I attend many presentations and have seen many that had a lower quality than they should have. Some things are difficult to change (for example I have difficulty speaking slowly). But there are some things that are easy to change that many people seem to get wrong and I will list some that stand out to me.<br /><br />Unreadable presentation notes. You have to use a reasonably large font for it to be read by most people in the room. This means probably a maximum of about 16 lines of text on the screen. I have attended some presentations where I couldn't read the text from the middle of the room!<br /><br />Too many slides. On a few occasions I have heard people boasting about how many slides they are going to use. An average of more than one slide per minute does not mean that you have done a good talk, it may mean the exact opposite. One of my recent talks had 8 slides of main content plus an introductory slide while waiting for people to arrive and a Q/A slide with my email address and some URLs for the end. The speaking slot was 30 minutes giving an average of a slide every 3-4 minutes.<br /><br />Paging through slides too quickly. If you have 60 slides for a one hour talk then you will have no possibility of going through them at a reasonable speed (see above). Even if you have a reasonable number of slides you may go through some of them too quickly. On one occasion a presentation included a slide with text that was too small to read, I tried to count the lines of text but only got to 30 before the presenter went to the next slide.<br /><br />Using slides as reading material for after the lecture. Sure it can be useful for people to review your notes after the lecture, and it's generally better to give them the notes than to have them be so busy writing notes that they miss somehting you say. But if you want to have something verbose and detailed that can't be spoken about in the lecture then the thing to do is to write a paper for the delegates to read. Serious conferences have papers that they publish (minimum length is generally 4 solid A4 pages) which are presented by a talk of 30 to 60 minutes. That way people get a talk as an introduction and they get some serious reference material if they want to know more. Also people who miss the talk can read the paper and get much of the value. Is it not possible for slides to take the place of a paper.<br /><br />Bad diagrams. Diagrams should be really simple (see the paragraph about readable text). It is OK to have diagrams that don't stand alone and need to be described, a lecture is primarily about talking not showing pictures.<br /><br />When simplifying diagrams make sure that they still represent what actually happens. Simplifying diagrams such that they don't match what you are talking about doesn't help.<br /><br />Animations. The only thing that is animated in the front of the room should be the person giving the presentation. Otherwise just do the entire thing in flash, publish it on the web, and don't bother giving a talk.<br /><br />Staged content, particularly when used as a <span style="font-style: italic;">surprise</span>. Having a line of text appear with every click of the mouse forces the audience to stay with you every step of the way. This may work for primary school students but does not work for an intelligent audience. Give them a screen full at a time and let them read it in any order that they like. This is worst when they someone tries to surprise the audience with a punchy line at the end of every paragraph. Surprising the audience once per talk is difficult. Trying to do it every paragraph is just annoying.<br /><br />One final tip that isn't as serious but is not obvious enough to deserve a mention. Use black text on a white background, this gives good contrast that can be seen regardless of color-blindness and with the bright background the room is lit up even if all the lights are off. The audience wants to see you and sometimes this is only possible by projector light. Also the more light that comes out of the projector the less heat that builds up inside, it can really mess up a presentation if the projector overheats.

We're still in wt:Copenhagen today, but we head out this afternoon for our tour of the Baltic Sea. We've had a great time in the city so far, mostly due to staying with longtime Wikitraveller wt:User:Elgaard, who generously offered us the extra room in his apartment for the time we're here. There's something about staying in an actual human being's home while you're travelling to really recharge the batteries. After a week in hotels and restaurants, a little time in a real house can make you feel a lot more human. We took our time getting to Copenhagen from wt:Odense at the end of the Wikisym conference, mostly because I was really hung over. I'd spent the last night of the event drinking at the Irish pub in the pedestrian area, and I probably had 1-5 pints too many. Paul Yount calls Irish pubs "the first Open Source franchise", and it's true: you can expect certain things at a pub no matter where it is in the world. Although we started out with about 30 people, the crowd thinned through the night. I had a good time talking with Brion Vibber and Chuck Smith about the state of Esperanto-language wikis on the Web -- in a mish-mash of English and Esperanto, of course. (In case you were wondering: the state is "fine".) I also chatted Wikimedia Foundation politics with Angela Beesley; we both think Erik Moeller is going to make a good addition to the WMF board. After the pub shut down, I headed to the deathly silent casino in the sub-basement of the Radisson of Odense. The bar was eerily silent, and the gaming tables were intense and serious; I don't think people could have been more somber if they were organ harvesters gambling for body parts. The last hangers-on were Andrea Forte of Georgia Tech, Alex Schroeder of CommunityWiki, Sunir Shah of MeatballWiki, and Eugene Eric Kim, of Blue Oxen and HyperCore. In other words, some of the smartest people in the wiki world today -- we talked wiki politics and theory until the wee hours of the morning. They all switched to mineral water while I was still slugging down pints of Carlsberg Special, which is probably where I went wrong. Wikisym, for me, was one of the best conferences I've been to this year, and I've been to a lot. It capped off a long summer of conference-going, and this fall should be relatively tranquil. Which is great: I have a lot of work to do, based on the ideas I've picked up this season. tags: wikisym2006 odense copenhagen wiki

sterbro All of which is to say that I was feeling pretty crufty the next morning as we got on the train. Kindly Maj got us a late checkout and let me sleep in late, which helped a lot; a falafel sandwich around 11AM also cleared my head a bit. The train ride from Odense to Copenhagen was great, and by the time we got to Niels Elgaard Larsen's house in sterbro (a neighborhood of Copenhagen) I was pretty refreshed. Niels took us out to an early dinner at a restaurant called Pixie in a square by his house. Copenhagen has some pretty strict traffic laws, and the number of cars on the street is possibly the least I've ever seen for a major metropolis, leaving a lot of room for sidewalks, bike paths, and open parks and plazas. We got to chat with Niels over a fresh pasta dinner, and thence home to his house for beers and more talk. One great thing about visiting Wikitravellers is that they tend to be a) very smart, b) well-travelled, and c) interested in Free Software and Free Culture. Niels is no exception; he's active in the Danish and European Free Software and information freedom communities, and he's extremely interesting to talk to on the subject. We shared travel stories and talked about Open Source and Open Content later than I would have thought, based on my earlier-morning hangover. Probably the high point of the evening, for me, was when Niels shared a brilliant idea for a way to distribute Wikitravel guides in digital form for a very wide array of users. We've had a hard time settling on a mobile document format for Wikitravel guides, since mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones support standards so poorly. It's one of the most requested features for Wikitravel, but it's going to take a huge amount of work to cover even a fraction of the mobile device owner community. Except Niels had a genius idea for how to distribute guides in a simple, standard format that works on a mobile digital device many if not most travellers carry with them every time they travel. The idea: make guides that are downloadable JPEG images which can be copied to a SD card or Compact Flash or Memory stick or whatever, then stuck into a digital camera. If the camera supports zooming on images, and has a decent screen for review, the guides might be useful and readable. I'm going to try to do some experiments with the idea -- I think it could be a real winner. Adding 30-40 images to a camera today is pretty cheap, and if they're just text I think some aggressive compression can work well. tag: jpeg sterbro niels copenhagen wikitravel mobile

Copenhagen on foot Yesterday we did a big tour of the city on our own. In the morning, we had some breakfast at the Laundromat Cafe right next door to Niels's house, and I took the opportunity to clean a week's worth of dirty laundry. Nothing like a stack of clean clothes to make you feel more like a decent citizen. I was down to a bathing suit and the ICANNWiki t-shirt Ray King gave me at Wikisym. Then we headed out on the town to do some sight-seeing. First we hit the Kastellet, a fortress in northeast Copenhagen that's the oldest operational military base in Europe. It's got the distinctive star-shaped outline typical of old fortifications, and is surrounded by a lovely park with ducks and swans. We had lunch at a nearby caf , with large beers. (Gee, I'm getting worried about the pattern here.) After lunch we made an unscheduled stop at den lille havfrue -- the famous Litle Mermaid statue in the harbour. It was miniscule and surrounded by perhaps 100 onlookers, crammed into a tiny swatch of sidewalk. We stopped about half a mile away, took some pictures of the crowd, and moved on. We then hoofed it down through the harbour and across Nyhavn and a bridge to Christianhavn and Christiania. We'd both heard about the city-within-a-city run on anarchist principles -- kind of like a giant squat -- but neither of us had been there before. It was an interesting place -- packed with people, lots of food cooking a beer-drinking, caf s and restaurants all over the place, interspersed with art installations and little gardens. But it had the unkempt scumminess of a big squat, too -- especially on the main drag -- and there were a few too many pitbulls and gutterpunks for my tastes. Overall a good experience but I don't know if I'll go back. After our long walk we took the metro back to Niels's, where we napped until he and wife Chiquita got home. Chiquita is an investment banker from wt:Toronto who does a lot of business in Europe, where she met Niels a few years ago. They were married last year and have had a long-distance relationship -- visiting each other a week or so out of each month -- for the whole time. She's moving here this year, which I think will be nice for both of them. We had a good dinner at a place called Thomas's -- a buffet, which seems to be very popular here -- and then back home for a nightcap and bed. Amita June was overtired by the time we got her to bed, and she let us know that we'd pushed her too hard with a quarter-hour of heavy crying. But we all got to sleep pretty well afterwards, and at least the parents know that we should take it easy in the future. tags: copenhagen kastellet christiania little mermaid

So earlier today (or yesterday, if you want to be technical) I final dragged myself down to Stratton to pick up my MIT student ID and tell the orientation dudes that I’m here, even though I’ve already been here for two months. I ended up being tackled by a rep from Bank of America as soon as I stepped into the building, who assumed I was Not A Freshman™ when I mentioned that I in fact am already the possessor of not one but two Bank of America bank accounts. The wearing of the bike helmet probably helped there, since I doubt many other freshmen are biking to orientation. The ID itself is, to put it shortly, kind of rediculous looking. What with the bubbly background and the shiny “MIT” holograms all over it. It’s definitely better than my currently-used-as-ID New York State driver’s permit though, which has “UNDER 21″ plastered all over it in rather large letters and a rediculously old photo. Which can get pretty annoying sometimes. Now, I just hope I can get the card activated for access to the Media Lab pretty quickly so I’ll stop locking myself out trying to go to the bathroom by the elevator after 6 PM or so. I don’t know about you, but I found that pretty annoying. And I never did manage to figure out exactly what time they started locking the doors, so I did it at least three or so times. Even though my last day of work was technically Friday, I’ll probably go in for a couple hours on a day or two next week. I plan on being a real UROP there during term anyway. Other than the ID, the other major things I picked up were “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Orientation” which actually does mention some things that may end up being fun during orientation, a t-shirt that just screams frosh, and a book called How to Get Around MIT which actually isn’t really a whole lot about getting around MIT, and looks like it may even have some useful info in it. I blame it on the fact that the book’s written by students. Orientation starts Sunday, but I’m skipping that day to go on a 50-ish mile bike ride on a rather sexy borrowed touring bike. Word.

Evaluating programming languages for playing with Debtags Since having workable bindings for the C++ Debtags libraries seems to be still a bit in the future, I'm planning to build a bit of native infrastructure in some higher level language. First step is seeing what language I could start playing with. The problem At the most basic level, in Debtags we have a number of packages, each of which have a set of tags. The way I usually save tags is a file with the format:

package1, package2: tag1, tag2, tag3
package3: tag1, tag2

That is, every line has a list of packages with the same tags, and the list of their tags. Since any script I'm going to write has to at least be able to parse the data into something like a package -> tags hash, then print it out. Let's see how perl, python and ruby perform. Tests C++ The reference point for the experiment will be the C++ implementation, tagcoll:

$ time tagcoll copy package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m0.421s
user    0m0.412s
sys     0m0.000s

Perl First attempt is with Perl, creating the script that parses into a hash of package => set of tags and prints the result. There are set modules for Perl on CPAN, but I have none handy at the moment. However, since they are implemented using hashes, I can approximate them by using a hash. Note that I also want to have a different copy of the tag set for every package, so that I can manipulate them in the future without unwanted side effects. Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my %db;
# Read the tag database
while (<>)
 
    chop();
    my ($pkgs, $tags) = split(': ');
    # Create the tagset using keys of a hash
    my %tags = map   $_ => undef   split(', ', $tags);
    for my $p (split(', ', $pkgs))
     
        # Make a copy of the tagset
        $db $p  =  %tags ;
     
 
# Write the tag database
while (my ($pkg, $tags) = each %db)
 
    print $pkg, join(', ', keys %$tags), "\n";
 

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.pl package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m0.448s
user    0m0.436s
sys     0m0.008s

Not so bad, comparable with tagcoll. Python Then comes Python. I'm not much of a Python fancier, but I'm rather attracted by the new set native type introduced with Python 2.4, which seems to have most of what I need nice and done. Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/python
import sys
input = sys.stdin
if len(sys.argv) > 1:
    input = open(sys.argv[1],"r")
# Read the tag database
db =  
for line in input:
    # Is there a way to remove the last character of a line that does not
    # make a copy of the entire line?
    line = line.rstrip("\n")
    pkgs, tags = line.split(": ")
    # Create the tag set using the native set
    tags = set(tags.split(", "))
    for p in pkgs.split(", "):
        db[p] = tags.copy()
# Write the tag database
for pkg, tags in db.items():
    # Using % here seems awkward to me, but if I use calls to
    # sys.stdout.write it becomes a bit slower
    print "%s:" % (pkg), ", ".join(tags)

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.py  package-tags  > /dev/null
real    0m0.418s
user    0m0.376s
sys     0m0.036s

I'm pleased, very pleased. Using the native set seems to be not only handy, but efficient. Ruby Finally, Ruby. I like to use Ruby. In this case, however, it lacks a native set implementation, although it has a set module which is implemented using a hash. Here is the script:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
require 'set'
infile = ARGV[0] ? File.new(ARGV[0]) : $stdin
# Read the tag database
db =  
infile.each_line do  line 
    line.chop()
    pkgs, tags = line.split(": ")
    # Create the set using the Set module
    tags = Set.new(tags.split(", "))
    pkgs.split(", ").each do  p 
        # Is this a copy or a reference?  I need to find out.
        db[p] = tags
    end
end
# Write the tag database
db.each do  key, tags 
    # Ouch, Set does not do join by itself
    print key, ": ", tags.to_a.join(", ")
end

Here is the running time:

$ time ./parse.rb package-tags > /dev/null
real    0m1.637s
user    0m1.572s
sys     0m0.052s

I hope I got something wrong in the script, but I can't see what. Results As much as I don't fancy Python, it looks like it's currently the best choice for playing around with Debtags. I hope the native sets will bring me joy. If in the future I'll be asked "how come you chose Python for this Debtags thing?", I can point to this page.

Ryanair finally sued the UK government for 3 million pounds for the air traffic disruptions, just like I called it!
Now they only need to team up with British Airways (who demand their money from goverment’s BAA) and all the other affected airlines, so that the court doesn’t just dismiss it right away. Also it would be nice if Ryanair rallied the people to halp them - demonstration in front of the courthouse and bumper stickers saying “Keep Britain Flying!” and “Keep US Flying!” (along with t-shirts, umbrellas and sports style water bottles) would also help to rally public support.

On the whole I agree with Erich. Subprojects are key to preserving positive energy as a free software project scales. But I wouldn’t say the ill effects suffered by projects as they age is just “a matter of size”. And I wouldn’t de-emphasize the importance of guidelines like the CoC in countering those effects, though I’d agree it does not provide immunity by itself. Ubuntu benefits from the Debian social experiment having started first. So the people involved have the opportunity to learn from and improve on earlier efforts while their project is still young. The CoC is no panacea, but it is a clue that lessons are being learned; deliberate effort needs to be made to keep work fun, especially as a project grows and people begin to lose touch with each other. Putting these lessons into practice isn’t always easy, but I think it would help if as individual developers we’d reflect more on how we interact within our projects and work on making improvements. I appreciate the personal guidelines Erich shared and will adapt them to make them my own.

This post was part of my answer in a thread about the "sourceless data" general resolution on the debian-project mailing list. Firmwares are an essential part of any modern computer, and it is an annoying but currently hard to change fact of life that we lack the source for almost all of them. I reject the notion that we can ignore some fundamental parts of the computers which we use only because we do not distribute them: this would be hypocritical. Even if Debian stopped distributing sourceless firmwares users would continue to use them, either on a flash chip or by downloading and installing them on their file systems. Such a change on our part would not drive users to buy hardware whose firmwares are accompanied by their source, because with a very small number of exceptions there are no such devices. The claim that vendors would start to distribute the firmware sources is unproven, and indeed I cannot see how it could happen when only a small part of the community would care enough to deliberately make life harder for their customers. Instead this would push the less technically competent users toward other distributions, whose commitment to free software is usually less strong than our own. In this scenario I do not see an advancement for the cause of free software.

I don't know what changed, but recently autotools are refusing to let me run configure when the tree is already configured. I have to run make distclean. Of course if I've started configure via an autogen...

[sbox-ARM: ~/source/osso-addressbook] > make distclean
/bin/sh ./config.status --recheck
running /bin/sh /home/ross/realhome/Programming/scratchbox/osso-addressbook/configure  --prefix=/usr  --no-create --no-recursion
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /scratchbox/tools/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
configure: error: source directory already configured; run "make distclean" there first
make: *** [config.status] Error 1

Stab stab kill die die!! NP: Zwischen zwei und einer Sekunde, krill.minima

Two small bits: bzr.debian.org and git.d.o now exist both in the DNS and in costa's Apache2 config, so please use them instead of arch.debian.org if you want to do Bzr or Git. Also, work has truly begun on setting up the new host for Alioth. Rapha l has started setting up Xen hosts on wagner.d.o, and I've started reviving my CVS-to-Bazaar gateway for the Gforge code to help us keep our Alioth-specific changes versioned. Along with the move to a faster, bigger box (single box too, so no more account synchronisation delays), we'll take the opportunity to upgrade to Gforge 4.5. We'll keep you posted about that.

Short summary: Server down.

Isn't Murphy absolutely lovely? Hardware will, of course, break on weekends.

The light in my kitchen's ceiling stopped working a month ago. I changed the light bulb, a week ago, but it didn't help, so on Friday I asked H ctor to take a look at it. Absolutely low priority. The cable was literally roasted, so he asked me to cut the power off, in order to replace the cable. I did, without remembering to propperly power off the server. What are journalling filesystems for anyway? The UPS battery used to perform much better, oh the decay, so the server is abruptly shut down after a couple of minutes. As H ctor was not able to "quickly" fix the kitchen light, and I was not in a hurry, and do not really care about the damn light, we just didn't look at it any further. So far so good.

Some hours later, at midnight (maybe that's technically Saturday, but it really felt like a Friday, I swear to the allmighty vegetarian spaghetty monster with no meat balls whatsoever), I try to power the machine up. And a sadly familiar ritual is about to be performed. Since I moved the server into "the run down attic I call home" I dreaded the moment I had to reboot the machine. It would come up, you could see the blue case fans light up and spin, the hard drives and CD drives be initialized, but no beep, no POST, no nada.

The ritual dance would consist of me submissively kneeling down to power on and off in a random sequence the back switch, the front one, the UPS, the reset buttom, curse, turn it completely off for random amounts of time, pull the cable in and out, curse some more... never really finding out when or what would make it fully come to life. But eventually it did, after 5, 10, 15 minutes, without any reproduceable pattern, it did. Not on Friday night. Or saturday. I spent most of the night (until 6 am) performing the ritual, googling like crazy, fustrated and eventually plain angry. All I could find was "the mobo is b0rked, exchange it". But I knew it was not. I knew the CPU was fine, the MoBO was fine, the memory was fine, because when I finally managed to get it to power up, all worked well!

But Miry came home and helped me out, coming up with a valuable clue: The mobo was not getting enough power form the PSU, so I got a spare PSU from H ctor and swapped them. The baby came up instantly. So I was very pissed off.

The good thing about it all is:
- I learned that power supply units sometimes fail. Even my wonderful, 100 EUR BQuiet! PSU.
- I missed completely all of the udev fun. Well, at least on my machines, but there's a couple of people I needed to help out today.

On Monday I got a new power supply, it is a joke of a plastic, for SM's sake! plastic!?, PSU with a couple blue fans. Pics of old nice one and crappy new one here. My sitting room looks like a space craft, and sounds like a plane is about to take off. The cats have not complained yet. They have not disconnected my land line (yet).
Update: The reason I bought this PSU is I have quite a big case, a case I can ride! So I needed Log cables. And I had to go for a cheapo modder plstic thingy, simply because I could not afford anything better.

I hate hardware.

I uploaded a new perl package to the archive today Net::HTTPServer a stunningly easy to use HTTP-server module. The last time I did so it was rejected by the ftpmasters who suggested that I used the wrong license. I didn’t so I’m hoping this upload will get approved! (Understandable mistake; the package contains LICENSE.LGPL but is dual-licensed like perl as the code and readme says. It was rejected because I said it was “duel perl” and the reviewer believed it was LGPL.) I’ve been using this module a lot recently at home and work and like it. I might write about using it for random purposes in my copious free time …

LWN has an article up about how RPM is forked, with no single agreed-upon upstream and lots of distros going off and patching it on their own:

Fedora currently ships version 4.4.2, and even the Fedora development repository has not gone beyond that. SUSE remains at 4.4.2, and the current RHEL offerings have rather older versions.

(And Debian's at 4.4.1+a year of patches.) rpm is not the only peice of software that is a major component of many linux distributions but has no agreed-upon upstream maintainer, and thus effectively one fork per distro. Another such peice of software is cron. Vixie cron was last released in '93. In many distributions it's still used, but in eg, Debian, the package is the result of 13 years of patches on top of that release. The debian version number is 3.0pl1-96. That's ninty-six versions based on 3.0pl1. The Red Hat sub-version is in the fourtys. There's no standard version anymore, just this pile of patches, and other piles of patches in other distributions. If we're lucky, they at least share the same security fixes. Another example is makedev, which was had its last upstream release in '98 and is at patchlevel 82 in Debian. Or netcat, last released in '96, patchlevel 32 in Debian, and a fork/rewrite at netcat.sourceforge.net. Or xgalaga, whose upstream author has fallen off the net and last released it in '98. The Debian package, which I maintain, is at patchlevel 37, and seeme to be the only place a lot of people can find to send patches to. But I don't want to be its upstream maintainer. This is the kind of thing that makes me gibber in horror when people at Ubuntu talk about Debian and other distros being part of an "ecosystem of software". I don't want to be part of an ecosystem; I'd rather be part of something that works not something that muddles through via massive trial-and-error and redundancy. Biomass is another word for "shit". But I digress.. The most productive thing I've seen done to try to address this general problem is the Unmaintained Free Software wiki, which tries to track this software and find new maintainers. That has managed to match up some software with interested people (though it failed with xgalaga), but I think it actually works less well for big and important software that ends up forked and maintained separately by the major linux distributions. I, myself, am beginning to use the degree of divergence from upstream as an indicator of how well a distribution maintains a given peice of software, with more divergence == bad. A distro that's doing a good job will a) get their patches integrated upstream and b) should work with other distros to find a new developer if upstream goes missing or insane. This is the inverse of what people might naively consider a good metric of how much work a distro is doing, but I think it leads to better software in the long run.

Peter Nuttall is my personal hero for running with my idea to limit N consecutive posts on a planetplanet installation - if you’d like test it and apply it to planet.debian.org, or elsewhere, find it here. (Note: Patch is reversed). Bad day at work today. I spent half the morning wrestling with xen on my laptop - it seems that linux-image-2.6.16-2-xen-686 or linux-modules-2.6.16-2-xen-686 panics on boot in some weird Xen way. (ie. before initrd.) I upgraded to these packages yesterday afternoon, and the problem only showed itself by a failure to boot this morning. Since the laptop is fairly new none of my install CDs were capable of booting it with networking. In the end I downloaded knoppix, broke a window whilst waiting for it to download, and finally installed a non-Xen kernel so I could work. I’ve reported a bug against the kernel package (with a bogus email address which I’ll need to fixup afterwards) but it hasn’t shown up in the bts yet. There isn’t anything obvious in the bootup message just a panic after “disabling trace buffers” so I’m not sure the report will be terribly useful. In other “worky” news four months after making the request I got a second phone line installed in my flat today, so I can get another network connection. Neat. Now I need to track down somebody to replace / fix my window. Thats going to be pricy, but it will have to be done before the weather turns or I’ll freeze in my house. The problem is frustratingly mechanical - the window “handle” is jammed in such a way that I can’t turn the handle and close the window - so it is permananetly open about four inches. The frustration comes primarily because if the window would open more, (it won’t), I could use a screwdrive to unscrew the locking site - and that would allow me to close it. (Albeit leaving it unlocked). Its half-open/half-closed state is just the worse way for it to be stuck.

People writing about how the "new graphical installer" looks the same as the one "in text" don't understand debian installer. If you want to know the truth, 'get the facts':<br /><ul><li>There's a (not so) new frontend (GTK+ based) - read 'skin', not a entirely new installer</li><li>The questions will never be totally different than the dialog frontend (read 'blue' background) or readline frontend (read 'text mode'). It makes no sense<br /></li><li>The partitioner can look better in the GTK+ frontend and hopefully will, after Etch release<br /></li><li>If in doubt ask in debian-boot (http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot) for technical issues or debian-publicity (http://lists.debian.org/debian-publicity) for press related stuff, before post your shiny new article about beta quality software that you've no idea what really does and contains behind the scenes</li><li>debian-installer development page is http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer wiki.debian.org contains useful information to make a good or poor article too, but it's like the pile of papers in our desk, nothing more.<br /></li></ul>

This year I purchased a 3 chip video camera with the hopes of capturing some good footage at geek conferences. Part of my motivation was selfish (perhaps one day I can make a small documentary) and part of my motivation was selfless (give video footage to the geek community). Now my footage is available and I will put more up in the coming year. Warning: I have no experience with shooting so I am sure I have done most things wrong. I hope to learn some of the more technical stuff over the next few years.

<a onblur="try parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully(); catch(e) " href="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 89px; height: 31px;" src="http://www.telecable.es/personales/algarcia/img/epiphany-88x31.png" alt="" border="0" /></a>If you're using GNOME as your desktop environment, it's possible that you're using the wrong browser or just using one that isn't doing everything you want as i was, right ? Well, when Firefox came into the scene with one of its previous names i was using Galeon. Galeon worked for me, but it lacked some features that the new browser was offering. I would like to tell you that the same thing is happening again, and it's now time to give <a href="http://www.gnome.org/projects/epiphany/">epiphany</a> a try. If you did it before, do it again with the latest epiphany (2.14.0) in Debian sid, my reasons are below:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gecko<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span>Yes, it uses Gecko 1.8 as backend and not gtkhtml so don't worry about page rendering. For those 'in the loop', it's already linked against <a href="http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/XULRunner">xulrunner</a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></span></span>library. Firefox (in Debian sid) isn't yet.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>Bookmarks</span><br />You can attach tags (epiphany calls them 'topics') to the bookmarks and it will organize everything in a tree for you. The bookmark manager looks good for me too, i'm not too much into the bookmark thing but together with deskbar-applet and epiphany topics i can find what i want.<br /><br />The most interesting feature is that epiphany can look up to bookmarks published using avahi (mdns/dns-sd daemon) and show them as "local sites". In other words, you can setup a centralized bookmark server and all the epiphany users in your network will be able to see them. I've a mt-daapd server, and epiphany recognize that there's a admin website around, just like rhythmbox does.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Extensions<br /></span>Yes, it has extensions and is able to do ad-block and all that. Unfortunately the latest <a href="http://packages.debian.org/epiphany-extensions">epiphany-extensions</a> package still needs to be built for i386, but it's already ok for amd64 arm hppa powerpc s390.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">RSS<br /></span>I had some rss apps around, but wasn't really using them because what i needed was subscribe from the browser, organize the feeds in the app using topics/tags or folders and see some interesting integration between that app and the browser. It's now done, try epiphany and liferea. =)<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">Memory<br /></span>After eight hours using epiphany it won't eat all your memory to 'optimize page loading' and even with this "bug" i don't see epiphany (and the rest of my desktop) too slow to open a new page after all this time.<br /><br />I think that a lot of users and developers will just look to epiphany as a serious Firefox alternative, after a big "user oriented" distribution pick it as the default browser. Thanks to the epiphany developers anyway, keep the good work.

Being improved as we speak for Etch, but needing testers...<br /><br />Quick howto:<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">aptitude install gnome-desktop</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">desktop</span><br />or<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">tasksel install gnome-desktop<br /><br /></span>You can download the <a href="http://www.us.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/">testing weekly images</a> and select "Desktop environment" after base installation, if you want to help testing this from scratch.<br /><br />Some known issues are:<br />- It could boot faster;<br />- There's no visual consistency yet (login screen, splash and wallpaper);<br />- It doesn't fit in the first CD (it should, really).<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span>I'm helping with the current known issues and probably some more useful packages will be added soon in the desktop. By the way thanks to joeyh, kov and joss.<br /><br />Suggestions and general feedback to my email are welcome. That would be good if the people that i've contacted and once worked for a better Debian desktop start replying my emails.<br /><br />Closing, i don't want to work for extend the supermarket catalog. I prefer to focus on some fridges and if it isn't enough for all the users, they're free to install something more from the next fridge. Hint: Pick your fridge in Debian and work there, avoid this supermarket bloat!

Well, two days ago Jason Norwood-Young published in Tectonic the worst article about Ubuntu, Debian and the Ubuntu latest release Dapper Drake until now. I would like to point out where he's wrong here, just to clarify for Debian users my view on the subject.<br /><br />Source: http://www.tectonic.co.za/view.php?id=1026<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;" class="viewbody">"I can only guess where Ubuntu went wrong. The first mistake, I think, was its desire to be a bleeding edge distribution, rather than a leading edge distro. Basing itself on Etch, Debian's unstable release, could be a problem. When the early versions of Ubuntu used the then-unstable Sarge as their foundations, it wasn't a risk -- Sarge was on the cusp of being released. Etch, on the other hand, is brand-new, and far from getting a thumbs-up as a stable distribution."</span><br /><br />The truth is that Ubuntu Dapper Drake was never based on Debian testing that we will be our next release, that we already call Etch. Ubuntu spend some time importing packages from Debian Unstable (that we always call sid too) and merging them with the changes they had and applying new changes, adding more packages software and all that. For more information about Debian release cycle, check our <a href="http://www.us.debian.org/releases/">Debian release page</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;" class="viewbody">"I also wonder who is doing the up-stream support. Shuttleworth poached the best-of-the-best Debian developers for Ubuntu. So who's working on Debian? The hald bug has been identified as an up-stream problem -- a Debian problem in other words. Perhaps Debian doesn't have the man-power to run around fixing Ubuntu bugs. "<br /><br /></span>Mr. Jason failed miserably here. Considering that he's right and Mark hired the best-of-the-best Debian developers for Ubuntu, the hald bug that is a software <a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fhal">from freedesktop</a> and not Debian, should be solved by the best-of-the-best, no? Perhaps Ubuntu doesn't have the man-power to run around fixing every freedesktop bug.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;" class="viewbody">"Finally, there's the problem of prioritising. Ubuntu, at its heart, is a community project. Many of the developers are not Canonical employees and don't get paid to work on Ubuntu -- they do it because the want to."<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><span class="viewbody">Great, Ubuntu at its heart, is a community project and what Debian is?<br /><br />I think the guy isn't a troll, but he should be more polite with both projects, after all he likes the previous Ubuntu release without considering that we (Debian) had some input there. In other words if it works it's Ubuntu, if it breaks is it upstream's fault? He can't recognize that Ubuntu upstream isn't always Debian.<br /><br />Meanwhile:<br /></span> <span class="body"><b>"Comment added</b></span><br /><span class="body">Thank you for your contribution <b>Gustavo Franco</b>. <br />Your comments will be posted on the site as soon as they have been moderated by the editors."<br /><br />We will see which kind of moderation i'll receive there.<br /></span>