La Salle Debain

Update: Yes I am dumb and the book is actually called Fahrenheit 451. Tune in next week for my review of George Orwells' 1983.

I've spent a good amount of time today reading Ray Bradburys classic novel Fahrenheit 451. The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns. You see in the future, houses are completely fireproof. So firemen have been repurposed as book burners. The story concerns a fireman called Montag who has a crisis of conscience and becomes a saviour of books instead.

Bradburys observations make this a dystopia which seems more apropos to the present day situation in America than those of say Orwell. Montag is denounced to the authorities, and forced to flee. But it turns out the ones who betrayed him, are not the sinister agents of the surveillence state but his own friends and loved ones. And unlike in 1984, the reason they rat him out is not "thoughtcrimes" but because books make them uncomfortable. How did it get to this stage? special interest groups each vying to impose their own brand of political correctness had rendered literature so muddled and useless, they were effectively destroyed long before the burning started. No wonder society turns to the soothing immersion of non-stop, action-packed but totally soporific TV which continues the cycle of deadening genuine feelings and making thinking hurt even more.

Isn't this whats happening in politics? Both parties today are just conglomerations of pressure groups with disparate and often contradictory agendas. So much energy must be spent on keeping the base together, the candidates have to be as bland and non-comittal as possible. Making scapegoats of those who point out problems becomes more comfortable--for both the elected and the electorate--than actually dealing with the problems. Third parties won't help, on the contrary they make it even less necessary for zealots to compromise. It is the sheer scale of politics in a large and diverse country like the US which is the problem. The answer I think (and Bradbury may not agree) is to bypass the government altogether on important matters. Let it be gridlocked, as long as it is toothless, it won't be in a position to hurt.

On a cheerier note, the BBC has resumed the radio adaption of The Hitchhhikers Guide To The Galaxy. The first episode of the tertiary phase aired on Tuesday on Radio 4. It will be repeated again on Thursaday. If you are outside the listening range as I am, you can tune in via the web by using Realplayer or a compatible player. (I used kaffeine the KDE frontend to Xine.)

Are you ready to rock?

I said ARE YOU READY TO RAWK?!!

No? Well are you ready to see a demonstration of the new Debian installer then?

I've been visiting a number of Linux user groups this year and today I was the guest of the Greater Hartford GNU/Linux User Group. (GHGLUG) Unfortunately there isn't a direct route from Jersey City to Hartford and I am averse to driving long distances if I can help it so I ended up taking the Gereyhound bus, a four hour ride each way. But it was worth it I think. There were about 20 people in the audience. Not the biggest crowd I've spoken too but a decent number especially considering the hurricane related bad weather the East coast of the US is still suffering from. I did a demo of the new installer which people found to be suitably impressive and took questions about the project. And finally I participated in a keysigning. I had a really good time and I hope my hosts did too.

Mike Newman of GHGLUG took this picture of the presentation.

I threaten to do this every now and again but now I've finally done it. I've orphaned all my webmin/usermin packages. Why now? It's not that I have bad relations with the upstream maintainer. On the contrary Jamie has been very helpul and responsive to Debian needs. It's not the users. As far as I can tell webmin is very popular and the users I've talked to have been very appreciative of my work. It's not the code itself. Although webmin for portability and compatability reasons is written a very grotty subset of perl, I get it and can work with it.

No I'm just losing interest in it for reason I can't quite put my finger on. Lately I've had to struggle to summon up the enthusiasm to work on it particularly because there are several other things I'd like to do for Debian--particularly Debian-IN. I decided that it is not fair to the author, users or myself to let the packages rot. So I fixed a bunch of bugs, uploaded the latest versions, and let them go.

Until proper new maintainers are found I do intend to keep an eye on the packages so they don't deteriorate too badly. For instance as soon as the current packages migrate to testing, I'll do another release to fix an RC bug and add some upstream bugfixes. But hopefully someone (or a group) will step up and take over.

Today was Janmashtami. There were record crowds at the mandir at
midnight this year. But that's not the big news today.

As she is approaching the ripe old age of three, my wife and I decided it was time to put our daughter Shailaja in preschool. We found a nice one a little further away than we would have liked but still a manageable distance, filled out the forms and paid the fees and then spent a nerve-wracking Labor Day weekend worrying about how much Shailaja was going to miss us or more accurately how much we were going to miss her. Luckily for Jyoti, she had an 8:30 meeting so she spared herself a wrenching scene. Instead it fell upon me to take her.

So by 8am I had Shailaja ready to go. She did Saraswati puja and wrote 'a' for Vidyarambha. Then disaster struck when it suddenly dawned on her that although pappa was taking her to school, he would not be staying. By the time we got there, she was firmly attached to my leg and would not budge. However the schools large selection of toys soon tempted her away. I had to go upstairs to ask the director some questions and by the time I came down, she was engrossed in making new friends. In fact she didn't even notice when I left!

When Jyoti and I came to pick her up in the evening, Shailajas' teacher reported that she had been a good girl all day and had not asked for us once.

Well everyone is doing
it.
Here are my results.

• Wackiness: 24/100
• Rationality: 70/100
• Constructiveness: 50/100
• Leadership: 52/100
  
  You are an SRDF--Sober Rational Destructive Follower. This makes you a font of knowledge. You are cool, analytical, intelligent and completely unfunny. Sometimes you slice through conversation with a cutting observation that causes silence and sidelong glances. You make a strong and lasting impression on everyone you meet, the quality of which depends more on their personality than yours.

You may feel persecuted, as you can become a target for fun. Still, you are focused enough on your work and secure enough in your abilities not to worry overly.

You are productive and invaluable to those you work for. You are loyal, steadfast, and conscientious. Your grooming is impeccable. You are in good shape.

You are kind of a tool, but you get things done. You are probably a week away from snapping.

I'm in Connecticut again for the second half of the perl class I'm
teaching for Innovation Software Group. Last night I also gave a talk to the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group SCOSUG. By now I've developed a standard song and dance mainly demoing the new installer. The audience (which I'm told was larger than usual for this type of event) were really impressed. If we can integrate something like Red Hat's kickstart into the installer, it will be unbeatable. There were also the usual questions about when sarge was going to be released. So I was happy to be able to show the message from the release team stating that we are aiming for mid-september.

So I came home from Connecticut and opened up debian-devel for the first time in four days to find a General Resolution had been proposed to get the amd64 port into the archive and a huge flamewar has resulted. The amd64 porters feel they are being blocked by ftpmaster intransigence and lack of communication. Other people are sickened that Debian, which has always prided itself on doing the right thing not necessarily the popular thing, is now using voting as a means of coercion and the ftpmasters are unfairly being hassled. Who is is the real victim?

I'll tell you who the victim is, it's ME! Why am I forced to have to sift through large piles of crap, just to keep abreast of what's going ? Just kill the threads you aren't interested in I hear some people say. The problem is threads drift. Occasionally, there is some useful and important bit of information amongst the drivel. (Again, remember ajs' social contract bombshell? Delivered during a massive and unrelated tread on debian-vote.) I am subscribed to 18 mailing lists and hang out on IRC a couple of times a week and I still don't know exactly what the deal is with things like the amd64 port. This is a major development one should know about don't you think? If I could devote my life to the project as some people seem to be able to it wouldn't be a problem but I can't do that. God, family, rent, Debian has to take a back seat to all of these nowadays. I don't like this situation. Working on Debian has been both pleasurable and brought me material benefits but something will soon have to give. Of course I could just follow the lead of atleast 50% of the developers (according to recent voting patterns) and just live on the little island of my own packages not paying any attention to what goes on within the project. But doesn't such a view make a mockery of our ideals of openness and collaboration?

Manoj says we should have a little sympathy and respect for the people behind the titles. This is sage advice and I agree. But how about if those people showed a little sympathy for us? I'm sure writing status reports is a boring waste of time but think of how much time is wasted by other people when they aren't written. For a great example of something I wan't to see more of, read Roger Leighs' report about the LSM Free Software Printing Summit. (The only criticism is that it should have been posted to debian-devel-announce.) Frankly if people in key positions can't do something like that once a month, they are a hindrance and should step aside or be replaced. Debian is not a little club anymore. The amount of communication which was adequate in those days is not adequate anymore.

I'm in North Haven Ct, teaching an introductary class in perl for Innovation Software Group who you may remember as the fine people who helped us out so much at Linuxworld. It's an all day class. Yesterday was the first day, it continues till wednesday, then we break for a week and do another Monday-Wednesday session.

The students are mostly professionals from nearby Yale university so they're very bright and motivated people. We're having fun.

Today is the last day of voting on the General Resolutions concerning Sarge. Here are my choices:

==-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
[ 2 ] Choice 1: Postpone changes until September 2004 [needs 3:1]
[ 1 ] Choice 2: Postpone changes until Sarge releases [needs 3:1]
[ 6 ] Choice 3: Add apology to Social Contract [needs 3:1]
[ 3 ] Choice 4: Revert to old wording of SC [needs 3:1]
[ 5 ] Choice 5: "Transition Guide" foundation document [needs 3:1]
[ 4 ] Choice 6: Reaffirm the current SC [needs 1:1]
[ 7 ] Choice 7: Further discussion
==-=-=-=- Don't Delete Anything Between These Lines =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The reason is that we have get Sarge out right now. Sorry the rotting corpse of woody is beginning to smell. Once that is out of the way, people can do all the legal noodling about they want. I prefered choice 2 over choice 1 because in the event of something going wrong a vague date is more flexible than an exact one.

My next preference was choice 4. Even though the changes were strictly editorial in my opinion, the release manager doesn't agree. And only chose to mention it at the local planning department on Alpha Centauri ^WW^WW^WW^WW in the middle of an obscure thread on debian-vote. So if it's going to hold up sarge, let's get rid of it.

My next preference is choice 6 which is to let the editorial changes stand. I would want to force the release manager to change his mind or step aside in that case because as you may have gathered by now, sarge must be released right now and it is way too late to do drastic surgery on it.

A transition guide is just extra bureaucracy and an apology is just plain weaselish. So no love for choices 5 and 3. And last of all choice 7, further discussion because the last thing we need is even more gum-flapping on this topic.

We found out that our new baby is going to be a boy. I'd like to stick with the *dhar tradition but a nice Shaiva name like Pinakin, or Tryambaka would be ok too.