after the rather intensive last week, this week was more business as usual. here's the list:

• #565064 src:xshisen: "xshisen: ftbfs with gcc-4.5 and gcc-4.6"
  add patch inspired by patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #608927 src:klog: "FTBFS with gold / ld --no-add-needed"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Felix Geyer, upload to DELAYED/2
• #613387 libbio-das-lite-perl: "libbio-das-lite-perl: FTBFS: test failures"
  disable tests that need internet access, upload to DELAYED/2
• #618063 src:fvwm: "fvwm: FTBFS: libfontconfig.so.1: could not read symbols: Invalid operation"
  close as unreproducible locally and on Grid'5000
• #618099 src:kwave: "kwave: FTBFS: KwaveFileDialog.cpp:37:66: error: call of overloaded 'QString(int)' is ambiguous"
  close as unreproducible locally and on Grid'5000
• #618231 src:wmnut: "wmnut: FTBFS: x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc: @LIBSSL_LDFLAGS@: No such file or directory"
  close as unreproducible locally and on Grid'5000
• #622068 src:asio: "asio: FTBFS: ./../include/asio/ssl/detail/openssl_context_service.hpp:73:20: error: '::SSLv2_method' has not been declared"
  apply patch from Cristian Greco, upload to DELAYED/2
• #624203 vpnc: "more verbose iproute makes vpnc fail connecting"
  sponsor NMU prepared by Florian Schlichting
• #639032 src:gtklp: "gtklp: FTBFS: gtklp.h:99:1: error: unknown type name 'ppd_file_t'"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Colin Watson, upload to DELAYED/2
• #644113 gtklp: "gtklp: FTBFS format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #646488 src:wmtemp: "wmtemp: FTBFS: dockapp.c:52:16: error: variable 'stat' set but not used [-Werror=unused-but-set-variable]"
  add patch from peter green, upload to DELAYED/2
• #646503 src:xmlroff: "xmlroff: FTBFS: fo-area-page.c:907:12: error: format not a string literal and no format arguments [-Werror=format-security]"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #646559 gnome-alsamixer: "gnome-alsamixer: Latest version 0.9.7~cvs.20060916.ds.1-2.1 is unusable (segmentation fault)."
  sponsor maintainer upload

I've moved from using SD for bug tracking to using Ikiwiki. SD is a distributed bug tracker, and I quite like it. However, it seems to be hard to get anyone else to use it. Ikiwiki is a wiki engine, and makes it easier for others to deal with it, since they can just use a web browser. Since I don't really use any metadata for bugs, apart from open/closed, Ikiwiki is a simple solution that suits my needs. It's probably not suitable for a large project with lots of open bugs. I've only just switched, we'll see how this goes. I really hope distributed bug tracking takes off in a big way, however, since it's oh so nice to be able to take full advantage of one's bug tracker even when offline.

You make backups? That s great! But are they usable? The very day you will need your backup to restore your infrastructure, are you sure this backup you make three months ago contains the only file you need to restart your production environment? Are you sure this backup is not corrupted? Are you sure you do not store irrelevant or empty files instead of the ones you will need one day? Brebis is a fully automated backup checker. Brebis is written in Python 3 (>=3.2) and comes under the GPLv3 license. The current version is 0.4 (direct download). Some features (extensive list of features available here):

• Support of tar files, compressed with gzip or bzip2 or not, zip files, gzip or bzip2 files and uncompressed trees of files.
• Identify corrupted archives, unexpected size or type for an archive, associated wrong hash sums, Unix rights and owner users/groups of the archive thanks to a list you provide.
• Inside the archive, identify missing files, unexpected ones, unexpected size of a file, wrong associated hash sums, unexpected mode, type or owner users/groups for a file thanks to a list you provide or generate from a given archive.

Dear lazyweb, I bought an Aten CS1784A DVI+USB KVM switch a couple of months ago. I m pretty happy with it except for one annoying problem. It has a Dell multimedia USB keyboard plugged into it (picked it up from a swap meet for $15 nice. it's a pretty good keyboard in its own right but i mostly bought it to match what I use at work), and a Logitech MX518 mouse connected. Also two computers one runs Linux only. The other is switched off most of the time, but is occasionally powered up to boot into either Linux to experiment with stuff i don't want to do on my main system (like gnome 3) or sometimes Win7 to play games. OK, that s the background data. Here s the problem Whenever I reboot either of the Linux installations, the KVM stops recognising the keyboard. I have to unplug the keyboard and plug it back in before any input is recognised. Keyboard input doesn't get through to the currently active system, and I can't even use the KVM's magic key <ScrlLock><ScrlLock>n<Enter> to switch between systems it doesn't even beep after the 2nd ScrlLock as it should, so it seems as if all keyboard input is ignored by the KVM, or the keyboard is totally confused and not sending anything. The mouse continues to work during this. Rebooting Win7 doesn't do this. The keyboard just works as it should. The problem occurs sometime between the time Linux is selected from the Grub2 menu and the gdm login screen is displayed (same result with both gdm on my main system and gdm3 on my secondary system). The keyboard works when plugged directly into either system, without the KVM. I d been using it for several months before I got the KVM, and I ve tested that it still works correctly across a reboot if i plug it in directly. Googling for "+linux +CS1784A" just gives me hundreds of pages from web sites selling the KVM, but no useful info. Anyone seen anything like this before? Can anyone think of anything that linux might be doing in it's console or X initialisation that would confuse the KVM? it's not a huge problem because I really don't reboot all that often more of an annoyance that I'd like to go away. problems with Linux and Aten CS1784A KVM switch is a post from: Errata

1. Non-resizable configuration windows. I have a 1920 1200 screen but the window manager provides no way to resize windows like the System Settings window. Result is that the window is quite small and, worse, has a scroll bar for no good reason when another hundred or so vertical pixels would easily display everything. Even another 30 or so horizontal pixels would allow more icons per line under Hardware, reducing the number of lines, and again allowing the entire list of available settings to be displayed without a scroll bar. Instead, to see all of the options I have to scroll down. And these people call themselves user-interface and usability experts. It's not up to the gnome developers to decide that I never need to resize certain windows or certain kinds of windows. It's up to me to decide that. They're not at my desktop, using my screen. I am.
2. No way to disable a shell extenstion from the command line. I installed the gnome-shell-extensions package and was trying out various extensions to see if they made gnome shell tolerable. Enabling one of them (i forget exactly which one), immediately displayed some "Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occured and the system can't recover. Please log out and try again." leaving me no option but to log out. An absolutely fucking useless error message. "Something" has gone wrong. A little fucking detail might help me to diagnose the problem and fix it. Like a trace of whatever the fuck it was doing when "Something went wrong". When i logged back in, it crashed again, with the same useless error screen. So, now I can't even log in to Gnome Shell. I've tried logging in to Fallback mode, but the Extensions tab is empty in gnome-tweak-tool (because, of course, nobody would want to configure Shell Extensions from fallback mode, would they?). I can't even find any way of listing which shell extensions are enabled, let alone disable one of them. Hell, I'd settle for disabling all of them, and then carefully re-enabling them one-by-one until I rediscovered the culprit.
3. Oh, wait. I finally found /org/gnome/shell/enabled-extensions in dconf-editor. it's a text field with an array of items. so far, so good. The "editor" (and i use that term very loosely) for text fields is garbage. It can't even wrap lines so that it displays the whole field without a horizontal scroll bar probably my all-time least favourite user-interface element. Have gnome devs never heard of multi-line text-edit fields? Rather than fuck around with a crappy GUI editor, it's far easier to:

   $ dconf read /org/gnome/shell/enabled-extensions > /tmp/extensions
   $ vi /tmp/extensions
   $ dconf write /org/gnome/shell/enabled-extensions "$(cat /tmp/extensions)"
   

   I guess now it's time to log out from fallback mode to find out if I can log back in to Gnome Shell again. [ nope. didn't work ]
4. Add non-resizable user-interface elements to item 1. above. So far, Gnome devs are doing a great job of regressing to the crap usability of the Windows GUI here s a useful rule of thumb for things like that: Every single window, every single user-interface element should be resizable and tweakable by the user. And the system should remember all user changes so that they don t have to waste a few minutes every time they run an app resizing things to suit their requirements. Gnome 2 mostly had that. Gnome 3 seems to have lost a large part of it along the way Second rule of thumb: If the user happens to replace their monitor or run it in a mode too small for the current settings, then they should revert to some sane default. Even better, it should remember the settings for each resolution choosing either sane defaults or the user s settings for the nearest similar resolution if the user hasn t created custom settings for that resolution yet.
5. Lack of documentation. here's a good example:

   $ gnome-shell-extension-tool help
   Usage: gnome-shell-extension-tool [options]
   $ man gnome-shell-extension-tool
   No manual entry for gnome-shell-extension-tool
   See 'man 7 undocumented' for help when manual pages are not available.

   What more needs to be said? At least /usr/bin/dconf has built-in help. Which is great, since it doesn't have a man page either.

Update: About three hours of stuffing around later, and I ve finally got Gnome Shell running again. I have NFI what actually fixed it, it could have any one of the dozens of settings I fucked around with. Nor do i have any idea what the actual problem was. And after all that, the extensions I tried still don t make Gnome Shell tolerable. They make it less *intolerable* (bottom-panel extension in particular), but that s still a long way from being tolerable i m really trying hard to find some way to come to terms with Gnome 3. I ve been trying for months now. But every time I give it another trial, I just end up hating it even more I m glad I have more than one desktop machine to use, so i can experiment with odious shit like Gnome Shell without fucking up my main working environment. So it s back to my main desktop machine and gnome2. Eventually I ll have to upgrade that, but xfce4 is looking to be my best option. I already switched to xfce4 on my desktop machine at work last week, and it s pretty good certainly far better than the Gnome 3 fallback mode i ve been using there for the last 5 or 6 months. Thanks, Gnome devs you re making a fantastic advertisement for XFCE. I wouldn t have bothered trying it again if I hadn t been forced to. ps: before anyone says wait for Gnome 3.2, it s much better . Todays waste of time *was* using Gnome 3.2 some more reasons to hate gnome shell is a post from: Errata

Wrote up some of my memories about the early history of Linux. See http://liw.fi/linux20/, but be warned that it's long and rambling.

Luxury is a roomy shower with plenty of hot water and a non-slippery floor. A gold-plated faucet really doesn't make it luxurious, just ugly.

I've today released version 0.21 of Obnam, my backup application. This is the first version that also got uploaded to Debian. It is currently waiting for manual processing in the NEW queue. From the NEWS file: USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• Obnam will now unlock the repository if there's an error during a backup. For the most part, the force-lock operation should now be unnecessary, but it's still there in case it's useful some day.

BUG FIXES:

• Negative timestamps for files now work. Thanks to Jamil Djadala for reporting the bug.
• The documentation for --checkpoint units fixed. Thanks, user weinzwang from IRC.
• The connections to the repository and live data filesystem are now properly closed. This makes benchmark read/write statistics be correct.

I have just released version 0.22 of Obnam, my backup application. Snippet from the NEWS file below. This version fixes a couple of bugs that could be said to be of the brown paper bag variety. USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• Obnam now reports its current configuration in the log file at startup. This will hopefully remove one round of "did you use the --foo option?" questions between developers and bug reporters.

BUG FIXES:

• The repository is now unlocked on exit only if it is still locked.
• A wrongly caught GeneratorExit is now dealt with properly.
• Keyboard interrupts are logged, so they don't show up as anonymous errors.

CHANGES RELEVANT TO DEVELOPERS ONLY:

• setup.py has been enhanced to work more like the old Makefile did: clean removes more artifacts. Instructions in README have been updated to point at setup.py.
• Compiler warning about _XOPEN_SOURCE re-definition fixed.
• Tests are now again run during a Debian package build.

I've released version 0.23 of Obnam, my backup application. USER VISIBLE CHANGES:

• restore now shows a progress bar.
• fsck now has more useful progress reporting, and does more checking, including the integrity of the contents of file content.
• fsck now also checks the integrity of the B-trees in the repository, so that it is not necessary to run fsck-larch manually anymore. This works remotely as well, whereas fsck-larch only worked on B-trees on the local filesystem.
• force-lock now gives a warning if the client does not exist in the repository.
• Subcommands for encryption now give a warning if encryption key is not given.
• The --fsck-fix option will now instruct obnam fsck to try to fix problems found. For this release, it only means fixing B-tree missing node problems, but more will follow.
• The default sizes have been changed for B-tree nodes (256 KiB) and file contents chunks (1 MiB), based on benchmarking.
• SFTP protocol use has been optimized, which should result in some more speed. This also highlights the need to change obnam so it can do uploads in the background.
• If a client does not exist in the repository, force-lock now gives a warning to the user, rather than ignoring it silently.

DEVELOPER CHANGES:

• New --sftp-delay=100 option can be used to simulate SFTP backups over networks with long round trip times.
• obnam-benchmark can now use --sftp-delay and other changes to make it more useful.

INTERNAL CHANGES:

• Got rid of terminal status plugin. Now, the Application class provides a ttystatus.TerminalStatus instance instead, in the ts attribute. Other plugings are supposed to use that for progress reporting and messaging to the user.
• The posix_fadvise system call is used only if available. This should improve Obnam's portability a bit.

Recently I said that my perl-based sysadmin tool, Slaughter, was at the cross-roads. I wasn't sure if I should leave it alone, or update it somehow. As I'm generally lazy and busy (yes it is possible to be both simultaneously!) I didn't do anything. But happily earlier in the week I received a bunch of updates from Jean Baptiste which implemented support for managing Windows clients, via Strawberry Perl. So I guess the conclusion is: Do nothing. Change nothing. Just fix any issues which are reported to me, and leave it as-is. (I did a little more than that, refactoring to avoid duplication and improve "neatness".) As I said at the time I've had some interesting feedback, suggestions and bugfixes from people over the past year or so - so I shouldn't be surprised to learn I'm not the only person using it. ObQuote: "Oh, yes, a big cat! My salvation depends upon it! " - Dracula (1992)

Happy. This is how I feel after I ran the "Le Puy-Firminy" night race last Sunday. 70 kilometers (mixed roads and trails), 1500 meters positive slope, close to my birth town, St-Etienne (the track on Garmin Connect unfortunately has bugs for the profile, sorry for this....this is apparently a bug in Garmin Connect as pyTrainer shows the track very well. And running this by night, starting at midnight and arriving at....09:16 the next day. A full night running. Such "ultra" experience is completely different from marathon running. In marathons, you mostly try keeping a constant pace all along the race, running very close to your limits all along the race. Very long distances involve managing much more than keeping a constant pace. Being able to run (and walk) for many hours requires being very careful at the start of the race, controlling the pace and save energy for the last part of the race. Climbing is most of the time done by walking (except for the very first runners) and going down for kilometers is very hard for legs, even at slow paces. Night running is also making things a lot different. Particularly in a quite small race like this one, it means running alone most of the time. And, by alone, I really mean alone. You and your head lamp, that's all. I am very happy about the way I managed this race. I reached the 32km mark, where an important food/drink point was organised, in a little bit more than 3 hours 15 minutes, where I stopped about 7-8 minutes. That was followed by about 5 kilometers downhill, at 6%, on a paved road, which is really killing legs. The marathon distance was reached in about 5h05, more or less what I planned, but that race is known to be harder in its second half. And completing a marathon, *then* knowing that you still have 2/3 of a marathon to run is kinda challenging..:-) Another important moment of the race was the 55 kilometer mark. This, because this was the longest distance I ever ran in a single race (in March, for the Paris Ecotrail race). Of course, the longer you run, the harder are legs and what was expected happened to me: I had cramps in both legs, at the worst moment, around km 64, when the track brutally goes down for 150 meters in a small canyon, then goes up for about 200 meters. Indeed, I completed kilometer 66 in....22 minutes (I see my marathon runners friends laughing here). This is indeed where you know if you're strong and motivated enough : not abandoning, continue despite cramps, waiting for them to disappear...and finally complete the race. It was really worth it anyway : running by night is really magic. I still remember the though moments at 5am, in the moonlight, alone on a road...and so happy to be there..:-) That race was the last one for me this year. I followed my plans (the only regret being not beating my record at Berlin marathon). Next year plans include two marathons: probably Caen ("Les Routes de la Libert " along the D-Day beaches in Normandy) in June and another one during Fall. I'll also push my limits a bit further with the 80km race of Ecotrail, arriving at Eiffel Tower first floor after running through forests in the SW area of Paris....and probably again that 70km race in November. Once you've tried ultra races, you don't want to stop..:-) Until the end of the year....recovery...and training. After all, Ecotrail is only in 4 months..:-)

Slovak complete for all levels. Norwegian Bokm l completes level 1. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 25 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg bscs de eo es fa fr gu hi it ja ko mr nb nl pl pt ru si sk ta te th zh_CN
• 1 language 98%: sv
• 1 language 97%: eu
• 1 languages 96%: tr
• 6 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk uk
• 4 langauges 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 9 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 13 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 4 langauges 95%: el fi he nb
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl tr
• 10 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 9 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German (de), Persian (fa), French (fr), Portuguese (pt, Russian (ru), Slovak (sk)

Sam Morris reported the Debian bug #650000 on Friday November 25th, against system-tools-backends. Bug #640000 was reported as of September 1st. We're now approching the 3 months mark for 10,000 bugs. It either means that Debian development rate is slowing down...or that we're in the way to stabilize our development version. To be honest, I think that both reasons can be invoked. So, we're indeed halfway in the road from bug #600000 to bug #700000. Remenber the bug #700000 prediction contest? Bug #600000 was reported as of October 12th 2010, So, it took 1 year, 1 month and 13 days to reach #650000. It means that, with the same rate, we should reach bug #700000 at the very very beginning of 2013.And thus, the closest bets as of now are those by David Pr vot and, sorry, myself. There's of course plenty of time (and a release) to change this.

The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world.If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now.The German Linux Magazine runs a sponsored an "Open Source Lounge" at CeBIT each year. Last year I put in a proposal for DAViCal and it got accepted! With some airfare support from InternetNZ I got to showcase my Free Software project at the largest IT trade fair in the world. If you have an open source project to promote I can't recommend this highly enough. Below is a review of my experience at CeBIT early this year. This is long overdue for posting, and I'm prompted now because submissions are now open for the Open Source Project Lounge at CeBIT in 2012. Apply now. DAViCal at CeBIT 2011 CeBIT in Hannover is said to be the largest trade fair in the world, attracting over 300,000 visitors during it's five days. Late last year a DAViCal user in Germany suggested that I apply for a free booth for DAViCal in the Linux New Media Open Source Project Lounge . When DAViCal was accepted, I realised I needed some funding to help me travel around the world to attend, so I applied for a grant from InternetNZ who were kind enough to agree to cover part of my travel costs, and I was on my way. Germany in March is cold, especially for me coming from Summer! My travel allowed for a couple of days in Germany before CeBIT because that was when I could get the cheapest flights, and I wanted to have a little time to recover from the journey. Everyone had warned me to pack my winter woollies, and they were definitely needed! I stayed with a friend in Hamburg for two days and on the the second day we walked through the frozen park, past the frozen lake and over the frozen streams to see the Attraktor Hackerspace in Hamburg Nord where the CCC also hold their meetings a very impressive hackerspace in a repurposed bank (including the vault :-) with several separated areas for talks, meetings and workplaces. The day before CeBIT I travelled to Hannover to take a look at my booth space, fetch exhibitor passes for myself and volunteers and generally prepare to do battle with the crowds. The following day the fair started and it was up at 6:30 to get ready and catch the 7:38 train out to the fairgrounds. Although the fair opens at 9:00 there was always something to do between eight o'clock or so when I arrived at my booth and when the attendees started wandering past.
I was fortunate to have two volunteers for my booth who were there all week, as well as a couple more who turned up on the first two days. Not only did this mean that I got to spend a few hours during the week actually wandering the fairgrounds, but that I had some knowledgeable native german speakers for the occasional visitor who could not speak English. DAViCal has been translated into a dozen languages, and there had been some extra work put in to update the German translation before CeBIT also. As well as showing DAViCal, I was also able to demonstrate a new project at the fair which was aCal - a CalDAV Calendar Client for Android which I had released into the market just a few days beforehand for a token sum (it is licensed GPL v3 or later and the source code is available on gitorious.org). Having the smartphone devices available was great for giving live demonstrations, and I used the timetable for events at the Open Source Forum across the aisle from the Open Source Lounge to populate a calendar that we shared among a variety of devices. The first day was really the calm before the storm, and we saw lots of people asking what we were about, and had some good conversations with people wanting to know more, or telling us they used the software and were very happy with it.
CeBIT closes the gates at 18:00 with the visitor supply drying up pretty quickly around then and the secret lives of the exhibitors are revealed with people starting to relax and joke, and beer or wine starting to come out and some booth parties kicking off... if you have the stamina! I didn't, so it was off back to the train, to Hildesheim, to dinner and to bed. That first day blurred into the next, and the next and by Friday I was starting to lose my voice with all the talking I had been doing. I was visited by a chap from Posnan University who are a DAViCal user and he invited me down to the Polish stand to tell me about what they do there, and he agreed that they would love to help get the Polish translation improved. Another DAViCal user turned up with some bavarian wheat beer and a special beer glass for it by way of thanks. In some spare moments I fixed a bug in aCal's handling of character sets and uploaded a new version, so that we could use umlauts in events. Many people came past to talk to us, some of whom want to help with them project or have ideas for interesting things to do with DAViCal, some were already users of DAViCal and some went away thinking that they would be in the future. The last day of CeBIT is a little different: it's a Saturday and the doors are opened to the public and the minimum age is lowered to allow children to attend the event. I had been warned that this day is a madhouse, and it did indeed seem to be so for many booths. For DAViCal it was probably quieter than the day before, I think perhaps because calendar server software is inherently less sexy than many of the other things on display. We still had plenty of great discussions with interested people nonetheless and to be honest I was fairly happy to be spared the further exhaustion that had been threatened. Sunday was spent recuperating: discovering that Hildesheim has a great little restaurant that does traditional german pancakes for breakfast and then wandering around the small city soaking in the sunshine that I'd seen through the windows outside all week. On Monday I caught the train to M nchengladbach to meet with an organisation that might provide support for DAViCal in Germany, but who hadn't been able to come to the fair to see me due to illness. I was encouraged to spend the night in Aachen a beautiful little city , which I did, arriving around sunset and I spent a couple more days before flying home being intensely antisocial to recover from the furious week beforehand. Is CeBIT worth it? CeBIT seemed to me to be quite a different business model, or perhaps on a different scale. I've seen trade fairs in New Zealand for other purposes, but not to showcase software and services in quite this way. To give an idea of it's scale, consider that I had a tiny booth in a hall that was probably four times the size of the TSB Arena, and CeBIT included around 20 such buildings , packed with exhibitors, with free buses to get around the campus, acres of multi-storey parking buildings, two train stations, and so on. The scale of the event is incredible. As a result of this scale, CeBIT boasts impressive visitor numbers, and while a visitor will usually attend with a specific area of interest in relation to their business they will also wander the fair to see other areas of more personal interest, or just to see what is around. Open Source is a specific area of interest to a significant percentage of business in Germany, and Deutsche Messe, the fair operators, recognise the value of having an open source area as a draw for visitors, with the primary open source area placed in Hall 2, directly off the main north entrance. Within the open source area, the Open Source Project Lounge , where DAViCal was located, is a series of booths sponsored by Linux New Media AG. Projects in the Open Source Lounge are selected by a jury of Linux New Media, Deutsche Messe and several community advisors, so as such there is a range of interesting projects on show and the draw of any given project has a flow-on effect to the others. As an example, at one point while briefly minding the adjacent stand for the OpenEmbedded project I was unable to help an inquiring visitor, but I was able to talk about DAViCal with him until the exhibitor returned to answer his question. His interest in DAViCal was definitely increased in this process, and I'm sure that many people came into our area of the lounge attracted by a specific exhibitor and moving on to see some of the others. Outside of this association with open source, however, CeBIT offers something which general free software events cannot: an association with mainstream software and services. This presentation of Open Source alongside IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle, Software AG, Apple, Microsoft and so forth makes inclusion at this event particularly valuable. Free software solutions can have good brand recognition within the open ecosystem itself and yet be practically unheard of outside it. Most traditional methods of communication with suppliers don't work well with Open Source projects: a request for proposal will sail silently by, unless noted by a related commercial entity. In general there is no sales department, and marketing is frequently a desultory hit or miss affair. The fair is different. The fair is about talking with people. While there is still plenty of collateral marketing with brochures, signs, presentations and giveaway knick-knacks those things are just there to bring people into range: the real action happens when you engage a person in conversation, and at that point a humble free software project can be on an equal footing with a larger booth staffed with eager young salesmen. Of course there are a number of places where free software can get a booth. Linuxtag is a German example where there are many booths for free software projects, linux.conf.au also offers booths to free software projects during it's more outreach Open Day and software freedom day events happen all around the world where booths are available, but the audience arriving at these events are all largely pre-sold on openness and free software. So in presenting this broad blend of people, in a way in which free software projects can present on a roughly equal footing with their commercial brethren, CeBIT is an opportunity not to be missed. The numbers speak for themselves, too: traffic to the DAViCal websites has increased by about 50% around CeBIT with 25% coming from Germany, but significant increases also from France, Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland and Poland. Traffic to the DAViCal wiki has doubled over the last 12 months in a steady increase to around 200,000 page views each month. This sudden increase to around 10000/day in March, with some days during CeBIT peaking at over 20000/day The Future I won't be returning to CeBIT to represent DAViCal in Hannover next year as the sponsored booth is pretty much a one-time thing and the costs involved in purchasing a booth for attendance at the fair are significant (around NZD$15000 for a small 3m x 2m stall). It's possible that I will return next year in a different capacity, as one of the larger stand organisers has confidentially indicated he will invite me to attend as part of an Open Source Apps area that he is considering running on his stand, somewhat along the lines of the Open Source Lounge . Time will tell, I guess, but if invited I think I would definitely go for that. I will definitely be suggesting to a few specific free software projects that they should apply for the Linux New Media opportunity when it comes around again. Koha is one project that immediately springs to mind, but of course there are many, many worthy free software projects and this opportunity seems to be little-understood outside of Germany. If I do convince a project to apply, and they are successful, I will also try and give them some assistance and background knowledge to understand the fair, and how best they can take advantage of the opportunity it offers. Some basic tips would be:

• Book accommodation early, a small apartment or B&B is good. CeBIT accommodation prices are exceptionally high 3 or more times normal rates. There are companies that specialise in renting apartments for the week of CeBIT which are more reasonably priced.
• The fair is in Hannover , except that really it is some distance to the southeast. Exhibitors tickets provide free transport within greater Hannover for the whole week, so you don't actually need to be that close. Options like Hildesheim, a city of some 120k people south of Hannover (where I stayed), are also good although they add a small transport cost.
• Have a pop-up banner for your project.
• Develop a slideshow which tells people about your project and which can just be left running on a larger screen.
• Have a flyer you can hand out to interested people.
• Get at least one committed person to assist on the stand for the whole week.
• Get some more volunteers to assist on the stand for one day each.
• Pace yourself: get to bed early and try not to overdo the partying it's a long week!
• If you want to take a look around the fair don't wait until Friday or Saturday do it on Thursday or earlier.

and finally... I would like to express my appreciation to InternetNZ for the grant to partially cover my travel costs to Hannover, making my attendance at this outstanding event much more achievable. My thanks also to Britta Wulfling who supported all of the projects in the Open Source Lounge. My friends Alexander & Meike in Hildesheim who supplied somewhere for me to recuperate, and accompanied me to the fair every day to run the Debian booth. Thanks also, of course, to the German Linux Magazine for selecting DAViCal for a free booth, and to Benny who pointed the opportunity out, encouraged me to apply, and came along and helped out for the whole week.

I think I'm currently supposed to be out buying a TV at the moment. Or something else expensive. Instead I'm lying on the sofa listening to Whale and drinking tea. That's much better in my opinion, but it reminded me that I hadn't mentioned that I bought a projector. I had the loan of a projector for a while when I was in Belfast. It was a huge thing that made a lot of noise, but was pretty cool for watching films with. When I moved to the US I decided not to bother with a TV to start with - using my laptop did just fine for most things. Except films. They really benefit from a bigger screen. Especially if you want to watch them with someone else. So I started looking at pico projectors, because I wanted something small and cute that I could throw in a bag with my tiny laptop. At the time the best the pico projectors could do was 840x480, which I felt wasn't really that great. However back in January TI announced their DLP Pico HD chipset, offering a resolution 1280x800. I kept a look out for projectors using this to appear, and eventually, in July, Amazon claimed to have availability of the Vivtek Qumi. So I bought one. And I'm very happy with it. I'm not a heavy user, and there are some niggles, but it's small and does exactly what I want. In low light conditions it'll happily throw an image all the way across the room, which is more than it's rated at. There's a mini-HDMI connector on the back, so it's a doddle to plug it into my laptop using the supplied HDMI to mini-HDMI cable. The laptop auto-detects the device and extends the desktop appropriate, as you'd expect. It'll also do media playback itself - there's a USB host port and a micro SD slot on the back. This works ok, and the included remote means you can easily set the projector somewhere above your head and still be able to easily control it. Unfortunately the built in speakers are fairly useless. There's a 3.5mm socket for external speakers, but having to plug something else in detracts from the convenience factor of the built-in media player. Also my unit had the power switch installed upside down (the little red line indicating the power is on actually shows up when it's off), but that's the only complaint I've got about the build quality. There's a little neoprene case to store the thing in as well. So, er, yeah. I think I can continue to make do without a normal TV for a while longer and avoid the nightmare that I suspect are the shops on Black Friday.

Being tired of feeling embarrassed when noticing some warning in a buildd log only after having it uploaded and looking at the buildd logs of the other architectures, I've decided to write some little infrastructure to scan buildd logs for things that can be found in buildd logs. The result can be visited at https://buildd.debian.org/~brlink/. Note that it currently only has one real check (looking for E: Package builds NAME_all.deb when binary-indep target is not called.) yet and additionally two little warnings (dh_clean -k and dh_installmanpages deprecation output) which lintian could at catch just as well. The large size of the many logs to scan is a surprisingly small problem. (As some tests indicated it would only take a couple of minutes for a full scan, I couldn't help to run one full scan, only to learn afterwards that wb-team was doing the import of the new architectures at that time. Oops!) More surprising for me using small files to keep track of logs already scanned does not scale at all with the large number of source packages. File system overhead is gigantic and it makes the whole process needlessly IO bound. That problem was be easily solved using sqlite to track things done, though as buildd.debian.org doesn't have that installed yet, so no automatic updates yet. [Update: already installed, will be some semi-automatic days first, though anyway] The next thing to do is writing more checks, where I hope for some help from you: What kind of diagnostics do you know from buildd logs that you would like to be more prominently visible (hopefully soon on packages.qa.debian.org, wishlist item already filed)? Trivial target is everything that can be identified from regular expression applied to every line of the buildd log. For such cases the most complicated part is writing a short description of what this message means. (So if you sent me some suggestions, I'd be very happy to also get a short text suitable for that, together with the message to looks for and ideally some example package having that message in its buildd log). I'm also considering some more complicated tests. I'd really like to have something to test for packages being built multiple times to due Makefile errors and stuff like that.

The bug webinterface of the Ultimate Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	1758
Affecting Wheezy:	1102
Wheezy only:	138
Remaining to be fixed in Wheezy:	964

Of these 964 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Wheezy:	45
Patched in Wheezy:	176
Duplicates in Wheezy:	47
Can be fixed in a security Update:	31
Contrib or non-free in Wheezy:	13
Claimed in Wheezy:	0
Delayed in Wheezy:	2
Otherwise fixed in Wheezy:	91

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible) 618 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 7.0 Wheezy released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 1002 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Slovak complete for all levels. Norwegian Bokm l completes level 1. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 25 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg bscs de eo es fa fr gu hi it ja ko mr nb nl pl pt ru si sk ta te th zh_CN
• 1 language 98%: sv
• 1 language 97%: eu
• 1 languages 96%: tr
• 6 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk uk
• 4 langauges 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 9 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 13 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 4 langauges 95%: el fi he nb
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl tr
• 10 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 9 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German (de), Persian (fa), French (fr), Portuguese (pt, Russian (ru), Slovak (sk)

Due to some still unknown bug, all the iLOs of two of my HP blade enclosures became confused and stopped accepting TCP connections. This not only made them unusable, but also prevented upgrading the firmware to an hopefully fixed version... My solution: reset them from the OS by running:

ipmitool mc reset cold

HP's support solution: remove and reseat each blade.