[Attention] Personal content follows. If you got to this post expecting technical or organizational content, go ahead and skip it.
Sometimes, when you don't want something to happen... You don't even talk about it. Sometimes you try hard not even to think about it - Well, it wasn't so in this case, as it has been a long time devoted to... Thinking, thinking a lot.
The important thing is that I feel there is a fact I should have shared with the people I consider close to me. And some people do know it, of course, but it has been hardest for me to share this with who I consider my closest friends - maybe out of hope that the result will be something different?
Anyway... the fact is I have been living on my own for the last two months. Nadezhda and I decided to take a three month period to... Decide what comes next. And most of the time since this strange period began has been quite decent... But the last week or so has been... A bit different. I have been much more... introspective. Maybe it could be seen as more depressive, more introverted.
So, what does this mean? Do I have my mind clear on what to do? No. Not by far. But I am working on finding my feelings and my reality, full-time. I might be under-achieving both in my Real-Life works and in Debian - please cope with me. There is a reason for it, as you now see.
And, no, this post is not aiming at getting sympathy and hugs... It is just... Because I need to finally share this thing I am going through with. Think of it as finally stepping out of the closet, more as a step for myself than for anything else... A significant share of who I consider dear to me, even though we share no contact besides mailing lists I have mostly abandoned and two cathartic and beautiful (and, of course, technically productive!) weeks a year, lives in different timezones and countries - I do hope to have stabilized on either of the two possible realities by the time I meet my Debian fellows. As for my Mexican friends following my life by this blog... Well, just excuse me for not speaking out face to face, as this should have been done.
Comments intentionally closed. Want to say something? Just think it hard enough, it will get to its destination ;-)

The Daily WTF has published an interesting essay on why retaining staff is not always a good thing [1]. The main point is that good people get bored and want to move on while mediocre people want to stay, but there are other points and it’s worth reading. Following the links from that article led me to an article comparing managing IT departments to managing professional sports teams [2]. They chose US football (a sport I know little about and have no interest in) so I probably missed some of the content. But they have some good points. John Goerzen gave a good presentation to the idea of increasing petrol taxes and decreasing other taxes to have a revenue neutral result while also discouraging petrol use [3]. I credit him with presenting the idea not inventing it because I have heard similar ideas several times before (but not nearly as well written and not written from a right-wing perspective). Hopefully some people who read his presentation will be more receptive than they were to the other versions of the same idea. Craig Venter spoke at TED about his work in creating artificial life [4]. He spent some time talking about the possibilities of creating artificial organisms to produce fuels directly from CO2 and sunlight. Nick Bostrom published a paper explaining why he hopes that the SETI projects find nothing [5]. His theory is that the fact that our solar system has not been colonised and that we have seen no immediate evidence of extra-terrestrial life indicates that there is a “Great Filter” which is a stage of evolution for which it is most unlikely that any species will pass. If the Great Filter is in our past (he cites the evolution of multi-celled life as one of the possibilities, and the evolution of prokaryotes into eukaryotes as another) then it means that our future might be more successful than if the Great Filter was something that tended to happen to advanced societies. Jared Diamond (the author of Collapse), has written an interesting article about vengeance [6]. He focuses on an example in New Guinea and uses it to explain why personal vendettas tend to run wildly out of control and how society is best served by having the state punish criminals.

• [1] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Up-or-Out-Solving-the-IT-Turnover-Crisis.aspx


• [2] http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/14/the-longest-yard-reorganizing-it-for-success/


• [3] http://changelog.complete.org/posts/708-A-Smart-Gas-Tax.html


• [4] http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/227


• [5] http://www.nickbostrom.com/extraterrestrial.pdf


• [6] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_diamond?currentPage=all

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England swings like a pendulum do! There's another fuel price protest and the coverage in the London press is pretty biased, with occasional balanced reports and very rare dissenting opinion. One of the favourite whines on news-and-nutters phone-ins is "waah, I live in a village, I need my car". While that's true for some people, most villagers could switch to bicycles for many journeys without problems. At the moment, the biggest problem with cycling to town is the number of cars on the small lanes, followed by the number of potholes. Switching to cycling or walking will have a triple benefit: fewer cars on the road will free up space for cycling, wear the roads out less and reduce fuel demand (so petrol should become cheaper for those who really need it). Over the last few days, I've been happy to read Bike The Drive 2008 [Dirk Eddelbuettel], Mountainbike, By Joerg Jaspert and How to Start Bicycling to Work, by John Goerzen. A couple of tweaks to that last one: in England, I don't think that a cycling helmet is necessary. I've not worn one for the last few months (it went mouldy after a rain storm) - I find I can hear traffic better and many drivers seem to give me more room on the road. I wonder if helmet-wearing "dehumanises" cyclists to drivers? The safety data seems rather confused, but it's a personal choice. If you feel safer with a helmet, wear one. I also wear ordinary business or casual clothes, relying on a good quality commuter saddle rather than cycling shorts. I suspect that drivers here are developing a sort of blindness to the "screaming yellow" hi-vis jackets, so I don't wear those - but sometimes I wear hi-vis reflective armbands if I'm wearing black in the dark. I agree completely with the comments on that page about being predictable, Cateye lights and pannier bags. Finally, Bike Week 2008 starts on 14 June, which would be an ideal time to try a group ride - or just get a free breakfast for cycling into town.

Here's a selection of pictures from a recent visit to the Efteling.

Click the icons for full versions or view full set. I'm still planning on making yet another web photo album software of my own based on a revolutionary idea. Maybe I will actually do it sometime, who knows.

foosel tagged me, whatever that means. Perhaps it’s the English word for “Stöckchen” (German for “small stick”) of which I always wondered how the English blogging part of the blogosphere is calling that kind of coercing blog posts… ;-) So these are the rules:

1. blog a list with your favorite desktop Linux software (as many or few you want)
2. add links to the software project’s websites
3. post these rules
4. tag three other Linux using bloggers

Interestingly splitbrain, who started the thing just calls it “Meme”, but to me memes are the same thing just without duress. ;-) So you want to know about what Linux desktop software I like and use, hmm? Desktop means GUI, doesn’t it? There are only a few GUI application I really use often since, as you probably know, X is primarily a terminal multiplexer and screen resolutions are compared by how many 80×25 xterms with fixed font you can get on one screen without overlapping. ;-) But to be honest: Although I’m more the command line guy hacking cryptic lines into windows with small fonts, there are a few thing where I don’t want to miss X and the GUI applications: For all things web – that means web browser, feed reader, etc. But then there is also a bunch of GUI software I use occasionally or as alternative tool to some text mode or command line software. Web

• Liferea – My favuorite feed reader although it takes ages to start and since a few days also starts crashing, probably since I have configured it to cache up to 1000 items per feed and have subscribed to several hundred feeds. I do not read them all though, but I use them togther with Liferea’s “search all feeds” feature as a Google News replacement. ;-) I though read a lot of feeds in it, since I use it for news, blogs, webcomics and to read missed tweets on Twitter. It organizes the feeds in a tree structure so I can easily group different types of content together.
• Opera – I’m back using Opera as my primary web browser since they offer alpha versions for 64-bit Linux. Initally I started using Opera with version 3.60 on Windows 95 somewhere about 10 years ago and I’ve always come back to it when no current free browser fits my needs. Although it hasn’t an AddOn possibility as Firefox has, I still prefer it over the bloaty and leaky and quite unstable Firefox 2, since it offers nearly every functionality I need (mainly mouse gestures and a flexible tab management), is fast, needs less RAM and is quite stable for an alpha version. And Firefox only offers those features I need via Addons which are often the cause for leaking or crashing. Haven’t tested Firefox 3 yet, but it’s said to be be less bloaty…
• Kazehakase – Formerly I used kazehakase as my primary web browser since I really like its user interface, but the version in Etch is quite slow and seems to have memory leaks. It’s currently the second browser I have always open. But since my browsers always have uptimes in terms of months I don’t need web browsers that are leaking, so I’m thinking about replacing it with something more stable.
• Conkeror – A Gecko 1.9 (i.e. Firefox 3) based web browser completely controllable with the keyboard. And the key bindings are those from Emacs and partially also from the classic text-mode browser Lynx. Will be available in Debian Experimental soon.
• Netsurf looks very promising as it’s a simple and fast browser with it’s own rendering engine and originating on RISC OS. But since I’m a heavy tab user (60 tabs in one window are not really seldom), a browser (yet) without tabs isn’t really that useful for me. But I hope it will get tabs soon.
• Midori – The other upcoming new browser in the Linux world is using Apple’s WebKit (which itself is based on KDE’s KHTML) underneath. Only in Experimental yet (form a Debian point of view :-). Use it on my Debian Sid machine to play around with it.
• Twitux – A simple GTK Twitter client which doesn’t clutter the screen with unnecessary icons or buttons. Just a small menu bar, status bar and the tweets.
• Azureus – In the seldom case where I need to download files via Bittorrent I either use Opera’s builtin client or Azureus. The nice thing about Azureus is that you can get nice graphical as well as textual statistics about all aspects of your downloads.

X / Desktop Environment

• FVWM – My favourite window manager for normal, big or multiple screens. I use it since more than 10 years (twm and tvtwm were its predecessors) and its configuration has evolved since then quite a bit to tinted transparent window frames and title bars, etc. I tried other window managers in between (e.g. Sawfish and GNOME’s own Metacity, each for a month or so and both together GNOME, also played around with KDE on one machine) and I always came back to FVWM. No other window manager is so fast and configurable in regards of keybindings. Handles multiple screen very well and out of the box, too.
• ratpoison – My favourite window manager for small screens (less than about 1024×768, e.g. on my EeePC, on the 8” touchscreen connected to my MicroClient Jr. or on my 1996 ThinkPad 760ED with 133 MHz Pentium 1) since it doesn’t waste screen space for window borders or title bars. It just maximizes all windows by default to screen resolution. You then can manage (split, resize, switch, close, kill) windows as you are used to manage shells and text-mode applications with screen(1). Doesn’t work that well with multiple xrandr managed screens though if they don’t have the same size.
• FLWM – The Fast and Light Window Manager. My favourite low-end but still DAU compatible window manager. Use that on demo and guest accounts, especially on low end machines.
• Synergy – connects displays of other computers (not only X but also even Mac or Windows) with your mouse and keyboard similar to a KVM switch. I use it at work to add my laptop as fourth monitor. ;-)
• trayer – A desktop environmen independend system tray developed by the FVWM Crystal Project. Since I changed from manually editing /etc/network/interface on my laptop each time I came into a new wireless LAN to using GNOME’s Network Manager, I needed a system tray for the nm-applet. Trayer is quite easy to configure using command line options and can handle tinted transparency as I use with FVWM and ATerms. So it fits in perfectly.
• ratmenu and dmenu – For showing generated menus together with ratpoison, I use ratmenu (e.g. as replacement for ratpoison’s non-interactive window list) and dmenu (e.g. as application menu using my own wrapper which generates the menu from some config file). Probably will publish that code once it proved itself stable.

xtrlock – the simplest tool to lock you desktop: The mouse turns into a lock and it only goes away if you enter the right password. No screen saver included though and everyone can see what’s on your desk. I like it though. Use it on low-end machines.

XScreenSaver and Really Slick Screensavers (GLX Port) – Configurable and command controllable screen saver daemon. Favourite modes: GLMatrix and Substrate from XScreenSaver and Lattice Sky Rocket and Hufo’s Smoke from RSS GLX.

xosview – my favourite system monitor since more than a decade.

Terminals

• xterm – there is no better X terminal emulator than the original xterm. I found no other terminal which is so fast, has no problems with text-mode applications (aterms break aptitude’s display), no problems with character set encodings, which can be embedded into other applications and which has a fully working classic Unix cut & paste.
• aterm – When I need a fancy transparent terminal for showing a fancy desktop, I use the AfterStep Terminal Emulator aterm. In that case, the system tray, the window borders, the window’s title bar and the terminal on my desktop have the same fancy tinted transparency.
• yeahconsole – A wrapper around xterm which works like the pulldown console in quake. Good for the short shell usage inbetween. ;-) The other similar pull down consoles I know (KDEish yakuake and GNOMEish tilda) had some issues with focus and keybindings while yeahconsole works just out of the box and showed no problems until now.

Audio and Video

• XMMS and Audacious – If I want to play a single list of files of the same file format or single stream, I usually use the command line tools mpg123 and ogg123. But if I need anything more fancy or more flexible, I prefer the WinAMP clones. Formerly XMMS, nowadays Audacious. Both with some old skin which I use since more than a decade and which I initially used with WinAMP 2 on Windows 95.
• mplayer – no fancy GUI, easily controllable with the keyboard, plays most video file formats I can remember. ;-)

Editing and Developing

• GNU Emacs – I’ve been raised with GNU Emacs and Lisp at university, so I’m quite sticked to that. I usually only start one Emacs instance and connect to it using emacsclient. I also like TRAMP for editing remote files. but I don’t need it that often. On machines, where I don’t want a full blown Emacs installation or under root I prefer GNU Emacs’ little brother GNU Zile (Zile Is a Lossy Emacs), but that’s text-mode and no GUI software.
• OpenOffice.org – I think it’s a really great software, but I use it quite seldom, usually only when I have to open some file in a Microsoft file format. For writing letters, articles, presentations and so I have LaTeX.
• Gnumeric – My preferred spreadsheet application. Although for some purposes I use the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet, usually when Gnumeric has not all necessary features.

Graphics

• xv – Yet another tool I use since more than a decade: No other image viewer is so fast and yet so easy to use with both keyboard and mouse. Open source, but unfortunately not (yet?) free software.
• keyjnote – fancy PDF presenter with a lot of interactive features.
• pdfcube – PDF presenter turning pages as a cube as compiz or Macs do with the desktop.

Chat

• Pidgin – I usually use irssi inside a screen for IRC as well as Jabber and ICQ (via Bitlbee), but I also often have a local Jabber client running which then is Pidgin (formerly known as GAIM).

Other Tools

• Unison – I use it to synchonise the cache and state of my feed reader between laptop and workstation. And I do indeed prefer the GUI version over the text-mode version. I use the text-mode only if I use it from some remote location.
• XKeyCaps – The ideal tool to wreck you keyboard layout. ;-)
• XGnokii – Used it to backup my former Nokia mobile phones, the 6130, the 6210i and the 6310i. Doesn’t work anymore with my new E51, though.
• Sunbird / Iceowl – Not really using it yet, but I plan to use it as my primary calendar tool.
• QEMU / KVM / KQEMU – My favourite desktop hardware emulator. (For servers, I prefer Xen for virtualization.)

Games

• ScummVM
• Planet Penguin Racer / Extreme Tux Racer (all forks of Tux Racer)
• Frozen Bubble
• Battle for Wesnoth
• cuyo, xpuyopuyo, flobopuyo
• Sauerbraten
• PrBoom / Freedoom
• Neverball / Neverputt
• Briquolo
• xfrisk
• Icebreaker
• XBomb

Non-Desktop Applications In case someone wonders about my mail client, Jabber client, IRC client, ICQ client, file manager, notes taking application, shell and versioning system – they’re all command line or text-mode applications:

• E-Mail: mutt
• Chat, Instant Messaging: irssi + Bitlbee + GNU Screen
• File management: coreutils (and sometimes busybox ;-)
• Notes: hnb
• Shell: zsh
• Version control: Subversion (svn), Mercurial (hg)

Who’s next? That’s difficult:

• maol would be interesting, but since a while he just blogs in Jeopardy style, so he would need pack all those programs into the subject of his blog post… No, not a good idea.
• Venty! No, has no active blog anymore.
• Dieter! No, no Linux user.

Hmmm, I think I have to look in a different corner of my circle of friends. Hmm. Ah, now I know:

• dyfa – not really a Linux user, but I guess FreeBSD is ok, too. :-)
• nion – this will be really interesting. He even uses more strange software than I do. ;-)
• alphascorpii – no idea what she prefers (except that it will be available as Debian package ;-)

And no, I don’t expect posts as comprehensive as mine. :-)

Three quick updates to items I've posted in the past:- Justin Rolfe has re-opened his fishmonger's shop on Alexandra Parade Weston-super-Mare less than six weeks after what Avon Fire called a "lucky escape" when his van crashed off Kewstoke toll road. I'm glad I didn't try to go to an event in Exeter yesterday that I was invited to. I don't remember seeing that restaurant, but the BBC writes it only opened last September. A religious bombing in Devon. Whatever next? Eurovision is tomorrow night. I'm not going to write in detail here this year (because I don't want the pain of dealing with the planet-purgers again) but I might try to guest blog somewhere else and mention it at the end of tomorrow's post.

When recording changes in some software there are basically three approaches, with their different advantages and disadvantages.

• One approach is just record modifications chronologically. Each modification is just a little diff (or some glorified variant of diff, or if you insist something that is no diff but just has some similarity). Advantages are:
  • It keeps itself out of the way. You just do modifications and store them somehow one after the other.
  • You can reconstruct all past points, so can regain missing documentation by looking at the evolution in time.
  So it is no surprise that essential every tool (i.e. all the VCSes) to handle non-packaging work on software essentially uses this way. If you have an canonical other source for the software (like an upstream for an package), it has quite some severe drawbacks:
  • Reviewablity does not scale. While every single diff can easily be reviewed, the mass is not. Most changes are relative to past versions of the software. If something introduces a problem or and upstream change introduces a problem with that, the fix might only show up years later, separated by tons of other changes in between. (The effect especially with changing upstream always depends a bit on the later merging, but the worst case is still the same).
  • For the same reason changes cannot be easily extracted. Single commits usually are fine, but what of those past changes is needed to make some specific change in the functionality is easily lost after some time, some improvements and updates to new upstream versions. The whole approach degenerates to having a single large .diff.gz file of the package. (Except one has a bit of history recorded, so when sorting out the stuff in that diff one can better guess what effect a single unattributable line has).
• The next possibility is to store modifications sorted by topic and against upstream (either as .diff files relative to the upstream source, as topic branches, or or or). Advantages:
  • As you have to send the patch upstream anyway, you have to create such an patch initially, anyway. Also each is in a format that if upstreams wants to apply a single one, each is in the correct format for this.
  • Branches relative to a (relatively) fix point are usually use to store in VCSes.
  • When other people want to pick a subset of those patches, they only have to do the merging, and not dismerging with the missing ones first.
  On the other hand, there are some disadvantages with this:
  • As the differences are relative to the upstream code, multiple patches are in general not applicable without additional merging.
  • Because of this, those patches cannot be used to generate the source to build the Debian package.
  • Thus those patches by itself are never directly used, unless the maintainer regularly tests them, they are essentially untested and will see bitrot.
  • As those are not the changes to the package because of the missing merge, they are nice for a cursory review, but if you want the review the actual changes, you need to review the merged variants.
• Last but not least, there are stacked patches, i.e. patches that are supposed to be applied in a specific sequence. Advantages:
  • The patches itself are actually used. Thus they get wide testing and bitrot cannot happen that easily.
  • Equally, reviewing the actual changes can be separated into the different patches, as connected changes are next to each other and the files describe the changes without pitfalls in merges.
  • If someone else wants to use multiple patches from the start of the sequence, no merging is necessary. They can directly be applied.
  Given these advantages, it is no big surprise that all Debian specific patch management tools (like dbs) and other programs to deal deal with multiple patches against other people's code (like quilt) use this approach. Though there are also some disadvantages:
  • Ordering patches is not important. Only unrelated patches can be skipped to have later patches applied cleanly, so ordering needs to predict what patches are more likely to be used by other people.
  • Testing only happens for the whole stack. If some match modifies parts that a later patch removes, bitrot can still happen.
  • Extracting those patches from the currently available VCSes is not trivial.

So the format most suitable to Debian packages (stacked patches) is the total opposite of a format most suitable when you are upstream yourself and nothing is suitable for everything. There are many different thinkable ways to combine the different things to get more of the advantages, though many are a bit lacking (like storing quilt series in a VCS as text files), not yet possible or non-trivial with the current tools. Hopefully the future will improve that.

People who know me are surprised when I tell them I play Guitar Hero, simply because I don t ever touch gaming consoles, or any computer games whose complexity surpasses Pac Man, with a stick except Guitar Hero, which is just fun. I also listen to a bunch of music, whenever possible, basically, and there are plenty of songs that I d love to try on Guitar Hero. Mel and I decided that e.g. Shine on You Crazy Diamond or Comfortably Numb are far up there (and they probably exist somewhere), but today I listened to Damn the River by The Phoenix Foundation and thought the same, yet I doubt that this song has been transcribed, which is a shame. I am well aware that sites exist, or must exist, which have songs for download, or you could make your own (check out Metallica s Master of Puppets there!). But that sounds like a lot of time lost, which I prefer to spend otherwise like today it occurred to me that Guitar Hero 2000 is long overdue. Guitar Hero 2000 is the Guitar Hero game that takes your song on audio input and scans it in advance and that fits the song to play to the five frets in the game in real-time. It can t be that hard. Where is it? NP: Pure Reason Revolution: The Dark Third

There are obviously some things we need to remind if we don t want something like the OpenSSL debacle to happen again. It doesn t mean we need to throw stones nor to rush into changing our processes without thinking. However, there are already some things that should be obvious but unfortunately are not.

1. Shipping a giant diff.gz that contains all changes in one, putting security fixes, policy fixes, bug fixes, cosmetic changes and autotools files at the same level, is not something we should accept anymore. Improvements in the dpkg-source format are much welcome in this direction, but they are useless if maintainers don t use them. Neither a VCS nor a build tool will be able to know which line of the changes is related to which bug. Only the maintainer can.
2. Core packages should all have co-maintainers. This is pretty much stating the obvious, and is much easier said than done. The OpenSSL case is one of the best examples here: Kurt is not one of those who refuses help, but frankly, would you want to maintain that package? Having already maintained packages with messy code, upstreams not understanding at all the needs of a distributor, avalanches of security alerts and randomly-changing ABIs, I can tell you this is no fun like it can be to hack on a desktop environment or a device driver. The only sane reason to do this is that you need the package to work. The only visible result you get from your work is that programs are not randomly crashing.
   I have no magic recipe to propose so that more people help with such packages, and that s where we need to be really innovative. Cross-distribution teams, mandatory co-maintainership on a core package for each DD these (and all ideas I have not heard of) are the experiments we should start now.
3. Patching bad code leads to unpredictable results. What maintainer of a complex package has not introduced a new bug while trying to fix another one? Even when a piece of code is maintained by uncooperative developers, is not commented, uses arcane variable names or is impossible to understand without having contributed 3 winning entries to the IOCCC, it needs to evolve. And in these cases, it is only a matter of time until such things happen.
   Don t get me wrong: I m not trying to put the blame on upstream here. They have contributed very valuable code to the community and their work helped in the considerable widespread of cryptography. It s just that their code is not enough for our needs. If we can t patch it safely (and I m now convinced we can t), maybe we need to focus on alternatives and help them getting used by crypto-related packages. The code in GnuTLS and NSS is not necessarily better, but most (if not all) patches Debian needs to apply to them are build and portability fixes.
4. Unless Debian-specific, 1 patch = 1 bug in the upstream tracker. This should be obvious, but given the number of patches that are never forwarded, it doesn t seem so. You should not only give a chance for upstreams to review the patch, but you need them to track it, and you must give them the chance to review it anytime someone else stomps on a similar issue. If upstream does not have a bug tracker, they probably think their software has no bugs. Which means they are not trustworthy, and we go back to point 3.
5. We need to give more priority to security. Issues in the security team seem now fixed for good and they have been doing an awesome work. There isn t much left to do so that packages are all built with security-hardening features, but it still needs to be done. And there is much more to do so that we can provide out of the box a decent SELinux setup, or, if it turns out unrealistic to do, a decent system hardening setup using another framework. I know the SELinux zealots will jump on their high horses to explain that their framework is better, but the current situation where it is impossible for the average system engineer to setup a Debian-based MAC system is much worse than having a suboptimal setup that already works.

All in all, this incident has a great impact on Debian s image. If we don t react accordingly, adapting our processes and our system to match what our users expect from us and they expect the best they will turn away from us. With very good reasons to do so. Update : It seems OpenSSL does have a bug tracker. Thanks Kurt for pointing me to it.

A little off-topic exercise conducted in the "eye of the storm", when Ilenia and Helen were still in the hospital: A post on Seth Robert's blog brings up the idea that many Chinese restaurants were opened as a way to go into business without competing with native male workers. The post made the rounds of several other online journals. That was the push I needed to get up and go collect a few statistics of my own, regarding an idea I've been kicking around for a while. My theory is that the number of restaurants of a given type, divided by the number of immigrants from that country might be an interesting way of guaging the popularity of the cuisine in question. In order to simplify things just a bit, I actually used data from Italy, for the following reasons:

• Most immigration to Italy is pretty recent, so it's not necessary to account for the length of time different immigrant groups have been present, and the effects that may have had on the diffusion of a given cuisine.
• Immigration statistics were readily available: http://demo.istat.it/str2006/index.html
• Italian the language almost completely corresponds to Italy the country (outside of a chunk of Switzerland, San Marino, and the Vatican), something that makes things that much easier.
• I speak Italian, so it was easy to find out all the information I needed

Unfortunately, finding out the number of restaurants of various types is far from an exact measurement, and since this is a quick fun project, I just went for Yahoo search (they deserve credit for keeping their search API open when Google's was closed) results on terms like "Ristorante Turco" (Turkish), "Ristorante Messicano" (Mexican), and so on. This was the most expedient means of gathering information quickly, but this approach does present a number of obvious problems, listed here in the hope that someone without diapers to change and a business to run might come up with some good answers:

• Some hits likely come from people talking about a restaurant that happens to be in a country, like "ristorante americano". "Nel tipico ristorante americano, ...." or in other words, "In a typical American restaurant", rather than an American-style restaurant in Italy, which is what we were looking for in the first place. This is probably also true of countries close to Italy, where people go on vacation and thus have occasion to write about their experiences in a "ristorante tedesco" (German), rather than going to eat in a German restaurant in Italy. Perhaps the search query could be improved in an attempt to eliminate this sort of false positive.
• Some restaurants probably are not known as, nor brand themselves with a country name, but instead utilize titles like "Middle Eastern", "Arab", "South American", "African", or others that do not correspond with any one country in particular. It would be possible to group countries together with other adjectives, and get statistics for these clusters as well.
• Measuring hits is measuring what people are talking about, rather than simply restaurants that exist, so if restaurants from a certain country are more talked about than others, that would muddy the statistics a bit. However, it seems reasonable that people would mostly talk about restaurants in proportion to their popularity, and I don't see a particular reason why there would be more talk of Vietnamese restaurants, say, than Thai restaurants, compared to the actual numbers.

That said, for a quick project, this approach seemed to work out ok, and the results appear credible. Obviously, the results also reflect people discussing certain cuisines, rather than an actual number of restaurants, but since it does reflect interest, we'll use the number in any case. Since the number of restaurants/interest in a type of restaurant was clearly not correlated directly with the number of immigrants, other factors must come into play. For instance, "ristorante giapponese" turns up 125,000 hits, but the stats say only 6873 Japanese nationals live in Italy. As above, hits don't mean actual restaurants, but clearly Japanese cuisine is not being popularized through immigration. Here's my guess: these statistics show, to some degree, what people in the host country actually like to eat. Food that tastes good means more restaurants. Things that aren't that popular mean few restaurants, even if there are many immigrants. To pick on one country, there are many Philippino immigrants in Italy, but very few search hits - and anecdotally, I've never seen a Philippino restaurant in Italy either, whereas even smaller towns like Padova have Chinese, Mexican (well, it's called that, even if it's a shadow of the real thing), Japanese, various Arab and middle eastern restaurants, and even a few less common things like Eritrean. And I know that many native and foreign restaurants employ Philippino cooks. Below is the chart I whipped up showing the number of Yahoo hits per immigrant. The Italian names shouldn't be too hard to figure out. A few tricky ones: Giordano-Jordanian, Giamaicano-Jamaican, Spagnolo-Spanish. If you're interested in numbers or source code, contact me.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young man in your 20s, trying to make your way in the world. You are married and have a young daughter, just old enough to start to talk. You live in a run-down neighborhood, long passed-over by any economic advances. What schools you had access to barely taught anyone much. The few jobs you can reach have fierce competition, even though the pay is low. You worry about your health, but even more about that of your wife and child. Finding food is a constant concern. Although you are still healthy now, and you are willing and able to be a hard worker, there is simply nobody hiring people in your area. Not to mention the gunfights that erupt between gangs or drug dealers. Oh, and did I mention that your wife is 4 months pregnant?

Your top priority is to do your best to keep your family safe. You're afraid that your whole family will starve, or be killed by an errant bullet. You've tried for a long time -- it seems like forever -- to do everything you can think of, with no success. Finally, you decide that the only way you can have the hope for a better life is to move somewhere where the economy is better, and the drug dealers are fewer.

But moving hundreds or thousands of miles away is no easy task when you have no money to move. Somehow, with some luck, ingenuity, and tenacity, you have finally managed to find a way. You have no job offer in your new town, but conditions are so bleak at home that you just can't risk staying there. So the three of you move 1500 miles away.

You arrive with no money, no apartment, and don't know anybody. But you're a hard worker, and have talked yourself into a job. It pays what passes for minimum wage in your new home, but it's a fortune compared to what you made before. It's backbreaking work, and you work long hours. But soon you can afford a cramped apartment, and keep your refrigerator stocked with food. What a luxury!

Pretty soon your new baby son is born. You can afford to feed him, your daughter, your wife, and yourself, every day. When you're really lucky, you even have some money left over to send to your brother back home, who is still struggling to make ends meet there. You seem to have climbed the first rung on the American Dream ladder.

Years pass. Your old home becomes a memory; your daily life revolves around new struggles now. Your oldest child is in school, your wife finds part-time work sometimes too, cleaning houses for rich people. You've been laid off several times, your income isn't guaranteed, and the others in your new home don't take kindly to strangers -- and they still think you're one. But it's better than flying bullets and never knowing where your next meal will come from.

Then one day, while you are at work, federal agents show up. You are arrested and taken to jail. Agents show up at home, too, arresting your wife. It turns out that they realized you entered the country illegally from Ecuador those years ago. Meanwhile, your wife wonders what will happen to your son that was playing in a neighbor's yard while she was arrested, or to your daugther that was at school.

After months in jail, with little contact with each other, and poor medical care, the government decides to deport you to Mexico. Why Mexico? Well, it's cheaper, and there's no documentation showing where you came from. Apparently you "look" Mexican, and they don't believe your story.

After months in jail with no income, you are once again bankrupt. A government bus takes you to Mexico and drops you down someplace there, with your wife and your oldest child. Your younger child was born in the United States, and so is an American citizen and can't be deported. But the government isn't going to give him a free ride on a prison bus (and Mexico wouldn't take him anyway, since everyone knows he's American). You have no idea where he is. You have no idea how you're going to find food in Mexico, no idea how to find your son, no idea where to find refuge from the ever more prevalent drug dealers. Meanwhile, the Americans think you're scum because you wanted to protect your family, and it's going to be much more difficult to get back in to try to reunite your family.

This story is based on true events.

It's truly easy to demonize illegal immigrants, isn't it? Easy to round them up by the thousands, easy to build a bigger fence, easy to lock them away.

Sometimes it seems like this nation built on freedom, supposedly on Christian values, has lost sight of compassion for the lowly. In this country, we would throw in jail parents that didn't do everything humanly possible to find food for their children. We also throw in jail parents that grew up in other countries that are just doing the same.

How sad that we have people going on TV, suggesting we round up millions of Americans that happened to come here illegally, breaking up millions of families, creating an immense foster child problem, a human tragedy on a mass scale. How incredible that some of these people on TV wear the title "senator" or "candidate for president". How stupid do they think we are, suggesting that a poor South American family would somehow be able to navigate the arcane American immigration system and wait the 15 years to get here legally, if they manage to come up with all the necessary money somehow?

Politicians have been pushing our buttons for too long. We aren't a nation of selfish hoarders; we came together through tough times, survived the Depression, put in place the Berlin Airlift that saved countless lives in West Berlin. But the thought of someone with darkish skin coming to this country and building highways is enough to send some people looking for a rifle.

I hope that we will someday do better.

Some more stats: $VCS distribution for Debian packaging I've set up yet another stat page, this time it's about the distribution of $VCS for Debian packaging. It's as trivial as you can imagine: it gets all the Vcs-XXX fields out of unstable Sources and plot how many packages are using a given $VCS. I've got no surprises in the relative popularity of $VCS: subversion is clearly the most widespread (with about 2700 packages on a total of about 13000) and git is growing (700 packages); with the exception of bzr (90 packages), all the other are used by less then 50 packages. Thanks to Lucas I've also included graphs in the page, as I think it would be interesting to monitor the evolution. (Probably as everybody) I'm confident to see an increasing trend for git balanced by a decrease of subversion, we'll see. The total number of packages using some $VCS is encouraging, we are at about 29% of the archive (you know that if your package is not declearing some Vcs- headers in its source stanza I'm not counting it, right? Go add the headers!). Interesting side effect: as I'm now maintaining a handful of these stat pages, I was pondering hey, we should create a wiki page with pointers to all the stat pages about Debian we have . Well, in fact it already exists: Statistics on wiki.d.o.

These last two weeks most of my time has been sucked into getting Python 2.5 as default into testing. That’s done now. I made use of the block uploads thingie ftpmaster implemented for the release team to use. Basically, if your package could disrupt an “almost there” transition, the upload will be rejected. The blocks were in place for 5 days, which I think it’s acceptable. As long as we don’t end blocking stuff for very long, I think we should be fine. See the end of this post for more about this. Though it was quite a bit of work, I’m very glad I took care it myself, since now I really feel I’m 100% back to Debian, after the time I spent off for health reasons. Update: Oh, and I forgot to say: having control over britney has really really helped. Thanks a lot Joerg for that.

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Dudesconf Tomorrow I’m leaving to Coru a for Dudesconf, which is a kind of Debconf-ES. I’m giving an introductory talk to Git, a semi-lighting talk about grep-dctrl (30 min.), and (gasp) a talk about Debian packaging with a VCS. We may have a Debian Quiz as well. I’m so looking forward to it, since many people who’ll attend are amongst my most loved ones, and I already missed last year’s since I wasn’t fully recovered yet. See you there!

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Minirok and Sevilla One of the reasons I wasn’t fully back to release management during the past 5 months or so is because I spent as much time as I had doing development for Minirok. I don’t think I mentioned here before, but I was participating in a Free Software Contest for college students organized by the University of Sevilla, Spain. Such effort finally paid off, since Minirok was elected as one of the finalists. This means next week I’ll go to Sevilla, to make a presentation of the project, and who knows what more. ;-) I’m very excited.

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Finally, more on blocking uploads This Python 2.5 transition was the first time the block uploads feature was used, and there were a couple bumps along the way. In particular, a couple packages were blocked, when they shouldn’t have been (libqt4-ruby and evolution-sharp), and one needed package was not blocked, though Rene Engelhard thankfully spotted it very quickly (mono). The problem is it’s not completely straightforward to generate a list of all the stuff that could possibly affect the transition. What I did was to make a run of britney on an arch that had all the needed bits in place, and block all the packages that migrated together as a result of the hint. This fails in two ways:

• it can include stuff that is not needed for the transition, namely unrelated packages that happen to become candidates for testing by one of the their dependencies having migrated as part of the hint. This is what happened with libqt4-ruby and evolution-sharp.
• it can miss stuff that is needed, like packages that can migrate by themselves, so the main run prior to the hint migrates them, and hence do not show up as part of the hint, but that some package of the transition depend on. This is what happened with mono.

The second problem, though, can be fixed by parsing the excuses list and blocking stuff that some bits of the transition depends on. Easy enough. Yet, there are more cases when things can go wrong, for example a shlibs-bumping upload of a package (say, sqlite3) linked against by some package still needing a couple of builds (say, qt4-x11). For that, blocking uploads is not an option, since that’d be an insane amounts of packages that, furthermore, can be uploaded if they don’t bump shlibs, so I guess we’ll have to ask in the next release update that shlibs-bumping uploads are coordinated in -release too, at least when close to finishing a transition.

A few weeks ago, NYU hosted an interesting event about the future of the Internet, appropriately tittled The Futures of the Internet, the video of which is now available here. One of the panelists was Jonathan Zittrain (who recently wrote an important new book bearing the same name as the event) and during the talk he provided a few ideas about how geeks and developers can help secure the Future of the Internet. While I agree with a lot in fact most of his assessments about the state and fate of the Internet as he lays out in his book and his talks, his characterization of geek/hacker/developer politics is not one of them. Basically, one of Zittrain’s claims is that developers are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet and it is their rampant, Atlas-like libertarianism, which is, in part, to blame (first made 37:20 minutes into the video for those who want to listen to the actual comments). They have little-to-no political consciousness, are too cool to care about the fine print and they don’t care about the broader politics of the the Internet because they assume that they can just hack around any sort of barrier and impediment. While we can, without a doubt, identify a strain of libertarianism among hackers, it is by no means representative of all of geekdom and in fact, is becoming more and more a worn out 1990s stereotype/clich as time passes than an accurate representation of what is a far more variegated set of ethics and practices among hackers (and I will soon publish an article on this topic). It also completely fails to capture the ethical spirit as well as sociological, and political workings of one of the most important strains of hacking free and open source software which not only powers most of our (open) Internet but which in fact has provided a pretty hefty ethical backbone by which to conceptualize one of the ways we should think about the fight for the future of the Internet. Ok, time for a rant now Geeks not only designed the Internet, an indisputably revolutionary medium, but also implemented, and continue to maintain it, and then in their copious spare time, also engage in fighting back the political, legal and corporate encroachment which threatens to limit the very revolutionary nature of the Internet (as Chris Kelty’s new book on Free Software argues). If these acts by geeks are not enough political action, then maybe the development of not just one, but multiple entirely open and free alternatives to the only two proprietary operating systems that exist today might be a political act that would satisfy? Many would agree that even simply using a free operating system is a political act. It would be better to claim that individuals, lawyers and other political actors are not doing enough to save the Future of the Internet, rather than imploring the already overtaxed geeks to set aside everything that they are already doing to do something even more. (end rant) It also seems that when it comes to political questions related to the Internet, net neutrality being the hot topic now, or fighting restrictive and problematic laws like the DMCA, one of the only groups of people (outside of lawyers and librarians) to actually understand and dissect the fine print (and geeks actually are pretty attuned to and like to dissect the fine legal print), to protest these unsavory laws, and to support the organizations who are doing something about it (like the EFF), are geeks and hackers. While many geeks are not necessarily keen on conceptualizing their labor in traditional political terms, or aligning their technical projects with a political affiliation, and yes would rather just be writing good code, they do fight for their productive freedom and this productive freedom just happens to relate to most questions and concerns related to an open, accessible, and tweakable Internet, built by the geeks, lest we forget What was perhaps most surprising was that he also seemed to think that geeks and developers have not turned to “apprenticeship,” nor policies and procedure to coordinate their development projects, unlike Wikipedia, which he considers a shining example that geeks should look towards as a beacon of policy that geeks should consider emulating in their projects (comments made answering my question). He clearly has not been hanging out with any Debian developers in the last 10 years nor has he gone through their New Maintainer Process In other words, he seems to think they are allergic to regulation due to their accentuated libertarianism, or are against structure because of their anarchism, neither which is remotely true. I think I found this characterization most ironic and problematic for before Wikipedia was even an entry on a Wiki, projects like Debian (and most other F/OSS projects) were transforming and changing to integrate normative procedures and policies that allowed a group of people to work together, scale, grow and deal with crises’. No, they don’t have the Wikipedia badge system, but that system is emblematic of Wikipedia’s own transformation into integrating its own normative procedures and policies for working together, not an example of an idealized policy system that other projects are too primitive to have evolved into yet. About one hour into the talk when questions opened up, I objected to his characterization, but given his answer back to me, I did not make much of a dent in his thinking. Another lawyer Tim Wu (who also wrote a wonderful book on the Internet) chimed in to give me some props and also made a good point that even if geeks are the only groups of people who would storm AT&T and know intimately about the importance of net neutrality, there is a lot of room for thinking about how to strengthen and improve the tactics and politics among geeks and developers so that we can ensure the type of open and generative Internet and set of technologies we value. As part of thinking and rethinking new strategies, it is as key to acknowledge and honor the past. In this regard, free software development has been pivotal both in terms of providing software (and making it is an important political act as is choosing to use free software over propriety software) and a set of important set of ideas that a lot of lawyers like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig have run with to make some important political claims of their own. So despite my rant above, which was a rant and thus exaggerates things to some degree, I do think there is much more that geeks and non-geeks can do, such as help translate these uber-geeky issues into less geeky terms (and actually this is already being done by some geeks as the work of Jelena Karanovic has shown, or translate the technical issues into new domains as the uber-geek Karl Fogel is doing with question copyright but first lets give credit where credit it due and recognize that labor is political

Since my DAM rejection earlier this year I’ve been trying to cut down on Debian work. Unsurprisingly (and perhaps surprisingly to some) I fealt a bit emotionally drained and demotivated from defending myself and working with debian security. Lately I have been working with new maintainer Andrea De Iacovo and I am very pleased with his work on Wordpress. Wordpress takes most of my time, like the beautiful day of Saturday yesterday. :) Unfortunately Andrea has had problems finding a sponsor, though a Wordpress security release expedited matters and got Nico Golde’s upload powers into action. :) So if you’re a DD and you use Wordpress, please help out Andrea. Before I get unsubscribed from Debian Planet, I thought I should pimp my:

• Debian tips and tricks site – the current 400-odd tips are in the public domain so please rip them, update them or add some!
• The fantastic Web kiosk distribution Webconverger based on Debian Live, which also has a blog

Both based on ikiwiki. ;) Anyway, I am still around of course. Met some great people in the Debian community and sadly some pretty pedantic unfriendly ones too. Final suggestion for DDs: Revoke your GPG keys more often and go to less key signing parties. :P

I'm about to leave for Monterrey, Nuevo Le n, some 700Km North. Why? Because I was invited to be at the Monterrey FLISOL. And what exactly is a FLISOL? A very nice and interesting idea: Festival Latinoamericano de Instalaci n de Software Libre, Latin American Free Software Install Festival.

So far, I have stayed away from install-fests. I don't like them. And I will keep what I have always said: I am going because I was invited to talk about network security (of course, giving more than a little bit of relevance to Free Software as the IMHO only way to get to a decent level of security). But I do want to be part of this. It is large. Very large. So large, you don't want to miss out.
According to Beatriz Busaniche, FLISOL will be simultaneously held in 210 cities all over Latin America, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. In short: everywhere.
Spread the word. Spread the love. Spread the fun!

I m a person who isn t satisfied with a lot of things. This both affects me and helps me on several circumstances in life, such it is. The latter also affects my way to deal with mail, mail serving and MUAs. For years, I was a strong Novell Evolution user, mainly because it was quite easy to use, it was pretty and it used to understand the needs that people like me, involved in a lot of things (some of the worthwhile, some of them shitty), required. But in the last couple of years, it began to bloat, to handle connections Bayesian filters and SpamAssassin in a way that was utterly broken and decomposed. I took a break years ago, and tried Mutt, as many free software folks and Debian developers use them on a daily basis to deal with even more incoming mail. I actually liked it, but I was just unable to deal with spam too. My local config was probably broken, fixing it was an obscure fart of Benedict XVI and hidden folders for mailing lists were just a way to forget that I actually was subscribed to mailing lists and focused only on the incoming mail on the inbox. I then tried KMail, since I started usign KDE. It was good enough for it was sometimes slow when trying to load or search on about 100 000 mails and it just didn t fulfill me. I also tried Thunderbird which only made me hate its very closed format to display its ugly UI. Besides, a lot of things on it were getting my angry, like the message filters, etc. So I just didn t give a damn and moved my whole personal mail accounts to Google Apps, giving an opportunity to a totally different approach on mail handling. So I started using the Web interface of GMail. At first I was shocked watching me dealing with a Webmail but after a while I started getting used to it and liking it. Its way to put all conversations threaded on a central inbox was sweet (i was able to filter, tag and take out of inbox too). So I liked it. Some things have never liked me whatsoever: It will always use your default mail address to reply to all messages, even if they are delivered to another recipient, which I consider retarded; its way to let users to top-post, etc, (you should also see how debian-private is seen on GMail and how the google sponsored links propose products based on all its threads xD). The good thing here also was that while not being a total purist, I loved that most spam has automatically handled for me, oh thank Lord I m a lazy bastard. Then I found Sup, which I think is like GMail but on mutt. It is written in Ruby and distributed as a gem (I d prefer it to be in C/C++, but I ll always give the benefit of doubt). Its main feature? A console mail client featuring GMail s features, such as, one inbox, one big archive and labels all over the place, which is exactly what I was (probably) looking for. As the time of writing,Sup can only connect to IMAPs remote servers or read a number of local file formats. So, I undusted fetchmail and set it up. Since all my mail accounts now are forwarded to the main GMail account, I only need to handle one fetchmail config to get messages with POP (and some procmail recipes salting touch). Here comes the sweetest thing from all this setup, by enabling GMail s POP support, you can also specify if you want it to delete the GMail copy or store it. Since I ve used 2% of all my storage, the best thing to do right now is to store and archive, which means that while i download all my email everyday and several times a day, all downloaded copies are also being stored on GMail, so in case I don t have access to my machine, I can still find messages on the web interface. GMail also works nicely when you are sending an email from your remote mail client and using GMail s SMTP, then also the mail you are sending gets stored on your GMail web interface, which is totally cool. So I think I m mildly content now with what I have. This also leads me to another awesome feature for me: Spam gets processed by GMail before I fetch it, so most of my downloaded POP mail is ham. In case I want to see some spam, the web interface will have it as usual for 30 days before being deleted. I like to improve my time for productivity, to get more things done in less time, I do like learning about it, and the proof of concept for GMail handling being used by Sup and the free facilities that Google offers to dudes like me is just a great of avoiding procrastination. It s a hell nice bag of features for me, and probably for you, why not try it?

I’ve noted in the past that Debian has deliberately enshrined in its constitution some rather serious principal-agent problems. By and large this isn’t a bad thing, since there isn’t the consensus within the Debian community to support the “benevolent dictator for life” model of decision-making—if you want that, well that’s what Ubuntu and Daddy Warbucks is for. But it does mean that sometimes the caca hits the fan when a Debian project leader does exercise his powers, as our now-former DPL did earlier this week just before the end of his term of office (by my estimate, just over one hour and 27 minutes before). John Adams would be proud. So we have three related issues in my mind:

• As a matter of general principle, lame-duck DPLs shouldn’t be making appointments. This issue is ameliorated somewhat because DPL delegations—unlike “midnight judges”—can be revoked at any time, but it strikes me that whatever legitimacy a DPL has from the developers evaporates once a new DPL-elect has been designated. I can only speculate why this happened in this case, so I won’t bother.
• Second, while Debian has a very strong tradition of developer sovereignty, with many aspects of the project being self-organized rather than originating with appointments from upon high, it seems to me that certain aspects of core infrastructure can’t be managed in this way.
• Third, the appointment does little to relieve the excessive concentration of power in the core of Debian; if anything, Anthony Towns’ apparent resignation in the wake of Jörg’s appointment worsens the situation. Ensuring there is proper vetting of people with access to important infrastructure is important, but at the same time I find it difficult to believe that there are only a half-dozen or so Debian developers who are trustworthy enough to be system administrators, account managers, or archive maintainers (several of them occupying overlapping positions). That, rather than a lack of technical tools, has been a problem of note within Debian since, oh, the days of my youthful vigor within Debian (which are long since past).

In any event, congratulations to all the new Debian developers—and I’ll avoid pondering for too long why one person’s appointment to an unrelated group would suddenly break the logjam of developer application approvals.

I spent the entire week at the SambaXP conference in G ttingen, Germany. The conference is the annual conference of the community of developers, contributors and users of Samba. I general call it "my annual german pilgrimage" as I attended all seven editions of the conference, the only FLOSS conference I attend on my work time, as my daily work involves quite a lot of uses of samba. This year featured a workshop or training session held by John Terpstra, longstanding FLOSS evangelist and member of the Samba Team for over 10 years, and Karolin Seeger, the brand new release manager of Samba. This has indeed been an incredible opportunity to have discussions with them about the packaging work for Samba. Actually, the work we did in the last 3 years to bring Samba Debian packages in a very good shape (when I don't screw up) is much appreciated. I think these days have been another opportunity to keep that link very closed. I have been impressed by the promising work of Karolin with respect to the preparation of the release and the very serious way she has to do that work....as well as her very friendly, while still discreet approach to technical discussion. Some work was done on Samba package bugs, though less than usually (the remaining ones are harder and harder to tackle!). I mostly work on Debian packages as well as .deb packages prepared by Sernet (the services company that organises the conference and employer of some Samba Team members), as these could some day become the packages provided by the Samba Team. Talks at the conference were pretty interesting, to keep connected with Samba 3.2 and 4.0 development. News from Andrew Tridgell about exchanges with Microsoft (yes, The Evil) and access to MS documentation, are very promising. The collaboration between Samba developers and Microsoft enginneers is now working well again, at the engineers level (as Tridge says: "lawyers are away, now, we can talk at the engineers level and restore the link that existed in the early 90's"). I also could measure the progress of the Openchange project whose ultimate aim is to provide a complete Microsoft Exchange replacement solution. They currently have working MAPI libraries and an Evolution plugin for Exchange is under development, while the bricks to build a server are patiently being put together. Good discussions with Julien Kerihuel, the lead (and French) developer and manager of the project. Jelmer Vernooij and I also settled the final plans to get Samba4 packages in Debian. I proposed to make a first upload to experimental, but quite soon to upload to unstable, the point being a largest as possible exposure of that code, so that upstream developers (Jelmer himself, Andrew Bartlett and a few others...) get as much feedback as possible. That upload will not be targeted for lenny (we'll block it from entering testing). For that reason and also because Samba 3 and 4 will certainly coexist for years, the source package will be named "samba4". Expect more news quite soon. And final conclusion of that week: I've also been delighted to be able to visit Alex and Meike in Hildesheim, as well as Andreas in Wernigerode. It's always a great pleasure to see longstanding Debian friends. At the beginning of the week, I planned to see *two DD and finally, at the end of the week, I can tell I've seen *three* Debian developers, finally!