Jessa is moving to Boston. Why is Jessa moving to Boston? To work for Microsoft. What will she be doing for Microsoft? Studying how drag queens use Facebook.

I want a CLI WebDAV client that's better than cadaver or hdav.

I want a program that can sync an .ics file with a CalDAV server, by dividing it up into events and individually synchronizing each of those. I don't have a clue how deletions would be handled, but that would be nice too. Then I want a program that can synchronize the .ics file with org-mode files.

I want a SIP client that works as well as Twinkle but has the architecture of SFLphone or is a library upon which an arbitrary UI can be constructed.

I want an HTML-rendering library that has callbacks or hooks for security- and privacy-relevant things like cookies and SSL certificates. I want at least one browser built on this library. I want it to support vi-like keybindings.

I want an HTTP(S) proxy that can be dynamically-configured per-client or per-connection through a standardized protocol that web browsers or their plugins can speak. I want it to be able to handle all the relevant things covered by AdBlock Plus, RequestPolicy, and NoScript.

I want HTTPS authentication through Monkeysphere and mod_gnutls.

I want a git-annex backend for Ogg Vorbis files that treat the audio streams independently of the metadata yet stores them together in the same file so that everything behaves as usual but the annex doesn't bloat by 400Go after I run beets.

I want a file transfer queuing system that can work over any sort of transport mechanism, direct or asynchronous, that handles partial transfers and throttling, and is generally magical.

I want all kinds of accounting software improvements.

I want sane PBX software.

I want an OpenStack that doesn't use libvirt for KVM.

I want backup software that behaves some weird hybrid of BoxBackup and Dirvish.

I want a peer-to-peer card- and board-game platform that uses cryptographic assurance.

I want everyone to use YAML instead of XML.

I want a phone that's not running a doomed operating system.

I want lots of other stuff.

There were two competing free software projects, doing more or less the same thing. Project B was in active development 3 years before Project R showed up, and then the two competed for quite some time.

While Project B seemed to operate as part of the gift economy, Project R was developed by folks who had received some monetary funding, and once their funding began to wane, they began to complain. Eventually fundraising campaigns were held.

The community was happy to participate in polite fictions: Project B didn't really exist; the only people who could possibly fix the bugs in Project R were the people demanding money; there would be no conflict of interest between the gatekeepers of Project R.

Gradually, all development ceased on Project B and never resumed. The leader of Project R kept jumping up and down and demanding more money, until finally he declared it insufficient.

Then there were two dead codebases.

Antonia came into the room. “Where's Alieta?” she asked.

“We don't know,” replied Luda. It was true; we hadn't seen Alieta in quite some time, and we had no idea where she was.

Antonia left. Varvara eyed me mischievously and said, “You could call her.”

“How?” I asked.

“Touch the grandmother clock and you will figure it out.”

I touched the clock trepidly. Nothing happened. I opened my mouth to speak, but the word I had been about to say resonated in my mind as if spoken through a comb filter. I concentrated. “Alieta,” dozens of human-like voices sang over and over in different harmonies. I let go.

“What was that?” I demanded.

“Clock,” Varvara said dismissively.

“Come on, let's do laundry,” Luda grunted.

We carried our laundry out to the garage, which is where the washer and dryer lived. Alieta slipped in through one of the open garage doors, and surreptitiously pulled Varvara over for a whispered conversation.

Antonia wandered in and squinted in Alieta's general direction. Luda quickly pulled Varvara in front of her. “It's just Varvara,” she announced.

Antonia's eyes glazed over and she went back into the house. Alieta pursed her lips and studied the wall as if there might be some reflective object that had alerted her mother to her presence. Then she grabbed Varvara by the hand, pulled her over to push the buttons that closed the garage doors, and dragged her into the house.

I watched the garage doors close. Then I watched the one on the left reverse direction. I opened my mouth to notify someone of this, but the doors reversed direction again, and proceeded to partially open and close as if possessed. I tried to hide behind Luda, without success.

Now she was watching as well, as reality seemed to to shimmer and bend. The roof became arched, and there were loud mechanical noises as our environs transformed. When it finished, the place where the garage doors had been was now a wall of screens displaying video as you might encounter in a television store. More disconcertingly, we were in front of a railing which overlooked what appeared to be a car dealership showroom.

Luda sucked in her breath. “Benjamin Snow, you were into some serious shit,” she muttered.

A boy died.

He knew he was dying. He tried to get help. We don't know if it occurred to him to switch off the modem and make a phone call, or if he was too weak to get up and do it. We know he sent an email.

He didn't type perfect English at the best of times, and as his life slipped away from him, he misspelled many things. He misspelled “ambulance”. He may have misspelled “diabetes”. That was all fine—the meaning was clear enough—but the bit where it gets tragic is that he misspelled “.net” in the To: line.

So instead of arriving at its destination, the NOC of his employer, where it would have opened up a ticket and been seen by a human at some point, the email bounced.

We will never know whether they could have or would have done anything in time. We will never know if, had whoever been on postmaster duty at his ISP at the time been paying attention, he could have been saved.

These things were debated angrily, by people struggling to make sense of something, but it changes nothing. The email bounced, and he died.

After recovering from the shock of seeing “consensus” spelled correctly for a change, I thought I should respond to some claims of healthiness.

1. Package fiefdoms waste people's time quite frequently: MIA processing, duplicated effort in DELAYED NMUs, conspiracy and infighting, trying to get an absentee maintainer to respond, the ridiculous things that happen when a maintainer is still around but not doing his job for 3 consecutive years, and so on. Having all packages maintained by "Debian Developers" is a great idea.

2. The current hierarchy might work better than some lesser evils, but that doesn't mean it's good at all. We should strive toward ZERO hierarchy, not some magical fiction where people imagine themselves wiser than everyone else because their drinking buddies said so.

The anti-consensus features in Debian would better be replaced by a real solution to the problem pervading nearly all free software projects: ego.

No, Simon, not yet.

“I'm taking a krav maga class. It seems like a good place for single guys to meet women,” she hinted.

“Oh, good god,” he sighed. “Classes are a girl's last resort.”

“I'm taking it with Bev,” she continued.

“Is she the hot one?” he asked.

“Second eldest,” she clarified.

“See?” he crowed. “Classes are a girl's last resort.”

Finally, SFLphone 1.2.0 is almost a reasonable Twinkle substitute.

Thanks to #673900, wheezy is down to 0 working SIP clients with the freeze looming. Fantastic.