The Debian Edu / Skolelinux project is still going strong and made its first Wheezy based release today. This is the release announcement: New features for Debian Edu ~7.0.0 alpha0 released 2013-04-26 This is the release notes for for Debian Edu / Skolelinux ~7.0.0 edu alpha0, based on Debian with codename "Wheezy". About Debian Edu and Skolelinux Debian Edu, also known as Skolelinux, is a Linux distribution based on Debian providing an out-of-the box environment of a completely configured school network. Immediatly after installation a school server running all services needed for a school network is set up just waiting for users and machines being added via GOsa , a comfortable Web-UI. A netbooting environment is prepared using PXE, so after initial installation of the main server from CD, DVD or USB stick all other machines can be installed via the network. This is the first test release based on Wheezy (which currently is not released yet). Basically this is an updated and slightly improved version compared to the Squeeze release. Software updates

• Everything which is new in Debian Wheezy, eg:
  • Linux kernel 3.2.x
  • Desktop environments KDE "Plasma" 4.8.4, GNOME 3.4, and LXDE 4 (KDE is installed by default; to choose GNOME or LXDE: see manual.)
  • Web browser Iceweasel 10 ESR
  • LibreOffice 3.5.4
  • LTSP 5.4.2
  • GOsa 2.7.4
  • CUPS print system 1.5.3
  • Educational toolbox GCompris 12.01
  • Music creator Rosegarden 12.04
  • Image editor Gimp 2.8.2
  • Virtual universe Celestia 1.6.1
  • Virtual stargazer Stellarium 0.11.3
  • Scratch visual programming environment 1.4.0.6
  • New version of debian-installer from Debian Wheezy, see installation manual for more details.
  • Debian Wheezy includes about 37000 packages available for installation.
  • More information about Debian Wheezy 7.0 is provided in the release notes and the installation manual.

Documentation

• The (English) Debian Edu Wheezy Manual is fully translated to German, French, Italian and Danish. Partly translated versions exist for Norwegian Bokmal and Spanish.

LDAP related changes

• Slight changes to some objects and acls to have more types to choose from when adding systems in GOsa. Now systems can be of type server, workstation, printer, terminal or netdevice.

Other changes

• LTSP clients start as diskless workstation / thin client can be configured via command line argument -- or individually adding an entry in lts.conf or LDAP.
• GOsa gui: Now some options that seemed to be available, but are non functional, are greyed out (or are not clickable). Some tabs are completely hidden to the end user, others even to the GOsa admin.

Regressions

• No mass import of user account data in GOsa (ldif or csv) available yet.

No updated artwork

• Updated artwork which is visible during installation, in the login screen and as desktop wallpaper is still missing or the same as we had for our Squeeze based release.

Where to get it To download the multiarch netinstall CD release you can use

• ftp://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
• http://ftp.skolelinux.org/skolelinux-cd/wheezy/
• rsync -avzP ftp.skolelinux.org::skolelinux-cd/wheezy/

The MD5SUM of this image is: c5e773ddafdaa4f48c409c682f598b6c The SHA1SUM of this image is: 25934fabb9b7d20235499a0a51f08ce6c54215f2 How to report bugs http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/ReportBugs

After arriving yesterday, and doing the obligatory jetlagged wander around Circular Quay to the Opera House, I crashed for 15 hours sleep and seem reasonably well over the jetlag now. I'm staying near Central Station, which is great because it's very convenient to transport and there's lots of cheap ethnic food.

view down my street

Today I took the ferry over to Manly Beach. I had to get in some in swimming of course, although today was cloudy and only in the 80's (F). That was ok, but the really nice bit was walking over to Shelly Beach and up along the sandstone cliffs near North Head. Highlight was finding a small gotto high on the cliff, with some beautiful sandstone filigree overhead, that seemed carved by water (but probably really by wind), and contained a shady bench overlooking the Pacific. Great place to enjoy a lunch of crusty bread and salami if you're ever in the area. Topped off a great day with a random trip to Neutral Bay (the D&Der in me liked the name, and why not, ferries are free) and a wander through the Royal Botanic Gardens. I'm hoping to spend either Thursday or Friday at a co-working or hackerspace in Sydney, but I don't know where yet. Any locals have ideas?

Review: The Borrowers, by Mary Norton

Series:	The Borrowers #1
Illustrator:	Beth Krush
Illustrator:	Joe Krush
Publisher:	Sandpiper
Copyright:	1953
Printing:	1986
ISBN:	0-15-204737-9
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	180

Arrietty is a 14-year-old girl who lives under the clock. Well, actually, she lives under the kitchen floor, but the entrance to her family's passageway is under the clock, from which they get their name. She sleeps in an old cigar box, her living room is wallpapered with strips cut from letters (and decorated with postage stamps), and she keeps a journal in a miniature book that's half the size she is. Arrietty, and her parents Pod and Homily, are Borrowers. The Borrowers is a classic series of children's books by Mary Norton about miniature people who, at least in this first book, live in the walls and take things. Not big things, but all the little things: the blotter paper, the pins, the stray sock, old postage stamps, empty matchboxes, and the occasional thimble. With these things, they build their furniture, their clothes, and their homes, safely hidden in the walls and other secret places, always wary of the "human beans" (as Arrietty's mother tends to call them). That life is, of course, a remarkable simulation of middle-class, class-conscious British life, which is much of the fun. Arrietty's family lives in the home of an elderly woman who's confined to bed, so it's quiet, safe, and driven entirely by routine. They only have to watch out for the maid and the gardener, and they keep regular schedules. That's just the way the Borrowers like it; predictable and quiet. Which is why they get caught entirely by surprise when a boy shows up, recovering from illness in the country, and spots Pod on one of his borrowing runs. This is technically a re-read, but I read the original series so long ago that I barely remembered it. Not that there is all that much to remember, at least in the way of plot. This first book follows one of the standard plots for children's books of this type (although it follows Arrietty as the viewpoint character rather than the more common choice of the boy): boy discovers hidden creatures, hidden creatures are afraid, boy turns out to want to make friends with them, they strike up a friendship, peril nonetheless ensues. If you've read many children's books, you've probably read this before; The Mouse and the Motorcycle is an obvious example (and, in terms of plot, a somewhat better book). Arrietty is a typical protagonist, her parents are silly (and a bit flighty, particularly her mother), and the boy is, disappointingly, almost a non-entity. But you don't read The Borrowers for the plot. The brilliance of this book is in the descriptions of what they use, how they use it, and how they construct their ingenious homes. Norton captures much of the wonder of other miniaturization stories (the movie Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is an obvious example), but takes it one step further into clever and thoughtful repurposing. The book is full of off-hand descriptions of how everyday objects become different everyday objects for miniature people, giving it the same delight that one gets from descriptions of how model railroad dioramas or hand-made doll houses are constructed. The detailed (if busy) illustrations by the Krushes help tremendously with visualization and make the descriptions even more fun. This is very much a children's book based on an exploration of a single great idea, so don't expect too much in the way of plot or deep characterization. It's also not science fiction; there isn't any realistic extrapolation of culture. The Borrowers all behave like perfectly ordinary English people without any further explanation because, of course, that's what they would do. Re-reading it as an adult, I wished there was a bit more meat to it. But the ingenuity is still a delight. It's great fun to spend a couple of hours imagining how one would construct the miniature accouterments of everyday life. Followed by The Borrowers Afield. Rating: 7 out of 10

This was a good year for plums in the garden, both for the yellow plums and for the Italian prunes - enough so that it took some doing to figure out what to do with them all. Since I'm not in a hurry to set up a still and make slivovic, and you can only pawn so many plums off on friends and neighbors, I had on the order of 15 pounds of Italian prunes to dispense with. With our change of diet to eliminate extra carbs, Patty and I have both been experimenting with reduced-carb desserts in the kitchen. And I've always been fond of central European (e.g., German) desserts, which tend to be sweetened much more lightly than American equivalents. Indeed, my earliest impression of "coffee cake" comes from the home of an elderly couple who were friends of the family, who served a delicious plum cake in their home. She was from Bavaria, so I guess she probably wouldn't have called it Zwetchgendatschi like the Austrians do (if they even really call it that; I have my suspicions that this is a made-up name designed to poke fun at the foreigners). Maybe she would have called it Pflaumenkuchen. The Internet calls it "Polish plum cake". Whatever you call it, it's tasty, and I aimed to recreate it at home. The plums are now nearly a month gone, but after multiple iterations the cake turned out well enough that I feel compelled to share it with the Internet. Since we have friends who are dairy-intolerant, this particular recipe is tailored to be low-carb and dairy-free. It doesn't lose anything in the taste for being made with a restricted set of ingredients. The original recipe did call for a streusel, and a non-dairy streusel is pretty pointless so this recipe simply omits it. Metric cooks, avert your eyes. ;)

• 1 c almond flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• tsp salt
• c Steviva blend
• 3 tbsp grapeseed oil
• c milk
• 1 large egg
• 12 fresh plums, pitted and halved
• tsp cloves

Lightly coat an 8"x8" pan with cooking spray. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and Steviva. Add grapeseed oil, milk and egg. Beat at medium speed 4 minutes. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place plums on top, cut side up, pushing down slightly into batter. Sprinkle cloves over the plums. Bake about 50 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean. Let the cake cool in the pan so the plum juices will be reabsorbed to create a moist cake. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and cut into 16 squares.

[edit: the Internet is bad at me for my badly spelled german. Spelling corrected. ;)]

This was a good year for plums in the garden, both for the yellow plums and for the Italian prunes - enough so that it took some doing to figure out what to do with them all. Since I'm not in a hurry to set up a still and make slivovic, and you can only pawn so many plums off on friends and neighbors, I had on the order of 15 pounds of Italian prunes to dispense with. With our change of diet to eliminate extra carbs, Patty and I have both been experimenting with reduced-carb desserts in the kitchen. And I've always been fond of central European (e.g., German) desserts, which tend to be sweetened much more lightly than American equivalents. Indeed, my earliest impression of "coffee cake" comes from the home of an elderly couple who were friends of the family, who served a delicious plum cake in their home. She was from Bavaria, so I guess she probably wouldn't have called it Zwetchgendatschi like the Austrians do (if they even really call it that; I have my suspicions that this is a made-up name designed to poke fun at the foreigners). Maybe she would have called it Pflaumkuchen. The Internet calls it "Polish plum cake". Whatever you call it, it's tasty, and I aimed to recreate it at home. The plums are now nearly a month gone, but after multiple iterations the cake turned out well enough that I feel compelled to share it with the Internet. Since we have friends who are dairy-intolerant, this particular recipe is tailored to be low-carb and dairy-free. It doesn't lose anything in the taste for being made with a restricted set of ingredients. The original recipe did call for a streusel, and a non-dairy streusel is pretty pointless so this recipe simply omits it. Metric cooks, avert your eyes. ;)

• 1 c almond flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• tsp salt
• c Steviva blend
• 3 tbsp grapeseed oil
• c milk
• 1 large egg
• 12 fresh plums, pitted and halved
• tsp cloves

Lightly coat an 8"x8" pan with cooking spray. Heat oven to 350 degrees. In medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, salt and Steviva. Add grapeseed oil, milk and egg. Beat at medium speed 4 minutes. Pour batter into prepared pan. Place plums on top, cut side up, pushing down slightly into batter. Sprinkle cloves over the plums. Bake about 50 minutes or until a toothpick tests clean. Let the cake cool in the pan so the plum juices will be reabsorbed to create a moist cake. Sprinkle with confectioners' sugar, if desired, and cut into 16 squares.

Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email. After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of the people behind the German "IT-Zukunft Schule" project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm welcome to Angela Fu . :) Who are you, and how do you spend your days? I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son. At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids. Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also in the middle of buying a house and moving to it. In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer relationship management and the communication processes in the project. Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener and a yoga teacher. How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu project? I fell in love with Mike ;-). Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about several points where the communication with the schools head or the teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the parents. Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt Gramlich in G tersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building networks of people and in being in communication we dived into Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern Germany. For information about our school project you can read the interview with Mike Gabriel. What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My answer comes rather from a social point of view. The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large and strong international community of Debian Developers in the background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well ;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students, teachers, parents... What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian Edu? I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of Skolelinux / Debian Edu. What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Which free software do you use daily? On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin, LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of my N900 running with Maemo. Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to get schools to use free software? I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the strategy has three crucial pillars:

• We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.
• Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school, they also pay us for leading all the communication processes needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.
• Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the offer to become more and more independent from us.

Last year, via jwz, I watched the video "Archive Team: A distributed Preservation of Service Attack" from Defcon 19. I learned about the Archive Team and the work of Jason Scott. More recently I learned about the archive.org Shareware CD Archive. In the fledgling days of the Internet, shareware (and cover-mount) CD-ROMs were a popular way for files to be distributed. They therefore archive an interesting age in the history of modern Internet culture. Inspired by the above, I dug out some of my old shareware Doom CDs, ripped them, scanned their covers (where I had them) and uploaded them to archive.org. Here they are:

• The Ultimate Add-On Collection for Doom and Doom II
• D! 1000 (better CD scan needed)
• D! Zone Gold
• 3D Game Alchemy the CD that accompanied the book "3D Game Alchemy" (needs a better CD scan). I thought everyone had seen the stuff on this, but when Justin Fisher's NEMESIS.WAD appeared on Doomworld - relatively recently - I was surprised how few people were familiar with it.

They are all part of the growing Doom Level CD Collection. In most cases, the CDs are a super set of files that exist in the /idgames archive. I'm fairly sure there is some stuff on these CDs that never made out of BBSes or the AOL and CompuServe walled gardens onto the wider Internet, with the exception of these shovelware collections. A follow-on project would be to cross-reference their indexes with the /idgames archive and upload whats missing (that can be done so, legally.) Finally, I also had a single, solitary PC ZONE covermount CD that I held on to because it was a Quake (and Duke Nukem 3D) add-on special:

• CD Zone issue 48, March 1997

From an archive-perspective, Quake has not fared as well as Doom did. The Internet was young when Doom was popular, the World Wide Web was not the all-encompassing thing it has become and by accident rather than design nearly all Doom add-ons ended up being uploaded to a single FTP server: The Walnut Creek CDROM FTP Server, to a sub-folder /idgames. This single archive was mirrored wide and has lived on past the death of Walnut Creek. Today, it is small enough for casual enthusiasts to mirror, and has been kept alive by volunteer admins. The most popular front-end is now http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/. The WWW had grown up by the time Quake came along. There is an /idgames2, but it was never as popular as /idgames was for Doom. The Quake modding community was centered around a series of commercial websites such as Planet Quake, later part of the Gamespy network. Sadly the vast majority of web pages on the old Planet Quake site and similar sites have died completely from bit-rot. Large chunks of the history of the Quake community are therefore lost to a sort-of technological dark age.

So, it's now over. After two weeks of DebCamp+DebConf, followed by two weeks touring over to the best places in Nicaragua with my beloved Elisabeth (our first long holidays as a couple without children since....1987!), my best holidays EVER are over. I visited a wonderful country. I met wonderful people. And I have to come back as I left un unachieved volcano climb (some could think I did that on purpose just to have an excuse for coming back)...:-) I'll probably try to blog about all this in a soon-to-come very long bubullish post (IOW: full of typos and Frenglish) for those of you who aren't tired of these. Now, doh, I have two gardens to clean out before resuming work in less than two weeks.

The challenge is now more and more to find good places to run without too much cars and noises....and not too far away. Today, I think I made it well..:-) After a look on the map, and some wild guess from what I now know of the way the city is organized, I decided to go south-west of Managa, from the hotel Seminole. This is again a hilly run because, anyway, wherever you go south in Managua, you're going up. Ralf, who arrived just yesterday, joined me and, I guess, enjoyed the run. After going through an obviously quite rich neighbourhood with nice villas, gardeners, huge US truck-style cars, we went close to the Mormonschurch...and a mosque, then headed westward close to "Colegio Americano", with fences, walls, guards in the corner, etc. Seems that any tiny bit of USA in the world needs an army to protect it. Crossing la Pista Suburbana, we then went on a very quiet roads towards the hill, in a very green and peaceful area. House there were really not as fancy as in other places, even seeming quite "poor" in some way. However, we never felt any problem and people we meet on the way are always friendly and smiling : "Hola", "Buenos Dias", etc. At the end of the road, after about half an hour, we decided to head back. However, as going back the same way is boring, I suggested we head up west as my phone's map (it is very helpful to have a smartphone with GPS and Google Maps for wandering through unknwon places) was mentioning another road going north-west a little bit westward. So we entered a small trail between house farms...with dogs! These were a bit "scary" as they were barking at us and of course running entirely freely. On the other hand, none was really aggressive and we had no problem. I however saw a few people really staring at us as I guess there are not so many runners in this place..:-). But still, we never felt unsafe: just in a quite uncommon place. After abotu 500m we found the "road" that was on my map: indeed a path going down slowly along the hill. And there was the marvel. An incredible panoramic view going going the volcanoes that are East and North of Leon : San Cristobal, Telica Rota, Pilas elHoj and last but definitely not least: EL MOMOTOMBO. A nearly perfect pyramid-style volcano that lies about 50km north-west of Managua, on the eastern shore of Managua Lake. The view there is...just fantastic with also a 180 panorama to West and North-West of the lake and the volcanoes area. After this, all we had to do was heading back to the hotel and share this with you...:-) As usual, the full GPS trace is here.

Many community driven projects have a problem with overgrown bureaucratic processes reducing the desire and ability of casual contributors to contribute. Debian has struggled with this problem, with efforts like Debian Maintainers and sponsorship to address it, but it's insidious and difficult to completely overcome. I recently ran into this problem again with Wikipedia, where I'm a casual contributor (I probably average an edit a month). Sometime in 2006, I uploaded an image of a Boojum tree I took in 2004 to Wikipedia to provide an image for the Boojum tree article. It wasn't a particularly awe inspiring image, as I took it while I was teaching second quarter freshmen biology on campus, and showing the students the awesome Botanical Gardens at UCR. In 2011, a Wikipedia user asked for deletion of the image because of some confusion about the copyright on the image, as Apache::Gallery's default template footer contains Apache::Gallery's copyright. I didn't notice that during the 7 day deletion review period because I rarely log into Wikipedia. A few days ago, I noticed the deletion and asked for a Deletion Review. I assumed that my explanation that the copyright notice was for Apache::Gallery would be understood (or at least believed), and that at least the original reason for the deletion would be seen to be invalid. Instead, during the process I was questioned as to whether I actually took the picture, why I used GPLv2+ for the pictures, whether I was claiming other people's images, and whether the image was actually good enough to be in Wikipedia in the first place. Hundreds of lines of text, an edit to the template in A::G, hours wasted, people still unsatisfied, and the potential contributor (myself) feeling so annoyed with the entire process that I bothered to write this blog entry. While I'm not sure what to do about Wikipedia, I've been forcibly reminded of how important enabling easy contributions are, and how alienated one can feel when one is stymied by them to the point that your (admittedly insignificant) contribution to a project no longer seems worth the effort.

The Grand Plan today was reaching the end of the road I already explored on Tuesday. Named "Camino Las Viudas", it's climbing in the southern hills up to a place named "Intermzeeo del Bosque", apparently a very fancy (and expensive) restaurant. The road climbs in the apparently "rich" neighbourhood of Managua, with very fancy villas as guarded by private security, as well as private condominiums, guarded as well. What's funny to see is that, at the bottom of the road, when it crosses a large avenue (Pista Suburbana Espana), you can find several auto-rickshaws, just like those you find everywhere in India. Those autos apparently drive people who happen to work in these villas (like maids, gardeners, security guards, etc.) up to the place they work. We even met two cows wandering on the road and I hesitated waiting for a rickshaw to show up and take a pic of the road (with holes), the auto and the cows, then pretending that I'm no longer in Nicaragua but back in Karnataka. I did the run along with No l K the, who I was very happy to find again, restoring our now famous Debconf Runners Duet. We even found the German Embassy! Though climb, even if we took care to start at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat (and also the traffic and noise). No l unfortunately had to give up at 1km from the top of the road, when a 15% climb suddenly "killed" his legs. I need to train him more for ups and downs..:-) I could continue the road and finally reached the restaurant....which was guarded by private security (as apparently everything in this country) who unfortunately didn't let me in despite my desperate attempts to convince him, in broken Spanish, that I just wanted to take a few pictures and not place a bomb or rob someone... So, I gota little bit disappointed and the only option was then....to run down for another 8.5 kilometers, accelerating all the way, to finish nearly at 14 km/h on Managua's sidewalks...Fun. Great run (nearly 400m positive slope in less than 17km). Next challenge : find another such nice run in the neighbourhood! Maybe Volcan Masaya tomorrow. GPS trace is here.

I'm currently updating the ISO-3166-2 list in the iso-codes package. This is the list of countries subdivisions and official codes for these subdivisions. The funny part is that I just updated the names of states of India, some of them being often (much) more populated than most countries in the world : Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, etc. And some of them larger than most countries in the world. And a few minutes after, I end up adding the 17 "quarters" of the city of Monaco. Yes, Monaco, one of the smallest countries in the world, has official subdivisions or "quartiers":

• Quartier de La Condamine (MC-CO)
• Quartier de Fontvielle (MC-FO)
• Jadin Exotique (MC-JE) .... "Borough of the Exotic garden"
• Quartier de la Gare (MC-GA) .... "Train station borough"
• Monaco-Ville (MC-MO)....Monaco-City....as is there was something else than a city in Monaco....
• etc.

Real fun..:-). And the funny part is that all this is translatable..:-)

The Debian/Ubuntu games team recently organised a half-day screenshots party for creating screenshots for all the games that are available in Debian/Ubuntu. Unfortunately, only 5 people participated in the screenshots party, I had hoped that we would get more folks turn up. Only one of those was not already involved in the games team and that one person found out via our spam on the #debian-mentors IRC channel. This means that most of our promotion of the event was ineffective. Hopefully for future games parties we can improve this, please let us know if you have any ideas about that. We also had 7 other people on the channel during the party lurking, discussing and or working on other things, in particular Ben Armstrong was working on a games live CD. Over the 7 hours of the party, we uploaded 100 screenshots for 40 different packages. Of the packages, 2 are available only in Debian (auralquiz, cutechess), one is available only in Ubuntu (plasma-widget-tictactoe) and the rest are available in both. I think we got quite a bit done for such a small group. Some of us could not resist filing some bugs on packages that had issues preventing or delaying us from taking screenshots. I also suggested to one maintainer that his package (acm4) be removed from Debian, since it is obsoleted by acm and unusable. If you want to play some games, check out goplay, which is a tool for browsing available games using debtags that displays screenshots from the games-thumbnails package, which has just been updated with the screenshots created during the party. goplay needs some more development, if you would like to help out with that, you would be most welcome. If you are interested to see our screenshots, they are all on the screenshots.debian.net website and the packages are auralquiz, cardstories, londonlaw, cube2font, ardentryst, cutechess, pianobooster, emacs-chess, xye, flare, tmw, garden-of-coloured-lights, flight-of-the-amazon-queen, geekcode, glpeces, fofix, unknown-horizons, klickety, polygen, tictactoe, xscreensaver-screensaver-dizzy, goban-original-games, xjokes, mudlet, xabacus, xtux-client, connectagram, crystalspace, pescetti, purity-ng, qstat, slashem, sudoku, minetest, xscavenger, plasma-widget-tictactoe, xbomb, xfrisk, xpilot-ng and xsok.

Rain Friday was something of a rare day for February in Kansas. Starting at about 2AM, the wind picked up, blowing so hard that our windows rattled. That part isn t so rare. Then the cold rain started, dropping almost 2.5 throughout the day. As I worked, I had the blinds on the windows open, but they didn t let in very much light. Still, the wind had calmed down, so the intermittent rain outside was peaceful. Jacob went out to play for a little while, so every so often I saw a warmly-dressed and excited-looking 5-year-old run past my window. A little while after he came in, I told Jacob, I saw you playing outside. His response: Oh good! I got wet! Which, despite the fact that it was about 50 degrees, seemed to excite him. After the blustery start, the calm, slow, and peaceful rain was a pleasant thing to see throughout the day. Funeral My great aunt Alice Goerzen passed away last Sunday. So today, for the third time in a little over a year, I was at the funeral of a Goerzen relative and neighbor. Alice s husband, Milt, passed away in late 2010, and it was while I was at his funeral that Jacob got run over by a tractor. That memory certainly came back to me today. But I think I should set the stage and explain what funerals are like in this small, rural Kansas community. At the church, while people file in, family and close friends generally defined as loosely as desired meet in some other room before the funeral. Memories may be shared, or songs sung, or maybe just a brief meditation or prayer. Then the man from the funeral home there s only one in town will step in. Ivan Miller owned the business for decades, and although he s now retired, his replacement seems pretty similar. Kindly, respectful, and pretty much unchanging. This group then files into the church sanctuary to sit up front, while the rest of the congregation is standing and music is played. We typically sing some hymns, hear memories from the family, a message from a pastor, and then do downstairs for faspa: an light meal with coffee, zwieback, funeral cheese , and some relishes and dessert. You can, by the way, go to the local grocery store and find a product labeled funeral cheese . It s a sharp cheddar, sliced thick and cut into pie piece-shaped wedges. After everyone has picked up their food, microphones are passed around, and anybody that wants to can share memories and stories. These are often hilarious, or touching, and can be more random than anyone could expect. Today we heard a lot about how Aunt Alice loved her flowers and garden. We even saw a video of her giving a tour of her garden, with Milt s mower in the background occasionally accidentally causing a distraction (or maybe it wasn t so accidental; he d never miss an opportunity to cause some mischief ) I tend to think of attending funerals around here as a good time. Sadness is inevitable, but there are so many amazing stories that it is hard to leave feeling sad. Excitement This afternoon, Jacob found me in the office and as he often does, said, Dad, I want to do something with you. Usually I ask him what he d like to do, but his first instinct is usually to ask for watching train videos on Youtube. So sometimes I make other suggestions. Today we played hide and seek with radios, in which the person that is counting is supposed to radio to the other person when they are done. Today was the first time that Jacob came up with the trick of talking into the radio while I was hiding so he could hear where I was. I was sort of proud of him, and he failed to completely hide his smile when I told him I had to turn off my radio or else he d find me too fast. Then later, we played with Jacob s computer, a Linux-based command-line-only machine. I have set up a few shell scripts and aliases for him. Since it doesn t play videos, he doesn t use it as much as he does mine, but it is really fun to watch how his interaction with it changes as he gets older. He can now read amazingly well for a 5-year-old, and is starting to learn how to spell. He loves word games, writing, and typing. I thought I would install an ASCII art program for him. I told Jacob I had some ideas for a new game, and he was irresistibly intrigued. I offered him a choice between figlet and toilet. And, as is probably no surprise to anyone with a 5-year-old, he chose toilet based on its name, Jacob and Oliver both loved typing things and seeing them displayed bigger. I showed Jacob how I could make a freight train by typing ,<@-[]-(*)-@> (that s the comma-shaped snowplow, engine, boxcar [], tank car (*), and caboose @>). Then toilet drew them big, and though abstract, caused great excitement. I hooked up one of the speech synthesizers in Debian to a simple shell script named talk , which is a huge hit with the boys. They enjoy typing in nonsense and hearing the funny result, or in typing in real words and hearing how the computer says them right (or doesn t). All told, we had a good hour s worth of excitement up there.

I moved 600km away from Madrid, I quit my job because with all the coming and going I was barely making any money, and in order to keep a healthy, active mind, I'll keep working for Debian. I also started occasionally helping kandinski with sysadmin stuff for Barrapunto (the Spanish SlashDot), also for love, and because of incredible timing.

We also now have a new cat (an orange tabby named named gato, not very original nor practical as it's our fifth cat in the household). We also now have a small garden the cats love, even in bad, evil rain. I also now have a bright new horizon where a vegetable garden, civil marriage, quitting smoking, and motherhood will be slowly making it into my life as the dust settles down.

Last, but not least, I'll try to get back in touch with all the people I lost contact with because of, you know me, another one of my falls through the rabbithole I call depression. I missed two Debconfs in a row, this time it was bad. But I found the way out and I am back. So hurry up and drop me a line before three years (that's when i believe the rabbithole will eat me again). At least now I understand the cycles. It still sucks, but helps feel in control. Or something.

Anyway, if you ever show up close to Seville, I am up for keysigning, beers and rl spammer harassing, as always.

Makers by Cory Doctorow (and Chiriaco Summit again) Tonight I'm staying at the free camping area behind the General Patton Museum at Chiriaco Summit. Not a lot has changed since the last time I stayed here. There is one other RV here as well. The picture is taken from the tank garden, with my RV in the free camping area behind. Makers is a SF novel set in the fairly near future. It is available in ebook form free from the author's web site or if you prefer you can buy the paper edition from a bookstore. I found the first portion one of the most believable near-future with a significant change I have read. (The boogie-woogie Elmo dolls that run Linux and didn't sell were a cute touch.) While the technology involved might seem the same as the typical techno-babble seen in mass-market SF to someone not in the computer industry, it is actually plausible and the details are correct. The later parts of the novel are less believable, but still internally consistent. Overall, I found this a good but not great read.

Now that the semester is done and now that I have compiled my crazy paperwork for Canada (wow, it is a lot), I will be heading in six days to the wonderful city of Montreal to settle down, at least for a few years. I am ready to leave but it is not an easy move, as I like NYC and my job. I came to New York City for the first time at the age of 19 after spending a year on a ship and I rather did not like the city for those 5 years, although loved my college years and all the time I spent chasing a Frisbee while running on grassy fields all over the east coast. When I left in 1998, I said, never again. But the future is impossible to predict so of course I came back when I got a job, my only job, at NYU MCC and headed quite happily here (incidentally from Canada). And NYC was much much much better the second time around, most likely as I had a salary, and here is what I <3 and loved about the city. 1. Not having a car (which will still be the case in Montreal)
2. The bike path on the Hudson, especially the gardens and the Irish famine memoriall
3. The farmer s markets (won t miss the prices though)
4. High walkability factor (and though I did not love my hood, I loved being 1.5 blocks from my office)
5. The music jam circles in Washington Square Park (I was always left wondering if they were spontaneously generated or long standing groups // prolly both) and the occasional but mighty impressive hawks in the park.
6. Coney Island especially under certain special conditions when you can rly enjoy the lights radiating out of the amusement park
7. Leaving the city for some nature time
8. 24 hour trains (despite not loving them cuz the noise robbed some life from me every time I took them)
9. Grand Central Station s ceiling
10. The gluten free options (this is going to be the hardest to give up as Montreal sort of sucks in comparison)
11. Being able to take your small dog on the train which is only a recent pleasure
12. My department
13. East Asian Starr library at Columbia University (still my favorite library in the world) and totally loathed NYU s Bobst, ugly on the outside, ugly on the inside
14. NYC sunrises which I have like only seen 3 times (sadly) but they have been stunning every time
15. Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
16. HOPE
17. The Highline
18. The Strand
19. My favorite thing = Massive Snow Storms in the City (good thing I am moving to Canada, eh?)