Search Results: "michi"

3 May 2023

John Goerzen: Martha the Pilot

Martha, now 5, can t remember a time when she didn t fly periodically. She s come along in our airplane in short flights to a nearby restaurant and long ones to Michigan and South Dakota. All this time, she s been riding in the back seat next to Laura. Martha has been talking excitedly about riding up front next to me. She wants to be my co-pilot . I promised to give her an airplane wing pin when she did one I got from a pilot of a commercial flight when I was a kid. Of course, safety was first, so I wanted to be sure she was old enough to fly there without being a distraction. Last weekend, the moment finally arrived. She was so excited! She brought along her Claire bear aviator, one that I bought for her at an airport a little while back. She buckled in two of her dolls in the back seat. Martha's dolls And then up we went! Martha in the airplane Martha was so proud when we landed! We went to Stearman Field, just a short 10-minute flight away, and parked the plane right in front of the restaurant. We flew back, and Martha thought we should get a photo of her standing on the wing by the door. Great idea! Martha standing on the wing She was happily jabbering about the flight all the way home. She told us several times about the pin she got, watching out the window, watching all the screens in the airplane, and also that she didn t get sick at all despite some turbulence. And, she says, Now just you and I can go flying! Yes, that s something I m looking forward to!

10 December 2020

John Goerzen: How the Attention Economy Hurts You via Social Media Sites like Facebook

There is a whole science to manipulating our attention. And because there is a lot of money to be made by doing this well, it means we all encounter attempts to manipulate what we pay attention to each day. What is this, and how is it harmful? This post will be the first on a series on the topic. Why is attention so important? When people use Facebook, they use it for free. Facebook generally doesn t even try to sell them anything, yet has billions in revenues. What, then, is Facebook s product? Well, really, it s you. Or, more specifically, your attention. Facebook sells your attention to advertisers. Everything they do is in service to that. They want you to spend more time on the site so they can show you more ads. (I should say here that I m using Facebook as an example, but this applies to other social media companies too.) Seeking to maximize attention So if your attention is so important to their profit, it follows naturally that they would seek ways to get people to spend more time on their site. And they do. They track all sorts of metrics, including engagement (if you click like , comment, share, or otherwise interact with content). They know which sorts of things are likely to capture your (and I mean you in specific!) attention and show you that. Your neighbor may have different interests and Facebook judges different things are likely to capture their attention. Manipulating your attention Attention turning into money isn t unique for social media. In fact, in the article If It Bleeds, It Leads: Understanding Fear-Based Media, Psychology Today writes:
In previous decades, the journalistic mission was to report the news as it actually happened, with fairness, balance, and integrity. However, capitalistic motives associated with journalism have forced much of today s television news to look to the spectacular, the stirring, and the controversial as news stories. It s no longer a race to break the story first or get the facts right. Instead, it s to acquire good ratings in order to get advertisers, so that profits soar. News programming uses a hierarchy of if it bleeds, it leads. Fear-based news programming has two aims. The first is to grab the viewer s attention. In the news media, this is called the teaser. The second aim is to persuade the viewer that the solution for reducing the identified fear will be in the news story. If a teaser asks, What s in your tap water that YOU need to know about? a viewer will likely tune in to get the up-to-date information to ensure safety.
You ve probably seen fear-based messages a lot on Facebook. They will highlight messages to liberals about being afraid of what Trump is doing, and to conservatives about being afraid of what Biden is doing. They may or may not even intentionally be doing this; it is their algorithm predicts that those would maximize time and engagement for certain people, so that s what they see. Fear leads to controversy It s not just fear, though. Social media also loves controversy. There s nothing that makes people really want to stay on Facebook like anger. See something controversial and you ll see hundreds or thousands of people are there arguing about it and in the process, giving Facebook their attention. A quick Internet search will show you numerous articles on how marketing companes can leverage controvery to get attention and engagement with their campaigns. Consequences of maximizing fear and controversy What does it mean to society at large and to you personally that large companies make a lot of money by maximizing fear and controversy? The most obvious way is it leads to less common ground. If the posts and reactions that show common ground are never seen because they don t drive engagement, it poisons the well; left and right hate each other with ever more vigor a profitable outcome to Facebook, but a poisonous one to all of us. I have had several friendships lost because I a liberal in agreement with these friends on political matters still talk to Trump voters. On the other side, we ve seen people storm the Michigan statehouse with weapons. How did that level of disagreement and even fear behind it get so firmly embedded in our society? Surely the fact that social media shows us things designed to stimulate fear and anger must play a role. What does it do to our ability to have empathy for, and understand, others? The Facebook groups I ve been in for like-minded people have largely been flooded with memes calling the President rump and other things clearly designed to make people angry or fearful. It s a worthless experience, and not just that, but it s a harmful experience. When our major media TV and social networks all are optimizing for fear, anger, and controvesry, we have a society beholden to fear, anger, and controvesy. In my next installment, I m going to talk about what to do about this, including the decentralized social networks of the Fediverse that are specifically designed to put you back in charge of your attention. Update 2020-12-16: There are two followup articles for this: how to join the Fediverse and non-creepy technology purchasing and gifting guides. The latter references the FSF s page on software manipulation towards addiction, which is particularly relevant to this topic.

10 June 2020

Evgeni Golov: show your desk

Some days ago I posted a picture of my desk on Mastodon and Twitter. standing desk with a monitor, laptop etc After that I got multiple questions about the setup, so I thought "Michael and Michael did posts about their setups, you could too!" And well, here we are ;-) desk The desk is a Flexispot E5B frame with a 200 80 2.6cm oak table top. The Flexispot E5 (the B stands for black) is a rather cheap (as in not expensive) standing desk frame. It has a retail price of 379 , but you can often get it as low as 299 on sale. Add a nice table top from a local store (mine was like 99 ), a bit of wood oil and work and you get a nice standing desk for less than 500 . The frame has three memory positions, but I only use two: one for sitting, one for standing, and a "change position" timer that I never used so far. The table top has a bit of a swing when in standing position (mine is at 104cm according to the electronics in the table), but not enough to disturb typing on the keyboard or thinking. I certainly wouldn't place a sewing machine up there, but that was not a requirement anyways ;) To compare: the IKEA Bekant table has a similar, maybe even slightly stronger swing. chair Speaking of IKEA The chair is an IKEA Volmar. They don't seem to sell it since mid 2019 anymore though, so no link here. hardware laptop A Lenovo ThinkPad T480s, i7-8650U, 24GB RAM, running Fedora 32 Workstation. Just enough power while not too big and heavy. Full of stickers, because I stickers! It's connected to a Lenovo ThinkPad Thunderbolt 3 Dock (Gen 1). After 2 years with that thing, I'm still not sure what to think about it, as I had various issues with it over the time:
  • the internal USB hub just vanishing from existence until a full power cycle of the dock was performed, but that might have been caused by my USB-switch which I recently removed.
  • the NIC negotiating at 100MBit/s instead of 1000MBit/s and then keeping on re-negotiating every few minutes, disconnecting me from the network, but I've not seen that since the Fedora 32 upgrade.
  • the USB-attached keyboard not working during boot as it needs some Thunderbolt magic.
The ThinkPad stands on a Adam Hall Stands SLT001E, a rather simple stand for laptops and other equipment (primarily made for DJs I think). The Dock fits exactly between the two feet of the stand, so that is nice and saves space on the table. Using the stand I can use the laptop screen as a second screen when I want it - but most often I do not and have the laptop lid closed while working. workstation A Lenovo ThinkStation P410, Xeon E5-2620 v4, 96GB RAM, running Fedora 32 Workstation. That's my VM playground. Having lots of RAM really helps if you need/want to run many VMs with Foreman/Katello or Red Hat Satellite as they tend to be a bit memory hungry and throwing hardware at problems tend to be an easy solution for many of them. The ThinkStation is also connected to the monitor, and I used to have an USB switch to flip my keyboard, mouse and Yubikey from the laptop to the workstation and back. But as noted above, this switch somehow made the USB hub in the laptop dock unhappy (maybe because I was switching too quickly after resume or so), so it's currently removed from the setup and I use the workstation via SSH only. It's mounted under the table using a ROLINE PC holder. You won't get any design awards with it, but it's easy to assemble and allows the computer to move with the table, minimizing the number of cables that need to have a flexible length. monitor The monitor is an older Dell UltraSharp U2515H - a 25" 2560 1440 model. It sits on an Amazon Basics Monitor Arm (which is identical to an Ergotron LX to the best of my knowledge) and is accompanied by a Dell AC511 soundbar. I don't use the adjustable arm much. It's from the time I had no real standing desk and would use the arm and a cardboard box to lift the monitor and keyboard to a standing level. If you don't want to invest in a standing desk, that's the best and cheapest solution! The soundbar is sufficient for listening to music while working and for chatting with colleagues. webcam A Logitech C920 Pro, what else? Works perfectly under Linux with the UVC driver and has rather good microphones. Actually, so good that I never use a headset during video calls and so far nobody complained about bad audio. keyboard A ThinkPad Compact USB Keyboard with TrackPoint. The keyboard matches the one in my T480s, so my brain doesn't have to switch. It was awful when I still had the "old" model and had to switch between the two. UK layout. Sue me. I like the big return key. mouse A Logitech MX Master 2. I got the MX Revolution as a gift a long time ago, and at first I was like: WTF, why would anyone pay hundred bucks for a mouse?! Well, after some time I knew, it's just that good. And when it was time to get a new one (the rubber coating gets all slippery after some time) the decision was rather easy. I'm pondering if I should try the MX Ergo or the MX Vertical at some point, but not enough to go and buy one of them yet. other notepad I'm terrible at remembering things, so I need to write them down. And I'm terrible at remembering to look at my notes, so they need to be in my view. So there is a regular A5 notepad on my desk, that gets filled with check boxes and stuff, page after page. coaster It's a wooden table, you don't want to have liquids on it, right? Thankfully a friend of mine once made coasters out of old Xeon CPUs and epoxy. He gave me one in exchange for a busted X41 ThinkPad. I still think I made the better deal ;) yubikey Keep your secrets safe! Mine is used as a GnuPG smart card for both encryption and SSH authentication, U2F on various pages and 2FA for VPN. headphones I own a pair of Bose QuietComfort 25 with an aftermarket Bluetooth adapter and Anker SoundBuds Slim+. Both are used rather seldomly while working, as my office is usually quiet and no one is disturbed when I listen to music without headphones. what's missing? light I want to add more light to the setup, noth to have a better picture during video calls but also to have better light when doing something else on the table - like soldering. The plan is to add an IKEA Tertial with some Tr dfri smart LED in it, but the Tertial is currently not available for delivery at IKEA and I'm not going to visit one in the current situation. bigger monitor Currently pondering getting a bigger (27+ inch) 4K monitor. Still can't really decide which one to get. There are so many, and they all differ in some way. But it seems no affordable one is offering an integrated USB switch and sufficient amount of USB ports, so I'll probably get whatever can get me a good picture without any extra features at a reasonable price. Changing the monitor will probably also mean rethinking the sound output, as I'm sure mounting the Dell soundbar to anything but the designated 5 year old monitor won't work too well.

17 October 2017

Norbert Preining: Japanese TeX User Meeting 2017

Last saturday the Japanese TeX User Meeting took place in Fujisawa, Kanagawa. For those who have been at the TUG 2013 in Tokyo you will remember that the Japanese TeX community is quite big and vibrant. On Saturday about 50 users and developers gathered for a set of talks on a variety of topics. The first talk was by Keiichiro Shikano ( ) on using Markup text to generate (La)TeX and HTML. He presented a variety of markup formats, including his own tool xml2tex. The second talk was my Masamichi Hosoda ( ) on reducing the size of PDF files using PDFmark extraction. As a contributor to many projects including Texinfo and LilyPond, Masamichi Hosoda tells us horror stories about multiple font embedding in the manual of LilyPond, the permanent need for adaption to newer Ghostscript versions, and the very recent development in Ghostscript prohibiting the merge of font definitions in PDF files. Next up was Yusuke Terada ( ) on grading exams using TeX. Working through hundreds and hundreds of exams and do the grading is something many of us are used to and I think nobody really enjoys it. Yusuke Terada has combined various tools, including scans, pdf merging using pdfpages, to generate gradable PDF which were then checked on an iPad. On the way he did hit some limits in dvipdfmx on the number of images, but this was obviously only a small bump on the road. Now if that could be automatized as a nice application, it would be a big hit I guess! The forth talk was by Satoshi Yamashita ( ) on the preparation of slides using KETpic. KETpic is a long running project by Setsuo Takato ( ) for the generation of graphics, in particular using Cinderella. KETpic and KETcindy integrates with lots of algebraic and statistical programs (R, Maxima, SciLab, ) and has a long history of development. Currently there are activities to incorporate it into TeX Live. The fifth talk was by Takuto Asakura ( ) on programming TeX using expl3, the main building block of the LaTeX3 project and already adopted by many TeX developers. Takuto Asakura came to fame on this years TUG/BachoTeX 2017 when he won the W. J. Martin Prize for his presentation Implementing bioinformatics algorithms in TeX. I think we can expect great new developments from Takuto! The last talk was by myself on fmtutil and updmap, two of the main management programs in any TeX installation, presenting the changes introduced over the last year, including the most recent release of TeX Live. Details have been posted on my blog, and a lengthy article in TUGboat 38:2, 2017 is available on this topic, too. After the conference about half of the participants joined a social dinner in a nearby Izakaya, followed by a after-dinner beer tasting at a local craft beer place. Thanks to Tatsuyoshi Hamada for the organization. As usual, the Japanese TeX User Meetings are a great opportunity to discuss new features and make new friends. I am always grateful to be part of this very nice community! I am looking forward to the next year s meeting.

5 March 2017

Julien Viard de Galbert: Raspberry Pi 3 as desktop computer

For about six months I ve been using a Raspberry Pi 3 as my desktop computer at home. The overall experience is fine, but I had to do a few adjustments.
First was to use KeePass, the second to compile gcc for cross-compilation (ie use buildroot).
KeePass I m using KeePass + KeeFox to maintain my passwords on the various websites (and avoid reusing the same everywhere).
For this to work on the Raspberry Pi, one need to use mono from Xamarin: 
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main"   sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install mono-runtime
The install instruction comes from mono-project and the initial pointer was found on raspberrypi forums, stackoverflow and Benny Michielsen s blog.
And for some plugin to work I think I had to apt-get install mono-complete. Compiling gcc Using the Raspberry Pi 3, I recovered an old project based on buildroot for the raspberry pi 2. And just for building the tool-chain I had a few issues. First the compilation would stop during mnp compilation: 
 /usr/bin/gcc -std=gnu99 -c -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -D__GMP_WITHIN_GMP -I.. -DOPERATION_divrem_1 -O2 -Wa,--noexecstack tmp-divrem_1.s -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/divrem_1.o
tmp-divrem_1.s: Assembler messages:
tmp-divrem_1.s:129: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode  mls r1,r4,r8,r11'
tmp-divrem_1.s:145: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode  mls r1,r4,r8,r11'
tmp-divrem_1.s:158: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode  mls r1,r4,r8,r11'
tmp-divrem_1.s:175: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode  mls r1,r4,r3,r8'
tmp-divrem_1.s:209: Error: selected processor does not support ARM mode  mls r11,r4,r12,r3'
Makefile:768: recipe for target 'divrem_1.lo' failed
make[]: *** [divrem_1.lo] Error 1
I Googled the error and found this post on the Raspberry Pi forum not really helpful
But I finally found an explanation on Jan Hrach s page on the subject.
The raspbian distribution is still optimized for the first Raspberry Pi so basically the compiler is limited to the old raspberypi instructions. While I was compiling gcc for a Raspberry Pi 2 so needed the extra ones. The proposed solution is to basically update raspbian to debian proper. While this is a neat idea, I still wanted to get some raspbian specific packages (like the kernel) but wanted to be sure that everything else comes from debian. So I did some apt pinning. First I experienced that pinning is not sufficient so when updating source.list with plain debian Jessie, make sure to add theses lines before the raspbian lines: 
# add official debian jessie (real armhf gcc)
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ jessie main
deb http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ jessie/updates main
deb http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main
deb-src http://ftp.fr.debian.org/debian/ jessie-updates main
Then run the following to get the debian gpg keys, but don t yet upgrade your system: 
apt update
apt install debian-archive-keyring
Now, let s add the pinning.
First if you were using APT::Default-Release "stable"; in your apt.conf (as I did) remove it. It does not mix well with fine grained pinning we will then implement. Then, fill your /etc/apt/preferences file with the following: 
# Debian
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable,n=jessie
Pin-Priority: 700
# Raspbian
Package: *
Pin: release o=Raspbian,a=stable,n=jessie
Pin-Priority: 600
Package: *
Pin: release o=Raspberry Pi Foundation,a=stable,n=jessie
Pin-Priority: 600
# Mono
Package: *
Pin: release v=7.0,o=Xamarin,a=stable,n=wheezy,l=Xamarin-Stable,c=main
Pin-Priority: 800
Note: You can use apt-cache policy (no parameter) to debug pinning.
The pinning above is mainly based on the origin field of the repositories (o=)
Finally you can upgrade your system: 
apt update 
apt-cache policy gcc 
rm /var/cache/apt/archives/* 
apt upgrade 
apt-cache policy gcc
Note: Removing the cache ensure we download the packages from debian as raspbian is using the exact same naming but we now they are not compiled with a real armhf tool-chain. Second issue with gcc The build stopped on recipe for target 's-attrtab' failed. There are many references on the web, that one was easy, it just need more memory, so I added some swap on the external SSD I was already using to work on buildroot. Conclusion That s it for today, not bad considering my last post was more that 3 years ago

3 July 2016

Joey Hess: Hacker Holler

A quiet place in which to get away and code is all I was looking for when I moved here. I found much more, but that's still the essence of the place. On returning home from the beach, I've just learned that after several years renting this house, I will soon have to leave, or buy it. The house is an EarthShip, tucked away in its own private holler (as we say here in the Appalachian Mtns of Tennessee), below a mountain that is National Forest, two miles down back roads from a river. A wonderful place to relax and code, but developing only free software for twenty years doesn't quite stretch to being able to afford buying this kind of place. But, I got to thinking of times friends were able to visit me here. Grilling over wood fires with friends from Debian. Steep hikes and river swims. Sharing dialup bandwidth between our Linux laptops. A bunch of us discussing Haskell in the living room at midnight. And too, I've many times talked about the place with someone who got a gleam in their eye, imagining themselves living there. And then there's my Yurt, my relief valve before I moved here. And a great spot I like to visit on an old logging road above a creek. Could we put all this together somehow? Might a handful of my friends be able to contribute somewhere in the range of $10 thousand to buy in? Interested? Want more details? Have ideas?
Visit the Hacker Holler website and get in touch. (Limited to folks I've met in person or spent a lot of time online with.)

6 July 2015

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Apport Integration with Debian - GSoC Update

For this year's Google Summer of Code, I have been mentoring Yuru Roy Shao, on Integrating Apport with Debian. Yuru is a CS student studying at University of Michigan, USA completing his PhD. For around 2+ years, Apport was packaged for Debian, but remained in Experimental. While we did have a separate (Debian BTS aware) crashdb, the general concerns (bug spam, too many duplicates etc) were the reason we held its inclusion. With this GSoC, Yuru has been bringing some of the missing integration pieces of Debian. For example, we are now using debianbts to to talk to the Debian BTS Server, and fetch bug reports for the user. While apport's Bug Report data collection itself is very comprehensive, still for Debian, it will have the option to use native as well as reportbug. This will allow us to use the many hooks people have integrated so far with reportbug. Both Bug Report data collectors will be available. Yuru has blogged about his GSoC progress so far, here. Please do have a read, and let us know your views. If the travel formalities work out well, I intend to attend Debconf this year, and can talk in more detail.

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23 August 2014

Joachim Breitner: This blog goes static

After a bit more than 9 years, I am replacing Serendipity, which as been hosting my blog, by a self-made static solution. This means that when you are reading this, my server no longer has to execute some rather large body of untyped code to produce the bytes sent to you. Instead, that happens once in a while on my laptop, and they are stored as static files on the server. I hope to get a little performance boost from this, so that my site can more easily hold up to being mentioned on hackernews. I also do not want to worry about security issues in Serendipity static files are not hacked. Of course there are down-sides to having a static blog. The editing is a bit more annoying: I need to use my laptop (previously I could post from anywhere) and I edit text files instead of using a JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor (but I was slightly annoyed by that as well). But most importantly your readers cannot comment on static pages. There are cloud-based solutions that integrate commenting via JavaScript on your static pages, but I decided to go for something even more low-level: You can comment by writing an e-mail to me, and I ll put your comment on the page. This has the nice benefit of solving the blog comment spam problem. The actual implementation of the blog is rather masochistic, as my web page runs on one of these weird obfuscated languages (XSLT). Previously, it contained of XSLT stylesheets producing makefiles calling XSLT sheets. Now it is a bit more-self-contained, with one XSLT stylesheet writing out all the various html and rss files. I managed to import all my old posts and comments thanks to this script by Michael Hamann (I had played around with this some months ago and just spend what seemed to be an hour to me to find this script again) and a small Haskell script. Old URLs are rewritten (using mod_rewrite) to the new paths, but feed readers might still be confused by this. This opens the door to a long due re-design of my webpage. But not today...

8 June 2013

Benjamin Mako Hill: London and Michigan

I ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know! Starting June 24th, I ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen. I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

13 September 2012

Gunnar Wolf: Great online course available: Securing Digital Democracy , by J. Alex Halderman

I was pointed at a great online course If you are into e-voting analysis (or, more broadly, into democratic processes' history, evolution and future), I strongly suggest you to take a look at Securing Digital Democracy . Just the name of the teacher should be enough to make it interesting: University of Michigan professor J. Alex Halderman, the guy who has analized/hacked several electronic booths, and one of the clearest, smartest voices to explain what should we require of a voting system and how electronic booths are the worst fit for any purpose. The course is delivered through Coursera; I have found Coursera to be an effective, usable, unobtrusive platform So much I even signed up for another course. I am not so happy with online courses requiring to wait so much between lessons, but after all, it tries to mimic what we see at "regular" (i.e. classroom) teaching settings. And, after all, we autodidacts are still a minority. The course in question started ten days ago, but you can still perfectly join. Each week has two lessons, worth of approximately 40 minutes of video each, and are "graded" through a quiz. Lets see how this evolves.

17 September 2011

Andrew Pollock: [life/americania] Whirlwind visit to the Windy City

Our friend Susan was going to be in Chicago for a conference, and as we hadn't seen Chicago yet, and it was on the list of cities we wanted to visit, we made the semi-spur of the moment decision to have a three day weekend there last weekend. We got the Virgin America red-eye flight from SFO, which left on Friday at around 5pm, and got into Chicago at around 11:30pm, local time. Zoe didn't do as well as she has previously, and didn't sleep very well on the flight over, despite us getting lucky and scoring an empty seat between us on an otherwise fairly full flight. I think she's getting too big to comfortably sleep in the Ergo baby carrier (or isn't keen on sleeping vertically any more). We stayed at the Swissotel, because that was where Susan was staying (and was where her conference was) and nearby hotels seemed to be around the same price range. When we checked in, we let them talk us into an upgrade to a larger room, which had fantastic views of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. Lake Michigan is just mind-bogglingly big. It's an inland sea. What can I say? I was totally in love with Chicago. The weather while we were there was unbelievable. Clear skies. High 20's (Celsius). It was more humid than the Bay Area, but less humid than Brisbane. The first thing we did on Saturday was go visit a friend of Sarah's who lived in Bryn Mawr. We took the "L" there. The elevated train was an interesting affair, and turned out to be less accessible than we'd been led to believe from some light research in advance. In fact, I found Chicago in general to be fairly wheelchair (and by extension, stroller) unfriendly. We had to lug Zoe's stroller up and down stairs quite a bit to get from the river level to where the hotel was. Zoe seemed to find it amusing, at least. Aside from that problem, the city seemed pretty flat. I'm really glad that we got out of the city and into Bryn Mawr, because it was really great to see that aspect of Chicago life as well. Lovely, quiet, tree-lined streets with wide sidewalks. Beautiful buildings. Sarah's friend was fostering 8 kittens, so Zoe got to have a play with all of them, which she thought was pretty cool. After we returned to the city, Sarah and I kicked back in Millennium Park while Zoe napped in the stroller. Saturday, being 9/10/11 in US date format, seemed to be particularly popular for weddings, and there were a lot of couples getting wedding photos taken in the park. That night, we tried to have some deep dish pizza at Uno, the home of deep dish pizza, but the line was ridiculous. We subsequently learned about Due, and went there the following night. The pizza was good, and I found the crust to be slightly different from what we'd get at Patxi's. We checked out the Navy Pier on both Sunday and Monday, taking Zoe to the Chicago Children's Museum both days (we got free entry thanks to our membership at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose). We had grand plans of checking out the Shedd Aquarium, but it turned out that Monday was a "free for all Illinois residents" day, and the line at 11am was ridiculous, so we gave it a miss and took at water taxi back to Navy Pier. It was Zoe's first boat ride, and she enjoyed it. I got some unbelievably good photos of the city skyline from the boat. Our flight out was at 7pm, so we took the train to Midway. I was very impressed that we could get all the way to the airport by train for the standard price. I love flat-rate fares. I really love a city with good mass public transit. The only thing that detracted from this in Chicago was the accessibility issues. We explicitly went to the Orange Line Clarke/Lake station to go to Midway because it was listed as being wheelchair accessible, and we had a stroller and a suitcase. We ended up going up to the wrong platform, and getting across to the other side was a bit of a mission. We'd entered the station from the street level, took the elevator up, and then realised we were on the wrong side. We had to go back down the elevator to the level below the street, cross the street from underneath it, and then go back up the elevator on the other side. Aside from these sorts of shenanigans, the whole elevated train thing was pretty cool (but I wouldn't have wanted to have an apartment with the train line right outside my window). If only the cars had glass roofs, the Loop would have been a lot more scenic. Overall, it'd be hard to say whether I liked Chicago or New York City better. I liked the clean, flat nature of Chicago, the architecture and the lower density of buildings, but I also really love New York just because it's New York, and has an awesome (probably equally stroller-unfriendly) subway system. Photos from the trip are here.

31 October 2010

Debian News: New Debian Developers (November 2010)

The following developers got their Debian accounts in the last month: Congratulations!

12 September 2010

Theodore Ts'o: Moderate Muslims need a better PR Agency

There has been much made of recent reports that roughly half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam. And as usual, there are those who will try to claim that Muslims really aren t all that bad, and that Sharia is just set of nice, abstract principles which are all about the protection of life, family, education, religion, property, and human dignity. And on the other side, we have people pointing out that using Sharias as justification, there are countries which are stoning women and chopping off poor people s hands and then forbidding Muslims from arguing about whether such things are just. Worst yet, some of the more public moderate Muslims , such as Iman Rauf, refuse to criticize organizations such as Hamas, on the ground that he is a bridge builder , and it wouldn t help to criticize Hamas s terrorist activities as being anti-Isalmic. OK, so let s grant for the sake of argument the claims that Shariah really is far more than just criminal sanctions, but mainly about exhorting people to live a moral life, and that of the 1,081 pages of the two-volume Arabic text which Sherman A. Jackson (the Arthur F. Thurnau Prfessor of Arabic and Isalamic Studies at the University of Michigan) used to study Shariah, only 60 pages were devoted to criminal sanctions (i.e., the stoning and the cutting off of hands), and only 19 were devoted to Jihad. Let s even further grant the claims made by Humaira Awais Shahid that most Muslims reject Political Islam and are not even arabs. OK. But that case, wouldn t there be more Imans publically disavowing the people who advocate terrorism and suicide bombs as not being Islamic? Not all of them are bridge-builders, are they? And if so, some of them might be better deployed towards saying what Islam is not, and saying that perhaps people who espouse those beliefs are being profoundly unIslamic and saying this loudly outside of their Mosques. Oh, I understand that many Muslims feel that they shouldn t be asked to repudiate the sins of a few crazy terrorists ; just as all Christians shouldn t be held accountable for disturbed crazy rants of a small-time pastor from Gainsville, Florida. But at the same time, it seems to me that Islamic leaders should be eager to say, loudly, that what is being done in the name of their religion in Iran and Nigeria is wrong, and to denounce it. Maybe, some would say, that they are doing that and the media isn t paying attention to them. Well, the Media is surely paying attention to people like Iman Rauf, and he refuses to denounce Hamas! I would gently suggest to those Islamic leaders who feel that they and their faith haven t been given a fair shake, to hire a better PR agency; and make sure that active denunciations of that which they claim does not represent true Islam is shouted from the rooftops; published in press releases; made in press conferences. And actively denounce your fellow Muslims that you feel are shaming your religion, instead of complaining about American Islamophobia. Trying to pretend that there is absolutely no truth in why Americans might be afraid of terrorists who have been hiding under the mantle of your religion is not going to help your cause. There may be truth in the fact that many Americans don t know as much as they should about Islam and Shariah. And there may be truth that American unswerving support of Israel, despite the fact that they acted in profound and unjust ways against the Palestinians, is not only morally and ethically wrong, but has hurt American interests. I certainly believe that to be to true; I am no friend to fundamentalists of any stripe, whether they are Christian, Jewish, or Islamic; and I think the Jewish fundamentalists have almost completely taken over the Israeli political discourse. But all of that is irrelevant if the goal is reduce people e negative views towards Islam. And in any case, if you really believe that attacking innocents, and coercing religion by threatening Muslims who have fallen away from their faith with the death penalty is wrong, then it s wrong regardless of whether those innocents happened to vote for politicians who have been influenced by way too much money from AIPAC. So instead of trying to lecture Americans about their uncritical support of Israel, why not just stand witness to the fact that killing innocents is wrong, and that people who do that are not Islamic, no matter what they claim or how impressive their turban might happen to be? And maybe it might be a good idea to speak out against those who would lend support, whether moral, or financial or logistical, to people who do these unIslamic things in the name of Islam? And it may not be enough to say it once; it needs to be said again and again. Which is why it s important to hire a good PR agency. No related posts.

10 July 2010

John Goerzen: Radios

Those of you that follow me on twitter or identi.ca know that I ve been working on my amateur radio license. This started a few weeks ago when Jacob got excited about radios, and must have infected me too. I ve been studying and learning a bit. I had called a local ham (amateur radio operator) I know from church. He gave me one of his apparently newer radios, a 1981 2m Icom IC-22U 10W unit. That was great and got me all the more interested. Then last Friday, a couple of local hams came over to check out that radio and see what repeaters I could hit with it. They discovered a handheld 5W unit could hit at least one local repeater, and this 10W unit could too. One of them also had an HF rig in his pickup, and it was fun to stand out in the driveway and listen to conversations in Michigan and Utah. That evening erased any doubt in my mind about whether or not I would become a ham and it s a bit hard to believe it was only a week ago. I had been studying for the Technician-class amateur radio license, the lowest of three levels of licensing. One of the guys that came over Friday gave me a book to study for the General license, the intermediate level. It warned me to allow a month to prepare, and here I was planning to take the exams Tuesday. I picked it up Sunday, so really got 2 days of studying in. Tuesday I drove to Independence, KS, about 2.5 hours away for the exams. I went so far primarily because the Wichita exams weren t going to be offered until mid-August and I didn t want to wait that long. I found a fun group of people in Independence. I hadn t expected to have fun taking exams, but really, I did. We visited before the exams, and they wanted to know where I was from, of course. When it was time to take the exams, I guess I sort of surprised them by already having my FRN (FCC registration number) and photo copies of my IDs with me. One of them said, You re going to have no trouble with this, are you? I took the Technician exam, checked my work carefully, and turned it in to be graded. They checked it twice and had two people looking over it before they announced I passed with all 35 questions correct. I should note at this point that I was the only person taking the exams that night. Anyhow, on to the General exam. Same drill. It was harder, of course, and I turned it in to be graded. One of them looked at the test, looked at me, put on a grave face and said, Uh oh, not one right. I knew he was joking and they announced I passed THAT one with 100% correct as well. I hadn t expected that, and neither had they. That was what I planned to do, but they said that nobody had ever walked in, taken two tests, and had a score like that and pretty much insisted I try taking the Amateur Extra exam as well. I said I haven t studied for it at all and really doubt I could pass, but eventually went ahead and took that one too. I didn t pass, but I don t think they d have wanted to let me leave without trying. After the paperwork was done, they invited me to hang around and chat with their group that was meeting next door for a bit. I did, and drove home. Then was the frustrating part of the week: waiting for my license. I can t transmit until the FCC issues my license, even though I had passed the exam. My handheld radio arrived later in the week, and of course I still couldn t do much with it. Finally the FCC posted my license late yesterday so I was able to talk to people. It s been fun and I look forward to doing more. I was able to talk to people 55 miles away while driving, and with suitable equipment at home should be able to do much more than that. Several of the people I talked to were offering me tips. I ve never seen a group of people so eager to help out someone new. It s an amazing community and I think Jacob and Oliver will enjoy it one day too.

11 October 2009

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Chicago Marathon 2009

Earlier today the 33rd Chicago Marathon was held. I will organise my comments by pointing out three epic fails. First, of course, was the Chicago weather. After two successive marathon in excessive heat --- the 2007 race I completed, poorly, with its thousands of runners forced to abandon when the race was cancelled due to excessive heat, and the 2008 version which I skipped as I ran Berlin that year just weeks before Chicago, this year had forecasts of temperatures in the thirties and possibly snow the night before. Well, the weather cleared up -- but with those clear skies we still got a severe weather alert for the area due to frost! So at the (now earlier by 30 minutes) race start, it was very nippy and in the higher 30s, improving steadily under sunny skies. Overall, a little chilly and hence not exactly ideal, but not too bad in the grand scheme of things. A little windy coming up Michigan Avenue. But hey, Wanjiru still finished with a course record though still well off the world record. So maybe not a fail after all. The second fail, though, was my GPS which I had just blogged about yesterday (albeit indirectly). I had had my issues with the previous (much simpler and older) Forerunner 205 which lost satellite tracking when running downtown amidst the skyscrapers. I had high hopes that this newer model would do better. But no, not only did it loose track within the first few miles, it even managed to outdo the older model by turning its GPS tracking off in the later stages. Now that's a fail! The third and final fail, unfortunately, concerns my run. Training had gone well enough to let me hope for another decent race. However, a latent cold during the last two weeks had left me somewhat afraid I might not do well. Things felt better yesterday, and I ended up running a decent first eighteen miles to the waterstop the rest of my household was working. And thereafter: well let's just say that the wheels came off. I ended up with a 3:25:40 (or around 7:51 min/mile and 4:53 min/km) which is not terrible but also not one of my better races. I updated the two race data geekery charts shown here before to illustrate the fail. As I am running out of shades of blue for Chicago, I show the 2009 race in purple. A decent, flat chat indicating a reasonably steady pace throughout most of the race ... followed by one of the very worst finished. And as discussed above, I cannot really blame the weather either. (updated marathon pace comparison chart) I also updated my 'performance by race type through time' chart which suggests that I may be getting slower for marathons (if we allow for a non-linear effect). Eek. (pace by date given group lattice chart)

2 May 2009

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Brad Mehldau at the CSO

Just got home from a wonderful concert by Brad Mehldau at the CSO. This was long overdue as I kept reading about Mehldau. And even though he performs quite regularly around here, I had never seen him. Big mistake. The first set was performed as a (strictly acoustic) trio with Larry Grenadier on bass and Jeff Ballard on drums. After several compositions by Mehldau and a brazilian samba piece, the first set closed with a rendition of 'Holland' from Sufjan Stevens' album Michigan which was truly beautiful. The second set had Mehldau performing solo, again with several compositions of his own as well as one from Neil Young's classic 'The Needle and the Damage Done' leading two two pieces from the Sound of Music including an amazing, yet really different 'My favourite things' that just hushed a piece of the central melody along with a strond rhythmic element. Lovely. And then to cap it all off, four encores. Highly recommended.

14 April 2009

Michael Schutte: Chain of unfortunate events

I did some work on kbd today. I basically took an old Debian patch, the only significant divergence from the original tarball, and altered it in a way that I can read and understand it more easily (so I can send it upstream in good conscience). This process naturally involved a lot of errors. As I m talking about loadkeys here, they became unpleasantly obvious whenever I tested my code: First I messed up everything but plain printable ASCII characters (so the return key was mapped to Unicode U+0201 instead of the correct K(0x02, 0x01)), then I managed to completely freeze everything. In both cases, Alt+F7 was affected by the damage. Just like Ctrl+Alt+Del. Time for the good old boring elephants. I learn from mistakes when I make them twice, so a while sleep 60; do chvt 7; done loop saved me from further reboots. I nuked /dev/tty1 once more (in the really cool, irreversible way that disables all keypresses), but I could move on to the next VT. After a final adjustment, my modified patch finally worked. I sent it upstream, forgot about the troublesome debugging and went on to something else. Later in the evening, I decided to end the last school holidays in my life with a bit of instant messaging. BitlBee, a Jabber IRC gateway, is running on my virtual private server for this purpose. Being the occasional chatter that I am, I haven t touched it since the recent upgrade to Lenny. The format of its account configuration files has apparently changed, so I started to set up BitlBee anew. It kept telling me that there is an Authentication failure ; given the peculiar setup of the XMPP server I use, this didn t really surprise me. But still, this thing had worked before. Perhaps I really got my password wrong? I haven t typed it for ages, BitlBee stored it for me. As the administrator of my Jabber server, I could easily reset my password to what I thought it was. BitlBee still refused to get past the identification stage. I decided to install Gajim, entered my account information and told it to connect. Gnah. One or the other Python exception caused an eternal stream of error dialogue boxes to appear simultaneously and steal my focus. I don t have a keyboard shortcut for xkill and I couldn t type anything in a Urxvt (error message #54321 would receive the keystrokes). Ctrl+Alt+F1, get me out of here! Oh, right, I broke that one! At that point, I burst into a laugh. Somewhere in this post, there are a few bugs to report.

17 March 2009

Daniel Kahn Gillmor: Publicly-funded knowledge should be public

I live in the USA. Our government issues many grants to scientists for research via the National Institute of Health. I recently found out about the NIH's recent requirement that publicly-funded research must be published freely online within 12 months. As you can imagine, i think this is a remarkably Good Thing (though 12 months seems a little bit long for fast-moving fields). Apparently, John Conyers and several co-sponsors have introduced HR 801, which appears intended to overturn this remarkable policy, primarily for the benefit of the companies that publish scientific journals. This bill is a shame, and i had hoped for better from Rep. Conyers, who otherwise has a remarkably positive record as a legislator advocating for government transparency and the public good. Sadly, his stance on so-called "Intellectual Property" seems characterized by heavy-handed legislation designed to benefit the parties already heavily favored by the current imbalanced copyright situation. If you live in the US (and especially if you live in Conyers' district in Michigan), please send him e-mail or get in touch by phone and tell him to drop the bill. You might also check the list of cosponsors to see if one of them is more local to you. If you want to read more, Lawrence Lessig has written about this issue, addressing Congressman Conyers directly in the Huffington Post. Curiously, Rep. Conyers' web site contains no mention of HR 801.Tags: policy

20 January 2009

Obey Arthur Liu: Debian Summer of Code 08 : Where are they now (part 1/3)

It s been a while now since the 2008 Summer of Code ended. This year, twelve (?) projects were selected. That s twelve students working full time on a Debian-related project during the summer. The Google Summer of Code has sometimes been criticized in the past for having a poor student-developer retention rate inside the host projects. One of the goals of the program has always been to bring new people to budding or established free software organizations and it s a pity that some would leave the project as soon as the program ends. On the other end, poor integration of created code within the project leads to work that is hard to merge in, or worse, doesn t get merged in at all. That s a waste of time and resources and a probably cause of global warming as well. Hopefully, it s not always the case. Some people choose to stay committed within the organization in the long-term. Useful code gets merged in and pushed to the public. I am going to give a talk about this at FOSDEM (go to FOSDEM!) so I m giving you a little preview. I need your help to collect information for my talk. As you know, information is always hard to come by with these kinds of projects so anything can be useful. Without further ado, let s have a look at the cast of the Debian Google Summer of Code 2008: Netconf, a network configuration management system Presentation Netconf is a network configuration management system designed with modern network infrastructures and the needs of roaming users in mind. It is a personal project of Martin Krafft that he started in 2007. He did some presentations about it that you can find on the dev website. The project proposal was introduced by the mentor. The work was mainly about completing the roadmap items for version 1.0. Most of the design was done and code fleshed out. The stated goal was to have netconf ready for lenny. Martin noted that due to lack of regular free time, he couldn t reach that goal by himself. Student Jonathan Roes was a computer science graduate student from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He had programming experience as a hobby for a long time and wrote some free games and libraries for the Nintendo DS and some proprietary webapps. He submitted a few little patches in mid-march right after the publication of accepted mentoring organizations and went on to work from mid-may to mid-august. He wrote a lot of code right into the trunk since the whole project was a prototype. Result The last commit by Jonathan was also the last to date in the main netconf git repository. No further progress has been made and obviously netconf didn t get into lenny. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Jonathan within Debian. The ultimate Debian database, all things Debian in a SQL database Presentation The Ultimate Debian database wants to reunite all Debian data sources in a SQL database The project was mentored by Lucas Nussbaum and co-mentored by Stefano Zacchiroli and Marc HE Brockschmidt. The project proposal was introduced by Lucas. Student Christian Neronus Von Essen is.. well, there wasn t much information readily available on him. Result The whole project is coded up and working well with a whole bunch of data sources. There will be a talk at FOSDEM about this so I ll leave it to Lucas to talk about it in detail. I couldn t find any further public involvement of Christian within Debian. Security-beta, a beta testing for Debian security updates Presentation The task is to improve the quality assurance process for security updates by providing a public security update beta test program in addition to the existing QA done for security updates. During the preparation of security updates, there s an inherent delay between the initial upload of the fixed packages and the time until the packages have been built on porter machines. This time gap will be used for a new security update beta program. The project was supposed to be mentored by Moritz M hlenhoff. Student The project was supposed to be done by Nico Nion Golde. He is studying computer sciences at the Technical University of Berlin. He s also a DD. Result There s no nothing. Nico, what happened ? And obviously, he s still developing for Debian. Debgraph, a generic infrastructure for the development of packages management tools Presentation In a large software ecosystem such as Debian Linux, there is the potential for dependencies among software packages to create complex management and technical problems. For example, dependency loops (cycles) in which a package directly or indirectly depends on itself can confuse package management tools as they determine the proper order of package installation. debgraph helps developers to solve this problem by enabling generic queries (e.g., Give me all the nodes that depend on package X ) against the graph of packages and thus automating much of the manual labor that is typically involved in resolving dependency problems. The project was mentored by Robert Lemmen, who introduced the project proposal. The project was already started and the C++ code foundation was done by the time it was proposed. Student The project was executed by Adam Jensen, research assistant in the Software Engineering and Network Systems Laboratory at Michigan State University. Result Adam maintained a blog about his progress and finished ahead of schedule. However, the resulting work seems to be unused, which is a pity since the code could be used within other programs (package managers?). I couldn t find any further public involvement of Adam within Debian.
That s all for now. The information is quite fragmented I admit. Most of it was pulled from Google, mailing lists, commit logs, blogs, whatever. If some projects are lacking in information here, it s because I couldn t find it readily (which is an issue in itself!). In my next post, I ll try to analyze the success and failures to extract some insight. Teaser: pet projects!
 If you re a student or a mentor mentioned above, feel free to fill any of the blanks in my report. It s much appreciated. You re not a student or mentor mentioned above and have an opinion on how to improve the next Debian Summer of Code ? Feel free to comment.
Sledge, ping! Here s a list of projects to be described in my next posts:

10 January 2009

Michael Schutte: Re: Nice(r) console fonts

Bastian, You could also have a look at console-setup. In your case, installing it would be sufficient to get the desired result: it depends on console-terminus and uses it in its default configuration. Another benefit is ckbcomp, an xkbcomp clone for the console which is absolutely cool if you use some obscure keyboard layout which doesn t come with an up-to-date Linux console keymap. Just dpkg-reconfigure (or set XKBLAYOUT and friends in /etc/default/console-setup) and let the setupcon script do everything for you.

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