At DebConf I whined at Mark Shuttleworth about my fears that Ubuntu is reducing Debian to a supermarket of components (an analogy that was introduced entirely innocently by someone else during an unrelated talk). At least, that seems to be the kind of comment that I later heard some Ubuntu people characterize as whining. Anyway, NewsForge ran an article about DebConf that included a mention of that, and I had to follow up with a comment explaining a bit more about the problem. I'll reproduce it here:

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The problem with everyone treating Debian as a supermarket is that it ends up with Debian == sunsite^Wmetalab. Giant un-integrated collections of software are not particularly interesting in a lot of ways. My main motive for contributing to Debian is to make Debian the best distro I can; I don't mind if others use that work, especially if stuff gets contributed back. But it's long been clear to me that the most important added value to Debian is not adding another package to the shelf, but finding new ways to integrate our software together. When you're working mostly above the level of individual software packages, to have your work mostly appreciated on the basis of "component contained in Ubuntu" is not very motivating. If that motive goes away I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another peice of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc. Some of these are exactly the areas in which Ubuntu is apparently better than Debian, and in most of those cases, contributing individual patches back to Debian is simply not enough for Debian to share Ubuntu's improvements. It puts Debian at best in the position of wasting a lot of time trying to play catch-up and figure out how a collection of patches to different packages fits together into a coherent overall improvement.

So, I'm back from Mexico, and already massively offended. :-/ Why the hell does anybody still use DHL as a carrier when they admit on the phone that they are unable to reroute a parcel, or even tell where it is? "We have so many parcels, it is impossible to tell that". WTF? Isn't that what you have been fricking paid for? Well, I've mostly switched away from them. I only wish other people would do that as well. FedEx, on the other hand, has left a positive image on me. Despite the sabotage attempts of the reception staff at Oaxtepec (they told the courier that I had left weeks ago) they managed to get my stuff to me. How they did that? The person on the phone was able to find the parcel and call the driver and ask where he was, then schedule a meeting.

I'm writing an application in Ruby that makes heavy use of XMLRPC (the application of XMLRPC-over-Unix-socket fame), and so I'm using Mock Objects to mock out the XMLRPC client proxy and provide an interface that doesn't involve having a whole other infrastructure running on my laptop so I can run my test suite. For those who don't know, mock objects are objects which look and superficially act like the real objects you might use to communicate with an external service, but don't actually do the communication -- instead, they return canned responses to your calls. Why is this useful? Well, imagine that the real object talks to a SOAP service on the 'net (such as the Google search API). It means that every time you run your test suite, you need access to the Internet. The external service may also cost something everytime you talk to it -- or it may be impossible to use to test, since there's statistics generation or something going on that means that hammering it for test purposes is just impractical. In addition to returning values to your application, mock objects will usually record what has been called, so that after your test run is complete, you can also verify that all of the methods you wanted called have actually been called. This means that you can have a good idea that what you wanted to happen to the service actually would have been done. Handy. Some people have a (justified) ditrust of Mocks, because it's easy to make a mock object that doesn't perform like the real one (and hence invalidate your tests), but they provide a necessary evil in cases where you just can't use the real object when running your test suite. The XMLRPC proxy I'm using has a bit of a quirk. Everything runs through one method on that object -- XMLRPC::Client#call(). This seems really limiting, especially in a wonderfully dynamic language like Ruby. In reality, it's not too bad -- it makes the object interface easier to mock, and you couldn't emulate the whole thing with method_missing anyway, because you can have various Ruby-illegal characters in XMLRPC method names. The downside to this all-in-one-method thing, though, is that simply verifying that #call() has been invoked a dozen times doesn't really tell me much about whether the mock was used the way I wanted it to be used. My chosen mock object suite, Test::Unit::MockObject, whilst otherwise excellent, is (or rather, was) missing the ability to verify the arguments that are passed to your calls -- you can say "I need methods x(), y(), and z() called", but you couldn't say "I need the call y('foo', 'bar', 42) made". Of course, this change the mock object class is non-trivial, and needs to be tested itself (it'd be pretty lame if a class intended to facilitate automated testing lacked a test suite of it's own). I added a bunch of tests to the test suite, and got some good results. I had a couple of false starts, where I wasn't checking most of the corner cases (where bugs lurk in the shadows), but eventually I got a test suite that was fairly complete, which drove the new features I needed to a good place. So I carted my newly enhanced mock object class across to my production project, and off I went. Except that I was getting some downright weird failure messages when my code wasn't invoking the mock object the right way. Why? Because I hadn't tested that my failure messages were appropriate. Why was that? Because the assert_raise assertion in Test::Unit doesn't have a facility to make sure that you're passing back the right exception message, only that you're passing back the right exception class. Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot? Over. (This space intentionally left blank for me to insert the correction to this claim that the lazyweb is sure to provide) So I had to write a new assertion (assert_exception_message) which checked that both the right class and the right message came back. This code, of course, needs to be tested too, because otherwise you can't be sure that your test code is performing right. At this point, I was writing test code to test a new assertion I'd written so I could test the mock object class I had modified so I could test my application. At this point, things got a bit "meta". It got a bit difficult to separate out the tests from the tests' tests. But I fought through the brain melt, and shortly thereafter came out the other end with a properly working piece of actual application, and all was well in the world. By now, a certain Mr. Tendys is probably rubbing his hands with glee, as he gets ready to espouse at length about how this whole post just proves how utterly useless test-first programming (or even testing in general) is for producing economically-viable software. Let me analyse what I "spent" on getting all this functionality, though -- about 3 train trips home -- maybe 4 hours of time total, including writing the extra tests in my application to use the wonderful new features I'd made. That's not much, in the grand scheme of things. I've wasted that much time in a day skiving off work in the past because I was frustrated with what I was trying (and failing) to program, usually because I was swamped with bugs. What did that four hours of my time buy me? Heaps. I can now better verify my software works as anticipated. I have confidence that my software is a lot more robust than it was before. My tests identified several issues that passed my eyeball check, but blew up when I tried to actually use them in a particular way. But with the help of my tests, I identified the problems quickly and went on my way. Since I was working in a localised area of the application, I was immediately familiar with the code, and could stomp the bug almost immediately. If I'd only done end-to-end testing at the end of development (or worse, released it with the bugs still in there), the debugging would have been much harder because I'd forgotten little details about the code. I reckon that benefit, alone, has probably saved me 4 hours already, since I've spent whole days hunting down little bugs in an ad-hoc fashion in the past. I'm fairly sure most any programmer can empathise with me there.

... yesterday evening, we fell into bed. Interesting: Although I managed to sleep very well in the airplane for something near to 10 hours (and so did alphascorpii), we still slept for another 16 hours when we got home. I think I'm getting old; that's the worst jet lag I ever had. So here is a list of things you can do at 3:00 AM in the morning, when you can't sleep because of jet lag problems:

• Wait for your luggage to be delivered to you (British Airways finally managed to bring me my lost backpack; after promising me, that it's already on the way and will be delivered to me next morning, it wasn't delivered before 20:00...)
• Sort all the snail mail from the last weeks
• Read through all the mail from last weeks
• Watch the streams from the last weeks tagesthemen
• chat with the other jet lagged people
• chat with the people still in Mexico
• Call your family telling them you got home in one piece (after not telling them, that you've left)
• Get angry, because your landlord hasn't done anything about the wet walls (well, at least the broken water pipe got fixed) or the mold on them
• Chat with your girlfriend whether landlord is the proper word for that
• Finally drink some real vaso de leche milk
• Write some notes for DebConfs final report
• Throw them away
• Synchronize your private mirror
• Pay old bills
• Agree with other, that we should make a Wine, cheese and chocolate session next year
• Write useless blog entries
• Adding stuff to the DebConf fortunes

Perhaps I just finish reading The Da Vinchi code before someone, who went to the movie, spoils the ending. See you in... wherever DebConf7 will be.

Another Debconf has come and passed. This was my 3rd conference and surely to be one of the more memorable, partly because I showed up for the whole time (and am now traveling with 4 other DD’s in Mexico) and partly because of a few problems that plagued my visit. There is no doubt that I had a wonderful time but some of my attention was drawn away from enjoyment toward crisis management. For the first few days, it was due to computer problems (now sort of fixed) and then the last few days I had “Biella Hardware” problems in the form of one of the worst combo sore throats/ body aches that I have had in recent memory (now sort of fixed but not entirely). Now that I am in Oxaca, I hope to spend a little time blogging about this year’s Debconf but before I wanted to pass along what I think has been one of the more amusing experiences thus far in Mexico. So yesterday a group of us (Jeroeun, Martin K, Micah, Vagrant) rented a car to head off to the Southern city of Oxaca. I have actually never rented a car in a foreign country, and I was a little concerned about everything from price to roads to cops. Amid my nervousness, the employee at Thrify was sort of reassuing and quite nice but he gave us some unfortunate news: he warned us that as we reached this one particular circular intersection in Mexico City we would be stopped by a cop (because we are tourists) and basically bribed. This was not surprising news to be but I was surprised at how upset this made me. (maybe because I have never had such an experience and thought I would mangle it when the time came to pass off the money or offset the bribe or whatever). Anyway, after we packed 5 bodies and copious luggage into our compact Nissan, we headed off somewhat prepared to face off the cop and decided it was best I drive as I was the Spanish speaker. We made our way through the congested streets and headed toward the intersection and as we got closer, I thought to myself how are they going to spot us within all this traffic? But you see, the thing about this intersection is as soon as you make the turn left, you hit a light and need to stop for a long time. And you see, this gives the cop ample time to switch on the tourist radar and spot the noticeable white bodies. Sure enough, within 30 seconds of stopping at the intersection, a Mexican cop walks over and there is where the fun began. So he basically told me that I did not use my signal lights for turning when I made a left and that this infraction would cost me US $120. At this point I started to get a little freaked (I already dropped too much money on a rental car) but I remained calm and told him basically in Spanish With all respect, officer, I think I used my light because I am in a foreign country and am very aware that I must follow all traffic rules. After a little back and forth, I moved on to the bribe stage. While we were told that 100 pesos (10 US) was the typical bribe, we, being cheapskates, just offered 5 US. And then, magically, at that point, the officer said, ok just go ahead and be careful not to repeat the offense next time. I was shocked. I mean there was some money being offered right there and I was sure he was going to ask for a little more. But he backed off. Why? I think it was a combination of factors. Ok so perhaps he was surprised that I knew what was going on. Perhaps he was uncomfortable that I knew Spanish. But I think he the tipping point was due to cultural factors. I think he found it odd that there was this little woman driving a car with 4 grown and pretty large men. Given the gender dynamics in the country, this was just beyond his cultural comfort zone and he realized that I was badassss, and he just backed off. Ok, so I don’t really know if that is what happened but I like the explanation and am glad I got off the hook

I’ve just finished recovering from an unexpected few days away to York. Unexpected because I had only intended to spend one night there, but there was some work being carried out on the trainlines over the weekend so in the end I spent three nights there, and barely staggered home on Monday morning in time to start work at 9:30. Still nice to spend three days with my sister, her husband, and their new cat Nero. Once I got back I uploaded a new revision of xen-tools, so the Debian package is now bugfree. There might be more movement in that software soon. I’m currently experimenting with rpmstrap which can be used to install non-Debian distributions. Nifty. In other news, despite valuable suggestions, I’ve managed to install cfengine on 69 hosts and do useful things with it. So far I’m mostly copying files around, restarting services, and running simple jobs from it. (e.g. installing nullmailer, setting up syslog-ng to log to a central host, etc.) Still it is all going well.

My mother was admitted to hospital yesterday due to weeks-long fever and other symptoms. They say it’ll take a week or two to figure out what’s wrong. I hope it’s just a simple reversible infection.

Today was the previously mentioned Tour de Cure ride. I'd managed to raise the requisite $150, just from hitting up people I host services for, which made it nice and easy (thanks again guys!). The weather forecast was fairly ominous, but the rain stayed away until we got back. The ride itself was fairly leisurely. The highlight was cycling through Palo Alto and checking out the very nice looking houses. 25 kilometres was pretty easy. It took a little over an hour, so I think I'll try the 50 kilometre ride next year. Some photos from the ride are here.

Sun is worried about compatibility in a world where Java is open source. I can’t say I blame them, and I say this as someone who spends a majority of his time thinking about compatibility in the Linux world, where we’ve managed to hold it together but still have a lot of work to do to match the relative consistency of the Microsoft alternatives (Windows and .NET, among others). After all, a platform is useless if there’s not a single, standard way for developers to target it. Question is: Does open source inherently lead to compatibility problems? Hardly. How many incompatible versions of, say, Apache are there? Or the Ps of the LAMP stack (Perl, PHP, Python)? Or MySQL? GNOME? KDE? BIND? CUPS? The only reason “Linux” and compatibility often come up in the same breath is because the term is used to describe so many different things. Yes, “Linux” has compatibility issues if you’re comparing Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian, but the actual “Linux” used by each of these “Linuxes” (that is, the Linux kernel) have few if any compatibility issues. It’s more the bits around the edges, like slightly different versions of core components with slightly different ABIs or APIs, not to mention the independently developed subsystems for configuration etc., that lead to the compatibility issues. If anything, the fact that the various Linux distributions share so many of the same open source components makes them far more compatible than the various implementations of UNIX ever were. James Gosling, the father of Java, highlights JavaScript as an example of the situation they’re trying to avoid in a recent podcast with Dan Farber. Today, he explains, there are dozens of AJAX toolkits, and the main reason for this is the need to paper over incompatibilities between the various JavaScript implementations. He’s absolutely right. If anything, though, the JavaScript situation is a good example of what might have been if we knew as much about the power of open source in setting standards in the 1990s as we know today. There are numerous JavaScript implementations today because there wasn’t a de facto standard implementation developers could just use when they needed one way back when (like there was with Apache etc. and wasn’t with some of the problematic “Linux” technologies like configuration management). What if there had been an open source JavaScript all along that became a de facto standard like Apache did? Would the AJAX world look any different today? Ironically, then, Java looks a whole lot more fragmented on its current trajectory as the various open source efforts (Apache Harmony, GCJ, GNU Classpath, etc.)—which exist only because the de facto standard implementation isn’t open source—mature and are more tightly integrated into the Linux distributions. So, what lessons does Linux have to offer Sun as it contemplates the future of Java and, more to the point, how to open source it? First of all, far from being a surefire path to turning Java into a veritable tower of babel, open source could actually help promote compatibility in the Java world. For one thing, if Sun’s Java implementation was open source, history shows there would be no need for another implementation. Case in point: Remember the other Harmony project? Secondly, what’s in a name? Absolutely everything. It’s entirely possible to open source Java without diluting the Java brand and the compatibility guarantees that brand promises. Most famously, this strategy has worked very well for Red Hat—Red Hat’s platform is open source, so you can fork it, but you can’t call the result “Red Hat”, which preserves the compatibility guarantee a successful platform requires. It’s not too late, but we’re rapidly approaching a time when it will be. For one thing, the open source implementations are getting better, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s damned near impossible to get it back in (see, again, JavaScript). As I said the other day, “open source Java” isn’t so much about licensing as it is about ubiquity, though licensing can get in the way of ubiquity. We’re almost there. Let’s take the final step we need to take to make Linux/Java as well integrated as Windows/.NET.

The air has been hot but dry, so it's been quite bearable if you drink enough water. On Wednesday morning, we woke up to the sound of rain. I went to the window and looked through the glass slats to the basketball court outside. There were puddles in the middle of the dry pavement, and it looked like it was raining only in those puddles! The droplets just evaporated as they hit the ground. This was a promising start to the Debconf day trip. A large group of us met at the front of the resort, near the reception, where there was a parking lot full of buses. Silver buses that look like they drove out of the seventies. We milled about before boarding, which took a while, because of the "herding cats" problem. Once we were all aboard, we drove off. I was sitting on the first bus and we puttered along until we got to the highway. We drove past roadside stalls and restaurants until we got to a town. After going through that, we got to open fields and then a series of hills and valleys. The little bus climbed the largest of these hills, like the Little Engine that Could, and we finally pulled into a parking lot. The museum in front of us was a green concrete structure, which contained an exhibit. We stood in front of a model of the area, while our tour guide explained the history of the site. We were going to visit the ruins of an old city, Xochicalco, which was built as a fortification on the top of this hill. Since I was never a docile student, I went around looking at things, taking photographs, and having fun. I found the staff lounge where there were people sitting around chatting. There was also a large pool of stagnant, alg clogged water. Nearby, a dog with fleas was scratching and biting herself. I decided to give her a wide berth. The rest of the group started heading up a stone path to the old city, so I ran alongside to catch up. By the time we got to the top, we were greeted by some pyramids. Well, they weren't really friendly pyramids, and more like imposing pyramids. I ignored the tour guide again and started taking photographs. I spotted a Tlachtli court in the valley below, which seemed to be in remarkably good shape. The front gates of the city were built to restrict entry, as is normal for a fortified city. In order to actually enter the city, you have to climb about a hundred narrow steps, which is something pretty difficult to do if you're invaders. According to some of the signs that were placed there, it appeared that the city collapsed due to a revolt, as there were plenty of skeletons found near the gates. And because there was plenty of soot on the stones, which indicated a large fire. At the top, we climbed on some of the pyramids. Or rather, other people walked up some stairs and I climbed up them. Which got me in trouble with the local security guards. I suppose I wasn't very good at being sneaky. I should practise more. We left the site and headed to a large restaurant that was just on the side of the road. It's sort of in the middle of nowhere, with only a motel across the street. The staff was warned that we arrived, but they still looked a little panicked, as we crowded inside and took over their restaurant. They had this buffet table set up, which we queued up to serve ourselves. Since it was a buffet, the food and service wasn't of spectacular quality. However, since we had hundreds of people, the food was consumed really quicky and it was very fresh. So it was the tastiest sponsored meal I've had so far. At the restaurant, they kept some pets. There was a dog, a pair of birds, and some others. One of which was the most adorable lizard, who won everyone's hearts. A crowd gathered around Biella Coleman as she petted him. I think she wanted to take him home. After we stuffed ourselves, we climbed back on the buses and drove to Cuernavaca. It had started raining again, lightly, but we got off the bus just after the sun came out. We were greeted by a marketplace in the center of town and given half-an-hour to look around. Since it seemed pretty touristy, I found Biella and Martin Krafft who had the same sentiments, so we walked around the central part of town and played tourist. We found a juice stand that was selling mixed drinks. Martin decided to get an interesting drink, which apparently had too much banana in it. We then decided to find a public restroom, which we did. It advertised very clean washrooms, for only 5 pesos per person. We had reports that it was spotless. Afterwards, we wandered about and found a Japanese-fan store that sold action figures and anime. We then discovered a tobacconist, which got Martin excited. He attempted to buy a cigar, but the person inside refused to sell it to him. It turns out that this was just a friend minding the store, who refused to engage in any business transactions, by proxy. Martin left, and I was disappointed once more by people's misunderstanding of simple economics. The bus returned us to the reception after a rather long drive and I stumbled into the HackLab. On the veranda, people had gathered to have a liquor BoF. Plenty of foreign liquors showed up, including a bottle of Sortil ge that I brought, and they were consumed rapidly. People had trouble staying awake by now, but I'm unsure if it was because of the alcohol. Maybe it's because it was Wednesday.

I'm really amazed to see so many users of the ion3 window manager here at DebConf6 in Oaxtepec.

Yeah, last day was a day I'll remember, folks. I mostly ran all day doing tons of stuff I'll try to describe later because I ran out of time and I'm slowly lagging out of my promised blogging of "one entry per day" (hope some of you enjoy it...but anyway, It'll be great help for me to remind all this in the future) But, up to now, this Friday was the best Debconf day ever and, no I'm not on some drugs that makes you happy. I'm just a happy Debconfer. Orga dudes, you rock. Speakers, you rock (special mention to Meike). Attendees, you rock. Local people at the hotel, you rock, even though you sometimes rock manyana (still no tilde on that keyboard). Mexico, you rock (and this is why I'll come back). This was from happy bubulle. More later.

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? Why do I need to worry about people skinny dipping, since finally it’s up to them? I started to meet people and to hang on with several old friends and began enjoying the meeting here. Why do I need to worry if people are watching the unpleasant and poorest side of Mexico (bad Internet connections, towns lost in the desert, hookers, rain breaking roofs, etc, etc, etc)? Why do I even have to worry if people get sick or not by drinking water or whatever? I enjoy people here, thanks to all the organization cabal, thanks for your effort and your time on this. I surely cannot hide my displeasure on some of the things here, but I didn’t do anything to make it better, obviously, since I’m an irresponsible person. 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).

Strange day today. It began pretty badly for me, being quite sick after a bad night. Even some swimming in the pool didn't really help and I was feeling pretty bad to begin the day. I first went to Jim Getty's BOF about the One Laptop Per Child project. Interesting talk, but maybe a bit quick and a bit too fast talking for me (Jim should attend Meike sessions about talks even with his great background in doing talks, I'm afraid). Then I moved at about 11:00 to the Tower where I actually stayed up to 19:00. There I attended a few deep and dense talks and BOFs. Keith Packard about X.org was good, though here again I would advise native speakers of English to pace a little bit down and think about their non native audience, especially when using few slides. Interesting questions and discussion in this BOF, really. Steve and Andi about release management were perfect. They made their points very clear and we now exactly know what we have to do to releas on time. I woul dlike to deserve a special mention to Andi who made huge efforts to improve his talk skills, slow down when talking and all that kind of stuff he probably did benefit (again) from our wonderful alphascorpii speaker training sessions. While everybody was going to lunch, I quietly stayed in the tower, visiting the local bathroom at regular intervals. I used this occasion to try my laptop setup for the video beamers. Actually, in short, it sucks. It appears that I'm only able to do 1024x768 at 60Hz if I want to have both my laptop display and the beamer. In that case, the beamer display sucks. Otherwise, with only the beamer, it's perfetc, but of course not really convenient. I think I'll use Javier's laptop for our talk. The afternoon was filled with two workshops. The first by Frans Pop about D-I internals did obviously not teach me many things but I was of course proud, just like he was, to see the graphical installer receive a big applause from the audience. His demo went well (I know that Frans likes really well done work) and He kept his audience fairly well awaken ! We ended with Javier's workshop about security bugs. Here, a perfect knowledge of the topic and a very well prepared demo (having tried that once, I'm really admirative). Javier was sometimes a bit fast on some topics and I will certainly have to slow him down for out Saturday's talk but indeed he made it well. Kudos ! After many hesitations, I finally decided to come at the "formal dinner", a Debconf tradition (and I can't miss stuff like that). Even though I'm not a party man, I enjoy these moments where all Debconfers share fun. Of course, as many have already written in their blogs, this was a really special dinner with many events, most of them being good stuff...and one of them being a real shame (the person responsible for starting that one does not even deserve to be mentioned and, no, I'm not talking about Holger or Ana in case someone would have worry). We came back quite early (Feeling better, I didn't want to play with my luck and try all the dishes) and I even had an opportunity to exchange a few words with Erinn, which I most often have no occasion to do. Back to the hacklab and a very intense hacking session, mostly talking with Otavio, Grisu and Nicolas to prepare this morning's BOF about i18n infrastructure....which will happen in 1h now, so I should stop blogging..:-) Strange...but great day. This is Debconf, dudes...

The night started great. Tables arranged in a swirl, happy geeks gathered around a good meal, it was going to be a great formal dinner.

Then came AJ and his megalomania. Well, it was kind of fun at the moment, although I still haven't cooled down after seeing his contribution to the Java in non-free thread. He even compromised himself by showing up hand in hand with Ted Walther.

After that, Ted tried to spoil the dinner, and almost managed to do it. Please people, correct me if I'm wrong as I was a few meters away from the incident and didn't follow everything. It seems the person Ted is calling a "local businesswoman" was a prostitute. As he doesn't want to name people, I'll do it: when learning that, Holger tried to throw Ted out of the building. Unfortunately some people stopped him from doing it. Holger, thanks a lot for having the courage to give this guy what he deserves, and already deserved before the provocation, when most people (including me) just stand still when facing such unbearable behavior.

Of course Ted tried to act as a martyr, as shows his blog entry. Ted, I do hope things won't be "resolved to your satisfaction". And anyway, you won't need to denounce the people who deserve to be awarded instead. Why have you come to Debconf for, anyway? Uploading broken versions of your packages, or writing stupid and provocative blog entries?

Then, the mariachis tried to improve the ambiance but only managed to prevent people from talking to each other. The real fun came from the rain, which fell so hard it entered the building in a magnificent cascade, leaving us eating and walking in a few centimeters of water. Another great moment was the power outage, during which we were lightened by camera flashes.

The food had so much success that I didn't have time to taste more than one dish before everything was wiped out. Still, despite Ted and despite the lack of food, this was a great evening, one of those I won't forget for sure.

I'll upload pictures later, but in the meantime you can have a look at Barry Hawkins' blog.

I’m moving to a new studio apartment in June, about 200 metres to the west from where I currently live. This naturally causes a snail mail address change. While very few people need my snail mail address, it’s listed in some of my free software as an alternative contact point, so I’d better get the word out on the change. (I will, of course, update the addresses in my software as I release new versions.) My current address is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Helokantie 1 A 16
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

My new address, which becomes valid in the beginning of June, is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Sienitie 2 B 27
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

(Some post offices may require a country prefix in front of the postal code; use “FI-40640″ in such a case.)