I'm disappointed to see that the Co-operative Bank was one of those chastised by the Information Commissioner for "dumping customers' personal information in bins outside their premises." At least it wasn't the Co-operative Bank I was calling stupid recently and its online banking works with GNU. I keep getting asked by banks (including the Co-op) and utilities to switch to e-mail billing, but they seem clueless about e-mail security and none of them have offered me encrypted e-mail yet (OpenPGP or S/MIME). E-mail without encryption is like post without envelopes - anyone along the route can read it without asking. This leaves customers at risk of identity theft and worse, even more so than dumping details into bins. When will the information commissioner tell companies to stop exposing customer details by e-mail billing and start using encryption? Would these companies be allowed to post bills without envelopes?

I am excited to read I’ve Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel Solove and I am also excited of its “short” length, mostly because I reckon I can use this for undergraduate teaching (and will perhaps include it when I teach some version of this in the future). I place short in scare quotes because I don’t think a 25 single spaced article is really all that short though it is flagged as such in the abstract. But given this is a law journal article, which tend to trail into the 75-100 page range (and thus out of reach for most undergraduate teaching), it is indeed tiny. I am in the lookout for more law journal articles that are under 30 pages as I find them to be quite useful in the classroom…

Made some progress with gpe-cash today - fixing compiler warnings, stripping out yet more source code and fixing the debian packaging. It does build from SVN but it needs libqof1 >= 0.7.3 which is an unreleased version from QOF CVS.

gpe-cash.

It's now down to < 1Mb installed binaries with less than 500kb of additional libraries (liqof1, libsqlite) compared to a basic Gtk installation. It may creep up to 2Mb all-in by the time the rest of the Gtk code is complete but an Emdebian build should be able to cut that back towards 1.5Mb or so, installed, by dropping the docs. The SQLite backend is fully functional and the default backend. An optional libxml2 backend adds libxml2 and bumps the size requirements substantially but is worth using on the desktop as it adds support for a command-line mode that combines SQL-type queries with XML results. (Eventual plan is to rsync the sqlite from the handheld and use XSL to generate reports etc.) Still a lot smaller than any other double-entry financial package I can find and with none of the dependency problems of the original GnuCash, despite using the same objects. Managed to remove the need for GConf too which is quite handy for an embedded application.

gpe-cash will be my first GPL3 upstream - all the code I'm forking from GnuCash is GPLv2 or later, as is QOF, and GPL3 code can be linked against the LGPL2 or later libgpewidget so I'm making the new Gtk frontend GPL3 or later and I will eventualy release the whole thing under the GPL3 "or later". Thanks to Joe Smith and Anthony W. Youngman for their help with all that. I had it nearly right, just tweaked debian/copyright a bit.

Actually spent a fair bit of time migrating my upstream projects to Anjuta2 and getting used to the new interface. It is a bit twiddly at times and one or two bits are annoying (bit too much eye candy for my liking - repetition of labels and buttons) but overall it's a lot better than when v2 was first uploaded. The integral DevHelp window is handy. I'm still waiting for the svn plugin though and I've no idea what is going wrong with the anjuta manual. It is being installed and yelp can load it when passed the URL directly but I can't get it to show in the normal Gnome Help browser lists - only the man pages show.

I got a SIO2PC cable for my atari, hooked it up to a linux box, and used the atarisio tools to rip a few of my old BASIC disks. Now I can load them in the atari800 emulator, and will hopefully never lose this early code -- cuz it's in subversion now. The first disk I rescued ("finished programs disk 1") has a nice little menu on it with lots of games and stuff I'd put together. I've always been proud of the "vidio" game, which is the first game shown above. It'd give Pong a run for its money in simplicity, and has gameplay I still enjoy (for up to 5 minutes at a time). You're the green dot, which is flying from left to right. Each time it reaches the right side of the screen, it wraps back to the left -- but leaves a blue wall behind. Crash into the wall and you lose a life. Sometimes other dots appear that you can pick up to get new lives. This sounds easy, but it's not, mostly because the Atari joystick (or my code for reading it) is not very precise, so it's hard to line up to exactly the right place on the screen to go through a small hole in the wall. In contrast to that piece on innovation, the "jump" game is a pretty generic platformer, jump over the water and shoot the enemy that's crawling along the ceiling. It's also a bit buggy. I took a look at the code, but the bug on line 200 isn't very obvious, whatever it is. This is how everyone's old code looks to them after 20 years ... right?

---

Update: Some more games I found.. My version of Tetris for the Atari. It looks a lot better on a real TV tube. Two fun things in writing this were that I couldn't figure out how to program it to rotate the blocks on the fly -- so I just wrote out data with every possible rotation for every block. Also, Atari BASIC lacks arrays, so it uses strings for storing the game state.
(Colors are ok in 1st screenshot, but messed up in second.) Fatso's adventure had the best graphics I did on the Atari. It remapped parts of the the character set and used ATASCII characters as sprites. Ok, it's kind of a Lode Runner clone, but only the kind you write after having seen Lode Runner for 2 minutes. Looks kinda like it, but I don't think Lode Runner had spiders that dropped exploding eggs that broke all the rungs in the ladders..

---

Update 2: Disk images are nice, but regular files are nicer. I was able to explode files out of the disk images only with difficulty. I ended up using wine to run a windows program called Total Commander. It has a plugin that allows .atr disk images to be unpacked. To view the BASIC files, they have to be detokenized. I found a perl script to do that, that can be used on the fly of anything suspected of being a BASIC program. All the stuff is in my subversion repository.

As has been pointed out in pixie's blog entry earlier, today was insanely chaotic. Quite how we managed to get a confirmation number from a travel agent, and then get refused at checkin still baffles me; I think words need to be had with this company. Not only did they ruin our carefully planned journey to Amsterdam, they also delayed us by a day.
Oh well, in Duesseldorf for tonight; will be leaving in the early morning to go to Amsterdam. Luckily express train journeys to Holland are every two hours, and take only two hours to Amsterdam; so that should be relatively painless (touch wood).
What the hell is up with everything? I can't remember stuff ever being this chaotic or disorganised (myself included)!

Today I have released the next version of DebTorrent. It's been over a month since the last release, which means there are lots of new features in this one. This is also the first release that I consider actually useable, as it now listens for HTTP requests from APT for packages to download, and feeds the downloaded packages back to APT. It also includes a backup HTTP downloader that will use a Debian mirror to download packages from, only when no peers can be found that have them. This means your download always works, even if you're an early adopter (which I hope you are) and there aren't that many peers available. Finally, the larger packages have now been split into multiple pieces, which makes downloading them much more efficient. Here's the changelog:

• Add proxying capability to listen for HTTP requests from APT
• Add caching for all files downloaded
• Add automatic starting of torrents when Packages files are downloaded
• Modify startup to initialize all torrent downloads to download nothing
• Add automatic enabling of files to download based on requests from APT
• Add a backup HTTP download from a mirror when no peers can be found for a package
• Modify torrent creation to break large packages into multiple pieces based on the information from http://merkel.debian.org/~ajt/extrapieces/ (thanks to aj for most of this)
• Add download status information available from http://localhost:9988/
• Add lots more documentation

I've already started work on the next release, which will include almost no new features, but will be much easier (I hope) to use. It will also be distributed in a .deb binary format for the first time, and (again I hope) be available in the Debian archive. Here are the plans I've come up with for the steps to complete for the next release:

1. Make a debtorrent daemon script based on btlaunchmany
2. Make a config file with lots of explanations
3. Load configuration info from /etc
4. Save downloads and state to /var/cache
5. Log all messages to /var/log
6. Clean up the debug logging, possibly add debug levels
7. Use bittornado packaging files (debian/)
8. Add init script

I've never created/packaged a daemon before, so hopefully I haven't made any blunders in those plans.

If you are playing World of Warcraft on a Debian or Ubuntu system with newest Wine packages from WineHQ, then you might run into a problem - WoW-2.1.2.6803-to-2.1.3.6898-enUS-patch.exe files will crash on Wine 0.9.40 with some nastygrams sent in the direction of its mshtml implementation. Downgrade to 0.9.33 (like the version in feisty) and the patching will work just fine.

So I've been very happy with exaile - the media player - for the past week or so. I think I'm going to switch to it full time. The "random play" is suprisingly random. Despite listening to music 24x7 I'm finding myself hearing new music. I can only conclude that xmms and xmms2 have poor random functionlity .. The bigger issue is the handling of plugins. How do plugins get loaded? Via an external website. You do the pointy-clicky dance with the user-interface, and the system downloads arbitary code from exaile.org, installs it into ~/.exaile/plugins and executes it. Double-plus ungood.

 download_url = "http://www.exaile.org/plugins/plugins.py?version=%s&plugin=%s" \
    % (self.app.get_plugin_location(), file)
  xlmisc.log('Downloading %s from %s' % (file, download_url))

Let us hope they never lose control of that domain, (and never implement automatic plugin updates) otherwise all current users will hit the site, be persuaded there are newer plugins available and be compromised en masse... In other news, even with my planet-searching script, I cannot find the blog entry I wanted to refer people to. It involved people looking pretty and acting miserable. Possibly on buses?

No connectivity since Friday evening. I took all the precautions to ensure my connection will be working in the new place but it seems I'll have to wait until Thursday.

No email or anything. Even worse, I have a FTBFS bug that needs fixing.

Why are all the hotspots I find encrypted ? ;-)
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I’ve been away from blogging. I’ve been away from doing Debian and Ubuntu work (although there has been a few package updates, as well as a new one.) I’ve been away from a lot of happenings (like how the excellent Knightlust got to convince my fellow townsfolk at Lourdes College Foundation to use FOSS,) but that’s fine, since I know there will be others who can keep up the flame burning. I’ve been away because I’ve been looking at stuff. Lots of stuff. Various stuff. Stuff like Plan 9 from Bell Labs, and Inferno, and dabbling into distributed computing, working on an implementation of Plan 9’s file protocol. Stuff like thinking about programming, meditating upon it as an art, exercising a discipline of simplicity, clarity and frugality. All that stuff. I first looked at Plan 9 last March, when I was wanting to go another round at the Google Summer of Code. While I was not selected, just getting Plan 9 to run on my machines (first as a qemu terminal, then as standalone CPU server replacing my old Ubuntu dapper install on my desktop) exposed me to that other side,’ and that got me thinking about how software ought to be good. Of course, I could have just chosen to drop it all (after all, I wasn’t selected, so…) but I knew that if I stick long enough, I might just learn something. And yes, I am learning something. Like how a lot of software isn’t really simple, just appearing to be. Or how sophisticated software development methodologies rob the clear picture gained from a well-thought, clear, and simple analysis of problems. Or when push comes to shove, I will have to make a choice, between tolerating software complexity and status quo, or facing it and attempt to simplify it. Well, there’s much to tell, but I’m lazy, and I’d rather tell stories in bits. Anyway, I think I’ll have some time to spare, especially as I have accepted a new job at an up-and-coming company that, I hope and endeavor, will rock the local and international tech scene. And, while doing that, get around to make great tools to get my job done, and other people’s jobs too. I’m getting back to the action.

debbie commented:

"I really appreciate finding somewhere that's giving info' on where to find the coverage on t.v. I've just looked through Sky t.v listings and coudn't find a damn thing at 9a.m. on Saturday.........unless I'm blind and stupid. So ITV4 sounds the best, then. I'm not subscribed to the larger SKY packages. It's such an excting time!!!! The Tour De France starting HERE in England!!!!"

I've also linked CTC's listing in the last few days, which is more complete. I'm not subscribed to Sky either and I don't think British Eurosport's coverage was as good as International Eurosport in the past. I would be quite annoyed if I paid for Sky's sports package and still only got such limited coverage when better is available free-to-air. Get a dish, point it at 19 east and enjoy the German, or 5 west and enjoy French. Maybe today, the weather here will be good enough for me to fix my dish. I'm still surprised by itv's bizarre decision not to promote their tour coverage properly and not to put the highlights on itv1. Wouldn't 2 million fans be worth sacrificing a little of their much-hated late-night phone-in game show that currently hogs itv1 after midnight?

I'm back from watching the Tour de France stages in London (actually, I was back yesterday, but was straight out the door to CoopSW - more on that soon). It was pretty damn amazing, with far more than the expected 200,000 spectators on the Saturday alone. We started in Green Park, but it just got silly there - couldn't see a damn thing - so we plodded through to Hyde Park and stood about 10 rows back on the top of a bank where we could see both the course and a big screen. Excellent contest, but Kloeden and Cancellara were disturbingly fast. After a thoroughly surreal overnight stay in a hotel in Canning Town (yes, surreal: I'm sat there eating breakfast and a giant stick figure goes past the window at 30mph - it was damn Champion supermarkets caravan float), I went and stood on the roadside near km0 in Greenwich. Again, an amazing turnout. Every available vantage point was occupied. As well as being between 4 and 6 deep at the barriers, people were hanging from nearby railings, perching on top of stone pillars - and it seems that London bus shelters will support at least 8 people on the roof. I then took the DLR and Jubilee line back to Hyde Park, saw a bit on the big screen and caught the train home. I took tons of photographs, but used the film camera, so I'll wait for them to return from the developers. I'll watch the rest of the race on TV.

As we reach mid-summer, I think now is a good time to provide a more detailed update on my summer of code project, vlosuts. For anyone not familiar (or for anyone forgetful) the following is a brief summary of my project proposal. In order to assist in distribution upgrades, vlosuts (Virtual Live Operating System Upgrade Test Suite) aims at performing upgrades of live systems (between releases and/or repositories) while logging any errors encountered. By running on a live system (virtualized via QEMU/KVM/Xen/other) problems that may only be encountered with services upgrading can be identified early. The full proposal can be found at: http://code.google.com/soc/2007/debian/appinfo.html?csaid=24C7766EC4271F15

I am happy to say that vlosuts is successfully in alpha, with most of the desired features already implemented. Based on my initial project propasal timeline, I'm well on schedule.

Some of the features that were proposed included the ability to run the upgrade with packages selected by priority, from a list, and as mirrored from an existing system (packages can even have a specific version specified, though of course the repository used must have that version available). Additionally, when mirroring this package list, configuration files can optionally saved as well. This allows testers to (as nearly as possible) reproduce a specific system.
These options have all been implemented among others. I have also put in support for running with QEMU, KVM, and Xen backends.

For the remainder of the summer, my goal will be adding additional features and tackling a few bugs that have come up. In particular I'm trying to take advantage of QEMU's ability to emulate various architectures. However, the stability of user-mode emulation has been uneven for me (segmentation faults whenever any program is launched), which is required in order to cross bootstrap. Once this is worked out, one should be able to test upgrades on any of QEMU's supported architectures.

Additionally, vlosuts is not yet available as a package, which is clearly something that needs to be fixed soon. I'll be spending some time in the next couple weeks packaging it and making sure it sets up correctly.

I think that about sums up the current state of things. It's been a good experience thus far, and hopefully the rest of the summer continues to go well.

So the journey of David Noble and I began. (Actually a few days ago I just couldn’t be arsed to write anything before now).
After driving to Cambridge and staying in Norwich for a whole dreadful week, we went back to Cambrige for a couple of nights, where I ended up playing Zelda on the wii for a good 11 hours. On our way to the airport, at 4am, the bus was late due to someone leaving a bag at the busstop, so they ofcourse took this as a bombthreat and closed down the entire road leaving the bus 45 minutes late.
We then arrived at Stansted, which was surprisingly non-hell-like this time as opposed to last time where I was treated as a terrorist for bringing vaseline.
An interesting planeride with paper IRC in the google notebook (Which will never be spoken of again) later, we arrived Stockholm, or, atleast what Ryanair calls Stockholm. It was two hours away from the actual Stockholm so we had to take the bus. I saw the sun for the first time in three weeks and it was the happiest day of my life, until the event that followed..
Our boat tickets for Turku were the only things we hadn’t printed out, so we ofcourse went to the wrong side of the shore in the city. They said they couldn’t find us in the system and assumed it was because our boat wasn’t arriving for another six hours. We locked our bags in the lockers and ran off into the city and had wonderful wonderful sushi and sun.
A few hours later when we returned, about an hour before our boat was to leave, they still could not find us in the system. Upon where we thought ’shit’.
Struggling to get online, we found out our actual boat terminal was on the other side of the city.
We rushed down, and actually DID make it to the boat in time. The boats had sauna ohmygod.
However, Dave had booked us a nightboat with no room or beds, so we had to spend the night on a cold floor. After not sleeping for two days already that is not very pleasent.
We eventually arrived Turku, took the train to Helsinki, and went to Teemus place and passed out on the grass in the sun. This ended in sunburns for my sunintolerant useless norwegian-english skin. Totally worth it though.
The day after we left for the festival Konemetsa with Hanna/Tulitar. The weather was nice uptil the middle of it where a huge rainstorm covered the area. It was literally bucketing down with rain, which resulted in a wild crowd, tons of mud, and us jumping and dancing around in it being very much into the music (I’ve never been so happy to have a shower my entire life once we got home). I can’t believe none of us are sick after that actually, one would think it would result in a heavy cold doing this for three days.
Tomorrow we will head for Copenhagen by plane, followed by train to Amsterdam. New adventures await us!

Last night I came across an amazing photo of one of my favorite spots in Viejo San Juan, Puerto Rico, La Rogativa. It is one of the *best* spots to sit, at night, after a walk and few drinks, and watch the lights dazzle in front of you till the sun decides to rise. You will not be disappointed, especially during a winter’s night when there just may also be a slight touch of cool breeze to caress your skin. Here is the story of the statue:

A modern bronze statue of the Bishop of San Juan and three torch-bearing women stands in the Plazuela de la Rogativa. A good spot for scenic views, due to is fine location overlooking the bay. The beautiful bronze statue is the work of Lindsay Daen, created in 1971 to mark the old city’s 450th anniversary. Plazuela de la Rogativa (plaza of the procession) features a modern sculpture depicting a procession of religious women and a bishop. It commemorates an event that took place on the site in 1797. During the spring of that year, a fleet of British ships led by under Sir Ralph Ambercrombie sailed into San Juan Bay, meaning to launch an assault on the city and take control of the colony. When the attack was foiled, they undertook a naval blockade of San Juan, hoping to starve the residents into submission. As the town s people began to despair of any help from soldiers garrisoned in the inland towns, the governor ordered a rogativa, or plea, to ask the saints for assistance. The women of the town formed a procession through the streets, carrying torches and ringing bells. The British, hearing the commotion and seeing the moving lights, decided that reinforcements had arrived and quickly sailed off.

Mary Gardiner has written a lazyweb post asking about how to solve the problem of laptops being more expensive in Australia than in some other countries. She didn’t post contact details or enable comments on her blog, but that’s OK as this information may be useful to other people. Some years ago I was living in The Netherlands and discovered that the cheapest Thinkpads were available by US mail-order (which didn’t support shipping to other countries). As I was attending a US conference (the Colorado Software Summit) anyway I decided to get a Thinkpad at that time. So I found an friend in the US who was attending the same conference who was willing to receive the Thinkpad for me. I arranged to have the Thinkpad delivered to his doorstep (he assured me that he lived in a safe neighbourhood) and a couple of weeks afterwards I met him at the conference and received my nice new Thinkpad! I’m sure that most people who are active on the net can find someone in the US who they would trust to deliver them a package costing >$1000 and finding such a person who attends the same conference as you shouldn’t be too difficult (I’ve done it). Another way I bought a Thinkpad was that I arranged to have a holiday in London at the same time as the wife of an American who ran a computer store. I met his wife at Heathrow airport and made the final cash payment for the Thinkpad that she delivered. I was worried about a police reaction to seeing a cash sale of a parcel in an airport, but there weren’t any problems… In terms of warranties on laptops, the Thinkpad warrantee is world-wide. You can quote a serial number of a Thinkpad when arranging the warranty repair and they will tell you which country it was purchased in, but they always cover you. I’ve had many Thinkpad repairs, I wear out keyboards regularly through constant use, and due to the extensive travel and hard wear often other parts wear out too. It’s been pretty rare for me to have a warranty repair in the country where my Thinkpad was purchased and I’ve never had a receipt available. It’s never been a problem, they know from the serial number whether the warranty is valid and take care of everything. Thinkpad repair (both under IBM and now under Lenovo) also operates when there is no hard drive in the machine. They don’t even ask a question about the lack of a drive, just note that it doesn’t have one. Update: It has been pointed out to me that importing a laptop without paying tax on it is illegal in most places. But of course if you pay the tax then the total cost will probably be about the same as buying it locally.

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I. Introduction

Today, the mid-term evaluations of the Google Summer of Code starts. It means it's a good for a comprehensive summary of what I've done so far.

For those who don't remember, My GSoC project is the Bug Triaging and Forwarding Tool, whose aim is to help triaging of Debian bug reports. On my proposal, I had included the following timeline:

• April - May: Study of the resources available for use in the project
  (Debian BTS SOAP/LDAP interface, Bugzilla interaction resources, etc)
  and the design of the tool. Request needed unavailable features,
  if any, with patches if possible


• May - July: Development of initial interface and code to interact with
  Debian BTS


• August: Development of Bugzilla plugin

During the proposals evaluations and the community bounding period, it was pointed to me that there's already a lot of good tools to handle bug reports, so I've changed this a bit and already started to work on BTS-Bugzilla interaction, which seems to be the more novel part of the
tool.

The development has been fragmented in three modules: btsutils, bzutils and bug-triage.

II. btsutils

The btstutils is a python module to interact with the Debian Bug Track System. Currently, it can query the bts by bug number, package, source package, maintainer, submitter and usertag. For each bug, it returns bug number, package, summary, status, severity, submitter and tags. Support for returning usertags is under way.

Ths btsutils can use html or soap to access the bug data, and has also a backend-agnostic module wwith tries the best method and, if that fails, tries the other.

Steffano Zacchiroli has offered me to include the btsutils on the debian-bundle, a bundle of python modules for dealing with Debian infrastrcture. I'm very excited by this idea, and believe that if all or at least some of the Debian tools which interact with BTS end using a standardized module for access, this might end up being the major contribution of my GSoC project for the Debian community.

III. bzutils

The bzutils is similar to the bzutils, but is to interact with bugzillas instead. Currently it can do queries based on GNOME's bugzilla boogle and the more generic boolean charts. The later works (at least) on GNOME, KDE and standard bugzilla (i.e., landfill). For each bug, it returns bug id,
product, component, status, resolution, reporter, assignee, summary, priority and severity.

IV. bug-triage

The bug-triage is the Bug triaging and forwarding tool. It's being developed using python, gtk and glade.

Currently, it can query the BTS using any of the btsutils' supported fields (even though the usertags aren't really accessible through the interface yet). It can also launch one of the returned bug reports in a web browser.

Integration with bugzillas is under development. It already has an interface to establish links between Debian packages and upstream bugzilla's address, product and component. The next steps will be to add an upstream button in the toolbar/menu and make it show the bugs selected through these info, allowing the user to mark the bug as forwarded to one of them.

V. The future

After that, I'll work on these features (in no particular order): filling a new upstream bug using the Debian bug data as a starting point, more advanced filtering options to filter the upstream bugs (such as filtering by words in the bug summary, and maybe through backtraces if available) and more ways to manipulate the BTS through the interface.

To be sincere, it seems this project won't be as advanced as I would like on the end of the GSoC. There are some new, unexpected (and good ^_^) things going on my life, which are taking some of the time I expected to dedicate to GSoC, which means I'll likely keep the current pace until the end of the project (I expected to increase it during July). Even so, I believe the
project is going on a good path, and I hope it'll be very useful for the Debian community.

I'm still lacking the obligatory post-DebConf7 post... These weeks had been intense... So, first of all, thanks to all the DC-team for another wonderful conference. Next year I'll feel how it's done one of the two things that everybody likes but nobody wants to know how it's done. Hint: not sausages. This is the first time I've also attended DebCamp, and it was very useful. Not that I could do any real work, as very few people are able to do that during DebConf, but I managed to do what I planned, that is talk with many people who are working on debian-cd, debian-installer and custom-cdds. I've already uploaded my pictures to a temporary place, whitout captions, until I decide how I will replace the stinko called gallery. And there you can see that I was one of the few that actually wore a kilt during the event —not a proper Debian kilt, but hey... After DebConf, and after a year of hard work, I took a seven days vacation in the UK. So I was able to know Edinburgh (I prefer to hang out with Debian people that doing tourism during the conference, so I only knew the way to the supermarket). I also went to the Arthur's Seat HIll, which was very beautiful, and was only a 1-hour walk from the hostel to the top. Then I did a small visit to Stirling and concluded that castles in Scotland are not that interesting (but go to the Smith Museum!). Then, I went to London for a couple of days (dang, that was expensive!!), visited Marx's tomb, rided near the car bombs, got to know all the nice stuff that the british stole from around the world in the British Museum (it's really great, and free), and went to Cambridge to spend a day (and punting, I even did the punting myself!). Finally I spent my last day walking around that beatiful city, in the Soho and South Bank areas. I don't want to forget to say thanks to Nattie, Kai and Ben for hosting me, you guys rock!! This last week has been very productive. I was working GSoC project, trying to recover from lateness, and staying until late. It was worth it, I have finished settling down the architecture and overall design, and wrote the main program which will coordinate all the tests to be run. It includes from the begining dependency-based scheduling and paralellism, so I hope it will scale well in SMP computers. I also wrote a draft specification for the plugins and description of the running plan in the wiki page. I've also asked for the creation of a Alioth's project, so I can start publishing the code, and get feedback from the people that will use it.

I'm still lacking the obligatory post-DebConf7 post... These weeks had been intense... So, first of all, thanks to all the DC-team for another wonderful conference. Next year I'll feel how it's done one of the two things that everybody likes but nobody wants to know how it's done. Hint: not sausages. This is the first time I've also attended DebCamp, and it was very useful. Not that I could do any real work, as very few people are able to do that during DebConf, but I managed to do what I planned, that is talk with many people who are working on debian-cd, debian-installer and custom-cdds. I've already uploaded my pictures to a temporary place, whitout captions, until I decide how I will replace the stinko called gallery. And there you can see that I was one of the few that actually wore a kilt during the event —not a proper Debian kilt, but hey... After DebConf, and after a year of hard work, I took a seven days vacation in the UK. So I was able to know Edinburgh (I prefer to hang out with Debian people that doing tourism during the conference, so I only knew the way to the supermarket). I also went to the Arthur's Seat HIll, which was very beautiful, and was only a 1-hour walk from the hostel to the top. Then I did a small visit to Stirling and concluded that castles in Scotland are not that interesting (but go to the Smith Museum!). Then, I went to London for a couple of days (dang, that was expensive!!), visited Marx's tomb, rided near the car bombs, got to know all the nice stuff that the british stole from around the world in the British Museum (it's really great, and free), and went to Cambridge to spend a day (and punting, I even did the punting myself!). Finally I spent my last day walking around that beatiful city, in the Soho and South Bank areas. I don't want to forget to say thanks to Nattie, Kai and Ben for hosting me, you guys rock!! This last week has been very productive. I was working GSoC project, trying to recover from lateness, and staying until late. It was worth it, I have finished settling down the architecture and overall design, and wrote the main program which will coordinate all the tests to be run. It includes from the begining dependency-based scheduling and paralellism, so I hope it will scale well in SMP computers. I also wrote a draft specification for the plugins and description of the running plan in the wiki page. I've also asked for the creation of a Alioth's project, so I can start publishing the code, and get feedback from the people that will use it. PS: do MIND THE GAP, please. :-)