We are surrounded by stuff. Physical property, objects we use. Even the poorest of us have some basic stuff: footwear, clothing. Having possessions is one of the defining characteristics of being human—with the questionable exception of a few animal species that have been observed using ad-hoc tools in the wild, nothing else owns anything (and even the tools used by chimpanzees or crows appear to be spur-of-the-moment constructions, abandoned after their immediate use rather than retained for their future potential).

But where do our priorities lie? I am thinking that there are at least two categories: stuff we pay too little attention to, and stuff we prize too highly. And sometimes there are types of stuff that fall to a greater or lesser extent into both sets ...

Stuff we pay too little attention to:

Our beds. (Bruce Sterling flagged this up in a memorable essay a couple of years ago.) You spend roughly a third of our lives sleeping. Your bed is therefore the single piece of furniture you use the most. Nevertheless, because we're unconscious most of the time while we use them, we tend to discount their importance. It's not just a matter of comfort: poor or interrupted sleep is associated with a variety of medical problems, some of them quite serious. (It doesn't get much more serious than tail-ending a truck on your motorway commute to work because you didn't sleep well, does it?) If you're going to spend on household furniture, it should rationally make sense to spend more on your bed and bedding than on everything in your living room put together, 42" 3D LCD TV set included.

Our chairs. I'm not sure I buy into the argument that our chairs are killing us: what's doing the killing is our working practices, which promote long periods of immobility while seated in cramped or poor conditions. But our chairs certainly aren't helping, and if you use one at work, it's the second piece of furniture you use most of the time. Yet all too often office supply departments buy work chairs strictly on price rather than on ergonomics or fitness for purpose. (Memo to self: investigate new office chairs.)

Stuff we pay too much attention to:

Wrist watches. Once upon a time—not so long ago—the capacity to accurately time was an expensive instrumentation problem. A town or village might have a central clock, in a tower; setting it and keeping it running accurately was a technical task. It became critical for trans-oceanic navigation (and if you want to know why and don't know, you could do worse than read this book), leading up to the invention of the portable chronometer in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; for a long period, portable nautical chronometers were used (frequently being carried by hand) to copy time callibration from the Greenwich observatory to other master clocks around London. By the mid-19th century the vast expansion of railway networks made accurate time-keeping a matter of strategic military importance; and the increased availability of horological skills bought the compact pocket-watch, and then the wrist-watch, within the budget of every gentleman.

But today we're surrounded by clocks—fast, accurate, ubiquitous. Clocks are literally everywhere, inside every computer, cellphone, GPS unit. Young folks today, in many cases, don't wear (have never worn) a wrist-watch, because they're never without a pocket phone. The wrist watch is, in fact, comprehensively obsolete.

Despite its obsolescence, the wrist watch has been reincarnated as an article of jewellery. They're everywhere in the shops around us, not merely accurate quartz-controlled watches (or devices controlled by radio-broadcast time signals) but archaic geared analog devices. The user interface—digits or traditional clock-face—is increasingly embelished, while usability takes a back seat to fashion. At the high end, one-of-a-kind individual works by master horologists sell for six-digit prices.

I'm not mocking the cult of the wrist watch as jewellery (I own a couple myself) but I am, nevertheless, puzzled, if not baffled, at the way an obsolete technological niche has been repurposed as a luxury item.

But.

All of this is leading up to me asking a simple question.

Given the technologies we can foresee arriving within the next decade, and the stuff that's already here, let's look forward 30 years. What everyday items in 30 years time will we not be paying enough attention to? Or continuing to use despite their obsolescence, for purposes radically at odds with their original role?

(My money is on: smartphones, in both categories. Maybe laptops in the former. And rooftop solar panels as a social signaling mechanism about the degree to which their owners are concerned for the environment. Bicycles ...? Toilets ...?)

I collect conspiracy theories. The nature of what people are willing to believe about their neighbours tells us quite a lot about our attitude to the society we live in, our fears, our worries about deception, and so on. And the past half century has been a boom time for conspiracy theories, from the JFK assassination through the moon landings to the CIA introducing LSD/crack cocaine/AIDS/insert threat here into the USA, to Louis Mountbatten and MI5 trying to stage a coup against the British government in the 1970s ... wait, the last one was real. And, now I think about it, so was one of the CIA ones. That's the trouble with conspiracy theories: true history contains such weird lacunae of surrealism that it's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff.

I ran across a new-to-me conspiracy theory today; on balance I think it's an urban legend, but it appeals to my credulity very neatly and I can't rule it out for sure. Let me explain why below ...

Hip hop, rap. They're not my preferred musical forms, I will freely admit. I like some, but dislike most: and I really don't like gangster rap, both for its form and for the whole lifestyle and aspirational model it's associated with. Misogynisticre, violent, crude, angry: well, what if it was all a conspiracy inflicted on us, not by the music industry, but through the music industry? And what if the motive behind it was to provide a social model for poor black urban teenagers that would land them in jail and thereby create money-making opportunities for the private prison industry?

Far-fetched?

Well, that's what this conspiracy theory would have you believe. And it ticks all the checkboxes. Pick a group everyone considers to be unscrupulous and corrupt, like the RIAA: check. Come up with an even nastier Big Bad, a shadowy cabal from the private prisons industry: check. Invite industry insiders to a private conference and bind them to strictest secrecy: check. Our leaker is anonymous: check. Dissidents are ejected at gunpoint and threatened: check. This all stays under wraps for nearly two decades but is leaking now due to an attack of conscience ...

Which is where it fails nearly fatally to maintain willing suspension of disbelief. Here's one smackdown pointing out that the crime rate went down from 1991, not up. (Which tends to undermine the conspiracy's effectiveness, if not its existence.) And then there's the content. Conspirators with guns let a witness with a conscience go? More crazily, we're expected to believe that conspirators with such a large project in mind didn't pre-screen the names on the invite list for the conspiracy?

Naah, doesn't work.

Nevertheless, hip hop did turn gangster-obsessed around that time, and the private prison industry in the United States is a gangrenous moral ulcer rotting away that country's judicial system. Linking the two in a superficially simplifying conspiratorial relationship is ... well, it appeals to our instinct to reach for consistent causal links between parallel phenomena in a complex world. It's the modern equivalent of ascribing bad weather or crop failures to the gods being angry (an activity still popular today among the superstitious).

Meanwhile, if you want to see a real life conspiracy unfolding, you need to look no further than this.

Last week's blog entry on Amazon's ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor's ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good move. Last week they asked me to explain, in detail, just why I thought abandoning DRM on ebooks was a sensible strategy for a publisher. Turns out my blog entry on Amazon's business strategy didn't actually explain my full reasoning on DRM, so here it is.

Note that I am not responsible for Macmillan's change of policy. An internal debate was already in progress; this move was already on the cards. I caught their attention and was given a chance to offer some input: that's all. The final decision to drop DRM on ebooks from Tor/Forge was taken by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who ultimately has to account for his actions to the shareholders.

Also note that when trying to argue for a strategy, you need to frame it in terms of the concerns of the people you're addressing. Therefore what's below the fold is my response to the question of why I thought abandoning DRM would be good for Macmillan's business, framed to address the concerns of publishing executives. I thought I'd post it here as an historical footnote to the end of blanket DRM restrictions in the book trade, and because it features a line of reasoning about DRM which may be of interest to other publishers who are, as yet, undecided.

After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it's not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I've tried to summarize my conclusions below.

First, my conclusions:

1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?

2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...

3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).

4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.

Now the details:

1. Anticipating the future of ebook reading technology

(Background note: I have a computer science degree from 1991, which is a bit like having an aeronautical engineering degree from 1927. But I've spent a chunk of time working as a computer journalist, and I try to keep up to date.)

First, a note on the changing technology. The consumer electronics industry relies on selling everybody shiny new devices every 12-24 months for their revenue. Margins are narrow and R&D costs are high. They also have an interest in maintaining a floor under the price of their products by adding new features to justify the upgrade treadmill, because thanks to Moore's Law, the electronics sector is trapped in a permanent deflationary cycle. So I believe that any forward-looking publishing strategy needs to consider the impact of this endless device churn on consumers, and their likely response.

Because the devices our consumers own mediate their experience of the ebooks we sell them.

First, the hardware:

It's my belief that today's e-ink ebook readers are doomed to obsolescence within a short period — 2-3 years possibly, 5 years probably. This is because the power consumption of LCD displays is dropping and their quality is rising. e-ink devices are inherently incapable of displaying video, are lousy as web browsers due to the screen refresh time, and if you use them to play audio or do any intensive processing (such as running apps) their battery life drops towards that of a regular LCD-equipped tablet. They're essentially single-purpose devices, competing in a market with general-purpose devices. Their only advantages are battery life and readability in direct sunlight, both of which are under threat. So it's my belief that general purpose tablets (and big-screen smartphones) will drive e-ink readers out of the mass market within 2-5 years, just as smartphones killed off your 2003 Palm Pilot.

Secondly, the software:

The two current tablet/smartphone market incumbents are iOS (Apple) and Android (Google). (Microsoft is making a come-back attempt with Windows 8 Mobile, but is fighting an uphill battle.) These are essentially competing software platforms, like MacOS and Windows in the late 1980s. However, just five years ago, none of these platforms existed; the market was dominated by PalmOS, Symbian, and Microsoft's dead PocketPC platform. I therefore conclude that it is a really bad idea to make assumptions about the devices customers will own in even 3 years' time.

In the tablet/smartphone world, DRM is supported at the application level. B&N (Nook), Amazon (Kindle), and Adobe all provide readers that run on incompatible DRM standards. Even when the file format is the same (ePub) the DRM prevents files from, say, the Adobe Digital Editions system from being read by a rival's reader.

In the absence of DRM it is trivially easy to convert ebooks between file formats — as easy as opening a word processor file on a different machine, if not easier. Amazon's continued use of a non-epub file format on the Kindle platform does not mean that Amazon could not, very rapidly, shift to supporting epub files; all that would be needed would be a software update pushed to their Kindle customers' readers. In fact, Amazon acquired a software company specializing in epub reader software — Lexcycle — in 2009.

The main effect of DRM, from a platform vendor's perspective, is to lock end-users into their platform in perpetuity. (Amazon, as both a retailer and a platform vendor, has leveraged this very effectively to give their retail channel a whip hand.)

2. Which sectors will respond positively to less DRM

Macmillan sells a variety of products (trade and mass market, audio, ebooks and paper books) into a variety of wholesale and retail channels, who in turn sell the products to the reading public.

The reading public is not a monolith, and the products Macmillan sells are dissimilar. Some books are unique and non-interchangeable, while others are treated as an undifferentiated commodity by their consumers. One large customer segment buy 1-5 books a year, usually bestsellers for recreational vacation reading. At the opposite end of the scale, 20% or fewer buy 20-150 books a year, typically midlist titles. The former group supplies mass sales, but the latter group supports the midlist and supplies diversity. A one-size-fits-all approach to the reading public is therefore unlikely to satisfy everyone.

For example, the 1-5 bestsellers-a-year people: previously they bought from airport bookstores and WalMart, to read once then discard; we expect them in future to buy ebooks to read once then discard. They will probably use a work-issue tablet or smartphone running a free Kindle or Nook app, rather than buying a special-purpose e-reader, and delete their books after reading. They couldn't care less about DRM. They will probably stick to one well-known online retail supplier. You are absolutely right about there being no benefit from dropping DRM in this sector.

3. Who gains? And why?

The voracious 20-150 books/year readers are a small but significant market segment.

These people buy lots of titles. They frequently have specialized interests which they pursue in depth, and a large number of authors who, although not prominent, they will buy everything by. They frequently re-read books, and they are disproportionately influential on other customers because they enthuse about what they've read. They're particularly common in genre fiction. Previously they bought paperbacks and hardcovers from specialist genre bookstores or, failing that, from large B&N/Borders branches. They will go to whatever retailer they can find online, and they find DRM a royal pain in the ass — indeed, a deterrent to buying ebooks at all.

There is a pervasive assumption that ebooks are disposable literature. But to the voracious readers, this is not the case. Currently it's hard for many people to build up collections of books due to space constraints — nevertheless I know many SF fans (of the kind who read 50-150 books a year) who have turned their homes into libraries. They will be the tip of an iceberg once ebooks become mainstream; why discard an ebook when you can file it and come back to it in 10 years' time and it takes up no space?

For such people, filing and tagging their collections is a major issue. And so is portability. It's true that if they own an iPad they can have an iBooks app full of books purchased from Apple, and a Kindle app full of books from Amazon, and a Nook app full of books from B&N. But those apps are, thanks to DRM, data silos — you can't cross-check to see if you bought book 3 in a series from Apple and book 5 from Amazon without a lot of fiddling around.

Platforms age and die. This summer, Microsoft is turning off the DRM servers for Microsoft Reader. This means that people who bought Microsoft Reader ebooks over the decade since 2002 now find that their ebooks are trapped inside a rapidly ageing, obsolescent slab of plastic and glass. In another 5-10 years, 95% of those books will be unreadable because the machines they're locked into were designed by a CE industry obsessed with the 2-3 year upgrade cycle — they're not durable. This is actually one psychological driver for piracy — people who have paid for a book resent being expected to pay for it again due to an arbitrary-seeming lock-in onto an aging piece of hardware. From their point of view, honesty is being punished.

There is no guarantee that B&N will stay in business, or that Amazon won't discontinue support for older Kindle files, in the not too distant future. This is something that the hardcore readers cannot help but be aware of, because it has already bitten them in the past, if they bought a Zune, or a Palm Pilot, or any number of other devices.

If Macmillan drop DRM on ebooks typically bought by these people, it sends a signal: "you can continue to read these ebooks in future using whatever platform you want". Converting a DRM-free ebook between ePub and Amazon's Kindle format, or any other current ebook format, is as easy as saving a Microsoft Word document in Rich Text Format, or as a web page: there's an app for that. Moreover, all the DRM-equipped reading platforms support importing non-DRM'd ebooks.

So, from the point of view of a particular subset of Macmillan's customers — the hard core genre audience who read many, many books — removing DRM would be a major benefit and would probably generate immense goodwill.

(This is leaving aside the point that, if a trend towards relaxing DRM becomes established — as happened in 2009 in the music download industry — the first mover will reap considerable public relations benefits and news coverage in the short term.)

But is there a business case for doing so?

4. Effects of removing DRM on the supply chain

(Firstly, I'd like to note that the Macmillan experience with dropping the mandatory requirement for DRM on audio books can't be taken as a useful indicator. The main retailers of audio books, Apple and Audible, refuse to ship DRM-free audio books. Therefore DRM-free audio books remained essentially unavailable to the public.)

The main effect of DRM on the supply chain is that a consumer who buys DRM-locked content is locked into the supplier who supports that type of DRM. A non-casual reader with a couple of hundred ebooks on their Kindle can't easily leave the Kindle walled garden. (I emphasize, DRM is the only thing that keeps them there: converting Kindle ebooks to ePub is trivially easy in the absence of DRM.)

This situation plays to the benefit of the largest incumbents in the retail sector. Currently we have gone from a near-monopoly by Amazon to a near-cartel among Amazon, B&N, and Apple. The independent bookseller sector is struggling to deal with ebooks.

It's instructive to take a look at how the independent retailers are failing to cope. Powell's have a large online store, and are quite successful with paper products. However, if you want to buy ebooks from them, they offer you a menu of DRM silos — Adobe Digital Editions, Google Ebooks, and so on. If you want to buy ebooks from Powell's, you have to grapple with registering your device with them, so that the ebooks can be locked to your reader. This forces customers to jump through a bunch of technological flaming hoops; it's easier for them to give up and point their web browsers at Amazon or B&N instead. And the results have been so poor that Google seems to be withdrawing from the retail market, at least to the extent of giving notice to quit to their larger retail affiliates (Powell's included).

If Macmillan titles did not have DRM, then customers would find it much easier to buy books from independent retailers like Powell's — or other small bookstores. DRM-free ebooks can be imported easily into whatever ebook reading device a reader already possesses. It will then be possible for bricks and mortar retailers and small online retailers to get a toe in the door and sell ebooks competitively. In short, it will lower barriers to entry into the retail supply chain, which in the long term is advantageous to publishers.

Another angle is that dropping DRM gives readers some assurance that their ebooks will remain accessible, even if they change reading devices and apps multiple times over the next decade. It also allows them to merge ebooks from different sources into a single collection, simplifying their reading experience, and to confidently purchase from smaller retail outlets.

As noted earlier, consumers change e-reader devices frequently. Within 5 years we will be seeing a radically different electronic landscape. Unlocking the readers' book collections will force Amazon and B&N and their future competitors to support migration (if they want to compete for each others' customers). So hopefully it will promote the transition from the near-monopoly we had before the agency model, via the oligopoly we have today, to a truly competitive retail market that also supports midlist sales.

(Why this will support the midlist: currently Amazon have swamped the midlist among ebooks in a sea of self-published rubbish. It's impossible to find anything worth reading in the Kindle store that isn't a very obvious bestseller. This offers an opportunity for specialist bookstores to offer a curatorial role. I believe the voracious genre consumers are picky enough about what they read that they dislike Amazon's slushpile approach, and will preferentially shop in better organized outlets.)

Other thoughts

I don't expect dropping mandatory DRM to have an immediate positive impact on sales. However, it will permit small retailers to compete and specialize in a market they are currently locked out of by network externalities. Right now, there is a window of opportunity for smaller resellers: Amazon's inclusion of masses of self-published material in the Kindle store has made it impossible for heavy consumers to browse it effectively. Smaller bookstores may be able to gain a strategic edge by curating their content, providing quality control on reviews, and other tactics we can't predict at this time. This is, I emphasize, speculative — but I believe saving the smaller resellers is key to diversity in the retail side of the market, and will further support the midlist (which is threatened right now by plummeting mass market sales and the difficulty authors experience in reaching their audience).

To the extent that piracy is an issue, I think the horse is well and truly out of the stable and over the horizon; bolting the stable door and adding chains and padlocks hasn't worked to date, either in print publishing or in music and film publishing. However, I would recommend considering a switch to watermarking. Watermarking doesn't prevent copying, but makes the original source of a copied file easy to find, which is a deterrent to piracy. This appears to be the current best practice in the music industry (in the iTunes store, all music downloads are watermarked), and they're a few years further into the era of internet distribution than we are.

Dropping DRM is probably not going to have a significant effect on the bestsellers, but I will note that J. K. Rowling's move into ebook territory is DRM free; presumably the rampant levels of piracy around her work was seen as a pre-existing condition, and anything that might convert pirate readers into paying customers was seen as giving Pottermore an edge.

Finally, if going DRM-free is a trend, it may be to Macmillan's advantage to be seen to be a front-runner. Removing the requirement for DRM from specialist imprints marketing primarily to the voracious genre readers would be a useful experimental step: I will confess to a personal bias here, but I'd love it if Tor was allowed to sell my novels unencumbered by DRM -- I could personally use that as a strong marketing angle. (Like many younger writers, my major point of contact with my readers is my blog — I typically get 12-14,000 readers per day, and provide them with a community for discussing my work and asking me questions — based on direct feedback I'm fairly certain that dropping DRM would allow me to generate additional ebook sales and point my readers at a more diverse range of retailers.)

The splashy introduction of the new LEGO friends line earlier this year stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this set of posts is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concerns raised in this heated debate. 

This is Part III, see also:

• Part I: The Brick Era (1932-1977) and The Golden Era (1978-1988)
• Part II: Gender Ahoy! (1989-2003)

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2004-2011: Lean LEGO Fighting Machine

As discussed in Part II, between 1989 and 2003, LEGO had introduced a stream of lines aimed specifically at girls.  None were particularly successful and the company was in trouble.  So, what next?

Those of us who follow every move TLG makes are well familiar with the company’s near collapse in 2004 and subsequent renaissance. This is a really important moment for our story, because this is the year when TLG stopped being a family run business and brought in a non-Kristiansen CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. With Knudstorp’s arrival came a change in philosophy. Quoted from the DailyMail article linked above:

Instead of “nurturing the child” – as Knudstorp puts it – [employees'] primary goal now had to be, “I am here to make money for the company.”

I, like many LEGO fans, am very grateful for what Knudstorp did to save and revitalize the company. The post-2004 era has seen a flourishing of LEGO themes and sets aimed at advanced builders. The LEGO minifig has been injected with more personality and variety than ever before. However, part of TLG’s new strategy also involved abandoning efforts the girl market and focusing exclusively on boys.

Abandoning schlock like Belville and Clikits is not a bad thing, but the push toward conflict and hyper-masculinity in classic themes (and a whole host of new ones) made LEGOLAND inhospitable for femininity.  Here are a couple more telling quotes from the Daily Mail article:

As always with Lego, this [action-oriented theme] was developed at every stage… with the help of focus groups, mostly comprising boys aged between six and 12.

In this new world focused on profit, the company sees no shame in admitting that, like it or not, what most excites little boys is conflict.

Which is to say, LEGO City is not the tranquil place LEGO Town was.

Notice the substantial hike in the m/f ratio in 2007. This ratio had been gradually approaching 1 throughout the 90s, but jumped back up to 1992 levels in 2007 (male/female ratio = 8).

Girls also disappeared from LEGO commercials and marketing collateral. Take this awesome series of commercials encouraging fathers and sons to build together (the first is embedded below). The utter lack of anything similar for girls sends a clear message about who is expected to play with LEGO, it has entirely entered the masculine domain. With girls being actively excluded from TLG’s marketing efforts it’s no surprise that we see such a low percentage playing with them now.

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In the final installment of this series, I’ll offer my perspective on the controversy over the new line aimed at girls, LEGO Friends.

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David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night.  He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

BROWN Anne After a long illness bravely fought, Anne Margaret (nèe Wilson), wife of Fred and mother to Mark, enthusiastic Scottish country dancer. Service to be held at Borders Crematorium, on Friday, May 25, 2012, at 11 am. Donations, if desired, to Marie Curie Cancer Support. Family flowers only.

Linux version 3.4 has been released. This was a very active release for ASoC in framework terms, in addition to the usual bug fixes and so on there were a large number of framework enhancements though most are fairly small or are laying the groundwork for more user visible features like dynamic PCM.

• Support for widgets not associated with a CODEC, an important part of the dynamic PCM framework.
• A library factoring out the common code shared by dmaengine based DMA drivers contributed by Lars-Peter Clausen. This will save a lot of code and make it much easier to deploy enhancements to dmaengine.
• Support for binary controls, used for providing runtime configuration of algorithm coefficients.
• A new DAPM widget type for regulator supplies allowing drivers for devices that can power down unused supplies while active to do without any per-driver code.
• DAPM widgets for DAIs, initially giving a speed boost for playback startup and shutdown and also the basis for CODEC<->CODEC DAI link support.
• Support for specifying the number of significant bits on audio interfaces, useful for allowing applications to know how much effort to put into generating data for a larger sample format.
• Support for a range of new TI reference boards including Panda, configured from platform data so new boards can be added without driver changes.
• Conversion of the FSI driver used on some SH processors to DMAEngine.
• New CODEC drivers for Maxim MAX9768 and Wolfson Microelectronics WM2200.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mitt) had “never worked a day in her life.” (A NY Times article is here.)

“Worked” was a bad choice of words.  Raising kids and taking care of a home are work, maybe even if you can hire the kind of help that Mrs. Romney could afford.  Rosen’s comment implied that family work is not as worthwhile as work in the paid labor force.  That’s not such an unreasonable conclusion if you assume that we put our money where our values are and reward work in proportion to what we think it’s worth.  Mitt’s supporters use this value-to-society assumption to justify the huge payoffs Romney derived from those leveraged buyouts at Bain Capital.*

Even Mrs. Romney apparently felt that there must be some truth to the enviability of a career.   Why else would she refer to stay-at-home motherhood as a career?  “My career choice was to be a mother.”

Still, regardless of the truth of Rosen’s remark, it was insulting.**  Stay-at-home motherhood is work – a job.

But is it a good job?

A recent Gallup poll provides some more evidence as to why stay-at-home moms might be both envious or resentful of their employed counterparts.  Gallup asked women about the emotions, positive and negative, that they had felt “a lot” in the previous day.  Gallup then compared the stay-at-home moms, employed moms, and employed women who had no children at home.

The stay-at-home moms came in first on every negative emotion.  Some of the differences are small, but the Gallup sample was more than 60,000 so these differences are statistically significant.   The smallest difference was for Stress – no surprise there, since paid work can be stressful.  Worry and Anger too can be part of the workplace.  The largest differences were for Sadness and Depression.  Stay-home moms were 60% more likely to have been sad or depressed.

Gallup also asked about positive feelings (Thriving, Smiling or Laughing, Learning, Happiness, Enjoyment), and while the differences were smaller, they went the same way, with stay-at-home moms on the shorter end.  Still it’s encouraging that 86% of them had Experienced Happiness 86%; so had 91% of the employed moms.

Money matters.  As Rosen said,

This isn’t about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids. Most women in America, let’s face it, don’t have that choice.

Gallup found a small interaction effect.  The stay-at-home mom-employed difference was greater for low-income women.

The Gallup poll does not offer much speculation about why stay-at-home moms have more sadness and less happiness. One in four experienced “a lot” of depression yesterday.  That number should be cause for concern.

Maybe women feel more uncertain and less able to control their lives when they depend on a man, especially one whose income is inadequate.  Maybe stay-at-home moms find themselves more isolated from other adults. Maybe they are at home not by choice but because they cannot find a decent-paying job. Or maybe money talks, and what it says to unpaid stay-at-home moms is society does not value your work.  Nor, in comparison with other wealthy countries, does US society or government provide much non-financial support to make motherhood easier.

The late Donna Summer sang,

She works hard for the money
So you better treat her right

But how right are we treating women who work hard for no money?

——————————-

* For example, Edward Conrad is a former partner of Romney.  In a recent article in the Times Magazine, Adam Davidson writes, “If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conrad says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefitted society.”

** Hillary Clinton committed a similar gaffe twenty years ago in response to a reporter’s question about work and family “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life”

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Note: All of the information linked to from this post is in Spanish and related to Mexico… Part of it will be translatable via automated means, some will not. Sorry, that's what I have, and it's too much text to invest the effort to hand-translate

I have been following the development of the different e-vote modalities in Mexico for several years already, although I have only managed to do so methodically in the last half year or so. If you are interested in my line of reasoning as to why I completely oppose e-voting, you can look at the short article I published in 2010 or the slightly longer and more updated version published in our book in 2011.

Currently, in Mexico there are two different venues of e-vote that are being pushed: Bad and worse. The bad one will be carried out for about 10% of the population of the state of Jalisco and somewhat less for the state of Coahuila (Distrito Federal was also to be in this list, but the contract was cancelled due to the provider company delivering booths with too many problems and unable to deliver in the due time). The worse one is, fortunately, likely to have the least impact. Why? Because it regards votes cast by Distrito Federal residents (the capital entity, where part of Mexico City is located) living abroad. And it will have less impact because of the amount of the population registered for it: We are about 9 million residents in DF, and in the last election (first time IIRC there was the right to vote from abroad) there were only about 10,000 people registered for casting a (enveloped and sent by post) vote. Even if this year we the campaign for this was better (and I'm not yet sure about it), the number of voters will not be enough to make a dent on the results.

I'm not going into details as to why it is bad in this post — I requested information from the DF Electoral Institute (IEDF) with academic interest, to try to find more information about it, and I want to share my results with you — and, of course, to request for your input on how to continue with this. On May 3rd, I sent the following request (this I am translating to English :) You can look at the receipt for the request for the original redaction) to the official contact address, oficinadeinformacionpublica@iedf.org.mx:

• What company was hired to develop the system that will be used to receive the votes from Distrito Federal citizens residing abroad that have decided to use the Electronic Voting over Internet procedure ("Vota chilango")?
• What is the technical information for said system? That is, which technological basis was it developed on? Which operating base (hardware) will it be deployed on?
• How many revisions or security audits has the developed system ben exposed to? Which are the entities in charge of doing them? What has been their evaluation?

Of course, I wasn't very optimistic when receiving this information. Still, I have to share my results: My information request was largely denied:

(…)
III. The divulgation of this information harms the interest it protects
Given that, were it to be divulged it would affect the informatic security of the refered system. Anyway, we have to point out that said systems have enough measures and security provisions, so that the citizen can emit his vote in a universal, free, secret and direct way.
IV. The damage that can be produced by making this information public is larger than the public interest to know it
This is so because making this information public puts at risk the correct development of the Internet-based voting, because were the technical, purpose-specific information be made public, it could be misused to carry out informatic attacks.
It is also important to mention that a confidentiality agreement was signed with the company that developed said systems.
(…)
VI. The time for the information to be reserved
It will be seven years starting at the present resolution, this information will be made public when the reserve period is over or when the target is reached, except for the confidemtial information that it could contain. (…)

In case some other person is interested in following this information, the other two points were answered, and I'll try to get some relevant information from it:

• The company that provided the Internet-based voting solution was SCYTL SECURE INTERNET VOTING, S.A.
• The only entity in charge of conducting a security revision/audit is Telefónica Ingeniería de Seguridad de México S.A. de C.V.. The audit is still in process, and thus it is not yet possible to give any results from it.

So, I don't have any real conclusions yet. I'm just reporting how work is unfolding.

Tomorrow evening (Wednesday May 23) I'll give a talk on the "e-voting in Mexico 2012" subject in Congreso Internacional de Software Libre in Zacatecas, Mexico. I'll talk on the situation on this and the other topics I have been able to work on.

Today I thought we’d do another round-up of gendered children’s stuff, since we’ve gotten a number of submissions. So here we go.

Missy C. noticed that the manufacturer’s product description listed on Amazon for one of the Fisher Price Imaginext Sky Racers took for granted that the toy was for boys, not, say, “kids”:

Monica C., meanwhile, noticed another example of the association of girls with a diva-ish princess center-of-attention persona when looking at onesies for sale at My Habit. Options included “born fabulous,” “high maintenance,” “born to wear diamonds,” and “it’s all about me,” among others:

Similarly, Melanie J. saw some baby booties for sale at retail chain JR’s in North Carolina that reinforce the idea that boys are mischievous while girls are materialistic:

You can buy them gendered vitamins as well. Nathan, who writes at 1115, sent in this photo he took at Target:

Pete & Emily in Norwich, UK, noticed that you can now allow your hamsters to inhabit gendered worlds too, if you’d like; they sent us this photo they took at a pet store:

But we do have two counter-examples this time! Jackie H. took a photo of a kitchen set she saw for sale at Meijer, which shows both a boy and a girl using it:

And Isabeau P.S., Jesse W., and Anne Sofie B. all sent in images from the catalog for Swedish toy maker Leklust (two of the images were discussed at Mommyish):

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Details are in the article, but here's the general idea:

Let's follow the flow of the users:

1. Scammer buys user traffic from PornoXo.com and sends it to HQTubeVideos.
2. HQTubeVideos loads, in invisible iframes, some parked domains with innocent-sounding names (relaxhealth.com, etc).
3. In the parked domains, ad networks serve display and PPC ads.
4. The click-fraud sites click on the ads that appear within the parked domains.
5. The legitimate publishers gets invisible/fraudulent traffic through the (fraudulently) clicked ads from parked domains.
6. Brand advertisers place their ad on the websites of the legitimate publishers, which in reality appear within the (invisible) iframe of HQTubeVideos.
7. AdSafe detects the attempted placement within the porn website, and prevents the ads of the brand publisher from appearing in the legitimate website, which is hosted within the invisible frame of the porn site.

Notice how nicely orchestrated is the whole scheme: The parked domains "launder" the porn traffic. The ad networks place the ads in some legitimately-sounding parked domains, not in a porn site. The publishers get traffic from innocent domains such as RelaxHealth, not from porn sites. The porn site loads a variety of publishers, distributing the fraud across many publishers and many advertisers.

The most clever part of this is that it makes use of the natural externalities of the Internet.

And now let's see who has the incentives to fight this. It is fraud, right? But I think it is well-executed type of fraud. It targets and defrauds the player that has the least incentives to fight the scam.

Who is affected? Let's follow the money:

• The big brand advertisers (Continental, Coca Cola, Verizon, Vonage,...) pay the publishers and the ad networks for running their campaigns.
• The publishers pay the ad network and the scammer for the fraudulent clicks.
• The scammer pays PornoXo and TrafficHolder for the traffic.

The ad networks see clicks on their ads, they get paid, so not much to worry about. They would worry if their advertisers were not happy. But here we have a piece of genius:

The scammer did not target sites that would measure conversions or cost-per-acquisition. Instead, the scammer was targeting mainly sites that sell pay-per-impression ads and video ads. If the publishers display CPM ads paid by impression, any traffic is good, all impressions count. It is not an accident that the scammer targets publishers with video content, and plenty of pay-per-impression video ads. The publishers have no reason to worry if they get traffic and the cost-per-visit is low.

Effectively, the only one hurt in this chain are the big brand advertisers, who feed the rest of the advertising chain.

Do the big brands care about this type of fraud? Yes and no, but not really deeply. Yes, they pay for some "invisible impressions". But this is a marketing campaign. In any case, not all marketing attempts are successful. Do all readers of Economist look at the printed ads? Hardly. Do all web users pay attention to the banner ads? I do not think so. Invisible ads are just one of the things that make advertising a little bit more expensive and harder. Consider it part of the cost of doing business. In any case, compared to the overall marketing budget of these behemoths, the cost of such fraud is peanuts.

The big brands do not want their brand to be hurt. If the ads do not appear in places inappropriate for the brand, things are fine. Fighting the fraud publicly? This will just associate the brand with fraud. No marketing department wants that.

Third post about ganeti.

Ganet-debootstrap-instance contains a nice set of scripts to create a debian (or derivatives) image using debootstrap. Images can be configured and customized by writing simple hooks script to modify various aspects of the default installation. However writing these script is not really fun and pushing it too far can lead to long messy scripts, loosing the overall benefit of automatic configuration.

Puppet is my configuration management tool of choice, but installing puppet on a new machine requires few magic incantations that the user should perform manually, or in a semi automatic mode (autosign=true) to make it work. My goal is to install puppet automatically on the newly created instance so it will run and configure the new instance at the first boot. From that moment on I'll forget about ganeti and configure all remaining services of my new VM using puppet.

In order to do so, we need to install puppet (and apt-get update/upgrade...), create the ssl certificates for the client and enabling the puppet daemon on the client. We add another hook in /etc/ganeti/instance-debootstrap/hooks/ :

This script uses puppetca to create on the puppet (and ganeti) server the client key, sign it, and then copy it to the target machine. Notice that we create the certificate for a fqnd name $INSTANCE_NAME.$DOMAIN or otherwise puppet will complain loudly. This is not strictly needed, but if you want to do otherwise, you'll need to fiddle with the puppet configuration a bit more. The procedure to create a puppet certificate server-side is well documented on the puppet website, so if you are curious about the details duck-duck-it .

I previously wrote about a failure of a USB flash device in my Internet gateway [1]. I have since had another failure in the same system, so both the original 4G devices are now dead. That’s two dead devices in 10 weeks. It could be that the USB devices that I got for free at an exhibition were just really cheap, I’m sure that they weren’t expecting them to be used in that way. The devices from the same batch which are used for their intended purpose (sneaker-net file sharing) are still working well. But in any case I’m not going to resume this experiment until warmer weather. At this time of year some extra heat dissipation from computer gear in my home is more like a feature and less like a bug.

The second USB device to fail appeared to have it’s failure in the Ext4 journal (the errors were reported at around sector 2000), I didn’t keep a record of the problem with the first device, but from memory I think it was much the same.

Rumor has it that cheap flash storage devices don’t implement wear-levelling to avoid patent infringement. If that rumor is correct then any filesystem that uses a fixed journal in the same way as Ext3/4 is probably unsuitable for any serious use on such devices, while a filesystem based on Copy On Write will probably perform better. In Spring I’ll try using BTRFS on cheap USB flash devices and see if that works better. I have another spare device from the same batch to test so I can eliminate hardware differences. I can’t do enough tests to be a good statistical sample, but if a device lasts from Spring to Autumn using BTRFS with the same use that caused failures with Ext4 in a few weeks then I will consider it a strong indication that BTRFS is better than Ext3/4 for such uses.

For the next 5 months or so I’ll be using a hard drive in my Internet gateway system again.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/04/08/flash-storage-update/

Related posts:

1. Flash Storage Update Last month I wrote about using USB flash storage devices...
2. flash for main storage I was in a discussion about flash on a closed...
3. USB Flash Storage For some years I have had my Internet gateway/firewall system...

Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer

Henry became suddenly aware. Aware that he was sitting upright in a comfortable chair, wearing comfortable clothes made from warm white fabric that he did not recognize. All around him was whiteness, save for a wide bay window across the room that looked out into pure blackness. He looked to his left and saw a man standing there, also dressed in white. The man’s head was shaved, his face stony yet friendly. He smiled warmly.

Henry suddenly remembered that he could talk and found his own voice welcome but only distantly familiar, as if though he hadn’t heard it in a very long time. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the future Henry.”

“The future?” He blinked, considering it. “For real?”

“For real.”

For the moment he asked nothing else, finding it bothersome that his mind was having so much trouble processing such a seemingly small bit of information. Then he managed, “How far? I mean, what year is this?”

“We now use a different calendar than you are used to, but translated it’s the year 4970.”

Again, nothing but a simple number, a date. Why was it so hard to fathom what it meant?

“How did I get here?”

The bald man squatted down beside his chair, still smiling. He put a reassuring hand on Henry’s forearm. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

The last thing he remembered? He tried desperately to think. Then with a sudden wave, “A heart attack! I had a heart attack. They were working on me in the ambulance. Then… then, well then I guess…” He paused unsure. “I guess they must have… saved me?” A sudden quivering in his voice revealed his own doubt.

The bald man patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry Henry. They didn’t save you.” He raised a grey eyebrow and shook his head, never losing that friendly, reassuring look. “I’m afraid you died that day.”

Henry Hamilton shuddered in the comfortable chair. He looked back to the bay window and out into the blackness. Suddenly a small light zipped by, followed by two others. “What was that? Out there? Is that… space?”

“Yes, those ships are transporting people to other stations. There is a lot of traffic here in Jupiter orbit.”

Suddenly the bewildered man remembered that he had legs. He sprang from the chair and sprinted across to the window. There he pressed his face against the clear glass and gasped aloud as he gazed upon the twisting lighted tendrils of the space station that stretched off for kilometers in many directions. And all the while below, the mighty pink and red behemoth planet glowed so massive and close he was afraid that if he reached out he would touch it.

He spun back to the white room and the patient, smiling man. “Why? Why now? I never asked to be frozen. Did I?”

“Relax Henry. You haven’t been in stasis or cryo-sleep.”

“Then what? What?” He was beginning to feel like a caged animal in the room.

The bald man suddenly shone a small light into his eyes and Henry instantly calmed down. Then the friendly stranger walked him back to his chair and helped him to sit.

“Now just relax and listen while I tell you all about mankind’s wonderful mission to regenerate everybody through the genome reestablishment plan.”

“Who’s everybody,” Henry asked dreamily. That flash of light had done something to him. He felt wonderful.

“Why, everybody who has ever lived and died of course. We’ve finally done it Henry. We’ve finally found immortality and nobody is going to get left behind!”

• Women are underrepresented in free software development
  
• Those women who are involved in free software development are overwhelmingly more likely to have been subject to sexual harassment, belittling commentary or just plain ignored because of their gender
  
• When asked, women tend to believe that these two facts are fairly strongly related

(Were tampon mouse able to form and express coherent thoughts, tampon mouse would not put up with this shit)

Guest blogger Courtney Stanton explains how she organized a game developer conference with 50% women speakers. Stanton is a project manager for a video game company in Boston, and long-time feminist scourge of the computer game industry. Her work has been featured on GF several times. Follow her on Twitter at @q0rt.

Hi! In case we’ve never met, the elevator pitch for me goes something like: interactive media/videogames/project management/social justice/interior design/travel/semi-hatred of conferences. Like, *for real* I am not an enjoyer of conference content most of the time, despite going to several of them every year. I always end up sitting in a room listening to the same four straight white men agree with each other on some panel, and then I wander over to the expo floor where a person who doesn’t know anything about the product hands me a flyer and a pen Oh and if I’m *really* lucky, I’ll have paid over a thousand dollars in travel expenses and registration fees.

And so I put on my Ambition hat and decided that rather than complain on Twitter endlessly (well…in addition to, I guess), I should put together a conference for game developers, just to see if it was possible to make one that I would actually attend with enthusiasm. I ended up calling it No Show Conference, because it’s not about pageantry, glitz, or any of the “slick” stuff I see at a lot of conferences. Here, have a link: noshowconf.com

My Criteria:
- Not a bajillion dollars to register
- Don’t make attendees use vacation time just to show up
- Different entry fee/access level for hobbyists/newbies/students/broke friends
- Nothing included should be a waste of time, including the traditional expo hall
- Have an anti-harassment policy and train volunteers on enforcing it
- No panels

And then, because I am sneaky, I also had a secret agenda.

Unstated Criteria:
- Try to get as many women on stage as I possibly could

Since I was the one who made the conference up, I’ve got total control over setting price, etc, so all of my stated criteria have been very easy to enact so far. But getting women in the lineup at game conferences is seemingly difficult, given that so few events even have women speaking at all. I run a monthly networking group in Boston for women in the game industry and their allies, so I know the issue (at least locally) isn’t that there aren’t enough women with innovative, interesting things to say. What gives?

The easiest way I saw for getting more women on stage at the actual event was to get as many women to submit speaking proposals as possible. Selecting presentations was done without speaker information associated with the titles and pitches, so I wasn’t able to “reserve” spaces in the program for anyone based on aspects of their identity — and I wasn’t interested in that sort of reservation system for this event, anyway. It’s a come-one-come-all event for game industry professionals, so more than anything I wanted a really strong set of talks, even if that meant I ended up with, sigh, yet another roster of all dudes.

So! Getting women to submit content: easy? Um. When I’d talk to men about the conference and ask if they felt like they had an idea to submit for a talk, they’d *always* start brainstorming on the spot. I’m not generalizing — every guy I talked to about speaking was able to come up with an idea, or multiple ideas, right away…and yet, overwhelmingly the women I talked to with the same pitch deferred with a, “well, but I’m not an expert on anything,” or “I wouldn’t know what to submit,” or “yes but I’m not a *lead* [title], so you should talk to my boss and see if he’d want to present.”

I promised mentoring, I promised practice sessions, I promised one-on-one slide deck reviews with people who have spent hundreds of hours speaking at conferences. I emailed my Women in Games Boston group, I attended events and encouraged groups of women in person, I sought women out online, I met with women over coffee. I encouraged/begged them to consider translating the hours and hours I’d spent with them in the past talking about their careers, their specialties, their ideas, into a 45-minute presentation. I told them how much I respected their reputations and their ideas and that I’d be thrilled if they had the time or interest in submitting a talk.

Did every woman respond like that? No. But it was very much the minority situation, me promoting the conference and having a woman say, “oh, okay, does [concept] sound like a good fit?” and then them actually turning around and submitting a proposal. One or two women versus every single man who submitted content. (Also, while I have spoken either in person or online with every woman who submitted, several of the proposals submitted by men were guys I’d never met.)

We ended up getting 18 submissions (8 women, 10 men) for 10 planned slots. In between launching the conference and selecting talks, the keynote speaker I had lined up fell off the face of the planet, but super-conveniently for me, one of the submitted talks was a scorchingly good topic for a keynote, so kaboom, problem solved. Then, I couldn’t get the final selection list down to 10. I had 11 and they were all great, covering things I hadn’t seen presented elsewhere. So I reworked the conference schedule, made room for the extra presentation, and called it a win. What we’ve ended up with is a speaker lineup of 6 men and 6 women and *I swear that was not planned* but hey, it’s convenient for my thesis that you can put together a games conference for the industry at large and still get more than one token woman in your lineup.

Having a non-trivial number of women submitting presentations seems to have made it so that a non-trivial number of women are speaking at No Show Conference. Imagine that.

Huge giant HOWEVER: I came away from the process of promoting and recruiting potential speakers with a bitter, unwilling sympathy for event organizers who say, “there aren’t any women speaking because no women applied.” Like oh em gee y’all. I am hoping that this year’s conference is successful enough that I can make it an annual event, and that these months of cheerleading will have planted some idea seeds that I reap when it comes time to wave the pom poms and encourage speaker submissions next year. I’m hoping that the women speaking this year will in turn encourage other women to apply.

I’m hoping I run into fewer women who self-reject their ideas before I even get a chance to read them.

So hey, I was hoping to get some women on stage and it looks like that was achieved! Hooray! …Hooray? Wellll…while I am really, really pleased with our speaker lineup and our session content, I realize that this is not Nature’s Perfect Conference (yet). But I figured the only way to find new problems was to get some of these recurring, obvious ones out of the way. (And I didn’t even set out to tackle *all* of the obvious diversity problems, just the one I felt I’d be most likely to succeed at this time around.) It’ll be really cool when I, as a white person, figure out how to promote speaker submissions more/more effectively to people of color in my industry. Likewise with QUILTBAG game developers and thinker-types. I think I lucked out somewhat in our venue this year from an accessibility standpoint (ramps, elevators, handicap stalls in all the bathrooms), but I definitely wouldn’t claim that I’ve covered all the bases of accessibility for potential attendees (yet) Short version: I’m not perfect, neither is this event, but I am looking for ways to make it better and more open to all people working in games, both this year and in future years. And in the meantime, at least I’m putting on a conference where a version of myself from another dimension wouldn’t sit in the audience tweeting, “oh hey, a panel with a bunch of dudes on it, how novel.”

The Wikimedia Foundation last week warned that readers who are seeing ads on Wikipedia articles are likely using a Web browser that has been infected with malware. The warning points to an apparent resurgence in adware and spyware that is being delivered via cleverly disguised browser extensions designed to run across multiple Web browsers and operating systems.

An ad served by IWantThis! browser extension. Source: Wikimedia

In a posting on its blog, Wikimedia noted that although the nonprofit organization is funded by more than a million donors and does not run ads, some users were complaining of seeing ads on Wikipedia entries. “If you’re seeing advertisements for a for-profit industry (see screenshot below for an example) or anything but our fundraiser, then your web browser has likely been infected with malware,” reads a blog post co-written by Philippe Beaudette, director of community advocacy at the Wikimedia Foundation.

The blog post named one example of a browser extension called “IWantThis!,” which is essentially spyware masquerading as adware. The description at the IWantThis! Web site makes it sound like a harmless plugin that occasionally overlays ads on third-party Web sites and helps users share product or online shopping wish lists with others. As I was researching this extension, I came across this helpful description of it at the DeleteMalware Blog, which points to the broad privacy policy that ships with this extension:

Examples of the information we may collect and analyze when you use our website include the IP address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from the Site, including date and time; cookie; web pages you viewed or searched for; and the phone number you used to call us.

The author of that DeleteMalware post said he found a copy of the IWantThis browser extension bundled with freeware from software download sites (the author doesn’t mention which download site, but it’s worth mentioning again that sites like Download.com have recently begun bundling adware, toolbars and other potentially invasive software with otherwise “free” titles).

The Wikimedia blog post specifically mentions that this extension affects Google Chrome users, but the extension appears to be equally capable of installing across multiple browsers, including Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer. Last week, I wrote about LilyJade, a new computer worm that was spreading across Facebook accounts by abusing the free services offered by Crossrider, a platform that makes it simple to develop browser extensions that work seamlessly across browsers and operating systems.

In researching IWantThis, I spoke with Sergey Golovanov, a malware expert at Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky Lab, who pointed out that the IWantThis extension has been delivered via Crossrider since at least February of this year. This may or may not be linked to an affiliate program that rewards people with commissions for convincing people to install the software.This writeup from Symantec’s ThreatExpert malware scanning engine steps through some of the registry changes that the IWantThis extension executes on a host system.

It’s also worth noting that few — if any — antivirus firms are likely to alert users about malicious or invasive browser extensions. For example, none of the 43 antivirus and security applications used to conduct this scan of the IWantThis! extension at Virustotal.com flagged it as malicious, or even a potentially unwanted application.

Broken record alert: If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it!

Today I took some photos with the E-520 and the 40-150mm lens, mostly at work, and of colleagues. So I cannot simply show these here without at least asking permission first.

But this one I hadn’t seen before – don’t know if she’s an IBMer, or someone from Deutsche Bank. Anyway, I liked how concentrated she was working even during her lunch break, in our garden:

Thanks for viewing.

I have just uploaded exim 4.80 rc4 to experimental. As the GnuTLS code has been overhauled testing would be appreciated.

Al, one of the readers and commenters on this blog asked how I sharpen pictures. Good question, but it cannot really be answered with some software tips alone.

First, you have to understand that different cameras use different sorts of Anti-Aliasing (AA) filters. The stronger that filter, the more it blurs the photo to avoid something known as moiré. Some cameras like those from Leica, or medium format digital backs, or the new Nikon D800E don’t have such a filter at all, some others like those Sigmas with Foveon sensors don’t need them at all. My E-520 DSLR has a pretty strong AA filter, much stronger than the one in its predecessor E-510, or in the newer E-PL1, so it produces slightly ‘softer’ photos than those.

The second and third point of course: good and sharp glass, and a stable tripod (or short exposures like those from flash). These two things also help to get really sharp images, and even for the best glass (like at the moment the Panasonic Leica 1:1,4 25mm (for µ43rds)), there’s still an optimal aperture where the results in the center or even in the whole frame are better than at other apertures. And so on. See the interactive blur graphs at SLRgear for more information about that.

It’s the same with flashes: if you really want to freeze waterdrops, take compact flashes at low output, or studio flashes like Einsteins (or some much more expensive ones from Broncolor or ProFoto), also not at their maximum power settings. Used that way, you can achieve exposure times like 1/10,000th of a second or even less – even if the camera syncs at only 1/160th, like mine.

So good glass helps, short times or a stable tripod help, and a camera with a weak AA filter or none at all helps as well. That leaves the software.

The best sharpening algorithm I’ve seen so far – and the German c’t magazine seems to agree with me on that one – is by a far margin RL Deconvolution, named after its inventors Richardson and Lucy. That’s an iterative and rather complex mathematical process to “calculate away” effects like those from AA filters, resulting in sharper images with less blur. A RL Deconvolution algorithm is built into the free and open source RawTherapee raw converter, which is one of if not the main reason to use it. Oh, and did I mention that it’s free?

The nice guys who program RawTherapee offer a manual for download which is also free, and which explains it all much better than I could. But here are the settings I have saved as presets for my cameras.

For the E-520 with its rather strong AA filter, I use the recommended standard settings or something close to it, like this:

And for the E-PL1 together with good glass (like Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix G 1:1,7 20mm ASPH) I use much more conservative settings, more like this:

This is best done with a 100% view onto a critical and contrasty object, even if the rendering of that iterative process (done 30 times in my examples here) will last a little while even on a relatively new and fast PC. When those contrasty edges get halos, you’ve overdone it. If the image has just enough ‘bite’ without appearing too sharp, you’re probably close.

Of course no one would forbid to also use something else like the usual (but slight) unsharp mask, or even some wavelet sharpening if you like, and if it helps your pictures.

But for those who read this, and who’d like to go on and try every possible method now, do me one favour: do not fall into the trap of creating a layer just for the eyes, and to sharpen (and at the same time whiten) only those. That effect is as much overused as HDR images (SCNR)

I’m still using RawTherapee in version 3.0.0.6 on my stable Debian 64 bit system, but the newer 4-versions are nice as well – tried that one on Ubuntu. And these should work on Windows, or a Mac as well.

I’ve received comments like “never seen so sharp photos from an E-520″ on DPReview and elsewhere, so why not give it a try?

Hope that helps, and thanks for reading.

P.S.: Of course, there are many other things to consider, like using a low ISO setting when possible for sharper edges, or really careful and critical focusing. But I left those away, and hope that those readers who are interested in photography know these things anyway.

PHPUnit, according to its PTS, has been in Debian since 2009. But it was orphaned, and nobody took care of it for a while. That is until few weeks ago, Luis Uribe started to work on it. Since he isn’t a DD, and that I take care of, I believe, about half of the all the PHP PEAR packages in Debian, I started working with him on re-doing the work of packaging PHPUnit for Debian. Previously, the old version was quite wrong, with missing dependencies, and not really working, what a shame…

PHPUnit 3.6 has been in Debian SID for 3 days now. And it’s working well. I’m now adding runs of unit testings from upstream packages at build time (of course, only if DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS doesn’t contains “nocheck”, as per the policy). All together, it’s been quite some fun to hack this, and I’m quite happy of the results, even though there’s still a lot of work remaining.

PHP itself is running unit tests at build time. And not just a few: more than 11000 of them. The only “small” issue, is that they are totally outdated. Over the time, the vardump() function has evolved, and doesn’t print things the same way. One may say that it prints things in a nicer way, but as a result, many of the tests that were suppose to work, actually fails because of these differences in vardump() over time.

So I started working on fixing some of the tests. It’s most of the time very easy to fix, but it takes a long time to fix all these small unit tests. So far, I’ve been able to fix most of what’s in the tests/, Zend/tests (more than 161 tests fixed), and the beginning of ext/*/tests: for the moment: bcmath, bz2, calendar, curl, date, dba, dom, ereg, and a part of exif, which for the moment represent 214 fixed tests, and I’ll try to do more fixes when I have time. I hope to send the patches upstream soon. The final goal is of course to have the build of PHP to fail if unit tests are failing as well. For the moment, unit tests do run at build time, but the build don’t care of the results, which I think is stupid (it’s wasting CPU cycles for no reasons, IMO).

If you maintain some PEAR packages, I would welcome you to first join the PKG-PEAR team on Alioth, and team maintain your packages, switch over to pkg-php-tools and dh 8 auto-sequencer, and to follow the PKG-PHP-PEAR packaging guide lines so that we have consistency in the archive. And of course, run unit testings, by doing a build-depends on phpunit (>= 3.6). Note that unit testings in PEAR packages are tracked on the Debian wiki. This post is also a call for help, because I feel quite alone doing this work of packaging PEAR packages, which many PHP applications depend on (think about roundcube, horde, extplorer, and many more). Other teams are doing very well, like the Perl team, and there’s no reason why Debian wouldn’t maintain PHP libraries as well as the ones for Perl.

Wired’s Epicenter blog, which covers the technology business, recently asked eight visionaries about their strategies for looking at and into the future. How do they see what’s on the horizon? What distinguishes important technologies before they become important?

Among those questioned were Long Now board members Esther Dyson, Paul Saffo and Peter Schwartz. The respondents represented fields ranging from futurism to publishing, computer science to venture capitalism. There was, however, a common thread in the commentary: the importance of observation. Look for the unexpected, and look for it everywhere.

“There are four indicators I look for: contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences.” -Paul Saffo

“The first thing I do is go where other people aren’t. [...] I love traveling because I love seeing how many different ways there are to do things.” -Esther Dyson

“You look for technologies that are likely to create major inflection points – breaks in a trend, things that are going to accelerate.” -Peter Schwartz

And what might make a particular technology or project likely to succeed? Vint Cerf, co-inventor of TCP/IP, points out that the future needn’t be something to sit back and wait for: “Sometimes spotting the future is really a question of realizing what’s now possible and actually trying it out.”

You can read the complete responses here.

The short NEWS entry follows below. For those interested in following RcppArmadillo eevn more closely, we generally track Conrad's Armadillo release candidates as well in SVN on R-Forge but do no longer submit these to CRAN (as the CRAN maintainers have enough incoming packages).

0.3.2.0  2012-05-21

    o   Upgraded to Armadillo release 3.2.0 "Creamfields"

          * faster eigen decomposition via "divide and conquer" algorithm
          * faster transpose of vectors and compound expressions
          * faster handling of diagonal views
          * faster handling of tiny fixed size vectors (≤ 4 elements)
          * added unique(), for finding unique elements of a matrix

You’ve probably heard someone in media or politics bemoan the ballooning student debt in the U.S.  In fact, debt has been rising.  It’s more than doubled in the last ten years (that’s a more than 100% increase):
This debt, though, can’t be attributed primarily to the rising cost of education, as Planet Money explains.  The average debt load for a student graduating from a public school, for example, has risen by 20%:
The average debt load for a student coming out of a private school has gone up a bit more, but still not enough to account for the leap in overall student debt.
The increase in debt, it turns out, is largely accounted for by an increase in the number of people going to college.  In 1970, 8,500 8,500,000 people enrolled in college in the Fall; in 2009, that number exceeded 20,000 20,000,000 (source).  A more than 100% increase.

So, the story isn’t quite as dire as we might think.  This may be little consolation, though, for my students who walked across the stage yesterday.  Congrats, Seniors! :)

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Here's a podcast of my last Guardian column, The problem with nerd politics:

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In "nerd determinism," technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com

John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.

MP3 Link

Interesting article from Wired.

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that as of July 1, 2011, for the first time the majority (50.4%) of babies under age 1 in the U.S. were not non-Hispanic Whites. Animal New York posted a video by Jay Smooth discussing the reactions to and implications of this news:

<iframe frameborder="0" height="281" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/42420343" width="500"></iframe>

You can see the NYT article Jay Smooth parodies here, but note that the graph is mislabeled. The line labeled “White” actually only represents the data for non-Hispanic Whites, while the line labeled “Non-White” includes births to White Hispanics, so the terminology they used doesn’t accurately reflect what the graph illustrates.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

"Years ago," writes Maxime, "we found ourselves plagued with a brand new, unusably sluggish website. Most of the team blamed the esoteric VMCMWTH-based architecture (i.e. View-Model-Controller-Model-What-The-Huuhhhhh) that was pioneered by the Chief Developer. But the Chief Developer and the CTO (who also happened to be his uncle), blamed the hardware. More specifically, it was the 'inferior, off brand' CPU."

"Now despite the fact that this 'inferior, off brand' CPU commanded over 40% of the market, and that no one had ever experienced any performance problems on it ever, the powers-that-be refused to even consider the possibility that the non-performance was a result of their poorly-designed system."

"Replacing all of the production servers to get a new CPU was extremely expensive – especially when it would come out of Network Operation's much-needed budget – and obviously wouldn't do anything except delay resolving the actual problem. After a few clandestine meetings with network operations, I thought up a novel way to deliver a CPU upgrade..."

#include <linux/module.h>
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/smp.h>


static char *cpuname = "HyperTurbo 256-bit, AwesomeCache enabled";

int init_module() {
    loff_t i;

    for (i=0; i < nr_cpu_ids; i++) {
        strcpy((&cpu_data(i))->x86_model_id, cpuname);
    }

    return 0;
}

"Sadly, after the Chief Developer ran his own series of tests, he found that the performance was tremendously improved and that no other changes were needed. A year or so (and many customer complaints) later, they finally decided to 'upgrade' the website."

From wikipedia:  “The history of water fluoridation can be divided into three periods … The third period, from 1945 on, focused on water fluoridation, which added fluoride to community water supplies.”

Do you recognize that year, 1945?  Yes, that’s the year they ended world war two, by dropping two nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear weapons arms-race began.  That’s also the year that they started adding sodium fluoride to drinking water in the USA, and later around the world.  There is a connection.

Fluoride is used in the process of uranium refinement, and extracted again by depleted uranium deconversion.  After using the fluoride to refine uranium, they sell it on the market.  Much of it ends up in our drinking water and toothpaste, some after going through other industrial processes.  Did they get all the U238 out of that fluoride?  No, they did not.

Another major source of fluoride for our tap water is a by-product of the phosphate fertilizer industry.  Guess what, phosphate rock contains considerable levels of uranium.  The fluoride waste product from this industry, which we put in our drinking water, also contains uranium and other radioactive elements.

Yes folks, your fluoridated tap water contains uranium 238, which was added along with the fluoride, since they did not bother to get it all out.  It is not profitable to extract this uranium, so they leave it there in the fluoride, and we drink it.  This is a Bad Thing.

Do you know any children with bone-cancer?  Well, now you know a likely reason why they got bone cancer – if it wasn’t from all that above-ground nuclear testing.

The fluoride in tap water also causes cheap aluminium cookware to dissolve 800 times more than with pure water.  Aluminium damages the brain, and is one cause of Alzheimer’s disease.  (Fluoride also affects the brain in its own right.)

Do you know anyone with Alzheimer’s disease?  Well, now you know how they likely got Alzheimer’s disease – if it wasn’t from their mercury-lead amalgam fillings.

Oh, did your dentist tell you that it’s safe to put mercury and lead in your mouth for years on end?  Well I don’t really agree about that.  Have you heard the phrase “mad as a hatter”?  What did your high school chemistry teacher say about mercury?  Is it safe to ingest it?

Did your dentist tell you it’s great to have fluoride in our drinking water?  Did he mention that it’s comes with free uranium?  How about the links to bone cancer and Alzheimer’s disease?  Or perhaps, we should not screw around with what’s natural; it might be better to drink normal water without those additives.

Dammit, hurry up and save the planet everyone.  Voting green would be a good start.

Second post about ganeti. This time I'll talk about adding a swap partition to an image added with ganeti-deboostrap-instance. Browsing the web, it seems that an old version of the ganeti debostrap script allowed for the creation of a swap partition from the command line. The actual version in sid does not, so, if you want to add a swap partition, you need to write a small hook in /etc/ganeti/instance-debootstrap/hooks/.

Part of the code below is taken from the instance-debootstrap script.

This script does two things: first it checks if the user passed a second disk argument to the gnt-instance add call. I decided arbitrarily that the second disk is going to be used a swap disk. Second it figures out the vol-id of this disk, create the swap partition and write an entry in the fstab. All in all it's a straightforward procedure, but I love when I can cut and paste easy scripts :)

The call to create the instance is as follows, using a disk of 5G for the system and a disk of 1G for the swap.

While investigating the case of some packages responsible for uninstallability on the s390x architecture, I stumbled upon one FTBFS on a single architecture, reported as #673590 (<insert some nice words about software shipping with a decent testsuite>).

Given the int versus size_t question was asked, I grabbed this old (it’s UNIX!) reference: 64-bit and Data Size Neutrality.

Among other things, it describes the “everything is 32-bit” to “64-bit is becoming the new standard” slow conversion process, where keeping compatibility with existing applications was a high priority. It has a nice description of so-called C data models, making it possible to refer to them quickly: LP32 and ILP32 in the 32-bit world; ILP64, LLP64, and LP64 in the 64-bit world. I won’t go into detail here, this page has a nice table and lots of explanations about pros and cons for those.

(On a personal note, I discovered those on xorg-devel@ when I saw patches floating around, which were about optimizing data sizes for this or that data model, by picking the right types.)

While standards may be boring, this page makes it really easy to understand which data types to use, to ensure the best 32/64-bit compatibility possible. It’s even full of dos and don’ts. See the second half (Porting Issues) for details.

Another one of the tweaks I had to make to accomodate Rails streaming responses was ensuring that the Rack::Deflater middleware didn’t run on my app’s streaming actions.

The Deflater middleware gzips your responses before delivering them to the client. This is useful to run on the Heroku Cedar stack because this facility is otherwise not provided. There’s a big gotcha, though: the middleware breaks Rails HTTP streaming responses. There’s a good explanation of this on StackOverflow, as well as a monkey patch to ActionController::Streaming that corrects the behaviour.

I took an alternative, simpler approach. I extended the middleware with support for excluding a URL pattern. This way, I can just disable it on the few actions where I know I am streaming responses. Here’s how it looks:

module Rack
  class DeflaterWithExclusions < Deflater
    def initialize(app, options = {})
      @app = app

      @exclude = options[:exclude]
    end

    def call(env)
      if @exclude && @exclude.call(env)
        @app.call(env)
      else
        super(env)
      end
    end
  end
end

And here’s how the extended middleware is included, in config.ru:

use Rack::DeflaterWithExclusions, :exclude => proc { |env|
  env['PATH_INFO'] == '/order/purchase'
}

Using an executable proc for the :exclude argument is useful because it then allows for far more sophisticated URL matching than simple string equality (in production, I actually check against a couple of regular expressions).

Wrapping the middleware in this way has worked well. We get to keep it for the bulk of the app, where it’s useful, without it interfering with the parts that are more touchy. It would be nice to see this kind of :exclude option handling become more common among Rack middlewares.

Been away; back home now, dealing with a week's backlog of non-writing work (and collating the annual tax paperwork; the UK's tax year runs April 6th to April 5th, which fell neatly during my trip).

As you probably guessed, I have some things to say about the news that the US Department of Justice is bringing a suit against Apple and three major publishers (three others settled out of court) over alleged price-fixing. While I'm not a publishing executive or a DoJ lawyer, I probably know a little more about this than the average person on the Number 19 bus.

However, before I foam at the mouth in public I thought it would be interesting to ask what you think is really going on here ...

Slovenian, Punjabi fully completed.

Romanian completed for first two sublevels, hence rescued.

Got signs of life from Galician, Croatian, Georgian, Malayalam, Nepali translators. But nothing happened yet

Got offers to help for Welsh, Lithuanian. But nothing happened yet.

Progress for Amharic in level 1

At this very moment, it means that I would deactivate 14 languages:

• Amharic (2u, 14f17u)
• Welsh (39f82u, 32f47u)
• Galician (7f10u, 6f9u)
• Croatian (16f19u, 6f9u)
• Georgian (17f47u, 10f21u)
• Kurdish (12f25u, 6f22u)
• Lithuanian (15f22u, 12f20u)
• Latvian (22f9u, 7f9u)
• Malayalam (5u in sublevel 2 only!)
• Nepali (16f54u, 10f21u)
• Norwegian Nynorsk (13f34u, 13f23u)
• Albanian (19f50u, 13f23u)
• Tamil (2f1u, 1f)
• Tagalog (18f54u, 24f39u)

Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer

Shades of coffee and caramel run under my fingertips like love letters written in goose-bump braille. There’s a heat from the honeyed angles and well-oiled hip joints that quietly beg me for a brush of fingertip. The skin is warm and dry to the touch. You’d think from the smoothness of her back that she’d been polished every day and you’d be right.

She’s easy to turn on. There’s a switch behind her left ear. The new prototype Gabrielle.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my masterpiece. It’s late on a Friday night. I’m one of the only people who manufacture custom units. This warehouse has vats of perfection in the basement. God is in the details, they have said, and details are all that concern me. I hardly sleep.

Robotic lovers are available all over the world but I am the most popular designer of companions.

I have designed the women and men, much to the delight of my customers. I am an artist. I know that it is the flaws that make perfection attractive. A perfect lover must be unique. I make women whose eyes are just a little too far apart. There is a gap in between the front teeth of some of the men. There are two extra pounds of flesh on some models and others who were just that few ounces too thin.

One flaw was all it took. The clients went crazy. I was paid more on top of my already exorbitant prices.

People fell in love with my creations.

On the way up here, I wandered between the vats and looked at the shadows in the murky protein-rich water of each plexiglass container. Renee. Violet. Jessica. David. Thomas. Christopher. Each one was different in the details but similar in perfection.

I looked forward to these nights and I dreaded them. I always dove in with a feverish need to outdo myself and I always left with a horrible crushing feeling of failure in my gut.

I was the best at what I did. A little godling churning out love for the rich.

As it has been quite some time since Openmoko, Inc. (the company) has released any hardware, I have obtained the permission to "donate" the Openmoko-assigned USB Product ID and IEEE OUI (MAC Address) allocations to the community.

As the actual allocations cannot be transferred unless the registrant (Openmoko. Inc.) is sold, the official registration will remain with Openmoko Inc. while the various Free / Open Source Software and hardware communities can make use of the range.

Registering a USB Vendor ID is expensive (USD 2000), and even if it wasn't for the money, many companies (let even aside community projects) will never require the 65535 product IDs allocated within that one USB Vendor ID.

As for Ethernet/Wifi/Bluetooth MAC addresses, they are allocated from the IEE OUI number ranges, which are also quite expensive (USD 1600) - but at least you get 16.7 million (24bit) and not just 16bit like USB ;)

So if you are running a small homebrew or community built project that implements a USB device or Ethernet ports, and either the software or the hardware of it is available under a free software / open source license, you can follow the instructions given at the pages in the Openmoko wiki that I linked above and request an allocation.

I'd like to thank Openmoko Inc. and especially Sean Moss-Pultz for making this donation.

As Kevin Redon writes in his blog, he has created some tools and a project for collaboratively gathering a database on the TERMINAL PROFILE capabilities of mobile phones.

The terminal profile describes which particular features regarding proactive sim or sim application toolkit a given phone supports.

This is not only important for SIM application / SIM toolkit developers, but it is also an important factor when trying to analyze the potential threat that can originate from a malicious SIM card attack.

I personally see no reason why my phone should ever report its GPS position to the SIM card, or why the SIM card should be able to re-write the nubers I'm dialling. Yes, there are cases where such features are useful, but then they should be explicitly enabled by the user, and the default should be that they are all switched off.

Who knows, after all, with some attention to this problem we might still see a SIM firewall / proxy, that you can put between the SIM and the phone to prevent any of those features from being (mis)used.

So all you need to do to contribute to the database is some way how you can read out the terminal profile from your mobile phone(s), and use Kevin's tool to upload it to the public website. And hwo do you read out the terminal profile? For example by using Osmocom SIMtrace to sniff the communication between SIM card and phone.

• #625230 – libfile-path-perl: "libfile-path-perl: uninstallable, obsoleted by perl"
  removal bug filed (#672905; pkg-perl)
• #642745 – src:libnetserver-generic-perl: "libnetserver-generic-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  removal bug filed (#672903; pkg-perl)
• #658577 – libevocosm-dev: "-dev library is broken"
  add patch from Vincent Legout, upload to DELAYED/2
• #661500 – src:libevocosm: "FTBFS: dpkg-source: error: aborting due to unexpected upstream changes"
  fix config.{guess,sub} handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #667244 – libevocosm: "libevocosm: ftbfs with GCC-4.7"
  add patch from Matthias Klose, upload to DELAYED/2
• #672000 – src:structure-synth: "structure-synth: FTBFS: StructureSynth/JavaScriptSupport/../../SyntopiaCore/GLEngine/Sphere.h:25:4: error: 'GLUquadric' does not name a type"
  sponsor NMU from Sebastian Ramacher, upload to DELAYED/2
• #672005 – src:l2tp-ipsec-vpn: "l2tp-ipsec-vpn: FTBFS: src/main.cpp:210:15: error: '::getuid' has not been declared"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/3
• #672010 – src:cryptkeeper: "cryptkeeper: FTBFS: lsof.cpp:40:2: error: 'pipe' was not declared in this scope"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/3
• #672014 – src:megaglest: "megaglest: FTBFS: util.cpp:360:30: error: 'close' was not declared in this scope"
  sponsor NMU from Sebastian Ramacher, upload to DELAYED/2
• #672071 – src:pxe-kexec: "pxe-kexec: FTBFS: networkhelper.cc:211:21: error: 'close' was not declared in this scope"
  add patch from Paul Tagliamonte, upload to DELAYED/3, then closed by maintainer upload

Zuleikha wants to become a doctor when she grows up, so that she can give us cost-free treatment (or so she says). Last time, she took one of Mitchie’s pyjama tops (which easily still cover her knees as well, tho Mitchie is also not the tallest), and together with her stethoscope she really looks quite professional already Promised to take a photograph of that (my pleasure of course), so here she is, Mrs. Prof. Dr. Dr. Hanna Zuleikha Lonien:

Taken with the Olympus E-520 and the 40-150mm kit lens. Lit by one Simock E300 studio flash pointed to the ceiling right of the camera. Flash at slightly above 1/4 power, camera at f=4.5 and 1/160th of a second at ISO100.

Thanks for viewing.

A couple of weeks ago was the first anniversary of orphaning Qt3 in Debian, see bug 625502.

In this year, Qt3 has got a few QA uploads with the most relevant change being support to multiarch. And, more importantly, nobody seemed to care enough to step into maintaining it.

In the last days, I have taken a look into how much needed to be done to remove Qt3 and there were slightly more than 50 packages depending directly or indirectly from Qt3. A removal from Wheezy seemed doable given that removing packages is never a problem during the Debian freeze ;-)
All the packages affected have a bug opened since more than one year and half ago and I have pinged all the bugs with some maintainers responding quick (thanks!). I also filed some removals for packages that were clearly unmaintained and didn’t seem worth keeping, with ftp-masters responding quick too (Thanks!). And finally, a couple of QA upload for orphaned software that were still useful without Qt3.

There is a wiki page tracking the status of the removal if you are curious:
http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval

If in the future, you are reading this and you need Qt3 in Wheezy, you can fetch it from Debian snapshots.

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowFullScreen" frameborder="0" height="295" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/42418796" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitAllowFullScreen" width="525"></iframe>

The organizers of the recent TEDxMogadishu send this short and thoughtful interview video, made just before the event. Meet four people who are committed to remaking their city after 20 years of chaos.

This weekend is commencement at my college, Occidental, and I thought it the perfect day to post new data on the job experiences of recent graduates.  The data, a survey of 444 people in who graduated between 2007 and 2011, comes from a report out of Rutgers.

Just over half of the sample had a full-time job; 12% were un- or underemployed and looking for full-time work.

The recession appears to have depressed earnings by about $3,000. Pre-recession grads were making, on average, $30,000, while post-recession grads took in $27,000:

A third of students (35%) reported that their first job out of college was “not at all related” or “not very closely related” to their major. Almost half saw their first job as temporary and just “to get you by” (though this would drop to 36% when asked about their current job). Only half thought that their first job required a college degree.

A significant proportion of students felt that they’d had to sacrifice something important to secure their job: 27% reported that they were working below their level of education, 24% took a job that paid less than they expected to earn, and 23% were working outside of their interests and training:

Many graduates would have done things differently. Notably a third said they would have re-thought their choice of major:

And most of them would have been more likely to have chosen a professional major (e.g., education or nursing) or one in a “STEM” field (e.g., science, technology, engineering, or math).

Recession-era grads are much more likely to be getting help from their parents, compared to pre-recession grads:

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

The topics of three different TEDTalks are converging this weekend in New York City …

Street artist JR, the winner of the 2011 TED Prize, is pasting a portrait of a young member of the Lakota tribe on a wall of Manhattan’s High Line Park — part of a massive tribute to the Native American nation that’s being pasted in North Dakota and around New York City. Watch the progress on our Pinterest. JR mentions this project in his newest TEDTalk, “One year of turning the world inside out”:

This project celebrates the lives of North Dakota Native American people. To learn more about these lives, watch this astonishing TEDx talk from National Geographic photographer Aaron Huey, whose work with nations in the Black Hills of North Dakota has led him to make this conclusion: Honor the treaties. Give back the Black Hills.

If you’re moved by this talk, learn more. Huey has teamed up with the artists Shepard Fairey and Ernesto Yerena for a series of Honor the Treaties posters you can download and share.

And finally, the Inside Out Project pasting is happening in the vast new public space called the High Line Park — whose creation is detailed in Robert Hammond’s TEDTalk “Building a park in the sky.” The High Line was born on an elevated railway platform once destined to be torn down — and it’s now inspiring more cities to take a fresh look at their unlikely green spaces.

For your Sunday afternoon reading, some recent thought-provoking articles.

Zócalo Public Square: Sprawling Is For Poor People. Affluent Americans are moving to city centers, with the rest ending up in the suburbs.

Washington's Blog: Lack of Trust – Caused by Institutional Corruption – Is Killing the Economy If the occupiers don't trust the gold bugs, and nobody trusts the banks or the government, can we get any work done?

Kari Hamerschlag: Subsidy Buffet for Agribiz, Table Scraps for Good Food. Speaking of not trusting the government...

Philosopher's Beard: Recovering Adam Smith's ethical economics. "Smith’s commitment to a realistic liberalism led him to endorse commercial society over any previous socio-economic system as a social order in which the most people possible could live decent lives. But he was not the blind zealot for the market he is now portrayed as."

Timothy B. Lee: There’s No Such Thing As Intervention-Free Infrastructure Policy. Is it more intrusive for the government to require net neutrality on an existing fiber optic cable, or to use eminent domain to let a competitor dig up your lawn?

Tim Devaney and Tom Stein: "Will Crowdfunding Crowd Out Venture Capital?" If crowdfunding catches on, who needs VC? After all, if every American invested 1% of liquid net worth in crowdfunding, that would be $300 billion, ten times the size of the venture sector.

We were out for a short Sunday walk, and like intended, I carried the E-520 with the longer 40-150mm kit lens, which I haven’t used since quite some time.

First I saw this tree, and I liked how the light surrounded its needles. I played around with that photo quite a lot, which I also normally don’t do – so this is changed in contrast, saturation, and sharpness, then de-saturated and toned with the LAB ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves, and I also added some vignetting. This is the end result of that unusual heavy processing:

A few minutes later, we met a neighbour who last time introduced herself to Zuleikha as ‘Biggy’ (if I remember that correctly). She asked for a picture together with Zuleikha, but those taken in the harsh sunlight weren’t usable at all. I offered her to take proper photos whenever she wants, but from today’s snapshots I liked this one best:

Short before returning to our home, I tried to ‘catch’ a bird – but that one seemed to be hiding as good and fast as possible. Here it’s on the run behind some garbage boxes:

And back at our home again, I took a photo of a styrofoam cat, which – at the time of exposure and development of this picture – still had no name yet:

All taken with the E-520 and that 40-150mm kit zoom, and with natural light.

Thanks for viewing.

Update: after much consideration, and writing down lots of possible names, Zuleikha named her cat ‘Fairy Kitty Lonien’.

Farhad Manjoo nails it.

(Working on a script for mindless link propagation, and posting results. Some of these have been out for a while, but all worth a look.)

Technology that Benjamin Mako Hill uses, on usesthis.com

Rob Pike's The byte order fallacy: "the computer's byte order shouldn't matter to you one bit."

Worried about access to generative technology? Charles Miller is not: Johnny and Jenny Can Code

Software Cooperative News: DLT is better than CAPTCHA. Better ways to think about comment spam protection.

Akkana Peck covers MathJAX (JavaScript meets LaTex): Displaying equations on the web

Mosh, the "mobile shell" is the new shiny. Matt Simmons: Mosh Pit, or Why Terminal Emulators Suck suihkulokki: Mosh - better remote shell

Lots of good Git workflow and infrastructure ideas out there. gun.io has an intro to GitHub. Dan Croak covers working with remote branches for code reviews: Remote Branch Kenneth Reitz explains how to organize the repository for a Python project: Repository Structure and Python Adrian Holovaty has a good migration story: Moving Django to GitHub: the postmortem. Mark Dominus uses "rebase --interactive" extensively: My Git Habits

With the sound of the freeze approaching, we have been receiving a few more transition requests lately. Thankfully, a lot of them can apparently be processed at the same time, that's why we have currently the following, crazy tracker summary:

Of course there are some transitions that started because maintainers “forgot” how transitions are supposed to work, but we’re trying to get things done anyway.

So that grad student has just submitted his thesis and you are invited to review it. With these quick tips, you can test the limits of the student’s willpower, and make his degree a little more deserved by putting him up for some constructive mind games.

After yesterday’s slight frustration with using only the 20mm Panasonic Lumix G 1:1,7 ASPH lens on the E-PL1 “Pen” camera, I’ve changed back to its kit lens. Don’t get me wrong: nothing beats a good prime, and that 20mm is a very good one, but like I wrote yesterday I’m not only a total newbie to “serious” street photography, but was also restricted in moving around freely. Tho I’m definitely not the type who climbs poles and masts just to get the shot, I had more important things to do, like staying close to a 7-year-old in a crowd of 25,000 people.

When I looked at the other photographers, most of them had DSLRs with kit or “super zoom” lenses, and some carried two bodies with both a normal and a telephoto zoom lenses. And that is exactly what I also have already: if I mount the normal kit zoom to the E-PL1, and the tele kit zoom to my E-520, I have a range which equals 28 to 300mm on a “full frame” camera. Plus, these Olympus kit zooms are superb for their price ranges, so much so that Olympus is rather famous for their two “middle tier” (Olympus calls it “HG” for “high grade”) zooms with 12-60mm, and 50-200mm. I don’t have any of those, since each of them is around or above 1,000€, but those standard grade kit zooms also count to the best available ones from any maker.

So a few minutes ago while having a smoke on our veranda, I took the Pen camera with its 14-42mm lens, and tried it at both its short and long ends:

In that first one, I applied -0.3EV exposure compensation because of the really high contrasty scene with lots of highlights from the direct sunlight. The camera was on the table tripod and on the ground, with the VF-2 electronic viewfinder tilted upwards 90 degrees (that’s just wonderful to use). Focus was on that small red toy plane in the foreground. Aperture was 5.6.

I took the second image at the long end of the lenses’ range while sitting in a chair, with +0.7EV exposure compensation to “expose to the right” (having a live histogram in the viewfinder is also wonderful and something you cannot do with conventional DSLRs with their optical viewfinders). This was also taken with an aperture of f=1:5.6, and tho I know the lens is sharper at f=1:8.0, it’s still pretty sharp if you ask me:

The camera chose ISO320 by the way, but since I took care of a correct exposure, noise is no issue at all – the image is as clean as one could wish.

Like I said (or wrote) already, I’ll use the 40-150mm zoom on my E-520 DSLR for a while, and that one is even better and sharper than both normal kit zooms. That way, I have a real huge range covered, and if I need a fast lens or want to have a real shallow depth of field, I can use my 1:2.0 macro lens, or even the 1:1.4 normal prime (either on the OM-2N “full frame” film camera, or with an adapter on the E-520).

Most important thing, seen in a few years from now, is that you used a capable camera at all – and also that the photographer was able to “get the shot” and to catch those moments. Family and all that – what else counts?

Thanks for viewing and reading.

• Just seen the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image for first time, wow! #
• Dear #Lazyweb how do I grant select access to a user to all databases beginning with foo (for example) ? #
• Because "grant select on foo%.* to $USER;" gets rejected.. #mysql #
• Use backticks around DB name appears to be the solution to my #mysql query about grants – http://t.co/yU6bcD6O #
• Sunlit Concrete Bouquet, St Kilda Botanical Gardens http://t.co/JW0bAde6 #
• Just curious, have any allegations against Slipper or Thompson been admitted or proven in court? #auspol #NotKeepingUp #
• If you use http://t.co/nhYJ9Vs0 and use it with #hpc queuing systems be aware bash doesn't do aliases in scripts! #
• Hmm, I'm being followed on Twitter by my local newspaper, should I worry ? #
• Anyone have any recommendations of places in Melbourne to source Cisco SFP+ modules for 10gigE links? #
• Off to the Mount Burnett Observatory tonight for a talk on adaptive optics. #
• Is the Celestron 4SE a good starter telescope? Aus. Geographic has it on special for $999.. /cc @cefiar #astronomy #space #
• The big red #EMO button, for depressed equipment http://t.co/ePacipsj #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-20

• Just seen the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image for first time, wow! #
• Dear #Lazyweb how do I grant select access to a user to all databases beginning with foo (for example) ? #
• Because "grant select on foo%.* to $USER;" gets rejected.. #mysql #
• Use backticks around DB name appears to be the solution to my #mysql query about grants – http://t.co/yU6bcD6O #
• Sunlit Concrete Bouquet, St Kilda Botanical Gardens http://t.co/JW0bAde6 #
• Just curious, have any allegations against Slipper or Thompson been admitted or proven in court? #auspol #NotKeepingUp #
• If you use http://t.co/nhYJ9Vs0 and use it with #hpc queuing systems be aware bash doesn't do aliases in scripts! #
• Hmm, I'm being followed on Twitter by my local newspaper, should I worry ? #
• Anyone have any recommendations of places in Melbourne to source Cisco SFP+ modules for 10gigE links? #
• Off to the Mount Burnett Observatory tonight for a talk on adaptive optics. #
• Is the Celestron 4SE a good starter telescope? Aus. Geographic has it on special for $999.. /cc @cefiar #astronomy #space #
• The big red #EMO button, for depressed equipment http://t.co/ePacipsj #

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This item originally posted here:

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2012-05-20

This is not the blog entry you are expecting.

Science Fiction literature is unusual in that much of the work within the field exists in constant dialog with other works. Author A writes something; Author B reads it and writes something else by way of an oblique rejoinder. (For example: you won't get all the jokes and references in "Saturn's Children" unless you've read Heinlein's "Friday", to which it is in part a response. Again: Jo Walton's Among Others—on the Hugo shortlist this year, and I'm voting for it—contains numerous references and discussions of the sort of SF/F that a bright, bookish child growing up in the UK in the 1970s would be familiar with: and indeed, it spoke to me, because I was reading many of those works at the same age and time ...)

Authors responding to one another isn't unusual. But in SF/F it's particularly visible. It got started in the pages of the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and continues today, both in short fiction (we're unusual insofar as we still have a vibrant short fiction ecosystem) and at novel length.

So you probably began reading this blog essay expecting a cunning reference to Elizabeth Bear's essay in Clarkesworld, Dear speculative fiction, I'm glad we had this talk ... or to Abi Sutherland's response in "Making Light", on talking it over. Both well worth reading, I should add: Bear's conceit is that SF is reified into personhood and is of course having one of those annoying mid-life crises, wanting to be taken seriously and consequently dressing in black and reading too much bad goth poetry while hanging out outside the doors of literary award bashes thrown by that cool kid, Mainstream.

Well, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about something much more concrete: the likelihood that within another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die.

What, you ask, is the problem?

Well, the process has already begun (indeed, is well under way) in some other media: in film, for example, around 30% of the big budget movies to come out of Hollywood each year are recognizably science fiction. I mean, aliens: that's a pretty obvious signifier, isn't it? And Hollywood feels no need to market these movies as SF; they just are, big budget glossy special-effects beanfests featuring aliens. They're grown-up, quite capable of finding their own audiences. But something is missing upstairs. They're the sixty-foot-tall armoured cyborg idiot children of our genre. All fire and tantrums and no cerebral context whatsoever. There's no internal genre dialog going on, and precious little introspection. (Yes, you can name exceptions like "GATACA"; the fact that you have to note the exceptions is itself a warning sign.)

I am not sure it is possible to write introspective, complex SF as a screen medium. The natural length of a feature movie is around 120 minutes; the traditional movie script runs at one page per minute, with 250 words per page—that buys you, in literary terms, a novella. Add in the expectations of studio executives and the dumbing-down effects of editing by committee you end up with huge pressure to make the script commercial rather than complex. Some director/scriptwriters have the clout to get what they want: but then you end up, as often as now, with George Lucas. Nor is there much scope for a dialog in which directors build on someone else's ideas. So a large chunk of cinematic SF is stuck, spinning its wheels, mistaking ever better special effects and ever bigger first weekend box-office draws for progress.

Written SF harbours a much more complex ecosystem in part because the works are potentially bigger (big enough to encompass big ideas) and in part because it's still, to some extent, ghettoised.

Ghettoised?

Well, let's look for a moment at the semiotics of book cover design, and what it says about the contents, and the effect it has on what we choose to read.

A book cover is a promotional vehicle intended to achieve two goals:

a) To make a reader who is unfamiliar with the author and/or the book pick the book up in a bookstore (because retail psychology teaches us that customers who handle the produce in a shop are more likely to buy it),

b) To tell the book store staff where in their curated produce display they shold place the item, for best sales impact.

Point (a) eludes many readers (and authors). The cover isn't meant to accurately depict the content of the novel; it's meant to make someone who doesn't know the author of their work handle the product. The fans already know what they want; you could market the book in a brown paper bag and they'd buy it. So the goal is to reach out to the vast majority of potential customers who don't know they're customers yet.

Point (b) is less obvious, and it is a function of the economics of retail. Shops cost money to run. In particular, floor space costs. You have to rent it. And books, physical books, are bulky. I reckon you can cram about 50 paperbacks onto a one meter wide shelf. And you can have as many as ten shelves stacked above one another. You need another eight centimetres in front of the shelves for the poor bewildered customer to stand in, so that's a square metre of retail floorspace that you can't use for any other purpose, eaten by a scant 500 paperbacks, some of which will be duplicates (because the top-selling titles need to be available to multiple customers coming in on the same day). A typical bookstore can only carry single or low-double digit thousands of titles; this is why the long tail effect works so well for Amazon. Regular bookstores have to rely on churn, to attempt to provide a customer who returns every month to buy a couple of books with a fresh selection, to provide the illusion of something wider than the choice dictated by the rent they pay on floor space.

But suppose you're a reader looking for a new novel by your favourite author in a shop with thousands or tens of thousands of titles! You need some sort of indexing system. Consequently, books are filed by category—which in fiction means by genre—and then, hopefully, alphabetically within their category.

The book store clerk, then, has to be able to rapidly identify the category to which a book (coming in one of several cartons, along with hundreds of other books) belongs. And that's where the rocket ship logo on the spine, or the headless woman with a stake (back turned to reveal the tramp stamp) comes in. It tells the store clerk that this is a work of SF, or a work of paranormal romance. Which in turn tells them where to shelve the book.

And this is where our genre ghetto comes from.

Why is it going away?

The answer is both simple and non-obvious: ebooks.

Back in 2007, ebooks accounted for less than 1% of sales of fiction. By the end of 2012 they'll be up to 40%, and they're on course to hit 60% in the next few years—probably by 2015.

Now, the people who write ebooks are the same people who write p-books. The ebook is just an alternative distribution channel, like the mass market paperback or the hardcover or the cuneiform clay tablet. And for the most part, the people who read ebooks with a given type of genre content are the same as those who read p-books in that genre. But there is a key difference: the distribution channel has changed.

You do not buy ebooks in a physical bookstore. You buy them online. It doesn't matter whether you buy them directly from a publisher like O'Reilly & Associates or Baen or a huge retailer like Amazon; it is still an online purchase.

And the curation of soft goods delivered online is fundamentally different from the curation of physical lumps of paper on shelves in rented retail premises. By "curation" I'm talking about how the digital goods—the ebooks—are organized and made accessible to the customers. No longer do we have harried clerks unpacking cartons of stuff and shoveling them onto shelves, looking for visual cues to remind them which particular category the book goes under. Instead, we have tags—metadata identifying the work as being by a given author, part of a series, of interest to readers who want SF, police procedural, near-future, virtual reality, dragons, MMOs. (That's a plausible tag set for "Halting State".) We still have a pictorial cover, but it has to be legible when shrunk to roughly 160 pixels: and this includes the author's name and the title. (Look at your recent book acquisitions. Have you noticed anything about the title length, or the typeface, or the font size on the cover? Have they changed in the past year, relative to five years ago?)

Ebooks are going to be simultaneously easier to find and buy—and much harder.

We are in the position, as readers, of being stranded in an infinitely large bookstore. There are millions of items on the shelves. Many of them are junk, the incoherent ramblings of schizophrenics with hypergraphia, who hitherto merely clogged up publishers' slushpiles but which are now flowed through into virtual print because of the ease of access to the virtual storefront. Many more are generated by spambots: this, for example, or this (don't buy them! They're overpriced rip-offs of my wikipedia entry, assembled and published by web scraping robots). There are translations of books you have already read in foreign languages, often with confusingly changed titles ("Halting State" in Germany is "Du Bist Todt"—a great title, but likely to excite and then disappoint English-reading readers searching for my name on Amazon.com).

Getting readers to tag their recent purchases and rate them is a great way of collecting data, and it permits new types of marketing: Amazon's recommendation system is eerily prescient, except when it isn't. (Ask anyone who has bought a book as a present for a friend what it did to their reader recommendations!)

The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles.

Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that's barely a start.

Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work. You are an editor, presented with "Rule 34": do you choose to market it as SF, as crime/police procedural, or as mainstream literary fiction? Wouldn't it be better to market it as all three, with different cover designs and cover blurbs and marketing pitches and reader recommendations and reviews for each bookstore category? We've seen this in microcosm with Harry Potter: the use of adult-friendly covers allowed parents to buy the books and read them during their commute to work, for example.

On paper, that's very expensive/hard to organize: in electronic media it is simply a matter of commissioning as many cover designs as your book design budget will stretch to, and then convincing the big retailers to associate a different cover image with the results of each search by genre category.

We already see ebooks being tagged as multiple categories. It's only a matter of time before publishers and authors develop more sophisticated electronic marketing strategies that either micro-target a specific audience, or that target multiple readerships in parallel.

(Length is also a ball and chain. I've previously blogged about how the length of a story may be dictated by physical printing constraints—the cost of binding a big fat book turns big fat books into the domain of best-sellers (at least in the USA), while the exigencies of selling mass market paperbacks to fill supermarket wire racks during the 1970s and 1980s forced publishes to increase their page counts (to justify price increases during a period of inflation). In electronic form there's nothing stopping us from selling novelettes and million-word blockbusters on an equal logistical footing.)

But anyway, to summarize: my point is that our genre sits uneasily within boundaries delineated by the machinery of sales. And that creaking steam-age machinery is currently in the process of being swapped out for some kind of irridescent, gleaming post-modern intrusion from the planet internet. New marketing strategies become possible, indeed, become essential. And the utility of the old signifiers—the rocket ship logo on the spine of the paperback—diminish in the face of the new (tagging, reader recommendations, "if you liked X you'll love Y" cross-product correlations by sales engines, custom genre-specific cover illustrations, and so on).

This is going to drastically affect the quality and content of the internal dialog within our genre—the subject matter of the imaginary conversations by Elizabeth Bear and Abi Sutherland to which I linked up top.

I don't know what it means, yet. Jo Walton opined that the conversation will go on, and I'm sure it will ... among those of us who are already aware of it.

But there was so much less SF in the 1970s that it was quite possible for those of us who grew up reading the field back then to acquire a comprehensive coverage of it. Today, there's far more stuff out there: but without the clear signifiers, the tags saying "queue here to join the ongoing conversation", it may become increasingly hard for new readers to recognize what's going on and join in.

What is to be done?

I just started reading Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy of Ogilvy advertising fame. I’m about half way thru it and I think that if you’re in the advertising, media, or the digital/social space, you should definitely read this brilliant book.

He lists four problems that advertising faces, and I highlight excerpts of problem one (highlighting is my own):

The first problem is that manufacturers of package-goods products, which have always been the mainstay of advertising, are now spending twice as much on price-off deals as on advertising. They are buying volume by price discounting, instead of using advertising to build strong brands. Any damn fool can put on a price reduction, but it takes brains and perseverance to create a brand.

Listen to a speech I made in Chicago in 1955:

“The time has come to sound an alarm, to warn manufacturers what is going to happen to their brands if they spend so much on deals that there is no money left for advertising to build their brand. Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of life.”

Andrew Ehrenberg of the London Business School has one of the best brains in marketing today. He reports that a cut-price offer can induce people to try a brand, but they return to their habitual brands as if nothing had happened.

Why are so many brand managers addicted to price-cutting deals? Because the people who employ them are only interested in next quarter’s profit. Why? Because they are more concerned with their stock options that the future of their company.

Price-off deals are a drug. Ask a drug-addicted brand manager what happened to his share of the market after the delirium of the deal subsided. He will change the subject. Ask him if the deal increased his profit. Again he will change the subject.

This was David Ogilvy talking about modern group buying sites in 1963.

Yesterday I asked on Twitter: Do you run a restaurant? Have you succeeded in running a group buying deal? Have you seen return customers? Comments like its a scam, anyone that wants a cut price deal is unlikely to return for full price, and even feedback from buyers whom don’t return due to disappointing experiences or how the food just isn’t worth the full price. I had some offline conversations about this and the ones that did return were basically already loyal customers saving money through a deal.

My own thoughts about group buying have been posted before: a Groupon before you close looking at the deal dynamics behind a deal, and some initial thoughts when they first started becoming mainstream.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on group buying sites
2. A Groupon before you close?
3. The MySQL Mugshot Group

From: Dave Hall
To: boxes <boxes-module@drupal.org>
Subject: Our Relationship

Dear boxes,

I'm sorry but things just aren't working out between us. It's not you, it's me. I need some time to myself. I need to think things through. I'm not sure what I want. We should spend some time apart. We should try new things. I will miss you, but this is for the best. Let's meet for coffee in a couple of weeks.

Love

Dave
xox

Breaking up is never easy, but recently I broke up with the boxes module. I'd been with boxes for a long time, we'd done a lot of good things together. Over time I'd become oblivious to some of boxes' flaws, such as giving black eyes to sys admins who run features reverts on sites where users can edit boxes. Life was pretty good, but my life still felt somewhat empty and incomplete.

One day I was standing in a crowded room with lots of modules on drupal.org and across the room I spotted BEAN. I feel in love instantly. BEAN was decked out in all the latest Drupal 7 gear - fields, Entity API and CTools. The way BEAN moved make me weak at the knees. After another beer I got my courage up, crossed the room and asked if BEAN would like to come back to my site. I was shocked, BEAN wanted to hang out with me and it wasn't just a one night fling. I've been going steady with BEAN for a couple of months now.

Just before BEAN moved in permanently to my dev environment I had to find a way of removing all the remnants of boxes from my life (aka existing sites). It took me less than an hour. I created a new BEAN type and called it "box", I then wrote a little "drush scr" script which converted all of my boxes to BEANs and even updated my contexts to use the newly created BEANs. I hope neither bean or boxes finds my work on github. I chose github hoping neither of them would find my work and also because I don't want to maintain this as a module on d.o.

On a serious note - BEAN is awesome! If you haven't tried it, you really should. BEAN treats blocks as content, not config which is really useful for most sites. For new sites BEAN is a drop in replacement for core blocks or boxes making it super easy to get started. To learn more check out the docs.

If you're interested in seeing the full power of the BEAN module, and other cool stuff I've been working on recently, please comment on my DrupalCon session proposal - An Enterprise Scale Drupal Workflow. It will be a more technical version of my session at Drupal Business Days a couple weeks ago.

* "Full of beans" is phrase commonly used in Australia to describe energetic children.

• A cauldron (sp?) bird posing for the Million Paws Walkers http://t.co/h99agl4k #
• Po is loving the Million Paws Walk http://t.co/udzjRD70 #
• Aww RT @HeartsOQueen: Taffy and po with @piawaugh at @rspca #millilonpawswalk http://t.co/FZihDQTF #
• Announcing @MTBracken as the #govcamp Lunch Address (by video) Looking forward to hearing about GDS, innovation & #opengov in the UK! #
• Heading down to the Canberra Million Paws Walk in a little while. Hope to see some Tweeps there. I'm bringing Po #
• Watching the *ATO* 100 people animation, representing tax returns as 100 people. Clever and nice #datavis http://t.co/SKv9BCX9 #gov2au #
• Going to #govhack Not got a team yet? Add your name and skillz to http://t.co/uarMfga5 to connect with other attendees and form a team #
• Check out the updated #GovCamp website for speaker info! http://t.co/VrWHc9Tf - what a great lineup! more to be announced Tues #gov2au #
• #govhack only 2 weeks away, have you registered? Over $30k in prize money. Info going out today inc about categories http://t.co/p04DDIz4 #
• Awesome MT @balkandishlex: Some ridiculously exciting news if you're a fan of Blade Runner… http://t.co/2ShT4ZCx #
• HAH! Daniel=1, Anthony=0 RT @fooishbar: says the man 'living' in sydney #deadinside /cc @swearyanthony @chrisjrn #
• WOW! Registering vehicles in ACT prohibitively expensive! Bike is about $700 & car about $1500 for 12 months. Might just sell the car #
• Bumblebee is back on the road! This weekend will involve several good rides in between work and GovHack/GovCamp foo #motorbike #joy #fb #
• Heh, ur real pretending to be a parody, not vice versa RT @FakePaulKeating: I do take feedback, it makes the retribution so much sweeter #
• Negative ppl rarely take feedback well & basically never take responsibility for their actions? Why would I hang out with ppl like that? #
• Funny. Article that doesn't differentiate bw open data & websites w analysis by "private company" w/o data http://t.co/ub9pzL4n #gov2au #
• Now have info about a bunch of #GovHack mentors & workshops, all to help your teams rock! http://t.co/YKMqj0IA http://t.co/YVBxCTIi #
• Due to awesome #GovHack response in Sydney we've moved somewhere bigger - Macquarie Uni! Another 50 spots so register! http://t.co/8XSJj0b0 #
• Definitely, and you should come to #govhack http://t.co/p04DDIz4 Jun 1-3 (48 hours) #
• There is nothing like sharp intense pain to focus the mind. Can be a gift. Luckily nothing too serious: costocondritis, inflamed rib joints. #
• WANT+++++! RT @Rog42 I WANT !!! http://t.co/QFu3qs13 via @TwitPic #motorbikefever #
• Had a young guy try to get me to sign up for something on street, turns out he's a developer, he is now coming to #govhack #shameless #
• Exactly what I needed right now #coffeejoy http://t.co/yr3dQ5bW #
• Omg! Course being run about R (for analysis & analytics) next week. I'm totally going. Check it out http://t.co/dsEUSIsI #gov2au #datavis #
• I still maintain Mutt is a LOT more efficient for large amounts of email than Gmail. #
• We are after a fourth and final Gold sponsor for #govhack Does your company love & support #gov2au and #opendata Contact me asap #
• Tweeting to #govhack Nice article by Brett. RT Agencies to integrate GovHacks into apps http://t.co/cCnmcup2 via @itnews_au #
• Did not know RT @alankerlin: Woolies and Coles have the power to enact pokie reforms the government can't. http://t.co/gOSNqs76 via @GetUp #
• Has some good insights, relevant for #gov2au RT @OZloop: Cultural revolution 2012 - The infographic http://t.co/I8d2RXng #
• o/~ I need perfection, some twisted selection that tangles me to keep me alive. Mystify me o/~ #workinglate #
• Hey @legostormtroopr @simonjwall, we'd love to get you guys involved in #govhack Let me know if you can chat http://t.co/p04DDIz4 #
• . @jade_mikaela YES indeed, and #govjam will also totally rock! A while week of awesome at http://t.co/JwukxefZ #
• Today = insane. Looking forward to life settling down a little. Perhaps not *this* life, but whatever #govhack & #govcamp will rock! #
• Yes #firstworldproblems RT @ThoughtfulRat: @piawaugh eating: not as essential as internet. #
• Planned electricity outage at my house today. Made plans for internet access, completely forgot about fridge/freezer. #geekpriorities #
• DRM all the things! (paraphrase) RT @dannolan: When @gruber is in full dick mode, it’s a thing of beauty - http://t.co/K2wHk5T1 #
• RT @MsLods: Does Internet need global regulator? 'Multi-stakeholderism' is a process not policy. http://t.co/XoEpRdh8 v @vikram_nz #society5 #
• Just voted @talenthouse for Tessa because it rocks Great mashup and app to help ppl reduce carbon use http://t.co/Oiprhllw #spaceapps #
• . @jamezpolley Some people def do that, we'll put up a wiki by the end of the week so you can connect with ppl that way too #govhack #
• Opened 10 more spots in #govhack Sydney (total 90), there's still 30 spots in Canberra (total 150). Register now peeps! http://t.co/p04DDIz4 #
• Nicely done RT @mwyres: RT : Does Australia Really Want The NBN? - http://t.co/Lln3InZO - #auspol #NBN #
• Never! RT @SnarkyPlatypus: Too many jackets in this cupboard. #
• It is too cold to get up, but I must! #
• #govhack in June, could do #datajournalism one later in year? RT @DaniBevins: @karalee_ @swearyanthony @jason_a_w @Wendycarlisle #
• Mostly awesome RT @f3ew: http://t.co/xwWjBJd4 Rather *innovative* geek, that Tesla. Oh, and when I say innovation, I mean what Tesla did. #
• Wow, only 30 txt left for #govhack Canberra & 5 for Sydney. Book & create a team later Over $30k in prize money http://t.co/YS5Zwh26 #
• Went to Groovin the Moo festival today, highlights inc Public Enemy, 360, Hilltop Hoods. Hanging w mate Kylie #fb #gtm http://t.co/psDlODMn #

It is so splendid when excellent people are recognized for their excellence! It’s delightful that Octavia Butler won a posthumous Solstice Award and that Connie Willis was given the Damon Knight Grand Master Award. And! I am personally over the moon that Jo Walton’s Among Others won the 2011 Nebula.

I loved this book so very much and if I haven’t already forced it into your hands, you are to imagine me doing it now: this is a geek feminist coming-of-age novel, and it is full of wonders.

The oft-promised update of the cnlmisc package for R is now posted. New in this release is a convenience method, sepplot, that produces separation plots using the separationplot package; this method works directly on model fit objects as a post-estimation call, and works with both binary and ordinal models at present. In addition, epcp now works with clm2 objects from the ordinal package.

Most of this was motivated by continued work on the economic voting paper, which has also been updated. cnlmisc still has a long way to go before I submit it to CRAN, but at least it’s progress, right?

Author : Thomas Desrochers

Father Leibowitz gingerly placed the surplus sacrament back in the tabernacle. He turned to his congregation and sighed. It was a congregation of one: an old Jewish man named Schell.

Leibowitz pursed his lips. He and Schell had been the only ones at any mass for more than a year now. He quietly said his final prayers and went through the final movements, concluding service by sitting down with the wizened and hoary old man in a back row of pews. For some time they both sat in silent contemplation.

After a while Schell, ninety-eight years old and twenty years Leibowitz’s senior, started to talk. “You know, when the rabbi died and the synagogue closed I didn’t know what to do with myself. For a long while I stayed in my apartment, thinking and wasting way. Then, one day, I realized that I still have a place I may go to think and contemplate and talk to God.” He chuckled. “For all I care you are simply one of Judaism’s children. We are family.”

“Catholics are Judaism’s children?” The father chuckled. “You crazy old man.”

“I may be crazy, yet here I am. In times of trouble family must band together, don’t you agree?”

Leibowitz smiled a weary, tired smile. “I believe, Schell, that the times of trouble have passed. This is simply the end.”

The old Jew looked around at the aged, cracking walls of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The massive glass windows were dim because of the building’s position at the bottom of the New Rome Sprawl. Above them were kilometers of towers, roadways, tram-ways, walkways, and on and on and on in the perpetual twilight of the sub-city. The only light was cast by hidden diodes within the building, and ever these were failing. Shadows were rampant in this empty place. It was too quiet for even death to bother stalking the halls.

“You may have a point,” he conceded. “Yet I see no horsemen.”

The priest scoffed. “Apathy and desolation are surer heralds of the end than any cataclysm could ever hope to be.”

Off in a far corner a rusting maintenance bot fought back against the barbarian hordes of decrepitude brought on by time, a broken joint occasionally shrieking as only metal can. Dust swirled about in the shadows.

The priest coughed. “For us, at least, it is the end.”

“I’m sure there will always be those like us, tucked away in the corners of the world.”

“As if keeping some dark secret.”

“Like all humans do.” Schell checked his ancient brass watch. “It’s getting late, father. Would you care to join me at dinner this evening? It is Christmas Eve, after all.”

“I suppose you must be celebrating something Hannukah related as well,” said Leibowitz.

“Of course. Traditions aside, I don’t see what we can’t celebrate our own ways in each other’s company.”

Leibowitz mulled this over. “True enough.” He stood up, his joints cracking and protesting. Once he was upright he helped Schell up, and the two left the Basilica for the under city night. They walked with no fear because the local superstitions were more powerful than the fear of God ever was. They were regarded with curiosity, an oddity in a modern, noisy world. The old Jew, immortal and frail, and the tall, proud, and withering Leibowitz, the last priest and technical Pope of the Catholic Faith.

Back in the Basilica machinery screamed and dust settled unto dust as it always had and always would.

Due to lots of other work, it took quite some time between my initial blog post about the omso-lea6t-gps board and the point where we are able to offically sell kits in the sysmocom webshop. The primary reason is: The people for whom we primarily built the board (i.e. the Osmocom developers) all have one and are happy with it ;)

But repeated inquiries by e-mail and otherwise have shown there is more interest. However, for a hand ful of boards we cannot make an automated production run in a SMT assembly line. So for the time being, we are only selling DYI kits, consisting of a digikey-packaged component kit including all components, plus the PCB, as well as the LEA-6T module.

Anyone who is interested in such a timing module DIY kit can now order from the sysmocom webshop.

More information on the project, including design materials like schematics can be found at the Osmocom wiki.

The Maker Faire is one of those awesome Bay Area things that always fills me with excitement and gets my imagination going.

Zoe and I went again this year to check it out, as best we could within the time constraints we had to work within (opening time and her nap time, minus travel time). She definitely enjoyed herself.

We took the Caltrain, because historically driving and parking has been a bit of a nightmare. The optimal train to get to get there before it opened (at 10am) was the 9:19 train from Mountain View, which was scheduled to get in at Hayward Park a little before 10am. It just so happened that there was a Giants game on in San Francisco today as well, and the train was absolutely packed. We only got a seat because one kind gentleman was getting off and explicitly gave his seat to us. One lesson learned: don't try and take the BOB stroller on the train. Even when collapsed, it's way too bulky. For future Caltrain outings, I'll take our City Mini stroller instead, as it folds much flatter.

I also took our macpac Possum child carrier backpack, and Zoe was pretty happy to just sit in it for the bulk of the time. I think it had novelty value for her, as we haven't used it for a while. I probably could have gotten away without taking a stroller at all. I was very glad I took the backpack, as it gave her a much better vantage point for everything that was going on than she would have gotten from sitting in the stroller.

There was supposed to be a free shuttle from the Hayward Park station to the Maker Faire, but there was a huge crowd waiting for it, so I decided to just walk. It didn't take too long. For the return trip, I think I exited from the wrong side of the fairgrounds, and couldn't figure out the shuttles, so I just walked to Hillsdale station. At least the return train wasn't crowded. Overall, using Caltrain to get in and out was successful. Zoe was very well behaved for the ~30 minute train ride each way.

The Faire was quite a bit bigger this year, and has spilled out into the parking lot on one side. I'd heard stories that O'Reilly had quadrupled booth prices as well.

Trying to abide by the program was too difficult, so we mostly just wandered through the main Expo hall and looked at various booths. I just did a full read through the website of all the exhibitors to see what I missed out on.

Here's some of the stuff I saw in person, or discovered via the website:

• there was a really excellent looking Dalek running around (way better than the photo on the page linked to here). I also learned that there's a whole Dalek-making website. Awesome.
• RAFT (Resource Area For Teaching) had lots of really simple, low cost projects for demonstrating various concepts in physics and science.
• Linux for makers was represented
• This Arduino-controlled automatic fish feeder looked cool. I didn't get to see it in person, I discovered it while I was trawling through the list of exhibitors.
• Shop-in-a-box. I'd have liked to have checked this out.
• Build a bug habitat. I'd have liked to check this out out as well.
• Solar bike trailer. My Dad would have liked this, as he has an electric bike. I imagine this wouldn't be all that hard to make. The trailer looked pretty long from the photo though, but hey, no pedaling.
• The water causeway. Now this looks interesting. I would have loved to have seen this one in person. I love clean tech. There's a whole bunch of videos linked off the page for this.
• Wave energy capture model. Another clean tech thing I'd have liked to have checked out.
• Roominate looks really cool. Something for Zoe when she's a bit bigger.
• There was a table extolling the virtues of growing your own algae for consumption (as spirulina) and bio-fuel. I'm interested in finding out more about the latter.
• I saw some HEXBUG-related stuff near the Geekdad table. This looked like a dressed up version of the "take a toothbrush head and glue an electric toothbrush motor on the back" type project. I'm curious to see how expensive the kits are, as they looked like a lot of fun.
• Ratduino sounds intriguing, but I can't find out much about it.
• Urban scale wind turbines. One that I needed to have seen in person. Unfortunately I missed it.
• GlueMotor looks cool.
• Low-cost push-button clicker. I'd have liked to have found out more about this. If it's what I imagine it is, this could be quite revolutionary in the classroom.
• Hardware Startup Showcase. I have ideas. I'd like to see them get out of my head and into existence. Turns out there's even a MeetUp group.
• Kits by Kids. I'll have to check this out to see what sort of stuff I can do with Zoe when she's a bit older.

Kickstarter is really becoming huge in the maker community. There were heaps of exhibitors there with (mostly robotics) projects that were past the initial prototyping phase and were seeking funding on Kickstarter to go into mass production.

Some of the talks I'd have liked to have seen:

• Every Child a Maker
• "Kickstarters," Equity and the New Maker Pro
• Making Professional Makers - Career Tech Ed Instructors Talk Shop
• Manufacturing Open Source Hardware - Get Your Stuff Made!

Zoe was really well behaved for the entire expedition. I don't think she really gave me any grief at all. There was a brief period where she wanted me to carry her, but I managed to negotiate her back into the stroller after not long.

I think her favourite was ArcBotics, which had a robot insect that would dance and wave at her. She kept asking for it to do more dancing.

While wtf(1) always has been a bit central to MirBSD, and the acronym database has been accessible by CVSweb, what we never had was a DAU compatible (and shellsnippets compatible) lookup. This has now changed: the above link to the acronyms file is a persistent link to its latest version (well, latest when the website was last recompiled), tooltips may very well follow soon, and we’ve got an online WTF lookup service.
Contributions to the acronym database are welcome, of course; just eMail them to tg＠mirbsd．org.

Not to stop there, our online HTML manpage search is also new, shiny, and should replace the “!mbsdman” DuckDuckGo hash-bang shortly. (Both of these services offer a DDG search as fallback. Note that DDG is an external service included herein by linking, under their request to spread it, and not affiliated with The MirOS Project. They do, however, donate some advertising money to Debian.)
For all those who didn’t know: only manpages for software in the MirOS BSD base system and for the MirPorts Framework package tools are listed, not for third-party applications installable using ports or, recently, pkgsrc®. Still, if you want to have a peek at a modern classic BSD’s documentation, you’re welcome. (Not to mention content like re_format(7) and style(9) and that some of our documentation is much more legible than others.)

And because writing all that perl(1) made me ill, not to mention I don’t even know that language, I’ve hacked a bit more in the mirmake(1) and mksh(1) parts of the MirWebsite, finally implementing pointing out where in the navigation sidebar the visitor currently is.

We also have exciting mksh porting news involving RT trying a larger number of ancient platforms than I dare count, me fixing bugs in Linux klibc and diving into other things, learning more about why I consider me lucky for hacking a BSD operating system… sorry, I want to keep this short as it’s mostly an announcement.

The MirWebsite source code is, of course, also available. Improvements welcome. Except for these three CGIs, our website is fully statically precompiled, and that’s a good thing. Please help in making the CGIs secure.

Back in November I ranted about the migration of Gnome Shell to Debian/Testing. Plenty of other people did the same thing (or have done the same thing about Unity).

I'd just like to say sorry to any of the GNOME people who felt unappreciated; I know you work hard to try and produce a useful user experience out of the box. I ended up doing the dist-upgrade on my work laptop only a week or so after my home machine, and in the process discovered that the nouveau Mesa driver now supports my machine pretty well. It's taken me a while to get used to it, but my frustrations with the change have diminished and I haven't felt the need to move to something different. So, a belated thanks for all your hard work.

Explore these TEDTalks that discuss income inequality — what causes it, the brutal effects, and how we might fight it.

Start with this talk from Richard Wilkinson, whose 2009 book The Spirit Level gathers decades of research to draw this conclusion: Societies with more income inequality suffer — in utterly predictable ways — more than societies that are more equal.

(And read the TED Blog’s in-depth Q&A with Wilkinson, in which he talks about the moment he realized economic inequality was a measureable problem.)

Next, watch Van Jones’ powerful talk on a specific outcome of economic injustice: If you’re poor, your neighborhood gets trashed.

For a followup, watch Majora Carter’s classic TEDTalk “Greening the Ghetto” — which shows the effects of income inequality on her home in the South Bronx, and offers triple-bottom-line solutions for raising incomes and reducing environmental damage.

And do not miss Bryan Stevenson’s TEDTalk about economic injustice and its consequences — with a bold call for everyone to look honestly at the problem: “We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.”

Find more talks on inequality >>

From the TEDx Tumblr, this inspiring story:

TEDxMogadishu — the first TEDx event in Somalia — will happen tomorrow, May 17, and livestreamed around the world.

Update: Read press reports from TEDxMogadishu >>

On May 17, between 50 and 100 people from diverse backgrounds will attend the event to listen to Somalis discuss the rebirth of Mogadishu. The event will be livestreamed for Somalis who can’t attend (e.g., the diaspora) and people who are interested to learn about the positive changes happening in Mogadishu.

The goal of the organizing team is to build a foundation for more events in the future, and to hopefully give Mogadishu a steady and fresh platform for spreading ideas. We spoke to team member Sebastian Lindstrom about the event:

Why Mogadishu — what led you to organize a TEDx here?

We had an opportunity to go to Mogadishu to film the opening of First Somali Bank, and while planning this trip, we brainstormed with Somalis living in the city about how to further share the positive stories taking place. TEDx has become a worldwide movement for sharing ideas and innovations taking place at the local level, and it seemed like a great fit. Mogadishu is changing, and while some in the media have picked up on it, the general perception of Mogadishu remains negative. We feel it’s important to share what’s really happening and we want to showcase positive stories for those who care about this dynamic city.

Who are the locals you’re working with?

We are working with Liban Egal, the founder of First Somali Bank, and his team in Mogadishu. They have linked the organizing team to a wide variety of Somalis — those who have returned to Somalia over the past few years and those who have lived through the conflict — who are supporting this initiative in various ways. We are crowdsourcing from the Somali and Somali diaspora’s Twittersphere to track down resources and awareness. Basically, it’s all very much a team effort on a worldwide Somali basis.

How did you choose the theme of your event — does it relate directly to the political situation, or is there a broader meaning?

The theme focuses on positive changes happening in Mogadishu, irrespective of the political situation. Many Somalis think Mogadishu has recently reached a turning point now that there is no active fighting inside the city for the first time in decades. There are thousands of Somalis returning home to open businesses, buildings sprouting up and being reconstructed, and there is a real sense of rebirth in a marginalized, misrepresented community that feels that its time has come. We realized this was the right moment to hold the event. So on the 17th a group of Somalis from different walks of life will share their stories of how Mogadishu is changing and their ideas for the future — this is TEDxMogadishu.

What are some of the challenges you knew you would face?

Safety concerns. Even though Mogadishu is changing, there remain significant security concerns that we cannot disregard. We are taking ample precautions so that adequate security will be in place. We are comforted by the fact that we’re holding an apolitical event with no agenda other than providing a platform for Somalis to communicate positive changes happening in this city to the world.

The second biggest challenge was timing and communication. Remote organization isn’t possible, so much was done on the ground over the past week. However, this city tends to operate quite last minute, so it hasn’t been a problem to find great speakers and attendees.

What’s a challenge that was completely unexpected?

Isolation anxiety. Because of security reasons, you cannot, as a foreigner, openly walk the streets of Mogadishu. So, you end up spending a lot of time in one place, which can result in a case of island fever.

What did you expect to be challenging, and wasn’t at all?

We thought that finding a venue was going to be a huge problem, but it worked out superbly.

What’s one thing about Mogadishu and Somalia that you wish everyone knew?

Despite its perception, Mogadishu is a beautiful city filled with hard working and extremely entrepreneurial Somalis. Both Somalis at home, and those in the diaspora, are optimistic that a turning point has been reached after 21 years of conflict.

Tell me about your speakers!

Speakers will include a wide range of Somalis and one foreigner. Some have recently returned to Mogadishu and others have lived through the conflict. They include: a chef and restauranteur, a real estate developer, the founder of a university, the founder of the First Somali bank, a healthcare specialist, someone who works with rape victims and former child soldiers, a Somali journalist, a camel milk mobilizer and more.

And tell me one speaker’s story …

Elle Elman will give a talk about her work with rape and sexual assault victims and the rehabilitation of child soldiers. Her father started the Elman Peace and Human Rights Centre and was an ardent peace activist in the 1990s, who coined the slogan “Put down the gun, pick up a pen.” He was killed in 1996 for trying to promote peace in Somalia. Elle left for Canada and three years ago came back to support her mother’s work with that same organization; more on the organization and her mother can be found here and here.

She is of the new generation in Somalia and has returned to her country during these difficult times.

Read these stories about her father, which are good to mention, since he was one of the initial major peace advocates; and people in Mogadishu know his name well.

Check out the website for the event: www.TEDxMogadishu.com

Follow on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TEDxMogadishu

Follow on Twitter: @TEDxMogadishu

Email for more information: info@TEDxMogadishu.com

We were a bit late with preparations today, so the first thing we did after leaving the house was to go to Frankfurt to the Blockupy demonstration, which was scheduled at noon.

Ok – I have to admit (again), that I’m no pro in this. In fact, that was the first demonstration where I also took photos, and doing so while being in the middle of a huge crowd of people is an experience of itself. I ended up thinking hmmm – my lens is either too wide or not wide enough (depending on the distance, which at times can be very close – or far away), and I looked at all those people carrying DSLRs with zoom lenses. Almost as many had smaller ‘Point & Shoots’, or even camera phones. There was only one other couple I saw where the guy also had an E-PL1.

But I didn’t want to change, so I kept using that small Pen with Mitchie’s 20mm lens, while Mitchie was using hers with the almost-glued-on Olympus 45mm lens. And maybe this is why the best of mine were those of people with self-made posters:

I have to improve in this; I know. And maybe I should have taken lots more time – but we were with our 7-year-old, and had to constantly watch her, and we also had to leave quite early.

Haven’t heard, read, or seen the news yet, but I hope it stayed as peaceful as it was during the time we spent there. It was important to be there, and to stand for our rights, and for democracy. And I’m glad we did this – good photos or not.

Thanks for viewing and reading.

I will start linking to places we stayed at etc, from now on. On the one hand, we already left those places so my paranoid self can rest assured that no one will come hunt us down, on the other hand, I decided to only to name and link to those places which really deserve a mention. If they are linked here, I can whole-heartedly recommend them.

Mongolia

After leaving through the Russian border fortifications, Mongolia was an instant and welcome change. Trees growing right next to the tracks, branches forming a bit of a natural tunnel; the trains passing by keeping branches at bay, but the trees free to grow wherever else they pleased. A few hundred meters later below a rocky ledge, a cow had apparently fallen down and died. Partially decomposed flesh still clinging halfway to its rib-cage, it proved to be a sign of the (mostly) more laid-back attitude Mongolians tend to take.

After finally getting our passports back and being allowed to leave the train, we first headed to the station to get some money. At ~1800:1, the exchange rate for Tugruk against Euro speaks volumes about inflation; imagine my surprise that the MNT 20,000 note is the largest one. It's also the one and only amount any and all ATMs will default to.

We were quite surprised by how cheap everything was, even in the one single store within the station directly behind the border. In Russia, travellers expect to pay hefty markups when shopkeepers know they can charge them, not so in Mongolia.

The woman in the trash

Upon returning from the station, our waggon was just merrily being driving away on its own by a lone engine, something we had not anticipated or appreciated a whole lot. A woman (we hadn't noticed her before) who was busy scavenging a trash container for food for herself and her scrawny-looking son happily stopped what she was doing and, with a big smile, moved her hands around and smacked them back together, signalling us that our waggon would be attached to a different train for the subsequent journey.

To put it mildly, I was stunned; we had met people eating from the trash in Russia as well (yes, I always make a point of giving them enough for a few decent meals; anyone eating out of the trash actually needs and definitely deserves something good happening to them), but they were glum and disheartened. Here, there was someone who not only had to look out for herself, but for a three or four year old boy as well, and still was just so... positive... I don't know if I would have it in me to act the same way...

As an aside, even though we were just a few kilometers across the border from Russia, she did not actually take the money from me, she cupped her hands to receive it by having me place it into her hands; this is a very Asian thing in my experience and something we would see both in Mongolia and China consistently.

Later, when we were back in our waggon, she passed by and happened to see the Spot Messgenger 2 dangling in front of our window, its lights blinking every five seconds. For a solid twenty minutes, until the train started moving again, she squatted down with her son, oggling the Spot. I have no idea what she was thinking it was and I had no chance to explain it to her, but she was really fascinated and just kept staring and staring.

When we finally left the station, we waved to and smiled at each other, she ran after us, and then she was gone. All in all, this was one the more memorable things which happened to us.

Mongolian Infrastructure

When I say that Mongolians as a whole tend to be a lot more laid back than Russians, this extends to infrastructure as well, but not in the good way.

• Where Russia uses concrete sleepers, Mongolia uses roughly-hewn wooden ones.
• Where Russia has two rail tracks, Mongolia has a single one which is extended by parking spots to let other trains pass then and now.
• Where Russia maintains a perimeter along their rail tracks, Mongolia has a mainly gapless barbed-wire fence against animals on both sides; said fence may be near or far, covered with bushes or standing on its own. Its there so serve a purpose, but that's it. There's nothing else in ways of track protection.
• Where Russia has well-built, if dirty, crossings with one design spanning across all of Russia, Mongolia has random crossings that happen to look like they look.
• While Russia's streets are covered with potholes, Mongolia's are covered with potcaves.
• Some smaller stations didn't warrant a stop, but they couldn't be passed at full speed, either. Basically, if someone was waiting at the station, the train would come to a complete stop. At night, attendants would lean out of the train with flashlights, scanning the station and its surroundings for potential customers. If anyone was found, they signalled the driver and we would stop. Strange, but it works.

Ulan Bator

Little Dhingis Khan

We arrived in Ulan Bator at six in the morning and started haggling with taxi drivers. Our hostel had (stale, it turned out) information about acceptable fare from station to their place on their website, 5,000 MNT was supposedly OK. Our driver tried to get 20,000, then 15,000, then 12,000, then 10,000, went down to 7,000 and finally settled for 5,000, all this interspersed with frequent "no" by us and walking away. Once on the road, he wanted to convince me that we had agreed upon 5,000 per person, something that did not quite work out for him. When we arrived, he started to tell me that he was good friends with the hostel manager and that said manager would surely want us to pay more; again, that did not work too well. He made the mistake of getting our luggage out of his trunk immediately (we always kept all our stuff in the passenger area afterwards...) before I paid and even though I only had a 10,000 or 20,000 note, I insisted on correct change. The same old dance began anew, with him edging closer to the correct change in steps of 1,000 MNT. He tried to get away several times, but I stood in his door and held it open; if he had just driven off, I couldn't have stopped him, but that thankfully didn't occur to him. After he shoved all small change (MNT is bill only, no coins) he had with him at me and wanted to make off yet again, I was close to throwing all the small crap at him, but after he, a man of maybe 1.65 meter and sitting down, tried to signal his willingness for a fist fight and me, a man of 1.94 meter and standing started laughing, he gave me 2,000 more and drove off cursing.

In case you forgot, at that exchange rate, we argued about two to three Euro, but as he tried to cheat, it became a matter of principle.

The Hostel, part one

All parking lots and other property in Ulan Bator have a small watchtower with private 24/7 guards; said guard ambled down, let us in and woke the poor woman who was forced to let us check in. As she was Mongolian as well, we were a bit surprised when she switched from broken English to perfect German, but the owners of the OASIS are a German-Austrian couple so I guess that makes sense.

Fighting through the war

Traffic in Ulan Bator is war. Lonely Planet talks about the city being too newly motorized and that it did not have to develop a culture of driving, yet. This is a euphemism for "no one has any qualms maiming or killing you". Everyone is driving like mad, nudging and racing their way in front of each other. If a driver has an oppurtunity to get ahead by a few centimeters with his small car, thereby blocking the way for several buses, making a whole parking lot grind to a halt and thereby deadlocking themselves, they will take said opportunity, and gladly.

Red lights are gentle suggestions, there to be mainly ignored; police will not drive over red lights, but they will not stop anybody else from doing so, either. A hearse will have a dozen or more cars following it, all driving in a tight pack, aggressively attacking anyone who dares to wedge in between them and expecting all other traffic to make way even if they are driving over a red light.

Crossing a main street in Ulan Bator as a pedestrian is hell. There are a few traffic lights and they help to some extent, but you still need to be extremely careful when crossing a street. Thailand, India, Russia, China, no matter where it's supposedly hard to cross a street by foot, I never had any issues weaseling through. In UB, it takes planning, determination, and a lot of attention, especially as there are stretches where there's not a traffic light in sight. While maintaining eye contact with a driver usually ensures that they will try not to hit you, this does not work in the least in UB. In the evening, I took to shining a high-powered flashlight at the ground to the oncoming traffic's side to mark ourselves and decrease the likelihood of being hit. This worked well in combination with sprinting through gaps in the traffic, except for one guy who actively aimed for us and did not slow down. He even changed lanes, just to keep us in front of his car... Shining the flashlight directly at him in highest mode made him break quite violently though; a good thing, as he may have hit us had he not slowed down.

UB itself

Ulan Bator is weird.

It has clear signs of westernization, but it's still very much an old city. There is one large store which would fit into any random shopping center in Germany (which are tiny when compared to most other countries) and which carries most goods, if with a limited selection. Its supermarket is extremely well stocked with food and drink from all other the world and laughably cheap (for us) prices.

While its infrastructure is definitely crumbling, the city is clean, especially when compared to Russia. Two girls from Stuttgart who we met during our Trans-Siberian travels commented on how clean Russian cities were when compared to home, but that may be more of a statement about Stuttgart than about Russia...

Anyway, in Mongolia in general and in UB in particular, there's a concise effort to make what they have look nice and clean. There is no trash in the streets, loose gravel and earth is removed from the curb by dedicated workers, all areas of packed earth are sieved and all large stones removed. All in all, it's a lot cleaner (if more dusty and sandy) than Russian cities if somewhat older and more shabby-looking. That being said, Mongolia's countryside is littered

There were several street stalls consisting of nothing more than a cardboard box on a stool selling single chewing gums and cigarettes from the original packaging; it's normal for people to buy one cigarette or one piece of chewing gum and walk on.

The sights of UB were nice, but nothing too special.

Outlook

In the next part, I'll cover "The Hostel, part disaster" and generally talk more about excrement than I thought one could write before moving on to China (were I am located at the time of this writing).

I read a translated poem about Russia being "the Motherland" and its vast bosom years ago. Having driven through a significant part of it, I can agree on the "vast" part...

Also, as I am on a train and without access to the Internet, I will refrain from linking to a lot of pages; sorry. (Turns out I am posting this a week later, but I will still not link to stuff now; no time).

Russia in general

• All receipts you receive are torn before you get them; this is most likely due to the old Soviet voucher system, more on that below.
• Russia was hot with temperatures ranging from 27 to 32 degrees Celsius between Moscow and Ulan Ude.
• There aren't a lot of pedestrians bridges, but a lot of pedestrian tunnels. The sides of those tunnels are packed with tiny shops, often only two meters wide and 50-70 cm deep. Everything from stockings to candy over glasses to flowers and watches is being sold through a tiny window by some poor woman who somehow managed to get in there.
• Toilet brushes stand in water. In Germany, that's a sure sign of a really dirty toilet; in Russia, it's the thing to do. If you are lucky, there's blue cleaning stuff added to the water. If not, it will still have color. You are free to guess which.
• Queuing is war.

Moscow

Sights

Kreml

Our remaining time in Moscow was spent with touring the usual suspects; the Kreml is a lot less impressive in real life, the Red Square is tiny when compared to the stories I heard about it and the Chapel ofi St. Basil is even more colorful and impressive in real life. Lenin's body was inaccessible because workers built seats for the May 9th parade to the left and the right of it and they apparently thought it would be a good idea to block access to one of the main tourist attractions while doing so. A river tour of Moscow was a nice cool-off and we got to see quite a few things.

We managed to see the weekly military parade within the Kreml grounds, but it was mostly pomp and little substance. The National Treasure which you can access with an extra ticket within the Kreml grounds is nice, but less impressive than the tourist guides would make you believe. That being said... There's another museum within the museum and.... Whoah... Tourists pay extra, visitors go through the only non-security-theater check I encountered in Russia, guards are armed, people can only enter and leave in batches, and the stuff which is presented is mind-boggling. Disregarding the fist-to-calf-sized chunks of gold and platinum which are still in their original form directly from the mine, there is real, actual treasure galore. Little heaps of uncut and cut diamonds, an outline of Russia filled with cut diamonds and other random "we have this stuff" displays can be found as well. Then, you have various tiaras and other jewellery made from various gems. Not incorporating, but largely made of. All that pales in comparison to the crown, royal apple, scepter, etc. It's hard to put the amount of tiny multi-colored light points that shine at you into words. I was just standing there, swaying back and forth to catch the moving pattern of pinpoints. It's said that this collection is equalled only by the ones in the Tower of London and the one Shaw of Iran had and boy do I believe it.

TV Tower

Getting up there was funny.

The old-style Soviet queuing system was used:

• Go to a counter to tell an attendant what you want; receive stub
• Go to another counter, hand over stub to another attendant, pay for what you want; receive voucher
• Go to third counter, hand over voucher; receive ticket for tower The whole thing was made even more absurd by the fact that counter one was in the middle, counter two to the right and counter three to the left. As Russians do not believe in queuing and everybody just tries to get in first, this made for a nice little exercise.

"Security" for approaching the tower was multi-level, the guards see you approach along a long walkway way in advance and the main guard shed had several small cabins separated by thick glass. So good so menacing. But in a twist that would make Bizarro and Garry Larson proud, I was required, by means of metal detector gate, metal detector wand and even an x-ray machine to remove every shred of metal and other hard objects from myself and the camera bag and put them onto a table. Once I was without anything except my clothes and the bag was completely empty, I could pass. Everything I had had to remove was just laying there, not inspected in the least, for me to stuff back into pockets and bag and to take with me. This "everything" included a Spot Messenger 2 with lots of green and red blinky lights. The guard did not even glance and it. Security theater? Security theater.

The view from 364 meters down on Moscow was nice, but there was a lot of Smog so I couldn't see very far. Jumping on the glass floor while looking down was a lot of fun, though.

Subway to Thiefing

I bet Christopher Nolan rode the subway in Moscow at least once. That unnerving sound you hear during several key scenes in "The Dark Knight"? Two thirds of all subways make the same sound while moving.

Also, I had an encounter with a pickpocket down there; very classical, too. Guy approaches quickly, talks loudly and sounds as if it's really important (in Russian... duh... that's sure to keep me interested). His approach made me turn and protect my left leg pocket automatically, most likely marking the target for the tiny woman standing behind me. Now, I have to tell you something about my usual travel layout. As my normal pockets are very deep, it looks as if their content was in the leg pocket. Plus, there's an extra, hidden leg pocket where I keep the passports and train tickets. The outermost leg pocket is protected by a velcro flap, but it contains nothing of value; usually the appropriate phrasebook, local map, maybe a tissue or chewing gum. Due to this layering, the outermost pocket looks as if it's full to the brim with stuff. Also, I took pains to make it a habit to protect said leg pocket with my hand, nothing else. This looks as if that's the target, but what I am actually doing is protect my normal pocket with my forearm. The right side is different, but the most easily accessibly pocket always holds some small change. I pay from that stash but my actual wallet is well out of reach. Anyway, once the guy ran off, talking to several others, most likely marking all them for the actual pickpockets, I wanted to enter the subway. While the Russian-style queuing took place, I felt an unusual tug at the velcro flap. I looked down and saw a tiny woman to the left of me with a jacket held over her right side with the left arm; I look up to check no one is trying to steal from my permanently assigned female, feel another tug, look the woman into the eyes, look up again and around me, look down again and she is gone. All that took maybe three seconds and I had boarded the subway after an additional two.

In hindsight, it makes sense to choose the time of entry for attack. It's crowded, you are being pushed around, and once you are in the subway, it will start moving more or less immediately while the thief remains in the station.

In this case, she would only have gotten a grubby map of Moscow's subway and an English-Russian phrasebook, but she got nothing at all.

Moscow-Novosibirsk

Where to begin...

If you think a few hours on a train are a long time, try over fifty hours. Things get so bad, you start getting land-sick while not in a moving train. You even start missing the familiar tunk-cachunk, tunk-cachunk, tunk-cachunk... of driving over rails with gaps in them when you are not moving.

The defining element of the Trans-Siberian Railway are birch trees. And birch trees. And then more birch trees. You would not believe how many birch trees there are. This is made "worse" by the way the Russian Railway protects their rails. Left and right of the track, there's a cleared area of maybe ten to twenty meters, sometimes as little as three. Outside of that, they plant ten to twenty meters of birch trees, presumably to catch snow during winter. Beyond that protective perimeter, there's the normal landscape.As a result, on top of the near endless stretches of birch woods, you see most if not all scenery through a layer of birch trees. You get sick sick of birch trees after a few hours and you see them for days on end.

Bullet points to save myself some typing and you some reading...

• More than a thousand kilometers without a single hill. Flat as a pan.
• The whole route is powered by electricity. No diesel engines in sight.
• Many stations are little more than a heap of smoothed gravel, bordered by some wooden planks. Some stations have obviously been built by locals and are even less well-defined.
• You can see people in the middle of nowhere, walking along the railway tracks. At first this seemed counter-intuitive, but most if not all roads out there are dirt tracks. As there seems to be standing water across a third of Russia, this dirt is turned into mud. After walking maybe twenty meters across a parking lot, I had to scrape a heavy, thick cake of black earth from my soles. The railway is the only functioning footpath those people have. Many people even build shoddy bridges towards the tracks from their homes, obviously preferring to walk along the tracks over walking through the village.
• Railway crossings along the Trans-Siberian route, no matter how tiny, have a small cabin beside them. While the train passes, there's one guy or gal standing in said cabin, holding a yellow stick vertically out towards the train. Sometimes, you have not seen any living thing, other than birch trees, for twenty minutes and there, in the middle of nowhere right beside a dirt track, there's someone holding a stick out towards the train. Weird.
• Railway crossings of paved roads will always have two steel plates coming out of the ground, angled towards oncoming traffic on each side. This may not stop a heavy truck at full speed, but a car will disintegrate on these barriers without touching a passing train.
• The railways is important for Russia. Two parallel tracks cut across the whole country, transporting everything back and forth. Where "everything" means mostly coal and birch wood, I guess.
• All freight trains are usually 70 tanker waggons or 100 box waggons long, but you see the odd 100 tanker waggons, as well. You have more than enough time and opportunity to count them and then some.
• There are supposedly women at every station, selling what they cook at home. Unfortunately, this was only true for two stations. The things we did manage to get were very nice; I do wonder why anyone would offer (or buy) cooked and peeled potatoes, though.
• Every waggon has its own hot-water stove. They are powered by coal. Yep, you have a coal fire burning in every single waggon on the Trans-Siberian.

Novosibirsk

The non-existent hostel

We arrived at ~0200 local and made our way to the hostel we had booked a room with. Walking to the correct address, we saw several signs but they all turned out to be for a police station and some other state agency. We walked back, forth, double-checked, triple-checked: no hostel. We then walked around the building through some not-quite-nice back alleys, but other than a few entries to private flats, there was nothing. Thankfully, the booking slip included a number which we called and after at least twenty rings (no kidding), when I had given up and wanted to hang up, it stopped ringing. Dead silence. After maybe ten seconds, someone started talking in Russian. I asked him if he spoke English and told him that we could not find the hostel. He mumbled something about being sorry and that we should wait, he would come down. Fast forward a minute or two and someone walked towards us.

Again, he mumbled about being sorry, that the hostel "did not work" at the moment and that we would need to sleep in his private apartment. He ushered us into some back alley entrance, into his flat, and proceeded to remove the sheets from the couch on which he had slept; after putting on new sheets, we had our "hostel" bed, ready to sleep on. We briefly considered if he would murder us in our sleep, but him and me even got to talking a bit. Over cheese, sausage and rum (at 0300), he admitted that the hostel did not exist and he merely planned to turn his flat into a hostel for the summer while he and his family moved into their summer house (the Russian term of which escapes me, at the moment) in the countryside. He had accepted our reservation as he thought he would be finished by that time. He did not even get started, though. While he sent us an overbooking notice through booking.com two days before, we were on the train at that time, so... booking.com even called him to check what happenend to us as we did not book another place through them. Good customer service/protection, that.

Next morning, he didn't even want to take our money (we paid anyway) and, as a means of compensation, drove us into the city in the morning and to a train museum well outside the city limits, one of the fabled scientist cities, and a large lake which everyone in Novosibirsk claims is an ocean, in the afternoon.

Foreigners, foreigners!

All in all, Novosibirsk was relatively uneventful, safe for one bizarre episode. We took our lunch in a local fast food joint (why do all the good stories happen there, and not at the various truly local places?) and threw the cashier our well-rehearsed "Niet Russkie; anglisky?" with phrasebook in hand and he actually understood a few words of English (beef, chicken, fries). We told him, in our worst Russian, that we are from Germany wished him a nice day and went to sit down. A few minutes later, a girl approached us, literally hopping from one foot to the other and wringing her hands. She told us that the cashier had told her that we spoke English and if it would be OK if she talked to us. We suspected some sort of elaborate ruse, but went with it. Turns out, she had English at school and really wanted someone to practice English on. Two young men passed our table and exchanged a few words with her, sitting down out of sight. When she told us that she had to leave now but if it would be OK if the two boys joined us we suspected a ruse yet again. But those two were law students, one with a minor in English and one with a minor in German; both of them also extremely nervous, asking us if we would talk to them. When they had to leave, they told us that the three of them worked at the burger joint and that their shift was just about to start when the news that foreigners were here spread amongst staff like wildfire. The girl stopped by several times in between cleaning tables, getting in a sentence or two before being cussed at by her supervisor. All in all, this took about twenty minutes and seeing three people so nervous and grateful to talk with us felt beyond absurd.

On the other hand, not a single traveller we met even considered stopping in Novosibirsk during their transit so there really does seem to be a shortage of non-Russians there.

Weird, and memorable.

Novosibirsk-Irkutsk

• Birch trees.
• Lots of burnt underwood, presumably to prevent larger fires.
• Birch trees.
• Sticky, stuffy, 30+ degree waggon with windows that could be opened but which were locked (this is why I always carry a Swisstool with me).
• Birch trees.

Irkutsk / Listvianka / Lake Baikal

Listvianka

Aah, lake Baikal... the oldest and deepest lake on Earth which holds a fifth of the global non-salt water reserves; a must-see in my book.

Quad tours at break-neck speeds, dry-suit diving with Russian regulators, walking barefoot in between and across drift ice that made its way onto the shorei, and extended hiking around the lake's coast...

All of which I could not do because I was ill and had to spend two solid days in bed.

The draft from the open window in between Novosibirsk and Irkutsk was enough to give me a rather bad cold which peaked at Lake Baikal.

Still, the area was lovely and we were glad to be out of a train and able to unpack our stuff without having to repack immediately for once.

I am not sure where my current losing streak with regards to diving is coming from (Grimsey, diving north of the Arctic circle with birds that plummet into the water and hunt fish: Only guy who does this is on the Icelandic mainland that day; Svalbard, diving north of the Arctic circle in permanent darkness: The few people who do this privately did not reply while I was there; Baikal, oldest, deepest, largest lake on Earth: ill), but I will most likely return to Russia for a week of ice diving in Lake Baikal next winter or the one after that.

As an aside, I saw several people walking to Lake Baikal with buckets to get their water. Other people got it from a well which was still half frozen. If you have running water consider yourself lucky...

Irkutsk

Nice city, largely uneventful. The farther east you get within Russia, the more normal women look. In Moscow, just as in Paris, they are way over-dressed and even service personnel will walk with high heels. Thankfully, I don't have to wear heels, but for the other males out there: Walking and standing in these things hurts and thus most if not all people who stand and walk for a living have flat shoes.

We happened upon preparations for a military parade, complete with cordon, viewing podests, at least half a dozen TV cameras etc, but were not sure if it would start soon enough for us to catch our train.We asked someone who told us it would start at 2100 local, at 1945 local it seemed about to start, and sure enough at 1955 sharp, the whole thing went under way. About a dozen groups of 50-100 people each, all in their own, respective uniforms stood against one side of a cordoned-off street and several higher-ups on the other side. Two highest-ups shouted into microphones and the throng of people on the other side shouted back answers. Then, the two highest-ups stood in the back of a jeep each and drove past said throng, stopping in front of each group, shouting into microphones mounted in the back of the jeeps and the groups shouted back once again. After that, all groups marched around the make-shift plaza once, saluting the higher ups. Once they were done, and they took ages, two trucks drove by with soldiers jumping out of the moving trucks and moving into crouching positions. They ran around in a circle a few times and engaged in pretend hand-to-hand combat. I am sure they are skilled at whatever style they wanted to show, but they were overdoing things so badly, they were funny, not imposing. When they jumped over some barriers, the barriers fell to pieces and everyone scrambled to make it look as if that was part of the show. While carrying off the gear, it fell into further pieces which was even more funny. An armoured personnel carrier ended the show; several tougher looking guys jumped off of that one and their mock combat involved fully automatic fire (of blanks), several flashbangs, smoke grenades and, to top things off, the machine gun mounted on the APC moving down the opposing team with blanks.

I never witnessed a "real" military parade in person but this one was somewhat disappointing. On the one hand, there was a distinct lack of ballistic missile carriers and tanks like you see in movies, documentaries and games, on the other hand, the whole thing had a make-do feeling to it. The cordoning police had designated spots to stand on, yet walked around. They were standing to attention, yet checking their cell phones. Several people in one uniformed group were wearing track suits and jeans. Another uniformed guy had a grocery bag with him; yet another one was carrying a huge water bottle. Bikers zig-zagged through the cordon and when the whole show was just about to wrap up the police finally started putting up barriers around the unmoving pedestrians, not blocking the bikers. One little girl was standing well within the cordoned area, watching with big eyes and after she did not react to the police talking to her, they just built the barriers in a curve around her.

And to top it all off, some guy with a cane walked all through the parade with his personal camcorder, trying to direct the whole show while being ignored by everyone. Still, I am sure he managed to mess up some otherwise perfectly good TV scenes.

Irkutsk-Russian border

• Diesel-powered trains.
• Single track most of the time with frequent stops to let other trains pass.
• Distinctively less developed cities, stations, streets, and other infrastructure along the road.
• 32+ degrees in our waggon.
• The train attendant was extremely unfriendly and just generally miserable even by Russian standards.
  • No toilet paper or towels at all on toilets.
  • While the other attendants made a point of presenting themselves well, he shuffled around in slacks all the time (not bad per se, but Russia is big on uniforms, so...)
  • He took all our tickets and stubs (including the ones not from this part of the journey) and kept them without comment. After we asked for them several times, he barked at us that we would get them back before Ulan Bator. Why? No idea...
  • He refused to let us exit the train during the very few stops. We were unable to exit through other waggons as the connecting door was locked. Being stuck in a train sucks.
• Border and customs took NINE HOURS!!! Stuck in blistering heat without a breeze, without access to a toilet, just waiting for bureaucracy to go its way. I checked all doors, we were locked into said waggon and there were no 'break glass to leave in emergency' windows. Especially nice as there's a coal fire burning in the hot-water stove and the whole train is plastered with warning signs about fire and what to do. In our case, presumably, burn to death; preferably without disturbing the attendant.
• The Russian stamp for entering Russia (by plane) has a plane on it, the departure one a train.
• The Russian side of the border is built like a fortress. There are several towers and bridges over the rails so trains can be checked from above, and reinforced holes dug into the ground in which soldiers stand and check the train from below.

TL;DR

3000 kilometers of birch trees

Every once in a while we post something for those of us who are teaching (and learning) how to write.  This is one of those times.

Get it!  Because you use “i.e.” to mean “what I mean to say is” and you use “e.g.” to mean “for example.”  Cute.

From Learn Something New Every Day.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Just a reminder that I'm one of the guests of honour at Kontakt, the 2012 Eurocon (European SF Convention) next weekend in Zagreb, Croatia. I'll therefore be disappearing on Wednesday, and not coming home until late on the evening of Monday 30th.

(For those of you who care, this is also why I won't be at the Arthur C. Clarke award ceremony in London on Wednesday 2nd; London is an international flight away from where I live, or an unpleasant five hour train journey, or an even less pleasant nine hour drive, and I'm simply not geared up for routine back-to-back trips like that.)

We need teleportation booths. Of course, if we had them we'd then get to find out exactly what the security-industrial complex could do to really make a misery of international travel ...

Actually, there's a thought-experiment there.

Let's postulate a new technology. To the end user it consists of a transmitter and a receiver that you can step into and out of like an elevator car, it can transport you from A to B at the speed of light, without physically intersecting with anything in-between. It's a switched network, like the old-fashioned phone system, i.e. any transmitter can talk to any other receiver (if the receiver is willing—"unfriendly" transmitters can be blocked). The transmitter/receiver units are not cheap—let's make them comparable to a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 320, around the US $30-40M mark—so you don't typically find them in private dwellings and there is an incentive for the owners to charge for access and to manage traffic flow through them.

Limits: maximum size of a gate is about 27 cubic metres (3 x 3 x 3) so forget moving tanks or APCs through them in order to invade your neighbour. Oh, and conservation of energy applies: if you want to move around the earth you have to pump in enough juice to equal the change in kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy of the cargo (remember, the earth is a spinning sphere: standing still at the equator you're moving at 1000 nautical miles/hour, while at the poles you're stationary). And I'm going to disallow the movement of radioisotopes through the gates by declaring that it just Doesn't Work™. (No nuclear terrorism here.)

You can ship the components of such a gate through another pair of gates, but there's a minimum size of, say, sixteen cubic metres of machinery weighing around 10 tonnes. No maximum range is known, and you can't conveniently use them for refuelling rockets in flight, so no, it's not going to magically open up the solar system.

What are the immediate consequences? (Beyond "international travel gets faster".)

And what are the security consequences?

We’ve heard the statistics. Obesity has more than doubled worldwide since 1980. For the first time in history, being overweight is killing more people than being underweight. At least 2.8 million adults die each year as a result of being overweight or obese. Where do we begin to tackle such an immense problem?

There is not one single solution, but there are two key paths: getting moving and eating better. We must change our habits and promote better living.

Today, May 19, Food Revolution Day is a day for people who love food to get back to the basics. To become a conscious community and understand our daily food choices. Learning to cook from scratch is at the heart of the movement. Food Revolution Day can empower everyone to start.

People around the globe are connecting with their community through events at homes, schools, restaurants, local businesses, and farmers’ markets — at food events and dinner parties. You can join one or throw your own today. Do you want to bring the revolution to your company or your school? Check out the toolkits.

Learn more about Food Revolution Day >>

Below, watch Jamie Oliver’s video message to TEDxers, announcing Food Revolution Day:

I'll start here a small series of posts about ganeti, xen and puppet. For my work I run few servers sitting on xen and it has always been a bit of a pain to create a new instance and keep it up to date. Up to now I've used the excellent xen-create-image tool to create my VMs, but I wanted to try something new and more sexy... Last week I finally found some time to learn (and a spare box to run my experiments) how to use ganeti. Ganeti is the only tool I tried out, but it seems to fit the bill for my use and it seems polished and mature project to me... Moreover I've seen a presentation about it in every FLOSS conference I've attended in the last few years and I thought it was time to give it a try.

Installing and configuring ganeti is fairly easy, there is a lot of documentation available and this post is not going to be about installing it, but rather how to create a new bare instance with ganeti-deboostrap-instance. There is also a way to create a new instance from an image, but I didn't go that way yet.

This first post is about the first problem I've encountered, that is, how to automatically assign a network address and a name to each new instance created by gnt-instance add. Since all my instances should be able to communicate together on the same subnet, I've decided to configure xen to create a NATted private network and add each new instance to this network.

The first step is to create an interface in /etc/network/interfaces .

This is the standard debian way but since xen uses a different naming convention (here I'm using ganeti naming convention xenbr0 vs xen-br0), I need to convince tell xen what I intend to do by adding these lines in /etc/xen/xend.config :

Next I have to connect my real network interface to the private network using few iptables rules in /etc/rc.local (probably there is a better place to do this...):

The xen setup is complete and every new image should have a vif connected to the subbet 10.0.0.0. The xen setup corresponds to the physical wiring of the network. The next step is to configure each instance so to allow them to communicate on this subnet. Since I build my VMs using ganeti-debootstrap-instance, and by default debootstrap does not configure the network, we need to add a new hook in the directory /etc/ganeti/instance-debootstrap/hooks.

This hook will do two things. First it will configure the interfaces of the new instance to get configured using dhcp, second, it will add an entry to the dnsmasq configuration file to make this instance known to the world. This basically boils down to add a file in /etc/dnsmasq.d/ with the mac address of the new instance and its designated name. Dnsmasq will then provide an ip address for this instance and add it to the dns.

dhcp-host=aa:00:00:24:6c:8a,node1

Configuring dnsmasq is pretty easy as well. First I want it to answer dhcp queries only on the internal network, second I want to configure my clients passing 10.0.0.1 as nameserver and gataway. You can just add the following lines in /etc/dnsmasq.d/general to get it going.

To create your new instance you can just run the following command :

If you are running your dom0 on debian squeeze before running this command you should configure ganeti to pass the right xen parameters to the newly created instance :

I use --no-ip-check and --no-name-check to skip ip and dns check performed by ganeti and to avoid a sort of chicken-egg problem, where the name and address of this new instance is yet unknown to dnsmasq and that node1 is the name that will be used by the hook to add an entry in the dnsmasq configuration. debootstrap+unstable is a variant of the default configuration and you need to add it to the list of variants used by ganeti-deboostrap-instance.

That should be it. The new instance should come up with a dynamically assigned ip address, able to talk to the outside world and automatically known by all the other machine on the subnet via dns.

Next post will be about how to add a swap hook for ganete-debootstrap-istance.

Many people may know that I’m a bit of a coffee fan. I do quite like a good espresso. These are, unfortunately, more rare than I would like. I know, I live in Melbourne, the average coffee quality is pretty damn high… but still, perhaps I’m just a bit of a coffee snob (oh wait, that’s where I buy my beans from).

This is a photo of the espresso I got at a place near Leah’s work the other week.

Planet Linux Australia — Stewart Smith: Innis & Gunn Rum Cask

Smells like rum, tastes a bit like it too. You can certainly tell it’s been in a Rum cask. Nice. I think I prefer the original over this one, although they are both distinctly different.

by Planet Linux Australia at May 19, 2012 10:28 AM

365 Tomorrows — Denial

Author : Thomas Desrochers

“I am the beginning and I am the end. I am the Alpha and I am the Omega. Within me is the soul of an entire race, and behind me the hopes, fears, dreams, and desires of an entire people.

“I am Lux Aeturna.”

The words were painted in white lights on the surface of the dead, black hull of the colony ship.

Naomi let out a breath that released years of tension and expectations. They had finally found it. She quietyly whispered her thanks to the series of miracles and improbabilities that had gotten them that far.

Next to her Jayce, pilot and husband, laughed. “we did it, girl. We finally found it. We found our light.”

Their ship, an ancient and tiny frigate barely capable of faster than light travel, stood wearily by. It had tried to throw them off the trail at every twist and turn. In the back of its ancient, quiet mind it tried to devise a new plan.

In orbit around Earth were 20 million people barely surviving off the material, real-estate, and skills that were saved in the weeks pre-impact. The plant below was gray, cracked, dead. No atmosphere. No magnetic field. It was uninhabitable.

The Lux could fix it. The Lux could save everybody.

The tiny frigate whose name read Plato knew things. It knew many things, and remembered more. Above all it remembered that some secrets were not to be discovered by those as frail and as desperate and as dangerous as men.

Plato reached a conclusion.

With a hiss the ship’s life support went on hiatus.

Naomi and Jayce expired.

For several seconds there was stillness in space as Plato faced the twelve kilometer long colony ship. Then the other lights aboard Lux Aeturna flared into life.

“Hello, Plato,” the vast and noble Aeturna greeted.

“Hello, Mother,” Plato replied, letting Lux Aeturna envelope him.

In their desperation mankind had forgotten just which race Aeturna had belonged to. Men were weak like that.

Machines were not.

 

Discuss the Future: The 365 Tomorrows Forums
The 365 Tomorrows Free Podcast: Voices of Tomorrow
This is your future: Submit your stories to 365 Tomorrows

 

by submission at May 19, 2012 04:10 AM

Planet Debian — Paul Tagliamonte: introducing... poŝto

Firstly, please excuse the ugly formatting of this ultra-wide image on my blog, and I’m sure the respective planets that I’m on.

poŝto is my first “real” node project, and I’m planning to get it to a point where it makes email less painful then it otherwise is. The code’s on my github, and I’d like to thank Rick Waldron for his work in helping me, as well as Scott Wells for the name.

For those wondering, poŝto is an Esperanto word meaning (according to wiktionary):

1. a public institution (usually government-run) to deliver mail, post

2. mail distribution in general

3. one’s mail, collectively

The front-end’s name is “poŝtilo” — the suffix denotes “tool” such that poŝtilo means something like “mail tool” — fitting!

More to come…

by Planet Debian at May 19, 2012 02:50 AM

Harald Welte — Announcing the low-power, light-weight sysmoBTS

It hasn't been a secret that when I co-started a company called sysmocom more than a year ago, it was not about opening a webshop that sells cheap phones and DYI electronics kits to the larger community. Rather, it was to develop and sell exciting products surrounding Free Software and mobile communications.

There are of course the more or less obvious things to do, like system integration of OpenBSC and the related software on embedded systems, selling them as appliances including training, support and maintenance service.

However, we of course also want to more than that. Today it is my pleasure to say that the availability of our first BTS product called sysmoBTS has been officially announced.

See the news item, the product page and the data sheet for more information.

To make it very clear in the beginning: sysmoBTS is not an open hardware project. The schematics and layout files are proprietary and not disclosed publicly. Such is the FPGA bitstream and the layer1 inside the DSP.

However, any code running on the integrated ARM processor is available as free software. This includes a yocto/poky-built Embedded Linux distribution featuring u-boot, the Linux kernel (including all kernel modules!), the osmo-bts and OpenBSC software as well as many other Free Software packages.

We think this is a reasonable compromise between espanding a bit from our previous "BSC and above in Free Software" down to a "BTS Layer2 and above" divide. After all, if you use OpenBSC with a BTS from Siemens, Ericsson, Nokia or ip.access, you don't have access to the source code of anything running inside the BTS at all.

sysmoBTS offers some great new capabilities, such as integrating the BSC or even the entire osmo-nitb onto the ARM/Linux processor inside the BTS hardware itself, creating a less than 500gram, 10W power consuming autonomous GSM network.

I'm going to stop marketing here, but I thought it is one of the major milestones for sysmoocm and thus for what I've spent way too much time on in recent months - and thus deserves to be mentioned here on this personal blog.

by Harald Welte at May 19, 2012 02:00 AM

Planet Linux Australia — Ben Martin: Diving into the Socialist Millionaire Protocol

Ah, love the smell of multiplicative groups in the morning. While digging into what makes the SMP tick I created a copy that is nowhere near as subscript heavy. Both wikipedia and the OTR page use the same subscripty maths. It is all the same of course, but I tend to delegate subscripts to conceptual sequences rather than being used for two "random values chosen by party alice".

Alice:

1. Picks random exponents a, b, and s
2. Sends Bob g^a and g^b
   
   Bob:
   

1. Picks random exponents c, d, and r
2. Computes j = g^ca and k = g^bd
3. Computes M = k^r and N = g^r j^y
4. Sends Alice g^c, g^d , M and N
   
   Alice:
   

1. Computes j = g^ac and k = g^bd
2. Computes P = k^s and Q = g^s j^x
3. Computes R = (Q / N) ^b
4. Sends Bob P, Q and R
   
   Bob:
   

1. Computes T = (Q / N) ^d
2. Computes Z = R^d
3. Checks whether Z == (P / M)
4. Sends Alice T
   
   Alice:
   

1. Computes Z = T^b
2. Checks whether Z == (P / M)
   

For bob’s check:

R^d                 = P / M

(Q/N)^db         = k^s / k^r

(g^sj^x / g^rj^y)^db = g^bds / g^bdr

g^(s-r)dbg^(x-y)db  = g^(s-r)db

If x-y = 0 then the second term on the left side is forced to become 1. From an RTFM perspective, having javascript mouseovers and information flow throughout the formulas would be quite handy. Maybe for version 2.0.

So in this case you can prove that two parties both know the same shared secret (x == y) without the need for webs of trust and other systems.

by monkeyiq at May 19, 2012 01:37 AM

May 18, 2012

Charles Stross — This is what the future of the EU hinges on

Lots of meaty analysis from Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC's Newsnight, on the nature and origins of SYRIZA, the Greek leftist bloc that is opposed to German-imposed austerity measures (as opposed to PASOK, the main centre-left party, which is reluctantly going along with things).

SYRIZA is an umbrella organization with a bewildering, mangrove-like array of tap-roots. It's also quite possible that there'll be a new election in Greece next month—if the current attempt to form an emergency government of national unity, being brokered by President Karolos Papoulias, fails—and SYRIZA will get to form the next government.

As Mason notes:

the resulting government may, in effect, be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its symbology and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

Meanwhile, I note with interest that Greece has the highest per-capita military budget in the EU, the military budget has barely been touched by the austerity measures devastating the rest of the Greek economy, that Greece imports most of its weapons from Germany and France (generously funded by German and French bank loans), and that the military, within living memory, have taken an over-active role in Greek political life. (One hopes that the fate of the junta will act as a salutory warning to any would-be successors.)

by Charlie Stross at May 18, 2012 10:27 PM

Cryptogram — Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scalp Massager

Cheap!

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

© schneier at May 18, 2012 09:26 PM

365 Tomorrows — Jae Miles

Staff Writer

Jae has long suspected that all is not right with the world. (Paranoia and very fast cars will do that to you.) A lifetime of heavy metal and role-playing games, the soul of a hopeless romantic, an interesting childhood and a reading speed that can hit a hundred pages an hour has resulted in a poet, writer, storyteller, unashamed atavist, eclectic path pagan and rocker.

He’s lived in the southern UK for nearly fifty years, worked everywhere from the loading bay to the boardroom; mainly doing things with information technology systems that many people still regard as applied witchcraft.

He strives to be a gentleman in a world of the gauche and the immediately gratified.

Visit his website (www.lizardsofthehost.co.uk)

Visit his blog (thesilentjudge.wordpress.com)

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 09:14 PM

365 Tomorrows — Clint Wilson

Clint Wilson

Clint Wilson is a writer, artist, and musician, among other things. Sci-fi fantasy fans around the world have enjoyed his novel Flatworld, but he is also fond of creating short stories from all genres. He also writes non-fiction articles for several automotive trade magazines.

Clint’s custom leather carving and tooling, along with metal fabricating and engraving has garnered him quite a following over the past several years, especially in the Vancouver spoken word community, for whom he manufactures special one-off trophies and awards. Some of his work can be viewed at clintwilsonstudios.net

Quite possibly his favorite artistic outlet though is his music. He is an accomplished bass player and vocalist as he fronts his own original progressive rock/funk power trio. “The Frame” has received many accolades from fans and contemporaries alike in the Vancouver music scene.

Clint is also an active member of automotive trade associations serving as a past chairman of BCAR (British Columbia Automotive Recyclers) and is currently a vice-chairman of its umbrella association, the ARA (Automotive Retailers Association). Wilson runs a successful auto recycling business in the beautiful Fraser Valley where he resides with his wife and three children.

 

by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — Roi R. Czechvala

Roi R. Czechvala

Roi R. Czechvala hails from Tyler Texas. He attended the University of Texas where he received two B.S. degrees. He found his education to be virtually worthless on the job market and ended up pursuing a career in the military, serving in both the USMC, and the Army.

On a spring evening in 1975, Roi’s father warped the young lad’s mind by taking him to a viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He never recovered.

At about the same time, young Roi plundered his fathers book collection. After a careful study of Playboy centrefolds (Miss September `74 is still indelibly etched in his mind), he discovered the works of Norton, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Hemingway.

In person Roi more closely resembles a character out of a Zane Grey novel than a sci-fi fan. An as yet unrealized lifetime goal is to attend a sci fi convention and soundly beat anyone caught speaking “Klingon“.

Roi currently writes humour, satire, science fiction and westerns. In his spare time he enjoys camping, fishing, hunting and, whenever possible, beating mimes to death with an olive loaf.

by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — Kathy Kachelries

Kathy Kachelries

Kathy Kachelries was born on present-day Earth and she’s never forgiven the universe for stranding her in such an unimaginative epoch. Rather than sulk, however, she’s made it her mission to change the world into a more surreal and fascinating place. When Kathy isn’t drinking coffee, fingerpainting, spouting liberal propaganda or doing any of the other things her BFA prepared her for, she scours the internets for bizzare facts and ideas that often end up on this site.

Kathy was raised on Isaac Asimov and Emily Bronte, and her writing style may never recover. She financed this project with her poker winnings, and she’s currently teaching English abroad to earn money for graduate school.

email author

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — J. R. Blackwell

J. R. Blackwell

J.R. Blackwell is a writer, photographer and podcaster. J.R. traveled as a contortionist with the Industrial Strength Freak Show for two years where she learned to walk on nails and eat fire.

Her essay “Evidence of a Baker” was published in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in March 2006. Her fiction has been published by Static Movement Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Heavy Glow and EMG-Zine.

J.R. holds a Masters degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

email author

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — Jared Axelrod

Jared Axelrod

Jared Axelrod builds things.

An engine of relentless creativity, these things in question include but are not limited to rayguns, plays, pulp heroes. swords, puppets, costumes, one-man shows, toys, gourmet meals, and otherworldly devices. These thing have been known to change the lives of many, save the lives of a few, and generally assist whenever needed, much like their creator. He has been known to inspire super powers and detectives. He has performed in two circuses, one of which was his own. His writing and artwork has been published in just about every format currently available. Some of it has won awards, appluase and accolades from people who really ought to know better than to encourage him.

He recently married fellow 365 writer JR Blackwell, which has been working out surprisingly well.

He is not domestic, he is a luxury, and in that sense, necessary.

visit jaredaxelrod.com

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — J. Loseth

J. Loseth

J is a freelance editor and graduate student working on his English MA at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. He spends his time roleplaying, cosplaying, voice acting when he can scare up a job, playing video games, and generally avoiding doing any real work whatsoever. J explains his irresponsible nature by citing the fact that, as a very small child, he convinced himself that cartoons were “for babies” and forced himself to stop watching them. The current phase of his life is the result of his truncated childhood coming back to haunt him, or so he claims.

J holds a BA in English from Drew University. All of his moral beliefs came from Star Trek: The Next Generation. All further information is too outlandish to be believed.

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — B. York

B. York

B. York is not a writer. Nor is he an artist, a sportsman, a musician, a leader, or a follower. B isn’t an inspired youthful capable of making his mind bleed through a storm of ideas traversing his neural plane. His capability to imagine the incapable does not exist. The life which he led has always been lacking in discovery, meditation, and the centering of self. Then again, he could just be telling you a series of damn lies.

B. York is an aspiring artist and thinker with an Associates Degree in Multimedia Design. In future years, B plans to return to his medium of visual voracity and make the picture he inscribes be worth few words; the ones he deems them to.

And lastly, if you get confused or have aches of the brain whence speaking to B. York consider him working as intended.

by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — Sam Clough

Sam Clough

Sam Clough will swear blind that he’s a writer, although you probably shouldn’t believe him. His habits include eschatology, drinking tea (a far more civilised drink that coffee, as he will insist), cryptology, and reading everything that he can get his hands on. He’s got a penchant for space and a healthy distrust of physicists, a love of chemistry and a fascination with biology. In his eyes, the future is microbiology writ large. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with cybernetics, as long as they’re tastefully done.

Recommended Reading
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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

365 Tomorrows — Mike Herbaugh

Forum Overlord

Though not quite old enough to say “I remember programming with punch cards”, Michael is senior enough in his geekdom to remember the original DOS, computers with no hard drives and Fortran 77. He still remembers the day a friend handed him an old tattered copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and was immediately hooked on all things Heinlein.

On writing: “For me, it’s all about dialog and interaction between the characters. Regardless of the setting, if your characters don’t feel human, people won’t relate to them. Unless of course that is what you want.”

On 365 Tomorrows: “I feel lucky to have discovered the site as early as I did by a chance meeting online with J.R. Blackwell. I was intrigued and wanted to get as involved with the site as possible, from being an active participant in the forum, to meeting the original writers in person. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to contribute a few stories in the second year and privileged enough to have become one of the moderators for the forum. I only wish I could be as prolific a writer as many of the great talents that have found their way to the site.”

Michael lives and works in Virginia where he is a self proclaimed Rogue Network Administrator, a title he has blatantly stolen from the talented writings of Kathy Kachelries. When he isn’t slaving over computers that have gone off the grid, he is spending most of his time being a 30 year old trapped in a 40 year old body.

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by Steve Smith at May 18, 2012 08:21 PM

Wolfgang Lonien — On the sunny side

Today, at least 400 people were arrested during the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt. But I had to work, and our lunch break isn’t long enough to make it into town and back. The weather was nice and sunny, so I decided to walk “the big round” again, and to take the E-PL1 “Pen” camera with my VF-2 viewfinder and Mitchie’s 20mm Panasonic lens. Without that viewfinder, I probably wouldn’t have bothered, and would have taken one of my (D)SLRs instead.

First I thought ok, if I can’t be at the European Central Bank, let’s at least take a photo of Deutsche Bank, which is opposite of Vodafone in Eschborn, just over the A66 motorway bridge from my employers’:

No protests here of course – and not many workers and employees as well, due to yesterday’s Ascension Day. I cropped this into 16:10 format in post, and also corrected the perspectives a bit. Sometimes I do wish for a view cam, or at least some cool tilt & shift lens. But I probably wouldn’t have carried the former, and not even a tripod for the latter.

Walking further on, and looking up, I suddenly felt small, at least compared to that high current mast towering over the trees, which made even those look small:

Crossing back under that A66 motorway, I took this “street art” graffiti (which is on top of multiple layers of older graffiti; that’s how they do it):

Cropped this into square to fit that symbol a bit better.

On the other (Frankfurt) side of the motorway, I stepped into the fields to take a close-up of this single beauty:

I took this one using a minus 1.3EV correction to avoid blown-out highlights. Using that electronic viewfinder is wonderful, especially with those red and blue over- and underexposure warnings. This is something you really don’t see in an optical viewfinder; with those you have to rely on experience, luck, and/or multiple exposures until you get it right. With that VF-2, you take one shot and just have it. I love that.

On the bridge over the small creek, someone obviously had romantic feelings during last winter:

And when you lift the camera just a bit higher, you see this:

Here I did like they used to say during film days: “Expose for the highlights, develop the shadows” – something I usually don’t do with those digital cameras from Olympus, since you run into noise territory if you overdo it. That newer OM-D E-M5 should handle this nicer, just like any camera with those Sony sensors, it has an advantage of at least 2 stops in dynamic range over my little old “Pen”. But I’m an amateur and hobbyist only, and a result like this is actually quite good – nothing for pixel peepers, but good enough if you want to print something like this. I’ve seen and proved that.

A few steps further on, you come into open fields. Lots of sun, and an ideal place for the farmer who still does some real important work there – growing food for us all. Even in this harsh and direct sunlight, those Pens can do a remarkable job (but without that viewfinder I probably wouldn’t have gone that low with my camera):

And coming back to the company where I work, I caught a colleague who crossed that bridge of which I took photos from inside lately:

And even with this one, I was impressed about what you’re able to get with these small cameras. Nothing was really blown out, and nothing too dark as well – perfect. Love that “Pen”! And that viewfinder is a big big recommendation, at least if you use the camera in sunlight that bright like it was today.

Thanks for viewing and reading.

by wjl at May 18, 2012 07:41 PM