I know, my blog is pretty much dead. Not much time to blog on my various travels.
However, I am going to try to resurrect it for Debian and Scilab. My next messages related to Debian will be also published on Debian Planet.

It s been a long and wet winter here. We live down a dirt/sand/gravel road, and when it rains, it s difficult to get a car down the road due to mud. And impossible to get a bicycle down it. As a result, I ve only been able to ride my bicycle to work once since November, and that was in January. Last Thursday, I intended to ride in to work, but discovered my front tire wouldn t hold air. I had heard about a wonderful local bike repair shop, so I dropped off the wheel there. The owner replaced the tube and checked it out, and charged me, yes, $4 including labor and the tube. Nice. So today was my first ride of the season. I rode a total of 21.8 miles (35 km) today, which was probably unwise enough for being as out of shape as I am. It s 9.6 miles each way to work, plus I did some errands over lunch. But add to that the winds 30 MPH (48 kph) with gusts to 43 MPH (69 kph). This morning, they were weaker and also mostly at my back. This afternoon, though, they were mostly a vicious crosswind. If you ve bicycled much, you ll know that s less annoying than a headwind, but is still quite annoying and takes a lot more energy to battle than you might think. So, I am now rather sore. And the question is: will I be silly enough to do this again tomorrow? The answer to that probably depends on how late I stay up watching the Butler/Duke game tonight, as I have to get up an hour earlier on days that I bicycle to work. I found that the bicycle rack at work which, somewhat to my annoyance, was moved indoors last year has been rather disused. It is in a rather dusty and dirty part of our manufacturing shop, and there were large metal bins completely blocking the path to it, which I had to move before I could park my bike. Then, of course, it was the usual comments which I take with a smile about somebody that shows up to work wearing cycling shorts & shirt. It should be noted that I change into professional clothes at work. But my commute is too long to wear them on the way in and expect to be presentable, non-smelly, and pain-free. In any case, evidence that this may not have been the best day to start my commute: it hurts to sit at the moment.

Heavy Ion collisions try to recreate conditions very shortly after the Big Bang. Thus the created quark gluon plasma is often the Little Bang, due to recreating this very hot conditions.
The kernel Team already uploaded the linux-2.6 Big Bang release now follows initramfs-tools with the Little Bang. ;-) Newer initramfs comes with lots of fixes and new features:

• Faster boot thanks to Ubuntu merged patches using pre-cached boot scripts. It be cool if someone could time that and let us know?
• Support for several compression schemes as set in initramfs.conf or overridden by appropriate mkinitramfs call.
• Better MODULES=dep support /sys parsing (Still needs fixes for md).
• Hooks for out of linux-2.6 make deb-pkg generated linux-images.
• Call ipconfig with increasing timeouts to better fit with large scale clusters.
• Use BOOTIF mac address passed from gpxe in setup_networking.
• Out of the box support for devtmpfs. Hurra for devfs 2.0.
• Loading of the netconsole module together with the specified args, when netconsole is set as bootarg.
• Adds available, built network drivers in a dynamic way without need of hardcoded list.
• Smaller and thus faster MODULES=most generated initramfs due to kicking the video drivers out of generic initramfs.
• Last but not least don't suppress eventual modprobe errors.

Thanks for all the patches and useful input! Sorry for late release, will try to do it earlier more often and there is hope of an Ubuntu sync: view of initramfs-tools repo.
P.S.: cryptsetup needs fixup of #576488, udev can now start at a earlier stage of initramfs.

The Debian GSOC admins have made it clear that it is possible for DDs to be selected as GSOC students (even if people who are not Debian contributors will be prioritized). So, if you are a student, a Debian Developer, and interested in getting paid to work on Debian during the summer, it s a very good idea to apply! For the details, see this blog post. Note: the goal of this post is not to start a flamewar, but to make sure that everybody is fully aware of the unrestricted selection process. Since we are going to accept DDs as students anyway, let s at least try to get the best applications.

...would you be so kind to tell me where is the bloody fix for "my" bug in this mess? Hopefully my samba co-maintainer will bring the right fix as he's been involved in solving the issue in Ubuntu..and is by definition more familiar with the LP infrastructure than me. But, sure, that one made me mumble quite a bit this morning...

This is probably the only real surprising to an American post I ll be making, because it was the little thing that was most surprising. And that despite the fact that I had been warned:

Don t expect to get a glass of tap water at a restaurant or caf ; it s an unusual request that probably won t be understood or honoured. Lonely Planet Germany

Now, before I go on, I want to clarify that this post is NOT a complaint of what I saw in Germany and Prague; it s just a description of how it was surprising to these American eyes, and perhaps also a description of how the American approach such a mundane topic might be surprising to people from elsewhere. (Update: I want to clarify that I only visited 3 cities in Germany plus Prague. I don t want anybody to assume that I m making generalizations about the entire continent here, despite my title; I think the comments reflected that I didn t make this point clear enough. I lack data to draw much of any generalization at all; this is more of reporting on my experiences than anything else.) Utilitarian Water I noticed that the vast majority of toilets I saw in Germany and Prague are of the extremely water-saving variety, with an option for a small or a large flush. These toilets exist in the USA, but are still rather uncommon here. I was glad to see this attitude of conserving water. I was a bit surprised when I took a shower at our hotel in Berlin. Although that hotel was extremely environmentally-conscious in every other way including the toilets, light switches with RFID sensors and timers, etc the shower head was the most wasteful of water I had seen in quite a few years. I felt rather guilty of using so much water for a shower. But our hotel in Prague took shower heads to the next level. The shower head there was this huge square monstrosity, about a foot long on each side. I have never seen a shower head that big. It had a voracious appetite for water, too. Although it could be pointed in any direction, doing so was useless because, even at full blast, it was clearly getting not nearly enough water to propel the spray forward. It seems that this shower head needed special water-guzzling plumbing. But even without it, I felt even more guilty for showering in Prague. I suspect that I used more water for the two showers I took there than I would have over an entire week at home. I also very much suspect that this shower head would be illegal in the USA due to its water consumption. (I should note as an aside that the shower heads I saw in private homes were no different than American ones.) One thing I didn t see was lawn sprinklers. This may have been because there is less open grass in the places we visited, or perhaps because spring hadn t yet really hit. In any case, I wonder if our American habit of pumping water from deep beneath the ground, only to shoot it up in the air and spray it back on the ground again might appear a bit odd to others. Drinking Water In Restaurants We did a lot of walking in Europe, and sometimes we d have walked awhile to get to a restaurant. I really prefer water when I m thirsty, and ordered water with my meal at restaurants a few times. I stopped doing that, though. The presentation varied, but usually it went along these lines: they brought a glass bottle to the table, it cost EUR2 EUR5, and generally contained almost as much glass as water. The most impressive display of water was at a Berlin restaurant. I wanted some water, and so did Terah. So the waitress suggested we could share an EUR 4.90 bottle (0.75L). Sounds good, I guess although it s less water than you d get in a typical American bottle for one person, it seemed a lot by typical German restaurant standards. A few minutes later, our water arrived. It required the waitress to use a full tray to deliver our water and its, well, water accessories. First she carefully placed a frosted plastic water holder, precisely centered on the table between the two of us. Into this, she carefully placed the water bottle. It was, of course, made of glass, and also tall taller than most wine bottles, though containing less actual liquid. I am not yet sure of the purpose of the holder; it certainly wasn t to keep the water cold, as it was served warm. Perhaps they feared the bottle s impressive height acting as a sail and getting knocked over by a gentle breeze. In any case, next came our water glasses, which appeared to be exactly like wine glasses, but bore the logo of the company that bottled the water etched in the glass. After that, she picked the water bottle back up out of the holder, carefully opened it (it was just a regular twist-off lid), and then poured water into each of our glasses. She was careful not to have even a drop run down the side of the bottle, and filled each glass precisely 2/3 full. The glasses were, of course, positioned carefully on the table, and the bottle of water returned to its place of honor within the water bottle holder. This process consumed most of the small quantity of actual water in the bottle. I do believe that is the most elaborate presentation of a small amount of good ole H2O I have ever witnessed. It was made with the kind of care I would expect to be shown to someone that had just bought a $100 bottle of wine, not a EUR5 bottle of water. We had walked a mile (1.6 km) to get to that restaurant, and I was indeed a bit thirsty. I wasn t sure I wanted to drink all of my tiny quantity of water presented so elaborately all at once, so I had a sip of the beer I had the good sense to order along with the water. The beer, incidentally, cost roughly the same per liter as the water and was simply plonked down on the table with a complete lack of fanfare. Sadly, beer is not really very good for quenching thirst, due to its diuretic effects over time. Another surprise came at a restaurant in Prague. It appeared to have the typical prices for water, so I ordered a local Czech orange soda to drink. It, like the water, was served in a smallish glass bottle. In any case, I ordered a traditional Czech goulash to be served in a bread bowl, while Terah ordered some ribs. The waiter took our orders and menus, and returned a minute later bearing a bowl full of water and a lemon slice. This he put next to me, and announced, wash for you. My reaction was: Hmmm. This is different. (Which is why we went to Europe, after all!) What is this for? Did he think my hands looked dirty and needed to be washed before eating? Or did he think I would get them dirty while eating, and somehow fail to use my napkin? It turned out that the use of it became clear. I ate the goulash using the supplied spoon, but the bread bowl it was served in was of course edible too. It turns out it is pretty much impossible to eat a bread bowl that had contained a stew without getting your hands dirty, and the wash turned out to be quite practical and useful. It was free to wash my hands in, but I m sure would have cost EUR5 had I wanted to drink it. Drinking Water American Restaurants Some of you reading this may never have experienced water in an American restaurant, so allow me to explain. In a typical American restaurant, water is free and comes with unlimited refills. Americans generally think of water as healthy (and our doctors and government medical experts urge us to drink plenty of it), and water in a restaurant is a good way to save money while dining. It would generally be considered questionable service if your glass of water at a restaurant got less than half full, and really quite bad service if it sat empty for more than a minute or two. A waiter at an American restaurant will typically go around with a pitcher of ice water. If your large water glass isn t completely full, the waiter will pick it up and step a few steps back from the table before filling it from the pitcher. The waiter will then dump water and ice from the pitcher into it, usually overflowing the top such that some water and ice spills on the floor (so now you see the point of stepping back from the table). The glass will then be returned to your table, wet sides and all. It will be completely full, so you have to be careful not to spill when you take your first sip. The fancier or more expensive American restaurants will offer a version of this, though without the spilling on the floor part. Usually at one of these restaurants, you ll automatically get water set out for you when you arrive. This is free, and if you order another beverage, you ll still keep your water. (Though at any restaurant, it would be quite acceptable to order water along with your other beverage.) Needless to say, this water is coming from a faucet, not some glass bottle, but I m fine with that. A few American restaurants have bottled water on the menu, but I can t recall ever seeing somebody with one in a restaurant. Drinking Fountains Drinking fountains are common in the United States. They provide free tap water to anyone. You can find them near almost any public restroom, whether indoors or outdoors. You can also find them in virtually every park, along some walkways or bicycle routes, in airports and train stations, and even in museums. They re so common that I rarely even think about being able to find water in a city if I m thirsty. Often you ll find them installed in groups of two or three, with one at a lower height so as to be usable by children or adults in wheelchairs, and another at a regular height. Many indoor ones even contain integrated chillers to make the water cold (which, sadly, probably more than negate the environmental benefits of water fountains.) I saw exactly two drinking fountains in Europe, and I can say I got a drink at 100% of the drinking fountains I saw there. One was in the Hamburg airport, but notably it was at the place where you wait to have them check your passport. So you can use a drinking fountain in Hamburg, but apparently you must do so before you have officially entered Germany. The other one was in the Prague airport. It was in an out-of-the-way corner, on the lowest level, by the gates for the people that are flying out on the small planes. Which we were. Above it was a placard bearing a icon indicating that this was, in fact, a drinking fountain and how to use it. I was surprised at the need for the icon at first, but less so after I observed a man walk by, glance at the fountain, and wash his hands in it (rather than do so at a sink in the restroom 5 feet away). As a result, we were sometimes a bit thirsty in Germany. By the time we got to Leipzig, we realized what was going on and bought a Coke bottle which we could refill from the tap water in restrooms as we went along. (This we kept until it was confiscated at a museum in Prague). I didn t see many Germans carrying around bottles of water, but it was still cold, so it s possible they were but were in a coat or bag. I was left with the somewhat unwarranted conclusion that some Germans must be either always slightly dehydrated, carrying around hidden bottles of water, or paying EUR2 for a small plastic bottle of water all the time. In the USA, we do have bottled water. Among people that care about such things, there are certain people that drink only from bottled water as much as possible, and then there are other people that view bottled water as exceptionally expensive and an environmental catastrophe and avoid it as much as possible. I m part of that latter group. I ve noticed that statistics show that Germans consume more bottled water per capita than Americans do, which is not really a surprise given what I observed. Conclusions Part of the reason I wanted to go to Europe was to experience different approaches to things, and we surely did. I didn t expect it to lead to a blog post about something as mundane as water, but here it has. I ve got to say I like the overall attitude of water conservation in Germany, which seems to have gone further than it has in the USA. I also like the system of water fountains we have in the USA, which also helps the environment by reducing demand for plastic water bottles. The wash for me in Prague was just great. One of those moments where I was completely surprised (and in a good way) by something. (I m just glad the waiter spoke a bit of English, because I wouldn t have figured it out at all otherwise.) In the end, part of the fun of traveling is learning about these differences. So next time, we ll just plan on finding a bottle to carry around at the start of our trip, and then thirst won t be a problem. Perhaps I ll even try washing my hands in a drinking fountain.

Health Monitoring Eric Topol gave an interesting TED talk about wireless medical monitoring devices [1]. The potential for helping diabetics and other people who need ongoing treatment is obvious as is the potential for helping pregnant women and other people who might suddenly need medical treatment at short notice. One significant positive potential for this is integration with multiple services. For example Eric s talk showed a graph of sleep levels on a mobile phone, the deep sleep (which is apparently the most restorative) was shown in sections that were significantly less than one hour in duration. I often receive SMS messages about network problems during the night, the vast majority of them aren t that important and can be delayed without any problem. If my phone could determine that I was in deep sleep and delay sending me a NAGIOS report for up to 30 minutes then it would help me sleep while not making any significant impact on my work in repairing server problems it s not as if I would be immediately productive if woken from deep sleep anyway. Status and Attention Monitoring Eric Horvitz, Carl Kadie, Tim Paek, and David Hovel of Microsoft Research wrote an interesting paper titled Models of Attention in Computing and Communication: From Principles to Applications [2]. In that paper they describe various methods for tracking user attention and filtering messages so that the user won t be needlessly distracted by unimportant messages when they are busy. The next logical step is to integrate that with a smart phone (maybe Android would be good for this) to screen calls, unknown callers could be automatically directed to voice-mail and known good callers could be given an automated prompt as to whether they think that their call is important enough to be worth the distraction. It seems to me that combining health and status monitoring would be the sensible thing to do. If a bio-sensor array indicates that someone is more stressed than usual then decreasing their availability for phone calls would make sense. It would also be trivial to analyse calls and determine which callers are likely to cause stress and block their calls at inconvenient times. What we Need Of course there are lots of security implications in this. Having multiple networked devices tracking and collating information on health and all activity (including video-monitoring in the Microsoft model) has a lot of potential for malicious use. This is one of many reasons that we need to generally improve computer security. We also need to have free software implementations of such things. We don t want Microsoft to get a monopoly on status monitoring. Also it seems that smart Nike shoes that can work with the iPhone [3] are the leading mass-market implementation of health monitoring, everything related to health-care should be as open as possible. I m happy for Nike to make their own special products, but we need to have them work with open systems and make the data available as widely as possible. There is the real potential for people to needlessly die if health data is not available in open formats! According to the Wikipedia page Nike has been shipping products using a proprietary 2.4GHz wireless network since 2006 [4], it would be a really good hardware project to devise a way of making compatible sensors and readers. We also need some free software for monitoring the user status to avoid interrupting them. Finally we need some software to integrate all the data. Canonical s Desktop Experience team are doing some interesting work on managing desktop notifications that will be in Ubuntu Lucid [5], they appear to have some basic support for masking notifications based on priority. Please keep up the great work Canonical people, and please consider working on advanced status monitoring next!

• [1] http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_topol_the_wireless_future_of_medicine.html
• [2] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/cacm-attention.pdf
• [3] http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-10272535-233.html
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike+iPod
• [5] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotifyOSD

After several other Debian developers convinced me that a ShortURL service, which is under control of a Debian Developer would be useful for them, I've spent some time to write the necessary code for it. And if it will be used regulary, I'll ask DSA if they want to host it on a proper machine. So I'm happy to announce the public beta test of deb.li (also available under go.debian.net)! Please note that neither the content of the pages nor the CSS is finished... As this should not become just another random, spammer-attracting ShortURL service, I will not provide a web based form to add new URLs. Instead new URLs have to be added via a simple JSON-RPC based interface. Other ways to add new URLs will be added on request (or by sending patches ;)), at least an email-gateway similar to db.debian.org is planned. The small piece of documentation which exists so far is available at wiki.debian.org/deb.li And if you want to give it a try now, log into alioth.debian.org and have a look into

/var/lib/gforge/chroot/home/users/bzed/godebian-client

- the usage is documented in the README file and should be pretty straight forward. I hope it will be useful - comments, bugreports and patches are welcome!

As you might have read, one of Debians slightly important machines had some hardware trouble. Before I get into more details of this story, let me say thank you to all the people who worked on this issue: - The DSA (Debian System Administrators) team, - the local admins at Brown University Computer Science department. I intentionally leave out the HP support here, I think their work in this issue was pretty suboptimal. While they do follow a certain schema, it took a bit long and the stunt with the technician not finding the replacement board and later on leaving without further notice wasn t all that great. (Update: Just to clarify this: In general we are happy with HP and the hardware and relationship and all that stuff. And usually the support works pretty well, like for all the times we had to replace broken disks.) Now, the story. This all started by us noticing something in ries kernel output telling about some trouble with the ram:

ries kernel: [168074.392016] Northbridge Error, node 0, core: -1
ries kernel: [168074.392186] K8 ECC error.

This was first noticed somewhere at the beginning of January. A DSA member then used the usual HP tools to check whats up, none of it reported an error. There wasn t much of an option left besides waiting what happens in the future. No support would do anything here. Until March we did not have any trouble. But at the 14th of March this changed, as the HP tools now found a serious error, reporting Status: DIMM is degraded for the third DIMM module. A support ticket was opened at this point and a replacement DIMM got sent out. Unfortunately the well known Mr. Murphy did look at this issue and so the wrong thing was sent out to the wrong place. Countdown continued and 10 days later the host decided to randomly lockup. And as HP servers have an Automatic Server Reset function in such cases, the whole machine rebooted. Not only once. Guess how much a filesystem likes such things when the machine is active. And for added fun a second DIMM got reported as broken, we now had DIMM #3 and #4 gone off. A certain ping-pong with HP support later we asked the local admins to take out the broken DIMMs and then also to change the order in which the remaining DIMMs are arranged. Unfortunately this did not help, the errors stayed. At this time we already turned off the services running on the machine and it mostly waited in the HP Insight Diagnostics test from HPs SmartStart CD. (And it always locked itself at 97% here). The support asked us to try another round of work on the machine, which our DSA team and the local admins did. But as it already was the 30th of March and nothing helped, our DSA got a little more direct in asking for a working solution. Like replacing the board and sending a technician to look and fix the machine. This was scheduled for the 1st of April, but turned out to not work as hoped. For some reason the technician was not able to find the board that was sent as replacement (no fault of our local admins!), so nothing happened the 1st of April except us getting a little upset. DSA communicated this to HP support, asking for escalation and finally getting this fixed. Our local admins could at last greet a HP technician on the 2nd of April then and he even had the replacement board with him, so he did his work there. He also confirmed that the two DIMMs mentioned above are faulty. For some reason he did not replace them, but left them outside of the machine. He also left the place without telling the Brown CS staff, so it wasn t the best performance he made. Fortunately the machine was in a working state again, only missing 2 of its DIMMs, 4Gb RAM. This has to be replaced by HP in the next days. When the Brown CS staff found out the technician left without notice they enabled our DSA to access the ilo of the machine again, so they could get the machine back up. Of course the first run was the HP SmartStart stuff again, running a full test. It reported no error, pheeew. There had been a few more steps in getting the settings of the ilo correct again and running a full filesystem check on it, but somewhere in the night the machine was back up and ready for us FTPMasters and Release team to get the services back. As the machine was back up in the middle of the night where I was sleeping, I did start my work somewhere this morning. At 10:25 CEST this started with a md5sum check of all files we have in our pool/ structure, ie. the Debian archive. We had 655k files to check, so it naturally took a while. Luckily we only found 32 broken files. Even better a set of them is already fixed, the rest of them is easily fixable with a set of binnmus the buildd people helpfully schedule, so not too much work involved in fixing this issue. Could have been worse. (Actually, when the first reboots happened, before the long downtime, we also had some broken logfiles, unreadable changes files and such things. But those I already fixed back then). More or less in parallel to the md5sum check we also started the queue daemons again, to let our upload queues from the other hosts forward their files to the central queue on ftp-master, tested the triggers to the new buildd peoples machine and the release team did a britney run. This took the first 5 hours (and a bit) of the process. As a second step, and we are still in this, we started the processing of the incoming queue. Turned out we have to process 10gigabytes of new uploads, in a total of 1285 uploads. This process is still running at the time I write this blog post, having processed about 1100 uploads. A good 9 til 10 hours run, but this was expected. I actually thought it will take even longer. When this is done I will go and have a manual dinstall run. That is, I will run every action a dinstall is usually doing by hand. And verify each step. Usually dinstall takes some 2 hours, manually it can take a bit more. Somewhere during this run a mirror push will also be done, a fairly huge one this time, with all those updates. When this all works I will turn on FTPMaster cronjobs after this dinstall, or at latest tomorrow morning, as usual, and service is back as usual. As far as I know the release team plans to turn on their cronjobs tomorrow morning too, so this will all be nice then. Apropos release: Please note what I wrote in my latest d-d-a mail:

As a sidenote from me: If you have a package that might be involved in
whatever transition to testing, or simply might get involved, it could
really help if you wait a day or two with the next upload, so the
release team can sort through all before you give them new trouble. If
in doubt, try mailing debian-release@lists.debian.org and ask. :)

So, thats it, enough annoyance with all those status bits here and there. I go leave you alone now. :)

A Stupid Bisop breaks the Godwin Rule The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Catholic Bishop Anthony Fisher has just claimed that GODLESSNESS and secularism led to Nazism, Stalinism, mass murder and abortion [1]. This is a violation of the rule part of Godwin s Law. We might not expect clerics to have enough general knowledge of society to know this rule, but it does seem reasonable to expect them to have enough empathy to understand why inappropriate Hitler analogies will just offend people and don t advance their cause. But anyone in a position of leadership in a global organisation who is going to talk to the media should have enough intelligence to check historical references. The Wikipedia article about Positive Christianity is worth reading, it includes references to Christian based race-hate in Nazi Germany as well as modern references [2]. There is also an interesting Wikipedia page about the Religious aspects of Nazism [3], there seems to be room for a lot of debate on the matter of how religion fit in to the Nazi regime but it seems quite clear that it was not an atheist regime. The Wikipedia page about the Rechskonkordat (the agreement between the Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church) is also worth reading [4]. Also I m sure that the Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet wasn t the only Catholic despot. Community Services and Moral Authority Cardinal Pell was quoted in the same SMH article as saying we find no community services sponsored by the atheists , of course if he was to investigate who is contributing to the religious based community service organisations he would find plenty of atheists. I know I m not the only atheist who donates to The Salvation Army [5] on occasion. I wonder how many religious people would be happy to donate to an explicitly atheist organisation, I suspect that the prevalence of religious charities is due to the fact that a religious charity can get money from both religious people and atheists while a charity that advocated atheism in any way would be limited to atheist donors. If I was to establish a community service charity I would seriously consider adding some religious element to help with fund raising it s just a matter of doing what s necessary to achieve the main goal. Even if it wasn t for violating Godwin s law and a total lack of any knowledge of history Anthony would still have failed. We all know the position of the Catholic Church on the sexual abuse of children. The Catholic policies are implemented in the same way in every country and as far as we can tell have been done so for all time. I believe that makes them unqualified to offer moral advice of any kind. Criticising the Secular World Peter Craven has written an article for The Age criticising the secular world [6]. He makes the extraordinary claim the molesting clergy are like the brutal policemen and negligent doctors and corrupt politicians: they come with the territory because pennies have two sides . The difference of course is that police, doctors, and politicians tend to get punished for doing the wrong thing even when they do things that are far less serious. But the molesting clergy seem to be protected by all levels of the church hierarchy. Peter makes some claims about the secular world as if there is a Borg collective of atheists and claims that there is an incomprehension of Christian values . I believe that the attitudes of atheists and the secular justice system correspond quite well with what most Christians would regard as Christian values the problem is that the actions of the church leaders tend not to match that. It s All About Money I would like to know why Christians almost never change church and never cease donating. Religious organisations are much like corporations, they seek new members and new revenue sources. If a significant number of Catholics were to pledge to not donate any money to their church for a year after every child sex abuse scandal then Catholic policies might change. Also if Catholics were to start changing to Christian denominations that do the right thing in regard to moral issues then the Catholic church would either change or eventually become irrelevant. If you keep paying people who do bad things then you are supporting them! I suggest that any church member who cares about the moral issues of the day should vote with their checkbook. If their church fails to do the right thing then inside the donation envelope they should put a note saying due to the immoral actions of the church I will donate to other charities . I am not aware of any church that would expel members for such a protest, but I know that some smaller parishes have cash-flow problems and would rapidly escalate the issue through the management chain if even a few members were to protest in such a manner.

• [1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/thank-god-were-not-all-atheists-bishop-says-20100401-ri4q.html
• [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_aspects_of_Nazism
• [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichskonkordat
• [5] http://salvos.org.au/
• [6] http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/has-the-bell-tolled-on-easters-meaning-20100401-ri1f.html

• Steve McIntyre has sent a final report closing his 2 years as DPL. Steve, we are grateful for all the work you did during the past two years!
• Debian Project Leader Elections 2010: After 3 intense weeks of electoral campaigning, the voting period started today. You can read the questions and answers from the DPL candidates in the archives of the debian-vote mailing list. The new DPL term will start on April 17th, 2010.
• ries.debian.org, the host behind ftp-master.debian.org, has suffered some grave hardware problems and it has been down for one week now. If you were wondering why there were no new packages in your upgrades, this is the reason.
  This problem is actively being worked on, but until it is fixed, uploading new packages to the archive is not possible.
• The release team has sent a detailed update about the status of the transitions and release goals for Squeeze.
  A freeze in late May/June might be possible, if people work hard on getting these transitions done. Read the email to see how you can help!
• There were no new Debian Developers in March.
• Some developers participated in the traditional April Fools Day jokes, see: the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit in planet: initial post by Adrian von Bidder, followed by this post by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl; and the Intend to package (ITP) bugs:
  ITP: jidanni a natural intelligence to find many bugs
  ITP: cpan All possible perl modules you could ever need

As of writing, xulrunner 1.9.2.3 has been uploaded to experimental, but as ftp-master is currently offline, and as it will also need to go through NEW, it won t be available immediately. Which is why, once more, I make them available for you:

• for i386:
  • xulrunner
  • libmozjs
• for amd64:
  • xulrunner
  • libmozjs

Iceweasel should follow in a few hours.

Two months ago, I explained how cosmetic carbon copy could allow you to list recipients in a message who never receive a copy. Today, thanks to John Stumpo's writing talent and Wes Filardo's IETF-NG, an Internet-Draft informational document has been published. IETF didn't like it enough to accept it as an April 1 RFC. (I do actually hope that one day someone will submit a modified version to IETF as a rest-of-the-year RFC.) Slashdot took note! In first visible comment, an Anonymous Coward writes:

Although it is an April Fool's...this would actually be useful.

Other highlights from the Slashdot discussion:

• An Anonymous Coward writes about an existing implementation.
• quantumplacet actually corrects me on my recollection of the standard.
• Delusion_ complains of April Fool's Day, "I hate today."

In my last post, about GRUB2 theming, there were a few people who were unhappy at the perceived difficulty of creating GRUB2 themes, largely based on the lack of documentation. And to be honest, those people are right if the documentation were complete & correct when I started, then I wouldn t have ended up bumping into all the bugs I did. So, to help on that front and to help kick-start GRUB2 theming in general, I m announcing Larval. More GRUB2 themes means more awesome-looking systems in the wild. Hopefully the GRUB2 upstream will embrace it as a project to help raise the profile and potential of GRUB2. It didn t take me long to realise the most obvious way to develop such an editor: GRUB2 s canvas-based layout system has an awful lot in common with XAML, so the obvious choice was to develop using Silverlight (or, more specifically, Gtk.Moonlight). Larval s internal theme format is XAML files, which are then exported to (and imported from) GRUB2 s simple text based files. The biggest piece of work, to be honest, is the Managed implementation of a PF2 font reader/writer, so you can design a theme using the regular TrueType fonts of your choice, then have them automatically ported to PF2 format as required. I look forward to plenty of community input on Larval, once it reaches a point where I m sufficiently pleased with my (Ms-PL licensed) code to share it with the world. Until then, you ll have to make do with the above screenshot!

Today, the Internet will be full of bullshit.

No, I'm not reverting to the commodore 64. LOAD stands for 'Linux Open Administration Days' and is a community event targetted at sysadmins. This being quite obvious, as I have a talk on the schedule. It'll be a repeat of my 'Debian Secrets' talk that I've also done at FOSDEM, in Essen, and in Buenos Aires. Except it will be better than it was at FOSDEM. I'll be there the whole of saturday. Not sure yet about Sunday.

The answer is probably no way! I like the way Jon Corbet put it (article will be free in a few weeks):

The SCO affair is kind of like a bad zombie movie; the plot is implausible, the acting is horrible, and, even though you know the good guys must win in the end, that obnoxious zombie just keeps coming back and ruining the party.

Realistically, what will happen? The judge in the Chapter 11 case has so far been quite interested in helping SCO succeed, so I guess there will be an appeal on this. The contract claims in the cases surrounding this are probably not very relevant, so I'm not sure how much press they'll get (although I'm sure Pam will continue to cover the issue although I think the Apple vs. Hitachi patent cause should be the one that should be in the center of attention right now.) And, of course, there's the Canonical vs. SPI lawsuit coming up. I find it very difficult to tell in what direction that will get decided, but I hope it won't take as long as the SCO case.

Congratulations to everyone involved in what looks like a very good GNOME release! Interesting times are now ahead for the GNOME project, as on the plate is now a big release like 3.0. That will mean a lot of changes to the desktop we've got used to in the last decade, and I hope it ends up being successful, innovative and useful. Debian has packages for GNOME Shell, and a special gnome3-session which starts Mutter + Shell. I experimented with it last week at my work place, and had mixed feelings with the current status. I'm not a big fan of hard dependencies on Direct Rendering. My main computer is an Athlon 800MHz. Compiz crawls on it, and sadly Mutter is basically unusable on it. At the office, I have P4-based system with 1GB of RAM, which runs GNOME 2.28 OK. When I switched to the GNOME 3 session, it showed that it's getting old. I also experienced X crashes and kernel oopses, apparently a classic for ATI users using a composited window manager. This being said, I consider myself lucky because both systems have ATI cards and can do DRI using free software. If I was forced to use nVidia non-free drivers, it'd probably mean I'd stick with the Panel until that wasn't an option at all. I am aware we'll see improvements both in Xorg/kernel and GNOME before GNOME 3.0 is released next Autumn, and have high hopes for a release that is accepted by our users really fast (avoiding a KDE 4.0 situation). GNOME hackers have done good stuff for ages, and 3.0 will be a new example!

As I really liked saying why I think Open Game Art is a good project I decided to start a small serie of well done free (well not only software) projects. This time SFML got to be the one. SFML is, as the name already tells, a Simple and Fast Multimedia Library written in C++ but providing bindings for a whole bunch of other languages like Python, Ruby, C, D and others. Debian currently provides the original library as well as the C and Python bindings maintained by the Games Team and myself. On a side remark, SFML also uses my favourite License, zlib. What I really like about SFML is the readable code all through the project. Every time I was unsure what some function does having a look at the actual implementation (and some OpenGL and X11) knowledge turned out to be quite satisfactory. This is, of course, aided by the fact that SFML's development is driven by a single Developer, Laurent Gomila. On the rather weak points I'm still hoping the to-be-released 2.0 Version of SFML will introduce something like a stable API which it currently lacks (although the API has settled and there are no such huge changes as from 1.2 to 1.3 in recent updates any more). SFML also uses hand-made Makefiles for building (now supporting DESTDIR at least -- in some non-standard way) and has the usual load of embedded libraries which results in it's current load of patches. For a nice time burner make sure you take a look at the python binding's snake-like clone. It clearly misses some important aspects to form a full game but it's nice nontheless. I have a (not-quite) small SFML based Project myself, a forward ported game from my old DirectX days, however it's unfortunately not yet playable again und rather stalled at the moment due to lack of time. So much for SFML. If you feel like it feel free to join me on writing about well done pieces of software or just about pieces on how you think it should be done and tell us where you found it happening.