Yesterday I returned from Dresden where I attended the Linux-Info-Tag. All in all it was a really great weekend. The event was very well organised and I had a lot of fun. We shared a booth with debianforum.de and had a lot of visitors, ranging from people who had just started to consider switching to Linux to advanced users with detailed technical questions. As usual I also learned quite a lot of stuff myself, this time (among other things) that my digital camera (an IXUS II) works very nicely with gphoto2 and that there's also a lot of other graphical digital camera software that works with it.

We had two copies of Frank Ronneburg's Debian Anwenderhandbuch and I thought it would be a nice idea to give them away in a little contest. Alexander "Tolimar" Schmehl owns a little etch that I asked him to bring along. The idea was, that, in order to promote the name of the next release, people should draw us a picture on the little etch and the best one would win a copy of the book. I'd actually expected to see people fail miserably and in the end crown the funniest try. But I was confuted. Totally!! In fact we had two entries that were so good that we decided to split the first place and give both of them a copy of the book.
Here are (as promised) all contestants:


This entry was taken out of the rating. It was our first entry and was made by Carsten, who was one of the Debian booth people. Of course we know that he could have done much better and only produced this in order to not discourage other contestants.


The third place, personally I don't really agree with the motive but it won a lanyard anyway.


The second place, a rather obvious motive, but well done and a worthy second place. Another lanyard for this gentleman.


The two first place entries: We absolutely couldn't decide between the perfect curves of "Tux" and "A house with garden"'s 1000 little Details. So the first place was splitted and we gave a away both copies of the book.

Congratulations again to all contestants! Well done!

After deciding on the prices I had to hurry to give my talk on user friendly system administration. I had a nice number of people and I think the talk was well received. The (German) slides are now also available online. Please inform me of any usage.
One nice incident was, when after the talk a former system administrator of the Technical University of Dresden approached me and told me that he really liked the talk. He said that he was now retired and really missed talking to the users and helping them when they had trouble with the system. After hearing so many sysads talking about their users like complete idiots, that all seem on a personal quest to annoy their sysads as much as possible, this was a nice change. I sometimes think that the "BOFH-Syndrome" is also a generation problem. But that's a different story ...

After the talks there was a barbecue outside the building, I talked to a lot of people and had quite some fun. Afterwards there was a presentation and movies, a really nice ending for an almost perfect event. (The only problem was, that there had been no Internet access until around noon, but from what I heard it was one of the University's switches that had given up. Apart from that everything worked out perfectly.)

On Sunday we went on a guided tour through Dresden and afterwards to a museum. The museum actually is on Human Biology but there were two special exhibitions, one on evolution and one on games. As expected most of us went for the game exhibition that featured several rooms dedicated to the history of games as well as the different kinds of games that exist (imitation, strategy, gambling, ...). All rooms had games to try yourself and all of us had a lot of fun. (We're such a bunch of kids ;)) After leaving the museum we went for a Pizza (Very tasty! I think, I am developing a weakness for Pizza with Parma and rocket.), which concluded that day.

One last nice incident happened when I was riding home on the train with Tolimar. We asked the guy who'd checked our tickets for a later train connection. His answer: "Oh, did it get too late at the Linuxtag at the Technical University?". Unnecessary to mention that we were most thrilled! Often when talking to "normal people" I get the "what is this all for" feeling, since, how much ever you evangelise, there's such a mass of people who never even heard about the existence of FOSS/Linux. It's these little incidents that are really rewarding!!

Final conclusions:

• Great weekend
• Very good event (Thanks LIT people, you guys rock!! Also a big thank you to our host, Frank, who provided three of us with a place to sleep, really tasty breakfast and also drove us around.)
• Lots of fun
• Lots of interesting people to talk to
• An IXUS II does not work as a USB storage device
• You can do amazing things with an etch a sketch
• Knowing that my talk is being recorded gives me an awkward feeling (I tend to use a lot of "spicy language")
• The rebuilt Frauenkirche looks impressing
• Pizza with Parma and rocket is great!

Lua Directory Handling

Arrrgggghhhhh!!!! OK maybe lua is not love. I just realised that Lua has no concept of directory handling (opendir, readdir, etc). Indeed it isn’t possible to tell whether something is a directory or a file. So I added some more primitives to the Lua socket extension library. Most usefully a readdir call. This means the sample webserver can now serve directory contents if index.html isn’t found. It can also now fall back to serving a “default virtual host” if the requested one doesn’t exist. The webserver code is now very stable and complete. The only omission is CGI handling, but I’m not going to bother unless prompted strongly. I’ve added some simple examples to the documentation and I think things are looking good. The Debian package has been downloaded a few times, but no real feedback - feel free to share, don’t be shy!

It's late at night, so what else could I do than watch the stars? Of course, as I am such a moron geek, I don't just look out of the window — I use GPL'd software to watch the stars.
apt-get install stellarium


... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

Advogato

Randomly clicking around Advogato today I accidently tried to login. Rather than seeing “Person not Found” which is all I’ve seen since my account(s) were removed I now get “incorrect password”. It looks like my primary, and replacement accounts at Advogato are back. At the time those accounts were removed I setup this blog so that I could still remain syndicated upon Planet Debian. It would be nice to have the Advogato account(s) back, but I could live without them. (Indeed mailing Raph at his acm.org address bounced so I may will have to)

Syndication

For my own notes. This blog appears at:

• Planet Debian.
• Planet Hants Lug
  • The Hampshire Linux User Group - ironically i live in Edinburgh and should be more affiliated with Edlug…
• Planet Former Advogato
  • A planet syndicating people who “moved on” from Advogato.

Stalker-tastic. Of course my daily life goes entirely elsewhere - but that contains rudeness, angst, & etc. As you would expect from LiveJournal

I've decided to use hevea to add info documentation to wysihtml, since I enjoy using whizzytex for editing documentation.However, I cannot find the proper option to use for hevea info output.I am looking for the option to create the INFO-DIR-SECTION and START-INFO-DIR-ENTRYsections into info files.Looking at the changelog, it seems like rawtext environment was intended to be the one, but it seems like rawtext environment outputs text indented.Two problems I found: 1. rawtext doesn't output raw text for info (and it also outputs text for text, which I don't want, not just for info).2. hevea.sty does not have rawtext environment, and latex will no longer be able to process that documentation if I have rawtext used.I probably need to work around 2 with some conditional tex magic by detecting if the documentation is being built with hevea or tex.Oh well...That was all for my today's hack session in Shinkansen.

With all the hype that was around it, I got myself a GMail account some time ago, when they were rather "rare". While the UI is still very good for a webmail, it has also a lot of things I do not like. I don't use it heavily - not for personal emails, but only to recieve some mailing lists I don't want to clutter my regular mail (and there are no privacy issues there... Google will index them in the list archives anyway), and to recieve some off-site notifications by some servers (it's always better to get warning emails etc. off-site so you can still access them when the site is down... oh, and if you have an email relay, try to setup a direct transport for your email, so it works if there is something wrong with your email relay, too!) My top issues with gmail are:

• Functions moving their location in the menus. E.g. when I empty my spam folder I always try to pick "delete" from the dropdown. But while the "delete" function is there in every other, it's not there in the Trash and Spam folders (instead it's a big button where the "Archive" button usually is).
• "Delete" is hidden away. GMail assumes that you don't want to delete any mail. But I do. There are so many mails not worth keeping at all! Especially with the logcheck mails I get - sometimes one every hour - I really want to delete them permanently. It's just of no use to keep them, all I want to review is that they do not contain important information (e.g. suggesting a hack attack, software or hardware fault) and then get rid of them.
• There is no keyboard shortcut for "delete" either
• GMail diverts my browsers /-shortcut for in-page searching to in-mailbox searching

I used gmails feedback function before, but didn't get any reply.

All-Around Awesome You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 77% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored well above average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 82% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Nice one, Mike! I would have liked to end up being more humane, though ;-)



  
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
  

Much More Scientific        You have: 77% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 47% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored about average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition.Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you're best at. Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition. Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable  Funny Test It rules.

  

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 80% on Scientific You scored higher than 7% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

Very Well-Rounded You have: 62% SCIENTIFIC INTUITION and 62% EMOTIONAL INTUITION

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored above average on emotional intuition and above average on scientific intuition. (Weirdly, your emotional and scientific intuitions are equally strong.) Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you’re good at Quake. Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences. Try my other test! The 3 Variable Funny Test It rules.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 30% on Scientific You scored higher than 36% on Interpersonal

Link: The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

I'm going to Montreal this weekend. It should be fun. For those curious about my trip through Scotland, I've managed to post half of my ramblings at Cycling Sasquach. Not all of the posts are still on the front page, so what may seem like never ending rants do go on ;)

Larry Murdock: “Blogging is a better way of disseminating one’s thoughts than sitting on the bench in front of the County Courthouse whittling and shooting the breeze with a couple of old-timers.” Dad’s been forwarding me interesting bits he reads on the web with his own insights attached for years, and I finally convinced him to put these kinds of things in a blog so the rest of the world can enjoy them too. Dad’s an excellent writer and is one of the most creative, articulate, and intelligent people I’ve ever known (though he seemed remarkably stupid between about 1987 and 1991, when I briefly knew more about the world than he did). I owe him a lot.

board games Bought myself the European version of "Ticket to ride" in preparation for the winter to come. Also, some Carcassonne updates ("The dragon and the princess" and "The count") since i believe i have all the rest. Maybe i should also get "The city", but it is a standalone game, so i need to read some reports. dspam Dspam is back. We have a coordinated effort to get it out in less than a week. I had a package more or less ready, but since two non-developers are working on it, too, i stepped out and right now i am more an observer than an active packager, while i clean (read janitor) some things from time to time. Also, too much work is keeping me from doing other Debian stuff, including coordination of DC6. music I have recently discovered beatport.com. I have refused to access it before, due to its Flash (yep, chilling effect) interface. It is crack for the following reasons:

• One cannot set bookmarks. I would like to set a flag on some artists, or just have a "duh, this one i have to recheck". Forget about it.
• One cannot open multiple windows/tabs. While I am surfing the interface, i would like to open some labels/artists in another tab for inmediate review. CAN NOT DO.
• Shit, man, one cannot even send a URL to a friend for him to buy a song, since there is no such concept in the interface.
• Also, one cannot go back, since the flash buttons (RW, FF) are b0rk3n.

So, please, beatport, if you are out there and listen to your users, do something about it. However, the music selection they have rocks (even if it is crappy electronic music).

If you're interested in doing sysadmin work in a heavy Debian/Ubuntu environment in the Boston area, check out this posting for a Senior Network / Systems Administrator.

Here's how to subscribe to mailing lists with a combined total posts of 2000 or more per day, and live. It's all about pattern recognition. Threaded mail readers such as mutt sort emails into a tree based on which emails are replies to other emails. The mail index displays this tree of messages with the author of each indicated. Since the Subject field rarely changes, mutt does not display it unless the thread's subject changes. Combining these elements of author names, thread trees, and occasional subject changes produces patterns that the brain can use to quickly identify important and useless sets of mail messages, without actually reading anything, and without resorting to complicated and fragile killfile and scoring systems. Some patterns are very simple. For example, this is the "take it to private email" pattern. This pattern can be thread-killed on sight; if you're feeling generous, read the last two messages in the thread.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
fred         +->
bob            +->
fred             +->
bob                +->
fred                 +->
bob                    +->
fred                     +->

This is the "think before you post" pattern.

bob    +-> Foo
bob      +->

This is the "blindingly obvious answer" pattern. If you're bored you can read any one message to get the gist. Sometimes many of the replies will be worth reading to get a broad overview of all possible responses to a given obvious question. Most times not.

bob    +-> Foo?
fred     +->
alice    +->
george   +->
nancy    +->
steven   +->
nick     +->

Here's a deceptively simple pattern, the "uninteresting message". It might be worth checking the post date to make sure that it's not just the beginning of one of the above patterns of course. And if you're feeling generous, you can read some small fraction of them.

bob    +-> Foo?

This might be a worthwhile thread. Notably because it's short, has a reasonable mix of participants, and seems to come to some kind of conclusion.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
alice      +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bob              +->
nancy    +->
fred       +->

And here's a transformation of that same thread featuring "too late for the party syndrome"

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
alice      +->
bill       +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bill             +->
bill         +->
nancy    +->
fred       +->
bill         +->
bill       +->
bill     +->

This is a perfect time to er, threadkill bill. Or if feeling generous, read the second or third of his many replies to see what's got him so worked up. To see more sophisticated patterns, you need to categorise participants of the mailing list. A few people almost always manage to turn even a useless thread into something interesting, or have viewpoints that are good foils for your own. Learn to recognise the names of these interesting posters without thinking about it (I'll name them in uppercase below). Similarly, some people never contribute anything useful, and can be filed under the label of k00k. If there are more k00ks than interesting posters it's probably time to leave the list. Most people won't fit in either category. Some people change category depending on the subject. Here's the same potentially worthwhile thread as before, but now the people matter.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
k00k       +->
bob          +->
george         +->
bob              +->
NANCY    +->
fred       +->

Suddenly, three messages of the thread become worth reading, and the larger k00k-tainted subthread's likelyhood of being valuable drops substantially. Similarly, this thread can be ignored.

k00k   +-> Foo
bob      +->
fred       +->
k00k         +->
alice  +->
k00k     +->

And this thread has a high potential for being interesting.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
NORRIS       +->
george         +->
bob              +->
NANCY    +->
fred       +->

This thread, a variation of "take it to private email", increases bob's chances of being a k00k. Or he's really right and everyone else is wrong.

alice  +-> Foo
fred     +->
bob        +->
nancy        +->
bob            +->
alice            +->
bob                +->
fred                 +->
bob                    +->
fred                     +->
bob                        +->

This thread is a hard case to call, it depends on how good the interesting poster is in deflecting k00kitude. There could be as many as three worthwhile messages in here; I'll flag them.

  k00k   +-> Foo
  bob      +->
* NANCY      +->
  k00k         +->
* bob          +->
* NANCY          +->

It might be worth reading the interesting poster here, but probably only for a laugh, and it's just as likely that they've been cruelly trolled into answering, especially if an instance of the "blindingly obvious answer" pattern is grafted onto one of the subthreads.

k00k   +-> Foo
NORRIS   +->
k00k       +->
NORRIS       +->

So far the Subject has been ignored, and generally it's more important to look at the thread structure than the subject, but there are useful exceptions. It might be worth checking out the differently named subthread here, on the other hand its close proximity to the k00k likely means its a useless tangent.

bob    +-> Foo
fred     +->
k00k       +->
bob          +->
george         +-> Bar (was: Foo)
bob              +->
fred               +->
fred           +->
tony     +->
fred       +->

Here is not just one thread, but a collection of threads. This pattern, typically associated with a much larger thread than shown here, is a sure sign that a thread has gone pear-shaped and unless the followup thread has a lot of interesting posters in it, there's not much hope for the lot. (k00ks also spawn disconnected threadlets; such threadlets should be ignored.)

 k00k   +-> Foo
 bob      +->
 NANCY      +->
 k00k         +->
 bob          +->
 NANCY          +->
 bob    +-> About foo..
 tony     +->
 k00k       +->
 alice  +-> That foo thing

That's enough patterns to get started with, but they really come into their own when picked out of larger threads in an overloy long ongoing discussion. A few examples can be found in this segment of 23 lines of a much longer thread.

bob                                                       
k00k                                                      
tony                                                      
k00k                                                      
tony                                                      
k00k                                                    +-
bob                                                  
k00k                                                +-> Bar
john                                    +-> Bar
nick                                  +-> Bar
barney                                  +->
nick                                      +->
nancy                                       +->
NORRIS                                        +->
nancy                                           +->
SAM                                           +->
nick                                            +->
NORRIS                                            +->
oliver                                          +->
john                                    +->
frank                                     +->
john                                        +->
tom                                           +-> Mumble
bob                                             +->

Part of this thread is useless by two criteria; it has far too much k00k in it, and it's nested so deep that mutt doesn't bother to try to draw the thread indicators. The next bit though shows some signs of being interesting despite its fairly deep nesting. And the tangent might be worth keeping an eye on. Those are the thread patterns that I know I know. I suspect there are many others that I also know, since I can typically read mail with the d key as fast as mutt will scroll, stop at the interesting spots, and not miss much. If you know of other patterns, send them my way. Finally, even if you prefer to read every post, please do us all a favour, imagine your reply is already in the thread structure, and look for patterns like "take it to private email", "blindingly obvious answer", "too late for the party syndrome", and k00k influenced posts.

Jick seems to have wrecked the main KoL database and restore doesn’t seem working as expected. So KoL will be down for a while. Which means for me: More time in the evenings. ;-)

Now playing: Hermit Permit -eh- Hermits Herman’s — No Milk Today

Regular readers might remember me ranting about how evil google is. It seems that they are not only evil, but also very self-ironic. Check out their newest product, conquering yet another product field:

My favourite quotes are

No personally identifiable information of any kind related to your consumption of Google Gulp or any other current or future Google Foods product will ever be given, sold, bartered, auctioned off, tossed into a late-night poker pot, or otherwise transferred in any way to any untrustworthy third party, ever, we swear. See our Privacy Policy.

and

This “limited release” beta product is available to anyone who turns in a used Google Gulp bottle cap at any local retailer. If you don’t have any Gulp caps, ask a friend to give you one.

I’m looking forward to all my mailing lists being spammed with “I have Gulp caps to give away”!

Hello Planet Debian , Steve Kemp wants a solution to magically build uploaded packages. I maintain several small Debian archives and recently needed a solution like this too. The solution needs to provide semi-automated package builds and installation. The full Debian Archive Kit (DAK) was far too heavy for my needs. I ended up creating a couple of wrapper scripts around sbuild and debarchiver to achieve this. The basic flow of packages through my archives goes like this:

1. Packages uploaded to an incoming directory (/home/sbuild/incoming/<dist_name>)
2. process_packages script scans incoming directory for each dist every minute and spawns builds (via sbuild) as necessary
3. Once packages are built site admin is emailed build logs
4. Admin checks packages and runs add-packages to add the packages to the archive
5. add-packages invokes debarchiver to do the heavy lifting and then generates the release files.

There is no support for GPG signed packages at this stage, hence the manual check before packages are added to the archive. The scripts were a quick hack a few months ago, and I’ve just hacked them again to pull all the site specific stuff out into easily modifiable variables at the top of the scripts, so hopefully I haven’t introduced any syntax errors! You will need correctly configured sbuild and debarchiver setups prior to running these scripts. If you want to use them, feel free, I’d love to know if they are useful to anyone but me. If there is some interest I’d be happy to tidy them up, package them properly and maintain them. Get them from:
http://www.mattb.net.nz/debian/misc/process_packages
http://www.mattb.net.nz/debian/misc/add-packages I run process_packages from cron with an entry like

*/1 * * * * sbuild /home/sbuild/bin/process_packages &>/dev/null
My /home/sbuild layout looks like

drwxr-xr-x 2 root sbuild 4.0K Jul 31 11:16 bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 sbuild sbuild 12K Oct 26 16:32 build
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4.0K Sep 14 12:38 chroots
drwxr-xr-x 4 sbuild sbuild 4.0K Jul 13 09:59 incoming
drwxr-xr-x 2 sbuild sbuild 24K Oct 26 16:31 logs

bin contains the scripts, build contains symlinks to the chroots, and is used as the directory to invoke sbuild from. The resulting .debs are also placed in build. chroots contains the actual distribution chroots, incoming holds a directory for each distribution to process and is scanned by process_packages. logs contains a dump of all the sbuild logs. Debarchiver should be configured to pick up packages out of the build directory. Let me know if I need to provide more details.