For anybody that doesn't know - Ken Starks is the man behind the Helios Project - recycling computers, putting Linux on them, donating them to youngsters and the needy in Austin Texas.

He has a cancer diagnosis but his disability pension is enough to defeat his state provided insurance. Now he himself needs the help of the community.

More details here: http://linuxlock.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/something-ive-been-putting-off-all-day.html and his partner's post above.

and here: Thomas A. Knight, who is setting up donations.

http://thomasaknight.com/blog.php?id=71

UPDATE:

There is now also a donate button at the Blog of Helios (linuxlock.blogspot.com).

Enough has been raised so far to buy Ken an appropriate monitor - because of the effects of radiotherapy, he's been unable to tolerate using a monitor with backlighting.

One donor has also stepped in to buy a month's drug treatment.

The initial target -US $5000 - has been met but The cost of an operating theatre session is at least US $50,000. All donations continue to be gratefully received.

Should efforts for raising funds for Ken himself be unsuccessful, all surplus funds raised will be ploughed back into the Helios Project (now known as Reglue following a recent merger with another local computer charity).

The Helios Project has been associated with Software in the Public Interest [SPI - also the umbrella organisation supporting Debian] for some years.

UPDATE2 - From Thomas A. Knight's blog referenced above:

By Thomas A. Knight on Sun 19 Aug 2012 07:33:49 am $11,000 so far, and still going strong. The outpouring of support for this is amazing. My most humble thanks to all contributors.

Even though we are still far from our goal, this has been far more successful than I ever thought possible. Thank you.

UPDATE3 - From Ken Starks, Sunday 26 August 2012

The amount of money needed has been raised. Donations to Helios Project/Reglue are welcome, as ever - but Ken's immediate needs are satisfactorily met and he himself doesn't wish to profit further from the community's goodwill. As he says, he can't thank us enough
More news at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com is due on 27/08/2012

Svalbard The things you find when cleaning out a disk; preparing for re-installation of your laptop on a larger disk once the laptop comes back from repair... I thought I had posted this in early January, but apparently not. As it would be a shame to just throw this away, here goes: I am sitting in the Oslo airport, waiting for boarding back home to start. Seeing the sun after a week of darkness still feels strange. Inital trouble It's been a very interesting week, starting with our trip to Oslo in the other direction. We spent New Year's Eve in Oslo, timing our forced overnight stay before reaching Svalbard to coincide with something interesting. The close timing of our travel meant that there was exactly one flight to Oslo we could take. Never having heard of Air Baltic before and finding out that they are a discount airline, my gut feeling told me to be be wary. I refuse to fly with those airlines on principle, not wanting to support their business model while hurting airlines with decent treatment of customers. Unfortunately, I was forced to book with them in this case. As it turns out, my gut was right. More on that below. Our plane was late in landing and my luggage was lost. As it was New Year's Eve, the staff at Oslo airport understandably wanted to be home, not at work. Still, getting them to file a report was tedious and finding out days later that the report was incomplete was, well, not good. The express train from the airport to Oslo central station had closed early without any advance notice or local signs, presumably because of NYE. The gates were simply closed and that's that. We figured out how the bus system worked, got our tickets from a vending machine, saw the one bus to central station drive away, and proceeded to wait in the outside waiting area; at least we had a front spot in the queue. While we don't get cold easily, it was funny to see Norwegians in thin clothes stand around in the biting wind, apparently being comfortable. A young mother with a baby, who didn't anticipate being forced to wait outside at -15C, as opposed to just sitting down in a train, had no warm clothes for her son; something that was fixed by wrapping him in spare clothes from Ilona's luggage. After waiting for about thirty minutes for the next bus to appear, it parked twenty or thirty meters away from the designated parking spot. The rough queue disintegrated and if not for Ilona's leaving me with luggage and backpacks and storming off to fight the masses, said mother with baby and ourselves would have waited for another thirty minutes. More than hundred people were left stranded at the airport to celebrate there or on the bus. Meh. We hurried, by taxi, from central station to hotel to harbour and arrived about five minutes to twelve. NYE itself was nice. We stood on top of the opera house and watched a rather impressive show of fireworks through the thickening mists. Norwegian fireworks pack lot more punch than German ones; you actually feel your clothes shake when they go off. Getting to Longyearbyen The flight from Troms to Longyearbyen had free in-flight Wi-Fi and flying over the edge of satellite coverage demonstrated how far we were from everywhere else rather impressively. Arriving at Longyearbyen, I fixed the lost luggage claim with the help of an extremely nice woman working at the airport. She confirmed that Air Baltic is legally required to reimburse me after an arcane system based on a virtual IMF currency to the tune of about 1.500. That may sound like a lot, but seeing as I had most of my scuba gear with me, that's not even half of what my luggage was worth. I was forced to get by New Years with what I had on my body and went shopping the next day when I could buy at least a few things. I got by with spending about 180 by going for non-fitting bargain bin clothes, wanting to reduce impact on Air Baltic. Shortly after that, my luggage arrived, unannounced. Air Baltic refused to reimburse me even though they are legally required to, again the airport staff confirmed this. But unless I sue in the country of destination, Norway, I won't see any money. Long story short: Avoid Air Baltic if possible. They will break the law to cheat you out of money when they have a reasonable expectation of getting away with it. Update: Yep, seems they got away with it unless I take legal measures. You have been warned. Longyearbyen itself was very nice. We started off with a short, guided taxi tour around the city, seeing literally everything of it as there's not a lot of Longyearbyen to start with. Dogsledding Next day, as noted earlier, we went shopping and spent the "evening" with dogsledding which turned out to be tons of fun. We helped with harnessing the dogs which is somewhat cumbersome as the dogs are so eager to burn off their energy that they want to run all over the place, not being put into a harness and snapped onto the pull-line. Never having been dogsledding before I was a bit wary, but riding over not too rough terrain is almost trivial once you get the hang of it; listen to what the musher in front of you yells and emulate the same shouts with your own dogs. If the dogs become too fast, step onto the brake pad which simply drives spikes into the snow. If the dogs slow down while going uphill, skate with one foot to help them. That's it for speed. As the dogs are following the musher's sled anyway, steering the dogs was not a concern. Fun fact: The musher used a laser pointer to steer his dogs; simple, efficient, and presumably fun. We learned, by demonstration, that sledding dogs can eat snow, take a leak, and take a dump while running at full speed and pretty much all at the same time. The dogs are left either in cages or on long chains far away from the city as they tend to bark and howl a lot. We were surprised to learn that, even when there are seals left to hang dry as dog food nearby, there are no problems with bear attacks. Apparently even the extremely aggressive and hungry one year old males will not go near dogs. Still, while out in the ice and snow, our guide carefully flooded all crevices and cliff bases to root out female bears with young ones early. They hide their children from the wind and they will attack, dogs and all, if we get too close. That's why our musher carried rifle in his sled and flare gun on his body. Snowmobile The next "morning", we drove around by snowmobile. This turned out to be extremely boring as it was a curated trip with over half a dozen snowmobiles in our group; a stark contrast to our two-sled tour the day before. The last time I went snowmobiling, we raced each other up and down a two-star black (i.e. steep, bumpy, and curvy) ski slope, jumping several meters when racing over larger bumps and crossing streets, so riding single file at 30 km/h was... anticlimatic. Again, the guide had rifle and flare gun with him. We spent the afternoon and evening walking around the city. Ice bears, part I As the ice caves and the glacier were still closed, we decided to have another walk around the city. Having planned make it a quick tour, we lost track of time due to lack of sun and ended up walking around for seven hours. A note about that trip.. If you are alone with your wife, unarmed, climbing up a very steep and slippery mountainside over a sheet of ice with deep snow underneath and loose rocks in between, and then start shining around with your flashlight under the stilts of an abandoned mine that looks like in a horror movie, the correct answer to "What are you doing?" is never ever "Looking for ice bears". Even if it's the truth, this is not an acceptable answer. I crawled up the last part on all fours, camera and tripod in hand while Ilona stayed about two dozen meters below the mines' entrance, refusing to go another step towards the mine. As soon I made it up the creaky and shaky, for a lack of a better word, let's call it ladder, she forced me to come down again. Bleh, but I guess I deserved that. Armed photographer Next day, we got final confirmation that we would not be allowed to rent snowmobiles to explore the hinterland on our own and that other for some, and I quote, "crazy Russians", no one would even attempt to cross over to Barentsburg. Thus, we ended up renting a car for the ~20 kilometers of total road length. That turned out to be a great idea as it allowed us to get away from the light and take some very nice long exposures. It was then that I got a rental rifle, as well. There is a law against leaving the town unarmed and I was not about to test my luck too much. Turns out that, as part of Germany's WWII reparations, Norway received our all hand guns and as they still function perfectly when dirty and in cold climate which makes them still popular in Svalbard, today. The Karabiner 98 Kurz which I received is built incredibly well. It's somewhat scary inasmuch every detail is designed to make this weapon ready to fire. If you hurry or are inexperienced, you will end up with an unlocked and loaded rifle after putting in the bolt. Putting the safety in and not chambering a bullet takes conscious effort and knowledge of the weapon. This is in stark contrast to other weapons I had the chance to dissect, which all defaulted to being safe. Even other military weapons such as the AK74 and the M4A1 are inherently more secure, designed to be locked and safe. The Mauser K98... not so much. As an aside, they didn't bother to remove the Reichsadler and Swastika from the rifle, contending themselves with striking out the German registration number and stamping the rifle with a Norwegian one. I guess Norwegians don't really "care" about these signs as much as we Germans do. In a way, that's a good thing I guess, at least as long as it's an indication of indifference towards the sign, not one of forgetting or ignoring the underlying issues. Still, I was very glad to have rented the rifle. While Ilona tended to stay in the running car with heat and lights on, I went out and away from the car. Even when standing near a street, a medium snow storm will make you appreciate the four powerful arguments against being eaten by a random bear which are at the ready over your shoulder. We even went to the shooting range so I could get some practice. The procedure is very trusting, as is anything in Longyearbyen. After accessing the interior of one of the houses in a particular way which I won't specify here, you simply switch on the floodlights, put up the red flag, position a target and write your name into the guest book. Once you're done shooting, toss a few coins into the bowl next to the guest book, remove the targets and flag, turn off the lights, close the door and that's that. Unfortunately, the way in was under a few meters of snow so I couldn't get in any practice shots. Ice bears, part II Later, as I was standing on a wind-polished slate of ice taking pictures of the Seed Vault (located here), I heard an ice bear roar behind (i.e. to the north of) me. I consciously remember hearing the bear, I consciously remember facing the other way around, half-crouched, rifle raised in the direction of the roar. I also consciously remember smacking the safety off and chambering a bullet after having regained control of my body. I do not remember spinning around on a wind-polished slate of ice, so treacherous I hand to balance with my arms and didn't even lift my feet when walking over it, without losing balance or footing, nor do I remember crouching and raising the gun. Evolution really is amazing; no matter what primal chord that roar struck, it certainly saved a ton of people over the years. In my case, thankfully, there was no bear to be seen down the slope. There may be no sun or anything, but the snow reflects the starlight so you tend to see surprisingly far and as I was on on the mountainside and the roar came from down from the coast, and as I had my rifle, I decided to finish the photo session while keeping the slope in close view. In hindsight, I am still glad I decided to do that as the shots came out rather nice. Next day, we drove out to Mine 12, the farthest you can away from Longyearbyen. The dump truck transporting coal alternated between driving a full load of coal back to the city and being its own snowplow. One quick trip to get coal, one slow and empty trip to plow away snow, rinse, repeat. If not for that, our 4WD would never have made it all the way up to the mine. Neither snow storms in North America nor around the Alps prepared me for what people on Longyearbyen consider normal wind in their backyard. This is where the word wind-swept was invented. The main reason that Svalbard is inhabited at all, other than the Gulf Stream, is coal. We have been told that the coal up there is of extremely high quality and while I can't say much about that, I can say that it's hard as stone. This is nice as it does not smear when you get coal all over yourself. Just shake out your jacket and pants and you are good as new. On our way back, we met two locals who had just prepared the glacier and ice caves for tourists. Had I known that in advance, I would have tried to go with them to take pictures completely away from all artificial light. Oh well, can't have everything. Speaking of not being able to have everything, the outdoor hot tub in our hotel which integrated ice bar and BBQ grill was still under several meters of snow so we couldn't use that, either. Finally, the few divers who are in Longyearbyen didn't have time to take me onto a trip while I was there. As I already missed my opportunity to dive the Arctic circle when the one diver on Gr msey happened to be on the mainland and barely missing it by diving Str tan instead, this was kind of a bummer. On the plus side, this has given me a goal to pursue and achieve. Random notes For the rest of my notes, I will resort to a largely unsorted list of bullet points as there's just too much to talk about in prose.

• There are a lot of things in Norway that are similar to the Iceland (where we spent our honeymoon over June, experiencing permanent sunshine)
  • Norway uses Torx screws everywhere and for everything. This makes sense and I can't understand why Germany is lagging behind so severely.
  • There is free coffee everywhere.
  • The coffee is horrible.
  • Roads are built onto an artificial ridge, increasing wind speed. This ensures that sand, snow, and debris are always swept off the road and can't pile up too much.
  • As easy as it is to lose track of time when the sun is always up (in Iceland, we come down from a mountain after an extended walk at 01:30 in the morning and never realizing how late it was until we wanted to drive a few more kilometers), it's just as easy to lose track of time when it's always dark. We went for a "short" walk to take a few pictures and, on coming back to the hotel, realized that it had taken us seven hours.
  • You start to realize where sagas, trolls, little people and other folklore is coming from when exposed to raw nature. Especially once vision becomes bad and you see shadows dance in the snow (and sand, in Iceland's case) storm.
  • The concept of Common Land is pervasive. Just walk anywhere, no one cares.
  • No one has ever heard of OpenStreetMap, which is weird as people up there rely on GPS a lot.
• Locals tend to keep all lights on 24/7. I guess that's understandable.
• There is an eerie shine all over the land as the snow reflects and re-reflects the little light given off by the moon and stars.
• Almost all houses are built from wood. Drift-wood in the early days, imported wood today. The few concrete cause massive problems when the cold makes their floors and walls crack. Also, concrete is very hard to heat when it's sitting right on the perma-frost.
• Houses are not built on the ground, but on stilts. Drill a few holes into the ground, put long trunks into them, wait a few months for the perma-frost to freeze them into place and build your house on that. This insulates your house and gives you storage space below. Simple and efficient.
• Winter is so cold that people in Longyearbyen are forced to build water, sewage, and electricity infrastructure over ground, on stilts, and put in active heating. Else, it would burst or rupture.
• Our hotel had the taps running 24/7 as they already had a pipe burst a week before we arrived.
• The air is incredibly dry even though Longyearbyen is a coastal city. This is great as snow does not stick to anything, including clothes and camera lenses during long exposures against the wall in a snowstorm. Not so much when you suddenly realize that this means all rocks will be loose, scraping your shin open quite thoroughly.
• It's very hard to judge distances in permanent darkness; you will usually underestimate distances by a lot.
• This also means that you should not trust people when they tell you that Mine 2 is "not far away".
• Ice bear danger is real.
• Locals will not tell you about hiking trails unless you assure them that you are armed.
• Snow storms are amazing, impressive, and frightening. They will also make distances appear a lot farther, all of a sudden.
• While Longyearbyen does not have any sales or alcohol taxes and alcohol is still more expensive than in Germany.
• Stating that you won't drink before the sun goes down is a neat trick.
• Coldness and dryness mean your lips will burst open within seconds after holding a flashlight in your mouth as I usually do. As it's dark all the time, I tended to do that a lot. I learned quickly not to, though.
• I saw an arctic fox run through Longyearbyen, we saw two reindeer and we saw what we think are ice bear tracks behind our hotel.
• Timing your travel to catch the Quadrantids is useless when there are several independently moving layers of clouds for a full week.
• The Aurora Borealisis an elusive thing. We have a few long exposures with it showing, but we didn't see anything with our bare eyes.
• The few minutes when we saw stars, meteors, the moon, Jupiter, and Venus all at once were worth it and more.
• Survival is no joke up there. They keep a coal mine running just to power their local plant.
• That plant has its own storage facility for coal in case the mine shuts down.
• There are several independent "fire houses" that can provide energy and heat in case the power plant shuts down.
• The seed vault is somewhat boring on the outside, but it's one of the most important sites on Earth and visiting it was nice.

All in all, it was well worth it. PS: If you know anyone working with Google Maps, ask them to consider improving their coverage of the Arctic. This is a real pity. As is the rest of the Arctic and the fact that Google Earth cheats you out of the North and South Pole by stretching adjacent tiles into and over them.

As we're doing trends today, I got curious about Debian. I don't particularly care about popularity contests other than popcon, and Debian choices surely aren't driven by them. But hey, curiosity is curiosity, right? So, here are today's w3techs trends for websites using GNU/Linux, with all lines shown: (As thou shall always read methodologies before stats, here is the technologies overview page.) Debian is the top entrant with 30% of the websites using GNU/Linux. What I find interesting is that Debian has jumped at first place in January 2012, significantly after the release of our current stable release, Squeeze, that dates back to February 2011. It is also interesting to see community distros (Debian and CentOS) starkly ahead of commercially backed distros. That is what I find most fascinating about our projects. Whether that will remain the case or not is, for me, one of the big questions of the decade for the self-determination of Free Software communities.

After almost 10 years the Americans finally found Osama bin Laden, unfortunately they were unable to take him alive. The Reid Report has a good summary of what happened [1]. Sam Varghese wrote an interesting analysis of the political aspects of this event in Pakistan [2], and he s a lot less positive about it than most people. Later he wrote about the inconsistencies in the reports, it seems that bin Laden was executed while unarmed [3]. When dealing with someone who is no stranger to suicide attacks and who has stated an intention to never be taken alive it s not unreasonable to shoot quickly, it s just a pity that they couldn t have been honest from the start. Dr. Pamela Gerloff wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today titled Why We Should Stop Celebrating Osama Bin Laden s Death [4]. She asks the rhetorical questions What kind of nation and what kind of species do we want to be? Do we want to become a species that honors life? Do we want to become a species that embodies peace? and suggests that we should mourn the series of tragedies that led up to this situation and to feel compassion for anyone who, because of their role in the military or government, American or otherwise, has had to play any role in killing another . Daniel R. Hawes wrote an insightful article for Psychology Today that s quite different from Dr. Gerloff s article [5]. He is quite glad that bin Laden is dead. But he considers how the people who have lost friends and relatives on 9-11 might feel about this and says that the shouts and celebratory chants that rang around America today seemed to me to carry a certain element of irreverence for those affected most deeply by the September 11 attacks and the entire military operations that followed . To represent the people who are partying now there is a post by Jenny Lind Schmitt that is totally unworthy of a site such as Psychology Today [6]. Jenny told her small children about al Quaeda: They hate you because you are American. Their god is destruction, and they would kill you, a little child, if they had the chance, just because you are American. She also describes al Quaeda as lunatics . Describing all your enemies as lunatics is quite common in general conversation, but it s not suitable for a web site that discusses psychology (where some respect for people with mental health issues is expected). Teaching children to be bigoted against Islam is a bad thing too. It seems to me that a factor in the violence that comes from the middle-east is a result of women just like her telling their children similar things but with country names and religions switched. Finally some capacity for empathy is required for someone to have any insight into psychology, someone who can t understand such things can t be competent to discuss psychology. In stark contrast to Jenny (who bears an irrational hatred in spite of apparently not having any close connection to the events in question) there is a TED talk by Phyllis Rodriguez (who s son was killed in the 9-11 attacks) and Aicha el-Wafi (who s son is in jail for being a member of al Quaeda and was accused of being part of the 9-11 plot) [7]. The two women became friends after 9-11 and work together in the cause of peace. From reading some interviews that Google turned up Aicha seems like a very intelligent woman, I think that the TED talk with her section translated from French to English didn t seem to show this. Perhaps people who speak French and English would get more from the TED talk than I did. Also perhaps if she gave a talk to a French audience and it was subtitled then the result would be better. Now of course the less intelligent people on the right-wing are trying to spin this to say that Bush deserves credit for getting bin Laden. The Reid Report has a good analysis of the history of the hunt for bin Laden and it doesn t make Bush look good [8]. Also the Reid Report has an interesting analysis of the operation to get bin Laden and the possibility for peace now that he s gone [9]. LA Times has an article about the use of the name Geronimo as a code-word for bin Laden [10]. But compared to the use of words such as crusade and paladin by the US armed forces this hardly rates a mention.

• [1] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/05/behind-the-operation-to-get-osama-bin-laden/
• [2] http://wildcard.gnubies.com/?p=574
• [3] http://wildcard.gnubies.com/?p=611
• [4] http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201105/the-demise-bin-laden-and-the-future-terrorism/revenge-nothing-celebrate
• [5] http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201105/the-demise-bin-laden-and-the-future-terrorism/is-not-america
• [6] http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201105/the-demise-bin-laden-and-the-future-terrorism/what-bin-ladens-death-means-our-kid
• [7] http://www.ted.com/talks/9_11_healing_the_mothers_who_found_forgiveness_friendship.html
• [8] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/05/dead-or-alive-the-sorry-history-of-george-w-bush-and-the-hunt-for-osama-bin-laden/
• [9] http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/05/10-things-we-now-know-about-the-operation-that-got-bin-laden/
• [10] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/05/congress-to-discuss-use-of-geronimos-name-in-bin-laden-mission.html

Web Video and Global Innovation Chris Anderson (the curator of TED) gave an insightful TED talk about Web Video and Global Innovation [1]. Probably most people who have used the Internet seriously have an intuitive knowledge of the basic points of this talk, Chris had the insight to package it together in a clear manner. He describes how the printing press decreased the importance of verbal communication skills and services such as Youtube have caused a resurgence in the popularity and importance of speeches. He has some interesting theories on how this can be leveraged to improve education and society. Lectures for Developers vs Users Now how can we use these principles to advance the development of Free Software? It seems to me that a good lecture about Free Software achieve will achieve some of the following goals:

1. Promoting projects to new developers.
2. Teaching developers some new aspects of software development related to the system.
3. Promoting projects to new users.
4. Teaching users (and prospective users) how to use the software.

The talks aimed at developers need to be given by technical experts, but talks aimed at users don t need to be given by experts on the technology and someone who has less knowledge of the software but better public speaking skills could probably do a better job when speaking to users. Would it do some good to encourage people to join Free Software projects for the purpose of teaching users? It seems that there are already some people doing such work, but there seems little evidence of people being actively recruited for such work which is a stark contrast to the effort that is sometimes put in to recruiting developers. One problem in regard to separating the user-training and developer-training parts of Free Software advocacy and education is that most conferences seem to appeal to developers and the more Geeky users. Talks for such conferences tend to be given by developers but the audience is a mix of developers and users. Would it be better to have streams in conferences for developers and users with different requirements for getting a talk accepted for each stream? Publishing Videos It has become a standard feature of Free Software related conferences to release videos of all the talks so anyone anywhere in the world can watch them, but it seems that this isn t used as much as we would like. The incidence of Free Software developers citing TED talks in blog posts appears to exceed the incidence of them citing lectures by their peers, while TED talks are world leading in terms of presentation quality the talks by peers are more relevant to the typical Free Software developer who blogs. This seems to be an indication that there is a problem in getting the videos of talks to the audience. Would it help this to make it a standard feature to allow comments (and comments that are rated by other readers) on every video? Would having a central repository (or multiple repositories) of links to Free Software related talks help? Would it help to have a service such as Youtube or Blip.tv used as a separate repository for such talks? Instead of having each conference just use it s own servers if multiple conferences uploaded talks to Youtube (or one of it s competitors) then users could search for relevant talks (including conference content and videos made by individuals not associated with conferences). What about video replies ? What if after each conference there was an RSS feed of links to videos that had one video featured per day in a similar manner to the way TED dribbles the talks out. If you publish 40 videos of 45 minute lectures in one week you can be sure that almost no-one will watch them all and very few people will watch even half of them. But if you had an RSS feed that gave a summary of one talk per day for 6 weeks then maybe many people would watch half of them. Defining Success Chris cites as an example of the success of online video the competition by amateur dancers to create videos of their work and the way that this was used in selecting dancers for The LXD (Legion of eXtraordinary Dancers) [2]. I think that we need a similar culture in our community. Apart from people who give lectures at conferences and some of the larger user group meetings there are very few people giving public video talks related to Free Software. There is also a great lack of instructional videos. This is something that anyone could start doing at home, the basic video mixing that you need can be done with ffmpeg (it s not very good for that purpose, but for short videos it s probably adequate) and Istanbul is good for making videos of X sessions. If we had hundreds of Free Software users making videos of what they were doing then I m sure that the quality would increase rapidly. I expect that some people who made such videos would find themselves invited to speak at major conferences even if they hadn t previously considered themself capable of doing so (the major conferences can be a bit intimidating). How do we Start? Publishing videos requires some significant bandwidth, a cheap VPS has a bandwidth quota of 200GB per month, if short videos are used with an average size of 30MB (which seems about typical for Youtube videos) then that allows more than 6000 video views per month which is OK but as my blog averages about 2000 visits per day (according to Webalizer) it seems that 6000 views per month isn t enough for any serious vlogging. Not to mention the fact that videos in higher resolution or a sudden spike in popularity can drive the usage a lot higher. It seems that a site like Youtube or blip.tv is necessary, which one is best? There are lots of things that can be changed along the way, but a hosting service is difficult to change when people link to it. Conclusion I don t claim to have many answers to these questions. I m planning to start vlogging soon so I will probably learn along the way. I would appreciate any suggestions. Also if anyone has a long suggestion then a blog post will be best (I ll link to any posts that reference this one). If anyone has a long suggestion that is worthy of a blog post but they don t have a blog then I would be happy to post it on my blog.

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
• [2] http://thelxd.com/

My SO did had an extremely good idea for my birthday this year: We went to a concert of Ich + Ich. We both were a bit sceptical beforehand but actually we were both in agreement about that it was one of the finest concerts we have been to. I want thus to share some of the great songs of the band with you:

• Universum (Universe): I am thinking of my son when listening to this sweet song.
• Stark (Strong): Not only the title but the lyrics.
• Dienen (Serve): Probably the best known of their songs.

Enjoy!

Last month I joined Mozilla as a UI engineer on the Fennec (Mobile Firefox) project. Firefox is already available for Nokia's Maemo platform, and now a group of Mozilla programmers are porting it to Google's Android OS. This Tuesday they made an early preview build available for public feedback. Until now, the only people working on Firefox for Android were platform developers getting the back-end code to build and run. This week was the first time most other people including me got to try it out. We front-end developers and designers are now starting to adapt the user interface to Android. (The preview build used the look and feel of Firefox for Maemo, designed for rather different hardware and software.) Because we are an open source project, we like to share our work and hear your feedback even at this early stage of development. While I wasn't directly involved in the Android development effort, I spent some of my spare time this week talking to users via Twitter and our Android feedback group. Here's what I heard, in rough order of importance to users, plus some information on our future plans.¹

• Zoom and multi-touch: Pinch zoom gestures are coming! We are reviewing a patch for animated multi-touch (pinch) zooming on Qt-based devices, and testing similar code on Android. (Current Maemo devices have no multi-touch, so we use the volume buttons to zoom. That code hasn't been ported to Android, so only double-tap zoom was working in the preview build.) We also had some requests to fit text to the screen when zoomed in, like the Android browser. Today Brad Lassey and Ben Stover released the Easy Reading add-on that does exactly that. We might make this a built-in option in Fennec once it is fast and reliable enough.
• Menu and Back buttons: The preview build did not handle Android's standard hardware buttons, but code is now checked in to support the back button and the menu and search buttons. We still need to do some UI work to make good use of these.
• Size: I didn't anticipate this problem, but in retrospect it should not have been a surprise. A ten megabyte download (over 30 MB installed) is not huge for a desktop browser, but it's hefty for a mobile app especially on Android, where apps are saved to limited onboard memory. Even worse, users reported that our Fennec build did not work with the feature in some custom Android ROMs to move apps to the SD card. Shrinking Fennec is possible, but not trivial. Some of the library and toolkit code in our build is probably unused and could be removed. And we could try minifying our Java Script source, like many websites do. Mozilla's Android developers also hope to fix the problem with SD installation. It will be nice someday when app storage on Android is as plentiful as it is on other mobile platforms.
• Hardware compatibility: There are a lot of different Android phones out there. Some of them won't run Fennec because they still have Android 1.5 or 1.6. We hope this will be fixed by the hardware vendors soon, since we currently rely on some Android 2.0 APIs. Other devices failed for different reasons, possibly related to insufficient RAM or incom patible OpenGL APIs. We will need to optimize Firefox's memory footprint on Android, and test on a wider selection of devices, perhaps with help from Firefox users.
• Keyboard problems: There were many problems with the software keyboard working intermittently or not at all, especially in landscape orienta tion. There were also prob lems with Shift and Alt keys on some hardware keyboards. I haven't heard any news about of these bugs, but we know we need to fix them quickly.
• Speed: Strangely, we had some users calling Fennec slooooooow and others calling it fast as hell (and those tweets were sent just one minute apart)! Once a page is loaded, Fennec is pretty speedy. It's faster than the Android browser in some areas, and slower in others. But it's definitely choppy while a page is still loading or complex scripts are running. To fix this, our next major release of Fennec will include Elec trolysis. This gives Firefox a multi-process architecture much like Google Chrome, and ensures that the browser always stays responsive. Electrolysis requires many changes to our code, so it may be a couple of months before it appears in usable Fennec builds. In the mean time, Mozilla is working on many other performance improvements. This work will also speed up Firefox for desktop computers I've been using the FF4 nightly builds, and they are already much snappier than the Firefox 3.5 I was using before. We've also checked in some simple changes to improve perceived speed, like better feedback when pages start loading.
• Crashing bugs: Users were generally forgiving of crashes and other obvious bugs, to be expected at this stage of development. We will of course fix any such bugs as fast as possible.
• Add-ons: We're just starting Fennec 1.1 beta testing, and most of our add-ons are not yet updated for version 1.1. Unfortunately, the timing means that many add-ons were not available to our first Android previewers. This should be fixed over the next few weeks. I believe add-ons are the biggest advantage Firefox has over other mobile browsers. For the first time on a mobile phone I can easily customize the browser to scratch my own itch. (See my first Fennec add-ons, Read Later and Show Image Title.) And there are many great add-ons from other devel opers to choose from.
• User interface: Most of the feedback on our UI was positive. Users told us that panning to reveal the toolbars felt natural and easy. I think Madhava and Sean have done a great job with the design. This will get even better as we take advantage of Android features like the hardware buttons, integration with other activities, voice input, and the notification bar.
• Flash: Firefox for Maemo supports plugins like Flash, although enabling Flash does cause performance problems on some sites. (We are working on fixing that with major changes to our graphics code.) Flash is not yet included in our Android builds, but it will be supported eventually.
• Web site compatibility: Fennec renders almost all pages the same as desktop Firefox. Users did report problems entering data on some pages, and found that most sites do not have mobile versions targeted at Firefox. One of my personal goals is to make Firefox compatible with more mobile sites, and to give web developers the tools and information they need to make their sites work great in mobile Firefox. I'll write much more about this in future articles.

We don't have a regular schedule yet for releasing new builds on Android. Once we get the code merged and automated build servers configured, we'll publish nightly builds of Firefox for Android alongside our Maemo and desktop nightlies. Later this year we will have alpha and beta versions, and hopefully a stable release. Until then, you can follow @MozMobile or Vlad (@vvuk) to hear about any new previews.

1. Please remember I am still new to the project, and cannot speak for the whole team. This is a personal blog, not a Firefox roadmap!

As Dries Buytaert, the creator and head of development of Drupal, announced on Twitter, the new major (pre-)version of Drupal, namely Drupal 7 alpha 1 has been released! This was on the 9th birthday of Drupal.

This is great news and the release notes are mentioning some aspects why this is so:

Revamped User Interface
An incredible amount of work has gone into improving the user experience and administration interface. The new administration theme "Seven", the overlay module, the dashboard and the configurable shortcut bar, all lead to a much more user-friendly interface. In-place editing is enabled for blocks and nodes by default, so modifying the content of a site becomes much simpler.

Custom Fields
Drupal 7 bundles in the ability to add custom fields, similar in functionality to the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module. However, fields are no longer limited only to content types; they can be added to users, taxonomy terms, and other entities. Fields also have support for translations.

Image Handling
Drupal 7 brings native image handling to core. Image fields may be added to content, and have image styles applied to them, such as scaling, cropping, and other effects.
Update Manager
Building on Drupal 6's Update module, which keeps site administrators informed when new module and theme releases are available, the new Update Manger module can also install and upgrade modules and themes.

Front-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A new render API allows for highly granular theming, core template files have been revamped to provide more semantic markup, Drupal 7 now has built-in RDFa support, includes jQuery UI and a new AJAX framework, and a new core theme "Stark" which exposes Drupal's markup directly for those who want to dive in and start theming.

In addition, Drupal 7 has several major accessibility enhancements, making it the most accessible release of Drupal to date!

Back-end "under-the-hood" improvements
A revamped database layer resolving nearly all limitations in the Drupal 6 database layer, automated testing framework, new PHP stream-based file API that supports private and public files simultaneously, revamped node access system, new hooks for more flexible system interaction, an Entity API, a job queue API, and many, many, many more improvements.

Drupal 7 is also the most scalable release to date, with features such as built-in proxy server support, advanced caching techniques, and Content Delivery Network support for static files.

Alone the inclusion of CCK and Views are great news, whereas all PostgreSQL users will benefit from the new database layer under the hood. I've tested a pre-alpha development version some weeks ago and that Drupal 7 experience was already great. So, it would be nice to see Drupal 7 in Debian soon as well, but I guess a alpha 1 version might be too early to be packaged.

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

During the month of October I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the past, present, and future of F/OSS. This was due in part to participation in a Berkman Center event on Free Culture, where we discussed the historical arc of Free Software to Free Culture, the relationships between them (and their differences), and also the content and meaning each. Over the years, what I have found so interesting about Free Software is how it left its enclave to inspire countless groups into rethinking the politics and ethics of production and access and yet, as I raised in this pod-cast interview (due to the prompting of my interviewer, Elizabeth Stark), Free Software and/or Free Culture is still pretty bounded and contained phenomenon especially when compared to something like the existing consciousness over the environmental movement, which many folks know about and understand even when and if they are not involved in doing anything for the movement. I always ask my first year students whether they know what Free Software or Free Culture is and 9 out 10 stare at me with those blank eyes that basically speak in silence: no. Now, there are a group of activists, many located in Europe, a number of them with deep roots in the social justice movement who are taking Free Culture down a different path, trying to expand its meaning and conjoin it to social justice issues, build a broad set of coalitions across the political spectrum so as to override the fragmentation that is so characteristic to contemporary political moment, and use FC as an opportunity to critique the market fundamentalism of the last few decades. If you are interested in these issues, take a look at their charter: they are looking for comments (critical and constructive) as well as endorsements (here is the long version). I myself have a few comments, for example, I think it is worth noting something like the limits of what FC can do, that even if in many ways it can be activated to do good in the world, it is also best to highlight in the same swoop that FC is not some political panacea and has limits. For example some groups in the world, notably some indigenous communities abide by a different logic of access and culture, whereby full access is not culturally or ethically desirable, as the work of Kim Christen has illuminated. I also wonder in what ways issues of labor might be addressed more forcefully, and though they briefly raise the question of environmental sustainability, it is worth expanding these more directly and deeplyas this article by Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell make clear. There is more to say but I will leave it here for now and just say it is really great to see Free Culture taken down another political path that is rooted in coalition building.

Trends are deceptive - but I haven't come back to this blogging in a while :)

I did my first Windows XP install for a while today for friends. Their machine had slowed to a crawl and _needed_ a disk format and reinstall. Three sets of media to find, three sets of 20 digit codes to type in. Printer software not found - so they'll have to go and download a huge program bundle from the manufacturer's site. [And it always takes an alleged 39 minutes from first reboot irrespective of the actual speed of the hardware :) ]

New hardware put in - a DVD writer to replace a CD writer which had lasted ten years and moved between at least two machines - that's spectacular in this day and age. The new drive is also 10% of the cost of the old one - 17 instead of about 200.

Total time to put on Windows XP, an AV product, get Firefox and to get part way through an Office 2007 install was about three hours. That's without setting up any accounts, shared directories (or network - the attached wireless router didn't need any changes).

I could do a Debian install onto the 40G disk in well under half that to include X windows, openoffice.org, iceweasel and a desktop environment. It would also run far better in 512M which is what this machine has.

Thankfully, they have data backups and an older laptop which has been the family workhorse - and a new netbook which attached to the network readily, has more disk than all other machines in the house combined, and cost less today than the "big machine" cost ten years ago at about 3 x the performance.

Intelligent questions were asked about Linux - I _wish_ I'd known about Ken Starks' radio advert or had it to hand at the time. See the Blog of Helios at http://linuxlock.blogspot.com for details - it's Free/Libre/Open Source under a CC Atttribute Share-alike 3.0 licence, and is available in a short version used in the radio advertisement .ogg or .mp3 or the longer version (.ogg .mp3 All in all, a balanced and a reasoned argument for switching based on nearly everybody's real life experience :(

[UPDATE] - The owner of the machine was up until 1 a.m - 11 hours total - because the machine decided to do a defrag. :(

Whenever I attend Debconf, the first day is always a bit disorienting due to the confluence of jet lag with the sea of male programmers swarming at the venue. I am not sure I should be admitting this but one of the first things that pops to mind is the very cheesy one hit wonder whose video is filled with many bikini clad men, Its raining men. So for a few hours, maybe a day, I sometimes feel out of place but this this first wave of discomfort usually gives way to comfort. This is not only because I connect with friends but because Debconf as well as many other hacker events and this sits in marked contrast to professional academic conferences are remarkably accepting of diversity and difference, at least that has been my personal experience. Most notably, people could care less about how you look, disabilities are consistently accommodated, and some things, like gender changing, which would raise serious eyebrows for instance in most academic conferences, is accepted with next to no gossip. I raise this because this is how I personally have experienced the world of Free Software: overwhelming male but overwhelming accepting of difference as well. So even while I think it is key to confront the problems of discrimination in this world, it is not a simple story, for again, it is an environment that is also accommodates difference and quirkiness to some notable degree. The question of gender in F/OSS is complicated one and here I am not going to ruminate on sources of gender bias except to say that I am sure there are some in operation (as there are in most domains) some of which are internal to Free Software and other s external to Free Software. But what I have been struck by, especially over the course of the summer, is the explosion of sites, blogs, and debates that have confronted gender in Free Software. It has been nothing short of astounding and a really positive turn. The most notable example is this AWEEEEEEEEEEESOME pair: a wiki and a blog that confront gender head on. These are notable because the wiki, for example, catalogs all sorts of controversial events, comments on them, leaving a very visible trace of debate, one that is necessary to change the gender make-up and dynamic within Free Software project. Along with these, the FSF is finally hosting a min-summit, which is great (less great is that participation seems invite only but perhaps they have some good reasons for doing so). And today I just learned of this diversity page coming out the Python project. These are perfect examples of the recursive public in action raised in Chris Kelty s work. And I have long been impressed with the dialogue that has followed from some controversial events in the world of Free Software, including those related to gender and this summer seems to be a watershed of sorts and I look forward to their developments over time. Indeed and this may be controversial as well, but I think my academic field of media, law, and culture has something to learn from these gender politics for there are some very real, though probably unintentional forms of discrimination that are not under that much active discussion. The most glaring problem is the underwhelming presence of female scholars during conferences (and as we know, conferences are exceedingly important for one s professional development and career). What I find most striking about this trend is the number of female scholars is significant. That is, when it comes to scholars and this seems different from the world of tech, there is a sizable community of women scholars and activists so when there is a 5% female participation , as for example, with this event, one has to wonder why is it raining men at these conferences? It also seems that while the debate exists, it is not as vibrant as with what is going on right now in F/OSS. Take for example, this recent mailing list post which unapologetically highlighted the lack of female presence in the up and coming Free Culture event at the Berkman Center. While the post generated a handful of thoughtful responses, including this supremely classic, biting, and quite clever response from Georgetown professor Julie Cohen, the debate did not linger on (however short, the posts and discussion were quite fruitful). What to do? Frankly, blame and finger pointing are pretty counterproductive, mostly because the discrimination is quite unintentional and I believe change can be brought about via more constructive paths. More important is we need to make the issue visible, identify some possible sources, and then create projects that can remedy the problem. Along with Elizabeth Stark, who has also been keen to note and change the gender problems, I am currently whipping together a wiki with a list of female scholars, leaders, and technologists as a resource for folks organizing conferences. We already have a base list (with a remarkably long list of folks) and will hopefully in the course of the next month throwing it up on the wiki. I don t think it will ever be as cool as the Geek Feminism Wiki but it will hopefully do some good!

• Why coding after a long drinking night is not a good idea
  Heh.
• Extension Developers - Better Background XMLHttpRequests
  Background content fetching that isn't canceled when the window closes, silences authentication prompts and SSL certificate dialogs... and this is supposed to be a good idea?!
• Jed s Other Poem
  Still love this video.
• Monsters

The National Council of Churches in the US [1] has produced some advice for Christian voters titled Christian Principles in an Election Year [2]. It starts by saying “Your church, your communion, and the National Council of Churches USA do not endorse any political party or any candidate” (which is in bold in their text) and then lists 10 issues that Christians should consider when voting. Here are the 10 section headings, the full article has a sentence or two explaining each one. I think that most good people (regardless of religion) will agree with all of this - maybe substitute “God” with the name of some other entity that has not been proven to exist or with “humanity”.

1. War is contrary to the will of God.


2. God calls us to live in communities shaped by peace and cooperation.


3. God created us for each other, and thus our security depends on the well being of our global neighbors.


4. God calls us to be advocates for those who are most vulnerable in our society.


5. Each human being is created in the image of God and is of infinite worth.


6. The earth belongs to God and is intrinsically good.


7. Christians have a biblical mandate to welcome strangers.


8. Those who follow Christ are called to heal the sick.


9. Because of the transforming power of God s grace, all humans are called to be in right relationship with each other.


10. Providing enriched learning environments for all of God s children is a moral imperative.

The Blogger Joy Reid [3] often uses the term “Matthew Christian” to refer to Christians who follow the book of Matthew and act in ways that would be considered to be good by most people regardless of belief. This is in stark contrast to some of the nasty people who call themselves Christian and who promote hatred, inequality, and war - such people give all Christians a bad reputation (see the comment section of any blog post concerning religion for examples). John Goerzen’s post titled Politics and the Church (which references the NCCUSA article [4]) is also worth reading. Interestingly his blog post had a Google advert for “Christian Masturbation” when I viewed it. John also has a good post explaning why he is voting for Obama - based on his Christian beliefs and “Traditional Values” [5].

• [1] http://www.ncccusa.org/


• [2] http://www.ncccusa.org/votingprinciples/


• [3] http://blog.reidreport.com/


• [4] http://changelog.complete.org/posts/771-Politics-and-the-Church.html


• [5] http://changelog.complete.org/posts/762-What-Traditional-Values-Mean-to-Me.html

Share This

I use Firefox (well, Iceweasel) from several machines. On a daily basis, at least three: my workstation at home, my workstation at work, and my laptop. I have wanted to have my bookmarks synced between all three of them for some time. I've been using unison to sync them, which mostly works. But firefox likes to store a last-visited timestamp in bookmarks.html, so if I have a browser open at more than one place, I get frequent unison conflicts.

I started searching for better alternatives again, and noticed that the new alternative del.icio.us plugin for Firefox supports a del.icio.us version of the traditional Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar. I use that toolbar a lot, and anything I use in place of standard Firefox bookmarks absolutely must support something like it.

I imported my Firefox bookmarks (about 900 or so) into del.icio.us. They arrived OK, but flattened, as del.icio.us doesn't have a hierarchical structure like Firefox does. After a good deal of experimentation, I have mostly gotten it working how I want. I'm using the bundles mode of the extension toolbar in Firefox, and simulating subfolders by using certain tags. It works fine; not quite what I'd want out of it ideally, but everything else is so much better that I'm happy with it.

The social bookmarking aspects of del.icio.us sound interesting, too, but I haven't started trying to look at that stuff very much yet. Delicious also has a new "Firefox 3" extension that also is documented to work fine in Firefox 2. It has a few new features but nothing I care all that much about.

My main gripe at this point is that the Firefox extension doesn't allow me to set things as private by default. It also doesn't propogate my changes to the site immediately, which led to a considerable amount of confusion initially. On the plus side, it does do a synchronization and store a local cache, so I can still use it offline to load up file:/// links.

Some things about del.icio.us bug me. There are very limited features for editing things in bulk (though Greasemonkey scripts help here). It has a published API, but seems quite limited (I couldn't find out how, in their documentation, to add a tag to an existing bookmark, for instance.)

del.icio.us lets you export all your bookmarks, so you have freedom to leave. Also, if you poke around on freshmeat.net, you can find Free Software alternatives that actually emulate del.icio.us APIs and sites.

I also looked at alternatives, and it seems that the most plausible one is Diigo. But I'm going to refuse to use it right now for two reasons: 1) its Firefox plugin has nothing like the Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and 2) its hideous Terms of Service. If you go to their ToS and scroll down to "Content/Activity Prohibited", you'll see these gems:

6. provides any telephone numbers, street addresses, last names, URLs or email addresses;

7. promotes information that you know is false or misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous;

11. furthers or promotes any criminal activity or enterprise or provides instructional information about illegal activities including, but not limited to making or buying illegal weapons, violating someone's privacy, or providing or creating computer viruses;

So, in other words, they can delete me account if I bookmark the Amazon.com contact page, or if I bookmark the opinions of someone I disagree with. Good thing the Vietnam War protesters in the 70s didn't use Diigo, because they'd be kicked off if they wrote about their sit-ins at Berkeley. Also, I didn't even quote the other section that says they get to remove anything you post that they think is offensive, in their sole judgment. Goodbye, links to EFF's articles about RIAA.

Since we can't use last names, I guess it's just "Hillary" and "John" instead of "Clinton" and "McCain". Oh, and don't get me started about the folly of operating a social bookmarking site where you aren't allowed to post URLs. That's right up there with Apple releasing a Windows version of Safari that you aren't allowed to install on PCs.

Compare that to the del.icio.us terms and privacy policy and the contrast is stark indeed.

So a year and a half ago, I mentioned I was trying to learn Haskell, and I still am. It’s been going much more slowly than I hoped, since I haven’t really spent any time on it. I never write anything new anymore! So I decided to rewrite something I had previously written myself, need be damned. So I chose the RSS aggregator I wrote, harsh. harsh hasn’t changed in eleven months (and that change was just about making the location of its configuration file configurable), but I still remembered how it worked pretty closely; at least enough that I didn’t have to really go searching through its code too much. That’s probably also a function of how small harsh is; in terms of lines of code (excluding blank lines):

  config.c: 139
  cookie.c: 221
 display.c: 709
    feed.c: 577
    list.c: 96
    list.h: 16
    main.c: 96
    main.h: 84
     md5.c: 360
     md5.h: 76
     rss.c: 120
     xml.c: 276
     xml.h: 17
     total: 2787

It uses expat to parse the HTML, libnbio for socket management (which is available in Debian), and ncurses for the UI. It doesn’t have any sort of threading (libnbio does a good job of making sure that, other than DNS lookups, there’s never anything going on long enough to prevent responsiveness). About its only feature is that it will use my cookies.txt file, so that I can see my LiveJournal friends’ protected entries. I originally wrote harsh in about a day or two. It was really easy because of the 2800 lines, about 850 of them had been written in some of my other projects (list.c/h and xml.c/h) or are standard (md5.c/h). I was also really familiar with the three helper libraries from writing grim (my IM client) and stark (a tool for viewing GnuCash data files). As a learning exercise, rewriting harsh in Haskell was excellent. It’s incredibly small, does a lot of standard things (like networking and console UI), and doesn’t do a lot of non-standard things (like an AIM client does). I got to play with the Haskell light-weight threads and STM; I learned how to create a Debian Haskell package; I learned how to use ghci as a debugger with breakpoints; and I’m much more comfortable with monads and with the language in general. It did take me significantly longer to write than the C version, though that’s more due to me having to learn not just the language but some libraries along the way (like HTTP, Vty, and HaXml). I still think that it would take me just as long to write the Haskell version as the C version, but I’m still much more comfortable with C, and imperative programming in general. From a code size perspective, the Haskell version is about one-sixth the size (excluding comments):

Config.lhs: 53
  Feed.lhs: 144
 Harsh.lhs: 272
  Util.lhs: 26
     total: 495

However, that’s not a very fair comparison. In the C version, md5.c/h are included in the total count, when really they should be considered a standard library (and on the Haskell side, I used Data.Hash.MD5 from MissingH). On the C side, I did all of the HTTP request and response processing myself (which is what more than half of feed.c is about), while on the Haskell side I left that to an HTTP client library. Excluding all those things though, the Haskell version is still about one-fourth the size. Anyway, I put the Haskell version of harsh up here. If any Haskell hackers out there could take a look at it and let me know what I’m doing wrong or oddly, I’d appreciate it.

Yesterday, I read an article on CNN called From $70K to food bank.

It describes a woman who was laid off in February from a job paying $70,000 a year. "Weeks later", with bills "piling up and in need of food for her family", she went to a food bank.

The article proceeds to talk about the subprime lending situation at great length, which is largely irrelevant to this person's situation.

Then we learn she applied for food stamps, but was denied. There's a quote from this person about how frustrating that was, and general "tugging at the heartstrings" trying to make us feel sorry for this woman with two children whose mother moved in to help make the house payment. It seems to me that this is a correct decision; someone that can pay a $2500 mortgage each month ought to move into an apartment before trying to leech food or money from social service agencies.

And that's where this story gets interesting.

She has an interest-only mortgage, and is managing to pay the $2500 bill each month.

If you're not familiar with an interest-only mortgage, here's how it works. The bank loans you money to buy your house -- say, $200,000. This is a loan, and you have to pay interest on it each month, just like a regular mortgage. But with an interest-only mortgage, you never pay off the loan. You could be making monthly payments for 30 years and still owe $200,000. In general, the only ways to "pay off" this kind of loan is to sell your house, or get a conventional mortgage that pays off the interest-only loan.

Interest-only mortgages were largely banned after the Great Depression. Prior to that time, they were how mortgages normally worked. But there are several problems with them. One is that you have to pay on them forever, even after you retire. Another is that you can't move unless you can sell your house for at least as much as the bank financed, even if you've lived there for 20 years. In times of declining housing prices and unemployment, that really stinks. People often default on the loans, and from a bank's perspective, that really stinks, too.

Interest-only mortgages are usually used by banks financing construction (we had one for a few months when we renovated our farmhouse) or other short-term projects such as professional real-estate investors that buy old houses and fix them up to sell at a profit. Except for these things, in general, they should never be used for a primary house. It's not in the interest of the bank or the homeowner.

But since you never pay off the principal, the monthly payments can be lower. It seems likely that this woman took a knowing gamble, buying a home more expensive than she could afford, and somehow found a bank willing to finance this. Problem is, both she and the bank took a knowing risk. If she ever ran into financial difficulties, she'd have to sell the house quick. But now the house is probably worth less than the value of the mortgage, so selling it won't remove the loan -- BUT it would let her pay off a large part of the principal, reducing her monthly payments and giving her some wiggle-room to buy food and pay off the rest of it.

It seems to me that she is unwilling to own up to the calculated risk she took, and wants society to help bail her out. Don't get me wrong; I think we need to help people that run into hard times. We need to help make sure they still have the tools they need to find a job and a place to stay. But bailing out people that take huge financial risks shouldn't be the job of society. Let's help them land softly, but not be enablers keeping them in a home they never could -- and still can't -- afford. Fortunately, I don't think anyone in government (or running for president) is suggesting we should.

Not only that, but her bank shouldn't have ever made that loan. Banks should be held accountable to not sell unwise products to people that rely on them for their primary residences.

Here's another interesting point: in just a few weeks, she had burned through her entire savings.

This, unfortunately, is a quite typical situation for many Americans. My financial planner, and I think most experts, suggest that everyone ought to have 6 months of income in liquid non-retirement assets (savings accounts, investments, etc.) in case something like a layoff happens. Very few Americans have this.

And when it comes down to it, isn't that part of the problem? The economy thrives on consumer spending. Or, put more starkly, overconsumption. If people start saving like they ought to, and stop feeling like they're outcasts just for not keeping up with the Joneses and buying every last gadget or the biggest house, we'd all be in better shape -- but the economy wouldn't have grown as much.

The growth it would have seen, had we all been more responsible, would have been a lot more durable and recession-proof, I think.

Next semester I am teaching one (yay one) course and it is a graduate course on digital media. This is the description I have so far and I will post the tentative syllabus in the next few week.

Computers, especially in their networked dimension, have sparked a series of ethical, political, and social debates that often revolve around a series of stark and connected dualities: control and freedom; pleasure and exploitation; creativity and constraint. In this course we will approach topics in digital media via an historical angle that squarely addresses these dualities. To this end, we will often cross-cut readings on similar topics and material whose conclusion about the nature of computing will often vary considerably. The goal, however, is not to determine the correct or right side of these dualities but have students come away with a firm understanding of the following: 1) the history of computing and networking in light of the ways the authors as well as technologists/inventors construct or understand these dualities; 2) the various sources technological, social, and political that may shape or drive any of these elements; 3) unpack the political and social relationships, if any, between them and the stakes involved in how these authors represent the nature of computing and networking. The course primarily concentrates on computers and networks and is roughly chronological, starting with the first digital computers and ending with our digital present. Particular topics we address are: cybernetics and liberalism; networks and the cold war; personal computers and online communities; hackers, the free software movement and intellectual property; labor, development, and computers; peer-to-peer knowledge production; computer gaming; and counter-globalization and computer networking.

I'm giving a talk today as part of Media in Transition 5 (MiT5) conference organized by the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. The topic this year year is right up my alley: "creativity, ownership, and collaboration in the digital age. Everyone else is talking about free culture issues so I'm branching out a bit and delivering a paper I wrote with Harvard Law School and Harvard Free Culture's Elizabeth Stark on "the politics of piracy" with a focus on political action around P2P filesharing. We'll have a paper in the proceedings which I'll post with our talk notes and slides. You can find information on our talk on how to attend on the conference website.