My optician had warned me: Don't expose your glasses to excessive heat. Yeah, one of those superfluous security warnings like: "Do not iron while wearing shirt." Right?

Wrong, as it turns out. I went to the sauna, reading a newspaper. The sauna had 105° rather than the advertised 90° (I should probably sue those bastards). As it turns out that was enough to produce a flurry of small cracks on the surface of my glasses. It took a while to recognize this as my glasses are usually so dirty that they always look like that. But what the fuck? A hundred degrees celcius destroy that piece of craftsmanship. I bet Leornado da Vinci made better glasses. That makes a 400 CHF fee for not listening to my optician or seeing the world in a blur. Which might not be such a bad choice after all.

Nach meinem Kurzbesuch in Goettingen und Eschwege bin ich mit dem Zug nach Zuerich zurueckgefahren. Nach zwei puenktlichen Cantuszuegen, der erste DB Zug ab Fulda: ausgefallen wegen Triebkopfstoerung. Der empfohlene Zug hatte 17 Minuten Verspaetungen, daher haette ich den Anschluss in Frankfurt eigentlich nicht bekommen,... wenn der Zug ab Frankfurt nicht auch 30 Minuten Verspaetung gehabt haette.

Daher in Basel mit 30 Minuten Verspaetung angekommen, der SBB Zug hat nicht gewartet, aber ein puenktlicher TGV. Dann mit der SBB auf die Minute genau nach hause gefahren. Ich weiss warum in den Bahnhoefen die Puenktlichkeitsstatistiktafeln wieder abmontiert wurden.

Und was das Geschaeftsgebaren angeht: Vor 6 Monaten Kuendigungsschreiben meiner Bahncard an die Bahn geschickt. Jetzt neue Bahncard mit Rechnung bekommen. Die naechste Kuendigung geht per Eischreiben ein. In der Schweiz wird keine zwanghafte Autoverlaengerung betrieben. Sucks!

After burglars stole all laptops and external hard disks from a friend, I decided I need some online backup space where to put my important photos. After quite some extensive research I settled for onlinestoragesolution.com which seems incredibly cheap for what they offer. 20$/year 30$ for 2 years with unlimited storage space and traffic!

Even more, they have a plentitude of ways to connect to:

• ftp, webdav, Windows netdrive (CIFS), rsync, SSH tunnels (apparently). WOW

Even after reading some reviews, both very positive and very negative, I decided to go for them. And things seem to work fine so far. Except for the fact that there is hardly any information as to how to setup the thing on their website. I was majorly puzzled until I found this user guide, which apparently belongs to them but is not linked from their website. So if you sign up with them, it will come in handy.

UPDATE: What sounded too good to be true, was probably too good to be my true. My access worked for one day, and then ceased working. Support has initially answered my mails but seems to now having stopped answering me.

I now signed up for http://memopal.com which also looked like a good online backup service as they offered access to the files via webdav. What they did not write in their frontpage was that this access is read-only and they are pondering to discard it completly. Which leaves the only access via some binary application that I cannot run on my ARM-based file server. Which makes memopal also useless. It seems I have to just use the amazon cloud services myself now :-(. I had hope to make my life somewhat easier though... :-(.

©Ulrike Spaeth

Oliver liebt Nudeln, und er weiss genau dass man "Körner" zu "Mehl" mahlt, aus dem man "Teig" macht. Und dass Pasta nicht nur aus der Tüte kommen, sondern auch aus Teig gemacht werden können, weiss er jetzt auch.

Heute ein Rant von Almut:

Gestern bekamen wir einen Anruf einer Dame, die sich als Mitarbeiterin der Groupe Mutuel (Anbieter von Krankenversicherungen) vorstellte.

Sie sagte auf ihrer Liste stehe dass wir der Groupe Mutuel (mit der wir noch nie etwas zu tun hatten) erlaubt haben, uns nochmals anzurufen. Als ich dies verneinte, beharrte sie darauf dass das aber auf ihrer Liste stehe.

Auf meine Aussage, dass wir kein Interesse an ihrem Angebot hätten, wurde die Dame unfreundlich und betonte, sie wolle uns nichts verkaufen. Vielmehr wolle sie uns "unabhängig" zu Krankenkassen beraten. Als ich auch diesbezüglich ablehnte (freundlich aber bestimmt), hörte ich nur noch ein "Blöde ..." durchs Telefon, bevor die Dame ohne Verabschiedung auflegte.

Da scheint der Kunde ja wirklich König zu sein! Sicher ist die Groupe Mutuel eine Versicherung deren Leistungen ich mir nicht genauer ansehen werde...

For a number of reasons I had to reread this Gambardella & Hall, 2006 article [1] today. It is about researchers (in which open source software developers are included) having to chose between operating in a "Public Domain" (PD) manner, in which knowledge is disclosed according to "The republic of Science" and a "Proprietary Research" (PR) mode in which researchers attempt to monetize their work and keep the created "intellectual property" proprietary.

Overall, I have to say I found the paper to be somewhat sloppily researched and written. It refers to "forking" as selling a commercial program while an open source version of the same program co-exists, a definition which most of my acquintances would not approve of. Also, I am not at all sure that one can subsume all "scientists, open source contributors, user inventors and communities of technologists" into one category, as there are major differences in terms of incentives, governance structures and legal frameworks between those.

I do not think the GPL license is presented in a correct manner either (which I find disappointing for a paper that is mostly about the GPL license). It is not intended to restrict freedoms from a Public Domain point of view (the GPL is far from a Public Domain approach), it grants additional rights over the conventional copyright-based protection mechanisms (PR). While the end result might be similar, the emphasis is different, the GPL does not limit freedoms, it grants additional ones. This becomes important in cases when the GPL would be deemed illegal or invalid: The assets in question would not fall into the PD area, but squarely back into old-style copyright law, and its use by others would become automatically illegal too. Gambardella & Hall make a point on the enforcability of the GPL, and they seem to posit that there is "a lack of legal enforcement" and that the GPL mostly "acts as a signal" clearing potential ambiguities. I think, the companies that have been subject to a GPL violation law suit or informal settlement would disagree on the lack of legal enforcement. I that I think a thorough paper on the GPL as a legal coordination tool would be good to point out these issues in more detail. There are more things like that, but that is not the point.

The paper attempts to bring home 3 main points, 2 of them I can whole heartily agree with:

"Our contribution is simply to highlight that Olsons's insight [that collective action needs coordination in order to be sustained] can be applied to the analysis of the instability of open systems."

That is a valid and well observed point. I think that there is still too little research on Open Source from a collective action perspective. Our study [2] attempts to go there, but more on that would be welcome.

The second point is a policy implication:

The implication is that there is little need for policy if more proprietary research is desirable, as the latter is likely to arise naturally from the individual actions. By contrast, policy or institutional devieces that could sustain the right amount of corrdination is crucial if the system under-invests in knowledge that is placed in the public domain." p.880

Research on the fragility of knowledge sharing ([3] forthcoming in Research Policy, online available if you have a subscription) is certainly needed and its policy implications discussed. I do not think that the above statement will be valid under all circumstances (Open Source contributions seem to be coming without policies in place), but I am sure they are needed in other circumstances.

And third, their main point is to create a framework which rests under the assumption that (in my own phrasing):

"The number of contributors to GPL projects will increase. As 1) those who would have operated under the Public domain (PD) scheme anyway stick to it and 2) some of those would would have done Proprietary Research (PR) join the PD scheme, increasing the number of overall contributors to the PD-GPL scheme. Those who would have done PR at any price will stick to their way."

It is interesting and intuitive assumption, but I am not convinced that it will universally hold true. I have previously written a piece about What constitutes free that asserts that there are 2 camps of "free" definers. One sees the GPL-free as they only free (as GPL'd assets are guaranteed to remain free), the other camp (BSD-free) sees the GPL as unfree as it limits what can be done with the code (eg it can not appropriated). Gambardella and Hall cater to the first group but silently ignore the second one. They are even closer to any "PD" scheme, but would never contribute to a PD-cum-GPL scheme which is not free enough. (If you don't believe that read any BSD vs GPL flamewar in a mailing list). As such, attaching a GPL license to assets, could very well deter PD-proponents from joining the GPL'd project. Which renders the paper's underlying model moot.

Even coffee chains can do nice coffee nowadays.

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-2.0

My favorite coffee is the Solstice cafe though.

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-2.0

Yes, coffee is important, and Seattle is the home of good coffee in the US. The shelves offer an amazing range of brands.

I always thought our office building is decent.

But this is before I saw this...

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-2.0

The library reading room is a great office!

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-2.0

Today I met Michal Juraska, the former exchange student who stayed at my uncle's place for a year. The world is small, isn't it? He is a nice guy and speak near-perfect German after 9 nears of abstinence. He might take me on a hiking trip on Saturday (he tried climbing first, but my Burger-filled body is not up to that task...)

Random curious impressions: Even Hawaiian Burgers contain Teriyaki Ham and "Swiss". What defines Swiss Cheese, I wonder? Ketchup does not go with fries automatically, one has to order it. Teriyaki is my fate, I cannot avoid it.

Wedgwood Ale house has both motherly waiters that greets regulars like they are family members and cool, baseball-cap donning and toothpick chewing waiters for people like me. It does have some advantage though (besides being a few blocks from my home), it features "Steam Train Porter" -- a robust dark ale is brewed with Chocolate, Brown and Crystal malts that give it chocolate and raosted coffe flavors.

Also, I do note that I am getting old. My favorite radio station is KJR FM, the Seattle station that plays 50s-70s music. Oh my...

I have been working this Saturday for a few hours. But as the library (my current working place) had only opened from 12pm-5pm, I had some time to visit the nearby Seattle Street Fair which is pretty big. Lots of bands playing, beer gardens, very -esoteric-, err, alternative stalls offering anything from fried ice cream to hand reading sessions. Lots of people too and I was having a blast just wandering along the street.

On a completely unrelated note: I am starting to become a Teriyaki expert, it seems every second restaurant offers it around here. Yummy.

©Spaeth, licensed: CC-BY-3.0

This is the garden of my apartment that I have rented. I have to say that sitting out in the shade and working with a laptop is not that bad at all. And yes, that is a cat on the bridge. :-). We need it to fight the mouse in the house that got in yesterday...

On a related note... I miss my family...

I miss them (Almut too, even if not on this picture :-))