Now I admit, reading through the almost 40 pages of legalese is not for everyone. Luckily, the EFF (the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-standing fighter for your rights online) has written an excellent summary on the document. I recommend reading that if you don’t want to read the actual document itself. There is also a nice Dutch summary written by BOF (Bits of Freedom, sort of the national counterpart of the EFF). Both list four reasons why ACTA is dangerous:

• Intermediate parties, the internet providers, will be made to enforce the agreement by filtering internet traffic relating to file-sharing;
• Disconnection from the internet in case of alleged infringement of copyright, you as an internet user can be disconnected by your ISP if there is an accusation of infringement, no trial, no judge, just gone from the net;
• Criminalization of non-commercial use, severe penalties for mere citizens such as you and I that up until now were reserved for criminals who are willfully and for profit mass-producing illegal copies of, for example, movie DVD’s;
• Seizing of computers and other equipment in the case of alleged copyright infringement, in other words: the police can come and take your computer (and destroy it) if you use file-sharing technology, irrespective of whether you are sharing copyrighted material or not.

Several organisations so far have jumped on the ‘Stop ACTA’ bandwagon, and a simple search on ’stop ACTA’ on a search engine of your choice will get you a whole lot of sites that are somehow trying to counter this agreement. You can sign several petitions, and you should. But in the end, a petition is just a single number, and does not impress the average member of the European parliament that much. What impresses them most: personal letters, emails or even phone calls, where citizens of their constitucy explain why they believe ACTA is not a Good Thing.

So I hereby call everyone to arms: write your members of parliament! Tell them, in your own words, why you think ACTA should not become law in Europe. The site of the European parliament can give you a list of the members that represent your country, and their contact details. Of course, you can write to all members of the EP. But, in general, members of the parliament represent the people from their own country and are therefore more likely to listen to input from their country. On the other hand, you do not have to restrict yourself to those members of parliament that are aligned with your own political preferences.

Try to make your letter personal! Don’t just copy and paste one of the many example texts that are all over the web. Rather, use them as inspiration. A thousand different emails make a bigger impression than ten-thousand copies of the same letter. You do not have to write high-quality prose ready for publiction in the papers, so even if you think yourself a bad writer I am sure you can come up with a sentence or two saying you do not want ACTA in your life.

Some members of parliament will respond to your letter, perhaps explaining why they think ACTA is a good thing, or why they agree with you that it is not. Some might not even reply, and yet in other cases you will hear from an assistant to the member of parliament. Don’t be discouraged by that. Voicing your opinion is important, and even if you do not get to speak to the member of parliament in person, your input will be passed on and considered when time comes to vote.

Act now! Stop ACTA! Write to your members of parliament!

Worst EU Lobbying Award 2008 — Vote Now — www.worstlobby.eu
http://www.worstlobby.eu/2008/home_en

Vote now for the 2008 Worst EU Lobbying Awards — the annual award for deceptive, manipulative or unethical lobbying.

This year you can vote in two categories:

1.      The ‘Worst EU Lobbying’ Award for the lobbyist, company or lobby group that in 2008 has employed the most deceptive, misleading, or otherwise problematic lobbying tactics in their attempts to influence EU decision-making.

2.      The special ‘Worst Conflict of Interest’ Award for the MEP, Commissioner or Commission official whose background, side-jobs or other liaisons with special interests raise the most serious concerns about their ability to act in public interest.

Select your winners now in both categories and cast your vote at http://www.worstlobby.eu

The nominees for the 2008 Worst EU Lobbying Award are:
*    the Agrofuels lobby (MPOC, Unica and Abengoa) for greenwashing agrofuels;
*    European Alliance for Access to Safe Medicine for hiding the involvement of big pharma;
*    European Business and Parliament Scheme for EP indoors lobbying;
*    Gplus and Aspect Consulting for spreading war propaganda;
*    the airline lobby IATA for deceptions to avoid CO2 reduction obligations.

The nominees for the Worst Conflict of Interest Award are:
*    Dr Caroline Jackson MEP – appointed advisor to a waste company;
*    Piia-Noora Kauppi MEP – lobbies for her future employer;
*    Klaus-Heiner Lehne MEP – doubles as a lawyer;
*    Ex-Commission officials Petite, Klotz and Kjølbye – now lobbying for industry;
*    DG Trade Director Wenig – slips inside informations to lobbyists.

The candidates were selected out of 54 nominations by citizens and groups from around Europe after thorough scrutiny by the organisers. For more background on the individual candidates, check out http://www.worstlobby. The voting website is available in English, German and French.

Help us expose the worst lobbying in Brussels and cast your vote at http://www.worstlobby.eu

Please spread the news about the awards! Tell your friends via our website or put banners on your websites. Banners can be found here: http://www.foeeurope.org/corporates/banner/wla.html

Online voting closes November 30. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Brussels on December 9.

The Worst EU Lobbying Awards are organised by Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Europe, LobbyControl and Spinwatch.

On the PostgreSQL front, i went to a talk by Gabriele Bartolini, one of the driving forces of the italian PostgreSQL users groep. At the back of my mind, the idea of a Dutch PostgreSQL user group has been gestating. I’ve met two other PostgreSQL-ites from Holland during fosdem, and there are probably more. Who knows, I might just try and get them together, and see where things go from there. Gabriele is an inspiring person, whose enthousiasm about PostgreSQL advocacy sparked something in me.

At the end of the day, we elected the first board of the Postgresql EU association! The unofficial results: Magnus Hagander, Gabriele Bartolini, Jean-Paul Argudo and Andreas Scherbaum are the members of this historic board. Originally, only 3 members would be elected, but there was a tie for the third position so it was decided that we would just have four! Congratulations to all. They will now shape the association, no doubt with help from others such as me.

I’m gonna keep this a short post. I’m tired, and have to get up early tomorrow again. Fosdem crew, thanks! PostgreSQL people, thanks! I had a great weekend!

Quite a succesfull day for PostgreSQL af fosdem I would say: the goodies sold like mad, and the devroom (shared with FreeBSD) was packed! Between doing some volunteering for the fosdem organisation, finding people i know who also are visting fosdem, walking along the booths and visiting some other talks (a.o. the openasf ligthning talk) I unfortunately only saw two of the talks in the shared dev room. I even missed out on the FreeBSD talks, which is a shame, because I really dig FreeBSD!

At least I was present for the PostgreSQl keynote, which was brought by David Fetter. He talked about all the great new features the recently released PostgreSQL 8.3 has. In his talk, David alluded to some of the things Simon Riggs would later elaborate on in his talk titled ‘PostgreSQL 8.3 performance features’.

In case you missed it, there are quite some performance improvements in 8.3. One of those is HOT (heap-only tuples), which is sort of a mini-vacuum which kicks in as soon as a page has filled up. Another is asynchronous transactions, where you can say that for certain transactions, writing it to the WAL log can be delayed.

Simon Riggs

Another great feature is the simultaneous sequential scan. One of the more expensive operations on larger tables is the sequential scan, where each record is loaded from disk one-by-one. When two queries have to scan the same table, a lot of disk-i/o is duplicated. With the simultaneous scanning, the second query will piggy-back on the scan that is already going on.

I haven’t put 8.3 in production yet, but having heard Simon present some of the performance features, i’m more likely to switch soon. Especially because 8.3 has better options to diagnose performance problems, which i’m eager to check out.

Mind you, these performance improvements are no silver bullets. For most of them, you need to be aware of the limits and conditions of each of them. And most importantly, these features have been designed with certain use cases in mind. What is needed is more exhaustive testing, more analysis of how things work in cases that might not have been thought of by the developers.

Tonight is the free beer party at imatix, by former FFII president Pieter Hintjens. I was planning on going there, but we only finished dinner around 23:00, and i’m way too tired to drink belgian beers. It is a pity, i was looking forward to meeting Pieter and other FFII people.

Other highlights of the day were finally meeting a TWiki friend of mine, saying hi to Reinout of the wg open source of GroenLinks and buying a syllable deluxe cd. Tomorrow will be the key-signing party, the election of the first board of the PostgreSQL eu association and of course the auction of one of the two big plush elephants!

It was a bit early getting out of bed, but worth it. The PostgreSQL booth is up, i’ve put myself in a PostgreSQL shirt and the live cd’s are labeled. What can go wrong now? I’m gonna see what else there is to do here!

Wij zaten met een man of 20-30 in het bier circus, waar ze ontzettend veel bier op voorraad hebben (en bij elk bier het juiste glas). Tien tot 15 pagina’s telt het biermenu. Een hapje eten kan ook, ik had biefstuk met Duvel saus, lekker hoor! Duvel is sowieso mijn favoriete bier, hoewel niet de meest ‘exotische’ keuze van de kaart.

Later voegden ook enkele FreeBSD’ers zich bij ons. PostgreSQL en FreeBSD delen samen een developers room, eigenlijk heel erg logisch: PostgreSQL en FreeBSD zijn een ontzettend goede combinatie, zowel technisch als sociaal.

Lopend vanaf het biercircus, want de laatste tram en metro waren reeds vertrokken, trokken we de camera niet bij alle mooie gebouwen die we passeerden. Maar toen we onderstaande busje tegenkwamen, werd er druk geflitst! Samen met Gevik, de andere Nederlandse PostgreSQL enthousiasteling, posseerden we voor het busje. Die foto houden jullie nog te goed (want die staat niet op mijn camera).

Naast de Worst EU Lobbying award wordt 4 december a.s. ook uitgereikt de Wordt EU Greenwash award, voor de instelling of persoon die het meest misleidend zijn over de werkelijke ecologische impact van hun bedrijfsvoering. In deze categorie zijn de kandidaten Airbus, BAE systems (fabrikant van ‘milieuvriendelijke’ wapens), ExxonMobil, het German Atomic Forum en Shell.

Ze hebben hier twee kleinere vliegvelden, in plaats van 1 groot vliegveld zoals Schiphol. Op zich wel slim, want zo heb je toch net wat minder drukte en daarmee gepaard gaande vervuiling en criminaliteit. Vanuit het vliegtuig wel eerst met de bus naar de aankomsthal, in plaats van direct via zo’n slurf. Dan met een speciaal pendeltreintje, dat met een grote bocht óm Rome heen gaat, naar het centraal station alwaar de metro dan niet meer blijkt te rijden! Nouja, ik had Tomtom meegenomen, dus de wandeling van 20 minuutjes naar het hotel was zo gepiept.

Aangekomen in het hotel gauw m’n tas uitgepakt en naar de lobby om weer even online te gaan. Want internet op de kamer, daar doen ze niet aan bij Hotel Adriano. In de lobby werkt het internet overigens ook niet, dat komt morgen pas weer. Dus ben ik als een echte cyberjunkie met m’n laptopje de straten af gaan schuimen, op zoek naar een open wifi punt. Of bij gebrek daaraan zo’n wifi punt waar je voor moet betalen. Met wat truukjes (TCP/IP tunnelen over DNS of ICMP) hoef je daar overigens helemaal niet voor te betalen, en dat was ik eerlijk gezegd ook helemaal niet van plan.

En zo kan het dus gebeuren, dat ik op een pleintje ergens in Rome m’n mail zit te checken, de laatste RSS feeds binnen trek en zit te bloggen. Het is hier in ieder geval veel beter weer dan in Nederland, dus alleen daarom is het de moeite al waard. Wel raar dat de metro er al om 21.00 uur mee stopt. En de verhalen over het verkeer zijn ook schromelijk overdreven, wie Amsterdam is gewend vind Rome een speeltuin.
Morgen ongetwijfeld meer over de TWiki summit. Er staat genoeg op het programma. Nu ga ik maar weer eens terug naar het hotel, want morgen om 9.00 uur begint de eerste sessie reeds. Ik denk dat ik maar ontbijt op bed laat bezorgen, zodat ik dat kan combineren met wakker worden.

Amsterdam, voorheen gay capital van Europa. Tegenwoordig middenmoter als het gaat om tolerantie ten opzichte van homo, lesbo, bi of transsexueel. Zo mocht blijken toen een voorbijlopende allochtoon het nodig meende te vinden om ons ‘kankerhomos’ toe te schreeuwen.

Gelukkig bleef het daar bij. Want in Polen, waar zaterdag de jaarlijkse gay pride is, gooit men er dan nog een baksteen achteraan. Tijdens die gay pride in Polen zullen ook Kathalijne Buitenweg, Joost Lagendijk, Emine Bozkurt, Boris van der Ham, en nog vele anderen meelopen. Enerzijds om de Poolse holebi’s een hart onder de riem te steken, anderzijds om aan de Poolse regering te laten zien dat homohaat niet bij een Europees land past.

En dat vind ik eigenlijk best dapper. Zo’n gay pride kan in Polen namelijk wel eens uitlopen op een slachtveld. Naast omstanders die dus met stenen gooien is er namelijk ook nog de politie, die het geheel goedkeurend bekijkt en als het even kan ook nog een handje helpt met het nationalistische potenrammen. Ik wens hen die meelopen, en de Poolse holebi’s zelf, een goede en niet door politiegeweld verstoorde gay pride toe!

En oh ja, zet vooral even je handtekening! Deze petitie zal zaterdag worden aangeboden aan de Poolse regering. Je hoeft niet holebi te zijn om deze petitie te tekenen!