It's almost newyear, and people tend to do some predictions around that time about what will happen the next year and beyond. I've never done this, since I tend to find such things quite stupid. But, hell, sometimes you've just got to change your habits, so here goes:

• In december, just about every Belgian radio station will make an overview of either the most popular songs ever, or just the most popular songs of 2008.
• Also in december, just about every Belgian TV station will produce their version of "an overview of the pasts year", and broadcast that.

Fun if people get predictable. Not that I don't like such overviews, but sometimes you just want to see something interesting when you put your brain in "off" mode. In addition, 2008 will be the year I turn 30. It will most likely also be the year I move out on my own. More on that later, I guess.

In a sudden rush of stupidity, the Argentinian government decided that we should change our timezone to include DST. For those that don't know, Argentina lies almost completely in the GMT-4 zone. 20 years ago we used to have DST, switching between GMT-4 and GMT-3. But since 1990 we've been using GMT-3 as the permanent timezone for our country. Thus, noon happens at 13:00 (or even later in more western parts of the country). Now, since we are in energetic crisis, our government decided that we should go back to DST, but instead of GMT-4 and GMT-3, we are going to be GMT-3 and GMT-2. This means that during the summer noon will happen at 14:00 or later. Not only this, but they decided to do this on December 21st, passed the law on December 26th, and published it on December 28th. And the day of the switch is December 30th!. Thanks to the quick work of Clint Adams, a patch was provided, applied and uploaded to unstable today, and it's already available. After the package was uploaded, I patched Etch's version so that we could upgrade all our servers. So, in case you need to take Argentina's stupidity into account, you can currently download tzdata_2007j-3 from unstable, or download tzdata_2007j-1etch2 from:

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile stable/volatile main

Updated to reflect current situation of the package

It's noon now and half the attendees or so the day hasn't really begun. Sure, some people here at the 24C3 in Berlin are having lunch already, but most are having breakfast or not even that yet. As the Debian booth is set up (mugs are sold out, bags almost...) and there are no interesting talks for me at the moment, I'm having a second breakfast in the smokers lounge is the cellar. Officially, this is the third non smoking congress and inofficially it's the third time there is an official smoker place ;-) This time, it's a lounge with comfortable sofas, ambient light and loud music...

About four weeks ago I was contacted by Martin Michlmayr and asked if the video team could make use of some hardware donation a company wanted to sponsor. I said yes, and so last week two boxes arrived at my house: a small audio mixer, a Behringer XENYX 1202 with 12-channels and XLR and chinch inputs, which is supposed to help us improve the audio quality in small venues. The second box contained a TwinPact100, which is a video converter box. It has an SVGA-input (supporting up to 1600x1200), an SVGA-output (sending the same signal out) and DV (firewire) output (and more features we don't really care about). So for us it's basically a SVGA-passthrough box which also outputs a video stream (of a speakers laptop in our use case) over firewire. So no more capturing of slides with a normal camera, yay! Yesterday Ben Hutchings and me tested this box and found it working, then Ben also fixed an issue with dvswitch, which we use to mix different firewire video streams together, probably even as soon as FOSDEM again! Many thanks to hitflip.de for this nice donation!

When I arrived here this morning I hoped to see the BabelBox I set up last night to be still running, and it was, yay! BabelBox is a d-i setup which loops through an installation of Debian etch in 36 languages, mostly using the graphical installer. And this will be running here for approx 72 hours non-stop resulting in 289 installations without a single keystroke :) IMO it shows real nicely two of the three major strengths of d-i: internationalisation and automatisation.

I guess it's pretty unlikely that I'll find some time during the last two days of the congress to take Andre Salomons packages for the OLPC laptop and demonstrate d-i's third major feature: it's modular design. It's more likely to be an excercise for next year though (I'll arrive home on the 31st..), here is too much stuff happening. Installing babelbox was just following a good howto. In any case, there is a OLPC.de meeting planned tomorrow at 12.30 noon at the Debian booth or in the Embedded Corner. Just come along and look out for the green cluster of XOs :)

And by now it's 8 PM - time flies when you're having fun. I just noticed that my wireless connection is up since seven hours uninterrupted! Wow.

Using a bluetooth headset for giving presentations While looking for ways of flipping slides while not near the computer, I stumbled on this idea this idea, bought a cheap headset for like 10euros and started playing. Getting the headset to work with alsa It's supposed to just work, but bluez-utils in Debian has audio support disabled. I've rebuild the package with the patch found in the bug report, copied the extra configuration files as I mentioned in a followup to the bug report, and brought my Debian up to speed. Once the patched bluez-utils is in place, this is how to get the headset to work:

1. put the headset into pairing mode
2. hcitool scan (to get the address of the headset)
3. put this in ~/.asoundrc (using the address you got with hcitool scan):

   pcm.bluetooth_hw  
      type bluetooth
      device 00:11:22:33:44:55
    
   ctl.bluetooth  
      type bluetooth
      device 00:11:22:33:44:55
    
   # No idea why this is needed, but it makes aplay complain a bit
   # less, and also it makes aoss work
   pcm.bluetooth  
       type plug
       slave.pcm "bluetooth_hw"
    
   

Now, forget hcitool cc: in order to pair with the headset, the command is:

mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth moo.wav

This will trigger a funky chain of events that will eventually cause the bluetooth applet to ask you for the pin (0000 for the headsets), get things paired and activate super cow powers. Now you have an alsa sound card called 'bluetooth' that works only with some, but not all, alsa applications. mplayer works. aoss works, but not always. aplay seems to work. twinkle won't work; apparently, it's because it tries to open the device multiple times. Feeding synthesised speech to the headset Synthesised speech is done by festival. Festival works with oss. The headset works with alsa. aoss works, but not always. This is the script I'd like to run:

#!/bin/sh
warn()  
    echo -n "Attenzione: "
    if [ $1 == 1 ]
    then
        echo -n "manca un minuto"
    else
        echo -n "mancano $1 minuti"
    fi
    echo " alla fine."
 
(
    for x in 5 4 3 2 1
    do
        warn $x
        sleep 1
    done
)   festival --tts --language italian

By tweaking the sleep times and numbers a bit, it's a useful prototype that sends updates on how much time is left for the presentation. This, under aoss, does not work reliably. An alternative is to replace the festival invocation with this:

echo string   text2wave tmpfile.wav
mplayer -ao alsa:device=bluetooth tmpfile.wav

However, I found no way to tell text2wave to use Italian instead of English. I did manage, however, to get some link between festival and the headphones. At a further stage, I can write a program for the countdown that keeps the audio device open and every once in a while gets a waveform out of text2wave and feeds it to the audio device. Keeping the audio device open seems a good idea, to avoid losing the beginning of the message while the connection is established (happens with my cheap headset) and to avoid the headset to go idle and switch off. Reacting to the buttons on the headset It's supposed to be possible, but I didn't manage to find out how to do this using the normal alsa driver, now that btsco is apparently deprecated. Once I find out how to be notified of button presses, I'll try to see how to send a Page Down keystroke to OpenOffice Impress or xpdf. Voice commands sphinx2-bin seems promising, but since everyone around me is now asleep, playing with voice commands has to be postponed. Further ideas

• IRC link: send me a message on a public IRC channel, and I could head it on the headphone: nice for giving talks that people is watching remotely via streaming.
• Giving the percentage of time passed, instead (or additionally to) the time remaining.
• Linking with the presentation software and also say the number of slides remaining.
• Get the status update being spoken not just at regular intervals, but also when changing slide.
• Get the headset to read slide notes, or only the slide notes marked with a special leading keyword.

I’ve just read an interesting article in the New Yorker titled “Twilight of the Books” [1]. It started with some depressing statistics about literacy. One comment that I couldn’t figure out concerned “the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed“. The decline in literacy concerns me because I want to live in a society where everyone can contribute as equals and where all voters have the possibility of becoming well informed about the issues that affect their vote. If literacy declines far enough then fascism seems to be the inevitable result. I’m not sure whether that makes me a humanist according to the author. Below in the second part of this post (not included in the feed) I include my dictionary definition of the word, #4 is the definition most commonly used today (which is a reasonable match for my beliefs). There is some interesting information regarding basic research on the mental abilities of literate and illiterate people which suggests that people who an read are better at handling abstract concepts and hypothetical situations. The article notes that spending time on the net increases academic scores for children. It also makes the interesting claim that visiting pr0n sites increases grades, I find that difficult to believe. I wonder whether there is a difference between readers and writers in this regard. Does the typical serious net user who averages writing more than 3650 messages a year for fun (in addition to whatever email may need to be written for work) plus some blog posts and writing other web pages have different mental abilities to someone who just reads what others write? Does blogging (and other writing on your choice of topic) change your brain? What about programmers, does spending 8 hours a day writing formal rules for hypothetical mathematical situations (which is essentially what programming is about) change your brain? Are programmers going to have greater abilities for managing abstract concepts and hypothetical situations than people who have not had such experience? NB It will be difficult to determine this as people who have such skills will find programming easier and more fun so therefore a career in programming computers is self-selecting for people with such abilities. Another interesting fact is the results of research into the comprehension of a PowerPoint presentation. People who read it without an audio-visual accompanying it learned more and rated it as more interesting. Based on this my plan is that in future when attending conferences I will try and read papers which are presented BEFORE attending the lectures. Unfortunately most conferences which have papers presented seem based on the idea that you give a lecture about a topic as a teaser for your paper and assume that the audience knows nothing about it (conferences which don’t have papers outnumber the ones that do). Most Linux conferences seem based on the idea that almost no-one reads papers at all, they attend lectures and visit web sites and IRC channels afterwards. NB this comment is based on talking to people who attend conferences and my observations on attending conferences - it is not a criticism of any conferences merely an observation on cultural attitudes. Based on this information it seems reasonable to provide copies of lecture notes to the audience before the lecture. For example for a typical talk that I give to a LUG I could blog the lecture notes before the meeting and email the LUG mailing-list with the URL, people who really want to learn would hear me talk AFTER reading the notes and hopefully get the best of both forms of learning. I had been considering producing some YouTube [2] videos with instructions on how to use SE Linux. But it seems that might not be such a good idea (at least not a good enough idea to justify the amount of effort I would have to spend). The author seems to misunderstand YouTube, it is NOT about making the Internet resemble TV (where millions of mindless drones watch content created for the lowest common denominator in the audience). The AtGoogleTalks on YouTube [3] and www.ted.com are examples of high-quality free content (comparable to the best TV documentaries - the type of content which is cited as increasing the academic results of children) and the culture of creation and discussion must be a good thing. Most TV is bad because it’s one-way communication and the quality of the content is low. YouTube videos are widely discussed in email, blogs, and other written forums. The creation of the best (and often most viewed) videos would surely involve some writing. I wonder whether the benefits attributed to reading can be obtained without reading fiction. The nature of work is changing to require an increasing amount of reading and writing. The most menial work requires reading instruction manuals. Most of the best paid jobs involve a lot of reading and writing. If reading fiction isn’t required then it seems that there is little risk in the immediate future.

• [1] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=all


• [2] http://www.youtube.com


• [3] http://au.youtube.com/profile?user=AtGoogleTalks

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Tomorrow, all being well, I should receive a new desktop computer. I ordered it upon Boxing Day so the turnaround is pretty good. Right now I have two desktop machines:

yours.my.flat

This machine is occaisionally used by my partner, but primarily exists to remotely backup my various servers. It runs rsnapshot to do a full rsync of four machines every six hours.

vain.my.flat

This is my day-to-day desktop machine. It is going to be replaced, and this will be rotated into the backup machine. The machine yours will sit in a closet for a couple of months then be donated to somebody local.

As with all the machines I've bought recently the new one is coming from Novatech - (Another company whos website has a suprising hostname.) The interesting parts of the spec are :

• AMD X2 4200 processor
• 2 x 500Gb SATA drives
• 4Gb memory

The biggest difference to me will be the significantly increased disk space which means that I'll be able to remove the external 120Gb USB hard drive I currently house my MP3 collection upon. By retiring vain and moving my current desktop machine to be the "random guest machine" and backup host I'll also have a lot more space for storing backups upon. (Full database backups every six hours; I'm paranoid...) Having 4Gb of memory will also mean that I can run more than 2 or 3 Xen guests at the same time. My plan is to setup at least the following guests:

• sarge.security-build.xen
• etch32.security-build.xen
• etch64.security-build.xen
• etch32.desktop.xen
• etch64.desktop.xen

The desktop machines will run GDM / X11 and will be available for logins via xdmcp - so that I can have a fully seperate working environment which is pristine and easily regenerated. Giving 5 xen instances 256Mb of memory each will leave me with close to 3Gb of disk for the host and that is three times what I hav enow! All in all I'm looking forward to the new machine enormously a bargain at ~ £290.

Until today, my workflow for handling debian/changelog was:

  % dch -i -D UNRELEASED
    (or dch -v X -D UNRELEASED)
  % dch -t
  ...
  % dch -t
  % dch -r

The first call opens a new changelog entry with distribution set to UNRELEASED, then each dch -t call adds successive changelog lines (the -t makes dch leave the trailer line untouched, which I find very useful, since it reduces noise in diffs, particulary in multi-maintainer packages), and finally dch -r changes the distribution from UNRELEASED to unstable, and updates the trailer line. While preparing this blog entry, which was about dch -t only, recommending it for everybody, I found that the above workflow is nicely automated for you if you use --release-heuristic changelog, or set DEBCHANGE_RELEASE_HEURISTIC=changelog in ~/.devscripts. Automated as in, just running dch will open a new entry if appropriate (that is, if the latest entry is not UNRELEASED), or will add new lines defaulting to -t. So the workflow now is:

  % dch
    (or dch -v X)
  % dch
  ...
  % dch
  % dch -r

Kudos to Guillem and Joey for #435980 and #448795, and the devscripts maintainers, of course.

Trolltech has released Qt4.4.0 technical preview (tp1). This release introduces new features like phonon (multimedia framework) with the gstreamer plugin, webkit (web browser engine), xmlpatterns (XQuery and XPath engine), help system with QtClucene (Qt wrapper around clucene), etc … and some enhancements to current modules. It comes with new demos (browser using webkit, mediaplayer using phonon and embeddeddialogs) and new examples (help, ipc, phonon, qtconcurrent and xmlpatterns). It’s worth to take a look closer from a packager point of view:

• phonon can be found in KDE svn and webkit can be found on WebKit svn.

=> It means different release schedule and sources not always synced. It seems we need to choose which branch we want to package (TT/KDE and TT/WebKit).

• xmlpatterns module depends on exceptions support.

=> So far, we build Qt without exceptions support. If you want the xmlpatterns module, you need to enable exceptions support

• a change on Qt4.4.0 breaks ABI on mips architecture.

=> nobody is perfect… If you want to play with this release, you can find packages for Debian (sources and amd64 build at the moment) on: http://people.debian.org/~fabo/debian/qt4-x11_4.4.0~tp1-1/ the regular snaphot of the QWebView (done in 3s): As far as i can see, Qt4.4.0 will rock !

my blog has moved to: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog BIG FAT WARNING: my blog has moved to a new location, namely: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog (following my homepage which is now located at http://upsilon.cc/~zack). Redirects are in place to avoid suddenly un-subscribing people feed readers, by they will be removed sooner or later, so please update your feed readers. Here is a quick link to the new RSS feed URL: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/index.rss. If you prefer, now there is even an Atom feed URL: http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/index.atom. A functional improvement over the previous location is that discussion pages work again, so you can now leave comments to my posts in wiki-style using them (though you will need to register or have an openid account).

my christmas gift: a new homepage Funnily enough, while Dato was migrating his homepage to ikiwiki, I was doing the same as my own personal Xmas gift to myself. I moved from the bononia.it domain to upsilon.cc (a virtual host machine on slicehost.com), where you can now see my shiny new homepage. The migration was easy, though quite boring, especially the part of adding redirects. Indeed, I have set up almost all redirects, including the blog feed, but at the point where I've reorganized my initial blog posts (which weren't following the YEAR/MONTH/NAME scheme) I gave up in setting up the redirects for that. That means that my ancient blog posts (including some about the VCS fields) will have some 404 on Google for some time: that's life, that's the Web. I now also have a more specific feed for Planet Debian on my blog, and playing with ikiwiki's show parameter for blogging I'll do my best to avoid flooding. Follows a big fat warning post to inform people about the blog new feed ...

Hope you had a good Christmas Day if you celebrate it. The cycling starts again already: RAI Sport Sat (free-to-air 13e) have highlights of today’s seventh Cyclocross World Cup event from Hofstade Belgium at 22:30 CET today (Wednesday). No idea whether it will be repeated… my recent predictions seem to have been a bit wrong. Hofstade is the sixth elite men’s event to actually happen, after the cancellation of their race at the Milan round. Sven Nys of Belgium leads the elite men’s rankings by almost 500 points from compatriots Bart Wellens and Klaas Vantornout. Daphny van den Brand of the Netherlands leads the elite women by 340 points from USA’s Katherine Compton. 300 points for a win, then 260, 220, 190, 170, and so on. The contests aren’t over yet. Update: It’s on again 22:30 CET today (Thursday) and repeated at 11:10 tomorrow (Friday) according to teletext.

My thesis is about data mining, clustering of correlated data in high dimensional vector spaces, to be a bit more precise.In detail, I'm working on methods to improve upon existing clustering algorithms such as 4C (Computing Clusters of Correlation Connected Objects) and ERiC (On Exploring Complex Relationships of Correlation Clusters), where you need to pick some parameters (e.g. k for a k nearest neighbour based approach) appropriately.My approach is twofold. On one hand, I'm improving upon the traditional covariance based correlation (which is quite sensitive to noise), so the parameters become easier to pick, on the other hand I'm working on an approach to automatically fine-tune the parameters to further improve stability.For testing my computations I needed a visualization of this data. I was considering using gnuplot (and in fact I'm using gnuplot a lot), but for some situation I needed animation capabilities, and thats where gnuplot becomes really messy.So I decided to dive into SVG and Javascript. Here's my first SVG project:Visualizing kNN correlation in SVG with Javascript(Internet Exploder is not supported. I don't have Windows, and for all I know it doesn't really support SVG. Use a Gecko-based browser such as Firefox, Opera and Safari (at least on Windows) also seem to work. I didn't get it to work on kHTML/Konqueror/Webkit. I'm just doing this for myself, so I have no need to support other browsers.)It's a 3D dataset, consisting of 300 points. 100 points are noise, 100 points are in a 2D cluster (green) and 100 points are on a 1D cluster embedded into this plane (I'm working on algorithms that support hierarchical clusters, so I needed a dataset with this property!).There are two buttons in the UI, one toggles rotation, the other one toggles the playback of "k". It will cycle k through a range of about 3-200. When offset hits 20 (so k would be 22 or 23), the main correlation vectors - the big blue lines - already point along the 1D cluster. At an offset of around 80 they have already diverged quite a bit from the 1D cluster - at this point, the correlation is seeing the 2D plane quite well already.I could also show you the behaviour for points in the 2D plane (but outside of the 1D cluster) and noise points.We're preparing a paper for SSDBM 2008.[Update: Safari works at least on Windows]

I’m glad to have found a new maintainer for Amarok, since I now obviously use Minirok to reproduce music. From the work I’ve seen him do in other packages and in Amarok recently, Modestas is competent and diligent, I’m sure Amarok users will know to appreciate that!

As I wrote earlier, I bought an Eee PC to use on the bus. Initially, I only used it offline to do some Debian packaging and blogging, but I soon discovered that I could do a few things online on the many open networks on my daily commute. While the connections are normally brief in good traffic conditions, even a few seconds here and there is enough to participate in irc discussions. Manually connecting to each got old very quickly. So, to automate those connections I settled on wpa_supplicant, (wpasupplicant is the Debian package name,) which is quite easy to set up in roaming mode, as outlined in /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/README.modes.gz. All you need is the following in /etc/network/interfaces:

allow-hotplug ath0
iface ath0 inet manual
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Then create your wpa_supplicant.conf as follows:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network= 
     key_mgmt=NONE
 

That’s it. You can now roam from one open network to the next and the supplicant will connect you to each one in turn. I have used this to reconnect to my screen session each time the bus slows down for a stop or gets stuck in traffic to carry on conversations on irc for the whole length of the commute. If you also connect to networks requiring authentication, you’ll need to add a “network” clause for each network. See /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant/examples/ for help with that, particularly the annotated conf file, README.wpa_supplicant.conf.gz. For finer control over the process, I use sudo wpa_cli so i can:

• keep an eye on what networks are around: scan, then scan_results,
• disconnect from a network once I know it’s out of range
• and reassociate as needed.

The only things that I haven’t figured out how to do yet are to make the process of switching from one network to the next a bit faster (it normally takes about a minute; precious seconds of online time are lost when the bus is in motion,) and to blacklist certain essids, e.g. commercial hotspots that make you pay before they’ll route your packets to the Internet. For the first problem, I have already tweaked my dhcp settings, which helps a bit. For the second, I tried adding network blocks for specific networks and setting them to a lower priority, but that doesn’t work because then the ‘catch all’ open network block kicks in and picks them up anyway.

A couple months ago, I got an iPhone, like I wanted. Today, I dropped it flat on its face onto a tile floor, and the bottom half of the touch screen no longer responded. So this afternoon, Christmas Eve, I went to the Apple store at 5pm to try to get it fixed, realizing at the time how stupid and unlikely that was. To my great surprise, the store was open, mostly empty, and I was given a brand new iPhone on the spot. I took it home and connected it to my Macbook, and iTunes asked me if I wanted to restore my old profile. A short sync later and it’s indistinguishable from my old iPhone, pre-drop. It even remembered which websites I had open! It also had the pictures I had taken with the phone but hadn’t yet copied off of the computer. So now I love my iPhone even more because I don’t care if it breaks; the new one will be identical to the old one in every way. Today ends week eight of my forty-eight week Invisalign treatment. I originally was looking at orthodontic work to correct the crowding on my lower teeth, and have been considering getting either braces or Invisalign for about four years now. I’ve talked to several dentist and orthodontists, and the ones who offer both braces and Invisalign have tried to persuade me to get braces instead. The main reasons they’ve pushed braces are that they’re cheaper, they’ll probably take less time, and they’ll be able to correct more things, such as my overbite. I decided to go with Invisalign instead for several reasons: vanity, comfort, convenience, and protection. Invisalign so far has been much more comfortable than braces were, especially since they don’t cut at my lips and gums like braces did. I can eat whatever I want, unlike with braces, since the retainers come off while I eat. And I grind my teeth at night, so the Invisalign gets worn down instead of my teeth. The biggest inconvenience so far with Invisalign is that I’ve stopped snacking, since there’s such a huge time cost involved with brushing my teeth before putting them back on, and I’m not supposed to have them off for more than two hours per day.

Well I've been in Devon for the past week, and will remain here for another week. During that time I've averaged about ten minutes of online time a day! So far things are going well, but it will be wierd spending time with another family over Christmas. Still I've been vaguely productive. I've released a new version of chronicle - which has the CGI support for leaving comments upon my entries. (TODO: Reinstate some previous comments for Martin Krafft) One thing I'd not anticipated was the amount of spam I'd start recieving. The peak so far was 40+ comments a day, all with random URLs. I deleted them manually for the first day - but now I've written a shell script or two to classify comments via the spamfilter I use for handling email. I'm not 100% sure I should have done that. I suspect that over time I will find better results if I actually have a distinct "blog spam" and "blog ham" corpus - rather than risk confusion over "email" and "blog" texts to classify. Still I shall wait and see. The only thing that I think I want to do now is add a bit more fine control over the comment process, so the choice is not just between comments being globally on, or globally off. A nice middle-ground where I could say "Comments enabled for entries posted within the past two weeks or so". Anyway thats my quota for today. Now I have to walk the family dog ..

Spamassassin supposedly can precompile rules to allow faster operation. It compiles an optimized matching automaton that will process all the regular expressions in parallel.Anyway, in order to use it, you need to manuall install some dependencies. They probably can't be introduced as real dependencies to not enforce them upon people who don't want to use this feature. So far, I've identified

aptitude install re2c gcc libc6-dev make

I'm aware that many people will have the libc6-dev and gcc stuff already installed, and the re2c dependency is well-documented. But I actually had removed the C compiler from my mail server.

I joined HP's Open Source and Linux Organization (OSLO) at the beginning of the month as an Open Source Community Expert. I spent the last three weeks in Ft. Collins for some training and to get to know the team, but normally I'll be working from home in Europe. The main focus of my work will be governance issues related to the deployment of FOSS in enterprise environments. However, I've already started to get involved in a number of other areas I'm interested in, such as community relations. I'm pretty excited about my new position because it is a good fit for my skills and interests.