I spent Monday to Friday in Vienna, visiting some friends from school. Quite a few people I know moved to Vienna after finishing high school (or later), so I thought I'd go there for a few days to meet up with some of them. On Monday evening, I gave a talk at Debienna, the Debian group in Vienna. I started with one of my presentations about quality issues in free software, but given that we were a small and informal group we often interrupted the presentation for discussions. During these discussions the generic issues I mentioned were applied to Debian and we discussed a number of problems in Debian and what we could do about them. I think it was quite interesting, although it stretched the talk quite a bit and some people were getting restless towards the end. This was also the first talk I gave in German. I originally planned to give it in English but then thought I'd try to do it in German. It went pretty well, although I couldn't think of a number of words on the spot and just used English words instead. (Not counting technical terms, obviously, which I didn't even try to translate.) On Tuesday and Wednesday, I mostly stayed in bed working on my laptop. This was, after all, only a pseudo-holiday and I had plenty of work to do. On Wednesday evening, Veronika (the friend I was staying with), maks (Maximilian Attems) and I went to B72 to see a concert by Das Bo. There was also a DJ from Waxos who was great. Das Bo was pretty good too, although he talked too much crap between songs. On Thursday, Veronika and I went shopping and I bought lots of new clothes. Friday morning, just before leaving, I met with Stefan Holek to do an interview about release management in Plone for my research. He raised a number of really interesting issues.

Via reddit (which kicks the crap out of slashdot and digg): What I've Learned From Failure.

The link above is a long, but fascinating piece. I've had to become a lot more interested in how to manage software projects since taking on Xorg maintainance, and the same lessons seem to scale up well to how Debian as a whole manages itself. This article talks about some of the major problems that I've seen myself deal with, and the experiences of this guy echo my own over the past year very strongly. Here's a few examples:

"Getting away from weak teams, another source of failure is the omnipresent threat of "chickens." A chicken is not necessarily a weak individual, but a sign of a weak management structure. A chicken is an individual who has significant authority over your project, but does not make a personal commitment to the success of the project. Significant authority includes the authority to impose constraints on the team."

I like this and I've noticed it in the XSF and in Debian as a whole. People are free to work on what they want how they want, and this tends to work out well for us. But we also have no structure in which people must actually commit to what they do. As such, there's no accountability. This frees Debian developers from the preassure of having to work on something they don't enjoy, but it also creates abandoned packages, ignored bugs, and frustrated release schedules. In the past I've described a need for a stick in addition to a carrot for Debian developers, and the sentiment here echoes that idea. I've spoken with Manoj about his conception of personal responsibility in Debian, and I think it may truly be the bedrock on which Debian needs to rest. I still don't have a good mechanism for this yet though.

"Another sign of a weak team is poor development hygiene. There are dozens of development practices that seem trivial to the inexperienced outsider or to the manager focusing on "big wins." Examples of development hygiene include source code versioning, maintenance of an accurate bug or issue database, significant use of automated testing, continuous integration, and specifications that are kept current (whether incredibly detailed or high-level overviews)."

This is a something I myself have had a problem with over the past year. Branden was extremely good about keeping the XSF svn repo and the BTS up to date and well managed. I've done just about the opposite over the past year, and it's bitten me a few times. This however, was a conscious decision on my part, knowing that I was so far behind upstream that it was going to be hard to effectively manage the BTS without a recent codebase deployed to our users. So I focused on packaging instead, and luckily that road is nearly finished. Also fortunately, everyone else in the XSF managed the BTS for me, most notably (in alphabetical order by last name) Julien Cristau, Michel D nzer, Eugene Konev, and David Martinez Moreno, and they've managed to keep it relatively tidy. I'm going to spend some serious effort over the coming months to clean out the BTS so it's more manageable both for users and developers again. Luckly our SVN repo is in good shape still, so for the most part we're doing pretty well here. Debian as a whole also seems to be doing better at this, with lots of public svn repos springing up on alioth.

"It's mandatory to fail early. You need to know you're in trouble right away. That's essential when taking over an existing project or starting something new. You have to find out how you're doing within weeks. Not quarters, not months. The longer you wait, the more inertia the failure will have."

We're getting better at this, and I've sort of made it my mantra for this release cycle. Get things in to experimental as fast as possible, and then when I've fixed the majority of the bugs that show up there, put it in unstable as fast as possible. It worked out well for all the releases I've done so far and I'm going to keep doing it. Michel is really pushing me to keep CVS (or git as of Real Soon Now) snapshots from upstream in experimental, and I really like this idea and plan to follow through with it for this reason. This also echoes some of aj's ideas about speeding up development pace. Hopefully he'll implement them whether or not he becomes DPL, because I think they're going to be important for Debian as a whole.

"Dates are sacred."

We learned this during the sarge release cycle.

"The net result is that I've tried to find the happy medium where I generate weekly management reports on projects. A management report is something that is used to actually make a decision. Everything else is garbage. I've learned that when I haven't had management reports for a project, failure has resulted."

This is an interesting idea. It sort of echoes how I try and provide status updates on my blog, as well as the "Bits from" emails, but perhaps something more like this would be useful. I may try and play with this idea in the near future.

There's a lot more in there, but this entry already got way too long. Hopefully there's some food for thought in there for everyone who's interested in how Debian is run. The Debian development model has carried us very far, but I can't shake the feeling that we need to make some critical changes for it to continue. This will require a certain degree of boldness, but in order to fix the problems with the project I think we just need to clench our teeth and go for it. With that, I'll leave you with one last line from the above: "And if you decide to make changes, have the courage to go 100% with your gut. I've failed more than once when I watered down my convictions in order to appease dissenters. The only thing worse than evangelizing change and failing is looking back and realized you might have succeeded if you'd held firm on your convictions."

So remember Jerry Taylor, the man from Tuttle, OK that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux vendor because an unrelated hosting company had misconfigured Apache?

Well, this story is just getting funnier and funnier.

First off is this story from the Tuttle Times. It basically repeats Taylor's view that the CentOS people were expected to help him with his problem, and that he was somehow entitled to their help. But there are some funny tidbits in the story:

"Phone calls from across the country started coming in to the newspaper and city offices, and e-mails from Switzerland, Australia, Wales and England were received. Many of the web sites discussing the exchange are in foreign languages." I hate to break it to you, but Australia, Wales, and England all speak English.

(Ok, so they did switch from talking about email to web, but it still sounds funny.)

"In their search to find out more, web surfers discovered that the Tuttle Times online forums were hacked, and theorized that it was in retribution for the e-mails. Those forums, however, were corrupted several months ago, and the newspaper s now former web hosts did not repair it after numerous requests. New forums should be available at the Times site in the coming weeks." I'm so glad to know that your forums were merely corrupted for months and not hacked. Sounds like the IT problems in this town extend well past the city building.

Taylor said: "[CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he s got on his hands." Grumble.

Quoting Tuttle Mayor Paxton (trying to say what was more important than this): "We have issues with sewer. People here want better park facilities. They want a library." I think this has just validated every stereotype people have about Oklahoma.

Tuttle is more than 7 times larger than my hometown in Kansas, and yet my hometown has had a library for years.

Jerry Taylor also reported having 500 e-mails and numerous phone messages when he arrived to work Monday.

There's a new blurb on the Wikipedia page about Tuttle about all this. And in their talk page about the now-deleted article on Jerry Taylor, one person wrote: "Mr. Taylor's actions have coined a new term of art "Tuttled", in reference to the invocation of criminal consequences by one who is ignorant of the true situation. Since this is now a part of the English vernacular the story behind the term should be explained to give it an historical context. It is no longer about the action of a single person and an attempt to publicly vilify him, it is about a world-wide common experience of dealing with a Kafka-esque minor government official who, through ignorance, creates problems far beyond their normal sphere of influence. The page should be returned to the public."

The Register has two new stories about it. The first reports that Taylor has been interviewed by all sorts of media and says that he did the right thing. The second, Linux conquered, Tuttle man takes on London is a story about the grandson of the namesake of Tuttle, OK -- who happens to be the current US ambassador to the UK. This person is refusing to pay the regular London car fees. The mayor of London said: "It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge like everybody else and not skive out of it like some chiseling little crook."

And finally, there's some incredibly funny photoshop work on this one over at fark.com (you have to scroll down a ways). Also, this comment:

"A small-town American politician wants a British newspaper to turn off the Internet.

Say that to yourself a few times. Please."

A couple of days ago, I mentioned the Register article about the Tuttle, OK city manager that threatened to call the FBI on a Linux developer because his webhost misconfigured their server.

Now The Register has a great followup. Apprently people all over are justifiably upset at the city manager.

There are also some great reader comments over at The Register.

Also, that city manager has removed his e-mail address from tuttle-ok.gov. But fortunately, we all remember that it's citymgr@cityoftuttle.org.

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

I just read a story on The Register entitled Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over "renegade" Linux maker. Quite hilarious.

Apparently Jerry Taylor, city manager for Tuttle, Oklahoma, noticed that the city's webpage wasn't working right. He got the default "test page" for the Apache webserver on CentOS.

Instead of calling the hosting company, he sent a series of vicious emails to CentOS, even threatening to call the FBI. The CentOS folks really went out of their way to help this guy -- he was not even their customer. And he repaid them by saying they should have helped him sooner.

Of course, there was the obligatory comment about being computer literate: "I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove 'your software' that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this 'hacking.'"

The Register story is hilarious, and the original discussion even more so because it includes a full transcript of the event. Favorite quote (to the city manager):

If you will not let me help you, or at least talk to someone who knows what Linux is, then you will look like an idiot.

Your choice.

Should anyone wish to write to the city manager of Tuttle, OK, to complain about his outrageous behavior, his e-mail address is citymgr@cityoftuttle.org. Assuming they have figured out how to properly configure e-mail.

He's probably not worth his $63k salary and with a personality like this almost certainly isn't giving his employees the "feeling that we're 'working together'" (see that link).

Sigh. Why do people hire a guy like this in the first place?

Last night, glib 2.8 and pango 1.12 entered testing, as a first step on the GNOME 2.14 quest. The bad news is that the fixed evolution & friends were not ready to go in as well, so now many etch users will be wondering why their evolution doesn't start up, or doesn't show any mail. Until we manage to get a fixed evolution in testing, and it looks like it won't be trivial to get this done in the immediate future, Erich's recipe comes handy again:

My personal hero of the day is Gustavo Franco, for this email to debian-devel. He writes how to get your Gnome/Pango/Glib applications that don't work since yesterday's upgrade like evolution (#358071) working again:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc evolution

And you should be able to read your email again.

Just FYI, and in case you missed it. :)

Thursday 23^rd March: Friday 30^th March: In the space of seven short days, they've managed to go from hard-line right-wing, give us tax cuts, don't "throw it away" on the state; to full-on fund the NHS more "Daily Express Crusade" your childen are All Going To Die. If these headlines were in The Onion they'd be a fine example of tabloid spin and use of language. But they are serious, and I hate this paper. NP: g tis Byrjun, Sigur R s

I’ve found this photomontage at the Chewie’s blog (hilarious) (the blog also, not only the photomontage) BTW, me and around 6 more people from Venezuela are coming to DebConf 6 in Oaxtepec. That if you don’t count David, of course. Everything can happen. Even some people are waiting for a last-minute Venezuelan government sponsorship… I was originally travelling with Colombian flag carrier Avianca in the itinerary CCS - BOG - MEX, but this was expensive, slow and uncomfortable for me to pay (the travel agency is in a city 2 hours away from Caracas) so I went to my plain-ol’-good travel agency in Caracas and found a special offer from Mexicana with a student fare. I have to wait until April to buy it, but it’s worth the wait. I now have my Venezuelan and Spanish passports, but someone told me that Mexico won’t take my old Venezuelan passport (the Country changed names, from Republica de Venezuela to Republica Bolivariana de Venezuela on 1999) since we have diplomatic problems with them, and also they told me that my Spanish passport won’t do for entering Mexico since I’m not travelling from Europe. So I have to request the new Andean Community Passport (links in spanish). See you in Mexico!

Call For Papers for the 4th. World Forum on Free Knowledge is now released in english (non-official translation, sorry for mine) and spanish. The WFFK is a Community-organized Forum, made possible by the sponsorship of Government Enterprises and Private Enterprises, as well as Volunteers and Donations. The first was made in Caracas, on November 2004, in the installations of the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, with the sponsorship of the Venezuelan Oil Company, PDVSA. The second WFFK was made in Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala-India, under the name Free Software, Free Society in May 2005, and the third WFFK was made in Maracaibo, Venezuela, with the support of several Institutions, including PDVSA, CONATEL and serveral others. Impressed by the success of the 3rd. WFFK, a group of people is organizing the fourth, which will take place in Puerto La Cruz, Venezuela, in October 2006. This is the first ocassion a Call For Papers is being done, because the Forum will have a Congress inside it, as well as selected articles. In the past, we only had selected articles and invited speakers on a certain basis. This time, a Call For Papers will also be done, so we can invite nice speakers to come and share with the attendance. Last time in Maracaibo we had David Moreno Garza with us, as well as several Debian Maintainers and Co-Maintainers with us, from Venezuela and Colombia: Ernesto Hern ndez-Novich, Polkan Garc a, Ernesto Crespo, V ctor P rez, Ana Delgado, Gerardo Curiel, Manuel Garc a, V ctor P rez and myself (am I missing someone?). So this was quite a MiniDebConf! Let’s make the 4th. a complete one

The New York Times: “Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who led the campaign to get the [48,000 boxes of Arabic-language Iraqi documents captured by American troops] released, does not believe they have received adequate scrutiny. Mr. Hoekstra said he wanted to ‘unleash the power of the Net’ to do translation and analysis that might take the government decades.” Bonus: In addition to this being “open source” in the same sense that Howard Dean’s presidential campaign was open source politics and that the term “open source” has been applied to a wide range of non-software fields, including computer hardware, genetics, journalism, publishing, and even cola, “open source” is an actual term for an intelligence gathering discipline that uses information collected from sources available to the general public. Interesting!

The "rise" of udev, hal, dbus, networkmanager, powermanager applet and such has caused an increase of groups on the typical debian system. Groups provide a reliable way of granting access rights, so this is a good thing. The drawbacks are that you need to add users to these new groups and users need to logout and login again to get these new group rights. Groups you might want to assign to typical desktop users include: audio, video, plugdev, netdev, powerdev, dip, scanner, cdrom, floppy You can assign these groups using the gnome user manager, or by the following shell script as root:

for user in USERNAME1 USERNAME2; do \
for group in audio video plugdev netdev powerdev \
dip scanner cdtom floppy; do adduser $user $group; done; done

We're lacking a way to handle such changes on upgrade, though. This definitely is something we should handle with etch, that on upgrade the user is offered an easy way to update his group permissions. Anyone knows how to put winbind-users into unix groups? I have some machines where user accounts are actually loaded from ActiveDesaster, authenticated using kerberos. Winbind works fine for the single-host username to uid mapping, but it doesn't give me an option to assign e.g. the plugdev group to all users. Which I really need.

I’m taking Rojo for a spin, mostly because of recent upgrades that add some interesting features, including a “sort by relevance” function that lives alongside the usual “sort by date”—a “personalized digg”, as some have called it. One thing I like about Rojo is that it’s a River of News style aggregator, which means all feeds get combined into a single stream that’s very easy to scan for interesting items, rather than serving as just another way of filling my inbox with stuff I won’t have time to read anyway (the “aggregator as an extention to the email client” model). With River of News style aggregators, it’s no big deal if you miss something, kinda like it’s no big deal if you don’t read every last article in the newspaper every morning. Trouble is, how do you make sure you read the most important stuff first, so in the event you don’t get through everything, the likelihood you miss something is small? “Sort by relevance” would appear to solve this problem nicely. Rojo appears to calculate “relevance” by analyzing a few things: What I read (i.e., what I click on), what I tag (either by giving it “mojo” or by tagging it in the Web 2.0 sense of the word), and what my contacts read and tag. That seems like a reasonable enough algorithm. Problem is: 1. most of the things I read Rojo doesn’t know anything about (they’re in my browser clickstream); 2. I already have about a year’s worth of tags accumulated at del.icio.us, and I have no intention of moving those tags anywhere else (ironically enough, because del.icio.us gives me the ability to do just that); and 3. I already have more social networks and contact silos than I know what to do with, and I certainly don’t want another one. So, Rojo’s new features are less interesting than they appear at first glance. Guess I’m going to have to continue doing without, either until I decide to dump all my stuff in one place (ahem) or until small pieces loosely joined evolves a bit further. Update: On second look, it looks like relevance is actually calculated by the total number of reads and tags rather than by the number of reads or tags by me or my contacts. Not sure how that can be called personalized, but I guess those are the words of others, not Rojo’s.

Jim Gettys wrote about a problem regarding localisation that the OLPC project will face in the future. The One Laptop Per Child project aims to provide the famous $100 laptop to children in the developing world. They are Free Software based, and as most GNU/Linux distributions, the bundled software will be available in a number of languages. For now, it'll only be ten or so, but as OLPC grows, the number will skyrocket... just think about the number of languages spoken only in Africa. The $100 laptops don't have a hard drive. Instead, they have a 1 gigabyte of compact flash memory, which is enough to run the software, but it can't store that much extra data. The most common way of internationalising and localising Free Software is to use GNU gettext, which provides an easy to handle text file format for translations, with a series of sentences and labels that the translators need to fill in in their language. The applications ship these translations in .mo files, which are the same .PO files, in compiled binary format the gettext enabled programs can read. Each application installs one .mo file per language it is translated into. When the apps are big enough, these files can amount to several megabytes per application, which is a problem for embedded systems or projects like OLPC. Ubuntu has been trying a different approach to the distribution of translations. Instead of packaging all the translation files with the applications .deb packages, they are stripped off from the packages, and provided by language packs. Language packs offer the translations for all the applications and libraries of the main component of Ubuntu. This includes GNOME, KDE and many other popular applications. When you install Ubuntu, you select the main language of the interface, and the installer program will download the appropriate language pack, plus a selection of useful localisation-related packages like dictionaries, translated manuals, etc. These language packs are generated periodically by Rosetta, a web-based translation portal which is sponsored by Canonical, Ubuntu's and Launchpad.net's parent company. Rosetta offers a very easy to use translation infrastructure, and Ubuntu users can start translating the applications they are running with just two clicks on the application's interface. With Rosetta lowering the barrier for people wanting to translate Free Software, Ubuntu can have, and is now having, lots of people improving the translations of not only the next version of the software, which is what translation groups have traditionally worked on, but also the version you are running at that same moment. There is no need to wait for the next version of Ubuntu to see your translations complete. Help your team translate whatever is missing, and wait for the next language pack update. Voil ! If the OLPC project adopted the language pack scheme and Rosetta, they could install a raw OLPC laptop without translations, and only install the language packs that are needed in the target country or area. The langpacks are currently split into GNOME, KDE and the rest , but any derivative could fine-grain the components they wish to include. Furthermore, the system helps improving the localisation of the system after the laptops have been deployed. Just stick a USB drive to the laptop, and use your usual package manager to install the updated language packs contained in it. Or just use the Internet if it's available. In environments where network access is completely impossible, making the availability of updated packs from a remote server a no-op, as well as online translation in the Rosetta server, other solutions could come in place. Generating langpacks from a set of local PO files should be pretty easy.

Today is an special day.

One year ago we (yes, you and me), started a beautiful path together. A long path with wisdoms and mistakes. I learned about Debian and you about correcting me, but both learned to wait each other.

Dear Pyro, for not to many years together, with this wonderful relation ApplicationManager-Applicant, I say you: Happy Anniversary!



PD: don't get angry, I'm just joking (c:

Hi! This is Comas, the conference management system we all know and love! Perhaps you remember me from /www.consol.org.mx/">/www.consol.org.mx/">CONSOL 2004 and 2005, Debconf 5 and 6, CICOL, Seminario Globalizaci n, Conocimiento y Desarrollo or other such great conferences! Well, it is a pleasure for me to announce I am moving.
That's right - My developers have felt too constrained by CVS to keep being merry and productive, and decided to move away from it and to Subversion. If you are tracking my development history, you should have noticed a new file in my base CVS directory, called DONT_USE_THIS_REPOSITORY_ANYMORE. I will reproduce it here following Gunnar's wishes, and hoping it is useful to you.

PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY ANYMORE! Just in the meantime, while we migrate our current installations to point to the correct server, while our users take note, and while the kind GBorg admins lock down this project: PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY. WE HAVE MOVED. The Comas project will no longer be hosted at GBorg - We are moving to Debian's Alioth.
Comas' webpage (although it is still ugly :) ) is still the same as always. The repository will no longer be handled through CVS - We switched to Subversion. Don't worry, the usage is basically the same. You can use anonymous access to get the Subversion tree. If you want to participate in the project, register at Alioth and ask us for commit access. You can also use the very nice SVN Web interface, which allows you to look at each of the files, view the changes, and even subscribe to the Comas RSS feeds! Development goes on. Stay tuned! Greetings, - Gunnar Wolf

Of course, as in any migration, there is still a lot of things to do. Mail the other contributors and interested people notifying them of the move. Migrate (and check the validity of) any tickets we have in the old site. Point all the places where there is Comas-related information to the new repository. Close the existing project page at GBorg. Sanely re-structure the repository in a more standard and functional way (and hope it does not break current installations ;-) ). Rework the documentation that has been neglected in the last months. Rework the bits of logic that never smelt very good but -as a dead rat- now positively stink. Fixe the things that will eventually stink as well... Anyway, I'm sure this will speed up my growth!
I am very excited on which way my dear authors will continue to push me - I know I'm quite a lousy program for many things, and I know there is a lot for me to learn until I am a military-grade conference management system - But my many parents have written me with deep love, and I understand they had to write hastily parts of my code. I understand their mistakes, but I hope they make them go away soon.

DIY Canadian farm-style, or “what I did this weekend.” First, you pack about ten people into the back of a pickup truck… …and walk through the fields… …to empty the buckets on the trees, spiles having been drilled previously. Back home, you cook in the ancient, homemade sap cooker (which was once an oil drum, long ago). Sometimes, you need to feed the fire. Make sure to keep adding sap when the level gets low, or when the pans threaten to boil over (overzealous fire feeders!). If you’re bored, you could always go exploring and fall through the ice on the half-frozen flooded field. Late afternoon is the best time to take advantage of the fact that boiling liquid kills bacteria, by sampling straight from the pans–with the same spoon. By now the sap’s thick enough to actually taste good. The day’s cooking is done when the sap’s about 60% sugar. (Damn, I don’t have a picture of the sugar-measuring gizmo.) The sap pans are unloaded… …into pots, to be brought inside and finished on the stove to 66% sugar. A more controlled environment, to prevent accidental burning/overcooking/sludgification. Which would be a Bad Thing. A fun weekend. It’s something I do just about every year (the farm belongs to my grandparents), but this year I managed to drag a couple friends along to slave have fun.

Well, I've just got back from the first OpenVAS DevCon in Onsabrück in .de. More on that later.

However, this particular post is about STN airport. On the way out, I had a transfer in STN, and nothing could be easier. I got off the plane, was told to walk down corridor 'a', and I ended up right by the gate where my next flight was due. Easy, right?
However, on the way back, things didn't quite go to plan. I knew the day was going to start badly when I found myself wandering around Onsabrück at 2:30am in the rain, trying to find a random bus shelter that the airport bus stops at. I failed fairly miserably to catch the 2:56am bus, but at least it showed me where the bus shelter was, unlike the random drunk tramp that insited on trying to talk to me. The next bus was at 4:22am, so I did have quite a wait. However, this meant that I had 10 minutes before check in closed for the flight. I made it. Just.
The flight set off on time, and all was fine. When we landed at STN, there was a slight delay due to some 'confusion' over which gate we were heading into. So, I get off the plane and expect to head down a magic corridor somewhere. Well, it didn't quite happen like that. We climbed down the stairs instead of using a gangway, and then were ushered into a bus. This then took us to the other side of the airport and dumped us by passport control and arrivals, so no facility for transfer passengers.
This meant that I had to go through all of passport control and security checks again, and as the plane was late getting in, I didn't have much time. So, I finally manage to find where the departure gates are, and spot a HUGE queue to get in. I join it, and about 10 minutes later discover that there is an even longer queue inside to get through security. Never mind, I'll still make the flight if I run. So, the man who checks your boarding passes before letting you get to the security bit notices that I'm a transfer passenger, and tells me not to use this queue, but go straight to the 'Priority lane' which is used for first class passengers etc. I do this, and the man checking the tickets insisted that I don't have the right ticket, and to join the queue again. So, I do so, and 10 minutes later, I'm told to go to the 'Priority lane' again. WTF? I eventually manage to get the left hand to meet the right hand, and get through the priority lane.
Now, STN has a rather high-tech system with opening and closing corridors and routing people to the right gates. Today, however, it was very broken. So, a usual 5 minute walk to the gate turns into a 15 minute jog. I arrive at the gate, just as it says 'final call', and it's shut. They haven't even opened the gate yet. Eventually, I get on the aircraft, and look out the window. I'm on the same plane I got off, and sitting in exactly the same seat that I was two hours earlier.