As is natural for an LTS cycle, lots of people are thinking and talking about work focused on quality rather than features. With Canonical extending LTS support to five years on the desktop for 12.04, much of this is quite rightly focused on the desktop. I'm really not a desktop hacker in any way, shape, or form, though. I spent my first few years in Ubuntu working mainly on the installer - I still do, although I do some other things now too - and I used to say only half-jokingly that my job was done once X started. Of course there are plenty of bugs I can fix, but I wanted to see if I could do something with a bit more structure, so I got to thinking about projects we could work on at the foundations level that would make a big difference. Image build pipeline One difficulty we have is that quite a few of our bugs - especially installer bugs, although this goes for some other things too - are only really caught when people are doing coordinated image testing just before a milestone release. Now, it takes a while to do all the builds and then it takes a while to test them. The excellent work of the QA team has meant that testing is much quicker now than it used to be, and a certain amount of smoke-testing is automated (particularly for server images). On the other hand, the build phase has only got longer as we've added more flavours and architectures, particularly as some parts of the process are still serialised per architecture or subarchitecture so ARM builds in particular take a very long time indeed. Exact timings are a bit difficult to get for various reasons, but I think the minimum time between a developer uploading a fix and us having a full set of candidate images on all architectures including that fix is currently somewhere north of eight hours, and that's with people cutting corners and pulling strings which is a suboptimal thing to have to do around release time. This obviously makes us reluctant to respin for anything short of showstopper bugs. If we could get things down to something closer to two hours, respins would be a much less horrible proposition and so we might be able to fix a few bugs that are serious but not showstoppers, not to mention that the release team would feel less burned out. We discussed this problem at the release sprint, and came up with a laundry list of improvements; I've scheduled this for discussion at UDS in case we can think of any more. Please come along if you're interested! One thing in particular that I'm working on is refactoring Germinate, a tool which dates right back to our first meeting before Ubuntu was even called Ubuntu and whose job is to expand dependencies starting from our lists of "seed" packages; we use this, among other things, to generate Task fields in the archive and to decide which packages to copy into our images. This was acceptably quick in 2004, but now that we run it forty times (eight flavours multiplied by five architectures) at the end of every publisher run it's actually become rather a serious performance problem: cron.germinate takes about ten minutes, which is over a third of the typical publisher runtime. It parses Packages files eight times as often as it needs to, Sources files forty times as often as it needs to, and recalculates the dependency tree of the base system five times as often as it needs to. I am confident that we can significantly reduce the runtime here, and I think there's some hope that we might be able to move the publisher back to a 30-minute cycle, which would increase the velocity of Ubuntu development in general. Maintaining the development release Our release cycle always starts with syncing and merging packages from Debian unstable (or testing in the case of LTS cycles). The vast majority of packages in Ubuntu arrive this way, and generally speaking if we didn't do this we would fall behind in ways that would be difficult to recover from later. However, this does mean that we get a "big bang" of changes at the start of the cycle, and it takes a while for the archive to be usable again. Furthermore, even once we've taken care of this, we have a long-established rhythm where the first part of the cycle is mainly about feature development and the second part of the cycle is mainly about stabilisation. As a result, we've got used to the archive being fairly broken for the first few months, and we even tell people that they shouldn't expect things to work reliably until somewhere approaching beta. This makes some kind of sense from the inside. But how are you supposed to do feature development that relies on other things in the development release? In the first few years of Ubuntu, this question didn't matter very much. Nearly all the people doing serious feature development were themselves serious Ubuntu developers; they were capable of fixing problems in the development release as they went along, and while it got in their way a little bit it wasn't all that big a deal. Now, though, we have people focusing on things like Unity development, and we shouldn't assume that just because somebody is (say) an OpenGL expert or a window management expert that they should be able to recover from arbitrary failures in development release upgrades. One of the best things we could do to help the 12.04 desktop be more stable is to have the entire system be less unstable as we go along, so that developers further up the stack don't have to be distracted by things wobbling underneath them. Plus, it's just good software engineering to keep the basics working as you go along: it should always build, it should always install, it should always upgrade. Ubuntu is too big to do something like having everyone stop any time the build breaks, the way you might do in a smaller project, but we shouldn't let things slide for months either. I've been talking to Rick Spencer and the other Ubuntu engineering leads at Canonical about this. Canonical has a system of "rotations", where you can go off to another team for a while if you're in need of a change or want to branch out a bit; so I proposed that we allow our engineers to spend a month or two at a time on what I'm calling the +1 Maintenance Team, whose job is simply to keep the development release buildable, installable, and upgradeable at all times. Rick has been very receptive to this, and we're going to be running this as a trial throughout the 12.04 cycle, with probably about three people at a time. As well as being professional archive gardeners, these people will also work on developing infrastructure to help us keep better track of what we need to do. For instance, we could deploy better tools from Debian QA to help us track uninstallable packages, or we could enhance some of our many existing reports to have bug links and/or comment facilities, or we could spruce up the weather report; there are lots of things we could do to make our own lives easier. By 12.04, I would like, in no particular order:

• Precise to have been more or less continuously usable from Alpha 1 onward for people with reasonable general technical ability
• Canonical engineering teams outside Ubuntu (DX, Ubuntu One, Launchpad, etc.) to be comfortable with running the development release on at least one system from Alpha 2 onward
• Installability problems in daily image builds to be dealt with within one working day, or preferably before they even make it to daily builds
• The archive to be close to consistent as we start milestone preparation, rather than the release team having to scramble to make it so
• A very significant reduction in our long-term backlog of automatically-detected problems

Of course, this overlaps to a certain extent with the kinds of things that the MOTU team have been doing for years, not to mention with what all developers should be doing to keep their own houses in reasonable order, and I'd like us to work together on this; we're trying to provide some extra hands here to make Ubuntu better for everyone, not take over! I would love this to be an opportunity to re-energise MOTU and bring some new people on board. I've registered a couple of blueprints (priorities, infrastructure) for discussion at UDS. These are deliberately open-ended skeleton sessions, and I'll try to make sure they're scheduled fairly early in the week, so that we have time for break-out sessions later on. If you're interested, please come along and give your feedback!

I used to know guys who would take old computer hardware out in the desert and shoot it up. I never went, and I've never gratuitously destroyed a computer in 2 decades of working with the things. Until yesterday when I picked one up by the monitor and introduced it to the floor. My regret isn't that I violently destroyed a computer, but that it was my Mom's computer, and I did it right in front of her, and without even a story-worthy reason, just out of garden variety frustration. And perhaps there's some regret that I was actually unsucessful in destroying anything other than the monitor and some speakers. The computer was salvaged, and my mom has a new monitor and a working system again. Sorry Mom & Maggie. To make up for it, I'll humiliate myself with this recording of "broke mom's computer blues", which will only be available for a very limited time: click to listen (warning: contains harmonica). Anyway, don't worry; any remaining frustration will be taken out the usual way: Splitting firewood.

I stopped my story in early 1994, after my Big Switch to the mysterious and new world of Linux. My home server, kheops, is now running Debian and is fed with news and mail by FrMug, formerly French Minix Users Group and now run by AFAU, the "Association Fran aise des Amateurs de Usenet". As I'm still console-challenged, I'm reading mail and news on another machine I have at home, named "khephren", which is running an, ahem, beta copy of Microsoft Windows 95. Yeah, I know...:-) These 1994-1999 years were mostly the Usenet years, for me. I gradually became more and more involved in several fr.* newsgroups, either related to the Linux world...or to the Windows world. The latter was professionnally a bonus for me as 1994 is also the year where I switched from the Material Science department at Onera to the Network and Computing Department. My mission there was to accompany the increasing prevalence of personal desktop workstations in the daily life of what was formerly the Big Castle of Computing at Onera, hosting various generations of Cray computers, most of which being in the Top500 world supercomputers (we even had one in the Top10, very briefly, at somepoint). So, I was "the PC and Windows guy" in this world of supercomputing, Unix and network wizards. But my hobby at home helped me keeping and growing skills in both "worlds" which, over the years, has proven to be a not so common profile..:-) Meanwhile, at home, I was spending hours and nights reading those newsgroups...or getting involved in fr.* hierarchy management..or expanding my friends network to many people in the news, Linux, BSD worlds. That lasted for about 3 years with ups and downs (with three young kids at home, you end up having slightly less time...). I was gradually improving my home server use, adding more functionalities to it, for instance setting it up as a file and print server with Samba 1.9.something (this will be the beginning of a long story with samba!). Unfortunately, my dear Ren had passed in the meantime. Ren did so much for Linux in France that he'll be the only link I give in this article. If you happen to go through P re Lachaise cemetery in Paris, go to its Memory garden instead of visiting Jim Morrison's grave and drink a whisky bottle in memory of Ren . Or just install one of the most funnily named Debian packages: le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc and, again, drink something to his memory (whisky is highly preferred). We then reached 1997 and a specific event: my father (who was very sick for years) passed during summer, some time after my grand-father passed too. As it apparently happens for many people, it triggerred me into the interest for family history. After all, those people who are going away are family memories. And, in some way, I wanted to keep track of this memory. As a consequence, I started collecting family memories, interviewing my close relatives (the oldest ones) and ending, of course, in tracking all this with my computers. That was the start of a long genealogy research that sent me on the track of the Perrier family (of course), but also all other branches, on my mother and father side, as well as reconstructing the tree of cousins we have, etc, etc. As anybody who did that knows, this is quite an endless task but I went very committed to it. I quickly ended up in joining research groups that were using the recent growth of personal access to Internet communication. Those groups were, in these 90's, building elaborated systems where people can help together in their research instead of having to travel to places where archives are stored. I participated to many such groups and even ended up animating one who was doing research in archives of the "Yvelines" "d partement", my place of living (even though I have no family branch there). At the same time, other groups were sending me research results for my own family in the French region where my roots are. Collective effort, help others for free, you can recognize things that are a constant all over these years, indeed. It actually helped me in tracking my Perrier ancestors up to about 1680, with 11 generations of men holding that name (from Jean-Baptiste, my son, up to tienne Perrier, who is born about 1640-1650, in the small village named Briant in Sa ne et Loire, in France). Or even climbing up to Laurent Polette, born circa 1510, mentioned in a document date February 1562. He his my oldest known ancestor.Those folks being 15 generations before me. My oldest ancestor is born under Fran ois the First, King of France, protector of Leonardo Da Vinci, at the time La Joconde was painted or the Chambord castle was built. Doh. Unfortunately, genealogy software, at that time, was quite poor for Unix systems. Lifelines was a quite strong development but wasn't that user-friendly and I ended up using a Windows-based "shareware" software written by an individual. Still, my Linux machine was used quite intensively: databases were stored there, and saved there, all important informations were there, my mail was received there, along with dozens of mailing lists I was reading. I even hosted a few mailing lists on my home server. Still, in the meantime also, again in 1997, in October, another event happened. We had a pollution peak in Paris area and October 1st was the first (and as of now the only ever) day where driving restrictions were applied. Up to that moment, I was driving to/from work (30 kilometers one way). I decided to use this opportunity to really test public transport, for one full month. As I knew it would take me much more time than driving, I tried to imagine a way to use that time. How about reading mail and news on a laptop instead of only at home? Done... In a few days, I found a used Compaq Aero laptop (486 16MHz), I installed Debian "bo" on it, switched my mail and news workflow to console programs (mutt and slrn) and here we go! So, finally, in October 1997, I was using Linux nearly all time long, the only exception being genealogy data handling. That laptop was named "mykerinos" (the small pyramid) and....my laptop is still named mykerinos, though it's now the 5th mykerinos I have..:-) Ah, and since then, I nearly always use public transport to go to/from work. Debian addiction is good for the planet! At some point (I don't remember exactly when...about 1999, I think), DSL connections appeared and one of the first DSL FAI emerged on France: Free. I was already using their services for dialup access, but DSL was then a revolution: persistent connection! And nearly immediately, static IP! I became one of their first DSL customers (and I'm still one). Moreover, I had then friends working there...and they had many Debian machines to host their services. So, with the help of my Freenix friends, some DNS hosting on their machines and the still tireless eu.org entirely free domain, perrier.eu.org was born. Immediately, this gave me opportunities for doing many interesting things with my home server: setting up www.perrier.eu.org and use it....for learning web things and sharing genealogical data. For instance, I ended up hosting some data sent by other genealogists such as digital copies of archives for some French regions, all served through my 512/128kbps DSL line (quickly upgraded to 2Mb, IIRC). And, very quickly, I felt the need to share my family tree, of course! And here comes Geneweb. Written (in Ocaml) by Daniel de Rauglaudre, Geneweb was (and still is) by far one of the best tools to share genealogy data over the Net. So, I ended up installing it on my home machine. Guess how I did that? "apt-get install geneweb", of course. Yes, it was packaged. Indeed by Brent Fulgham who did the initial release on July 22nd 2000. Here, my memory is a little bit vague. I think I actually packaged Geneweb for my own use and sharing it on upstream FTP site, forking Brent's package as a start, but updating to latest upstream release. Then I quickly ended up having discussions with Brent about this new upstream release, and that lead to:

geneweb (3.10-3) unstable; urgency=low
  * Merging with unofficial package from Geneweb ftp site
    (in preparation of new maintainer [Christian Perrier] takeing
    over responsibility).  Note that all of this work is from
    Christian.
  * Default database dir is now writable by members of geneweb group
  * New geneweb group added at installation
  * Package tries to properly handle former installations of the
    unofficial Geneweb package available on Geneweb ftp site
  * Debconf dialogs translated in french
  * More languages available
  * Creation of /var/geneweb/etc, /var/geneweb/cnt, /var/geneweb/images
    with proper permission so that authorised users may use these also
  * When de-installed, all databases are exported with gwu (should allow
    smooth upgrades when the databse format changes)
 -- Brent A. Fulgham <bfulgham>  Mon, 22 Jan 2001 19:30:47 -0800

See? Already "debconf translation to French"! "More languages available". Here we are. As discussed with Brent, he propsoed me to take the package over. So, on January 11th 2001, I had applied in the New Maintainer Process. I'm amazed how quickly it went indeed: there was a tool I needed, it needed to be packaged, I could handle the packaging...and then I decided to be involved. Here we are: bubulle is on his way to become one of those magicians who are building the best universal operating system. Yes, me, the clueless material scientist..:-) How did it go? You'll know this in next episode, of course...

Another year, another Debconf and now it is passed. Pictures are processes and all are now uploaded. We are still missing 25 names in the Debconf 11 group photo. With 265 people and 86 Mpix it is the highest resolution image we have had so far (Spain image had a bit more pixels, but a lot of them were outside the actual photo) and the largest number of people (Edinburgh photo had 248 people). The video team produced hundreds of gigabytes of footage, we had very interesting talks and debates and sometimes the AdHoc meeting room on the side was overcrowded with people in BoFs that were not on the initial schedule. It has been a very special kind of conference. As it always is.
As always, there were also some problems. I did not read the debconf-team mailing list, but I hear there was plenty of fun discussions to be had in the run-up to the event, some information on getting to the venue was not quite clear (that was quickly fixed as first people arriving to Debcamp were documenting their experience), the organizational dance with the food tickets was more elaborate than usually, both the day trip and the formal dinner were more self-driven than expected, vegetarian complaint level was about the same as usual (which is considered high by some) and the wireless in the hotel was very weak, also Saturday weddings are quite loud and run very late apparently.
To compensate for that we had: very sunny Debcamp, cheap beer (!!!), great quality accommodations, very good looking venue, good network at the venue (after initial scalability issues with the wireless), good food (that did sometimes run out, though), short distances to all locations, oh and did I mention cheep beer? What do we learn from this for next year? I am told that Debconf12 team has already had some meetings specifically to identify and learn from some shortcomings and strengths of this years conference. However, I think everyone of us might have an idea or two to add to the mix as well. For example, I think that BoF rooms are great and we should expand and solidify on that concept: take a page from unconference playbook have a board on-site where people can book slots for their BoF in one of the two rooms for tomorrow. Not far in advance and without moderation requirement of penta scheduling. In the evening the stickers can be taken down and tomorrows BoFs can be added to the schedule at that point, so the people can see online what is going on.
Also I think that we need some kind of coverage of the BoF room(s) from the video team. Even if that is in a form of a single self-service omnidirectional microphone where people could just walk into the room, press a single button and the audio would start streaming and recording.
In addition we could have a screen with the IRC channel of the room projected onto a screen on a side of the stage, to simplify getting questions off the channel. Recording that channel (as a text log) could also be useful.
It feels like post-conference assembly of the talk lists, presentations, links to the relevant recordings, photos, chat logs, ideas, comments, for every talk is very problematic in penta, should we perhaps just use wiki for that?
Any other ideas? And to finish off some more personal travel-inspired rambling. After visiting Paris, Zagreb, Banja Luka and (very shortly) Vienna on this trip it was very interesting to see similarities and draw some parallels, especially with the added context of Berlin and Riga. The similarities in city planning, street shops, brands and the way people go about their lives in these capitals are quite remarkable. I would even say that a trend can be seen where capitols of countries/regions that had troubles in the past (Bosnia more recently; Riga, Zagreb and East Berlin a bit more into the past) are now moving from their different pasts and converging towards the vision of the European capitol city living we see in cities like Paris. If you look at individual pieces you can even recognise milestones along this route and see when specific cities reach them (possibly in a different order than others). With that in mind you can even try to predict what might come next, like looking at Banja Luka and thinking that they might reach the point of upgrading their buses in the next 2-3 years, or comparing Riga and Zagreb we can see that Riga needs to soon choose a street and close it to car traffic to have more caf s, beer gardens and shops concentrated in that area. Or looking at Paris we might find a compelling idea, like clustering a lot of businesses of the same type (such as kitchen design) in the same street, so the customers know where they can go to have all the best choices available within a block. All in all this years Debconf for me was one with the most diverse experiences and the one that felt closest to home. I hope to see you all good people again next year! P.S. I do hope that Debconf12 dates are nailed down in the next 2 months, so we can start talking to air plane companies for group discounts immediately.

Boy, the last three months have been very eventful, developmentally. First off, about 2 weeks after she turned 1, Zoe started walking in earnest. Within about 2 weeks of that there was no stopping her. It's funny to think she's only been walking for under 3 months and yet she's very stable on her feet. Secondly, she developed a mild egg allergy. Sarah was giving her some scrambled eggs (one egg's worth) for lunch one day, and she mixed in some cream cheese, and Zoe absolutely scoffed it all down, so she scrambled another egg and she scoffed that down too. She then broke out in some hives around her mouth and Sarah noticed that she was coughing a bit and a little wheezy when she put her down for her afternoon nap. Upon subsequent consultation with her paediatrician and a blood test, the allergy was confirmed and we now have to avoid eggs and Zoe was prescribed an Epi Pen Jr. We went and saw an allergist as a followup, and he did some skin tests that showed eggs were the only thing she's allergic to. He said her allergy was very mild in the grand scheme of things, and we're going to do another skin test when she's 2 to see if she's grown out of it. Eggs in baked goods are generally okay, as the offending protein is denatured at high temperatures. She's more allergic to the egg whites (1.56, which is in the "moderate" range) than the egg yolks (0.55, which is in the "low" range). Egg allergies are apparently something that one does eventually out grow, so that's a good thing. We'd also been keeping her off gluten and dairy because of a strong correlation between them and rather disgusting bowel motions. We've successfully reintroduced gluten with no adverse effects, and we've just started her back on cow's milk. We of course had our epic trip to the Grand Canyon, which Zoe handled absolutely marvelously. That was closely followed by a weekend down in LA, which was a bit more of a disaster as Sarah and I both came down with a 24 hour stomach bug that Zoe had had during the week. There's nothing quite like languishing in a non-childproofed hotel room, feeling like death, with a full of beans toddler busy running around jamming her fingers in drawers. Fortunately we were able to use a babysitter for a few hours respite, but it did rather completely mess up our plans for the weekend. Zoe did handle the drive to and from LA very well though. Zoe's been doing Saturday morning swim classes at the YMCA, which I've taken her to. I don't think she's enjoyed them as much as the indoor ones she did at the Sutton Swim School, where she went with Sarah previously, and I definitely don't feel like the classes are as structured. Unfortunately we just finished an 8 week session, and the next one filled up before we got a chance to book, so we're hoping to get back into something at the Sutton Swim School once an opening comes up. I might do something ad hoc with her on Saturdays at the Rinconada Pool in Palo Alto in the meantime. Zoe has also started going to regular daycare on Thursdays, so Sarah gets a day to focus on her University study. It's a home daycare that isn't too far away, and our friend's daughter goes there too, so there's someone she knows. The first few times Zoe got pretty upset when she was dropped off, but she barely makes a whimper now when Sarah drops her off. She's also usually down to one nap a day now. She has four teeth, top and bottom, with one molar definitely through and another three starting to make an appearance. I just bought an iBert safe-T-seat for my bike, because I've been itching to get out on the bike with Zoe on the weekends when I'm looking after her so Sarah can get some more study done. The weather is currently nice, and I've just learned about a bike trail that cuts across the bay in front of Moffett Field, so I'm keen to check that out. Apparently there's geese out there. I did my first decent ride with her last Sunday to the Mountain View Farmer's Markets and back. Zoe seemed to be okay with it. The helmet we got her drew a lot of comments from people at the markets. She's very much in the "point and grunt" stage at the moment. What's really cool is she'll nod or shake her head in response to yes/no questions. It's so cool when you can ask her a question and she solemnly nods her head in response. Often in the morning Sarah takes her to the park around the back of our home, and so now Zoe's gotten into that habit, so she'll scratch around at the front door and they head over there. The other day, Sarah opened the front door and she took off in the direction of the park, so Sarah just followed her to see where she went. Sure enough, she made her way over to the park. Tonight, Zoe fetched me my shoes and then dragged me over by the hand to the front door to demand that I take her out for a walk. She's also really getting into books now. She actively seeks out books, and has a bit of a flick through them, or brings one over and climbs into our laps, or backs up and sits in our laps if we're sitting on the floor, to have us read them to her. She's now strong enough to hold her bottle herself at bedtime, so I sit with her in my lap in the glider and read a story to her while she has her bedtime bottle. It's indescribably wonderful. She seems to understand quite a large array of words. We can go "Where's your <insert object here> and she'll look around the living room and generally find the item we're talking about. She also seems to understand questions about breakfast, lunch, going to the park, going to the bathroom, having a bath, etc as she seems to respond appropriately. In the speech department, I haven't really counted the words, but she's not saying a huge number of words. This morning, apparently she yelled "MAMA! MAMA! PARK!". "Park" being a new word for her. We bought an annual membership to the Children's Discovery Museum in San Jose, and we've probably taken her there half a dozen times or so since getting the membership. She particularly loves the water area. We finally got around to getting our back yard landscaped and made generally fit for a small child to run around in. Sarah's planted a butterfly garden in one corner, so hopefully once that's established we'll have some fun things for Zoe to watch from the window. I'm looking forward to planting some bulbs in the autumn. I expect the next 3 months will be more of the same. We've got some more overseas travel coming up, but a lot of relatives will be around, so hopefully we'll get a bit of downtime to ourselves.

Seems like everybody s writing Google+ reviews these days, but most of the ones I ve found seem to be fluff pieces. I haven t used it long, but have some initial impressions to share. First, an analogy. Facebook reminds me of the sleazy guy selling stuff from his car down the street. They do things like change privacy defaults when they think it s good for Facebook, rather than good for you. Google+ reminds me of an Apple product. It s beautiful, easy to learn, but locks everything down and is lacking some critical features. So here goes with the details. The good I think that this can be best summed up by: it s not Facebook. Facebook has, perhaps, set an incredibly low bar but still, this holds. Facebook is the only website I can ever remember using that changes things so much, so often, and so completely that I keep having this feeling of not knowing how to do things. Try maintaining a Facebook page or two and you ll especially feel my pain then. But even the basics: how many times have I accidentally posted a partial comment because I pressed Enter to start a new paragraph (that has only been the button used for that for, hmm, let s see now, decades), and instead it posted the comment. Principle of least surprise, anyone? Google+ has a simple and, on the surface anyway, intuitive interface. However, it does get muddy; more on that below. I m going to spend a lot more space on the bad below, but don t let that diminish my excitement about having a viable alternative to Facebook. I am keen to get rid of that monster. The Bad I ll start of this section with the fact that Google+ is a tightly-controlled walled garden. There is no way to take a copy of your status updates, comments, etc. and back them up with your own devices. If your Google account goes away, so do all your updates about your kids first words. Facebook does have this feature these days. It has broken half the time, but it exists, works, and I use it. Twitter doesn t have the feature built in, but its API makes it pretty easy; you could easily use my twidge program to do this, for instance. But whatever you put in G+ stays in G+. There is no autoposting it to twitter or Facebook, no backups, nothing. I m disappointed in that, given Google s prior attitude about openness to individual data ownership. (Update 7/12/2011: There is a way to get a backup, which I hadn t noticed; see comments below.) Almost as bad, there s also no way to get data in. So I now have identi.ca, twitter, Facebook, and now also G+ accounts. When I post an item in identi.ca, it autoposts to twitter, and then it autoposts from twitter to Facebook. Handy one place to notify people of my public activities. My uploads to Flickr and blog posts also auto-post to Facebook, so people I m friends with there get a picture of what I m doing outside of Facebook without me manually having to link it in. Not so with G+. There is no way to even add an RSS feed for my blog to auto-post to G+ as there is with Facebook. If you use G+, the only way to get stuff into it is with a keyboard. Poor integration with other Google apps is also an issue. G+ is nowhere near Google s first social app. They also have Blogger, Google Reader, Buzz, Gmail, etc. So here s the rub. These aren t integrated well, and when they have tried to integrate them, they ve done an exceedingly poor job of it. As an example: Buzz is a twitter-like service for posting updates. Very similar to what G+ does, right? Well, the best you can do is link your Buzz account to a separate tab on your profile. You can t even have your Buzz updates flow straight into G+, from what I can see. You have a separate list of followers in Buzz from G+. Reader is even worse; it has a sharing feature, but it s not G+ aware, so it goes to a reader inbox. But what takes the cake is the integration with Gmail Contacts. Sounds easy? Not entirely. When you add someone to G+, apparently it sometimes links the record with their entry in Contacts. And the help gives you the handy warning that when you remove them from G+, you have the option of removing them from Contacts, which could impact what you see on a mobile device. It is unclear what happens when it doesn t link the record, or how it decides which record to link (some people have more than one person in a family sharing phone numbers and email addresses, for instance.) One very nice feature of G+ is you can add email addresses, even if they aren t G+ members. Then when you post updates to the circle you ve added them to, G+ offers to send them an email with an update. Very handy. Except the undocumented part is that if you select Your circles (meaning all your circles), rather than individually ticking the box by each circle, they don t get the email. And they also don t get it if you set it Public. You have to select their specific circle, which is a significant difference from how people with G+ accounts are treated. And that s just an example. There are a ton of things that work one way 95% of the time, but have non-obvious exceptions. Some of these exceptions are documented in the help, and some aren t. I m still confused about the integration with Picasa. G+ help says that you can upload unlimited numbers of photos for free (though they will be downscaled at a certain point). Picasa has definite storage limits. But G+ uploads are showing up in Picasa. Do I really get free storage by uploading to the same place via a different tool? Very odd. And finally, a gripe about web standards. I ve been using Firefox/Iceweasel 3.5, which came out in Debian squeeze and is still supported there. It is also pretty darn new by corporate IT standards. And Google Plus refuses to let me log in with it, saying it s incompatible. Perhaps it can t do some fancy animation, but then again I don t really care. Seems Google has forgotten the old RFC adage: be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you generate. If you can detect that my browser won t animate something right, then you could give me a stripped-down version of the page rather than an error message.

A while ago I registered with flattr. I found the idea of encouraging people to give kudos to people who do something on the web easily and meaningfully, by attaching a little bit of money to it. I had planned to use my flattr account only as a kudos-forwarder: All funds that I get by being flattred would be spend on flattering things that I like. At that time, flattr did not allow me registering my things without first uploading money, so I did not use my account. But recently, they changed this policy, so I added a few of my projects to the list of things people can now flattr:

• This blog (flattr it)
• My LaTeX wiki engine latexki (flattr it)
• The German lecture script wiki Mitschriebwiki that it runs (flattr it)
• The web-version of screen-message (flattr it)
• The pornyness calculator (flattr it)

I almost always use the less intrusive text links. I fear that this means that people have to do an extra click before the have flattred the thing, but I still prefer it this way. Also, I do not use the automatic addition of things for each blog post, on the one hand because that does not seem to work with text links, and on the other hand because I don t think that each post is worth to be flattred. Generally, I avoid such closed-source walled-garden online services. I guess I make an exception this time because it is not a service that I run the risk of becoming dependent on. Flattr makes money per things flattered. It would be nicer if they only charged when people actually withdraw cash from their account, this way, many more people could do forward-only flattering for free, making many other people happy and appreciated, while still eventually making money.

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I sponsored the upload of fonts-anonymous-pro prepared by Rog rio Brito. This fixed-width font is especially designed for people who write code, for instance by making clear differences between characters such as O and 0, or I, l and 1. I fixed a few glitches in various l10n scripts related to D-I (those tthigns that run daily, for which I receive a daily mail). They were the consequence of Alioth migration and I omitted to fix them until now....mumbling every morning about the scripts' noisy output..:-) I worked on only one bug for samba (doh). This was #631118 which I forwarded upstream in order to get it fixed in 3.5 series (even if 3.6 is due out soon and will be what we target for wheezy). I tried to follow the flow of translations/reviews in DDTP for French. The activity is high, here, with about 10 packages translated every day (most often packages I target for the team...by using high-popcon stats). We even had a big bump during the week-end when Georges Khaznadar (who is very active when it comes at educative software) initiated the translation of many edu-related packages (many of which he maintains himself). That's about it. Quiet week, indeed with more time invested in paid work, including during my spare time..:-). And also a week-end in our country house in Normandy, which usually means more gardening than hacking.

It was time to update my creaking old laptop. I ordered HP6-6023TX online and after a few days it arrived just before a long weekend. I first backed up Windows 7 onto a set of DVDs and found that either my blank DVDs are old or this new DVD drive is far more fussy. There were quite a few coasters made until I gave up and bought some new ones. DVDs seemed to be trouble for me that day. I downloaded the Debian 6.0.4 DVD image but couldn t burn it. Brasero would just keep saying calculating checksum and go no further. So after waiting too long, the CD iso was downloaded and installed. Installation of debian onto the laptop was straightforward. That is if you used a wired connection. Wireless needs the non-free firmware and I gave up trying to work out how to install it at debian-installer time as it didn t see the tar.gz full of firmware on the USB stick. Wireless worked perfectly once I loaded everything on. So at this point with not much trouble I had an almost fully working setup. Even the webcam and sound was working. Video Fun The laptop is one of these strange modern ones that has two video cards. The low-spec one is an Intel Sandybridge while the higher one is an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6700M. The idea being you use the ATI when plugged in and the Intel on batteries. Xorg worked first go, but only on the Intel chip. Trying to force X to use the ATI driver with an Xorg configuration resulted in the Xserver crashing. Next attempt was the fglrx packages within Debian. aticonfig said it didn t know about the card. The reason for this is that the Debian packages use fglrx version11.4 and I needed for my card 11.5 So close but so far away. OK, so building the ATI software can t be that hard can it? A nice set of instructions on the Debian wiki and we had errors. The first problem is that the packaging used is ancient. The second problem is much more serious; it won t compile. I was stuck about here until I hopped onto the Debian irc channel and asked about it and someone found a very useful webpage about compiling the ATI drivers on Debian which importantly had information about the patches you need, especially the blk patch. Success! the program compiled and installed. A small xorg.conf specifying the fglrx driver and the BusID and we were up and running. I now have accelerated graphics on the laptop. Ouch, my eyes! I do actually get outside (one of my hobbies is gardening and that is an outdoor activity) so I don t need a monitor screen trying to give me a suntan. The default screen brightness on the laptop could be described as sub-nova . I m sure there is some alien astronomers several light-years away who will in many years time wonder what that flash from the unimpressive end of the milky-way was about. To protect your eyes and keep the neighborhood complaints down you can reduce the brightness to something sane. You do this in the power management settings which for me is System -> Preferences -> Power Management. I can see again!

Grabbed a shot of my brother's Pug trying to keep cool in the garden at the weekend.

Terah and I recently decided that each of us could use a day off of not having to do work or supervise boys. Yesterday I had the day off work so that was mine. I took my Kindle, along with its Gutenberg copy of War and Peace, which yes, I m reading for fun. I slept in a bit, then got breakfast and sat down at Botanica, the Wichita Gardens with the Kindle for awhile. That was a nice way to spend the morning. Today was Terah s day off. Initially I thought of taking the boys to The Cosmosphere, one of the world s premier space museums, or to the Kansas Aviation Museum. But then I realized that the Midland Railway, a historic excursion line in Baldwin City, KS, was having their first train trip of the year. And it s the Easter special: you take the train a few miles out of town, get off, the kids do an Easter egg hunt, then also get to get their picture taken with the Easter bunny. Kid paradise, right? What could be better? So this is how my alarm came to be set for 5:15 on a Saturday morning. Oliver woke up early, but I had to get Jacob up. He was groggy, trying to cover his face and ears, and annoyed at me for trying to wake him up. Until I said, Jacob, it s time to get ready for the car trip to the train ride. Can you go get dressed for the day? Silence. Then about 5 seconds later, he jumped up, said, OK dad, I will do it, and he did. We drove our 2.5 hours. I had set out a non-dirty breakfast in the car for them the night before, so they munched while we drove. Then had to wait in a huge line for our tickets. An hour later we had them got the last 3 tickets for the first departure of the day, 10AM and ran to get on the train before it left. Jacob and Oliver both got very quiet. Sometimes Jacob especially does that when he s very excited about things. He doesn t always look it right then, but I knew I d be hearing about it later. He had his face almost pressed to the window the whole way. Oh, and yes, he dressed himself and I didn t check to make sure he had the correct shirt, or that it wasn t on inside-out, until it was too late. Oops. We rode in an ex-CP car built in 1936. One of the cars on the train was built in the 1890s quite some neat equipment. Anyhow, next came the hunt. There were two large lawns covered in eggs, separated by age group. Jacob and Oliver were in the younger group, but still only got a few eggs (there were lots of other parents, uhm, helping their kids by picking up eggs the kids were too slow to get and putting them in baskets ) But they were thrilled with the experience so that s what counts. They moved the locomotive to the other end of the train for the trip back using an adjacent track. Lots of the kids watched them couple it back on. Jacob and Oliver were particularly interested nothing could have distracted them from watching that train though they didn t particularly like the noise of the horn. On the way back, someone in an Easter bunny suit was on the train for pictures. I took the boys there. They usually refuse to sit on laps of Santa and such, so I didn t figure much success. They actually agreed to do it. And despite their expressions in this photo, Jacob later told me over and over how much fun it was to be with the Easter bunny. After we got back, we headed for the car. Jacob insisted on carrying his own Easter bag, and predictably wound up carrying it upside down for awhile. So his bag had some grass in it from picking the candy back up. Oliver discovered some rocks by a ditch and had fun throwing them in to make a splash, so we paused for that for awhile. By this point it was about noon. So at this point, what does a dad who has managed to keep two active boys in line for an hour, help them with an egg hunt and giant rabbit, and keep them from falling into the ditch they re throwing rocks into, do? Say that it s time to eat lunch and then head for home so we can be there in time for supper? Or go for MORE ADVENTURE? I said, Jacob, how would you like to eat lunch inside a big train station in Kansas City? Pause for a couple of seconds to think. YEAH! I have never had lunch in a train station before! Let s go! Shall we go NOW? So I gave them the leftover breakfast to eat during the hour drive on towards the beautiful Kansas City Union Station. It s one of the few grand American train stations that survives intact, and is just stunning. Jacob and Oliver both fell asleep on the way there. We parked, walked inside, and Jacob just froze. Dad WOW! That ceiling is SO HIGH! I can t even reach it! He then raised his hand as high as it would go and said, See dad, it is so high I can t touch it! (Most ceilings are, but this one is indeed much, much taller than most.) We ate lunch in the second level of a restaurant right in the Grand Hall, which Jacob really enjoyed. Here s Jacob, annoyed that I pulled out the camera again: Then we went exploring for an hour. Jacob talked about his adventure . We went up the elevators and checked out the balconies. Then we found the Model Railroad Experience. And oh my. The boys were visibly the most excited they had been all day. Oliver just froze at the spot he walked through the door, not caring to move and see the rest of the exhibit because he was so fascinated by what he already saw. There was a huge layout in the middle of the room, and smaller ones in adjacent rooms. We finally made our way there, and Oliver just ran round and round one of them, following a train, excitedly yelling There it is! There it is! There it is! Here s a photo from the big layout: Jacob cried when it was time to go, but I had promised them some dessert before we left, so after a bite of ice cream we were on our way. On the way home, every 15 minutes or so, Jacob would make a remark like this: Dad, the train ride was SO fun! or Dad, I really liked Kansas City Union Station! and so forth, naming every highlight of the day for him several times over: the Easter bunny, the egg hunt, train ride, and everything about Union Station. On the way home, we stopped at our favorite restaurant in Emporia: BobbyD s Merchant St. BBQ. This is always a hit for everyone in the family. A down-home place that has excellent food, is not far off our path, and never seems to have a wait. Yum.

As you can see in week number, I failed to take photo every week. Nevertheless I will try to continue, maybe I won't skip that much. To compensate it a little, I've decided to publish two photos taken in Prague Botanical Garden on annual butterfly event.

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Projects I've been working on are, if not bearing fruit, at least showing promise. git-annex is growing up a nice community that nags me about things like Mac OSX and FAT filesystem support. It's great to have their feedback, it's been leading to fast improvement, even though I've only gotten two patches to my haskell code. :) New users are finding Branchable despite us not knowing how to market it. Sometimes a new site springs up overnight fully formed, having been developed on a laptop and git pushed to us. I get a vicarious thrill over whatever our users are doing, be it driving to Mongolia or watering plants with arduino.

Managed to grab a few shots of my brother's Pug in the garden in one of the rare moments it stood still.

My paternal grandmother died a month ago today - I may have been quieter than usual since December. The most vivid memory I have of her is helping to collect runner beans from her garden - apparently this had been going on since the World War II "dig for victory" campaign. Her funeral was in Hastings on 10th January, and she was buried in Fairlight, in the Roman Catholic area of St. Andrew's - it was a very peaceful setting.

This brief announcement was published in the debian-devel-announce mailing list and I repeat it here for your information.
Hi! Since there has been a lot happening in the Debian Multimedia world during the Squeeze release, so we figured we should give you an update on that. Who are we? In the dark old ages, there were two teams involved in multimedia: the Debian Multimedia and Debian Multimedia Packages teams. Please note that neither of them is related to debian-multimedia.org (which is maintained by Christian Marillat, and is known to break current ffmpeg-based applications like mplayer and vlc in Debian Squeeze.). During late 2008, both teams were merged into one, the Debian Multimedia Maintainers team, to avoid effort fragmentation. Since then, there has been a lot of work done: Consumer Multimedia in Debian Consumer Multimedia is about playing and, well, consuming multimedia. Squeeze will feature:

• FFmpeg 0.5.2, finally uncrippled thanks to zack! No mp3/h264 encoder, though. (still in NEW).
• mplayer 1.0rc3, finally with mencoder enabled.
• VLC 1.1.3
• VDPAU hardware acceleration in ffmpeg/mplayer (but feedback is welcome!)
• Guayadeque 0.2.5
• gmusicbrowser 1.0.2

Squeeze will not feature:

• FFmpeg 0.6 (But already available in experimental)
• Hardware acceleration with VA-API (packages also in experimental, for support on Intel hardware).

Producer Multimedia in Debian Producer multimedia is software for producing multimedia. Squeeze will
feature: End user applications:

• Ardour 2.8.11
• Audacity 1.3.12
• Composite 0.006
• Csound 5.12. The QuteCsound frontend is also available.
• FluidSynth 1.1.1
• Hydrogen 0.9.4.1
• Internet DJ Console 0.8.3
• Jokosher 0.11.5
• LiVES 1.3.4
• mhWaveEdit 1.4.20
• morituri 0.1.1
• QTractor 0.4.6
• Rosegarden 10.04.2
• SooperLooper 1.6.14
• Traverso 0.49.1
• X Jack Video Monitor 0.4.13
• Yoshimi 0.058.1

Platforms and technologies:

• JACK versions 0.118 and 1.9.6 (aka, jackd1 and jackd2). You can choose to install any of them (but only one at a time).
• LV2 plugins are supported. Ardour has support for them, and there are a bunch of them provided in Debian.
• LADSPA plugins are still supported.
• DSSI updated to 1.0.0, many plugins are available.
• FireWire sound devices are supported with libffado, and is supported by JACK.

Squeeze will not feature:

• JACK session support.
• Ardour 3 (it s not out yet, so it did not make it in time for squeeze).
• SuperCollider. There is a package in the works, but did not make it to Squeeze.
• Toonloop: This live stop-motion animation editor has been packaged only recently.
• NASPRO: Convenient library to implement LV2 dynamic manifest plugins. It s available in Sid.
• Mixxx: 1.7 series had RC bugs, and 1.8 was too late for squeeze.

Debian Multimedia Blend There is also an effort to start a Debian Multimedia Blend to give a better overview about what multimedia applications are available in Debian. There is a short list for a quick overview as well as a long package list separated in sections to give a more detailed overview (including translations, screenshots, popularity of package etc). You are invited to help improving the tasks either directly in SVN or by sending patches to Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org> or debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org (see below). Note that not all of the packages listed in the tasks pages are maintained by the Debian Multimedia team, since they are aimed at producing useful package sets instead of showing only our own packages. For those who want to squash some bugs in multimedia packages there is also the bugs page generated by the Blends tools, or our team bug page. Other activity The team has seen a lot of growth since the merger. Of the current 52 members of the Alioth team, 20 were added during 2009 and 18 in 2010, many of whom are involved in upstream development as well as the debian packaging. The number of packages has also grown, with 112 of the current 205 git repositories in our team area having its first commit during 2010. Where to reach us The Debian Multimedia Maintainers can be reached at pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org, should you have any questions. We have also decided to repurpose the old debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org address for user and more general discussion. We would like to invite everyone interested in multimedia to join us there. Interested developers/packagers can also join us at the first address. Some of the team members are also in the #debian-multimedia channel on OFTC.

Regards,

Alessio Treglia on behalf of the Debian Multimedia Maintainers

Prioritising packages for the Debian Edu / Skolelinux DVD, which is supposed provide a school with all the services and user applications needed on the pupils computer network has always been hard. Even schools without Internet connections should be able to get Debian Edu working using this DVD. The job became a lot harder when apt and aptitude started installing recommended packages by default. We want the same set of packages to be installed when using the DVD and the netinst CD, and that means all recommended packages need to be on the DVD. I created a patch for debian-cd in BTS report #601203 to do this, and since this change was applied to the Debian Edu DVD build, we have been seriously short on space. A few days ago we decided to drop blender, wxmaxima and kicad from the default installation to save space on the DVD, believing that those needing these applications are few and can get them from the Debian archive. Yesterday, I had a look what source packages to see which packages were using most space. A few large packages are well know; openoffice.org, openclipart and fluid-soundfont. But I also discovered that lilypond used 106 MiB and fglrx-driver used 53 MiB. The lilypond package is pulled in as a dependency for rosegarden, and when looking a bit closer I discovered that 99 MiB of the 106 MiB were the documentation package, which is recommended by the binary package. I decided to drop this documentation package from our DVD, as most of our users will use the GUI front-ends and do not need the lilypond documentation. Similarly, I dropped the non-free fglrx-driver package which might be installed by d-i when its hardware is detected, as the free X driver should work. With this change, we finally got space for the LXDE and Gnome desktop packages as well as the language specific packages making the DVD more useful again.

During my recent trip to Massachusetts for CalConnect XIX I passed back via New York, surfing a few nights on the couch at the Washington Cube Garden¹. This was just enough time for my new Davis VantagePro2 to arrive by UPS ground (phew!) causing me much consternation, as the box was about twice as wide as I expected it to be. On opening it I discovered that the reason for the size was the physical dimensions of the rain gauge, leading me to realise that I had actually bought exactly what I wanted: a high quality weather station. Also leading me to wonder how the hell I was going to get it halfway around the world with me the next day. Unfortunately that extra wide carrying case was in no way going to fit inside my suitcase. Fortunately it came with a handle. And those wonderful people at Air New Zealand gave me a Koru Gold upgrade for a 50th birthday present, so it was time to put it to the test... Travelling on the subway out to JFK was it's own little adventure, but I made it out to terminal 5 and wandered around a bit before concluding I needed to be in terminal 7. Once I was in the right place I found the fancy people's check in counter and the nice lady there was only too happy for me to carry it to New Zealand, though she did aver that perhaps the security scanners would be dubious. Not a hitch there though: I guess they're used to letting everything through that's not specifically denied, so weather stations are fine because nobody would be silly enough to even think of doing that... Being Koru Gold really helped at this point though, because it enabled me to queue jump use the priority boarding line when getting onto the plane, and every airline in the US seems to have gone all-out for this "checked baggage costs more" approach, so the planes all fly with empty baggage holds and totally overstuffed overhead lockers. If this progresses I shouldn't wonder that the planes will get so top-heavy they roll over, but through the miracles of priority boarding I was able to commandeer all the locker space I needed before anyone else had even made it past row 40. I confess that I was a little worried that it wouldn't be quite such plain sailing getting through LAX. I mean we all know what reputation this delightful little exit port has. In the event it was totally anitclimactic. If it has a handle on it, and it's about the same size and shape as a largish carryon then it's fine. There have been no recorded stabbings with wind vanes anyway - at least on aeroplanes - so clearly they are perfectly safe. Finally back in my country of birth, thinking I was home free, I breathed a sigh of relief transferred my bags and nipped off to the Koru lounge for a much needed shower and change of clothes after I snuck the station through another scanner. By now the handle had broken, so it was looking decidedly more 'box' like and less 'carryon' like, and when I eventually rolled up at the gate with my boarding pass the attendant made a valiant attempt to relieve me of it, but she was too slow and I danced around her and swanned up the gangway to take my seat. I was slow, this time, having missed the first boarding call, and all overhead lockers were crammed full. There was no seat in front of me to put the weather station under. Fortunately a nearby cupboard proved fit for purpose and it was secreted there and we were underway. At this point the guy two seats over said "didn't I see that weather station in New York?". Of course being bright yellow does make it a little conspicuous I guess, and I'm not renowned for my own inconspicuousness myself. So that's how I got my new weather station home, and you can see right away that doing things the easy way would never even occur to me. Possibly this is why I run Linux: there just isn't enough challenge when you run a different operating system. On Windows someone has always written a program for your new weather station, and a Mac user wouldn't be seen dead with it because it's black and beige and comes in a bright yellow box! So now I had to find some code to write. I looked around and very rapidly discovered that some software called vproweather was available, which would happily talk to my weather station and download the data from it, write web pages, stuff it into a MySQL database and so forth. All, obviously, far too easy, so I thought aha! I could convert that to PostgreSQL, and then I would be happy and relax with the thought of a job well done. So I downloaded the code in question an impressive several hundred kb of C code, cranked open a text editor and started to crawl through it and see where I could add the magic pixie dust to make it work with PostgreSQL. But it was not to be. My eyes glazed over or scales fell from them or something, and I realised that this particular edifice was beyond my help. Back to square one. I downloaded the Vantage Serial Protocol docs from the Davis Instruments website did some quick googling and decided I should write a module to talk this protocol. And I should write it in Perl (it was a Thursday, and Perl always seems more sensible on a Thursday, and not because of Douglas Adams, either). I beavered away into the night. Rain threatened, so I raced outside and installed the new weather station on the roof in the hopes that it's magnificent rain collector would collect. I raced back inside and was able to count the first (and so far, only) tip of the bucket. And so I now release upon the world Davis::VantagePro my first perl module. Well, the first one I care to share with the world, anyway. I have stressed it with very little testing, lumbered it with no planning or design whatsoever and so I feel it only fair that I should cast it upon the world with very little thought for it's survival or existential goals.

¹ I seem to recall one night we came up with some fantastic names for Micah & Biella's Washington Square apartment, but I couldn't remember any of the good ones and had to slap a new one on there. I should also mention my stay at the Acetarium in Boston, which was a fabulous few days, but it would pad this blog post needlessly, and I've already done that.

Sunday. A good day to take some time to myself, and get some much needed excercise. And the pseudo-meditation that comes with it: That's one of the factors I love the most about cycling. It's possibly my favorite way of just idling, of allowing for the time to pass without me noticing, just watching the movie of life, watching the world go around me with very little effort. I just love cycling. I have posted here several mentions of the Ciclot n: Every month, the last Sunday, our city government closes a ~32Km circuit to make it for cycling (and skating, and walking, and jogging, and other human-powered locomotion) use. Whenever I am in the city and have the possibility, I do the Ciclot n. Two months ago, I even did it twice in a row, for a total of almost 70Km. But this Sunday was not the last Sunday of the month! So, why am I writing this? Well, because when I left home today at ~10AM, I thought it was. Only when I reached Circuito Interior and had a this is full of cars moment, I remembered October has 31 days. And next Sunday I'll very probably be in Oaxaca city (for the Hackmitin 04h4ck4 2010). And I didn't want to miss the fun of a nice Sunday ride! I don't care if streets are closed just for bikes I am used to riding in traffic. Of course, this meant I would not take the central lanes in Circuito Interior on the way back, taking the ~10 bridges (which are quite tiring, to be honest!). It also meant I was free to make my own route. So, I thought, a nice small ~20-30Km ride will do. I'll just get to Eje 2 Sur or so, and back by another route (i.e. Plutarco E. Calles or so). But as I got closer to Reforma, I realized that every Sunday (independent of a Ciclot n), Reforma is closed for the "Paseos Dominicales" - Shorter than a Ciclot n, but still a nice way to share the streets with other cyclists. So I headed for Reforma. Part of Reforma (from the ngel roundabout westward) was closed due to a precisely cyclist race. But from there eastwards we had the street for us. Good, lets head downtown. The surprise came when I saw that it was not only towards downtown, but passing Av. Ju rez, Reforma continued to be closed just for cyclist use northwards. Great! Lets see how far does it go. The first surprise there: A couple of days ago, it was the "Noche de los Alebrijes". The alebrijes are a beautiful and very elaborated Mexican typical handicraft, depicting psychodelic dragons or dragonic representations of animals. Of course, alebrijes are usually ~30cm long... But here we had huge ones! And verrrry elaborated! How much so? You tell me. And as I started off... A nice thing about cycling is that you get to meditate. My body continued cycling, taking care not to run over the kids that are not so proficient, stoping at each red light... At some point, my mind entered back the body, and I realized we were passing by Tlatelolco (ok, to be honest, the picture was taken when crossing southwards, on my way back), about to cross Circuito Interior on the North, in that symbolically very strange place where Paseo de la Reforma (a long, beautiful avenue named after the war that marked the complete separation between church and Mexican state, in 1860) becomes two streets... Calzada de los Misterios and Calzada de Guadalupe. And, yes, it is among the greatest peregrination routes in the world. On December 12, the Holiday of the Guadalupe Virgin, up to 7 million people go visit her temple. And also around here, when my mind was busy inside my body, I noticed a pair from the Un paseo a ciegas (roughly translated, a blind ride) program was riding just by me. I knew about this program, but had never seen them before So I took the opportunity to get to know this program. Basically: Two people ride a tandem bike. The one in front, as always, drives and steers. The one in the back is a blind person, who gets the amazing sensation of freedom and enjoyment that only a bike gives you. Un paseo a ciegas is held every Sunday at 9AM except for the last Sunday every month. And I definitively want to be part of it! They told me the program has been adopted as well in Puebla, and if I recall correctly, it will soon be started in Quer taro and Guadalajara. Anyway, by then I realized the ride was probably going to reach the Bas lica, a very impressive church I had just visited for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago. And yes we went all the way up Guadalupe until the place where the street gets impossible to bike on, then left along a small street, and back to the South by Misterios. Then, all the way along Reforma again, saying goodbye to Cuitlahuac, Jos de San Mart n, Sim n Bol var, El Caballito, Cristobal Col n, Cuauhtemoc, La Palmera, El ngel... And back home. Of course, not without the sight of some bizarre signs we enjoy so much to find, point at and laugh. Have I ever told you, my nameless reader, that I love this city? I love getting surprised with so many great things. I love the distances I can safely ride on my bike without ever being far from a bike repair shop (which are only needed when they are far away). I love being surrounded by people breathing their freedom to take the streets. I love the safety of our wide, long streets (and no, I'm not joking here Mexico City is among the safest places for cyclists I have been to). I love its weather, that allows me to go out and enjoy the street at any time of year. And I love biking in it, one of the best ways to get to know so many bits of the city I would have never ventured into otherwise.