inamerrata

I originally wrote this entry in the middle of last month when the news of the moment was that Linus was giving up Bitkeeper. Then I went to linux.conf.au and got distracted, and by the time I got to thinking about finishing it off and posting it, it didn’t seem relevant anymore, so I deleted it. Then came the spat about Scott and Ian and I thought I’d post anyway, and went to find a copy I could resurrect.

Anyway, back to the original theme. Linus dropped Bitkeeper not because he’d been convinced the open source replacements are better (he’s not, and he’s designed and written his own more or less from scratch instead), but because he’s been forced drop it to as a result of a fellow free software luminary irking Bitkeeper’s owner just that little bit too much.

Or at least that’s more or less Linus and Larry’s side of the story; Tridge’s is that he did nothing illegal or immoral, and that he shouldn’t get blamed because Larry gets inspired to take his bat and ball and go home.

What makes this even more fun is that open source has apparently gone mainstream enough for cheer squads to gather round in schoolyard fashion and chant “FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!” when we have the occasional non-technical problem. And that sort of encouragement is probably just the thing to ensure we waste more time pontificating on the problems and fighting amongst ourselves rather than creating the awesome software that we’re supposed to so brilliant at building in the first place; that would be the software that will ensure everyone in the world really does have the freedom to do whatever they might want with their computers.

Perhaps what really bugs me about the Bitkeeper issue is that there seem, to me, to be three ways of avoiding those problems. The obvious one is not using software that’s owned by someone else, which in some respects is of course exactly what we all want anyway; the other two are trying to avoid annoying the software’s owner too much, and hoping for continued charity; and doing enough for the software’s owner that it’s not considered charity, and the bumps and differences of opinion can be considered “just business”. Sadly, the latter two just don’t seem to be options for significant groups of free software folks: the former getting ruled out by eagerly tying free software to free speech, and the latter getting ruled out by an apparant inability to disentangle free software from free beer.

But even with an ideal world of free software everywhere, I don’t think those sort of choices are going to work really well — there wasn’t any non-free software in Planet Debian, yet Scott’s abdication of ownership still seems a loss to me, and a spectacularly unnecessary one. Debian and Ubuntu will probably make a good contrast here: Debian sticking to both the free beer and free speech policies; Ubuntu employing key hackers and establishing a code of conduct that expects people to treat each other decently, at least internally. I’d expect the latter to be one or two orders of magnitude more productive in both the short and long term, personally. We’ll see what happens.

Really, I guess I’m not that worried: I think that choice is bad enough that it’ll die out anyway soon enough; I guess I’m just hoping the attitude doesn’t take too much more than Linus’s Bitkeeper license with it while it goes.

(Okay, my other reason for resurrecting this entry was to see if the title would make my referer spam change from poker sites)

Hrm. Evidently I was careless in checking my mail yesterday evening.

The Government has commenced a review on options for including new exceptions in the Copyright Act 1968 and released an issues paper, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock announced today.

The review will examine whether an exception or specific exceptions to copyright based on principles of “fair use” should be adopted to make copyright law more flexible and relevant in the digital age.

“The Government is aware developments in digital technology are changing the way people use copyright material,” Mr Ruddock said. “Many Australians believe quite reasonably they should be able to record a television program or format-shift music from their own CD to an iPod or MP3 player without infringing copyright law. However, this issue needs careful consideration,” he said.

Issues paper available here.

Heh, so much for blogging regularly on LA stuff. Anyway, we’ve had more meetings since being elected, including a face to face planning session in Sydney; a couple of other meetings to keep things running, and generally been trying to run a tight ship. Jon’s President’s report goes into a bit more detail of all the stuff we’ve been trying to promote and such.

More interesting stuff on the agenda over the next couple of months too hopefully! (Including getting all those minutes and reports collated somewhere sensible, rather than just on mailing lists and blogs)

— Log opened Wed Feb 02 01:27:21 2005
<vorlon> btw, it seems Skolelinux is interested in sponsoring a physical meeting of folks related to the release process to discuss how we can get Debian to a state of timely, regular releasing. Your name was on the list of people I said should be there. Would you be interested in attending, and if so, what weekends this spring would you be (un)available?
<aj> spring?
<vorlon> … fall for you. :)
<aj> march-may, ym?
<vorlon> yes. :)
<aj> “autumn”

— Log opened Fri Feb 11 11:04:28 2005
<stockholm> please book that flight of yours.

As has been mentioned previously on this blog, Europeans are crazy. Anyway, as a direct consequence of their evil influence on world events, I ended up enjoying a whirlwind trip of New York, New York, Toronto and Vancouver in February/March just gone.

(Technically, I think NUUGF ended up being the sponsors)

You can always pick an exciting overseas trip by noticing that around 24 hours before you leave, you still don’t have your ticket. Or that you haven’t booked, and it’s under a week before you’re planning on leaving, or that you haven’t paid and there’s only a couple of days before you have to have gone through customs. Or it’s under a month before you’ll be overseas, and you don’t even know there’s going to be a trip at all. But hey, three cheers for the modern technologies that make such craziness possible!

Actually, a warning up front. I bought a new camera the day before I left; and while it’s technically vastly superior to my old one (and still wonderfully small and easy to carry around), it also requires a bit more skill in actually taking snapshots. Like being able to hold the camera steady, and press the button all the way down. As such this entry’s artwork may not be as perfect as I might hope.

Anyway, a flight to the US from Australia takes 14 hours at best, and likewise for the return, so I figured on spending slightly more time being vaguely touristy to make the trip a little worthwhile. As it happened, mostly thanks to the short notice, my flight plan to Vancouver ended up having to be pretty much 23rd Feb ’til 9th March, which happily coincided with the tail end of helix’s (aka Erinn’s) plans for FoodConf NYC (pictured right), hosted at chez Mako and Mika in upper Manhattan. Adding in a brief stopover in Toronto to try meeting up with a couple of ex-Brisbanites, and some touring of Vancouver, and all was sorted.

The trip over

The trip over to NYC wasn’t bad as these things go. The flight left at midday Wednesday, arrived in LAX early Wednesday morning. Actually, we left a little late, not starting boarding ’til we were meant to leave; which turned out well, since we spent less time in the plane on the tarmac, which in cattle class on a 747 gets uncomfortably warm pretty quickly. But it was a fairly empty flight — I initially had an entire (four seat) middle row to myself, though by the time we reached cruising altitude someone had moved into the other aisle seat. I ended up not getting any sleep on the plane (we landed at 2am or so Brisbane time, which is about the time I usually want to start drifting off, not wake up), but there were a bunch of decent movies, so that was okay. What was less okay is that, in spite of our late take off, we arrived early. Which you’d think would be a win, except that we were scheduled to arrive when the customs official start work, and we weren’t allowed off the plane until they had. Yay for forty minutes sitting outside the gate, on the plane, doing nothing. Feh.

Once we actually got to see them, LAX customs were fine, and the fingerprinting and photographing were fairly unobtrusive. The baggage handling sucked — they decided it’d be fun to use two carousels for some reason, without any indication which one your bag would come out on. Yay for forcing the entire plane to stand in between them so they can look at both, rather than spreading themselves out around just one. So I collected my bag, walked out the door and through some halls then gave my bag to the security people to check aboard my next flight. Useful! Efficient! Yeesh! Getting my boarding pass with United went fine; getting through security at LAX didn’t. First I have to show my boarding pass to someone. Then I have to watch some guy get glared at for stepping over the sticky tape line before the security scanner. Then I have to take off my jumper because it’s too bulky. Then I have to take my laptop out of it’s wetsuit. Then I have to put my wallet and camera into a different tray to my laptop. Then I have to get my boarding pass back out of my bag to show it to some other guy. Then I have to have my travel documents go through the scanner again because they’re too bulky. Meanwhile the poor guy behind me is evidently running a little late for his flight to wherever and getting stressed out. Gag. And there wasn’t even a Krispy Kreme store to have breakfast at.

Let me just say up front that I don’t care for LAX.

So I then got to wait around in the boarding lounge area for a few hours, getting gradually more and more sleepy. Starbucks provided me with a muffin and some coffee — which generally makes me more sleepy rather than less it seems. Maybe half an hour before my flight was due to leave (on time!) I moved into the proper boarding lounge, and tried not to doze too heavily. I was amused to see a couple of fashionable young hotties appear, who were evidently wait listed for the flight, dressed in short skirts and long boots. Nice, certainly, but they’re flying to New York in winter — not the place or the time to be showing skin, ladies. Anyway, got on board, and find myself sitting in between some huge black guy, and some huge white guy. Fun. Fortunately, by this time I was completely exhausted, and pretty much just spent the five hour flight to JFK airport in NYC asleep.

NYC

NYC was cooooold. Not uncomfortably so — at least if your knees are covered — but enough to warrant wearing a couple of shirts, a jumper and a jacket, at least if you’re acclimatised to summertime Brisbane. The trip to Mako’s was fairly simple: catch the airport train to the train station, then ride the A train for an hour and a half or so all the way to the stop near Mako’s place. And what better introduction to New York than a late night ride on the subway, cold and alone? I certainly couldn’t think of one. Then there was getting off the train, finding the right street, and trudging a block or two in the ice and snow, ringing Mako’s buzzer — the one that won’t actually let you talk through it — and hoping someone’s home and awake and inclined to unlock the door. A click, a few flights of stairs, a knock, and voila! Warmth, and rest, and two lovely ladies in the form of Mika and Erinn. Mako and Andres arrived (from shopping, I think) a little while later.

From there on, things blur a bit: there was a lunch of vegan chinese with mock meat and various NYC Debianites, there was found furniture and beds on the floor with Powerpuff Girls linen, there was the secret completion of my DPL platform and the shocked expressions when it (and others!) were noticed on IRC, there were drinks at a hidden Belgian beer bar, there was the eerie temptations of amateur night at some bawdy bordello, there was washing day in Central Park, there was Times Square, there was a horny dinosaur and light-sabre fights, there was ethiopian food both vegan and with beef, there was vegan caviar, there was a hookah and strange cheeses, there was alcohol, there was pina colada shampoo and hippy shampoo, there was snow on the ground and snow falling from the sky, there was open mic hip hop night at some seedy dive bar in lower Manhattan and black men sharing their souls and their pain with the tiny Sunday night crowd, there were religious folks handing out pamphlets with prayers and asking for donations for orphans, there was the Manhattan subway in all its glory, there was breakdancing in the station and the peak hour commute at the end of the week, there was somethingawful.com, there was staying up ’til 3am drinking spirits and cocktails in a manicurist’s salon that had been converted into the “Beauty Bar”, there was vegan food at an Indian restaurant, there was homecooked vegan food, there was a sword fighting lawyer, there were drunk Australians singing “Waltzing Matilda” across the street, there was GPLed porn, there were weird short films, there was the development of unhappybirthday.com right before our eyes, there were bags of painkillers and birth control pills, there were fine teas and too fine chocolates, there was whisky, there was discussion on the merits of bukkake rice, there was the OMG store and the VIM store and the BONOBOS store, there was the DONUT PUB, there was Union Square at night, there were the projects and the concrete playgrounds, there were the bookshops with the art books and feminist literature and anatomy references and style guides, there were the helpful strangers on the street giving bad directions, there were new words like “sketchy” and “bougie”, and then there was yet more.

I was going to complain about NYC not living up to my expectations of being full of excitement and variety, but for some reason I’m suddenly having second thoughts.

I do strongly recommend foreigners who don’t care for all the fat and supersized portions in American food try going vegan for the stay. It was really orders of magnitude yummier than past food I’ve had in America, though having full-time vegan gourmets helping with the food selection might’ve had some impact too.

Anyway, Andres left (and forgot his new suit) mid-way through my stay, and was replaced by Ari and David. Lunches and dinners variously included folks like the oh-so-posh Clint Adams; SPI lawyer, photographer, book collector, sword fighter, and musician, Greg Pomerantz, and other folks whom I didn’t take pictures of to help remember. Ooops.

After the Beauty Bar we made it back to Mako’s in the deep darkness of early Monday morning, everyone else went to sleep while I packed up to leave for the airport and my earlyish flight to Toronto. I didn’t manage to get any sleep, but once I’d packed, I did at least manage to hail a cab only a couple of blocks down from Mako’s (I stuck my arm out: I can’t whistle effectively, sadly). From there to the airport was quick and easy and not too expensive, and I was even lucky enough to get bumped to an earlier flight to avoid waiting around in the airport too long. After spending half an hour or so stuck on the ground while air traffic control scheduled us for take off, we spent an hour or so in the air getting to Toronto, Canada, almost all of which I missed, falling asleep shortly after sitting down.

And that was New York, New York — so good they had to name it twice.

Toronto

Hurriedly filling out the immigration form after landing, and waking up a little bit, I made my way to Canadian customs. You would think “better than US customs” wouldn’t be a high bar to set; but apparently it is. Canadian customs were horrible. Sure, it seemed easy enough. There was even an empty line when I walked in, inviting me to just walk up and breeze through.

I should have known it was a trap, a cunning ambush.

But walk up I did. And to the usual questions of “What’re you here for”, I replied “to see some friends here, and head to Vancouver for a meeting to work out what we should do about releasing our operating system in a more timely manner”. She looked at me suspiciously, shrugged, put a pink line through my form, handed it back, and told me to go wait in the queue.

“Fair enough”, thought I, and I wandered over to the queue. And noticed the door to the bags was beside the queue not beyond it, and saw other people just ignoring the queue and walking through. I though “Hrm, well, maybe I should go get my bag first, rather than wait here”, and wandered over to have a look at that. But my bag wasn’t there, so I wandered back to the queue and waited some more.

This must’ve been around 11:58 or so, I think, since there was a guy a few people ahead complaining that he needed to make a 12:00 flight, and that he was being screwed around unnecessarily, and that there weren’t other flights he could take. The security guard said something to the effect of “Well, you’ve missed the plane already, and sorry, it sucks, I know, but I don’t make the rules” and heard his complaints out some more.

The line grew longer, and the queue was bent back upon itself to take up less space.

The line continued to grow. Occassionally it’d move forward.

Someone on a mobile phone rang a friend who hadn’t gone through customs yet, and told them to avoid the woman at the end, who was having a bad day. Ah. That was why the line was so short.

The line edged forward some more.

Fade out, watch the hands of a clock whir by, fade in.

So I get to go talk to some immigration official. He wants to know why I’m here. I say “to work out release issues for Debian”. “Why in Canada?” “Because it’s the easiest place for us all to get to.” “What’s Debian?” “An operating system, a replacement for Windows and Office and such.” “Do you have permission from Microsoft for that?” “…” “You’re replacing Windows, you must need permission from Microsoft for that.” “Uh, no, you don’t.” A brief intermission while an immigration bureaucrat wishes he was a copyright lawyer. “Have you heard of Linux? Debian builds a Linux distribution. We’ve reimplemented all of Windows precisely because we don’t want anything to do with Microsoft.” “You can’t have developed Linux, it’s a huge thing, with lots of people who’ve worked on it.” “Yes, I’m one of them.”

It went on for a while, strangely going more smoothly only after I took off my glasses. My only thought is maybe he thought I was going to try to get a punch in before the security guards tackled me, or something. At any rate, after an idiotic half hour quiz he eventually asked if I had a return ticket, which I showed him, and he let me go to get my bags and leave the hell hole known as Toronto immigration.

HATE.

Anyway, an orange juice and a taxi ride through the falling snow later, and I’m at my plushly appointed hotel in the centre of Toronto. I figured since I’d been sleeping on the floor at Mako’s, and would be sleeping on the floor again at Ryan’s I could justify living it up for a couple of nights in between. I checked in, let the porter carry my bag up to my room on the umpteenth floor, checked out the wireless access, considered trying to catch a bus to Niagara Falls or down to Buffalo back down in the US to visit a friend, considered the heavily falling slow, considered how tired I was, and fell asleep.

As it turned out, one of the friends I was trying to visit was too busy to catch up with, and the other couldn’t conveniently make it across the border into Canada to come and visit briefly during the week, so Toronto ended up being a bit of a washout on the planning side of things. I could’ve tried travelling down myself, but with the whole foreign country thing, the snow, the customs fiascos, the already paid for room, and the difficulty of actually making it back in time to catch my flight to Vancouver, well, it didn’t happen.

So instead I caught up on my creature comforts for a day, wandered around Toronto for a day, then left.

Toronto’s pretty awesome: it’s huge and high and fantastic. With heavy snowfall no one’s on the streets, so it feels emptier than NYC, which makes the buildings seem even more imposing. And then there’s the great lake (Lake Ontario?) which makes it feel like you’re on the shore of some strangely placid sea.

Walking around a city in that much snow takes special skills, as it turns out. It’s not just the dangers of slipping on icy footpaths; there are even special challenges just crossing the road. The problem is when you’ve got a metre or so of snow along the kerb most of the way (from the snow ploughs on the road and the snow ploughs on the footpaths), and then metre wide puddles at the intersections. Even better, the puddles are icy and dark enough that you can’t tell how deep they are (a centimetre, and thus safe to just step in? enough to drown your shoes and wet your jeans? who knows!) and wide enough that walking around them is difficult, and if you were to try walking around them, you’d have to walk through the piles of snow, which are freshly fallen and soft, and thus almost as bad as walking through a puddle anyway. Entertaining!

There was also a cool audio-book-store, an interesting sporting goods store, and my introduction to a burger chain that sells burgers by family member: the teen burger, the papa burger, the mama burger, the baby burger and the grandpa burger. Strangely, rather than being pre-cut or mushy, the grandpa burger is actually the biggest of the lot.

Anyway, another taxi ride through the snow to an airport, and voila, off to Vancouver. Well, at least once we’d had the snow and ice cleaned off the aeroplane just before takeover with what looked to be heated anti-freeze. Mmm! Reassuring!

Vancouver

Vancouver, on the upside, wasn’t covered in snow. Temperatures were a fairly mild (at least by comparison) in single digits, Celsius. Arrived at the airport safe and sound, collected my bag, spotted Ryan, with whom I was staying for the week. Got driven to his new house in the sketchy neighbourhood, said hi to Andreas who’d arrived a day or two earlier got onto the wireless LAN to IRC and download mail and such, and tried to figure out when James would arrive, since his flight had been delayed. Eventually he did arrive, and Ryan went off to pick him up, and we went out to eat, then came back to sleep. On the floor, at least for me and James; Ryan obviously had a bed, Andreas the fold out couch.

The next day we got up and did the touristy thing, did Andreas, James and I. Walked through a park taking snapshots, and seeing the sites: including the weird “KIDS DRYER” and a creek that, perhaps prophetically, seemed as though it ran red with blood when photographed. Post park, we took the “Sea Bus” (apparently the word “Ferry” is too complicated) to Vancouver proper, wandered around briefly, then took a bus to Grouse Mountain.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve already briefly intimated subsequent events.

In any event, we arrived at the end of the bus route in good health and spirits. Exited the bus, and found ourselves at, well, the bottom of Grouse Mountain, without many options. There was a souvenir shop, a carpark, and a gondola station that’d take you up to the ski resort at the top of the mountain. We checked the prices, and decided $25 each was a bit rich, and thought maybe some bushwalking might be fun. So we walked towards the trees and found ourselves obstructed by a fence. With barbed wire. We decided to pass on that direction and see if there was a more promising avenue elsewhere, and walked back towards the carpark.

Well, we found a gate at least. Unfortunately we found it was locked, and accompanied by a bunch of warning signs. But still, it seemed pretty safe — the warnings signs were for winter conditions, and it had been unseasonably sunny and warm over the past month or so to the point where they almost certainly didn’t apply. And there was no barbed wire. And, perhaps more usefully, there were other people climbing the fence to go up, and there were folks commenting that the gate had been unlocked earlier.

Some trolling ensued, and we found ourselves clambering under the fence, and wandering up the Grouse Grind.

“What,” asked James, “could possibly go wrong?”

There may have been a “Fuck it”, preceeding that remark.

In any case, up we walked, along the nice dirt track, between the wonderful leafy trees, underneath the bright clear sky and the shining winter sun. It was early to mid afternoon (around 2pm or so probably), and we were just figuring on a gentle walk somewhere, then turning around and going home. The signs promised about an hour and a half’s entertainment, which was pretty perfect as far as we were concerned.

So we walked. Or climbed. Or clambered. A little way in we came across another huge yellow warning sign, and an invitation to branch off onto the seven hour walk, or the ninety minute walk we were looking for. We continued the way we were going, while reiterating our slogan.

We began noticing little signs nailed to the trees, saying things like “GG 350”, which we figured was some indication of how far we were, but weren’t quite sure what it was measuring. We figured it was 350m out of 900m or so, and were pleased.

A little further on, after what we figured was probably 45 minutes walking, we came to a big sign saying “1/4”.

I guess, at this point, we realised, deep in our hearts that we were a quarter of the way there, and completely, utterly screwed.

Naturally, we told ourselves and each other that it clearly meant “track one of four” and that we were almost there and there wasn’t any point turning back now anyway.

And continued on.

The walk was tough, but not really that bad, it wasn’t too late in the day, and there were continually other people on the track passing us, so stupid as we were being, it was still fairly safe. Heck, we even had mobile phone reception all the way — to the point of me getting some SMS spam from one of the mobile providers half way up the mountain.

A little ways further on, still clinging to the hope that we were getting pretty far up and must be almost there, and while taking a breather, we were passed by some obvious regulars. They said “How you going?” We said “Exhausted!” They said “Well, buck up, you’re almost half way!” We said “!”

On the upside, we really were almost half way. Another ten minutes got us to a “1/2” sign. At which point there really wasn’t much point turning around — bush walking downhill is pretty much harder than walking uphill, and ending up at a ski resort where they have food and drink is much nicer than ending up in a carpark with a soft-drink vending machine.

So we kept going. And actually, it was a fair bit easier with the right expectations — actually realising that the signs on the trees were probably “metres above sea-level”, and thus began at 250 or 300, and would end at 1250 or 1300 not 900; and keeping track of time, and thus realising that just because five minutes of climbing felt like half an hour, doesn’t mean it gets you a third of the way there.

Probably about two hours after we climbed under the fence we found ourselves walking out of the forest, onto the snow, and into the sun at the top of the walk. There before us was the resort building, with its promise of food and warmth and somewhere to sit down, and off to our left was an absolutely wonderful view of Vancouver city and the ocean beyond. Thoroughly, thoroughly worth it.

Discerning an appropriate metaphor for the Debian release process is, at this point, left as an exercise for the interested reader.

Anyway, we photographed, bought souvenirs, ate, rested in front of the open fire, then thought about getting back down. Even without the “EXTREME DANGER” sign, or the gathering twilight, there was no chance we were walking down, so we walked over to the Gondola ticket place, and prepared to bite our tongues.

Only to find that the one-way-going-down price was $5.

That is how Grouse Mountain spells respect.

So down in the Gondola we went. We looked at some expensive tracksuits in the (warm) souvenir shop, caught the bus, caught the ferry, and caught another bus back to Ryan’s.

We spent the next day lazing around mostly, with dinner in the evening with the other folks making up the Vancouver Release Team Meeting. The meal was pretty nice, but what you won’t believe is what happened then.

[REDACTED BY ORDER OF THE CABAL]

Okay, okay, that’s not actually true: really I just couldn’t be bothered writing anything more up about the actual meeting; there’s been plenty of bytes spent on that already. Some references for your convenience: the Nybbles announcement, my summary of some of my followups, LWN’s take on the matter, and the applicable list archives.

James, Ryan and I also had a chance to chat some more about ftpmaster stuff, resulting in the eventual reorganisation and additions to the team: having both Joerg and Jeroen present and able to be taught how to actually do things, and to be able to work out ways of having “ftp assistants” who can do useful things without also being able to accidentally screw up the archive completely was pretty helpful.

I also got to chat to Andreas some more about what more needed to be done to get tiffani working. Hopefully that shouldn’t take much longer, as there’s just some random finishing to be done, like tweaking how some options are configured.

There was, of course, also my second rate DPL campaign and the odd night lost to reading and responding to people on -vote.

The weekend concluded with another yummy dinner, which for me was a delicious “baseball steak”, named for its size, not it’s toughness, texture or taste. It was delish. Post-weekend, we spent some time lazing around and/or hacking. After James left, we went to have dinner with Randall (spaghetti at Randy’s favourite spaghetti joint — Randy had the steak. Randy, apparently, always has the steak). I considered trying for a day or a half day’s skiing the day before I left; at which point the unseasonably clear skies immediately clouded and began to weep, and in any case Grouse Mountain seemed to have already lost enough snow to not be worth the effort anyway. So some more lazing around, a little touristing around Vancouver city, and that was pretty much it.

The trip home

Woke up (having slept!), tried catching a bus to the airport, got off in the city, but evidently too early because I couldn’t find the stop for the connecting bus even after walking for blocks, so caught a cab instead. Which ended up taking the back streets because there were road works and a traffic jam, so it was probably for the best. Got to the air port, checked my luggage, passed through US immigration (“Why are you entering the US?” “To go home!!!! At last!!!! No offense!!!!”) and got on the flight. It’s always nice to see “You are now entering the US” signs in the middle of a Canadian city.

The couple sitting next to me were nice Canadians off to visit their recently married daughter who lived somewhere outside of LA. They spoke of fascinating things about the snow in the East in places like Ottawa, and were generally pleasant.

As such they made a marvelous contrast to LAX.

After collecting my bags, I walked out of the terminal and decided “I know where I am. I should walk… this way.” Apparently I didn’t and shouldn’t have, and after walking a couple of terminals down, came to my senses and caught the shuttle to the right place. At which point I entered, to be greeted by teeming throngs of people right at the door, in strange unmarked queues doing who knows what. I tried joining one, got told the end of the queue was actually way back somewhere else, and thought “screw this for a lark” and tried finding a shorter queue to join that might be appropriate.

While the Qantas queue was, indeed, shorter; it still took about an hour to progress through so I actually got to put my bag in and get my boarding pass. Turns out the other queues were for baggage checking — you go to the airline to get your boarding pass and your bag tag, then you go to the TSA queues to actually get your bag onto the plane. Yay. Efficient.

By this time I was getting hungry, so I skipped the TSA queue for the minute, and went upstairs to eat. Because, being LAX, which is to say, retarded, once you’ve gone through security there’s nowhere to eat. So up I go, and after waiting an interminable amount of time to find someone who’ll actually take my order (as opposed to the bored, milling staff who wouldn’t take my order), and waiting a little longer before actually being given a tiny, expensive, glass of orange juice, I hear something that sounds suspiciously like my name going out over the PA. Well, there were vowel sounds that sounded like me — it was, naturally, unintelligible. So to the outraged stare of my waiter who apparently thinks I’m doing a runner before even getting any food or drink, I lug my bag back downstairs to see what’s going on. At least I don’t have to wait in the queue. As it turns out, they neglected to bother actually putting the tag on my bag — it had just been sitting on the counter, forlorn and forgotten. Idiots. Back up to the food. Drink. Eat. Drink some more. Get the $24.35 bill. Hand over a $20 and two $5s. Get accosted with the comment “There’s only $25.” Refrain from saying “Well the service did stink…” and say instead “There should be $30.” “Oh, thankyou, thankyou.” Retards. $30 USD for a hamburger and a few mouthfuls of orange juice. What a goddamn rip off.

And onto the TSA queue. Which is actually two queues: one queue to let you give them your bag, then another queue to wait while they scan your bag (and the twenty other people who’re also waiting), and then give you a thumbs up so you can be on your way through security proper. Fun.

Then Qantas refuse to let me into their lounge, for love or money, but at least there’s some free wireless leakage in the departure area downstairs. And some hot asian air hostesses too as it happens. Some four or five hours later, I head off to wait to actually board my flight, watch some poor girl throw up all over the carpet, get cramped into the middle seat in the middle aisle of a packed jumbo, and try to sleep on the way home.

Which more or less worked, and was followed up by the lovely short “Australians only” queue, a pleasant immigration official, a pleasant quarantine official, and a walk straight out the door, and home.

By which point I was about as exhausted as you are now, dear reader.

(And, odds on, the singular is singularly appropriate at this point :)

James Troup and I are giving a talk at the Debian mini-conf at LCA in six minutes. We mostly finished the slides. What could possibly go wrong?

Skye, 1991 – 2005

Chips, 1998 – 2005

Regular readers may remember Skye, Chips and Cheeky from my gratuitous dog-blogging of last year.

Sadly, Skye hasn’t been getting any younger, and over the past months her hind legs became more arthritic, she lost her hearing and her bowel control, and a couple of weeks ago her front legs gave out too. She passed away under the care of the local vet on March 12th, 2005 at the ripe old age of fourteen.

We didn’t own Skye since she was a pup; she spent her younger days as a show dog under the care of some pros: as I understand it, she was such a star that she even had her own waterbed to sleep on. Eventually she started getting beaten in the competition by her pups, and her owners had to pass her on, so we were lucky enough to add her to our family, sometime around ’96.

Summer wasn’t her favourite time of year: the Queensland heat isn’t fun if you’re a bald monkey like me, it’s got to be a lot worse if you’re a Siberian Husky bred for arctic climes. Skye also wasn’t too fond of loud noises; so she didn’t really appreciate either the reliable Queensland thunderstorms throughout summer or the fireworks at New Year’s Eve and Chinese New Year. She’d love a good walk and even a run, though, even when she couldn’t do much more than hobble around. Although whether it was the walk itself, or the chance to sniff around the place and smell what’s going on in the neighbourhood was hard to tell. The only time she ever baulked that I know of was when her hind legs first started to go, and even then she only gave up after trying to walk to the gate, and collapsing on the way.

Chips, on the other hand, we did own since he was a pup. He was the liveliest one in his litter, and loved being around people and was, well, quite mad. In theory, dogs are supposed to get a little calmer when they’re neutered; Chips stayed just as energetic and crazy anyway — possibly an “infinity divided by two” arrangement on his zaniness stats. Chips loved walks too, but he was far more interested in being around people — running around while someone’s out doing the gardening, dancing around in circles in sheer exitement at company, wandering from door to door to see what’s going on inside, running alongside the bike, jumping up on your leg just to say hi, or, to his utmost delight, getting nursed on someone’s lap and having his tummy scratched. He loved the pool — but moreso the getting out of it and shaking himself all over you than the getting in or the swimming around. Floating around on a lilo, or just running around at the edge of the pool with Cheeky barking at people swimming or splashing was probably his preferred compromise. Lately he’d developed an interest in speeding around Moreton Bay in the motorboat, though he still got a bit nervous when it started going fast.

Chips was also a bit of an escape artist, or at least someone happily willing to learn once Cheeky came on the scene. In spite of the bars in the pictures above being smaller than he is wide, he’d manage to fit through them anyway, so we needed to add some mesh. Unfortunately he and Cheeky then figured out they could still get out if they’d chew and scratch at the mesh, then climb a little over it, so we had to get the stronger and higher mesh you see pictured. We tried feeding them a little more so they wouldn’t be able to squeeze through, but they both seemed to wise up to that trick pretty quickly.

In any event, Chips took Skye’s passing pretty hard; particularly since I’d moved into a unit a year ago so was only visiting on weekends, my parents work in the city, and Cheeky had been keeping our old neighbours Frank and Toni company during the week. I spent the first week out keeping him company, which he sorely needed: the first day, I found him waiting on the back porch, having squeezed himself under one fence to get out there, and between the glass panels of another to get onto the porch. The next day he did one (or more!) better: after getting onto the porch again, he jumped onto a chair, via a pot plant onto the window sill, clawed his way through the gauze on the open window, jumped through onto the couch, then found his way upstairs to greet me when I got out of the shower. We didn’t work out how he’d managed it ’til that evening.

Chips had been going out in sympathy with Skye in her last few weeks, only eating if she did, and generally being unhappy and mopey. By the end of the week he’d started to get a bit more life back in him, and we went back to our respective routines. A couple of weeks’ later, on April 1st, we headed down to beautiful Byron Bay for my step-brother’s remarriage the next day, leaving my cousin and his fiancée to look after Chips and the house. They had to leave early Saturday morning, unfortunately, which left Chips feeling lonely, and he decided to use his escapist skills to get out onto the road — by pushing some bricks out of a hole in the fence that my cousin was going to patch up properly over the next couple of days. His resulting run in with a car resulted in a right mess, and some ugly x-rays. He somehow managed to stay breathing for long enough for a neighbour to take him to the local vet, who managed to find a mobile number and give my step-father a fairly disturbing call at lunch time. He then got driven by my cousin to the local vet surgery to see what could be done. We drove back from Byron the next morning, and got to see the ugly x-rays, and how poor Chipsy was doing. Amazingly, he was still conscious and alert, but… Well, I guess that’s where I still get choked up, and wish that dogs had their own last words to pass on, and I didn’t have to come up with my own.

Chips and Skye, thankyou for your company and friendship. We miss you both.

A couple of days after Ubuntu released warty, I had a look at how warty and sarge compared at least so far as how current their packages were. With hoary freshly released, and some more discussion underway, it seems worthwhile doing another comparison.

To review, Ubuntu creates a new release by synchronising various packages against Debian unstable, doing development of their own, freezing, fixing bugs, then releasing. Hoary is split into a few components, the most significant of which are “main”, which contains the supported software, and “universe” which contains the unsupported software. Packages that are modified for Ubuntu usually have “ubuntu” in the version string, though that’s not the case all the time.

Debian, by contrast, does continual development in unstable, synchronising packages into sarge as they become suitable. A base+standard freeze has been in effect since around August last year (so about eight months) with changes to those packages requiring review by the release management team; and an effective freeze has been imposed recently by the arm autobuilders lagging behind. Debian’s testing distribution is called sarge, and will form the next stable release. Debian’s unstable distribution is called sid, and is the first stop for package uploads.

So, let’s run the numbers. We’re doing this with binary packages on i386, since that’s probably what users are most likely to see.

In hoary/main there are 3136 packages. 49% of them modified for Ubuntu. 663 (21%) of those packages are the same as sarge, 630 (20%) are the same as sid. 1565 (50%) are newer than sarge, though only 1337 (43%) are also newer than sid. 908 (29%) are newer in sarge than hoary, and 1169 (37%) are newer in sid than hoary.

If you exclude the packages that Ubuntu have apparently modified explicitly, there are 405 packages that are newer in sarge than hoary compared to 140 that are newer in hoary. Adding sid into the mix, we get that 91 of those 140 packages are newer in hoary than sid as well as sarge; and only 462 packages are newer in sid than hoary.

To look at that another way: of 462 packages updated in unstable since hoary/main froze that were not modified by Ubuntu, testing’s been able to update 372 of them (80%) beyond what Ubuntu has managed, while Ubuntu’s freeze unstable approach has captured 59 packages at more recent versions than testing has in the intervening time.

There was a different 80% figure for warty; related to how much of the “freeze” process testing would “handle for you”, as measured by what proportion of the packages that you didn’t modify by hand would end up at least as recent. In this case that’s (663+372)/(663+372+140-91), or 95%. So the advantage of branching unstable seems to be diminishing, though there’s no obvious way to compare that against the disadvantages of working from unstable (ie, getting random bugs that you then have to fix before releasing).

In any case, at least at a statistical level, the comparison of warty/main and hoary/main to the sarge of the day seems fairly steady; about 50% of packages have been modified for Ubuntu, and testing continues to handle updating the remaining packages fairly well.

Well, as far as testing goes anyway. At the moment, as of a couple of days after hoary’s release, 43% of hoary/main is newer than the corresponding packages in sid, by a pure version number comparison (or else, not present in sid at all). For the warty analysis, only 16% of hoary/main was newer than what was in sid.

Of course, main is where Ubuntu focusses is strengths. So the comparison to universe makes an interesting contrast.

For universe, there are 12654 packages, 16% modified for Ubuntu. 6798 packages are the same in hoary and sarge (54%), and 3490 (27%) are newer in sarge than hoary, leaving 2366 packages that are newer in hoary. For comparison with sid: 6461 (51%) are the same, 4536 (36%) are newer in sid, and 1657 (13%) are newer in hoary.

Ignoring the Ubuntu specific changes, and the packages in common, we get 2829 packages newer in sarge, 79 packages newer in hoary than sarge, 496 packages present in hoary and sid but not sarge, and 427 packages not present in sid. So if you’re looking for pure currency, Debian’s still doing significantly better when it comes to universe.

However, it’s interesting to compare this to warty. In that case, hoary is up from 6% Ubuntu specific versions to 16% (with an additional 3% of packages in hoary/universe not present in sid). It’s also moved from 36% of packages being older than sarge to 27%, and 50% of packages being equal to 54%.

All in all, 23% of hoary is currently definitely an Ubuntu package rather than something pulled from Debian, and possibly another 5% of hoary is Ubuntu specific packages that just don’t have “ubuntu” in the version. For a distribution that’s under a year old to be maintaining about a quarter of Debian’s packages seems pretty impressive.

Of course, pure package count and currency isn’t everything; there’s the question of support and security updates (universe is “best effort”, as is all of sarge, but not stable); and of course a higher version number means different things — it can mean anything from a spelling fix, or to adding download authentication to apt.

Anyway, one other statistic: 47.45% of hoary is exactly the same as sarge of today. Back when I was looking at warty, 47.27% of it was the same as sarge at the time.

So I get bored occasionally and start analysing things. Some interesting absences from the DPL voting this year seem notable. None of our ex-DPLs have voted (yet): Ian Murdock’s stuck in n-m so has something of an excuse, but Bruce Perens, Ian Jackson, Wichert Akkerman, Ben Collins and Bdale Garbee also don’t appear eligible for “I voted!” badges. At least our soon-to-be-ex DPL, Martin, can proudly stick a metaphorical pin to his chest! Similarly, only two of our seven-member technical committee have voted; three cheers for Manoj and Raul for holding the fort!

Oh well, at least all this year’s candidates have voted, that’s gotta count for something, right?

So, for various reasons I ran for DPL this year. My platform’s available, and as a bonus feature includes links to about a dozen posts on the -vote list that expand on some points. There’s also David Schmitt’s excellent q-and-a summary, the debate transcript and the full -vote archives. Voting’s ongoing, though according to the secretary we’ve achieved the lowest turnout on record and if Planet Debian‘s anything to go by, we might be looking at a None of the Above victory, and starting over again. Fun.

It’s probably going to be difficult to say anything more while sticking to the right side of the “campaigning’s over dude” line, but, hey, it’s my blog, and where else are my mindless thoughts going to go? And hey, this is exactly what my “seemore” plugin is for anyway.

Campaigning was definitely kind-of odd. You can see it a bit in the -vote list stats for March, even. I posted 70 messages, Matthew 44, Andreas 23, Jonathan 14, Branden 11 and Gus 10. Which is a bit unbalanced to begin with, but seems even more so when you consider MJ Ray posted 87 messages and Thomas Bushnell 72 — both more than than any individual candidate, and more than Andreas, Jonathan, Branden and Gus combined. Sven Luther (53 posts), Martin Krafft (38 posts, though a fair few were about organising the debate), Ean Schuessler (28 posts), Frank Kuster (25 posts), David Schmitt (21 posts), Andrew Suffield (21 posts), and Henning Makholm (19 posts) all also posted more to the list than the majority of candidates. Weird.

Last year was complicated by the simultaneous debate on removing non-free — but the two candidates that year at least posted a fair amount during the campaigning period (49 mails from Branden, 50 from Martin), people who posted more in that period were Michael Banck (57), Anthony Towns (68), Raul Miller (72), Sven Luther (111) and Thomas Bushnell (155). In 2003, Branden posted the most with 30 messages, Martin followed with 12, Raphael with 11, Bdale with 8; Manoj also posted 8 mails as project secretary and another 6 without wearing that hat; similarly in 2002, Branden posted the most with 39 messages, Raphael posted 28, Bdale posted 20; the next highest poster was outgoing DPL, Ben Collins on 15 mails — in both years no one posted more than any of the candidates. In March last year, including the tail end of the non-free debate and the proposal and discussion of the “editorial” changes as well as the DPL campaign period, -vote received 1063 messages. This year, with just the DPL proceedings, there have been 888. In 2001, 2002 and 2003, traffic on -vote for February and March combined was between 260 and 320 messages.

It all combines to be… well, weird. And then, of course, there’s the unprecedented array of candidates, too. And that’s not to mention the impact of Ubuntu on Debian that’s become a factor over the last year, or the ongoing controversies with SPI, the Social Contract, DFSG interpretation, the technical committee, communication issues, the (non-)existance of the Cabal, and whatever else. And then there’s the Vancouver plan to stop releasing all but a handful of architectures, too. And, of course, actually releasing sarge before we get to woody’s third birthday. And, no doubt, more.

I’m tending towards the idea that Debian’s pretty much at an inflection point — not so much in relation to who gets to play DPL for a year, but more in relation to what we’re going to be as a distro. There seem to me to be a whole range of things that could happen: we could effectively become Ubuntu’s community arm, with people contributing to Debian now and then, but using Ubuntu where it counts; we could become the new GNU, fighting for freedom but never quite managing to release our OS; we could implode completely, with everyone just getting fed up with dealing with everyone else, and no one being left to claim the remains; we could become a boring mainstream OS that’s just like Red Hat or Fedora, only with debs instead of rpm; we could become a boring niche OS that’s not really all that useful except on a bunch of rarely seen computers that no one else can be bothered writing software for; or maybe we’ll avoid all those pitfalls and live up to the hopes of all the folks who’ve supported Debian over the years and go on to bigger and better things.

It’s particularly frustrating in that I can’t seem to decide whether Debian’s going to collapse, whither, die, and just not be very interesting to me anymore — and if I should just cut my losses and spend my free time on other things; or if the cool things I think Debian ought to be able to manage actually have some chance of happening, and I should be putting my shoulder, back, thighs, and other body parts into helping make it happen. I even spent more or less six months after stepping down as RM seeing if there were folks waiting in the wings for me to get out of the road to take Debian to new and better things, with pretty much nothing eventuating…

Oh well, at least there’s something like a four in seven chance I’ll know exactly what I want to do after the vote’s done, and in any case there’ll be another datapoint as to what’s going on — hopefully one with a little precision to it, given the number of candidates this time. Here’s to hoping we work out wtf we’re doing sometime soon, and not prolong the suffering too much more.

Vote: also rhymes with asymptote.

[0] Rhymes with footnote too!

Well, admittedly, I haven’t tried reading debian-devel for the past eight hours or so, but there still seems to be a bunch of confusion about the big scary plan to not support all architectures equally. Anyway some people seemed to find some of my followups useful, so continuing the “Today’s list posts”, faux-deli.cio.us-style, Clayton’s blogging I’ve been doing, here are some followups you might want to peruse.

So, this mail gives some details about what actually went on at the meeting. Not a lot, but some background’s better than none. This one is the “babies” post that might be useful to porter’s wondering how their architecture should fit into the proposed system. These two posts might be helpful to porters who want to think about how they might operate if their architecture doesn’t fit on the release track.

UPDATE 2005/03/16:

Here’s some more links from posts after I caught up with -devel a bit more. This one has some more on how the process might work for becoming a release architecture; and this one includes some elaboration on the N+1 rule.

I think people need to stop talking about McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner, and instead start promoting the ubiquity of Krispy Kreme. Mmmm, sugary capitalist goodness.

Well, it looks like fair use is back on the agenda in Australia.

So I was in Sydney over the weekend for the first LA exec meeting of this term. The meeting was, like all meetings, boundlessly thrilling, and minutes will follow. This post is for the trivia.

First, my poor, poor expectations. Cast mercilessly aside to be dashed on the rocks of reality. The trip started well — I was flying Virgin Blue. But then, it all went wrong. The head stewardess was a guy. On a Virgin Blue flight. Sure, he was young, fun, and attractive in his own way, but still — a guy! WTF?!

The trip continued badly. On Saturday night, we went to a dark, sophisticated cocktail lounge in Woolloomooloo. We ordered expensive cocktails, and even had one invented on request, possibly some sort of watermelon martini that may have been baptised Flames of Passion. Or perhaps something else, I’ve no idea. And then, and then our dark, sophisticated cosmopolitan cocktail lounge closed — at 11:30pm. Did I mention this was on Saturday night?

Likewise, public transport was clean, pleasant and mostly ran on time, the weather was sunny and clear, and when traipsing through Kings Cross at midnight alone and at night, I wasn’t mugged even once.

Also worth noting the “Bombay Lounge” in Surry Hills is an awesome little indian restaurant. Some of the nicest I’ve had, with good portions, and excellent service. Apparently they’re planning on opening some more restaurants in other cities sometime too.

Krispy Kreme donuts are pretty yummy, too.

Also, you’d think I’d know by now that sunburn is bad, mmmkay.

Subject: Warning: inactivity detected

Really, I’m surprised I don’t see that more often.

Via IP Wars, seems there’s been some oral argument in the High Courty on the Sony v Stevens case (ie, is it okay to sell PlayStation modchips, whether you’re using the modchips to play imported games, or pirated games?). Justice McHugh raises some good points. Here’s a notable exchange:

McHUGH J: But you seem to be converting the ensuring of access into a right to access, rather than as a means of protecting your copyright. Why should the Copyright Act be concerned with giving you sole rights of access as opposed to ensuring that you can use means concerned with access to protect your copyright?

GUMMOW J: That is the new dimension that is going on, is it not?

MR CATTERNS: Yes, your Honour. That is the debate. We have now committed ourselves under the free trade agreement to control access without any question of infringement, a la America — apparently, we have got to do that within two years — we have given your Honours the reference to that. But, your Honour, what protects us, as this is worded now, from your Honour’s idea, is the words “infringement of copyright”. So this is not giving the copyright owner a new right to control access. It is giving the owner a right to control access so as to prevent infringement.

[..]

Your Honour, on our construction, we do not have a pure right to control access. The control of access is a means to prevent or inhibit infringement.

There’s also an interesting section earlier when Justice McHugh discusses the possibility of an entirely reverse-engineered console, that happens not to implement the access restrictions the PS2 does. Mr Catterns wishes to call the entire device a circumvention device in that case, but appears not to believe such an argument mightn’t be possible. That’s got some relevance to Linux DVD players:

McHUGH J: Can I just ask you about this question which has been troubling me. On the view of the Full Court, their construction only prevents or inhibits the infringement of copyright when it is used on the copyright owner’s machine or on your machine. Let me give you an illustration. Supposing this appellant had not only sold the circumvention device but had also sold a reverse engineered device of your console, you would have no case, would you? In other words – – –

MR CATTERNS: Well, your Honour, that might leave us an argument about whether the access code itself alone could be a technological protection measure, which is not this case, but we would submit that is precisely what this new machine is doing, your Honour’s hypothetical machine. It is just the same as one of our consoles with a circumvention chip in it, because that is what it is. It will have all of the same other devices inside it, but instead of a Boot-ROM which looks through the access code and says, “I won’t play the game if it’s not present”, it will write a rival Boot-ROM which does not do that. Your Honour, I would submit that in that case the whole new console would be a circumvention device.

McHUGH J: No, but the point is that it does not prevent or hinder the infringement. I mean, the argument of the Full Court is in a practical sense it makes the infringement useless, therefore it prevents or hinders it, but if you can reverse engineer another console, then you can play, so it does not prevent infringing. Your device does not prevent infringing in any practical sense.