Good evening, internet. I've got a personal story to tell, then something of immediate relevance. I just can't stand these stories about the NIF, this test fusion facility at Lawrence Livermore. But the personal bits first.

nukular

Faced with the typical dilemma of "what to do with your life", as a 16-year-old high school student, I was sure I wasn't going to be a nuclear engineer. My dad worked for the power company at that time, and I had grown up in the figurative shadow of McGuire nuclear station. The nerdiness of the whole thing attracted me, but the nuclear profession seemed so dead, like so much office work.

So it was with some surprise that I found myself that summer at a camp run by the nuclear engineering department at North Carolina State University. To this day I'm not sure why I went. But go I did, and ended up being attracted by the promise of solving our world's energy problems via fusion power. Limitless energy! And I, your humble writer, could have a hand in it. Surely there would be a corner of the spotlight reserved for my modest contributions, and if not the spotlight, then some nook in engineer heaven.

Nothing about the education there had much to do with fusion, though. Most undergraduate programs are basically funded by the nuclear power industry. There is some medical work, a fair amount of plasma work, and a modicum of fundamental work, but the professors who do well (and transitively, their grad students) sell to the fission power industry. Thermal hydraulics simulation codes. Safety assessments. Sponsored chairs. Fuel rotation algorithms (my department chair got rich off that).

But it took me a couple years to realize that, because you know, it's the bait and switch thing. Even to the very end. In my last year there I was working for a professor on a monotonic X-ray source, for medical imaging applications. As it was sold to me, this was going to allow more accurate mammograms, without the need for painful compression. All the simulations were coming out good, the device looked quite powerful, and my advisor said, "This will make a great gun!"

A gun! Because I didn't mention the other funder: the military. This guy was a Naval Fellow This and a Thank You From The Army That, and here I was thinking I was earning my honorable discharge via working on a medical imaging device.

I did end up getting my BS there, and at the top of my class, which that year was a class of one. But that's another story.

fusion

Well, longer story shorter. When I went into nuclear engineering, in 1997, the main way of thinking about fusion energy was the tokamak, the donut-looking thing that tries to make a ring of plasma, then magnetically compress it into a density and temperature that will sustain fusion. Then somehow you extract the heat, boil water, turbines, generators, same old story.

It's an enormous complicated thing, into which billions and billions of dollars were sunk, both in the US (like at the Princeton facility) and internationally, through ITER. About the same time I went into NE, US funding for ITER was pulled.

So what was I to do, the erstwhile fusion power Nobel prizewinner? Well the US story was that they had another thing going, the so-called National Ignition Facility. Perhaps you've seen it in the news recently. Their PR agency is quite good; the message was mainly conveyed as "plucky and valiant scientists make step towards fusion energy".

But the NIF has little to do with energy. Here's the deal: due to popular protest, the US can't make test explosions of H-bombs any more. But how are they to know what would happen if they dropped a bomb on some unsuspecting adversary, if they can't test their weapons? Well they simulate those explosions with computer codes. (That's why LLNL and LANL have the some of the world's fastest supercomputers.)

But how will they know if their codes actually work? They need actual fusion explosions. So they concocted a plan to sell Congress a power plant driven by fusion bombs.

That plant is NIF.

Of course, the actual development of this story has more nuances, but the reason that the US is funding NIF is entirely due to its military applications.

energy

Peak oil, peak coal, peak gas. Blood for oil. Global warming. Poisonous gas wells. Vampire hydro dams. These things are well-known.

Peak uranium is also fairly well-known, but fission energy has other problems, of which I'll touch only one today. But first, the engineering issues with internal-confinement fusion power.

NIF claims to be a power plant. But actually getting useful power out of bombs is very unlikely. How are you going to harvest the resulting heat energy without destroying the enclosure? What about all those neutrons? What about the radioactive trash that the neutrons make?

But beyond that, how would you sustain ignition of fusion bombs? The idea is, one explosion goes off. Then you position the next pellet, fire on it, and so on at such a rate that the residual heat creates conditions for a sustained reaction: ignition. When I was studying these things, the estimated necessary rate for this process was 10 to 20 times a second.

This is an engineering nightmare. Fission is easy in comparison.

I don't think ICF will ever achieve ignition, but this is a prediction from someone who's been happily out of that industry for almost a decade.

An almost equally large problem is money. Finance, rather. Nuclear fission plants can deliver effective per-unit costs of electricity, of course ignoring externalized costs. That is, effective if you don't count in finance costs. Building a fission plant typically costs multiple billions of dollars. Fusion plants are probably just as costly. The NIF test facility is already brushing 5 billion, though I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up costing twice that.

This financing issue turns out to affect not just the bottom line. It ends up being large, centralized agencies that control such large investments. Centralized power is centralized control, and that goes for electrical power too.

powerdown

As someone who went in idealistic, with the hopes of solving the world's energy problems, I am still an optimist. The solution to the world's energy problems will be twofold: power-down, and energetic democracy. One way or the other, we will consume less energy in the future. That's power-down. The other side is people producing sustainable energy for themselves and their community: geothermal heat, solar power, wind power.

There's simply no other way. We can try other ways, but they will only hurt us in the end.

While I fail to sleep, some readings:

Is it time for a Fifth International?, by Michael Albert. I've always respected Albert's work on parecon. He's a very smart and principled fellow. It's also equally clear that someone else will have to be the one to implement his ideas.

Permaculture for renters, and emergent urbanism. Via the ever-inspiring Federico.

Last year I went on a Jane Austen kick. Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice, all these, check. Only two more savory delights left! Oh, Mr. Darcy!

My current reading is the fascinating The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome. It's a little hard to get a hold of, but I highly recommend it. Parenti is a great storyteller, and it's great to hear him rip a hole in Cicero. It's also eerie how the struggles of Roman times echo our own.

Sup tubes,

I'm feeling dandy as a dandy here, having just finished implementing a dynamic foreign function interface for Guile. By that I mean that you can call C procedures without writing any C code.

To be fair, most Schemes have this capability already, so Guile is playing catch-up here. But still, this is some sweetness. I can call functions with any number and type of arguments, including by-value struct args and return values, and things just work. It's nice, and liberating.

intensification

Continuing a series of things I'm told happen in France, I'm told that when you don't know the words to a song, and just make some stuff up, in French you're singing yogurt. Yaourt, rather. As in, Teak me daou tou ze pair dais yaourt yoaurt yaourt. I've always thought that Danone should host an international yogurt competition.

Anyway. nontechnical readers, feel free to hum the yogurt national anthem for a few paragraphs here, 'cause I'm going to talk about Guile a bit.

Guile! Hark, the beloved hack-country! Yes. We just made a release, did you know? 1.9.7, dontcha know. I'm particularly pleased that if you enter an expression at the REPL and something goes wrong, and you don't catch it, you are dropped into the debugger instead of being presented with a backtrace printout.

The debugger is totally silly at this point. You can't do much more than just print a backtrace. But you can parameterize the printing of that trace, print local variables for each frame (bt full), inspect values, print with different widths...

That last bit is crucial. You typically don't want objects to print out in their entirety, because that could be quite long. So you truncate the output. But Murphy's law says that the part that gets truncated is always the part that you need! So actually, being able to specify the #:width is a big win.

Also you can profile expressions. Like this one, check it:

scheme@(guile-user)> ,profile (resolve-module '(gnome gtk)) #:hz 20
%     cumulative   self             
time   seconds     seconds      name
 13.16      0.12      0.12  variable-bound?
 10.53      0.10      0.10  #<procedure 9d2ad68 at ice-9/boot-9.scm:584:4 (obj)>
  7.89      2.80      0.07  vm-apply
  7.89      1.27      0.07  memq
  7.89      0.17      0.07  module-make-local-var!
[...]

In this case it reminded me that I had some bugs to fix, that things were taking about 10 times longer than they should have. But hey, that's what profilers are for, right?

One can trace, too:

scheme@(guile-user)> ,trace (fib 3)
(fib 3)
|(fib 2)
||(fib 1)
||1
||(fib 0)
||1
|2
|(fib 1)
|1
3

Sweet? [Y/N]

There are other lovelies in that release: the SSAX XML toolkit is now part of Guile, there's some unicode normalization improvements, some speedups, more compile warnings, and such. It was a lovely release. 1.9.8 will be even better!

digression

This stuff isn't always on my mind, you know. Most of the time, perhaps; but maybe in the same way that what you go to sleep thinking about is in your dreams, and in your mind vaguely in the morning. I gave my folks the (excellent) Settlers of Catan game this Christmas, with the Cities & Knights 5-6 player extension, and we all slept dreaming of sheep.

(Catan is a great game, for those few of you that haven't had the pleasure yet, and it appeals to most everyone. Call a game night, for great justice!)

Anyway. Probably what's most been on my mind in recent weeks is movement: to Paris and back (often), to the north of France for Christmas, to Bruges and Ghent for New Year's, to Lousiana just recently for a number of birthdays -- speaking of which: I am now 30. Trust my words no more!

Apart from that, time passes. A few months ago I planted the idea in my parents' mind that we were going to make or join a commune in a few years. At this point they're totally down. They've put off buying "old age insurance", or whatever you call it -- instead we younguns will take care of them. It's a retirement plan.

If you're reading this from anywhere that has roots, at any level, this won't surprise you at all. But the states is a different kettle of fish. At 13 they bussed me 30 miles away to secondary school; at 15 I went to (public) boarding school, 250 miles away; at 17 to university, at a similar distance. But the university bit was "close", family-wise. It's common to go 1000 miles away. Then when you graduate, it's common to go 1000 miles in a different direction, to find a job, and then likewise 5 years later when you change jobs. Myself, I left the states, and spent 8 years of the aughties abroad.

What I mean to say though is that you aren't expected to have roots in the states. I didn't live near my grandparents. Going home just now I didn't go to North Carolina, I went to Louisiana where my mom's family is.

These are many details, but it's all to say, the future is going to be like the past, but not like the recent past. It was really neat to hear my mom and dad and sisters and aunt all down with the idea of living together. Separate "houses", same place. I'm sure we can get some more too -- friends, partner's family, &c. Maybe we can even take over a town government. The times, they are a'rollin' round, round to a re-vision of what they were.

nerd resolutions

Readers: you really didn't want to know my personal resolutions, did you? Perhaps you did. Kind readers, you few.

Silent sufferers, the rest; but here is some nerd fodder, in the form of new year's resolutions:

• Switch to Notmuch mail. Will require some kind of Gnus-like integration.

• Get a version of elisp running under Guile that's faster than Emacs' implementation, but still strictly compatible.

• Release Guile 2.0 in March, to wide acclaim.

• Go to FOSDEM, the European Lisp Conference, GUADEC, and one other conference. (More if you invite me to speak.)

• Work-related: start working in a G-Speak environment by default (with G-Speak as the window manager).

• Start poking solutions to Free distributed web services. GNU has a huge role to play here, and I think Guile is the language/vm in which to implement the applications. More on this in the future.

• See if I can corral the necessary elements to get a working Guile-in-Emacs branch in Emacs' repository. A stretch for this year, I think.

You can see that all of these are for the love. I really dig on the Guile work that we've done the last year, and 2010 is the year to strut our stuff.

non-nerd resoutions

I guess the only one I really want to get out there is to be more real. Garden more. Chat more. Organize more. More human, more vegetable, less machine. How this meshes with my profession, or even my hack-desires, I have no idea.

time

Well, I do declare! It took me until after lunch to realize this day is has a personal significance: it was five years ago today that I came to Spain, not for the first time, but for this time.

Europe's been good to me, but the heartstrings still tug homewards. Here my word choice betrays me. True, there is no one place for me to go back to in the States, a "home" of relationships; but there is something there. Something green, something makeshift; something not entirely settled.

It sure isn't the health care. Or the architecture, for that matter, I notice as I hear the bells chime three, from the office where I sit.

I guess one doesn't have to explain the pull of a native land.

travellin

I'm told that in France one may wish bonne année all throughout January, as long it's the first time you see someone. So bonne année, tubes! Nice to rap at ya.

These waning days of my twenties are somewhat dislocated; or bilocated, perhaps. I spend a fair amount of time in Paris. Modern times, modern relationships, right? So it's me, my girlfriend, and the Talgo. I slept four nights on the overnighter last month, it will be four this month, and next month at least two.

It's not the cheapest way to travel, but I just feel bad about taking planes all the time -- apart from the environmental impact, plane travel just doesn't do a body right. You're alternately treated as a terrorist or a consumer. Your mind doesn't have time to arrive. It just ain't natural.

Anyway, until soon. Ciao!

I have been meaning to write this article for a couple weeks now, ever since the recent GNU Hackers Meeting over in Göteborg. I'd rather be hacking tonight, but some other circumstances make such a report a bit more timely; so, here goes!

GHM

I arrived a little late, having missed the first day's talks. I was particularly irked to have missed Bruno Haible's talk on modularity and extensibility, but I understand that there will be some video up soon.

I didn't know enough at that time to miss having seen José Marchesi's talk, but now that I know the fellow, it is a shame indeed. Actually that was one of my biggest take-aways from that event: that I never really knew GNU as a community of maintainers. GNU in 2009 is not the kind of organization that flies people all over to meet each other, and it's to our loss. I hope to see much more of GNU hackers in the future.

So everyone that goes to conferences knows why they are great: the hallway track. Or the bar track, as it might be. So what were the topics?

GNU is not FSF

This point really surprised me: that GNU is not the Free Software Foundation. There a relationship, but they are not the same thing, not by a long shot.

So here's the deal. In the beginning, there was GNU. But Richard realized that in the world of 1985, with proprietary software on all sides, it would be easier to defend the small but growing software commons if hackers collaborated by assigning their copyright to one U.S.-based organization. The FSF was set up as the legal entity associated with GNU, with RMS at its head.

25 years later it's still like that. The copyright assignment paperwork that every GNU contributor signs has some clauses that obligate the FSF to keep their conributions free (in the Free Software sense), but ultimately trust in the FSF is a trust in RMS, and in his principles. It is a testament to RMS's character that there are 35000 lines in fencepost.gnu.org:/gd/gnuorg/copyright.list, representing at least 5000 contributors.

But what's up now? As free software became more and more successful, it became clear that there were other ways to get involved than just writing code. There's all kinds of advocacy work that needs doing, for example. The FSF was a natural concentration point for these efforts.

However, also inevitably, with the influx of people, the composition of the FSF changed. There are very few hackers in the FSF now. There is RMS of course, whose work these days doesn't involve programming, but that's about it. Recently Mako was added, which is an important step to redressing that situation, and more on that later.

I mean, look at www.gnu.org and www.fsf.org. See the difference?

So the advocacy and campaigning is with the FSF, and the hackers are with GNU. I think every GNU hacker is really down with the message of freedom; I mean, we are the ones hacking the hack. But, as a majority, the GNU hackers are not down with "Windows 7 Sins" or "Bad Vista" or most of these negative campaigns the FSF has been running recently.

I say this as a GNU maintainer, not as a representative of GNU, but I believe I have the facts right.

GNU and RMS

All GNU hackers respect RMS. We respect his ethical principles, his vision, his tenacity, and his hack. I mean, GNU Emacs: this, for most of us, is the best software in existence. The early days of GCC. Texinfo. Really remarkable contributions, these, without which the world would be a poorer place.

(If you disagree, that's cool; but I'm just trying to explain where we come from. I guess also I should clarify what I mean by GNU here. I mean, "people who have signed paperwork to assign copyright to the FSF". I know that mentioning the FSF there is a bit ironic, but it's a strict definition.)

But nowadays, while RMS's principles remain strong (thankfully), he's a bit absent, technically. That would be OK -- he has certainly put in his hack-time -- but that the GNU project doesn't really have a means to make technical decisions on its own right now. Each maintainer can mostly make decisions about their modules, and we can talk to each other (mostly via gnu-prog-discuss), but there is no governance structure for the GNU project itself.

Worse, sometimes RMS decides things without any input at all, when such input really is needed. The decision to bless Bazaar as the official GNU version control system, for example, really sits poorly with a lot of people. The adoption of SCM and MIT Scheme as two additional Schemes in the GNU project also are real WTF decisions.

These "blessings" don't have much of an effect on people's behavior -- most active GNU modules use git, for example -- but they make people lose faith in GNU's technical coherence.

The issue here is that the GNU project is a community of people working for software freedom, yes, but we have some specific values binding us together. One, the ethical principles of supporting user freedom; more on that later. Secondly, there is a technical vision of a "GNU project" as a cohesive, well-thought-out, integrated technical whole. One can now argue about the extent to which that is currently true, but it is a very important value to GNU hackers.

Things were more or less fine when there was more of UNIX that needed to be reimplemented, and when RMS himself was more on the ball. But now there is a significant measure of dissatisfaction within GNU itself about the way decisions are made. There are some steps being taken to fix this (a recently created GNU advisory board, for example), but it is ironic that some decisions in GNU really do come from one man.

At the same time there is actually a widespread concern within GNU about what would happen if decision making were to be made more open. No one wants outsiders making decisions, it would still have to be maintainers; but there is concern that things might get out of hand, that there might be too many pointless discussions, that bad decisions could be made, that there would be a tyranny of the talkers, etc. This is why things are changing really slowly. Everyone wants more autonomy, but they don't want to lose the solidarity.

GNU and GNOME

So what's the deal with GNU and GNOME? Everything, and nothing. Allow me to explain.

GNU people see GNOME as an "outside" thing at this point. To most GNU hackers, GNOME is not quite GNU. GNOME doesn't follow GNU's coding standards (recall the point about technical integrations), assigns no copyright to the FSF, and seems to prefer LGPLv2+ and not GPLv3+. There is hardly any communication between GNOME people and GNU people. In GNOME, people look at problems their systems are having, and decide to solve them within GNOME -- PolicyKit, for example.

(I don't want to pick on David's excellent software; but I'm equally sure that it never crossed David's mind to suggest PolicyKit for inclusion into the GNU project. There are many similar examples.)

Hell, many GNU people even use things like Sawfish or Xmonad or StumpWM or other such things. Admittedly, GNU folks would be more likely to install GNOME on their cousin's computer; but as for themselves, Emacs is the only program many people need.

GNOME people on the other hand are in two camps, more or less. Broadly speaking these camps correspond to Free Software and to Open Source, respectively. The former feel a strong heart-tie with the GNU project; perhaps they started working on GNOME back when it really was a GNU project, or perhaps they started with it because they believed in GNU's ethical principles and chose that environment because they wanted to spread user freedom to their friends. As I say, most GNOME people are disconnected from GNU per se, so this tie really is more cultural than practical, but it is there, and it is strong in its own way.

The Open Source people tend to value GNOME in particular from the days when Qt was GPL-only, or even proprietary, and GNOME allowed them to develop open source applications as well as proprietary ones. Open Source people appreciate the technical comraderie, as well as the technical excellence of the platform, but often disagree with the GNU project's copyleft principles, instead appealing to individual choice as to whether to use or make proprietary software or not.

I hope I haven't been uncharitable to anyone here. Please correct me in the comments if so.

is GNOME GNU?

So, Andre posts, wondering about the relationship between GNU and GNOME. I hope I have been able to add some broader context to the question.

I think that Andre's characterization of RMS as "fascistic" is totally wrong. There are serious problems of decision-making within the GNU project, yes, but "fascistic" takes it a bit too far, and almost brushes Godwin's Law ;)

The particular context in which the discussion has been brought up, that nasty thread on foundation-list, is unlikely to bring about any mutual understanding. It is ironic that the topic is the code of conduct, which was designed to promote understanding.

Bottom line, GNOME can be GNU if it wants to. But I don't think a decision is necessary right now, and certainly not on foundation-list, not in that thread of the talkers.

GHM redux

I promised to talk more about hallway tracks at the GHM, but I've run out of semicolons. Until next time!