Consilience

As many of you know, I am currently working for Creative Commons and as such I am also always in the Creative Commons IRC channel, #CC. One of the unintended consequences of this abbreviation of Creative Commons is that it is also the abbreviation of Credit Cards (and “Change Congress,” come on Larry, branch out a little!). This didn’t really seem like a problem to me at first: who would have thought the #CC channel was a place about credit cards? Would people be applying for credit cards via IRC? No.

But, I forgot to account for the nefarious side of humanity. The people that are looking for an easy way to scam the world. On a somewhat regular basis people come into the channel and ask for credit card numbers. Scratch that, they DEMAND credit card numbers. A typical scenario is:


user1 enters #CC
< user1> !CC
< user1> ?CC
< user1> !give
< user1> give me credit card #!
... 5 minutes goes by
user1 leaves #CC


This has happened enough times that the /topic for #CC now includes this at the end: “Need credit card numbers? email tips@fbi.gov”

Today, however, I got my first personal request for credit card numbers. Since I idle in #CC, so goes the users logic, I must have access to credit card numbers to sell to people. Here is the full unedited transcript from our interaction:


12:03 Irssi: Starting query in Freenode with oera
12:03 < oera> hello, i'm here for buy credit card number, can you help me?
12:03 < greg-g> email tips@fbi.gov they can help you
12:05 < oera> ok thank but are you try this email?
12:06 < greg-g> they can help you
12:13 < oera> they can help me for going to jails ?
12:13 < oera!i=oera@eta91-1-82-234-203-250.fbx.proxad.net ["Leaving"]


Now, my response wasn't as good as it could be; it could be a ton more funny. What do you think I should say next time someone asks me for credit card numbers? I'm looking for snarky and/or punny responses.

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

I’ve been triaging bugs for Ubuntu for a while and I have always wanted an easy way for bug reporters to give me all the relevant information that is needed to help with finding out the problem. The way I usually did this was to add copy/paste-able requests to the Debugging Procedures Ubuntu wiki page. This was a pain for a few reasons: sometimes those copy/paste segments weren’t there and I had to add them and it also necessitated I have those wiki pages open (and wasting valuable tab-space in Firefox).

But now, thanks to the work of Matin Pitt, you no longer need to do anything as complicated! If the package already has some Apport Hooks then all you need the bug reporter to do is to run the command: “apport-collect 12345″ (substituting 12345 with the bug number in question, obviously).

apport-collect will then go find all the open tasks for that bug (just in case it is assigned to more than one package), run all of the apport-hooks for those packages, and attach that information to the bug report. It does all of this with out any other interaction with the reporter. To see which packages already have apport hooks available for them, see the Apport wiki page. Now, we all need to start adding more apport hooks so this is even more useful.

Be sure to check out Martin’s original announcement on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list.

This past week was Spring Break at the University of Michigan. So I decided to skip the trip to the beach and instead go to Washington DC to work 9-5 for a week. Really.

My school, the School of Information, has this neat program called Alternative Spring Break where students can go work with some really cool organizations in Washington DC, New York, or Chicago. It is an opportunity to go discover if you actually enjoy doing what you are in Graduate School full-time to learn (my words, not theirs). Also, it is a wonderful networking opportunity; I met some really great people last week and whether or not they can help me find a job is secondary.

I specifically worked for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. This is basically the “think tank” for the ALA Washington office. The Washington office also has the people in the Office of Government Relations; the people that go out there and make sure that the libraries’ perspective is heard on Capitol Hill. It is a really important perspective: who else are as big of proponents of open access to knowledge for all people? who else guards your privacy to such a great degree? Librarians are wonderful people to have on your side, but watch out if you do something wrong.

My time at the OITP involved writing a report about the HathiTrust, an endeavor originating at the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. It is, in the most simple of terms, a long-term digital works preservation project. It is preserving and providing access to all of the digital scans that are being given to the various member Universities from the Google Book Search scannning program and also the libraries’ internal scanning operations. But there are some important implications of the HathiTrust, and that is what I set out to find. I want to give special thanks to John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust, for answering my many questions.

Well, I will call that a success.

First, we all traveled through the blizzard conditions to get to the event. No one was hurt.

When we arrived we set up quickly and got to work. The only hitch was the wireless at the library was effectively non-existent. Luckily, we had a hub and cables. Our turn out wasn’t the highest (I blame the weather) but our spirits were high.

Everyone there was really putting a lot of good effort into doing some quality triage today. Had lots of good questions asked (and answered!) and judging from the stats at the end of the event, we kicked some butt!

(sidenote: I’m not sure what is up with the stats now, because I’m pretty sure the michigan team did not touch over a thousand bugs today).

Be sure to check out the pictures taken by Craig, another Michigan LoCo member, and his blog post about the event: linky.

And speaking of pictures, so far I am the only one to have uploaded pictures to flickr with the tag of “ubuntu-global-bugjam-february-09” as outlined on the GlobalBugJam/Stories page; get your photos up there!

So I just showed up to the Michigan LoCo Global Bug Jam event after making the hour drive through blizzard conditions to get here.

But after figuring out the networking situation (thanks Clinton-Macomb Public Library for the ethernet cable!) we had the first big reward of the day.

A guy walked by our conference room and popped his head in, “Hey, is this a Linux User’s Group?”
Me, “Yeah, pretty much.”
Guy notices I am running Ubuntu, “Is this specific to Ubuntu?”
“Yep, we’re the Michigan Local Community Team for Ubuntu.”
“Oh, cool!”
“Yeah, we doing a Bug Jam right now.”
“Good deal”
Guy walks away to go be with his kids.
A little later he walks back by the conference room with his wife and kids and says “Hey kids, those people in there are who make Ubuntu better. They’re working on the new release, 9.04.”

Wow! That is a reward in and of itself.

First, a review of a neat new tool that provides a cool function for many academics:

GPeerReview is a very simple Open Source tool that lets you write a review of a work, embed a hash of the work in your review, and sign that review with your digital signature (using your GPG key). The last two things are pretty neat. The hash allows you to be sure that people know which version of a paper you reviewed. Or at least, they will know if the version they have matches the version you had. This would be useful in the case where major changes are made to the paper that contradict your review.

Then, signing your review so that the author (and their publisher/advisor/dean/what have you) knows it is actually from you is pretty neat, and an obvious use of gpg. In fact, GPeerReview is essentially just a wrapper around the GnuPG command-line tool (see the FAQ).

I think this is a pretty interesting tool that could have some great uses, especially if we integrate it with the work-flow of academics (somehow). Step one of that implementation would be to move it from the CLI to some sort of Word/OpenOffice.org plugin. Or, even better, would be to provide a web-based service for this.

Crazy Idea
Launchpad for Scholarly Articles and GPeerReview

Going back to my crazy idea of a Launchpad for Scholarly Articles: basically a service that provides users the ability to link published articles, whether open access or not, with pre-prints or author deposited versions in Institutional Repositories. The killer feature of this service would be to provide a way for people who DON’T have access to the expensive scholarly journals a way to read and be informed via the pre-prints written by the authors that are not restricted by the overzealous journal publishers.

Then, add on the ability for readers of those articles to make comments on and provide useful reviews of the material. Even adding this ability to places like arxiv.org would be great; it provides a mechanism to build community. And as we all know, the community is what makes any service an important resource for people. Without community the service is just a collection of tools.

But, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know all of the various web-based services out there for scholarly communication; maybe someone has already implemented something like this. Leave a comment if you know of anything out there like this.

Of course the Michigan LoCo Team will be participating with the Global Bug Jam, once again.

Here are the details:

• Place: Clinton Macomb Public Library
• Address: 40900 Romeo Plank Road – Clinton Township, MI 48038
• Contact: Craig Maloney
• Hours: 2pm – 6pm
• Non-residents, please be prepared to register for a one-day card. Cost is minimal (under $5)
• Wired ethernet will be available

For more information check out our event page.

Also, see what we did last time: first story on this page.

Be ready for another awesome and rocking bug jam with the Michigan LoCo!

I just wanted to throw a quick shout out to Spitfire (launchpad profile) for being awesome and making me more productive by getting Tasque working again in Intrepid!

Apparently to get it working in Intrepid he needed to backport mono2, gtk-sharp2, and evolution-sharp. No small tasque (HA!) I’m sure. This also shows how well PPAs can be used by projects to keep their users updated with the latest fixes.

Thanks again to Spitfire for improving my productivity; I didn’t know what to do without Tasque telling me.*

Go out there and get your Tasque working again in Intrepid and be productive. And thank Spitfire while you’re at it!

* Slight exaggeration, but Tasque is one really useful pieces of software.

So, I’ve spent a little over a week setting up my new email consumption/creation system. As you can see from the title of this blog post, there are a few parts to it. Why would I do something crazy like edit config files for 4 different apps JUST to read and write email? Well, I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird (yes, I’ll try 3.0 when it hits the repos) and Evolution wasn’t at all what I wanted. I do have gmail so why not just stick with the web interface? Because I am wanting to do more self-hosted solutions for web apps. Also, since I have more than one account, I want different messages to be sorted different and archived differently.

In Thunderbird I had an extension that allowed me to press “y” and the current message would be “archived” to the gmail All Mail folder. This was great, but it only supported one account. If I was reading my work email in Thunderbird (which is also hosted by gmail) and I hit “y” the message would go to my personal gmail account’s All Mail folder, not the work account one. Not good (and a dumb limitation).

So, what email program allows you to have complete control over those types of settings? Mutt. And yes, (Al)pine also. But, I have friends local to me who use mutt so exchanging .muttrc files and such is easier and we can meet in person to share tips.

What I want to do with this blog post, though, is not convince you that Mutt is the best solution for you. I do want to, however, share what I did to set everything up for use with Mutt. In fact, all the rest of the pieces of this setup can work equally well with some like Alpine or even Thunderbird.

(since it is a long post, I didn’t want to spam your reader, click for the rest of it)
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