This should be a reply on Hughsies blog, but I don’t want to create a livejournal account. Richard, please move to blogs.gnome.org! In response to Jason’s comments: Hey. I’m a Debian/Ubuntu kinda guy and I think PackageKit is a hell of a lot better than Ubuntu making ubuntu-only solutions like gnome-app-install. It’s DEFINITELY not a NIH, there was nothing that gave us this kind of capability at all before PackageKit started. Everyone knew what was needed to be written and Richard was the guy that jumped in and got it started. Also Richard wasn’t working at Red Hat when he started PackageKit and has worked with every distro he can on this. Jason, stop the Stop Energy. Update:
I though I might jump in and say a bit more on this problem: It really comes down to the question of whether a backend should ask questions of the user. Richard thinks that they shouldn’t, mainly because every time he’s seen backends ask questions they aren’t ones he knows the answer to and so, by inference, most people don’t know the answer to. These questions shouldn’t be asked in a user-friendly system.
However ‘These questions’ are actually multiple classes of problems and simplistically dismissing these is really just asking for failure in solving the problems correctly. Before I go any further, let me note that debconf has multiple levels of verbosity that it can ask questions at. Most Debian based distros just ask the highest priority questions. It should be noted that a PackageKit backend should allow a central administrator to set default values for any of these setting however. Lets break down some of the kind of questions asked though debconf:

• Configuration file overwrites
• License agreements (cf suns jdk packages, flashplugin-nonfree, etc)
• Technical questions, like whether to start a daemon or not
• Lots of other things?…

Some packages also use stdin/out to really make sure you know what the hell you’re doing, like kernel packages, but i think that’s somewhat outside of this scope of this problem. Those kind of things should just fail unless you’re doing leet-super-admin work So the question really comes down to asking the user sensible questions that they a) know how to answer and b) care about. The point I made to Richard on IRC is that this is actually a difficult and multi-faceted problem and just hiding these problems won’t help in solving them well, so my take is that PackageKit should allow asking of questions, probably via a dbus interface, have a debconf frontend that channels questions by this channel, and then let the Ubuntu and Debian guys get on the case of forming projects and policy to help fix the problem at source. Update 2:Richard pointed me to this FAQ entry which explains why even handling debconf questions is hard.

This should be a reply on Hughsies blog, but I don’t want to create a livejournal account. Richard, please move to blogs.gnome.org! In response to Jason’s comments: Hey. I’m a Debian/Ubuntu kinda guy and I think PackageKit is a hell of a lot better than Ubuntu making ubuntu-only solutions like gnome-app-install. It’s DEFINITELY not a NIH, there was nothing that gave us this kind of capability at all before PackageKit started. Everyone knew what was needed to be written and Richard was the guy that jumped in and got it started. Also Richard wasn’t working at Red Hat when he started PackageKit and has worked with every distro he can on this. Jason, stop the Stop Energy. Update:
I though I might jump in and say a bit more on this problem: It really comes down to the question of whether a backend should ask questions of the user. Richard thinks that they shouldn’t, mainly because every time he’s seen backends ask questions they aren’t ones he knows the answer to and so, by inference, most people don’t know the answer to. These questions shouldn’t be asked in a user-friendly system.
However ‘These questions’ are actually multiple classes of problems and simplistically dismissing these is really just asking for failure in solving the problems correctly. Before I go any further, let me note that debconf has multiple levels of verbosity that it can ask questions at. Most Debian based distros just ask the highest priority questions. It should be noted that a PackageKit backend should allow a central administrator to set default values for any of these setting however. Lets break down some of the kind of questions asked though debconf:

• Configuration file overwrites
• License agreements (cf suns jdk packages, flashplugin-nonfree, etc)
• Technical questions, like whether to start a daemon or not
• Lots of other things?…

Some packages also use stdin/out to really make sure you know what the hell you’re doing, like kernel packages, but i think that’s somewhat outside of this scope of this problem. Those kind of things should just fail unless you’re doing leet-super-admin work So the question really comes down to asking the user sensible questions that they a) know how to answer and b) care about. The point I made to Richard on IRC is that this is actually a difficult and multi-faceted problem and just hiding these problems won’t help in solving them well, so my take is that PackageKit should allow asking of questions, probably via a dbus interface, have a debconf frontend that channels questions by this channel, and then let the Ubuntu and Debian guys get on the case of forming projects and policy to help fix the problem at source. Update 2:Richard pointed me to this FAQ entry which explains why even handling debconf questions is hard.

Update (3/3/2008): We’re also working to bring Google Gears for mobile to Android and other mobile platforms with capable web browsers. Here is my writeup of yesterdays Android Code Day in London. Eclipse 3.3 is needed to get the plugin working. Only eclipse 3.2 is in Debian unstable. Download the Europa release and re-setting up the plugin will do it. I’m no Eclipse fan boy, though the integrated debugger works. The iteration cycles are really short for trying stuff out. Very good. Developers, mainly from a Symbian background grilled Jason Chen over security and wanting C API access. Lot of people didn’t seem to like the idea that users were controlling security. I like Google’s “empowering the users” stance, though I think representatives from operators don’t. I heard that poor argument about users asking their operators for android support. Jason argued well that it’s up to user education to contact the right people. When a computer crashes in the UK, who do people call? VirginMedia? Please! :) How about Breakpad crash reporting on Android?. Jason used the OHA to defend Google from looking like they have all the political power… Hmmmm. :) I can understand the tight rope that Google are walking. They are trying not to fragment their platform before it’s properly released. OEMs, operators will feck it up if they have the chance to play with the source code before a Google co-ordinated release. Once they release Google claim they will release everything under the Apache 2 license. So I asked could we see Android on desktops? Jason said there is nothing stopping you. I hope not. Their opened fonts and multimedia codecs on desktop PCs could really make a big difference for Linux take up, especially in Asian (growth) markets. I have studied and implemented Asian fonts and Android’s font rendering even on that nightmare Website sina looked good to me. Despite the “Symbian developers” giving Jason hell in the beginning I had impression they actually liked Android. It fealt almost staged. Scary. Symbian C++ programmers learning Java and jumping ship! Same old problems with images. People are concerned about how bitmap images will scale on different target screens. There is four ‘skins’ already supported in the emulator (QVGA-L+P, HVGA-L+P). We need scalable images too on the Web. ;) Though there are some workarounds demonstrated which seemed OK to me. During the hackathon, I wanted to write a backup/sync tool. Since only Jason Chen seemed to know Android and there was a filled audience, I didn’t get to ask him how really to go about coding it. Though with the help of Dave from Zyb, we eventually found out about content providers. Took some debugging to find that out, but we got there. Having a working debugger is really really nice. We discovered we needed “android.permission.READ_CONTACTS” in the manifest to make our little application that read out the contact on stdout. Cool, though I’d rather use Javascript and the Web stack. Anyway, Android seemed like a good platform, but I have concerns. My biggest concern is basically where is Google Gears on Android? Jason could neither confirm or deny this, so perhaps they have it. Though gears is an opensource project and you can see code reviews… no Android mentioned. What happens if the Android platform is wildly successful? Then we are going to see two major platforms. The Android platform on mobiles and the Web platform on everything else. I worryingly saw no support for Web application device APIs on Android. Encouraging people to write for their Android/java-esque platform undermines their main Web platform! It’s like Microsoft’s mistake of undermining their own platform all over again. From Android you can use Webkit and the Web stack. But from the Web API stack you can’t seemingly access their Dalvik VM APIs. I disclose I am an employee of Aplix (opinions etc. are my own), also a OHA member. I am actively working on a plugin technology that exposes APIs as familiar JS APIs to Web developers. I have already done a proof of concept implementation of Google Gear’s Location API on mobile devices with Aplix technologies. Google you should really do the same and make Web applications equal citizens on your mobile platform by implementing Gears on Android (if you haven’t already).

I am 10 000 metres above sea level, on my way from Melbourne to Wellington. I am looking back at a very enjoyable week of conferencing, with LCA 2008 ending yesterday, followed by today s Open Day. The purpose of this final day is to invite the general public to learn about open-source. Individual projects present their work at booths and field questions by bypassers. Jacinta Richardson and the other organisers and helpers of the Open Day have done an amazing job. The place was buzzing and the selection of projects broad and interesting, even to me. Two talks and a series of lightning talks, as well as catered food for everyone rounded it off. I will try to have this event in mind as we organise a similar event in Buenos Aires after the forthcoming DebConf8 in Argentina. I had a splendid time at the conference and probably can t thank Donna Benjamin and her army of mignons enough for organising it. Compared to the other open-source conferences I previously attended, this one was the most professional. Good job, everyone!!! Here are the highlights:

• I opened the Debian mini-conf with the state of the project address.
• My second presentation on that day was on my packaging workflow (slides), including a live demonstration, which was received well even though I should have prepared it.
• At the keysigning, I (again) used my Transnational Republic identity card and reported on it in another post. I was pleased by the level of attention this got, and how many people approached me during the week to discuss the issue.
• I really enjoyed the talk by Adaora Oniya on communication challenges in Tuesday s LinuxChix mini-conf. Among other interesting points, she listed traits that are typical to males and females and stated how none is 100% on either side. Glancing over the adjectives, I started to wonder about my feminine nature.
• Later that afternoon, a bunch of us sat down to find similarities in packaging workflows of the Debian and Fedora projects.
• Bruce Schneier s keynote titled Reconceptualising Security didn t teach me anything new, but that was to be expected since I am a regular reader of his Cryptogram newsletter. He s a good speaker, but I think his talk would have benefitted from a few, simple slides to illustrate some of his points.
• A few of us met on Wednesday morning for a few games of the Asian board game Go. Paul Wayper and I played two non-competitive games, in which we talked about each others moves and strategies. I think I learnt quite a bit during that session.
• Jeff Waugh s mini-conf talk titled Disintermediating Distributions as well as Stormy Peters keynote Would you do it again for free? , as well as a few other sets of slides, taught me that I really need to work on my own presentation style and get rid of bullet points once and for all.
• The Penguin dinner, traditionally a catered event for conference attendees, took place at the Melbourne Night Market this year. Everyone got food tickets and went off to the dozens of stalls to get food and drinks. This was an excellent idea to deal with 600 people.
• I was very glad to have attended Jason White s presentation on braille and text-to-speech interfaces on Thursday.
• My presentation on [netconf](http://netconf.alioth.debian.org] was well attended and the audience had plenty of good questions. I was able to answer most of them with reference to the design of the netconf core, which is a good omen. The idea of on-demand dialing went into my notes. I screwed up once when I went off on a tangent while answering a question about firewalling and then forgot the original question, but my listeners showed mercy.
• Luke Kanies presentation of Puppet convinced me to allocate more time to this system administration tool. He did a very good job fielding questions and managing time, but he should try to slow down a bit.

Apart from the busy programme, I particularly enjoyed the hallway track , which is usually the reason why I attend these events. I really ought to practice remembering names and faces a bit better. I am not paying enough tribute to this week with this report, but I shall conclude it regardless. Unless something very unexpected comes up, I will attend next year s LCA in Tasmania. NP: Porcupine Tree: Futile

On Sunday, the day before LCA 2008 officially started, Kelly and Rusty asked us first-timers to blog about events, specifically about what we liked and disliked. So far, this conference has been really enjoyable and busy, and I have not found the time to write about its content. The talk I just heard leaves me without an excuse, so there: I have recently had a very interesting and enlightening discussion with a blind Debian developer. When I saw on the conference schedule that Jason White would talk about using Linux with speech and Braille output interfaces, I passed up my opportunity to hear Andrew Tridgell talk about clustered Samba and attended his lecture instead. Jason covered a great number of aspects: from the history of the Braille system, and current, Free implementations thereof, via speech output, to strategies of integrating these techniques into existing programmes which are generally not designed with visually-impaired users in mind. He has a collection of references on his webpage, to which I shall refer for the technical content. His presentation left me very excited and impressed. Excited to see him giving a presentation with such enthusiasm and energy, and impressed because his talk (without notes or slides) was by far better than the job of the average presenter with access to notes and slides to display. Jason conveyed a lot of information in a very well-structured, capitivating report. I think he left most of the audience speechless (figuratively speaking; there were good questions). I feel uneasy with thanking Jason explicitly, or even writing this blog post. If you bear with me for a minute, then let me bridge to women involvement in open-source software. My position on this topic is quite clear: I make no distinctions where they are not obvious, and simultaneously I think it s awesome that more and more women are joining the predominantly male crowd (and their influence undeniably makes the community a more comfortable place). Every now and then, I would like to comment on that, such as I think it s awesome that you are working on this, being a woman (an oversimplified example). What I am trying to say is given how few women are involved with OSS, I appreciate all the more what you are doing. This is non-judgemental, I don t say this because I am trying to highlight someone s gender or sex. It s a communication issue, and I am learning, but I d also rather not limit what I say by making absolutely sure never to offend anyone. But when I utter such a comment, it might still greatly annoy someone or yield vicious returns. This is not always the case in fact, less than it used to be but I ve encountered it here and there, which made me more careful. So when I write about Jason s presentation and how great it was, I want to highlight how it s a greater achievement for him than it would be for me, because he is blind and I am not. I don t mean to single him out or put him on the spot. I am simply impressed, very impressed. And being who I am, I d like to say so. Thanks, Jason. Update: David Schmitt makes an interesting point:

The important question is now, why are we blind people doing great presentations more impressing than people with working eyes doing a great presentation? My personal answer isn t so great: because I didn t expect it. No wonder people get offended if you tell em to their face that I m impressed with his achievements, because I wouldn t have expected it.

I don t agree, or at least I fail to see it. I was impressed, I did not expect it (which isn t to say that I came in to Jason s talk expecting it to be any less than a good talk, I had no expectation! Please think for a second if this isn t immediately clear!) is that offensive? I didn t know Jason, had no way to know whether his presentations are great or less so, but then he pretty much blew me away. The presentation was better than what I am used to (from anyone), and the achievement is all the more greater because it seems to me that he has had to put much more effort into it, purely for accessibility reasons. I guess I should know better, but I still, after all these years, have a problem seeing through the end of it, understanding it. Kant to the rescue, my intentions are good (I claim), but this goes both ways regardless: in any communication, one ought to try hard never to offend. At the same time, one ought to try hard not to be offended until one can be reasonably sure that offence was intended. When I brought this up in Adaora Oniya s miniconf talk on communication challenges, Bdale Garbee recalled the policy in use when he was involved in protocol design work groups: send politely, receive with an open mind. I don t remember his exact words, but I think I got the gist. Update: I just talked to Jason and got his feedback on the issue. It boils down to a quote I ll transcribe: I want my work to be judged by its merit and not by who I am. It only leaves me wondering about the situation at hand: I was impressed by his very well-structured and presented talk and by the fact that he did such a good job given his visual impairment. In any case, I ll close the issue. Jason told me he d happily engage in further discussion and I stated that he is not offended. There is another lesson I learnt: the next time I blog about someone else in such a way, I should really get his/her clearance before publishing! Just to be sure

I'm a bit tired after driving up to Munich for the Android developer meeting, hosted by Google, and being "on" all day, but it was worth it. I was a bit apprehensive that it might be too 'introductory' in the sense of the Google guys telling you in person things that you could have easily looked up on the web, without spending a bunch of time driving around Austria and Bavaria. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. There was some of that, but also plenty of unstructured time to chat with Dan Morrill and Jason Chen, the two Google "Developer Advocates", who are both very friendly, informative and informed, approachable and put a lot of energy into what they do, despite being a bit tired from flying over from the US. It was nice to get a chance to talk with them, and considering that the platform is still changing, useful as well, because they were definitely listening to what people had to say to them. My thanks to them for a job well done. Here are some "impressions" I took away - note that they're not what anyone said, just ideas I got about what they said:

• Source code is being released when handsets ship because they want to work very closely with the hardware partners to make sure the phone experience is good (they said this). They want to "set the bar high", and they probably run the risk of someone snatching the code and slapping together a phone if they let out the source code to early. (They definitely didn't say this, it's just me connecting the dots).
• Despite interest for 'other languages', it really looks like they want everything to go through Dalvik in some way or another. Clearly, at some point in the future, there will be specs for writing Dalvik byte code.
• They won't talk about the upgrade strategy, something I asked about. I want to know that as a developer, I won't be stuck with N combinations of things that I have to support over the years. I want to know how they'll minimize that pain, but they're not currently able to discuss it.
• Talking with other people attending, there seemed to be some doubts about security and permissions for user data, since Android is moving away from the j2me "everything is private" model, to a model where data can be shared between apps, which opens up lots of good things, but also some potentially bad ones as well.

There's still really a sense of Android continuing to evolve, in a true spirit of openness. I liked that, as it means there is space for people to tell Google what they want, rather than simply being given a finished product and told that that's that... but then again, I would, being the open source guy that I am. I didn't get to show off Hecl quite as much as I would have liked to, but I did get to mention it a few times, so I guess I did ok.

Some days ago, my RSS reader found Mark Jason Dominus' Help.pm - Yes, the module is (so far, at least - I could not find it on CPAN) only published as a blog post. But don't let that fool you - It's a beautiful (and simple!) Perl module that can help developers that are too lazy to go look up methods in the man pages. Perl's introspection capabilities are not behind other dynamic languages' (i.e. Python's or Ruby's, speaking only about what I'm familiar with). However, it's used much more seldom, partly because Perl does not ship by default with an interactive console (such as Ruby's irb or Python's regular behaviour when called without an input script). Of course, writing a Perl console is an easy task, and good Perl consoles exist, although its use is not part of the Perl culture. But of course, just glancing over MJD's code made me come up with a simple, yet useful, way to use introspection in Perl, usable as a simple one-liner. Say you want to look at all of the methods provided by IO::File:

gwolf_at_mosca[25]/tmp$ perl -e 'use IO::File; print join(", ", grep defined & "IO::File::$_" sort keys % "IO::File::" ), "\n"'
binmode, carp, confess, croak, gensym, new, new_tmpfile, open, qualify, qualify_to_ref, ungensym

Want the scalar variables? Of course:

gwolf_at_mosca[26]/tmp$ perl -e 'use IO::File; print join(", ", grep defined $ "IO::File::$_" sort keys % "IO::File::" ), "\n"'
VERSION

Same goes for arrays and hashes. And, of course, leaving out the grep gives you anything. Yup, it's the magic package-name hash trick. Main difference between this and MJD's Help.pm? That Help.pm goes up the inheritance chain, and is thus much more correct. Of course, I'll be uploading Help.pm to Debian very soon - And, why not, I think I'll add a way for it to query on different symbols, not just on methods. And the simple binary to call from the command line. Sounds very much worth it ;-) Thanks, MJD!

Pelican has decided to abandon his efforts to scale the walls of the legal academy and proposes this simple eight-step program for others who would follow in his footsteps:

1. Don t do interdisciplinary work. The legal academy doesn t know what to make of it unless it is economics.
2. Don t go to a school without a law review or grades. I did and it was a huge problem.
3. Get on law review, clerk, write.
4. Check the faculty listings at most law schools. Go to the most often listed schools: Harvard, Yale, etc. It does matter as law faculty select their own, usually. I was told by a faculty member as a 1L expressing interest in the academy that I should transfer immediately to Harvard if possible. I didn t.
5. If you think you want to be a legal academic, look at what is on the FAR form in your first or second year. Orient your academic career to produce a good looking FAR.
6. Remarkably, the legal academy does not care about your ability to raise research money or bring in grants.
7. Don t publish in interdisciplinary journals. Publish only in law reviews writing only dense and impenetrable texts.
8. Demonstrated impact of your work in policy or law is not relevant.

This critique could be extended broadly to much of the academy (not just law schools). I had once thought I might like to teach law, but now I can only really see myself as a clinician. Two contradictory academic trends:

• The tendency toward dense, impractical writing that only makes sense to other insiders. This is often but not exclusively the influence of postmodernism. Steve recently brought Chomsky’s response to postmodern thought to my attention. It boils down to this: sure, it might be complicated. But there are lots of other fields that are complicated–quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, even game theory–in which an expert can still explain to a bright layperson the contours of the field sufficient for the layperson to get the gist of it, even if they can’t grasp all the details without extensive study. This doesn’t seem to be true of postmodern philosophy. Is the emperor naked? Paul Graham’s How to Do Philosophy reflects a similar attitude with less of a political bent, although my friends pursuing philosophy doctorates claim Graham has got it all wrong.
• The tendency to reduce all disciplines to a science, particular the humanities and social sciences. This can either mean approaching the study with some method that approaches “scientific rigor” or literally basing the analysis in an already recognized science, preferably neuroscience. While I can see some sense in incorporating neuroscience, cognitive science, and certainly psychology into fields such as economics, I don’t think this is a good thing to the extent it overwhelms other modes of analysis, particular for literature. Neuroscientist/author Jonah Lehrer discussed this phenomenon (and its drawbacks) with Christopher Lydon in an episode of the newly-revived Radio Open Source. (Warning to Debian readers: Radio Open Source has very little to do with open source software.)

Technorati Tags: Law, Legal Academy, Postmodernism, Neuroscience, Jonah Lehrer, Paul Graham, Philosophy, Noam Chomsky, Christopher Lydon

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After Argentina-France on the first day, that one was planned to be one of the few big matches of first round. Of course, after the game won by South Africa (36-0), that seems pretty silly to say... The Springboks were definitely better than England, in all parts of the game. What stunned me, particularly after watching South Africa live , is their complete control on the game, which is a great improvement over their match against Samoa. South Africa scored three tries all of them great examples or organized attacks by the rear lines. Two tries for JP Pietersen, after 3 by Habana on first game: the South-African wing players rock. Despite this, the player of the game was definitely Jason Du Preez, the scrum half (hope this is the correct term in English) who organised all attacks from RSA. England was missing too many key players (several injured) to be able to be a menace for South Africa. They never were really dangerous, except maybe when the magic Jason Robinson has the ball in his hands (what a player!). I was particularly disappointed by their center back players, and even more particularly by Farrel. Ditto for Andy Gomarsall as scrum half. So, South Africa is now probably qualified with two quite easy games against USA and Tonga. England will have to fight to qualify and noone can tell if Samoa or Tonga can surprise them. Watching Samoa-Tonga on Sunday will be interesting and Samoa-England or Tonga-England are already key matches. A great rugby week-end is about to begin, again. Today, Wales-Australia is the match of the day, for sure, with wales playing home (some matches are not in France, but in Cardiff and Edinburgh). New Zealand-Portugal will be...interesting, though the only incertainty is the number of scored tries. And finally, Ireland-Georgia is of some interest for the French. Tomorrow, France could have hard times against Namibia. Of course, the challenge here is winning *and* scoring the bonus point. That match is 5 days before a key France-Ireland, so the challenge is also not wasting too much energy. Of course, tomorrow's top match for me is Samoa-Tonga while I whileprobably skip Fidji-Canada (too bad, I haven't seen those playing yet). BTW, if someone has a recording of the most intense match as of now (Japan-Fidji), I'd be delighted. Rugbystiquement v tre,

After Argentina-France on the first day, that one was planned to be one of the few big matches of first round. Of course, after the game won by South Africa (36-0), that seems pretty silly to say... The Springboks were definitely better than England, in all parts of the game. What stunned me, particularly after watching South Africa live , is their complete control on the game, which is a great improvement over their match against Samoa. South Africa scored three tries all of them great examples or organized attacks by the rear lines. Two tries for JP Pietersen, after 3 by Habana on first game: the South-African wing players rock. Despite this, the player of the game was definitely Jason Du Preez, the scrum half (hope this is the correct term in English) who organised all attacks from RSA. England was missing too many key players (several injured) to be able to be a menace for South Africa. They never were really dangerous, except maybe when the magic Jason Robinson has the ball in his hands (what a player!). I was particularly disappointed by their center back players, and even more particularly by Farrel. Ditto for Andy Gomarsall as scrum half. So, South Africa is now probably qualified with two quite easy games against USA and Tonga. England will have to fight to qualify and noone can tell if Samoa or Tonga can surprise them. Watching Samoa-Tonga on Sunday will be interesting and Samoa-England or Tonga-England are already key matches. A great rugby week-end is about to begin, again. Today, Wales-Australia is the match of the day, for sure, with wales playing home (some matches are not in France, but in Cardiff and Edinburgh). New Zealand-Portugal will be...interesting, though the only incertainty is the number of scored tries. And finally, Ireland-Georgia is of some interest for the French. Tomorrow, France could have hard times against Namibia. Of course, the challenge here is winning *and* scoring the bonus point. That match is 5 days before a key France-Ireland, so the challenge is also not wasting too much energy. Of course, tomorrow's top match for me is Samoa-Tonga while I whileprobably skip Fidji-Canada (too bad, I haven't seen those playing yet). BTW, if someone has a recording of the most intense match as of now (Japan-Fidji), I'd be delighted. Rugbystiquement v tre,

Firstly, a big hello to Planet Ubuntu! As an Ubuntu community member and Ubuntu core-dev, I've decided to add my livejournal to there. Since I usually don't make any effort to sensor my thoughts on here, I chose not to add it while I was still with Canonical in order to make sure that there was no confusion as to the OfficialStatus(tm) of anything I write.

The last two days have taken us from Toronto through to Cincinnati. Andrew took us down to the Buffalo airport, we met Jason and Brian from Koolu on the way day and finally wound up down there at 22h30 despite having left NewMarket at 11am. When we stopped at Babur for lunch, we wound up seeing Nancy and Alexis walk past.

We stayed overnight at the Mum's Red Carpet Inn, just over the Pennsylvania border. It didn't have Red Carpet. It *did* have Orange Shag on the side of the bed, however. High class. The continental breakfast was Tang, Bananas, vegan doughnuts and twinkies. The vegan doughnuts were full of palm oil, I don't think my heart rate has recovered yet.

On the drive towards Kentucky, we got hungry (and tired of Subway) when we approached Columbus. We first tried to go to a place called "Leaf Restaurant", which it turns out can feed us exactly zero things. Down to the pre-made chef salad, and the spaghetti sauce having meat in it. We went a bit further, and decided to try the university district. We pulled over after seeing an Ethiopian place, and saw Ben Sostrom, whom we'd just met at Opus the week before! We spent the evening hanging out with him, michael dobson, amber, and the rest of their YA group. They meet on Tuesday nights a couple blocks from where we parked! It was nice to have a post-Opus day like that, but their stories of carjackings and cops randomly pulling people over are hopefully overstated by several orders of magnitude!

We continued the drive down to just outside of Cincinnati. We're meeting up with Stephanie Truax today for our tour of the Creationism Museum. After this, we'll turn west and try to find our way to California.

Retiring from Debian In response to the inactive developer ping, I have decided to retire from the Debian project. Between my job and the new baby, my time for hacking on other projects is nonexistent, or possibly negative. I have already passed Audacity maintainership to the debian-multimedia team. I still use and like Debian, and I hope someday I'll return from "emeritus" status to become an active developer again. Cyclone While browsing through some very old backup files, I rediscovered one of my first real software projects, an IRC client for BeOS. This was a neat collaborative effort, but we weren't really on the ball with project hosting or version control. This is from a file I wrote documenting what was left of the project after it stopped:

Cyclone was started in spring 1998 by a group of developers who hung out in the #bedev channel on EFNet. The original Cyclone team included Jason Gosnell (Avatar), Jeff Hamilton (Pyrus), Matt Lewinski (mattl), John Wiggins (prok), and Matt Brubeck (mgb), with contributions from several other #bedev regulars. The Cyclone project produced a small, elegant IRC client. Unfortunately, the team dissolved as several members moved around the country to go to new schools or jobs at the end of summer 1998. Along with the loss of some important pieces of source code, this prevented Cyclone from ever seeing a public release.

I also found some poetry I wrote in middle school, but it's compressed using a version of StuffIt that does not seem to be compatible with any open source tools. This is probably a good thing.

Cultivation is a video game written by Jason Rohrer about a community of gardeners growing food for themselves in a shared space. Jason is also author of Transcend, a retro-style, abstract, 2D shooter already in Debian repositories. The game is cross-platform, and has been released in the Public Domain. Cultivation is quite different from most other games. It is a social simulation, and the primary form of conflict is over land and plant resources. There is no shooting, but there are plenty of angry looks. It is also an evolution simulation. Within the world of Cultivation, you can explore a virtually infinite spectrum of different plant and gardener varieties. All of the graphics, sounds, melodies,and other content in Cultivation are 100% procedurally generated at playtime. In other words, there are no hand-painted texture maps. Instead, each object has a uniquely “grown” appearance. Every time you play, Cultivation generates fresh visuals, music, and behaviors. Cultivation is certainly an unusual game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, in Jason’s words. From experience, some people absolutely love it, while others absolutely hate it. It’s intended to be an “art game” after all, and mixed reactions go with that territory. When two sides are fighting, they often ruin the commons for everyone. The game is a metaphor about that kind of situation. Too much fighting destroys the island for everyone. I’ve already finished the packaging of this game, and I hope it gets into Debian repositories soon.

I'm not sure of the exact date - if my memory serves me correctly, it was sometime during the summer of 1997 - I was given an account on Debian's server (located, at the time, in Beaverton, Oregon). I didn't go on to upload my first package until October of that year, as I had landed my first programming job at the same time, at CKS Partners. The "new maintainer process" in those days consisted of Klee Dienes calling me up and checking that I was a real person, had a pgp key, and wasn't completely clueless. It was a very different project in many ways than it is today - much smaller, much more informal, and of course much less well known in the world at large. Some elements were in place, though - my recollection is that the "flame friendly" atmosphere, while perhaps not quite as accentuated as it at times appears today, was firmly in place even back then. In '98, '99', and 2000, the Linux world was an exciting place to be. I still recall reading about the database companies deciding to release their products on Linux, reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and going to one of the first big commercial Linux conferences, in San Jose, in early 1999. Debian was well poised to take advantage of Linux's growth, too. Under Bruce Perens' leadership, several key elements of Debian had been put in place, like the social contract and free software guidelines. Fortuitously, Jason Gunthorpe was working on apt in that time period as well, which was another key element in Debian's success. One of the things I've always admired about Debian in the open source world is that it is in some ways a "stepping stone" project, meaning that it's a good way for people to start getting involved with free software, to get their toes wet "giving something back", without already being an expert hacker. It's easier to maintain a package of code, if you're willing to put in the time and attention to details, than to, say, write a new kernel module, or some other piece of critical C code. I've seen a number of people take this route - they get started with Debian, and as they go, learn more about the packages they work with, and perhaps even get involved with them "upstream", as they acquire skills and knowledge. By no means is everyone in Debian in that situation, though - there are some really first rate hackers, who tend to be the small core of people that really make Debian zing along. Indeed, being an autodidact in the world of computers, outside of one very forgettable term of C++ at Lane Community College, has given me an immense appreciation for the enormous opportunities open source affords in terms of learning - and especially hands-on learning. How many other fields let you work from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, with anyone else who is interested in the same subject, at whatever time you want, with tools that you can download entirely for free? It's really an intoxicating sensation realizing that you can do anything you want if you are willing to put the time in to learn how. The learning opportunities are one of the many things I'm grateful to Debian for. These days, I'm really not involved much with Debian anymore. I mostly run Ubuntu, which I think has perhaps improved on some of the social aspects of Debian (although Mark's zillions of dollars certainly play a large role, too). In terms of free software, I don't have as much time, and dedicate more of it to my own projects like Hecl. I still love the idea of open source software, but I'm also older and wiser (or more cynical?), and must face the reality that without scarcity, you have nothing to trade with others for things like food. Due to my lack of activity, perhaps I should resign, but ... I really don't want to, and who knows, maybe I'll have more time, and an "itch to scratch" at some point in the future. Who knows what the next ten years hold for Debian?

For "Freedom, Justice, and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass", one man's very well-written tale of why hot-linking isn't such a hot idea. While you can probably guess the overall content of the story just from the keywords "hot-linking" and "gaping ass" (what's Google going to make of that, I wonder?) I think it's worth reading this just for the way that Jason Scott tells his story of goatse, and his "pilot" explanation of why such stupidity exists on the Internet of today.

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. …

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Linuxdays in vienna were fun (as usual). Lessons learnt:

• stfl (Structured Terminal Forms Language/Library) is definitely worth a look (thanks for the great talk and the nice discussions at the grml booth, clifford!)
• thanks to the inclusion of grml-x in rocklinux now zsh will become part of rocklinux (yeah!)
• the filter language feature of the upcoming newsbeuter release 0.5 (newsbeuter is the best available console based rss reader) looks rocking - killfile!!1! (thanks to andi for implementing this cool feature)
• using zsh-mime-setup might result in unwanted behaviour
• the catalyst web framework seems to rock (thanks, koki and tom!)
• I should take a closer look at template toolkit as well (thanks again, koki)
• even though I’m not a perl monkey attending to YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna (Yet Another Perl Conference) would be cool (meeting people like Larry Wall, Damian Conway, Audrey Tang and Mark Jason Dominus)

I was responsible for the booth of grml (Linux live-cd for sysadmins and texttool users) as well as for the ones of Debian and Debienna (Debian in vienna) - especially in the first two days, until Markus and Kira joined. Regarding the grml booth: It was once more amazing to see how many people already know and use grml. I had the pleasure to meet people from a professional data rescue organization who use grml in their daily business. Not to forget to mention all the people who let me know how often grml managed to save their lif^Wdata. Oh, and some nice ideas were brought to my attention and are now part of the todo list for grml. Very geeky was the 13 year old boy who visited our booth and when asking him whether he knows how to work on the console (he was staring at our grml-CDs with shining eyes) he replied: "YES, of couuuuurse!" I couldn’t resist in giving him a grml-CD. Oh, and we were running out of grml-CDs earlier than expected. Thanks to my girlfriend - who can even explain the difference between grml meilenschwein and grml64 to you now - I had the chance to attend some few talks - besides my own one about grml of course. I once more didn’t manage it to take just a single picture but I just received a pointer to the linuxdays photogallery of jostusz, thanks Sven.

"The list of features is a mile long but let me summarize them all down to this simple statement: everything just fucking works exactly as you would expect it to."

No, this is not about Debian Etch :-) (but I guess we could make that happen).

Here is the origin.
Sorry for indirectly advertising non-free software, I just liked the quote.


Update:

Martin, it seems (just at first glance) that Zimbra is licensed under a MPL license and is non-free:

"The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Server and Zimbra Ajax Toolkit are both licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and require that modifications made to existing files be given back to the Community."

Last minute note: I mentioned some discussions about advertisement on Wikipedia; I sadly missed a conversation in which Jason Calcanis pointed out that Wikipedia leaves $100M on the table, and the response from Jimmy Wales who has his own take on advertising and Wikipedia. Interesting discussion. tags: wikipedia advertisement jason calcanis jimmy wales

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.