Since January 13th I am on my last vacation-time of my last year as a Radiology resident. I've received my certificate and have already been hired to work as a radiologist! Things are going fine and I even enjoyed some summer days on the beach. Pictures for these will be posted to my gallery soon.

Yesterday was my girlfriend first day as a Public Health-Social Worker resident and we gave her a "surprise party" both in celebration for this and for her birthday (that was on Jan 26th). We've planned this party this whole month, and since she is "too aware of everything around" it was not an easy task. She was really surprised and have not suspected anything. Pictures are already in my gallery. So, for the next two years, it's her turn to be somebody's slave. My residency took me three years (since radiology program is a bit longer than public health), and in the exact moment I finally stepped out, she steps in. All the patience that the last three years demanded from her are now my task, since I'll be demanded the same.

I am just too happy for her. Being a social worker without a residency in Brazil is living with an unfair sallary and a whole lot of poverty around. After these two years, things will be better for her (and for us), at least wrt the sallary.

Meanwhile, I've been working in flumotion and icecast2 for the Free Software Television - thanks wingo and karlH, for your patience -, watched the launch of another free software based internet TV called YSTV, released more videos from fisl6.0, and helped the Program Committee of fisl7.0.

WRT this last, we've closed the papers review process which is mainly driven by a computer calculated score based on reviews given by selected people. We do not interfere with the process, except that some of us were reviewers also for some tracks. We've notified the chosen and within this week they have to confirm, then we'll start publishing a partial program... We're using a home made free software we keep in our subversion called papers.

Diesen Abend war in meinem Wohnheim, der Insterburg, ein kleines Festivalchen, mit drei Lifebands. Und da ich gerade eh warte, bis die ~150 Bilder skaliert und hochgeladen sind, kann ich auch gleich dar ber bloggen.Die erste Band, die aufgetreten ist, wurde von mir vermittelt: Peer Pressure kenn ich noch aus Herrenberger Zeiten, fand sie damals schon toll, und sponsere nicht umsonst auch deren Webseite (Domain/Hosting). Man merkt deutlich, dass die vier Jungs inzwischen doch schon einie Routine haben, und die neuen Songs sind wirklich h renswert. Besonders gefiel mir “On the inside”. Leider hatten sie das undankbare Los des ersten Auftritts, und so kam das Publikum nur schleppend in Schwung - ein wenig mehr B hnenshow w rde hier nicht schaden.Das konnte daf r die n chste Band sehr gut: Los Elektrodomestikos ist eine Ska-Band in Anz gen (naja, zumindest am Anfang) und komplett mit Trompete und Posaune und war das Highlight des Abends: Nicht nur die Musik war gut, sondern vor allem lieferten die Jungs eine klasse B hnenshow, was unter anderem dazu f hrte, dass die meisten der Bilder, die ich von dem Abend gemacht habe, von den Jungs sind. Auch die Ausdauer war ausgezeichnet, was wohl auch daran lag, dass sie regelm ig die Positionen durchgewechselt haben, und so bekamen wir f nf Zugaben.Und es w hren vielleicht noch mehr geworten, h tten wir nicht die Zeit f r die dritte Band gebraucht: Brehon, eine in Karlsruhe wohl nicht unbekannte Irish-Folkrock-Band, die (ger chteweise) schon auf “Dem Fest” gespielt hat. Leider war die Musik nach der Ska-Band etwas unpassend und die Masste tobte nicht mehr. Vielleicht h tte man die Reihenfolge der Bands anders w hlen sollen, aber das ist wohl vorher schwer abzusch tzen.Insgesamt ein gelunges Fest (und die Konserven-Musik f r hinterher h re ich immernoch in den siebten Stock), das erste Lifekonzert bei mir zuhause (und ich mit Hausschuhen mitten drin) und die, die wegen einem Heizungsleck nicht kommen konnten haben leider wirklich was verpasst.

Vor einigen Wochen schrieb ich das Programm Tapu, eine Implementation von Tabu f r das Handy. Leider wurde mir kurz darauf mein Handy geklaut, so konnte ich es selbst nie spielen. Nun hat Andreas Zwinkau das ganze im Z10 in Karlsruhe getestet, und auf seinem Blog dar ber berichtet. Im Fazit: Spielbar, nur einige Knopfbeschriftungen sind nicht klar genug. Und es sind nicht genug W rter drin, uns so ruft Andreas auch auf, W rterlisten einzuschicken. Viel Arbeit werde ich momentan mangels eigenem Handy nicht reinstecken, aber W rterlisten-Zusendungen stecke ich ins SVN und baue dann bei bedarf auch entsprechende Pakete.

Heute hab ich mich zum zweiten mal in eine Sneak gewagt (wieder in die Karlsruher Schauburg), und wieder gab es einen Film aus Skandinavien, dieses mal ein Schwedischer.“Popul re Musik aus Vittula” handelt von der Kindheit und Jugend zweier Jungen im letzten Eck von Schweden, wo man selbst nicht so richtig wei ob man noch dazugeh rt. Obwohl der Film einige ernste Themen anspricht - Famili re Gewalt, Ausgrenzung von Homosexuellen, Tr ume von der gro en Welt - ist der Film doch sehr unterhaltsam, hat seine ernsten wie auch seine lustigen Szenen und ist auch was sonst das Kino ausmacht ganz gut gelungen. Man muss dazu sagen, dass der Film eine Literaturverfilmung ist, was sich meiner Erfahrung nach meist positiv auf das Endprodukt auswirkt.Durch die Gegend, in der der Film spielt, bin ich bei meiner Skandinavienreise fast durchgefahren, zumindest reden die Jugendlichen davon, in Lule aufzutreten, ein kleines St dtchen am n rdlichen Ende des finnischen Meerbusen in dem ich eine Nacht verbrachte.Der Film kommt in Deutschland offiziell in einer Woche in die Kinos, und ich kann ihn durchaus empfehlen.

Just before Christmas, I finished reading the second volume of Tad Williams’ “Otherland” quadrilogy, “The river of blue fire”. Most of what I said about the first part still holds, especially what I said about the similarty to “games” like Second World, and how Williams forsees where stuff like Telepresence leads us.

By now, some of the story lines have crossed or merged, others are still independant and a few new ones have begun. The largest part of this volume consists of helplessly stumbling through virtual worlds. By doing so, Williams has all freedoms to create strange and interesting settings. At quite a few spots I thought: Wow, that would make a great movie szene. I hope some visually gifted will someday make a (or better: a few) Otherland movies.A few of these worlds are perverted versions of famous literature, notably H.G. Well’s “War of the Worlds” and “The wizard of Oz”. Oddly, I have only heard of these stories before, but just about the time I read about them in Otherland, they somehow re-appeared somewhere around me: The recent “War of the Worlds” movie (which I actually haven’t seen) and the old “Wizard of Oz” movie being shown at a small local theater in Karlsruhe.I’m looking forward to reading the next volume, but I have to wait for my brother to finish it, so I’ll probably squeeze another book in between.

In 1999 I went to LinuxTag as a Debian representative after the project has received an offer to staff a booth there. I took over the maintenance and organised the first Debian meeting in Germany. I also gave two talks during this event, one of them was even repeated on the second day. We've had a lot of fun and since this was the first meeting of Debian affiliated people in Germany, it was very interesting to connect faces to mail addresses and to learn more about the people behind a name. This LinuxTag was the last such event that took place at the University Kaiserslautern. Free projects such as KDE and Debian have been offered a booth in one building from which one could reach the lecture rooms, while company booths were located in the Mensa building with their own professional booths. It was a warm weekend and the Jolt people have supported us with cool and caffeined drinks. We had the opportunity to use a lecture room for sleeping with other project members. Klaus Knopper was supporting the network and supervised the security team, and hence, had the unfortunate job to move away all project members from their booths, out of the building or into the lecture room. I've heard, that he had a hard time, and still believes that Debian people don't need sleep. I guess we should have moved him into the lecture room for a sleep instead. This '99 LinuxTag was quite a real success. It took place at the rise of the dot com era and all people were happy about the event. There were about 7,000 visitors in total on both days. The city of Kaiserslautern has called the university several times since there were no free hotel rooms anymore. Former events happened more or less unnoticed by locals, but not anymore in 1999. After the show was over, we dismantled the booth, moved away our own equipment and left the place. However, I made the "mistake" to notice that the LinuxTag people, who have provided us such a great opportunity, still had work to do since they had to dismantle the booth system and clean the ground floor. My biggest "mistake" was that I didn't run away and have a nice evening but decided to help and ask other booth members who were still around to do the same. Having cleaned up the location quite fast was not the only result. Oliver Zendel, who was in charge of talking to the community and who offered Debian the booth, spoke to me afterwards and wondered whether I would be interested to join the team. Well, I knew how to organise stuff, can talk to people, know quite some people in the community, the LinuxTag people were a cool team, so why not. So for the event in 2000 I was in charge of the projects exhibition. In 2000 we also had to move out of the university of Kaiserslautern since 7,000 visitors were already too much for that small university and city. That's why we eventually moved to the Stuttgart fair. That was an interesting experience. It was also interesting to see how such an event can be organised by a team of friends and how the acceptance in the business world was. In Stuttgart we were able to use a small office (max. 15m ) for the entire team as working space. Two computers were installed which we were allowed to touch but not to install a real system on. Hence, Klaus brought Knoppix CDs. This was the first time that I learned about the Knoppix Live CD. Together with my notebook we've had three desks and could work. However, today I really wonder how this could have worked with so many people, but apparently it really did. Due to the need and my experience in both talking to the press and being the press I joined the LinuxTag press team and even held the final press conference, while my colleague held the opening press conference. So after all projects were happy, the show went fine and most of the office jobs were done, I prepared a press release together with others and maintained the final conference. This was also the first time LinuxTag has organised a business congress as a special extra program for business representatives. It was also the time I experienced the need for several supporters for various tasks. In that year, a dozen supporters were paid as "security" who also drove the shopping for us. Hence, I already acquired some people who supported us as volunteers. That was also the time when Benny joined the team. In 2000 the exhibition boomed and there were a lot of large dot com company booths, which was very nice because LinuxTag arose from a students association and became more and more professional, a platform for both companies and projects. It was organised just like a Free Software project and worked non-commercially. Despite several flame wars and disputes, which seem to be normal, it was organised by friends who believed of a higher goal. It was very nice and gave me a warm feeling when looking at what we have achieved. However, I had nothing to do with commercial interests, income, acquisition, invoices etc., so I may have missed a lot. This year, LinuxTag was planned to take place in one exhibition hall, but there were so many companies interested in running a booth that a second exhibition hall was later rented as well. That's why there were two adjacent halls instead of one large location. In 2001 we were using a different exhibition hall, a larger one due to the strong demand in 2000, but still at the Stuttgart fair. This time I was also in charge of the supporters and already dispatched jobs during the event. From time to time I also maintained the shuttle service to the airport to pick up speakers or take back speakers, which I've also done in 2000. This time we've had a larger office in which all of use fit and which was a nice working atmosphere. We were also able to provide more booth space to Free Software projects. In that year I've automatically taken over the office and communication with the outside world, collecting and distribution information. I don't think this was planned, but it just happened since I was able to do the job besides my other obligations. I also gave a talk about Debian, even though others in the team considered me insane for doing that as well. With a lot of help by the local user group, we were able to offer project members a cheap sleeping opportunity. The LUG acquired a gym hall during the night an cooked in the student's office "Hellblaues Nilpferd". After I've picked up Hans Reiser I went there for a snack with him before dumping him at the hotel. It was a nice atmosphere. One of the lead people for this effort, Hubert Kai er, was suddenly overtaken by death two weeks ago. In 2002 LinuxTag moved to Karlsruhe and thus to a new fair where everything had to start again from zero. We had to get acquainted with the local company and their representatives and learn how the new fairground works. The fairground was more interesting since there was a large open area between the conference site and the exhibition hall. Looking at past years, it was used by visitors. Thanks a lot to Jochen Topf from GUUG and members of the local user group KaLUG a lot of community events happened during LinuxTag. They maintained an Internet caf in the conference building and organised the legendary KaLUG party which has become a regular LinuxTag event. In addition to that I've also worked more and more and took over more areas where I noticed help was needed and that I could manage it. So it happened that I took over more work at and before LinuxTag which finally resulted in two months of work were I don't remember a day on which I've worked less than 8 hours for LinuxTag in 2005. In 2002 I worked on the coding marathon and delegated the tasks and support during LinuxTag to two other people, so it will run independent of me. Since I was the first of the team to arrive in Karlsruhe, I also built up the office and the storage. Due to the large distance I had to leave Oldenburg the day before I want to arrive in Karlsruhe, so that I was at the fairground at last at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning. Before the event a lot of issues had to be negotiated with various parties, which required quite a lot of work. Until 2004 the entire team was working in their spare time without getting paid for their LinuxTag work. The higher goal was the impulse and all of us had neglected one issue or another that wasn't important for LinuxTag. We've had some external service providers at least since 2002. The acquisition became a difficult task for students who liked to work until the morning and get up at lunch time, since many companies expect a partner that is available for them from 9 to 5. That's why Charter was eventually hired and this year ergomedia. For press work newthinking was hired. This year the social event was also organised by them. However, having two people from the board of directors being paid by the association for their LinuxTag work from April, and external service providers that were also paid, was something I considered problematic if not unfair, looking at how other people commit to LinuxTag and don't get a monetary compensation. Several people still worked a lot on LinuxTag in their spare time and had to live from something as well. It caused resentment in the team.

For me this year's event was the most successful and wonderful LinuxTag I've eve been to. I've worked during LinuxTag as much as I could and did my best to make it the best event ever. If I commit myself to something, I try to work properly and generate proper results. This was the same for LinuxTag. As a result, this year I had many tasks to work on. First of all I managed the community and free projects so that they had an opportunity to present themselves to the broad audience during LinuxTag. This required months of communication with members of all attending projects and negotiating their needs. It also required to gather information about the various parts of LinuxTag that also affected projects. Since it is boring having to answer the same questions all the time I decided not doing that anymore and once started to maintain an FAQ that intends to contain all important information for exhibiting projects. Last year I've also added an location plan with information about shops and restaurants nearby and this year I contributed a map for getting to the AKK where the legendary KaLUG party was organised. Being responsible for the projects I was required to decide which project are suited to get a sponsored booth, its size and its location. This year we have had the opportunity to use the ground floor of the conference building in addition to the regular exhibition ground, so that we've could use about 700m in total for the projects exhibition. I've worked nearly two entire weekends to get the booths assigned properly and to have proper graphics. For the conference building I also created the "official" booth map, booth naming, booth signs and booth numbering. One weekend was planned, the other was an accident since we had to rearrange some booths. Exhibiting projects and other community and Free Software oriented projects also had the opportunity to use two workshop rooms for workshops, BoF sessions, meetings and talks. For these I maintained the schedule and negotiated with the speakers and projects, and also acquired moderators for both rooms for the entire time. The people who organised the Accessibility booth people managed to get green light for building a large booth and a so called forum, which is an open talk area, but without any support. Since they couldn't fill in all slots and you can't dismantle a forum in the middle of the show, I've taken over its maintenance and schedule and managed to complete it with interesting talks, setting up, looking for moderators and dismantling. One of these talks I've even held on my own. Fortunately, a DJ contacted us and was able to provide his PA, boxes, microphone and stuff. Without him, the forum would have been an utter disaster. To support the projects we had to build up the network in the main exhibition hall for them on our own. Otherwise it would have cost us several thousand euro, which we didn't have. So I had to draw plans containing the cables we had to lay, calculated the length and decide where to deposit switches and stuff. On the day before the show opened, several supporters went around with a large ladder laying the cable. In the conference building this was done by the KaLUG. I've also coached the supporters during LinuxTag, and was even present at a special short meeting for and with supporters in order to reflect the past day and talk about the next day. This year was the first time I really had the time to attend the meeting and thank our supporters. Before the show started I've also negotiated food arrangements with a restaurant and a colleague so that we had lunch during the show. I ate from it as well, but didn't manage to eat every day unfortunately. Most additional signs of A4 and A3 size that we used during LinuxTag in order to help visitors and officials to find their way were designed and printed by me. Many of them were the result of last year's aftermath. Most of them were fixed with adhesive tape by our supporters. The Coding Marathon was supervised by me as LinuxTag representative. It was organised by HP, intel and Red Hat and, of course, negotiated with the acquise team of LinuxTag. The Coding Marathon was a half day programming session for visitors. The resulting code is released under the GNU GPL and winners were awarded with prizes at the end of each day. This required me to attend several phone conferences, name one or two interested people from "LinuxTag" who would propose a task and head the marathon during one day. Last year already, when I took over this job, With p2 and Arne I've already found two competent people, and this year also added Alex Schmehl for a task I proposed. Naturally, it was not possible for me to moderate the Coding Marathon during LinuxTag due to other obligations. When I arrived at LinuxTag the week before it officially started my first job was to build up the office and prepare the rooms so that the entire "team" could work inside properly. The first office should be used by supporters for general requests and customers, with a desk for me as well. The next room was meant to host the speakers office and the other rooms were intended to be back offices or private rooms. In order to be able to work properly in the office I've also brought with my some of my network equipment and set up the office LAN, server and printer. I had already experienced cable problems last year, that prevented us to use 100MBit/s switches, so that antiquated 10MBit/s hubs had to be used. I've also supervised our daily shopping tours and collected demand for various items from others. The most important items were fluids since it was quite warm during LinuxTag and collapsing core members and supporters are no fun. Other food had to be fetched as well. A lot of other items had to be purchased as well, in order to run LinuxTag and be able to fix or improve various areas. One or two supporters were taking the car for the shopping tours. When I arrived in Karlsruhe the HP booth was already being built. The other, smaller booths followed on Monday. Hence, on Monday and Tuesday I also supervised the building of the booths. It's important that somebody is around for questions, both from booth builders and from officials of the fairground. One also has to check if the booths are built properly and that they don't cause a risk for the exhibition hall, neighbour booths, smoke detectors and stuff. Issues should be corrected as soon as possible so that they don't become problems later. As soon as I arrived I also took over our own storage area and maintained deliveries for booths that haven't built up yet. Several companies negotiated with me before the show so that I knew which deliveries to expect and could move them to their respective booths as soon as they were built up. This year the first X.Org developers conference took place right before LinuxTag as well. I negotiated with both the X.Org people and the fairground people so that this developers conference could really take place. Unfortunately the plans and acknowledgements were sent out quite late so we were in a hurry getting everything set up and organised. Since we experienced network problems this year, they had not network as well, so did we in the office. Two days without a network connection. Pure horror. On Thursday the legendary KaLUG party took place. The location had to be prepared for the party, for which several supporters went there before the party has started. It was planned that I attend the party, so I went there at about 1 a.m. For some reason I didn't manage to leave the fairground earlier, and on the way to the AKK some of my friends who were also supporters were on their way home, excusing themselves for leaving before I arrived. Eumh... When I arrived at the party I first checked the situation and saw loads of uncleaned pots and stuff. Since nobody was cleaning them, I jumped into the mobile kitchen and started cleaning before I even ate or drank anything. That was fun, though a bit unplanned. The social event on Friday was organised by Claudia from a service provider who got some support from me before the show and during the show. Several supporters helped her clean the area that was unused for several years. During the evening I only gave away free tickets for the supporters and moved inside afterwards, always looking around if everything was ok, negotiating with her, of course. Very well managed, I can only say. This year I gave three talks during LinuxTag. Usually I only give zero or one during such an event, due to my other obligations. However, this time I felt, that I should make a maximum use of LinuxTag, anticipating the future. Hence, it started with Debian Security held during this year's Debian day, followed by Howto LinuxTag on the following day and finally Debian Internals together with other Debian developers. After the last talk I had about two hours to calm down again and initiate the general dismantling. Fortunately I've already planned a lot before the event because after my final talk I was a bit exhausted and needed to calm down and get into LinuxTag organisation again. Dismantling is the most parallel work at LinuxTag because all booths are dismantled at once and many people are running around with arbitrary stuff. One really has to take care of ones own stuff or it gets lost faster than one can shout. During the evening the entire fairground was cleaned, from all conference rooms the audio and video technique was removed again, all bottles and glasses were moved back into the office, the movable walls collected and moved back to their owners, the Internet caf was dismantled and computers moved back into their respective boxes. Some exhibitors had to use extra storage space temporarily. The Community forum in the conference hall had to be dismantled and chairs stacked properly. The same goes for tables and chairs used by the projects booths in both, the exhibition hall and the conference building. The network for projects had to be removed again, cables and switches secured. All additional signs had to be removed again. Since we have used some durable signs that could be used for future events again these had to be removed carefully and secured again. We've also ordered a container for paper since a lot of paper had to be thrown away and throwing away large amounts of junk is expensive. This way we were able to get rid of paper stuff a bit cheaper, but had to take extra care so that only paper went into this container. Hence, we needed a supporter who stayed with the container until it was fetched again. When the internal LinuxTag party in the office was nearly over, I came back into the office with all other areas finished, ready to start dismantling the office - usually the colleagues don't let me because they want to party and don't have any obligations anymore. That sucks a lot. So, again the internal party went on nearly without notice by me, but I'm used to that. This year I had already taken this into account and organised some stuff for an after work party (contrary to the other while-others-work party) outside of the office with supporters, friends and some team members that were still sober. This night we went to bed after 5a.m. and hence had a chance to get a quick breakfast already (we didn't use it, though). It was when we thought "Yes, this was a hell of an event!" I usually went to bed at 1 to 3a.m. and got up again at 5 or 6a.m. so that I was able to work on the important stuff that I committed myself to, and so that I was able to chat with friends and supporters in the evening. That was something I really missed on past events. Last year I probably wouldn't have spoken to Alfie if he hadn't placed himself into my way as a brake block. Thanks Alfie! This year such a maneuver wasn't required. In order to be able to work on so many areas during LinuxTag I tried to optimise the workflow and the processing as much as I could. I also used several sheets and paper to write down stuff for later processing so that my brain was kept clear and I don't become insane (or more insane, for what it's worth). That worked quite well and all areas I worked in worked fine as well, since I had time to talk to people even during the day. Even after my talks I wasn't flooded by phone requests like last year. After the event I had to drive some 750km back, after having only little sleep. Getting to Karlsruhe is always the easy part. Driving back is exhausting because I'm usually quite exhausted and in need of a lot of sleep. I won't disclose how long it took me to reach Oldenburg but it was faster than last year.

Today, I took part in a tour to the Intelligent Sensor-Acuator-Systems (ISAS) department here at the University of Karlsruhe. They work on a project for extended-range telepresence. At first it is like a regular Virtual Realtiy device: Head-mounted display for the 3D view of the world and an acoustic tracking system to record the user’s curret position and orientation. While this is a nice toy by itself, the guys from ISAS have developed a system where you can walk through inifinitely large virtual places, including a virtual museum, a pacman game and our cafeteria, rendered by quake, and still stay in the 5x5m room at the university.This works by bending the space, at least the space you percieve: The computer calculates a path that resembles the path you want to go with regard to length and turns, but bends it a barely noticeable bit, thus guiding you in circles around in that room. This guiding is done by shifting the view on the display, making you counter-act that shift and thus turning. A bit like dizziness, when you think you tip over and you move the other way.This works pretty well, at least for movement at regular speed and not too many unpredictable turns - the less predictable the path you take in the virtual world, the less optimal is the path you will take in the real room, thus having stronger and more noticable bends.To me, this seems to be the first step to a world like the one Tad Williams describes in his “Otherland”-Series. Together with what promising but also threatening advances are made on the neurological front, e.g. retina prothesises, “real” virtual reality for mass comsumption is not so far away. And even more improvements in the human-device-interface field have been made: Remote control of human movement by stimulation of the equilibrium sense was sucessfully tried in Japan (German link).I have more pictures of today’s presentation and check out the video on the Karlsruhe telepresence installation.

Late at night an no time for reading, but this sounds like a good candidate for the next few days: Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel of CVS and Subversion fame. The book is freely available (e.g. in HTML, PDF, or dead tree format) and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 license. Thanks Karl! (via Roland Tanglao)

This time of year it's great to curl up in the evening with a feather comforter and a good text file. I recently read all of Andy Hertzfeld's stories about the origin of the mac on folklore.org, pretty much straight through in chronological order during one long night. Only at the last story did I find out that he'd turned the website into a book. Reading a whole book in one sitting online is not a novel experience for me, though it seems to be for many, but doing it by accident is. My enjoyment of quantities of text online does sometimes come out in my own weblog postings, which are probably long enough, if not good enough, to be their own book. This weblog at least occasionally violates 8 of Nielsen's 10 weblog usability guidelines. The only one I think I should fix is point 5. Another book I read online recently is Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software. The contrasts between how Karl suggests doing some things and how projects I'm involved in work are sometimes large (he suggests voting on technical issues for example), sometimes due to differences in technology (the debbugs bug tracker makes conversations and other email-based use of a bug tracking system work much differently than the BTSes he describes using), and sometimes pointed to things that could be improved. More often though, he seemed spot on in extrcting and highlighting best practices. For example, he does a great job in pointing out that simple, consistent naming conventions, like #404093 for a bug report and r1021 for a repository revision, are more important than they appear. I also enjoyed reading some reviews of Katamari Damacy, which sounds like a truely unique and fun game. I'm looking forward to playing it (probably under emulation) one of these years.