Russell Coker has recently started posting random tech-tips and recipes in his blog :

To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog.

This is nice to see on Planet Debian - although I hope we continue to see the personal entries. For anybody else who is considering posting things like this I would be delighted if you'd copy them to the Debian Administration website. There have been numerous times when I've been just about to write something on a topic, seen it posted elsewhere and figured I shouldn't do so:

• Because it would be duplication.
• Because it would look like plagiarism

(Notable examples off the top of my head: Introduction to OpenVZ, Introduction to GIT, several Xen pieces.) I don't get many submissions, which I'm getting resigned to, but it is easy and people really really are greatful for new posts. In other news linuxlinks.com are a bunch of spammers and will be reported as such. I utterly fail to care that they've added "my software" to their list; if I cared I'd join their site and agree to receive emails from them..

Despite my previous choice to stick with an i386 system, I couldn’t resist any longer when I have seen that both openoffice.org and the proprietary Flash player were easily available in the amd64 port (not a fresh piece of news). I have thus just re-installed my main desktop machine which is now running a complete amd64 system. I have added this architecture to my unofficial packages repository, and all the arch-dependent packages in the unstable branch were re-built. Note that I do not plan to re-build packages available for the current stable distribution (namely etch). This might however change in the future if people show interest for
this. I have been able to build i386 packages in a chroot using pbuilder and cowdancer, which I will explain later in an article.

Hmh... It's hard to get to a decision on this aspect, although I'm mostly sure I'll vote for a "yes". I have read most posts on this subject on debian-vote and on the planet, and I'm still not too much at ease... Anyway, one of the most relevants so far is Joerg's - And not because he is so involved with the NM process, but because he drives me to what I think is a very important point few people have addressed:
For long, we have been saying that you don't have to be a programmer to help Debian - But so far, we have been unable to deliver except for this funny French guy. And although the current proposal still focuses on getting a step closer to DDness, and for many people this seems like geared at reducing the frustration when going over the NM process, my impression is that this will help us implement something similar for other areas.
Some people have complained about implementing decisions per policy instead of doing so gradually. Thing is, I feel, this kind of proposals have been reiterated over the years - and they have always dropped into the silence because some actions need to be taken by the people who are less willing to. Maybe the only way to break the inertia is to take a step by a GR vote. Maybe parts of it will have to be undone or re-done differently if we end up with the wrong results - but we will have broken the status-quo. Maybe, who knows, this will serve as an experiment - and after another long series of long flame threads we will end up in 2010 in the same position are we currently at - but it won't be because of inaction.

After an exhausting trip home from OSCON (Portland to Frankfurt 10 hours, then by car to Innsbruck, 6 hours), I caught something nasty and am taking it easy. So I took a little bit of time to work on updating the Linux Incompatibility List to use DedaWiki, to which I also added a search function. Hopefully this will allow me to manage spam just a little bit better, as it is becoming a serious problem for that site, due to its popularity.

I finally managed to learn CTest enough to be able to add some test cases to add some automatic testing to Gammu. Well there is not much to test until we have some fake driver for phones which can be used to feed custom data, but at least some parsers can receive testing. First thing I try to focus on is vCard parsing. I know this is currently tricky and I'm trying to collect as many problematic vCards as possible. For now I have collected some from issues in bug tracker and my emails when people reported some problems. So if you have some vCard which Gammu parses wrongly, please send then to me. For now 3 of 5 vCard tests fail, but I hope to resolve those problems until release will happen :-).

Chris Samuel blogs about a plan to censor porn from the Internet in Australia. According to the ZDNet article the Fundamentalist Christian party Family First wants a national porn filter to protect children. However there is strong evidence to suggest that the incidence of rape decreases as the availability of pornography increases. Access to porn prevents rapes! The question is whether protecting people (mostly women and children) from rape is more important than protecting the strange and unusual (by the standards of modern Australian society) religious beliefs of a minority of people who oppose porn. The current research on porn vs rape is based on comparing different regions of the US with different levels of Internet access. It would be more accurate if a scientific test could be performed in a controlled environment. The US has the largest number of prisoners of any country and the largest proportion of the population in prison of any first-world country and rape is common in prison. It would be easy to grant access to porn to one cell block of a prison and deny access to another and then record the incidence of reported rape (currently in the US porn is restricted in prisons and masturbation in prison is a crime). The results of such research could be used to devise government policy with the aim of protecting people from rape. Of course that would require compassion - something that’s extremely uncommon in politicians particularly the ones that claim to be Christian. Some people are requesting the creation of Christian Porn - so Porn and Christianity don’t have to be opposed. The same site has an interesting page Masturbation: God’s Great Gift to Us. Now if all those rapists could be encouraged to watch Christian Porn and take advantage of God’s Great Gift then the world would be a better place.

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If you don’t follow debian-vote, you have missed this. It’s really worth a read before casting your final vote on this issue. As I explained in my reply to Russ, this vote is not about details but whether we want to have an intermediate level between DD and nothing, or not. If you don’t give an initial policy, then people against DM will use that “hole” to block it because “it’s not how DM must be done” (and then you’ll need another GR to define a correct implementation and overrule those who are blocking). Yet people keep mixing issues when discussing DM. For some, DM is okay if we had a working NM system. For some, DM would be okay if the responsibility to give upload rights didn’t rely on DD but on a sort of QA committee. For some, DM would be okay if it were integrated in NM. There are also people who are opposed to this second class of contributors but I don’t think they are a majority. Still we might loose a nice opportunity because people want to solve too many things at once instead of doing a first step in a new direction.

I've been busy doing various things, so I've not had a chance to blog much lately. Time for a quick catch-up... We've had a bit of a development panic at work, so I've been working longer hours than normal. The scary thing is (and I've noticed this in the past too), I seem to enjoy the job more when there's real pressure involved. That's not to say I want it to always be stressful, but we've had more fun with a small group of us really concentrating on a single project, working well together. Outside of work, I've been really quite relieved to take a bit of a break from Debian stuff since Debconf has finished. Debconf (as always) was a really good way to be re-enthused about working on Debian, but it has taken me several weeks to get over it physically. I've finally finished upgrading all of my machines at home to Etch. In most cases it was easy, but the final one left was lump, the firewall/mail/web/foo server. I'd chickened out of upgrading it for quite a while due to the sheer number of services it hosts, and also the substantial amount of local config it therefore holds. In the end, things were thankfully mostly painless. The nice thing about doing the upgrade was that finally lots of new software has suddenly become readily available. Amongst other things, I've added iodine and openvpn, and now I'm looking into playing with voice over IP (probably Asterisk). My Nokia E70 has a VOIP client and wifi, so in theory I should be able to use my regular mobile phone as a voip handset on my wireless network at home and just get cheaper outbound calls. Yay! I visited my friend Matthew a couple of weeks ago, and also helped him upgrade/install his network of Debian machines. Unfortunately, his main workstation (dual AMD64 goodness) is still left just running Windows. BIOS/SATA RAID - just say NO! No matter what we did on that machine, we could not make it dual-boot XP and Debian without forcing him to reinstall it all from scratch. :-( The SPI board elections have just finished. Congratulations to the new mugs^H^H^H^Hmembers of the board, and best of luck in doing a good job. And comiserations to the people who lost - I'm sure most of you would have been good, useful board members too. We're having a final Debconf 7 wrapup meeting next weekend in York, where we're hoping to get the final conference report finished. There are a few more T-shirts to get finished and delivered to people and the sponsorship bags to go out, then it's all done for this year. It'll be good to meet up with people again anyway. Oh, and not long now until the big BBQ at my place. I've started getting some supplies in already, and I'm looking forwards to a bunch of geeks coming round to wreck my house again. Or something... *grin* Last but not least - I'm changing ISPs shortly. Noodles and Huggie have provided excellent service for nearly 3 years, but are exiting the business and moving on to other things. So I'll be moving my home ADSL back to UKFSN shortly. Hopefully the disruption will be minimal.

I recently received an email from RSA inviting me to read their blog (after having requested an evaluation copy of one of their products). They invited me to “join the conversation“. Often blogs are described as a “conversation” and I’ve been considering whether that analogy is appropriate. The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 has the following definition: Usage: Conversation , Talk . There is a looser sense of these words, in which they are synonymous; there is a stricter sense, in which they differ. Talk is usually broken, familiar, and versatile. Conversation is more continuous and sustained, and turns ordinarily upon topics or higher interest. Children talk to their parents or to their companions; men converse together in mixed assemblies. There are instances of blogging that can approximate conversation when bloggers cite each other’s articles in turn and leave comments on each other’s blogs. But it’s usually not that continuous and sustained. An occasional patterin is that blogger A writes a post, blogger B writes a post disagreeing with it, blogger A comments on blogger B’s post, and that’s usually the end of it. Usually it’s just a case of multiple bloggers writing posts representing their own opinions with occasional references to other blogs and no sustained interaction. The blogging interaction seems to more closely resemble academics presenting papers with alternate solutions to a problem than a conversation. One factor that I believe defines conversation but which isn’t mentioned in the dictionary is that the parties involved have an equal standing. The comments section of a blog is not such a forum, the blogger has a significantly more powerful voice (at least in connection with their own blog) than the people who comment. Someone who posts a comment may have it deleted, and it if is left then a rebuttal in another post will be seen by a significantly larger number of people (the number of people who read comments on a post is a tiny minority of the people who read the post). This doesn’t preclude conversation between bloggers who are of equal popularity in a community, for example most readers of my blog come from Planet Linux Australia and Planet Debian so any blogger who is also syndicated on those sites has an equal voice to me. Another factor in conversation is whether responses are even read. Many blogs don’t accept comments and it’s never certain that a blogger will see a track-back from a blog that references one of their posts. When one party ignores the other (or appears to do so) then there is no conversation. I’m not aware of whether a conversation with RSA people would be possible. While their blog refuses to send content to my Planet installation I guess I’m not going to find out… Is the lack of conversation a bad thing? One problem with conversation is that it often degenerates into what GCIDE defines as talk, while that is good for a friendly mailing list (EG your local LUG) it isn’t so good for the exchange of technical information. A compounding problem for mailing lists is the number of posts that can not be interpreted without the context of a thread of discussion. This often makes mailing lists unreasonably difficult to use in the search for answers to technical problems. When reading google search results I will usually read blog URLs before mailing list posts as a blog post will usually stand alone and either give me an answer or be obviously not related to my problem - sometimes I have to read a dozen messages in a list discussion to determine that it’s not going to help me! To improve things in this regard I plan to increase the number of posts I write with solutions to random technical problems that I encounter with the aim of providing a resource for google searches and to randomly inform people who read my blog. I find such posts by other people quite useful, I often get inspired to implement a technology after reading a blog post about it - there are many things that have a low priority in my todo list because they seem difficult, a blog post that reveals them to be easier than expected and advises how to avoid common problems can really make a difference!

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I've been struggling with gettext most of the day but I've finally got the solution! gpe-cash builds an application and a shared library (with API, -dev, -dbg and -doc). Source files for the application contain translatable strings, as do source files for the shared library. Unable to find documentation for how this should work with gettext, I got no end of path related errors.
Here's the clue: Keep ./po/ for the $PACKAGE.pot file, add ./po-foo/ for the second POT file. My mistake was to try to use po/ and src/po or src/po and src/foo/po.
Then, remove the symlinked Makefile.in.in from po-foo/ and copy the file from po/ so that the po-foo/Makefile.in.in can be edited to change the value of GETTEXT_PACKAGE to the alternate file.
Then, add the LINGUAS file to each po directory.
Add po-foo/ to the configure.ac output.
I also switched from glib_gettextize to gettextize (switching the configure.ac macros at the same time). I'm not sure if this is strictly necessary (and it added quite a lot of stuff to both po/ directories) but I'm not keen on breaking what I've just spent all day fixing!

Committed to cashutil SVN: r619.

This is probably the last GUADEC roundup to hit the Planets, considering that it finished a week ago. But, hey, I've been busy. GUADEC was, as usual, a blast. Less sun, sea, and beach parties than last year; more rain, clouds, and parties in fake-Australian bars with too-loud music. If the weather was better we could have hijacked the landlocked beach, which would have been fun. As an educational conference I totally failed at GUADEC, out of an entire week of talks I managed to attend a grand total of seven talks. Between the GNOME Mobile meeting sprawling across two afternoons, a few meetings with clients, occasional attending our stand and having to leave Thursday afternoon meant that there just wasn't enough time. As a photographic experience I mostly failed. I took more photos at Matthew's excellent Clutter Foo talk than the rest of GUADEC itself, and more photos at the ping pong tournament than the others combined. From playing with my camera at the tournament I now know that the Sigma 17-70 lens is no way up to the challenge of sports photography: too slow and too short. My next lens however will be Sigma's new 30mm f/1.4, I've been eyeing it for a while now and Daf had given in to temptation so I could have a play with it. Sports photography will have to wait. As a member of the organising team however, I don't think I totally failed. There were a few last minute snafus in the schedule but on the whole it appeared to hold together, the main problem being there being just too many good talks on at the same time. Congratulations of course are due to Paul, Thomas, Bastien and Rob, who kept the conference running on track all week. Next year, Istanbul. That will be interesting. NP: F♯ A♯ ∞, Godspeed You! Black Emperor

From two sources I have read today about the almost secret deal signed by Chile Goverment with Microsoft. The deal, in most pure Orwell style, means that all kind of computer driven activity in the administration will be held with MS software. Even, education will be only made with their software, with no posibility of teaching any other alternative. This obviously will make very child in Chile captive of MS software. Against this deal, a movement has arisen: Movimiento de Liberaci n Digital. We should ask governments only the freedom of choice. This doesn't mean that they have to support every OS out there so any citizen can interact with administration with the format he just developed some ours ago, but they should be using open standards that anyone could implement in their software. We have to teach them that using the most common used standard is not the same than using an open standard.

tags 388218 + pending
tags 270533 + pending
thanks Ladies and Gentleman, I am finally happy to mark this pending … upload should go to sid
today. iceowl is the unbranded sunbird standalone application. lightning, the sunbird based thunderbird extension will be called
iceowl-extension … and will be usable in icedove + thunderbird. I will announce on debian planet once those are uploaded. Have fun, – Alexander

I'm getting myself ready to take off for Taipei for Wikimania 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- my first time in Taiwan, too. I've been ambiguous about Wikimania each year, but I seem to keep going. The stated purpose of the conference is to be solely for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, but people seem to keep coming who don't have anything to do with Wikimedia projects, so I figure I might as well go, too. I like finding out what other people are doing with MediaWiki, and I like getting pumped up about Open Content, the Wiki Way, and freedom of information around the world. I hope that eventually more general-purpose wiki conferences like RecentChangesCamp and WikiSym will get more public attention, and participation by Wikimedians, in the future. It would relieve some pressure on Wikimania to be something it doesn't seem to want to be. I'm going to be speaking about Extending wikis with social networking tools. We've done some interesting work with this on Wikitravel Extra, and I plan on using the same technique for other wiki sites in the future. I think it's a powerful way to enhance the unity of consensus knowledge with a multiplicity of varying opinions. I'm also looking forward to the Debian Birthday Party 2007, thrown by local Debianistas. It should be a lot of fun! There's also a Creative Commons conference happening during Wikimania, which will be pretty interesting. Lots to do in Taiwan this year. tags: wiki wikimania wikimedia wikipedia debian taiwan taipei

WYSIWYG and MediaWiki I've been an advocate of WYSIWYG editing in MediaWiki for 3 years now. So I'm interested to see that the core dev group for FCKeditor have gone the distance to make a real, working WYSIWYG plugin for MediaWiki. The extension has just about everything that I'd want from a WYSIWYG mode for MW:

• It stores articles as Wikitext. Since in-browser editors generate HTML, plugins often try to store HTML in the wiki database, but this conflicts so much with other parts of the site, it's unworkable.
• It's implemented as a MediaWiki extension. This makes it possible for MW installations to experiment with the tool and remove it if they don't like it. It also shows that the tool isn't too invasive and should work with other extensions.
• It supports templates, tables, images, and citations. A lot of the advanced syntax for MediaWiki is supported.
• It's optional for users. Users can switch to Wikitext any time they're editing a page, and users who don't like WYSIWYG at all can turn it off with a user preference toggle.

I think that this tool has the capability to be the WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki. The previous effort using Wikiwyg didn't handle most of these points. Jimmy Wales gave an impassioned keynote at Wikimania 2006 about the need for WYSIWYG editing on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and I hope we can use the FCKeditor MediaWiki extension to meet that need. tags: wiki wysiwyg mediawiki fckeditor wikiwyg

Following my previous article, I had some interesting comments introducing me to git-filter-branch (which is a new function coming from cogito’s cg-admin-rewritehist). This command is really designed to rewrite the history and you can do much more changes… it enabled me to fix the dates/authors/committers/logs of all the commits that were created with git_load_dirs. It can also be used to add one or more “parent commits” to any commit. In parallel I discovered some problems with the git repository that I created: the tags were no more pointing to my master branch. This is because git rebase won’t convert them while rewriting history. This lead me to redo everything from scratch. This time I used git-filter-branch instead. The man page even gives an example of how to link two branches together as if one was the predecessor of the other. Here’s how you can do it: let’s bind together “old” and “new”… the resulting branch will be “new-rewritten”.

$ git rev-parse old
0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a
$ git checkout new
$ git-filter-branch --tag-name-filter=cat --parent-filter \
"sed -e 's/^$/-p 0975870bb1631379f2da798fa78736a4fe32960a/'" \
new-rewritten
[...]
Rewritten history saved to the new-rewritten branch

Short explanation: the only commit without a parent commit (thus matching the empty regex “^$”) is the root commit and this one is changed to have a parent (-p) which is the last commit of the branch “old”. At the end, you remove all the temporary branches, keep only what’s needed and repack everything to save space:

$ git branch -D old new
$ git prune
$ git repack -a -d

The DebConf 7 videos needed some post-processing, mostly to recover missing pieces from tape. I've done a large part of that, but it's not yet complete. The video team to-do list has details of the recordings that still need work, and the sessions that we believe were not recorded. Please tell us if we did record some of these, and we will have another look through our tapes for them. The conversion to "publication" formats (i.e. small enough to offer for download) was started at the conference and I have continued this at home over the past 2 weeks. Unfortunately this has been interrupted by some hardware failures. It looks like the CPUs in two of my PCs were running hot enough to be damaged (slowly) but not hot enough to trigger an alarm or automatic shutdown. The remaining conversions will be running mostly on my laptop, which is pretty fast and should be able to finish conversion of the recordings that are in a good state in about 2 days. However, some of the converted files may be broken and need some manual attention. My upload bandwidth is only 448 kbit/s so the high-quality files will take about a week to upload. As ever, the video files are being published on meetings-archive.debian.net.

Hey folks, we released some minutes ago finally Debian-Edu/Skolelinux 3.0r0 ?Terra? which is based on Debian 4.0 with some modifications to work out-of-the box. Here are the releasenotes: Oslo - July 22., 2007 Skolelinux 3.0 is ready. This is an community release with comprehensive support from regional and national projects in Germany, Spain, France, Greece and Norway. The Skolelinux project is now a part of Debian under the name Debian-Edu. Several other projects have made additional functionality to Skolelinux tailored for national needs. Skolelinux now supports more than 50 countries. whats new in skolelinux 3.0: based on Debian 4.0 ?etch? and therefore compatible to LSB 3.1, using kernel 2.6.18 and KDE 3.5.5 Full support for networked Thin clients, ?LowFat (diskless) clients, Workstations and Laptops. With the ?LowFat clients users got full PC functionality with extremely low maintenance cost. The use of ?LowFat clients gives full support for sound, video, USB memory stick?s and DVDs without the need for a local installation. Skolelinux now got more than 80 applications selected for pedagogic uses, supporting more than 50 languages. Many new applications are introduced in addition to popular classic as GCompris, KDE-Edu, Iceweasel (unbranded version of Firefox) and ?OpenOffice.org. Installation is a breeze: Both the installation and source code for all software are now distributed on a single DVD now supporting three different processor platforms as i386, PowerPC and AMD64. This makes it more easy to choose hardware, and to study the recipes behind the software. Those interested can exercise their freedom to learn, participate and share knowledge more easily. Installation CDs are also available, but requires a working Internet connection for installation. about skolelinux Skolelinux is a complete tailored software solution for the needs of any educational institution or school. It is a ready computer system were the school does not need to piece together the components. Skolelinux is the result of the work of the Debian Edu project and Debian Edu is an official Debian subproject. It is installed in a great number of schools in Norway, Germany, France and other countries. Municipalities and Commercial Service Providers run Skolelinux across multiple schools, operated and maintained centrally. Service providers report that the ?lowfat clients? require half the maintenance cost of other desktop alternatives. The next milestone of Skolelinux development will be to merge the Debian-based ?LinEx distro into Debian Edu. Currently ?LinEx is used by more than 250,000 students and public employees in the region of Extremadura in Spain. in depth Lowfat clients is also known as Diskless workstations. They run applications locally on the client. All software comes from the server instead of locally from the client hard drive. Recommended minimum requirement for client machines is > 256 MB RAM and 800 MHz CPU. Skolelinux now got improved tools for system surveillance and maintenance. Roadmap for next merging of ?LinEx and Debian-Edu: * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/LinEx2DebianEdu-Roadmap Please note that the documentation for the 3.0 Terra release is only available in English at the moment and contains some rough edges. We have considered releasing before the end of the summer holidays more important and we will fix those rough edges in the coming weeks, when we also expect more translations to show up. Those fixes will be included in the upcoming 3.0 r1 release.

It is not fresh news, but I haven't had time to comment about it before. Very soon after launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was only made available worldwide in its original English version, you can read a free and non-academic version in Spanish. Spanish Hallows project, built up by a bunch of Harry Potter fans have made completely ridiculous efforts of J.K. Rowling and hers publishers (Bloomsbury Publishing) to try to delay versions in other languages. Perhaps this was not made with other intention than to avoid early publishing of copies sent to translators, which, as you know yet, happened anyway. Once again we see how is not only impossible, but stupid, to try to keep information in this new environment. I am pretty sure that most of books, movies and music publishers will disappear soon. But not because of piracy: they are not being able to adapt their corporate business model to the new environment. And I am sure that there are little start-ups out there working in this new model, and some of them will succeed. But nothing new here... it is how business world has worked for years now.

It’s interesting to see an eWeek article about outsourcing to Canada, apparently the US immigration laws are restrictive enough that US companies (such as Microsoft) are establishing offices there. It really makes sense, Canada seems like a much nicer place to live. It’s also interesting to see an eWeek blog post about reductions in outsourcing to India that claims that Indian salaries have increased so much that there are few benefits in outsourcing the work. I have previously blogged about my approval of outsourcing as a form of charity to developing countries which received this response in Spanish. An English translation of a section of that post is “Conclusion, outsourcing hurts and the damage to many individuals is permanent. In countries in the third world like the one where I live, the damage affects the majority of the population (80% of the population is very poor). It’s ridiculous that less than 10% of the Mexican population earn 8 to 10 thousand pesos per month which only allows them to survive and save a little to buy a car or a house“. I agree that the inequality in Mexico is a bad thing, but I think that outsourcing is more of a cure than a cause for such inequality. The competition for employees who are capable of doing such work will increase salaries for workers and create a middle-class. Also the net access which is needed for outsourced work will drive some political changes. When discussing these issues with Indians I never hear any complaints about outsourcing!

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Some people reading this blog know that I'm growing a special link with the isolated kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. This link is born with the DzongkhaLinux lanuch back in 2006 and the connections that were established then with the people working over there on their national Linux distribution at the Department of Information Technology. And more particularly with their lead developer in this, Pema Geyleg. In parallel to this, I developed a good "vibration" with that country and I realy plan to come back there in the future and visit it more deeply, including all friends I made there in very few days. The country is currently not what we, in the so-called western world, would call democratic. This is a monarchy and not, yet, a constitutional one. However, the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, (who has been ranked among the 100 people who have more influence in the world, last year, by Time magazine) decided long ago that he would bring the country to democracy by following a long but probably needed process. He first resigned last year, surprising everybody in the country, in the favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is currently the youngest head of state in the world. Democratic parliament elections are programmed for 2008. And, yesterday, as another step in this democratic process, the Prime Minister resigned along with 6 other ministers, to "enter politics" in preparation of these national elections in February/March 2008. Again, it's very interesting to watch this process from far and see whether the country will succeed in achieving this transition (Pema told me several times that, indeed, the majority of people in Bhutan are not particularly eager waiting for this transition, given the very special relation they have with the king (the buddhist religion playing of course a great role there). And, well, let's anyway hope that the future government and parliament will keep the push they're giving to the development of free software, currently.