As I crawl through the social science literature — a very painful endeavour, believe me — it fills me with disgust to see how much bullshit is being spread as authors randomly insert citations into their text to back up some claim they need to argue their case.

Often, the claim is something in which I am interested, so I go out and seek the reference they cite only to find that the referenced authors say nothing even remotely related to the claim for which they were cited. It is happening all over the place, and even in articles that appeared in “renowned” journals.

If we ever get to the point where all academic articles are properly interlinked so that references can be automatically checked — and I don’t mean just checked for correctness of the reference data, but for actual correctness of the reference — then the population of academics will probably shrink to single-digit percentages, at least for the social sciences; I don’t recall it being much different when I was researching artificial intelligence a few years ago though.

Until then, I am compiling a list. Whether I’ll publish it and point journal editors at, or just send it to the journals depends on my mood at the time.

NP: Guns ‘n’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction

It’s now three weeks since I am officially a Ph.D. student at the University of Limerick, but I’ve been too busy to do anything about it. Today, I finally updated my research webpage and sat down to tell you the tale of how I successfully defended my research, but failed to leave the country the next day.

As is customary in the British system, I initially enrolled at UL as a Master student. In October, I then applied for a transfer to the Ph.D. track, submitted a transfer report and prepared for a live defence, according to the UL code of practice.

On 23 November, I presented my research to my examiners, Dr. Pär Ågerfalk and Patrick Healy, who found my work to be at Ph.D. level and approved of my transfer.

I was moderately nervous going into the presentation, not really knowing what was expected of me. In the end, however, the presentation went well and the ensuing discussion provided valuable feedback. Thank you, Pär and Paddy, as well as Norah (who chaired), and Brian (my supervisor) for all your time, help, and support.

After the defence, Mel waited outside with a beer in hand, and it being Friday and all, I happily popped the cap and drank. Plans to head to The Stables gave way to chilling on the couch in 110 (my home away from home), before we headed to town for the Kila gig.

We arrived early, had some beers, enjoyed the show, had some more beers, went home, and had some more beers to Guitar Hero, and when I crawled into bed, I was shocked to find out that I had lost all track of time and it was in fact already 5:30 on Saturday morning, instead of the perceived 2 o’clock.

See, the source of this shock was a plane that left Dublin the next day around noon, and a rental car that was to get me there, leaving the house at 8. But when my alarm shattered my drunk dreams at 7:30, it quickly became clear (or well, everything was blurred, actually), that I would have a hard time getting into the car, and I would certainly never manage to navigate it to Dublin, a three hour drive. So I called up the airline and the rental company and rescheduled for the next day (only one flight from Dublin to Zurich a day), and went back to dreamland.

I am entirely unsure whether my Ph.D. transfer defence was enough of a reason to get smashed. I still had a good time, though — as always in Ireland, especially with this crowd…

NP: The Flower Kings: The Rainmaker

After an amazingly stressless journey [0]_, I’ve arrived yesterday evening in Limerick and met Daren and Mel, two alumni of UL who let me move into a spare room in the house they’re renting. To be exact, Mel actually lives next door, but who cares about details. After a bit of unpacking, we headed for the pub and returned for an extensive session of Guitar Hero on the Playstation II, which is a truly fun and excellent game.

.. [0] I brought my bike along, for transport and exploring. This involved : packing a bit of extra stuff, borrowing a friend’s Tranzbag, arriving early at the airport to get it boxed to ensure a safer journey, picking it up in Dublin, and somehow getting it to Limerick, where I’d have to reassemble it. I wasn’t really looking forward to the trip.

: It turned out to be stressless, as I said. The boxing cost me 10 Franks at the airport and was completed in less than 5 minutes, nobody at the check-in counter said anything, as if it was the most normal thing for them to check in bikes, some dude retrieved the box in Dublin and placed it on my cart, and while I was waiting, I found out that I wouldn’t have to hop on a coach (bus) to go to the Dublin train station, catch a train to Limerick, and then finish the last mile in a taxi: a bus operates fairly regularly directly from Dublin airport to Limerick, taking four hours for the journey. That’s about how long it would have taken me via the train station, but I only had to pay 19€ — the train itself would have been 25€, plus the taxi charges.

: The coach driver was curious when he saw the box, but I didn’t have to pay extra, and after watching Airport on my laptop and listening to the new Katatonia album, I found myself with my bag and the bike next to the university’s main entrance, with Mel and Daren on the way to pick me up. Five minutes later, I was in my home-to-be-for-five-weeks.

I dropped into bed at around 4am and promptly overslept the next morning, then decided to use the day for errands, hitched a ride from Laura (the stressed-out Skynet president and Skycon organiser) to an excellent nearby bike store where I reassembled the bike, got myself a lock (see below) and a mud guard for the front wheel, then headed off for the campus bank to open an account, rode back and forth between the Lero building and the bank to satisfy their bureaucratic thirsts and finally obtained the details for my very own Irish bank account. And I squeezed a bit of grocery shopping in between.

Meeting Brian (my supervisor) in the hallway, we agreed on a meeting on Monday, so the remainder of this week is for finishing the various proposals and papers on my to-do list, preparing for the meeting by getting back to speed with my research, as well as getting to know the local party crowd — exams are about to end in Limerick and I’ve been told to have picked quite an excellent time of year for my visit because the university will become a mad house this weekend. We’ll see how compatible those tasks are, but boy am I glad that I am not living anywhere near the student villages, or as I put it last night: I don’t mind going to parties, but if the party comes to where I am, I’d rather not have it be every night.

So this would bring me to the title of this post: stuff that I forgot to pack:

• A second sweater, it’s pretty cold here and I don’t want to be wearing the same sweater every day (even though it’s merino wool and thus woudn’t start to smell).

• A pair of windcheater gloves, the thin wool ones I have aren’t exactly made for cycling.

• Rain trousers to wear over my regular pants. It’s raining and wet and the light colours of the pants I am wearing are a high-contrast basis for the mud.

• My bike’s lock key. Fortunately I left it unlocked, but still had to go out and buy a new lock (which was more painless than having the key sent here).

• Comfy sneakers for home use, as it’s too cold to just be wearing socks.

Due to popular request, I shall be back here with pictures of my surroundings one of these days.

NP: I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness / Fear Is on Our Side

My professor, Brian Fitzgerald, identifies a common misconception about the initial phase of Ph.D. research as the drawing of a line to indicate a point in time when the research starts. Undoubtedly, a lot of thinking preceeds any such decision, and that’s all part of the research. I didn’t argue.

Nevertheless, I do consider my research to have officially started with the beginning of this month, especially since I’ve really taken a turn from my initial plans last year. It’s been painful staying away from computers as much as possible while trying to cure my wrist problems with all these ideas and a lot of enthusiasm about getting to work on them. Even though the problems hadn’t subsided in February, I decided to get back online while trying to take more care of my body. Since then, I’ve attended a few conferences, addressed some legal issues, cleaned up my data, and travelled around in Southeast Asia.

I could have continued going about, having a good time, and getting stuff done endlessly and I would have never started my research, which is why I decided to come to Limerick and booked a flight to have a fixed date.

So far, it’s been a lot of literature and papers, but I’ve also spent a considerable amount of time making plans for how to proceed, and I am really pleased with what I’m currently looking at, even though I really need to figure out how to avoid distractions. And since my wrists and the rest of the body aren’t all well yet, I should really be explicit of how I spent the few hours per day that I can be typing.

I’ve started a little web page to document my intentions and progress, and to bridge between the horribly tangled world of academia and the more pragmatic outside world, including the Debian project (which is core to my research). You can also find my current proposal on that page, in case you want to know more than the brief overview reveals.

PS: is it really the case that there are no means on Linux to annotate PDFs and highlight text in them???

FOSDEM 2006 is over, I am now sitting at one of the weirdest airports I have seen so far: passages are intertwined and long, and it seems like you have to walk several hundred kilometres in circles before you finally end up at the place you ned to go to.

I gave a talk Saturday on my Ph.D. research. Having spent almost an entire week preparing it, which involved rethinking my topic, the approach, and fighting doubts several times, I was all too pleased that a new aspect of my research was dawning upon me just in time to change a lot of the slides around a bit on the plane from Zurich. Even though my goal is to work a lot on Debian, I think the question on which I really want to concentrate is along the lines of “how to get volunteers to adopt new models and methods.” Debian seems like a perfect environment in which to search for an answer, but I assume I shall also be looking around the Zope and Plone communities.

Unfortunately, my talk didn’t go as well as I had hoped. Part of it was on the Debian security situation, and having talked to a couple of people up front, and receiving even more feedback to my online personna, which apparently sometimes misrepresents my intentions, I took specific care to do with the delicate topic of Debian security with utmost care (and I think I succeeded; oh, and as a German I have a right to run-on sentences…). As a result though, I lost about 10 minutes of time, and additionally, I got confused about the length of my talk slot somewhere in the middle of the talk.

After giving an overview of my research idea, model, and approach, and the security situation, and just before coming to the exciting meat on possible extensions to Debian package management and the upload process which are geared to making it easier for others to contribute, h01ger kindly pointed out I had 10 minutes (not 25) left, a bunch of people walked into the room, generating noise and switching lights on and off, and on top of it all, OpenOffice crashed with the remainder of my slides — those that contained graphs and other means to convey the complex ideas I was about to introduce.

Everything seemed to be going wrong. I tried to give brief overviews of the ideas from the top of my head, but I didn’t manage to piece together all the details that made the ideas interesting in a Debian context, and how the approach differs from Ubuntu’s Launchpad and their new tool hct. So at the end of the talk I felt like I hadn’t persuaded anyone of anything. Oh well. I was down for a while afterwards, it’s been a long time since I felt a talk of mine failing as I did this time, and it wasn’t until Hanna and some others consoled me by mentioning that they appreciated the contents I did convey (especially the security stuff), and quite a bunch of people found me afterwards with questions, suggestions, and comments.

My slides are available online (\~ 4.3 Mib) and I am looking forward to your feedback. I apologise for the size of the PDF and herewith promise never to use OpenOffice.org again. A bzip2-compressed version is available here (\~ 1.4 Mib).

Saturday night then ended with dinner and a bit of beer drinking, but noone was really up for anything more after the excessive opening party the night before.

Sleep.

Sunday morning, my laptop was still frozen by OpenOffice, and I rebooted it to find myself dumped into busybox as /dev/hda5 (my root) didn’t exist. I quickly found the problem to be a missing udevd and udevsynthesize in the initramfs, but I did not manage to bring the system back up until Tollef gave me a hand to get pivot_root to do what it was supposed to do. Here’s approximately how:

busybox mknod /dev/hda5 b 3 5
mount /dev/hda5 /root
mount -o move /sys /root/sys
mount -o move /proc /root/proc
chroot /root /sbin/udevd --daemon
chroot /root /sbin/udevsynthesize
exec run-init /root /sbin/init 2 < /root/dev/console > /root/dev/console

While we were at it, Daniel Silverstone showed us a wonderful way to help debug problems of this sort: /usr/bin/open. If bash only has /dev/console, it won’t enable job control. This is exactly where open comes in:

/root/usr/bin/open /root/bin/sh

This will put an interactive shell on the next free tty with job control and all. Thanks, Daniel! I think that the above approach actually failed in the end for some weird reason we did not investigate further, so Tollef resorted to fixing the initrd instead:

update-initramfs -c -t -k 2.6.15-1-686

The important part is -t, which essentially redoes the filesystem so that custom changes are undone. I hadn’t made any custom changes, but from the point of view of initramfs, I had deleted the udev binaries.

Within an hour I had a working system again, and a

dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.15-1-686
zcat /boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-1-686 | cpio -t | grep udev

verified that the problem was only intermittent (I rarely reboot my laptop but update it often).

The T-Shirts Uncle Steve and I were selling pretty much all found new owners. This is great because I had been sitting on about a dozen shirts in XS and XXXL, and I thought I’d never get rid of them. Unfortunately, I sold them at no-profit, but given it was the last batch from Kernel Concepts, I am now thinking of arranging something with Steve to get a bunch of his shirts (which are nicer anyway).

With talks coming to an end that day, everyone’s departure was a stressful time and I was all the more glad to have had another night to spend in the city. I linked up with Jordi and some of the Debian Catalan people who were staying with a friend, Raoul, in the city. Raoul took us around a bit, showed us some of the historic sites in the centre of the city, and finally lead us to the bar of 2000 beers, where supposedly “the best beer of the world” was served: Trappist Westvletern Bleu 8. We ended the night around midnight for our flights were in the early morning.

This having been my first FOSDEM, it was a great experience and I shall definitely try to be in Brussels again next year. Thanks to Wouter and all others who have helped out.

Update: My slide links were previously not working. Thanks to all who pointed that out to me. They are fixed now. See above.

My tendonitis is level, meaning it is not getting better nor worse. I feel handicapped, and my new Kinesis keyboard will take a long time to fit into my habits, especially since I am learning Dvorak at the same time.

Anyway, Joey’s post is reason enough to make a short exception, and bring out the old PS/2 with the familiar qwerty layout. There’s been some news in my life related to Debian: I have been accepted as a Ph.D. student of Prof. Brian Fitzgerald and will be performing action research on improving workflow of the Debian development processes. I am mentioning this here because version control is stated in various places as being the logical step up from dpatch & Co., and I intend to go yet one step further.

My full proposal is available, and I am looking forward to your comments. Please note that I may take a while to respond. It’s best if you could include a phone number and times for calling, then I can go easy on my wrists and still talk to you about your thoughts.

Of course, within minutes of learning about my acceptance, I received a very juicy offer from Google, just to make my life a little more difficult. I now have to decide between another two years of academia and Debian, or a career at that colourful company. The question is: can I sustain myself for two years without income or dig up some funding for my research? I’d rather do that than sell myself.

Feeling bored? Come to Ireland, rent a car, and make your way from Dublin to the University of Limerick. Yes, there is Shannon airport, but not at short notice, and you’d miss out on all the excitement. So it turns out that it’s quite easy to convince your mind that it was replaced by its own mirror image when driving on the left side of the road. The only difference I (vigorously) discovered is the shifting. In normal cars, you push the rod away from you to the far upper corner for the fifth gear; here, you don’t. It is, and trust me on this, unpleasant to figure this out at 100 kph. Anyway, traffic sucks, the roads stink, but the people seem so much more relaxed than those German Deathmatch Drivers. Kinda refreshing.

My meeting with Prof. Brian Fitzgerald was a full success. Several details have to be worked out yet (and all the bureaucracy), but it looks as if the fall of 2005 will see me in a new field, pursuing a Ph.D. in open source development, and more specifically: workflow and productivity management in distributed (open source) projects. You can guess which project will be the main focus.

I am not yet clear on what exactly this means for me. I will likely get to stay in Zurich, which has become my favourite city and with which I’d rather not part (not to mention Aline), but what exact academic arrangements will have to be made — time will tell.

After finishing my Honours Bachelor in Computer Science and Psychology at Swarthmore College, I really wanted to do research (and not a masters degree). Se Dschermans would require me to do another 4 semesters to get a diploma (despite the 99% overlap in syllabus and other requirements, but regulations are regulations, and they get even better if people can cling to them as an excuse to turn off their brains), which is why I ended up at the AILab under the provision to complete some extra coursework (which I did). Whether or not I can get that accredited in Limerick, or whether I have to actually enroll for a master’s programme and convince people after a year that I could in fact just do a Ph.D. straight away, I don’t know yet. Fact is that I’d be willing to climb if it means to be able to devote myself to Debian and research in open source full-time. Nevertheless, given that I see certain aspects of new artificial intelligence as an integral part of the direction in which I would like to go, I might even be able to sell this endeavour as a continuation and skip all the requirements.

What exactly drove (or rather kept) me in the field of artificial intelligence, I don’t know. It sounded cool, and it was fascinating for a while, but quickly I discovered that my true interests were elsewhere. But all the time I found myself doing other things instead, and that’s no basis for a Ph.D., now is it?

Finally it seems I can merge my Ph.D. with my true interest. And boy, am I excited! Sipping on my Smithwick’s, I let the day pass revue. I’d be travelling to Limerick on a regular basis to keep up with the folks at the Computer Science Department, but that seems alright (if done via Shannon). Ireland is a most beautiful country, so differently green than Switzerland, and I enjoy the people very much. I had dinner with two old gents in some bar food place in the middle of nowhere and it was lovely. I think they were speaking English, but without the fish in my ear, it was hard to keep a conversation going. Nod and smile… that works almost everywhere.

With tired eyes I now surrender to the pillow, hoping that the fifth part of the definitive guide won’t keep me awake too long. But there’s a baby screaming next door in this blood awful Dublin Airport Holiday Inn, which must have paper for walls. Flight’s at 6:50. Yawn.

PS: Happy birthday, bubbles! I can’t sing for you.

Baz is a great tool, and with the advent of bzr, I think GNU arch will likely take off to be among the top leads in the future of SCM. In fact, IMHO, it’s going to be between bzr and git (though darcs will continue to be a really nice system for smaller projects). MHO is based on experience with the major SCM tools, I have no experience with Monotone. The Perforce SCM is an interesting tool too, but it’s non-free (it does have some wicked cool features though).

Based on Manoj’s work, I’ve started to promote the use of baz for Debian source package management. Ever since the pkg-zope live demo (and earlier too), I’ve been convinced that the approach Manoj takes is great but just a little too complex for the normal Debian developer (Manoj is beginning to see this too).

On Tuesday I will fly to Dublin and make my way to the University of Limerick (by rental car because Irish public transport is a pain) to meet Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, author of the book Understanding Open Source Software Development, to discuss the possibility of a Ph.D. in the field of workflow and productivity management in distributed (open source) projects, specifically in Debian. I am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in robotics (horribly outdated), but it is not my field as I always find myself to prefer spending time on Debian instead. Even though I am not the type of guy to quit something before completion, this time I have come to the conclusion that I’ve not been honest to myself, or have not reflected on the topic enough when I chose to continue in the field of AI.

If the meeting in Dublin goes well, I will likely change my field and start researching workflow in Debian full-time. One of the first milestones I have on my mind is ABT, the arch build tool (a temporary name), a tool that simplifies and speeds up the Manoj’s arch management approach. The tool should become a typical Unix tool in that it reuses rather than reimplements, but I also want it to become a one-stop helper to Debian source package management for inidividuals or teams alike.

I am already excited by this idea, but it gets better, and this is where the Ph.D. comes in. My work in AI has always been on the “New AI” side, which is the side that does things bottom-up rather than top-down. Tools like SCM (or crypto, or …) are usually implemented by techies to meet some technical goals. As the tool gains in popularity, more and more users climb the learning curve. This is top-down for me. What I’d like to do is analyse the way Debian developers do things, would like to do things, or what they’d be willing (and capable) to “just learn”, and then to design the tool accordingly.

I would like to help improve Debian’s workflow and make it more scalable at the same time as I want to make Debian more accessible to developers. A developer who wants to help out and maintain a few packages for e.g. pkg-zope should not be required to spend a week learning just how to use the tools to be able to do the work. Sure, developers are expected to know their tools, but when we decide that pkg-zope uses a complex version control system to coordinate between 30 people, we should not exclude those from contributing who don’t consider baz to be among their tools.

And finally, I want to look into ways to play better with Debian derivatives, such as Ubuntu. Mako raises the point with his deriver’s council effort, and I think it’s a worthy one: Debian should really work much better with its derivers, and if that only means to make it easier for them to work with us. With pkg-zope, I am trying to create a project that will unite Debian and Ubuntu (and …) developers alike to work on a single “upstream” source for all Debian-based distros providing Zope stuff in their archives.

I always welcome comments about this stuff, best by email.

PS: Sorry for this long post. When I get some more free time, I will try to get PyBlosxom to show only the first paragraph or two and then include a link to the rest. If you know how to do that, don’t hesitate to swing the clue bat.

NP: Mono: One More Step and You Die