Election 2010 Wallpaper (Sep 10 09)

If you are looking for a wallpaper for your laptop or desktop computer, here is the wallpaper that is strongly recommended for your use. The wallpaper is not only beautiful, but is also cool to the eyes, because green is known to be a restful color. Also we have here a plea, a request, a prayer, for COMELEC to release the source code of the election 2010 computer programs, because that is the honorable thing to do. It is the lawful thing to do. Comelec should not keep promising to the electorate that it will release the source code, should not keep making press releases that it will release the source code, when in reality it has no intention to do so, and has in fact written to CenPEG, and has given impossible conditions for CenPEG to join a Dominion-Smartmatic-Comelec-supervised closed-door, no external communication, review of some source code, which may not even be the source code of the election 2010 computer programs!

Where is the source code that is supposed to be in escrow at the Central Bank? Where is the source code that Comelec is supposed to release to all interested political parties and groups, for their "own review", as soon as the technology is chosen (for implementation) in the second week of June? It has been three months since the technology was chosen for implementation, and yet there is no source code. Chairman Melo, Commisioner Rene Sarmiento, Executive Director Tolentino, SBAC Chief Atty Rafanan, CAC Chair Mr. Roxas-Chua, CAC member Mr. Garcia, COMELEC TEC Chair and ASTI Director Denis Villorente, members of the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee, where are the source codes of the PCOS and CCS computer programs? Why don't you obey the law and prove that Comelec is a law-abiding government agency?

Supreme Court Upholds Poll Automation (Sep 09 09)

In a news report at Inquirer.Net, Comelec Chairman Melo announced that the Supreme Court has ruled that the automation of the 2010 elections is legal. I do not understand why Chairman Melo is making this announcement and not the Supreme Court. You can read the rest of the Inquirer report here:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/nation/view/20090908-224221/SC-upholds-poll-automationComelec-chief

Where does that leave Atty Harry Roque and the Concerned Citizens' Movement? I was at the Supreme Court during the pleadings, and I personally believe that Atty Roque made more sense (to me as an IT person), than either the government counsel for Comelec, or Atty Lazatin for Smartmatic. But the Supreme Court has decided, and we have to respect the decision of the highest court of the land.

My heart goes to Atty Harry Roque, though.

Ateneo 150 Fedora Linux Wallpaper (Sep 07 09)

On the occasion of the Ateneo sesquicentennial (150th anniversary 1859-2009), I am posting a modified version of the Fedora 11 Leonidas Noontime wallpaper. You can use this as wallpaper for any of your GNU/Linux distro (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, CentOS) or even as a wallpaper for your Windows Vista / Windows7 desktop, if you are not too particular about your Windows loyalty. I think the wallpaper is simple but pretty. Also it reminds you that your school has been around for 150 years, educating the Filipino with its ratio studiorum, with the required readings in literature, theology, history, philosophy, with the problem sets in mathematics and physics, with the rigor of legal training, and now with clinical work in medicine. Which school is crazy enough to want to mold Filipinos with Christian, Catholic, Filipino and Jesuit values?

Only Ateneo!

The Women of Gabriela (Sep 06 09)

On Saturday, August 29, 2009, the Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG) gave a briefing on the Automated Election System (AES) 2010 to the members of Gabriela in its offices in Quezon City. Miss Elsa Gines gave a presentation on the "Five Technical Vulnerabilities of AES2010", and Mr. Bobby Tuazon gave a presentation on the "Vulnerabilities in the Management and Legal Aspects of AES2010". The room was full of women participants, although there were a few men and some children around. The women were serious and were intent at listening to the presentations. And they were taking notes! An open forum followed after the talks. The two most important questions were: (1) What procedures have been put in place in case a machine breaks down and there are no replacement machines available? (2) We want to be poll watchers -- how do we watch the fully computerized election of May 2010? I think these are two questions which COMELEC has to answer, and answer soon.

CenPEG has given many briefings about the AES2010 -- to teachers of ACT, to lawyers of the UP College of Law, to members of the Concerned Citizens Movement, to the nuns (and priests) of the Association of Major Religious Superiors, and to other groups. The women of Gabriela are my personal favorites. They are serious, they are involved, and they want to take correct action.

Long live the women of Gabriela!

Parallel Programming with MPI and OpenMP (Sep 02 09)

Last week, I attended the course "Multi-Core Faculty Training" given by Intel at the Department of Computer Science of the University of the Philippines - Diliman. Our trainors were Rama Malladi and Vipin Kumar of Intel-India. The participants were computer science faculty of various universities in the Philippines. The training was about programming threads on Intel multi-processor computers, called Intel multi-core computers, without the need to use the POSIX threads application programming interface (API) [1]. In particular, we used the Intel Threading Building Blocks [2], which is actually an implementation of the OpenMP [3] standard. The laboratory exercises were done on Intel Core2 Quad (four-processor) computers with one MB ram, running 64-bit Windows XP Professional. We used Microsoft Visual Studio with Intel C/C++ compilers, Intel VTune Performance Analyzer, Intel Thread Checker, and Intel Thread Profiler. It was a pretty interesting course, made slightly less interesting by the fact that we used Windows when professional scientific practice on multi-threading almost always happens on Linux scientific clusters. This is a slight oversight on the part of Intel, which is, after all, a closed-source commercial software vendor like Microsoft.

After the course, I decided to find out what similar tools are available for Linux, and I found that all recent versions of the GNU compiler collection [4] already support OpenMP, including the most recent gcc-4.4 C/C++ compiler. This means that all the friendly tools like Eclipse and similar IDEs automatically support OpenMP. I also found a beautiful book, "Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP" by Michael Quinn [5]. MPI stands for message passing interface [6], and it is a tool for dividing up a big program into smaller pieces for execution in several separate computers connected by fast network switches. OpenMP, on the other hand, is a tool for executing a program as several threads in one multi-core computer, without the programmer worrying about API calls like pthread_create() and pthread_join(). So MPI and OpenMP are the tools that we need for programming clusters of Intel Core2 Duo/Quad/etc computers.

Today, even the poor computing science researcher can construct using commodity products, compute clusters of cheap Intel multi-core computers, and pretend that they are gods computing with very expensive Cray super computers. Isn't life beautiful?

End notes:

[1] On a Linux box, type the command "man pthreads" to get an idea of the POSIX threads API.

[2] The Intel TBB documentation can be found here: http://software.intel.com/en-us/multi-core/

[3] The official website of OpenMP is http://www.openMP.org

[4] The GNU compiler collection is supplied as standard on most Linux distributions. Its documentation is available froma the website http://directory.fsf.org/project/gcc/

[5] Michael Quinn, "Parallel Programming in C with MPI and OpenMP", McGraw-Hill, NY, 2004, xiv + 529 pages

[6] Documentation for MPI is available from http://www.mpi-forum.org/docs/

Abigail's Pilgrimage (Aug 27 09)

My daughter, Ma. Abigail, writes:

Nakabalik na ako from my piligrimage to Santiago de Compostela. I walked 100+ kms in 5 days from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela (camino frances). Siyempre hindi whole day yung lakad para hindi maubusan ng beds sa hostels na para sa peregrinos. I have now a certificate which they grant once you have finished the pilgrimage. Plus, they mention the statistics during the pilgrim's mass everyday at noontime. I was the only Filipino who finished it on that day. The following day's mass na nga lang nasabi dahil dumating ako sa Santiago halos 11AM plus the queue for the registration took almost an hour. Na-mention pa ulit yung Philippines during the homily dahil sinabi nung priest na yung camino ay nag-u-unite ng tao not only in Europe. Although I started the piligrimage alone, I was never really alone. The first 3 days, I was walking with someone from Almeria and the last 2 days with 2 people from Zaragoza who have made the pilgrimage 2 times before and are well-prepared for the voyage. I'm quite content about the whole experience. It is not easy. I have seen at least one girl cry because she cannot finish the pilgrimage due to a problem with her knees. Anyway, I just wanted to inform you that I'm back in Granada.

Well, that's my girl! Always so gutsy. Congratulations, anak!

Election 2010: Why Windows Programs for Linux PCOS Computers? (Aug 20 09)

I am baffled by this entry in the Financial Proposal submitted by Smartmatic-TIM to COMELEC on May 4, 2009. Item 1.1.1 lists 83,925 licenses to "Enterprise grade N-tier software application Database SQL Server Standard 2005", obviously Windows software. But Item 1.5.1 lists only 72 units of EMS Machines (Windows Computers), so these 83,925 Windows SQL Servers can not be for the 72 units of Windows EMS computers. The closest figures that I can find in the proposal is the batch of 82,200 units of PCOS Machines enumerated in Item 1.5.2, but these are running uClinux in firmware, and these PCOS computers do not even have hard disks for the SQL Servers.

Does Smartmatic-TIM even know the system that they are installing for election 2010? Why do they make glaring errors like this? And why didn't the Comelec Advisory Council call COMELEC's attention to this error?

Is this Smartmatic-controlled computerized election leading to computerized padding of election costs? COMELEC must answer this important question.

Election 2010 Computers: Good vs. Bad (Aug 18 09)

I prepared a set of Adobe Acrobat slides describing the PCOS or counting computers that will be used on election day May 10, 2010, and the CCS or canvassing computers that will be used at the city, municipal, provincial, national COMELEC, and national Congressional canvasses. The Financial Proposal submitted by Smartmatic-TIM to COMELEC was used as a basis for these slides.

I also give the good points and the bad points of each type of hardware and operating system. As I am one of the oldest Linux users in the Philippines, with Linux User No. 5037, and having taught courses on operating systems and Linux system administration for a number of years, and having actually done system administration for a time in Ateneo, I believe that my assessments as GOOD or BAD, are very reasonable.

I also mention nine (9) KNOWN ISSUES, a result of the critical study done by the "U.P. College of Law Policy Study Project on AES2010". You may debate the veracity of these KNOWN ISSUES, but you can always go back to the documents mentioned there and verify for yourselves the truth of these ISSUES.

We all want clean and honest elections in May 2010. But clean and honest elections will not happen automatically even if Smartmatic computers are used. My honest IT professional's belief is that unless these issues are addressed satisfactorily by Smartrmatic, COMELEC, the COMELEC Advisory Council, the COMELEC Technical Evaluation Committee, and the Joint Congressional Oversight Committee, then computerized election 2010 will lead to computerized failure of elections.

Smartmatic's PCOS: Why 4-Bit Scanner?

Smartmatic's PCOS: Why 4-Bit Scanner?

In an earlier blog post:

http://pmana.multiply.com/journal/item/61/Why_Smartmatics_PCOSSAES_Passed_the_SBAC_Accuracy_Test_Jul_31_09

you will find an explanation of why and how the Smartmatic PCOS machine passed the SBAC's reading accuracy test despite its having only a 4-bit scanner. I've been thinking hard why Dominion/Smartmatic used a 4-bit scanner, when 24-bit scanners are so cheap today. For a little over two thousand pesos (PHP2,000.00) you can buy a high-end scanner. As you already know, 4-bit scanners can see only 16-shades of gray (black and white) while 24-bit scanners can see over 16 million colors, enough for the job of reading our hand markings on our ballots on election day. With Smartmatic's 4-bit capable PCOS scanner, many people's votes will not be counted properly, and voters will not even know this. They will be totally clueless, because COMELEC will not enable the PCOS feature that allows the voter to verify how the PCOS read his ballot. Kawawa naman ang Pinoy. Magbabayad na ng PHP7.2billion, madadaya pa ng mumurahing scanner.

Dr. Felix Muga, faculty of Mathematics at Ateneo de Manila, sent us a link that explains why Dominion/Smartmatic's PCOS computer uses only a 4-bit scanner:

http://www.vote-ny.com/english/transcripts-sequoia/

Dominion/Sequoia computer was designed to read ballots printed and marked by another computer that can produce PERFECTLY-SHADED OVAL MARKINGS. The Dominion/Sequoia voting system used in New York consisted of four components: (1) a big hooded touch-screen, which the voter uses to make his selections, (2) a quality printer which prints the voter's ballot, with his choices indicated by perfectly shaded oval markings, (3) the PCOS computer that scans the computer-printed ballot, interprets the votes, and counts and accumulates the votes for the precinct, and (4) the ballot box for holding the paper ballots. But Smartmatic licensed only item (3) from Dominion, for use in the Philippines.

So on election day, May 10, 2010, all voters, young and old, must learn to mark his ballot like a computer marks ballots, using perfectly evenly fully shaded ovals. But we are not perfect markers because we are not computer markers. Why should COMELEC penalize us voters by buying the inappropriate technology and asking us to to make up for the inappropriateness of the technology that COMELEC has chosen? Why should COMELEC's chosen technology fail at reading dots, check marks, cross marks, pencil marks, ballpen marks, etc, when the capability to read such markings is a condition for bidders, as stated in COMELEC's own Terms of Reference? Why does COMELEC contradict itself in order to accommodate a bidder that people are starting to believe to be COMELEC's favorite? Was SBAC's bidding fair?

COMELEC must answer these questions. It is only fair for COMELEC to do the honorable thing, and explain these to us.

Harry Roque vs COMELEC-Smartmatic

The Honorable Justices came into the room, dressed in black robes, and occupied their positions at the bench. Then everyone was asked to be seated, and the hearing of the "Harry Roque vs COMELEC-Smartmatic" case started. Atty Harry Roque spoke with confidence, secure in the knowledge that he was fighting for the "right", and armed with hard facts that buttress his claim that COMELEC must pilot test in 12 areas in the country in the national elections of 2010, before doing fully computerized elections in the national elections after 2010. He also gave proof of his claim that the 60-40 split in the JVA between TIM and Smartmatic is on paper only, but in reality, it was Smartmatic that was calling the shots in almost every major decision making.

After Atty Roque spoke, all the Honorable Justices asked him questions. From the manner of their questioning, one can tell that the Hon Justices were biased, six for him, and six against. I asked Atty Vicky Avena what happens in a situation like this, and she said Atty Roque will lose in case of a tie, unless the Hon Chief Justice can convince the other Justices to change their votes. The Justices were very well informed, and most of them did their homework, displaying a depth of knowledge even more extensive than the lawyers at court. At one point, the Chief Justice asked Atty Roque if he knew the contents of COMELEC Bid Bulletin No. 10, and it took him some time to realize that the Chief Justice was actually leading him, because Bid Bulletin No. 10 is one of the documents that he needed to prove his point that Smartmatic is actually running the 2010 elections and that COMELEC has surrendered its mandate to manage the election to Smartmatic. In Bid Bulletin No. 10, COMELEC gives Smartmatic full responsibility for generating the private and public keys of the BEI and BOC personnel, which the BEI will use to digitally sign the precinct election returns (ER). Since Smartmatic has this responsibility, it will have possession of all BEIs' private keys, and will give Smartmatic the capability to change the ER of any precinct in the entire country, resulting in massive computerized cheating in case this capability is exploited by Smartmatic.

Next it was the turn of the Asst Solicitor General, counsel for COMELEC, to speak, and to be asked questions. Finally the lawyer for Smartmatic spoke and gave a demo (actually Chris Iskander of Dominion-Smartmatic gave a demo, while the lawyer spoke about the demo that was going on) of the PCOS-SAES-1800, and then the Justices asked him questions.

It was my first ever court experience, and it was at the Supreme Court! I felt so proud that I am witness to a most important event in the history of my country, at which the implementation or non-implementation of the first fully computerized national election will be decided. Most people in attendance were lawyers from U.P. Everyone was dressed smartly, the men in barong Tagalog or coat and tie, the women in blazers and smart dresses. I was the only one in long-sleeve shirt! The Supreme Court session started at about 2:00 PM, and lasted nine hours and twenty minutes. The court never called a merienda break.

Now I have added three major heroes in my Honor Roll, for their intelligence, breadth and depth of knowledge, and fairness: Chief Justice Reynato Puno, Justice Antonio Carpio, and Justice Leonardo Quisumbing, all Honorable Justices of the Supreme Court. I also want to add a minor hero, Atty Harry Roque, Knight of Truth, fighting against major odds, armed only with the wisdom and ingenuity of a UP lawyer, at one time citing "an IT expert from the neighboring rival school", in order to reveal the truth behind the COMELEC-Smartmatic deal.

Letter from a Student (Aug 05 09)

Dear. Dr. Manalastas,

I'm not sure if you remember me. I graduated from the MS program back in 1991. I was one of the only Americans in the program at the time. You were one of my instructors. I was on the Ateneo site searching for some information and came across your name. I wanted to let you know that you were one of the best instructors I ever had, and that includes the instructors from UC, Berkeley and University of Oklahoma where I earned other degrees. Just wanted to send my regards...

Best Regards,
Mike Hawkins


Dear Mike,

Of course I remember you, and your heuristic for the travelling salesman problem! Actually, you were my favorite student, although I did not tell you that before. You work hard and are always first to submit homework. And you get good grades.

I have retired, and now teach part time only, one course in the University of the Philippines, and one-half in Ateneo Quezon City. I also volunteered as IT consultant for the U.P. College of Law Policy Study on Computerized Election 2010 (www.aes2010.net). You will probably find out that the computerized Philippine national elections on May 10, 2010 will be the biggest ever computerized elections in the whole world. This one will use paper ballots, computerized counting at the precincts, mobile internet to transmit results to canvassing centers, and computerized canvassing to determine winners. There will be 50 million voters, 82,200 precinct counting computers, and 2,000 canvassing center computers, and will cost the Filipino taxpayer PHP7.2 billion - PHP11.4 billion.

I also have a blog, and I might be the oldest blogger in the Philippines: http://pmana.multiply.com/journal.

Thank you for your letter. It comes like a gift from heaven, to rejuvenate my dying soul.

Pablo Manalastas

Karen Completes Babel (Aug 02 09)

Equipped with a PHP75,000.00 budget to buy a desktop computer for the Protein Structure and Immunology laboratory at the National Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (NIMBB) at the University of the Philippines, my daughter Karen decided to make the most of this money, and buy a compute cluster instead. With that amount, she got four nodes: a master front end and three compute nodes. Each node had an Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2GB memory, 320GB disk, and a gigabit network card. She also got a Samsung LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse, shared by all four nodes via a KVM switch. She was left with enough money to get a 16 port 10/100MB network switch, although a gigabyte switch would have been better but more expensive option. She got the 16 port switch, so that when their laboratory get more money in the future, they can add more compute nodes. She installed Rocksclusters v5.2, and the installation process took her several days, because this is her first cluster installation job. She had no one to consult, because there are not too many molecular biology people who know how to install compute clusters.

When her boss, Dr. Bascos, saw the contraption, she called it Babel because it reminded her of the biblical tower of Babel. This name might actually be an appropriate name, since the cluster speaks many computer languages like C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, and PHP, and in addition, many BIO packages/languages like TIGR, BioPython, ClustalW, NCBI Blast, T_Coffee, Fasta, Gromacs, and Phylip.

Her next problem is learning to use these BIO packages to help in her work. The search for knowledge never ends.

Is Smartmatic's PCOS software covered by GPL?

Smartmatic's PCOS computer, called the SAES-1800 [1], will be used as vote counting machine at the precincts on election day, May 10, 2010. SAES works under the uClinux operating system and most probably uses the libSANE scanner library for its built-in ballot scanner. Both the uClinux operating system and the libSANE scanner library are covered by the General Public License (GPL) [2], a freedom software license (open source license). Under the GPL, any derivative product, like the SAES software, has to be covered by the same GPL, and so must necessarily be open source. Is the refusal of Smartmatic to release the source code of SAES-1800 a violation of the GPL? During the Senate hearing on the Smartmatic-TIM-Comelec contract by Senator Chiz Escudero's committee, I asked Mr. Cesar Flores, spokeman of Smartmatic how I can get technical documentation and the source code of the SAES-1800. Mr. Flores said that anything that we need from them, we should ask Comelec. The Center for People Empowerment in Governance (of which I am IT consultant) asked Comelec for the source code of the election programs, including the SAES and CCS (canvassing and consolidating system) programs. In an en-banc resolution dated June 2009, Comelec granted CenPEG its request for a copy of the source code of SAES and CCS. Up to now, more than a month after the en-banc resolution, CenPEG has not gotten a copy of the source codes of the two programs. Comelec's Executive Director Tolentino asked CenPEG to wait for the Comelec's Technical Evaluation Committee to issue a set of guidelines for the source code review by independent parties outside of Comelec. But the law (RA-9369) [3] is quite clear on this issue of source code review of the election programs:

"Once an AES technology is selected for implementation, the Commission shall promptly make the source code of that technology available and open to any interested political party or groups which may conduct their own review thereof."

Is this delaying tactic part of the Smartmatic-Comelec conspiracy to get full control of computerized election 2010, so that no one has an idea of how the Smartmatic computer programs are counting our votes and combining them into canvasses? Is this refusal of the Comelec to "promptly make the source code ... available" to CenPEG, so that it may "conduct its own review thereof", a violation of RA-9369?

Is Smartmatic's refusal to release the source code of the SAES-1800 a violation of the General Public License? In recent announcement of Microsoft to contribute 20,000 lines of Hyper-V code under the GPL, it was discovered that Microsoft had used open source components that were released under GPL. Microsoft is contributing its Hyper-V code under GPL in order to avoid a big embarassment that will be caused by its violation of the GPL of some of its components. Now is this not precisely the same case of Smartmatic's use of uClinux and libSANE library? Should not Smartmatic do the honorable thing and release the SAES-1800 code under the GPL?

Smartmatic: the people of the Philippines is waiting for you to do the honorable thing.

Richard Stallman: What are you doing?

//PManalastas


[1] http://www.smartmatic.com/fileadmin/users/docs/SAESSAES1800_technicalsheet_v2.0.pdf
[2] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
[3] http://www.chanrobles.com/republicactno9369.html
[4] http://www.osnews.com/story/21882/Microsoft_s_Linux_Kernel_Code_Drop_Result_of_GPL_Violation

Entering Formulas in OpenOffice (July 20 09)

Some colleagues have asked me how to enter formulas in OpenOffice documents. I discovered that OO has a tutorial on this topic:

http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/formula/Formula_HowTo_1_0.pdf

The notation used for entering formulas is almost like TeX, only slightly better. So friends, go ahead and get this tutorial, and fire away with your formulas!

Fedora 11 Lion Wallpaper (Jul 19 09)

The latest Fedora Linux distribution, Fedora 11, is codenamed "Leonidas", so I wanted to get a "lion" wallpaper for my laptop. Several lion wallpapers are available for download from various sites, including:

leonidas-1-noon_right.jpg
King_4070x1536.xcf

The first one "leonidas-1-noon_right.jpg" has a very big lion face that tends to obscure the icons on the desktop. The second one "King_4070x1536.xcf" is too big to use as wallpaper. So I decided to fix "King" to make it just right for my 1280x800 screen, and I got the wallpaper above. I do not know if I'm violating any copyrights here, and if I am, please tell me so that I can take this jpg image from my site.

Karen Installs 4-Node Rockscluster (Jul 17 09)

My daughter Karen works as research assistant in one of the labs at the National Institute of Melocular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of the Philippines. She told me that their lab had a budget of PHP75,000.00 for a desktop computer. I suggested that that amount could buy them a compute cluster, instead of just one computer. So we did some canvassing, and she finally bought the cheapest four-node cluster of Intel Core2 Duo machines, interconnected with a 16-port network switch. The 16 ports is for growth, should they decide to add more nodes. The flat screen LCD monitor and mouse is shared by all four nodes via a KVM switch.

Being a molecular biology graduate did not prepare her for what lies ahead -- the installation of Rockscluster software. Now she is learning about master front-end, compute nodes, managed switch, DNS, IP addressing, MAC addresses, kickstart files, grub configuration, X configuration, Xen or no-Xen, BIO roll, etc.

Life is interesting when you have problems to solve. And my daughter sure has lots of them!

Karen Installs 4-Node Rockscluster (Jul 17 09)

My daughter Karen works as research assistant in one of the labs at the National Institute of Melocular Biology and Biotechnology at the University of the Philippines. She told me that their lab had a budget of PHP75,000.00 for a desktop computer. I suggested that that amount could buy them a compute cluster, instead of just one computer. So we did some canvassing, and she finally bought the cheapest four-node cluster of Intel Core2 Duo machines, interconnected with a 16-port network switch. The 16 ports is for growth, should they decide to add more nodes. The flat screen LCD monitor and mouse is shared by all four nodes via a KVM switch.

Being a molecular biology graduate did not prepare her for what lies ahead -- the installation of Rockscluster software. Now she is learning about master front-end, compute nodes, managed switch, DNS, IP addressing, MAC addresses, kickstart files, grub configuration, X configuration, Xen or no-Xen, BIO roll, etc.

Life is interesting when you have problems to solve. And my daughter sure has lots of them!

Public access to source code of election programs (Jul 17 09)

The term "open source" and the more revolutionary term "free software" have official definitions given in the following documents:

1. Open source: http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php

2. Free software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Basically, open source (& free software) means the person (anybody) who got the software under the open source/free software license has the freedom to study the code, make improvements, give the code away for free or for profit, plus many other freedoms. The only difference between open source and free software is in the treatment of derivative products. BSD-open-source allows the derivative product to be covered by any license the derivator wants. A derivative of GPL-free-software must be covered by the GPL-free-software license. The exact text of the GPL is given here:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

The law RA-9369 requires that the source code of the election programs (PCOS and CCS) be made available by Comelec to the political parties and interested groups, for their independent review. But the law did not specify that the election programs be made open source, since that is asking too much.

However, Smartmatic's SAES-1800 program can be considered a "derivative" product of the uClinux operating system and libSane scanner library, both of which are GPL-free-software. "Considered derivative product" because I am not absolutely sure that it is a derivative product. If it is, then it must be GPL-free-software, by the infectious nature of the GPL. Under the conditions of the GPL, Smartmatic has to post the PCOS/SAES-1800 source code in a publicly accessible site.

Whether GPL or not, the law RA-9369 is clear. The political parties and interested groups have just to request Comelec, and under this law, Comelec has to make the source code available. There is no mention in the law of any source code review "guidelines". The term "guidelines" was coined by Melo/jimenez to restrict the freedom of citizens to access the source code, and "guidelines" has the effect of making the code accessible only to the experts, and only those "experts" as defined by Comelec.


By the nature of fully computerized counting of our votes from our paper ballots, it is not possible to witness a public counting of our votes, and so we can never be truly confident that the computer does not make mistakes counting our votes. Only a source code review by the public will assure the public that the computer will do a reasonable job. But by setting "guidelines", the Comelec is depriving the public the right to know how their votes are counted.

It helps to know that we graduate tens of thousands from our B.S. Computer Science and B.S. Information Technology programs. In fact, our government leaders take pride in the fact that the Filipino is the world's best English-speaking programmer. So we have hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who can read source code, so why restrict access to source code by setting "guidelines" giving only experts selected by Comelec exclusive access.

Computerized Election 2010 should implement secret voting and public counting. And computerized counting can have some semblance to public counting only when the source is made public.

Free as in Freedom (Apr 06 09)

My friend and co-teacher Dr. Prof. Mr. Kardi Teknomo, associate professor of computer science at Ateneo de Manila University, one day asked me why some programmers write free open source programs. He reasoned out that a good programmer can make a lot of money from the programs that they write, and he could not understand why they give their programs away for free. I could not give him a short one sentence answer that will be satisfactory both for him and for me. I have read three books: "A Quarter Century of Unix", by Peter Salus (http://www.amazon.com/Quarter-Century-UNIX-Addison-Wesley-Systems/dp/0201547775), "Just for Fun: the Story of an Accidental Revolutionary", by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond (http://www.amazon.com/Just-Fun-Story-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/0066620724), and "Free as in Freedom", by Sam Williams (http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/), and I know that the answer is in one of those pages that I have read. It's just that these three books make a beautiful account of the struggles of the programming community to write programs and to share them with the rest of the programming community, without regard for monetary reward. In particular, "Free as in Freedom" is an account of Richard Stallman's crusade to make source code of programs available for programmers to study and to improve upon, and to make the source code of such improvements available for programmers to study and to further improve upon. If the source code is kept a trade secret (by making only the binary executables available for sale or for free), then only the programmers hired by the copyright owner can make improvements to the program, and the program does not grow as fast as when the source code is made available. This seems to be the view of Stallman, and it is a view shared by all free open source advocates, and by companies that have made their products open source, products like Mozilla's Firefox, Sun's OpenOffice, Apache's webserver, Debian's GNU-Linux operating system, Canonical's Ubuntu Linux operating system, UC Berkeley's BSD derivative operating systems, and many others.

All that we wait for is for Bill Gate's Windows-8 operating system to be made truly free GPL open source, with GFDL manuals, so that we can use it to teach our operating systems laboratory course in the university.

Philippine Eagle in Ubuntu Wallpaper

In January 2009, Linux Torvalds was in Australia (http://apcmag.com/in_pics_linus_torvalds_shaves_open_source_legend_down_to_size.htm) and in March, we read that the Australian Tasmanian devil will be the new mascot of the linux 2.6.29 kernel (http://apcmag.com/australian-marsupials-get-stellar-billing-in-the-linux-community.htm). The Tasmanian devil is in danger of extinction, and adopting it as temporary mascot of the Linux community is a step towards preventing that from happening.

Now in the Philippines, the monkey-eating eagle Pithecophaga jefferyi, the world's largest eagle, is also in danger of extinction. If I put it in an Ubuntu wallpaper and people download it, then maybe we increase people's awareness of the near extinction of this beautiful bird. Note that the Linux mascot, Tux, is also a bird, just like our own Philippine eagle.

Download this wallpaper, and use it as your Linux or Windows wallpaper. Then visit the Philippine eagle website, http://www.philippineeagle.org/, and see how you can help save the Philippine eagle.