Logiciel Libre

Thanks to Sam for the idea.

int k = 0;
k = k++;

After both lines execute, what is k equal to?

(more…)

Mifos’s beloved director George Conard will be giving a talk on Mifos at the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The phrase double bottom line refers to having a bottom line besides just profit.

See you there!

As seen on Planet Fedora…

:) [adamm@snax ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a)\
{print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
79 svn
68 vim
57 cd
35 ls
32 pwd
25 ant
20 s
19 mysql
19 find
12 mv

“s” is aliased to “cd ..”.

Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) knows a thing or two about fostering a geeky volunteer community. A desire to do well at my current post of “Mr. Open Source” on the Mifos project has led me to try and learn some lessons from people like Jimmy. Here are two crucial points gleaned from an interview with him on FLOSS Weekly:

• small group dialogs are best, too many people on one problem ends in voting/groupthink
• build a system that supports bees and and handles wasps (my verbage)

I’ve been enjoying strolling through the FLOSS Weekly archives; a collection of one-on-one interviews with key players in FLOSS. Here’s a quote that really speaks to why FLOSS is something to pay attention to:

“Free as in Freedom” is a really important concept. That is, technology really as to be free in some important ways if people are to have political freedom.

- Eben Moglen, speaking on the GPL version 3 during FLOSS Weekly interview.

IRC is an ancient, tried-and-true one-to-many chat protocol. Pidgin is a feature-rich instant messaging client that can handle many protocols, including IRC. Pidgin runs on many different platforms, including the three most popular ones. Pidgin integrates nicely with the desktop.

Here’s how to set up a Freenode IRC account in Pidgin:

1. Open Pidgin; click Accounts -> Add/Edit.
2. Click the Add button.
3. Change the protocol to IRC and enter
   irc.freenode.net as the server.
4. If you have a Screen name (called a “nick” or “nickname” in IRC
   parlance), type it (e.g. MrOpenSource) in the Screen
name field. If you don’t own one yet, make one up.
5. Click on the Advanced tab, and fill in the Real
name field.

Now, register your nickname. This helps people recognize you, protects your
identity, and allows you to send private messages.

1. Click on Buddies -> New Instant Message.
2. Fill in NickServ for Name.
3. Change Account to the Freenode account you just created,
   and click Ok. Now you can “talk” with the
   NickServ robot.
4. The first message you send should be register PASSWORD
   (where PASSWORD is one of your choosing).
5. Next, set an email address. This will give you a way to reset your
   password later should there be a need. Send set hide email on
   to NickServ.
6. Next message should be set email ADDRESS (where
   ADDRESS is your email address)

Then, join #mifos. :)

One problem sometimes occurs when you have connection problems. You may be disconnected from the internet and the IRC server may not realize you’ve dropped off. When you reconnect, you may see what appears to be two of your username in the channel with slightly different names. Like: USERNAME and USERNAME_. Send help release to NickServ, and NickServ will tell you how to release the original, correct nickname.

Further instructions can be found here or by saying help to NickServ. Commands like /msg NickServ help do work in Pidgin.

This guide was heavily inspired by the following article on freesoftwaremagazine.com.

One more final tip: enable the “Join/Part Hiding” plugin to supress the many “so-and-so joined the room, so-and-so left” messages that will likely show up in the channel.

There are just too many shiny objects out there. Here’s how I ended up looking at some of the strangest C code I’ve ever seen.

1. Started on the gslug mailing list, reading about a new keyboard layout. I continue to be drawn in to rumors that the QWERTY layout is a conspiracy to slow down typers, so hearing about a new keyboard layout called Colemak piqued my curiosity.
2. Progressed quickly from colemak.com to the Wikipedia entry on Colemak. Cool, Colemak is supposed to be easier to switch to than Dvorak.
3. The Colemak entry on Wikipedia mentions digraphs. I’ve heard of digraphs because I use them in Vim, but you can use them in C, too? Strange.
4. The digraph entry on Wikipedia also mentions trigraphs. Trigraphs!

Sheesh. Interesting, but talk about distracting. I sure hope it isn’t true that multitasking kills your brain.

The GNU build system (aka Autotools) is/are too fricking hard to use. But I’m split… when the conventions of autotools are embraced, the product is quite portable. Though not very maintainable. Is it impossible to be infinitely adaptable and still be user friendly?

Ian Lance Taylor captures what’s wrong with autotools quite nicely. Ian says Cmake isn’t a suitable replacement, but perhaps it could evolve into one

http://jwz.livejournal.com/830604.html

rotfl.

I agree that it is basically vandalism in that the reason everyone is there is to see the what’s on the TVs, but it’s still funny as heck.

Like a couple of the commenters, I’ve found the TV-B-Gone indispensable in airports, bars, restaurants; any place where the management seems to think people need a TV playing in the background (or foreground) at all times.
Here’s the thing they probably used to turn off the TVs.

(via Patrick)

We’ve got online banking, auctions, and dating. What about elections? I want to vote online to decide who gets to run our country and how it is to be run.

Online voting is a complex problem and I haven’t thought it completely through, but I feel like moving to some type of online system is inevitable and I’m curious how it will happen. Maybe I want to be involved. I love to kibitz about it with friends like Mark and Patrick.

Some points that any online voting system should address:

• security
  • votes should be untraceable to the voter
  • should be difficult to impersonate a voter and steal their vote
  • should provide an equivalent to “election-day verification” (ala showing your driver’s license and signing a roster)
• simplicity
  • should be as easy as possible to match a vote to a candidate without compromising security or robustness
• robustness
  • voters should be able to confirm that their vote was counted, and counted correctly
  • recounts should be possible

But I’m an engineer. Of sorts. So I want to know how it would really work. I feel like it needs to involve some sort of high-grade encryption and should be FLOSS. Beyond simply being implemented as FLOSS, the blueprints of the entity creating the secure online voting system (including business processes involved, like project management, financials, etc.) should be completely transparent. And that’s the extent to which I’ve thought through the problem.

But at least one person has gone further. Check out Alex Weir’s proposal on SMS external encrypted voting. Here are my humble thoughts about it.

• PROS. The proposal:
  • focuses on elections in developing countries (the “third world”), but there is plenty useful to developed countries as well.
  • employs a one-time pad idea seems pretty dang secure.
  • encourages cell phones be used as the transmission device. Excellent idea since the number of people with cell phones in third-world countries is supposedly booming. If SMS can be used, a Web interface should be pretty easy to tack on.
• CONS. The proposal:
  • has had little exposure in mainstream media. I imagine his idea isn’t quite “press-ready”.
  • doesn’t adequately address how voter envelopes will be distributed.
  • doesn’t have a replacement for “election-day verification”. Voter envelopes and a cell phone are all that is needed to cast a vote.
  • outlines a poor user interface. The interface needs to be dumb simple, like “click HERE for candidate A, HERE for candidate B”. Not “encode the corresponding numbers in the one-time pad matrix for the candidate of your choice, and decode the response based on the second matrix.” So I’m fudging the description a little. My point is that the voter could be spared the complexity with a FLOSS application running on the cell phone that took care of the encryption. Or something. Perhaps an application running on the phone wouldn’t work because, well, how would you support the one-time pad? The idea of using another piece of paper with holes cut out that can be placed atop the one-time pad matrices sounds like an excellent solution to easing the complexity of encryption/decryption while maintaining security.
  • places too much power and responsibility in the one villager’s hands who happens to own the local cell phone.
  • requires fees of USD 0.001 per vote to Mr. Alex Weir. I don’t know how much is fair, but this just doesn’t feel right.

My feedback and opinions aside, this is a very exciting idea! It should at least provide some starting points for future secure online voting systems. Kudos, Mr. Weir!