Copyrighteous

After a 3-4 month break, I was catching up on mail in the Unicode email list and I noticed a number of threads about the interrobang (my favorite punctuation point and perhaps my favorite Unicode code point (U+203D)).

At Debconf5, I was talking with a number of the Spanish speaking developers about the lack of an inverted interrobang in Unicode which renders the glyph less useful in Spanish which normally prefixes questions or exclamations with inverted versions of the glyph at the end of the sentence. Why shouldn't this carry over the interrobang as well‽ I was, quite seriously, thinking about writing up a proposal for the inclusion of an inverted interrobang myself when I found this message from Michael Everson on the Unicode email list:

N2935: Proposal to add INVERTED INTERROBANG to the UCS http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n2935-interrobang.pdf

This will be posted to the WG2 and L2 sites in due course.

After composing a message to Michael thanking him for his proposal, I realized (helped by the announcement to withdraw the entire Unicode Standard immediately after Michael's proposal) that the proposal has been sent on April 1st and was, in all likelihood, a joke. How cruel is it to toy with my emotions like this‽

Sent about a month later, I found another message from Michael saying:

I suppose I should note that despite the date of its publication I am completely serious about: http://www.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2935.pdf

I have written Michael to confirm that he is serious. In any situation, I think it is important that all supporters of the interrobang (and it's inverted cousin) make their voice heard in Unicode to ensure that the inverted interrobang gains a much-deserved spot of its own in the standard.

Update: Michael Everson has told me that the Unicode Technical Committee has asked him to first find Hispanic support for an inverted interrobang. If someone knows of this or of a list for Spanish typographers where we can ask, please let me know.

Over the last few months, it's been disconcerting to see the reported cases of people getting fined (or worse) for using open wireless access points without permission.

I travel frequently and the use of open APs is an important (if not always reliable) way that I get online. Every time my Internet connection at home goes down, I take advantage of one my neighbors APs. To balance things out, I make sure I always run an open AP for others out my home.

There are many smart reasons not to run an open AP but, for me, doing so is about being a good neighbor. I've found that even for the most cautious and conservative, most of the serious risks of running an AP can be mitigated by a measured combination of firewalling and monitoring.

The most ridiculous part of this crackdown is not how common and completely normal intentional "transgressive" wireless sharing is but how how often people do it completely unintentionally and without ever knowing.

Once I was in New York City with Micah and Biella and, knowing that we were technically proficient, a member of Biella's extended family invited us over to help fix his printer which he was unable to print to over his wireless network. What eventually became clear was that his wireless AP was set of incorrectly and had never worked. His laptop couldn't find the printer because the printer was on his home network and he had, without his knowledge, been using his neighbor's wireless since he moved in. He had been paying for DSL which he had never actually used.

In densely populated places -- New York in particular but any Western city probably falls into this category -- this is incredibly common. Punishing people for doing what so many people do completely unintentionally -- and almost entirely without negative consequences I might add -- would be silly if what was at stake was not so serious.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on Creative Commons that was critical of what I thought was a major difference between CC and the Free Software movement that many folks in the Free Software world didn't seem to see. I showed it to a number of people and received a series of very mixed reactions. Some folks from iCommons Italy said they were reconsidering their role in CC. Cory Doctorow (who worked for CC at the time) compared me to a Troskyite. Others were conflicted.

Since I knew the article was potentially inflammatory and could easily be misunderstood, I've sat on it. In the last year, the things that bothered me about CC have continued or been aggravated and my article has continued to be passed around and revised. A growing number of people have been pushing me to publish. Under pressure -- and kind words -- from both Richard Stallman and a team of folks at Libroscope in France, (in addition to everyone who has been pushing me all along), I've finally decided to throw the article out there.

Many people seem to be criticizing CC lately and I don't agree with all of them. As I say in the article, I think CC is doing a lot of good. My criticism is not with what CC has done but with the fact that they have failed to take a strong ethical position in the way that that has made Free Software successful.

Please feel free to pass the text around. The piece is short and I encourage anyone to read it and send me feedback. If you're at What The Hack, just find me.

Finally, thank you to everyone who helped listen to this, read it, give me feedback, send me corrections. An incomplete list includes Alan Toner, Jamie King, Julien Tayon, Antoine Pitrou, Biella Coleman, Andreea Carnu, Richard Stallman, Holger Levsen, and WTH-DebCamp the Debconf5 sauna party.

You can read the whole article at its canonical(!) location on my homepage or upon on on Advogato. Source is also available.

What the Hack starts in a couple days and I'm already in the area. It promises to be a fantastic outdoor hacker summer camp.

Howver, I'm a little worried about one thing. It's raining now. A lot. It's basically rained every day in the last week. I feel like that many people, that much electrical power, and that much water is a bad combination.

My plan is to stick with with my friend Andreea. That way if the worst happens, at least we'll be putting the cute in electrocute.

I've been somewhat disappointed with the lack of community participation in some of what I feel were my most fun and potentially contagious blog entries. For example, after spending almost two hours forming a list of packages useful in writing package name poetry, not a single person added to the body of work in the genre.

I think the problem may be lack of incentive and I've stepped up to remedy that. I have purchased 10 Dutch Bottle Scrapers (also known as flessenlikkers or flessenschrapers in the Netherlands) and I will be giving them away as prizes for small competitions I coordinate on my blog in the near future. While they are not expensive in the Netherlands, for the rest of world, these wonderful kitchen tools are absolutely priceless.

To learn more about flessenlikkers, read the Wikipedia article I wrote on the subject. While they may not look like much, I've been walking around with 10 flessenlikkers in my backpack over the few days and I often feel that I've found the true source of ultimate power.

A couple weeks ago, I realized that one of my eyebrow hairs was long. Like really long. Like 3cm plus. Other hairs were long too. What's weird is that as far as I can tell this is the first time I've ever really looked at my eyebrows closely in my entire life.

I'm almost embarrassed to admit this since they are, after all, less than a centimeter from my eyes. Then again, this close proximity both makes it logistically difficult to scope them out and introduces a sense of assumed familiarity.

Then again, perhaps these are just rationalizations and I am just the sort of guy who wouldn't notice a mustache if it were right under my nose.

I come from a pretty diverse family. I have a sister adopted from Korea and two sisters from Ethiopia.

Once I entered a Men Who Cook competition and the winner in the deserts category was someone who had brought a habanero and lime cheesecake. It was very tasty and I've made it several times since then. Since the cheese and the lime both tend to cancel out of the heat, the cake is usually just like a cheesecake that bites back a little bit.

Once though, it was really hot. It was tasty but there was a limit to how much one could eat. Since it wasn't going fast, I suggested that my mother could serve pieces of the cake at her book club meeting. One of my Ethiopian sisters, apparently very worried, warned me, "You have to be careful! That cake could kill a white person."

If you don't mind a little bit of heat, you can try the recipe for Habanero Lime Cheesecake That Can Kill White People yourself. Sorry for the Imperial measurements for those of you outside of the US.

Dafydd Harries, Hanna Wallach, and Moray Allan gave an interesting Debconf talk on the Debian New Maintainer (NM) process and thought I would throw in my two cents. If this looks familiar, it's because I made the second half of this argument on debian-newmaint a long time ago without much effect.

I see two major problems with NM as it stands right now:

• The idea of "developership" in Debian collapses package maintainership and membership or citizenship into single quality.
• Quite simply, NM focuses too little and too indirectly on the qualities that make good Debian developers.

At a certain point, the end result of each of these is the same: we create barriers to entry that block good developers. Some believe that the procedure also fails to block bad developers although I'm personally less concerned about that.

Developership and Citizenship

Being a Debian developer means that you have a key in the Debian keyring. This allows all developers to upload packages into Debian but also allows them to vote in General Resolutions and Project Leader elections. There is only one keyring for both of these things. Because all developers can upload packages, the process to become a developer tests packaging skills. While it is possible for non-technical folks (e.g., documentation or translations folks) to become developers, there is a understandable queasiness about adding keys to the keyring for folks who have not and do not intend to upload.

My favorite example was always Greg Pomerantz who is Debian's lawyer. In terms of time, effort, and impact, Greg contributes to Debian more than most developers. However because he did not maintain packages and was not interested in doing so, he was not enfranchised within the Debian political system. Greg's example is now less good because he's started maintaining packages and jumped into the normal NM queue but I think his example highlights a serious shortcoming in the Debian system.

In Ubuntu, we have split "membership" from upload privileges. Members are people who have testimonials from trusted members of the project, who can demonstrate a history of substantial contributions, and who have agreed to our foundation documents. Membership conveys voting rights but -- unlike Debian -- expires with inactivity. While only members can upload, members cannot upload by default. They must first be checked off by a board of technical guardians who will look at their sponsored package history.

Now, I'm not convinced that Ubuntu's model is the best way for Debian. However, if Debian really can't separate uploaders from voters, I think that our NM process should test less on specifics and more for people that know their own limitations. Branden Robinson had an interesting idea I'll let him propose on his own but I think might be a great retroactive fit for Debian.

Selecting For Quality Maintainers

On the second point, I am increasingly frustrated with the way that tasks and skills are handled in Debian. When I went through NM I was asked (and answered) exactly zero task and skills questions. I made packages, upgraded packages and fixed bugs. My work was vouched for by others and left to speak for itself.

What I ask to my NMs is similar to what was demanded of me. I ask few, if any, questions but look for, and require, active engagement with the Debian and free software communities. If people are doing good work and have great technical reviews from sponsors and are creating clean, well documented packages, and demonstrate that they know when and how to read a manual, this should be enough. I heard a talk from a famous biologist a couple years ago who told a story that went something like this:

A group of scientists bred mice so that they were really good at running through a maze. Many generations down the line the mice that made it through the rigorous breeding selection process were really good at running through the maze; but they were also partially deaf and partially blind. Partially blind and deaf mice are less distractable and are better at running through mazes. The mice were no smarter or better than other mice -- just worse in a way that was helpful in the narrow case of the test.

I'm afraid the length and depth of the NM process is, in many cases, selecting for something other than competence, reliability, and knowledge of and adherence to our policy, philosophical, and quality standards. I half-jokingly believe our system is selecting for people who like researching and writing very long series of emails over people who enjoy going out and getting high quality programming work done in a consistent and reliable way.

Imagine the flame wars of the future.

A bit more than a month ago, I posted about an essay I'd written on Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects. Thank you to everyone who sent me feedback.

As I mentioned then, I wrote the paper for a talk at this years Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, Germany. I gave the talk as planned and am using this opportunity to upload the talk notes and the slides. They are based quite heavily on the pre-paper version of the talk I gave at FISL 5 in Porto Alegre, Brazil a bit more than a year ago.

I'm not sure that these notes add much to the paper but if people couldn't make it to the talk and liked the paper, they're here for you to check out in the following shapes and formats:

• Slides in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • PDF
  • OpenOffice Impress (Source)
• Talk notes in the following formats:
  • HTML
  • ReStructured Text Source

Yesterday I arrived in the Netherlands. Until a few weeks ago, I thought that the Netherlands was home to the most fun looking written language in Europe. The long strings of double vowels in Dutch frequently make me smile.

After last week at Debconf5 in Helsinki, I'm ready to change my mind. Finnish has everything Dutch has and more.

I mentioned to Mika that I would be going out to dinner at a restaurant called Töölönranta. She mentioned that she thought the name was very cute because of all of the "eyes." I suggested that the might in fact be umlauts or separate umlautesque graphemes (as the case seems to be) but she remained confident that they were, in fact, eyes.

Linguistics aside, I think she's right. Finnish wins.

Yesterday, I arrived early to my flight from Amsterdam to Helsinki. In fact, I arrived exactly three hours and one month early.

Apparently, the travel agent has booked me on flights on August 10th and 18th instead of July 10th and 18th as I'd asked and I had been a bit rushed and not examined the complete itinerary as well as I should have.

Most people in New York did not want the Olympics. In fact, many New Yorkers seemed to quite reasonably conclude than the only thing more completely insane than building a professional sports stadium in Manhattan would be using that stadium to hold the Olympics in Manhattan. When it came time to ask for volunteers to appear in an NYC2012 Olympic bid promotional video, there were of plenty of people that showed up -- but they were from New Jersey.

Greg Pomerantz, who still stubbornly refuses a blog of his own, quite astutely pointed out the auspicious nature of July 6th for globally conscious New York hackers saying, "truly a day to celebrate -- no euro software patents, and we lose the Olympic bid!"

Amen.

Today I received an email with the subject, "Difficulties in the bedroom?" I was almost surprised to find out it was not about Debconf5 room assignments.

Yesterday, I heard a Plan 9 developer laugh when he hear someone said they were a Hurd developer. He thought that the Hurd was a marginal and trivial operating system.

I laughed harder.

When I was in high school, I saw more people using 35mm film cannisters to hold marijuana than to hold 35mm film. I still think of drugs every time I see the little black vessels.

With 35mm all but eliminated by the explosion of digital cameras -- at least in the world of most teenagers -- these small containers will soon become drug cannisters and the people who use them to store their film will appear as the quaint repurposers of technology. It is only the illegality of marijuana that will keep people from speaking openly and explicitly about this transformation.

Tomorrow I will be at the Sixth Libre Software Meeting or Les 6èmes Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre. I'll be giving a talk on Ubuntu as part of my aforementioned Ubuntu Does Europe tour and, due to my own weak will and the persistent nature of the conference organizers, also be giving two other talks.

Here is the line-up:

• On July 5, I'll be opening the "taking Free Software beyond IT" theme with a talk called Broadly Defined Freedom and Radical Non-Discrimination based off of some of the writing I've done with Biella Coleman including How Free Became Open And Everything Else Under the Sun. It's some of my older work but I think it's still important to repeat every once in a while.

• On July 6, I'll be giving a LinuxTag redux of To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian on the Ubuntu derivation model and how other projects can learn from our successes and challenges and why I think the model is an important step toward the way that free software will be built in the future.

• Later on July 6, I'll be giving a final talk on Creative Commons and why I think it has fundamentally misunderstood (or at least misapplied) the structure (and goals, but that's another talk) of the Free Software movement.

  I've had a concise and rather stinging article on this I've been circulating semi-privately for over a year and that I've been unsure about what I wanted to do with it. Cory Doctorow read it and compared me to a trot and Richard Stallman somehow managed to get a copy and has been repeatedly urging me to release it -- along with a number of other people I respect in the movement. As a result, I'm going to give the topic a go at LSM and then, if all goes well, incorporate any meaningful and helpful criticism I receive and release the article afterward.

  If you're not at LSM but you want a preview of the article or know of someone who might be interested in publishing it, please get in contact

You'll have to check the posted conference schedule for details, precise times, and rooms. Please find me if you'd like to sign keys or introduce me to an excellent French wine.

Slides, notes, and the like are on their way from my LinuxTag talks and I'll link to them some time this week.

I received an email last week with the subject, "woops...attached this time," and decided that enough was enough. How many times I have read (or written) emails referencing the file "attached below" that is nowhere to be found.

I've heard people joke about creating a program that would remind people to actually attach their attachments but Googling only came up with two Outlook specific scripts. So I wrote one myself.

The only tough problems are interface issues. Since I send through Mutt, I figured the best, least invasive, and least MUA-specific way to set it up was a MTA wrapper that could fail and spit out warnings on STDERR (which Mutt and most MUAs will then show you) when the program expects attachments but find them missing.

The user then needs the ability to either confirm that they really want to send the message sans attachment or they need to go add their forgotten file. The former example is the tricky one from an interface perpsective. Since you can't depend on being able to ask "Y/N", the program currently looks either for an added header or a CONFIRM command in the subject that it will then strip out before actually sending. This should make it work with just about anything that sends mail using /usr/sbin/sendmail.

At the moment, the program is smart enough to ignore attached PGP signatures but not smart enough to understand any languages other than English (and a super limited vocabulary at that). Patches and suggestions are welcome.

You can grab the script and the necessary Mutt configuration to make it painless at this little web page I put up for it here:

http://mako.cc/projects/attachcheck/

I want to start selling clothes to club-going crowd. The first outfit I have in mind is a shear skirt designed with either built-in underwear (thong, etc.) or that comes with matching underwear of a sort that would encourage the owners to wear the skirt and the underwear together.

People are surprised, not always positively, by the selective luminescent of certain parts of clothing under ultraviolet lights in dance clubs. My outfit will be designed so that the underwear luminesceses powerfully through the sheer skirt which will not luminesce at all.

I haven't yet decided whether I want to keep this aspect of the outfit a secret and sell these to club-goers as a sort of performance art project or to advertise the feature widely as a way to increase sales.

For everyone who reads my blog and participated in the large Ubuntu Down Under keysigning, the keysigning at LCA, or the large keysigning at Linuxtag, I'd like to point out that nobody remembered where my passport has been.

Points go to anyone who remembers at the Debconf keysigning party. Double points, and a good laugh afterward, go to anyone who remembers and does not tell their fellow keysigners.