FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks. Are you interested in giving a talk about open source and Qt, KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, mobile development, applications that enhance desktops and/or web? We have extended the deadline for a few more days, until January 8th. If you want to submit a talk proposal, hurry up! I have to say I am very surprised to see very few Qt/KDE talk proposals. Is there nothing interesting the Qt and KDE world have to say to 5,000+ people?
There is more information in the Call for Talks we published a couple of months. If you are interested in Qt/KDE, come visit us at the KDE booth. If you add yourself to the KDE FOSDEM 2012 wiki page, we will be able to better organize the usual dinner on Sunday and/or smaller meetings for special interest groups .

Fenella Wagener wrote an article for the Herald Sun about an Autistic girl who won the best personality award from the controversial new Australian children s beauty pageant [1]. The girl s mother is complaining that an Autistic girl shouldn t win a prize for personality and is critizing the pageant organisers. A beauty contest involves queuing, being quiet, appearing on stage, wearing cosmetics and unusual/uncomfortable clothes. It probably also involves having someone else assist with dressing and applying cosmetics (being touched by another person). These are all things which tend to be difficult or impossible for Autistic kids. So any girl who can get on stage wearing make-up can probably do whatever is required to avoid being obviously excluded from a personality prize. As any such prize has to be largely subjective I don t think it would ever be possible to prove that someone was the correct choice for the winner, it would merely be possible to prove that some candidates excluded themselves. But whether the girl deserved to win isn t the real issue here. I think that beauty pageants should be restricted to adults, merely entering a child in such a contest is bad enough, but making nasty public statements about a child is horrible. If other children made a Facebook page claiming that the girl in question didn t deserve to win a best personality prize it would probably be reported as cyber-bullying. I don t think that publishing the name or photo of the girl in question is in the public interest either. Many news sites that have picked up the story have shown the same lack of journalistic ethics so now the girl has some high traffic sites with her name linked to this story, it seems unlikely that anything good she might do in the near future will get a higher ranking for her name in search engines. So any time she searches for her name on Google (which most people do regularly) she will be reminded that her mother thinks she has some sort of defective personality because she is Autistic. High school is generally bad for almost everyone on the Autism Spectrum. Presumably any parent who would abuse their child by allowing such an article to be published would also send them to a regular school (as opposed to Home Schooling which is probably the only good option for Autistic kids in Australia). I m sure that the standard practice at every high school nowadays is that the kids all use Google to discover things to tease each other about. So in a few years the Herald Sun article will probably be the basis of a high school bullying campaign. The girl in question is only 9, so she s got another 6 or 7 years before she can legally leave her mother. In Australia 16 is the minimum legal age to live without parents and the police won t forcibly return runaway children who are almost 16. The Journalistic Code of Ethics Here is a link to the Australian Media Alliance code of Journalistic Ethics [2]. Section 8 includes Never exploit a person s vulnerability or ignorance of media practice . I think that publishing the name and photograph of a 9yo girl in a way that is likely to lead to bullying in a few years is a clear example of exploiting a vulnerable person. The code of ethics has a guidance clause which says Only substantial advancement of the public interest or risk of substantial harm to people allows any standard to be overridden . Even if it was a proven fact that a beauty pageant was issuing awards to unqualified children there would not be any substantial advancement of the public interest in publishing that. Beauty Contests are Evil The Australian has an article about the same beauty contest by Caroline Overington which quotes adolescent and child psychotherapist Collett Smart calling for government intervention [3]. Catherine Manning has written a good article explaining some of the reasons for opposing child beauty pageants [4]. The American Psychological Association has published a report on the Sexualization of Girls [5], they have lots of references to psychological research which gives a variety of reasons for opposing child beauty contests. IMHO each of the reasons alone should be sufficient to convince people that child beauty pageants are bad. Finally the pictures of contestants who are less than 10yo but made up to look like they are 20+ are rather disturbing.

• [1] http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/fashion/child-beauty-pageant-under-for-awarding-autistic-girl-tahnee-myles-best-personailty/story-e6frfn7i-1226106345484
• [2] http://www.alliance.org.au/code-of-ethics.html
• [3] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/ugly-truth-about-beauty-pageants/story-e6frg6z6-1226106209926
• [4] http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12506
• [5] http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report.aspx

Related posts:

1. Child Abuse and Censorship In Australia we are currently in the middle of a...
2. Autism Awareness and the Free Software Community It s Autism Awareness Month April is Autism Awareness month, there...
3. Autism, Food, etc James Purser wrote Stop Using Autism to Push Your Own...

* This post is almost translation of my this post on Gujarati blog (with some corrections and additions etc). If you re not interested in Wikipedia, move on. So, as I mentioned here and here, Wikipedians in Ahmedabad planned event: Wikipedia Takes Ahmedabad. We gathered at Gandhi Ashram. Met Noopur again and some volunteers were already there at 8 AM. I never been to Ashram since long time. This place has something, you know it, folks! People started coming around 8.30 and we quickly divided them based upon their interests on 4 routes we already decided. Most of people went to old city s route 1 and our route 2 had odd 6 (and 2 coordinaters) people only. Good. Less is always good. Noopur and Anirudh gave introduction to wikipedia, creative commons license and some basic rules and todo. We then left for Swaminarayan Temple at Sahibaug. We asked for permission to take photographs and we got it after meeting main swamiji there along with nice sweets and he promised to send professional picture for wikipedia to use. We then left for Delhi Darwaja. Ahmedabad has numbers of old fort gates. We covered some of them and moved to Kalupur Railway Station. Palak and Chirag were caught by traffic police and we should take care of following rules from next time. Point noted for next photowalk. We then left for Zulta Minar. This is well known for its carving and some myths associated with it. We discussed some points regarding uploading pictures, categories and left for Raipur Darwaja. This place is famous for Bhajiyas. We didn t taste it but had again fun taking pictures, talking to police and had smile before we leave for home. Only bad thing I ve got in this walk is that due to some or other reason my phone s touch screen seems stopped working That s another topic, but I couldn t call Noopur/Anirudh for lunch etc due to that You can view all uploaded pictures at: Categories: Ahmedabad 1 Most of Ahmedabad is covered due to event. Time to write articles?

A bit over a year ago, I wrote about how an incredible number of Android tablets on the market were in violation of the terms of the GPL. I've had rather a lot else to do since then so it's now awfully out of date - but taking a quick browse through the current stack of cheaper devices indicates that things aren't all that much better. We've got source code for some chipsets that were missing it before, but to compensate we've got a whole bunch of new hardware that's entirely lacking. It's all pretty poor, really.

At the time, I wrote the following:

"(Side note: People sometimes ask why Google aren't doing more to prevent infringing devices. For the vast majority of these cases, Google's sole contribution has been to put Android source code on a public website. Red Hat own more of the infringing code than Google do. There's no real reason why Google should be the ones taking the lead role here, and there's fairly sound business reasons why it's not in their interest to do so)"

Factually speaking, nothing's changed. Each of these devices contains code owned by Google, and Google could absolutely take legal action against the vendors. Equally, so could Red Hat, Intel, Nokia and dozens of other companies who hold copyright on portions of the code carried on these devices, and so could thousands of individuals around the world. Nobody's obliged to enforce their copyrights, and in the absence of anyone else doing so it's unreasonable to insist that Google should do it.

However.

Google gives Android away. This seems like an odd thing for them to do, given that it's a significant engineering effort and costs a lot of money to produce. But remember what Android brings to Google - it's a platform with a well-integrated mechanism for distributing advertising to users. Scanning the market shows a huge number of ad-supported apps, and Google's getting money for every single one of those that gets shown. The more Android devices, the bigger the market for apps - and the wider their advertising reach.

In other words: unscrupulous hardware vendors save money by ignoring their GPL obligations. This lets them appeal on price, increasing the number of Android devices in use and increasing Google's profits. Google makes money off other people's violation of the GPL.

Could Google do anything to stop this? Yes. They could sue for copyright infringement, but that kind of thing's time consuming and awkward and any argument about the GPL always seems to end up as a big argument involving conspiracy theories. Instead, Google could attach some extra conditions to the Android trademark. Requiring that the trademark only be attached to GPL-compliant products ought to allow Google to take advantage of the existing well-tested mechanisms for seizing counterfeit goods, providing a direct economic incentive for companies to come into compliance. For added marks, they could restrict the adwords code to devices that use the trademark - if the vendor removes the trademark, applications depending on the adwords functionality would refuse to run and Google wouldn't make money off the infringing hardware.

Or, of course, they could just carry on making extra money as a result of vendors denying users the freedoms granted by the copyright holders. Although that sounds kind of evil to me.

Edit: You probably also want to read the followup post here.

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A discussion a couple of days ago about DPI detection (which is best summarised by this and this and I am not having this discussion again) made me remember a chain of other awful things about consumer displays and EDID and there not being enough gin in the world, and reading various bits of the internet and wikipedia seemed to indicate that almost everybody who's written about this has issues with either (a) technology or (b) English, so I might as well write something.

The first problem is unique (I hope) to 720p LCD TVs. 720p is an HD broadcast standard that's defined as having a resolution of 1280x720. A 720p TV is able to display that image without any downscaling. So, naively, you'd expect them to have 1280x720 displays. Now obviously I wouldn't bother mentioning this unless there was some kind of hilarious insanity involved, so you'll be entirely unsurprised when I tell you that most actually have 1366x768 displays. So your 720p content has to be upscaled to fill the screen anyway, but given that you'd have to do the same for displaying 720p content on a 1920x1080 device this isn't the worst thing ever in the world. No, it's more subtle than that.

EDID is a standard for a blob of data that allows a display device to express its capabilities to a video source in order to ensure that an appropriate mode is negotiated. It allows resolutions to be expressed in a bunch of ways - you can set a bunch of bits to indicate which standard modes you support (1366x768 is not one of these standard modes), you can express the standard timing resolution (the horizontal resolution divided by 8, followed by an aspect ratio) and you can express a detailed timing block (a full description of a supported resolution).

1366/8 = 170.75. Hm.

Ok, so 1366x768 can't be expressed in the standard timing resolution block. The closest you can provide for the horizontal resolution is either 1360 or 1368. You also can't supply a vertical resolution - all you can do is say that it's a 16:9 mode. For 1360, that ends up being 765. For 1368, that ends up being 769.

It's ok, though, because you can just put this in the detailed timing block, except it turns out that basically no TVs do, probably because the people making them are the ones who've taken all the gin.

So what we end up with is a bunch of hardware that people assume is 1280x720, but is actually 1366x768, except they're telling your computer that they're either 1360x765 or 1368x769. And you're probably running an OS that's doing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, which requires that the hardware be able to address the pixels directly which is obviously difficult if you think the screen is one size and actually it's another. Thankfully Linux takes care of you here, and this code makes everything ok. Phew, eh?

But ha ha, no, it's worse than that. And the rest applies to 1080p ones as well.

Back in the old days when TV signals were analogue and got turned into a picture by a bunch of magnets waving a beam of electrons about all over the place, it was impossible to guarantee that all TV sets were adjusted correctly and so you couldn't assume that the edges of a picture would actually be visible to the viewer. In order to put text on screen without risking bits of it being lost, you had to steer clear of the edges. Over time this became roughly standardised and the areas of the signal that weren't expected to be displayed were called overscan. Now, of course, we're in a mostly digital world and such things can be ignored, except that when digital TVs first appeared they were mostly used to watch analogue signals so still needed to overscan because otherwise you'd have the titles floating weirdly in the middle of the screen rather than towards the edges, and so because it's never possible to kill technology that's escaped into the wild we're stuck with it.

tl;dr - Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

So you plug your computer into a TV and even though you know what the resolution really is you still don't get to address the individual pixels. Even worse, the edges of your screen are missing.

The best thing about overscan is that it's not rigorously standardised - different broadcast bodies have different recommendations, but you're then still at the mercy of what your TV vendor decided to implement. So what usually happens is that graphics vendors have some way in their drivers to compensate for overscan, which involves you manually setting the degree of overscan that your TV provides. This works very simply - you take your 1920x1080 framebuffer and draw different sized black borders until the edge of your desktop lines up with the edge of your TV. The best bit about this is that while you're still scanning out a 1920x1080 mode, your desktop has now shrunk to something more like 1728x972 and your TV is then scaling it back up to 1920x1080. Once again, you lose.

The HDMI spec actually defines an extension block for EDID that indicates whether the display will overscan or not, but doesn't provide any way to work out how much it'll overscan. We haven't seen many of those in the wild. It's also possible to send an HDMI information frame that indicates whether or not the video source is expecting to be overscanned or not, but (a) we don't do that and (b) it'll probably be ignored even if we did, because who ever tests this stuff. The HDMI spec also says that the default behaviour for 1920x1080 (but not 1366x768) should be to assume overscan. Charming.

The best thing about all of this is that the same TV will often have different behaviour depending on whether you connect via DVI or HDMI, but some TVs will still overscan DVI. Some TVs have options in the menu to disable overscan and others don't. Some monitors will overscan if you feed them an HD resolution over HDMI, so if you have HD content and don't want to lose the edges then your hardware needs to scale it down and let the display scale it back up again. It's all awful. I recommend you drink until everything's already blurry and then none of this will matter.

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Via Boing Boing, I stumbled across an excellent audio/visual project called instagr/am/bient: 25 ambient pieces of music inspired by 25 photos on the instagram photo service. The original upload featured a high-resolution PDF of the pictures, with MP3 audio and low-quality embedded copies of each picture as each track's artwork. I was a little disappointed about this, as I thought the tracks would be best appreciated next to the higher-quality picture that inspired them. So, I fixed it: Instagr/am/bient (HD images) This was possible thanks the liberal licensing of the original, but also two excellent pieces of software: pdfimages (from the poppler-utils package) and eyeD3, which made it not just possible but trivial. See also the 9.5M accompanying PDF. I do like what people are creating with instagram; I also like the "tumble-blog" approach to sharing similar images. I occasionally rotate the indexpics on my site; perhaps I should do so more often, and publish the new ones on my blog, too.

I use Google Calendar to manage my calendars, and I really missed something to warn me whenever I have an appointment with an alert set. So here is an example of a Python program to do such a thing. It is written using the Google Data APIs Python client library and pynotify. I'll detail the code here, so you can build your own and adapt it to your needs. First, we need to import GTK+ and pynotify, and initialize it.

import gtk
import pynotify
pynotify.init(sys.argv[0])

Then, we need to import gdata Calendar API and connect to the calendar. I'll use the simple email/password way to login, which is clearly not the best, but it's also the simplest. Feel free to use OAuth 2.0. :-)

calendar_service = gdata.calendar.service.CalendarService()
calendar_service.email = 'mygooglelogin'
calendar_service.password = 'mygooglepassword'
calendar_service.ProgrammaticLogin()

Now we're ready to request stuff and notify! First, request the events from the default calendar.

feed = calendar_service.GetCalendarEventFeed()

Now we can iterate over feed and do various checks.

for event in feed.entry:
    # If the event status is not confirmed, go to the next event.
    if event.event_status.value != "CONFIRMED":
        continue
    # Now iterate over all the event dates (usually it has one)
    for when in event.when:
        # Parse start and end time
        try:
            start_time = datetime.datetime.strptime(when.start_time.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
            end_time = datetime.datetime.strptime(when.end_time.split(".")[0], "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S")
        except ValueError:
            # ValueError happens on parsing error. Parsing errors
            # usually happen for "all day" events since they have
            # not time, but we do not care about this events.
            continue
        now = datetime.datetime.now()
        # Check that the event hasn't already ended
        if end_time > now:
            # Check each alert
            for reminder in when.reminder:
                # We handle only reminders with method "alert"
                # and whose start time minus the reminder delay has passed
                if reminder.method == "alert" \
                        and start_time - datetime.timedelta(0, 60 * int(reminder.minutes)) < now:
                    # Build the notification
                    notification = pynotify.Notification(summary=event.title.text,
                                                         message=event.content.text)
                    # Set an icon from the GTK+ stock icons
                    notification.set_icon_from_pixbuf(gtk.Label().render_icon(gtk.STOCK_DIALOG_INFO,
                                                                              gtk.ICON_SIZE_LARGE_TOOLBAR))
                    notification.set_timeout(0)
                    # Show the notification
                    notification.show()

Running this program, you should see a notification if an appointment has an alert to be raised at that time. This should be enough to start to build something. If you don't want to program this into Python, you might want to take a look at gcalcli.

A few days ago, I pushed out version 2.11.13 of the Geode X driver. This is the driver used by the OLPC XO-1, by a plethora of thin clients such as the ThinCan, by low-power desktops such as the Linutop and by a few notebooks such as the eCaf EC800. While this release indeed features a few bugfixes (mainly to keep this driver compilable on the latest X server), the lion's share of the changes involve a complete overhaul of the build scripts, courtesy of Gaetan Nadon. The key motivation for this overhaul was to acknowledge the efforts made by third-party contributors to make the driver compile on BSD variants. Sure enough, this release finally compiles on FreeBSD and, low and behold, on Hurd. However, the hybrid nature of Debian's FreeBSD kernel-based GNU operating system variant posed an additional challenge, because it provides usable support for Video for Linux version 2 (V4L2), but without the full complement of Linux definitions. This resulted in one post-release commit (included in Debian and Ubuntu package 2.11.13-2), following which my assertion that we could now safely define this package as Architecture: any-i386 finally proved to be a safe one for Debian-based operating systems. At this point, I'm curious as to how many more operating systems, especialy BSD variants, can finally use this driver. Patches to further improve support of non-Linux systems are welcome.

GTA01 and GTA02 lovers should take a look at GTA04 project. For those who want to own one, it's time to act. It's not so affordable, but for a small production device it's not bad at all. Note that GTA04 is a motherboard replacement for the Neo Freerunner (GTA02) or the Openmoko Neo 1973 (GTA01). You need such a device to install the new motherboard. Default rootfs is Debian Squeeze + LXDE. Other Debian-based projects like Qtmoko have also been ported.

Don Marti wrote an amusing post about the lack of standards for Android phones and the fact that the iPhone has a better accessory market as a result [1]. I d like to see some Android phones get standardised in a similar manner to the PC. The big thing about the IBM PC compatible market was that they all booted the same way, ran the same OS and applications, had the same expansion options, connectors, etc. The early PCs sucked in many ways (there were many other desktop computers in the 80 s that were better in various ways) but the larger market made the PC win. The PC even killed the Mac! This is something we should remember now when discussing the iPhone. I d like to see different Android phones that can run the same OS with the same boot loader. Having HTC, LG, Samsung, and others all sell phones that can run the same version of CyanogenMod and have the same recovery options if a mistake is made when loading CyanogenMod shouldn t be any more difficult than having IBM, Compaq, HP, DEC, Dell, and others selling PCs that run the same versions of all the OSs of the day and had the same recovery options. Then there should be options for common case sizes. From casual browsing in phone stores it seems that most phones on sale in Australia are of a tablet form without a hardware keyboard, they have a USB/charger socket, an audio socket, and hardware buttons for power, volume up/down, and home with the settings and back buttons being through the touch-screen on the Galaxy S but hardware in most others. A hardware button to take a picture is available in some phones. The variation in phone case design doesn t seem to be that great and there seems to be a good possibility for a few standards for common formats, EG large tablet, small tablet, and large tablet with hardware keyboard. The phone manufacturers are currently competing on stupid things like how thin a phone can be while ignoring real concerns of users such as having a phone that can last for 24 hours without being charged! But they could just as easily compete on ways of filling a standard case size, with options for screen resolution, camera capabilities, CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, etc. There could also be ways of making a standard case with several options, EG having an option for a camera that extends from the back of the case for a longer focal length such an option wouldn t require much design work for a second version of anything that might connect to the phone. Also standards would need to apply for a reasonable period of time. One advantage that Apple has is that it has only released a few versions of the iPhone and each has been on sale for a reasonable amount of time (3 different sizes of case in 4 years). Some of the Android phones seem to only be on sale in mass quantities for a few months before being outdated, at which time many of the stores will stop getting stock of matching accessories. Finally I d be a lot happier if there was good support for running multiple Android phones with the same configuration. Then I could buy a cheap waterproof phone for use at the beach and synchronise all the configuration before leaving home. This is a feature that would be good for manufacturers as it would drive the average rate of phone ownership to something greater than 1 phone per person.

• [1] http://zgp.org/~dmarti/misc/little-android-phone-why-so-sad/

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (364.18 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg and Multiarch I had some hope to have a multiarch-enabled dpkg in sid for Christmas as Guillem told me that it was realistic. Alas Guillem got sick. We re in January and we re still not there. While some of Guillem s commits in December were related to multi-arch, the size of his pu/multiarch/master branch did not really shrink. We still have 36 commits to merge most of the work he did was refactoring some parts of the code that were already merged. And he initiated some discussion on interface changes. I participated to those discussions hoping to bring them to a quick resolution. I m still maintaining my own pu/multiarch/full branch, it is based on Guillem s branch but with further fixes that I developed and that he has not yet merged and with a change reverted (Guillem s branch allows crossgrading packages between different architectures while dpkg does not manage this correctly yet). I can only hope that January will be the last month of this never-ending saga. It s been one year since I started working on this project. Misc dpkg work I reviewed (and later merged) a patch of Kees Cook to enhance dpkg-buildflags so that it can report which hardening features are enabled. This feature might then be used by tools like lintian to detect missing hardening features. I mentored Gianluca Ciccarelli who is trying to enhance dpkg-maintscript-helper to take care of replacing a directory by a symlink and vice-versa. I took care of #651993 so that dpkg-mergechangelogs doesn t fail when it encounters an invalid version in the changelog, and of #652414 so that dpkg-source --commit accepts a relative filename when a patch file is explicitly given. Guillem also merged a fix I developed for LP#369898. Packaging work WordPress 3.3 came out so I immediately packaged it. Despite my upstream bug report, they did not update their GPL compliance page which offers the corresponding sources for what s bundled in the tarball. So I hunted for the required sources myself, and bundled them in the debian.tar.xz of the Debian source package. It s a rather crude solution but this allowed me to close the release critical bug #646729 and to reintroduce the Flash files that were dropped in the past which is great since the Flash-based file uploader is nicer than the one using the browser s file field. Quilt 0.50 came out after 2 years of (slow) development. The Debian package has many patches and several of them had to be updated to cope with the new upstream release. Fortunately some of them were also merged upstream. It still took an entire morning to complete this update. I also converted the packaging from CDBS to dh with a short rules file. Zim 0.54 came out and I immediately updated the package since it fixed a bug that was annoying me. Review of the ledgersmb packaging As the sql-ledger maintainer (and a user of this software for my accounting), I have been hoping to get ledgersmb packaged as a possible replacement for it. I have been following the various efforts initiated over time but none of them resulted in a real package in Debian. This is a real pity so I tried to fix this by offering to sponsor package uploads. That s why I did a first review of the packaging. It took several hours because you have to explain everything that s not good enough. I also filed a wishlist bug against lintian (#652963) to suggest that lintian should detect improper usage of dpkg-statoverride (this is a mistake that was present in the package that I reviewed). nautilus-dropbox work I wanted to polish the package in time for the Ubuntu LTS release and since Debian Import Freeze is in January, I implemented some of the important fixes that I wanted. The Debian package diverges from upstream in that the non-free binaries are installed in /var/lib/dropbox/ instead of $HOME.
Due to a bug, the files were not properly root-owned so I first fixed this (unpacking the tarball as root lead to reuse of the embedded user & group information, and those information changed recently on the Dropbox side apparently). Then we recently identified other problems related to proxy handling (see #651065). I fixed this too because it s relatively frequent that the initial download triggered during the package configuration fails and in that case it s the user that will re-trigger a package download after having given the appropriate credentials through PackageKit. Without my fix, usage of pkexec would imply the loss of the http_proxy environment variable and thus it would not be possible for a user to download through a proxy. Last but not least I reorganized the Debian specific patches to better separate what can and should be merged upstream, from the changes that upstream doesn t want. Unfortunately Dropbox insists on being able to auto-update their non-free binaries, they are, thus, against the installation under /var/lib/dropbox and the corresponding changes. Book update We re making decent progress in the translation of the Debian Administrator s Handbook, about 6 chapters are already translated (not yet reviewed though). The liberation campaign is also (slowly) going forward. We re at 67% now (thanks to 90 new supporters!) while we were only at 60% at the start of December. Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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<source src="http://www.braincells.com/debian/images/jaldhar_jeopardy_howdy.mpg" type="video/mpeg">
<source src="http://www.braincells.com/debian/images/jaldhar_jeopardy_howdy.ogv" type="video/ogg">
HTML 5 Video does not seem to be supported by your browser. Download the video of my Jeopardy! "Hometown Howdy" here (MPG format) or here (OGG format). </video> Some time ago, I mentioned auditioning for Jeopardy!, Americas top TV quiz show. I didn't hear back from the producers for quite a while so I assumed I hadn't been selected but then suddenly one day in October I got a call inviting me to come out to Sony Studios in Culver City California for a taping in November. I went and it is finally airing now. So if you are in the US or Canada (the show is possibly syndicated elsewhere but I'm not sure) please be sure to watch me on Wednesday, January the 4th. I won't say how well I did until afterwards but I was quite pleased with my performance.

On my new particle physics blog (yupie to ikiwiki, thanks joey) posted some recollection of a fine, productive and busy Paris research visit to the Ecole Polytechnique. The feed agregegator for particle physics blogs got relaunched too that automn. In case you are interested in particle physics this should keep any reader updated on the Higgs hunt, black holes searches, fundamental interactions and much more.

Today, I've spent some time on ColorHug software (which I've preordered some time ago). The first missing bit there were Debian packages. There are already some packages available for Ubuntu, but I've chosen clean start and did all the packaging on my own. The packages are now waiting in NEW queue (which is amazingly empty in last months) and will hopefully get accepted soon. In case you are too impatient, you can look to git repository on Alioth (you will need libgusb as well). Packaging effort lead to writing (quite minimalistic) man page for colorhug-ccmx, which I've also sent upstream. The other thing, where I can help right now (not owning the device itself) is translation. As you can see on Transifex, my task is done here and Czech translation is complete :-).

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Every year, on January 1st, new material ceases to be protected by copyright and enters the public domain. This means, every year, more knowledge, literature, paintings, music, movies and a long etcetera becomes collective property, instead of being artificially held by the current holders of their rights. As this image shows (source: http://publicdomainday.org/node/39 ), I have the honor(?) to live in the country with the longest copyright protection term in the world. Copyright in Mexico does not only last for 100 years It lasts for the natural life of the author plus 100 years. This means that the popular corridos that tell the stories of the 1910 revolution are still not in the public domain. La sucesi n presidencial, the book which Francisco I. Madero wrote to justify that a peaceful political change was needed for the 1910 elections, will not enter the public domain until 2014 (president Madero was killed during 1913). Does it make any sense to kidnap cultural, political or artistic works for over a century? Not only that: Material that is legally sold as public domain in other countries is illegal in ours. Take as an example the recordings of Enrico Carusso, the great Italian tenor who died in 1921. Over 15 years ago, I bought a couple of CDs with his recordings (even if the sources were quite low-quality, as they had been copied over from wax cylinders to magnetic tapes to optical media). I bought them surprisingly cheap, as they were genuine public domain. But they are still protected in my country. That means, I ilegally have some stolen(!) works of art which I lawfully bought outside my country. Copyright law needs to be revised to match reality. Technological advances have strongly changed reality since 1717's promulgation of the first copyright laws. The solution is not to extend the terms, but to rethink the whole process. (yes, this rant was mainly made as an excuse for me to copy this image and put it in a location I can easily refer to later. But I hope it is interesting to you!)

Happy new year, translators. A very important and critical fix to partman-zfs broke a string in sublevel 4. Complete languages count is thus down to zero. Hurray.

• Level 1 100% stats down to zero
• Some progress for Indonesian in level 1

Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 0 language 100%
• 27 languages 99%: bg bs cs de eo es fa fr gu hi it ja kk ko mr nb nl pl pt ru si sk ta te th uk zh_CN
• 1 language 98%: sv
• 1 language 97%: eu
• 1 language 96%: sr
• 6 languages 95%: ar be bn dz he tr
• 3 languages 94%: ast ga ro
• 6 languages 93%: el hu id is km lo
• 1 language 92%: sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 12 languages 100%: cs de es fa fr kk nl pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 11 languages 99%: be bg da eo id it ja sl sv th uk
• 4 languages 98%: ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 97%: is
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 3 langauges 95%: el fi he
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 8 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl sr tr
• 9 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 26 languages 100%: be bg bs ca cs de el eo es fa fi fr ga gl is it ja kk nb nl pt ru sk sv th tr
• 4 languages 98%: he hu uk zh_CN
• others are 90% or below

No language is currently fully complete

Last year, my new year's resolution was to write in my journal every day. That actually stuck, I wrote 262 journal entries in 2011. While I've been keeping a journal intermittently since 1998, last year I doubled the number of entries in it. And wrote a novel's worth of entries -- 53 thousand words! Most of it is of course banal and mundane stuff. Not good compared with Lars, who does something with his journal where he goes into some detail about code he's working on, and other work. The excerpts I've seen are quite nice. But after I've written code, written a commit message, documentation, perhaps bug reports etc, I often can't find much to say about it in my journal, beyond the bare bones that I worked on $foo today or faced a particularly hard bug. I also worry that the journal, and my reluctance to repeat myself, often tips the balance away from me blogging, if I write down something in the journal first.

---

Here's my journal for today:

Compare what jokes are funny now with those in 1982. The 1982 ones from net.jokes on olduse.net seem juvenile. Now compare what Unix joke man pages are funny now with those I'm reading from 1982. They seem basically the same. What would Biella make of this? Liw noticed ikiwiki OOM on pell. Tracked down to a perl markdown bug with long lines. Had quite enough of perl markdown; ikiwiki will be moving to a different engine. Added discount support to it today, still needs Debian package tho. [censored] Really gorgeous sunset, with a high wind, moon, puffy low, fast moving clouds. Enjoyed it ecstaticly. It's going to get cold soon. Very rainy early, but then got intermittently sunny; power is holding out ok. Was going to roast a chicken today, but got distracted and had a large lunch besides. Need to find some quick food for supper. I need to start a new book, should it be the River Cottage book about meat that I stole from Anna, or some SF? Blogged about journaling, and put this journal entry in it, so also journaled about blogging. Wrote it somewhat self-conciously.

---

The benefits for me have ranged from being able to go back and work out dates of events, to forwarding the odd excerpts to others. The best thing though is certianly having a regular time of introspection, to look back over my the day. If you've not got a new year's resolution yet, I recommend this one. (Learning Haskell would be another good one, if you haven't yet.) Just write something, anything, down in your journal every day.

a rather lazy bugsquashing week but with a little cheating a managed to get at at least 7 RC bugs:

• #642738 src:styx: "styx: FTBFS: ./config.status: 1358: ./config.status: gawk: not found"
  add missing build dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #643471 src:lbreakout2: "lbreakout2: FTBFS: server.c:1093:16: error: 'LC_ALL' undeclared (first use in this function)"
  add a patch to include locale.h, upload to DELAYED/2
• #648842 src:libpgplot-perl: "libpgplot-perl: needs to be rebuilt against perl 5.14"
  do a versioned close, Carlo Segre has manually rebuilt the package (pkg-perl)
• #650598 src:pygpiv: "pygpiv: /usr/include/glib-2.0/glib/gtypes.h:34:24: fatal error: glibconfig.h: No such file or directory"
  apply patch from Ubuntu / Daniel Polehn, Michael Terry, upload to DELAYED/2
• #651231 src:xymon: "FTBFS: PCRE not found"
  add (extended) patch from from Ubuntu / Steve Langasek, upload to DELAYED/5, later rescheduled to 0-day by maintainer
• #651907 src:ido: "ido FTBFS uses G_CONST_RETURN with G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #652446 p7zip: "p7zip FTBFS with multiarch libwxgtk2.8-dev"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2

For the year of 2011, I finished and reviewed 60 books. This is a huge milestone for me; it's the first time since the second year I started doing this that the number of books I read actually increased. This gives me more confidence that I've stabilized the year-by-year decline in my reading. I did that while substantially increasing the amount of time I spent enjoying video games, which was another major goal of the year. Only two books received a 10 out of 10 this year, one fiction and one non-fiction. The novel was Jo Walton's Among Others: the best book I read this year. It's a delightful look at the process of finding a place for oneself in the world and features one of the best protagonists that I've seen. The non-fiction book was Rory Stewart's The Prince of the Marshes, which means that both of Stewart's books that I've read have received 10 ratings. The Prince of the Marshes is his look at his time spent in the provisional government of Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I think it should be required reading for anyone expressing an opinion on what the US and other western powers should or should not have done in Iraq. It lays bare the difficulties, confusion, and frequent stupidity of going into someone else's country and trying to fix it, and I think seriously calls into question whether this sort of international intervention can ever work. Other fiction highlights of the year were Kelley Eskridge's Solitaire, a startling and deep look at identity and social connection, and Mira Grant's Feed, a zombie apocalypse story that completely overcame my deep dislike of zombie apocalypse stories. Feed should have won the Hugo in 2011, despite some unbelievable politics and a bit too much cheering for bloggers. This was the year for excellent protagonists, with all three of my top-rated fiction books featuring unique and memorable characters who left a deep and lasting emotional impact. The two other non-fiction standouts were both a bit dry, but if you have the patience and attention, they reward persistance. Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is a deserved classic that gave me an eye-opening perspective on the long history of interactions between intellectualism and populism in US politics and culture. David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible is a wonderful history of Islam as it related to Europe and filled in some large gaps in my knowledge of world and religious history. 60 books a year, or five books a month, feels like a comfortable and sustainable level, although I'm going to keep my formal goal at a book a week (52 in the year) to give myself some leeway to either get distracted by video games or by other projects. My reading did concentrate more than usual in science fiction and fantasy this year, and I'd like to add more mainstream fiction and more non-fiction. The full analysis includes some additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.

For this new year I got a quite specific present : a Debian Developer account. Of course this is not an end by itself but rather a beginning, or perhaps a continuation of my modest effort to contribute to the greater good of our users and free software. As an introduction, I would like to quickly explain how I came to this point, and I also have some people to thank.

Debianist journey

1997-2003

First family computer, a PC running Microsoft Windows 98. I became a power-user, and I progressively replaced all the pieces of that computer, except it operating system (though I reinstalled it several times).

2003

First contact with GNU/Linux: at my preparatory school, we use XEmacs and Kile under Mandrake Linux 9.2 to do some works in Caml Light and LaTeX. I start enjoying free software at home, with Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and Libre^WOpenOffice.org.

2005, preparatory school

I try Knoppix at home and eventually install Mandriva Linux 10.2 for my own use. Since then I have never used Microsoft Windows for personal work any more.

2005, engineer school

I integrate Centrale Paris and I join the team of VIA Centrale R seaux, which I believe is a known den of debianists. So I start using Debian on my personal laptop.

2006

Debian power-user. I start reporting bugs.

2007

First small contributions: some of my bug reports now include patches. I also start maintaining a French training document about Debian: formation Debian GNU/Linux.

2008

First packaging work with the help of adn, a modification and split of frozen-bubble to have a server-only package (contribution finally refused, actually).

2010

First package: I adopt dokuwiki with the help of adn. I become a Debian Maintainer, with the intent of applying as a Debian Member later.

2012

I am now a Debian Developer, responsible for a handful of packages and able to do NMUs and to sponsor new contributors.

As you may guess, I have always been a tinkerer, about computers but also about bikes (the ones that work with manpower, not the ones that make noise and smoke ;-)). And I also always wanted to publish my works somehow, because I hate to think that someone could have to do again some reusable work I had to do before instead of taking advantage of it. Well, it happened that free software was a way to achieve both goals: to hack and to make my work available for anyone. Thanks I would like to thank all those who helped me to discover and contribute to free software, especially: adn, who helped me with my first steps to directly contribute to Debian, dererk and all the Debian Developers that patiently reread and sponsored my packages, and my Application Manager gwolf, who gave quite a lot of time asking me questions, reading my replies, and replying to some questions that arose during the process. Outside of the Debian Project I have to thank Alexis de Lattre, who wrote the original Formation Linux that I am now maintaining under the name of Formation Debian GNU/Linux , a document which helped me to discover GNU/Linux and Debian specifically. More generally, I would like to thank all the Free Software community that made that possible: Debian Developers, hackers and users from everywhere. We have built and we are still building quite an impressive pile of very useful work, and we can be proud of it. Notes

1. Here in the northern hemisphere our school years begin in the middle of the civil year, which makes it tricky to tell them apart
2. This is almost a synonym for tinkering, in the context of free software, is it not?