'The Trap'

Yesterday I went to bed too late because I was captivated by the last episode of The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, a series by Adam Curtis. Even since I saw Pandora's Box I've been an avid viewer of his work. The Trap talks about what freedom is, and this morning I realised that many things he talked about can be seen in the OSS world, and more specifically in Debian. I'm certain Biella can write something much better (and shorter) and I'm still thinking about it, but I wanted to write some stuff down.
One of the main ideas is the modern western culture has been formed to appeal for people thinking like a model in the 'prisoners dilemma': they only case to further themselves. This lead to the idea that life (not only the economy) should be like a free market, and that people should be 'free' to choose what they liked. Of course in practice the rich are 'free' to send their kids to better schools then the poor who are 'free' but constrained to send their kids to worse schools. The program called this negative freedom: there is constrained freedom. Think of it as Microsoft's vision of freedom, their 'freedom to innovate' (which they don't), your freedom to select which of the N licences of vista is good enough for you. This limited freedom is more stable then the positive freedom that is actual seeking true freedom, without constraints. This positive freedom was then developed by Satre, Fanon and Shariati into the idea that true freedom could only be gained by armed struggle, to gain freedom but also an identity that transcends the simple individual.
The whole idea of the two freedoms was described by Isaiah Berlin and he also had the idea that freedom can only be gained by limiting the power of the state over the individual, otherwise both concepts of freedom would become tyrannical because the powers that be would decide what freedom is, and then suppress anybody that does not agree with that idea. Examples are the communists in the USSR, but also how the Americans turned to torture, imprisonment without tribunal to 'liberate the Iraqi people'. Or older still the Reign of Terror during the French revolution.
All of this has some relevance to OSS and Debian in particular. Don't we search freedom from constraints (licences, absence of source)? Don't we want a revolution in the use of computers? Are we not using disruptive means to get it? The introduction of a samba file-server in a pure MS environment by a disgruntled admin who just wants stuff to work could be seen as being almost a terrorist method of working. Not that we want to terrorise the population, but make them aware that an alternative exists. And this to chance the system. Sometimes the whole mindset does seem to be a little too much confrontational, almost towards having a real conflict. Just think about the many references that some disaster should wipe out the Seattle area. Are we not at risk of becoming tyrannical in many ways? Ignoring any Debian discussions, there is the whole FreeBSD/OpenBSD split, people complaining that wikipedia is removing contents the consider valuable, projects refusing to create howto's and introductions to keep the newbies away etc. OOS does seem to have a tendency to become tyrannical in some aspects. Not that this is always bad, see the benevolent dictators handling the Linux kernel or python.
If I understand the idea's correctly it means that even if we want freedom, from the moment we start using the powers of the project to limit somebody we start the slide towards being oppressive and tyrannical. Somehow I fear that all this will lead to a lot of reading and thinking...

what $$%@$ is causing all this io?

sudo su -
sharrow:~# /etc/init.d/sysklogd stop
Stopping system log daemon....
sharrow:~# echo 1 >  /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
sharrow:~# dmesg | gawk '/^[^( ]*\([0-9]*\): (READ|WRITE|dirtied)/ {activity[$1]++} END {for (x in activity) print activity[x],x}' | sort -nr | head -n 10
502 amarokcollectio(358):
3 amarokapp(359):
2 mysqld(18448):
1 io(358):
1 bash(31560):
sharrow:~# echo 0 >  /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
sharrow:~# /etc/init.d/sysklogd start
Starting system log daemon....

A good argument for debian support

The inquirer writes that HP makes $25 million out of Debian in EMEA alone!

I'm just shocked!

Oh: see some of you guys and girls at fosdem.

Slow times

While the next debian release is being prepared it is not a good idea to upload new packages, so I'm trying to use the holiday to 'look across the fence'. For starters I've gotten me an iMac and so far I like Mac OS X. It is an immense improvement over Windows and a pretty good alternative to KDE from my point of view. I'm still a bit lost with accelerators and in-program window movement but it is nice to have another environment to play with.

And on that machine I'll try to play with sbcl, openmcl and f-script. But so far I'm been busy using iMovie to convert our DV tapes into DVD's.

A brilliant ad

Today I saw a new Belgacom ad for their isp 'skynet': two romantic souls are communicating with email, and 'he' tries to find romantic music. So off he goes to the 'skynet itunes music shop' and searches the list of songs. Then he replies that he cannot select a fitting song from the long, long list. She (I presume) replies that she can, and sends a romantic song.

Let me repeat that last point: she attached an song to the email. Besides the fact that the itunes shop doesn't give you an mp3 (what most people expect), this is also blatant illegal sharing of music unless they went through the whole 'authorise that computer to play my songs' song and dance, which is unlikely given the 'becoming an item' setting.

Just brilliant: seeding the population with expectations that the DRM will never allow them to actually do.

misrouted: goto 1

I've had a little setback with misrouted: it turns out that my original idea of how the universe of CP objects work (ie we have item and containers) turns out to be deeply wrong.

While parsing some complex rulebase with the old implementation it turns out that the objects are divided in 3 classes: items, containers and container-of-listable-items (ideas on naming are welcome). This is because you can have a network, which is a collection, that can contain a group, also previously a collection, in a different way then that the group contains the network: all members of the group are in the network versus a custom method looking if all possible ip's in the network are in the group. Also the trivial method I used the last method kind of broke down when it tried to expand a /8 network into ip's. :-S

So this means surgery at a pretty deep level in the class hierarchy and the old program could just about handle it, but the scars run deep. So misrouted is being rewritten to use the new setup. The good news it that I've thought of a more complex, but not O((N_rules**4)**N_firewalls**2) method of simulating the effects of a rulebase on traffic.

on blobs

I notice that the binary blob discussion is again on lwns front page. Recently I got a new portable from work and this gave me some new insight. In short: binary-only drivers are so bad people will buy other hardware.
The machine (a Lenovo Z61m) uses a X1400 ATI chip, so I have to use the ATI binary-only driver. Well. I'm trying to use it.
The amount of grief I'm getting from it would convince even billg himself that opensource drivers are mandatory in an opensource system. Strange errors pop up and you're just lost, googling only gives you forums where other poor users are trying to make it all work. Due to the dynamic nature of xorg and kernel development the driver will never 'catch up' and problems will keep popping up. And there is little I can do except complain to the responsible person and urge him to buy the Intel only portable next time.
If this keeps on Intel will just sweep the Linux hacker's market, and with it the heart and minds of a lot of people. My next machine will be an Intel, the first one in years, because I cannot get an AMD with a open graphics card, and I think I won't be alone in this.