These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 14 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Thanks to the s390-dasd upload, we are now two packages ahead from 100%. Six strings missing. The translation for dpkg-cross will soon be reported and I will just have to nag Neil Williams kindly so that he helps us reach our Grail. Czech gains near 100 strings today while I didn't do a single NMU. That shows that maintainers are still motivated to fix remaining l10n issues which is indeed the best reward you can make to all translators. Thank you, again, ladies and gentlemen.

I reject the unconstitutional honorary membership allocated by debian.ch and I have not made the mistake that I made with DUS, of possibly accepting membership by conduct. You can tell debian.ch is nothing to do with me: its director can't even print my name right. Will debian.ch continue to be used for personal abuse? Will the next DPL actually defend the debian name against unethical enterprises? Update: To madduck, because you don't even have comments on your blog: Yes, the debian user database is wrong. I don't know why my gecos is different from my GPG key, most of my IDs and my AM report and I've asked for it to be corrected for years, as readers of debian lists may remember, but it's well-known how responsive admin@db.d.o can be sometimes. IIRC, Ian Jackson once refused to sign my key because my IDs and db.d.o disagree. Seeing as it was posted to another blog, I'll delete the similar comment, but that's fairly unusual for me.

(update: numerous typos removed) This year, attending the whole Solutions Linux event wasn't compatible with my paid work (for those who care, I'm since September head of the Personal and departmental computing unit in the Networks and Information Department of ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab). Despite this, I booked at least yesterday afternoon to visit the expo and more particularly the Debian booth. It is always a pleasure to meet again French developers and contributors as well as all these old dinosaurs which I learned electronic communications with 1200bps modems with, some time ago. The Debian booth was as crowded as usual. It was still featuring a Babelbox, built in one night by Pierre Habouzit and Julien Blache. Congratulations, you did an awful job here. I'm glad I saw all those good people. I was tempted to cite everybody and will finally refrain because I'm too afraid of forgetting one of you guys. For our international readers, this includes several of the people I may have had a few flamy discussions and even blog "wars" with in the recent past (I'm just missing you, Joss, being told that you couldn't attend that Wednesday). As usual, we all survived very well. The other "big" event was also the first formal meeting of the Debian France non-profit organisation. Everything is pretty young but the hidden creation work done by the founding members has been huge and the base is now here. Debian now officially exists in France. I'll do my best to play my part in this action and work with other members of the board to fit the organisation goals and bring Debian more prevalence in our country. I also had a very long talk with Bruno Cornec and Louis Bouchard from HP. We discussed about HP customers needs for official support for Debian on HP machines, and not only servers (ONERA has an internal project to deploy a few hundreds of workstations aimed at being the scientific platform for ONERA scientists and PhD students. We already have more than 100 of these, based on RHEL and guess what are my mid-term plans for them? :-)). We just need some official commitment from HP to support using Debian to unlock the internal fears. It sounds like HP could go this way if customers show enough interest. Of course, ONERA's project is pretty small but we are one of the key players in out domain in the country so that could be kind of interesting marketing for HP...and Debian..:-). Bdale, I need to talk with you soon.... Back to work now, for a few days. Then, I'll take 3 days off next week to attend the 3rd Free Software World Conference in Badajoz and present the results of the Extremadura i18n session we held in September, along with other people who held some of these sessions, namely Frans Pop (about the D-I session), Wookey (about the Embedded Debian session), Knut Yrvin (about the Debian-Edu session) and Martin Michlmayr (about the QA session). All people who I will be very glad to meet again.

Milton Country Park

This park near Cambridge is under threat, partly due to council mismanagement.

Climate change prompts Cabinet change in Canada - CNN.com

Carry on flying, says Blair - science will save the planet Special Reports Guardian Unlimited Politics

Weston and Worle News: Recycling Service Branded Rubbish

"A Weston resident has branded the town's recycling service rubbish and joined calls for it to be investigated.Carolyn Jones, who moved to Weston Village from south Gloucestershire 18 months ago,..." I've had to telephone and get Biffa to come back after they missed my collection every time since New Year. What's going on?

Linux Ecology-HOWTO

Nuclear Power?

Cycle Parking Farcility of the Month

CTC - Cyclist who refused to stay in the gutter wins

So you are allowed to cycle on the roads in Telford, despite what the police there think. More coverage:

Cyclist's conviction thrown out : Shropshire Star

BBC NEWS England Shropshire Cyclist wins road blocking appeal

Cycle-lanes - epetition reply

A relevant reminder from Tony Bliar's office that cyclists don't have to use useless cycle lanes.

Trains Swindon - Melksham - Westbury - SLASHED by the DfT and First

Campaign site about the government-enforced cuts to Great Western services in the Wiltshire/Somerset/Bristol area.

EDP24 - Dangerous driver in cyclist death jailed

BBC NEWS England Norfolk Tired motorist jailed over death

High-res plans of the TdF London stages

As far as I can tell, I was not getting any email from debian.org because master cached a bogus MX record for phonecoop.coop. Update 2: superstar DSAs stroked the right widget so email should start flowing again. I think I can't email anyone at debian.org or lists because debian uses sender verify. Update: It seems that debian.org's use of sender verify means debian will get blacklisted. An anonymous commenter posted:

"I'm arguing against Debian admins using Sender Verify because it's evil. Even uceprotect will list them if they caught a mail from them: http://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=10&s=0"

Update: Steinar H. Gunderson - Sender verify says we shouldn't care.

In the last three days I made 15 NMUs, fixing 11 RC- and 4 l10n-bugs. I noticed that some maintainers were not aware that one of their packages had an open RC bug from the mails I received afterwards. So please double check your QA package for open RC bugs and fix them if you can. If you have some spare time please go to the unofficial RC-bugs page and check the bugs which are older than 7 days and affect etch and sid. We’re currently in a permanent BSP till etch is out, so 0-day NMUs are allowed. If you are an NM or no maintainer at all, you still can help by providing patches, submitting them to the BTS and tagging the bug with “patch”. Someone will upload ASAP and might even thank you in the corresponding changelog entry.

This has been a little overdue, but here it is. Lots of less than glamorous stuff has been going on in the XSF, and a few more exciting things are in the pipeline.

Among the less glamorous stuff, our resident release junkie/alpha porter, Steve Langasek, fixed #392500 which was our major RC bug on the alpha arch. Aside from that bug, there's been a whole host of bug triage by our newest team member, Brice Goglin. Brice has taken on the unenviable task of going through the massive list of bugs owned by the XSF. I've been traditionally less than responsible about handling bug reports like I should, and Brice is dealing with the mess I've left behind. Before he started, we were at over 2000 outstanding bugs, and as of this writing we're down to 1646 bugs, which is a huge amount of work. Hopefully this will go a long way towards making our little corner of the BTS usable for mere mortals. Aside from that, there's been an enormous amount of small cleanups and bug fixes by the whole team, most notably Julien Cristau (who's been doing more actual release management than yours truly), Thierry Redding, and Drew Parsons. Perhaps most important among these are miscellaneous last minute driver fixes that will enable a fair number of people to actually run Etch without backports. Michel D nzer has continued to be his usual awesome self, responding to the tough DRI bugs that the rest of us are terrified to approach.

Some of the more exciting stuff from a user perspective has been the various updates and new packaging going on. Thierry has taken on mesa, which is an incredibly daunting task, and he's done and incredible job of it so far. He and Julien cooperated on getting the newest mesa release, 6.5.2, in to experimental. That's a huge step on the way to getting the 7.2 release in to the archive. Thierry has also packaged up the newest compiz and some additional plugins ported from beryl, both of which are waiting in NEW right now for our overworked ftp masters to find time to have a look at them. Speaking of beryl, we also have that more or less complete and packaged. Our second-newest XSF member, Shawn Starr, has taken on beryl, and done a great job of getting the packages ready for experimental. They came back from review with a few minor comments, so he's busy getting those last issues resolved, so beryl should be winging its way over to NEW again for re-review soon. Finally, Josh Triplett and Jamie Sharp, who are both Debian and XCB developers, have put XCB in to experimental for you to test and play with. Expect to hear more about this when the Lenny development cycle starts.

The other huge thing that's been going on, and what I've been devoting most of my time to (aside from reading all the mail from Brice's bug triage), is transitioning the XSF over to git. Thierry has written major chunk of infrastructure to help move us over. I've done most of the conversion locally, and have been putting things up on git.debian.org as I go. As of now, we've got a very large chunk of X in git now, and using svn for those bits is officially closed. I'm hoping to complete the move in the next two weeks or so. If you want the above software that's not yet in the archive (beryl, compiz, compiz-extra, etc) you can clone it from the git repositories and build away. The other major thing that I've been doing is writing up a XSF git policy. This required a lot of input from the team, and we had to come up with a reasonable way of working the archive so that we could easily work with an upstream that was also using git, which as far as I know is a unique situation right now. It's in pretty good shape right now and we're just starting to put it in to real use. I've proposed a talk for Debconf on the XSF roadmap for Lenny, and I'll be sure to talk about our experiences using git if it gets accepted. In addition, we've all been learning the ins and outs of git, which is a whole other post in itself. I think that the XSF will end up being a really good resource for people in Debian who are looking to use git, as we'll have a lot of real world experience with a tool that relatively few people actually seem to know. Since I think git usage will only grow in the future, hopefully this will end up being valuable for Debian as a whole.

The housing situation for foreign students in Utrecht is far from optimal, but the most problematic is that there's no clear point where those students can go when they have an issue with their housing. Since most stay here only for periods ranging from one to twelve months, they're understandably not organising this themselves. I'm therefore delighted that after two years of talk, we've finally decided on a single point where Short Stay tennants can get help. USF Studentensteunpunt will welcome questions and issues from them, and our task is to make sure this point is well known by the foreign students, and to assist with any complaints that USF can't solve on its own. One wonders why this had to take so long, but we can finally start :-)

Playing with popcon data Check out http://people.debian.org/~enrico/popsuggest.php. You can upload there the popcon results of your system and have them compared with all the other submissions. It will show the results grouped by the most relevant tags found in your system, and you can filter the results based on various package types that map to debtags expressions. Credits also go to Eric Evans, for the continuous very useful and supportive discussions during all the development. As I said, there is so much really cool stuff to be written, just within reach. Some random notes taken during the development:

• The popcon dataset is on gluck in /org/popcon.debian.org/popcon-mail/popcon-entries
• Local popcon scan results are in /var/log/popularity-contest
• I now generate and publish aggregate frequency information
• Here are two links about TFIDF
• Here is some more literature about computing similarities; the Jaccard Index seems to be made exactly for Debtags tag sets.
• Xapian has python bindings documented in /usr/share/doc/python-xapian/bindings.html and the full C++ API documentation is also useful

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 13 days of "blitz l10n NMU". conserver and libpam-rsa being uploaded leave us with 8 (EIGHT) strings to update to reach the Grail. Czech continues to improve slightly. We will probably soon reach a plateau as, now, many remaining Czech translations are fairly recent bug reports.

The growth of new Open Content projects continues to amaze me. I really admire how the wiki technique makes it possible to combine the microcontributions of thousands or millions of people across the Internet and make high-quality, usable reference works for everyone to share and enjoy equally. What we'd normally think of as staggeringly audacious becomes manageable and realizable using wikis. I'm mostly waxing poetic here about a new project for creating a Free event calendar for the entire planet. Wikevent is built using the ubiquitous and reliable MediaWiki software, but with a ton of add-ons and features to make organizing an events calendar reasonable. There's a good mix of calendar-oriented interface, geographical interface, and a nice dose of Microformats thrown in for good measure. Wikevent is still in its early stages, but it doesn't take much imagining to envision a great future for it. Managing event calendars -- everything from the Beck concert in your city to the meeting of the local Interlingua club -- is a daunting task for local media. As its API and data feeds mature, it's reasonable -- nay, probable -- that Wikevent feeds could power the events calendars for local weekly newspapers, radio stations, TV, and community Web sites. I think it will make a good data source for community-oriented sites like Upcoming.org or Eventful. Wikevent plans to use a lot of metadata to allow slicing its database in different ways for different kinds of people. The entire database is available under the extremely liberal BSD-like Creative Commons Attribution license. Because it's such a nice complement to a travel guide, we've started adding Wikevent links to Wikitravel guide articles on our English version (and, soon, other versions too). There's more crossover, of course: the site's founder, Mark Jaroski, and community powerhouse Andrew Haggard, are both longtime Wikitravellers. I'm looking forward to seeing how this new Open Content project continues to develop. tags: wiki wikevent mediawiki mark jaroski andrew haggard cc event calendar

Jyte Speaking of cool new sites, I was glad to see in Scott Kveton's blog news of the new Jyte project. Jyte is a fascinating social network that uses the OpenID authentication system for the identity infrastructure. I think this is really interesting -- using OpenID for social networks is really a good idea, and opens up the process a lot. Another interesting point is that Jyte lets you make arbitrary assertions about yourself or, really, anything that has an URI. Other users can approve or disapprove the assertion, giving it more validity. For example, I've made an assertion that I'm the founder of Wikitravel: http://jyte.com/cl/evan.prodromou.name-is-the-founder-of-wikitravel That assertion has been backed up by 3 other people (so far), giving it a little bit more authority. Or, as Chris Dawson put it, http://jyte.com/cl/jyte-is-hot-or-not-for-nerds I think that the claims system is pretty intelligent -- a great way to make statements about yourself or others. It works like ClaimID, but with more latitude in what you can make claims about. tags: jyte openid claims assertions kveton janrain

I just learnt about the Free my nano! (Porting iPodLinux to the 2nd Generation iPod Nano) project, and it actually looks like there is some activity (and progress). Emmanuel Fleury reveals what is so far known about the 2gb 2nd Generation Ipod. Way to go!

Quoting from the site: 2nd gen iPods are great hardware platforms. Unfortunately, this is protected hardware! Apple has protected the firmware of the latest iPod through encryption. Our goal is to collect and publish as much information as possible about software&hardware and then try to use our own Operating System on that platform.

Owning this little device has been quite frustrating so far, but I still have some hope that I will not need to sell it on ebay, or exchange it for a model supported by either Rockbox or iPodLinux.

Bastian: I'm unable to provide the about:config key to prove it, but clicking on a link on my Iceweasel does open a Mutt mailto dialog. Maybe network.protocol-handler.external.mailto or network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto will do? They are booleans, so I cannot get much insight out of their respective true and false values... Keep peeking around ;-)

Well, I did it. My Sansa e280 is now once again the property of the Bellevue Circuit City. The gadget had pretty sweet hardware (holding my entire music collection in the palm of my hand was a cool thing), but I have no real need for it -- certainly nothing that would be worth putting up with Sandisk's attitude regarding non-Windows computers.

I'm currently trying to decide whether to remain portable-less for now (on the theory that portable media players are likely to advance ridiculously in the next few months), to buy a simple 4GB or 2GB Flash player, or to give up on Flash for the time being and get a hard disk-based player. I'm leaning towards waiting until the 4GB model of the Cowon D2 becomes available in the U.S., and then ordering it -- its feature set is pretty amazing, and hopefully 4GB will be enough storage capacity (especially considering that you can insert an SD flash card to get more storage space). In the meantime, I can cover most of what I was using the player for with a combination of podcasts, .oggs of my music, and borrowing Kate's portable FM radio. Less convenient, but entirely workable.

I have a number of upcoming talks at conferences in the next few weeks and months that I thought I'd mention in case people want to attend or meet up:

• Debian Quality Assurance, Free Software World Conference 3.0, 7-9 February 2007, Badajoz, Spain. I will briefly give a summary of QA activities in Debian and of the work accomplished at the Debian QA meeting in Extremadura in December 2006.
• Running Debian on Inexpensive Network Storage Devices, FOSDEM, 24-25 February 2007, Brussels, Belgium. I will mainly talk about installing Debian on the Linksys NSLU2 and Thecus N2100, both very interesting devices.
• Compiler testing using Debian as a real-world testcase, Gelato Itanium Conference and Expo, 15-18 April 2007, San Jose, California. I will talk about the work I did testing GCC 4.2 and Osprey by compiling the entire Debian archive on Itanium (and other architectures).
• Release management in free software, Google, 19 April 2007, Mountain View, California. I will present some results from my research. I'll probably present good and bad practices found in large free software projects.
• I'll probably tour Norway in May to talk about my research on release management but details have not been finalized yet.

I will update my talks page as more details become available. I hope to see some of you at these conferences.

I've just noticed that some debconf7 registrations close this week. Yes, this week - a full two months before national rail advance tickets go on sale. What's that about? [...] Jon Dowland replied

"MJ, the debconf7 travel page has far more flight information on it than anything else because it has been put together primarily by people who are figuring out international travel arrangements which will require flights."

International travel does not necessarily require flights. Intercontinental travel probably does, due to time constraints, or maybe even cross-continent, but I've seen DDs from nearby countries posting about booking their flights, and putting the deadlines before land tickets are even on sale is really shameful.

"It could certainly use some more information for people travelling more locally. If you have some advice on how to get there from Europe or the UK without flying, please contribute it: the site is a wiki, you can sign up for an account and edit the page yourself."

As I've posted elsewhere, it's a mediawiki rather than a wiki, so once I get around to installing mvs, I can sign up and edit it. (Bring back patches in the mail...) However, I'm not sure how best to get to Edinburgh without flying yet, because most tickets aren't on sale yet, which is where I started, remember? David Moreno Garza replied

"in 3rd world countries, some things like technology, travelling or taking care of the environment are not a matter of choice, unfortunately. [...]"

Sure, if people are travelling from 3rd world countries to Edinburgh, then flying is probably the only practical way, but surely people from nearby countries can get to Scotland without dumping CO2 into our sky?

These are the current translation ratios for French and Czech in unstable, after 12 days of "blitz l10n NMU". Nothing happened yesterday, which explains why I didn't post. Today, a few packages uploads in unstable should have improved the stats for French. However, this is also the day where dpkg-cross introduced 3 strings without prior notification to translators. A good occasion to test my "Please interact with translators" new script..:-) Czech has improved a lot as a consequence of numerous package uploads after my strong activity during the week-end. Thanks again to all these responsive maintainers. So, now we're hunting tha last remaining parts for French:

• postfix, on its way by LaMont Jones
• s390-dasd, a D-I component, already completed in D-I SVN and which will be uploaded by Frans along with all other D-I updates
• conserver, which has indeed been uploaded today by J rgen H gg
• libpam-rsa, which I'll sponsor in a few minutes
• dpkg-cross, as explained above

Another package will soon appear, out from NEW: emdebian-tools, uploaded by Neil Williams, who took care to request for translation updates in debian-i18n. Thanks, Neil.

(Almost all links in this text lead to German sources. Sorry, but this is a local topic and there aren't any English sources.) Unfortunately, Hildesheim is home to some rather prominent figures of the German neo-nazi scene. One of them has now registered for a protest march through Hildesheim on the 24 February 2007. The reason for this is, that an other neo-nazi event, that had been disguised as a "birthday party", but was in fact a propaganda event featuring talks by "contemporary witnesses" and "an evening of ballads" and was arranged by "National Forces of Hildesheim and the Association of German Women" had been prevented by the Hildesheim police. As a reaction to this, the aforementioned gentleman has now registered for a demonstration with the Hildesheim city council. (In Germany you need to register demonstrations.) Official head of the whole thing is this other gentleman, who has a history of trying to organise nazi demonstrations. He occasionally does so in Leipzig, where he tries to organise such demonstrations about twice a year. Their attendance is dropping though and they are usually met with about ten times as many counter demonstrators and thus have to be ended prematurely, exposing them as the unwanted and ridiculous farces they really are. However, the fact that people still try to register demonstrations such as this one is worrying. And the fact that this one is meant to be in the town I live in makes me pretty angry. Fortunately the demonstration is met with broad opposition. An alliance has been formed, consisting of the German adult education centre of Hildesheim (VHS), the Federation of German Trade Unions (DGB), Verdi, our public services union, Attac, the Antifa, the refugee council of Lower Saxony and the political parties with the Hildesheim Greens as the most active part at the moment. It is good to see, that such neo-nazi endeavours are met with such a broad opposition, and that this opposition does not only originate from the "usual suspects", but from the centre of society. (The VHS for example is usually a non-political organisation, and seeing them engage in such an alliance and even hosting its meetings is pretty cool!) It's not sure yet, whether the demonstration will be approved. It probably will, but with a bunch of extra conditions. If it is approved, it is even more important to meet it with the resistance it deserves! So, if you are living near Hildesheim, watch this space for announcements of the planned counter measures.

I had this planned for over a year, but for whatever reasons, I didn't get around to doing it until last week - Knowing that my Institute was moving to almost the opposite edge of Ciudad Universitaria, and would now be located at over 3Km from home (from around 300m that it was before), I decided to get a bike. And, after having it in my to-buy list, I bought it last Sunday (January 21), and Nadezhda got one for herself as well.
I had had a bike before, over 15 years ago, and we rode a bit when we were in Amsterdam, but that was back in 1996. Since then, I cannot recall using a bike - So, of course, I was quite shaky and afraid to begin with. I must admit, I envied Nadezhda, as she seems to be natural - While I was still trying to get the bike moving without crashing into something, she was literally making circles around me.
On Sunday, we went for a short ride in the main circuit of UNAM. On Monday night, we went most of the way to the gym/running lanes where we go to make our excercises - Yes, mostly uphill, and I managed! (she had already done that road earlier the same Monday). Thursday and Friday, I rolled early to do my excercise, and we basically crossed each other on the way. On Saturday, finally, we came all the way to the new Institute.
Sunday was amazing: We went with her family (two sisters, one brother and five pedalling nephews, plus one nephew in a basket in his mother's bike) along the Ciclopista. The Ciclopista goes on the path that used to be the Mexico-Cuernavaca railroad, and starting at Contreras, it goes uphill to cross the Ajusco/Chichinahutzin ridge. I cannot find a decent map, and I don't have a clue on what distance we rode, but it was just great - We crossed basically all of the Magdalena Contreras part of the Ciclopista and part of Tlalpan, until maybe 500m past the market at Calle 8. Of course, after the ride, we feasted with quesadillas at the market, plus some tacos of a delicious chicharr n prepared by Nadezhda's mother. It was a long ride anyway - I got quite tired, and the way back (fortunately, downhill) was still long. We had promised the four year old nephews to take them to the zoo that same day, although we counted on them being tired by that time - Well, a child's will is stronger than being tired, so we still went to Chapultepec to dive in a sea of people and look at some nice animals ;-)
...Finally, yesterday and today I have come by bike to the Institute. There are a couple of hard parts, and I still have not mastered the techniques for being an effective rider, but the way back is just delicious. Besides, yesterday I made 15 minutes on my way back, today it was 20 minutes coming here - almost the same time that going by car! Oh, and on the way back, I get to enjoy a beautiful view of my beloved volcanos, Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl. And, as Mauricio already pointed out, thanks to the light rains we had in the previous days... They just look amazing, covered in snow from their very bases.
Not much to add to it... But I'm delighted :)