Registering for the Mesh Conference this year, I was a little dismayed to see so little French content on their Web site. This opened my eyes to the lack of French language text on a lot of grass-roots and community-oriented Web sites in Canada. I think that the large (~25%) portion of the Canadian population that's lost by not having French text and community input in a site can be really damaging to a community effort. Especially for issues that are dealt with at a federal level (like information rights, open content, open source software, freedom, privacy) it's vital to get a cross-Canadian site developed. So I've written an essay (yes, again) about Bilingual Web sites in Canada and how they could be improved.

After two weeks and a bit it finally happened: I hit austria again. But, first things first. I guess everyone noticed by now that at the start the network wasn't our best strengths. I helped as much as possible, collected network cable back from one path to lay it out at a different one just to find that the about 200 m were a bit too short (or rather, me was lying the cable with too much safety). Though, it was too long anyway to be relyable, to it was cut in the middle and a small access point was put in. Later it had to be replaced because we were running a bit short of specific power supplies. But it wasn't too bad, waiting for some more rj45 plugs and other things even allowed Ganneff to spend some time in the pool and relax a bit. And given that there seem to have been a few (vegetarian) people less than registered for sponsored meals allowed stockholm and Vagrant to get extra dishes to get fed. People during the debcamp mostly enjoyed themself, mao was played, fights for the gay vegetarian sign, tetrinetx on homer when only local network was available, and I managed to translate the new wesnoth tutorial into german. It wasn't clear by then that the new release will be delayed due to other problems until after the debconf, but in my opinion the tutorial is one of the most important parts of any games because it explains the basics, so I wanted to be sure that there won't be another release without a fully translated one. About enjoying oneself: I tried out the skirts I brought with me and considered them absolutely comfortable. You'll find me more with one, especially when it gets warmer. It helped me to be more "myself". Also I enjoyed the weird looks and repeated questions about my shoes — although it was often that I was walking barefooted; but that got a bit of a pain, especially after noon when you were able to boil eggs on the stones. And given that I forgot myself when I switched from blue/red shoes to red/blue ones you don't have to send in your guesses when it was done because I can't tell who would be the winner anyway. ;) The end of the week came, the Debian Day was here. Closer to its happening more and more people arrived and it was becoming more crowded in the hacklab. The network became more and more stable, the video streaming setup got finalized, and everything looked alright. Some of the mexico city people stayed for the night and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere (and a beer or two ;)). The debconf started for real, the talks started, people were busy all around, zack added me to the alioth pkg-vim project to continue helping with the hijacked debian specific syntax files. Haven't done much yet beside a checkout, still pondering where I can bug around most ;) I was looking forward to bubulle's BoF about the i18n infrastructure. It was really inspiring, and I collected some ideas for what the tool-to-be-created should support. The second BoF later the week just showed that others were mostly thinking along the same lines, so I hadn't much to add. Still I am looking forward to join the effort to make it happen — I was playing with the idea about such a tool for ages now, and I guess this is what it will make it happen, finally. Christian is so much more able to get people interested and together for making it happen than me... :/ There were some more talks I could mention, like Enrico's talk about Advanced tools for wasting time (yes, I have submitted my gnu.cow file in the meantime), or Erin's and aj's Debian's Debugging Debacle: the Debrief (in which I finally got around to fix a RC bug incidentally), and the talk by bubulle and jfs about State of the art for Debian i18n/l10n of course, which features some of the conclusions of the two part BoF. Some of the evening featured interesting things too, like a cheese BoF, the everywhere featured formal dinner with its mariachis, the waterfall and the blackout; special effects you wouldn't be able to plan as well as they happened — though Martin Ferrarri had a small accident with it when water rushed down onto his plate and spilled the sauce over his white shirt and the table. And then there was the hard liquour BoF where I quit after the eggnogg. The week passed, I got my hair dyed and rid of my beard right in time for the group photo. Thank you nattie, a thousands time, it went better than I expected! Really like it. I didn't attend the fun photo in the pool the next day, was a bit late after the talk, didn't had my bathing slip with me, was worried about my newly dyed hairs and was nervous... because a person I was looking forward to meet again was late. But gladly only late, so I got rid of my nervousness and enjoyed the last official talk (formerly mentioned i18n talk) of the week, and explained to some attendee that even in languages like French, German and English (yes, no mistake) there are still areas we have to struggle with all of this, like when keeping things up to date and the likes. It was the last evening in Oaxtepec for me because I refused to leave by bus at 4 in the morning, rather wanted to spend the night in Mexico City to at least be able to have seen a tiny bit of it and eat something my tummy enjoys completely. :) I guess I don't need to point at sandino's gallery about that evening anymore, thanks to Gunnar. And yes, I'm mentally disturbed, but that shouldn't be anything new to people who know me for a while, or is it? ;) This night was too long (less than 4 hours of sleep is even for debconf not much), so I rather went to bed early after a small walk (just 2 blocks or such) in the city and a nice dinner with friends who are missing the nice time too and was wearing too big sort-of shoes. Went to the airport in the morning by taxi whose driver gladly was able to speak english. Met zack and Martin Ferrari again there, and some other people with whom I was taking the same plane with. They were hacking along on the airport, found the open wifi, using power supplies from different spots. Bubulle already wrote about the two loud guys, gladly I wasn't too close to them, and plugged myself into the music and movie channels from the plane. The showed Last Holiday (which I really liked, although in the ending I started to cry — mostly because I started to realize what I was leaving...) and two spanish movies of which I don't remember the titles. People started to hack away in the temporarily set up hacklab and we started to wonder how much power they might have, though they cheated: They used two battery packs... In Madrid some more people parted and we were down to 5 people. I bought totally overpriced playingcards so we could play Mao, had a short nice session and spread the word. We did hack the baby room power supply and hacked along a bit more, and then Peter and me were off heading to vienna, finally. All in all I really enjoyed it. Although there were its down times, sunburned, my butt hurting a bit because in the end I did jump from the 10m platform into the pool, it still was a really nice event and even though I guess many people tried to enjoy themselfes quite some things were acomplished. If not really codewise, then at least social-wise, which will benefit quite well in the future, I'm sure. Hope to see you all next year, wherever that might be.

Rachele and I went to Montreal for the day this past weekend. It was the longest time we’ve ever left our one year old daughter Esther—just over twelve hours with my parents. Remarkably, she survived, and didn’t even miss us. Every time I go to Montreal I’m reminded of just how much better Canada is. For example, Senzala, a Brazilian breakfast place in Mile End, served the most delicious gourmet poached eggs (pictured here with Rachele): We also had a great time visiting the Botanical Garden, a vast park that dwarfs anything Boston has to offer. Here are a few examples of the flora—click on the image to see the full size version. Along with poached eggs, beautiful gardens, and socialized healthcare, what more could one ask for?

This trip to Bhutan is really an experience to have. First of all, that's my very first trip to Asia, so many things are actually new to me. I'm just like a 12-year old kid...:) I have been incredibly lucky to have flights booked on Emirates. This airline company is by far the best I have ever used. Aircrafts are all brand new (or I have been lucky enough to have theit only two brand new ones). Cute entertainment system which JoeyH would have loved hacking and Erinn would have loved putting games on it (maybe some were from your company, dear?). Large seats....and plane filled at about 30%, so 3 seats for myself in the Dubai-Bangkok flight and 2 in the Paris-Dubai. Geesh. My co-travellers from the trip to Mexico would appreciate the difference, I think. The aircraft crew is one of the friendliest I have ever seen (and cutest, should I say?). Iberia dragons are far away. Very international crew: on the plane from Dubai to Bangkok (which was continuing to Australia and NZ), the total number of languages spoken by the crew was 21. Not exactly as many as languages supported in D-I, but not that bad, indeed. I would have been tempted to continue to Sydney and Auckland. I bet I would have easily found hosts over there to stay for a while (hello to my friend Andrew "karora"). But I stopped in Bangkok. Huge noisy airport, with work IP-over-DNS on the WiFi...nice. As I had to spend nearly 12 hours there, that helps. I was tempted to go sleeping in a hotel, but the only easily accessible one is a luxury thing, for USD280 per night. Dude. So, let's spend the night on the hard seats in the waiting areas, trying to sleep with a bunch of other lost people. The stop in Dubai was an experience. The airport is simply...a big mall with luxury shops everywhere (and bloody expensive stuff: it seems that as long as you write "duty free" on shops, all jerks come and spend their money to buy stuff they could have bought for half the price in their country). However, seeing the city from the top is somehting one has to do once. Pictures to come on my gallery. I'll maybe blog again from Bhutan, if I manage to get time enough (I bet that I'll be very busy as there are a few people over there that I'm really impatient to meet and talk with). And, agin, nice pictures from the airplane to come, I hope (Himalaya, dude!) See you in Timphu!

La semana pasada encargu una impresora Brother HL-2030. Lleg en unos d as, la saqu de la caja, la enchuf , fui a la web del fabricante, baj dos paquetes Debian, los instal con un par de comandos y funcion a la primera. Aunque en las especificaciones de la tienda no dec a nada, investigando un poco parec a que el fabricante s que proporcionaba drivers para Linux. As que la encargu , sin investigar mucho m s, pensando que si funcionaba en Linux ya har a lo que fuera para que entrara en Debian. Pero ponerla en funcionamiento, y en red, en 3 minutos estaba muy por encima de mis espectativas. Felicidades (y muchas gracias) al equipo de Brother. Y si alguien llega a este mensaje buscando informaci n sobre la impresora, comentar que es de las pocas l ser (monocromo) que he podido encontrar por debajo de los 90 euros y casi la nica con el precio del t ner por debajo de los 60 euros. Por este precio, ni siquiera hay que tener una peque a oficina para que salga rentable, basta con ser un usuario normal que a n le tenga cierto apego al papel.

Last night (30 May) at midnight the new Quebec smoking law went into effect. People who've been to Quebec before may naturally think that this law required mandatory smoking in all public areas, but in fact it was just the opposite. They actually banned smoking in restaurants and bars!

By Monday morning, it was my turn to get up ludicrously early. I managed to catch a hot shower, which was very welcome. You see, they turned off the hot water late at night, and didn't turn it on early in the morning. So if you kept hacker hours, you'd get a cold shower before going to bed. I bid goodbye to my sleeping companions as I rolled my suitcase out of the room and checked out at the Reception desk. I sat on my suitcase with laptop in hand, as we waited for the others to show up. We were carpooling to town in some taxis, as I had an awful bus experience coming in to Oaxtepec. It was in this hour that I taught myself how to blend exposures in the Gimp. There was a lot of fiddling with alpha channels and masks, until I hit upon exactly the right solution. By the time I was done, a rather large group of people had gathered about me. It was about then that four taxis pulled up and we threw all our luggage into little hatchbacks. Then Nattie, Ben, and I squeezed inside and we were off! Instead of choosing the toll highway, our driver decided to take the country roads. This was not such a poor idea, since we got a good look at the countryside. I had never seen fields of cactus before, but I suppose that makes sense. After all, it is edible and requires very little irrigation. We drove along the winding roads and passed through town after town. In one, we had to stop momentarily. That's because a herder was driving his flock of sheep through town. We saw them turn a corner, and then our car was surrounded by a sea of bleating wooly sheep. Then, as quickly as they appeared, they were gone. As we neared Mexico City, we noticed a rather large mountain in the distance. A mountain that spewed smoke. Our driver informed us that it's Popocatepetl, a local active volcano. He pulled over by the side of the road and let Nattie hop out to take photographs. The taxi behind us pulled over as well, and they spent a few minutes snapping shots. I noted that where we had stopped was rather hazy, so I just snapped a few photographs when it appeared in my window. I lucked out, I suppose. You could tell when we approached the city, as the traffic got heavier and things got louder. I awoke from my brief nap to see us pull through a toll-booth and on to a six-lane highway. We managed to get to the international gates at the aeroport, have our luggage unloaded, and paid our driver for his troubles. Then we checked in. My luggage tested positive for explosives about four times. The security guard for Mexicana kept swabbing away with test strips, each time coming up with a different result. Eventually, he printed up a chart, stared at the squiggly lines, and let me put it on the conveyor belt. Then, I met up with Nattie and Ben, and we also bumped into Peter. We bought some postcards and sat in a restaurant. There, we ate overpriced American food and wrote back home. Or rather, Nattie and Ben wrote charming postcards and I dashed off twenty-three hastily worded missives. Then, we hugged goodbye and it was time for me to board my flight. Ben graciously offered to post my mail, because I had run out of time. Liftoff was quite exciting. The wind was gusting so as we took off, I got to see the engine shake furiously in its housing. And we did a little hop as we pulled off the ground. A little girl, sitting behind me, shrieked in distress when we did that. I really don't blame her. Landing in Montr al was a lot safer. Even though we had to go through layers and layers of clouds to do it. It was sort of depressing, actually, flying from gorgeous blue skies into a city covered by grey. But I had brought the sunshine back with me!

I awoke to a very early alarum clock, which I shut off quickly. I dragged myself out of bed to see ze_dinosaur off, but he was far more prepared than I was. I waved goodbye and then collapsed back into bed. Sunday morning was pretty difficult for me. In fact, I only got up in the afternoon. I ate some bananas and showed up to the HackLab where I socialized for a good while. Then we realized that lunch would be smart, so we went to the market. Instead of tortilla based food, we managed to get some stewed meat and deep-fried vegetables. That was rather tasty and I had to waddle back. I spent the rest of the day touching up photographs instead of going on the waterslides. I'm now wondering if that was wise. But at the time, it seemed like a lot of fun. What wasn't so wise was trying an iced treat when I didn't want one. I got some money out of an automated teller and saw a shop across the street that sold iced things. Well, I crossed into the shop and ordered one. They scooped out some ground ice, topped it with mango syrup, splashed it with lime juice, and topped it with salt and chili powder. Now that I think of it, it would be tasty and refreshing if you drank lots of water all day. Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that our last meal in town should be wonderful. So I rounded up a rather large group of people who wanted to go out for dinner, expressed that we'd be going all fancy, and generally herded them into the fanciest restaurant in town. Some people initially complained about the potential cost, but the convival atmosphere and cloth napkins overruled this. So did the tasty platters of beef. We were all quite happily stuffed. Afterwards, a few of us strolled through a park attached to a local historic site. There were plenty of benches to sit upon and we contemplated the night air. I'll have to say that Mexico's nights are a lot less chilly than Montr al's. But the resort had all the lights on, so you couldn't see any stars at all. By the time we had strolled back to the HackLab, people were disassembling the network. I lugged a big server into a van and brought a few more boxes of things there. After the heavy lifting, I took a few more photographs of people, wonderful people, before deciding to retire. But the camera never does capture the fleeting moments.

Yes, Bugzilla 2.22 is not yet in Debian, I know. And you know what?
That’s my top priority in my todo-list. Just be patient, I’m working on it. It’s just that I had a lot to do in real life recently and didn’t manage to find the time to focus on my pretty-complex-and-patched package, named bugzilla. By the way, as there are sometimes requests for help about the bugzilla debian package on irc.mozilla.org (chan #mozwebtools), I created a new chanel to gather those discussions: #debian on the same server. Feel free to join if you like.

Oh yeah, time to get rid of that silly USB WLAN device I had to carry with me for Linux wireless networking. Ubuntu Dapper supports BCM43xx almost out of the box, heck it is even displayed correctly in d-i, albeit not working (or at least I did not try it). After enabling universe, fetching bcm43xx-fwcutter, running the provided script (/usr/share/bcm43xx-fwcutter/install_bcm43xx_firmware.sh) and a reboot I have WLAN working on my iBook. How nice. The signal strength displayed by both iwconfig and network-manager is sticky at 100%, though.

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t ever actually blogged that yes, I accepted enrollment at MIT. Hence the preparing to move from Camillus, New York, a little suburb outside of Syracuse, to Cambridge, Massachusetts. (I.e. the Cambridge where you get to pick your email!) Not only that, but I have a job. A job at the MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media Group. They use Gentoo (on cygwin…), but I forgive them at least for now since it’s a heck of a lot more interesting a job than the crap retail jobs that my friends are queueing up for the summer. Though it means that I won’t be able to party with them for the last summer before university, since I won’t be home. Why I have the job is mostly Mako’s fault. So, I was staying at him and Mika’s place when I was down visiting MIT, and I met him outside the Media Lab the night I arrived since it’s right across the road from East Campus, where my undergrad student host lives. I got an awesome tour, got to check out the shiny toys, and got introduced to a few people. A day after I get home, I have forwarded email from Mako in my inbox from one of the people I was introduced to (another grad student at the Lab), who’s looking for people to hire this summer. Zing, nifty. The position’s basically a temporary UROP, hence the post title. A month and a bit later, I’ve paid my June rent for my sublet in Cambridge and am making lists of stuff to go shopping for. If you want to be helpful, tell me something you took to college and never used. Though keeping in mind that I’m in a small, rented house for 2.5 months until I move into my dorm in late August. Or, point me to quick and easy recipes. I’ve never really done a lot of cooking before, so I’ll be using the kamikaze “cook or don’t eat!” method here. I have 9 days of high school left until classes let out for exams, and I’m pumped. I’ll only have one final exam this year since the only classes I’m taking that have ‘em are Economics and AP Physics, but I managed to cut through the numerous layers of red tape necessary to get out of taking the New York State physics regents exam since it’s given on the very last day of testing, and I am leaving before then. (I’m heading down on June 19th; it was supposed to be the 22nd.) Seriously, red tape. Talk to guidance counselor, talk to academic dean, talk to guidance counselor again, talk to admissions officer from MIT whom I’m acquainted with, give guidance counselor his phone number so she can fulfill the school politics requirement of having official confirmation of okay-ness, get the go-ahead from guidance counselor afterward. The economics exam is on the first day of tests, w00t (June 12th, IIRC). Commencement is June 17th. Walk across the stage (I’m giving a speech!), then drive across the Northeast to the rest of life.

Ana was intrigued by the idiom to open a can of worms tonight. There are two English idioms I like, too: to stir the pot (when you do it, what used to be in the bottom rises to the surface) and the shit has hit the fan (no need to explain what happens when viscous matter gets in contact with an object that revolves at a high speed). But one word that intrigued me, in turn, was aftermath . What’s it? The feeling you get after solving a particularly difficult mathematical problem? Well, no. Apparently a math is a mowing (of grass or hay or whatever), and the aftermath is the grass that grows after the first crop of hay in the same season (Webster, 1913).

As part of my work leading the Debian Creative Commons Workgroup, helping to fix problems in the Creative Commons licenses that make them unsuitable for works in Debian, I've been very interested in the relationship between wp:Digital Rights Management technologies and Free Software licenses. So I've written an essay on the subject of Free content and DRM, to encapsulate my thoughts on the matter.