It s general election time again in New Zealand this year, with the added twist of an additional referendum on whether to keep MMP as our electoral system. If you re not interested in New Zealand politics, then you should definitely skip the rest of this post. I ve never understood why some people consider their voting choices a matter of national security, so when via Andrew McMillan, I saw a good rationale for why you should share your opinion I found my excuse to write this post. Party Vote
I ll be voting for National. I m philosophically much closer to National than Labour, particularly on economic and personal responsibility issues, but even if I wasn t the thought of having Phil Goff as Prime Minister would be enough to put me off voting Labour. His early career seems strong, but lately it s been one misstep and half-truth after another, the remainder of the Labour caucus and their likely support partners don t offer much reassurance either. If I was left-leaning and the mess that Labour is in wasn t enough to push me over to National this year then I d vote Greens and hope they saw the light and decided to partner with National. Electorate Vote
I live in Dublin, but you stay registered in the last electorate where you resided, which for me is Tamaki. I have no idea who the candidates there are, so I ll just be voting for the National candidate for the reasons above. MMP Referendum
I have no real objections to MMP and I think it s done a good job of increasing representation in our parliament. I like that parties can bring in some star players without them having to spend time in an electorate. I don t like the tendency towards unstable coalitions that our past MMP results have sometimes provided. Of the alternatives, STV is the only one that I think should be seriously considered, FPP and it s close cousin SM don t give the proportionality of MMP and PV just seems like a simplified version of STV with limited other benefit. If you re going to do preferential voting, you might as well do it properly and use STV. So, I ll vote for a change to STV, not because I m convinced that MMP is wrong, but because I think it doesn t hurt for the country to spend a bit more time and energy confirming that we have the right electoral system. If the referendum succeeds and we get another referendum between MMP and something other than STV in 2014, I ll vote to keep MMP. If we have a vote between MMP and STV in 2014 I m not yet sure how I d vote. STV is arguably an excellent system, but I worry that it s too complex for most voters to understand. PS. Just found this handy list of 10 positive reasons to vote for National, if you re still undecided and need a further nudge. Kiwiblog: 10 positive reasons to vote National

Could you not trust this man?Max and Fraser are very interested in this year's election. I guess political awareness starts at the first election after you turn 10, or so. They're both very curious about how mum and dad are voting, and while their mother will not tell (though we all have our suspicions :-) I don't see any reason not to discuss my political leanings with them.I've been what is commonly termed a 'floating' voter for most of my voting life. I imagine the politicians themselves might term people like me 'floaters', with an eye to the scatalogical implications. After all, their livelihoods are on the line!So, after reading this blog post I thought I might as well also share my personal voting plans with the world.

alt="imagine an xkcd-style infographic here" 0 seconds

• peace and quiet
• full history of all my projects (git repos)
• my blog
• email

0.5 seconds

• chatting on IRC
• searching through all email received since 1994
• music
• cached web pages

5 seconds

• ssh to a server
• search the web
• lwn, hacker news, reddit, metafilter, and other web aggregators

10 seconds

• resuming laptop from sleep and waiting for network-manager
• view an unnecessarily pastebinned scrap of text
• access local Debian mirror
• looking up a typical bug report

20 seconds

• click on a typical link from a web aggregator
• an hour of video pulled from a USB drive with git-annex

2 minutes

• downloading new email
• commute to work
• an increasing number of websites that force https (average of 3 reloads needed due to timeouts)

5 minutes

• viewing a single file, bug report, or merge request on github
• cloning the full content of a typical not too large git repo
• retriving data from archival drives via git-annex
• going offline and making a phone call
• apt-get update (thanks aj, for the pdiffs)
• viewing a single a twitter page (megabytes of crud and #! redirections)

10 minutes

• entering a state of flow while programming
• boingboing.net (with all the pretty pictures)
• my mailbox (after a nice walk down a long driveway)

22 minutes

• milk and eggs
• a swim in the river

30 minutes

• broadband internet access
• someone else who knows what linux is

32 minutes

• an hour of video pulled from my server with git-annex (includes travel time to broadband access point)

70 minutes

• a halfway decent but slightly overpriced grocery store
• a produce stand
• a coffee shop

180 minutes

• family
• a bakery with real bread

300 minutes

• downloading a typical podcast

My favorite feature in bzr (Bazaar) is the bzr whoami command, which prints what your current identity (name and email) is, as far as the repository is concerned. You can tell I haven't used bzr much if that's as far as I have gotten. But seriously, with so many Git repositories around, several project identities, directory-specific shell configuration, and so on, it's easy to get confused, and it's annoying to have to check and repair commits for correct user name and email all the time. So here is git whoami. This has already saved me so many headaches.

On occasion I receive death threats in comments on my blog. This doesn t bother me, I had more than a few pathetic losers say similar things to me in high school but the difference is that a pathetic loser on the other side of the world can t do much about it. The latest one is on my post Is Asperger Syndrome a Good Thing? [1]. At 11:04AM my time (00:04 UTC) on the 23rd of November someone using IP address 82.14.50.190 (registered to NTL Infrastructure for Tesco Guildford ) and with the claimed email address of sharkbait @ tesco.net told me that I m on his to kill list . He was angry because my post apparently didn t satisfy his need to prove to people that they don t want AS . As it s not possible to choose your DNA there is really no point in trying to prove that one set of genes is better than another, unless of course you want to harass people who have different genes to you. Naturally he didn t read my post, in fact the differences between his comment and what I wrote made me suspect that it s something he was pasting in to lots of blogs, but it seems unlikely that he would use an iPhone for such a copy/paste job so he must just not read. For example he rhetorically asks did you even mention it was a form of autism in your negative points when I gave a link to the proposed DSM changes where Asperger Syndrome is being merged with Autistic Disorder and the word Autism appears 5 times in the post. He has one specific complaint about people he knows who are on the Autism Spectrum, he says Every time someone speaks to them they get angry and tell said person to back the fuck off. I ve been on the receiving end. Generally there are two possible reasons for being told to fuck off , one is that the person telling you is an asshole and the other is that you are being an asshole. If you are the type of person who sends death threats to bloggers then you really should consider the latter explanation. He also suggests that I watch Boston Legal presumably because that show has one character who is an Aspie. Now I have actually watched that show and it s the worst legal show I ve ever seen, when a legal show has such unrealistic portrayal of court scenes I don t think it should be relied on for information on any other topic. I watched a couple of episodes of Boston Legal and only saw one scene with the Aspie guy, so I can t even determine whether it s a realistic portrayal he s a minor character. In any case there are plenty of Aspie guys in the Free Software community who I interact with regularly, I read forums such as AspiesForFreedom.com, and I ve read some text books on the topic. So even if a TV show had a very accurate portrayal of an Aspie character I still doubt that I would learn anything by watching it. As a general tip for flamers, if you want to accuse someone of being a member of a NAZI or KKK type organisation then the word you are after is Aryan not ayrien . If you don t know a word then don t use it. Please note the conditions of sending me email [2], I reserve the right to publish all threats in any way that I wish. A Final Note Thanks sharkbait for adding me to your to kill list , I m sure that there are lots of nice people on it and I ve got good company. If I didn t get the occasional death threat I would worry that I m not writing well enough or failing to address important issues. I will write more about Autism in the future.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2011/03/26/asperger-good/
• [2] http://doc.coker.com.au/legal/conditions-email/

Since my last post about Firefox extensions I've enabled two other addons:

Through the comments I got pointed to Fox to Phone which enables you to send links from your browser directly to your Android phone with Chrome to Phone installed. Thanks for that.

Another useful extension that was recommended to me is LeechBlock. You give it a list of news sites you regularly frequent and it will make sure that you only spend a given time budget on them per day or that you only browse them in the evenings (or even a combination of both).

As I expected I did deactivate RequestPolicy again. That said, Facebook recently switched its certificates, so Certificate Patrol was unhappy. It's impressive and sad how many pages actually do cross-site requests to embed Facebook's buttons. If somebody would invent something less annoying to stop this mess, that would be great.

Andrew Cowie blogs about 'A good GNOME 3 Experience'. He writes

I think it s a bit odd not to expect that something that was widely advertised as being such a different user experience is different.

and

if they had gone and bought an Apple laptop with Mac OS X on it they would be perfectly reasonably working through learning how to use a new Desktop and not complaining about it at all. But here we are admonishing the GNOME hackers had the temerity to do something new and different.

I think Andrew's phrasing here is a bit disingeneous. Or perhaps he genuinely mistakes the frustration that has been felt by GNOME 3. I don't want to whine on too much, so I'll try to get this out of the way in one paragraph. F/OSS users are members of a community. There is inevitably a wall between the majority of community members and the blessed: the decision makers, the developers. The art of maintaining a good community is partly to do with making this wall as invisible as possible: encouraging participation, lowering the barrier for contributions; welcoming feedback; etc.1. The GNOME community have invested a lot into the GNOME 2 way of doing things, and GNOME 3, by breaking away from that so fundamentally, has devalued the community's investment. It screams: we don't want your panel widgets! We don't want your themes! Your working practices are wrong: this is the right way! GNOME 3 is opinionated software, and it's opinion differs from a large body of the GNOME community. The result? resentment. Remember: GNOME 3 is not just something new: it's the abrupt termination of something old, tried and tested. and hopefully that's the last time I need to vent about my GNOME 3 frustration. It's hear to stay, the question for the frustrated is: are you? Moving on Andrew goes on to recommend:

One thing I do recommend is mapping (say) CapsLock as an additional Hyper You do the mapping in: System Settings Keyboard Layout Layout tab Options..

I used to do this with GNOME 2, but I couldn't find how to do it on GNOME 3. Andrew's post gave me the important hint that it was still possible, but the precise location doesn't match: On my Fedora 16 / GNOME 3.2 system, it's System Settings Region and Language Layouts Options ". This is especially useful on my beloved UltraNav keyboard which lacks the Windows 95 keys. Sadly it does not work very well through various remote desktop tools: I get an inconsistent capslock state within VMs connected to via VNC. rdesktop seems ok.

ARGH! Have just finished "The Wise Man's Fear" - fantastic book, but still the middle of a trilogy, without the last book in sight... If you've not read "The Name of the Wind" and "The Wise Man's Fear" by Patrick Rothfuss, I seriously suggest going and picking them up (at least if you read some fantasy, even if you don't they're worth a read I reckon).

While working on SAT-Britney, I made heavy use of the IntSet data type provided by the basic Haskell library containers . Since memory consumption was a problem, I looked at its implementation, which is a binary tree, and wondered whether this could be improved for dense sets by using a machine sized word as a bit map to represent a continuous part of the integers, so I started to implement it. The effect on my program was not as strong as I had hoped for, but nevertheless, the code made its way back into containers after a thorough review and a considerable amount of further improvements by Milan Straka. I m getting sucked deeper and deeper into the Haskell community... (which means that the Haskell community does not suck, of course.)
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Yesterday evening I updated my server to remove MySQL:

steve:~# dpkg --purge mysql-client-5.1 \
                      mysql-common     \
                      mysql-server-5.1 \
                      mysql-server-core-5.1 \
                      python-mysqldb        \
                      libdbd-mysql-perl     \
                      libdatetime-format-mysql-perl

Until last month I had two database in use, one each for a pair of web-applications. As of now one is using redis - which I'm already using for my image hosting - and the other application is using SQLite. Until recently I had a high opinion of SQLite, although that has now been downgraded a little, it is still a thoroughly excellent piece of software. I was just surprised at little things it was missing, to the extent I had to rewrite my applications SQL. Still one less service is a good thing, and the migration wasn't so painful.. In more productive news I recently acquired a nice external flash - the Yongnuo YN-460 II is (very) cheap and cheerful, it can be fired remotely with my triggers so I've had a lot of fun with opportunistically taking pictures and experimenting with lighting. Most of the results are NSFW, but there are some other examples lurking around including the first time I managed to successfully capture a falling water-drop. (Not the best picture, not the most explicit effect, but fun regardless. I both can and will do better next time!)

Somebody recently asked me to write about "camera stuff under linux" and happily I declined. Why decline? Because there are so many good tools, applications, and utilities. (I use local tools for organisation and duplicate detection, rawtherapee for RAW conversion and GIMP for touchups). Having many available options is fantastic though, and something hard to appreciate for "newcomers" to Linux. (Yeah I waited 90 seconds - if I remembered to add -nojava - for Netscape Navigator to start, under X10, with 8Mb of RAM. Happier days are here. Sure DRM is bad, secure boot .. an open question, but damn we have it good compared to almost any previous point in time!)

ObQuote: "Yeah, obviously it is only a tactical party. I'm only having a party to eventually get sex." - Peep Show

This is both a release announcement for the next installment of The MirBSD Korn Shell, mksh R40b, and a follow-up to Sune s article about small tools of various degrees of usefulness. I hope I don t need to say too much about the first part; mksh(1) is packaged in a gazillion of operating environments (dear Planet readers, that of course includes Debian, which occasionally gets a development snapshot; I ll wait uploading R40c until that two month fixed gcc bug will finally find its way into the packages for armel and armhf. Ah, we re getting Arch Linux (after years) to include mksh now. (Probably because they couldn t stand the teasing that Arch Hurd included it one day after having been told about its existence, wondering why it built without needing patches on Hurd ) MSYS is a supposedly supported target now, people are working on WinAPI and DJGPP in their spare time, and Cygwin and Debian packagers have deprecated pdksh in favour of mksh (thanks!). So, everything looking well on that front. I ve started a collection of shell snippets some time ago, where most of those small things of mine ends up. Even stuff I write at work we re an Open Source company and can generally publish under (currently) AGPLv3 or (if extending existing code) that code s licence. I chose git as SCM in that FusionForge instance so that people would hopefully use it and contribute to it without fear, as it s hosted on my current money source s servers. (Can just clone it.) Feel free to register and ask for membership, to extend it (only if your shell-fu is up to the task, KNOPPIX-style scripts would be a bad style(9) example as the primary goal of the project is to give good examples to people who learn shell coding by looking at other peoples code). Maybe you like my editor, too? At OpenRheinRuhr, the Atari people sure liked it as it uses WordStar like key combinations, standardised across a lot of platforms and vendors (DR DOS Editor, Turbo Pascal, Borland C++ for Windows, ) ObPromise: a posting to raise the level of ferrophility on the Planet aggregators this wlog reaches (got pix)

It s been one year since the first People behind Debian interview. For this special occasion, I wanted a special guest and I m happy that our Debian Project Leader (DPL) Stefano Zacchiroli accepted my invitation. He has a difficult role in the community, but he s doing a really great job of it. He s a great mediator in difficult situations, but he s also opinionated and can push a discussion towards a conclusion. Read on to learn how he became a Debian developer and later DPL, what he s excited about in the next Debian release, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Stefano: I m Stefano Zacchiroli, but I prefer to be called Zack, both on the Internet and in real life. I m 32, Italian, emigrated to France about 4 years ago. I live in Paris, and I find it to be one of the most gorgeous and exciting cities in the world. As my day job I m a Computer Science researcher and teacher at University Paris Diderot and IRILL. In my copious free time I contribute to Debian, and I m firmly convinced that doing so is an effective way to help the cause of Free Software. Besides, I find it to be a lot of fun! Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Stefano: Flash back to 1999, when I was a 2nd year student in Computer Science at the University of Bologna. Back then in Italy it was uncommon for young geeks to get exposed to Free Software: Internet was way less pervasive than today and most computer magazines didn t pay much attention to GNU/Linux. Luckily for me, the professor in charge of the student lab was a Free Software enthusiast and all students machines there were running Debian. Not only that, but there was also a student program that allowed volunteers to become sysadmins after having shown their skills and convinced the director they were trustworthy. Becoming one of those volunteer Debian admins quickly became one of my top objectives for the year, and that is were I ve learned using Debian. The year after that, I got in touch with a research group that was to become the happy bunch of hackers with whom I would have done both my master and PhD theses. They were designing a new proof assistant. Most of the development was in OCaml and happened on Debian. OCaml was available in Debian, but many of the libraries we needed were not. So I approached the Debian OCaml Team offering to help. Before I realize what was going on I was (co-)maintainer of tens of OCaml-related packages. At some point I got told I think you should apply as a Debian Developer . So I did and in a couple of months I went through the New Member (NM) process, that was back then in its infancy. I still remember my happiness while reading the account created mail, the day after my 22nd birthday. I know the NM process went through some bad publicity in the past, but I m happy to see that nowadays the process can be as swift as it has been for me 10 years ago. Raphael: It s your second year as Debian Project Leader (DPL). Are you feeling more productive in the role? Do you fear to burn out? Stefano: I m feeling way more productive, no doubts. The task of the Debian Project Leader is not necessarily difficult, but it is a complex and scarcely documented one. It is also profoundly different from any other task that Debian people usually work on, so that experience doesn t help much in getting started. Before becoming effective as DPL one needs to get to know many people and mechanisms he is not familiar with. More importantly, one needs to set up a personal work-flow that allows to keep up with day-to-day DPL tasks (which are aplenty) as well as with urgencies (that tend to pop-up in the leader@debian.org INBOX at the least convenient time). Finally, one also needs to do proper traffic shaping and always retain enough motivation bandwidth to keep the Project informed about what is going on in DPL-land. Finding the right balance among all these ingredients can take some time. Once one is past it, everything goes way more smoothly. The above is why I m constantly encouraging people interested in running for DPL in the future to reach out to me and work on some tasks of the current DPL s TODO list. I swear it is not just a cheap attempt at slavery!. It is rather an attempt at DPL mentoring that could be beneficial: both to give future candidates more awareness of the task, and to reduce the potential downtime when handing over from one DPL to the next. Regarding burn out, I don t feel prone to its risk these days. If I look back, I can say that my contributions as DPL have been pretty constant in volume over time; my enthusiasm for the task, if anything, is on the rise. The effectiveness of my contributions as DPL are, on the other hand, not mine to judge. Raphael: If you had to single out two achievements where you were involved as DPL, what would they be? Stefano: I d go for the following two, in no particular order:

• Dialogue with derivatives. When I became DPL ~1.5 years ago the situation on that front was pretty dire. In the specific case of Ubuntu, by far the most successful and customized of all Debian derivatives, I remember being scared of raising the topic of collaboration with them on mailing lists. More generally, we had no specific initiatives to foster technical collaboration with and among derivatives. A huge potential of (forwarded) contributions to Debian was being wasted. Today things look much better, as I ve documented in recent talks at DebConf11 and UDS-P. The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum and many people who apply to become Debian Developers come from derivatives. Conflict situations still exist, for good reasons that we still have to either fix or figure out entirely. But I m positive we re on the right track.

  The amount of forwarded patches we receive from downstream is at its maximum

  This is by far not an achievement of mine alone. In particular, many of the activity of the Derivatives Front Desk have been organized by other enthusiastic volunteers. But I ve done my part, especially in breaking the ice and in proposing a vision of Free Software distribution where all distros play a role and are welcome to join the game, as long as they give back and give credit to their respective upstreams.
• Process membership. I m proud of having promoted the general resolution (GR) that has clarified (and advertised to the world) that Debian welcomes all kind of contributions, and that they all equally matter to become proper members of the Project. I notice only now while writing this that the GR title, traditionally chosen by the secretary, was Debian Project Members . That choice harmonically closes the circle with the recent renaming of the NM process to New Member process. Today, we have several project members (AKA Debian Developers ) that are active citizen of Debian with voting rights, even though they take care of tasks other than packaging. Anyone can become a Debian citizen, as long as they are ready to abide by Debian s values, have a track record of verifiable contributions to Debian, and are committed to keep them coming in the future.

  We have several project members that [ ] take care of tasks other than packaging.

  Once gain, this is by far not an achievement of mine alone, very little project-wide achievements are. DAM has helped a lot and support from the project as a whole has been immense.

OK, let me cheat and add a third one I m also proud of having been able to report to the Project my whereabouts as DPL, thoroughly and periodically, since the very beginning is first term. People annoyed by my reporting logorrhea now have all my sympathies. Raphael: Among the possible new features of Debian Wheezy, which one gets you excited most? Stefano: It s multi-arch, no doubt. Even though it is not a directly user visible change, it s a very far reaching one. It is also one of those changes that make me feel that moment of truth of coders, when you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

It s multi-arch [ ] you realize you are finally doing the right thing and ditching piles of ugly hacks.

Raphael: If you were not DPL and could spend all your time on Debian, what project would you do? Stefano: I would sit down and do software development for Debian. It s impressive how many important and beneficial changes for Debian could be delivered by specific software improvements in various parts of our infrastructure. We tend to attract many packagers, but not so many people willing to maintain Debian infrastructure softwares like dak, britney, debbugs, the PTS, etc. Their maintenance burden then falls on the shoulders of the respective teams which are generally very busy with other important tasks. As a project, we seem to be more appealing to packagers than to software developers. That is a pity given the amount of exciting coding tasks that are everywhere in Debian. Part of the reason we are not appealing to developers is that we are not particularly good at collecting coding tasks in a place where interested developers could easily pick them up. It also takes quite a bit of inside knowledge to spot infrastructure bugs and understand how to fix them. I long for some spare hacking time to check if I m still good enough of a coder to hunt down longstanding bugs in our infrastructure, which have ended up being my pet peeves. I d also love to dive again into RCBW. It s less committing than package maintenance, more diverse and challenging, and also an immensely useful activity to get Debian releases done. Raphael: Martin Michlmayr is worried that there is so few paid opportunities around Debian. Do you agree with his sentiment, and if yes do you have ideas on how to improve this situation? Stefano: The idealistic me wishes Debian to be a community made only of volunteers that devote their free time to the Project. Oh, and that me also wishes Debian to be competitive with similar projects, no matter how many full-time employees others have! That is coherent with a view of society where everyone has a day job, but also engages in volunteering activities ensuring that public interest is pursued by people motivated by interests other than profit. But I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role. I admire projects that strike a good balance between volunteer and paid work. The Linux kernel is emblematic in that respect: many developers are paid by companies that have a commercial or strategic interest in Linux. Nevertheless volunteers contributions are aplenty and the Linux community gives a convincing impression that choices are driven by the community itself (or by its benevolent dictator) without money-driven impositions.

I do realize that for Free Software to succeed companies, employees, and salaries should all have a role.

Such an ecosystem does not exist around Debian. We do have a partner program that allows for it to happen, but we have very few partners with an interest in doing distribution development work. Like Martin, I m worried by this state of affairs, because it de facto means we lag behind in terms of available people power. In a community of volunteers, that might frustrate people and that is not good. To improve over the status quo the first step is to federate together small and medium companies that have a strategic interest in Debian and listen to their needs. I m already in touch with representatives of such companies that, in many cases, already employ Debian Developers to do some distribution work in Debian. We will be soon sending out a call to reach out to more such companies, but since we are discussing this, why waiting? If some of our readers here are representative of such companies, I encourage them to get in touch with me about this. Raphael: You know that the fundraising campaign for the Debian Administrator s Handbook is on good track but the liberation of the book is not yet assured. What do you think of this project? Stefano: I m happy about the project, to the point that I ve accepted writing a testimonial for it . I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian and I welcome any initiative that might help closing that gap.

I m sad about the scarce availability of up to date and high quality (DFSG-)Free books about Debian.

Free Culture is a great offspring of Free Software and I m convinced we need to stand up against double standards in the two camps. Letting aside software-specific licensing details, the basic freedoms to be defended are the same. They are those freedoms that ensure that a reader is in full control of his book, pretty much as they ensure that a computer user is in full control of the software that runs on it. I m therefore proud that Debian has long resolved that the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) apply not only to software but also to books and other pieces of documentation. But the status quo implies that not only we have very few up to date, high quality books about Debian. It also implies that, at present, we have no such book that we can distribute in the Debian archive, showing off the Free Software (and Free Culture!) values we stand for.
Crowdfunding is considered to be a good mate for Free Culture, where the services model that applies to Free Software is more difficult to exploit. I so wish any luck to yours and Roland s initiative. A different matter is whether Debian, as a project, should endorse the initiative and actively campaign for it. As you know, I think it should not. While we do advertise general project donations, we don t do mission-specific fundraising campaign for Debian itself. Coherently with that, I don t think we should relay crowdfunding campaigns for 3rd parties, even when the result would be beneficial to Debian. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Stefano: There are two classes of people that I particularly admire in Debian:

• Those with an uncanny ability to guide discussions towards constructive conclusions. We are lucky to have many in Debian and I admire all of them. Having to single out one I d name Russ Allbery, in honor of whom I hereby propose the periodic Russ Allbery s Distinguished Flametamer Award .
• People stepping up for responsibility roles, especially when the responsibility put them in tough spots. Release teams, ftp-masters, DSA, DAM, as well as past and present members of teams with similarly hot seats have all my admiration.

---

Thank you to Zack for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook .

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Today, while merging changes to phpMyAdmin from our translation server I was very surprised that we have two languages which already reached 100% - Slovenian and Turkish (and four more just few strings from 100%). The huge amount of new strings introduced during 3.5 development (mostly being MySQL advisor hints) made me thing it will take very long time till they all get translated, but I was proven wrong. Anyway there is still lot of work to do, so feel free to join our translators team.

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In september I visited Brussels, Belgium. EPFSUG had kindly invited me to give a talk about FreedomBox in the European Parliament, and together we extended to also visit other organizations - both grassroots and more formal. I returned home exhausted but also fuelled with renewed energy and passion, and decided to engage in more such activities. Also, an old promise of mine to visit friends in the Aceh region of Indonesia (whom I met in Taiwan a few years back) rumbled in the back of my head. After a bit of juggling with travel routes and sponsoring options, my course was set for a 2 month journey with Debian Pure Blends as main theme:

1. England: London
2. India: Khammam, Hyderabad, Mangaluru, Bengaluru
3. Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho
4. Thailand: Bangkok
5. Malaysia: Putrajaya
6. Indonesia: Surabaya, Yogyakarta, Bogor, Banda Aceh, Takengon
7. England: Cambridge

Debian will be sponsoring East Asia part, and Debian enthusiasts in India seek sponsorship for India part.

Arrival in a new country is always exciting. This was my first time ever to visit India, and although I have heard especially cultural bits and pieces, I was as usual nowhere near "well" prepared. How to fill out the registration forms (surprisingly needed in addition to the visa already gathered ahead of departure) when your only known address in India is on the laptop you completely drained the battery of during the flight? Luckily they tolerated the "address during stay" to be left blank. I got out in the heat of Hyderabad in the late afternoon, got a cab, and had my host instruct the cab driver - over the phone via roaming to Denmark - where to drop me off. After a long ride with cows and beautiful dressed pedestrians casually crossing the high speed road and a short pitstop at an ATM, I finally met Pavithran. Until then we only knew each other from casual online chat. (I should later learn that my first impression was quite unusual - not cows or clothes or chat, but roads capable of driving at high speed!) Pavithran checked me into a small hotel and we visited his home. It was in the middle of being rebuild, so impossible to stay at as had been our original planed. After a few hours of looking at the neighbourhood and talking about possible events during the week, we decided to cancel the hotel and instead go visit his parents in Khammam, some 5 hours away by bus This text is part of my Asia 2011 scriblings.

RPostgreSQL goes back to a topic suggestion I had made for the Google Summer of Code 2008, and specifically for the R Project participation that year. And Sameer Kumar Prayaga (whom I then mentored for the project) did a fine job that summer putting together a working framework of package connecting R and the excellent PostgreSQL database system. Unfortunately, Sameer vanished once the summer was up; I heard he got himself a job a another db company. Fast-forward a few years. A caretaker group had maintained the package in the meantime, but without really writing any new code. But thanks to the tireless efforts of Tomoaki Nishiyama, who not only wrote a lot of new code addressing some of issues logged at the Google Code project page, but also stepped forward and became the new lead maintainer, things are much, much better now. The first 0.2-0 release a few weeks ago already addressed a rather large number of issues, bringing the feature set much closer to what one would expect from a feature-complete package. But one big thorn remained: builds on Windows still required a local PostgreSQL library installation as well as local compilation. And as we can tell from the mailing list(s), this is a little daunting for many potential users. But what did release 0.2-1 bring: a complete set of libpq sources so that builds on Windows no longer require presence of local PostgreSQL sources! We tested this using Uwe Ligges' excellent win-builder service for R, and after I reminded Uwe on the weekend to no longer blacklist build attempts of RPostgreSQL, we now have Windows binaries for direct installation. Just call install.packages(), and you're good to go -- much nicer! Tomoaki achieved this pretty much single-handedly, and for that reason he greatly deserves some extra praise as an unsung Open Source hero!

From a comment by Brad K at Causon's Book: It is a couple of days old now, so I imagine you have seen this. One hedge broker for grain and cattle, Barnhardt Capital Management (http://barnhardt.biz/) has called it quits. Most agribusiness deals with futures and options on their crops to make a good part of their annual income. According to Ann: "The reason for my decision to pull the plug was excruciatingly simple: I could no longer tell my clients that their monies and positions were safe in the futures and options markets because they are not. And this goes not just for my clients, but for every futures and options account in the United States. The entire system has been utterly destroyed by the MF Global collapse. " Interesting times. As the global financial system (not just banks) is wobbling, we need to ensure the food supplies. Time to plant veg and stock up on tins?

A few months ago, Adobe announced a slew of vulnerabilities in its Flash Player, which is a critical component of Adobe AIR:

Adobe recommends users of Adobe AIR 2.6.19140 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux update to Adobe AIR 2.7.0.1948. [...] June 14, 2011 - Bulletin updated with information on Adobe AIR

However, looking at Adobe's instructions for installing AIR on "Linux" systems, we see that it is impossible for people running a free desktop OS to follow Adobe's own recommendations:

Beginning June 14 2011, Adobe AIR is no longer supported for desktop Linux distributions. Users can install and run AIR 2.6 and earlier applications but can't install or update to AIR 2.7. The last version to support desktop Linux distributions is AIR 2.6.

So on the exact same day, Adobe said "we recommend you upgrade, as the version you are using is vulnerable" and "we offer you no way to upgrade". I'm left with the conclusion that Adobe's aggregate corporate message is "users of desktops based on free software should immediately uninstall AIR and stop using it". If Adobe's software was free, and they had a community around it, they could turn over support to the community if they found it too burdensome. Instead, once again, users of proprietary tools on free systems get screwed by the proprietary vendor. And they wonder why we tend to be less likely to install their tools? Application developers should avoid targeting AIR as a platform if they want to reach everyone.Tags: adobe, proprietary software, security

This announcement was provided by Martin Erik Werner. I m reproducing it for Planet Ubuntu. The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join! It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26. The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you re new to the Team, say hi! Then we ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways? Next we ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more? Next up it s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done? Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET? Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games? Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there! Related posts:

1. Debious A dubious Debian packaging GUI
2. One week with Debian
3. A list of some commercial GNU/Linux games

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Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2011. Permalink License Post tags: Debian, games, packaging