Random Thoughts

Film review - "We Live In Public"

2010-07-04T20:05:43Z

I had the opportunity yesterday to see "We Live In Public", a documentary film produced by Ondi Timoner on "the greatest Interent pioneer that you've never heard of", Josh Harris, at the Museum of Modern Art. One of the benefits of working for a firm that values the arts is free admission to most museums in NYC via corporate memberships, so while I didn't pay anything to see this, don't let the detract from the review, I'm just saying this in the interest of full disclosure :)

Timoner begins by painting Josh's childhood as somewhat troubled, which lays the context for the rest of the film. Josh was amazingly prophetic of things to come, even though he was way before his time. While you've never heard of Josh Harris, the things that he predicted have largely come true.

It begins in the late 90's, when he founded an online television network of sorts, called pseudo.com. However, Josh had no classical training in the arts, so he viewed himself more as a facilitator of creativity, giving people extremely wide latitude to do whatever they wanted on any of the "channels" of pseudo. Keep in mind that this was in the days prior to mass broadband adoption, so the quality of online video was abysmal at best - there's only so much data that you can shove down a 56K modem.

By doing things that we now think of as commonplace, for example leveraging multiple medium (video and live chat for example) to engage the viewer and make the viewer part of the content, Josh was able to make pseudo the first example of social networking.

When 60 Minutes came to do a segment on pseudo, Harris told the host that he would put CBS out of business, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was highly effective targeted advertising, instead of what I like to call "carpet bomb" advertising that must be performed in traditional media. While it is true that advertising in traditional media is somewhat targeted to the demographic of the "average" consumer of that content, obviously online advertising can be targeted to the specific user, and Josh was a visionary in that space, coming at it in the late 90's. Of course the host just sort of smiled and laughed, and asked when you could watch video online that was of as high quality as that which you could get on television. Well, you be the judge.

As time went on however, Josh was acting more and more quirky. He had an alter-ego that he called "Luvvy" that dressed up in clown makeup and various costumes. He would come to important business functions as this character, and as a result, pseudo began trying to distance themselves from Josh. Josh ended up leaving pseudo (which he then categorized as a "performance art piece" rather than a business), and went on to other endeavors.

The next one, at the end of 1999, was a Orwellian-type surveillance state bunker installation called "QUIET: We Live In Public". Approximately 150 artists and technologists were invited to spend a month living under 24-hour video surveillance, doing whatever they wanted, and sharing the most intimate details of their lives with the world-at-large. Cameras were everywhere - the beds, the showers, the toilets, just about anywhere that you could imagine. Everything was free, "except the video that we capture of you. That we own." In the basement, there was a firing range, there was an 80-foot long dining table, and in every sleeping pod, there was a camera and television.One could tune the television to whatever other pod they were interested in seeing at the time.

This was sort of a psychological experiment on a grand scale, seeing what would happen to people when faced with surveillance, control, and the complete loss of privacy. Every resident was a lab rat of sorts. Every single resident was interrogated in military fashion. The results were interesting and disturbing at the same time. As Alanna Heiss, the founder and then-director of MoMA P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, who herself was a resident, said: "it's really quite dangerous. Someone is going to snap".

The NYPD and FDNY came in to shut down the "millennial cult" on New Years Day, mostly due to live ammunition being fired in the basement. As one resident put it "we quacked like a cult, must be a cult".

Following QUIET, Josh decided to turn the experiment on himself. He and his girlfriend Tanya lived in an NYC loft, complete with 30+ motion sensing cameras, some in the most unlikely of places, and 60+ microphones, all broadcasting 24 hours a day. Again, every detail of every day, captured and integrated with chat for the world to see and interact with. At one point, Josh said that he wanted a pizza, and one showed up at his door without him ever ordering or paying for it.

After about 6 months of living like this, the relationship ended in a bitter fight, and with Josh suffering from some form of mental illness. He then retreats to an apple farm, where he lives for a few years. After that, he comes back to found another company, called "Operator 11", with the premise that users should be able to have their own interactive television network 24/7. He pumped the last bit of money he had into this, and prepared the company for sale. He went to pitch to MySpace, and the executive there said "I don't know who Josh Harris is" - a sure sign the the revolution had happened without him.

MySpace was unable to see the value in Operator 11, so Josh ended up with that venture also failing. He now lives in a self-induced state of exile in Ethiopia, teaching children there how to play basketball.

Overall, I would highly recommend this film to anyone to see. I would caution the the imagery is very explicit at times, and the film is most assuredly not appropriate for children or anyone who's sensitive to that sort of thing

Appointment to the Fedora Board

2010-05-19T04:58:26Z

I realize that it's a little late, since the appointment was announced several hours ago, but I'd like to say a few words about my appointment to the Board.

I think that being appointed to the board is an incredible vote of confidence in my ability to drive Fedora forward. I intend to use the appointment to further the goals of the Fedora project, and more importantly, to help define the future goals and direction of the project, beyond what the present board has already put forth (which I believe is the correct audience, the remaining questions are "how do we get there?").

I'm looking forward to the challenge, and hope to serve my constituents well! If there's anything that I can do, please don't hesitate to send me an email directly at jstanley fedoraproject.org.

End of an era

2010-04-01T12:25:57Z

Now that it's official and I've told everyone at my current employer, I guess I can say that I've decided to leave Savvis (my current $DAYJOB), and that my last day will be tomorrow, 4/2. It's been a pleasure working with everyone at Savvis over these last almost 10 years, however, another opportunity presented itself which I felt obligated to act on.

I'll be joining the Linux product engineering group at Goldman Sachs. This is a role that will allow me to influence the direction of the Linux product inside Goldman, which uses Linux at a scale that few other places reach. It will also allow me to further develop my technical skills, owing to the fact that rather than a generalist that does a little bit of everything, this role is one that will allow me to focus very deeply on the OS - both current and future (Fedora/upstream/etc).

I'm really excited, and can't wait to start on Monday!

SIG status updates

2010-03-25T02:05:00Z

I just sent the below email to people that I could find that were leaders of various SIG's in Fedora - I tried to hit all of them. If you lead a SIG and got the below email, PLEASE take the time to respond - it helps us know exactly where we are in Fedora. It won't take much time and won't hurt, I promise :). Now if you don't respond - I make no promises.... (just kidding).

If I missed your SIG (I just went down the page at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:SIGs please respond to the below questions, either via email to me (jstanley@fp.o), or even as a comment to this post, or a comment in this ticket, which tracks what I'm doing, whatever you're most comfortable with.

Thanks in advance for everyone's time as we try and get a handle on what exactly is happening in the community, and attempt to grow that community in any way possible.

This is an email being sent to all SIG's that are listed on the SIG page on the wiki. I'm trying to find the individual that's the "leader" of the SIG in order to avoid spamming mailing lists, but sometimes, that's what is necessary.

I'm writing on behalf of the Fedora Engineering Service, a new group within Fedora that acts on items submitted by FESCo that general volunteers are not likely to accomplish because either they are more administrative in nature, or there is a general disinterest in doing it, generally because it's seen as "boring". The task that I am now engaged in falls within that category :).

As FESCo has responsibility for SIG oversight in Fedora, I'm supposed to figure out where each SIG stands in terms of their activities in Fedora. Specifically, we have a few questions that we'd like answered by each SIG leader:

1) Is your SIG still active? (if no, skip the remainder of the questions, unless you feel that it could be active again, if only for not having resources, etc)
2) Would your SIG be so kind as to provide monthly status reports to either FESCo or the 'devel@lists.fedoraproject.org' mailing list? Think of this not as a bureaucratic measure being imposed on you, but more as what I call a "force multiplier" - a way to bring to the forefront of the larger Fedora community what your SIG is doing and why they might want to get involved in it.
3) Are there any resources that other teams in Fedora could provide (design work for something, marketing outreach, documentation people, IRC channel, mailing list - whatever you can think of, really) that would be beneficial to your SIG?

Thanks for your time!
-Jon, for FES

Comments on the open source legal environment

2010-02-26T04:55:00Z

NOTE: I'm not a lawyer :)

Well, with the recent talk from SCALE8x and Karsten's wish for further understanding of the legal environment of open source, I figured that I would comment on some old news that people may or may not be aware of, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuits 2008 ruling in Jacobsen v. Katzer. Interestingly, the case was recently resolved with a settlement in favor of Jacobsen (the OSS author)

This is a seminal ruling that copyright law is enforceable in open source software, and that open source licenses are valid legal constructs. The license in question was not the GPL, but rather the horrid (and unacceptable for Fedora) Artistic License version 1.

The central question for the Federal Circuit in this case was whether or not the conditions specified in the license were conditions of, or merely covenants to, the copyright license that was granted via the Artistic License. If they were conditions to the license, i.e. a copyright license does not exist if you don't follow X, Y, and Z, then you have a claim under copyright law. If there are covenants to the license, then the remedy for violation is found under contract law. This is an extremely important distinction, as the Ninth Circuit has held that irreparable harm is presumed and injunctive relief is appropriate in the case of copyright infringement, however not in contract disputes.

The district court held that there was no cause of action under copyright law, and Jacobsen appealed that decision to the Federal Circuit.

How this case came to the Federal Circuit is in and of itself an interesting topic, considering that the Federal Circuit normally only hears patent case. After Jacbosen contacted Katzer, Katzer came back with a claim of patent infringement, which Jacobsen challenged by seeking declaratory judgment on copyright grounds. Since the case arose under patent law, the Federal Circuit has appellate jurisdiction over the entire case.

The Federal Circuit in the decision recognizes the importance of open source - "Open source licensing has become a widely used method of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades ago". They then go on to say that open source software, while money may not change hands at the moment of licensing, should not be presumed to have no value. This is important because copyright law exists to preserve economic interests, not personal rights - as Katzer points out, US law currently has no concept of moral rights, and copyright law seeks to "vindicate the economic, rather than the personal rights of authors"

The Federal Circuit also properly recognizes the need for injunctive relief, particularly in the case of open source projects - "these types of license restrictions might well be rendered meaningless absent the ability to enforce through injunctive relief."

There is one important question remaining from all of this, and an article (not publicly available, unfortunately) in the Texas Intellectual Property Law Journal (17 Tex. Intell. Prop. L.J 335) raises the question of when is something a covenant, and when is it a condition, something that the courts have not specifically addressed. One of the issues raised is whether the anti-DRM provision of GPLv3 is a covenant or a condition - the author posits that as it now stands, it is a covenant to a contract, not a condition of license. Through a simple wording change, they could theoretically make it a condition - but should this be allowed?

One view is that conditions should only be allowed, that based on their violation, would trigger copyright infringement. This calls into question many sections of the GPL, particularly the reciprocation requirements - if you do not release source to your modifications, you are not violating any copyright, but rather a provision of a contract. Injunctive relief is rarely granted in contract cases, therefore the GPL becomes much less effective, as I mentioned the earlier important of an injunction as opposed to monetary relief, which is difficult at best to determine in the case of OSS.

The second view is that any clause in a license, through proper wording, can be made into a condition. This approach is supported by Jacobsen, as the decision frequently makes use of the word "control", and this shifts control very much into the favor of copyright holders.

The author agrees that the second view seems correct, as even though it shifts power in copyright law to the licensor, it also allows new and innovative business methods to flourish, such as open source itself. One quote from the article caught me as particularly salient - "open source licensing serves the core purpose of copyright: increasing the creation and distribution of works".

In conclusion, we now have case law stating that open source software licenses, even poorly written ones, have the force of law, and "The choice to exact consideration in the form of compliance with the open source requirements of disclosure and explanation of changes, rather than as a dollar-denominated fee, is entitled to no less legal recognition."

Yay Federal Circuit!

Alright, went to the store

2010-02-15T20:16:17Z

And the salesman sold me a D-Link DIR-655, which seems to have good reviews. And I have a good review to post here:

Hello Lazyweb: Home router recommendations?

2010-02-15T03:49:16Z

I just upgraded my home cable modem service to 60Mbps, and I've found that I can get those speeds when I directly connect my laptop to the cable modem - but that's not what a geek does! Through my existing OpenWRT based WRT54GL, I've found that I can only get about 35-40Mbps. So I need to upgrade my router to something that supports probably a GigE WAN port, and some decent throughput, and preferably something that can run OpenWRT. Any suggestions?

Fedora Events FAD - Days 0-1

2010-01-30T06:00:00Z

So I'm in Raleigh for the Fedora Events FAD, had an interesting time getting here - I had some things to do earlier in the day before I left in the evening for the FAD, so I got home maybe an hour before I had to leave for the airport, and had nothing packed or prepared for it; Typical late planning me. So I got home maybe an hour before I had to leave for the airport (took the E train to the Airtrain). I figured that with all of the increased security and whatever, it would take me forever and a day to get through security. Not the case - flew right through and there was nobody at JFK. You would think that for having such low volume all of the flights would be on time, but it would seem that's not the case we were delayed somewhere around 90 minutes getting out of JFK to come to Raleigh because of some weather in Montreal apparently. Got here and Mel Chua picked me and Dennis Gilmore up from the airport and went back to the hotel.

This morning, we were at the Red Hat offices bright and early, and got to work. Most of our work from today has been captured on the wiki, but I figured that I'd go into a few highlights of what I thought was most important.

We started out the day with four basic questions, and everyone put post-it notes on the whiteboard around that question. The four questions were what makes a good FUDCon, what makes a good FAD, what the difference was between a FAD and a FUDCon, and how to get stuff from point A to point B.

We only really got to the first of those four questions today, and by far, the item that makes a FUDCon most successful is ponies. But Paul threw that one out right at the beginning!

Seriously, we came up with some great ideas of what makes a FUDCon successful, and split that up into several distinct action items that we are going to further define tomorrow - they can also be found on the wiki, but I'll hit what I thought were to two most cogent things - what have we done right in the past that we want to preserve for future FUDCon's - in other words, what are the requirements to hold a successful FUDCon, and what things would we like to see change in the future about the event.

We then reviewed the presentation done by the awesome marketing team of the results of the survey from Toronto, and wrote down the recurring themes that we saw from that on the other side of the whiteboard. Then we began the process of taking things from the post-it side of the board where we laid out "what makes a good FUDCon" and aligned those things with the feedback topics, mostly around the "things we want to keep that are required for a successful FUDCon", and "things that we would like to change at future FUDCon's"

We came up with a number of things in both camps, but I figured that I would touch on one that's probably not reflected on the wiki, but was captured in a video that Mel is posting somewhere.

The discussion centered around four things that wound up on the board - really they were just different ways of stating two opposite things - more planning sessions and less planning sessions. I think that both ideas are important, and I think that we came to some understanding as to how to achieve all of the goals at the same time. . We debated things going both ways, and what I think we walked away from that conversation with is that while both types of hackfests are important, they each have different goals, and the FUDCon hackfests that we have today generally could use improvement on the former category - for instance, for the Fedora Talk FAD that we had in Fredricksburg, going into the FAD we knew exactly what we wanted to have accomplished coming out of the FAD, and had some measure on how to judge that as a success or failure. We don't have the same accountability for a hackfest at FUDCon. With so much debate going back and forth, we eventually came to the conclusion that while nothing is "broken" about the current hackfest process, however, we could do a better job of encoruaging planning going into the hackfest so that a defined set of goals is laid out prior to the hackfest (where that goal could be simply having a design for the "brainstorming" type of hackfest to having X, Y, and Z features implemented for the pre-planned type of hackfest) that we can objectively measure the success or failure of the hackfest against.

We then went to focus our efforts on capturing these items (and others that we came up with while doing so) on the wiki.

All in all, there will be 7 items that we hope to knock out tomorrow:

Generic FUDCon calendar - i.e what FUDCon happens in which region of the world around what time frame (generally aligned to Red Hat fiscal quarters)
A specific instantiation of that calendar for 2010 - because we're already in 2010 talking about this, the 2010 one may differ slightly form the one going forward
The bidding process for where to hold a FUDCon
Things that we like about the current FUDCon, and what is required in order to make a FUDCon a success - a minimum level of infrastructure, people, etc.
What would we change about FUDCon, and what specific problem area that we identified does that either definitely or perhaps solve
A "FUDCon organizer HOWTO guide"
Clearly defined process and standards around attendee sponsorship

I think that I've rambled enough for one blog post :)

Oh noes! My blog was down!

2010-01-29T16:09:19Z

It seems that my blog has been down for a few days :( My hosting provider, Linode, sent me a notice that they would migrate my Linode due to some power maintenance where it was - I didn't think that was a big deal, just a reboot, right? Of course, when things reboot, you find that MySQL and Apache weren't set to come up on boot :(. Of course, I didn't notice it until I went to go write something in the blog and it didn't work. Maybe I should do some monitoring of my blog. I love Lindoe though - at least they notified me that there was maintenance on the host and it's my lazy self that didn't actually check that everything was going to be OK - probably better than some VPS providers out there that would just take it down and not let you know! If you are interested in Linode, sign up here!

Events FAD coming up!

2010-01-25T04:25:00Z

I can't wait for the Fedora Events FAD that's happening next weekend in Raleigh - we have some lofty goals for the FAD, but I think that the most challenging is going to be fixing the "we broke BarCamp" bug from Toronto. As we scale in Fedora, we're going to hit this sort of challenge at lots of events.

I think that some of the issues were related to communications failure, though - there was plenty of confusion at the hotel about exactly what time we were supposed to be at the venue, therefore, lots of people showed up late. I'm not sure what exactly can be done about this - post signs at the hotel explaining when folks need to be there? A fudcon-attendees mailing list? These are just a few of the options to consider, I'm certainly open to other ones.

Also, not a slight at the location, but having to take mass transit that only comes once every 15 minutes or so is guaranteed to create issues - the bus was simply not designed to carry THAT many people getting on at the same time. All of the other times at FUDCon that I can recall, the venue was within easy walking distance of the hotel, a definite plus (come to think of it. I'm not sure that was the case at my very first FUDCon - 2008 in Raleigh).

Another thing that we need to deal with is the inevitable fail that comes with putting lots of geeks in a single hotel - the network will be absolutely useless - we need to just accept the fact that at the hotel, we'll have no connectivity to the outside world. We've seen this time and time again, yet we still don't have a way to deal with it and still communicate. I think that while IRC is a wonderful medium of communication, without network connectivity it doesn't work out so well. I think that one solution to this is the mailing list that I alluded to above - email is a wonderful asynchronous communication mechanism, add to that that many of us have smartphones that can send and receive mail even when we have no other form of connectivity (IRC from a smartphone is just painful :D)

At any rate, I'm looking forward to the FAD so that we can discuss these and lots of other interesting and exciting topics!

Mailing list migration - we're done!

2010-01-10T05:50:00Z

So we're finally complete with the Fedora mailing list migration. As I write this, we're just putting the finishing touches on prior to opening the floodgates to the world. I'd like to thank Marek Mahut, from Red Hat IT, and Dennis Gilmore for helping to get this massive effort completed. I'd also like to share a few stats about what we did today.

Lists migrated: 121
Number of archive messages migrated: well over a million (I have no way to give an exact number, but users@lists.fedoraproject.org - the former fedora-list - had well over 400K messages, and other lists had large numbers as well)
Time the migration took in all: approximately 14 hours
Number of lists currently being hosted on Fedora infrastructure: 165

Thanks for being patient with us through this, this migration allows Fedora to be more in control of our own "IT destiny" than ever before!

If there's a problem, feel free to open a ticket in the infrastructure trac instance!

Mailing list migration - the date nears!

2010-01-07T05:09:47Z

I just submitted the following outage for post on fedora-announce and fedora-devel-announce, just in case someone doesn't read those and reads planet instead, I've posted it here since it's so important :)

----

Outage Notification - 2009-01-09 - 2009-01-10

There will be an outage starting at 2009-01-09, which will last
approximately 48 hours.

To convert UTC to your local time, take a look at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/UTCHowto
or run:

date -d '2009-01-09 HH:MM UTC'

Affected Services:

Mailing Lists

Unaffected Services:

Buildsystem
CVS / Source Control
Database
DNS
Fedora Hosted
Fedora People
Fedora Talk
Mirror System
Torrent
Translation Services
Websites

Ticket Link: https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1912

Reason for Outage: Migrate mailing lists from RHT infrastructure to Fedora infrastructure. Note that this outage will not be for the entire 48 hours, however, there will be times when mailing list traffic will be queued rather than immediately delivered. This will occur as large lists are migrated.

We will attempt to minimize any impact. Note that as the mailing lists are being renamed as well, therefore, the List-ID headers will change. You can find further information about the changes at https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00011.html

Thanks for your patience while we undertake this massive migration effort.

Contact Information:

Please join #fedora-admin in irc.freenode.net or respond to this email to track
the status of this outage.

Brief reminder - mailing list migration

2010-01-04T04:58:07Z

It's my duty to remind people of the Fedora mailing list migration that will be taking place on January 9 and 10, 2010. All of your list ID information and headers will change, resulting in a need for you to adjust your mail filters accordingly. The original announcement about this with many more details is here. That is all :)

Friends of Bobst

2010-01-03T20:05:00Z

Well, I try to do something charitable every year, and when that charitable thing actually benefits me, the more the better!

I joined the Friends of Bobst Library, mainly so that I could get access to a university library to do some research for a blog post that I've been working on for a long time but hasn't really gotten anywhere (save the last two weeks). No details on what it is yet, that will be a surprise! But suffice it to say it requires much research :). The library is generally open 7 days a week from 7AM-1AM (for non-NYU peeps like me, the two lower levels are generally open 24hrs for the NYU crowd). Unfortunately, most of my time has been spent in the reference centers, and not on the north side of the building with magnificent views of Washington Square Park, since with their guest wireless you can't access the online databases that they subscribe to, but you're welcome to use their machines in the reference centers and save your work to a USB stick.

I found another post from another friend of the library, and unlike him, I hope they spend some of my $225 on the heating system! This place is frigid in the winter, and according to him, an oven in the summer! Just wonderful :)

MagicJack

2010-01-02T02:49:38Z

Well, I picked up this little thing called a Magic Jack the other day, and so far, despite the other negative reviews that I'm seeing out there on the Net, I actually like it! I bought it because I have a really nice Polycom speakerphone that had been sitting in the box gathering dust ever since I moved and dispensed with a landline, and for a total cost of $40, even if it didn't work, no great loss. There are some pretty serious drawbacks, though:

No Linux support (not a deal-breaker for me, as long as it support an Intel-based Mac, which it does)
Your computer has to be on, it's essentially a USB ATA I think (again, no big deal for me, could be a deal-breaker for some)
The software is not the best in the world - it pops up in the middle of what you're doing anytime you make or receive a call (not a biggie for me, since I rarely actively use my Mac for anything, I mostly use my Fedora box)
When you sign up, they try to upsell you on a number of things (a vanity number for $10, 5 years of service, prepayment for international calling, etc)

However, in spite of these drawbacks, there are a lot of good things about it as well:

You plug any analog phone into it, and it works just like the phone did before - it's so simple that your Grandma could use it :)
Call quality is good to excellent - I've only had a few issues with it
So long as you have Internet access, you can take your phone with you - there's even a softphone if you want to dispense with the analog phone attachment and just use a USB headset. This is most important if you're traveling internationally, you can take a US phone with you.
Speaking of international, all calls to Canada are free with magicJack (they're billable by most cell phone carriers). If you pre-pay, there are also low international calling rates as well.

In spite of the name, there's nothing magic about the magicJack either. It's just a standard SIP phone with this little piece of hardware. It appears to me that they're using Asterisk in at least some capacity, since the voicemail appears to be straight Asterisk. The unfortunate thing is the requirement to use their software, however, there are hacks out there on the Internet for obtaining the SIP credentials and just using it as a straight SIP trunk into Asterisk. I've not done this, because I actually like the hardware they make you use :)