I finally started the xulrunner 1.9.1 transition in unstable, and uploaded Iceweasel 3.5.3 there. One of the nice additions to the latest xulrunner (which has actually been in experimental for a couple weeks) is a dh_xulrunner script that adds the proper xulrunner package to shlibs:Depends, which means we are getting nearer to being able to handle xulrunner transitions with binNMUs only. We are still far from it, but it is a step closer. At least, transitions should get a bit easier. The way it works is very hackish, but it apparently works well enough for the packages that currently depend on xulrunner-dev. I also added a xulrunner dh sequence, for the dh users. Anyways, as a side effect of the starting transition, I ended up fixing 4 RC bugs on a single package:

• Outdated dependencies: rebuilding is enough to get the proper dependencies
• A segmentation fault at startup that I guess happened because the package didn t depend on xulrunner-1.9. With the transition patch, it does depend on xulrunner-1.9.1, now.
• Missing build dependencies
• Oudated build dependencies

Another package with 3 RC bugs is impacted by this transition, but it looks like a good candidate for removal. That s 7 RC bugs adressed by this transition, while not directly related to xulrunner.

On several occassions, R had suggested itself as a language for <it>systems scripting</it>. By this I mean random little adminstrative task such as (re-)moving or maybe renaming files or directories and the like. One of such cases just happened a few minutes ago. The aforementioned Garmin Forerunner 405 can cooperate quite nicely with Linux using the gant reader for the ant wireless communication protocol between the usb hardware dongle and the Garmin 405. (Sources for gant are both this file and this git archive.) I had meant to blog about this tool and the resulting files one of these days anyway, but today I just want to mention that the default filenames created by the program were somewhat horrid such as 20.09.2009 101112.TCX to denote the 20th of September of this year at 10:11h and 12 seconds. As we all know, filenames with spaces are bad for the environment as well as plain annoying. So I had made the simple change in the C sources to switch to a saner format such as 20090920-101112.TCX (and I see that the git archive now contains a similar fix). But that still left me with some 80+ files with the dreaded names. There are of course many ways to skin this cat and to rename the files in bulk. However, I found the following four lines to be fairly succinct

#!/usr/bin/r
files <- dir(".", pattern=".*\\.TCX$")
res <- lapply(files, function(f)  
    pt <- strptime(f, "%d.%m.%Y %H%M%S.TCX")  # parsed time
    ft <- strftime(pt, "%Y%m%d-%H%M%S.TCX")   # formatted time
    file.rename(f, ft)
 )

as they show, among other things,

• the access to one of the three (soon four) regexp engines, here as a simple patterns argument to dir()
• the functional programming nature of the beast: files is a vector of filenames, and lapply() unrolls the vector one-by-one calling the anonymous function and passing the current element off as f
• computing on times is particularly easy as we get strptime and strftime as any self- and POSIX-respecting language should
• similarly, we get access to file system-level operations natively avoiding all quoting issues that make files with spaces such fun in the first place.
• the littler scripting frontend providing /usr/bin/r rules.

So about five lines and two minutes later, some eighty-ish files were renamed and sanity was restored. Hm, and I took me five times as long to blog this. Lastly, I do not mean to imply that Python or Perl or Ruby or (insert favourite tool here) cannot do it equally well. I simply meant to say that programmatically creating new filenames is definitely easier in R than it would have been in shell. And as an added bonus, we even get fully parsed time objects that I could have tested for. But then tests and documentation never get written on a Saturday.

Today I was working all day on python-debianbts 1.0 and uploaded it to unstable a few minutes ago. This version breaks backwards compatibility with previous versions. I removed lots of unneeded old cruft like the HTMLStripper class needed ages ago when I was still using HTML instead of debbugs SOAP interface. A new method get_usertag(email, *tags) was introduced. It returns a dict containing usertag-buglist mappings. If tags are given the dict is limited to matching tags, otherwise all available tags of the given user are returned:

In [1]: import debianbts as bts
In [2]: bts.get_usertag( debian-python@lists.debian.org )
Out[2]:
 dist-packages : [547838, 547832, ..., 547858],
  dpmt-todo : [332913],
  policy : [373301, 373302, ..., 377089],
  python-oldnum : [478467, 478442, ..., 478441],
  python2.1 : [351108, 351110, ..., 351131],
  python2.2 : [351108, 351109, ..., 351161],
  python2.6 : [547838, 547832, ... 547858] 
In [3]: bts.get_usertag( debian-python@lists.debian.org ,  python2.1 ,  python2.2 )
Out[3]:
 python2.1 : [351108, 351110, ..., 351131],
  python2.2 : [351108, 351109, ..., 351161] 

get_bug_log(nr) now returns a list of dicts with the keys: header (string), body (string), msg_num (int) and attachments (list). Before 1.0 it returned a list of Buglog objects. The Bugreport class now supports every information provided by the SOAP interface. I tried to stay as close as possible to the data SOAP provides, so I renamed existing attributes (like Bugreport.nr which is not supported by SOAP but is now Bugreport.bug_num) and also added the quirky ones like: id and bug_nr, found and found_versions, keywords and tags, fixed and fixed_date which always seem to provide the same data. Instead of the Bugreport.value() method which provided a number representing the openness (in terms of: open, closed and archived) and urgency (like: grave, important, ) to make bugreports sortable by their status, the Bugreport class now has a __cmp__ method which makes bugreports comparable. The more open and urgent a bug is, the greater it is. Openness always beats urgency (eg: an open whishlist bug is greater than a closed grave one). While pre 1.0 versions of python-debianbts more or less served the needs of reportbug-ng, it now tries to stay as close as possible to the data provided by SOAP. As a result many parts of reportbug-ng had to be fixed for the new version. I hope this makes python-debianbts more attractive for other projects dealing with Debian s bug tracker. As always: python-debianbts is on github and forks, patches or other kinds of collaboration are very welcome. For the curious here a litte quickstart. it shows how to get all important bugs from reportbug-ng and prints out the bugnumber and summary:

# Get all important bugs of reportbug-ng (returns a list of integers)
bugnrlist = bts.get_bugs("package", "reportbug-ng", "severity", "important")
bugnrlist
[548871, 439203, 542759]
# Get the actual bugreports (returns a list of Bugreport-objects)
bugs = bts.get_status(bugnrlist)
for bug in bugs: print bug.bug_num, bug.subject
    .:
542759 [reportbug-ng] Erroneously reports nothing or repeats previous package s report
439203 Doesn t give any explanations of the severities and what they mean
548871 reportbug-ng: does not check for newer versions before reporting a bug

Here we go, another release has been cooked for your enjoyment: bash-completion 1.1 is here! This release's development cycle has seen the release of bash4: this introduced a number of bugs, which have been hopefully fixed. Blame us if you find any other Many completions were split out of bash_completion: this prepares the road to dynamic loading of needed completions (in a future major release), resulting in a smaller and faster completion! Furthermore, like each release, many new completions have been added, many old ones were improved, and some bugs have been fixed (more than 20). For more info, look at the changelog file. Still there? Go download bash-completion-1.1! For any bug you might find, please contact us at our mailing list, or directly file it at the Alioth tracker. For the Debian users out there: package coming soon! Happy installation!

I haven't written about politics since the election for several reasons. First and foremost, Obama won fair and square. While I might wish the other guy had won, I can't whine and pout or threaten to move to Canada like some people. The vox populi chose and that choice has to be respected. Secondly, one of the worst aspects of the current American political scene is the paranoid obsession with personalities in which the president is not just an implementor of policies good or bad, but personally responsible for the entire state of the cosmos. It started with Nixon, started getting alarming with Clinton and reached batshit levels of insanity with George W. Bush. But just because the left does it it, doesn't mean we have to follow suit. Although I figured Obamas policies would end up a trainwreck, I wanted to see what he actually did before calling him on it. The Nobel comittee isn't hoping and changing with me. In a decison that is bizarre even by the lax standards of a prize that long since jumped the shark, the President is to receive the Nobel Peace prize for...not being George Bush? It's difficult to see what substantive reasons they could have for their choice. But apparently one of these days he is going to make extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples...democracy and human rights are to be strengthened. Well let's see now:

• There was the ridiculous episode with Russia and the reset button.
• From India to Israel to Poland and the Czech Republic Obama has antagonized allies and lowered the goodwill built up by Bush (ya rly).
• The Obama Administration did nothing to support Iranian protesters rising up against blatant election-stealing by their theocratic oppressors. Neither was there so much as a squeak when the protests were brutally put down. This by the way is the same Iran with which the administration continued sham negotiations even after they knew it was pursuing nuclear weapons. (Hey guys! Remember when nuclear non-proliferation was a goal of "multilateral diplomacy"?)
• Oh but wait, there is one errant country whose villany will not be allowed to go unchecked by US might: Honduras, where the countries constitutional court and parliament (or was it teh J00z?) acting to stop a Chavez style demagogue from stealing himself another term kicked him out. Instead of supporting this attempt at preserving the rule of law in a fragile corner of the world, the US inexplicably bought into the propoganda that it was a coup despite the Congressional Research Service saying that it wasn't. Luckily Honduras is treating Obama diplomacy as all other countries do and ignoring it.
• Obama is the first president since 1991 to refuse to meet with old and busted Peace Prize winner the Dalai Lama

Perhaps I am being a little unfair in not taking into consideration all the great things the president is going to do real soon now. It's just that I'm worried that this might be an attempt to sway him in the task of winning the war in Afghanistan (and more likely than not carrying it into Iran and Pakistan.) I take solace in the knowledge that heretofore Obama has shown a refreshing inclination to throw people under the bus when they are no longer convenient. If he can do that to the guy who says he wrote his book than some silly Norwegians won't be a problem.

Random plea for free stuff. If anyone out there has any geeky stickers (or anything a bit random for a sticker) lying around, please send them to me! I d rather not put my address on the intarwebs, so please feel free to email me on martin AT sourceguru DOT net if you have something to send me, and I will happily send you out a Stamped Addressed Envelope. The stickers will be put to good use decorating my laptop Edit:- I ve just realised that sending a SASE to another country really doesn t work particularly well, different countries use different stamps after all!!!!
I m trying to think up a solution, but please let it be known that I am in the U.K., so if you re outside and want to send me stickers, you may have to help me come up with a solution for getting round the whole stamp thing!

So I finally got around to checking out the TED site; I ve quickly become a fan. One of the first talks I watched was Steven Levitt s child carseats talk. Both the talk and the feedback comments on the TED site reminded me of things I see in software development. Here s the video if you haven t seen it. Steven Levitt shows in his talk how 30 years of data on car crash fatalities imply that carseats do not outperform regular seatbelts for children ages 2 and up. Anyone who has a child or grandchildren will probably bristle at hearing that; as the father of a pre-schooler, it certainly gave me pause. We spent no small amount of time and decent chunk of money in selecting carseats for our child, thinking we had done our best to ensure our child s safety. For that matter, it would be illegal for us not to have done so. To see a decent-sized data sample suggesting my child would be better off in a seatbelt at her age is rather unsettling. By the end of the talk, I took away these observations:

• This great swath of an initiative was started by a very small yet vocal group of proponents whose assertions received little scrutiny.
• A solution tailored to the specific constraints of a portion of the audience has been put forth as the de facto solution for the entire audience.
• There is an ongoing assumption that the more complicated and costly solution must be superior to the simpler, existing solution.
• Cursory evaluation of a data set without rigorous attention to mitigating factors can lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions.
• The acceptability of a given solution is often tested against a narrow band of the overall criteria, and the solution is often optimized to pass that test.
• The likelihood that people will continue to choose the more expensive and complicated solution despite any data is high.

So, software professionals, does any of that sound familiar? It reminds me of numerous initiatives over the years that have led us inexorably to the software productivity morass we have slogged through for years now. I suppose the most heinous case study in my own experience would be J2EE and the insistence that it was the solution that any reasonable business application would choose for a platform. (Before you .Net folks jump on that one, DCOM and later the .Net enterprise stack was much the same.) And who hasn t read a benchmark or white paper with seemingly incontrovertible data depicted in highly-polished graphics insisting that Product Y is the one solution to address them all? I noticed that there were comments below the video on its page at the TED site, largely because the negative verbiage of the topmost comment jumped out at me. I took the time to read through them all (there were 36 at the time of this writing), and to my amusement, I saw parallels between them and how people react to questioning and examining our existing practices and means of developing software. See if any of these strike a chord:

• The idea that what we re doing might be wrong unsettles some people, and their response is often ferocious and irrational defense of the status quo.
• Those who have a financial stake in the current mode of operation are less likely to be open to scrutinizing it.
• There will be some people whose primary objection to the scrutiny is that they didn t think of doing it first; these people will sometimes attack the person questioning things on the grounds that it s all a selfish, attention-mongering endeavor.
• There are some people who will also be open to examining why and how we re doing things; whether they conclude the same thing or not, they are a welcome presence among the larger mass of those who ardently refuse to entertain the possibility of a need to change.

In recent years I ve been greatly encouraged by the willingness of companies to question whether or not the heavyweight frameworks and technology stacks are what they should be using. Helping companies slough off high-ceremony processes in favor of right-sized process that focuses on delivering the right software in a timely manner has been some of the more rewarding work I ve done the past several years. I think we have an encouraging number of people in the industry who are challenging the more expensive and complicated always equals better mantra. For the brave individuals willing to put these questions to the community at large, I hope you find some comfort in knowing that the resistance and rejection you will encounter is a thing to be expected; you are not alone in that respect. Here s hoping we continue to be open to self-examination, no matter what emotional responses it might provoke or what fear of the future it may stir up within us.

Today I branched the (LaTeX) source of my Debian book in preparation of the second edition, targetted for the forthcoming Debian 6.0 squeeze . I am very excited to come back to this project after deprioritising it in favour of my research for too long. Thanks to my publishers Open Source Press and No Starch Press for their patience. If you want to be the first to receive announcements about the book, such as release dates, previews, or other information, please sign up to the announcement mailing list. The second edition has two goals:

• Bring all existing content up-to-date with what has changed in Debian in the last four years.
• Add additional material, such as (but not limited to): SecureApt, backporting, using version control for packaging, IPv6, dm-crypt, Unicode, and virtualisation. If you have any suggestions or wishes for topics I should write about, let me know at feedback t debiansystem d t info.

I want to re-establish the book as the standard Debian reference, but also to give my existing readers a good reason to buy the book again. While we re on the topic of buying: yes, the book is pay-ware, and yes, in some ways that goes against the spirit of open-source, and Debian in particular. However, this is a choice I made. If this book didn t have a commercial basis, then I could not put as much time into it, and I would not be able to profit from the outstanding help from the folks at Open Source Press and No Starch Press it is thanks to their advice and experience that the book turned out to be as it is. The book will be available as PDF from the start, so if you care as much about the environment as I do, you ll prefer to get that over the Dead Tree Version. And if you re as haptic as I am, then you still have the option to buy the book so you can hold something real in your hands. I am looking forward to working on this project, to working intensely with the Debian community throughout, and to your input.

Like make(1), ikiwiki knows about dependencies between the files that it is building, and will rebuild a file if its dependencies change. I've always known that it was possible to greatly reduce the amount of work ikiwiki does, if it gets smarter handling of different types of dependencies. It would be as if make knew that changes to comments inside header files did not change the resulting binary, and avoided rebuilding it for such a change -- but did rebuild the doxygen documentation. Except that, in ikiwiki, this can be done sanely, since it figures out the dependencies by examing the wiki's files, not by using a Makefile. Also, there were some nasty bugs with certian complex dependencies not being handled right. Fixing one of them, the transitive dependency problem, would require ikiwiki doing significantly more work. So fixing all this has been on my todo list for a while. Though when I mentioned "transitive dependencies" at the ikiwiki BOF @ DebConf, eyes glazed over. :) And I expect I've lost most of my readers already here too.. Which is a pity, because I've just gotten to the fun stuff. So, a few (how many?!) days ago I started my current insane hackfest, and began adding dependency types into ikiwiki. The first special type was a presence dependency -- a dependency that only cares if a page is created, or deleted, but does not care about changes to the page. Next type was a links dependency -- a dependency that only cares if the page changes what pages it links to. That was great, except it often didn't work. For features like gathering "posts/*" together into a blog, or displaying a tag cloud of "tags/*", ikiwiki uses a PageSpec. This is a small, domain specific language, that can specify a set of pages with lots of control. For example, "(index or backlink(index)) and created_after(oldpage)". The problem is that when using a PageSpec like the one above in a presence dependency, it doesn't only matter if pages are added/removed. Certian changes to "oldpage" or "index" can also change what it matches. So now, I had this PageSpec DSL, that I needed to somehow analyise to find these influences. While thankfully not turing-complete, parsing it to extract the influences would still be annoying. Except: Operator overloading to the rescue! The solution was this perl:

package IkiWiki::FailReason;
use overload (
        '""'    => sub   $_[0][0]  ,
        '0+'    => sub   0  ,
        '!'     => sub   bless $_[0], 'IkiWiki::SuccessReason' ,
        '&'     => sub   $_[0]->merge_influences($_[1]); $_[0]  ,
        ' '     => sub   $_[1]->merge_influences($_[0]); $_[1]  ,
        fallback => 1,
);
package IkiWiki::SuccessReason;
use overload (
        '""'    => sub   $_[0][0]  ,
        '0+'    => sub   1  ,
        '!'     => sub   bless $_[0], 'IkiWiki::FailReason' ,
        '&'     => sub   $_[1]->merge_influences($_[0]); $_[1]  ,
        ' '     => sub   $_[0]->merge_influences($_[1]); $_[0]  ,
        fallback => 1,
);

Ikiwiki already dealt with pagespecs by translating them to perl (which is then compiled (yes, perl can), and happily memoized). A pagespec is translated to something like this:

(match_glob("index")   match_backlink("index")) & match_created_after("oldpage")

The match_* functions return IkiWiki::SuccessReason or IkiWiki::FailReason objects. These objects are special in a lot of ways; they act like boolean values most of the time, but if viewed as a string, you get a user-understandable message saying why the pagespec didn't match. And when ANDed or ORed together, they build up a list of influences, that can be accessed at the end to get all the influences for the whole pagespec. (Why am I using what's supposed to be bitwise operations & and , rather than "and" and "or"? Because perl doesn't seem to consider the latter to be operators. Odd.) Anyway, this stuff should be available in an ikiwiki release just as soon as I've finished making it smoking fast.

Yesterday was a glorious day for DebConf11 bid in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I had a scheduled meeting with Banja Luka s mayor Dragoljub Davidovic. We met in his cabinet, where I presented him with the paper DebConf11 in Bosnia and Herzegovina in which I tried to explain what it all means. From what Debian is, over what DebConf is, to why is DebConf important. The thing I was most worried about was how am I going to explain all this in simple non-tech words Either way, I was in middle of explaining what Debian is when mayor interrupted me I understand, I m electrical engineer myself you have no idea what relief came from these words! Explaining what DebConf is and what kind of profiles attend one such event went smoothly as well, where mayor made some replicas on my story from the projects he worked on and so on. After my last case he also explained me how it s good that we meet, since Banja Luka was known as electronic city in ex-Yugoslavia.

Mayor and I And this is where things start going just ballistic! He says something along the line this is a great idea and that we have his full support, I think you should talk to the prime minister (Milorad Dodik) about this as well! I find my way to the government building, wait for brief period of time and I get called inside of the prime ministers cabinet. I tell him somewhat different story, in terms of more details, how we are competing with M nchen for this bid, and how I m actually planning if we win the bid, and if the bid is successful we d most likely change the whole city s infrastructure to Debian. He picks up the phone and calls for someone, person comes in and I m introduced to IT Center General Manager (Krsto Grujic). He tells me that they have few RedHat servers while he leads the way to his office where I m introduced to director of Agency for IT (Srdjan Rajcevic) where we even have this informal talk where Srdjan tells me he used GNU/Linux user himself and that he still manages two OpenBSD servers. We talk about various topics, in the end I tell them what we need for the conference, they write it all down and we exchange contact details, since I was called back up by the prime minister. Prime minister, asks me what I need from him to realize this project and I tell him that I d need everything I gave IT guys below, and binding papers that we d have full government and city support by the end of the month, and that I ll consult with people from Debian in case we need anything else. No problem were his words
Prime minister and I I walk out, really asking myself, what just happened, was that a Disney movie or what? I d really like to use this opportunity to invite all Debian members to come and help us realize this bid. Help us put Bosnia and Herzegovina on map of the open source world! Stay tuned

You want to revitalize a dying, inactive free software project. How do you proceed?

1. You write code, contribute, get involved in the community, get in touch with the previous developer(s) to try and join the team or take over the project. Failing that, you fork the project, because this is how free software works after all. Then, once you ve got something to show, you start talking about it;
2. You set up a new forum, brag about it on the old one, arrange with the previous lead developer to make sure you can use the name and logo, then open a twitter account so users can follow the new forum s setup process minute by minute.

There s this saying about opensource/free software that says the logo and about box are the very first (and only) things that work in new/young projects (and sometimes that s also true for more mature projects, as we all come to know). Choice 2 above is the About Box 2.0. Unfortunately, that s the way a handful of people choose to revitalize mt-daapd/Firefly Media Server. Of course, not one among them can code or has actually got a clue about the current codebase. FAIL of epic proportions. Facepalm.

In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well. Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.

Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam. I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package). The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different. Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.

Unfortunately checkinstall didn't made it into Debian Etch, hence I needed to backport it from Lenny. I tried to follow the instructions given on www.backports.org, but unfortunately the package FTBFS on 64 bit architectures with the libc6-dev provided with Etch. I dropped the versioned build-dependency on libc6-dev and restricted its build to Architecture: i386, but probably this renders the package inacceptable for www.backports.org... You can find the backport here.

Someone told be about the cool features of the Thunderbird Lightning extension, an extension managing your calendar and tasks within Thunderbird. As this extension is only available for Thunderbird 2.0 and as Icedove is only available in version 1.5 in Debian Etch, I backported Icedove 2.0.0.16-1 from Lenny. If you're a Debian Etch user you can add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list, run apt-get update and install it with aptitude install icedove.

  deb http://micha.lenk.info/debian etch/

Have fun!

Last night I was about to sit down and write a post about how happy I was. After a long search, I found a beautiful appartment in Nice, with my flatmates we're cleaning and arranging stuff, we're planing parties and inviting friends to come over... When we were doing the moving, I started to see the city differenty: this time it was not just a visit. It made me remember the taste of starting from scratch, like when I did when I was 21. But some jerks ruined the party. Before sitting to write the blog post, I said I better check that the car is parked in a good place, tomorrow is Monday. And all of a sudden three guys assaulted me, making me a pass thru a real bad moment, and taking the car and house keys. Nothing happened to me, luckily, but I have no more car. I spent the day making things straight with police, insurance, etc. I had to spend a HUGE load on money to change a stupid door lock (I still cannot believe that people pay that much money for this "security" stuff), and more importantly, they ruined my mood. I'm really okay, so no need to help me or anything, I just wanted to say this somewhere. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian

I m back from Taiwan since Thursday already. It was a nice trip, the whole week and I do like Taiwan. We had a transit stop in Bangkok, pretty annoying useless stop (I m sure the smokers disagree, seeing how fast they got into the smokers lounge :) ). One nice detail at Bangkok airport are the ramps down to the Gates. If you use a wheelchair, you might end up having some fun in case you ever lose control of it. Better don t. The ramp down directly ends in a set of stairs, with nothing between which would stop you. Makes too great a jump down, hehe. We arrived in Taipei Thursday (the 24th) evening and so got rid of our luggage and went out for Dinner. Which was the only time in Taiwan I wasn t happy about the food, only one of the dishes was ok, the rest not for me. But the rest of the group did like em, so maybe it was just me after a long flight. On Friday we had nothing planned, except for Dinner, so took a very relaxed day. Somewhere around noon we went out for food, after that a bit sightseeing around the hostel . There are two attributes that are always true for Taipei:

1. It s a busy place, lots of people. No matter where.
2. It has more scooters than you ever saw before. (True, there are two times more scooters than cars).

Oh, and of course there are the same rules of the road than in Mexico: Something might be written on paper, but better don t count on that. Red traffic lights are followed (mostly), and then its whoever is stronger. But if everyone is following this, it does seem to work out. :) Friday evening we had Dinner in a place run by Taiwan aborigines where we met the other people attending the mini-DebConf. Oh, and as it was the third time I had to use them, I was slowly growing accustomed to chopsticks, a thing I was never able to get done before. (Ok, fine, if its the only way to get food and all the others are stealing your food if you can t handle them, now thats a good reason to learn to eat with chopsticks fast :) ). Saturday and Sunday we had the mini-DebConf as part of the ICOS. I took no pictures there, but a number of other people have, you can find them on gallery.debconf.org. It was a pretty nice event where I held one talk about the Debian archive and lead one discussion round about SPI and non-profit organizations behind OpenSource Projects. The slides for the archive talk are available (beware of the kittens!), the SPI stuff only had a small introduction, no slides here. Oh, before I forget it: Taiwan does feel very hot. And we found a nice notice in our hostel Monday til Wednesday was planned for just play the Tourist game and see stuff . There was a plan made to visit the Taipei 101. It turned out that Canonical has an office within that building, as well as Google. So people planned to visit their offices too. Just - what the hell would I want to visit a Canonical office? Or a Google one? Besides that it was much too early in the day and promised to be boring, so h01ger and myself skipped it. Luck did mean it good with us, we managed to get Sabrina as a local guide for the day and so went to the Taipei 101 later. The 101 is a pretty nice building, though I would have loved to be able to get up to the real top. And not just in the upper part. Anyways, we had been lucky and had a pretty nice view from it. Getting up from the 4th floor to the 89th is also an experience one has to take: The elevators go up with 1010m/min, which makes it a 37second trip only. Down is much slower, only 600m/min, pretty boring (though you do feel it more than enough in your stomach. I wouldn t want to do lift-boy job there). After the 101 we went and visited the Lungshan temple and in the evening a night market. As it was Monday the market was empty. (Where empty translates to enough people around that you never ever feel alone. Nor think its dead). Good that, I don t think I want to experience it during weekends when its busy We had a pretty good time there, with all the various little shops. Fun how many old-style game places there are. Like, playing basketball, throwing things at other things to win stuff, all those non-computer-using games. In a country where lots of the high tech comes from this is not exactly what you would expect. On Tuesday our trip continued as good as it started on Monday, as we had the pleasure to keep Sabrina as guide for Tuesday and Wednesday. So our Tuesday started out with a visit to the National Palace Museum. Which has a large enough collection that you can spend multiple days exploring it. We didn t have the time nor memory for all of that, so left it after half a day. Lunch we took in a Japanese restaurant and here it was the first and only time during my Taiwan visit that I used a fork. Well, none of the dishes would have worked otherwise. The afternoon we spent in the Yangming Park, so we actually saw a bit of nature near Taipei. Tuesday did end early for us, as we planned to attend the TOSSUG meeting, where I met some more people from debian.org.tw and had an interesting chat about non-profit organizations in Taiwan, their way of operation and what to think of when trying to create a new one. I ve also got a nice debian.org.tw shirt, but I won t ever be able to wear it. They didn t expect someone that large when producing them, oh well. (Hrr, people, if you make Debian shirts of any kind, always do some XXL too. There might be fat, large guys like me visiting. :) ) Anyway, they have another thing, one which I like very much. They created a map of usergroups of other open source projects in Taiwan. It s a foldable map style, titled FLOSS Community Manual , and a lot of different Projects/Usergroups/ are listed there. While its all written in Chinese and I can t read it, it does list them, then describes what they are/do (I think), gives contact information and further links. The backside of it also seem to list events happening there. You can find more information (so you can read it :) ) at their website. Does seem a very nice idea to take. Sometime during the evening I also managed to pick up a Chinese name. Or better, Andrew did so for me. I don t even know how to type it, so copy&paste it has to be. :) There: . And that is:

• Definition in English: long, far, remote, distant; liesurely; Mandarin Pronunciation: YOU1
• Definition in English: axle; personal name of mencius; Mandarin Pronunciation: KE1

Wednesday was our last day in Taiwan, unfortunately. We went out of Taipei, visting the Golden Mountain City. Another nice place, with a market and a history, but as our Taxi was leaving at 1630 we didn t have much time for sightseeing. You could spend a lot there. Especially not as we still needed to buy postcards, something people left home always request from one. Tssk. I really enjoyed the time I had there. Not only was the organization of the conference we attended good (especially the mini-DebConf is what I saw. The event around it, while named International, was so much chinese spoken, that I couldn t make much of it), but the details around the whole stay had been nicely taken care off. And then people in general did appear very friendly. Now, it might have to do a bit with me not being exactly their height, but I dont think that is all of it. Even without such a conference as an opportunity I think I will visit the country again, but that time I will have much more time available. Like two or three weeks. And I certainly will see more than Taipei City then. Like the whole country. :) (And hope I am lucky again with local guides :) ). So thank you SLAT, Andrew, Arne, (Sabrina), Rita, (Candy) and all the people who worked for the event which names I forgot. Oh, if you didn t find it yet with all the links, a set of my pictures is available from here.

Here we are back from our german week-end... The major event of this week-end was running the K ln Cologne marathon. Why Cologne? Mostly because my marathon Debian friends Ralf Treinen and No l K the ran it last year and enjoyed it. So, when we ran the Paris marathon together back in April, we decided to run either Berlin or Cologne later on. I finally settled for Cologne because this is closer from Paris and the date was more convenient. That was great also for No l, who lives close to K ln, so of course he planned that race in his (busy) schedule. Unfortunately, Ralf got tendinite problems since last Spring and could not join us. We really hope this will be temporary and we will enjoy running together in the future. So, I spent most of the week-end both visiting Cologne with Elizabeth...and running these 42,195 km. That was great, really. Even if there were much more Germans than in Debian, they were really as friendly and welcoming as Debian Germans are...:-). The race happens in Cologne center city and is well arranged for followers to be able to see runners several times, as the track comes back in the city center several times....with a memorable finish through the cathedral place, then central pedestrian streets and the bridge over the Rhein river (well, climbling it at km.42 is a small PITA, but still..). Animation nearly all along the streets with many K ln inhabitants and tourists encouraging the runners and shouting and applausing and playing percussions, and.... My own race was really as I planned to do it. I targeted 4h exactly (Paris was 4h10) and thus tried to keep a pace of 5'41"/km....which I nearly respected. I had a small alert around km13-15 when my legs where kind of heavy....and I was already imagining a terrible second part for the race. Finally, seeing Elizabeth encouraging me at km.19 in the middle of a big crowd, then passing through Friesen Platz in a great noise and with huge encouragements, just made it. I then completed the first half in 1h59'20", which was just fine. I slightly slowed down between km. 24 and 28, mostly because I was trusting my GPS watch to keep the pace...while it is indeed a bit inaccurate (its kilometers are about 950m long). So, when I realized that I was about 1-2 mins late at km. 30, I decided to accelerate a little and thus target 5'30"/km on the watch...which I could sustain up to km.38. I was fearing cramps and a very hard finish, just as it happened to me in Paris...but finally could finish in a quite good shape and keeping my pace. My final time is officially 4h00'47". So, I missed my target by very few seconds but I am really very happy with the result and the way I finished. Recovering in the hotel's sauna was amazing, after this, and I could then remember all the great moments of that race by viewing Elizabeth's pictures (soon online on my gallery, promise made). And, finally, today, we had another day off to drive back home and continue recovering....and register for Paris Marathon on April 11th 2010..:-)... Hopefully, No l (who did an amazing 3h15) will convince self that he should come with his running friends. So, dear readers, if you reached that part of my blog...I'm afraid you will again read about marathon stories from me.... As everybody was telling me: once you start, you never want to stop..:)

RCBW - week #5 RC bugs squashed this week by yours truly:

• 28/09/2009 bug #485303 - serpentine - remove useless dep on python-gnome2-extras
• 29/09/2009 bug #541562 - serpentine - replace dep on (now gone) python-gnome2-desktop
• 30/09/2009 bug #515002 - onetime - fix bashism and add missing build-dep (patch by Michael Bienia)
• 01/10/2009 bug #534078 - oaklisp - downgrade FTBFS on wrong arch: package is i386-only
• 02/10/2009 bug #527731 - monotone-viz - fix link-time name clash in C-OCaml stub
• 03/10/2009 bug #540497 - sox - file overwrite error when upgrading from Lenny
• 04/10/2009 bug #546551 - dejagnu - avoid shipping /usr/share/info/dir.gz

This week has been quite though to deliver: I was traveling (actually I still am) during the week-end, starting Thursday afternoon, to go back to Italy (for a scientific/family event) and then back again in Paris. I mostly entirely caught up with the (self-imposed) RC back log in a couple of hours today and Thursday on the train. See? it is doable Interestingly, the RC bug graph is going sharply down this week. Of course it has nothing to do with RCBW (most likely a big transition went in or something such), but it is a huge morale helper!

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