Without the vast number of voluntary supporters past LinuxTag events wouldn't have been possible at all. On the financial side LinuxTag has always made only little profit after the event. Without these nearly 100 volunteers who have supported us directly during the event and during its preparation the show wouldn't have been possible. Without the help of so many supporters during the event, the entire show isn't possible. Hence, it is important to either generate more income and be able to pay for hostesses and callboys or manage a proper environment in which many supporters want to help. For this, accepting the importance of the supporters, acknowledging their work and supporting them with food, fluids, fun and other advantages is very important. To my regret, I have to admit that this has not always been the case inside the core team. I have argued in favour of the supporters several times, so hopefully not much of it has been noticed by them. Supporters have worked in several different areas. I'll try to list them below but I'm sure I already forgot half of them even though I have coached most supporters directly or indirectly. We have maintained the parking ground so we were able to ensure that the Festplatz in the middle of LinuxTag is not abused as a parking place during the event. This required us to maintain a gate with at least one gatekeeper from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. This was a lot of work, and it wasn't that interesting, but good for people who want to read or hack in the gatekeeper pavilion. We have manually built the projects network in the exhibition halls. In the conference building it was built by the KaLUG. All information signs and plans had to be drawn, printed, magnified and fixed at their respective locations. There are a lot of additional signs that we have maintained to help visitors find their way. I'm sure still a lot of signs were missing. I have used the opportunity to prepare most of them after the last event, so that we have less work for the new one. Our own office had to be set up, since we've used naked rooms with only some cupboards, tables and chairs inside. More furniture had to be arranged, the network had to be built up, the server had to be installed or configured, the printer had to be attached, the network configuration needed testing, the desks had to be set up. For some years now one to three volunteers have helped us in the office in order to support the core team and so that we are able to present visitors, exhibitors, the press etc. We've had an an additional human firewall who worked for two or three days usually and was able to support most people already without clogging the office room. The firewall (Arne) himself had the idea to become a firewall several years ago and I have to agree that it was a very good idea. However, with the exhibitor support maintained at a special booth at the entrance less work had to be done for the firewall this year. Several large and self-standing signs had to be prepared or repaired after the had been broken at the last event or their content has been obsoleted. Signs for the gate from above had to be printed and fixed at proper locations so that exhibitors find their way. We have built up the entire audio and video equipment on our own with a service provider from Bremen. Since this affected up to six rooms a lot of equipment and cables had to be moved, installed and dismantled after the show. For this we've helped J rg and Sven with several volunteers. The business congress had to be prepared as well. Stuff for the attendees had to be created and taken to the conference building. The entrance counter for it had to be maintained and staffed. Doors had to be secured. Deliveries had to be maintained in a storage area, since before LinuxTag a lot of stuff is delivered to LinuxTag without the target booth built up already. During setting up the booth, the booth builders also had to be supported and problems detected, discussed and corrected. During the entire time of our siege of the fairground we've had to maintain our own storage of fluids and food. Due to the high temperatures having around enough fluids was very important. In addition to this demands for several goods also required us to send somebody out for shopping each day. In order not to die of starvation during the event we have also organised a delicious lunch for all supporters and core team members. Kudos to Thomas we were able to order large pots of salad and cooked food for two years so that we didn't have to eat unhealthy food (such as fat pizza for six days) and everybody could decide on their own how much they want to eat. In the years before we've had rented a cook and even ordered Pizza. The food had to be fetched from the restaurant, arranged, together with table clothes, cutlery and stuff, and finally taken back at the evening. Cutlery had to be cleaned regularly as well. For the social event the location had to be cleaned and prepared. This year we've had the great opportunity to use the Nancy Caf which was unused for about 10 years, and hence required a lot of cleaning. As it turned out just before the show began, it required a lot more cleaning than expected. However, thanks to the competent and highly motivated supporters the location was cleaned in time. Kudos to Claudia, this year's social event was also one of the most successful. For the legendary KaLUG party the location had to be prepared as well and the food cooked. Looking at the pictures, the pavilions had to be built, tables and chairs arranged, cutlery and fluids organised. In the evening all the stuff had to be cleaned as well. This year KaLUG had organised a so called "Sp lmobil" that helped with doing the washing-up, but somebody had to work in it as well. The KaLUG has maintained the Internet caf in the conference building and has set up the network for the exhibiting projects in the conference building. For this they have acquired a lot of computers and network equipment that had to be built up and dismantled after the show. They have also acquired a number of movable walls for separating booths and providing poster space. During the show we have distributed fluids for the conference rooms and exchanged information posters and flyers with the daily schedules. When you're giving a talk, your throat often gets quite dry, hence, a cup of fresh water is a good cure, but requires the organisator to maintain water and cups. Since the conference program changed daily posters and handouts had to be exchanged during the evening. Project exhibitors were supported directly by us while company exhibitors were supported by a service provider. Additionally all speakers had to be supported as well. The conference rooms were also maintained by a moderator who supported the speaker, announced the talks and speakers, ran (!) around with a microphone, helped in case of technical problems and maintained the schedule. Even though it may look strange for an outsider there are a lot of costs that emerge when such an event is organised at a commercial fairground. LinuxTag has always had the problem of only little yield after all bills have been paid after the show but had to start preparing the event for the upcoming year. In the past years it was always a struggle to continue with only little financial substance trying to get the next event set up properly. LinuxTag has been unique in its configuration, looking at its history, its organisation structure, its size and its components. There are basically only three ways of creating income: commercial exhibition, business congress and sponsoring. All three have obviously been on the descending path for several years now, reducing a lot of flexibility for the organisation. This income has had to be used for all expenses. On the other side there are a lot of areas that just cost money, such as the conference building, exhibition hall, hotel, travel reimbursements, projects booths, advertising. In addition to that we've had two service providers that have taken over some tasks and needed to be paid as well. A very rough overview is in my Howto LinuxTag talk from this summer.

Here is my friend lastguru - the second most active photographer on the AnimeFest3. He is trying to get a shot of the audience, but while he is doing that, I got a shot of him :)

Yesterday I discovered a great surge in popularity of SBackup - just on SourceForge around 700 people downloaded it in a period of three days (compared to ~250 total downloads before that) and some new bugs were filled.Only then I remembered about the interview I gave over the email, looks that it was published on Monday. Fun. Now the plans for a good rewrite are even more prominent on my ToDo list and I am also thinking about trying to get all developers of similar tools to unite in the context of this rewrite. This will bring all their good features in (encryption, per-user subconfiguration, removable media support, config on server option) and ensure continued development of the project even if I get a bit lazy on it ;) A confederation for simple yet feature complete Linux backup solution?

Also today we have a very good milestone - translation of Debian Installer to Latvian language has just reached 100%. I thank greatly our new contributor - Orvils from Latvian University who did bulk of the work. I still had to spend around 6 hours reviewing and correcting his translations and then updating the translations that changed or were added during the time that Orvils was translating, but it was much faster then it would have been it the translation was only up to me :)

Edd, Emacs will support Xft after the 22.1 release, the code is already in a branch in CVS and needs some polishing. If you want GTK for menus, check out emacs-snapshot-gtk.

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.

View Rendered Source Chart

Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.

Foxpose

Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.

Del.icio.us

Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.

Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

In several semi- or non-commercial associations work is done by volunteers who spend a lot of their spare time and energy for the goals of the association. This works fine as long as all people who are spending a lot of time on the goals are treated the same and work voluntarily. When some people decide that some people should get paid for their work, while others, who don't work significantly less, don't get paid for their work an uneasy situation is created. Why are some people treated better and get paid for their work while others don't get paid, but still work a lot on the same or similar issues? Why should those, who have to make money in other areas in order to live at all, continue to work voluntarily? I have always argued that in such constellations one must not have volunteers and paid workers do the same work. The only exceptions are volunteers who have stated that they want to do the same work, even though they don't get paid for it. Otherwise you'll create dissatisfaction of the volunteers, which in turn will most probably result in less volunteers, at least in the long term. Also volunteer work should be more interesting and relaxed than paid work, so that the volunteers have more freedoms and develop more fun doing the volunteer work they were asked to do. Paid work is fine for boring tasks that not enough volunteers are comfortable with, such as standing around asking visitors at an exhibition for their tickets, keeping people out of areas where they don't belong, working at a counter, folding and packing stuff etc. Looking at LinuxTag, we had such situations twice. First of all, two members of the board of directors have been on the payroll of the LinuxTag association for three or four months, while the others of the team have worked voluntarily. The same or at least a lot of similar work has been done by the same people before voluntarily. This has caused resentment by those who have worked for LinuxTag in their spare time, or even full-time for several months without getting a Penny for it. In addition to that there were two external service providers that have worked on some tasks (such as press coordination, social event and business acquisition) which didn't interfere with volunteer work. We've had those for years and especially for business acquisition it is important since they can maintain regular 9-to-5 business hours. These companies have worked very well, and we've had a great social event this year, after several years with extremely problematic social events. A second situation arose after it was clear that not enough hostesses were available and volunteers should work side by side with them. There is no problem as long as the volunteers want this. However, normally they don't. Many of them enjoy their freedom, not having to work for the entire time but having enough time to walk around and talk to people etc. Most volunteers feel very strange when they are asked to do the same job voluntarily while their neighbour is paid for it. In the Debian project I have always objected to paying some developers while not paying others. In my opinion, the best situation would be a company that employs a developer for regular company work but lets them work on Debian and Free Software issues for 30-60 % of their time. However, I have to admit that those, who work on Debian more or less for the entire day, and, hence, don't have enough time for their studies, jobs or work, will have to get some revenue or they will starve to death sooner or later. On the other hand, if they get paid for the work, they can't easily take a day off and enjoy their non-computer life. Err... I've heard that some people do...

On the first day of Christmas month, GPLv3 sent to me: three corporate counsels two FSF spokesmen, a research corporation director and a lawyer in a pear tree. No community projects support GPLv3? Were they excluded or did they refuse? If GPLv3 is a similar corporation-placater to the FDL, sacrificing freedom for sponsorship, I predict a riot. A bit of discussion about this problem here. The proposed resolution on publishing debian-private emails both contradicts itself and may have copyright problems. At best, reject. At least, amend. Also troubling, a claim from FSF France that new laws threaten free software developers or at least public distribution of source code. What madness is that?

I spent too much time today reading MIPS disassembly of the ADAM2 bootload, as used on the Netgear DG834G. The problem is that the version used on the Netgear performs a checksum over most of the flash device on every boot. This makes the use of JFFS2, as done by OpenWRT, somewhat problematic. In an ideal world I'd try to compile up a newer, less restrictive version of ADAM2 but there's no JTAG on the Netgear that I've found and the thought of frying the bootloader and bricking the device wasn't appealing. So what I've ended up doing is finding where the checksum is done and changing the branch instruction that aborts the boot to a nop. It's still scary, but it appears to do the job. PLEASE NOTE THE BELOW COULD PERMANENTLY BREAK YOUR ROUTER First, obtain your ADAM2 image. This is 128K and is mtd2 from the bootloader view. It should have an md5sum of 0530bfdf00ec155f4182afd70da028c1. If it doesn't, stop. The version I'm talking about is 0.18.01 as distributed by Netgear. Assuming you have the right md5sum you want to go to offset 0x3944 where the 4 bytes should be 44 09 00 0C (representing a jal 0x90002510 during execution). Replace these 4 bytes with 0 (representing nop) and you should end up with a new image with an md5sum of d8a2f4623bf6f64b7427812f0e849aa7. You'll then need to do something like dd if=adam2-fix.bin of=/dev/mtdblock/2 on the device (I don't believe you'll be able to rewrite the bootloader from the bootloader for some reason...). After that ADAM2 will still checksum the flash, but will continue to boot it after printing a checksum error message. This means you can go off and build yourself an OpenWRT AR7 based image and install it on your Netgear. Rock.

Sun! Sunlight is a wonderful thing. Yesterday I came back from a six day vacation in Madrid. The weather was not warm, a bit warmer than in Finland, but especially it was dry and sunny. Pretty good autumn weather, actually. The best week I've had for a while. This was my Quest for Sun '05. I stayed at Amaya's place, slept well and long every night, had a wonderful time with some Debian people, and walked outside and visited a couple of wonderful art museums. Thank you, especially, Amaya, Holger, and Miriam. And also vi and emacs, the feline foot fetishists who rule Amaya's apartment. I took some pictures. They're touristy snapshots, not meant to be art. I meant to make notes about my experiences during the week, but the nice, classy Moleskine notebook I bought especially for the trip got lost the first full day. Some moments stuck into my mind, however.

• Amaya's cats attacking my feet while I slept. At one point, one of them sat on my knees for a while and pounced every time I moved in my sleep.
• Tapas is a very good never-ending style of food. It just keeps coming: every time you get to the end of the plates you now have, the waiter brings more.
• Food in general was very good. Even cheap fast-food like kebab.
• Art museums in countries with a long history of art are bloody big. Both the Museo del Prado and the Museo de Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza seem to require about seven straight hours for a proper visit (I spent about three at each, and saw half of each). I think this is so that people will attract fewer cats by being too tired to move their feet during the night.
• Telling the history of love, bed, and sex to Amaya and Holger over a meal. I really should write that down some day. (They're editors.)
• One of Amaya's cats is crazy and likes showers. Or at least likes to sit in the shower after someone's used it.
• The Retiro park is wonderful. I could spend a lot of time just walking about in it. I did.
• Food in Spain is good. Spanish eating times are crazy, but you get used to them.
• Me: "Back when I was working on Kannel...". Person next to me: "Oh you worked on Kannel? It is such a nice program". Moments to live for. Enough to motivate me to write and publish some more free code.
• "Gracias", "buenos noches", and "de nada" is enough Spanish to get you live well for a week. Helps to have native speakers as guides, of course.
• Did I mention that the food is great?

Since the Quest for Sun '05 was a success, I definitely will do it again. A week of light (and sleeping properly) really improved my mood. Maybe even enough that I will be able to deal with the remaining months of dark, gloom, wet, and cold of the winter in Helsinki. The only big negative thing about this trip was flying. I suggest that international air travel henceforth shall be called "The Cattle Drive".

My "test" boxes (well, they are in fact production systems) are now all up and running SELinux with a "strict" policy and in enforcing mode, after some weeks in "permissive" mode to detect the last missing policy rules (well, maybe I'm still missing something in cron.monthly?) What took most of the time was in fact to write policy for some services or custom applications that didn't have one before. And that I basically was just checking the logs every day to see if some new audit errors had appeared. Oh, and inbetween we completely emptied the server racks and their wiring and redid the room... Just to mention a few things that were "missing": My OpenVPN is running a custom script to update DNS on login and logout, which obviously was missing from the SELinux policy. I'm also using heartbeat to failover between the two firewalls and two mailservers; that policy took me probably one hour (without much previous experience) to write. Then I have another custom LDAP to aliases for a Lotus directory (which hopefully will be replaced by a sane application soon... whoever invented "implicite email adresses" should be shot. Just put all email adresses into the directory, so any app can look them up without trying to guess what your generation rules are... firstname.lastname@domain.tld sounds easy, but what with non-ascii characters?) Anyway, the systems are doing pretty well. Maybe I'm going to enabled SELinux on the web server next. ( (cra-)PHP and typo3 will probably make that more difficult, though...) Oh, and I need to sort out which of my policy changes are local changes, and which I should feed "upstream".

I had a need to preview what's changed in a file,and the file was under subversion version control.The following is a snippet that I came up with.Creates a HTML docdiff for the current buffer in emacs,and invokes mozilla-firefox to view the change. Nice.

I use Gmail to filter my mail. This has been the case since June 2005. I usually have about 1000 SPAMs in the SPAM mailbox. Recently I’m up to almost 1500. Sigh. I noticed alioth was spammed pretty bad. That’s one reason. I get quite a quite a few SPAM in my inbox which I need to manually send to the SPAM folder. That’s getting worse. Thankfully no HAM is found (knock wood) nowadays in Gmail’s SPAM folder. There was a monster thread over at Linux Users Victoria about Microsoft Exchange. For some odd reason the LUG doesn’t want the mailing list archived. Anyway I made a bit a of a tangent on the thread when I recommended people and companies outsource their mail to external hosts. The savings can be incredible. Though if employees send a lot of attachments, it can be quite painful.
Especially as Australia is using “Pay as you Go” style Internet. Setting up mail servers nowadays is too hard. In my (contracting) experience most offices are incapable of running their own mailservers. Currently I have a painful problem with my Debian (unstable) T30 laptop with Debian’s default exim4. Mail seems to get frozen if I don’t find a net connection within a couple of days when writing email offline. Finally here is a cheerful link of computing pictures to ease the pain.

I have a picture of this space on my computer and, for the life of me, I cannot remember the name of it. If anyone can identify it, please email me. p.s., AJ, I thought we all agreed NIv2 would be named NINJA?

Several years ago (it seems like more than three) I was a student at Brown University. In addition to studying computer science and mathematics, I also took a bunch of courses in the music program, including three years of piano lessons. When I graduated, I gave a recital for friends and family, plus any members of the public who happened to wander in (not many did). And, this being the 21st century, we recorded it and I got a CD of the recording. I edited it, split it into tracks, and handed some copies out to my friends and professors as a going-away present.

Now I'm no longer a student of any sort, and Brown seems a lifetime away, but the music is still sitting on my hard drive. I've always meant to make it available for download, but I couldn't figure out how to get past technical issues of space or bandwidth. A few days ago, though, I had a rather belated bright idea: maybe the Creative Commons project would have links to places where you can host your music for free. Lo and behold, it turns out that the Internet Archive lets anyone upload audio to their server! Better yet, they're even willing to store lossless encodings -- more than willing, actually; FLAC is the preferred encoding of uploads.

So, to make a long story short, click here to hear my bad piano playing. :-)

So, uhm, a couple of weeks ago I changed my e-mail address. Surprisingly, though, I haven’t felt completely comfortable with that new one, so I’m now dropping dato(at)the-barrel.org in favour of dato(at)net.com.org.es. I’m hoping for this one to last; it being meaningless is certainly a plus.

I recently tried and adopted ccache, which (quoting its webpage) acts as a caching pre-processor to C/C++ compilers, using the -E compiler switch and a hash to detect when a compilation can be satisfied from cache. This often results in a 5 to 10 times speedup in common compilations. I must say I was sceptical, but ccache really works great, specially when you have to compile again and again the same code, like a Debian package which you have to clean but which source code remained the same. The only glitch is installation. If you wish to use it by default for all your compilers, there is still some manual configuration. I'd really like it to provide an alternative to, say, cc.

I just uploaded a belpic that compiles on stable to my people.debian.org webspace, so that people using stable will be able to use belpic, too, and might be able to use their digital ID card to sign emails, or use the tax-on-web thingy of the Belgian government. The idea is to get this into backports.org, but I can't reach Norbert Tretkowski ATM, so it'll have to wait 'till he reads his mail. One thing is weird, though. To be able to build belpic for unstable, I had to change some things like (unsigned char **) in the code to (const unsigned char **), or it wouldn't compile. Now that I try to compile it on stable, I apparently have to reverse those changes, or it won't compile. Probably some definitions of one (or more) of the build-dependencies changed. Not that it's a problem, of course, but it is silly. On a slightly related note, Zetes N.V. (belpic's upstream) suggested I go ahead and maintain packages for them to put on the Government's website, too, so that people would be able to install it by downloading from belgium.be. This wouldn't just be the Debian packages, but also packages for other distributions (probably RPMs, then). Sounds like fun. This isn't at all official yet, but it might be some time from now.