Currently sitting next to Josselin Mouette aboard flight AF 434, due to arrive in Mexico in about four hours (and Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec maybe two hours after that). The new battery I recently bought for my laptop means I can type this and not fear being interrupted after a few minutes, and so here I am, re-using the asynchronous blogging system I had set up last year for my world tour. Fond memories come to mind, except that this time I’m reasonably confident there will be network access. And I’m looking forward to hacking all day long for a week. Some of my packages could use some attention. Hm. The only games installed on this laptop are moon-buggy and bastet. I’ll have to get a few more in prevision for the return trip.

Lars Wirzenius kindly added some visibility to Kenshi Muto’s Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list, and had the interesting idea of mentioning live-cds in the same post. That gave me an idea: why not prepare a minimal live-cd dedicated to hardware compatibility testing? It could automatically open a browser on that check page, try multiple screen resolutions and sound systems and report the results, run glxgears, etc. Just boot on that CD in the computer shop, wait for a few moments, and see in big, easily readable letters, whether a configuration actually works with free software. Don’t forget to exclaim loudly if the shop attendant told you it would work and the tests show it doesn’t. I’m told there’s a tool to automate the creation of live-cds. Any takers for that task?

I am once again the victim of overzealous RSS readers. Especially one called “RSS Popper", which from what I can gather is a plug-in for Outlook. I have no idea how (or even if) it can be configured, but from what I can guess from my logs, it defaults to refresh the RSS feeds every one minute and a half. Which is far too often, especially considering the capacity of my server. Apparently there are only a few people subscribed to my RSS feed using that reader, but when their Outlook is running, my poor old webserver gets noticeably loaded. I am tempted to ban this user-agent from accessing my RSS feeds, but not immediately and without notice though. So if you read this through RSS Popper, please decrease your refresh rate to something reasonable. One refresh every day should be plenty enough. Thanks.

After large amounts of peer pressure from Rapha l Hertzog and other French Debian Developers, I finally created a new geek-fr category in this blog. The old geek category was renamed to geek-en for consistency, and both are now subcategories of a new geek category. I think that means you’ll get articles in both French and English if you just read geek. Same applies for the RSS feeds, so you may like to update your feed readers and aggregators (I already updated Planet Debian). The new geek-fr subcategory will contain articles in French, as you’d expect, and will probably be more related to French-specific events. I’ll post another announcement in French in a few minutes.

On Wednesday I got up way too early in order to go to Heathrow in time for my flight to Osaka. The flight went via Frankfurt and wasn't terribly spectacular. I was a bit disappointed in the flight entertainment system (only shared monitors in the middle of the plane, mostly showing movies I've seen before) but I had Hodges' biography of Alan Turing with me and slept for a while, so it wasn't a bit issue. Arriving Thursday morning, Yabuki-san, who had originally invited me to the Japan Debian Mini-Conf (JDMC), picked me up from the airport. Shortly afterwards I met up with Imai-san, who was so kind to go sightseeing with me in Kyoto. I wanted to go there because I heard that it's quite different to Tokyo, where I stayed for about 10 days for a conference three years ago (incidentally, that trip was in October too, so it was three years ago almost to the day). Kyoto was surprisingly close to Osaka — it was faster to get there than to go from Kansai airport to the city center of Osaka. We first went to Nijo Castle, followed by some temples, including Kiyomizu-dera, one of the most celebrated temples of Japan. We had sushi and noodles for lunch, and in the afternoon we returned to Osaka so I could rest for a few hours before meeting up with the interpreter of the conference. This we did at a restaurant specialized in tofu. The food was surprisingly good given that I'm normally not a big fan of tofu at all. The following morning, I had my keynote speech, talking about release management. I covered various insights learned from my research and then tried to apply some of them to Debian, asking the question whether something like time-based releases would make sense for the project. A big issue is obviously planning, and I think the new release team does a much better job at this than we did in the past, even if many improvements are still possible, such as better coordinated NMUs when major transitions take too long. All of the other talks where in Japanese, so I was either working on my laptop or walking around the city. The first day, Hatta-san and I went to Osaka Castle; Roland Mas, who briefly turned up for the JDMC, joined us as well. The second day I did some shopping before going to the conference where I participated in the key signing session. On Sunday morning I had to leave again... it was a nice trip, even though much too short and influenced by jet lag. I think there could have been more people at the JDMC but on the other hand it's nice to see some efforts to attract new developers in Japan and this conference was certainly a good first step in that direction.