We live out in the country and both have allergies. But we both enjoy cats, and we've had one almost continuously since we moved to Kansas. Our cats are outdoor cats. They always seem to enjoy roaming around the yard so much, it's hard for me to imagine keeping a cat indoors. I know plenty of cats are happy there, but it's not for us -- especially since we're both allergic to cats. We've had Tux for about 2 of his 3 years. Tux is not a cat with your typical cat personality. Tux loves attention and loves to be petted. But he is also afraid of just about everything. Here are a few things that have caused Tux to be scared over the years. I promise I am not making any of these up:

• His own shadow
• Rustling leaves
• Terah getting a new hairstyle
• People carrying grocery bags
• Grocery bags sitting perfectly still on the ground
• Other cats, even if smaller than him
• The wind
• Terah wearing a dress
• Snow
• The lack of snow (it melted since he was outside the day before)

Tux's favorite activity is hunting. We often joke that if he can work up the courage to not be afraid of his prey, he'll do well. And he does -- even catches rabbits sometimes. Here's Tux starting his morning patrol: We always knew he had a routine, but only found out last month that our neighbors would see him coming up the hedge row, just poking his head around to look at their yard, and then head back to us -- each morning. He also jumps down in our window well, and we can see the shadow of a tail wisping by the basement windows, each afternoon. Tux gets half of our 4-car garage/shed at night. He enjoys going in there -- it's safe. (We put him in to keep him safe from the coyotes.) But he has a routine that Terah and I must follow precisely if he is to go in. First, we're supposed to go outside and look for him. Then, no matter where he is -- even if he's right by the garage door -- we have to walk to the house with him, then back to the garage. He doesn't like to be carried, but likes to walk just ahead of us, ears pointed backwards to make sure we're following properly. Then he will stop just outside the garage door and wait for us to step over him and go in first (to make sure it's safe). Then he'll go in. Tux has become quite the popular cat. Terah set him up with a very funny blog on Catster.com, and he was a featured cat on their site one weekend. Here's one entry:

June 16th 2005 5:06 am I just love messing with their heads. Last night I hid in some tall grass so that when they tried to put me in, they couldn't see me right away. Then, just when they were giving up on me, I bounded toward them. I have them trained so that when I jump up when running they ooohh and aaahh. What a hoot! Then I grossed them out by eating my barf.

Today just before I left work, Terah called. Tux was hiding under our porch, wheezing terribly and hyperventilating. He wouldn't move at all. Which is odd, since he had been doing great the past few days. He even looked in at us watching TV a few times lately. After I got home, we managed to convince him to walk to the garage. He seemed a little better. We checked on him again at about 8:00, and he was doing pretty bad. We took him into the vet, and they decided that he had either a rare incurable viral disease, a hernia, or fluid in his chest cavity. His prognosis was not good. His lungs were functioning at only 1/8 capacity. We could attempt to treat him, but treatment would only likely save him if it was the hernia, and it would cost well over $1000. So we made the hard decision to have him put to sleep. Although I've lived around animals most of my life, this was the first time we had this decision to make. Outdoor cats usually live good lives, but rarely live long enough to become afflicted by serious disease. Cars, dogs, or coyotes usually cause a sudden end for them. As I was typing this up, I got the call that he was put to sleep. They determined that he had the viral disease, so I don't feel too bad about our choice. We have quite a few fond memories of Tux, plus some very funny video of his first experience with snow. He certainly liked to be scratched: Goodbye, Tux. We'll keep an eye on the neighbors for you.

So I’m a little late, but Happy Belated Chanukah 5766. Among other gifts (to ourselves), we got a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ30, about which more later. In the meantime, I’d like to do more photoblogging, and toward that end, I declare all content here to be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. I’m certainly open to granting less restrictive licenses, I’d just like to be asked first. Oh, right, and no more sweets for the month of January. I’ve had enough.

Well... a week ago I thought, that when I would be back, I would write an other personal blog entry. After I already told you, that I was quite nervy meeting her parents, I could tell you now, that everything went quite well, and that we had quite some fun. But getting back, I was confronted with a not so nice thing, which tainted my mood a bit. So no details, just a complaint. Well, but one step at a time. First a small explanation: I help a bit organizing the DebConf-6. I'm member of the "review committee" whose job was to discuss the proposals we got in answer to our Call for Papers. After that we accepted and rejected different proposals, and didn't get any feedback at all. Well, we did that short before Christmas and then half of us went to holidays. I was one of them, and managed to check my emails from time to time, without receiving any comments about the decisions we made. Therefore I thought everything was quite well, until I retourned. Then I got back, connected to my irc client (where I was logged in all the time, but was marked as away), and saw a small note in my awaylog, asking me for some rational about something mentioned a few lines earlier. I didn't know about what - I just log someone mentioning my name or some keywords (e.g. packages I maintain or am interested in). Sounded somehow important, so I asked back what the questions was. Soon I got informed, that there were complains about a talk proposal we rejected. After a bit confusion (according to my memory and some note we indeed accepted the talk), we found out, that we did a small mistake in the database, so the submitter of that specific proposal got the wrong mail telling him the proposal was rejected. Not a big problem; we could still mark it as accepted and send them the information the other accepted proposal got. So at this point you might wonder, what the big fuss is all about. Well, first of all: The complains about the rejected proposal reached us by luck. Luckily I was in the channel, where the rejection was discussed. Luckily I was connected at that time. Luckily my irssi didn't crashed. Luckily I checked my awaylog carefully. Luckily I was informed about the whole matter. Luckily we could solve the problem. After nearly two weeks I thought everything was fine (and therefore did nothing), it took just two or three hours to solve the problem (most of the time was spent to carefully formulate a difficult mail in a foreign language). Not a big problem at all - although you might wonder why they raised their concerns in a complete other channel on an other network, instead of simply asking us. What I really dislike is the form they used to raise their complains. When they complained they asked if the DebConf was bought by Sun or the committee on crack and similar things. I'm sure they didn't really meant it that way, but after losing a couple of good friends to drugs telling me, I am on crack (or any other drug) is one of the biggest insults you can give me! Wondering if I (or a volunteer project I'm working for) got bribed by a company isn't much nicer. So let me say this: Yes, we rejected proposals. Yes, we rejected even some proposals we found good in some way or an other. Neither have we been on crack nor have we been bribed! We rejected some proposals because they didn't fit to DebConf, were a rerun or had big overlaps with other proposals we accepted. We rejected some round tables, because the one proposing it didn't provided us with useful information: Whom to invite and what to ask. Sometimes we had mixed feelings about proposals; we usually then accepted them if we knew the one who made the proposal is a good speaker, we rejected some where we knew the proposal come from a bad / disorganized / boring speaker. We did that in a public discussion and answered questions by non committee members when they were raised. I really don't think we did anything wrong, beside the small mistake when we rejected a proposal which was accepted, and I think we got a nice mixture for the main track with some really good talks! As said: Telling me I'm on crack is a big insult. Nevertheless I tried to stay calm, tried my best to solve that matter, and later wrote a mail, apologizing for the mistake. Part of that mail was that we didn't liked their way of raising their complains (showing that I knew what they said about us). I expected at least an answer, thanking us for solving the problem, perhaps even a small apology about the insults. But till now - two days later - I didn't received anything, not even a small "thanks" via irc :( Now I just could forget the whole story. But then I saw it again: Someone wondering about the committees decision in the same channel, instead of just asking us! Damn! If you want to know why we rejected your proposal, just ask! Stop griping in unrelated channels. That's just a wast of other peoples time, resulting in nothing but damage to to the DebConf. Update: Small correction: We got some feedback. Liw raised some concerns. His mail was answered 8 minutes after we received it by a committee member. Since he didn't answered I guess he is satisfied by the answer or at least doesn't feel very strong about that point.

Gnarf: itentional repost to get the URLs right. Dammit :-]

2nd post :) I'm really curious where this will lead to... probably I should just write more and care less. OTOH, this will be on the net (somewhere there..) for eternity :)

my pictures from debconf.es 2 in December 2005 and debconf5 in July 2005 are finally online. Many thanks to Amaya for creating this fancy hackergotchi out of them!

debconf.es 2 videos are now being worked on.

In the end of december I went to 22C3 and had lots of fun and insights there. For the first time the congress was spawned over four days (instead of three the years before), which lead to a much more relaxed conference (no talks before noon and somewhat less crowded schedule), though in the end it was still too much information to proceed properly ;)

The CCC's conference management system, pentabarf, has been rewritten from scratch in ruby on rails - and IMO it already rocked when it was written in PHP. I guess I will have to take a closer look again..

The video team collected 400GB of data on 200 DV tapes. So now they'll have "some" work to do: only a few talks are already available online, most are not (more than 100 talks), and all need to be encoded properly. This is unfortunate for the audience (they'll have to wait) and a lot of work for the people doing it. For debconf6 we should aim to release as many videos as possible during the conference. So IMO streaming is purely optional and should only be done if a.) the video team consists of a sufficient number of people and b.) we have prepared this really well. You're welcome to help!

Oh, I almost forgot: that conference had better connectivity than Africa! That's 10 GB/s. Which really doesn't say much about the conference - your ISP might have more - but it does say a lot about the continents and its peoples situation.

This is the best blonde joke ever.

Thanks to Grant, I discovered a couple of interesting blog posts about how to become an early riser, and about polyphasic sleep. I'm certainly interested in becoming an early riser. I'm not naturally a morning person, but for a few years I managed to force myself into it, but then I lapsed back into being a night-owl sleep-in type person. At the moment, when the weather permits, I'm trying to cycle to work with enough time to eat breakfast there and be operational at my desk by about 8:30am. It's just as fine to start at 10am, but I'd rather not get into that habit, and just treat it as a bit of a splurge from time to time. This of course means I can't stuff around in the morning, and ideally I need to leave the house by about 7:45am, with appropriate flow-on affects on when I wake up and get out of bed. It certainly takes a lot of self-discipline to get out of bed when the alarm goes off. At the moment, I tend to opt for two alarms. One to wake me up and get snoozed a lot, and one to actually get out of bed. If I was more disciplined about getting out of bed, I could just have the one alarm go off, and get extra sleep. The extra waking hours gained by polyphasic sleep are tempting also, but I think it's altogether too disruptive to try at the moment. An interesting concept nonetheless. So once we're a little bit more settled, I'll hopefully become more of a morning person again. I think the key is consistency. Sleeping in on weekends just buggers everything up, which is a shame. I quite like my weekend sleep-ins. Downside is you spend half your weekend asleep, when you could be out exploring a fabulous new foreign country, for example...

Despite all the political correctness of this day and age, blond jokes still crack me up. Here’s a good one. Remarkably, this one seems to translate to Finnish just fine. It’s not a new joke, so many of you have probably already heard it, but, still … Reminds me, actually, of the magnificient Zangelding.

My good buddy Ryan Murray turned me on to the Quod Libet audio player. So far I like it. I never have liked library managers before but I don't find myself fighting with this one. Maybe using iTunes has made it more comfortable. The best thing i like is that I can use Audioscrobbler on my m4a's. XMMS had problems with that and now Last.fm shows more accurate information for what I listened to in the past week.

My expectations for Web 2.0 include standards for aggregating not only blog posts, but also calendar data and tracker items. I'd like to be able to subscribe my todo list manager to the list of bugs against my packages or tell the BTS that it should synchronise a bug with the upstream BTS. What needs to be solved first is the synchronisation problem: every so often, planet gets flooded with old posts. The current approach of assigning unique ids to items does not help much as either unchanged items need to be reloaded on each update or changed items that kept their id go unnoticed, and hell breaks loose when items get new ids.

Four years ago I started translating the Mozilla suite into Galician, and from that point on I managed to keep the translation completely up-to-date, even being one of the fastest ones to create translations (when Mozilla 1.0 was released, three translations for it were released at the same time: Chinese, Asturian and Galician), and later expanding my efforts into Firefox and Thunderbird. However, after two years, things started to go wrong: support for translations was starting to fail without warning, there were some undocumented changes to the language pack format and there was a movement to integrate translations officially into the Mozilla organization that would make it extremely inconvenient for me to go on working in Mozilla, so in July 2004 I resigned from the effort and stopped updating the translations. Well, it was not exactly a thing of “oh, now it is not worth the effort", but “those SOBs are taking all my past hard work down the crapper and they were supposed to stop updating the suite so why are they releasing a fucking new version?". And also “I’m here translating this shit and nobody appreciates it so fuck it all” Much angst and stuff, and I not only stopped with Mozilla: I stopped translating pretty much anything else and almost vowed not to translate again. And I made the T-shirt and all (some of you saw it in DebConf 5). During the Christmas break I didn’t have much to do, and it had been very long since I had last programmed for pleasure, so I decided to create a set of scripts for converting Mozilla XPI language packs into a huge PO file and back (days later I was told about translation-tools, but I was in the mood to hack and it worked with a lot of small PO files, which I didn’t want). Then, I imported my old Firefox 0.8 translation, created a POT for 1.0.7 and updated the translation. I may well start making Galician Firefox translations again – but unofficially. There’s already an official Galician team, which intended to start after my resignation but is, apparently, stuck in bureaucratland. Also, some horror stories I’ve heard about make me want not to work officially with Mozilla. Plus, some of the things that made me angry back in the days are still there. For example, the documents about translating Mozilla all newbies are referred to are badly outdated. And there are no new, unified documents. But I intend to take it easy. I will not invest emotionally on this again, because I don’t want to go back to spending a couple of months playing Frozen Bubble while I think bad thoughts about Mozilla developers. Anyway, I’m moderately happy now. I’ve hacked on my own, for pleasure, for the first time in months; I achieved a goal and I’m slowly regaining my motivation to do other stuff. I hope. That was all.

Hot on the heels of Joey's tale of getting rid of base-config (the second stage of the installer) in Debian, we've now pretty much got rid of it in Ubuntu Dapper too. The upshot of this is that rather than asking a bunch of questions, installing the base system, and rebooting to install everything else, we now just install everything in one go and reboot into a completed system. This does mean that, if your system doesn't boot, you don't get to find out about it for a bit longer. However, it has lots of advantages in terms of speed (the much-maligned archive-copier mostly goes away), reducing code duplication (base-config had a bunch of infrastructure of its own which was done better in the core installer anyway), comprehensibility, and killing off some annoying bugs like #13561 (duplicate mirror questions in netboot installs), #15213 (second stage hangs if you skip archive-copier in the first stage), and #19571 (kernel messages scribble over base-config's UI). To go with Joey's Debian timeline, the Ubuntu history looks a bit like this:

• 2004 (Jul): First base-config modifications for Ubuntu; we need to install the default desktop rather than dropping into tasksel.
• 2004 (Aug): Mark phones me up and asks if I can make the installer not need the CD in the second stage by copying all the packages across beforehand. Although it's a bit awkward, I can see the UI advantages in that, so I write archive-copier at the Canonical conference in Oxford.
• 2004 (Sep): Mark asks me if we can ask the timezone, user/password, and apt configuration questions before the first reboot. With less than a month to go until our first release, I have a heart-attack at how much needs to be done, and it eventually gets deferred to Hoary.
• 2005 (Jan): Matt fixes up debconf's passthrough frontend for use on the live CD, and we realise that this is an obvious way to run bits of base-config before the first reboot. It's rather messy and takes until March or so before it really works right, but we get there in the end.
• 2005 (Apr): I get "put a progress bar in front of the dpkg output in the second stage" as a goal for Breezy. Naïvely, I think it's a simple matter of programming, since I'd already done something similar for debootstrap and base-installer the previous year.
• 2005 (May): I hack progress bar support into debconf. Nothing actually uses it for anything yet, except as a convenient passthrough stub.
• 2005 (Jul/Aug): I actually try to implement the second-stage progress bar and realise that it's about an order of magnitude harder than I thought, requiring a whole load of extra infrastructure in apt. Fortunately Michael Vogt saves the day here by writing lots of working code, and the progress bar works by early August.
• 2005 (Sep-Dec): Upstream d-i development ramps back up again, with tzsetup, clock-setup, apt-setup, and user-setup all being cranked out in short order and the corresponding pieces removed from base-config. I merge these as they mature, and manage to get agreement on including the Ubuntu debconf template changes in upstream apt-setup, which helps the diff size a lot.
• 2005 (Nov/Dec): Joey and I chat one evening about the Ubuntu second-stage progress bar work, and we end up designing and writing debconf-apt-progress based on its ideas, after which Joey knocks up pkgsel in no time flat.
• 2006 (Jan): The rest of the pieces land in Ubuntu, and we drop base-config out of the installer. To my surprise, nearly everything still just works.

Although it caused some friction, I'm glad that we did the first cuts of many of these things outside Debian and got to try things out before landing version-2-quality code in Debian. The end result is much nicer than the intermediate ones ever were.

The Hogmanay celebration in Edinburgh started on December 29. This was coincidentally on the same day as my meeting with Steve Kemp, a fellow Debian developer. We had a nice chat and a huge and tasteful hot chocolate in a coffee shop on Nicolson Street. After our meet we ran into the Torchlight procession, Edinburgh’s Hogmanay first event. There seemed to be no end to the procession. I was cold, my feet were hurting, so I caught a bus home and missed out on the fireworks. New Year’s Eve On New Year’s Eve I took the last bus to the city centre (around 21:00). It was still raining a bit, but fortunately it had completely cleared up once I got out of the bus. There, I witnessed the start of the Royal Bank Street Party (consisting of concerts, a carnival, attractions, etc.), which meant thousands, ten thousands of people gathering to enter the party. This party was held in a closed down perimeter covering Princes Street and other adjacent streets. Since I had no ticket I made a walk around the perimeter to get a glimpse of the party itself but also to see what else was going on in the centre. It turned out that there were lots of ticket-less people who were partying in pubs or just singing and dancing on the streets. At 23:30, lots of people (including me) gathered on the North Bridge to wait for the 0:00 moment. At midnight loud yelling rose from the centre evolving into a load roar as if legions of men were sent to war and the Seven Hills Fireworks were set of. Everyone was cheering, jumping in the arms of strangers and wishing everyone a good and happy new year. It was an amazing thing to experience and be part of :), I hope that I can come back for it once more. A happy and good new year everyone!

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping Looking back at 2005:

• January :

• I started this blog (on the 22nd)
• Submitted my UPOU application

February :

• I got into using planner-el
• Tried my hand at managing GtkLP for Debian in Subversion
• Got to know more about BitTorrent as well
• Got a Gmail account
• Successfully set up Linux-2.6 on St. John’s Debian Woody box malinao
• Got to know Clair via this very blog

March :

• I met Ubuntu Warty, Clair, and Mario too after my UPOU admission exam
• Moved to Emacs 22
• Delved into Lisp while coding an MP3 playback script on Warty
• more PlannerWiki goodness

April :

• More Lisp programming
• Video card replacement
• Attending my first PLUG Technical Seminar

May :

• The usual summer routine: teach swimming and maths

June :

• Back to school
• Tried blogging under Emacs PlannerMode, in which I have inadvertently spammed Planet Debian and Pinoy Tech Scene, earning the ire of Mako
• Attended the first meeting for Software Freedom Day with Sacha, Clair, and Rick. Also met Jerome for the first time

July :

• Sacha (left for Toronto on the 15th)
• Went back to WordPress

August :

• ITA on ecb
• Preparing the LinuxWorld conference
• Trying out Arch
• Released a new GtkLP for Debian

September :

• New ecb package (which to this day hasn’t been uploaded yet, looking for sponsors

• Software Freedom Day on the 10th!!! Met Donnie too
• LinuxWorld at Dusit!!!
• MidTerms!!!
• Started contributing to Ubuntu

October :

• Finals!!! (yeah, just after midterms
• NatSci finals in Naga City, looking for Linux users too
• Became a Ubuntu Member

November :

• Became a MOTU

December :

• Glimmer of hope
• Another GtkLP release
• Lost cellphone
• Meeting Ealden for the first time at the Ubuntu-PH EyeBall
• Thankful for $DEITY letting me live another year

Things to I want to do this 2006:

• More Debian and Ubuntu work
• Learn some more programming languages
• Try other VCSs/RCSs
• Really finish school
• Catch up with my RL

Things to look out for:

• Ubuntu AsiaBusinessTour/Philippines
• PLUG’s very own hacker conference/camp
• Bicol Open Source Forum (and perhaps Bicol’s very own LUG

Rock on, 2006!

In late November, I did up a proposal to provide a way of making some of the interesting posts hidden away on the developer-only debian-private mailing list more public – mostly on the basis that secret discussions aren’t good for Debian, and that there’s some really fascinating discussions on topics which continue to come up, that I’d like to be able to refer to directly. In the end, that didn’t pass, although we instead ended up with a compromise position whereby we won’t release any of the old posts to that list, only the new ones; and there won’t be any practical result from the GR for another three years. Since this wasn’t a leadership election, who voted for what is now public, so we can do a few interesting analyses. At the most basic, there were five major categories of voters: Read the rest ...

Currently, Nautilus is hardcoded to draw the desktop icon’s captions in white with a black background. This works well for Latin scripts, but for CJK scripts where each character is pretty complex, the captions quickly become a jumble of black and white pixels. Hence the following patch against Nautilus 2.12. It adds a GConf key /apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow, which when set to False prevents the shadows from being drawn. A nice side benefit is that Nautilus then checks the background colour, and draws captions in black if the background is light. Nice. Screenshots later; gotta run now.

--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c.old 2005-11-19 10:58:42.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.c 2005-11-19 11:00:32.000000000 +0800
@@ -404,6 +404,10 @@
      PREFERENCE_STRING,
      NULL, default_font_callback, g_free
     ,
+          NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW,
+          PREFERENCE_BOOLEAN,
+          GINT_TO_POINTER (TRUE)
+         ,
    /* Icon View Default Preferences */
      NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_ICON_VIEW_DEFAULT_SORT_ORDER,
--- ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h.old 2005-11-19 10:58:47.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/nautilus-global-preferences.h 2005-11-19 10:59:35.000000000 +0800
@@ -54,6 +54,7 @@
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_DESKTOP          "preferences/show_desktop"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_IS_HOME_DIR                "preferences/desktop_is_home_dir"
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_FONT          "preferences/desktop_font"
+#define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW               "preferences/desktop_label_shadow"
 /* Display  */
 #define NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_SHOW_HIDDEN_FILES         "/desktop/gnome/file_views/show_hidden_files"
--- ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in.old  2005-11-19 11:04:30.000000000 +0800
+++ ./libnautilus-private/apps_nautilus_preferences.schemas.in  2005-11-19 11:06:17.000000000 +0800
@@ -321,6 +321,20 @@
     <schema>
+      <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</key>
+      <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_label_shadow</applyto>
+      <owner>nautilus</owner>
+      <type>bool</type>
+      <default>true</default>
+      <locale name="C">
+         <short>Desktop label shadow</short>
+    <long>
+     If set to true, then Nautilus will draw shadows for the desktop icon's captions.
+         </long>
+      </locale>
+    </schema>
+
+    <schema>
       <key>/schemas/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</key>
       <applyto>/apps/nautilus/preferences/desktop_is_home_dir</applyto>
       <owner>nautilus</owner>
--- ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c.old   2005-11-19 10:53:43.000000000 +0800
+++ ./src/file-manager/fm-desktop-icon-view.c   2005-11-19 10:58:01.000000000 +0800
@@ -532,7 +532,7 @@
    fm_icon_view_filter_by_screen (FM_ICON_VIEW (desktop_icon_view), TRUE);
    icon_container = get_icon_container (desktop_icon_view);
-   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, TRUE);
+   nautilus_icon_container_set_use_drop_shadows (icon_container, eel_preferences_get_boolean (NAUTILUS_PREFERENCES_DESKTOP_LABEL_SHADOW));
    fm_icon_container_set_sort_desktop (FM_ICON_CONTAINER (icon_container), TRUE);
    /* Set up details */</schema>

First of all, thank you DebConf5 organizers! You guys did a fantastic job in providing the opportunity for both DDs and non-DDs alike to meet face-to-face with each other. Debian definitely is alive and kicking! So it is with great disappointment to see articles like this (”No Way For Linux To Replace Proprietary Software”) when I came back to Hong Kong. It’s an op-ed piece in a local newspaper by Charles Peter Mok, and begins by attacking last week’s Evans Data report for lacking objective data, therefore the conclusion reached (OSS adoption is speeding up) is too far-fetched. This is followed by (translation to English mine):

In fact, due to their love of open source systems (sic), open source supporters often are shallow when it comes to analysis and reaching conclusions, and confirming their subjective wants become their priority; of course, open source critics, like the Microsoft Windows camp and Sun Micro’s Unix camp, sometimes do the same thing.

Maybe he takes the /. crowd too seriously? Anyway, he then essentially translates the month-old SG Cowen report as an example of an objective argument… actually the translation is rather dubious. For example, the report only said “Linux seems to be hitting a limit” (via BusinessWeek); he translated that as “Linux’s development has reached the stage where it’s facing piling limitations”. What a nice and objective extrapolation! Moving on, he uses the report to reach the conclusion that (again translations mine):

… whether Linux will still enjoy considerable growth, or the red light has been lit, is at the moment too early to say. Enterprise and personal users who use proprietary software such as Windows are still the majority.

Thanks for stating the obvious, Charles. So where’s the objective argument that supports the title of the article?

My 2005, in cities:

• Cambridge, UK
• Philadelphia, PA
• Brussels, Belgium
• York, UK
• Providence, RI
• New York, NY
• Dijon, France
• London, UK
• Helsinki, Finland
• nr. Bibury, Gloucestershire, UK
• Edinburgh, UK
• San Antonio, TX
• Cornwall Bridge, CT
• Vancouver, Canada
• Whistler, Canada

(One or more nights spent in each place.)

1. What is Preventa?

Preventa is a port of the Debian and GNU userland to the Minix 3 kernel and libc. Hence an alternate name is Debian GNU/Minix (but I won't use that unless it becomes an official Debian port. See below.) 2a. Why is it called Preventa?

It's a riff on the last attempt at porting Debian to a non-Linux kernel which was called Nexenta. 2b. Why is it called Preventa?

Because if it becomes an official Debian port, it is probable that the sheer number of release critical bugs caused will prevent Debian from ever releasing again. 3. Is this an official Debian port?

Currently Preventa has no official connection to the Debian project. In the future? Perhaps if there is some interest. I'm not persuing that angle right now. 4. Does Preventa suffer from licensing problems like Nexenta?

No, the Minix kernel and libc are BSD licensed. 5. So why are you doing this?

Like many people, I used Minix when I studied operating systems in college. I am interested in trying the new version but I am more comfortable with a GNUish environment rather than the BSDish one that Minix provides. This led me to wonder how hard it would be to port Debian and in general, how much work goes into a new Debian port. Maybe I might be able to write some articles about the experience. Other than that there is no practical reason really. 6. How can I help?

At the moment I am just doing this for my own edification so I'm not looking for help. This will undoubtedly change if I get stuck. 7. What does the port entail?

I will attempt to port dpkg, apt, and the Debian base system plus a few other odds and ends I feel I need. I will use the Minix kernel and libc (unless GNU libc turn out to be easy to port which I suspect it won't.) Basically Preventa will have the same kind of features as the official Minix3 distribution. If I have to patch anything I will offer it back to the Minix and/or Debian maintainers if they want it. 8. Where can I keep abreast of your progress?

I will blog about it. As soon as it is somewhat usable, I will release the results (including source of course) to the public for people to use as they wish. 9. what does ast and the Minix community think about this?

I haven't told them yet. I should do that soonish. 10a. Hi, I'm from OSNews and I don't like Preventas' green on black theme. And the file manager is totally unintuitive.
Uh, that's the command line. Minix doesn't support the X window system yet. 10b. Then I dub thee "not ready for the desktop."

Aieeee!

2006, what a lovely year! Not. I heard its a custom, that at the start of the new year, one looks back at the past one. So I did, and wasn't impressed at all. Mind you, the same happens each and every year, so it is no suprise, really. For the past year, I have been rather inactive, I should have gone on an extensive vacation from Debian a long time ago, around May, when I quit my last job. I intend to rectify that as soon as I manage to dig up my GPG key. Most of my packages will get officially orphaned too, as I lack the time and motivation to work on them - no news here, either, as this is the case since early last year. Lets see what I did on the free software front in the past year or two... One of my most succesfull projects was CCZE, a log colouriser. Needles to say, the idea is not mine. The crap implementation, the most messy and bad code I've ever written, is mine, though. It hasn't seen an update since I don't know when. Nor will it in the foreseeable future. The only thing that could help the codebase, is a rewrite, which I had been planning since 2003, and not a bit of code was committed ever. In the meantime, new programs appear, whose logs could be colourised, new demands arrive, but the project has been dead for good. Once, Thy was the software I was most proud of. I really loved it, and spent most of my time hacking on it. Those times are past, new, similar software appeared, that surpassed my beloved HTTP daemon in nearly every respect. I don't believe thy has any place among todays similar projects. This, I truly regret, I had great fun developing Thy. But as everything, even good things must come to an end. Back when I worked for a company that was into this media streaming business, I contributed a few bits and pieces to GStreamer, but all the "grand ideas" I had, and wished to make reality, never happened. Looking further back, I can't notice any significant contribution I made.. except maybe one, a very small one.. Even nowadays, I can't stop feeling a little proud, when it crosses my mind. Some may know, most probably don't, I acted as an application manager for Debian, and for a little while, I like to think I wasn't that bad at that job. For a little while... Anyway, during this, I had the pleasure to work with Daniel Stone. Heh, those were good times! I hope, that what we've done there, was of at least a bit useful. Meh, enough of this. My projects failed, I didn't have the neccessary resources to make some of my dreams come true. All I need now, is a break, a break so I will not feel bad about things I do not have time for. I'll let them go, as I should have done ages ago, that's best both for them, and me. Until a time I feel I can contribute back something, for all I received from the free software community, I'll take a vacation. From time to time, I'll be hanging around on IRC, but my activity will be as low as it was during the past year. Good bye, and thanks for all the fish! P.S.: Yamm, my over-sized tamagotchi expressed interest in maintaining me in Debian. If, by any chance, he'd take over my computer, and expressed his wish to run for DPL-ship, please, by all means, stop him. Thank you.