• Work on ext4 has begun. It'll be ext3-compatible at some point.
• Linux shall get full NTFS write support (German article) in ca. one year, and Apple pays for it, as they want the driver for Mac OS, too.
• DevFS is finally dead. It was removed from the Linux kernel, udev is used as replacement.

Enough spamming, back to work.

I just purged over 1000 spam that accumulated in my home email while I was away. Those were just the ones that got through. By best estimate, I have about 10 times that which actually got filtered.

My biggest culprits seem to be stuff that comes through @gnu.org and @debian.org, since those aren't subject to the RBLs that I use.

relays.ordb.org
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org

I think I need to teach my spamassassin/mailscanner to go through the received headers and try the RBLs. IIRC it's an option that I disabled for some reason.

We hit Movies 4 Mommies again this morning, although some horrible construction project on Av Papineau around Jean Talon made us about 20 minutes late. They say that there are two seasons in Quebec: winter, and construction. I think they say that about a lot of places, though. Today's movie was The Devil Wears Prada, which reads much better in French on the posters at the theater: Le Diable s'habille en Prada. It's the story of a girl who wants to be a journalist and takes a job as the assistant to a powerful fashion publisher. It stars Anne Hathaway of The Princess Diaries as the earnest young striver and Meryl Streep as the Andy Warhol-like cruel and judgemental boss-lady. The girl learns about love, life, and being true to yourself. In other words, it was sappy dreck. But it was watchable dreck, unlike the horrible Click we saw last week. I didn't feel stupid for sitting through this movie, which is pretty low praise but for the Mommy Matinee there's only so much you can do. The only bummer is that Streep's character spoke in a ferocious, disdainful whisper, which was hard to hear over the crying babies. tags: movies movies 4 mommies devil wears prada crying quebec late

Lawn After the movie we stopped by the Canada Tire in March Central for some garden supplies. I'd promised Maj for a Mother's Day gift that I'd convert the 10'x10' square of weeds and trash outside the front door of our apartment into a nice lawn for sitting on and drinking white wine, but it was raining on Mother's Day and one thing or another got in the way of me actually doing what I said I was going to do. Until now. I had weeded the lawn on Sunday, which was pretty damn hard -- the weeds were waist-high and full of barbs and fluff and procrastination and other defense mechanisms. But I managed to rip out almost everything with a leafspan greater than half a centimeter, which left most of the area bare of plants. We spread out some grass seed given to us by friends Tara and Chris, but I wanted to give it a little more care. So I got one of those pushy lawn mowers at Canada Tire, and a big rake, and some grass seed with fertilizer mixed in since I'm apparently too lazy to mix it together myself. I assembled the mower when we got home, then mowed what was left of the grass down to a low buzzcut. I raked the little square like the dickens to get out the old leaves and dead grass and rocks and sticks and cigarette butts and wrappers, which had the side benefit of turning over the soil, too. Then I threw big handfuls of grass-seed with fertilizer pellets all over the resulting mulched up soil. Some water, some cleanup, and voila: I have what looks like a patch of dirt with seeds in it. Hopefully this will become a lush lawn sometime in the near future, because we also bought some beautiful fold-up wt:Muskoka chairs to put on the front lawn. I think these are just about the same as wp:Adirondack chairs, but I'm sure some expert in patio furniture could explain the difference. They are, however, my favorite kind of chair, and I'm looking forward to sitting out there with some white wine in a few weeks once the lawn grows in. Like, I dunno... maybe Labo[u]r Day. tags: lawn canada tire mower grass muskoka chairs adirondack chairs

Hey, Baby Speaking of national (international?) holidays, in the aristo calendar it's the 4th of July. Happy Independence Day, everyone. My favorite 4th of July media item is the great song "4th of July" by X from their album See How We Are. X has an X the Band myspace thingy, which seems to play 4th of July when you navigate to it today. Which, like, hooray for them. Go, X. Amita June and I danced around the house this morning singing the "America -- Fuck Yeah!" song from Team America: World Police. Sometimes I wonder how Amita June is going to feel about her "dual heritage" when she grows up. She's got a Canadian passport and an American one; I hope for her that she'll be better able to appreciate the world by having that dual perspective. I've heard that there are parts of the world where Americans living abroad get together on the 4th of July and have hot dogs and toss the ol' pigskin around and stuff. I don't know if there's an Americans get-together in Montreal, and I kind of don't care. It's not like we're stationed in Siberia here, and we need to congregate once a year to remember what "home" was like. Quebec isn't so far from the US that I feel homesick for American culture -- just homesick for the people. I think the US Embassy in wt:Ottawa has a big party, but the Montreal US Consulate doesn't seem to. Which is probably just as well -- it's at the top floor of a 30-story building, which would make barbecuing hard, and playing tag football on the roof would probably be dangerous ("Go long!"). tags: 4th of july x canada usa consulate montreal

.de vs. .it Of course, there aren't any Stars and Stripes flying in Montreal today -- all the houses we passed today were flying the Italian flag, for the World Cup semifinals. Montreal has a vibrant Little Italy, and the residents and other Italians in Quebec are going nuts for the Cup games. I can't imagine what's going to happen tonight if Italy wins. I saw one car driving around with a German flag on the roof today... I hope they guy makes it home in one piece, is all I can say. I like the name "Little Italy" -- it makes me think of a cross between wt:Palermo and wp:Munchkinland. Like, 1-meter-tall Italians drinking espresso and playing tarantellas and dancing and cheering with those tiny squeaky speeded-up Alvin-and-the-Chipmunk voices. Teensy-weensy Italy! Itty-bitty Italy! It's so cute! tags: italy little italy montreal world cup quebec munchkins

Grilling After reading the Meathenge slapdown for once-a-year barbecuers, I'm once again happy that I'm a vegetarian (more or less). I just can't compete in that league, and my little propane BBQ with veggie burgers, portabellos and an occasional trout is enough for me, thanks. tags: bbq meat grilling meathenge

Wikitravel 10K Party I just announced on wt:Wikitravel:4 July 2006 that Maj and I are going to throw a little Wikitravel 10K Party during Wikimania 2006. I'm going to be presenting about Wikitravel and travel guide wikis, so it's going to be an exciting event for us. On a side note, it looks like we'll be in wt:Odense for Wikisym. Lots of people we like there, and Maj has always wanted to be in wt:Saint Petersburg for her birthday, so this will probably be close enough. tags: conferences wikitravel wiki wikimania wikisym 10k

El Destino One of the great minds of the Internet goes incognito as El Destino on Pigdog Journal. He may be one of the best media commentators I've ever read, and I'm proud to say that I know him well. Or, well, used to. He's written two articles for Pigdog Journal lately after a 3-4 year hiatus (I think... something like that). His article on the Devo + Disney combination is really funny and good. I hope I hear his voice more often; sometimes I wonder what he thinks of the Web in 2006. tags: el destino destiny pigdog journal devo disney

Stephen Hawking and the Long View Dr. Stephen Hawking asked Yahoo! Answers, " How can the human race survive the next hundred years?". tags: yahoo yahoo answers stephen hawking

Yes, this is one of those postings I'd like to make in Spanish. However, a long time ago I decided my blog should be in English, as many of the people I write it for don't speak Spanish, so don't bug me with that ;-) Besides, I do think it is very important not to leave this information inside the country. International pressure has proven fundamental to stop some of our government's flaws.
So... What happened with our elections? Nothing yet. As many expected, and as we all hoped it would not happen, the results are too close to call a winner. Ugly and tiring trend, just as it happened in the USA six years ago, and more recently in Germany, in Per (twice in the same elections!)...
As it stands now, it seems the candidate I have been favoring and promoting for quite a long time will not make it. The first results from the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) show a ~1% advantage for the right-wing PAN candidate. That's a sad result for me and for those that think like me, yes... But what is even sadder is that there is evidence pointing out it might not be true after all. It is sad that we might end up winning. Or losing, for that matter. Why? Because it will show that we are not over the fraudulent electoral system that made my country famous for decades.
As a side comment: Blogs suck for interactivity. Either we read replies on the different planets that syndicate us (and come up with unfollowable threads) or we leave comments on people's blogs (and risk never being read, and never read an answer)... Damog [update No, it was not Damog, it was somebody else cowardly using his name :-/ ] left me a reply to my previous post that I think I should address: Regarding the FeCal website I launched with some friends a couple of weeks ago: A site meant to point out the lies on the campaign of the right wing candidate, Felipe Calder n. And, yes, the site is meant (now) to attack him. Dirty, yes. But definitively, it was the only way to answer, and it was the only way not to let his lies dig further into the collective mind of the people. And to a very good exent, we (not only FeCal, but the whole L pez Obrador camp) managed to turn the trend, pointing out Calder n's uncleanness and disrespect for the people and the law. And even if in th beginning we thought of making a site that would just make fun of the Feliz-pillo, we ended up writing or refering to articles we think are relevant. And after the elections are really over (the IFE will start doing the exhaustive official vote count only tomorrow, and it can take even until next Sunday), we will see how to transform this site (or at least this group of people, we will see what happens next) into an observatory, following the politicians' decisions and trying to avoid they are as obvious as they have always been.
Anyway, back on track: Hundreds of complaints have been reported already. A site that keeps track of many of them is El sendero del Peje al 2006 - There are many criticisms we can make to this site, and up to now I have avoided linking to it too much... But their work is very important today. There are many photos of the vote booths' sheets of results, compared with what is registered in the IFE's preliminary results program, and they show slight differences - Strangely, in the 1% margin. Strangely, small enough so most people will not complain. Strangely, just the exact amount needed to give the elections to the right-wing PAN party.
From the first minutes after the results were announced, L pez Obrador told the media that there are around 3 million missing votes. Today, the IFE president (and a polemic figure himself, obviously) Luis Carlos Ugalde admitted those 3 million votes exist, but their data shows irregularities. Lets see what happens. Lets hope the irregularities do not mean the results will be modified.
There are also reports about the data reported by the preliminary results being too perfect, following a linear trend that would be impossible to achieve in a real vote count. The results of both candidates have a constant distance, going up or down together, depending only on the third candidate (a distant third) going slightly up or down.
There are also reports of voting booths that were already captured and disappeared from the system, to reappear some time later - with very slight differences.
So... It is too early to call this a fraud. Yes, many of those things might happen because of real corrections, capture errors or such.
I want not to call fraud. I want to trust the authorities no matter what they decide.
They are just making it harder for me -and for a hundred million Mexicans- to do so. Lets see what comes in the next days.

I just set up this antispam method, I hope it will be efficient.

After two and a half weeks of travelling, I'm happy to be home. In the past couple of weeks, I've been to UDS-Paris, then to a week of meetings at our head office, and then a quick trip up to Ottawa to see fireworks, snowbirds, Jim Morrison, Carlos and some other friends.

But now I'm *tired*

This Canada Day Weekend brought a few fun things:

* Kurt has finally moved to Montreal, which will make my work life easier.

* scjody also just moved here.

* I got some parisc gear to make the hppa Ubuntu port work again. Carlos has promised me an NPTL check-in to libc-ports, and I've promised him testing, feedback and bugreports.

* I finally purchased the keyboard from mkp, so for the first time since grade 8, I'll be able to take up Piano again. Interesting for itself, but also since the Recorder Sylabus has a piano co-requisite. I want to start learning now so it's not a crazy catch up.

I'm happy to be home.

Gar! It looks like life's not so rosy after all with this blog. YULblog, the Montreal blog aggregator, apparently uses TrackBack for updating the aggregator. So I'm going to have to build some kind of trackback system into WiLiKi. At some point I should probably collect my customizations for WiLiKi into a nice WikiBlog? add-on -- but there's still a lot Todo before that'd be ready. On the same subject, it seems that I'm getting more and more frequent WikiSpam on the About This Site page. I'm going to have to start instituting some anti-spam measures. Using regexps to refuse submissions with blacklisted URLs works very well for Wikitravel (see wt:Wikitravel:Spam filter), so I'm tempted to try it here. tag: wiliki trackback yulblog aggregator wikispam wikitravel spam filter

Piknik missed We were going to head to Piknic Electronik yesterday -- we had a great time a few weeks ago, and Piknik is such a harbinger of Montreal summer -- but Amita June is going through some freaky personal schedule issues, and she wouldn't take an afternoon nap. By the time to leave for the Parc, she was wiggin' out from sleep deprivation, and we couldn't really force her to go out to the island and dance to big fun beats. Which was kind of a bummer, since our friends Meg and Patti were out there, and it would have been good to see them. They came by on Friday night for Pizza Night Chez les Bads, and we talked about Ignition 2006 (yes, Montreal Burners, it is going to happen... I think) and kids and dancing and weddings and fun. Amita June and Meg get along like gang-busters; they have a lot of fun together. So instead of going out to the Island Amita June and I went across the street to Parc La Fontaine and played in the baby pools right next to the playground. How is that for lucky? We have two huge pools, about 18 inches deep, right across the street, next to the baby playground. Oh, and there's a good bar a block and a half away. This is the greatest apartment ever. We moved in this time last year, and I feel so at home here now. So many important things have happened to us in the last year -- Amita June, Wikitravel -- and this apartment has been a part of it. We're going to look for a house to buy in the fall, but right now this feels like home. tag: 1481 rue rachel parc la fontaine amitajune pizza night meg patti piknik electronik parc jean drapeau montreal home

Two months I almost forgot that it's my two-month blogiversary. Yes, I just made that word up. And it's months in the French Revolutionary Calendar, not, like, real months. But close. tag: french revolutionary calendar blogs

My mom For those of you who asked: yes, my Mom's doing great. She was bit by a rattlesnake last week (!), but now she's back on her feet, the swelling is down, and she's doing all the stuff she did before. Good for her; she's pretty resilient. tag: mom rattlesnake recovery bite

Microburst I now officially have a new phobia, since a Quebec woman was recently killed in her trailer by a microburst. Apparently a wp:microburst is a localized gust of wind that can reach speeds of 100 kph, kind of like a tornado. Unlike a tornado, a microburst doesn't spin around -- it goes straight down. It's usually accompanied by rain, and can be devastating. These freak winds happen several times a year in Quebec. Great. tags: quebec microburst death trailer wind

OpenID My current work project is enabling single-signon for all the language versions of Wikitravel. My preferred method for this is OpenID, since it will allow sign-on not only to Wikitravel language versions, but in the future other sites as well. So I'm writing an extension for MediaWiki to allow logging in to MediaWiki with an OpenID URL, and for making MW an authentication server for other sites. I realize this is a little roundabout for Wikitravel's needs, but for interfacing with new partner World66, as well as other MW sites like Wikipedia or Wikia servers, it'd be fantastic. I'm using the great OpenID Enabled libraries from JanRain. They're working out pretty well, although they're a little flaky around the Yadis edges. Given that I don't really care about Yadis -- sorry, LID and inames -- having to deal with those errors is pretty annoying. Even so, I managed to get a working consumer-side system going today. It was pretty exciting logging into my development machine for the first time with an OpenID, and having it work. Hooray for OpenID! tags: openid mediawiki php lid openid enabled inames yadis wikitravel

I returned last night from my first UKUUG conference, which I'd been at since Friday (missing the Thursday tutorials, but arriving in time for beer on Thursday night of course ;). Good to see the usual faces, as well as meet some new ones. Ta to JD for providing me with crash space (and recommending the wonderful Thai). I don't think my talk, Hardware Hacking on a Budget; the Amstrad E3 was as good as it should have been. The audience were much more hardware savvy than I expected and I went through it too quickly. Still managed to talk up until lunchtime due to the previous talk having started late so I guess that worked out ok. And hopefully some more people will get involved in the E3 work. It was amusing to see that TFM isn't the only person who decided to replace a broken heating system with something hooked up to a linux box. And Ben's talk on DVD creation was good as I'd been fighting with that myself last week. Meeting SteveC was good as well - I've been pleased by the number of people I'd been touting OSM who have now either gone off and starting marking things up or at least started thinking about how they can make tracks. All in all a great (if hot) weekend and too much to mention all here. Definitely something I'd go to again.

Good news for us: Wikitravel was selected as Featured Commoner for June 2006 by Creative Commons. There's a long interview with me and Maj about the origins of Wikitravel and why we think it's so cool. It may be the best interview I've seen about the project yet; I really recommend it for curious people. tags: wikitravel cc featured commoner june 2006 interview me wiki maj

Creative Commons plugin for Microsoft Office I'll say it right now: kudos to both Creative Commons and Microsoft for the new Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office. I'm not a frequent user of Microsoft Office, but I do get lots of .doc and .xls and .ppt documents over the transom, and it's good to know that Creative Commons is doing something to make it possible to Free works in these formats just a little bit. There's been a bit of controversy on the cc-community list about the move, but I think it's great. It took me a while to warm to it, but I really like Creative Commons's approach to Open Content. It reminds me of wp:harm reduction theories. I think they're not universally loved for this, but I also think it's been a big part of the success of the project. tags: cc microsoft microsoft office plugin

Sucks-Rules-Votes-o-Meter I keep forgetting to ask Don about making a microformats-oriented version of the Sucks-Rules-o-Meter. After all, the VoteLinks microformat isn't much more than a semantic-web-formalized SROM, is it? I figure a plugin for Nutch to look for vote-links would do the trick; and I bet Technorati would be cool about adding an SROM system to Pingerati. tags: votelinks srom microformats technorati don marti pingerati nutch

100M We were driving from wt:Culver City to wt:Santa Barbara yesterday, and we stopped in wt:Calabasas for a soda and some breastfeeding. I had on K-RTH 101, the soi disant "soundtrack for Southern California", when on came a commercial for HP laser printers. We were astounded to hear that there have been 100 million HP LaserJet printers shipped since 1984. Yes, one hundred million. That's one HP laser printer for every 60 human beings on Earth. Do we really need that many laser printers? Why? What the hell are we printing so much? It's pretty obvious that 100 million people haven't bought laser printers; much fewer people have bought more than one laser printer over and over. HP seems to think this is something to crow about, but I've looked into a lot of laser printers, and they're full of some pretty heavy iron. Those old ones aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Some quick math suggests that that's about one million metric tons of trash generated principally by HP. Probably the majority of HP printers have been smashed to bits, like the one in Office Space. Whose fault is it that we've gone through 100 million of these poisonous, heavy, clunky metallo-plastic whizzbangers in 20 years? Does the company have a responsibility to make machines out of reusable, recyclable materials? To not make its growth based on wp:planned obsolescence? If you're marketing the machine as a disposable device, shouldn't you have a plan for where they go at their end of life. Why aren't more machines upgradeable in small chunks, so you don't have so much material going into landfills? One hundred million laser printers, buried under piles of banana peels and diapers, or embedded in the ocean floor, or rusting in basements and warehouses. It doesn't seem like something to celebrate; it seems to me to be pretty depressing. tags: laser printer hp 100m

Now is a time where I feel the pain of supporting so many architectures again. I'm now not speaking about m68k, because that doesn't hurt the release team at all any more. I however speak about a dependency chain I blogged already about recently, which holds up removal of xorg-x11 (6.9) from testing. Now, we look at getting newer packages in. We basically need to update rhythmbox. However, rhythmbox is not yet build on sparc, because there some build-dependencies are not yet uptodate on sparc. Rhythmbox is not the only issue, it's indirect dependency qt4-x11 FTBFS on hppa with "*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0x00142838 ***". More issues to come, on another hint I'm trying to get resolved, I detected an ICE (Internal Compiler Error) on ia64. In sum, there is really some arch-specific pain available right now. I'm not happy with that at all.

Coming up on being a full year of only dialup internet at home. Slow dialup at that, generally 28.8. Most people I know who use the net a lot switched to high speed years ago and never looked back, while my internet speed graphed over time is a square tooth wave[1]. I seem to have learned to cope with a slow network, both in the tools I've chosen to use, the things I work on, and the ways I work. Oddly often slow internet turns into an advantage. Watching apt download the new pdiffs (which relieved at least 1/5th of my current pressure to get a faster connection), I seem to be able to see the steps it's taking to update better than people with insanely fast connections. Checking up on d-i's memory use the other day as it downloaded itself, I could get a much clearer picture of which components used how much memory. Loading a web page, I can tell if it's built on 200kb of crap html or a well-designed style-sheet. Using different revision control systems to download software trees, I can tell which have innefficient protocols. It's the effect of being able to turn a crank and watch the lights as the CPU processes one instruction at a time. Remember the first computer you used that could scroll text, maybe in a directory listing, faster than you could skim it? Did that feel like an improvement or a new burden? For me this happened with 486 66 machines in DOS as opposed to the older 33's. Now we have to remember to pipe certian commands through less or fiddle with a scroll bar to see their full output. Now when I am on fast internet, I often seem to feel like too many things are going on at once. I can no longer flip over to my mail reader and read one of the messages that downloaded this half hour while a web page is loading; instead the page loads in an instant and I find myself triggering one mail download after the other, since after all, each takes only seconds, not tens of minutes. And as the mail is downloading I can't watch it out of the corner of my eye and get a sense for whether I have a lot of new mails in one mailbox or the other, whether spam is attachment-heavy today or light, whether there's a lot of work mail today or not, etc. Instead it's all there at once and I feel compelled to go deal with it. The last time I had really fast internet at home, I ended up turning off my wireless for hours at a time so I could concentrate on coding or reading instead of the available distractions. Now I've inverted that pattern; I'll seek out a fast internet connection and spend a few hours soaking up the full slendour of the net, but then I'll go home feeling shakey and nervious and get back to getting something actually useful done on dialup. Sometimes I feel we've lost sight of the reason why we want computers to be fast; it's not an end into itself, it's just one more means to let the computer accomplish what we want it to accomplish, when we want it accomplished. Sometimes that's not right away; sometimes, the Italians tell me, you want a nice long compile to go out for a cappuccino. This all seems very interesting to me and ripe for more research. The rare bits of user interface that intentionally slow things down rather than operating at maximum possible speed (for example, edge resistance) are, I suspect, some of the hardest bits of UI design out there, and probably the most influenced by actual users. There are tie-ins with calm computing, all kinds of interesting UI and scheduling issues (for example, which download does the user need right away and which isn't a priority, as it's not really wanted until tomorrow), all kinds of stuff that we basically don't consider today in day-to-day program design. And if I could buy an old-style instruction-level crank and front panel lights USB dongle for my laptop, I would, in a heartbeat.

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[1] Old-timey-net "fast" at college, then dialup, upgraded to ISDN, back to dialup, then upgraded to ADSL, then blazing fast nearly symetric DSL, then back to dialup, then pretty fast cable, then crazy latency satellite, then back to dialup.

Recently, a proposal by Alejandro R os was made in debian-devel-spanish to provide a Debian planet in Spanish to syndicate blogs from developers, maintainers and contributors in that language. After working a bit (and after my trip to Cuba), we are able to show this to the public. I wish more people contributing with Debian writing blogs in Spanish, could ask their addition by writing to the mailing list; we are only 10 persons there so far. Join us! http://planeta.debian.net/

A few days ago I blogged about liboil being in the way for gst-plugins-base0.10, which itself blocks xine-libs being built, which is needed for gnome to go in, and the old xorg-x11 to go out. Now, we made some fantastic success. Liboil is in testing. However, now we get to more issues: xine-lib FTBFS on sparc with the wonderful error /tmp/ccoqKu6u.s:6222: Error: Illegal operands: There are only 32 f registers; [0-31]. Gotcha. Also, totem now needs also the new version of rhythmnbox in testing - and rhythmbox does not only depend on totem, but also on dbus (0 days), gnome-media (which waits for nautilus-cd-burner, which has itself a bunch of issues open), and the libsexy transition. Let's see how long it takes to sort xorg-x11 out.

Since mutt can’t tell me how many messages are in each procmail filtered IMAP folder I wrote a little script that could. That combined with a cronjob and a HTML template, I now have a listing that I can check from time to time. Didn’t realise I was subscribed to 60+ lists.

It’s almost the end of financial year in Australia, so what better time to take stock? I’m actually a bit surprised at just how much I need to do that – I knew being DPL would involve some new challenges, but it’s barely two months in and I’m already just about in shock. Guess it serves me right for putting “increasing Debian’s tempo” in my platform…

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The two other roles I’ve been in that I would have expected to prepare me more have been Debian release manager, and secretary of Linux Australia. They’re both similar in a way – the release manager does a lot of cat herding within Debian, and has to make some calls that will leave people aggrieved; and Linux Australia has some contact with the press, and some reasonably serious projects going on. So a few issues were completely expected: a random initial slashdotting, a press report, an interview or two, some requests for quotes in articles and press releases, or ongoing opposition and arguments from dedicated Debianites who don’t happen to agree with me on some decision. There were other things that were new and interesting though not really surprising. The leader@ mail address turned out to have just as much spam as I expected, though also some unexpected interesting stuff too, including my first ever personally addressed open letter – in this case by Keith Curtis who also wrote the 10,000 bugs away from World Domination article that got slashdotted a while back. A tidbit:

Everyone agrees that Ubuntu couldn’t exist without Debian, but I also believe that Debian is better setup to take Ubuntu where it needs to go. There are hints that the Ubuntu team feels like they brought a pork chop suit to a lions den. Ubuntu’s user base and development team is growing exponentially, but I believe they could get there much faster with more of Debian’s help.

Keith also forwarded an open letter he’d written to Mark Shuttleworth, and had some interesting comments on the whole Java thing. As well, I suddenly started receiving SPI board mail, as Debian’s advisory representative to the SPI board, and started getting a couple of requests for authorising expenditures (Debian UK reimbursing Matthew Garrett for travel costs to the Gnome Advisory Board meeting in 2005) or providing a Debian representative for a meeting or joining the Google Summer of Code. And then there were the cool things I knew absolutely nothing about, like the excellent news Christian Perrier passed on about the launch of Dzongkha Linux, featured in news reports from Bhutan, India, and Australia. Of course, I completely expected that all this would overload me a bit, and I’d end up getting distracted from what I wanted to do, and not being able to keep up with stuff other people wanted me to do. To help with this a little, I delegated Steve McIntyre as, essentially, a co-DPL, and he’s been working on a few things, including the now successful switch of irc.debian.org over to OFTC, and another fun little endeavour that I won’t spoil just yet. Things started getting a bit weird as I was preparing to travel off to debconf in Mexico – with some frustrated comments from damog and Marga and Gunnar, which was odd coming from the conference organisers themselves; and independently the reinflamation of some old tension on the debian-installer team. That got compounded at debconf itself, with the controversy over the inclusion of Sun Java in non-free extending not just to the lists, but an article in LWN (with a followup) as well as numerous other places around the net. That issue came to something of a climax when John Goerzen (with whom I’ve had some entertaining disagreements in the past) questioned whether SPI had been sufficiently involved in the decision (“I am becoming increasingly concerned at the unilateral method in which you and/or the archive maintainers have taken this decision.”), to which I responded fairly curtly to defend the way Debian makes decisions (“If SPI wish to withdraw from their relationship with Debian, then that’s entirely possible to arrange. I don’t think it’s at all proper that you try to obtain veto power of Debian’s activities as conducted by the duly authorised members of that organisation.”). Nothing’s really news there – flamewar on Debian lists between influential project members? Next thing you know the sun will rise in the East every morning, and then where will we be? What’s not so normal is those flamewars getting front page coverage on slashdot, or noted in an article on distrowatch. As far as Debian’s concerned, we had a couple more rounds, both in public and on the developer only -private list, then moved onto actually getting the legal advice John wanted. That’s actually still pending, and the debate has pretty much abated while that’s going on. And meanwhile, Wouter Verhelst, Manoj Srivastava, and others have started a much more productive look at Debian’s relationship with SPI and similar organisations, which has continued on to a draft of a constitutional amendment. But there was more stress and chaos at debconf than just the Java stuff, but what’s really impressive is the way people ended up dealing with it. Take damog for example:

Just as Tore said: This is the best DebConf ever. Isn’t it great? I started really enjoying this DebConf once I stopped worrying about bullshit, once I stopped worrying about senseless things and started to really give a shit about almost anything. Why do I need Gunnar to tell my girlfriend Ana, “you picked up the irresponsible one”? Why do I have to worry about the DPL giving a shit or not on the Latinamerican Debian community, even after being invited to meet the guys or to attend our BOF? […] I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this. […] But after leaving all of this behind, I think Ana and me are having a great time sharing time with friends around us (the friends, los cuates, we are here for).

After seeing that post, and figuring out who damog actually was when he gave a lightning talk towards the end of the conference, we had a chance to briefly chat about what was going on – somehow I hadn’t taken in the invitation to attend the BOF, and had been told it was all in Spanish anyway, so hadn’t gone; meanwhile they’ve been thinking about holding a Debian miniconf in Latin America somewhere and wanting to know what sort of support they can get from the rest of the project – particularly moral support rather than financial, at that. Hopefully we’ll see news on that score in the coming months. But really, damog was right in the first place anyway: why care if the DPL supports you or not? Debian’s about everyone doing what they think is good and worthwhile, and that combining to produce something great – it’s not about what some guy who got six votes more than the next guy happens to think is important. But support is important, whether it comes in the form of a DPL saying “good idea!”, or something else. Gunnar’s response to the latter, eg:

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. […] Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg’s talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

And in the end we got quite a bit out of debconf6, for example more movement on the forthcoming release, improvements on i18n stuff, a new publicity project, movement on updating python, amongst other things. Who knows if the next debconf will manage to be anywhere near as much of an experience, but at least we’ll find out fairly soon where it’s going to be (though that process isn’t without hiccups of its own). Post debconf, there’s also been a notable influx of trolling going on too; with the most obvious and odious example being the insane, anonymously-posted prayers for a female developer’s death. Fortunately those have mostly been ignored as the mindless spam they are, though one might argue that Marcela Tiznado’s acceptance as a DD on her birthday, and the inclusion of women.debian.org in the official debian.org namespace are a more appropriate response to that sort of harassment than any sort of direct reply anyway. Not all our problems have conveniently been resolved right now, of course, the difficulties related to the installer team I alluded to above are ongoing, and at the moment a really good solution is still eluding us, though development continues anyway. And then, of course, there’s more to come – half the point of posting this is so I can stop worrying about all the stuff that’s been and gone, and get on with interesting things like the next point release, and the various other projects that I’ve let languish for the past few weeks.

No. Time. To. Blog. But these few lines I wanted to post nevertheless: there's some neat new packages in Debian since today: Nexuiz (nice ego shooter), rcov (code coverage for Ruby), and Democracy Player (RSS video downloader/viewer for videoblogs, packaged by yours truly, as promised). That's all.

I passed my second diploma exam today, again with 1.7. Mostly theoretical computer science: logics, computer assisted proving and proof verification systems, automata theory (buechi, muller, ... so mostly on trees and infinite words, not just undergrad DFAs) and coding theory. The professor told me I could easily have done better if I had had learned the formal definitions and that better (just as the professor did in the previous exam on databases, index structures, dataminig and knowledge discovery in databases). I had expected doing much worse in this exam, since I had big trouble concentrating the last months (the heat wave in germany and the worldcup certainly did not help either). I ended up learning just one or two hours a day on average, which is really really little. Way to little. So I'm quite happy with these results (especially since I don't care about the grades too much anyway), given the amount of work I spent. What I'm really unhappy with is my lack of concentration these days. I used to be able to focus very well. I never was good at learning stuff literally, but I used to be able to sit down and tackle problems for hours at a time until I was really into the topic. I havn't been recently, which made me really wonder if I would be able to continue my studies as is... well, todays result, too, showed that even when not focussing I'm doing quite well. Two more exams coming up - one on Algebra (starting with galois theory, so the contents of this course are apparently usually taught as "abstract algebra" or "advanced algebra" in the U.S.; no matrices, linear transformations or vector spaces involved), the other on programming, modelling and data languages, so UML/OCL, XML/CSS/XSLT/other markup, logic programming techniques etc. Then all that remains to do to finish my degree is a six-month thesis, which will hopefully be on generating UIs (this may include a text UI) from schema languages such as XSD.