Having taken time out to go to the other side of the world to attend DebConf 7 in Edinburgh, and then after spending some time with my family, I have been somewhat distracted from things CalDAV for a wee while now. There are signs that I will be able to put a few more evenings and weekends into it in coming months. Current Status With the release of 0.8.0 I believe it is quite a usable application for shared group calendars. We use it at Catalyst for about 80 staff and, while we're not heavy calendar users, it manages without any noticeable performance problems. There have been an impressive number of downloads from Sourceforge, as well as substantial downloads from my Debian repository, and I believe that the program is in tens, if not hundreds, of installations. Future Plans In the immediate future I want to get the basic framework for querying properties about the owner of a calendar or a set of calendars. This will be used by Mozilla soon during their configuration of a new CalDAV source, and I think that Apple iCal probably uses them already. This is partly done, but it's implementation has been slowed by the necessity to refactor the handling of the REPORT method in general to make the code more modular and readable, and to support queries and properties in a more general manner. The refactoring of the REPORT method handling is in place now, so moving on to the handling of DAV:principal objects should become fairly straightforward. I may end up with a fair bit of quiet, undistracted time over the coming weekend so if I can get in the 'zone', it may get done, and we can start rolling towards a release 0.9. Release 0.9 will have a new name. One from the cast of thousands that have been submitted to me so far, or one that I will hastily think up in between, but the next released version will not be called RSCDS any longer. The main goals for further into the future are:

• Maintain interoperability with clients
• Improve specification compliance
• Extend coverage to related specifications
• Documentation improvements
• Configuration improvements
• Installation improvements

Interoperability I think that RSCDS does fairly well on the interoperability front. Unfortunately I have no access to the preview of OS 10.5, with it's native CalDAV client (though I have been told that it works with RSCDS). Likewise, other commercial CalDAV clients aren't available to me for testing either, so I have concentrated my efforts on supporting the featureset used by the various free CalDAV clients. My initial work focused around supporting Evolution, in particular, but with the recent effort put in by the Mozilla Calendar team the primary interoperability challenge is to enhance RSCDS to support their areas of development. If I could see how the OS 10.5 client behaves, too, I believe that would help identify a few points to extend, as well as suggesting some future directions. The best place to review interoperability would probably be at the CalConnect Roundtable 10 but I think that without some sponsorship for airfares I probably won't be able to make that. Maybe next time. Specifications Compliance As I read, and reread, the CalDAV (and DAV, and HTTP, and ...) RFCs the compliance with the various specifications improves. Recently I have put a lot of work into the calendar-query report, in particular, which means it now supports querying against arbitrary properties much more comprehensively. This is important because some of the client software is starting to do arbitrary queries also, and it is inevitable that queries for the classification of events, or the percentage completion of todo items will become more common. And now I notice that there is a new version of DAV in RFC4918, though not too many changes as far as I can see. The intent of this release is mostly to clarify, and slightly to extend, primarily in order to improve client interoperability. Coverage of Related Specifications In terms of general calendaring activities, the biggest hole in the CalDAV specification at present is standardisation around the location of other people's schedules. The current draft of the Scheduling Extensions to CalDAV appears to address that, and a lot more besides. I expect to start working on parts of this at some point, but perhaps not sooner than I see a client which starts using it, or when it is ratified, whichever occurs soonest. Documentation The documentation is OK. The wiki, in particular, is a reasonable resource for resolving problems (I believe), but it would be good to have some documentation of other things. One area that could do with enhancement is some documentation of how to check out a copy of the code, and how to provide patches back to me. Even better if other people can maintain their own trees which I could pull patches from, since we're using a distributed version control system (Git) to start with. Configuration The administration interface for RSCDS is OK, but could do with a few improvements to make it more usable. Really there are not a lot of reasons to be in the administrative interface, so these improvements should be relatively few, and relatively easy. This would be a good area for someone interested in helping out to become involved, because it does not entail reading large reams of RFCs, or watching tcpdumps scroll past for the debugging. Installation One thing that I have done right, I believe, was to provide the software from the beginning in a packaged form to make the installation easier. Although the software is packaged for Debian, however, it has not yet been uploaded to the archive because I have been waiting for the webapps-common package to enter Debian so I can use that for configuration. I think I have waited long enough though, so I will upload the next version to Debian for use by a wider audience. Security Security has always been a focus for me and I have had the code reviewed for any obvious security flaws. If any particular vulnerabilities are found they will be addressed with appropriate haste. Retrospective I've been working on this for a little over a year now, and I think I have largely met my goals for the project. It has certainly been an educational experience for me, and the effect of this work on other projects that I also participate in has also been valuable. Any new open-source project is always at risk of the developer losing energy and interest, but I believe this one has made it to a state where the bulk of the infrastructure effort has been done, and there are enough interesting challenges in the future to continue to keep me (at least) working on it into the future. The scope of this project is good, in that it is not at risk of expanding to take over the world. The intention behind this is simply to provide a back-end service for client software which should be very much Someone Else's Problem. In reality there have been times when I have had to get to grips with some of that client software in order to resolve problems, but those have by and large been good experiences.

I've switched from xmms to Audacious. The end of 10 years of love. At least I can use last.fm again

I've been offline, but I think I've caught up now. Email if you think I missed you. Here's some of what I did before I went offline:

robmyers Seller's Remorse

Social Contract ten years on July 5 -- celebration?

Advertising Free Software Projects etbe

A Cambridge Co-operator: Great News

Michael

Cooperative? My Arse Web design and development techniques by Steve Tucker

Anti-DRM campaign, Apple Store, London.

Place Your Blog on a 'Busy Intersection'

Should Links from Your Blog Open in a New Window? Reader Opinions

Back

Co-opNet :: View topic - What Crisis

LWN: Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

The Problem with RSS

Property of a Lady Answers to Love Is Strange Trivia

Fairtrade Beer niq's soapbox

Co-opNet :: View topic - The Cooperative Tour de France

ITV response to Coverage Question... - Page 3 - ITV Message Boards

Why doesn't Online Main Stream Media link?

Property of a Lady Tuesday Trivia: Dance

Humor for Bond 22? Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

lamby :: blog :: Graduation

itv and Other Tours Coverage: Vuelta, ToB

Holidays-London-and-rain

Reflowd - Recentlog

Reflowd - Source code

Aaargh! niq's soapbox

Ten Years of Catalyst IT It's our tenth anniversary at Catalyst this year. Since we have our company 'birthday' in the middle of the year we normally have a private party and, while that's been good in the past, we felt ten years was a milestone of some kind and we wanted to do something a little more special... So this year we decided to set up the New Zealand Open Source Awards, which are all set to go in October. There have been lots of entries rolling in to recognise all sorts of interesting projects and unsung heroes of the revolution, but I'm sure there are still a few out there that we haven't heard of. If you think we might have missed one you've only got 10 more days until nominations close at midnight, New Zealand time, on the 17th of August. Nominate your favourites now in the following categories:

• Open Source Ambassador
• Contributor
• Software Project
• Use in Government
• Use in Business
• Use in Education
• Use for Community Organisations

Note that this is not a vote. All entries will be judged on their respective merits by a panel of New Zealanders with a broad technological background. Good luck, and may the best people / teams / departments / organisations win :-)

Debian Revolutions ... begin with small steps ... ... let's see if the one I'm seeing right now will be one of those. Since ages the collab-maint project on Alioth has been configured so that all DDs can commit to its SVN repository. I've always thought this is a good idea and I've always wanted that to be true for all Alioth's collaborative maintenance project, rationale being always the same: DDs are lazy, if I have a patch ready there is nothing more valuable than the ability to commit it right now (together with an appropriate changelog entry of course!). At Debconf I chatted a bit about that with Sam and Raphael, and we started thinking about how to make that wish a reality. As a first step the Alioth admins agree on giving DD-wide commit permissions to every alioth project asking so. Let me repeat: you can widen to the whole DD body the commit permissions of your collaborative maintenance project on Alioth just asking the alioth admins. It's quick and easy, and I'm confident Debian as a whole will benefit for mass adoption of this good practice. Raphael has proposed that for adoption to the Python and Perl modules maintenance groups, and it's now implemented for the OCaml maintenance group. Ask that for your beloved collaborative maintenance project! The next step is to patch the GForge running on Alioth so that project admins can enable such a setting by themselves: I volunteered to work on that, but I'm a bit swamped with other Debian-related stuff, help would be much appreciated!

It's been a few days since I posted on my blog -- since I left Montreal for Taipei and Wikimania 2007. My time has been upside-down and backwards as I've traveled around to the other side of the clock and a day into the future, and I've just been insanely busy with other work. My flight to Taipei was dreamy. I travelled enough last year to get Air Canada's "silver" frequent-flier level, which earned me a couple of system-wide upgrade certificates. They came in handy, since I bumped up to business class on the leg between Montreal and Vancouver, and then to the "Premier Laurel" class on the EVA Air codeshare between Vancouver and Taipei. That was first class across the Pacific Ocean, and man, it's the only way to fly. Jimmy Wales was on the same plane (but back in business class...), so we got to chat a bit and we shared a taxi to the conference site. Jimmy's really fun to talk to -- it's always nice talking to another entrepreneur who's passionately dedicated to Free and Open Content. (We were in line for customs together, too, and I tried to peek at his passport to find out his date of birth, over which there is some confusion. But he had his thumb over the day (intentionally...?), and all I got was "Aug 1966", which everyone agrees on anyways. Dang! My personal theory is that Jimmy was born on 6 June 1966 and uses 8 Aug 1966 instead to avoid the demonic stigma.) The conference centre we're in is great -- a really big, clean, modern place. It's nice when we're inside, but Taipei in August is muggy and hot like a laundromat in rural Mississippi. I find myself rushing between buildings. tags: wiki wikimania2007 taipei evaair jimmywales travel

IM IN TAIPEI HACKING UR DAYS I came in a couple of days early to participate in the Hacking Days event. This is a pre-conference meetup for MediaWiki developers and those who love them. The meetup was really unstructured and fun because of it, although there were a few points of uncomfortable silence when people stopped talking and we all realized we had 14 more hours of meetings and not much left to say. There's also a real tension between the conference organizers, who've encouraged non-developers to come to Hacking Days, and the core developers who really want to just be left alone and get some work done. This year the 2-day event was split into "Hacking Days" and "Hacking Days Extra", with the first being invite-only and the second being open to all. I think it's a tension that needs to be resolved -- if outsiders aren't invited to Hacking Days, we just need to say that and live with it. We shouldn't let people think they're going to participate and then cut them out. That's a bait-and-switch tactic and it's unfair. I think that there's a need for an open-attendance MediaWiki conference; I also think that MW is a big enough piece of software that third-party conference organizers would be eager to make an MWCon work. And core developers could get hefty fees for coming to talk! tags: wiki mediawiki hackingdays wikimania2007

Announcements I've been having problems sleeping here. I've been falling asleep at the wrong times and waking up at the very wrong time. Last night, I missed the Wikitravel Eat-together because I fell asleep at dinner time and didn't get up for the event. Make mental note: don't miss your favorite wiki's user get-together! Fortunately Jani covered for me and apparently the event was a lot of fun. Speaking of Jani: this morning he announced a new venture that Maj and I have been helping him with. Wikitravel Press is an independent company that will be publishing a line of printed travel guidebooks (yes, paper books! That you can hold in your hand!) based on Wikitravel content. I think it's a great project and I'm really glad we're going to finally be fulfilling this important goal of the Wikitravel project. I also think it's going to be a great way to attract a new round of contributors -- people who are more reliant on their paper guidebooks than to a search engine for learning about their destinations. I think that the idea that they can change and improve the books they have will be a really important incentive for these folks. And like it or not, there are still a lot of people who don't consider digital information "real" in the same way as analog-stored info. So putting Wikitravel guides on paper is like Pinocchio becoming a Real Boy. Thank you, Blue Fairy! More info at the project's announcement and the on-site discussion (Wikitravel:3 August 2007). tags: wikitravel wikitravelpress guidebooks travel announcements

Called out This morning's keynote address by the Wikimedia Foundation chairwoman Florence Devouard was informative and interesting. She even talked about ways to bring money into the Foundation... including selling books based on the site content. I was giggling about this with Jani as she moved on to talking about the attention economy, to hear, "For example, Evan is not paying attention right now and talking to his neighbour." D'oh! Lesson learned: don't mess with User:Anthere! tags: anthere keynote books wikimediafoundation

If anyone fancies getting their hands dirty with some Evolution Data Server code, I just marked #314709 with the gnome-love keyword. This patch involves adding support for per-contact geopositioning to EDS. Half of the patch is trivial: adding a #define. The other half involves creating a struct to represent the GEO field (two floats), and hooking it up to the EContact accessors. I'm willing to mentor anyone who seriously wants to implement this. NP: (), Sigur Rós

• China fact of the day
• The Power of Java?
  Haha.

* Yes, they can upload crappy packages but we can ask to revoke an account.
* Yes, they can upload crappy packages but someone must sponsor the 1st upload.
* Yes, they can upload crap but a DD is advocating them. If they are smart enough to fool a DD to get an DM account then they are smart enough to fool him for the DD process.
* Yes, they can seek sponsors but finding sonsors is not that easy (At least for me).

Perhaps there's a way to identify the DM uploads so we can do more checks "not part of the process" ?
read more

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.

* Yesterday, we had meeting with Mozilla guys, Chris and Seth at HBCSE. I was touch with Seth from some days and made this announcement on ILUG-Bom mailing list. Nirav was backbone behind this meet. 42 people did RSVP for meet. * I reached there at around 9.30 AM, Ankit was already there and he came long way from Pune (and paid 500/- from Thane to HBCSE too!), we met after 2 years and I felt great after seeing him - our l10n hero. We chatted while, ate ‘Idali’ and Chris and Seth was there at 10 AM. Perfect. But, there was only 6 people. We waited till 11 and setup tshirts on stage, projector etc. People were coming like they are coming in marriage! * I gave 1 minute welcome speech. Seth started talk at 11 AM. People grab Tshirts, Pins, Mouse pads (wow!) and cool stickers. Chris joined presentation to talk about how Mozilla evolve. We had nice discussion and question/answers too. Lunch was good. We had presentations from different people, including Ankit’s step-by-step procedure to start new language process for localization in Mozilla-* packages. * Krishnakant Mane showed us, how Firefox is capable with accessibility. I also thanks him here for Gnome-orca package (I did ITP after his demonstration in Dec ‘06 Lug meet). Siji showed some issues and its solution with printing. Dr. Nagarjuna presented ‘gnowledge’ extension for Firefox. Shantanu also gave demo on transliteration extension for Indian languages. * Somehow, Official lug meet didn’t happen. Speaker was missing! I seated together with other IRCers of #linux-india in canteen and we talked about various things. It was real fun to hear Pradeepto after long time. BG came too late (too late to have nice stickers!) * I officially hate Mumbai traffic, now. Many thanks to people who did RSVP and didn’t appear.

I won’t re-explain in great length why I think it’s good to endorse the concept of Debian Maintainers. I have been enough involved in the debian-vote discussions (and the previous debian-project discussions). I would just like to remind everybody that we elected sam to see changes and progress on many areas. We haven’t seen many results yet, but I know that sam has been working hard and I’ve been helping him as much as I can on the problem of our DSA team (one day I might blog about it or even start a GR if the situation continues to not improve despite the numerous efforts that we’ve put into it). Here we have a concrete proposal for a change, and I believe a change for the better. But just like for every change, people have fears: they fear people who only care about technical excellence and not too much about philosophy, they fear that the quality level will drop, they fear that nobody will care about NM afterwards, etc. It’s legitimate to have concerns, to express them and to discuss them. But we should not let them take us over or we’ll end up abandoning all initiatives that are required to evolve and adjust to our moving environment. We need to encourage people who are ready to try out new things. In cases where it’s not entirely clear how the situation will evolve, it’s better to try out and react accordingly instead of doing nothing and hoping that people will wait us. When we do things while hoping for the best, the worst won’t come up true so easily. Have faith in our future.

What’s the single biggest advancement Linux has brought to the industry? It’s an interesting question, and one that in my opinion has a very simple answer: Package management—or, more specifically, the ability to install and upgrade software over the network in a seamlessly integrated fashion—along with the distributed development model package management enabled. It used to be that operating systems were big, monolithic products, and applications were big, monolithic products you put on top of them. If you wanted to deploy, say, a web application, you sourced the middleware stack (which itself was probably several big products too), you sourced the operating system, and you (often painfully) had to integrate the two yourself (or pay a big company lots of money to do it for you). These days, you increasingly just “apt-get install whatever“. In this world, where does the operating system end and the application begin? The line is increasingly blurred—for when applications are deployed using an OS facility, seamlessly integrated with the OS itself, is the result an application or a feature of the operating system? In fact, in a very real way, all software looks to become part of the operating system—or, at least, this has certainly been the trend in the Linux world. What does this shift mean to the industry? For one thing, those of us that build operating systems as monolithic products have to change—it’s what users expect, and with a componentized operating system rather than a wad of stuff, it becomes far easier to push new innovations out into the marketplace and generally evolve the OS over time. Indeed, refashioning Solaris as a “distro” is the essence of Project Indiana—and package management is the key technology that will hold it all together. So, the next time you read about how Project Indiana aims to make Solaris more “Linux-like”, keep in mind that what we’re actually “copying” is the distro model, not Linux itself—which, after all, is a kernel, and has nothing to do with the package management and so forth the distros (you know, like Debian) built above it. This, better than anything else, highlights the opportunity for Solaris: What people really know when they say they know “Linux” is the environment that exists around the Linux kernel—the distro—all of which Solaris can deliver, and more.

On several occasions I have watched part of a TV documentary on gifted children, but I have never been able to watch one completely because every one that I have seen has been offensively wrong. One thing that they always seem to do is say that gifted children have special needs and often claim that they have problems socialising. This sounds quite reasonable, but if that’s the case then why would you make such children perform tricks on TV? Putting the children on TV is a very poor example of journalism and often of parenting - the parents’ desire to boast about their children’s performance (and implicitly their own parenting skills) is apparently more important than protecting the children. I think that the only situation in which gifted children should have their talents demonstrated on TV is if their skill is related to the performing arts. Not that TV coverage is necessarily good for children who have abilities related to performing (a casual scan of the news regarding adults in Hollywood shows the problems that people have dealing with fame), but it’s something that they will be driven to anyway. Also if they are going to demonstrate the intelligence of a child on TV then they really should make sure that they don’t demonstrate a lack of intelligence (on the part of the child as well as the producers). Asking a child to provide a definition of a word is often used as an example of intelligence (when it’s really an example of vocabulary). In one documentary a child defined a philanthropist as “someone who has a lot of money” (according to dict on my system it is “Love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men“). In another a child defined a genius as “someone who knows a lot“, while the definition of genius is not clear and there is some disagreement about what it is, most people agree that it’s about ability not knowledge. Being able to recognise when you don’t know something and admit would surely be correlated with intelligence… Telling a child that they are a genius or telling them their IQ seems like a bad idea at the best of times, and doing so in front of a documentary camera crew isn’t the best of times. Children are able to determine how their skills compare to others, there are more than enough attitude problems in schools related to skill comparisons without encouragement from adults. When I was in high school a friend who studied a martial art refused to tell me which belt he wore - he had been taught that such things shouldn’t be discussed outside the dojo to avoid creating a hierarchy based on belt rating in the community. I think that the same thing could be applied to IQ ratings. The term genius is grossly overused generally, I believe that showing greater than average ability in one area is not enough to qualify. I think that the minimum criteria would be to produce dramatic new developments/inventions in one area of research (EG Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking) or to advance multiple fields of science or art (EG Leonardo da Vinci) would be the minimum criteria. I had people call me a genius when I was young because I won prizes in maths competitions, was good at programming computers, playing chess, etc. The main criteria for achieving such things is to avoid wasting time on sport - in a school run by idiots with a focus on sport this was more a tribute to being stubborn than being smart! The TV documentaries mention many things that gifted children supposedly require, but strangely I don’t recall any of them mentioning the need to meet adults who are significantly smarter than average! You might think that this is the most obvious thing. The Big Brother and Big Sister programs of mentoring children who are at risk of crime and drugs apparently provide significant benefits, something similar for gifted children might do some good, probably more based on meetings of a few intelligent adults with a small group of intelligent children instead of the BB-BS model of one-on-one meetings. Washingtonienne seems like a good example of the need for this. There are some useful print articles however, this article in The Age makes some good points, it’s particularly interesting to note that some schools lie about special programs to support gifted children to attract students (someone should name the schools that do this). But then you get awful ones like this, naming the child in such a situation is irresponsible journalism. The girl in question may be forced to change her name to escape google when she’s older. It’s strange that it’s illegal to name a child who is involved in a court case but it’s not illegal to name them in such an article (let’s hope that the journalist used pseudonyms). Also you might expect an organisation such as Mensa to have someone smart enough to realise that bringing such attention on a 2yo is not in the child’s best interests. Does anyone know of a good TV documentary about gifted children? I guess that it would be extremely difficult to make one without showing the children on TV so that would restrict the film maker to children who’s abilities are related to the performing arts.

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Cultivation is a video game written by Jason Rohrer about a community of gardeners growing food for themselves in a shared space. Jason is also author of Transcend, a retro-style, abstract, 2D shooter already in Debian repositories. The game is cross-platform, and has been released in the Public Domain. Cultivation is quite different from most other games. It is a social simulation, and the primary form of conflict is over land and plant resources. There is no shooting, but there are plenty of angry looks. It is also an evolution simulation. Within the world of Cultivation, you can explore a virtually infinite spectrum of different plant and gardener varieties. All of the graphics, sounds, melodies,and other content in Cultivation are 100% procedurally generated at playtime. In other words, there are no hand-painted texture maps. Instead, each object has a uniquely “grown” appearance. Every time you play, Cultivation generates fresh visuals, music, and behaviors. Cultivation is certainly an unusual game, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good, in Jason’s words. From experience, some people absolutely love it, while others absolutely hate it. It’s intended to be an “art game” after all, and mixed reactions go with that territory. When two sides are fighting, they often ruin the commons for everyone. The game is a metaphor about that kind of situation. Too much fighting destroys the island for everyone. I’ve already finished the packaging of this game, and I hope it gets into Debian repositories soon.

After almost a year of working on and off on the package, glest is now in the new queue.

Glest is really a free 3D real time strategy game with amazing graphics and really interesting game play.

So maybe you're wondering why did it took me so long to package it. Well, glest is mainly developed on a Windows platform and GNU/Linux is the platform it was later ported to. So this came with some problems:

• the game uses jam as a build system; don't get me started on the intelligence of this build system; I had to go through real pain to make it build
  
• the game is entirely written with "little endian" assumtion in mind
• apparently the editor is not functional on Linux yet, but there is a patch (I will enable this later, after some testing)
• the build system was not bootstrapped before building the tarball
• the linux build creates some symlinks and I had to do some really nasty tricks so that there are no unrepresentable changes in the source
• the upstream is currently not that active, but it used to be a lot less last year; it seesm that there is a motivation/time issue with the leader of the project
  
• upstream moved the project to sourceforge and they keep the code now in subversion, but I wasn't aware about this until recently
• there are a few people talking about forks and a real fork which proclaims itself ast the real project continuation; I suspect that all this mess appeared due to inactivity of upstream last year
• the game used a non-free font
  

Since when I started the packaging work I was using a PowerBook G4 as my main machine I was upset that the game was little endian only, so I started working on a patch. I made an incomplete patch but I got stuck at some point. Time passed by and I replaced my laptop and I wasn't able to continue working on the patch. So I kind of forgot about it. Before debconf I decided is time to do the upload for little endian machines, add the endianess patch disabled.

During debconf I asked Tolimar to make an upload, and it turns out that for some reason I still don't know, the build resulted in a statically linked binary. I was amazed since I didn't recall doing any changes that might have triggered this. At some point I suspected that the build system is broken on other arches than i386 (my main machine is amd64) and halted. This until a few days ago Joey Hess added a comment in the ITP bug pointing out that the game is ok. After a couple of emails I realized that the static issue was just some strange temporary issue on my machine and now the package is in NEW.

So, that's my excuse. I hope that upstream glest issue get fixed. If not, I'll probably package glevolution, too.

Oggi mi e stato passato il link a questo raccontino di fantascienza catastrofica… E carino, scritto bene, tecnicamente preciso (cosa rara oggigiorno). E anche decisamente intenso, specie in alcuni punti… Mi ha lasciato un po’ sotto shock, devo dire… Se vi va provate a leggerlo! Today I received a link to this catastrophic sci-fi short novel story… It’s nice, well written, and technically precise (which doesn’t happen so often). It’s also a bit shocking at points, and has definitely hit me a bit… Try to read it, if you want! http://baens-universe.com/articles/When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth

Today I was checking how much diskspace is need when a small CLI (.NET) application like gfax is installed. The last 2 years I am optimizing the Mono packages in Debian to reduce dependency chains. Dependency chains can cause a small application to become very big (at least it looks that way) when they are installed, as modern Linux distributions automaticly install all required dependencies. So first I worked against GUI dependencies for non-GUI applications, those are annoying for servers, you don't want to install a X server or other GUI libraries when you only serve webpages using ASP.NET.
Splitting CLI 1.0/1.1 vs 2.0 also seemed to be a very good candidate to split apart, as applications usually are target at 1.0/1.1 or 2.0.
Then I split Base-Class-Libraries that have dependencies on native libraries (via P/Invoke), as those packages must depend on those native libraries, like DB drivers.
Last but not least I split debug symbols in a different package, as those are not needed for normal production usage, and embedded systems don't have much diskspace. The mono-dbg package is 28.2MB in size when installed, that's alot.
The Mono source package in Debian is now building 67 binary packages, but thanks to APT nobody has to care for that, every part is installed when needed. So today I was checking the results of it, how much will a small application download and install?
I am testing with a clean minimal Debian system, that way all dependency chains will show up very easily.
Installing GFax + required libraries today takes 43MB to download and 138MB on the harddisk. GFax is a small GNOME application, it uses libraries like: Mono, GTK#, GNOME#, Evolution#, GConf#.
So someone might say: "of course, it is based on that bloaty Mono virtual machine!", well let's check a different application.
What about a GTK# only application (no GNOME) like graphmonkey + required libraries? That will download 19.5MB and uses 56.4MB on the harddisk. That's alot less, isn't it? graphmonkey only uses Mono and GTK#.
So it's not Mono taking all no diskspace? Well after all my packaging optimizations, it's not Mono
So how big is a install of a minimal Mono runtime + all required libraries then?
Minimal as in enough to run famous the "Hello World".
It's 2.4MB to download and 7MB on the harddisk, yes you read it correctly, the super monster bloaty virtual machine just needs 7MB. Mono only has glib as dependency which will be replaced by the eglib library some day. After I had this great result, I wondered how big other runtimes are.... like.... Java and Python? The results are interesting...
A minimal Python install takes 3.9MB to download and 13.4MB on the harddisk. Yes, that's almost double the size of Mono, I was surprised too.
So and Java? Here it becomes a bit unfair as SUN's license is not allowing to ship parts of a Java runtime. So the Java package in a distribution is one package. 34.5MB to download and 95.2MB on the harddisk. Yes, that's alot, but thats the smallest install you can get when you want to run anything on it. So, if you want to run Hello World on a virtual machine: use Mono! just kidding...
Small runtimes are important when it comes to acceptance and adaption of new technologies, as nobody wants to kill all his computer resources for it. And I often hear the replies on Linux IRC channels, when people ask which software they can use to do $task: "No I don't want o install 100MB just for $task" and they decide to try some other software with less dependencies and less resource usage.
Also for the embedded area, resources are very limited, every MB still counts there. For the completeness of my report, here the naked numbers of other available Java runtimes: sablevm 22.0MB (63.2MB), kaffe 52.2MB (118MB), jamvm 28.3MB (65.4MB), cocoa 28.8MB (66.0MB).

Dekoor, a student choir which includes our friend Jense, from Utrecht participates in a television show Korenslag, a pop-idol like contest for choirs. As we've been devoted fans of Jense from the "Miracle Man" up to now, we attended the semi finals of this program. Being in the audience of this show that is broadcast live on national television is an experience in itself. An "applause master" instructed us when to be silent, when to applaud, and when to go absolutely crazy. To which we faithfully complied. During the show Dekoor did very well in our unbiased ears, although the others did okay too. Although we SMS'ed a fortune to vote for Dekoor, the choir "Re-Flax" got the popular vote. Quite to my suprise because they were the least original and dynamic of the four, in my opinion. Luckily the professional jury was again impressed and decided that Dekoor must go to the finals together with "Re-Flax". Unfortunately the finals are decided by popular vote (eur 0,60 per vote) which might work against them. So remember, next Thursday, 20.30 Nederland 1: the finals. Vote Dekoor! P.S. I made some pictures aswell.