From kragen@pobox.com Mon Feb 17 06:53:32 2003 From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2003 01:53:32 -0500 (EST) Subject: stopping the war on Iraq Message-ID: <20030217065332.F2FBC3F573@panacea.canonical.org> Today, Beatrice and I marched with a quarter of a million other people in San Francisco. We marched through the city named after St. Francis of Assisi, who preached kindness and peace; we marched for kindness and peace. In 1945, the people of the world founded the United Nations in San Francisco, in order to end wars of aggression. San Francisco has a monument, the United Nations Plaza, commemorating this event and celebrating the growth of the United Nations over time. We walked down United Nations Plaza to the Civic Center, where the city government sits. We walked over the words of the Charter of the United Nations, inlaid in brass in marble slabs. We stopped to read these words, words filled with faith in a peaceful future. I wept as I read the words of the Charter, because day by day, my government prepares for a war of aggression against the people of Iraq. We walked through United Nations Plaza, along with a quarter of a million other people in San Francisco, with millions of protestors around the world who marched yesterday. We walked to stop this war of aggression and to fulfill the faith in peace on which we founded the United Nations almost sixty years ago. The marches this weekend --- perhaps the biggest the world has ever seen --- portend a better future for humanity, a democratic future where people make up their own minds instead of following the official government line, a peaceful future where wars of aggression --- which may profit the aggressor, but rarely profit his subjects --- cannot be started. *** We met our friend Susannah at the Embarcadero, near the beginning of San Francisco's Market Street. No huge dove accompanied us; we saw only one dove this time. We walked mostly ahead of the main body of the protest march, arriving at the Civic Center Plaza pretty early. Perhaps the doves trailed far behind us. Protestors packed together under the trees. Many local politicians spoke, as did Alice Walker, Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, the Reverend Cecil Williams, some local priests and bishops and rabbis, a peace organizer from Britain, an American Indian Movement spokesman, and a number of other people. Joan and Bonnie sang an a cappella duet. Alice Walker read a plea for grandmothers (she said it in two words, with a little pause in between: "grand mothers") to help guide the world. Danny Glover, the actor, co-MC'd with the president of the Vanguard Foundation. The Vanguard Foundation funded things like toilets, sound amplification, and promotion of today's march, through the International A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition. We met Susannah's sister and her aunt Diane there at the plaza. We stood by a small metal box that protected some kind of valve that protruded from the ground; Susannah and her sister climbed up atop it to get a better view. A woman sitting on the edge of the box had a loud discussion with the sister after they had been sharing the box for perhaps an hour; each thought the other had gradually encroached on their space, and they discussed who had been there first. This incident reminded me of a story the roshi at Green Gulch had told last Sunday; twelve years ago, a man on his way to some protests against the previous war against Iraq had stopped by the side of the road to yell insults at the Green Gulch residents for planting some trees. She spoke about the rage this incident had aroused in her as she stood there planting the trees, and how hard it was for her to listen to him when they sat and talked about the incident a few days later. As I watched the two women yell, women who had come to the plaza to create peace, I reflected on how it remains so much more difficult to be peaceful than to want peace. The organizers had arranged for some volunteers to collect money in buckets they carried through the crowd, but they had far too few buckets; one of our MCs appealed for anyone who had a hat to pass it around, then bring it backstage. The crowd filled with sudden volunteers, and their hats quickly filled with money. I hope most of it made it backstage. Beatrice and I rocked in one another's arms as we stood there in the midst of the crowd. Early on, we ran into my childhood friend Praveen Sinha, who attended with our friend Biella and her sister and niece. We promised to hook up later, but we haven't yet; we all felt pretty tired after spending a full day at the march. After about an hour of watching the speakers, I took a break from the rally in the square to go back and watch some more of the march and snap some more photos. The creativity exhibited by the marchers amazed me. A sea of different, creative signs stretched down Market farther than I could see; one man carried a spoof of the "12 galaxies" sign (which you've seen if you've spent enough time in San Francisco's Tenderloin), while a man in a gorilla suit carried a sign reading, "ANIMALS AGAINST WAR". Sign after sign decried war for oil, our dopey and evil President, the occupation of Palestine, the inefficiency of our energy infrastructure, and our habits of supporting terrorist governments, among others. Some signs declared the group affiliations of their bearers: ATHEISTS AGAINST WAR, CHRISTIANS AGAINST WAR, Jewish Voices Against War, New College, San Francisco State University, YOUTH SPARTACIST LEAGUE; a few poked fun at this practice --- ANGRY MISFIT AGAINST WAR, VOTING QUEER RANCHER AGAINST WAR. Joan Baez commented on this when she spoke; she said it was one of the big differences between today's antiwar movement and the one opposed to the Viet Nam war --- our slogans today seem far more creative and dramatic. I didn't see as much guerilla theater as last time, but one occurrence deserves mention. Along one side of Market Street, we saw a cage with a cloth over it. The cloth promised to reveal the link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda when it was lifted; then the handlers lifted it, to reveal a fake gorilla inside, wearing a George Bush Sr. mask. The handlers warned us not to get too close, as he was very dangerous, and they poked him with a stick (labeled, inexplicably, "SARIN") through the bars of the cage to keep him subdued. One-man-bands came out in force, and several street corners had three or four people dancing to the beats of rawhide drums, cowbells, and various other kinds of percussion instruments. One woman offered free cans of some lemon-lime drink to protestors as they passed. But most of the protestors remained serious and simply walked together down the street: men and women and children, black people, white people, Asian people, Arabic people, Jewish people, babies in strollers, toddlers, children, teenagers, young, middle-aged, old, and ancient. Beatrice's sister Connie had called us yesterday as she marched for peace in Los Angeles; and her brother marched in London, in the biggest protest ever held in England. -- Kragen Sitaker Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details. From kragen@pobox.com Tue Feb 25 21:36:21 2003 From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 16:36:21 -0500 (EST) Subject: Evan died; CodeCon Message-ID: <20030225213621.DE3453F579@panacea.canonical.org> My friend Evan Doughty died in his sleep Saturday morning. Nobody knows why he died. The autopsy, which finished Sunday, had inconclusive results; no heart attack or cerebral aneurysm killed him, but we don't know what did. As I write this, I await my flight to Ohio for his funeral. You can read Evan's journal at http://www.livejournal.com/users/evanfoo He had lived 21 years before his death. I miss Evan. He had the courage to take unpopular stands, but still listen to those who disagreed with him; and he changed his mind when they showed him he was wrong. At Best Buy, he stood up against the store's policy of illicitly signing up its customers for MSN when they bought a computer, without telling them; this eventually led to his departure. Among the Canonical Hackers, he had no fear to stand up for eccentric beliefs and interests he pursued, namely, Christianity and professional wrestling. You might think that groups of hackers would have a lot of tolerance for diversity, but until Evan forced us to accept these aspects of his life, our tolerance for professional wrestling fans and Christians sometimes included some condescension. I didn't know Evan as well as the other CHs did, and now I never will. You'd think that after such a sharp reminder of my own mortality, I wouldn't get so irritated at minor frustrations, but so far, I remain as irritable as ever. I went to CodeCon (http://codecon.info/) this weekend. Saturday morning, Beatrice and I had a long talk, after which we both felt much happier. But it lasted long enough that I missed most of the first CodeCon talk, which concerned a pure-Python cryptographic toolkit called CryptoPy, which seemed kind of fun; of course, modifying crypto algorithms takes much less effort if you write them in Python than if you write them in C, so CryptoPy makes algorithmic experimentation much easier. The OpenRatings talk, which concerned a web service for students to share their opinions about professors, interested me. Applications like these could change our society dramatically, for either better or worse. In this case, the more efficient propagation of professor reputation information gives students significantly more control over their college experience, for better or worse. The GNU Radio talk that followed impressed me much more. Eric and Matt have built software that can decode FM radio in real time (six stations at a time), given the output of an ADC hooked up to an antenna through a downconverter. They also demonstrated, for the first time, decoding of ATSC HDTV signals by the same means; they showed us a short segment of "Law and Order" from a few days before. This technology could give people much more control over their radios. For example, your computer could listen to several radio stations at once, playing only the songs you liked out loud. Or it could blank out commercials, or play all the songs backwards, or notify you when your dedication to your girlfriend got played. Extended to TV, it lets anyone build a super-TiVo out of their PC with free software, but with support for HDTV. (The software doesn't yet run fast enough to make this practical; it needs 40 minutes to decode each minute of ATSC.) I won't say much here about bidirectional communications with free-software-defined radio, but it should allow much more efficient spectrum use and much more effective privacy. The next talk discussed Neurogrid, a prototype flexible metadata search system, filling some of the same needs as recent proprietary photograph-management software: finding things by means other than the filesystem hierarchy. Saturday closed with a version-control panel, where Larry McVoy, Jonathan Shapiro, and Greg Stein managed to avoid fisticuffs as Shap and gstein explained how they had been stupid to think that version control was easy, and how lm had explained to them that building a version-control system would take three years. The BitKeeper licensing policy came up only at the very end, as Shap sandbagged lm with a really vicious promise to never screw OpenCM users the way bk has been screwing some of its users (by yanking their licenses). Beatrice and I went to dinner with Mark Miller, Seth David Schoen, and two other people whose privacy I will protect by keeping them anonymous, although their MD5 checksums are c16526ba8e12c687185a01e7382454a0 and fdd8a68d5f96fe0515cbd230bf3d7aab. I enjoyed seeing Shap and MarkM and Mike Linksvayer again, among many other people, and I was very happy to meet Ben Laurie for the first time; some people, like Sofia Akber, I didn't even get a chance to say hello to. After dinner, we went to Club Ass IV, a party at our friend Laurel's house (the House of Ass). We saw lots of people there, including one other CodeCon attendee, and danh, whom I hadn't seen in a long time. Danh hasn't had as much free time since he got a full-time job again. While I was there, I logged on to IRC and learned of Evan's death; his friend David Sakmar logged on and told me and Jason. My whole body felt cold, then hot, then painful; I took a long time to believe Evan had really died. Beatrice and I went home around 3 AM. Sunday morning, I arranged a conference call of the Canonical Hackers to discuss how to dispose of Evan's effects and share what new information we'd learned about his death. Sunday at CodeCon, I missed the Alluvium talk, which discussed a p2p media streaming system for non-live streams. (I mostly know this much from attending the Q&A section.) Then the amihotornot.com folks got up to talk, and really impressed on the audience the power of user interface details to influence human behavior. I went to a late lunch, then returned in time to see the end of the Hydan talk, where Hydan's author described the various bits of redundancy you can exploit to hide information inside executables. We had a break in which Len Sassaman eulogized his friend Disastree, to whom he dedicated this year's CodeCon. He kind of slagged all the so-called cypherpunks who, unlike Disastree, write no code. Then a masked man came up to discuss Mixminion, a next-generation anonymous remailer system to protect our right to anonymous speech on the Internet. Then Dan Kaminsky came up to give a really engaging talk about Paketto Keiretsu, a collection of really ingenious networking hacks. For example, he demonstrated a TCP SYN/ACK retry time-signature fingerprinting method, a way to tack extended information onto the ends of IP packets without breaking backward-compatibility. That night, I attended the California Community Colocation Project benefit dinner, at which Mitch Kapor talked for a while about Chandler. I left to go home early around the time the trivia contest started, so that I could spend time with Beatrice instead of listening to trivia. A reporter who'd sat next to me at dinner gave me a lift home. (So I could say to Beatrice, "I never did get a cab, but this hot blonde gave me a ride home in her red convertible." This amused her a bit.) It disappointed me that the elaborate deem sum dinner I'd paid for had no vegetarian items, so I had to eat chop suey. I missed Monday's CodeCon talks in order to go to work, which I really regret, because Khashmir, DeepGreen, YouServ, Bayonne, and Advogato all seem like more interesting topics than those of any talks I actually saw, except for the version control, Paketto, and GNU Radio talks. But I went to a tapas place afterward with a bunch of the attendees and Beatrice; at dinner there, Danfuzz gave me the inside scoop on the Danger HipTop developer program and its limitations, as well as some interesting tidbits about the platform. I developed a sore throat yesterday, just as Evan did on Tuesday of last week. I hope I get better quickly. -- Kragen Sitaker Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details. From kragen@pobox.com Thu Feb 27 10:12:40 2003 From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2003 05:12:40 -0500 (EST) Subject: Evan's funeral Message-ID: <20030227101240.1B0943F579@panacea.canonical.org> I don't have much time to write now, but I want to write a bit before I board the plane that takes me back to California, where I will go back to work. All the Canonical Hackers attended Evan's funeral yesterday. Hundreds and hundreds of other people attended. Many people loved Evan, I guess. His family hosted a get-together at their house after the funeral, but we thought we'd stay away so as not to impose. Instead, we ate at La Rosa's, a restaurant where Evan had eaten with many of us sometimes in the past. We spent the rest of the day together; people started driving back around 22:00. I went to sleep around 2:00 and got up at 4:00 to catch my flight. I hope to sleep more on the flight. Evan's death causes me to reflect on my wonderful good fortune to be part of such a loving group of friends. -- Kragen Sitaker Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.