My vacation is now over, and I think it is now time for me to summarise what I have done with regards to free software. First, I have sent my first real contributions to OpenStreetMap, in the area of my small town: http://osm.org/go/0DCaXeZ
I still have a lot of things to learn, but things are already better than they were!
I will also shortly write an article about how to use the GlobalSat DG-100 data logger on Debian GNU/Linux.
Working on OSM is real fun, as it can be done in family. I have also spent some time to test & improve the Debian packages for DSPAM (available from my repository). I have moved the SVN repository to a new GIT repository available at: http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-dspam/dspam.git;a=summary. Matthijs M hlmann (matthijs) is currently reviewing the packages, and will upload them to the official archive if everything is ok. Matthijs also accepted to be my advocate for my New Maintainer application. Thanks a lot to him! I am now waiting to be assigned an Application Manager: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=julien%40kirya.net As usual, I have also been quite active at reporting bugs on the Debian BTS. unfortunately, I haven t had the possibility to fix (RC) bugs.

Hey, look, a release! I ve decided to start making tarball releases that make it easier to build forked-daapd, especially on embedded platforms. The tarballs come with the build system already generated (as should any real release) and they also contain pre-generated source files for the ANTLR3-based parsers used in forked-daapd. The pre-generated files will be used if antlr3 is not available for the build. I expect that pretty much everybody will end up using the generated files, given the feedback I ve had about ANTLR3. I hope this will also clear the misconception that forked-daapd depends on Java. I have expanded the installation instructions, making the distinction between building from the git tree and building from the tarballs. A few more fixes made it to this version since my last post, and Kai also put the final piece to the sort headers by adding sort headers to the song listings. Tarballs are available at http://alioth.debian.org/~jblache/forked-daapd/. Tarball integrity can be verified with GPG using the matching GPG signature file and my F5D65169 GPG key from the Debian keyring.

In the Debian popularity-contest numbers, the adobe-flashplugin package the second most popular used package that is missing in Debian. The sixth most popular is flashplayer-mozilla. This is a clear indication that working flash is important for Debian users. Around 10 percent of the users submitting data to popcon.debian.org have this package installed. In the report written by Lars Risan in August 2008 ( Skolelinux i bruk Rapport for Hurum kommune, Universitetet i Agder og stiftelsen SLX Debian Labs ), one of the most important problems schools experienced with Debian Edu/Skolelinux was the lack of working Flash. A lot of educational web sites require Flash to work, and lacking working Flash support in the web browser and the problems with installing it was perceived as a good reason to stay with Windows. I once saw a funny and sad comment in a web forum, where Linux was said to be the retarded cousin that did not really understand everything you told him but could work fairly well. This was a comment regarding the problems Linux have with proprietary formats and non-standard web pages, and is sad because it exposes a fairly common understanding of whose fault it is if web pages that only work in for example Internet Explorer 6 fail to work on Firefox, and funny because it explain very well how annoying it is for users when Linux distributions do not work with the documents they receive or the web pages they want to visit. This is part of the reason why I believe it is important for Debian and Debian Edu to have a well working Flash implementation in the distribution, to get at least popular sites as Youtube and Google Video to working out of the box. For Squeeze, Debian have the chance to include the latest version of Gnash that will make this happen, as the new release 0.8.8 was published a few weeks ago and is resting in unstable. The new version work with more sites that version 0.8.7. The Gnash maintainers have asked for a freeze exception, but the release team have not had time to reply to it yet. I hope they agree with me that Flash is important for the Debian desktop users, and thus accept the new package into Squeeze.

I'm currently working on a Fortran program at work: a post-processing tool that takes climate data, in NetCDF format, and outputs in CMOR2 format (a NetCDF variant with climate conventions). So, it links against netcdf and cmor. Now in HPC and climate in particular, codes are typically linked statically: partially for robustness, but mostly for speed (more on which later). So, I'd like to link this statically, as I have tens of terabytes of data to process. Now, mostly I've been linking using pkg-config:

  gfortran -o nemo-rewriter nemo-rewriter.f90  pkg-config --libs --cflags nemo cmor 

pkg-config assembles the libraries. For dynamic libraries, the netcdf and cmor libraries are themselves linked to dependencies. But in the static case, all dependencies need to be on the link line, which is more complex. Never mind, it should be possible with:

  gfortran -static -o nemo-rewriter nemo-rewriter.f90  pkg-config --static --libs --cflags nemo cmor 

This should work by assembling all the required static libraries, via pkg-config dependencies. Unfortunately not every package has a .pc file, and so this fails: As of version 4.1 NetCDF allows a URL instead of a file to read, and hence depends on curl to retrieve the file. Curl has no pkg-config .pc file describing its libraries, and it fails. Never mind, lets assemble the static libraries by hand. Debian provides static versions of libraries in the -dev packages. Can I assemble a statically-linked program ? For this I need:

• NetCDF needs libnetcdff.a and libnetcdf.a directly.
• NetCDF needs HDF5: libnethdf5_hl.a and libhdf5.a for version 4 files.
• CMOR2 needs: libcmor2.a
• CMOR2 depends on libudunits2.a, to convert between physical units.

Now here it gets interesting. To handle secure communications and authentication, curl has some complex dependencies. It has two versions. Pick the gnutls one for example:

• libgss.a for Generic Security Services.
• libgss needs libidn.a for Internationalized Domain names
• libgss needs libshishi.a for Kerberos
• libshishi.a needs libgpg-error.a
• libshishi.a needs libgnutls.a
• libshishi.a needs libtasn1.a
• libshishi.a needs libgcrypt.a
• libshishi.a needs libresolv.a
• libcurl.a needs libssl.a
• libcurl.a needs libssh2.a
• libcurl.a needs libldap_r.a
• libdlap_r.a needs liblber.a
• libldap_r.a needs libsasl2.a. Which access databases, so ...
• libsasl2.a needs libmysqlclient.a
• libsasl2.a needs libpq.a
• libsasl22.a needs libdb-4.8.a
• libsasl.a needs libsqlite.a
• libssl.a needs libcrypto.a
• libcrypto.a needs libz.a
• libcurl.a needs libdl.a
• libcurl.a needs libcom_err.a
• libcurl.a needs libkeyutils.a
• libcurl.a needs libgssapi_krb5, which is in dynamic form only
• libcurl.a needs libkrb5crypto, which has no static library

I may have missed some out, having stopped because there is no static implementation of Kerberos on Debian. But still, the idea that a simple little fortran proggie will statically link in four database libraries is silly. It appears to be no longer possible to simply statically link a program in Debian, and definitely not via pkg-config, because so many dependencies do not yet have configuration files. Tags debian, static, cmor, pkg-config

I recently decided to use OfflineIMAP to synchronize my mails on my laptop. It's a great piece of software, and allows me to read my mail while I'm offline. I use it with Gnus, of course. But I lacked a proper way to integrate OfflineIMAP with it, so I decided to write a little Emacs extension to run and monitor OfflineIMAP directly from Emacs. Here comes offlineimap.el, an Emacs extension to run OfflineIMAP directly within Emacs. It will display OfflineIMAP output in a buffer, and optionally shows the current OfflineIMAP operation in the mode line. By default the status is in the mode line only if you are in the Gnus group buffer. But that's customizable, of course, since this is Emacs! If you are using el-get, there's already a recipe to install it!

The following post is the work of Pablo Duboue, the DebConf10 fundraising team leader.So you want to make DebConf, eh? You will need quite a bit of money then. That's when fundraising comes into play.There are traditionally two sources for funds for DebConf: government and businesses. A third one, micro-donors, has been mentioned, but haven't been explored yet. (Note, in this text I use the terms sponsors and donors interchangeably, as all sponsors are actually doing a donation to the Debian project earmarked for the use at a given DebConf.)Government funding has been key in a number of DebConfs. In DC10, though, by the time fundraising proper started, it was too late to secure it. Extrapolating from two DebConfs that had government funding, I would venture the following two pieces of advice: target a government level as local as possible (city, provincial level) and try to secure the funding at the time of the bid (which, by the way, can help you win the bid). A successful process will include government representatives aware of the bid status and the whole bidding process. This partnership can help unlock extra government resources such as housing or transportation. But to reiterate, if you haven't at least applied for government grants by the time the DebConf previous to yours is happening, then you have to plan to go along without government funding.Business funding for DebConf includes a significant amount of recurring donors. Keeping them happy is even more important than any money they will put forward for a given DebConf. Now, because of the high level of recurrence and the fact that government funding can cover easily one third of our costs, fundraising without government funding really means your projected funds are one third off. If that is the case, make sure to communicate that to the rest of debconf-team and even the larger Debian community (see below "asking for help").This entry has been truncated read the full entry.

I'm shocked to learn that Frans has died. Even more shocked to learn that, due to me sitting with my head in the sand, I almost missed it. You'll be missed, Frans. I didn't always agree with you or your methods, but I deeply respected you for who you were, what you did, and what you were willing to do. May you rest in peace.

So I got SVN access to plugins.svn.wordpress.org, but I hate SVN. Let s just use Git instead of SVN, especially when I already have my plugin as Git on github.com :)

git svn clone -s -r283636 https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/statusnet-widget/
git remote add -f github git://github.com/evgeni/wp-statusnet-widget.git
git merge github/master
git svn dcommit

(note the -r283636 it s very important, if you ommit it, git svn will fetch 280k revisions which takes ages, if you put it to something AFTER your repo was created, the log will be b0rked*)
Done! Now you can work as usual, push to github and commit to svn via dcommit :) PS: Dear WordPress.org Team, you have working SSL, why do you still have http-links in your mails? *: You can find the revision you need by looking at http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/statusnet-widget/ you need the one when plugin-master created your repo :)
Thanks nplus for reminding me about this on XMPP :)

Russel Garlick writes on behalf of the KohaCon10 Organising Committee:

KohaCon10 starts on October 25th in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an exciting line up of speakers on a range of topics related to Koha and [Free and] Open Source and Open Standards in libraries. See our programme for details. KohaCon is an opportunity for the entire Koha community, librarians and developers alike, to come together, meet each other, swap ideas and learn something new. The conference is split into 2 parts. The community conference will be held over 3 days 25-27th of October. This is not just a developer s conference. There will be presentations from librarians and developers alike. The second part of the conference is the Hackfest for Koha developers that will be held from 29th-31st of October. For more information see our website KohaCon10 is a free conference (that is right it will cost nothing for you to attend), but you still need to register to reserve your place. Registrations from the international Koha community have been very strong. Over half of all available spaces are already taken. If you have been holding off on the premise that you will have plenty of time to do this later, then please register now. Please do not rely on there being free spaces on the day. Registration is quick and easy via the website. We look forward to seeing you in Wellington!

Our co-op will be represented there. Will you?

Sarcasm and satire usually don t work on the Internet. One cause of this is the lack of out of band signalling via facial expression or tone of voice. Another issue is the fact that in real life people usually know something about the person who they listen to while on the Internet it s most common to read articles without knowing much about the author. So the reader can t use I know that the author isn t an asshole as a starting point to determine whether a message should be interpreted literally. This is really nothing new. The standard in printed communication for a long time has been to use Emoticons (Wikipedia) to indicate emotion and other interpretation that might not be deduced from a direct reading of the text. The Wikipedia page cites examples of emoticon use dating back to 1857 although the combinations of characters used for different emotions has changed significantly many times. The common uses that we now know on the Internet date back to 1982. In my experience the symbol :-# is commonly used to note sarcasm or satire. Unfortunately it seems that none of the Internet search engines allow searching for such strings so I couldn t find an early example of this being used. While I haven t found a reference describing this practice, I regularly receive messages annotated with it and find that people generally understand what I mean when I use it in my own email. But that is usually applied to a sentence or two. For a larger section of text a pseudo-HTML tag such as </satire> can be used to signal the end of satire. It seems that a matching start tag is optional as recognising the start of satire is a lot easier once the reader knows that some of the content is satirical. In spoken English a phrase such as but seriously may be used for the same purpose, but such a subtle signal may be missed on the Internet particularly by readers who don t use English as their first language. Another way of signaling a non-literal interpretation is by using Scare Quotes the deliberate usage of quotation symbols to indicate that the writer disagrees with the content that is written. That is common for the case of referencing a phrase or sentence that you disagree with, but doesn t work for a larger section of text. A final option is to make the satire or sarcasm so extreme that no-one can possibly mistake it for being literal. This is not always possible, Poe s Law holds that Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won t mistake for the real thing [1]. I think that Poe was understating the case, it is impossible to create a parody of religion that most people won t mistake for the real thing without signals or context. For an example read LandOverBaptist.org and Chick.com, of course if you know those sites then you will know whether they are satirical or serious but I expect that most readers of my blog won t invest enough effort into either of those religious sites to determine whether they are serious or satire. But satire and sarcasm without signals or a reputation usually fails. One example of success is The Onion which is a long running and well known satirical news site [2]. But even The Onion it is regularly mistaken for being serious the number of occasions when people forward me Onion articles for amusement are vastly outnumbered by the number of occasions when I see people taking it seriously. Even when material is known to be satirical it can still fail grossly. An example is the Chaser s satire of the Make A Wish Foundation [3]. Even material that is well known to be satirical seems to fail when it attacks bad targets or attacks in a bad way. One difficulty is in satirising bigoted people, to effectively satirise them without attacking the minority groups that they dislike can be a difficult challenge. Finally, when you write some satire and members of your audience don t recognise it you should consider the possibility that you failed to do it properly. If you can t get a hit rate close to 100% for people with the same background as you then it s probably a serious failure.

• [1] http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
• [2] http://www.theonion.com/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_chaser

The next 4th of September, the Portuguese Debian community will gather at the University of Aveiro for the third edition of the DebianDayPT

There will be several talks about about Debian/Free Software in Portuguese and as special guest, Martin Michlmayr will deliver a couple of talks titled Contributing to Debian and Project Management in Free Software . Like last year, there will be DVDs with Debian Live so people can discover, try and install upcoming Debian stable Squeeze .

You can find more information of the event and information of how to arrive at: http://debiandaypt.debianpt.org/.

You will be missed so much. You were kind, you were fun to be around.
It is a privilege to have met you. Debian is privileged for the effort and time you put in it.
Your contribution will remain with us and will inspire others for a long time.
You made a difference in this world, one that will last and outlive you. I can only thank you.

Rest in peace, my brother. See you at the other side of the Firewall, and thanks for all the FLOSS ;)

I have been wanting to post for several days already, at least since this last Sunday. I have repeatedly bragged about taking part in the Ciclot n: The last Sunday every month, the city's government closes to automotive transit a ~33Km circuit, for cyclists to enjoy. And by cyclists, I mean people from all expertise ranges Well, the very elite bikers will not take part of such a massive thing, but there are people pedalling a couple of blocks, people taking their small kids to drive a bit, and I recognized an amazingly large proportion of people doing the whole route. Well, this last Sunday one lap was not enough for me I did two laps, ~65Km. (oh, and just for keeping the complaint current: After all, SportsTracker did release a version of thier software for the N95... But it requires Flash for using the webpage at all. I have several pointers at other applications... but am time-starved right now to start reviewing :-/ ) Anyway, I decided to do this double ciclot n in order to train for next week. If you are anywhere near Mexico City, you are invited - this is meant to be a large group ride, and looks very fun! Doble Marat n Ciclista Urbano del Bicentenario We are two weeks away from the 200 year conmemoration of the beginning of the Independence War in Mexico. A group of cyclists came up with the idea to organize a Double Marathon to celebrate! 84Km of biking in Mexico City: For some reason, the distance numbers in that map were made... in miles :-P Anyway, the planned route will be:

1. Jardin de los periodistas ilustres (Delegaci n Venustiano Carranza)
2. Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de M xico
3. Circuito Bicentenario ( antes circuito interior )
4. Monumento a La Raza - Hospital La Raza
5. R o San Joaquin
6. Viaducto Bicentenario ( carril confinado sin interrumpir la circulacion )
7. Torres de Sat lite 50 aniversario
8. Presidencia municipal de Tlalnepantla
9. Presidencia municipal de Naucalpan
10. Anillo Periferico Sur
11. Secretar a de la Defensa
12. Bosque de Chapultepec 1 y 2 secci n
13. Segundo Piso del Distrito Federal
14. Ciudad Universitaria patrimonio cultural de la humanidad
15. Insurgentes Sur
16. Miguel ngel de Quevedo
17. Calzada de Tlapan
18. Z calo centro historico del distrito federal
19. Calle 16 de septiembre fin del recorrido

It looks very fun. Besides, although it is not that flat, it is one of the flattest long distance routes you will ever have. The toughest part will be IMO the Northern part of Circuito Bicentenario and possibly some bits of Perif rico towards Naucalpan. Then, a long flat stretch, with one long but not steep way up in Segundo Piso (near Las Flores), and a little stretch towards Ciudad Universitaria. Other than that, it looks very doable if you are in a moderately decent condition. And taking part in such a thing is very very worthy! As a final note... This same Sunday, it has been somewhat publicized the first D a Nacional de la Bicicleta (Bycicling National Day) will be held all over the country, kickstarting the National Cycling Crusade. Sounds nice, right? Even impressive? Yeah, but... If you look at the published information (in the page I just linked), you will see several cities are opening cyclist circuits. For one day only, which means, it does not build awareness among the population on how easy, how convenient and how fun it is to use the bicycle as means of transportation. And not only that The cyclist routes clearly make a point that cycling is a good way, at most, to have fun... But not a general habit we should all embrace. Lets see, as an example, the distances offered (only for the cities quoting route length):

• Guerrero: Chilpancingo, 2Km; Chilapa de lvarez, 4.5Km
• Sinaloa: Culiac n, 4.7Km
• Nuevo Le n:Monterrey, 1.9Km
• Quer taro: Quer taro, 3.2Km
• Sonora: Nacozari, 1.5Km; Naco, 1.5Km; Huasbas, 1Km; Granados, 1Km; Imuris, 1.5Km; Huatabampo, 1.5Km; Yecora, 1.5Km; Sahuaripa, 1Km; Caborca, 2Km; Navojoa, 3Km; Santa Ana: 2Km; San Luis R o Colorado: 2Km; Cd. Obreg n: 3Km; Hermosillo: 3Km; Nogales: 4Km; Magdalena: 3Km; Guaymas: 4Km; Empalme: 2Km
• Morelos: Cuernavaca: 2Km

...And so it goes. As you can see, several very important cities (i.e. Monterrey, Chilpancingo, Cuernavaca) put only a 2km route. 2Km by bike is... Nothing. 2Km is done at a leisurely pace in less than 15 minutes (I often sustain 20Km/h, which would mean 2Km in 6 minutes). And, in this short sample (the linked page has the information for several other states, but the pattern holds), most states are only making this in the largest city or two, completely forgetting the bulk of their territories. In my opinion, this "effort" was done backwardsly, and ends up delivering the exact opposite message to what should be done.

This evening I made my first Perl GUI application. The last few days I have worked on a Perl module for controlling my recently aquired Spykee robots, and the module is now getting complete enought that it is possible to use it to control the robot driving at least. It was now time to figure out how to use it to create some GUI to allow me to drive the robot around. I picked PerlQt as I have had positive experiences with the Qt API before, and spent a few minutes browsing the web for examples. Using Qt Designer seemed like a short cut, so I ended up writing the perl GUI using Qt Designer and compiling it into a perl program using the puic program from libqt-perl. Nothing fancy yet, but it got buttons to connect and drive around. The perl module I have written provide a object oriented API for controlling the robot. Here is an small example on how to use it:

use Spykee;
Spykee::discover(sub  $robot $_[0]  = $_[1] );
my $host = (keys %robot)[0];
my $spykee = Spykee->new();
$spykee->contact($host, "admin", "admin");
$spykee->left();
sleep 2;
$spykee->right();
sleep 2;
$spykee->forward();
sleep 2;
$spykee->back();
sleep 2;
$spykee->stop();

Thanks to the release of the source of the robot firmware, I could peek into the implementation at the other end to figure out how to implement the protocol used by the robot. I've implemented several of the commands the robot understand, but is still missing the camera support to make it possible to control the robot from remote. First I want to implement support for uploading new firmware and configuring the wireless network, to make it possible to bootstrap a Spykee robot without the producers Windows and MacOSX software (I only have Linux, so I had to ask a friend to come over to get the robot testing going. :). Will release the source to the public soon, but need to figure out where to make it available first. I will add a link to the NUUG wiki for those that want to check back later to find it.

Some careful readers of Planet OCamlCore should wonder why the OCaml packages in Debian has not yet been upgraded to 3.12.0. For the Planet Debian readers, this is the latest version of the Objective Caml programming language. The answer is simple: Debian Squeeze froze on 6th August. This means that Debian folks focus on fixing release critical bugs and avoid doing big transitions in unstable (Sid). In particular, the Debian OCaml maintainers has decided to keep OCaml 3.11.2 for Squeeze, because the delay was really too short: OCaml 3.12 was out on 2nd August. A great work has already been done by S. Glondu and the rest of the Debian OCaml maintainers to spot possible problems. The result was a series of bugs submitted to the Debian BTS. This effort has started quite early and have been updated with various OCaml release candidates. S. Glondu has also built an unofficial Debian repository of OCaml 3.12.0 packages here. Let's use it to experiment with OCaml 3.12.0. schroot setup Following my last post about schroot and CentOS, we will use a schroot to isolate our installation of unofficial OCaml 3.12.0 packages. approx approx is a debian caching proxy server for Debian archive files. It is very effective and simple to setup. It is already on my server (Debian Lenny, approx v3.3.0). I just have to add a single line to create a proxy for ocaml 3.12 packages:

 $ echo "ocaml-312   http://ocaml.debian.net/debian/ocaml-3.12.0" >> /etc/approx/approx.conf
 $ invoke-rc.d approx restart

approx is written in OCaml, if you want to know how I come to it. debootstrap and schroot We create a chroot environment with Debian Sid:

# PROXY = host where approx is installed, debian/ points to official Debian repository of 
# your choice. 
$ debootstrap sid sid-amd64-ocaml312 http://PROXY:9999/debian

We create a section for sid-amd64-ocaml312 in /etc/schroot/schroot.conf (Debian Lenny):

[sid-amd64-ocaml312]
description=Debian sid/amd64 with OCaml 3.12.0
type=directory
location=/srv/chroot/sid-amd64-ocaml312
priority=3
users=XXX
root-groups=root
run-setup-scripts=true
run-exec-scripts=true

Replace XXX by your login. And we install additional softwares:

 $ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-get update
 $ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-get install vim-nox sudo

OCaml 3.12 packages Now we can start the setup to access OCaml 3.12.0 packages. The repository is signed by S. Glondu GPG key (see here). We need to get it and inject it into apt:

$ gpg --recv-key 49881AD3 
gpg: requ te de la cl  49881AD3 du serveur hkp keys.gnupg.net
gpg: cl  49881AD3:   St phane Glondu <steph@glondu.net>   n'a pas chang 
gpg:        Quantit  totale trait e: 1
gpg:                      inchang e: 1
$ gpg -a --export 49881AD3 > glondu.gpg
$ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312 apt-key add glondu.gpg

The following part is done in the schroot:

$ schroot -c sid-amd64-ocaml312
# PROXY = host where approx is installed
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ echo "deb http://PROXY:9999/ocaml-312 sid main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ cat <<EOF >> /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release l=ocaml
Pin-Priority: 1001
EOF
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-get update 
...
(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-cache policy ocaml
  Install : (aucun)
  Candidat : 3.12.0-1~38
 Table de version :
     3.12.0-1~38 0
       1001 http://atto/ocaml-312/ sid/main amd64 Packages
     3.11.2-1 0
        500 http://atto/debian/ sid/main amd64 Packages

(sid-amd64-ocaml312)$ apt-get install ocaml-nox libtype-conv-camlp4-dev libounit-ocaml-dev...

That's it. The apt-policy command shows that OCaml 3.12 for the ocaml-312 repository has an higher priority for installation. Good luck playing with OCaml 3.12.0.

Since I published How to make 110.28 EUR in one month with free software and Flattr , quite a few people joined the movement and I had less troubles finding projects to Flattr. That s great! Without further ado, here are my recommendations for september:

1. Smuxi is an IRC application that integrates from the start the need to be permanently connected. You can run the engine on a server and the graphical interface connects there. The engine has all the intelligence so it remembers what message you last saw in each channel (including highlights) and you won t miss anything. I recently switched to it and I like it. It s not perfect but it s improving quickly. The next version even supports Ubuntu s messaging indicator for better integration with the desktop.
2. Geshi is a PHP class used by many other software to provide enhanced views of code on web pages by coloring the various parts based on the syntax of the respective programming language. It s used by Wikipedia, many blog plugins and lots of other web applications.
3. Git-buildpackage is a set of tools developed by Guido G nther to make it easier to maintain Debian packages in Git repositories. I use it for several packages that I maintain.
4. Mixare is an augmented reality browser. Take your Android phone and it will incrust information in the (camera) view of the environment. Impressive video on the website.
5. Lightspark is is a modern flash player implementation targetting ActionScript 3.0 support (while Gnash only supports older versions). It s one of those few projects that are really needed to get rid of the non-free Adobe plugin that almost everybody installs because there s nothing else that work well enough.

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#1: Dreams of a (almost) 4-year-old Yesterday, Terah had something going on in the evening, so it was just Jacob, Oliver, and me. Due to how the logistics worked out, she brought them to the office after work and I took them from there. We went to the post office, pharmacy, and a restaurant. Jacob and I had this conversation at the pharmacy. Jacob: Ooo! We are at the Goessel pharmacy! *claps happily* Me: Hmmm Actually Goessel doesn t have a pharmacy. This is the Hesston pharmacy. Jacob: *gets a serious look on his face* Dad, actually Goessel has a pharmacy . Look! A fire station! Me: That s right. And what can you see inside it? Jacob: FIRE TRUCKS! They are all still. Me: I guess there isn t a fire. Jacob: I think the Goessel pharmacy is on fire! Shall they go there now? Me: I hope it s not on fire. (what are you going to say to that?) Were you wanting to see a fire? Jacob: YEAH! I think it IS on fire. Shall we go see? So now he has an imaginary pharmacy with an imaginary fire and he wants to go see. Fortunately he was OK with just going inside Hesston Pharmacy instead. #2: The Songs on a Ceiling I read a book and sing a song to Jacob for bedtime every night. Over the weekends, sometimes I do that for him at nap time too. This weekend, he wanted us both to get on his bed, lie on our backs, and look at the imaginary songs on his ceiling. He gave me a whole tour, pointing to various (to me, nondescript) parts of the ceiling as he did so. Over there is a song about railroad tracks. There is one about trains. That train is upside down. That other one is stuck. There is a song about Word World. There is a song about preschool. There are the train tracks. There is a train on them. It might bump into the other train. Shall you sing a song about two trains on the tracks and they bump into the other train and go BLAM? He appeared to have a whole map in his head of his songs. The train songs were all at a specific place on the ceiling. #3: Younger Brother Oliver has really been changing lately. He occasionally will take a few steps by himself, and he has started to say a few parts of words. He communicates really well, though, especially with things he wants. He has a deep, vigorous nod to say yes, and sometimes it s accompanied by yesh for extra emphasis. His face is incredibly expressive too, and he has a distinctive Yoda-like expression at times. I almost expect to hear him say one day, Like that green bean I do not. Watermelon better is. Jacob, of course, is a lot bigger and sometimes is rough with Oliver. But they also have started to play together. Sometimes Jacob will put his head by Oliver s face. Oliver will grab fistfuls of Jacob s hair in both hands and pull. Both of them apparently find this hilarious and laugh on and on about it. #4: Viruses and Stomachs Sunday Jacob was complaining of a stomach ache. We were driving home, and shortly after we got home, he vomited on the driveway. Jacob really doesn t like throwing up. It s unpleasant and maybe a bit scary for him. He was about to start crying after vomiting, except One of our cats was hanging around. Claire came over, sniffed Jacob s vomit, and started eating it. Jacob was so fascinated by what was happening that he stopped sniffling and stood there staring at the cat, then gave an excited report of events to Terah and me. That evening, he was afraid he would throw up in bed. So we had a large bowl he held *directly* under his chin during story time. But then he didn t want to lie down, since he was afraid he d throw up in bed. Terah pointed out that he could have the bowl close while he slept. I went up and checked up on him an hour or two later, and he was sound asleep, face in the large bowl. #5: The Jukebox After the pharmacy, Jacob saw Skoops, a local 50s greasy spoon diner place across the street. He really wanted to eat there and get the birthday cake ice cream flavor. So we did. He was jabbering about getting a corn dog as we walked over, so that s what he had to eat. I don t know how he knew Skoops had them, as I don t think he s ever had a corn dog. Oh well. There s a jukebox inside Skoops, and every fifteen minutes or so, it ll spring to life and play a random song even if nobody put coins in it. This was very exciting for Oliver. He d twist all around in his highchair to watch it. And, most amusingly, he d start bopping his head. Not really in time with the music or anything, but it was cute to watch. Sometimes he d get really excited and pretty much his whole body was dancing. Well, as much dancing as you can do when you re 1 and strapped into a high chair, at any rate. One time, he heard the music, started dancing , and looked at me expectantly. So I started nodding in time with the music, and then Jacob saw us both and started sort of flailing about, somewhat in time with the music. All three of us wound up laughing after that.

To quote the ftp-masters REJECT-FAQ :

• Write manpages. Yes. Really. Write them. Well. It s basically: If your program/tool has a help and version commandline option you can simply run help2man and have a working start.

What may not be obvious to the recently REJECTed developer is actually how to use help2man. To try t0 explain the process a bit more verbosely, I took the liberty of writing a tutorial on the Debian wiki. Comments and corrections are welcome.

Of course, help2man-generated manpages are no substitute for real, hand-written manpages made of sweat, blood, and the Maintainer s tears, and it won t work for all packages. This is just a start, and is much better than no manpages at all.

There was a discussion on #debian-devel a couple of days ago when I brought up my creation of the above, and some wondered if it wouldn t be better to add hooks to man-db to allow package maintainers to enable manpage generation at runtime. I m not sure if that idea will ever make it into a proposal, but, if the details of the implementation were worked out, would be much better than the above, manually generated method.

Hello Thanks to Google, Debian and more importantly Krzysztof Tyszecki, the accept feature discussed in episode 2 is now implemented and tested in Config::Model 1.206 and Config::Model::Itself 1.216. Next task is to create a minimal model to enable upgrades for cupsd.conf. This minimal model will heavily use the new accept feature coded during this GSoC. Cups configuration is an interesting use case because:

• cupsd.conf is often upgraded (at least in Debian/sid)
• its syntax and structures are more complex than configuration found in INI files (although, cupsd.conf needs a new apache like read/write backend :-/ )

Next episode should provide more details on the work required to provide this minimal model. All the best

My good friend Frans Pop died on the 20th of August, just over a week ago. We had worked together for several years within Debian (especially within the Debian CD team), and we had become firm friends during that time. He was great to work with, always ready to help design new features or pick holes and find the bugs in the stuff I was developing myself, happy for others to dig into his own projects. On the more personal side, we met up many times at different Free Software events like DebConf and FOSDEM, and also for pure social things like BBQs and parties. We shared a lot of good times. Last week, along with some other Debian people who had worked with Frans, I headed over to the Netherlands for his funeral. His family also asked me to talk about him, and I was honoured to do so. I spoke briefly about Frans' work in Debian, highlighting the areas where he worked and the number of people he had worked with in various teams. I also told the group about the massive number of messages of sympathy and condolence which I had been asked to pass on from all over the world. His family knew that Debian was important to Frans, but were not aware of just how wide his influence and effect had been. They were especially surprised and grateful that people had travelled so far for the funeral; I told them that I would not have missed it for anything. Rest In Peace, my friend. You will be missed.