As we're slowly heading towards phpMyAdmin 3.4, it is good time to look at current translations state. There are few which are already at 100%, so they are in best possible shape:

• Czech
• English (United Kingdom)
• French
• Slovenian
• Turkish

Some languages really miss just few messages, so they will hopefully get to 100% soon:

• Swedish
• Greek
• Chinese (China)
• Catalan

And there is huge progress in Russian, which will at this pace get to 100% this week. Was your language not listed? You can help it being better!

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

When I started to use Emacs, I got hooked by many stuff like Gnus and Org-mode. One thing I quickly started to hate is how the Lisp code can be old and unmaintained. That especially applies to BBDB, which has been unmaintained for years, and has very very very old and obsolete code. Therefore I've decided to develop my own BBDB replacement based on my lovely Org-mode. It's called org-contacts, and it allows you to handle your contact like anything you would handle in Org. This way you can manage them the way you want, without any preset fields or any assumptions like BBDB has. I had the chance to present it at the Paris OrgCamp a couple of weeks ago, and due to the enthusiastic audience I had, I'm now releasing it to the wide Internet.

So Debian squeeze has finally been released and it is time to look toward to what we might work on or want to happen for the next release, codenamed Debian wheezy. An informal discussion on IRC mentioned libburnia libraries and apps, finishing DEP5, objnam, wayland, multiarch, Matthew Palmer plans to work on netcfg, ifupdown and the KDE team plan to remove Qt3/KDE3. I personally plan to work on catching up with my packages, the removal of defoma, boosting the Debian games team, improving collaboration with derivatives, changes to the Debian wiki, reviewing more packages mentioned on debian-mentors and more. I am really excited to see the cross-distro collaboration of Enrico Zini and others in bringing application management to Linux distributions, the multiarch work by Steve Langasek and others and hopefully optimistic about the recent discussions of automated post-install testing. I probably will not work on almost all of these but I would like to see multiarch, cross compiliation, widespread systemd integration, netconf revival, porting to phones/tablets, OEM mode and media for d-i, partitioning improvments for d-i, widespread automated post-install testing, expansion of daca, deployment of debexpo, widespread adoption of PET, automated removal of bad packages, better pro-active security measures, building all packages on buildds, migration away from Debian-specific stuff in favour of cross-distro solutions, addition of new UI experiences (like MeeGo, Android, Unity, QtMoko), addition of new APIs for portability (like Android, Khronos, MacOS/iOS stuff), more interesting/weird ports, merging derivatives into Debian, better integration of Debian Pure Blends, removing non-free packages where free alternatives exist, ex-developers and MIA folks returning to Debian, expansion of the backports repository, fixes for lots of bugs and probably other things I forgot. What are you going to work on? What do you wish you could work on? What work are you hoping others will do? What work are you excited about that others are doing?

mythbustering a Debian release This is no news anymore, but in case you don't know yet: Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" has been released the past week-end. If you haven't yet downloaded Squeeze, stop reading this blog post right here and jump to: to choose your ISO; or check the release notes for upgrade instructions from Debian 5.0 "Lenny". Done?
Cool!
I hope you are now enjoying Squeeze as much as I've enjoyed being part of its development cycle which:

• has lasted 24 months from the Lenny release
• has been worked on by a volunteer Project of about 900 members and thousands of other volunteer contributors
• has closed 150'000 bugs
• has increased user freedom by delivering a Free Linux kernel
• has added 2 non-Linux ports (kfreefbsd 32/64 bits) to the already large family of Debian ports
• will continue the tradition of archive-wide long term security support (lasting about 3-3.5 years given current Debian release cadence)
• maintains, stubbornly, the tradition of a rock-solid Debian-quality system, made of packages which have been "tortured" by testing utils like piuparts, edos-debcheck, and frequent archive rebuilds (after all, what is Free Software for if you cannot recompile your programs?)
• has added 10'000 new (binary) packages
• has provided official backport service
• ... etc, you got the idea

I'm still shaked by the events, given the release happened in a sort of split context: the teams working on the final phases of the release (release team, ftp-masters, webmasters, cd, DSA, etc.) were "at home" hacking frantically on it, while many EU-based Debian people (including yours truly) were at FOSDEM representing Debian to the community with booth, talks, and answering the recurrent question so, have you released yet? . At FOSDEM, I've been personally submerged by congratulation messages that are not really for me, but rather for the Debian community at large. So: congratulations folks! People out there be them Debian users, users of some derivative, or Free Software enthusiasts in general seem to really love what we have achieved with Squeeze! The people that need to be thanked for this result are way too many, so I won't try to name names. Nonetheless, I've a few personal kudos to deliver to:

• The release team for the fantastic coordination and communication job over the past few months. They have also contributed to mythbustering #1: Debian cannot fix a release date (a bit) in advance.
• All the people who have worked on fixing RC bugs by sending patches, reviewing and testing them, preparing NMUs, etc. I'll never give up my belief that releasing is a shared responsibility and that we cannot scale without realizing that and changing our culture accordingly. All this people have contributed to move towards mythbustering #2: NMUs are bad.
• The publicity team which with release live blogging via @debian, blog posts, and press releases have contributed to mythbustering #3: Debian isn't able to communicate about the "cool" stuff they are doing.
• The webmaster team which has done an incredible job at mythbustering #4: Debian web presence sucks.

I'm overwhelmed by happiness about all that and I'll cherish it forever as a souvenir of what a community of volunteers, driven by common ideals, can achieve. Now let's party and then roll up our sleeves for Wheezy, which is already open for development.

---

PS I've talked again at FOSDEM about the relevance of Debian in the Free Software ecosystem. I've the impression the message is getting through: check out the very nice article Why Debian matters more than ever by Zonker.

In an article about gender issues among American atheists, Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell give a list of things to consider to be better community, not just for women:

• Be a leader. Take responsibility for the tone of your group. If potential new members are being made to feel uncomfortable and aren t coming back, you re doing it wrong. As a leader, it is your job to prioritize the comfort of your attendees in programs, group dynamics, and communications. Try to put yourself in other members shoes and also ask for feedback.
• Promote a sense of community. Take the time to socialize and get to know each other. If you re group isn t primarily a social group, thinking about adding some social time. Go to breakfast before the protest, compose your letters to the editor over coffee, or grab a pizza and beer after that lecture. When you know each other, you have each others backs. Being a jerk isn t tolerated.
• Moderate discussions. Make sure everyone has the opportunity to participate- new people, quiet people, etc. Don t let conversation be dominated by one or two people who must win.
• Embrace and accept different ways of communicating. Whether someone is an aggressive debater or not, make sure they re still welcome. The other atheist in the room isn t your enemy.
• Encourage subgroups. Every event your group hosts doesn t need to appeal to your entire membership. Many women appreciate women-only space to express their nonbelief and to connect with other atheist women. Here at the Humanist Community of Central Ohio, we started a subgroup book club called Reasonable Women. When it grew to have about 25 regular members and was beginning to be a little too large and unwieldy to function as a book club, we created a second group, Heathen Chicks, which is just a social group that meets at a local cafe. It isn t just about creating women only space, for us, this has been a way to draw more women into other events our group hosts.
• Foster women in leadership. Groups with women in leadership positions tend to have more women. Encourage women in your group to be visible in leadership.

These should work pretty well for Debian as well. I mean for the project in general, for getting all kinds of new people in, and getting them to stay, not just women, even if the gender imbalance is perhaps the biggest glaring problem we have. As a concrete suggestion, maybe it would be a good idea to continue the Debian party line that Joey set up for the squeeze release. We already have IRC, but having an audio chat with your Debian peers might be a nice addition. Specifically a social one, instead of something intended to boost productivity.

Squeeze was released this weekend and it's time to slowly migrate servers to it. The first to upgrade came the ones backing up phpMyAdmin demo server. Reason for trying them first is they have mostly same setup as other, while definitely not being critical to run all the time. For simple reasons that users break them time to time as well :-). Everything went surprisingly smoothly, the only problematic thing being no availability of MariaDB packages for Squeeze right now. But it does not matter that much, as Lenny packages still work fine. There should be no visible changes on the servers, but in case there is something broken, please let me know. While having experience with upgrading database servers, I went to production database server and it is now running Squeeze as well. What still remains is the server doing virtualization, but I prefer to do this in time when I can quickly get to the housing, in case something goes wrong with the reboot.

Filed under: Debian English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

A while ago, I gave a presentation on Debian, and made a latex-beamer color scheme for it. Over time I improved it some. Eventually, I grabbed the colors from the new debian website, since they are much nicer (lighter) than the old colors, and thus fit in a presentation better. Last year, I wanted to write this up so that others could use the scheme.The theme can be found here, and there are examples in this gallery. This is distributed as a few color lines you need to copy and paste into your presentation (it is not much, and I thought that was better than an external dependency). You need to select your own layout theme from those included in beamer, for examples see the gallery. The theme page lists many credits for ideas, in particular zack for the idea of the logo on the background, and some other useful links. I would welcome others to improve this theme and make it more distributable.As a reminder, there is another Debian wiki page for collecting presentations people have given, and it has some other useful links on it.

The last weeks before a Debian release are usually boring with respect to working on new stuff since unstable is pretty much closed to development. Now that the release is finished, this fun is back \o/ I have been in an upload frenzy since yesterday night and I have updated some packages in unstable: KOffice[1] and KOffice-l10n 2.3.1, yakuake, rsibreak and tintin++. Another of my packages, kid3, got magically updated itself in unstable before I had time to look at it, the magic of having active co-maintainers. [1] Thanks for the gentle push to update this, Pino :) I also emailed one of my upstream maintainers to ask him about the KDE 4 version of his application and he will likely make a release soon. One of the goals for wheezy is remove completely KDE 3 and Qt 3. If you are maintaining a KDE 3 or Qt 3 based application, we are about to start annoying you about this! See http://wiki.debian.org/kdelibs4c2aRemoval and http://wiki.debian.org/qt3-x11-freeRemoval The last 2 weeks before the release I had some fun watching how the Squeeze release countdown banner I published at http://news.debian.net spread to a lot of websites, personal blogs, community sites, forums to news portals.
The traffic has been increasing little by little through the 2 weeks the banner has been online and currently is still moderately high, since people keeps retweeting the news item about the Debian release. While writing these lines, the banner has been served 449575 times to a total of 244975 unique IP addresses!

My laptop (an HP 2530p) gets quite a lot of abuse. It's been with me enough to have done the equivalent of going round the world 4 or 5 times, and it's typically just thrown in a bag without any particular care or attention being given to its care or wellbeing. It's been dropped a couple of times with the only damage being some corners that aren't really as even as they should be. All in all, it's survived amazingly well. But it recently started refusing to boot, merely flashing its LEDs. After finally finding a list of what these mean, I narrowed it down to the memory. Taking it apart and putting it back together again got things working for a while, but then it happened again. And again. So, since I have one memory module and two slots, I decided to just move the RAM in the hope that there's something physically wrong with the slot. It worked! Until I got to the BIOS splash and it informed me that Intel AMT requires that there be memory in slot 0. And didn't give me an opportunity to continue without AMT.

My hardware is conspiring against me.

This is my first blog post on my new tarent blog which I am using as a replacement for blogspot. We had 451 new source packages in the NEW queue tonight. It is nice to know that Debian is the largest free software distribution but it will take some time until we (the ftp team) have processed all those new packages as we need the check every single package. I wanted to work on dak (the Debian archive kit) again after we have released Squeeze but I ll give NEW processing a higher priority. My next plan for dak is generating the contents files in dak directly instead of using apt-ftparchive. Contents generation is the slowest part of apt-ftparchive and having the package contents in dak s database is quite useful.

Picture this week is a little bit later because of time spent on FOSDEM and traveling there. It was taken last Wednesday from Vy ehrad, the Prague castle is disappearing in morning fog.

Filed under: English Photography 0 comments Flattr this!

I m glad that 5 years after the facts, people are still not getting them straight. The Firefox logo was not under a free copyright license. Therefore, Debian was using the Firefox name with the earth logo (without the fox), which was and still is under a free copyright license. Then Mozilla didn t want the Firefox name associated to an icon that is not the Firefox icon, for trademark reasons. Fair enough. Although at the time Debian had concerns with the trademark policy, there was no point arguing over it, since Debian was not going to use the logo under a non-free copyright license anyway. Now, it happens that the logo has turned to a free copyright license. Request for a trademark license was filed a few weeks after we found out about the good news, and we are still waiting for an agreement draft from Mozilla to hopefully go forward. It is still not certain that this will actually lead to Debian shipping something called Firefox some day, but things are progressing, even if at a rather slow pace, and I have good hope (discussions are promising). By the way, thank you for the nice words, Daniel.

Wow, that was a night. I'm still quite tired from the weekend. Someone told me, that ~ 1 000 people subscribed to our live denting via identi.ca, and about 12 000 via twitter. And that does not even include those, who followed us via the respective web interfaces! While it was quite exhausting (we tried to watch about 7 irc channels for the important stuff, I partly had ~80 windows in my irssi (which is especially bad, since I only have keyboard shortcuts for the first 40) and there whas also a constant need to watch for mails and due to translations also our spamfilters), it was also very nice to think that somewhere there are release parties going on with people looking at our dents, maybe even having them running on a big monitor or projector ;) One thing that remains to be done, are the left-over dents we prepared as time killers: Since the release process went quite smoothly (and we didn't have the time to check all our dents for the limit of 140 chars ;) we still have some of them left. Since some of them where requested (and I poked other people to get me the numbers) here are the remaining dents:

• While IRC and Mailing-Lists are the primary forms of communication with and within the Debian Project, there's also a web based forum at http://forums.debian.net.
• There are also many localized forums, e.g. the German http://www.debianforum.de/.
• Debian's wiki has currently 8670 pages and 7760 users. It is viewed ~38000 times and has about 58 edits per day.
• The version control system of of the website counts 92377 commits since 1998-07-01, when it was initially checked in.
  Note: That number was from the 31st of January. It is quite outdated now for obvious reasons.
• 230 commiters worked on Debian's website since 1998-07-01, when it was initially checked in.
• 5000 web pages are maintained by the webteam and translated into 35 languages.
• When Debian 5.0 Lenny got released on the 14th of February 2009, the first website was translated into Vietnamese.
• alioth.debian.org, the SourceForge-like collaboration platform for Debian, currently knows 909 different projects.
• 10'748 people have an account on alioth.debian.org.
• alioth.debian.org also hosts 1080 public mailing list for said teams.
• Not surprising: Debian's mailing list with most subscribers is debian-security-announce with 31408 subscribers, followed by debian-announce with 29483 and debian-news with 22857 subscribers.
• debian-curiosa, the mailing list for All the funny stuff regarding Debian is only read by 946 persons. It is very low traffic.
• Most active mailing list: debian-user with ~2000 Mails each month.
• Debian's Sysadmin team takes care of 140 servers (including 24 virtual ones).
• The naming scheme for Debian's servers are names of classical composers.
• So the mailing list server was named liszt.debian.org.
• Debian's servers memory capacities range from 32MB to 48GB. All combined would amount to 892GB.
• Hard disk capacity range from 2GB up to 12TB.
• The first two DebConfs didn't have any budgets. The third had a budget of 5'000 USD.
• DebConf7 in Edinburgh had the highest budget so far: 180'000 USD. It had also the most attendees: 394 people attended it.
• During DebConf5 over 600 USD were raised by collecting the refund of empty bottles and cans.

I especially like the one about debian-curiosa ;) Update 1: The 600 USD where collected during DebConf5, not DebConf3. Update 2: Small clarification about the number of subscriptions on identi.ca and twitter: They didn't followed a live-stream channel, but they do follow our general channel. We are not sure, how many people where subribed before we announced the live denting; some saw 700 subscribers on identi.ca, which would mean ~200 seem to have subscribed for the release dents (still not including the ones just following us the old fashioned way via a browser).

The Ubuntu website states that we aim to make Ubuntu a wonderful place to participate . We developed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct to set a standard for participants to accept each other in the spirit of cooperation, and have improved it over time to state these principles more clearly. It is implicit in our philosophy that these and other Ubuntu values should hold equally true for everyone. I would like to propose that we upgrade this to an explicit statement on behalf of the project. I have spoken with many people who were interested in joining a free software project, but were put off because they felt unwelcome. I know various people who participate in Ubuntu today, but sometimes face difficult social obstacles in order to do so. Going forward, I would like for us, as members of the Ubuntu community, to make the extra effort to accept all kinds of people. This may sound simple, but it can be very difficult to put into practice. People often don t even notice they ve gotten it wrong, until the offended party points it out to them. We need tools and guidance to make this a reality. To that end, I would like to propose a diversity statement for Ubuntu. This draft has already received support from a majority of the Community Council, but I d like to take it a step further. Because I want this to be a commitment that we can all stand behind, I m also calling for support from the community as a whole. Please give this issue your consideration, and let me know in the comments if you can get on board with an official statement like this. The more support we have, the more real this commitment can be. Here s the text. Many thanks to Mary Gardiner, Valerie Aurora and Benjamin Mako Hill for their review and input.

The Ubuntu project welcomes and encourages participation by everyone. We are committed to being a community that everyone feels good about joining. Although we may not be able to satisfy everyone, we will always work to treat everyone well. Standards for behavior in the Ubuntu community are detailed in the Code of Conduct and Leadership Code of Conduct. We expect participants in our community to meet these standards in all their interactions and to help others to do so as well. Whenever any participant has made a mistake, we expect them to take responsibility for it. If someone has been harmed or offended, it is our responsibility to listen carefully and respectfully, and do our best to right the wrong. Although this list cannot be exhaustive, we explicitly honor diversity in age, culture, ethnicity, genotype, gender identity or expression, language, national origin, neurotype, phenotype, political beliefs, profession, race, religion, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, subculture, and technical ability. Some of the ideas and wording for this statement were based on diversity statements from the Python community and Dreamwidth Studios (CC-BY-SA 3.0).

Today, I've made available two new themes for phpMyAdmin on our demo server. First one is Toba theme which was contributed by Azhari Harahap: Second one is Graphite theme which I've started during Hackweek and finished during free time around FOSDEM: And we're still waiting for more contributions to our Theme contest. PS: Forgot to mention that new themes are only for 3.4 branch and won't work with others.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse 0 comments Flattr this!

FOSDEM ended yesterday and here I am sitting at Charleroi Airport (also known as Brussels South , quite a misleading name given that it s 80 Km from Brussels). I have already passed all controls, check-in and everything. While I wait for boarding, I am watching the shameful spectacle of airport personnel (let me reiterate that: airport personnel, not Ryanair s) enforcing RyanAir s 10 Kg cabin baggage limit. According to RyanAir, they want to minimize the weight the plane carries to use less fuel. So far, so good. Here is what I have seen: people who do not carry any baggage (very few, they have probably checked it in because it exceeded size or weight), people who are below the 10 Kg limit and people who are way over it (and have been told to check luggage in). I am OK with those cases. There is still a fourth case: people who are slightly over 10 Kg. I ve seen a woman whose bag was 10.15 Kg to be told to pay 20 EUR to check her bag, or go back to the RyanAir desk to check-in the bag. She opened her bag, took a scarf, put it on and now the bag matched the weight limit. Yes, RyanAir is charging 20 EUR/Kg for hand baggage from 10 Kg on. What a rip-off. A couple of East-European girls were about 1 Kg in excess each. They put a couple of extra jumpers on and now baggage was under 10 Kg. Many people were about 1 Kg in excess. When they were told their suitcase better got lighter or pay 20 to 40 EUR. Most of them just took something (camera, food, slippers, whatever) and put in the pockets of their coats. Fortunately, RyanAir is not charging for body and clothes weight (yet?). In all those cases the plane will end up transporting the same weight and RyanAir won t get one more dime, so why RyanAir? Why are you such a shameful company? Why are you enforcing ludicrous and pointless policies? Don t you know after passing the control everybody just put everything back into the suitcase? Of course you do. So after watching this ridiculous spectacle go on for a while, I had a devious idea: let s organize a fat people conference and fly them all over to and from using RyanAir. Further, all of them should carry exactly 10 Kg hand baggage.

(This is part of a series of posts on Why Linux?) I think of myself as reasonably pragmatic in my approach to Free/Open Source software. I don't get worked up over which set of language people want to use. I use devices that require binary firmware to be downloaded to them (because just because I can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist). I have non-free in my sources.list. And yet, talking to other Linux users these days, I realize I'm much more of a Freedom nut job than average. I want the source, be it for a driver, a minor widget, or a full app. I don't buy nVidia. I will sacrifice a degree of functionality in order to get Free. And while I think WINE is an excellent piece of software, I think the best end result is that it's no longer necessary, not that it's a perfect implementation of the ABI. How does any of this help justify my use of Linux in the work place? As previously mentioned, I'm a developer. Most developers don't operate in a vacuum; they have to inter-operate with other ecosystems. And usually somewhere along the line there's a failure to document exactly how something is handled, or an ambiguity about what exact choice might be taken. If I have access to the source then I can check that out for myself. If I don't, I have to guess. As an example, a long time ago I was involved in writing a serial console driver for QNX. There came a point where the behaviour wasn't quite as we'd expect. Although the organisation had a license for the source, I wasn't allowed to look at it. Instead I had to come up with a series of suitable questions that someone who could look at the source could answer without violating any NDAs. If I'd been able to look at the source directly we'd have all saved a lot of time. And that's an example where someone could look at the source, rather than having to make a bunch of guesses and instrument tests to see which was right. Access to the Linux source has helped me in other commercial contexts too. At Black Cat we were able to take advantage of patches like grsecurity in order to tighten up shell account boxes. I wrote the IPv6 support for l2tpns, because we had access to the source and could. I've been able to look at the source to understand exactly what SCSI responses are sent in certain circumstances too (or understand exactly what the error that a user land test program was getting back meant). Also I'm a big believe in Linus' Law. I do think that good Free software is much better than proprietary software (there's some really bad Free software out there though, I'm not disputing that). The fact that smart people can look at it and scratch whatever their itch is means that we get a gradual process of improvement that can't be ignored. Equally as long as someone has an interest in the software, end users can't be left high and dry by organisations abandoning still users applications. I think that should be a powerful driver to business to look towards Free software. (Before my more astute readers point it out; yes, I am employed writing non-free software. See the first sentence. One day I'll find a job working on Free software that ticks enough of the other boxes to be viable.)

Today the Chinese New Year celebrations were held in Liverpool City Centre, I went with my family. I wanted to get some shots of the dragon parade, but this year it seemed to be a lot more crowded than previous years. The shots I did get of the dragon were mostly obstructed, so I chose one of my other shots from the day of one of the many lanterns decorating china town.

Inspired by some chatter in IRC, and encouraged to post by Paul Wise, here are my personal goals (in no particular order) during the Wheezy development cycle:

• Keep my packages BugLess(TM). It should go without saying, given the piddling little packages I maintain, but I've been a bit slack about this in the past. I want to be more proactive in responding to newly reported bugs, and dealing with them (forwarding upstream, fixing, uploading, etc).
• No non-wontfix, non-help bugs in netcfg. Since nobody else is giving it any love, I've decided to step up and effectively "adopt" netcfg (the component in the Debian installer which handles the task of selecting and configuring a network interface for the install process). I've already uploaded 1.60 with a number of smaller bugfixes, and I have projects underway relating to IPv6 support and WPA support (help needed on that latter one; see the link for details), but I've set myself the somewhat ambitious goal of completely scrubbing it's bug list down to wontfix and help bugs. Let's see how that goes...
• Do something about ifupdown. This one has grown out of my netcfg work -- basically, it's bug list is terrifying, and it's missing support for a number of IPv6 features (most of which appear to be reported already). I don't know whether my "something" will involve just bug triage, or writing patches, or actually getting involved in maintaining the package on an ongoing basis, but I've committed myself (publically now, even) to doing something.

So, I've shown you mine, will you show me yours?