So the DPL vote just started and I crafted my ballot. So it’s my turn to give you my opinion on the various candidates. Here’s my top 3 by order of preference:

1. Jeroen van Wolffelaar
   I had the occasion to work with Jeroen due to our common involvement in Debian-QA and his work on the PTS. He’s only Debian Developer since 2004 but he’s the proof that you can get involved in core teams if you’re willing to work. His commitment to Debian is impressive. He’s also a strong proponent of the DPL team concept, and he managed to gather a well-balanced team. With some changes to the DPL team concept, this can make a big difference this year. Yes, I hope to be able to serve the project as a member of his team.
2. Steve McIntyre
   I worked with Steve on numerous occasions due to our common involvement in debian-cd. He’s very moderate, appreciated by many people and could be very effective in mediating internal conflicts since he’s not involved in any core team. I look forward working with him, his platform is very attractive.
3. Anthony Towns
   Anthony has been doing a great job for a long time, and I really appreciate his efforts to communicate what he does. I like his idea to bring momentum to the project… and he proposed the last general resolution to bring us to a conclusion on the GFDL problem. That’s the kind of initiative that I’m also expecting from a leader. His strong opinions do not suit everybody but at least he’s trying new ideas.

All the other candidates are well-intentionned (except one) but they do no match all my (fuzzy) criterion for a good DPL.

I have not been very much involved in this year DPL campaigning, but I’m part of two DPL teams, thus I feel the need to give my point of view on the subject. I’m not really satisfied by how the current DPL team worked out, and being on the DPL candidate team of both Jeroen and Andreas gave me the opportunity to gather information on what really happened. Also I’ve met Bdale yesterday and he gave me his opinion as well (and I really enjoyed that dinner. Thanks bdale!). Just for the record, I’ll try to sum up what really happened: Branden had agreed to be a participant of the DPL team concept, but wasn’t a major proponent of the idea. This, combined with his personal problems, explains why he didn’t make use of the full potential of a DPL team. Does it invalidate the DPL team concept? No, I don’t think so because the concept will evolve this year. Let’s see how it can change. Both DPL teams would this year receive all the mails sent to leader@debian.org. This means that the members are involved from the beginning and not only on request of the leader, which means that they can pro-actively take over if they see that the DPL doesn’t manage to follow up up to its expectations (which hopefully won’t be needed this year). Furthermore I expect that the team would be informed of what the DPL does, so that the team can give its opinion on everything done, and prevent big errors (nobody is perfect, errors do happen). But the most important thing is that the team should not stand behind the DPL, but next to him taking initiatives, and I expect the DPL to work with the team members for the best of Debian. As such I expect the DPL to accept most of the proposals of his team if there’s a consensus on it, even if he doesn’t personnaly think that’s it’s a priority for his DPL mandate. If I am part of an elected DPL team, I will work on that basis. I do have many ideas to try, and will make proposals. I ran once for the DPL election, and if you check my platform, you can see that I always had ideas for Debian and you can see that I worked on several of them which are nowadays very common (such as the PTS, alioth, collaborative maintenance). I won’t miss an opportunity to get the project moving forward.

I would really wish that I could travel around the world and do evangelization about i18n just like Jordi, Daffyd and Michael have been able to do. Of course, this is a known difference between a development model where people are paid to work on development and a completely volunteer development model. However, I really hope that all the good things that will be done to better support Asian languages in Ubuntu will end up in Debian really soon. After all, much of the initial work has been done in Debian itself by the wonderful Japanese/Chinese/Korean developers, or by the "debian-in" project lead by Jaldhar H. Vyas for Indic languages support. Don't take me wrong: I don't have any griefs towards Ubuntu when it comes at i18n. This is an area where the collaboration is already quite good and I hope it will become better if we manage to converge towards common tools (just free up the bloody Rosetta, Mark!). This is one of the goals I personnally set for the i18n session in Extremadura. Our goals here are common: we want more and more pleaces in the world to be able to use the Best Operating System ever and we will paint it red. (another way to say this: "we want the world and we want it NOW") For this, we just have to cooperate.

I'm miraculously on my way back from London, after spending a week with daf, mvo and two guests, abel and thep, from Hong Kong and Thailand, working on improving some l10n aspects of the upcoming Ubuntu release, dapper. The most visible result of the stuff that we've been doing is that if all goes well, users of the Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Bengali, Lao or Korean languages will get their required input methods, fonts and dictionaries Just Working as soon as their drives spit their dapper install CDs. We've learned quite a bit about the state of many of the Asian languages in the Free Software world today. Daf and I can certainly tell when an app renders Bengali or Thai correctly and when it doesn't, after closely comparing how different browsers do the job on various websites and font test pages. We've learned more than we probably like about fontconfig, and thanks to mvo, there is now a mechanism to get custom fonts.conf snippets depending on the default language of the system set by language-selector, so users get the right fonts installed and used by default. Thep's and Abel's help to get this straight is invaluable. On Friday, daf and I went to the ExCel Novotel where the Launchpad team is having a sprint, in order to lend a hand with the dapper translation import that is going on right now, but for a series of reasons we ended up working on l10n sprint stuff. At least I got to see the team again, and specially kiko, who greeted me with a "Qu pasa, hijo de puta!" The real life side of this sprint has been less exciting than on other occasions, as due to being few in number and being quite tired, we haven't gone out of Earl's Court area until today. Still, our exploring around the hotel has yield some nice discoveries. On Sunday, mvo and I were looking for a place to have dinner, and stumbled uppon the Troubadour a place which can either be a pub, a restaurant, a social club or a theatre, depending on your mood. The food was excellent, and the staff was really friendly. I found a Dictionary of Slang in one of the book shelves, and learned a few funny phrases. Other days we've been to good Italian, Indian or Chinese restaurants, but we couldn't resist to go back to Trobadour again. On our last night, Mark took us to a place in the South Kesington area, with again was very good. Abel left just after dinner as his flight was at 5AM from Stansted, and we hope he made it OK to the Netherlands, as at 00:30 or so he phoned us and seemed to be pretty lost somewhere. mvo left early in the morning, so daf, thep and I went to visit some bits of the city. My plane was at 16:45GMT, and we calculated that I should be leaving the K&K at 15:00 to be well on track for my flight. We went to Monument to see the tower, went up and enjoyed both the great views over London and the Thames river, as well as the really cold wind which made me swear once again about the %*@!# lack of Spring in the UK. It was getting quite late for me, so we went to China Town for lunch. Despite the restaurant people being really quick, I only managed to leave the place at 14:50, but given my travel plan was pretty conservative, I was supposed to be safe still. Daf left me at the tube station entrance, and there I started my way too stressful journey back to Val ncia. If on our way to London Carlos and were quite close to find our flight closed, this time, I think I hit the limits. I really don't know how daf and I arrived to the conclusion that leaving Earl's Court at 15:20 was acceptable to get in Heathrow on time. I ran up and down the tube stations, grabbed by luggage, and rushed back to the station, but I had just missed a train to Heathrow and that made me lose some precious 10 minutes. As stations passed by, it became clearer that we had fucked up somewhere when deciding at what time I needed to leave. At 15:35 I was still in the Hammersmith station, with half of the Picadilly line ahead before arriving to the aiport. I sent a message to daf, so he started to get prepared about me staying to sleep somewhere in London. As soon as the train's doors opened, a number of people rushed out. Someone ahead of me fell when climbing the automatic staircase and I somehow managed to jump over him, with luggage and all. After a run that seemed like half an hour, I arrived at the Iberia desk and, panting, I could only articulate "Tarde para Val ncia?". The guy at the counter looked at me, and with a "this can't be true" expression in his face, he picked up a phone and asked "Is it already closed? [...] Can you open it for one more piece of luggage? Thanks." In the meanwhile, I had been busy removing a 500 ml yoghourt from my bag, fearing having all my clothes smelling like strawberry back in Val ncia. The guy handed me a boarding pass, and gave me instructions about the "Iberia Room" near my gate. I asked him what that was about, and he says "oh, of course, you're in Business Class". For a second, I was reminded of stargirl's tricks to get free upgrades when flying, and immediately I was reminded that I was still in a hurry, and I should rush to my gate. And so I did, forgetting to thank the guy for being so kind. I left my yoghourt there though, so at least he could get some food if he was hungry. The long line before the security check was exasperating, and when I finally went past it, I had to run all over terminal two to my gate, where everyone appeared to be waiting just for me. The doors closed as soon as I entered the aircraft, and I sat in the first row, got a free newspaper and a free meal. I couldn't believe my luck. As I write this, we've gone over the Pyrenees, which are not as snowy as a month ago, but they still look beautiful from up here. I'm glad to be back in Val ncia.

This year was the first time I think I watched the debate live, and didn't just read the logs. We had some fun in the discussion channel, and one question of mine was actually posted to the candidates. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to get my point across (the "size barrier" question, it wasn't about Debian not growing any more, but about wether we could need some structural changes - e.g. bugmasters, first-level supporters with some privileges, but not the full DD requirements - to use our resources (that is mostly the time of our developers, i.e. us) more effectively. E.g. by preventing flamewars somehow. I hadn't really made up my mind yet. But some trends are there:

• Krooger. He definitely lost my vote in the debate; I had the impression that all he cared about to bring across was that all those who say he misbehaved are evil. When it came to financing, he seemed very naive; he suggested Debian should pay someone to optimize Debian for the Desktop.
  However, we should have plenty of people interested in optimizing Debian for the Desktop already, so if we were able to spend the money as easily (and I don't want to see anyone fighting over money...) we certainly should spend it on something we don't have sufficient volunteers for. Maybe processing the NM queue, ftp-master or security work. But there is tons of stuff that can go wrong if we pay any developer, anyway.
  So krooger will be below NOTA.
• Bill seems to be a nice guy, but I don't think he's that deeply involved in the project yet; I think the DPL should have been more visible before and maybe more involved with the core tasks. So above NOTA, but not first.
• Andreas seems to know a lot on how stuff works. No wonder: he's been in the DPL team before. Having a wife and children is a plus, this gives Debian a more "mature" representation, good for a DPL IMHO.
  In the debate, he had a realistic approach to running things and also on the financing stuff. He was involved in organizing DebConfs IIRC, and I think I already ranked him high last year, can't remember hearing anything bad about him. I liked his response to the expulsions question best IIRC. He currently is my favourite.
• AJ: above NOTA, but I can't really imagine him as DPL.
• Steve: don't know yet. Above NOTA likely, but no idea where either.
• Ari: although he just fixed my gaim bug, I mostly remember him as being a clown on IRC; but I don't give too much on that. Sometimes you're pushed into a certain role, and this definitely feels like a "running gag" during the DPL elections. Above NOTA likely, but can't really rank him yet either.
• Jeroen: DPL-team is a bonus with me, this means a smoother handover, and also means he probably is used to distributing responsibility in the new DPL team. Probably around 1-3, so above NOTA, too. Can't tell you yet how I'd rank him compared to Andreas, Steven, AJ, Ari yet.

I’m not much of a coder, but as everybody, I have several small scripts to do miscellaneous tasks. Over time, I’ve postponed repeteadly to put them under Subversion, which was my VCS of choice, since I didn’t like the “one repo for all” approach, and creating a repo for each of them felt like too much work. A few weeks ago I tried bzr, and have managed to put several of these scripts under its control since; one repo for each script makes sense to me when they’re very easily created, and data and metadata live together. (I realize other distributed VCS have this as well, but bzr was the one I tried first, knowing it’d be the one that would have more chances of me liking it.) I’ve made publicly available those scripts which I think somebody could find useful, here (mirror in gluck). The one I’m more interested in publicizing is grep-archive, a wrapper over grep-dctrl formerly known as grepd. Since it works over a mirror-like directory tree, I’ll try to write a script that creates one and fills it with symlinks pointing to Packages files under /var/lib/apt/lists, so that it’s easier to start using it. Another one worth mentioning is good old bug-reply-to.vim, which I remembered to put in bzr yesterday after kernel-team member Maximilian Attems expressed on IRC his frustration by bug submitters not CCing the bug in their replies to him. I’ve also taken chance to improve it a bit, most notably adding support for adding whatever is in the From field to the Reply-To (formerly the address would have to be explicitly passed as an argument, which was suboptimal if one uses more than one address), and documenting it a bit. NP: Fangoria, Interior de una nave espacial abandonada

Sad day for Free Software. The so-called VU/SACEM/BSA (for Vivendi-Universal/French Artists Societey/Bullshit Software Alliance) amendment to the DADVSI law presented by the French government has been voted. For details about DADVSI, see EUCD.info web site. This amendment says (bad English translation of course): "(Est) puni de trois ans d'emprisonnement et de 300.000 euros d'amende le fait de mettre sciemment la disposition du public ou de communiquer au public, sous quelque forme que ce soit, un logiciel manifestement destin la mise disposition du publ (une copie?) non autoris e d'oeuvres ou d'objets prot g s." "The fact of voluntarily make available to the public or communicate to the public, in any possible way, software obviously intended for making available to the public an unauthorized copy of protected work shal be punished by 3 years jail and 300.000 euros fine". (again sorry for the bad legalese English...). People interested may read this very complete analysis (in English) from the EUCD.info site. In short, as it has been written for instance by Sun France Head Security Officer, Gilles Gravier, this bans a vast majority of free software such as BitTorrent, Apache, FTP servers and the like. I think you get the point. It seems time for Debian to think about dropping French mirrors....and for French free software authors to emigrate (which I'll never do....I have too much attachment for this country anyway).

This is probably one of the worst flames I've seen in a long time. The funny part is that he complains about "AA zealots", while he clearly is a "non-AA-zealot" just as bad as any "AA zealot" can possibly be. I know a few (definitely a minority) of people who dislike AA fonts. But as far as I can tell, it's really easy to disable them. And from all I the average user will like them better, so it makes for a sane default to enable them. So, yes, you zealot, I want my fonts blurry, because I find them easier to read. Sorry for having a different personal taste. Oh, and then there is an explanation why AA fonts can actually be easier to read then black-and-white fonts. Because they grey levels are more consistent (which btw, is one of the tings LaTeX does very well, keeping the grey level) than if you have to make each pixel either black or white. Let's say we want to make a line 2 pixels to the right and 1 pixel down. In fonts these things happen... Here are your options: (Sorry, I forgot one: the hole in the middle...) the right one is obviously using AA and is "blurred". The left one is "too dark in the middle" and the other two are deformed. Now let's blur them a bit, like the average non-eagle would see them: The last one clearly is the best representation of the intended shape (a diagonal line of even thinkness). This is of course different if the intended shape was that it becomes slightly "fatter" here, or deformed. The only sane default for vector fonts is to assume that lines should well, not become deformed or thicker. I agree that a excellently made black-and-white pixel font might be done in a way that these deformations don't hurt. It doesn't apply to your favourite Helvetica font IMHO, because that font was designed for printing quality. Now go, and play configuring your "window manager", while I get some work done with openbox as my WM of choice. Because it just sits there in the background and allows me to have all my windows maximized on their own desktops except for my terminals which tile nicely without any zealot WM.

This year, we're dealing with the worst DPL election I've known. Despite the high number of candidates, none of them makes me really feel like voting for him.

Summarizing the general tendencies of the candidates:

• Jonathan Walther is a populist who's saying anything that could bring him any vote, after having spread infamous political ideas on Debian lists two years ago.


• Andreas Schuldei is a pure teletubby, fed with rainbows and sunshine.


• Steve McIntyre talks like something that's between a teletubby and a commercial guy with ultra-bright shining smile.


• Ari Pollak likes cats and Samuel L. Jackson. There can be nothing wrong with such a guy.


• Anthony Towns has a very appealing platform, but his past behavior when occupying a key position makes me very reluctant to see him as the DPL.


• Jeroen van Wolffelaar wants to force developers to be nice to each other. Teletubbies can also have fascist tendencies.


• Bill is a very nice guy with good ideas. He's also the only candidate who hasn't voted for option 2 in the GFDL GR - read, the only one who seems to be interested in truly free software. Sadly, he's not very good with public relations.

That makes only 2 candidates I can decently put above "None of the above": Bill and Zeke the cat. I know many developers disagree with my analysis for the other ones, but when filling your ballot, you shouldn't forget that behind their words, there is what they will actually do if elected.

Lately I’ve been testing a few distributions. A few comments. Redhat (or CentOS) make it real easy to re-compile their sources, so you can basically create your own Enterprise distribution with your own company’s branding very easily. Redhat Nahant EL4 “nahant” type distributions must have quite a high percentage of the server market. I see it time and time again. I find it quite an “average” platform, though I also find it difficult to argue why Debian is all that much better. One policy that interests me is that EL4 updates out the box. Is it a good thing for a box to update itself? I guess so, though with Debian that’s not as usual I find. I hate how all the distributions I’ve tried use screensavers that hog resources. Whatever happened to the screen just blanking ffs? Making the screen actually power down gets bonus points. Extra bonus points: do not power down while I am watching a movie. Xandros is quite an interesting distribution. Debian based. It has this LDAP centric xDMS (desktop management system) for aiding deployment. It also had crossover linux (for photoshop and M$ office) by default, also video works out the box and CD burning. I has quite a bit of spit and polish. It’s a pity they don’t seem to work as closely with Debian as Ubuntu seem to. I’ve got my sister using Ubuntu dapper and she is bitching that she can’t play multimedia files. I found this awful post on the ubuntu forums where it suggests installed j2re. FS, no. I’ve managed to download the win32 codecs and get that going for her over ssh, but I’ve no idea how get mp3 playback working still on her (sic) “desktop”. My sister is also struggling with copy and paste in Gnome (compared to win32). I feel her pain in ion3 and Firefox’s textarea. Ubuntu’s launchpad is painful. I remember some dude raved about it on -devel. WTF. I won’t rant about that. In Ubuntu I am still trying to understand the way the disb is formed and a release is made. The scripts are quite odd. Seed and Germinate ? I am getting confused with preseed.
I also don’t like the MoinMoin Wiki (same tech behind Debian’s Wiki ). Compared to MediaWiki, information doesn’t look as nice, editing isn’t as easy and the searching sucks. Someone has got to write some nice Web interface to these Ubuntu patches. They’re a nightmare for my brain to parse. When I was installing and re-installing different distributions, it would have been nice if the /home directory was left alone. I managed to save it once with the debian-installer, but the other installers were into blanking the drive. I also played about with LVM in the debian installer and somehow caused a strange error. I’m not confident about using LVM. I would like to test disbs without burning ISOs and nuking the HD. I remember QEMU being really slow and VMWARE being non-free and only working properly on Windows. I don’t think you can boot an ISO with Xen. Any tips people? Update: See comments. Or VM Player with Ubuntu samples are OK for testing.

While driving to Oxford yesterday (more on that tomorrow I feel) I was listening to Radio 1. The Scott Mills show had someone ring in asking for Laura's autograph. (I'm not sure exactly who she is other than someone who's having her diary from university read out on the show and appears to work for it somehow.) Scott then proceeded to try and get people to ring in with more pointless autographs that they had. This got me thinking. I don't think I've asked anyone for an autograph since Eddie Izzard signed my jacket when I was 15. I don't think I'd be that bothered about getting anyone's these days. But there are probably a bunch of people I'd quite like to have a drink and a chat with. And that led me down the path of the people I consider famous in the Free Software world that I've met and had what I consider proper conversations with. They probably don't remember them or me, but it's a level of access that I don't think is mirrored in other industries, such as the music biz. If I were a lowly guy with a band in my garage then I'm unlikely to get to meet the movers and shakers of the record industry and even if I managed to be in the same room as them they're unlikely to have a decent conversation with me. Yet in the Free Software community even a lowly unknown like me can rub shoulders with people who really make things happen and actually have meaningful exchanges with them. How cool is that? All you have to tend to do is make the effort to turn up to events; sometimes just your local LUG if you're lucky, or maybe a free LinuxExpo, or maybe something like Debconf. I think this is a pretty low barrier to entry. And I think it's a real strength of the community. In fact, it's part of what helps us have the community. (Maybe I'm just easily impressed by people though. And to be fair the people I'm viewing as famous probably aren't widely known to the non IT world. I still think it's a remarkable thing about the way in which we operate, something to be proud of and to not forget about.)