Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

Rebel with rather too many causes. And your host!
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Debian Lost and Found Lost @ 106 Haven Avenue

After the sarge release party last weekend, I ended with at least the following items and (none of their owners) in my apartment:

Any Debian developers traveling through New York City with large quantities of fine single-malt whiskey are welcome to stay at my place.

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Linuxtag and Beyond

After taking one year off, I will be back in Karlsruhe for Linuxtag this week. I have two papers in the Linuxtag conference proceedings and will giving talks based on each. These include:

  • Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects – The talk will be at 16:00 on June 24th. I’ve already distributed a draft of this paper and received some good feedback.

  • To Fork or Not To Fork: Lessons from Ubuntu and Debian – There are, believe it or not, two Ubuntu talks running head to head at 17:00 on June 25th and mine is one of them. It seems that Michael Kofler (who I did not even realize was giving a talk on Ubuntu until I saw the schedule ) is giving more of a general overview and introduction to Ubuntu. My talk will go into a good deal more technical detail and be geared more toward developers who want to learn from Ubuntu’s experience in trying to create a project that is developed in parallel with an existing project by diverging and maintaining a sustained inter-project relationship over time.

    It’s tricky stuff and I don’t claim to have all the answers but I hope I can shed some light on the situation. There’s been a lot of noise about this lately on Debian lists — some positive and some very critical. I hope that my talk can help describe the processes so far and the thinking behind them, distill some solid advice out the criticism we’ve all heard, and package it all in a way that is educational and helpful for folks working on very different types of projects.

I’m going to work a little more on my paper for the second talk and I’ll link that that here when I’m done. As always, I’ll also post slides and such for people that want to give similar talks of their own.

I am told that the Ubuntu community in Germany has arranged for some space sharing with GNOME and will have a bit of table space in that booth. I’ll be there there for some time handing out CDs and answering questions. There will also, I’m sure, be a great Debian booth packed full of hackers and you should be able to find me there as well.

I’ll be staying in Europe until the very beginning of August and will be at RMLL/LSM, Debconf5, and WhatTheHack. I’ll have a bit of time in between and will be popping up here and there for talks on Ubuntu around Europe and in areas nearby. If you’d like to host such a talk, and especially if you’ve got a great LoCo Team, get in contact with me and lets see if we can arrange something.

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Mako and Mako Hill

I’ve talked about intercultural confusion and human naming schemes before and the thought has remained on my mind.

In particular, I’ve been thinking a bit about marriage and the often traditional process of the bride taking the groom’s family name I like the idea of changing names and marriage seems to be one of the places where it is quite acceptable to change one’s name. That said, there are limits both to who can can change their name and the types of changes permissible if it’s going to remain generally acceptable.

I can imagine some humorous confusion in the process of name taking between cultures with given name/family name endianness incompatibility. I’d like to be able to also have the option to change my first (given) name and briefly considered the possibility of capitalizing on the confusion mentioned above to do this. The downside to this is that it probably would mean I end with the same given name as my spouse. This, I think, defeats the point.

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My e-Blog e-Post

We are often told that the "e" in "e-n" means "electronic" but this is only rarely true. E-Trade is hardly distinguished for any other trading firms in in the electronic nature of its trading. Similarly, we are left to wonder if eBay is really an "electronic bay" and, if so, what that could possibly mean.

The inaccuracy of this explanation was humorously visible in the dot-com boom where the likes of etoys.com and epets.com seemed to (successfully) be using the prefix "e" to mean little more than "invest in me" and when a domain registrar was sued for accidentally registering — and then rescinding — the prohibited (by specification) domain name "e-.com" to an entrepreneur who, like everyone else, had no idea what "e" meant but who had quite clearly observed that "e" was the new "$".

In turn, Apple has made "i" the new "e" hoping people will forget that the "i" in "iMac" once stood for Internet and that they will not notice that the "iPod" is completely unable to connect to the network on its own.

Mika was telling me that in Japanese "良い" means good and is often pronounced in the same way that English speaker pronounces the name of the letter "e." As a result, prefixing something with "e" in Japanese is done to mean something is good.

If you ask me, the Japanese have both the more correct answer and the more plausible excuse.

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Package Name Poetry Redux!

Yesterday, I posted an example of package name poetry. I had such a good time writing that poem that I decided to write a few more on a variety of other subjects.

If you’d like to check out the full list of package name poetry, you can visit the package name poetry webpage. You might also be interested in visiting if you’re thinking about writing some of your own and want a good wordlist to begin with and some example for inspiration:

Here are some other poems to whet your appitite:

Bash and Slash!

This is my second poem honoring the release of sarge. It’s overly harsh on a couple other distributions. In reality, I have no problems with either of the projects in question. This was really just a matter of engaging in few good natured jibes with other competing distributions.

Redboot: Greed.
File inn latrine (apoo).

Gentoo sux!
Velocity? Ne!
Crash? Yepp!

Sarg felt most tardy.
Foremost, nice.

Untitled Poem #1

Usually, the first two poems I write in any new genre or under any new set of limitations are a political poem and a sex poem. This poem is my political poem. It describes and calls for an anarcho-syndicalist violent uprising against an overzealous United States police-state using only the names of packages in Debian (which is not something, for the record, that I personally advocate):

The tripwire felt apt-Spy.
Whois kommander? FBI.

Meld worker members: Kontact.
Spread crimson mercury extract.

Guarddog toppler: Unison!
Subversion! Flamethrower! Arson!

Roundup, recover, remind.
Recite anarchist verse inn rhyme
Freedroid? Ne! Recode freemind!
Update freedom inn gnotime.

Untitled Poem #2 (Click Through To Read)

I also wrote a sex poem that that is not work safe. I think it may be the best one I’ve written but you’ll need to click here to read it.

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Package Name Poetry

What better way is there to honor and immortalize an important event than through poetry? There is none. It is with this in mind that I set out to immortalize Sarge’s release in verse.

What more appropriate way is there to honor the Sarge release in poetry than to write the poem using the names packages in sarge? Perhaps only by further constraining the poem to a well established genre of poetry.

It was a tall order but here you have it: a proper rhyming limerick honoring Sarge’s release composed entirely of words that are also packages in Sarge. It tries to describe my happiness as I read the Sarge release announcement email:

Woody: the stone and the jail.
Dynamite newsflash. Coolmail!
"Sarg: Happy Birthday!"
Thy cruft thrust away!
Bonsai! Foremost odyssey: Ale.

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Version Out-Of-Control Systems

I’ve heard that (sensibly enough) many big rich companies highly dependent on Microsoft Word use document management systems not wholly unlike version control systems to track the development of their documents over time. Law firms are a good example of places where this sort of software lives. However, many of these systems merely provide and track spaces that store different versions of documents and then associate these versions over time and provide an interface to help Word compare them.

On many of these systems, you can check out an old version of the document and, if you’re not careful, actually change or overwrite the old version basically rewriting or destroying history!

This really sounds more like a version out-of-control system to me.

Imagine how jealous these folks would be if they knew what they were missing. Of course, it’s worth remembering that there are many ways that one can be out of control and there’s hardly consensus on which are most enjoyable or most useful.

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UnSun-Dried Tomatoes

I love sun-dried tomatoes and eat them several times a week. It has always seemed slightly strange to me that the way that they were dried is so important to the final product that it requires mentioning the process in the name of product. Are lamp-dried tomatoes really so unacceptable? What is it that sun-drying adds over dry heat?

A few days ago, I remembered an older scrap of text by Seth Schoen and realized the obvious answer: it must be all of those delicious photons that get left behind in the tomatoes that make sun dried tomatoes so delicious.

Somewhat troublingly, my otherwise unimpeachable theory seems to be challenged by information I’ve found Googling that implies that there is some real misinformation out there in regards to sun-dried tomatoes and many "sun-dried" tomatoes are not sun-dried at all! That is to say, they are dried in ways that may not involve the sun or even light! Apparently, sun-undried tomatoes are easily distinguishably from the real thing.

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Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects

In my dealing with Debian, SPI and more recently with Ubuntu and Canonical, I’ve spent some time in the last few years thinking about the best way to go about funding voluntary free software projects without losing all of the benefits that volunteerism brings. As with many things, it always seemed easier to identify the way to screw things up than the right ways to act. Some people who read grants for large foundations and who have funded free software projects in the past (with mixed results) were nice enough to listen to me rant a few times and encouraged me to write up my ideas. Since then, I’ve been talking to folks off and on, reading, and noting relevant experiences. Last June, I gave a talk on the subject at FISL 5.0.

Over the last year, I’ve continued thinking about this and finally went ahead and wrote it up for the conference proceedings of the upcoming Linuxtag 2005 where I will be presenting this work and a paper on problems and strategies in regards to Ubuntu, Debian, and the tricky process of deriving a distribution.

I’m interested in expanding this document with the help, experience, and suggestions of others. If I get enough good feedback, I’d like to wrap this up as a sort of funding HOWTO for the Linux Documentation Project. Please get back to me with comments or suggestions — or, better yet, patches. It’s also in GNU Arch for those that swing that way and want to hack on it.

Without further ado, the essay is called, Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects. You can read it in HTML or get in a number of other formats (including the DocBook XML source) or out of Arch over here.

Update: I’ve gone and posted this essay as an article on Advogato because I’d never done that before, I’ve always wanted to, and it seemed relevant. It might be nice to post any comments over there.

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NYC SARGE RELEASE PARTY

My most recent communiqué to the Debian-NYC social-listas includes the following (edited) message:

OMG IT FINALLY HAPPENED!

YES! SARGE RELEASED! THAT MEANS IT’S PARTY TIME!

THE DEBIAN-NYC RELEASE PARTY WILL BEGIN OVER BELGIAN BEERS AT 530PM THIS SATURDAY (JUNE 11)! ALL ARE WELCOME! INVITE YOUR FRIENDS!

I’ll stop yelling now. I’m just so darn excited.

I really am that excited.

Read the full message for more information or if you are coming from out of town. Look at this message for directions to the normal meeting place. I hope to see some new folks there!

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I’ll Tell You What…

Mika explained to me yesterday that she she is annoyed when people begin statements with, "I’ll tell you what."

I’ll tell you what, that’s a pretty strange pet peeve.

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The Cloisters

If all goes to plan, I’m going to set off to visit the Cloisters today. This is very opportune because, at the book fair yesterday, I just happened to purchase a copy of Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns! I’ll be sure to have it with me.

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On Email Communities, Universal Qualities Of

I’ve been reading The Media Lab: Inventing the Future At MIT recently. It was written in 1988 by Stewart Brand who created the Whole Earth Catalog and who has said some pretty observant and insightful things about technologies and the way that they are used.

This observation, from The Media Lab, may not be one of them: "The most surprising and consistent quality in e-mail communities is the human warmth they develop."

Maybe things were better before the invention of top posting.