Our friends Andrew and Janice finally tied the knot last Sunday, in
Langkawi, Malaysia.
They're Aussies currently living in New York, and Janice is of Malaysian
descent, so I think part of the reason was to accommodate some Malaysian
relatives that wouldn't be able to travel, and the other reason was that it
was going to mean a bunch of people had to travel anyway, so why not travel
somewhere a bit exotic?
As my sister is getting married later this month in Brisbane, we decided to
spare Zoe two massive international flights in close succession, and Sarah
and Zoe flew out a few days ahead of me, and went to Brisbane, and then Zoe,
Sarah and her mum flew to Langkawi from there, and I flew there from San
Francisco, with the plan being for Sarah and Zoe to hang out in Brisbane for
the 4 weeks in between weddings.
It was the longest amount of travel I think I've ever done. I hadn't sat
down and calculated what the travel time was beforehand, and when I got on
the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and they said it was going to be
nearly 14 hours
just to Hong Kong, I nearly wept. The only good
thing about it was I didn't have to wrangle a toddler as well.
From there, I had to get to Singapore, with a several hour layover, and then
another flight from Singapore to Langkawi. I left SFO at 1:20am on Monday
morning, and finally arrived at about 7am (San Francisco time) the following
day.
I didn't even bother getting off the plane in Hong Kong, it was only an hour
and a half layover. I think the layover in Singapore was 5 hours, and it was
a separate flight. Singapore airport at least was pretty good to kill time
in.
It was funny, I was reading Wired while I was killing time in Singapore, and
they had an article, which included a side bar on
10 Best
Airports to Get Stuck In, and I observed that getting to Langkawi and
back involved using 4 of them.
The flight into Langkawi was more eventful than usual. I was dozing a bit as
we were coming in to land, and I woke up to the sensation of taking off
again. I wondered if we'd had an aborted landing? Sure enough, soon after,
the captain got on the public address and said that they'd had to abort the
landing due to bad weather in Langkawi. He had pretty bad Engrish, thanking
us for our frustration and saying something about fuel, so I didn't get a
lot of the details. We proceeded to circle for a while before finally
landing. I think the flight ended up landing something like an hour or more
later than scheduled. So that was mildly exciting. Langkawi airport was one
of those little "walk across the tarmac" places. I think I stood the closest
to an operating jet engine that I ever have, as another aeroplane taxied in
to a stop between my plane and the terminal while I was walking to it. Loud.
Anyway, that was all just me getting there. Sarah had a bit of fun getting
to Brisbane on her own with Zoe. She's now too long to sleep in an in-flight
bassinet, and doesn't seem to like sleeping vertically in the Ergo Baby
Carrier (possibly she was too hot in it). I think she got a bit of sleep
lying across Sarah's lap, but Sarah didn't get much sleep. I think there was
similar fun for the Brisbane to Kuala Lumpur flight, but at least she had
two laps to lie across for that one. Sarah, Zoe and Sarah's mum arrived in
Langkawi earlier in the day on Tuesday, and I made it to the resort at about
10pm (local time) and pretty much immediately crashed for the night.
The
Westin
Langkawi was just fabulous. I don't think we've stayed at a resort since
our honeymoon, and this resort was a whole other level compared to
Heron Island.
The rooms were very comfortable, and the resort was very accommodating of a
toddler. Their Kids Club menu was excellent. The breakfast buffet (included
in our room rate) was the most comprehensive breakfast buffet I have ever
seen in a hotel. The only thing missing was bacon, being a Muslim country,
but I can live without that. It was pretty easy to just fill up on
breakfast, skip lunch and just have a light dinner. The on-resort dining
prices were also very reasonable. The off-resort prices were even cheaper.
The resort facilities in general were very comprehensive. Three pools. A
children's play room. A well equipped gym and recreational area including
squash courts. An extremely nice day spa.
The thing I liked best about the whole destination wedding thing was all of
the activities leading up to the actual wedding. The wedding was on the
Sunday, and we had the Hen's and Buck's parties on Friday. Apparently
Australia is the only place that calls it a Buck's party. The rest of the
world calls it a Stag party, how about that? There was some last-minute
changes to the Buck's party, and we ended up chartering this huge $2 million
yacht for 4 hours and going for a cruise and doing some jetskiing and water
sports. The captain was Aussie, so we all had a good chat with him.
Apparently it's a corporate vessel, with an exclusive chartering arrangement
with the Westin.
On Friday night, we all went out to a seafood buffet dinner at the Yellow
Cafe over at Cenang Beach. Most of the guys and girls already knew each
other courtesy of the day's activities, so dinner involved a lot of meeting
the other halves.
What I really liked about all of the pre-wedding stuff was that by the time
the wedding rolled around, you really felt like you knew a bunch of Andrew
and Janice's family and friends, which I think made the whole thing feel a
lot more intimate.
Saturday was a recovery day. Sarah's aunties Glenda (who was in Singapore on
business) and Vicki (who lives in Thailand) had joined us at the resort by
this stage, so we were all knocking around together checking out the island.
We took the
cable car to
the top, but unfortunately the sky bridge was closed due to the inclement
weather.
There was a lot of touristy stuff at the bottom of where the cable car was,
and Zoe got to have an encounter with a very large python. She even tried to
give it a kiss.
One of the things that was surprising was how popular Zoe was with all of
the locals and other Asian tourists. We could probably have charged for
photographs. There was a little girl, who I thought was possibly a similar
age to Zoe (turned out she was two and a half) and I asked her parents if I
could take a photo of the two girls together, and no sooner had they sat
down together and a virtual paparazzi materialised out of nowhere taking
photographs. Similarly, all of the staff at the Westin were totally taken by
Zoe, and wanted to touch her. To her credit, Zoe handled all of the extra
attention pretty well.
The wedding wasn't until 6pm on Sunday, so we did a 4 hour island hopping
boat tour in the morning. That was a bit of an experience. It was nothing
short of sheer bedlam trying to board the right boat at the wharf (I use the
term lightly) and then the boat's captain had to arrange the passengers
appropriately so as to keep the boat on an even keel. It was a narrow motor
boat with a canopy cover over the back two thirds of it.
First stop was Dayang Bunting Island, home of Pregnant Maiden Lake, where we
stopped for 45 minutes. More bedlam ensued getting off the boat at the wharf
there (there was veritable flotilla of tour boats all trying to load and
unload at the same time). Monkeys abounded. They seemed incredibly tame. We
were practically tripping over them. Zoe didn't seem to be as taken by the
monkeys as I thought she would. It was a short walk up a reasonable flight
of stairs to get to the lake, though some incredibly humid jungle, and once
we got there, there wasn't a huge amount to do in the time we had available.
So we dunked Zoe's feet in the lake a few times and then made our way back
to the chaos at the wharf and got back on our boat.
We stopped for a similar amount of time at another island with a pretty nice
beach, and Zoe had enough time to a quick swim in the ocean with Sarah, and
then we made our way back to the boat again to another spot where we watched
sea eagle feeding. Heaps of eagles circling overhead would take turns to
swoop down and grab fish and fly off again. It was impressive. I think I
managed to snap some good action shots with the long lens.
Then we had the wedding itself. It was on the beach out the front of the
Heavenly Spa on the resort. Let me say, the Westin knows how to put a
wedding together. The ceremony was as lovely as the location.
For the reception, the one 5 bedroom villa on the resort was booked for the
night. Dinner was a buffet on the lawn out the front (briefly delayed thanks
to a rain shower) and then speeches and general partying happened around the
terrace out the back of the villa. There were some beautiful speeches.
Janice's brought a tear to my eye. Part of the whole package included
something like a 10 person video crew that were running around capturing
everything. It felt a bit surreal. It was definitely the most high-end
wedding I've ever been to (sorry Scott and Julie, your "Wedding of the
Century" has been eclipsed by the "Wedding of the Millennium").
Monday was a wind down day. Zoe mercifully gave us a sleep in until 8am.
Our flights didn't leave until the evening on Tuesday, so after we checked
out we went for a drive around the island to try and get Zoe to take a nap
in the car. We ended up at the
fruit
farm, which to the best of my understanding is run by the government.
Zoe had fallen asleep by this stage, and Sarah said she'd stay behind in the
car and have a nap too. So her mum and I went on the tour. It was a fun
little tour. There were only four of us on it. They drive you around the
farm on the back of a truck and show you the various crops they have. They
stop at a few places and give you a bunch of fruit samples, attempt to
answer your questions, and take funny pictures of you. The favourite seemed
to be to dangle a fruit on a knife up close in front of the camera while
having the subject(s) in the background look like they're carrying an
enormous fruit.
We got back to the car to an upset Sarah and small group of locals milling
around. Sarah had managed to lock Zoe in the car for about 30 minutes when
she got out to make her a sandwich after Zoe had woken up from her nap.
Fortunately the engine was running and the air conditioning was on, so there
was no risk of Zoe overheating (on the contrary, she was a bit on the cool
side). Some kind locals had somehow figured out which car rental company to
call (it's possible there's only one) and someone came out with a spare key,
so the crisis was averted just before we got back to the car. It's the first
time Zoe's been locked in the car (it's pretty much impossible in the Prius)
and it was just our luck that it'd happen in a foreign country!
One of the saddest things about Langkawi was the amount of garbage floating
around in the ocean, and washing up on the beaches. I was swimming in the
ocean off the yacht while we were out on the Buck's party, and it was
disgusting. The jetski was temporarily disabled due to sucking in something.
We visited Black Sand Beach, which was supposed to be something of a tourist
attraction. Covered in trash.
Ian Kiernan would be
sad. The captain of the yacht we were on for the Buck's party said it was
all from Thailand and got flushed out of all the rivers and streams by the
recent rain. Just goes to show how connected everything is.
The house is very quiet without Sarah and Zoe, but my friend Liam is
visiting from Zurich for a couple of weeks, so that's helping break the
silence. I'm using the time to get a heap of things done that I don't
otherwise get time to get done.
Unfortunately the photos from the trip are only available on Facebook at the
moment, but they'll eventually get uploaded
here.
Last night, the text below went out to r-sig-finance
along with updates to the R/Finance website and
its Call for Papers page;
followed by some tweeting and
Goggle+'ing
(and please do feel free to retweet and share at will...)
).
I left you 2.5 months ago with the last question asked by my
applicaiton manager, Martin Michlmayr : "Please tell me about about yourself and what
you intend to do for Debian".
Interesting question to revisit now, indeed. Here is what I answered:
About myself first.
I'm a 40 year old project manager and system administrator working in French
National Aerospace Research Center. My best definition of my skills in
computing is "Know more or less about a Lot of Things and be a Specialist of
Nothing"...:-). I'm definitely not a programmer, nor a real system
administrator, nor a RDBMS administrator, nor a personal workstation
designer, though I do all of these daily. I think I'm perfect for finding
the good person for having a defined job done.
Besides this, I'm a genealogist for several years now. This is what finally
decided me to apply for becoming a package maintainer : there are some quite
good free genealogy software for Unix, though for various reasons they are
not used very widely, even Unix geeks (my main software for genealogy still
runs on Another Operatin System and is evertythig but free).I think that I
can bring something here to the Free Software World, by helping some of
these good programs in getting into the best Linux distribution I know....
For me, this is a mean for giving back to the free software movement what I
gives to me since I discovered Linux 6-7 years ago.
My very first intention as soon as I get my way into the Debian Developers
Heaven is adopting the Geneweb package currently maintained by Brent
Flugham. I'm in close contact with the author (who happens to be french,
which helps) as well as a daily user of it. The current package which is in
the distribution is already my work for a great part. I gave it to Brent,
the current maintainer and we both agreed that it would be better for me to
apply to becoming anofficial maintainer.
I also contributed to the package for lifelines, another genealogy software.
The last version of the package is also 80% my work, acknowledged by Javier,
the official maintainer. Concerning that package, I do not have "plans" for
adopting it (we didn't discussed of this with Javier, and I'm not sure I
could bring him that much things).
I came to Linux thanks to a great friend of mine, Ren Cougnenc. Ren opened
my eyes to the free software world when I still thought that it was only a
variant of free beers.
I got really involved into Linux when I forced me to remove any other
Operating System from my computer at work and tried to do my daily job with
Linux.
I have now succeeded at ONERA in getting free software to be accepted as a
credible alternative for important projects. At this time, especially for
server and network-related projects.
I absolutely cannot tell why and how I came to be a Debian user. I simply
don't remember. But I know why I am still a Debian user : this is a
distribution which is controlled by only one organisation--->its users. And
I want to be part of it.
Finally, I did not mention above the somewhat "political" nature of my
personal involvment into free software. Except for the physical appearence,
I think I mimic RMS on several points (though he probably speaks better
french than I try to speak english....which does not help for expressing
complex ideas like the ones above!).
As anyone can see, I was already very verbose when writing, sorry for
this. Funnily Martin summed this up in one paragraph when he posted
his AM report about my application. From what I see, also, my English
didn't improve that much since then. It seems this is a
desperatecause, I'm afraid.
Anyway, all this was apparently OK for Martin and, on July 21st 2001,
he wrote and posted his AM report and, on July 30th 2001, I got a mail
by James Troup:
An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines
with username 'bubulle'.
bubulle@debian.org was born. Now I can more easily destro^W contribute
to my favourite Linux distro.
Indeed, I don't remember that much about the 2001-2003 years. I was
probably not that active in Debian. Mostly, I was maintaining geneweb,
for which I polished the package to have it reach a quite decent
state, with elaborated debconf configuration. Indeed, at that time, I
was still also deeply involved in genealogy research and still
contributing to several mutual help groups for this. This is about the
time where I did setup 
Today, I had some business in Bonn, so 
I think I'm currently supposed to be out buying a TV at the moment. Or something else expensive. Instead I'm lying on the sofa listening to 
Since there have been a few blog posts about GNOME 3 already, I m sure you don t mind me adding one. I m one of those who don t do any work, just lurk around and wait for stuff to be fixed or working in the first place. I also don t like compiling GNOME myself. I barely touched the already packaged stuff in the repository of our Debian GNOME packaging team. But I run unstable plus stuff from experimental. I ll thus have a bit of a different experience with GNOME 3 than current testing users who at least in parts don t seem to like what they re getting.
That being said I love it.
No, I don t mind running network manager on my systems, I even have it on my netbook (Atom processor). I used wicd for a long time because network manager really got nothing done back in the days (half a year ago or what :)). Nowadays, since version 0.9, it works fine for me. No fiddling around with config files, perfect integration in the desktop, and LAN and WLAN Just Work [tm].
No, I don t like if some weird dependencies dictate what tools to use. I usually used pidgin for messaging, for instance. Now I m using empathy, simply because it s best integrated in GNOME. And no, I won t switch from mutt to evolution. :-P
And there are more such cases. Also, these weird accessibility tools that are stuck in the gnome-shell top panel , I don t need them. Still there. (There s an extension to remove it, by the way.) Also, I must say, GNOME 3.2 is a lot better than 3.0 already. And I think 3.4 might do the final trick for me.
Fact is, with GNOME 3 I have a much cleaner desktop, there is more room for windows (which is nice on a netbook display), there are web apps which I already use a lot, and it has a professional, not too playful look (i.e. a few effects, clear and consistent theming, no bubbling windows). And the new notification stuff is just awesome, especially with the empathy integration.
Oh, and too many mouse click to access an application? 1) Put your most used apps in the favorites bar (or whatever it is called); it s just one click then. 2) Press your meta-key (that way our name for the windows key, or was that the ESC key? Whatever, press your windows key), type in the first two or three letters of your application, and hit enter; you don t need a mouse at all.
There. It had to be said. :)
Content Security Policy is a 
This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who 
Dpkg work
The month started with fixing newly reported bugs to prepare the 1.16.1.1 release:
WordPress packaging
WordPress sounds similar to python-django. I m also only a backup maintainer but Giuseppe has been inactive for many months and I had to step in August because I wanted the new upstream version. I discovered a bit late that I was not subscribed to wordpress bugs and thus the release critical bug 
Now the fundraising continues, but this time the goal is the liberation of the resulting book. For this to happen, we need to reach 25000 EUR in the liberation fund. So far we re at 37% of this goal with 9400 EUR in the liberation fund (which means that 59% of the money raised has been put in the liberation fund).
Finally!
Last Friday, after two years worth of work, I finally got the first box of books for the 
Translating over from the back cover text (and this is just a quick translation from me It reads better in Spanish ;-) ):
If so, please tell me in the comments, how and for what purpose.
I am going to remove this configuration feature as being an unnecessary complication, unless I hear compelling user stories.
By the way Paypal used to be required but it s no longer the case, you can support the project just with your usual credit card.
Misc blog updates
Over time, I have written many useful articles for Debian users and Debian contributors. But scattered in the history, they are somewhat difficult to find. To fix this I have created some index pages listing them. Check them out:
Today I was wondering that I had almost no new mail in my inbox in the morning. After a while I decided to have a look into the server logfiles . so I learned that postfix wasn t able to deliver mails via lmtp cause of:
This weekend we'll be having the 4th version of the Colombian Mini-Debconf. It will be held in the 