Isn’t it ironic: I just wrote Tapu, a game for my mobile phone and spend quite some time typing 450 playing cards for it - and then, before ever having played the game, my cell phone, a SonyEricsson T630, gets stolen! And that in a very bold way: At night, from my dorm room, while I was sleeping there. And since the theif did not take my laptop or other expensice stuff, I assume he was not planning on stealing, therefore he (or she) is most likely from my dorm. Which makes me uncomfortable.Also uncomfortable is the Siemens S35 that I still got lying around here, and so is the fact that I had to order a new SIM card, that I had to notify the loss at the police station and that I lost some contacts on the phone.Out of frustration (ok, it was planned for a while now, but this gave me the rest), I bought myself a new camera (the old one went to pieces, as previously blogged). Now I own a shiny new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5. It’s not a pocket size camera any more, but the 12x zoom and the large lense was just too tempting. It was actually at DebConf 5 when Ralph Amissah enthuiastically showed me his Lumix, making me interested in this kind of Camera.
I uploaded a few pictures, though nothing special yet. Have a look at this zoomed in picture versus this wide angle picture for a demonstration of the 12x zoom and compare these two pictures, both fully zoomed in, first one with image stabilizer, second one without. Again, for zoom demonstration, the wide angle view.

Yeah, the last stable release of Bugzilla is going to be available for Sid within a couple of hours (thanks Frankie). One of the major change with this release is… a new skin!
Eh Eh. You can take a look at it on the Backup Manager’s website: http://bugzilla.backup-manager.org. As I’m speaking about backup-manager, let’s say the last release (0.5.9a) is also going to be available, the package is in my sponsor’s hands. My travel through NM also follows, I just sent T&S Part #1 a couple of hours ago…

Daniel Burrows mentions how he hasn't gotten any reply from potential employers where he sent cover letters that are written like the Rules require. Reading that reminds me how I never ever got hired after writing such a letter myself, either.

• My first job after graduating was at DHL. I got there because I had listed myself on stepstone, a Belgian career site that (at the time, dunno about now) featured a very detailed list of abilities you could claim your knowledge of. Someone at an interim office needed someone for DHL who could work with UNIX and Oracle (both of which I claimed knowledge on that site), so she contacted me; a few days later, I was working at DHL's global headquarters.
• My next job was at a small company in Leuven. I was, in fact, their first employee. I got there after reacting to one of the employers' statements in their .sig on usenet that they were looking for a new employee. A few days later, we met in a bar somewhere in Leuven for a drink. We've had a few more of such meetings, until I was hired.
• Next, I worked at Template. This one was very nice—one of the people who work there, who would eventually become my boss, sent me a private email asking whether I knew someone who could set up an email server and a firewall under Linux. Uh, me?! Turns out he'd been googling a bit, found quite a few postings from me on be.comp.os.linux, and was rather impressed by my knowledge. I didn't have to convince him that it was a good idea to hire me.
• Next I co-founded NixSys. Which obviously doesn't involve job applications, though it is otherwise quite stressful.
• My most recent job (even if only a part-time one) did involve something close to one of those formal letters (not an actual one; but still the first one I ever wrote, actually), though only indirectly; I applied for a job at the department where I graduated first, but didn't get hired there; however, a few weeks later I received an email from someone at a different department (which, obviously, also means a different job). That's about two weeks ago now, and she didn't need any explanation either...
All things considered, I do think the value of such cover letters is highly overrated. Not only do most employers not really care about them; one could also wonder whether you would want to work at a place where paperwork is so important that you couldn't get hired if you're the best guy for the job, but you made an error in the paperwork...

I've been a Star Trek fan for a long time, and I have been fascinated with Klingons (especially as portrayed in the movies and afterward) and especially their language. I have known for a long time that there is a real (constructed) Klingon language. I've even known a student of the Klingon language for a few years now, but it only recently came to me: I'll start studying it for real. So I bought Marc Okrand's books The Klingon Dictionary and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler and have been studying them since early this week. I already am able to construct simple sentences, and if I look up every word, I am able to understand written Klingon (the Okrand kind of writing, not the funny symbols). The sentence in the title means "I am a Debian maintainer". The word Debya' is not canon, but it'll have to do. I make no warranties that my tlhIngan Hol (Klingon language) is correct, though :) QIn vIvan – end of message

So, Joey Hess managed to stir up a bit of a discussion on the relative merits of patch management systems used in Debian packages. I guess it's a bit of a change from having this discussion on debian-mentors, at least... So I was thinking that it's time to really have a head-to-head of all of the methods that people have to manage their patches -- from the purpose-built systems, like dpatch and cdbs, to revision control systems and the scripts layered on top, to whatever personal processes various Developers may have. To assist in working out what to write, and to make comparisons a little more structured, I've jotted down a few ideas about what areas we might like to compare different systems against.

• Friendliness to a developer experienced in using the system (general usability)
• Friendliness to a developer unused to the system (learning curve)
• Friendliness to sporadic developers such as the security team, NMUers, etc (decentralisation?)
• Friendliness to "observers" -- people who want to take a look at the code (transparency)
• Friendliness to upstream (collaboration)
• Friendliness to downstream (collaboration / derivation)
• Ease of bumping to a new upstream version (inertia?)
• Adaptibility to different working methodologies (flexibility)

So, tell us all your systems and why they work. Feel free to wax lyrical. Describe how your system works (even for the established programs, for people who aren't already familiar with the way they work), and describe how they match the areas above. I'd also be interested in hearing about systems you've tried and decided they weren't up to snuff. I'll be attempting to at least aggregate, if not summarise and combine, the opinions of everyone who contributes. If your blog is syndicated on Planet Debian, Just Blog It. Otherwise, either e-mail your ideas to me or send me a link to your blog or other page where your brainwaves are saved for posterity, and I'll include them in my "analysis".

So this week’s project was working on dak, in particular getting the tiffani implemention included. What’s tiffani, you ask? It lets you just download the changes to Sources.gz and Packages.gz files, instead of the whole damn thing – if you have main, contrib, and non-free for unstable in your sources.list, this means your apt-get update only needs to download 27.5 KiB instead of 2.85 MiB (for bz2) or 3.75 MiB (for gz). Two orders of magnitude saving’s not bad. I’ve mentioned this previously a few times if you want to see the history, in January I noted some quick hacks which have now been obsoleted by Michael Vogt’s integration into apt (which is in a personal repository, not uploaded to unstable yet…), back in August last year I did a little promotion of the concept, referring back to my post in December 2003 that summarised the analysis done previously, which takes us back to March and April 2002. The server-side implementation, tiffani, is thus a little python script that groks through the list of suites and components dak knows abouts, looks for Packages, Sources and Contents files, and creates a directory names something like Packages.diff which in turn contains an Index file and a number of gzipped patches, named after the time they were created. The process for updating an existing Packages file is to look for the matching SHA1-History entry in the Index file, download the corresponding patch, apply that patch to your existing Packages file, and repeat until your Packages file matches the one you were looking for (which you can determine by looking at the checksum in either the Release or Index file). Anyway, tiffani’s been co-developed with Andreas Barth (aka Andi) after the following exchange back in November 2003 on the RM channel:

<aba> elmo: If I find some time to take a look at katies TODO-file, what would be most appreciated? Deleting udebs with melanie? “Right” handling of orig.tar.gz when jumping out of NEW / changing of the archive section? Something else?
<elmo> aba: the TODO list is a bit of a mess to be honest
<aba> elmo: So, what should I do if I want to help the ftp-masters with katie?
<elmo> aba: I wouldn’t necessarily do anything based off that unless it’s obviously correct/wanted. none of the really urgent stuff is even on there (e.g. testing-security changes)
<aba> elmo: If you tell me something urgent, I can put some time into it.
<aj> hrm, surely i have some wishlists
<aba> urgent wishlist? :)
<aj> actually, you could critique something for me if you’ve got half an hour free now?
<aba> “critique” means?
<elmo> tell him how crap his ideas are. as brutually as possible
<elmo> ;) … <aj> ooo!
<aj> aba: around?
<aj> aba: one useful thing you could work on that’s kinda katie related is implementing pdiffs into katie/apt-ftparchive/apt/whatever
<Kamion> aj: mvo’s been working on that over the last couple of days, see #128818 logs
<aj> apt side or katie side?
<Kamion> apt side
<aj> cool
<aj> aba: hacking up a katie-side implementation for that would probably be interesting, worthwhile and straightforward

(aj = me, aba = Andi, elmo = James Troup, Kamion = Colin Watson) That ended up with me finding an old script I made up called update.py (from Dec 2003 apparently) that did the core patch and Index generation, Andi updating that to some more sane pythonic style and making it work on an actual archive, then both of us cleaning it up so it would actually work sensibly without handholding. (For those playing along at home, the idea needing critiquing was trying to fix up dak’s idea of what should happen if a new version of a package is uploaded to stable or testing, when it hasn’t changed in unstable. At the time, dak would REJECT it, because it violated the requirement that you can’t downgrade packages between stable and testing or testing and unstable. That’s still somewhat broken, unfortunately) TTBOMK, Tiffani’s named after Tiffani Amber Thiessen, apparently of Saved by the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 fame. I’m not sure who of aba or elmo is more to blame for that one, though I guess it is at least a little more distinctive than update…

vorlon announced 'Bits from the release team: the plans for etch'. Yay, let's try to keep a promise about schedule :) Another good news is aba becomes Relase Manager (although he has already worked as same as release manager :) ) My personal TODO for Etch is to find and solve problems around a transition from EUC-JP to UTF-8 on Japanese environment. Most parts are done by Debian people and other distro such as FedoraCore, but I'd like to clarify problems again and try to solve them. Yesterday I changed my LANG to ja_JP.UTF-8.

• I needed to convert filenames written in EUC-JP to UTF-8.
• Programs using GTK+2 and Qt work well.
• GTK+1 applications (such as xmms) have Mojibake. I took beep-media-player instead of xmms. :)
• Some of double width characters (box, arrow, and so on) of EUC-JP are displayed as single narrow width on X terminal (mlterm, gnome-terminal, and konsole). I found I can avoid this on mlterm by enabling 'Enable variable width'.
• zsh couldn't allow to input and complement UTF-8 characters. zsh-beta allows partially.

Been playing *farrrrr* too much mario kart double dash recently, I blame it all entirely on JD! Anyways - now on to trying to get the Special Cup in a 150CC Kart... it's not going according to plan, and I think I really hate "Rainbow Road". Yesterday I managed to get the Super Ghost thing by doing "Baby Park" in time trials in less than a minute fourteen seconds (YAY!). So, tommorows task is set, the gold cup shall be won, dammit!