This post concerns Romanian politics, internal affairs and improper direction of public funding for new hideous churches in spite of education, culture, health, technic development and old monuments. Thus I will write this in Romanian. Curious foreigners can try to read the text via Google's translation.

---

Din cauz c suntem n secolul XXI i consider c e o prostie imens s b g m bani n biserici n detrimentul educa iei, culturii, s n t ii, dezvolt rii tehnice i a vechilor monumente, iar politicul din Rom nia pare dornic s dea bani cultelor, am ajuns la concluzia c este cazul s -i scriu reprezntantului meu (teoretic) n Parlament, Deputatul Florin Iordache. Am aflat de ce colegiu apar in uit ndu-m aici i apoi n lista oficial cu deputa ii.




I-am trimis textul de mai jos:

M numesc Petri or Eddy i sunt unul dintre cei pe care i reprezenta i n Parlamentul Rom niei. Este pentru prima dat c nd scriu unui parlamentar care m reprezint n conducerea statului rom n i o fac pentru a-mi exprima n mod clar i r spicat ideile i opinia n ceea ce prive te subiectul pe care l voi discuta mai jos. Am 30 de ani, sunt programator, am muncit i mi-am pl tit taxele de c nd am fost angajat, din anul 4 de facultate p n n prezent, adic de vreo 6-7 ani. Nu, acest mesaj nu este un strig t de ajutor, nu a tept pomeni, nu am milogit niciodat , mereu am muncit de i v d c pentru unii parazitismul fiscal a devenit un mod de via . Din acest motiv sunt revoltat.

Sunt revoltat pentru c :
- de i pl tesc taxe i impozite care ajung la peste 60% din venitul brut, nu primesc n schimb nici un fel de servicii, nici un fel de infrastructur , nici un fel de respect, nici un fel de eficien
- de i lucrez de ceva timp, am observat c pe unde am lucrat competen a i performa a erau o necesitate; n aparatul de stat nu este cazul
- de i sunt destui ca mine care pl tesc taxe i impozite, vocile noastre sunt ignorate i banii no tri sunt arunca i pe fereastr de cei ce administreaz fondurile colectate.

Domnule deputat sunt revoltat c de 15 ani de zile dispar n medie aproximativ 4 coli zilnic i apare, tot n medie, o biseric la fiecare 2 zile, iar asta se nt mpl cu accep iunea aparatului politic. Spitalul din Caracal, ca orice alt spital din Rom nia, e prost dotat, nu exist personal suficient, nu are fonduri pentru medica ie pentru pacien i, pe scurt, este un dezastru care e pe cale s se nt mple. i cu toate astea, banii se duc spre biserici. Se fac dona ii de coli i terenuri c tre biseric , n mod ilegal i abuziv chiar n jude ul Olt.

Ultima perioad n care religia a condus lumea s-a numit Evul Mediu i cred c orice om care a tr it m car 5 ani n secolul XXI poate s observe c nu religia ne-a adus mari beneficii, ci tiin a i tehnologia. n Evul Mediu tratamentul se f cea prin s nger ri , t ieri sub limb , scoaterea argintului viu i tot felul de alte supersti ii f r nici un efect pozitiv sau chair cu efecte negative.

ntre timp umanitatea a progresat i am descoperit medicina, curentul electric, am explorat universul, am aterizat pe Lun , am pus zeci de sateli i artificiali pe orbit , am aflat foarte multe despre univers i lumea care ne nconjoar , am inventat noi materiale (plasticul, p nzele impermeabile, kevlarul), am investigat lumea f r idei preconcepute dup metoda tiin ific , iar lucrul acesta ne-a mbun t it via a n toate aspectele ei. Sperant de via a crescut de la aproximativ 30-40 de ani n Evul Mediu, la 70-80 de ani n prezent, totul datorit tiin ei aplicate. Datorit tehnologiei i tiin ei pot s v scriu aceste cuvinte i tiu c vor ajunge la dumneavoastr , nu datorit unor incanta ii sau ritualuri, nu datorit telepatiei, de i mediul sta de transmisie se apropie foarte mult de ceea ce define te ca fiind telepatie :-) . Cu toate astea, unii consider c religia trebuie finan at pentru c e religie, nici m car pentru c ar avea programe sociale, contribu ii cuantificabile reale, nu, doar pentru c este religie.


Am citit foarte multe articole din pres , articole bine documentate, i am senza ia c tr iesc ntr-o lume incon tient c nd v d cum banii care ar trebui s ajung n drumuri, coli, spitale, cercetare, medicamente, programe sociale cu real impact, ajung n noi i noi biserici de beton n timp ce monumentele istorice, bisericile din lemn, m n stirile cu adev rat valoroase sunt l sate n paragin . Asist cu o senza ie de dezgust continuu la felul n care ne batem joc de cei ce ne salveaz vie ile, medicii, de cei ce ar trebui s ne fac educa ia, profesorii, de cei ce ne sting casele dac iau foc, pompierii, i, de felul n care ridic m misticismul religios la rang de virtute. Este de-a dreptul jignitor i aberant ca alfabetizarea tiin ific n secolul XXI s fie at t de joas nc t s avem 42% din popula ie care cred c Terra este centrul universului, s avem oameni care cred c astrologia este tiin ific , s NU avem nici m car o universitate n top 500 n lume, este jignitor s fim n permanen n coada tuturor clasamentelor pozitive i n fruntea tuturor celor negative.

Recent money.ro a publicat un articol n care esitma foarte conservator c averea Bisericii Ortodoxe Rom ne se nv rte la peste 3 miliarde de euro, are scutiri de impozite, are zeci de afaceri i cu toate acestea, statul continu s scuteasc cultele de impozite, ba chiar le ofer bani ntr-una. La o asemenea avere nu cred c mai poate fi vorba de necesitatea finan rii de c tre stat. Oamenii pot decide s doneze direct c tre bisericile lor bani i nici nu mai implic pierderile inerente ce apar datorit administr rii fondurilor de c tre stat.


Statul nu este un organ aparte, statul trebuie s munceasc pentru mine, cet eanul, iar eu sunt mpotriva acestui tip de batjocorire i napoiere voluntar a noastr ndreptat mpotriva noastr . Alexandru Ioan Cuza a secularizat averile m n stirilor nchinate celor de la muntele Athos, deci unor ter i extreni rii, a a cum afl m din scrierile istoricului A.D. Xenopol, deci nu exist nici o obliga ie a statului s finan eze o institu ie anacronistic :

A.D. Xenopol Domnia lui Cuza Vod Vol.I , CAP. VIII. AI doile minister Cogalniceanu Secularizarea , pagina 291:

Nu vom atinge de c t mprejur rile care au condus la redob ndirea averilor, ajunse n st p nirea c lug rilor str ini, ating nd chestiunea nchin rei m n stirilor p n ntene c tre acele din R s rit, numai ntru c t va fi de nevoie, spre a n alege m sura seculariz rei nsu i.

Din aceste motive i multe altele, deoarece sunte i i reprezentantul meu n Parlamentul Rom niei, v cer ca s vota i pentru proiectul de lege ini iat de domnul Prigoan n ceea ce prive te t ierea finan rii personalui clerical de c tre stat i c t i a altor legi care ar putea duce la eliminarea privilegiilor pe care le au cultele, n condi iile n care singurul motiv real i corect pentru care o entitate ar putea beneficia de scutiri de taxe sau privilegii fiscale sunt doar cele ce nu urm resc interesul financiar i, totodat , au un impact social cuantificabil n mod clar.


Dac dori i, a fi bucuros s v r spund la eventualele ntreb ri sau neclarit i n ceea ce am scris, dac este nevoie.

V mul umesc anticipat!

L-am trimis joi, nc n-am primit r spuns de nici un fel. Pasul doi e s sun. M car s nnebuneasc dac tot sunt nesim i i. A a c , pute i afla de ce colegiu apar ine i i apoi pute i identifica pe cel/cea ce v reprezint n Parlament. Scrie i-le, suna i-i, a venit momentul m car s se enerveze, dac nu s - i fac m car o poleial de datorie.

There is apparently some MS-Windows software for navigating light aircraft in Australia. It takes input from a GPS device and knows the rules for certain types of common tasks (such as which direction to use when approaching an airport). My first question when I heard of this was so if the Windows laptop crashes does your plane crash? . But I ve been assured that paper maps will always be available. The requirement is for a touch-screen device because a regular laptop in the open position won t leave enough room for the control stick. So the question is, what is the best touch-screen Windows laptop? It must be relatively rugged spinning media for storage is unacceptable due to the risk of damage in turbulence, it should be relatively cheap (less than $1000), and can apparently have a somewhat low resolution for the screen. The pilot who asked me for advice on this matter is currently thinking of the ASUS Eee T91 which runs Windows XP home, has 16G of solid-state storage and a 1024*600 screen. I am concerned about the reliability of that system as the rotatable screen design seems inherently weak. The Smartbook concept sounds appealing, I don t expect that you would want to wait for a typical OS to boot while flying a plane. But those devices mostly use ARM CPUs and thus can t run MS-Windows. One particularly interesting device is the Always Innovating Touchbook [1] which has a detachable keyboard which would be handy for non-airline use. Unfortunately it seems that Always Innovating aren t doing production at the moment, they say The current Touch Book production is in stand-by and will resume in the summer when we will release our newest and craziest innovation well summer is almost over in the northern hemisphere so I guess that means there won t be anything from them for another 9 months. A device such as an iPad would also be a good option for looking at static documents. The pilot is considering using a MS-Windows PC to generate images and then viewing them on such a device. But he s not really enthusiastic about it. Are there any good and cheap touch-screen devices that run MS-Windows? Are there any particularly noteworthy PDF reader devices which would be better than an iPad for viewing maps while flying a plane? Is it possible to run a MS-Windows application that uses a GPS under Wine on a Netbook?

• [1] https://www.alwaysinnovating.com/touchbook/

...awesome. OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk about hacking, running and sightseeing...:) Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for being there in US, isn't it? I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it:

• samba packages
  • I (shortly) discussed with Steve Langasek about samba packages. He will have to talk with upstream about 3.6 that unexpectedly drops symbols in libraries , so that we can upload it in experimental (and probably also offer a lenny backport)
  • We didn't decide yet about the version to have in squeeze. I know, the freeze happened in the meantime, so we should stick with 3.4.8 but I'm more and more convinced that we should have 3.5.4 instead as upstream should stop supporting 3.4 security-wise around June 2011. I think I can convince the Release Team that 3.4-3.5 upgrade is not to be disruptive with the freeze.
  • I hopefully fixed the 3.5.4 packages for lenny which we have in our unofficial repository at http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org. I didn't take time to check this properly, though, so feedback will be appreciated.
• Pootle/translate-toolkit/virtaal
  • These are usually maintained by Nicolas Fran ois but he has no time for them. So, I agreed with him that I would release new upstream versions
  • pootle 2.0.5 is now in unstable. I have to work on an RC bug, still
  • translate-toolkit 1.7.0 is now in unstable too
  • virtaal: I began working on new upstream release packaging
  • backporting: I planned to backport translate-toolkit and pootle as there is a strong demand for them for lenny servers but the above mentioned RC bug prevented me to do so
• D-I work
  • I partly reviewed and corrected the D-I l10n documentation
  • I reviewed and activated new debconf templates added by Otavio Salvador and Daniel Baumann to live-installer, then called for their translation
  • Support for locales with "@" in their name in localechooser: I looked at this but I need someone more clever than me in shell scripting to fix that. Until that's done, I deactivated Serbian (Latin), unfortunately.
• Various packaging work
  • New release for console-data (mostly l10n stuff aimed for D-I)
  • Uploaded ttf-dzongkha and ttf-inconsolata to s-p-u to fix two RC bugs in stable
  • Polish tasksel and have Otavio to upload it
  • Checked my own packages against Rhonda's list of RC bugs in stable
• Localization work
  • Pootle upstream French translation completed, for 2.1.0
  • Cleaned out the tracking robot for French l10n in Debian

As one can see, a lot of planned work happened while I still could maintain the usual flow of recurrent work with localization (Smith reviews, l10n NMUs). Some asked me why I didn't propose l10n sessions this year. Indeed, I wasn't feeling I could sustain animating them and I had no clear idea about which topic I could bring to be discussed. Last year, these sessions slightly killed my free time and I wanted to keep some this year for "impromptu" things. I didn't attend many talks, sorry for the speakers. The most I attended were during Debian Day, which I found highlyinteresting and motivating, just like Eben Moglen's talk. Marga's talk was also one I wanted to attend, though I regreted that things went mostly out of control during the talk (too many comments from the audience to allow Marga pushing her important points). As usual, I invested a big part of my time in "social" activities, the most proeminent being of course the Cheese and Wine party, which turned ut to be a great success. The help of my son Jean-Baptiste and the tremendous support of Michelle Lynn Hall helped a lot, though I still regret that we screwed about accessibility. I also ran a lot..:-)..that may be counted as social activities as I organized several group runs. The one I'm proud of has been participating to a local race, namely the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series of cross-country running, in Bronx. We went there with no less than 10 DebConf participants and 1 kilt (hey, Luca!). All of us completed the race (that had 170 runners for 5 kilometers) and No l K the even finished 17th scratch and 2nd in his age/gender category. Besides that, we had a great run/sightseeing to Georges Washington Bridge (that links New Jersey and Harlem and offers an unusual view of Manhattan "from behind"). All this with a 17km run. We also ran several times in Central Park, and No l and me happened to go to Coney Island for the Day Trip by doing half of the trip by running (all around Manhattan and over the Broolyn Bridge), for about 20km. Then we "showered" in the Atlantic Ocean....:). At the end of DebConf, I think that I had my record broken with 112km run in 10 days and only one day *without* running. What about sightseeing? Well, this blog post is too long and we reach the end of Interstate-90, close to Albany, so that will be for an upcoming blog post. Aug 25th update: back home, so now I can publish this blog post...

There s some hype in the Ruby community about RVM (Ruby Version Manager). It s a tool that allows to switch between Ruby versions on the same system (much like what the alternatives system provides for Java on Debian, except that RVM does it either system-wide or per-user). However, when you look at it, RVM looks quite scary. The recommended installation instruction is:
bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head ).
That script doesn t use set -e, and actually does a git clone behind the scenes. Without first checking that git is installed. But if you don t have git installed, it s not a problem: there s another script later on the page that downloads and compiles it for you. After installing RVM itself, you need to install rubies (different ruby implementations). Use rvm install ree,1.9.2-head,jruby. That will automatically download and build the various versions in your homedir. It s interesting to note the the compilation messages were probably too scary, and are not displayed. But how does it handle the switch between different versions ? First, you need to add some magic to your .bashrc:
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
or, for a system-wide install of rvm:
[[ -s "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "/usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm"
And then, you can select your ruby implementation using rvm --default 1.9.2, for example. That works by redefining $PATH:
# echo $PATH
/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin:/usr/local/rvm/gems/ruby-1.9.2-p0@global/bin:/usr/local/rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.2-p0/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11 Of course, that s quite fragile: if you are in one of the cases where bash doesn t read .bashrc, or if you happen to be using dash, you lose. Looking at the code of RVM itself, it is also very fragile: it s pure bash, without any error handling. During my test (in a chroot), I often got error messages about missing commands that were apparently ignored. The installer insists on using colors, and spews lots of error messages if executed without a controlling tty. There are also some interesting code snippets like perl -e 'sleep 0.5'. So, where do we go from here? Well, obviously, with my Debian hat, I m not going to advocate a solution that makes everything possible to avoid the distribution s packaging system, and I don t see RVM being packaged in Debian anytime soon.
In Debian, we already provide co-installability of Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.2, and users are free to choose which one to use on a per-script basis, by running them with version-suffixed ruby executables. The ruby executable itself still points to 1.8, as it s clearly too early to make 1.9.2 the default. Many Ruby libraries are provided for both 1.8 and 1.9.2, and we plan to discuss changes in the packaging system to be able to make it easier to provide packages for both versions. There s also recent work on packaging JRuby, but it s quite hard as it requires removing all the non-free or undistributable parts, and packaging them separately.

The Debian Women project aims to get more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.

The Mentoring Program, allows men and women that want to contribute to Debian but aren t sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps.

There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. We d like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012.

There are some other interesting statistics about the current female participation in Debian.

We are also interested in getting more women to file and fix bugs, translate debconf templates or package descriptions, contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions in the near future, to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we ll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled.

For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the IRC channel #debian-mujeres on irc.oftc.net.

Contributed by: Margarita Manterola

FrOSCon was a blast. I had two booths of my own MirBSD and FreeWRT as well as shares of Debian and Grml. Well, MirBSD was run by Benny and gecko2 because I just didn t have any time for it, despite XTaran s help with the FreeWRT booth. All I did was the initial setup of both booths, while at the same time answering about three questions regarding FreeWRT in parallel. Wow. What a little small, open hardware can do to you. XTaran and I had fun and we ll do FreeWRT booths again; I managed to flash my two FON2100 devices ( La Fonera the FON2200 can use the same image, says nbd of OpenWrt) and will fix the port s remaining few bugs I found; XTaran will try to push the WL-500gPv2 development. The social part was nice as well, although I think the greek restaurant in the city will not be visited by me again. Anyway, if you didn t attend FrOSCon, your own fault Since the BitTorrent tracker used by MirOS is down, here s the link to the [updated 2010-08-28] current (FrOSCon 2010 Edition) snapshot s torrent, Triforce as usual. We ll probably rewrite torrent files for all our ISOs and publish them on the MirBSD website. I m currently considering OpenBitTorrent plus one or two DHT seed nodes with no statistics. Maybe with webseed. (Need to update the libtorrent/rtorrent MirPorts first, though ) Other options would be different trackers or running one of our own. I will announce the outcome as news entry, once done. On the plus side, the review process of mksh(1) in Android continues, and I fixed the realpath builtin to behave even more POSIX-ish.

Well, FrOSCon is over and it s time to sum up the event a bit. First of all: it was great! But it was also hot (I heard the air-condition is off during week-ends ) and busy. And still, it was great! :) Why? Mostly because of the people of course! It was esp nice to meet Rhonda in person (almost all other people [except the grml ones] in the Debian-and-Friends corner were the usual suspects who you see at every (big) FOSS/Linux event). I had some nice chats with Enrico (about Geany and Xfce) and Leo (about bley), besides of the usual when will Squeeze be released? and how does X work in Debian? with random people. When there are a lot of people, a key signing party isn t too far away. Thanks formorer for the orga! You still owe me a sig from FrOSCon 2008 ;) And if someone wonders why he/she got a sign-mail from me even when he/she wasn t at the FrOSCon KSP: I used the fact that I have to sign a lot of keys to sign even more (from the OpenRheinRuhr 2009 KSP and the BSP in M nchengladbach at the beginning of this year [yes tg, I even signed yours, hope you liked the MIME]). As usual I missed almost every talk I wanted to hear and end up with just one (the one about RegEx), which sadly wasn t good at all. I guess that s all I have to say about FrOSCon. Oh wait, no, there was a questionnaire which included the question whether I ll visit future FrOSCons. Of course! Hope to see ya all at MRMCD, OpenRheinRuhr, 27C3 etc So Long, and Thanks for All the Frogs!

Just echoing what happens in Planet Debian for people who follow my blog (or any other planet where it is syndicated) and is interested in DebConf processes I'm specially thinking about people interested in preparing a bid for hosting a future DebConf, as well as people organizing hacking conferences who are interesed in understanding how DebConf works: Richard Darst, a.k.a. our very invaluable MrBeige, started a series of posts describing various processes of DebConf organization. He explicitly asked me for comments while this series was still in planning/wiki stage, but I failed miserably at doing so ;-) So at least I'll publicize his work, linking from here:

1. DebConf and Debian: Introductory message, basically outlining (Richard's view on) the relation between Debian and DebConf. This is not yet a clear thing It seems we are converging on the fact that DebConf *is* part of Debian, but there are several things to clear before it is viewed as a done deal.
2. Timeline of a DebConf: Running a DebConf as a local team is not (just) becoming crazy for two weeks, leaving life behind ans working hard for having your friends and peers in your hometown. It is an interesting full two year process, with different phases and aspects for the work. Richard has been involved as an organizer for the last two years, and he summarizes the main periods here.
3. What is the DebConf team?: We talk about the localteam and the globalteam as if those terms make any sense. Then again, we have had people as part of localteam who live in different countries... What does this mean? What are the tasks of the teams? How do you join? What kind of work is expected from you? What is the real difference between the teams, if there is any?
4. The DebConf selection process: How does the next year's venue selected? How is this "contest" held? When do you have to submit your proposal? How is it ranked/judged/decided? As I have told several people, the first document you should check is always the location checklist (also linked from Richard's text), but having this timeline will surely help you know what to expect.

I don't know if MrBeige is planning further parts for this series; if the past four were interesting, you should check on his weblog.

Another day, another story about #ukgov cuts and today it s the turn of libraries. When I turned on the TV at breakfast, they were discussing BBC: A novel idea: Take a look inside the library pub. There s also a discussion on the terrible BBC speak your branes site. People have quickly pointed out that the library pub is quite small (a few hundred books) and couldn t run without the support of the council library service (according to FranksCasket and msarahwickham), so it s not an obvious cost-cutter. I guess the most endangered are the mobile libraries, as the books could be delivered on request by parcel or courier services without skilled staff. North Somerset has already consulted on cutting the number of stops (the results will be published by 06 Sep 2010) so that might be happen anyway. The reply which made me smile the most was Have a better plan: put a pub in the library which, of course, the visionaries in Norwich have already done. Well, a cafe-bar in the same building as the Millennium Library, at least. Not quite Real Ale, but it s a start. Personally, I feel library IT should be in line for cuts before library branches (I really don t enjoy using the local council library catalogue and the Windows-based PC kiosk control system feels like an expensive nasty experience to me), but it s all connected. More flexible library IT like Koha, with its web-based user interfaces, common hardware and possibility of distributed cooperative support, could probably support microbranches better than some of the legacy systems.

Selecting a DebConf location hard, and can certainly get intense at times. This is an area where the DebConf team and the Debian project can work to improve our processes. There is a wiki page to collect our thoughts in preparation for a discussion later, as planned during the DebConf&Debian BOF.
First off, there is a time at DebConfN-2 for interested localteams to describe their rough plans. These are videoed, and you can view the events online if you would like: for dc11 at dc9, for dc12 at dc10 .There has been a nominal deadline of December 31, 20XX-2 for submitting a bid (not finalizing), but this has been bent in the past.While teams are preparing their bids, they should look at the location checklist. This summarize what past organizers know to look for in a location. There are questions sorted by category and priority.To organize their information so that people can understand, teams prepare bid documents on the wiki (DC10, DC11, here are the winning bid documents: DC10-New York City, DC11-Banja Luka). These start off by just answering all of the questions in the location checklist, but then get a lot of work to make the pages clear and complete. Anyone can browse the pages and ask questions of the teams anytime.There are several mini-meetings where teams describe their progress, and organizers and other interested people can ask questions. In these meetings, the channel is not moderated. Questions tend to be about the location checklist criteria related things.In February/March, there is a big selection meeting. This is the only DebConf meeting where the channel is moderated and only voiced people can speak. The voiced people historically are two moderators who keep things moving, two other past DebConf organizers to ask questions and relay questions from the audience discussion channel. (These facilitators have been self-selected in the past, usually in the minutes leading up to the meeting.) Then, there are two people per location whom are voiced. There is a audience channel for everyone else to discuss, and the moderators/helpers will look there for questions and relay them to the main channel. There have been unvoiced Q&A periods and periods which are designated for relaying questions from the discussion channel.These meetings are logged (dc10 selection, dc11 selection)Teams are rated based on the priority list. There has been a simple point list the last two years, -1 to +1 for each point on that list. For each item, there are debates on how many points each location should get. Points are added up, and a result appears. In the past, this has been a simple arithmetic sum, so all items are weighted the same (despite nominally having different weights). In the case of a tie or close call, there is more discussion. For DC10, there was a tie, and NYC won after opening the meeting to the audience and getting their opinions. I didn't pay enough attention to the DC11 selection process to be able to say how that close call was resolved.While this isn't really part of the selection process, local teams can give presentations at DebConfN-1 about their location and encourage attendance: dc10 at dc9, dc11 at dc10
So, there it is. Overall, there is a lot of openness in the process, but the exact rating schemes in the decision meeting could use discussion. The criteria are established, but can be refined each year based on what we learn.If you would like to comment on how to improve this in the future, please use the selection process wiki page (first person create it). We can follow up with a list discussion after our ideas have been fleshed out.Tags: debconf

git rebase provides a simple way of combining multiple commits into a single one. However using rebase to squash an entire branch down to a single commit is not completely straightforward.

Squashing normal commitsUsing the following repository:

$ git log --oneline
c172641 Fix second file
24f5ad2 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

we can combine the last two commits (c172641 and 24f5ad2) by rebasing up to the first commit:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d

and specify the following commands in the interactive rebase screen:

pick 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file

which will rewrite the history into this:

$ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

Rebasing the initial commitTrying to include the initial commit in the interactive rebase screen will return this error:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d^
fatal: Needed a single revision
Invalid base

and squashing the top commit in the interactive rebase screen:

$ git rebase -i 97c9d7d

squash 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file

will return this error:

Cannot 'squash' without a previous commit

So we need to use a different approach to deal with the initial commit.

Amending the initial commitHere is an alternative to rebase which will work on commits that don't have a parent.

Taking the previously rebased branch:

$ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file

we can rewind the branch to the initial commit:

$ git reset 97c9d7d
$ git log --oneline
97c9d7d Add first file

without losing any of the changes introduced in 1a9d5e4 (shown here as uncommitted changes):

$ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
# (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: file1
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# file2
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Then we can reopen commit 97c9d7d and add the changes present in the working directory:

$ git add .
$ gitc -a --amend -m "Initial version"

which will finally give us a fully squashed branch:

$ git log --oneline
fcb85fb Initial version

$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)

In a previous post I mentioned split debugging info. One addendum to this is how symbols are handled. Symbols are separate to debugging info (i.e. the stuff about variable names, types, etc you get when -g is turned on), but necessary for a good debugging experience. You have a choice, however, of where you leave the symbol files. You can leave them in your shipping binary/library so that users who don't have the full debugging info available will still get a back-trace that at least has function names. The cost is slightly larger files for everyone, even if the symbols are never used. This appears to be what Redhat does with it's system libraries, for example. The other option is to keep the symbols in the .debug files along-side the debug info. This results in smaller libraries, but really requires you to have the debug info files available to have workable debugging. This appears to be what Debian does. So, how do you go about this? Well, it depends on what tools you're using. For binutils strip, there is some asynchronicity between the --strip-debug and --only-keep-debug options. --strip-debug will keep the symbol table in the binary, and --only-keep-debug will also keep the symbol table. Of course, you can then strip (with no arguments) the final binary to get rid of the symbol table; but other than manually pulling out the .symtab section with objcopy I'm not aware of any way to remove it from the debug info file. Constrast with elfutils; more commonly used on Redhat based system I think. eu-strip's --strip-debug does the same thing; leaves the symtab section in the binary. However, it also has a -f option, which puts any removed sections during the strip into a separate file. Therefore, you can create any combination you wish; eu-strip -f results in an empty binary with symbols and debug data in the .debug file, while eu-strip -g -f results in debug data only in the .debug file, and symbol data retained in the binary. The only thing to be careful about is using eu-strip -g -f and then further stripping the binary, and consequently destroying the symbol table, but retaining debug info. This can lead to some strange things in backtraces: Note one difference between strip and eu-strip is that binutils strip will leave the .gnu_debuglink section in, while eu-strip will not:

Now that I've mentioned the general timeline of a DebConf, let's talk about the "global team", "local team", and decision processes.Who is the "global team"? Basically, it is the active people on the debconf-team IRC channel and mailing list. Anyone can contribute, but we know who is who. Those with the most moral authority tend to be those who have organized a past DebConf or been involved for many years, and their opinions always have a high weight. Many of them are still around.So then how are decisions made? It's a combination of consensus-based and "whoever want to, do it". We discuss ideas based on what experienced people have seen work/not work, what new people want to try, and perhaps most importantly, who can make it happen. (this is where you fit in). There aren't necessarily leaders picked beforehand, instead leaders develop themselves. Overall, this is similar to any other team in Debian.There aren't formal gatekeepers who can veto anything, but if someone sees a problem, they should speak up and get critical mass of people to fix things. Those who hold the money (SPI, FFIS, the DPL) of course will monitor our processes and would intervene if someone started going off course.Typical global team tasks are fundraising, travel sponsorship selection, talks, registration.The local team starts out as the winning bid team. They started out figuring out local logistics for their venue, and up until arrival, they are the ones who are handling the local tasks (venue, food, accommodation, entertainment, day trip, Debian Day outreach). They should keep the global team updated on their status and what they are arranging, so that the experienced ones on the global team can give feedback. Global people will, of course, get involved here where they see fit and can help.The local team shouldn't exist in isolation though, anyone local is highly encouraged to get involved in "global team" tasks. The more coordination and bi-directional help we have, the better.It isn't the job of the local team to put on all of DebConf themselves. They aren't selected and left with free reign, they should integrate with and understand the history of DebConf, and then work on whatever improvements they want, whether they are local or global.
So in short, there are the names "global team" and "local team", but really, it's all one big Debian team. Those who are interested work and make things happen through a consensus-driven process. Things aren't always perfect: we have conflict, disorganization, leadership turn-over, lack of volunteers, lack of time, all the usual things that happen in volunteer organizations. I think most people want to work towards this ideal, and we hope that this series of posts will help us to improve. Most importantly, when you see something you'd like to work on, you can get involved.Tags: debconf

Released just a few hours ago:

We are pleased to announce this maintenance release of xf86-video-geode. It features a plethora of bug fixes, a few documentation updates and one performance enhancement. This release also marks the return of Advanced Micro Devices to the development team. Please read the content of NEWS for more details.

In practice, this Geode 2.11.9 release mostly fixes the growing number of rendering issues that were exposed with each successive release of the X.org server core. Among other things, it restores the ability to correctly view video streams on Totem and other media players, it fixes icon rendering bugs that affected various desktop environments and web browsers, it removes all remaining compiler warnings and, as a byproduct of fixing one rendering issue, the speed of our driver improved dramatically. This is one release that will definitely please users of the OLPC XO-1 and of thin client hardware running on LTSP!

Recently I blogged a serious complain about Facebook marketing practices.
I must note, that, while writing this, this is still a standing fact.
And it somehow leads me to the question why I use facebook (and similar portals like Xing or Meinvz at all) at all.

I would say that I'm a person, who values security. Probably I need to, because my job involves security aspects, even if its only to protect data.
Additionally I value privacy. I would never go onto a toilet in a glass case, where everybody could watch me doing my business.
The idea to keep the door to my flat open all the time would trigger all alarm bells inside of me.
But on the other hand I have a blog on which I write about technical topics, and personal topics. Like the death of my grandma or how my neighbours disturb me. And I use Facebook. And MeinVZ.

I'm well aware of how this makes it easier to trace me. How this could be used against me, if I happen to search for a job. Aware of the everlasting memorization of the internet who will keep this.. eventually forever.
And I have friends who have a serious antipathy against this and probably would never use such a portal at all.
So why do I use it?

That I started using that portals were some kind of peer pressure. I'm a person who likes beeing "thereby" and I like beeing present. Many of my friends were already using those portals and so I followed an invitation to use it, too. But I did think about several points:

• Could this affect my career plans? The answer is yes. But it can have positive and negative aspects. I'm active in the Open Source movement. Therefore I am already present in the world wide web. As an IT-guy that s not the worst that can happen. If you are interested in working for one of those big prominent companies and if its only peripheral, being present in the web is a good thing, because there is a chance of being perceived. On the other hand I'm a somehow crazy person in my private life. I like doing party and some people would probably call me freaky. Most likely this could show in such a portal.. or in my blog. If it affects my carrier plans in a negative manner, well there are several things to consider. For example if I really want to work for a company, which decides to decline me just because I have a real life next to the job. I probably don't.
• Can these portals store information about me that I don't want to be public?Yes and no. Its a fact that these portals are designed to collect as many information about as many persons as possible. But they also give you some tools to control what is known about you. If you don't want to show nude photos, then don't post them. If you don't want to be seen as a person always drinking too much then don't write about it and don't show photos of you being drunk. And if others post such stuff about you: Use the tools to get it removed and eventually ask yourself if the persons doing it are really friends.
• Are the companies behind those portals evil?Hard question. In many ways they are acting in a way that makes them look evil. Like that aggresive advertising, I wrote about earlier. But on the other hand they are serving a need of people who like to keep in touch and they are really just doing business. What they do is required for their business. They collect data because they need it to make their free portals financable (e.g. by showing targeted advertising). If you want you can still think of them as the great evil but you are not really being forced to use their service.
• Is every facebook friend a friend?Uhm.. no. Its so easy to request friendship on a social network platform that people collect "friends" on them as other people collect knickknack.
  Personally I consider my friend list on these portals to be a collection of people I know. Some of them are friends but not all of them.
• Do I really need those social networking platforms?And here is the most important question. The answer is No.
  No one does. If you really want to keep in touch with persons you like you can always do. By telephone, by writing a letter, by visiting them etc.
  But its convenient. An example:
  I have friends in different parts of the world. In the United States for example. Or people living in my country (but in a distance) or people travelling around a lot. I can keep in touch with them via email or instant messenging etc. but those social networks give me the chance to keep up-to-date with their lifes (in which I'm really interested if they are friends) without direct contact the whole time (for which we may not always find time and occasion). Its easy, its fast.

I came to the conclusion that there are pros and cons for and against using these services. And I found that I can live with the cons due to the convenience they bring to me. And that I could always stop using them.

However: That does not mean that I have to "Eat or die" what they serve.

Oh and on a side note: I found "Facebook, Br ste und die Currywurst" to be an interesting article about the topic. Its a recommended reading, although only for the people who understand German.

Since I started using Linux I've used several window managers. I felt used to blackbox and fluxbox and eventually used enlightenment and some others in the past, but nowadays its been a while since I became the user of an Desktop Environment. I'm using GNOME because it provides what I need and I don't need to spend an hour to configure it before it suits my needs. After all I'm lazy.
With respect to the fact that I'm quiet satisfied with GNOME, there is one feature I were always missing.
Because I spend much time with tiling and arranging windows on my desktops I noticed that I could need
a tiling feature. Something which was already a feature back in Windows 3.11.
GNOME/metacity does not have this features and given that a wishlist bug about this is open since almost 7 years
its unlikley that this will ever change. There are separate tools, which I recently learned about that can assist me with this. For example the perl script 'wumwum'. But this seems to be the wrong solution to a real problem. Additional wumwum does not work properly with metacity and so I'd need to another WM anyway, which lead to the point where I started thinking about integrating a true tiling wm into GNOME... once again.

First, I looked into awesome, which is a window manager I used some time ago.
But documentation about configuring it is basically an API documentation, with no obvious entry point.
It seems to be the best to study the whole API just to set some simple settings (e.g. a padding for the GNOME panel and some always-floating applications). I even thought about learning LUA, because it seems like a language which is quick and easy to learn, but honestly if I need to study a programming language and a whole API documentation just to configure a window manager then IMHO there is something conceptionally wrong with that piece of software.
After all I came to Xmonad. This window manager is using Haskell and I fear I need to learn this language as well if I want to configure weird things. But the wanted scenario is well documented and documentation for more common configuration settings exists all over the place so that I don't really feel inclined to learn more then needed.
Remember? I'm lazy.

Now I'm feeling quiet happy with this combination. It didn't cost me much time to get used to the most basic keyboard shortcuts or setting the whole thing up. GNOME and Xmonad work together like a dream team. I feel more productive now. As an additional plus I reinstalled the vimperator firefox plugin, because with my new desktop environment I more often use the keyboard for ordinary tasks like switching between apps or desks and I felt beeing able to quickly operate firefox with the keyboard, too, would be a plus. Well, it is.

When we were going on holiday lately we took some 2-3 hours of videos. It's a Panasonic HDC-SD600 camcorder we bought for that matter. Usually I'm connecting the camera to my Mac and import the videos into iMovie or such. During the holiday I copied the clips to an external USB drive to save the space on the 16 GB SD card. The plan was to copy it back to the card and import it later. This usually works, but somehow it did not for one backup. Sadly iMovie is so dumb that it can't import directly from those file. So I needed another way to import the movies. Kdenlive is able to import the movies as well as Handbrake on OSX is able to convert them. In the end I used ffmpeg on Debian to convert the clips:

for i in *.MTS ; do echo $i ; ffmpeg -i $i -deinterlace -threads 4 -sameq /srv/video/iMovie/ffmpeg/$ i .mp4 ; done

This converts the MTS files from the camera into some MPEG4 format that iMovie is able to import by itself. The quality seems to be ok on a first quick view. Or do I miss something and there's a command switch that will result in better quality? Basically I want the same video and audio quality as the source files have.

DebConf launched with a bang the day I arrived by bike I was up until 3am meeting and greeting in the basement lounge of the Carmen Columbia dormitory, where I was staying. No idea how I managed to be so awake for that. The rest of the week alternated between hacking like crazy on code for my talk and spending a lot of time socializing with Debian folks new and old. For the day trip to Coney Island, I joined the dkg-led bike expedition which ended up running to nearly 30 miles, which was a bit more than expected. The fact that this was all in actual dense city really drove home the scale difference between Boston and New York (I'd never been to NYC before this). We took several breaks to lounge around and eat and drink, so it took quite a long time even given the distance. I hadn't planned on seeing the baseball game that was a part of the trip, but I ended up going anyway and it turns out that a bunch of geeks at a minor league game is actually quite a lot of fun! I hope someone else will put some pictures from the bike ride and game online soon, since I didn't really take any myself. This was the first DebConf where I gave a talk, which resulted in me skipping almost all of the other talks, because my talk was on the last day and I reaaally wasn't ready at the start of the conference due to the rest of life being pretty crazy this summer. I missed some things I would have liked to see because of this, but ultimately I think it was worth it. The good news is: it went well! I was nervous until I actually started talking (never given a talk at a conference before), and then it was fine. If you missed it, the talk video is on the web in low and high quality; slides are here. The audience was great there were excellent questions and people were excited and interested in the project. I couldn't have asked for a better reception. After the talk finished I spent some time aisle-chatting with some folks, and totally failed to recognize Joey despite having met him before, because he'd shaved off his hair. DebConf was, like usual, both inspiring and exhausting. I haven't managed to follow up on much that happened during the conference yet. I definitely plan to do so, though, now that real life is calming down again. I'd hate to waste the post-conference buzz about SD. My todo list includes:

• Working more on the SD debbugs bridge to make it more stable.
  • I ran into Jesse soon after coming back and now have a better idea of how I'm going to handle a lack of history properly.
• Getting my patch to the Debbugs SOAP interface merged.
• Looking into the read-write SOAP interface work that was done as a Summer of Code project.
• After talking with Jesse I also kind of want to hack up a RESTful interface that could be used alongside the SOAP interface. It seems like doing so will make development of and using the Debbugs web API less painful in the future. This may be a rabbit hole that I don't actually want to jump down, but it's an idea.
• Maybe other help on Debbugs proper!
• Fixing SD bugs and generating more documentation.
• Thinking about and thanking people for talk feedback!
• Playing around with monkeysphere for authentication on my personal machines.
• Watching videos of talks I missed (this includes basically everything that didn't have to do with bugtracking).

If the Debian package of the day website were still alive, I would post this there. Since I still have the backups lying in my harddrive waiting to be restored in some other place, I'll post here. In the graphviz package there is a neat shell script called vimdot that will open vim and a X window showing your progress with the drawing, updated each time you save. Simple but really useful, probably not much people know it exists. Tags: Planet Debian, Planet Lugfi, tips

Yesterday I handed out how to vote (HTV) cards for the Australian Greens. The experience was very different to the one I had when I handed out cards for the Greens in the Victorian state election in 2006 [1]. The Labor party (ALP) hadn t spread any gross lies about the Greens and there were no representatives from the insane parties (Family First and Citizens Electoral Council/Commission (CEC)). So we didn t have any arguments among the people handing out the HTV cards. The atmosphere among the volunteers that were present was a good match for some ideals of a sporting contest. Everyone wanted their own team to win but acted in a sporting manner. When no voters were around we had some friendly conversations. One thing that was interesting to note was the significant number of families where the parents in their 40s deliberately snubbed me while their children in the 18-22 age range took the Greens cards. It seemed that for families with adult children there were two likely voting patterns, one was children voting Green and parents not liking it, and the other was when the entire family voted informal (when someone refuses all offers of HTV cards it s a safe bet that they will cast an informal vote). In Australia submitting a vote card is mandatory but making it legible and formal is optional. The last report I heard suggested that about 5% of the total votes were informal. This seems to be strong evidence showing that civics lessons are needed in high school. Also there were a disturbing number of people who stated that they didn t know which party to vote for when they were collecting the HTV cards. A HTV card has one or two sentences about the party and there are almost no requirements for truth in such statements. Anyone who votes according to such brief summaries of the parties is quiet unlikely to end up casting a vote that gives the result that they desire. The result of the election is a significant swing to the Greens, more senators and the first Green MP! For the lower house it seems that Labor will have great difficulty in forming government even when in a coalition with the Greens and some independents. It seems unlikely that the Liberal party could ever make a deal with the Greens, the Liberal position on almost every significant issue contradicts that of the Green policy, but there is a chance of a Liberal coalition with independent MPs. In any case it seems that the Greens will have the balance of power in the senate so the excesses of the Howard government can t be repeated. If you like the nail-biting drama of watching several columns of figures slowly changing over the course of several days then you would love watching the analysis of this election! Whatever coalition government is created is not likely to be stable and we can probably expect another election in a year or two.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2006/11/26/supporting-an-electrion-campaign/