboptimal), but the code exists, and (as I can see every day at $CUSTOMER) actually works. So I decided to just figure it out by myself. After all, it's free software, so if it doesn't work I can just read the censored code. As the manual explains, ExtreMon is a plugin-based system; plugins can add information to the "coven", read information from it, or both. A typical setup will run several of them; e.g., you'd have the from_collectd plugin (which parses the binary network protocol used by collectd) to get raw data into the coven; you'd run several aggregator plugins (which take that raw data and interpret it, allowing you do express things along the lines of "if the system's load gets above X, set load.status to warning"; and you'd run at least one output plugin so that you can actually see the damn data somewhere. While setting up ExtreMon as is isn't as easy as one would like, I did manage to get it to work. Here's what I had to do. You will need: First, we clone the ExtreMon git repository:
git clone https://github.com/m4rienf/ExtreMon.git extremon
cd extremon
There's a README there which explains the bare necessities on getting the coven to work. Read it. Do what it says. It's not wrong. It's not entirely complete, though; it fails to mention that you need to Make sure the dump.py script outputs something from collectd. You'll know when it shows something not containing "plugin" or "plugins" in the name. If it doesn't, fiddle with the #x3. lines at the top of the from_collectd file until it does. Note that ExtreMon uses inotify to detect whether a plugin has been added to or modified in its plugins directory; so you don't need to do anything special when updating things. Next, we build the java libraries (which we'll need for the display thing later on):
cd java/extremon
mvn install
cd ../client/
mvn install
This will download half the Internet, build some java sources, and drop the precompiled .jar files in your $HOME/.m2/repository. We'll now build the display frontend. This is maintained in a separate repository:
cd ../..
git clone https://github.com/m4rienf/ExtreMon-Display.git display
cd display
mvn install
This will download the other half of the Internet, and then fail, because Frank forgot to add a few repositories. Patch (and push request) on github With that patch, it will build, but things will still fail when trying to sign a .jar file. I know of four ways on how to fix that particular problem:
  1. Add your passphrase for your java keystore, in cleartext, to the pom.xml file. This is a terrible idea.
  2. Pass your passphrase to maven, in cleartext, by using some command line flags. This is not much better.
  3. Ensure you use the maven-jarsigner-plugin 1.3.something or above, and figure out how the maven encrypted passphrase store thing works. I failed at that.
  4. Give up on trying to have maven sign your jar file, and do it manually. It's not that hard, after all.
If you're going with 1 through 3, you're on your own. For the last option, however, here's what you do. First, you need a key:
keytool -genkeypair -alias extremontest
after you enter all the information that keytool will ask for, it will generate a self-signed code signing certificate, valid for six months, called extremontest. Producing a code signing certificate with longer validity and/or one which is signed by an actual CA is left as an exercise to the reader. Now, we will sign the .jar file:
jarsigner target/extremon-console-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar extremontest
There. Who needs help from the internet to sign a .jar file? Well, apart from this blog post, of course. You will now want to copy your freshly-signed .jar file to a location served by HTTPS. Yes, HTTPS, not HTTP; ExtreMon-Display will fail on plain HTTP sites. Download this SVG file, and open it in an editor. Find all references to be.grep as well as those to barbershop and replace them with your own prefix and hostname. Store it along with the .jar file in a useful directory. Download this JNLP file, and store it on the same location (or you might want to actually open it with "javaws" to see the very basic animated idleness of my system). Open it in an editor, and replace any references to barbershop.grep.be by the location where you've stored your signed .jar file. Add the chalice_in_http plugin from the plugins directory. Make sure to configure it correctly (by way of its first few comment lines) so that its input and output filters are set up right. Add the configuration snippet in section 2.1.3 of the manual (or something functionally equivalent) to your webserver's configuration. Make sure to have authentication chalice_in_http is an input mechanism. Add the chalice_out_http plugin from the plugins directory. Make sure to configure it correctly (by way of its first few comment lines) so that its input and output filters are set up right. Add the configuration snippet in section 2.2.1 of the manual (or something functionally equivalent) to your webserver's configuration. Authentication isn't strictly required for the output plugin, but you might wish for it anyway if you care whether the whole internet can see your monitoring. Now run javaws https://url/x3console.jnlp to start Extremon-Display. At this point, I got stuck for several hours. Whenever I tried to run x3mon, this java webstart thing would tell me simply that things failed. When clicking on the "Details" button, I would find an error message along the lines of "Could not connect (name must not be null)". It would appear that the Java people believe this to be a proper error message for a fairly large number of constraints, all of which are slightly related to TLS connectivity. No, it's not the keystore. No, it's not an API issue, either. Or any of the loads of other rabbit holes that I dug myself in. Instead, you should simply make sure you have Server Name Indication enabled. If you don't, the defaults in Java will cause it to refuse to even try to talk to your webserver. The ExtreMon github repository comes with a bunch of extra plugins; some are special-case for the place where I first learned about it (and should therefore probably be considered "examples"), others are general-purpose plugins which implement things like "is the system load within reasonable limits". Be sure to check them out. Note also that while you'll probably be getting most of your data from CollectD, you don't actually need to do that; you can write your own plugins, completely bypassing collectd. Indeed, the from_collectd thing we talked about earlier is, simply, also a plugin. At $CUSTOMER, for instance, we have one plugin which simply downloads a file every so often and checks it against a checksum, to verify that a particular piece of nonlinear software hasn't gone astray yet again. That doesn't need collectd. The example above will get you a small white bar, the width of which is defined by the cpu "idle" statistic, as reported by CollectD. You probably want more. The manual (chapter 4, specifically) explains how to do that. Unfortunately, in order for things to work right, you need to pretty much manually create an SVG file with a fairly strict structure. This is the one thing which Frank tells me is a dead end and needs to be pretty much rewritten. If you don't feel like spending several days manually drawing a schematic representation of your network, you probably want to wait until Frank's finished. If you don't mind, or if you're like me and you're impatient, you'll be happy to know that you can use inkscape to make the SVG file. You'll just have to use dialog behind ctrl+shift+X. A lot. Once you've done that though, you can see when your server is down. Like, now. Before your customers call you.

26 October 2012

Russ Allbery: Review: Fables: Legends in Exile

Review: Fables: Legends in Exile, by Bill Willingham, et al.
Series: Fables #1
Penciller: Lan Medina
Inker: Steve Leialoha
Inker: Craig Hamilton
Colorist: Sherilyn van Valkenburgh
Letterer: Todd Klein
Publisher: Vertigo
Copyright: 2002
ISBN: 1-56389-942-6
Format: Graphic novel
Pages: 127
The characters of human fairy tales are all real. Real, but hidden: they have been driven from their ancestral homelands by some force referred to here only as the Adversary, and have fled to the mundane world to escape his notice. Specifically, New York, where those characters who can pass as human blend into the streets of New York City, and those who can't (referred to only in passing in this story arc apart from one pig) stay at a farm upstate. That's the brilliant premise of Fables, an ongoing comic series from Vertigo that's up to 121 issues plus numerous spinoffs as of this writing. This is the first trade paperback, collecting issues 1 through 5 plus a prose story. Legends in Exile is, in underlying form, a murder mystery. It opens with Jack reporting a murder to Bigby Wolf, who is what passes for law enforcement among the Fables. Rose Red's apartment has been discovered covered in blood, and her body is missing. "No more happily ever after" is written on the wall in blood. Jack, despite being the one to report the crime, is Rose's lover and an obvious suspect. So is Snow White, the effective leader of the Fables (King Cole is a figurehead) and Rose's estranged sister. And, perhaps coincidentally, Prince Charming, Snow White's philandering and stunningly narcissistic ex-husband, has just turned up in town again. The basic plot plays out like a typical murder mystery, complete with a grand reveal in the last chapter and a reconstruction of events. It's diverting but nothing special in itself; it's primarily a hook on which to hang an introduction to the major characters and an exploration of Fables politics and history. And that part is excellent. Like most fractured fairy tales, the characters are more complex and nuanced than they are allowed to be in the canonical stories; unlike most fractured fairy tales, nearly all of that development is allowed to happen after the original stories. The original stories happened, largely as we all remember them, but then the characters kept living and changing. Wolf and his relationship with one of the three pigs is one of the highlights, but I think the odious Price Charming is the best bit of characterization. Willingham takes the idea of a charming seducer and layers in the rest of the womanizing associations that come to mind, while retaining a slick surface charm that is hard not to like at some level. I'm not the best at critiquing art. I read graphic novels for the story, with the art as a nice bonus if it's fairly good. But I can say that Medina's pencils tell the story well, with a few larger panels that were quite impressive. I particularly liked Snow White's office, early in the collection. Detail is reasonably good throughout, there aren't too many panels featuring only talking heads, and Medina does a wonderful job with the pig. (Significant credit probably also goes to Steve Leialoha and Craig Hamilton, the inkers. I'm not a good enough art critic to distinguish between the quality of the pencil work and what was added by subsequent inking.) The largest problem for me with Legends in Exile is my standard problem with graphic novels and the reason I don't buy many of them: the cover price is $10 for what is effectively a short story that builds an interesting world. If one really loves art in stories, graphic novels may be a good value. If, like me, one mostly cares about the story and would be almost as happy with straight prose, the value becomes questionable given the brief length of the material. That said, Legends in Exile does add a quite good prose short story by Willingham, "A Wolf in the Fold," which in several ways is better than the main story of the collection. It tells the story of the original exile and the covenant that settled all past grudges (mostly) from the perspective of the wolf. Willingham does a great job here both striking a more mythic tone than the main story but still tying it back to the sarcastic and practical tone of the rest of the collection. Although the main story itself is not particularly memorable, the background and concept make this one of the better graphic novels I've read. I can see why it's won so many awards, and I'll probably keep reading, despite the high graphic novel price tag. Followed by Fables: Animal Farm. Rating: 7 out of 10

2 August 2010

Christine Spang: lolbikeride to debconf

DebConf being in New York City this year, clearly the right way to get there was to bike, together with Molly and Daf. Being touring newbs, there were a few mishaps.

Day 1 We aimed to catch the 10:00 commuter rail train from Boston to Providence, Rhode Island, but we ran late (predictable) and had problems with the bicycle rack for my racing bike, which attaches without frame mounts (also predictable, since Mako and Mika test-rode it earlier in the week), so we didn't make it in to the station until around 10:20. We used the extra time to eat and fix up the bikes, though, so it's not clear how much of a setback that was. Here are our bikes ready to go at the Providence commuter rail station. bikes at Providence We then had some problems with Molly's brakes, and it took a long time to navigate out of the city, but eventually we found ourself on the "Washington Secondary Trail" a wonderful bike path along an old rail line. Every couple miles there'd be an old covered rail bridge over the river, and it was a well-paved straight shot for about ten miles, with no cars and no need to navigate. Molly on a train bridge Just as we were getting into things after the bike trail ended, something completely unexpected happened. This is Daf's derailleur after it sheared off in the middle as we attempted to start after a red light outside Tractor Supply Co. broken derailleur Luckily, John and his son Chris lent us a hand and hauled Daf and his bike to the nearest bicycle shop in the back of their pickup truck. They'd just come from there, where John had bought Chris a new helmet. Greenway Cycles, the only bike shop in a twenty mile radius, was three miles away. We got there an hour before it closed and Rick replaced the derailleur and straightened the hanger in a jiffy. Due to all these things, we didn't get as far as we'd planned in the first day and ended up camping in Seaport Campground in Mystic, Connecticut, rolling in at around 22:00. We did about 65 miles, including six due to the detour to the cycle shop. Carrying camping gear is heavy! Several delicious peanut butter and jelly bagels and some wheatberry and couscous salad later, we were passed out.

Day 2 Molly at the campground The second day included less bike trouble, but was no less eventful, and we were tired from the previous day's riding. The highlights included taking a tiny sidewalk path that I'm baffled how Google knows about up onto a sidewalk alongside the I-95 bridge across the Thames to New London, Connecticut. the Thames bridge The 13:00 ferry from New London to Orient Point, New York, where we got some remarkably good veggie burgers (whole edamame visible!) for lunch. Cross Sound Ferry And a vineyard on the north fork of Long Island, where we stopped for a quick tasting and ended up picking up a bottle of barrel-fermented chardonnay. The vineyard was small 23 acres, with 11 acres of grapes and the proprietors were friendly and extremely interested in our trip. They gave us a dollar off on the bottle due to our method of transport. The Old Field Vineyard It turns out there are only two trains a day on the Long Island rail, and we just barely caught the 18:52 return from Riverhead. We had mere seconds in the station and ended up without enough cash to pay for tickets onboard, but the conductor just took what we had and gave us tickets to Penn Station anyway. Outside Penn, a girl with a mohawk and a messenger bag overheard us talking about biking up Broadway and told us to bike up 8th Avenue instead. "Always bike up 8th and down Broadway because they have bike lanes in those directions." Thus, we didn't die dodging taxis in the dark. So basically, due to various people being extremely nice to us for no good reason, we made it to Columbia University around 22:30, on the correct day. Warm fuzzies for humanity all around. :)

27 September 2009

Ross Burton: London Transport Stab Stab Die Die

Sometimes I really, really hate London. A trip to London on Saturday, in theory: Leave Ely 16:26, arrive Kings Cross 17:34, change to Piccadilly line and arrive Covent Garden at 17:54. Dinner then the 21:52 train back home, arriving 23:10. A trip to London on Saturday, in practise. Leave Ely 16:26, arrive Kings Cross 10 minutes late. Change to Piccadilly line and stand outside the closed barriers for 15 minutes because of overcrowding. Give up on the tube, catch a number 59 bus to Aldwych: 10 minutes to reach Euston (faster to walk) and gave up after sitting in gridlock on Russel Square for 15 minutes. Eventually get rather empty Piccadilly line from Russel Square to Covent Garden, arriving 18:50. Oh, and then the restaurant said it would be a two hour wait for a table for four. That said, the return journey wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs. The tube was behaving so that took the expected ten minutes, but then we just missed the train back home and the next train wasn't for over an hour. Jump into a taxi to Liverpool Street to catch the 22:26... to discover there are engineering works and we'd have to get a bus for two hours. Attempt to get the tube back to Kings Cross... more engineering works so that was out. Another taxi back to Kings Cross and we finally get on the last train home, arriving at 00:35. Just for extra fun I'm in London for the Moblin 2.0 Release Party on Monday and there are yet more engineering works, so if I miss the 22:15 I'll be on a bus for half the journey. Stab stab stab.

15 September 2009

Matthew Garrett: Bye

I'm moving to the US on Thursday, so I will be here on Wednesday evening from about 7. If your presence is unlikely to make me stupifyingly angry, feel free to join me.

7 October 2008

Miriam Ruiz: Apostasy in Spain

Data ordered by entry data is not a data file, and thus not protected by the law regarding personal data files, because it’s hard to do searches in them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but that’s the argument that the highest court in Spain (Tribunal Supremo) has used to prevent the Catholic Church from losing believers. Many children are automatically baptisted by their parents when they’re just babies, without having any decision in that, and thus they names are written down in the Church files^Wlists of baptisted people. That’s the numbers they will use later when asking for privileges for the Catholic Church, and that’s why it’s so important for them that all of us are counted as catholics, whether we are or not believers. Fewer than half of Spanish youth consider themselves Catholic, so it’s important for them to keep appearances to keep their power intact. In Spain thousands of non believers are demanding that the Church cancel their baptism records, in order to annul any official connection with Catholicism. And church leaders in turn have gone to the courts to try to stop parishioners deserting. The Tribunal Supremo seems to be taking a political side with their decision trying to vulnerate non-believers rights to artificially promote the Catholic Church. Apostasy is the formal religious disaffiliation or abandonment or renunciation of one’s religion. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights, considers the recanting of a person’s religion a human right legally protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “The Committee observes that the freedom to ‘have or to adopt’ a religion or belief necessarily entails the freedom to choose a religion or belief, including the right to replace ones current religion or belief with another or to adopt atheistic views […] Article 18.2 bars coercion that would impair the right to have or adopt a religion or belief, including the use of threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adhere to their religious beliefs and congregations, to recant their religion or belief or to convert.”. Anyway, many religious groups and even some states punish apostates. For Catholics, the word “apostasy” signifies the desertion of faith, which had been one of the three unpardonable sins in the early years of the Church. AEPD, the national agency for data protection, is pondering now whether to appeal against the sentence. I hope they do. There are other legitimate subjects that could appeal against it, too. No one should be forced to belong to a Church they don’t believe in.

21 August 2008

MJ Ray: Would Debian Lists Send Scunthorpe to Coventry?

I had a small chuckle at the delay to Debian Project news because the listserver filter treated it as if an event was on Free Ando Penis Land. Parties in Scunthorpe and Penistone may have a similar problem. At least it got through eventually. If only Yahoo was as responsive as debian listmasters… Incidentally, while trying a web search for “the Scunthorpe Problem”, I got an intermediate screen warning me that the results may contain “adult content” but none of the results looked like they were more than 18 years old.

6 July 2007

Rob Taylor: Introduction to Codethink

As those of you who’ve been a bit more observant may have noticed, I now have a new company - Codethink Ltd. It’s really just starting up, but so far we’ve been doing work on HAL, OHM and Tinymail and it’s been good fun. However I don’t want to go the normal contracting house route of taking on employees to supply demand. This inevitably leads to static power structures and static role assignments which generally seems to lead to inefficiency, conflict and boredom as a company grows. Where I want to take Codethink: In business, I believe the future lies in loosely connected individual contractors, dynamically coming together to attack a project or idea, much as was described a few years ago in the seminal article ‘The Dawn of the E-lance Economy’ by Malone and Laubacher (Though I have to admit I hate the term ‘E-lance’..). Back then a few businesses were started up to try to facilitate this, like guru.com and elance.com, but I think these fail fundamentally as they don’t represent the knowledge of the network - that requires real people who actually know each other. Of course here in open source we implicitly understand the importance of knowing each other’s strengths, the importance of introducing new people to our community and building new expertise. This can only happen in loosely-bound structures, where cost of entry is negligible - quite the opposite of the standard large-corporation model. So with Codethink I propose to act as an agent of change. I plan to provide support and help to groups and individuals who want to strike out on their own. I will use my knowledge of the management, architectural and coding expertise of these individuals to provide the service of assembling teams to attack projects for clients. There needs to be another side to the equation. For this to scale, I also need to invest in bringing new people into our open source world and training them as experts able to strike out on their own. So that means taking on employees of a kind - but with the covenant that I will be expecting each employee to be looking at becoming her own boss in time. So my cards are on the table now - for this plan to work it needs to be transparent by default. It may turn out to be a crazy idea that’ll never work in practice, but lets see. If anyone wants to chat with me about these plans, you can find me at rob.taylor@codethink.co.uk on email and XMPP and I’m always around as robtaylor on Freenode and GIMPNet.

4 July 2007

Jeff Bailey: Leif's Dedication


img_8432.jpg
Originally uploaded by jbailey
Photo taken by Alice Robinette
We celebrated Leif's dedication a couple weekends ago on June 17th at the Unitarian Church of Montr al. I got permission from Diane Rollert, our minister, to post the text of it.

(LJ-cut used to keep it from being too long)


Dedication of Leif Alexander Bailey, June 17, 2007

To the Child:
Leif Alexander Bailey, you have come with stardust in your hair, with the rush of planets in your blood, your heart beating out the seasons of eternity, with a shining in your eyes like the sunlight.

Your parents have brought you here to be dedicated, to celebrate the joy they have and to count themselves blessed that you are a part of their family.

As you grow, may you come to love what it is that your parents and this community of Unitarian Universalists value. May you learn to count the number of your days, to weigh their meaning, to gather into your mind the wisdom of your ancestors, to know why we call one thing right and another wrong, and to treasure beauty, mercy and justice in the deepest places of your being.

To the Congregation:
A dedication in the Unitarian Universalist tradition is one of the few sacred rituals we share together as a community. It is a covenant, a promise of love and care, that the entire community bestows upon a child.
Although Leif and his parents are leaving us to pursue new lives in San Francisco, they have chosen to dedicate Leif here in this church that has meant so much to them. Their travels may take them far away, but in this act of dedication today, we will covenant to continue to hold a place of care and concern in our hearts for Leif as he grows. Do you, as this religious community called the Unitarian Church of Montreal, take upon yourselves the privilege and the responsibility of helping to nurture the character and spirit of this child even at a distance?

Congregational Response:
We who are members of this congregation rejoice with this family in the promise of this child. We pledge him now the love and care of this community.

To the Parents:
Angie and Jeff, parents of Leif, please repeat after me this pledge. Leif, we pledge to help you to realize the best that is in you. We will seek, to the best of our ability, to instruct you by our teaching and by our example. We promise to love you with an unselfish love.

To the Child:
Leif, I dedicate you to the service of goodness, beauty and truth. I touch you with this water, which is a symbol of purity, and with this rose which is a symbol of your unfolding life, on your brow, your eyes, your lips, your heart and your hands, that your thoughts, your vision, your speech, your love and your generosity may be dedicated to the care of the earth and its people. We dedicate you that the transcending power of all that is divine may be present in you all your life long.


Closing Prayer:
Spirit of Life and Transcending Source of Love that connects us all, bless this beautiful child Leif this day and all the days of his life. As we rejoice in the promise of Leif s life that stretches out before him, let us remember those no longer with us, especially Leif s grandmother Glennis Bailey who left this earth too soon to meet her grandson, but whose memory and spirit will continue on through him. May Leif continue to serve with strength as his life unfolds so that the richness and wonder of life may be abundantly his. May peace dwell in his heart,and understanding in his mind. May courage strengthen his will and may the love of truth forever guide him.

13 June 2007

Adam Rosi-Kessel: Parmet on Public Health and Individualism

Via Jason, my brilliant former Constitutional Law professor Wendy Parmet weighs in on the XDR-TB scare. Unlike most coverage, Professor Parmet brings out the big picture of how the incident fits into a larger flawed public health policy:
…It is trite but true that in America we admire individual self-sufficiency and rugged individualism. Not only do we admire this taking care of number 1 attitude, but public health has encouraged it. Over the last several decades, public health has emphasized the role that individuals can and should play in determining their own health. Indeed, every day of week, we are bombarded with messages about how we can do this or that to take care of ourselves. Sometimes the message extends to what we can do for our families. Seldom are we told what or how we can do for unnamed others. Even infectious disease policies perpetuate this myth of self-control. We are told to vaccinate our children to protect them. We are told to help ourselves by getting a flu shot. And the federal government provides us with information about how we should prepare to help ourselves and our family in the event of an influenza pandemic. This privatization of infectious disease control is even evident in the U.S. approach to quarantine. During the SARS epidemic, governments in Canada and in Asia quickly realized that quarantines would not be effective without income protection. So laws were passed to assure that people would receive compensation while under quarantine. In the United States, in contrast, despite all the efforts that have been made at public health preparedness and public health law modernization, income replacement remains off the table (the Family and Medical Leave Act only guarantees unpaid leaves for some ill employees). Perhaps even more astonishingly, in its proposed quarantine regulations, the CDC failed to ensure that it would provide all necessary health care to those it quarantined. …

14 March 2007

MJ Ray: Online Banking with GNU/Linux

Last May's threads on news:uk.comp.os.linux reported that online banking from Co-op Bank (maybe only personal accounts), Smile, NPBS, Firstdirect, Yorkshire Bank, Lloyds-TSB, Barclays, HSBC and RBoS work on GNU/Linux. Nationwide may work, but may require the not-yet-free Sun Java. Update: the Coventry Building Society works. Do you know about any more? Send me a comment, please.

10 December 2006

Thijs Kinkhorst: On Neal, Dials and Tagines

On our recent stay in London we passed through Neal's Yard: a nice and tranquil enclosure in the busy Seven Dials neighbourhood (Covent Garden). Here you'll find a number of establishments that cater specifically to those that can appreciate a vegetarian or organic lifestyle. Right around the corner is Neal's Yard Diary, an excellent cheese shop, selling only cheeses from the UK, including of couse very good Stilton and Cheddar. The neighbourhood around Seven Dials sports a number of nice specialty shops. Well worth a visit. We had dinner at the Souk Medina restaurant. Surprisingly large when compared to its modest entrance, it serves a large Moroccan menu with plenty of vegetarian choice. The entourage may remind one of Efteling's Fata Morgana, without being over the top. Seated at knee-level tables on comfortable pillows, we enjoyed a range of Moroccan specialties, a bottle of wine and a pot of mint tea. The price was very modest. Highly recommended!

17 November 2006

MJ Ray: Want a Pint? Give us your prints!

As if the underhand registration of children wasn't bad enough, this NO2ID newsletter describes another way to encourage people to submit to scanning:
"The scheme which is backed by the Home Office was first trialled in Yeovil but plans are afoot to expand the system to Coventry, Hull, Sheffield, Leeds, Gwent, Nottingham, Taunton and possibly Swindon. Drinkers must have their thumbprints scanned and supply their name, address and date of birth to enrol onto the system before they are allowed to enter licensed premises taking part in the scheme." "If you are in any of the towns affected, especially Yeovil, and are willing to do something then send an e-mail to phil@no2id.net (please put "pub fingerprinting" in the Subject).Don't get depressed, don't give in and get a home-brew kit - get angry and do something!" "PS. If anyone knows a pub that would like to take NO2ID beer mats, Newcastle NO2ID has created some with our logo on the front and key counter-arguments on the back, ideal for starting the discussions of the scheme that we need."
Not even our beer is safe from the ID State!

16 November 2006

Jeff Licquia: What Do We Want From Microsoft?

Jason Matusow of Microsoft wants to know:
That said, the real voice of the community is…well…from those of you I don’t know. I have to tell you that the issues with getting this covenant right are incredibly complex and there are real concerns on all sides. Our design goal is to get language in place that allows individual developers to keep developing.
(This is in response to the recent patent deal between Microsoft and Novell, and the poor reception it’s getting from the free software community.) Unfortunately, he got GrokLaw-ed, and his comment system isn’t taking the heat well. So, here’s my feedback; hopefully, he’s paying attention to views outside his comments. The big problem, if you ask me, is the distinction between “commercial” and “non-commercial” that Matusow (and everyone else I hear from Microsoft) is making. In our world, that distinction is a lot less important than the distinction between “proprietary” and “open”. For us, “commercial” is just another way software can be used, and restrictions on commercial use are like restrictions on use by women, or by people in Illinois, or by people who have ever picked their nose in public. Why are businessmen any less deserving of our software as a class than housewives, or Haitians, or other free software developers? Matusow claims not to be interested in any of this:
We are not interested in providing carte blanche clearance on patents to any commercial activity - that is a separate discussion to be had on a per-instance basis. As you comment, please keep in mind that we are talking about individuals, not .orgs, not .com, not non-profits, not…well, not anyone other than individual non-commercial coders.
Dialogue often means meeting the other person where they’re at, not where you want them to be. They would, presumably, not take us seriously if we insisted on a blanket patent license as a condition for any kind of conversation. Fair enough; but then why should we taken them seriously when they insist on us turning our backs on one of our bedrock principles? But does the conversation have to be either-or? I’m betting that Matusow’s blog post is evidence that it doesn’t. People at his level are not the types to waste time on wild goose chases. And is it all that strange to think there might be value in the conversation? There’s a mighty thin line between “proprietary” and “commercial”, so thin even we get them confused sometimes. Does Microsoft really care all that much about for-profit use and improvement of free and open tech? If so, they’re prominent members of a small and shrinking club. If not, then it seems to me that we have a lot of common ground for discussion.

16 May 2006

Ted Walther: Report from Debconf, Day Two

Photography. My roommate Aigars is quite a photographer, he came with his digital SLR and several lenses, an item I've lusted after for some time. Large apertures and manual controls are what every real photographer demands, and digital SLR's deliver. I told him my idea for a small sky recording station so that people could make movies of the paths that the stars take, and how it changes over the year. Ultimately I want a network of these stations, all uploading their pictures so I can examine them for anamolies. This is a hard problem, because stars are so faint. Aigars said to take a picture of the whole sky, a 1000 millimeter lense and a $50 computer scanner with some modifications should be able to do the job.

Me and Andreas Schuldei
Programming. Finally made progress in programming, now that I know where everything is in Oaxtepec. My IRC bot didn't handle things gracefully when the server refused to let it log in, but that is fixed now. Tomorrow I hope to add multi-channel support. Reading through the new IRC RFC, I have the information I need to make a proper configuration file for the software. The design is sketched out and feels right, finally. Weekend vs. Weekday. Oaxtepec is much quieter today. Saturday and Sunday there were far more vendors on the street, and they stayed open much later. Today everything closed down around 6pm when the church bell tolled the summons to mass. I couldn't find the coconut man; maybe he only comes on weekends. Half the stalls at the mercado were empty. During the weekend, the resort was full of vacationers swimming, barbecuing, picnicing, playing soccer, or just sunbathing while the kids ran around. Everyone, young and old, but mostly young adult men and women, were running around in bathing trunks and bikinis. The happy noises were great to wake up to. This morning the sounds were quieter, but still present. The swimming pools here get a lot of use. During the weekend, there was a large tent where some ladies were giving body massages for $10. I didn't see them today. Probably they will be here again next weekend. Food. Tried a dish called "pancita" today. I saw people eating noodles and assumed pancita was a noodle dish, like the Filipino pancit. But no. It is a type of tomato soup filled with chopped up beef rind and chunks of fat. For only P31, I bought a small chicken. It was perfectly marinated and roasted, better than Kentucky Fried Chicken. I paid the money, and the shopkeeper brought out a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into all the appropriate pieces for easy eating, just like they do in Korea (viz the use of scissors) Church. Attended mass tonight, since the church was so close. The church is magnificent. It really is a cathedral inside; to see the ceiling you have to crane your neck. And when you do, you see paintings of angels playing instruments. I went into the nave to pray, and saw a giant depiction of the ark of the covenant. It was very realistic, with the cherubim covering it with their wings. And above it, was a painting of the wine and bread offering, which were offered on the altar daily. The priest was a black man from Illinois; after a bit of attempting to speak to each other in Spanish, we realized we both spoke English, and got on famously from then on. The cathedral opens at 10am, closes for lunch from 2pm-4pm, and then is open until mass is finished. This must be what the church was like in the beginning; a place where believers could drop in any time to be with others of their kind, to meet, eat, drink, discuss, and elevate each other to a higher plane. I am sad that we don't have this in Canada. Debian. There were some Debian talks and presentations, but nothing too interesting. Finally met Mark Shuttleworth, Anthony Towns, Manoj Srivastava, and Roblimo Miller. Clifford Beshers of Linspire almost convinced me to look into the Haskell computer language. I couldn't quite tell what Haskell has that LISP doesn't, apart from forcing strong types on you and being very fast and efficient in benchmarks tests. Marga didn't give me meal tickets before, so Graham printed some up for me today. By pure serendipity, I sat at dinner with the only other Canadian developers at the conference; Simon Law and Eric Dorland from Montreal. The drinking started at 11pm and is still going strong; the atmosphere is very convivial right now, but half of us are still tapping away at our keyboards.