Planet Fellowship (en)

Tampere Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release party in pictures

Losca | 09:58, Wednesday, 16 May 2012

A couple of photos from the Ubuntu release fest in Tampere yesterday.

People gathering up before presentations

Tieto's Markus Mannio

Again, continuing on how Ubuntu is used at Tieto

A cut to the end of presentations, Trine 2 game licenses from Frozenbyte being raffled. A great game available on Linux.

Tablets running KDE Plasma, and Ubuntu for Android being demoed.

Someone else probably has photos of my generic Ubuntu 12.04 LTS presentation (what's new, what's next), and likewise for the other presentations (Ubuntu for Android, uTouch) held. Those will be available as slides and videos later on, although do note the whole event was in the crypto-language called Finnish.

Thanks to the organizers, sponsors and everyone I met, it was a great event with nice little dinner and wine served at the end!

Presentation shortening

Inductive Bias | 20:23, Tuesday, 15 May 2012

In an effort to make more room for more talks in our schedule for this year’s Berlin Buzzwords we’ve asked quite a few people to shorten their presentation from 40min down to 20min. The thought behind it is to not only give more people a chance to talk on their work but also have those shorter talks focused down to the absolute essential information for people to learn.

However I’ve seen people give awesome 45min presentations fail miserably when forced to cut down their talk - and have myself delivered a very weak presentation at a 5min Ignite presentation.

As a result I thought it might be a good idea to share some thoughts on how to go about shortening your talk and still deliver a convincing performance:

First of all, don’t take your usual 40min talk and cut away slides. As obvious as it may seem that this will result in poor slides it’s still all too tempting to take a working long presentation and just throw away some content to make it shorter in time. What really happens however is that people either cut out the meat - which leaves you with a shallow brief introduction and not much else left - or the meat is left in with not much around to help listeners understand what the talk is all about. Also speakers might be tempted to leave well working jokes in: Don’t without thinking twice - there are things that do take long to prepare, if you cut away all preparation the fun is gone as well. Some people cut down demos to just briefly skip to the browser and than switch back to the slides - if you like the demo and think it’s worthwhile: Take your time to demo and shorten elsewhere. Noone benefits from briefly seeing a browser window with not much like an application in there.

So how to go about when asked to cut down your slides? First of all: Think about what is the main message that you want to deliver. What is the core piece of knowledge people should know when leaving your talk. From there build up your story and provide all the necessary detail for the audience to understand your talk.

That does not necessarily mean throwing out all greek symbols because math is just to hard to explain briefly - if they are needed, leave them in, take the time for explanation and build up equations as you go.

Also it doesn’t mean that you should cover the very basics only. Clearly label your talk as advanced whenever that is both appropriate and possible - build on your audience’s knowledge without repeating all nitty gritty details. It can help to openly ask at the beginning simple yes/no questions and ask people to raise their hands to find out whether they are familiar with a certain technology or not. Knowing your attendees background can save you a lot of time when preparing a talk.

One final piece of advise: There’s one book that once helped my a lot improve my own talks called Presentation Zen - if you don’t know it yet, it certainly is well worth reading.

PS: Dear speakers, if you are reading this but have not yet fully read the speaker acceptance notification mail - please do so now - I promise it does contain information that is valuable for you to know in particular if your employer happens to sponsor your travel to the conference.

Install GTimeLog time tracker on Fedora 16 GNU/Linux

Sam's Blog | 11:03, Monday, 14 May 2012

GTimeLog is a simple and effective time tracking application for GNU/Linux. It is the preferred tool of top FSFE staff. It is not currently available in official Fedora repositories however, so in order to use it you must manually install it using Python. Fortunately this is simple to do.

Download GTimeLog from the official website:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gtimelog#downloads

Extract the downloaded file from the command line:

tar -xzf gtimelog-0.7.1.tar.gz

Enter the newly extracted directory from the command line:

cd gtimelog-0.7.1

Install dependencies from the command line:

sudo yum install python2 pygtk2

Install GTimeLog from the command line:

sudo python setup.py install

GTimeLog should now be installed. You can run it by pressing Alt+F2 and typing gtimelog [enter] in Gnome and KDE.

liberate your cloud data

autoverse » libre | 21:18, Sunday, 13 May 2012

Fosscomm just ended and this post is just a placeholder for my Saturday speech about available Free Software solutions out there that can be used for self-hosted cloud services. Let’s get control over our data :)

Full presentation: pdf

Improving E-Mail Privacy

h2's blog | 19:07, Saturday, 12 May 2012

I have recently decided to use PGP / GnuPG to sign and encrypt emails, and I also recently switched from KMail (after using it for ~10 years) to Thunderbird [the why of the latter is a longer story I might tell some other time].

So, after not caring about email privacy for pretty long, I now got it all setup, although the setup on my laptop produces faulty inline PGP once in a while, where it doesn’t even recognize signed content itself…

Anyway, what I want to discuss today is the email header. As you all know, it contains all sorts of information, even your IP-Address — if you have a nasty provider. I kind of had the intuition that Thunderbird and Enigmail would reduce this info, or at least not add to it, but apparently that is not true.

Stuff you normally transmit with every (signed) E-Mail:

1) Thunderbird user agent I was kind of confused by it, as I thought this information should go into the “X-Mailer” info, but obviously Mozilla has their own way, as you can see below. And it contains quite a bit of information, beside the mail client: My operating system, my windowing system, my cpu-architecture, even the Gecko-revision (what has that got to do with anything?).

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD i386; rv:10.0.3) Gecko/20120407 Thunderbird/10.0.3

2) Enigmail user agent Enigmail has its own client field, where it tells the world that it is installed on my system, and what version. Since Enigmail is specific to Thunderbird, this also tells people I am using Thunderbird (even if we get around 1) ).

 X-Enigmail-Version: 1.4

3) GnuPG Identifier Then, inside the PGP-Signature, GnuPG informs everyone of its version and my operating system:

 Version: GnuPG v2.0.19 (FreeBSD)

4) Enigmail advertising In case people hadn’t noticed from 2) or the combination of 1) and 3), here comes Enigmail again:

Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

Now, you might ask yourself why I worry about this information. Well first of all, it fulfills no real purpose. The receiving party doesn’t act on this information and it doesn’t need this information, as E-Mail is pretty standardized. This alone should be reason enough not to transmit the information. But here are some real scenarios:
- If an attacker knows the applications you are using and even their versions, it might make it easier for him to send you prepared code that acts on certain known vulnerabilities of these application versions.
- If you use more than one computer, people can identify which computer you wrote your E-Mail from based on different CPU-architectures, operating systems or application versions. This is less of an issue than the IP, but can still be used against you in different situations.

I didn’t find any place that describes how to easily fix this, so I gathered the solutions from different web-sites and man-pages… to fix all of the above, go to Edit->Preferences->Advanced->General->Config Editor and set these variables (they fix the above problems in the exact order):

general.useragent.override=""
extensions.enigmail.addHeaders=false
extensions.enigmail.agentAdditionalParam="--no-emit-version"
extensions.enigmail.useDefaultComment=true

The first two variables have to be created(string and bool), as they are non-default and there is no gui-way to set them. And yes the value for the last one is ‘true’.

Hope this is usefull to some of you and saves you some googling or scroogling .

Free Software, Open Source, FOSS, FLOSS – Same same but different

Björn Schießle's Weblog » English | 21:24, Friday, 11 May 2012

There are two major terms connected to software you can freely use, study, share and improve: Free Software and Open Source. Based on them you can also find different combinations and translations like FOSS, Libre Software, FLOSS and so on. Reading articles about Free Software or listening to people involved in Free Software often raises the question: Why do they use one term or another and how they differ from each other?

Historical background

Historically, Free Software was the first term, created somewhere around 1984 together with the Free Software definition. In 1997 Debian, a project aiming to create a completely free and community based GNU/Linux distribution, defined the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) as a check-list to decide whether a program can be included in the distribution or not. In 1998 the Open Source Initiative was set up as a marketing campaign for Free Software and introduced the Open Source definition by copying the DFSG and replacing “Free Software” with “Open Source”. According to a public statement by Bruce Perens, one of the founders of the OSI and author of the DFSG and Open Source Definition, the Open Source term was introduced as a synonym for Free Software. Perens eventually decided to return to the roots of the movement and to speak about Free Software again. This historical development shows that both Open Source and Free Software describe the complete set of software licenses granting the right to use, study, share and improve the software.

In the course of time people came up with even more terms. Today, terms such as Libre Software, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) or FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software) are often used to describe Free Software. In some cases people also use terms like “organic software” or “ethical software”. Often the motivation for these terms is to stay out of the terminology debate and to avoid confusion generated by words like “open” or “free”. At the end those terms create more confusion than they help because they virtually invite people to search for differences between the terms where actually no differences exist, regarding the software they describe.

In short, these different terms share the same historical root and describe the same set of software, although the choice of one term over the others highlight different aspects of Free Software.

Usage of the terms by different people and organisations within the movement

Today the Free Software movement is a large and diverse community. People have different interests in Free Software and different motivations to take part in this movement. But these differences are not necessarily related to the language they use. There are many people using the term Open Source and highlight the social and political dimensions of Free Software while on the other hand there are a people in our community who prefer the term Free Software but concentrate more on the practical benefits. This means that the terms Open Source and Free Software are not a good criterion to identify these different motivations.

Beside individuals there are also many well known organisations in the Free Software ecosystem. Many of them play an important role and emphasize different aspects of Free Software. For example, some organisations focus on the technical direction of Free Software projects, some on legal aspects, some on political, social and ethical aspects and some focus on license evaluation. These organisations typically have decided to use one or another term and sticked to it. But this should not lead to the conclusion that the term they use is the critical factor regarding their motivations. The critical factor are the people driving the organisation and the goals of the organisation as such. The practical experience with different organisations and people in the community shows that the line can’t be drawn along the language they use.

This diversity is good, as it reflects that Free Software provides many advantages in many different areas of our life. But we should not divide our community just by the term someone prefers. No matter what term someone uses and what his initial motivation is, at the end most of us work on the same set of software and on the enhancement of software freedom and any other aspect of Free Software.

License evaluation

There are three entities in the Free Software movement which people look to for evaluations of Free Software licenses: The Debian project, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Most of the time they come to the same conclusion. In some corner cases they may disagree. In such cases the differences do not lie in different terms or different definitions, which as already shown have the same origin, but in the fact that it happens quite often that different people come to different conclusions for challenging legal questions. It would be a big mistake to use these cases to divide our community.

Protective and non-protective licenses

Looking at Free Software licenses there are two main categories, protective or Copyleft licenses and non-protective licenses. While Copyleft licenses are designed to protect the rights to use, study, share and improve the software non-protective licenses allow to distribute the software without those rights. Sometimes people think that the terms Free Software and Open Source are used to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses. The lists of Free Software licenses by Debian, the FSF and the OSI show that both protective and non-protective licenses comply with the Free Software definition and the Open Source definition. This means that neither the terms Open Source and Free Software nor the different definitions are suitable to distinguish between protective and non-protective licenses.

Protective licenses and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses recognized by the Open Source Initiative and the FSF. Copyleft or non-Copyleft is not a criteria suitable to distinguish between Open Source and Free Software, both terms describe the same set of software.

Development model

When looking at software we have to distinguish between the software model and the development model. While the software model describes the attributes of the software (e.g. free or proprietary) the development model describes different ways to develop software. As described at full length in “What makes a Free Software company?” the different development models are defined independently of the software models and work for both Free Software and proprietary software. Development models that leverage the advantage of an open and collaborative community can show their full strength in combination with the Free Software model. However this does not mean that an open, collaborative development process is a criterion for Free Software. There are Free Software projects developed by a single person or a company with little or no outside input. On the other hand developers of proprietary software have adapted collaborative development models to fit into their software model, e.g. SAP with its partnership program.

While the development model can be a crucial factor for the success of a software project it is not suitable to distinguish between proprietary software and Free Software or one of its synonyms.

Why do I still insist on calling it Free Software if it is all the same?

If all these terms describe the same software people may wonder why I insist on using the term Free Software. The easiest answer is that I simply have to choose a term if I want to talk about Free Software. As explained in the article all the terms describe the same set of software, therefore I don’t see any value in combining them (e.g. FOSS or FLOSS). Quite the contrary, this combinations often create more confusion than clarity. So the remaining terms are Free Software and Open Source and I decided to stick with Free Software.

Free Software is the oldest terms. All other terms have their roots in the Free Software definition. It is a good tradition in science to use the first term and definition given by its author. Furthermore it is also advantageous if a term can be easily translated into different languages​​. This enables people to talk about Free Software in the most natural way, in their first language. In many cases Free Software even translates unambiguously into other languages, e.g. “logiciel libre” in French, “software libre” in Spanish, “software libero” in Italian or “Fri Software” in Danish which avoids the ambiguity between freedom and price of the English word “free”. I believe that it is important to use a clear terminology. I want to convey a strong message about freedom. Language is important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software and the language we use influences our thoughts about a subject. For me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want that my language reflects this.

Free Software, which is easy to translate in different languages and emphasises the aspect of freedom for individuals, business and public institutions, together with the clear definition provides these values. All this makes Free Software the right choice for me and I invite you to follow me.

Conclusion

For historical reasons there are different terms to describe software that is free to use, study, share and improve. All terms, Open Source, Free Software or one of the combinations have the same roots and describe the same set of software. When it comes to people and groups within the Free Software movement we see a large diversity of motivations, different people or groups focus on different aspects of Free Software. But whatever the motivation may be it is not the doing of the software, it is the people. Neither is it possible to distinguish the people according to the term they use nor is it the business of the Free Software movement or part of the Free Software definition to find and define groups within our community. The Free Software movement identifies Free Software and works on the enhancement and adoption of it with all its positive aspects. Regarding licenses, different groups agree in their evaluation of Free Software licenses except for some corner cases which shows the complexity of legal documents but not a division between people, movements or software along the terms they use. Protective (Copyleft) and non-protective licenses are sub-classes of Free Software licenses and are recognised as such by all groups in the Free Software movement. These two categories are not suitable to separate Open Source and Free Software.

Even if all these terms describe the same set of software the terminology we use is still important because it frames how people think about a subject. Different terms focus on different aspects, even if they describe the same software. I want to put freedom first, for me freedom is a core value of Free Software and I want to respect the naming by the founder of the Free Software movement. These are the main reasons why I invite you to join me and speak about Free Software.

But no matter which term we use, we should not allow people to split our community just because of different terminology. At the end most of us work on the same set of software, improve it and foster software freedom no matter what our motivation or preferred term is. The community needs to stay together to have an impact on all levels of involvement and to improve Free Software in all aspects. Don’t let others use the strategy of “divide and conqueror” to harm our movement.

In this context you should also read “It’s time for the community to take charge of its brand”.

Edit: The Comment by Bob McConnell shows that maybe the point “copyleft vs non-copyleft” needs to be addressed more explicitly. Therefore I added the sub-section “Protective and non-protective licenses” which was initially planed but got lost somewhere in the process of writing the article

Verdict in Oracle v. Google, what it says

Carlo Piana :: Law is Freedom :: | 13:28, Tuesday, 08 May 2012

There has been a lot of noise in some areas of the Internet around what to make of the verdict that the jury has taken in the Oracle v. Google case.

For the benefit of the readers, here the questions and what the jury has answered. For Europeans, it is very odd to see a jury to decide in matters that are strongly legal in nature, but that's how it goes up there. Bear in mind, though, that the jury is only responsible for the assessment of the facts, it's up to the judge to have a final say about the law.

Also, bear in mind that the judge has instructed the jury to decide as if the API (Application Programming Interfaces) are a copyright subject, but that is just a speculative statement, the matter will be settled by the judge in its final decision.

The verdict

 1. As to the compilable code for the 37 Java API packages in question taken as a group:

    A. Has Oracle proven that Google has infringed the overall structure, sequence and organization of copyrighted works?

    Yes

 

B. Has Google proven that its use of the overall structure, sequence and organization constituted “fair use”?

Undecided

 

2. As to the documentation for the 37 Java API packages in question taken as a group:

A. Has Oracle proven that Google has infringed?

No (2.b is then skipped, as per Judge's instructions)

 

3. Has Oracle proven that Google’s conceded use of the following was infringing, the only issue being whether such use was de minimis:

 

A. The rangeCheck method in TimSort.java and ComparableTimSort.Java	Yes
B. Source code in seven “Impl.java” files and the one “ACL” file	No
C. The English-language comments in CodeSourceTest.java and CollectionCertStoreParameters Test.java	No

 

4. Answer the following special interrogatories only if you answer “yes” to Question 1A.

A. Has Google proven that Sun and/or Oracle engaged in conduct Sun and/or Oracle knew or should have known would reasonably lead Google to believe that it would not need a license to use the structure, sequence, and organization of the copyrighted compilable code?

Yes

B. If so, has Google proven that it in fact reasonably relied on such conduct by Sun and/or Oracle in deciding to use the structure, sequence, and organization of the copyrighted compilable code without obtaining a license?

No

 

Short Comments

So this is what was decided. The only clear infringement has been found in 3.A, and it's about some 9 lines of code. Not really much.

Of course the bearings of 1.A are way more important, but two major roadblocks must be removed first: whether the API as defined in 1.A are copyrighted matter in the first place. And if so, whether the use made by Google was "fair use", which has a very broad meaning and involves a lot of factual and legal issues. On the factual issues the Jury has not decided, and Google has announced it would be moving for mistrial, hence, to re-start the trial from the beginning. If accepted by the judge (which is unlikely, I am told) that would only involve the copyright case, it will not span to the case about the patent violation, which is currently (as of the time I am writing) pending.

For a detailed recount of the day, including the verdict, see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120507122749740

Using Composer to manage dependencies in Heroku PHP apps

Henri Bergius | 10:18, Tuesday, 08 May 2012

Heroku is a very nice Platform-as-a-Service provider that allows you to focus on writing applications instead of managing servers. If your application code is already managed in Git, in most cases you only need to create a Heroku app setup, and then git push to deploy it on Heroku. Scaling your app is easy and there are many useful add-ons available in their "app store".

While Heroku got its start from hosting Ruby on Rails applications, it nowadays supports many different environments in the Cedar stack. Node.js is what many use, but they also do support PHP.

Dependency management is easy for Node.js applications as Heroku recognizes your package.json files and automatically installs the libraries needed via NPM.

Until now PHP developers haven't had this convenience, but as Composer is emerging as the default PHP package manager, I've now added support for it. Before the pull request gets accepted, Composer dependency handling can already be used by specifying my custom PHP buildpack when creating Heroku apps.

I've written a simple example app to show how this works.

First you need to create the folder for your app and make it a Git repository:

$ mkdir myapp
$ cd myapp
$ git init

Then create the Heroku app using a custom buildpack (when the pull request is accepted you can skip the buildpack definition):

$ heroku create -s cedar --buildpack https://github.com/bergie/heroku-buildpack-php.git my-cool-app

Then it is time to write your composer.json file. In this case we'll only depend on the urlize library:

{
    "require": {
        "php": ">=5.2.0",
        "midgard/midgardmvc-helper-urlize": "*"
    }
}

For Heroku to recognize the app as a PHP one, you also need to have an index.php. In this case with the following code:

<?php
// URLizer service
require 'vendor/midgard/midgardmvc-helper-urlize/interface.php';
if (isset($_GET['urlize'])) {
    $data = array();
    $data['from'] = $_GET['urlize'];
    $data['to'] = midgardmvc_helper_urlize::string($_GET['urlize']);
    header('Content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8');
    die(json_encode($data));
}
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>
<h1>Urlizer service</h1>
<form method="GET">
    <label>
        String to URLize
        <input name="urlize" type="text" />
    </label>
    <input type="submit" value="URLize" />
</form>

Now add and commit these files, and then deploy to Heroku:

$ git push heroku master

You should see that Heroku notices the Composer dependencies and installs them:

-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Fetching custom buildpack... done
-----> PHP app detected
-----> Bundling Apache version 2.2.22
-----> Bundling PHP version 5.3.10
-----> Installing Composer dependencies
Installing dependencies
  - Package phptal/phptal (dev-master)
    Cloning e146361f25b8672d364695b757eddf1c169e05d2

  - Package midgard/midgardmvc-core (dev-master)
    Cloning 2b00d38cb2fea42c8f9791c5ecc7270dc81182e8

  - Package midgard/midgardmvc-helper-urlize (dev-master)
    Cloning 92d0c8c638c389b7be1887ca67cd334f51932912

midgard/midgardmvc-core suggests installing ext-midgard2 (>=10.05.5)
Writing lock file
Generating autoload files
-----> Discovering process types
       Procfile declares types -> (none)
       Default types for PHP   -> web
-----> Compiled slug size is 13.2MB
-----> Launching... done, v13

And that is it! You can see an example of this app at http://urlizer-service.herokuapp.com/.

moved

Free, Easy and Others | 09:11, Tuesday, 08 May 2012

to jancborchardt.net

On the Kolab Server 2.4 Release

freedom bits | 08:56, Tuesday, 08 May 2012

So a while back I gave a primer and insight into what would happen with Kolab 3.0, and now we’ve released an out-of-schedule Kolab Server 2.4 – what’s that?

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the Kolab 3.0 development cycle is well under way, and progressing nicely for the most part, even if we may have to do some feature triaging for the 3.0 release depending on how many contributors come to the task in the next month or two.

But even so it is going to be some time before that release is out after some testing, and simultaneously the OpenPKG set of packages of the Kolab Server is ageing. Quickly. Providing security updates is something that would be done in the ideal world, but it takes around two weeks to wrap a release, as even an individual component easily means the entire stack needs to be rebuilt.

That’s a lot of effort for something that’s been discontinued.

From a business perspective it is also completely wasted, as there are zero customers of Kolab Systems on that particular technology base. None. Some other service providers may have paying customers on that basis, which is fine. But in the way they have chosen to maintain those customers on that basis without upstream support, they have themselves chosen to become the upstream for the solution their customers are on. So we gladly give them everything they need to provide such updates for their customers, but they’ll have to do the work themselves, I am afraid.

Naturally they could also hire us to do this for them. But I’d rather prefer if they didn’t, because this packaging base and some of the technology contained within is fundamentally unmaintainable, while the new basis is much leaner, more modular and each component can be updated as required without affecting the entire stack. In other words: Up to date (release) engineering.

In any case, even if an employee of ours were hired for another OpenPKG release, that person would be missing from other activities, such as the native packages available through our software subscription for customers with upstream support. So I’d much prefer to have the employee work on that, to be honest.

At the same time, we do not want to let our community be without an update for too long, and we want to lower the barrier to becoming active in the Kolab 3.0 development cycle. The answer to all those questions was the intermediate Kolab 2.4 release. That release already gets so many things right that we really encourage anyone with interest in Kolab, Roundcube or Free Software Groupware to take a look themselves.

The fastest way to a running virtual machine is if you’re on Fedora 16 or 17 and have the virtualisation packages installed & the service running.

Simply run the script below kindly provided by Jeroen van Meeuwen, our Systems Architect.

Or take a look at the quick installation instructions on the kolab.org web site.

 

Fastest way to Kolab, courtesy of Jeroen van Meeuwen

Assumptions to the script:

1. Purely demonstrative,
2. Assumes libvirtd managed ‘virbr0′ network,
3. Assumes no kolab-demo system already exists,
4. is to be executed with something like as follows:

sudo TMPDIR=/path/to/my/tmp/dir /path/to/setup-el6-k24.sh

Save the following as setup-el6-k24.sh and make it executable (e.g. chmod 755 setup-el6-k24.sh):

#!/bin/bash

virsh destroy kolab-demo
virsh undefine kolab-demo
rm -rf ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img
qemu-img create ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img 8G
virt-install \
--name=kolab-demo \
--ram=2048 \
--vcpus=2 \
--disk="path=${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/kolab-demo.img" \
--location=http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/centos/6/os/x86_64/ \
--extra-args='ks=http://hosted.kolabsys.com/~vanmeeuwen/ks.cfg' \
--network='bridge=virbr0' \
--hvm \
--virt-type=kvm

 

Why choose Python for teaching?

Computer Floss | 09:49, Monday, 07 May 2012

I recently read a tweet by a computer science educator claiming the superiority of a particular programming language for teaching purposes (Pascal, if you must know). Now, I don’t really go for religious wars — each to his own and all that — but I did reply with my opinion that Python might generally be… read more

Ubuzen in the Bay Area

Losca | 16:12, Monday, 07 May 2012

Enough said.


You can reach me most probably at the UDS on the Oakland side, and most directly via IRC if you don't see me.

Edit: Launch!

2012w18

blog.padowi.se » English | 10:00, Sunday, 06 May 2012

The scripty stuff

This week I finally managed to crack a problem I’d been trying to solve for a couple of weeks, namely how to only print the foobar errors, and the ensuing stack trace of these errors from a logfile:

awk 'BEGIN { section = 0 } /foobar/ { section = 1; print; next } /^[A-Z]/ && section == 1 { section = 0; next } section == 1 { print; next }' logfile 

Looking at the solution, I am kindof ashamed that it took me that long to get a workable solution…

I also found this neat little oneliner in a comment on reddit: echo "something long and space separated of which you want the last word" | rev | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | rev. Then again, I’m sure that awk could have done this with a little $(NF-1) magic or something like that.

The headache-inducing stuff

All since my netbook broke down, I’ve thought about two things: restoring the netbook/replacing it, and how to create some form of backup infrastructure which should be better than what I have in place today.

As for the backups, the “system” I have today is couple of USB-disks which I at times plug in and sync files to. That and most of my projects and config-files are in various git repositories all synced to the laptop/server-in-the-wardrobe which I made sure to backup after the netbook died, especially since the laptop/server disk is much older than the netbook disk was.

Another thing which bothers me with the current solution is that I have no off-site storage. And that would be nice to have. Belt AND suspenders of course, and off-site storage comes with its own set of problems such as trust in the offsite storage maintainer.

I think the solution will take the shape of a GNU+Linux box and Unison and possibly aided by incron. Not sure yet, will have to think more about it.

There are some other requirements which I have just barely scratched the surface of or not even begun thinking about yet, for instance it would be nice to be able to backup my parents stuff as well on a regular basis as to keep their stuff safer as well.

And as for the netbook, although it was a nice little machine, the keyboard was getting a bit worn out, and at times it was rather underpowered with its single core 1.6GHz atom processor, so the direction I am looking in now is towards something like this.

The stuff screwing over society

Now there’s truly no way in hell I’ll ever use Skype again.

Nothing new under the sun I guess, but it lends credibility to the Skype quip above.

This sure is some level-A grade retarded society we are constructing for ourselves…

Samsung Galaxy S3: The first smartphone designed entirely by lawyers, a great read about a truly depressing matter which probably is closer to the truth than we imagine. On the other hand, my personal opinion is that the midnight blue version looks pretty damn sweet.

SaaS and other crap where someone else is in control sure is a honking good idea, isn’t? Well, I guess it is if you’re the one in control, but I guess you won’t ever get my business…

The cool stuff

And I also managed to find some posts which touched the hacker in me, such as this post about how one could go about generating pseudo-random numbers (don’t use the algorithms, just be inspired by them) or how this guy started shaving bytes off of his “hello, world!” binary.

I immediately thought about FSCONS when I read this, and I didn’t feel at all worried about people thinking the same about our conf

Until the other day, when I read about its inclusion into git, I’d never even heard about git subtree, but this post makes a compelling case for looking into it.

I also came across a, to me, new data structure: the XOR linked list. Now, it has a couple of drawbacks, and I don’t think I’ll find much use for it, ever, but as a concept it is a very interesting idea, and just goes to show that XOR is frakking awesome.

I thought this was a pretty cool thing.

While I don’t have any problems with my ISP hijacking DNS requests right now, it is nice to know for posterity that there are ways around it

If you are going to use JSON, and need comments, this seems like a reasonable way to go about it.

While I haven’t decided what I think about Go I really liked this blog post on how to create a grass mowing agent which derives the most optimal way to cut the digital grass in a simulated world.

Hopefully I ain’t the only one who finds this hilarious

This is actually quite neat: Instead of adding “lorem ipsum” paragraphs all over your design, tweak the word list in the script, include it in the mockup, and markup all places which need filler content. Done.

In the latest issue of DatorMagaZin there was an article about FUSE which caught my eye, and having read the article my interest was piqued, so I just had to go look at the list myself, and truly, have you seen all the cool filesystems people have come up with? Frakkin’ awesome!

The food for thought stuff

Oh yeah, finally remember to treat everyone the way you’d like people to treat your own mother

:wq

My xmonad (wm) config

Thomas Løcke Being Incoherent | 18:57, Saturday, 05 May 2012

Because I got inspired by h2′s my awesome (wm) config post, I thought I’d share my xmonad config.

xmonad is a tiling window manager based on Haskell and as you can see in the example, the configuration file is written in plain Haskell, and if you haven’t been subjected to a functional programming language before, it might look a bit alien, but don’t let that scare you off – it’s a great language and xmonad is a great window manager. Both are well worth the effort.

I personally use xmonad as the primary wm for my workstation and my laptop, both of which are powered by Slackware64 -current. It just works. Give xmonad a whirl, and enjoy the power of a really cool tiling window manager.

my awesome (wm) config

h2's blog | 12:57, Saturday, 05 May 2012

Since quite a few people have been asking me for my awesome config, I thought I’d upload it.

For those of you who don’t know awesome, check it out, it’s awesome! SCNR

Main differences from the default are:

remove all panels and stuff, because they are ugly

load xfce4-panel instead, because it’s light, but provides stuff like mpd-controls &c

create 12 tags (virtual desktops)

bind certain type of applications to certain desktops

map Meta to ALt instead of Winkey, because my main kbd doesn’t have a winkey

map the tags to F* instead of the number keys, so I get tags with Alt+F* (original unix style)

use cairo-compmgr where available (unfortunately not on FreeBSD) and pre-start some other stuff (e.g. launchy for running things)

Thats basically it. I have thought about using shifty for dynamic tagging, but haven’t gotten around to trying it, yet.

Here it is: rc.lua
(in case you consider that bit of code as (c)-able I hereby release into CC0 / public domain)

Open Access Licensing Issues

Marcus Möller » FSFE | 17:57, Friday, 04 May 2012

We have recently organized a talk about Open Access at the ETH Zurich with Matthias Seemann (Lawyer) and Noémie Ammann (ETH library). It was very interesting but I realized that Open Access is still far away from being truly open.

Open Access has been founded to save money, in first place, as libraries have to pay A LOT for licensing commercial journals (e.g. the University Zurich pays about 10 million CHF a year).

Commercial publishers now often allow the author to release the pre-print to the Open Access repository of their university (but not to any repository). This is one reason why there are hundreds of Open Access repositories available. Another is that journals of high quality are also a good advertisement for the university itself. Sadly some people think this is only valid if the work is published in a local repository.

Most of these local repositories have no common infrastructure. Some allow choosing the license under which the paper should be published on upload, some don’t. Only a few display the license under which a work has been published, before downloading. Many repositories also have a ‘repository license’, under which all content of the repository is published. These ‘repository licenses’ are often not compatible with the license that the original author has chosen.

These facts make it really hard to mirror/centralize content and to reprint in Open Access journals.

The next major problem is that people who are publishing work on a Open Access repository often choose a NC-ND license as they are afraid that the integrity of their work is not kept otherwise. This prevents real innovation and wide distribution. I would suggest to choose a CC-BY-SA license instead, which makes sure that the name of the original author has to be mentioned in the form that has been defined in the document and the rework has to be published under a similar license.

A bridge leading nowhere: Outlook-centric groupware

freedom bits | 09:12, Friday, 04 May 2012

I have a confession to make.

I do not believe that Windows is the future of the Free Software desktop.

Perhaps you wonder why I feel it necessary to make this point?

A surprising number of Free Software (or Open Source, take your pick) companies, evangelists and journalists these days advocate some Open Core groupware solutions that focus on Microsoft Outlook as their primary client as “consequential” and “the best approach.” The term “pragmatic” is also quite popular among such comments.

Although some things could and should be said about this, let’s ignore the fact that not everything that calls itself Open Source actually is. That is a case of deception and deceit, of misleading advertising where the users only notice they’ve been locked in at the time they try to make use of the freedoms they thought they had gained. It is not specific to the area of groupware, though, and not the focus for this article.

There is a set of technical and strategic issues that make this approach a dead end.

That is not to negate the strength of Microsoft Windows on the desktop, or to try and ignore it. We always need to take the prevalence of Microsoft on the desktop into account. But there are paths of action that reduce dependency, and there are paths that increase it. Samba, Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org are all excellent examples of solutions that create more degrees of freedom. These are bridge-building applications. But where do these bridges lead?

Their approach is to interoperate by basing themselves on Open Standards that are equally available on all platforms, and then do their utmost to ensure they also support the Microsoft specific formats and the deviations from Open Standards that were often deliberately introduced to create incompatibility in order to facilitate lock-in. So they bridge towards empowering the user with Free Software applications that can now interoperate, thus enabling multiple platforms and reducing dependency upon Microsoft.

A groupware application that focuses primarily around Microsoft Outlook may seem related, but where does this particular bridge lead?

For one interoperability is often achieved at tremendous cost, such as storing the binary blobs of Outlook that are based on the in-memory application specific data structure in SQL databases. A somewhat better approach is MAPI as the transport layer for Microsoft compatibility. As long as there is a truly open and interoperable communication and storage layer and mechanism underneath, that is. The inherent danger is that MAPI becomes the primary and most important protocol in such an application, genuinely turning things back into a “every platform as long as it is Microsoft Windows” situation.

But even more importantly: By building a deeper habitual and technological dependency on Outlook, which only runs properly on Windows.

So that bridge leads towards where users already are: An ever increasing dependency on Microsoft Windows, which is the opposite effect of applications such as Samba, Firefox or OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice.

Worse, even, they block in particular the office applications due to a quirk in Microsoft’s licensing strategy which bundles Microsoft Outlook and Office. As a result, where one is already deployed, the other is already fully paid for. For the office suites that means LibreOffice / OpenOffice.org would have to pay users for using them. Everything else would be an added expense. Try getting this across the accounting department in a company that is struggling to stay within budget.

With groupware being a critical core functionality of any business, as long as MS Outlook stays firmly entrenched, the Free Software offices continue to have a much harder time catching up. So if your concern is to provide companies and users with more choice, investing into an Open Core groupware on the server can in fact strengthen the dependency on Microsoft Office if the deployment is predicated on Outlook as the client.

To make it worse the customer has now on good faith invested into something that promised openness and finds themselves deeper in the hole. Good luck getting that customer to trust in another solution that promises more degrees of freedom in a similar way and requires migration and further investment.

So while these Exchange competitors provide temporary relief in terms of cash flow, they do nothing to resolve the underlying problems, and companies that provide these kinds of solutions to their customers would be well advised not to oversell them as “Open Source Solutions with all the great advantages of Open Source” because they’d be misleading their customers.

Chances are the customer will anyhow harbour unjustified expectations even without the overselling, but overselling definitely increases the chance of leaving permanently scorched earth for Open Source / Free Software.

So what would be a sustainable approach?

Firstly, the solution should be based upon Open Standards as much as possible.

Secondly, it should be fully Free Software that is deserving of the name.

Thirdly, that solution should not predicate itself primarily upon Microsoft Outlook support. Support for Microsoft Outlook can clearly be a plus, but it should not permeate the design of the solution, nor should it be the only or even primary client of choice. So the client would be focused towards a truly heterogeneous client ecosystem, and ideally one that also assumes a multi platform world.

Then it should come with an up to date web client, mobile phone support and all the technical aspects users require, but it should not require a huge data centre to run it. In other words it should be able to scale up as well as down, to be installable on a single machine in an office as well as in a distributed cloud setup that can serve hundreds of thousands of users.

Why would you care about that level of scalability? Because it provides the grounds for ubiquity. And Microsoft has done a pretty good job at demonstrating how powerful ubiquity really can be. But that ubiquity depends upon a couple more factors. Such as the development process.

Does the solution you’re looking at actually have public development mailing list, issue trackers, wikis and such where the actual developers of the company driving it participate and can the community participate in the steering of the solution on all levels? Is there transparency of the development process, and is there a development process to speak of?

But most importantly: You don’t know your business requirements for the next ten years in advance.

What you do know, however, is that the domain of groupware is going to be a central part of that, because exchanging messages, planning your days and keeping track of the people you interact with is not going to become less important. Neither are the extended functionalities that are often associated, such as instant communication, telephony, video conferencing, collaborating on documents and so on and so forth. In all likelihood, its importance is going to increase as we move towards a more interconnected and cooperative world.

What does this mean for your decision right now?

You want technology that you can innovate upon and integrate into other technologies easily. That is partially covered by the Free Software & Open Standards points above. But there are also architectural aspects to consider here, and conceptual questions as to whether the solution is flexible enough to evolve with your needs.

Especially your groupware solution merits such in-depth analysis before you make a call.

Because lock-in starts at the application level this choice is an essential part of what you will be able to decide in the future. So next time you’re thinking about your groupware strategy you might want to ask yourself: Do you think that Windows is the future of the Free Software desktop? Do you believe it is the only desktop you should ever be able to choose?

If you don’t think so  I would unsurprisingly suggest you take a look at Kolab. Good starting points might be the Kolab Story, the Kolab 3.0 Primer, and of course the Kolab Systems web page.

But perhaps even  more importantly I believe this shows we need to be addressing groupware & office jointly if we want to displace Microsoft Outlook & Office.

So I invite everyone working on promoting the Free Software office solutions to get in touch and work together.

Pacman and cleaning out old packages

blog.padowi.se » English | 12:59, Tuesday, 01 May 2012

Just found this out, and thought it may benefit someone else, so here you go

In my netbook install of Archlinux I was running out of disk space on / because the package cache (/var/cache/pacman/pkg/) was always filling up with old versions of packages. The reason for this obviously being that whenever I would upgrade a package, it wouldn’t be until next reboot I’d know if something was amiss or not, so pacman -Sc wasn’t really an option. And at next reboot, did I remember to run pacman -Sc? Of course not.

But, as it has been said before, and will be said again countless times: the arch wiki is fantastic!

Take for instance the pacman page, where it gives a hint that if you don’t really like pacman -Sc, you could try cacheclean (found in the AUR).

It takes at least one parameter, or, I guess, two at the most. The required one is a number, indicating how many previous versions you wish to keep. And on top of that you could add -p for preview, in which case it will only simulate removing the packages, and instead printing their names, so you have a chance to spot any mistake you might have made. With -v, cacheclean will perform the task, and tell you what it has done.

Since it will operate on /var/ you’ll need to execute it as root.

Simple as that. The only gotcha is that it is a python3 script, but since that is the standard in arch these days anyway, it shouldn’t make much of a difference anyhow.

:wq

Traveling to Berlin in June? Update: No airport changes!

Inductive Bias | 09:23, Tuesday, 01 May 2012

Update: Seems like there won’t be any airport changes for Berlin Buzzwords: German article at Tagesspiegel on postponing airport opening.

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If you are planning to travel to Berlin in June – e.g. to attend Berlin Buzzwords – note that there is a major change to airports happening on June 2nd:

Saturday, June 2nd will be the last day, both Schönefeld Airport (SXF) as well as Tegel Airport (TXL) are going to be open. All planes departing TXL that day will arrive at SXF in the evening.

The morning after (Sunday, June 3rd) airport Berlin Brandenburg International (also known as BBI, IATA code BER) is going to open. This airport is located very close to Schönefeld, there will be trains and busses connecting it to the city.

Airlines should handle this change transparently. However when arriving at TXL make sure to check which airport you are departing from to avoid ending up in front of closed doors Also should you be arriving from the US keep in mind that there will be a few more direct connections to Berlin starting June 3rd – e.g. Air Berlin will offer multiple daily flights to and from New York and Miami.

When travelling from the airport to the conference by public transport, keep in mind that for TXL you only need a ticket covering zones A and B – for SXF and BER your need to purchase a ticket that is valid for zones A, B and C.

Travelling from TXL to the conference venue and speaker hotel by cab is roughly 30 Euros. For BER the fare is roughly 50 Euros.

Der “Tag des Geistigen Eigentums” beim BDI – die Nachlese aus der Sicht der FSFE

Agile Workers Software » FLOSS | 17:08, Monday, 30 April 2012

Der 26. April ist von der WIPO im Jahr 2000 zum “Welttag des Geistigen Eigentums” ausgerufen worden, um das Bewusstsein dafür zu schärfen, wie Patente, Urheberrechte, Warenzeichen und Designs unser tägliches Leben beeinflussen. Der Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie e.V. (BDI) hat am 26. April 2012 zum “Tag des Geistigen Eigentums” ins Haus der Deutschen Wirtschaft eingeladen. Das Motto der Veranstaltung war diesmal “Geistiges Eigentum verpflichtet” – was in Anbetracht der Hitzigkeit der aktuellen Debatte um eine Reform des Urheberrechts spannende Diskussionen versprach. Insbesondere wäre die Betonung der Pflichten der Rechteinhaber eine willkommene Bereicherung. Eine Delegation der FSFE nahm an der Veranstaltung teil, und wartete lange darauf, dass es zur Sache ging.

Schaltgetriebe, Kettensägen, Kopfhörer

Denn bei den Beiträgen ging es zunächst mal um Schaltgetriebe, Kettensägen und Kopfhörer. In einer tatsächlich beeindruckenden Präsentation von VW über das Direktschaltgetriebe und seinen auf den entsprechenden Patenten in Verbindung mit VWs Lizensierungspolitik aufbauenden Erfolges standen zunächst traditionelle Ingenieurserfindungen und ihr Schutz durch Patente im Vordergrund. Aus Sicht von VW “verpflichtet geistiges Eigentum zum Schutz von Technologien und Innovationen, damit Hochlohnländer wie Deutschland gegen die Konkurrenz aus Niedriglohnländern bestehen können”.

Der Werkzeughersteller Stihl berichtete unter der Überschrift “Wie der Schutz geistigen Eigentums allen nützt” über die erschreckenden Ausmasse, die Produktpiraterie angenommen hat, und zog die Verbindung zwischen den Namen der Unternehmen und Produkte, die Konsumenten entsprechende Qualität erwarten lassen, und der Verbrauchersicherheit, die durch Nachbauten schlechterer Qualität nicht gewährleistet wird. Dabei wird vorausgesetzt, dass Nachahmer immer auch schlechtere Qualität mit weniger Verbrauchersicherheit liefern, was sicher im demonstrierten Einzelfall zutrifft, aber – wie die deutsche Solarindustrie gerade schmerzlich lernt – sicherlich nicht verallgemeinert werden kann.

In der Paneldiskussion reduzierte dann Volker Bartels von Sennheiser das Internet auf einen “Marktplatz für Produktpiraterie, mit Strukturen wie bei der Mafia, und Gewinnen wie im Drogenhandel”. Überraschend war der Hinweis von Uwe Wiesner, Leiter Patente, Marken und Lizenzen bei VW, dass China inzwischen in Sachen Durchsetzung von Patenten ein verlässlicher Partner sei. Später im Pausengespräch wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass circa 30 Prozent der Produktnachbauten inzwischen aus Deutschland kämen (eine Quelle war dafür nicht aufzutreiben). Die Hamburger Politologin Ingrid Schneider betonte, das ACTA sich als umfassende Alphabetisierungs- und Sensibilisierungskampagne für geistiges Eigentum und Schutzrechte herausgestellt hat. Durch das Internet kommen Bürger direkter und häufiger mit Schutzrechten in Berührung, und durch die ACTA-Debatte denken sie darüber bewusster nach, erkennen die Wichtigkeit und beziehen deutlicher Position. Dies begrüssenswerte Erkenntnis stand im Gegensatz zu früheren Kommentaren, die den ACTA-Gegnern indirekt mangelnen Sachverstand vorgeworfen hatten.

Linke Ecke Digitale Gesellschaft e.V., rechte Ecke Industrie

Auf den Punkt gebracht wurde die aktuelle Bruchstelle zwischen Bürgerinteressen und geistigem Eigentum beim Streitgespräch zwischen Günter Berg vom Hoffmann und Campe Verlag und Markus Beckedahl von Digitale Gesellschaft e.V.

Beckedahl wies erneut darauf hin, dass der Begriff Geistiges Eigentum an sich irreführend ist und aus dem Sprachgebrauch gestrichen gehört. Er stellte die aktuelle Laufzeit des Urheberrechts mit siebzig Jahren nach dem Tod des Autors in Frage, und brachte erneut Pauschalabgaben zugunsten von Urhebern ins Gespräch. Er erläuterte, warum mit dem Internet aufgewachsene Bürger dieses als öffentlichen Raum betrachten.

Berg dagegen sprach von Mythos des Internets als öffentlichem Raum, der nicht zuträfe, weil das Internet im wesentlichen von wenigen sehr starken Unternehmen wie Google und Facebook kontrolliert sei. Es müsse auf die Entwicklung eine Unrechtsbewusstseins bei Internetnutzern hingewirkt werden, wenn sie sich ohne Gegenleistung Dinge aneignen, so wie sie dies im realen Leben auch haben.

Es schien, als ob beide Seiten deswegen nicht zu einem gemeinsamen Standpunkt finden konnten, weil die Rolle des Internet diametral unterschiedlich gesehen wurde. Zum Beispiel ist der Handlungsspielraum der Politik, wenn es sich um einen Marktplatz handelt, wesentlich umfassender als bei einem öffentlichen Raum, in dem politische Grundrechte geltend gemacht werden können. Im letzteren sind zum Beispiel Zugangssperren auf Grund von wiederholten Urheberrechtsverletzungen undenkbar, im ersteren schon.

Immer um den heissen Brei

In seiner Begrüssungsrede stellte Markus Kerber vom BDI Schutzrechte als das Fundament des Exporterfolgs der deutschen Wirtschaft heraus. Immer wieder wurde ACTA als Antipiraterieabkommen bezeichnet, dessen Umsetzung doch im Interesse aller liegen müsste. Wiederholt wurden Markenverletzungen und Produktpiraterie als Gründe herangezogen, um die Notwendigkeit der Überwachung des Internets zu belegen. Geistiges Eigentum wurde als integraler Bestandteil einer freiheitlichen und marktwirtschaftlichen Gesellschaftsordnung hervorgehoben. Es ist verständlich, dass der BDI die Interessen der deutschen Industrie vehement vertritt, es erscheint aber wenig zuträglich für das kultivierte Führen der Debatte um Geistiges Eigentum im 21. Jahrhundert, solche Positionen relativ unreflektiert vorzutragen. Auch drängt sich der Eindruck auf, dass der BDI im wesentlichen die Interessen der etablierten deutschen Unternehmen vertritt. Jedenfalls waren Stimmen von Tech-Startups bei der Veranstaltung nicht präsent (genauso wenig wie die von Urhebern).

Max Stadler, parlamentarischer Staatssekretär im Bundesministerium der Justiz, erklärte, der Schutz des Eigentums sei ein Grundrecht, aus dem direkt der Schutz des geistigen Eigentums folgte. Es ist nun aber so: Der Schutz des Eigentums ist ein Grundrecht, dass zuvorderst nicht nur dem Schutz des Bürgers vor Dieben, sondern aus den Schutz des Bürgers vor dem Zugriff der Staatsmacht sicherstellt. Das Grundgesetz sichert die freie Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit und die Freiheit der Kunst. Geistiges Eigentum kommt erst ausserhalb des Grundgesetzes im Urheberrechtsgesetz vor. Das geistiges Eigentum im Interessenkonflikt zwischen Urheber und Gesellschaft modelliert werden muss, zeigt sich an den einschlägigen Einschränkungen – so sind Schutzrechte im allgemeinen nur zeitlich beschränkt gültig, was beim Besitz an realen Gütern selbstverständlich nicht der Fall ist. Die amerikanische Verfassung enthält eine Copyright Clause, die den Schutz von geistigem Eigentum nur zu bestimmten Zwecken und ebenfalls befristet zulässt. Eigentum und geistiges Eigentum sind eben nicht das gleiche, und das eine folgt aus dem anderen nicht direkt. Die leichtfertige Gleichsetzung von Eigentum an Realgütern und geistigem Eigentum ist einer der Kernkritikpunkte der FSF(E) an der bestehenden Rechtsordnung, und dieser lässt sich durch einen solchen Pauschalsatz nicht aus der Welt schaffen. Eher entsteht der Eindruck, dass es sich um den Versuch der Wegdefinition des Problems handelt.

“Geistiges Eigentum” als irreführender Begriff

Wem dafür bisher Gründe fehlten – die Veranstaltung des BDI zeigte deutlich, wie der Begriff des “Geistigen Eigentums” an sich irreführend sein kann. Produktpiraterie, also das Verkaufen von Nachahmungen, die dem Verbraucher vorgaukeln, Produkte eines namhaften Herstellers zu kaufen, ist ein Problem des Markenrechts, also entweder der unrechtmässigen Verwendung eines Namens oder einer sehr ähnlichen Verballhornung (in der Präsentation von Stihl wurde von Produkten gesprochen, die unter den Namen “Still” oder “Sthil” verkauft wurden). Das Recht einer Firma an seiner Marke ist vergleichbar mit dem Recht einer Person am eigenen Namen, entsteht automatisch und gilt potentiell ewig. Es hat mit Urheberrecht oder Patenten an sich gar nichts gemein, dient aber in der Argumentation immer wieder als Beweis, das Geistiges Eigentum ständig verletzt wird, und deswegen die Durchsetzung dessen forciert werden muss. Selbst wenn durch Produktpiraterie Patente verletzt werden, lässt sich noch keine Verbindung zur Anwendung des Urheberrechts auf das Internet aufbauen. Die Argumente der betroffenen Industrieunternehmem sind berechtigt und ihnen muss bei der Vertretung ihrer Rechte zur Seite gestanden werden. Es handelt sich hier aber um ein Problem der Durchsetzung der bestehenden Rechtsordnung, während dem Wehleiden der Verwertungsgesellschaften das Wegbrechen eines überholten Geschäftsmodells zu Grunde liegt.

Tragisch ist, dass diese falsche Zusammenfassung von artverschiedenen Sachverhalten in diesem Fall der Industrie Schaden zufügt: Die Forderung nach der Bekämpfung von Produktpiraterie ist allgemein nachvollziehbar, und hätte, da sie dem gesunden Menschenverstand entspricht, es sicherlich leicht eine politische Mehrheit zu finden. Dadurch das ACTA aber quasi huckepack mit Antipirateriemassnahmen auch Vorhaben zur Überwachung wegen Urheberrechtsverletzungen enthält, erregte das Gesamtpaket an Massnahmen erheblichen politischen Widerstand. Es ist im Interesse des BDI und der deutschen Industrie darauf hinzuwirken, diese Verquickung eines Gemischtwarenladens an Schutzrechten unter dem Namen Geistiges Eigentum aufzulösen, und die einzelnen daraus entstandenen Problemfelder – den Kampf gegen Produktpiraterie, die Reform des Urheberrechts, das europäische Patent, … – einzeln anzugehen. Eine solche Vorgehensweise würde der deutschen Industrie und dem BDI auch ermöglichen, die Debatten um den Schutz von realen Gütern einerseits und die Umsetzung des Urheberrechts auf Informationsgüter im Internet andererseits sachgerecht zu trennen.

Das Internet – Marktplatz oder öffentlicher Raum?

Es ist überraschend, dass die Frage nach dem Charakter des Internets als öffentlichem Raum immer noch diskutiert wird. Deswegen folgt hier noch einmal das Verständnis derjenigen, die mit dem Internet aufgewachsen sind: Das Internet ist der öffentliche Raum, in dem Beziehungen gepflegt (Privatsphäre), Informationen aufgenommen (Meinungsfreiheit) und bereitgestellt (Freiheit der Presse) werden, das eigene Gesamtbild gepflegt wird (freie Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit), in dem in Communities gemeinsame Ziele verfolgt werden (Versammlungs- und Vereinigungsfreiheit), Nachrichten versandt werden (Briefgeheimnis), … Eine abschliessende Aufzählung ist wohl nicht möglich, aber wer will unter dieser Sichtweise dem Internet die Eigenschaft des öffentlichen Raums absprechen? Damit wird auch deutlich, warum die Verweigerung des Zugangs zum Internet vom Bürger aufgenommen wird, als würde man erwägen, Berufsverbote wieder einzuführen. Für Netzbürger ist das Wegnehmen des Internetzugangs vergleichbar mit dem Hausarrest für Dissidenten.

Politik und Interessenvertreter wie der BDI sind in diesem Zusammenhang gefordert, und offensichtlich teilweise überfordert, ihr eigenes Verstandnis vom mündigen Bürger auf den neuesten Stand zu bringen. So erlaubt das Internet neue Formen der partizipativen Demokratie, da es tatsächlich möglich macht, jeden einzelnen Bürger nach der Meinung zu einem Thema zu befragen. Insofern liegt Markus Kerber vom BDI falsch, wenn er postuliert, dass das einzige Thema der Piratenpartei die Umdeutung geistigen Eigentums als Kollektivgut ist. Es ist das Gespenst der aktiven Teilhabe des mündigen Bürgers an transparenten Entscheidungsprozessen, die das Internet möglich macht und von der Netzbürger wissen, dass sie möglich ist. Politik und institutionelle Interessenvertreter wie der BDI empfinden diese zumindest als unangenehme Veränderung. Deswegen sollte es aber nicht verwundern, wenn protektionistische Massnahmen wie ACTA heute grosse Teile der interessierten Öffentlichkeit zum Protest aktivieren, während man diese vor einigen Jahren noch gemütlich zwischen politischen Ausschüssen und Interessenvertretern verkungeln konnte. Der BDI sollte sich dafür einsetzen, alle Sektoren der deutschen Industrie in eine rational geführte Debatte einzubeziehen, und Lösungen zu unterstützen, die nicht sofort wieder auf Grund von Einschränkung von Freiheitsrechten auf den Prüfstand gebracht werden. Eine zukunftsweisende, langfristig stabile, den gesellschaftlichen, wirtschaftlichen und individuellen Interessen gerecht werdende Regelung des Urheberrechts ist eine wichtige Grundlage für das langfristige Wachstum der deutschen Wirtschaft. Der BDI kann hierzu eine führende Rolle übernehmen, denn “Geistiges Eigentum verpflichtet”.

@mirkoboehm • Mirko on LinkedIn • @AgileWorkers

Berlin Buzzwords Schedule online - book your ticket now

Inductive Bias | 10:29, Monday, 30 April 2012

As of beginning of last week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is online. The Program Committee has
completed reviewing all submissions and set up the schedule containing a great lineup of speakers for this years Berlin Buzzwords program. Among the speakers we have Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat), Alex Lloyd (Google), Michael Busch (Twitter) as well as Nicolas Spiegelberg (Facebook). Checkout our program in the online schedule.

Berlin Buzzwords standard conference tickets are still available. Note that we also offer a special rate for groups of 5 and more attendees with a 15% discount off the standard ticket price. Make sure to book your ticket now: Ticket prizes will rise by another 100 Euros for last minute purchases in three weeks!

“Berlin Buzzwords is by far one of the best conferences around if you care about search, distributed systems, and NoSQL…” says Shay Banon, founder of ElasticSearch.

Berlin Buzzwords will take place June 4th and 5th 2012 at Urania Berlin. The 3rd edition of the conference for developers and users of open source projects, again focuses on everything related to scalable search, data-analysis in the cloud and NoSQL-databases. We are bringing together developers, scientists, and analysts working on innovative technologies for storing, analysing and searching today’s massive amounts of digital data.

Berlin Buzzwords is organised by newthinking communications GmbH in collaboration with Isabel Drost (Member of the Apache Software Foundation, PMC member Apache community development and co-founder of Apache Mahout), Jan Lehnardt (PMC member Apache CouchDB) and Simon Willnauer (Member of the Apache Software Foundation, PMC member Apache Lucene).

More information including speaker interviews, ticket sales, press information as well as “meet me at bbuzz” buttons are available on the official Berlin Buzzwords website.

Looking forward to meeting you in June.

PS: Did I mention that Berlin is all beautiful in Summer?

2012w17

blog.padowi.se » English | 10:00, Sunday, 29 April 2012

Now this was an uplifting read.

And I know that it is the popular thing to do, to hate on Ruby and Rails and that entire community, but seriously, what self-respecting person would want to identify themselves as a brogrammer? But, if I don’t consider myself a rock-star programmer, what then do I consider myself to be?

My first thoughts reading this post revolved around oh no, not another hare-brained “improvement” to something which doesn’t need changing. Then I thought some more, and saw how this could be useful. But then I had another thought.

Ordinary letters, you know, the pen and paper kind, has worked pretty well without being programmable, and I suppose that is because you probably tend to formulate these letters in a different way, thus circumventing the need to programmability. Just a thought…

The world needs more people like this.

The world needs less of this type of operations.

:wq

Τα ζητήματα ψηφιακών δικαιωμάτων μας αφορούν όλους…

autoverse » libre | 10:20, Wednesday, 25 April 2012

Περπατώντας στον δρόμο, τουλάχιστον στο κέντρο της Αθήνας και στις περισσότερες Ευρωπαϊκές πρωτεύουσες, αν σηκώσουμε το βλέμμα μας πολύ πιθανόν να εντοπίσουμε σε κάποια κολόνα κάποια κάμερα παρακολούθησης. Είτε έχουν τοποθετηθεί για τη ρύθμιση της κυκλοφορίας είτε για λόγους ασφαλείας, έχουμε μια άμεση αντίληψη της διαδικασίας παρακολούθησης ακριβώς επειδή η κάμερα είναι ένα απτό αντικείμενο, και σίγουρα οι περισσότεροι άνθρωποι είναι αρκετά ευαίσθητοι σε τέτοια ζητήματα.

Παρόμοιες τεχνικές χρησιμοποιούνται και στον ψηφιακό κόσμο. Πολλές φορές αρκετά πιο “επιθετικές”. Παρόλα αυτά οι περισσότεροι άνθρωποι δεν δείχνουν το ίδιο επίπεδο ευαισθησίας. Είτε γιατί οι μέθοδοι παρακολούθησης δεν είναι τόσοι απτοί και παρατηρήσιμοι όσο μια κάμερα είτε γιατί εμείς δεν έχουμε καταφέρει να τους ευαισθητοποιήσουμε. Κι όταν λέω “εμείς”, εννοώ όλους εμάς που αντιλαμβανόμαστε αυτές τις μεθόδους και ξέρουμε στις περισσότερες των περιπτώσεων και πως να τις αποφύγουμε. Δεν έχουμε καταφέρει δυστυχώς να εξηγήσουμε με απλό και κατανοητό τρόπο αυτούς τους κινδύνους και να προσφέρουμε εύκολες στη χρήση τεχνικές ή υπηρεσίες προστασίας.

Εδώ και σχεδόν ένα χρόνο έχει ψηφιστεί και στην Ελλάδα ο περίφημος νόμος για data retention, δηλαδή παρακράτηση δεδομένων. Με απλά λόγια όλοι οι πάροχοι ψηφιακών υπηρεσιών, είτε μιλάμε για τους παρόχους internet είτε για τους παρόχους κινητών και σταθερών τηλεπικοινωνιών, είναι υποχρεωμένοι να καταγράφουν την κίνηση μας και να συντηρούν τα αρχεία αυτά για ένα χρόνο. Τα δεδομένα που παρακρατούνται είναι ουσιαστικά τα πάντα, εκτός του περιεχομένου. Δηλαδή οι διευθύνσεις IPs με τις οποίες επικοινωνούμε, τα websites που μπαίνουμε, οι τηλεφωνικοί αριθμοί που καλούμε ή μας καλούν και τα στοιχεία ώρας και τοποθεσίας απ’ όπου τα κάνουμε όλα αυτά. Αρκετά τρομακτικό ε; Κι όμως συμβαίνει (διάβασε το ΦΕΚ).

Τι μπορούμε να κάνουμε για να προστατευτούμε; Μια λύση είναι να κρυπτογραφούμε όλη μας την κίνηση (πχ. μέσω vpn ή ssh tunel), χρησιμοποιώντας έναν server σε κάποια άλλη χώρα, που ιδανικά δεν θα υπάρχει παρόμοια νομοθεσία. Αυτό φυσικά είναι μια λύση που για κάποιον απλό χρήστη είναι μάλλον ανέφικτη. Μια πιο απλή λύση είναι η χρήση του δικτύου tor.

Πρόσφατα είχαμε τις παγκόσμιες αντιδράσεις για το SOPA, ένα νομοσχέδιο που θα έδινε το δικαίωμα να εξαφανίζεται ένα site απ’ το internet με συνοπτικές διαδικασίες αν κάποιος έκρινε πως προσβάλλεται απ’ το περιεχόμενο του. Το νομοσχέδιο αυτό προορίζονταν μόνο για τις ΗΠΑ και απ’ ότι φαίνεται οι αντιδράσεις απέδωσαν καθώς πλέον έχει παγώσει η ψήφιση του. Στην Ευρώπη παρόμοιες δράσεις είχαμε για την ACTA, μια εμπορική συμφωνία, που δυστυχώς την υπέγραψε η Ελλάδα. Μια συμφωνία που συντάχτηκε εν κρυπτώ μετά από πιέσεις των εταιρειών παραγωγής περιεχομένου (κινηματογραφικού και μουσικού) και στην πράξη καταπατά στοιχειώδη ανθρώπινα δικαιώματα προς όφελος της προστασίας πνευματικών δικαιωμάτων. Μέχρι την ώρα που γράφονταν αυτές οι γραμμές δεν έχει καθοριστεί ακριβή ημερομηνία συζήτησης της συμφωνίας στο Ευρωκοινοβούλιο (διάβασε το πλήρες κείμενο).

Η ACTA είναι απλώς το αποτέλεσμα πρακτικών ελέγχου που βλέπουμε ήδη σιγά-σιγά στο διαδίκτυο, όπως ήταν η περίπτωση κλεισίματος του Megaupload, απ’ τα πιο δημοφιλή site διαμοιρασμού αρχείων. Η ευθύνη της κοινότητας μας είναι να αναδεικνύει τέτοια θέματα και να συμβάλει ώστε να γίνεται κατανοητό απ’ τον περισσότερο κόσμο πως όλα αυτά τους αφορούν άμεσα. Ακόμα κι αν το μόνο πράγμα που κάνουν στο internet είναι να διαβάζουν το mail τους ή να επικοινωνούν με τους φίλους τους. Ας ενημερωνόμαστε λοιπόν όσο καλύτερα μπορούμε κι ας παρακολουθούμε ή συμμετέχουμε σε δράσεις φορέων που ασχολούνται με τέτοια ζητήματα, είτε στο εξωτερικό (eff) είτε στην Ελλάδα (dln).

KDE Telepathy in GSoC 2012

drdanzs blog » freesoftware | 00:22, Wednesday, 25 April 2012

We had several good proposals related to KDE Telepathy for Google Summer of Code 2012, but unfortunately we only got 2 slots! But hey, we got 2 slots! That’s great! Thanks to Google for organising and sponsoring it.

The first accepted project is “Message Filtering Plugin System” by Lasath Fernando (shocklateboy92), the author of the chat plasmoid that will be released in KDE Telepathy 0.4. He will be mentored by David Edmundson and

“will create a completely asynchronous modular and extensible system that enriches messages before they’re displayed to the user. These includes embedding images and videos from links, Translating messages, (re)-formatting them nicely, reading out loud etc.”

The second project is “Enhancement to peer-to-peer DBus for Telepathy DBus Tubes” by Puneet Goyal. Puneet worked on the Payment Detection use-case of project Alkimia in Season of KDE 2011. I will be his mentor for this interesting project which aim is to make it even easier to use D-Bus Tubes from any KDE application:

“When an application connects to a peer to peer dbus tube, it must know what exactly to look for. Even When it registers for another object, the other side of the tube must know about it. So the ideas is to create a class that could ease the object to register and unregister on the DBus Tubes, and to provide you with an interface similar to the one as a DBus Server.”

We had to reject several good projects, because of the limited amount of slots, but if you are motivated to work on a project in KDE Telepathy you still have one chance[1]: Season of KDE (SoK)! SoK is similar to Google Summer of Code: you won’t be paid, but you will get a mentor, a very cool t-shirt and certificate! If you want to apply, you can have a look at KDE Telepathy ideas that we selected for GSoC but did not get a slot (“Telepathy setup for KDE multiplayer games” and “Collaborative editor“), check out some more ideas here or propose your own idea.

---

[1]Actually you have as many chance as you want to contribute even if you don’t want to take part to SoK! We have several junior jobs if you are (or want to become) a developer, and a few non-programming tasks that don’t require programming skill if you just want to help us!

Berlin Hadoop Get Together (April 2012)- videos are up

Inductive Bias | 14:22, Monday, 23 April 2012

Sebastian Schelter: Introducing Apache Giraph for Large Scale Graph Processing

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/40737998" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="500"></iframe>

Dr. Falk-Florian Henrich: Applying Compiler Technology to Event Stream Processing

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="275" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/40827692" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="500"></iframe>

Dr. Mikio Braun: TWIMPACT: On Real-Time Twitter Analysis

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/40827691" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="500"></iframe>

Fellowship interview with Bernd Wurst

Fellowship Interviews | 11:26, Monday, 23 April 2012

This month I chatted with Bernd Wurst, who operates Free Software based servers and workstations for the customers of his pro-privacy web-hosting and IT service company, schokokeks.org. He grew up on a farm in a rural district of southern Germany and got in
touch with computers in the early nineties. He has been using and advocating Free Software since 2001, and volunteers for the Freedroidz project.

Chris Woolfrey: What first got you involved in Free Software?

Bernd Wurst: I switched to Free Software at about 2001, after discovering it at university where I studied computer science. After switching over my desktop, I learned a lot about the philosophy of Free Software. Since then all computers I’ve operated – my family’s, too and some friends – have been switched to Free Software. I used Gentoo GNU/Linux to really learn the internals – I think Gentoo GNU/Linux had only just been founded when I started using it.

Those experiences were very valuable to me. As a Gentoo GNU/Linux user, you can’t avoid being a bug reporter for a great number of Free Software projects – as packages are build on thousands of computers many errors occur – so I think I’ve supported a lot of projects. But I’ve never been an official team member of any project, or anything like that.

“As a Gentoo user you can’t avoid being a bug reporter for many Free Software projects”

I don’t see myself as a coder. My web hosting company schokokeks.org – founded together with Hanno Boeck – relies on Free Software, so we certainly do bug reporting and stuff. Really I’m an administrator, so in terms of Free Software, I’m only a user. But I am a proud member of OpenStreetMap, having mapped my hometown. I am a member of the FSFE Education Team, and I’m involved in the freedroidz project.

The Freedroidz project is a really cool idea: pupils should have fun while they learn something. So the guys from a compant called Tarent took LEGO mindstroms robots and made a plugin for the Eclipse development environment application, which allows you to get the LeJOS alternative firmware for LEGO robots running on them. The Lego Mindstroms platform offers a bunch of sensors and can control some motor units. So you can easily build robots with it. The guys from the Freedroidz project also built a simple to use Java library, so that programming a simple robot can be done by about 10 lines of code.

It was in I think 2010 that I first saw anything about freedroidz – it had booth at the “chemnitzer linux-tage” conference. I had a nice conversation with FSFE President Karsten Gerloff about this cool project could be made available to pupils. He involved Elmar Geese, CEO of Tarent, the sponsor and founder of the freedroidz project. Elmar invited us – me, my wife who is a teacher, and another teacher from my wife’s school – to Bonn. We sat and thought about what could be done. In summer 2010, The Freedroidz team came to our school and did a workshop with our pupils here.

“The Freedroidz team came to our school and did a workshop with our pupils”

After that, we and some members of the FSFE met again in Bonn and started the plan to bring Freedroidz to schools regularly. But the next planned event, at least in my region of Germany, was cancelled. I don’t exactly know why but as far as I know it shall be scheduled again the next months.

CW: Lots of people say its important for children to understand how computers work, but can be difficult to find a way of teaching them that’s fun for kids, can’t it?

BW: That’s the cool thing about it: even young kids can learn programming, without feeling like they’re at school. Our initial school workshop had kids aged from about 12 to 17, and they all had a lot of fun. The older ones built more complex robots and had to dig deeper into programming.

Another great thing: they can take all needed software home and reuse it when they have access to any LEGO mindstorms robot. So we not only taught them programming but also what it is that’s important about Free Software.

CW: And the whole thing seems like it’d be easy to pass on to other schools and teachers

BW: Definitely. I think that schools should share much more knowledge than they do. Free Software can be a good starting point!

“Schools should share much more knowledge than they do”

CW: You mentioned earlier that you’re not a coder. What attracts you to Free Software, and helping out with these projects?

BW: When I say I’m not a coder I mean I don’t call it fun to do hundreds of lines of code by myself. But as I studied computer science – and learned to code PASCAL about 18 years ago – I sort of can write code. So if I find a bug in a software, I sometimes get my ass up and do the fix by myself. Sure, Free Software is the fundamental basis for being able do that. I always want to have that freedom.

On the other hand our company not only does web hosting but also IT support for local customers. I installed some GNU/Linux-based boxes and few have been unhappy about it. So it’s valuable for me and future customers to identify the reasons that some people refuse to use Free Software, and that the bugs and so on are found, and if possible repaired for future releases.

Of course, when I find bugs in software that I’m using myself, I simply want them to be fixed. Reporting the issue is the first step.

CW: You mentioned earlier that in some of your early encounters with GNU/Linux, there were often bugs and problems?

“Having software source code means you can optimize it for your computer’s”

BW: Do you know Gentoo GNU/Linux? It compiles all software locally on the computer it runs on, rather than downloading and installing pre-compiled binary packages. Hardware adjustment flags are set accordingly to the local CPU. So Software used on Gentoo systems gets compiled on many, many different systems with many optimizing compiler stuff. That process provides a great opportunity for bug hunting. It was a great resource for learning for me, too.

Gentoo GNU/Linux has also had bleeding edge releases by default. So Gentoo users used to find lots of bugs in applications before Debian GNU/Linux developers had even thought of including those applications in Debian. That’s changed now: Gentoo GNU/Linux is much more stable today.

CW: What do you think those earlier experiences taught you about Free Software?

BW: Many things. Knowing that all improvements that are done on the software are relayed publicly and that all users can benefit, there’s much more motivation to report issues or to fix things.

Having the source code for software is also important. You can optimize the code to your computer architecture. That aspect of Gentoo GNU/Linux could only work with software released in source code, as we know. Of course, software that is available as source code, but which is not Free Software (and therefore may not be altered of improved) is not useful and hardly even worth mentioning.

“For me, the “Free” in Free Software is mostly about freedom to fix things for the public”

It’s a silly situation, and one I ran into, long ago. For me, the “Free” in Free Software is mostly about freedom to fix things for the public. Being able to get software updates free of license costs is a logical consequence of that.

CW: Do you think the importance of that is something which can only be fully appreciated by people who are programmers?

BW: Getting bugs in the software that you use fixed is clearly something that everybody appreciates. But it’s possible that plenty of people only want bugs be fixed because it benefits them. I think non-administrators that cannot get updated software for free – because they have to pay someone to install it – don’t care about getting updated versions free of charge.

But that’s perfectly okay. I think if a regular user calls me, shows me the bug and then gets a fixed version a few days later, then the customer appreciates Free Software. Even if he had to pay something towards it.

Second steps with git

Inductive Bias | 20:34, Sunday, 22 April 2012

Leaving this here in case I’ll search for it later again - and I’m pretty sure I will.

The following is a simplification of the git workflow detailed earlier - in particular the first two steps and a little background.

• When dealing with remotes the git remote documentation is very useful.
• When sharing your changes with others the git tutorial on sharing changes is very helpful.

Instead of starting by cloning the upstream repository on github and than going from there as follows:


#clone the github repository
git clone git@github.com:MaineC/mahout.git

#add upstream to the local clone
git remote add upstream git://git.apache.org/mahout.git


you can also take a slightly different approach and start with an empty github repository to push your changes into instead:


#clone the upstream repository
git clone git://git.apache.org/mahout.git

#add upstream your personal - still empty - repo to the local clone
git remote add personal git@github.com:MaineC/mahout.git

#push your local modifications branch mods to your personal repo
git push personal mods


That should leave you with branch mods being visible in your personal repo now.

2012w16

blog.padowi.se » English | 10:30, Sunday, 22 April 2012

I ought to dedicate this blog post to git and rsync: The hard drive on my netbook died this week. I haven’t attempted to recover anything from the disk yet, but of that which is most important I figure I haven’t lost anything at all. And that’s due in no small part to git and rsync.

All of my configuration files, at least those I care about, had been added to a git repository. And most of the binaries I wanted to preserve had been rsynced to my server.
Not all of it though, which is a shame, but it shouldn’t be hard to replace what I’ve lost. Especially if I can get the old hard drive to function just one more time, just long enough to at least make a list of what it is I’m missing. The rest of the disk, well, it’s spring, perhaps a spring cleaning was in order.

So all is not lost, and looking beyond this setback, I did learn some other things this week (except for the fact that I need to become better at performing backups) such as:

• mplayer will work rather well without X: mplayer -vo fbdev </path/to/movie>
• how to revert the uncommitted changes of a single file in a git repository: git checkout -- <filename>

Also, quite some time ago, I went around thinking about how to automatically track my working time, and while this isn’t exactly like what I had in mind (I would probably just have created a daemon which somehow fetched the window title of the currently active window from X, and did so randomly 6 times per hour (not deterministically enough to be able to cheat the system).

And some assorted links which may or may not be of any particular use for anyone:

• It would seem like A/B testing is not optimal for testing web designs
• Who needs net neutrality anyway, right?
• As you sow, so you shall reap
• Programming is a culture, couldn’t have said it better myself
• Mental note to self
• The Zeitgeist framework seems like a pretty cool idea, although feel that it might operate on too high a level for my tastes. If it just worked on file access and time, and not stuff like email (would it work with any client, or do you need to use “certified” clients?) or what websites have been visited (although that could be useful)
• Funny, I thought people were innocent until proven guilty, and how can you be guilty of something which hasn’t happened?
• Making shit work is everyone’s job

:wq

An inside view on the Great Chinese Firewall

h2's blog | 14:08, Friday, 20 April 2012

As I am currently located in China, I thought I’d give all of you some technical infos on the current censorship techniques employed here. My experience differs a little from what Wikipedia tells us.

What you see as a user:
youtube.com, facebook.com, twitter.com are all not reachable. Google.com is on and off, usually redirects to google.com.hk (which is still the less censored version of google.cn). Google.de is however available. A nice site that lets you test which web-sites are unavailable is http://www.greatfirewallofchina.org, from my experience it is reliable.

Now funny enough all things political that I checked are available, be it critical (western) newspaper sites, blogs et cetera. Even Wikipedia is available. All sites that I checked, especially Wikipedia and Google.de do offer SSL (valid!) and so looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989 is possible (note that some sources claim that the western propaganda on this event is at least partly wrong, so don’t take this as defending the WP-article). Note also that I did not try without SSL, because I was told, that that would be detected and can get your internet service cut.

Whats going on under the hood:
Like I said, I did not experiment too much with entering sensitive terms in search engines, but regarding the web-site blocking I can say that

the DNS-Servers here resolve certain adresses to other IPs (obvious one). Strangely enough first neblock-owner checks reveal these IPs to be outside of China, even EU… will investigate this further.

dns-requests to foreign (probably non-whitelisted) DNS-servers are either all rerouted (based on port or deep packet inspection), or filtered and manipulated in case the requested host matches a blacklist or an expression (based on deep packet inspection). So just setting a different DNS-Server is no good, even when they are not widely known (contrary to what WP says)

traffic to the real IPs of the sites is blocked, so if you happen to know where twitter.com is, it still doesn’t get you there. This is probably achieved by resetting the TCP connection. Note that this happens early on, a traceroute to twiiter only goes one hop before dissappearing.

I currently go online trough SSH port forwarding, tunneling and proxies, will update that to proper VPN, as soon as I get the time. Anything encrypted really works, no issues with ssh and https on regular ports. OpenVPN also works…

owncould on Hiawatha

rieper|blog » en | 05:54, Thursday, 19 April 2012

Mainly for future reference here is a short summary of what to do for setting up owncloud on Debian with the (awesome) Hiawatha webserver instead of Apache. This is work in progress, since some adjustments needed to be made to Hiawatha and the new version is just a beta. So far everything is working quite nice, except the mirall syncing client, which connects, but doesnt sync.

tl,dr: apt-get update && apt-get install nano rcconf elinks && apt-get purge apache2* bind9 sendmail samba xinetd && apt-get dist-upgrade

tl,dr: cd /tmp && apt-get install -t squeeze-backports cmake && apt-get install gcc libc6-dev dpkg-dev debhelper fakeroot libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev zlib1g-dev && wget http://www.leisink.org/hiawatha-8.2.tar.gz && tar xfv hiawatha-8.2.tar.gz && sh ./hiawatha-8.2/extra/make_debian_package &&  dpkg -i hiawatha-8.2/hiawatha_8.2_i386.deb

}

tl,dr: wget http://owncloud.org/releases/owncloud-3.0.2.tar.bz2 &&  tar xfv owncloud-3.0.2.tar.bz2 &&  cp -r owncloud /var/www &&  chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/owncloud/ && apt-get install php5 php5-sqlite php5-json php5-gd curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl zip