Expelled the Movie

A few weeks ago, I was able to see a director's cut of Expelled: The Movie, a documentary starring Ben Stein. This movie explores a fascinating issue - the suppression of ideas by the modern pro-Darwinism movement, and how it is actually hurting scientific research.

Since it is coming out in theatres tomorrow (Friday the 18th of April,) I wanted to blog about and encourage people to see it. I believe that this is an important film because it exposes the politicization of scientific research and how institutions can become so attached to their respective traditions that they end up fighting the very cause they claim to support.

We have seen how established institutions can suppress upstart ideas in the past - with Gallileo and the Roman Catholic church, for example. For the geeks out there, we have seen this happen with the Gentoo project to a certain extent, where a once innovative project has in some ways become an obstacle to innovation.

As for the God debate, Newton, Einstein, Euler and other great minds believed in God and their own personal reflection on metaphysical issues was interwoven with their ongoing scientific and mathematical work. Based on this fact alone, I find it silly that the current scientific elites feel they know more than these great minds and believe they have the liberty to impose their personal anti-God biases on scientific research. By their actions, they are demonstrating that they think they are more enlightened than these great thinkers, and also promoting an unbalanced materialistic view of the world that is absent of significant philosophical value.

The most amazing part of Expelled: the Movie was listening to Richard Dawkins explain how he feels it is OK to believe in a higher power as long one also believes that this higher power evolved from inorganic matter via Darwinian processes. Wow. I really encourage you to see this movie for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Gentoo Stages Update

Hi All,

Many of you probably know that I am building up weekly Gentoo stages for x86, i686, athlon-xp, amd64, core64 and core32 that can be downloaded at http://www.funtoo.org/linux. Here's an update:

1) For the x86-based stages (x86, i686, athlon-xp,) I had been using a 2007.1 profile which I presumed was going to be used for the upcoming 2007.1 release. It looks like it has been removed from Portage, so I am building using the existing 2007.0 profile. If you are using one of these x86-based stages on your system, you'll find that your /etc/make.profile symlink will no longer point to an active directory. To fix this, you can do one of two things - either go back to the 2007.0 profile or move forward to the 2008.0 profile. Here's how to switch to the 2007.0 profile:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2007.0

The switch to the 2007.0 profile appears to be safe and does not force any downgrades of any key parts of Gentoo (ie. glibc, gcc.)

To use the 2008.0 (currently beta) profile, type:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default/x86/2008.0 /etc/make.profile

I don't see any major upgrades in 2008.0 beta currently (glibc, gcc) so you should be safe for now - however, package selections of key system components may change at the sole discretion of the Gentoo release engineering team, and could introduce unwanted upgrades on production boxes. So I recommend using the 2007.0 profile on servers but 2008.0 could be a good option for people who are wanting to follow 2008.0 development.

2) You'll notice that I'm building two new sub-architectures - core32 and core64. Right now, consider these experimental. They should work just as well as my other builds, but what's experimental about them is that I don't know if the optimization flags will actually be useful to anyone. Let me explain...

The intention of the "core32" sub-architecture builds that I created is to have a 32-bit build that is optimized for Intel's Core architecture, and the intention of the "core64" architecture is to have a 64-bit build that is optimized for Intel's Core 2 and 64-bit Xeon architecture. However, core32 is currently built using -march=prescott, and core64 is currently built using -march=nocona. These are both Intel NetBurst architecture gcc optimizations, not Intel Core architecture optimizations, so we don't know if they will actually run faster than the "i686" build on Intel Core-based processors, in fact it is likely that they will not :( . They probably will do better on Prescott and Nocona architecture (late Pentium 4 NetBurst architecture) systems, so they may get renamed to sub-architectures "prescott" and "nocona" in the near future. (I was hoping to find better names for these builds, because "prescott" and "nocona" mean nothing to people who aren't Intel Processor geeks.) But at least the core32 and core64 builds will allow the community to start playing with them to see how they perform.

Upcoming versions of gcc will allow us to have true optimized builds for the Intel Core series of processors. Until then, we wait...

Refocus

Today I am making an attempt to refocus on other commitments besides Gentoo and get back to a more normal and productive life.

I enjoy having conversations with Gentoo developers on what can be done to improve the Foundation and project as a whole, and I started doing this on the -nfp mailing list. I have been engaged by various members of the Gentoo project to share my thoughts. I and I have done so. But there is so much to say, and while it is productive, it is also very time consuming.

Just having a conversation with a lot of people on a mailing list takes a lot of time. Then, if you want to get something done under the current structure, you need to start building consensus. This means not only having a conversation with many people, but getting a critical mass of people on the same page working towards building a collective plan. Then you need to convince people to stop talking about the plan, to support the plan, and then vote on the plan. This is essentially a full-time job, maybe even more than a full-time job. It is also very hard to do on a mailing list.

That being said, I don't want to be overly negative. I've taken a pretty big chunk of time to share my perspective with the official Gentoo project. I want to encourage those working within the existing structure who have the opportunity to make a difference and improve things significantly.

For those who are kind of tired of the existing structure - well, I totally feel your pain. I will not be forking the project, and you may be bummed about that, but at the same time I am going to find effective ways to help the larger Gentoo community. And I have a lot of optimism about the larger Gentoo community. This focus is also something I can pursue on my schedule, so it is more compatible with the rest of my life.

Some people still want a fork, and I really don't think that the answer to this is for me to lead a fork, nor do I really have the time to do it. There are already "forks" of Gentoo in the form of Gentoo-based projects. You can get involved with these projects and help be part of the process to move to a more open, distributed model of development.

If a project doesn't meet your needs, I encourage you to create your own project. If you do, I recommend keeping the development team small, tight-knit and independent. I think this will maximize your productivity as well as your overall enjoyment of collaborative and open development. It will also allow you to collaborate with outside projects more easily. And again, I'm definitely open to collaborating with any Gentoo-based projects.

But, I need a break from Gentoo-related things for the immediate future. So I'll be over here refocusing for a bit.

I *did* seriously consider it...

First, it was determined that I was a valid nominee for the trustee election:

Dear Daniel,

I talked to Grant Goodyear (g2boojum) about your status.
It turns out that you are a member of the Gentoo Foundation. You
became one automatically as the original President.

You not being on the list of the Foundation members which was posted to the gentoo-nfp mailing list after 2006 elections was a mistake. We used that list and assumed you are ineligible. This was a clear mistake for which I apologize.

So now, on Grant's authority, I'm informing you that you are eligible
to both running and voting in the upcoming trustee elections.
with regards,

Łukasz Damentko
Election Official

I received this email last night, and I did seriously the nomination. I found Seemant on IRC and bounced the idea off of him of having both of us accept our nominations, post a platform to -nfp - basically saying "if you elect us, this is what we will be doing. x, y, z." The platform would have been blunt, to-the-point, likely extremely popular with users, and likely very controversial with developers. Seemant and I are in basic agreement on what is wrong with Gentoo and what needs to be done to fix it.

The short answer is that Seemant was more interested in pursuing a more independent and non-political direction to help Gentoo, similar to the path I outlined in a prior blog post - working with the community. So I think that by the end of our discussion, we both realized that we would have much more fun and many more opportunities to work together to improve Gentoo by focusing our efforts outside of the existing project.

I do want to sincerely thank Grant and the election officials for clarifying whether I was a valid nominee or not, as well as those who nominated me. I considered the nomination seriously because I do care about Gentoo and I am open to consider ways to improve the project. Ultimately, I did not think that the trajectory of trusteeship would have had a high likelihood of actually making a difference for Gentoo.

To fix the official Gentoo project, two key things need to be changed that are currently very hard to change. The first is to have the Foundation take a more active role in monitoring and improving the health of the project and the overall community. This is difficult because nearly everyone on the project has convinced themselves that this is not the role of the Foundation.

The other is to fundamentally change how key decisions and appointments are made on the project. It's my opinion that this pseudo-democratic developer self-rule model that has evolved in the last several years is a failure in concept and practice, and needs to be replaced with something that works better.

And making those changes would be extremely hard, even as a trustee. The only way I could see it working would be to return with a majority of trustees in favor of the changes, and even then it would cause a great amount of turmoil on the project.

So it makes sense to focus in more a productive direction - outside of the cathedral. And I realize I haven't exactly spelled out what this means. While I hope to give you some tangible details in the coming weeks on what I will personally be working on, I don't consider myself to be the center of the Gentoo universe either, just maybe the loudest cheerleader for the community right now.

Here is the big picture. I really believe that we - the Gentoo users and the larger Gentoo community - have the power to improve things, even if don't feel like we do. I think that we need to start shifting our focus away from the Gentoo cathedral and  start thinking about how we can all work together to make Gentoo better.

Yes, I do support and encourage those working to make Gentoo better from inside the cathedral, but I also don't want anyone to think that I'm suggesting that we place our trust in the cathedral reforming itself. If you feel motivated to join the Gentoo project and make a difference, by all means do so. I support your efforts and you may very well succeed but at the same time I'm am not asking the larger community to wait around for the cathedral to fix itself.

Our challenge as a community is to develop a new model for large-scale collaboration, integration and innovation that will serve the larger Gentoo community and result in growth. I think the first step is to for smaller independent projects to build positive relationships with one another and look for ways to help one another and work together, while maintaining independence. Things can be decentralized and relationships can grow organically. The tools to support this kind of collaboration already exist. Mechanisms to get these improvements to users already exist.

Also - I know that I personally will collaborate only with those who I really enjoy working with - this is volunteer time, after all. We need to keep it fun. I encourage everyone else to do the same. By doing this, we also help to encourage the larger community to be friendly and helpful.

I'm nominated as a trustee... or am I?

It looks like someone nominated me for the upcoming Gentoo trustee election:

I know drobbins is fairly controversial, and may not
even accept a nomination as suggested on his most recent
blog post, but I want to add his name to the mix.

Andrew Zane - Forum user drewgrange

Before I know how to reply to this nomination, I need to know if it is even valid. You see, it wasn't long before Chris Gianelloni - one of the trustees who recently resigned - posted this in response:

I'm pretty sure he's not eligible, since
he has never voted in any Foundation election,
nor was he a developer the past 365 days.

--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer

However, this contradicts the news item that announced the trustee election in the first place:

There is an open call for nominees; any voting
members of the Gentoo Foundation may be nominated.
That means any Gentoo developer, past or present,
who has at least one year of experience in Gentoo is
eligible.

Now, it appears that I've identified the source of the confusion - on the trustee election page, it states:

People who are eligible to vote in this election are:

• Everybody who ever voted in a trustee election
  
• Everybody who was a Gentoo Developer during last 365 days dated from the close of election poll.

and above this:

Every person who is eligible to vote in the upcoming elections may be nominated by any Gentoo user as a candidate.

So it looks like Chris is in fact correct and the news item on gentoo.org is wrong. Despite the fact that I'm listed as a nominee on the trustee election page, I am actually not qualified to run as a trustee, nor am I qualified to vote.

According to Łukasz Damentko, one of the election officials, the issue is that since the Foundation's inception, the trustees have failed to pass Bylaws that defined clear rules for them to follow in elections, so they are left to follow precedent. And in the past, this is how voters and nominees have been selected.

Ironically, I'm listening to the soundtrack of Fiddler on the Roof through my headphones right now - "Tradition!"

So, for those who are interested in whether I am a nominee or not, it appears that I am not a valid nominee and I also have no official vote in the upcoming election.