Many people agree that teams are good : doing team maintenance of packages is often seen as A Good Thing inside Debian, and Ubuntu enforces it by switching to the everything is team-maintained philosophy. However, teams are subject to complex group dynamics, and raise interesting issues that you don’t encounter when working alone. It is important to ask yourself those few questions Dilution of knowledge: Team members tend to individually know less about specific packages. Does the sum of all team members really know more than an individual developer would know about a specific package ? Responsibility: Are there some clear responsibilities in your team ? Are people feeling responsible for packages ? Not having clear responsibilities is dangerous, because a package could become sort-of-orphaned inside the team, because nobody would consider “his duty” to work on it. Hierarchy inside teams: Is there a clear hierarchy inside your team ? If there isn’t (which could be OK), are you sure there isn’t an unofficial hierarchy that built up with time, causing people to wait for an unofficial leader’s decision, while this leader might not even be aware that he is that leader ? Scalability: How much can a team scale ? How does *your* team scale ? How many team members are really active ? External interface: When dealing with the outside world (read: upstream), it’s easier to have a single point of communication. How does your team’s external interface look like ? Remember that teams’ external interfaces can easily become much more complex for upstream developers to deal with. There are no magic way to build a team that work, but it’s important to look at your team with a critical eye and try to improve its inner workings.

Ah, well. I’m such an errant blogger, being focused in doing actual work. But here are some updates:

• Summer Of Code: Sendpage - My code formatting patches have made CVS, and now I’m working on finishing the testsuite. Almost done, hehe
• Debian NM - Still at Philosophy and Procedures 1…
• Ubuntu PH: Picked up where Ealden left off as the PhilippineTeam Leader and LoCoContact, and with Jerome, taking care of the new, Drupal-powered portal for Ubuntu-PH.
• School: I’m loving Philo 173!

I finnaly took the time to package 0.7.4 for Debian, thanks to Philipp Kern, it has just been uploaded. This package closes about ten bugs and provide the last available “development” release of Backup Manager. I hope this package will please those who will “apt-get” into it. I now plan to fix as much upstream bugs as I can, and moreover, work on the inclusion of rdiff-backup.

Long day at Wikimania Hacking Days. Phillip Hallam-Baker gave a good talk about the importance of identity in the wiki community. David Recordon talked about OpenID, and I got to demo the OpenID MediaWiki extension. That was all pretty fun. But the hard part has been discussing WYSIWYG editor stuff. We're in a real bind with MediaWiki -- a complicated and almost non-deterministic text markup language with one (1) complete implementation and an estimated 5 million documents in various places on the Web. The challenge is to keep storage in Wikitext but editing in-browser with HTML. The marshalling between the two formats is so tricky to do, and the consequences in damaging documents so large, that it's almost impossible to make the project work. Meanwhile, wiki companies like JotSpot, WetPaint, and SocialText have WYSIWYG editors, and it's starting to look like MW will never have it. It's probably time to just bite down and do this job. Federico Caldeira Knabben of FCKeditor has come to Boston to offer his help. The guys from Wikia are working on using WikiWyg, which would be pretty cool, too. I just think it has to happen. tags: hacking days wikimania identity openid wysiwyg fckeditor

I agree with Destiny -- this letter from wp:Steely Dan to wp:Luke Wilson is just excellent. If only all creative property disputes were handled this way. tags: steely dan luke wilson destiny

Hot in the City tonight It's been a hot last couple of days in Montreal -- I mean, not hot like wt:California or wt:Europe but hot enough that it feels pretty bad. According to Sacr Blues -- one of my favorite books about wt:Quebec -- Montreal has the highest variation in temperature of any inhabited place on earth -- from highs of 40C in the summer to lows of -40C in the winter. We're at the high part now. Yesterday was my Primary Caregiver ("PCG") day, so I took the opportunity to take the baby for a long walk in Parc La Fontaine, under the gigantic poplars, where it's always cool and fresh. We also went for a nice dip in the baby pool. That kept things pretty nice.

Bonne F te Speaking of hotness, last night was the 30th birthday party for my friend Niko Ritoux. Maj and I took the opportunity to do our first evening out as a couple without the baby -- our great babysitter Julia came by with her boyfriend Antoine and took Amita June to a jazz concert at the Theatre de Verdure in Parc La Fontaine. How great is that? Anyways, we had a good night with Niko. We went to Le 2, the teensy but uber-cool bistro-bar our friend Daran co-owns. It's in possibly the most valuable real estate in all Montreal -- the corner of St. Laurent and Sherbrooke -- but it's unassuming and doesn't have that Lower Main clubbed-out fake tan feel. We had a great dinner of "international tapas" -- the little appetizers that remind me a lot of Toqu -style gourmet micro-meals -- and lots of liquor and good fun. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while -- P.E. and his girlfriend Ode, who were living in Taiwan for a long time; Fred; Daran and his new friend Annie; Joannie; and our own lovely Italian princess the Other Annie. After dinner (11:30PM!) we hustled up to Bily Kun on Mont Royal and then Plan B across the street. Nicely, for a Friday night, everything was open and airy -- Montreal bars can get so damn crowded, but in the summer everyone's in Cottage Country and there's plenty of room for dedicated barflies. I'm not sure when I got home, but I think Niko had a good time. tags: birthday niko jf joannie le 2 bily kun plan b

And more time Today I spent my time creating data feeds of Wikitravel content for researchers at the University of Zurich who are doing some sort of work on the reliability and development of online travel information. I can't wait to find out how their research comes out. Maj, Amita June and I went up on the Pont Jacques-Cartier tonight to watch the last event in the International des feux at La Ronde. One of the great things about being in Mtl for the summer is this months-long fireworks festival, in which national teams compete every Saturday and Wednesday night. This is the first time I've been on the bridge for the event, and it was amazing -- much louder and bigger than when we've watched from home. Amita June, of course, was dumbfounded by the fireworks -- she gawked open-mouthed through the whole thing. I thought she'd be scared by the lights and noise and the crowd, but she loved it -- reached out and pointed for each explosion, and even said ooooooooh for the big finale. She conked out on the 8-block walk home, which gave Mama and Papa a little extra rest. tags: amitajune fireworks montreal la ronde maj

GPLv3 and license compatibility According to this article on Linuxworld.com, compatibility with other licenses like the Apache 2.0 is going to be a major focus of the GPLv3 development process. I say huzzah to that. Trivial differences between licenses are a shameful waste of time and energy for hackers who have better things to do. The world needs too much good Open Source software for us to waste time with license incompatibilities. Hopefully this same philosophy will bleed over into the FDL. Creative Commons made an overture for unilateral compatibility between the Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses and the FDL, which got stony silence from the FSF. It's time to start thinking of the users and playing nice with each other. tags: gplv3 licenses open source compatibility

Put one foot in front of the other I nearly forgot to mention: Amita June took her first step today. She's been "cruising" (walking around holding onto furniture) for about 6-8 weeks now, and she loves walking around holding onto Mama or Papa's fingers. And she's been spending longer and longer periods standing on her own -- up to about 20-30 seconds. Today, she was standing up, and she wanted to walk so I held out my finger just a little out of her reach. She extended her arm for it, then took two little steps to get to me. Ta-da! Maj and I took turns getting her to stand up on her own then walk to us. She's only got about 3-4 steps in her right now before she freaks out and sits down, but it's still pretty amazing. tags: amitajune first steps maj baby

Speaker break-in tme myth or reality tries to debunk the myth of audio speakers needing time in orders of 30-50 hours to get to ther best audio properties after purhase.
I bought a new set of Sennheiser HD 215 a few weeks ago. I unpacked them and conected to my laptop. I was blown away by their performance, but something at how the bass frequencies were “muddy” and not clean confused me. Then I read in the manual that I should play some music on the headphones for at least 30 hours to break them in and only then they would get to their best audio characteristics. So I left the headphones on the laptop and left some music playing in them overnight and only came to them after at least 20 more hours of breaking-in. I put the same music on as I did the first time and I was not dissappointed - the bass was much more clean and instruments in the bass area were finally as distinct as they should be at this level of headphones. I did not listen to the music during the break-in time, so my brain did not adopt to the sound of these headphnes - they acctually sounded better.
I do not really care that a distinguised loudspeeker engineer can not find an explanation of how this break-in happens, but that does not change the fact - it exists.
Update - A few more links:

• Discussion - fun starts around page 10
• Pro-burnin article

In the end peple end up playing sine waves and measuring frequency response thus oversimplifying the problem. It is well possible that non-sinusiodal sound is needed for proper break-in (as in sound with multiple different frequencies at once, or sound with harmonics, …). It is well possible that the “sharpness” or “mddiness” that is reported by the audiphiles as the characteristic of a non-broken in sound system is not something that is measurable by frequency response - aharmonic dispositions, temporal dispositions and other distortions of the sound are easy to detect by a trained ear, but very hard measure with precision unless targeted. Also people ignore the real complexities of the materials that are used. We think that wood is simple and plain and understood material, but in reality wood is such a superior microcomposite material that it has properties that are still not nderstood by modern material science. And when we get cooperation of metalic parts, wood, chemicals and, most importantly, natural and complex vibration - predicting all effects of such vibration on the complex system, that is a simple speaker, is … well … complex. Audiophile ear can easily hear distortions that normal audio equipment simply can not measure with any confidence. Discarding phenomena that one simply does not know how to measure or explain is just blindfolding yourself. I was even more fascinated by the description of an simple non-scientific experiment showing break-in effect on audio cables. This was discarded outright as impossible, but it is acctually much easier to understand. Cable is simply a thin piece of metal through which a stream of electrons is flowing. It is not too hard to imagine that these electrons traveling at light speed could impact any impurities or defects in the cable. Any such impacts would distort the analog signal going through the cable. Also after multiple weeks of electron bonbardment it is not impossible to imagine such impurities or defects (or the material around them) being changed in a way to ease the flow of electros (like wind erosion of rocks) thus breaking-in the cables and improving their sound - making it more fluid. That is quite easy to see - why should not there be a set of similar efects working on a whole audiospeaker?

Thank you very much, Aur lien G R ME. So yaboot on XFS is finally fixed. (Which means that root on XFS is finally possible again on powerpc.) Ah and this is also fixed in Edgy's yaboot 1.3.13a-1ubuntu1.

Sound Juicer "I Need A Little Love To Ease The Pain" 2.14.5 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This releases rolls in the bug fixes from 2.15.4:

• Add date information to all possible albums (Alex Lancaster)
• Improve GStreamer error handling (Tim-Philipp Muller)
• Don't crash when re-opening the Preferences dialog
• Clear the genre field when re-reading the disk

Sound Juicer "Two Undernourished Egos Four Rotating Hips" 2.15.4 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Not a lot going on, sorry.

• Add date information to all possible albums (Alex Lancaster)
• Improve GStreamer error handling (Tim-Philipp Muller)
• Don't crash when re-opening the Preferences dialog
• Clear the genre field when re-reading the disk

Tomorrow we will encounter 38 C over here. I will be melting. Now. Really.

I need a new TV. I've have my current one for 6 years now and it was secondhand when I bought it. Plus it gets this little green patch now and then (which it's been doing for a couple of years). Not hugely annoying, but everything helps in justifying a new one. My current TV is a normal 25" 4:3 set. I've worked out that if I go widescreen I need a 31" set to get the same height, which seems perfectly doable. The tricky bit comes in that I'd like HD, as hopefully the new TV will last me at least as long as the old one has. HD's only recently been launched in the UK - Sky brought out their HD service just in time for the World Cup (though I understand lots of people who'd pre-ordered didn't receive their upgrades in time). Telewest also have a recent HD service. Of course NTL, who I have, don't yet (despite them having merged with Telewest) and the Freeview DVB-T trials are only in Central London. Anyway, I won't have HD signal for a while, but I want to be ready when for when I do (and I'll be hooking a media PC up to the screen anyway, so will be able to take advantage of it via that method). Sky appear to have decided on using 2 HD formats; 720i (1280x720, progressive) and 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced). So having support for those would be nice. In addition I'd like 1080p (1920x1080, progressive), for things like the media box and in case content becomes available in that format (HD-DVD/BluRay?). This doesn't seem like a huge request. Lots of TVs in the UK are marketed as HD Ready. What does that mean? Essentially it specifies that the minimum native resolution of the screen is 720 lines and that there is a digital (DVI or HDMI) input that can support 720p and 1080i input and copy protection (HDCP). There is no minimum width; the set is allowed to scale the image to fit whatever it has. I've seen HD Ready sets that have a 1024x1080i native resolution - not wide enough for a native 720p image let alone 1080i. However most HD Ready sets seem to do 1366x768 as the native res, so fine for 720p but not 1080i/p. sigh I managed to find a TV from Philips, the 37PF9830/10, which does native 1920x1080p. Amazon even sell it, though for an eye watering £2,248.28. What does this get you? Integrated Freeview decoder? No. MPEG2/4 playing of movies from flash media? No, just image viewing. A nice big monitor for your computer? No, Philips' website only lists 1024x768 as the max computer res and I've seen reports in forums that 1366x768 is possible, but no higher. There's a 42PF9830/10 (42") that adds movie playing and ethernet, which sounds good but adds who knows how much to the price (I couldn't easily find a UK price). Plus it's probably too large for me even if it was affordable. My naive hope is that with the Sky push lots of people will have got sorted for the World Cup, or will go HD for Christmas. Meaning that come the new year I might have a better available choice of proper HDTVs and the pricing might be sane. I can dream, right?

So after a week of post-graduation stress I am back at the computer working for Debian and for my Summer of Code participation. Two weeks ago I had to prepare myself for two oral examinations, which took place on Monday and Tuesday last week. On Tuesday I received my transcript, and all people celebrated this hilariously. The parties continued until Friday when we earned the final certificate. I completed my Abitur with a grade of 1.2 (with 1.0 being the best grade). I think that I am satisfied with this result. Next in line is the move to Karlsruhe to enroll for the CS department at the University of Karlsruhe.

MJRay started my posting in his blog why he is going to fold his feed (send only the first paragraph or so in the RSS feed instead of the full text). Wouter, Phillip, JoeyH, Noodles, have expressed why they don't like the idea. So I'll just have to <AOL>ME TOO!</AOL>
Folds are nice for news feeds, where you want to quickly gaze at the headlines and just open the articles that are worth something, great. (BTW, I hate when Barrapunto or Cofrad a send only the title, not the whole first block. Too little information to judge!) But for personal blogs, for following friends' lives and opinions, it's... Just torture.

The Debian New Maintainer process (NM) is well-known to be strict and tedious. It tests the skills, aptitudes, and attitudes of candidates in a number of areas, including technical, philosophical, and license interpreation. The process keeps the minimum level of competency of new maintainers at a reasonably high level. We have, however, no process for ensuring that old farts don't stink. Take myself for an example. I have been with Debian for over a decade, but I still find new surprises in things that are from the early days. Just recently, I learned about dch, which has existed since 1997 or before. This discover made my life much easier: I had grown tired of updating debian/changelog dates by hand, so they tended to be rather inexact. Now, when I do an upload, the changelog date is no longer a lie. The problem is not that I am incapable of learning, or that I don't want to learn. It's just that I don't, unless I make an effort to do so. Given the small amount of free time I have, I tend to spend it on other things. Most Debian developers probably keep up with most changes to policy, tools, procedures, best practices, and such, without anyone prodding them. However, during the past year and a half, when I've been doing quality assurance work, I've noticed that there seems to be a number of people who don't give any indication of current competence. There's two approaches we can choose from to deal with this. We can educate, or we can re-test. Education means writing documentation, announcing important changes, maybe giving IRC or video tutorials over the Internet, and so on. It is quite a bit of work, but if done properly, it would have quite an impact. Re-testing means putting everyone through NM at regular intervals. Certainly not the entire NM, that would be way too annoying, but a quick slimmed down version would be possible. Something that ensures that every DD still has at least a minimal level of competence, but doesn't take more than an hour or two to do, unless one is a decade out of date. There is of course the problem of what to do with people who fail the test. The simple approach would be to give them, say, two months of time to get up to date, and then they are re-tested, and if that too fails, they're retired. I'm not sure whether we should do either. Perhaps we could try both.

MJ Ray, couldn't you just export the complete entries via your RSS feed? (This also applies to other users of folding.)

I am offitially screwed. Last night I wanted to reinstall my laptop (which is also my only computer now), so I backuped the contents of my laptop’s hard drive to an external usb hard drive as a 13 Gb tar.gz file and happily went on with a format and reinstall. Of course, when I had completed the installation and went back to unpack files from the backup, I was greeted by a nice message from gunzip - “invalid compressed data–format violated”. Currently I am trying to follow gzip recovery guide that requires one to manually find the next undamaged compression block and make a new gzip file with standart header and then the undamaged compression blocks, but it is quite possible that data after that will also be damaged. Additionally I have no idea how tar will react to me giving it a middle of the archive, hopefully it will not get too confused. Unfortunately the damaged block is only 90 Mb into the 13 Gb file. Oh, and of course there is a huge heap of really important files that I have no backup for that are on that backup. Fun, fun, fun. Update: I have managed to recover two crucial OpenOffice.org documents from the formatted filesystem using Magic rescue and now I am proceeding with finding if I can recover anything from the .tar.gz backup file using Gzip recovery toolkit. It is buggy, but it is still better then doing it by hand. Unfortunately, I also found out about some kind of hardware problem with my external harddrive - if I transfer lots of data to it (think a direct copy of a 13 Gb file), then it just locks up and stops responding until I power cycle it. If I turn off the USB2 support, then it works reliably, but very very slowly. This slows down my recovery attempts even more.

I have the pleasure to have a laser printer at home, which works great and is wonderful for printing everything from research papers to read to envelopes for sending. ceilingsarecool uses it for taking things for proofing and research. While it was a slight trouble to set up with my Linux server, but works great now. Unfortunately while it was cheap as hell after rebate, the starter cartridge that it came with only prints off about 1,000 pages. Recently it started printing very light and shaking the cartridge wasn't working anymore, so I started looking for new toner. I found out quickly that one new toner cartridge costs as much as the whole printer itself, but my searches also turned up another option: refilling the cartridge that I have already. I figured I would take the chance, because it cost around $20 compared to the $80-90 for a new cartridge.

Yesterday I got the toner in the mail - it comes in a very small bottle with a small diagram and a little topper funnel. The process was fairly easy and straightforward. All I needed for tools that didn't come in the package was a Phillips and flathead screwdriver. The steps which I had to take:

1. Setup the area - I put newspaper down all around the area I was planning to do the work. I didn't need that much space and I was very clean and didn't spill, but I still got toner on the paper I put down.


2. Remove the side of the cartridge - this was indicated to me on the diagram that came with the new toner. There was one little clip which I had to push in in order to get the side off, and I had to pry the side off slowly with a flathead.


3. Remove the toner plug - the toner plug was under the side panel I pried off in the last step, and also took a little coaxing with my small flathead. Starting at this step, I also put on a set of latex gloves so I wouldn't get toner all over my fingers.


4. Open the toner - Open the top of the cap (mine came in a little bottle) and remove the safety seal (like on pill bottles). This got a little messy on my fingers to get all of the safety seal off. I also screwed the plastic funnel thing on.


5. Pour the toner into the cartridge - If your cartridge is really empty it's not a problem to turn it over so you can put the bottle in at a 45 degree angle and then turn both the cartridge and toner bottle so that the toner is pouring out. I had to tap the bottle a little and shake them (while still together) to get the toner into the cartridge


6. Put the plug and side back on - replace the plug and screw the side of the cartridge back on.


7. Shake the cartridge to settle the toner - shake it about 3-4 times, while it's still over the paper. Some of the small dust-like particles came off for me when I shook the cartridge


8. Clean up - throw away the toner bottle and the newspaper

I was thrilled to put the cartridge back into my printer and find that it printed just as good as before. Unfortunately this doesn't work forever - eventually the fusing barrel will wear out and start producing some of those other laser printer problems like lines and repeating patterns. Everything that I have read suggests that one cartridge of mechanical parts will work for about 10,000 pages. That means that I have about 2 more refills before this one runs out. Saving $50-70 every couple of months will make a big difference in the long run. I suspect that some of the toner cartridges that you can buy on line are "re-manufactured" much like this one, or possibly slightly more complicated (replacing a drum that's broken) so they might not work for as many refills as a new one.

Package count in NEW: 222
(NEW queue summary)

Well, that is a huge queue again. Could the ftp-masters please fast-track packages which fix RC bugs? (Like being stuck in NEW for a new SONAME because of an incompatible ABI change which caused dependent packages to FTBFS, like it's the case with gmp.) P.S.: And no, this is indeed intended as a general call, not to fast-track gmp, which is in NEW since only 2 days.

It is a daily fight with the oddities of PyGTK. It seems that there are severe issues in conjunction with the way I use the threading in Python. The patch is almost complete in terms of functionality. (Not everything is committed yet, because I will review all core changes again, to keep them both compact and sensible.) But there are issues with the GUI, like it not reacting after a program switch in conjunction with the GTK accessibility module. Scrolling the log window to the bottom does not work neither, even if I call the corresponding function scroll_to_mark in an idle handler (and thus in the main thread). Still those are minor, mainly cosmetic issues. It's just that the deadline is approaching. (Considering that I face the final examinations for my High School degree in a bit more than a week, I need to hurry up. I get my topics on Monday, so there is one week of preparation time for both a presentation and all content of one class.)

The captcha protector provided by Serendipity once worked correctly. But due to changes in one of the latest versions of the spam blocking plugin the captcha images went unreadable. Thus legitimate users were turned down by it. The protection was automatically activated seven days after the post was published, but I deactivated it now, after two complaints sent via mail. The comments could, however, still be held for moderation. So, thank you for your input! If I know of a problem I try to solve it as soon as possible.