Laughing Meme

If you’re a radical techie in or around Seattle (crews from Vancouver and Portland are coming) then you should to CATS this weekend, Saturday and Sunday, at the IMC.

CATS is an informal skill swap and socialize aimed at activists who are using technology in their work. Bring your own presentations, discussions, projects and hardware. Except conversations on collaboration, geek culture (and its negative impact on diversity), building secure webservers, VoIP (we’re all hoping someone will show up, and tell us all how its done), Debian NP, and whatever else people are moved to discuss.

See the wiki for some projects which people have said they would be willing to talk about (or have been volunteered to speak about)

Now and forever.

Today Debian turned 10 years old. The popular distro, that comes perhaps the closest of any of open source project in stating the radical anti-capitalist critique that seems to me the next logical step for free software, and has quickly become the de rigeur choice for the radical left techies, apparently had a long slow lead, before its wildly successful current days. Good to remember that. Debian has also really pushed the use of gpg keys, and the web of trusts to a new level, which was interesting to observe in action.

Party!

In Seattle we celebrated with a beach party/barbeque at lovely Alki beach organized by sometimes Protest.net volunteer, Debian Non-profit founder, Mako. Geeking, and key signing, were joined by a vegan grill, frisbee, fire juggling, kite flying, and “times I was arrested” stories for a well rounded event.

The Game Theory of Key Signing

Mako, besides being a general free software geek about town, and Debian evangelist, is also ranked 9th in the notorious “strongly connected set” of the PGP trust web. Fascinating times was spent listening to how he reached this vaunted heights, and the offensive, and defensive signing strategies necessary to keep his position in the competitive top 50. Who knew so much was involved?

More Key Signing Thoughts

• If you’re going to a key signing (and if you’re going to a Debian party there will be a key signing) it works really well to have your fingerprint printed out on tiny pieces of paper. Having it printed out on full sheets of paper gets cumbersome (especially on a windy beach) and merely having your laptop and handing writing out your fingerprint (as yours truly did) gets old fast.
• The really slick people had their fingerprint printed on their business card, which means someone else covered the cost of your printing, and you’re more likely to actually pass out your card.
• Can you think of any other type of party (beach party no less!) were you leave with homework? I’ve got a wallet full of keys I need to sign, ugh.

Last Key Signing Thought

While I was typing this a Friendstr “New Friend Request” email arrived, and I realized that key signing is just the geek version of Friendster.

ps.

Seattle Perl Mongers is next Tuesday, at Cedars (apparently an Indian restaurant in the U district), though the Ingy’s presentation on Kwiki has been postponed until next month.

Got a little time to play with my new camera today, a Canon PowerShot S230 Elph. I think there are still about 300 features I don’t understand (what is the mic for?), but I’m starting to get a grasp on it. So far photos are turning out with about 50% consistency, but I hope to improve. Also finally downloaded pictures to my laptop successfully.

Tips so far for syncing the Canon S230 with my Debian Vaio.

1. Use gPhoto, it seems to be what people use, and it works well.
2. The S230 is supported! For almost a whole month! gphoto2 2.1.1 is full of stocking stuffers.

3. However, it hasn’t hit Debian testing yet, so I had to figure out the --target-release option to apt-get; apt-get -t unstable install gphoto2 worked for me.

4. If the auto-detect isn’t working (gphoto2 --auto-detect), you might want to make sure that your USB module is loaded (modprobe uhci), and mount your device filesystem (mount -t usbdevfs usb /proc/bus/usb). This is all documented in gphoto2′s excellent manual, which we aren’t all smart enough to read first.

Next Steps

gPhoto strongly recommends hotplug for USB permissions management.

Anyone have a recommendation for a digital photo library tool? Something like iPhoto? Probably most of my photos will end up on a webserver with gallery, but it would be nice to have something local.

Maybe if you’re lucky I’ll upload my sepiaed, panoramic shots of our drooping Douglas Fir later tonight.

Scams as class warfare?

Teresa: “scams take the forms they do because they’re parodies–no, a better way to put it: they’re cargo-cult effigies–of the deals the ruling class cut for themselves.“, on how and why scams work.

Perl behind the curtain

Abhijit: sub perlhash { $hash = 0; foreach (split //, shift) { $hash = $hash*33 + ord($_); return $hash; }, on how and why Perl hashes work.

No more just taking them for granted. The only time I’ve ever felt insecure about using Perl was a when a C programming friend was riffing on how he could never be happy with mass produced hashes, and insisted on rolling his own.

We are everywhere

debian-devel: Is Debian Anarchist? (via anarchogeek)

Somedays apt-get is the most infuriating piece of software. I’ve got the Debian package for python2.2 installed, I want to uninstall the Debian python2.1, but apt-get won’t allow me to do that without installing libperl5.8. Excuse me? I need to upgrade to the latest perl to uninstall an old version of python? In other news, perl5.8 is finally in Debian

So just as I sit down to some serious coding this weekend, my text editor, NEdit, went all weird on me. I don’t know how to draw the proper analogy for non-programmers, when I explained it to my grandmother this morning I suggested it was something like her sewing machine going out as she started a quilt, but as I survey her studio the vast array of scissors, and knives, stencils, mat boards, needles, dyes, and tools without names, I realized this was an insufficient parallel. How to say, “Yes I do something real, but I use just one tool to do it.”?

NEdit didn’t stop working entirely. In fact it took me a little while to figure out what it was doing. Eventually I figured it out. The first document I opened worked fine. However, if I tried to open any other documents (and working in more then one document while programming is a given) then these children windows would act sullen, and unresponsive. I could see the contents, but all mouse or keyboard clicks were ignored.

I was despairing a little, but I took my relatively clueless understanding of the situation to the NEdit mailing lists, and got an amazing deluge of helpful emails. I sent my email before going to bed, and got up 6 hours later with an inbox full of helpful suggestions. The problem is the current version of LessTif (the one Debian packages) is buggy. The solutions are:

1. Compile against an older version of LessTif
2. Download the pre-compiled binaries
3. Compile against OpenMotif which doesn’t have this bug

As I’m not sure how to roll back to an earlier version of a package with apt (shame on me) I’m opted for option 2, and am back in business.

But I’ll leave you with this bit of wisdom from Scott T.

Debain will likely never link against OSF Motif due to their philosophy. So, if you’d rather have a working editor instead of philosophy, try the binary from our website.

I love Debian, but it has its costs.