It's nice if people remind you that the documented deadline for producing a devroom schedule (that you still have to write, and have all speakers agree to) is "today". At around 20:30 today, while reading my email "one last time" before heading home, I found such a reminder in my mailbox. I had completely forgotten about it. So, I hurried to write the schedule, and sent it off to all those involved. Hopefully, everyone can agree with what I produced... if not, reality and the printed schedule won't really match up, which would be sucky. The result: I left for home around 22:10, just in time to catch the 22:22 train, and on that train found out that I made an error in the initial version of the schedule. Grmbl. It would have been appreciated had I received that reminder a slight bit earlier. Then again, I should not have forgotten this. Sorry about that. Luckily, in practice the deadline is tomorrow noon, because that's when they'll bring everything to the printer. No, not "printer" as in "an output device that prints the results of data processing"; more as in "someone whose occupation is printing". But I'll need to hurry none the less.

Grmbl. My multi-cardreader refused to work today, after it had been flakey for a few weeks already. So I opened it up, to see which wire was loose and whether I could fix it. Turns out I'll need a new connector to fix it. The USB connector itself is still okay, but one of the cables at the connector at the end where it's connected to the board broke off. And it's impossible to fix that without a new connector -- some cable remnants are left inside, and it's going to be physically impossible to remove those without breaking it apart. At which point I won't be able to use it anymore to fix it, obviously. Problematic bit is now that I don't have access to my SSH or GPG keys anymore from my laptop, since they are stored on a CF card, and the piece of hardware which just broke down is how I access them...

I've been pretty busy lately, reading and writing up some stuff on women in/and FLOSS. The source of this "activity fit" was Michel Bauwens, who sent me an e-mail at the end of November. He asked me to look into the research he did on peer production, peer governance, and peer property modes (short essay on the topic) and comment on it with regard to the underrepresentation of women in P2P communities. I felt quite flattered by his request, so I put some effort in it, in order to give an (as I hope) well-founded answer. The result is this mini-essay, that is now featured in the P2P Foundation blog and may also pop up in a few other places.
This also coincides nicely with a mail I got at about the same time from the FLOSSPOLS Project. They are organising a workshop on gender and FLOSS in Cambridge next weekend and invited me to participate. I am very much looking forward to this! Not only because it's an interesting topic, but also because I am finally going to personally meet some very interesting women, who I've only virtually "talked" to or only read about until now.

Also, this happens at just the right time, since I have recently begun to grow a bit bored by the whole Women and FLOSS Issue and it's ever-repreating discussions. I feel that these events give me back some of the momentum I've lost over the last months. Raising the number of women in FLOSS is a complex, longsome and sometimes even tedious business and it's good to get a little push from time to time.


PS: Congrats, honey! ;-)

I have written and currently maintain PURI, a ported version of Franz's open-source URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) library. The Franz library uses a number of Allegro specific optimizations. I've tried to remain true to their optimizations by using similar optimizations on other Lisp implementations where possible. However, the is one non-Allegro specific optimization that has caused a number of people some trouble: that the library expects input strings to be simple strings rather than generalized lisp strings. That has caused at least 3 people to mention the issue to me. I pondered the best solution for a bit. Likely, the optimum result would be to write a macro that emits generic functions specialized to both simple and generalized strings. However, I took a simpler route: I removed the simple-string specific optimiztions (such as using schar rather than char). I expect the reduction of trouble for library users outweighs the run-time overhead. A few bug fixes including accomodating a change in the function of SBCL's shink-vector, and PURI 1.4 is now available.

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.

If anybody working at Novell / SUSE is reading this and wishes to donate a free license key/username + password for SuSE Enterprise Server 9 that would be great! This would make up for :

• Failing to respond to a web-based feedback system for three days.
• Failing to answer the telephone in the Edinburgh office for three days.
  • No answering machine either
• Failing to respond to a message left on the answering machine of the Bracknell office for two days.
• Failing to answer the UK-based email address, for two days.
• Being told when contacting the USA office that we should contact the UK office.

I suspect that we’ll be moving to RedHat in the future… Other free stuff is always welcome too

Andreas “jimmy” Gredler - who contributed to the backup-manager source tree - will give a talk about Backup Manager at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” event. The talk is entitled: “Backups einfach gemacht mit Backup Manager” and will cover the main design of the program.

It’s official: I’ve joined the Free Standards Group as Chief Technology Officer and chair of the FSG’s Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup. (The FSG made some great additions to its board too.) This promises to be a breakout year for the LSB and for free standards in general, and I’m excited to be a part of it. Some of the things on tap for the coming year are:

• The LSB 3.1 release (which adds Desktop functionality to the ISO standard LSB Core, among other things)
• A crisp, well defined roadmap for LSB 4.0 and beyond, with increased emphasis on synchronicity with the major distros and stability, predictability and consistency of the LSB ABIs/APIs over time
• A renewed emphasis on increasing direct involvement of distros, ISVs, and upstreams in the LSB development process
• A developer outreach program that will make it easier than ever for software developers to target the Linux platform in a portable way (hint: ever wish there was a Linux Developer Network?)
• A franchised certification program that will allow third parties to integrate LSB certification into their own value-added certification offerings (our recent announcement that we’ve teamed up on a certification center in China is a hint of things to come here)

As with most major life changes, this one’s bittersweet in some ways, as in the process of embracing this exciting project, I’ve had to step away from another, namely Progeny, the company I co-founded way back in 1999 (!). It’s always hard to move on from something that’s been a big part of your life for such a long time, and it’s particularly hard when you don’t feel like you’re “done” yet. On the positive side, I leave Progeny in excellent hands, and I’m able to remain involved in that wonderful position called “advisor”. Speaking of Progeny, I’m exceedingly proud of all we accomplished over the years. Not only did we survive the .com bust, but we successfully reinvented ourselves in the midst of it all. Furthermore, we not only survived, we pioneered: we were among the first (if not the first) to build a business model around the customization and integration of open source code, a model that’s been adopted by some of the hottest open source startups of the past few years. I’m also immensely proud of the DCC Alliance—indeed, my new role with the FSG is, in a lot of ways, a natural progression from that latest waypoint in a string of projects that date back to 1993. That’s it for now. Watch this space for additional news about the LSB as it continues to unfold. Better yet, get involved and help make it all happen!

Reminded by Christian's blog about the positive experience with Virgin Radio's technical people, I popped along to their streaming site to see if they had read the email I sent them last week. Indeed they have, as they now list Totem as a recommended player on Linux. Yay Virgin Radio! Now if they stopped playing the same damn songs over and over... NP: Music For The Mature B-Boy, DJ Format

Dear Alexander Schmehl!
Your account 'tolimar' has just been created in the central LDAP database of the Debian project. [..]
Welcome to the project! Thanks very much for everyone involved! That's indeed a very nice birthday present! And thanks to those who sent me congrats!

With Xorg 6.9, we've split xterm out from the main xorg package and have packaged it directly in its own source package taken from Thomas Dickey's site. He's been the maintainer of xterm for years now, and X.Org has just been pulling his stuff directly for their tree, so this way we skip the middleman. Thomas is also very notably a contributor and regular fixture on Debian lists, which is really cool.

David Mart nez Moreno did the grunt work a while back of making the individual xterm package, and he uploaded a version or two to experimental while 6.9 was sitting there. Now that 6.9 is in unstable (the next revision will hopefully be coming when I wake up tomorrow, btw) we needed the separate xterm package to join it. So today I did a little bit of work updating David's package to Thomas' most recent xterm version (208) and uploaded it to unstable, where it's already built on most arches.

This is the first bit of modularization you'll see, and I'm going to start uploading the more mundane bits of 7.0 to experimental this weekend if all goes well. The main requirement for getting 7.0 in to Debian is to have mesa updated. The package is ready for an NMU, and today I uploaded an NMU of libdrm to update it to the latest version. Once this package is accepted in to the archive, I can update mesa. From there on out, all the pieces will be in place to allow uploads of the modular tree to Debian as needed. Of course, these will go to experimental first until I'm confident in them, but my goal is still to ship them with Etch. Eugene Konev has started doing q&a; on the modular library packages, which will hopefully save us time and pain.

So that's where things stand with us. Once the major bugs are out of the way with 6.9, I'll be going full speed ahead for 7.0.

Long time no blog I guess. Things haven't been that exciting on the Debian front for me. Many of you may have noticed the Xorg -8 packages just hit unstable, complete with minor annoying debconf bug (fixed in svn now). That work was almost all packaging bugs, most of which are now taken care of. All those changes apply to the 6.9 packages too, so it's like I'm getting a two for one. This means that the 6.9 packages will be pretty well cleaned up on the Debian side of things when they actually ship. Thanks to Sven Luther, Julien Cristau, and Ari Pollak we can build 6.9 for powerpc, sparc, and amd64 (although there's currently an unrelated bug on amd64 stopping us from building any X packages there). Hopefully we can get the remainder of the arches ready to go so that we can drop 6.9 in to unstable as soon after it's released as possible.

One of the very cool changes that's come about lately is that David Mart nez Moreno has taken up the torch for xterm and produced a package for experimental. xterm never really lived at X.Org, and now we're getting it from the real upstream source. So thanks to David we'll have an up to date xterm ready to go with 6.9. It's sort of a little taste of the modular tree: if you need to get an xterm update for some reason, then you don't have to update all of X in the process.

Terrifyingly, I've reached a point where I can start working on the modular packages the moment I sit down to do Debian work next time. I'm going to repeat what I did with 6.8 and start with the Ubuntu packages and work from there. Now that I know a little more about how the whole thing is laid out I feel a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Last time it was really by the seat of my pants. The scariest thing for me is that I finally have to break down and learn the autotools, which is something I've managed to avoid until now. That should be the biggest hurdle for me in moving the modular packages forward. I have no idea how long it'll take, although history has shown that my time estimates are about 1/3 of the time that it actually takes to do a thing :-) The first third of what I set out to do (get Xorg in to Debian) is finished. The second third will be when 6.9 is in testing. The final third is when the modular packages that I'm happy with land in testing. It may take the entire etch release cycle to run this marathon, but I feel like I've reached the halfway point around now, with 6.9 stabilizing.

I've started talking with people about where to go after all that. Once the Debian packaging work is done, I want to start working on the Xorg codebase itself, preferrably on making the xserver a little nicer on the user. I have a project or two in mind, but I don't want to start on them until Debian's X packages are well in hand for the forseeable future.

After seeing everyone shill for their favorite scm lately, with most of the predictable ones getting the attention, I thought I'd throw my choice out there, just to see it represented.

I primarily use svn with my work on X in Debian, and it's a wonderful system. Fortunately though, I don't have to maintain the repos, and when something goes wrong I can cry to our beloved DPL to get his admin on, and he fixes things up. This works out fairly well for me as a basic user, but I don't want to be dealing with these sorts of hassles for smaller projects. The distributed scm thing appealed to me in this sense, so when arch started to become a serious buzzword in the Debian crowd I had a look.

Well, more than a look. I fought for over a month with tla and baz and found that they were both so unuseable and poorly documented that I couldn't do more than scream and cry. bzr looked cool, but it wasn't ready (I sorta tried to manage one of the X.Org releases in Debian with it and failed miserably). Darcs was slow and in a minority language, which was a major turnoff for me. And I don't have a ton of diskspace, so git was out. Svk struck me as a hack (it still does) so I didn't want to go with that. Monotone was ok, but not good enough, so I sighed, gave up, and went back to svn thinking that this was as good as it could get. Indeed, we added a quilt-based patch system to the Xorg packages, so now I have a mini-scm (quilt) inside an scm (svn) and it works amazingly well.

But one of my friends just got hired by the people who make Xen, and he mentioned that they used mercurial, and asked if I had tried it yet. I scoffed and said no, and that all scm's suck harder than anything has ever sucked before, but I had a lot of time to kill while I was waiting on an X build, so I gave it a look.

Mama, I'm home. I was stunned that I was able to pick up mercurial in about half an hour after tearing my hair out for over a month with arch.

The UI is apparently very darcs-like (by accident, according to the mercurial author) which is known to be fantastic. Branching, merging, etc is simple as can be so far, although upstream is still working out better methods to deal with merging.

It's very fast, built for large trees (i.e. the kernel) so it will be suitable for managing X with (although I haven't tried this yet, but I plan to). For X, I'll need something fast to keep my sanity. This rules out darcs and baz (which has somehow managed to get amazingly slow in addition to being difficult as of late).

Unlike git, it keeps changesets in xdelta format rather than storing whole files, so it doesn't eat my hard drive.

It's written in python, so it's something I could hack on if I want to.

It supports an easy server setup with apache, and you can push your repos and serve them via static http if you don't have a server, like me.

Like monotone, it exposes hashes to the user, but unlike monotone it also provides a local revision number to make sure you don't spend all your time copying and pasting hashes, which is what put me off from monotone.

It has a fairly small command set, with 39 commands in the current tip (i.e. HEAD) as opposed to the > 150 in baz which made me weep.

It feels like using bzr, except it's here now and ready for production. Indeed, it's already used in production in making Xen.

There's a bunch more that I won't talk about, mainly because these are the things that have grabbed me. A note of caution is that I've only been hacking on local projects by myself (mainly configure-debian) with it, so I don't have the tons of real world experience with multiple trees that the thing is built for yet. I'm thinking about putting up a parallel mercurial tree to the XSF tree just for fun (the svn repo would remain the canonical one) if people are interested and I can find a server. I hope though, that all the people out there who, like me, were bouncing around trying out scm after scm and never being quite happy with any of them at least give mercurial a fair chance. I'm still amazed at how much I like it, and I think some others might feel the same.

A lot of people have been reporting issues, particularly with MGA cards, with things like white screens and messed up graphics when they switch to a virtual terminal and back again. In the latest release of X.Org packages, I pulled a patch from Redhat that was supposed to solve the problem, and I closed the bugs in the Debian bug system, but the patch didn't end up fixing the issues so the bugs have been re-opened. It turns out that this is an issue in gcc4, and the gcc developers are aware of it now and are trying to figure out the best way to solve it. As such, it's more or less out of my and the X Strike Force's hands until such a solution is reached or a decent temporary patch to X.Org shows up that we can use.

In the meanwhile, there is a workaround so you don't have to worry about downgrading to XFree86 if this affects you, at least on i386. Meanwhile, ender (David Mart nez Moreno) has pulled a version of problematic binary file compiled with gcc3 (from my experimental packages) and has posted it at http://people.debian.org/~ender/libvgahw.a. You can download this, replace /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvgahw.a with it, and it should solve your problems. This is obviously not ideal, but until the bug is actually fixed it should help people out who are having this problem.

I wonder how often things like this (“Dear Sir, calling StarForce ‘Anti-copying malware’ is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now”) actually have their desired effect. I suppose it might work in cases where the recipient is actually dumber than the writer. On the plus side, that sort of letter could certainly create declaratory judgment jurisdiction; the recipient could turn around and sue the sender for a declaration that they have done nothing unlawful. I also wonder whether companies like StarForce actually have a “corporate lawyer,” and if that person is aware of these emails. I sure hope not. Update: Apparently this story has been slashdotted. I try not to post about things that also appear on slashdot, on the theory that most people will have seen the story somewhere else at that point, but this entry went up before the slashdot article. A commenter makes a good point, though, that Cory Doctorow (the recipient of the abovementioned threat) is Canadian and lives in London—something the writer of the threat seems to have no clue about.

In a little while I’ll be packing my things: clothes (with a few formal attires), a couple of (C/data structures) books, some snacks (Nerds!) and spare change (no bills). I’ve yet to see all of them fit in my backpack, so I’ll probably bring a couple of bags. Tomorrow, I will be bound for Manila yet again, much earlier than usual, for the AsiaBusinessTour on Thursday. And on the 16th, there will be the Bicol Open Source Forum in Legazpi City. Joseph Davidton Cadag invited me to be a speaker; I’ve yet to accept, but I’m leaning to it, especially since this would be a great opportunity to speak more about FOSS to my fellow Bikolanos. Also, its a nice time to meet up with Irvin Piraman who will be giving some Ubuntu CDs in the Forum too. I just hope I can finish my (re)packaging of ecb which I ITA‘d since last August. There is a package of the new upstream version already, but there seems to be a lack of Debian sponsors who can look into Emacs-related packages. sigh

Beagle 0.2.1 is out. Beagle is a very useful desktop search engine for GNOME (but you can use it with KDE, too, or even without any desktop environment like I do). Despite the low version number it is already quite stable and usable, and has lots of features. It can index all kinds of files and information on your computer (txt, pdf, doc, emails, IM logs, IRC logs, source code, images, music, and whatnot) and provides a very nice (new) search interface (see screenshot). Yes, Google Desktop Search and Spotlight do the same thing, but neither is available for Linux, and neither of them is Free Software. They can "phone home" without telling you and do other funny things. With Beagle you can easily check what it does (use the source, Luke!). Oh, and Beagle can now also parse Ruby files, a simple filter I had written and submitted has been included in the latest release (well, actually it was there in 0.2.0 already, but I didn't tell anybody ;-)).