It's again that time of the year for the Debian Project: the elections of its Project Leader! Starting on March 31st, and during the following two weeks, the Debian Developers will vote to choose the person who will guide the project for one year. Among this year's candidates there is the current DPL, Lucas Nussbaum, who admits that "the workload involved in being the DPL is just huge," and motivates his nomination with the need for stability in the project in this release cycle, especially after the difficult decision about the default init system. In his platform, Lucas speaks of technical and social steps to improve the project: from reproducible builds for a more secure archive to a renewed effort to run Debian on new platforms (especially smartphone and tablets); from a more welcoming approach to prospective contributors to an easier collaboration with organizations. The only other candidate left after Gergely Nagy withdrew his nomination, is former Release Manager Neil McGovern. Neil's platform focuses mainly on the need to "ensure that we cater to our users, and there's millions of them. From those running the latest software in unstable, to people who simply want a rock solid core release." In his opinion "the size of Debian is increasing, and will reach a point where we're unable to guarantee basic compatibility with other packages, or the length of time it takes to do so becomes exponentially longer, unless something changes." To fix this problem, Neil proposes the implementation of PPAs (Personal Package Archives), the modernisation of the current build and infrastructure system as well as generally supporting the various teams. The campaigning period will last until March 30th: the candidates are already engaged in debates and discussions on the debian-vote mailing list where they'll reply to questions from users and contributors.

My blog is included now in Planet Debian, so this post is to say hello :) And what can be better to explain who I am, that saying that I am a Debian Contributor? What does Debian Contributor mean? There are lots of tasks that people accomplish to make Debian better, and Debian Contributor is a new hat to credit any participation in the Debian Project, of any kind (even if the contributor is not a full-member of Debian). The idea was started and promoted by Enrico Zini. In less than one year, a website with a list of Debian Contributors, data source schemes and much more pieces have been designed. The site is working, and evolving, according to a roadmap. There are some working data sources already, some other proof of concept , pending to adopt or refine. There are much more kind of contributions that still have no data source created. Everybody can help on that! An example: my contributions I m listed now as wiki editor (at least, I edit once a month when doing my spam fighting tasks), website committer (I upload translations to the Spanish part of the website), and publicity (I ve sent some news to Debian Project News from time to time). Having your name in a list may seem a small thing, but happiness is made of small things!! The website committers data source is one of the proof of concepts and it s not being updated recently. I hope that somebody in the www team takes care of that oh wait, I m part of the www team I m part of the Spam Fighting Force too, but the data source tracks the spam reports reviewers, and I don t do that, I only report spam. That s why I m not there (yet). I m also a translator, member of the Spanish team. Translators are already credited in the translation coordination pages (for example this one), but we want to include them in the main list of Debian Contributors too. That means modifying the bot that tracks the mailing lists. I have joined the i18n team and I hope I can understand how it works and try to propose the required changes. If in the meanwhile, other person comes with the solution, the better! I have given a talk (and two lightning talks) in the last MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014. Most of the speakers in Debian events are available via the Debconf website, for example: http://penta.debconf.org/dc13_schedule/speakers.en.html I m sure a data source can be created somehow! More examples of data sources As I said, these are only examples (it s not about crediting my contributions, but everybody s). So if you explore the already managed data sources, you can find the Debian Sysadmin and Security teams, package maintainers, package uploaders to FTP sites, committers to several source code repositories of Debian-related software, people helping mentoring other people in Debian, people helping in the New Member process, people subtitling talks But we need more!! Please have a look at DcSiteDevel where you can learn how to create a data source and the tools for extracting information in an easy way. If each Debian Team cares of their own data source (which allows to credit their members) it is a sustainable way and also improves those Team s visibility (and new contributions, probably!). Identity management The last updates to Debian Contributors project are about identity management. Right now the site only shows data of contributors having a @debian.org account or an account in Alioth (the Debian software forge, used for many subprojects). It also uses the email field to merge contributions made in areas where you login with other kind of user (e.g. the wiki). This is a great step towards crediting people that are not full Debian members (yet), if they want their names to appear in the Debian Contributors list (they can opt-out too, or show/hide each contribution separately). So, what next? There is a Roadmap and a TODO list. But nobody as individual can know all the roles and actual work in the Debian project. It s better that each team cares about how to send their contribution info to the site. There are some mining tools available to extract for example names of committers in source code repositories, or senders in mailing lists. Not much code is required. Please think about it and join the wave of making Debian diversity skills more visible!
Filed under: Interesting sites, My experiences and opinion, Uncategorized Tagged: Communities, Contributing to libre software, data mining, Debian, Developer motivations, English, libre software, Project Management, statistics, translations

I'm currently a contractor, working for/with Dyn, until April the 11th. I need to decide what I'm doing next, if anything. In the meantime here are some diversions:

Some trivial security issues

I noticed and reported two more temporary-file issues insecure temporary file usage in apt-extracttemplates (apt), and libreadline6: Insecure use of temporary files - in _rl_trace. Neither of those are particularly serious, but looking for them took a little time. I recently started re-auditing code, and decided to do three things:

• Download the source code to every package installed upon this system.
• Download the source code to all packages matching the pattern ^libpam-, and ^libruby-*.

I've not yet finished slogging through the code, but my expectation will be a few more issues. I'll guess 5-10, given my cynical nature.

NFS-work

I've been tasked with the job of setting up a small cluster running from a shared and writeable NFS-root. This is a fun project which I've done before, PXE-booting a machine and telling it to mount a root filesystem over NFS is pretty straight-forward. The hard part is making that system writeable, such that you can boot and run "apt-get install XX". I've done it in the past using magic filesystems, or tmpfs. Either will work here, so I'm not going to dwell on it.

Another year

I had another birthday, so that was nice. My wife took me to a water-park where we swam like fisheseses, and that tied in nicely with a recent visit to Deep Sea World, where we got to walk through a glass tunnel, beneath a pool FULL OF SHARKS, and other beasties. Beyond that I received another Global Knife, which has now been bloodied, since I managed to slice my finger open chopping mushrooms on Friday. Oops. Currently I'm in that annoying state where I'm slowly getting used to typing with a plaster around the tip of my finger, but knowing that it'll have to come off again and I'll get confused again.

Linux Distribution

I absolutely did not start working on a "linux distribution", because that would be crazy. Do I look like a crazy-person? All I did was play around with GNU Stow, and ponder the idea of using a minimal LibC and GNU Stow to organize things. It went well, but the devil is always in the details. I like the idea of a master-distribution which installs pam, ssh, etc, but then has derivitives for "This is a webserver", "This is a Ruby server", and "This is a database server". Consider it like task-selection, but with higher ambition.

There's probably more I could say; a new kitchen sink (literally) and a new tap have made our kitchen nicer, I've made it past six months of regular gym-based workouts, and I didn't die when I went to the beach in the dark the other night, so that was nice. Umm? Stuff? Have a nice day. Thanks.

The Debian Security Team announced in the bits from their last meeting that they're considering to ask for the addition of a new suite to provide long term support (LTS) for Squeeze. Quoting their announcement:

• It needs to be pointed out that for this effort to be sustainable actual contributions by interested parties are required. squeeze-lts is not something that will magically fall from the sky. If you're dependent/interested in extended security support you should make an effort to contribute, either by contributing on your own or by paying a Debian developer/consultant to contribute for you. The security team itself is driving the effort, NOT doing it. Some team members will contribute to it individually, however.
• Anyone interested in contributing, please get in touch with team@security.debian.org. We'll setup an initial coordination list with all interested parties. All policies / exact work will be sorted out there.

This means this is still not something settled and if you or your company is insterested in joining this effort, you should contact the security team ASAP. So they can see if there is enough people and resources to launch the LTS.

Despite having a good, unbroken night's sleep, Zoe seemed a bit out of sorts this morning. She didn't have a particularly good breakfast. I'm not sure if that was because I made the porridge with cow's milk instead of almond milk (because I had some leftover cow's milk), or she was just having a bad day. Zoe has a trial dance class booked for tomorrow, which clashes with her normal Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, so we skipped Playgroup and did a BJJ class this morning. It was a good class, because there were 3 other kids there, a regular boy and girl, and a girl who was taking a trial class, so it was nice to have a bit more happening, but the two other regular kids were younger and a little less focused, and I think that distracted Zoe a bit. I think the lack of a decent breakfast also kicked in, and she went on strike a couple of times. Overall, it was a pretty good class though. The one downside was when I accidentally closed her fingers in the door on the way out. I didn't realise she was holding onto the door frame when I let go of the door I was holding open for her. Luckily it wasn't a heavy door or it could have ended more badly. Zoe had chosen to go to BJJ class by car today. I wondered if it was because of the improved music selection with the new radio. Her library books were due back soon, and since I don't have her this weekend, I thought we could just go to the library after BJJ class. I gave her a muesli bar to keep her going after BJJ class, but I think the lack of a good breakfast was really starting to show after we left the library. I was feeling like lunch out, and hadn't been to Grill'd for a while, nor sampled their kids menu, so I asked Zoe if she wanted a burger for lunch, and she said she did. We got to Grill'd, and I eventually managed to extract an order out of Zoe. She went for the mini chicken burger. The kid's menu items were pretty good. They came in a little box, with the burger, some chips, a popper (a.k.a. "juice box") and a colouring sheet with a set of colouring pencils. Unfortunately Zoe had a massive meltdown because she couldn't get the angle of her straw to her liking, and wasn't doing very well expressing how she wanted it ("down and then up" didn't make a whole lot of sense without it having bendy bits in places it didn't have bendy bits). Eventually I got her to eat. I'd say that food was definitely the issue, because after lunch she perked up significantly, and we had a nice little play in Bulimba Memorial Park, where I'd parked the car, and then we went home. We read a few of the new library books, and then she passed out for a late nap without much complaint. After her nap, she was still a little bit out of sorts, but we managed a walk down to the Hawthorne Garage to grab some lamb cutlets for dinner, and then she watched some TV and ate quite a good amount of fruit while I organised dinner. After a handwashing-related meltdown and dinner, we went back to the Hawthorne Garage for a babyccino. She'd perked up somewhat by this stage, and it was a nice outing. Many dogs were patted while there and on the way home. Bath time and bedtime went pretty well. It's another warm night, so I hope she sleeps well.

Web cookies are meant to store user preferences for a website, but they are often misused for evil purposes, such as tracking him, sometimes across distinct websites.For the user, there is a simple solution to that problem: set up his browser to refuse cookies by default, and use an extension such as Cookie Monster to accept them on trusted websites where they are known to be useful. Unfortunately, that reveals another problem: some shitty websites will just not work at all without cookies. Well, there is a Firefox extension that brings the solution to that: Self-Destructing Cookies. It works in a fairly simple way: cookies for each are accepted for each website, but destroyed when the user leaves it. So, does EvilCorp want to use a cookie, and refuse to work without it? No problem, here it is. Want to retrieve it on next visit? No way.

I know, I know, I should resist saying this. But every time I see it, I wonder why it happens, and I should just get this off my chest. The difference between "its" and "it's" is something that many people, even native english speakers, seem to miss. Yet, it's so extremely simple that I, a non-native english speaker, have been baffled about that common mistake for as long as I can remember. The apostrophe (') in any sentence usually means that something at the location of that apostrophe is gone out to lunch. In this particular case, it means that the " " and the "i" in the phrase "it is" were hungry. So rather than "it is", we contract that to "it's", and allow the space and the i to enjoy their meal while the apostrophe keeps their seats warm. Practically, what that means is that every time you want to write "it's", you should consider whether you can replace it with "it is" without making the sentence sound like junk. If you can't, you probably meant to write "its" rather than "it's". For instance, consider the following sentence: "It's not possible to repair this car within the budget that its owner wants to pay" It's perfectly possible to say "it is not possible" here, so we need to have the apostrophe keep a seat warm for the space and the i. It makes no sense to say "it is owner", unless you're trying to speak a much deformed form of english, so that makes it a possessive pronoun (similar to "hers", "his", "theirs", etc) and you shouldn't use an apostrophe. Speaking of food, it's time for lunch now.

I was going to put out some of these changes in a 4.5.6 release late last year, but that didn't happen, and then more things kept coming up. So this release is rather large. The major new feature is a new WebAuthCookiePath directive for mod_webauth, which allows path-scoped WebAuth cookies so that different portions of a site can maintain separate authentication credentials. There are various caveats, and support will get better later, but it's a beginning. There are two bug fixes from Benjamin Coddington: WebAuthOptional should now work with Apache 2.4, and internal notes management in the module is now done better, which should prevent some cases where the user was redirected to WebLogin twice. Eventually, the things WebAuth uses notes for should become request context data, but that's for a later change. There are multiple changes to keyring handling to let mod_webauth and mod_webkdc work properly with the ITK Apache MPM, which allows each virtual host to run as a different user. Previously, all virtual hosts shared one in-memory keyring, which meant leaking authentication keys between virtual hosts. Now, each virtual host gets its own, lazily loaded from the keyring on disk when it's first needed. This allows ITK users to configure separate keyrings for each virtual host. To make this easier, keyring files are now locked for write, and writing a keyring preserves the ownership and permissions if possible. WebLogin now supports a new remctl-based password change protocol, which I developed for Stanford to work around some problems with the kpasswd when password change takes too long. All the tools for this will eventually be available outside of Stanford when I have a chance to polish them up and release them. There are a few other, more minor bug fixes. mod_webauth and WebLogin are now more aggressive about telling web browsers to really not cache pages. WebLogin also now uses the authenticated identity returned by the WebKDC for multifactor, since it may have canonicalized the user's identity. The correct template variable is now set when the user doesn't enter a code on the WebLogin multifactor page. Better error messages are returned for invalid principals and unknown realms. The workaround for invalid XML returned by the WebKDC should now actually work. And WebLogin logs a more detailed error message on password change failures. You can get the latest release from the official WebAuth distribution site or from my WebAuth distribution pages.

Today was a very busy day for me. First up, I had my chiropractic adjustment. Then I had my half-yearly dental checkup. Then I got stuck into cleaning the house. Fortunately I'd done a bit the afternoon before, otherwise I'd never have gotten it done before my massage. I'm starting to seriously consider getting a cleaner. I can make much better use of the limited time I get than cleaning the house. Zoe's Kindergarten has a Parent Advisory Group or something like that, which meets monthly. I wasn't able to attend the first one, but the second one was today, about an hour before pickup, so I grabbed a quick lunch after my massage and biked over to Kindergarten early. The meeting wasn't particularly interesting. The majority of it revolved around fund raising. At pickup time, Zoe was fast asleep again, and had another massive meltdown when I woke her up. It took forever to get her out. She wanted to give Megan a hug, but Megan had long gone. Then, rather fortuitously, Megan's Dad texted me to tell me they were in the playground on the neighbouring school grounds, so I managed to use that as an incentive to get Zoe moving. I didn't know until today, but at the foothill of the neighbouring primary school, there's some play equipment. A few of the Kindergarten kids seem to have a play over there after Kindergarten. Megan and Zoe played there for a bit before it was time to go. Once we got home, we unpacked and then walked down to the Hawthorne Garage to get some vegetables, and then, after buying some milk from the corner store and another grumpy meltdown, I figured a quiet afternoon was in order, so Zoe watched a DVD for a bit while I prepared dinner. I'd bumped into the mother of Zoe's friends Eva and Layla from her old day care while I was at the dentist in the morning, and arranged for her to drop by to pick up a copy of the photos I'd taken at their 4th birthday party. I'd hoped that she'd bring the girls with her, and had told Zoe they'd be dropping by, but unfortunately she came on the way to picking them up from day care, so Zoe was a bit disappointed. We did arrange to have them over for dinner next Friday, so I'm sure that will be very exciting. After that, we had dinner, and a fairly uneventful bedtime. It's hot again, so I hope that doesn't mess with her sleep.

What s up? That was the sound of a new Debian Installer release, an early Alpha 1 for the Jessie release cycle. As usual, see the Debian Installer section of the Debian website, in particular the errata page which lists important, known issues. Then give it a try, and report bugs! Let s see if we can keep the debian-boot@ bug count below 1400 for a while, even if we get many new installation reports. Last weeks have been busy: Speaking of which, if you feel like helping with the triaging effort, there s now a bug type called installer bugs on UDD s Bugs Search page. ;)

The lack of journal updates recently is due to a lot of work chaos combined with getting obsessed with various leisure activities (to blunt the work stress) that don't result in public writing. Normalcy seems to be slowly returning, but it will be a while yet. This release of my collection of utility libraries and scripts only has updates to some of the Perl test infrastructure. Testing Perl scripts for strictness, warnings, and syntax errors now supports listing a set of modules required for meaningful script testing. This converts failures to skipped tests if the reason for the syntax check failure is that a required module is not installed. This release also works around two problems with Perl::Tidy 20130922 related to its new log (mis)feature. Perl::Tidy now attempts to create a log file in the current directory whenever it runs unless this is explicitly turned off, and the Perl::Critic policy doesn't know to do that. (Debian bug #742004) I now unlink that file if it exists, after the test completes, and skip the Perl critic testing if the source directory is read-only (since failure to create the log file is treated by Perl::Tidy as a fatal error). You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

It sucks. It annoys me to no end that I can t run my own Linux kernel on an Android device. It s very annoying that the android patches haven t been upstreamed, and it s even more annoying that I can t run a host OS that I build lovingly and work on during the nights. I hate that I can t use my tablet as a porter box with a USB OTG Hard disk. Alas. One day. One day I ll have a proper armhf device that I can run Debian on. But that day is not today.

On responsibilities I feel like in my Debian projects I have two roles: the person with the responsibility of making the project happen, and the person who does the work to make it happen. As the person responsible for the project, I need to keep track of vision, goals, milestones, status. To make announcements, find contributors, motivate them, deal with users and bug reports, maintain documentation, digest feedback. As the person who does the work to make it happen, I need quiet time, I need to study technology, design code, write unit tests, merge patches, code, code, code, ask around about deployment information, more code. I have a hard time doing both things at the same time: the first engages my social skills and extroversion, requires low-latency interaction, and acting when outside things happen. The second engages my technical skills and introversion, requires quiet uninterrupted periods of flow, and acting when inspiration strikes. I never managed to make good use of "gift bugs" or "minions": I often found the phrase "it's easier for me to do than to explain it" sadly relevant. Now I understand that it's not because of the objective difficulty of explaining or doing things, nor about the value of doing or of involving people. It's about switching from one kind of workflow to another. If I rephrase that as "it's easier for me to stay in flux and fix it, than to switch my entire attitude to ask for help". Of course this does not scale: we've all been saying it since I can remember. Looking at the situation from the point of view of those two roles, however, I now wonder if those two roles shouldn't really require two people. In other worlds they are: the project managers, taking responsibility for making the project happen, and the software designers, artists, and all other kind of artisans doing the work to make it happen. Of course I don't want the kind of project manager that shifts responsibilities to artisans, does nothing and takes the credit for the project: not in paid work, not in Debian. Project management is something else. I would be interested instead in having the kind of project manager that takes responsibility for the project, checks how the artisans are doing and communicates what is happening to the rest of the world, deals with the community, motivates more people to help, test, try, use, give feedback on things as they happen. A project manager / community manager. So that while I'm flux there is someone who tags bugs as "gift", mentors people to find code and documentation, and remembers to write an announcement if I implemented three cool things in a row and I'm already busy working on the fourth. So that I don't write cool ideas in my todo list where nobody can read them, but I can share them to a mailing list where someone picks up a relevant one and finds someone to make it happen while I'm busy refactoring old code that only I can understand. So that if I say "sorry, paid work calls, I won't be able to work on this project for a month", I'll be able to completely forget about that project for a whole month, without leaving the community out there to die. That's an interesting job for non-uploading DDs: please take over my projects. Let's share a vision, and team up to make it happen. Give me the freedom of being the craftsman I enjoy being, and take away from me those responsibilities that I've never asked for. The worst project managers are those that never asked to be one, but were promoted to it. Let's not repeat that mistake in Debian. A good part of the credits for this post go to Francesca Ciceri, for the discussions we had on our way back from MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014. P.S. I'm seeing how a non-uploading DD could be in the Maintainer field for one or more packages, with uploading DDs being, well, uploaders. Food for thought.

I'm back home from the MiniDebConf Barcelona 2014 (and I've had a full night of uninterrupted sleep! :) ), so it's time to thank everybody who were there (both in person and via IRC) and especially the organizers who did a great job at creating a welcoming environment and a smooth experience for all of us.

It was my first @Debian community experience (although I had already met a few of the members in various occasions) and it made me glad of my decision to start contributing to the project. (I realize that I've probably met a sanitized and newbie-friendlier version of the community, but it's also made up of people who are working to improve the not-so-friendly parts.)

It was also my first time speaking to an international audience; I believe it went overall well: I'm happy with what I said and how, not so much with what I forgot to say (e.g. mentioning testing and other non-packaging skills in my answer to Enrico's question "what skills are needed in the 3dprinter team", or actually showing the last slide with reference urls at least this one will be available as soon as I'll send the slides to be uploaded to the site).

Random mentions:

We had free software, and also free beer, from one of the sponsors (I didn't catch which one), but the venue had to remain beer free, which encourages bad puns of the kind I love :)

Contrary to what some people was fearing, the cake was real and not a lie! (also, it tasted like banana bread with chestnut flour).

Video team duty is fun and something I'll do again (and try to use in our local community what I learn in the process), but I don't think I'll let the Galadriel in my mind bully me into subtitling stuff, sorry.

To ease worries of package mistreatment, the cows in the arriero slides looked more like they were moving between pastures in transhumance rather than being led to be slaughtered.

There are curves in B ziers, France (and also bad coffee and great pastries: definitely a better place_with_geek_name to have breakfast than Perl, Germany)!

The stickers with "May I sign your PGP keys" were a nice idea, although they didn't work as well as they could (possibly because there was little time and lots of things to do). I did manage to reduce my dependency on Enrico's key to find trustpaths, however, which is nice :)

I like the idea to draw a pentacle on the floor, and forcing speakers to remain inside, as suggested by a meeting of videoteaming italian cabal members.

Lots of other things I'm forgetting to mention, but now it's time to stop writing this and start work on my todolist where a few things received a priority bump during the conf. :)

To provide geolocation-aware answers with BIND, a common solution is to use a patch adding GeoIP support. A client can be directed to the closest (and hopefully fastest) web server: However, an end user does not usually talk directly to authoritative servers. They proxy the query to a third-party recursor server which will query the authoritative server on their behalf. The recursor also caches the answer to be able to serve it directly to other clients. On most cases, we can still rely on the recursor GeoIP location to forward the client to the closest web server because it is located in the client s ISP network, as shown on the following schema:

1. Juan is located in China and wants to know the IP address of www.example.com. She queries her ISP resolver.
2. The resolver asks the authoritative server for the answer.
3. Because the IP address of the resolver is located in China, the authoritative server decides to answer with the IP address of the web server located in Japan which is the closest one.
4. Juan can now enjoy short round-trips with the web server.

However, this is not the case when using a public recursor as provided by Google or OpenDNS. In this case, the IP address of the end client and the source IP address of the recursor may not share the same locality. For example, in the following schema, the authoritative server now thinks it is in relation with an European customer and answers with the IP address of the web server located in Europe: Moreover, caching makes the problem worse. To solve this problem, a new EDNS extension to expose the client subnet has been proposed. When using this extension, the recursor will provide the client subnet to the authoritative server for it to build an optimized reply. The subnet is vague enough to respect client s privacy but precise enough to be able to locate it. A patched version of dig allows one to make queries with this new extension: In the above example, a client located in France gets a reply with two IP addresses located in France. If we now are an US client, we will get IP addresses located in the US: The recursor is expected to cache the two different answers and only serve them if the client matches the appropriate subnet (the one confirmed in the answer from the authoritative server). With this new extension, the authoritative server knows that Juan is located in China and answers with the appropriate IP address: Not many authoritative servers support this extension (PowerDNS and gdnsd, as far as I know). At Dailymotion, we have built a patch for BIND. It only works when BIND is configured as an authoritative server and it doesn t expose no configuration knobs. Feel free to use it (at your own risk). Once installed, you need to register yourself to OpenDNS and to Google to receive queries with the extension enabled.

As announced in the "Bits from the Security Team" (LWN copy) email a couple of weeks ago, it is possible that Debian squeeze will have Long Term Support, primarily in the way of security updates.

The news have made it to Softpedia and reddit and even though it has not been announced how long it would be supported, what use cases are planned, etc., the answer I can give is that it depends solely on people contributing to it.

I'd like to add that no, the LTS announcement is not related to the use of Debian on the ISS laptops, as mentioned in reddit - at least not that we are aware of. And to avoid possible confusion from the Softpedia article, the plan is LTS for the squeeze release.

From the emails we have received in response to the announcement, I do wonder however where are the people who expressed interest and signs of engagement last time there was a discussion about providing LTS for Debian.

Perhaps it wasn't stressed enough in the email, but those who are interested in benefiting from (and therefore contributing to) long term support, please do contact the security team NOW.

After all, the clock keeps ticking and Debian squeeze is going to reach its End of Life in less than two months otherwise.

I was pretty exhausted after yesterday's sustained activities. By the time I'd blogged, done some photo management, gone to yoga class, made dinner and called my girlfriend, it was late, and I'd gotten to that tired point where I couldn't be bothered getting off the couch, so I ended up having a self-inflicted late night. This morning I tried to go for a run, but I died at the 2km mark, half way up Hawthorne Road, so I walked for the remainder of my 5km circuit. I'm going to say it was a combination of tiredness, insufficient hydration, the heat, and my head space. I got home from my "run", and had a shower and cleaned up the kitchen a bit and decided I'd rather get out of the house than work on my taxes, so I headed over to Moorooka to talk to the folks at Northfield about a new car radio. I've been wanting to get a better radio for the car for a while. The factory one has no line in, so I can't play anything off my phone through the car speakers. I've been wanting one that can do Bluetooth and play USB media. That way I can stick all of Zoe's CDs onto a USB stick and give her (and me) more variety than the current 3 track CD from dentist that she's favouring, and with Bluetooth I can listen to Pandora without needing a cable. I got to Northfield, and was pleased that they could do something within the budget I was looking at, and bought the DEH-X6650BT, which they were able to install for me on the spot. They said it'd take an hour and half, so I went for a walk down the road to Moorooka's main street to kill some time. I ended up having lunch at a little Ethiopian cafe where I swear the lady didn't understand English. Moorooka's quite nice and ethnic. After lunch I walked back, with the intention of reading the manual while I waited, and was pleasantly surprised to find they'd already finished the installation. When the guy was walking me through how to use it, I was really pleasantly surprised to discover that it also included Bluetooth hands free for my phone, with a little microphone glued to the top of my windscreen. That really made my day. I don't have to faff around with my little Bluetooth earpiece in the car any more. Then I discovered it had built-in Pandora support. So I'm really happy with this purchase, and really glad I didn't have to make a second trip to get it installed. I scouted around for a small USB thumb drive on the way home, and copied all Zoe's music off my laptop when I got home. By this stage, it was too late to bike to Kindergarten, and I wasn't really feeling like it anyway, because it was too hot, and I wanted to show Zoe the new radio anyway. It was a good call, because Zoe was fast asleep, and didn't take very kindly to being woken up. It took about 20 minutes to get her calm enough to get her back to the car. We got home, and we chilled out on the couch and watched a bunch of Youtube videos on the TV from when she was in the US, and then I showed her some Winter Olympics figure skating and speed skating, and then she watched a bit of DVD while I cleaned up the living room. Sarah picked up Zoe, and then I hosted our Body Corporate's annual general meeting.