... yesterday evening, we fell into bed. Interesting: Although I managed to sleep very well in the airplane for something near to 10 hours (and so did alphascorpii), we still slept for another 16 hours when we got home. I think I'm getting old; that's the worst jet lag I ever had. So here is a list of things you can do at 3:00 AM in the morning, when you can't sleep because of jet lag problems:

• Wait for your luggage to be delivered to you (British Airways finally managed to bring me my lost backpack; after promising me, that it's already on the way and will be delivered to me next morning, it wasn't delivered before 20:00...)
• Sort all the snail mail from the last weeks
• Read through all the mail from last weeks
• Watch the streams from the last weeks tagesthemen
• chat with the other jet lagged people
• chat with the people still in Mexico
• Call your family telling them you got home in one piece (after not telling them, that you've left)
• Get angry, because your landlord hasn't done anything about the wet walls (well, at least the broken water pipe got fixed) or the mold on them
• Chat with your girlfriend whether landlord is the proper word for that
• Finally drink some real vaso de leche milk
• Write some notes for DebConfs final report
• Throw them away
• Synchronize your private mirror
• Pay old bills
• Agree with other, that we should make a Wine, cheese and chocolate session next year
• Write useless blog entries
• Adding stuff to the DebConf fortunes

Perhaps I just finish reading The Da Vinchi code before someone, who went to the movie, spoils the ending. See you in... wherever DebConf7 will be.

I just discovered that at least some of the requests for access to LWN.net under the group subscription Debian paid for by HP have ended up in the wrong mailbox for a few weeks. Sorry about that, it's entirely my fault. I believe I've now caught up and given everyone access who asked for it and meets the requirements. If I missed any, please re-send the request. If you're a DD and don't know what I'm talking about, you can find details about LWN and how to get added to the Debian group subscription in this message in the Debian mailing list archives. For what it's worth, there are now 427 DD's subscribed to LWN as part of this group subscription.

My mother was admitted to hospital yesterday due to weeks-long fever and other symptoms. They say it’ll take a week or two to figure out what’s wrong. I hope it’s just a simple reversible infection.

Never ever fly on Iberia anymore unless they can certify that only Finnish or Norwegian people are in the flight. Or that I have my wooden base-ball bat handy to puch the two jerks who speak (loud) all night long in the two seats in front of me (and Petr)....and laugh louder and louder as long as they keep drinking the whishy-cokes offered by an incompetent and inefficient crew. First time this happens to me in transatlantic flights where, usually, people are more civilized. PS, later: these morons were indeed Mexican, not Spanish.

summary of the problem I've re-read most of the calm and useful posts (yes some exist if you look hard :D) in the java-tro^H^Hhread. Yes, the pro-java-in-non-free are right if we omit to mention all the difficulties it will imply if such a removal has to happen for a stable update^[1] removing java from our mirrors do terminate the license solve most of the issues. Though, two major concerns remains:

1. clause 2.f (you agree to defend and indemnify Sun and its licensors from and against any damages ... and so forth) is IMHO unacceptable, even for non-free, because debian isn't in a position where it can risk to see that clause exercised by Sun ;
2. section 4 (and others of the same sort) makes the existence of java in non-free depending of Sun's mood: exercising clause 4 is trivial they just have to imagine a new kernel feature our kernel should support that we can't provide to terminate the license retro-actively. Many instances of that problem exists in the license.

The first problem in itself seems obvious, and none of the arguments of the pro-java-in-non-free have put me at rest. The second problem is a real concern because it means that our java support can be discontinued without possible clean upgrade path back to java-package. If Sun could not retire our right to redistribute one given version of java, then we could repackage the last version we can distribute with some debconf dialog to warn the user his java package won't be upgraded again, and that he must fall back to make-jpkg. But here, if Sun decides it, Sun can make the package simply disappear. And given the number of users that will concern, this is not a problem to be taken lightly.

I honnestly believe that putting java into non-free, whereas we already have java-package that allow a quite satisfying integration of Sun's JDK/JRE into a debian instance, implicitely means that we are confident that java will stay in here forever (or for a significant enough time). And I see nothing that can guarantee such a fact, and I see too many things that can prevent this with a probability significantely greater than 0. Yes there I know there is a FAQ about those issues, where Sun promise they won't use their power to hurt people. But if they don't itend to, why did they put those clauses in the license ? With all the good will I can provide, that does not makes sense to me. If you put landmines in your garden, well, that's for a purpose, not for the garnishment. debian issues And then, I've a couple of questions there, for which I've seen no real answer:

• why did that announce has been hurried like that ? yes Sun hadn't published their license, but I still don't understand how it can explain such a hurry.
• will debian switch to python 2.5 directly, so that we can skip one transition ? (that could explain why some maintainer have more time to dedicate to non urgent non-free packages, whereas some other would need its plain attention for etch)
• a more polite version of the previous question is: why do some people have been working soooo fast on this, when those people have other very real problems to deal with for etch ? that looks like a childish schedule, that puts shiny-public-things first^[2] instead of the problems that block a lot of DDs in their allday's work (some complains about NEW beeing stuck and it is, and was even before Debconf , other complain about the python2.4 transition that lags since ages, and other examples exists )
• why did only 3 persons worked on that, for a package that :
  • is well known ;
  • will obviously make noise, given to its history wrt the free software world ;
  • has a license that seem to have some obvious problems ;

and I'll skip the questions I don't want to ask, or more precisely I don't want/fear to read the answer to:

• why does this come 1 week after that ubuntu made it clear they had some things going on with Sun ?

Disclaimer Don't get me wrong. I've been really happy when I've seen that java entered non-free (even if I don't like the language but that's another story and is off topic here), because that meant that progress had been done in the good direction, and that's a thing I just have to praise. But then I've heard people complain about the damn license, and went read it. And then, I've been really disappointed, and I felt betrayed by those three people:
yes, I'm a DD, but I'm also a Debian User, and I trust my fellow developpers to bring to debian packages that don't have license issues, and will be supported enough^[3]. As a user, I feel betrayed because nothing that I expect from a package that is in debian (even in non-free) can be guaranteed for the java package.

We had quite a lot of discussion on the debian-project mailing list about changing the irc.debian.org CNAME to point at irc.oftc.net instead of irc.freenode.net. My early tally of public opinions went something like:

• 13 people expressed support for moving to oftc
• 3 people did not want to move
• 22 people expressed no strong preference either way
• 1 person thought we should use Jabber instead of IRC

I've had numerous other suggestions privately, via mail and (of course) IRC, in roughly similar proportions. On the strength of this support, we have decided to make the suggested move. The necesssary DNS changes will go ahead on the 4th of June.

As most people know already SUN JDK is now included in the non-free section of Debian. There where much discussions about the license of the JDK. To me its very questionable in its current state. For sure it would be better if the license would be more clear. But lets no debate about this again. I wanna raise another question: Who will do the needed support for our users? Noone of the Debian Java maintainers group was really involved in the inclusion of SUN JDK in non-free. Noone from the team wants to really put much effort into closed source Java. I dont speak about closing bugs. I mean answering questions in the IRC channel or on the mailing list. People need help with everything from setting JAVA_HOME environment variable correctly to setting up running a bigger application with a runtime. As I see it. SUN JDK will only rot in our archive. Noone likes it. FTP-Master put work on our shoulders but we don’t do it. It would have been great if FTP-Master would have contact us to clear the situation before doing any blindfold action. I think this got totally lost in the current discussions inside Debian.

Mark Wielaard posted this yesterday: Escaping the Java Trap
A practical road map to the Free Software and Open Source alternatives

For the last couple of years the community has been working to
ensure that developers can create applications using the java
programming language without having to depend on proprietary
software. Today, the free (as in libre) implementations are
already very capable and support a vast amount of functionality
that developers expect from a java-like environment. Important
large applications like JOnAS, OpenOffice.org 2, Eclipse 3 and
Tomcat 5 are known to work. This document provides a road map of
the various projects; how they work together, where they are,
where they’re going, and how we make sure that they work well
and are compatible.

http://developer.classpath.org/support/ Thanks Mark, very useful informations.

This Saturday was my talk's (shared with Javier Fernandez) day so, obviously, everything was mostly centered on it for me of course. The point is for sure arriving in condition at the talk's moment (16:00, ie the very last formal talk of the Debconf). I first went to Mark's Ubuntu Q&A; session. Pretty live session and interesting confirmaiton by Mark that, even though Rosetta/Launchpad still remains non free software, we could in the future collaborate with WordForge to allow building networks of i18n resources. I quickly ran to the Google Summer of Code BOF to be able to give news about our i18n infrastructure project. I have been delighted to see that the project got ranked very high and we're really likely to have it accepted (I hope this can be leaked this way...:-))). Running again to the Lightning Talks BOF by Joey, I just arrived to be able to show that I can indeed pronounce Jeroune vanne ouolfelaaaaaar very well. Then I attended Erinn and Anthony talk about debugging, which was pretty informative for me, one of the very few who raised their hand when Erinn asked for people who have never used "strace". Thanks, Erinn and Anthony. The fun photo was a good occasion to relax down and forget about my worrying of "where the hell is my cotalker".... We then jumped in the pool and formed this nice swirl (yes, it was nice, Aigars!). The french dudes later began a very entertaining ballet at the diving platforms, all jumping together, lalala. Ido have nice pictures (by the way, everything is uplaoded now). The next hours were spent doing what's usually recommended when giving a talk: last minutes changes with Javier, up to the VERY last minute, where I of course added my beloved SpongeBob Square Pants picture in the slides. About the talk, well, from my point of view it went well. I would have preferred seeing more package maintainers in the audience but, hey, this was the last Debconf formal talk so many were probably tired..:-). Anyway, the world map are still a good fun and, yes, Frans, next time I'll try to be a little less slow (but, hey, everybody has seen me blogging abou tpeople who speak way to fast....). This time, my slowlyness and habit to speak as clearly as possible were in high contrast with Javier's high speed debit..:-) Good positive feedback anyway and good vibrations for me. Thanks to the audience. Coming back at the hacklab we used Javier Sola's last minutes in Mexico up to the end. A very constructive meeting along with Otavio Salvador, Nicolas Fran ois, Aigars Mahinovs, Javier himself and Rapha l Hertzog (who's involved in the GSoC stuff). We finally concluded about the task we can assign to the GSoC student if the project is accepted. This was a good meeting and a good way to reach an agreement between people who do not always agree. The remaining of the evening and night has been spent coping up with my mail backlog and doing a few hacking, l10n commits and various small stuff which accumulated during the previous days. As it happened since 3 days, I was happy enough to have Elizabeth online before going to bed and then we shared some love over the ocean. I even had the plan to send my "je t'aime" during the talk (she was listening, or trying to)....but it would have sounded silly. But anyway, I love her, fellows. The next day will be the last day....yet another "hug" day, I think...not the happiest but....see you at Debconf7!

Sun is worried about compatibility in a world where Java is open source. I can’t say I blame them, and I say this as someone who spends a majority of his time thinking about compatibility in the Linux world, where we’ve managed to hold it together but still have a lot of work to do to match the relative consistency of the Microsoft alternatives (Windows and .NET, among others). After all, a platform is useless if there’s not a single, standard way for developers to target it. Question is: Does open source inherently lead to compatibility problems? Hardly. How many incompatible versions of, say, Apache are there? Or the Ps of the LAMP stack (Perl, PHP, Python)? Or MySQL? GNOME? KDE? BIND? CUPS? The only reason “Linux” and compatibility often come up in the same breath is because the term is used to describe so many different things. Yes, “Linux” has compatibility issues if you’re comparing Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian, but the actual “Linux” used by each of these “Linuxes” (that is, the Linux kernel) have few if any compatibility issues. It’s more the bits around the edges, like slightly different versions of core components with slightly different ABIs or APIs, not to mention the independently developed subsystems for configuration etc., that lead to the compatibility issues. If anything, the fact that the various Linux distributions share so many of the same open source components makes them far more compatible than the various implementations of UNIX ever were. James Gosling, the father of Java, highlights JavaScript as an example of the situation they’re trying to avoid in a recent podcast with Dan Farber. Today, he explains, there are dozens of AJAX toolkits, and the main reason for this is the need to paper over incompatibilities between the various JavaScript implementations. He’s absolutely right. If anything, though, the JavaScript situation is a good example of what might have been if we knew as much about the power of open source in setting standards in the 1990s as we know today. There are numerous JavaScript implementations today because there wasn’t a de facto standard implementation developers could just use when they needed one way back when (like there was with Apache etc. and wasn’t with some of the problematic “Linux” technologies like configuration management). What if there had been an open source JavaScript all along that became a de facto standard like Apache did? Would the AJAX world look any different today? Ironically, then, Java looks a whole lot more fragmented on its current trajectory as the various open source efforts (Apache Harmony, GCJ, GNU Classpath, etc.)—which exist only because the de facto standard implementation isn’t open source—mature and are more tightly integrated into the Linux distributions. So, what lessons does Linux have to offer Sun as it contemplates the future of Java and, more to the point, how to open source it? First of all, far from being a surefire path to turning Java into a veritable tower of babel, open source could actually help promote compatibility in the Java world. For one thing, if Sun’s Java implementation was open source, history shows there would be no need for another implementation. Case in point: Remember the other Harmony project? Secondly, what’s in a name? Absolutely everything. It’s entirely possible to open source Java without diluting the Java brand and the compatibility guarantees that brand promises. Most famously, this strategy has worked very well for Red Hat—Red Hat’s platform is open source, so you can fork it, but you can’t call the result “Red Hat”, which preserves the compatibility guarantee a successful platform requires. It’s not too late, but we’re rapidly approaching a time when it will be. For one thing, the open source implementations are getting better, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s damned near impossible to get it back in (see, again, JavaScript). As I said the other day, “open source Java” isn’t so much about licensing as it is about ubiquity, though licensing can get in the way of ubiquity. We’re almost there. Let’s take the final step we need to take to make Linux/Java as well integrated as Windows/.NET.

The air has been hot but dry, so it's been quite bearable if you drink enough water. On Wednesday morning, we woke up to the sound of rain. I went to the window and looked through the glass slats to the basketball court outside. There were puddles in the middle of the dry pavement, and it looked like it was raining only in those puddles! The droplets just evaporated as they hit the ground. This was a promising start to the Debconf day trip. A large group of us met at the front of the resort, near the reception, where there was a parking lot full of buses. Silver buses that look like they drove out of the seventies. We milled about before boarding, which took a while, because of the "herding cats" problem. Once we were all aboard, we drove off. I was sitting on the first bus and we puttered along until we got to the highway. We drove past roadside stalls and restaurants until we got to a town. After going through that, we got to open fields and then a series of hills and valleys. The little bus climbed the largest of these hills, like the Little Engine that Could, and we finally pulled into a parking lot. The museum in front of us was a green concrete structure, which contained an exhibit. We stood in front of a model of the area, while our tour guide explained the history of the site. We were going to visit the ruins of an old city, Xochicalco, which was built as a fortification on the top of this hill. Since I was never a docile student, I went around looking at things, taking photographs, and having fun. I found the staff lounge where there were people sitting around chatting. There was also a large pool of stagnant, alg clogged water. Nearby, a dog with fleas was scratching and biting herself. I decided to give her a wide berth. The rest of the group started heading up a stone path to the old city, so I ran alongside to catch up. By the time we got to the top, we were greeted by some pyramids. Well, they weren't really friendly pyramids, and more like imposing pyramids. I ignored the tour guide again and started taking photographs. I spotted a Tlachtli court in the valley below, which seemed to be in remarkably good shape. The front gates of the city were built to restrict entry, as is normal for a fortified city. In order to actually enter the city, you have to climb about a hundred narrow steps, which is something pretty difficult to do if you're invaders. According to some of the signs that were placed there, it appeared that the city collapsed due to a revolt, as there were plenty of skeletons found near the gates. And because there was plenty of soot on the stones, which indicated a large fire. At the top, we climbed on some of the pyramids. Or rather, other people walked up some stairs and I climbed up them. Which got me in trouble with the local security guards. I suppose I wasn't very good at being sneaky. I should practise more. We left the site and headed to a large restaurant that was just on the side of the road. It's sort of in the middle of nowhere, with only a motel across the street. The staff was warned that we arrived, but they still looked a little panicked, as we crowded inside and took over their restaurant. They had this buffet table set up, which we queued up to serve ourselves. Since it was a buffet, the food and service wasn't of spectacular quality. However, since we had hundreds of people, the food was consumed really quicky and it was very fresh. So it was the tastiest sponsored meal I've had so far. At the restaurant, they kept some pets. There was a dog, a pair of birds, and some others. One of which was the most adorable lizard, who won everyone's hearts. A crowd gathered around Biella Coleman as she petted him. I think she wanted to take him home. After we stuffed ourselves, we climbed back on the buses and drove to Cuernavaca. It had started raining again, lightly, but we got off the bus just after the sun came out. We were greeted by a marketplace in the center of town and given half-an-hour to look around. Since it seemed pretty touristy, I found Biella and Martin Krafft who had the same sentiments, so we walked around the central part of town and played tourist. We found a juice stand that was selling mixed drinks. Martin decided to get an interesting drink, which apparently had too much banana in it. We then decided to find a public restroom, which we did. It advertised very clean washrooms, for only 5 pesos per person. We had reports that it was spotless. Afterwards, we wandered about and found a Japanese-fan store that sold action figures and anime. We then discovered a tobacconist, which got Martin excited. He attempted to buy a cigar, but the person inside refused to sell it to him. It turns out that this was just a friend minding the store, who refused to engage in any business transactions, by proxy. Martin left, and I was disappointed once more by people's misunderstanding of simple economics. The bus returned us to the reception after a rather long drive and I stumbled into the HackLab. On the veranda, people had gathered to have a liquor BoF. Plenty of foreign liquors showed up, including a bottle of Sortil ge that I brought, and they were consumed rapidly. People had trouble staying awake by now, but I'm unsure if it was because of the alcohol. Maybe it's because it was Wednesday.

Half a year ago yesterday, I stepped off a plane in the United States. It's been an eventful 6 months, as can be seen from reviewing my blog, and I thought I'd summarise the top 10 things I like and dislike about living in this country as opposed to Australia. Ten things I like about living in California:

1. Plenty of sunshine Love the sunshine. It was a bit wet in winter and early spring, but I'm told that it should be pretty much rain (and cloud) free for the rest of the year. Daylight saving also helps make enjoying the copious amounts of sunshine easier, it doesn't get dark until well after 8pm.
2. The public transport options, particularly in San Francisco are vast Particularly in San Francisco, your options for getting around the city are huge. You've got the BART, the Muni (which covers about three distinct forms of public transport in itself), and the VTA overhead electric and petrol powered buses. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, you've got the Caltrain, and VTA light rail and buses.
3. Petrol pumps You need never darken the door of a petrol station. Everywhere has pay at the pump (with plastic of course), and the pumps all have the automatic latch, so you don't even need to stand at the side of the car holding the handle while it fills up.
4. Free parking This was a big change, coming from Canberra, which has a love affair with pay and display parking. Even the multi-storey and underground carparks in the downtown areas are free.
5. Pedestrian crossings that countdown No excuse to get skittled because you thought you could make it in time. You known exactly how long you've got before you'll get mowed down before you step off the side of the road.
6. The postal system Saturday delivery. Every mailbox is an outgoing mailbox (just put the little flag up).
7. Right turns on red This is a real time saver. I can't see why Australia couldn't adopt this for left turns. The only downside is you can spend so much time looking to your left for a break in the traffic to dart out in, that you miss your green arrow (but that's what the guy behind you and his horn is for).
8. Corporately run rental apartment complexes Instead of having an apartment complex where individual landlords own each apartment, the entire complex (and they tend to be larger) is owned by a mega-corporation that employs half a dozen people to maintain it and run it as a business. The upside is they tend to have better facilities, an onsite office (great for receipting packages delivered during the week), onsite maintenance (some places even have a service-level agreement). This offers some economies of scale that you wouldn't otherwise have.
9. At least the perception of a low cost of living I haven't done the sums, and it's probably partially because the bills come monthly instead of quarterly, but all the utility bills seem fairly low and reasonable. Dollar for dollar, petrol is also cheaper, even though it's jumped a dollar a gallon in the time we've been here.

Of course, one must take a balanced look at these things... Ten things I don't like about living in the United States:

1. The currency Not a big fan of the notes. I miss the one and two dollar coins, and the distinctiveness between each denomination. I figure that vending machines over here must be so much more expensive because they have to have a note reader, and even then, the treasury decides to produce some new oddball note that half of the readers don't recognise... I blame tipping. If there were no tipping, the utility of one dollar bills would diminish enormously.
2. The government bureaucracy As my blog records, I haven't exactly had a smooth run with the system over here...
3. The banking system The banking system in general is woeful by comparison. The cheque (or check) still reigns supreme, whereas it's nearly obsolete in Australia. There's no such animal as BPay (and oh how I miss it). In fact, the equivalent system here often involves the bank cutting a cheque on your behalf and mailing it to the biller. How ridiculously antediluvian is that? Oh, and I miss vaguely decently authenticated electronic payments. I've been at cafes were I've paid by credit card, and haven't even had to provide a signature. Given that the credit card is actually a debit card, it's pretty disturbing how easily someone can clean out your bank account.
4. Ex-tax pricing I'm so glad that when they introduced the GST in Australia, they required by law that all prices include it. Most prices here don't, but the occasional food outlet does (like Subway for example), so it's sufficiently confusing that you can't budget for how much you're going to actually fork out.
5. ATM fees The ATM fees are more in your face. Instead of the bank charging you a fee at the end of the month for every transaction conducted at an ATM that isn't theirs, the ATM itself tacks on an extra amount to the withdrawal and effectively skims the money. I've seen fees as high as $5 a transaction, but $2 is fairly common. It's kind of weird seeing an ATM withdrawal of $42 on your bank statement... So having a bank account that doesn't charge you feeds for non-bank ATM withdrawals is all well and good, but it doesn't stop the ATM from charging you.
6. Inaudible pedestrian crossings Oh, the number of times I haven't been paying attention and missed the walk light at a pedestrian crossing... In some places, they do make noises like birds, or talk to you when you can walk, but they're definitely not the norm.
7. The road surface For the highways, they seem to have gone for quantity and not quality, or they're too busy to take offline to resurface. Either way, the road surface quality is pretty poor.
8. Sugar Everything is loaded with sugar. Absolutely everything.
9. Alcohol labelling Light beer is low calorie, not low alcohol. I miss Australia's concept of "standard drinks". Makes it very hard to drink and drive responsibly.

So, really, here's now the full story of that 6th day of Debconf. It indeed began as early as usual, like 7:30 wake-up after being to bed at 02:30. It's amazing to see how I didn't yet burned out. I had to run a 2nd BOF about i18n infrastructure, which main point was indeed to begin summarizing all the ideas we exchanged during the first one, then later during the various private discussions. We had the very good suprise to finally see Javier Sola showing up at the meeting. For those who don't know about him, Javier is member and one of the heads of the Wordforge project, a project that attempts to simplify the process of localisation of Software and is developed with Free and Open Source software in mind. Wordforge is the project that now covers the development of Pootle and related tools such as the Translate Toolkit. Javier came especially for TWO days at Debconf, from Cambodia, where he lives, just to meet us. I tried, during this second BOF to summarize ideas we had already prepared, along with other people, the night before. It is really good to see people actually pusshing you up to achieve things you wouldn't have any idea being able to do when coming. Javier then improvised a general presentation of Wordforge, which has hopefully been taped along with the BOF so that interested people will be able to see it. I have to confess that I ended up this very long session (about 2h50) absolutely enthusiast about the idea of collaborating with Wordforge and this is the way to go if we want our i18n infrastructure. Just don't ask me why, I just know this...:-) The day then went at the speed of light. First, Javier (Fernandez Sanguino, that time) and I finally began to synchronize our thoughts for the talk of the next day. This quickly lead us to...the lunch time where we continued discussing together (not much occasions to talk with Javier during that Debconf even though we wrote a 25 pages paper together...). Too bad I missed the part about NM process by Christoph Berg which would have been deeply interesting to participate. Post lunch continued with still slides work with Javier, missing our fellow Josselin talking about shared libraries (I'm afraid I wouldn't have got a clue about this, but anyway....). My award for the "best Debconf6 talk" goes, this time, to Meike (who would have guessed?) for this so great talk about talks. And, no, you're not *that* jamming from one leg to another. The group photo and the keysigning are of course traditional events of a Debconf and both were one after the other...pretty tiring, but as usual good fun. I very slightly regretted that several of the usuall participants of the keysignings I've already been in weren't actually participating in that one. For sure, many of us have already exchanged keys but I see this also as a kind of "bienvenidos" to all participants in Latin America in this Debconf. For the same reason, I would also have, like Damog, been glad to see Anthony attend the Debian Latin America community BOF but I tend to believe that being in all the place people would like to see him and talk with everybody who wants to talk with him, is simply not humanly possible. Finally, after lunch, we i18n dudes continued with a huge discussion, again, to continue drawing ideas for that damn i18n infrastructure stuff. I ended up the "day" completely enthusiast (and, no, without any chemical help) and finishing my mail. Finally, at 02:00 the day finished liked a dream by a nice online chat with Elizabeth (my beloved wife, dudes) who was actually waking up to drive our daughter to the high school. To bed at 03:45...a bit crazy. I have a talk tomorrow...

I just visited Google and Firefox popped up a message, “Install Missing Plugins”. Oh crap. Are Google using (more) Flash I first think? Then I go see what plugin it wants… the Java runtime environment !! WHAT? NOOOO! I also sadly saw this webtoolkit released recently by Google that seems to be a Java + Eclipse monster. I hate Java. Absolutely loathe it. Recently there has been talk of an amazing license change to warrant its inclusion into Debian. Evil. I thought Java was dying. :(

The night started great. Tables arranged in a swirl, happy geeks gathered around a good meal, it was going to be a great formal dinner.

Then came AJ and his megalomania. Well, it was kind of fun at the moment, although I still haven't cooled down after seeing his contribution to the Java in non-free thread. He even compromised himself by showing up hand in hand with Ted Walther.

After that, Ted tried to spoil the dinner, and almost managed to do it. Please people, correct me if I'm wrong as I was a few meters away from the incident and didn't follow everything. It seems the person Ted is calling a "local businesswoman" was a prostitute. As he doesn't want to name people, I'll do it: when learning that, Holger tried to throw Ted out of the building. Unfortunately some people stopped him from doing it. Holger, thanks a lot for having the courage to give this guy what he deserves, and already deserved before the provocation, when most people (including me) just stand still when facing such unbearable behavior.

Of course Ted tried to act as a martyr, as shows his blog entry. Ted, I do hope things won't be "resolved to your satisfaction". And anyway, you won't need to denounce the people who deserve to be awarded instead. Why have you come to Debconf for, anyway? Uploading broken versions of your packages, or writing stupid and provocative blog entries?

Then, the mariachis tried to improve the ambiance but only managed to prevent people from talking to each other. The real fun came from the rain, which fell so hard it entered the building in a magnificent cascade, leaving us eating and walking in a few centimeters of water. Another great moment was the power outage, during which we were lightened by camera flashes.

The food had so much success that I didn't have time to taste more than one dish before everything was wiped out. Still, despite Ted and despite the lack of food, this was a great evening, one of those I won't forget for sure.

I'll upload pictures later, but in the meantime you can have a look at Barry Hawkins' blog.

<p>I&#8217;ve decided that with the amount of changes my life will be going through in the next few months (of which more in a later post), I should really start blogging again.</p> <p>I&#8217;ve gone looking for something with a pretty web front end, and since I refuse to install the <a href="http://www.php.net/">Abomination</a> on my server, <a href="http://www.typosphere.org/">Typo</a> looked like a pretty good choice.</p> <p>The titles are a nod to two of my favourite authors - Kim Stanley Robinson for &#8220;haecceity&#8221; and Ken Macleod for &#8220;biolog&#8221;, his take on blogs in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=as2&amp;path=ASIN/1841493449&amp;tag=haecceity-21&amp;camp=1634&amp;creative=6738">Learning the World</a></p>

I’m moving to a new studio apartment in June, about 200 metres to the west from where I currently live. This naturally causes a snail mail address change. While very few people need my snail mail address, it’s listed in some of my free software as an alternative contact point, so I’d better get the word out on the change. (I will, of course, update the addresses in my software as I release new versions.) My current address is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Helokantie 1 A 16
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

My new address, which becomes valid in the beginning of June, is

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho
Sienitie 2 B 27
40640 JYV SKYL 
FINLAND

(Some post offices may require a country prefix in front of the postal code; use “FI-40640″ in such a case.)