I’m often asked why I’m so obsessed with backward compatibility and, as a result, why I’ve made the issue such a central part of the LSB over the past year. Yes, it’s hard, particularly in the Linux world, because there are thousands of developers building the components that make up the platform, and it just takes one to break compatibility and make our lives difficult. Even worse, the idea of keeping extraneous stuff around for the long term “just” for the sake of compatibility is anathema to most engineers. Elegance of design is a much higher calling than the pedestrian task of making sure things don’t break. Why is backward compatibility important? Here’s a great example, via Joel Spolsky (note: from 2004):

Raymond Chen is a developer on the Windows team at Microsoft. He’s been there since 1992, and his weblog The Old New Thing is chock-full of detailed technical stories about why certain things are the way they are in Windows, even silly things, which turn out to have very good reasons. The most impressive things to read on Raymond’s weblog are the stories of the incredible efforts the Windows team has made over the years to support backwards compatibility: “Look at the scenario from the customer’s standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashes randomly, and program Z doesn’t work at all. You’re going to tell your friends, ‘Don’t upgrade to Windows XP. It crashes randomly, and it’s not compatible with program Z.’ Are you going to debug your system to determine that program X is causing the crashes, and that program Z doesn’t work because it is using undocumented window messages? Of course not. You’re going to return the Windows XP box for a refund. (You bought programs X, Y, and Z some months ago. The 30-day return policy no longer applies to them. The only thing you can return is Windows XP.)” I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case. The Windows testing team is huge and one of their most important responsibilities is guaranteeing that everyone can safely upgrade their operating system, no matter what applications they have installed, and those applications will continue to run, even if those applications do bad things or use undocumented functions or rely on buggy behavior that happens to be buggy in Windows n but is no longer buggy in Windows n+1… A lot of developers and engineers don’t agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It’s why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work… To contrast, I’ve got DOS applications that I wrote in 1983 for the very original IBM PC that still run flawlessly, thanks to the Raymond Chen Camp at Microsoft.

I can almost feel the revulsion among my readership right about now. However, next time you’re in Best Buy or CompUSA, look at the shelf of Windows applications, then compare it to the shelf of Mac applications, and perhaps you’ll better understand why it’s important. Beyond the results speaking for themselves, I’ll argue that it takes a better engineer to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don’t break. It’s pretty easy to wash your hands of something and declare it to be someone else’s problem.

Today I woke up with a strong determination to do some badly needed house cleaning. A series of rushed travels have left a few rooms full of stuff all over the place, after I emptied a bag or two to be able to pack on time. Just before going to Tunisia, I decided my wallet was way too fat so I got rid of shopping receipts and other random shit I had in it. That included quite a few PGP keys from people I had been collecting in previous travels, and I had forgotten about. So, armed with my willingness to get rid of all of those dust puppies, first thing I find in the living room is the pile of wallet papers, and my clever procrastinating mind apparently thought it was time to postpone real cleaning; instead I needed to sit down and sign all of those really old PGP keys. Many of you reading this will have got a few emails from me this morning. It was about time! Some of the silly strips of paper dated back to the Open Source World Conference 2004 in M laga, when a decent group of Debian Developers gathered in a really small hacking room and talked about some Debian topics. Signing the keys has let me identify a few non-revoked ids which really should be, as the accounts are no longer valid, etc.; many others have greylisted me for a while and finally accepted my email. There was one mail recipient which may have gone a bit too far with the anti-spam policies, though:

9323170A74B     4007 Sun Jan 14 17:55:38  jordi@nubol.oskuro.net
(host mail-dtag.reichmann.net[62.104.43.214] said: 421 call 09001000057 for admin support (in reply to MAIL FROM command))
                                         alexander@schmehl.info

Alexander, I'm not doing calls to Germany to send your key, but I can resend if you want, once you open up your mail server... (my tries to knoepix.org also failed). It seems I have misplaced a few keys from the Ubuntu Summit in Sydney, but I think I know where to find that sheet. More in 2 or 3 years! PS: dust puppies are alive and well, they managed to survive yet another tough day.

I have not blogged for quite some time, mostly due to real life eating up my energy for non-trivial stuff. Anyway there is some news:

• iceape is finally in etch. A big thanks to the maintainer team, I just did not like iceweasel/firefox.
• Mozilla bug triaging is progressing nicely, down from many bugs to about 430.
• Still no snow.
• Still no snow.
• Hold a second, I need to doublecheck. - Still no snow.
• I have been bored a little bit due to item just mentioned and therefore will be upgrading my monitor hardware. Going from a 17'' CRT on a Matrox G400 to a 20'' TFT (Samsung SyncMaster 204B) and a PowerColor 128MB Radeon 9250 SE. The old grafic adapter did not have DVI out and I simply bought the cheapest (about EUR 34) new one that had one since this computer is too slow for fancy 3D games anyway. Afaik the Radeon 9250 SE should be supported without any problems in Xorg, even with 3D acceleration.

Our top-10 female geek "helix" (congrats!) suggested (jokingly) we could do an Ajax interface for configuration files. Well, if you want, you can run a tomcat as root, and have it access your configuration files. If you're crazy enough. :-) No, there are actually secure ways of doing such things, if you want even with Ajax. Just have a secure web server for administration, which will then push the updated configuration file to the actual hosts e.g. via cfengine. Since people still tend do read "all configuration files should be XML", and "but I hate XML": please get down. We already have quite some XML-lookalike configuration files (e.g. apache). We have S-Expressions. We have some deeply nested INI files. We have true XML config files (e.g. /etc/fonts/fonts.conf). All I'm asking is that we should maybe use one single format for all applications that have similar requirements for their configuration. And no, not every application can be sanely configured with a linear, flat configuration file. Sometimes, a tree-based data model is much cleaner. You know, thats why we're using a tree directory structure, and not flat files. And face it, if you like it or not: XML is the most widely accepted choice for exchanging (tree structured) data. And if you manage systems, you want to be able to sanely exchange data between e.g. a configuration management tool and the service you're configuring.

Has anyone experience with DoSing spammers by deliberately flooding them with incorrect email addresses? I mean, it should be easily possible to put new (fake) email addreses up on web pages in a huge scale (actually this is an old idea of deterring spammers). Any spammer grabbing them will have his database grow somewhat out of control. At some point they'll probably notice that you have been providing them with bad data, and maybe drop all of your domains' email addresses harvested? Or do they just not care?

DebConf7: tickets bought! I did it: yesterday I bought the plane tickets for DebConf7. I'll arrive there (from Milano Malpensa, MPX) on June 14th for leaving on June 24th. This year I decided not to attend the DebCamp since the beginning, partly due to the likelihood of university duties in June (and 3 more days can mean a lot), and partly because I'm convinced that the first days of DebCamp are not that productive/fun. Last year that was the case .... and no, not only for the network issues. Other Italians attending the conference and willing to share the plane trip can have a look at my post on debian-devel-italian@l.d.o for more info. See you in EDI. P.S. do we already have a Wiki page for stating who/is-arriving/when? Or are the information submitted in Pentabarf going to be disclosed anytime before the conference?

I have Dreams I would be embarrassed to admit in public... that suddenly are not so embarrassing anymore!

I dream of winning 1 million Euros in the lottery, starting a Debian Foundation, buying a whole building in the best area of Madrid, making myself a nice home in the attic, with a huge terrace for Vi and Jazz, and having the Debian headquarters there. With that amount of money it would either be the Foundation or the building... So it really is wishful dreaming.

But sometimes I let this dreaming go on further, and I dream of winning more money, buying a whole island, starting a new country there, and calling it Debian Land, getting all DDs a Debian Passport, sponsoring their holidays with their families there, in the Debian Island, with great Internet connection, sun and wonderful beaches, so that they can gather, without waiting for Debconf, or just enjoy a break.

I learnt yesterday that The Micronation of Sealand is for sale and that the people behind The Pirate Bay want to buy it: With the help of all the kopimists on Internets, we want to buy Sealand. Donate money and you will become a citizien.

So I guess I am not the only one who dreams of starting a country where one can be really free. And Sealand is so close to the Debian Developer Centre of Mass... it s so tempting...

They even have a Plan B: If we do not get enough money required to buy The Micronation of Sealand, we will try to buy another small island somewhere and claim it as our own country (prices start from USD 50.000). That s exactly what I was dreaming of, and it doesn t sound so stupid anymore.

I just need to be more constant in my lottery playing, and have some faith.

The New York Times reports that the Pentagon has gone on the offensive against the pro bono attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees. Although there is a lot to criticize in U.S. detainee policy, these attacks represent a new low:

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties. … The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.” In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases. Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

Perhaps the worst part is the following statement, which as best I can tell has no basis in truth:

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

Deval Patrick, the recently-elected governor of Massachusetts, endured similar attacks for his work representing criminal defendants. Fortunately, that strategy backfired and Patrick was elected in a landslide. Although others in the administration have attempted to distance themselves from Stimson’s comments (including the Attorney General), the suggestion that large corporate clients should boycott these attorneys as punishment for representing detainees remains disgusting. The right to counsel is not a political issue. You could hold the unlikely belief that each and every Guantánamo detainee is a confirmed terrorist and still advocate for fair treatment. These attacks represent a new brand of McCarthyism. I hope that this strategy is as unsuccessful nationally as it was in Massachusetts. It strikes me that attacking the partners of some of the largest firms in the country is also bad political strategy. These attorneys are the type of people who may be major campaign donors and well-connected in both parties. I would think twice before attempting to vilify them. They are unlikely to drop their representation (and might be ethically barred from doing so) in light of these statements. If anything, I suspect their determination to ensure the detainees are accorded due process will intensify. Update: abovethelaw.com speculates that this may be an intentional good cop/bad cop strategy.

Gunnar doesn't like the idea of recommending XML for configuration files, why do you need to be able to edit a XML-file with a non-XML-aware editor if you don't like the raw syntax? If you don't like the raw syntax, use an editor that gives you a different representation. Or use some transformation. Write a tool that converts YAML to XML and back, if you like YAML better. (Btw, this is another reason to use a common library for configuration file handling - let people choose their configuration file formats!) Writing XML in the raw with a good schema-aware editor with syntax highlighting is actually quite nice. Have you ever edited an XML file with eclipse? You really should do that... I once opened my Openbox (a rather minimalistic window manager) configuration file in eclipse. Guess what, it was giving me useful syntax completion! It had loaded and used the referenced schema file. It's not as if I think XML is the ultimate thing; (nor is Eclipse an editor I'd use for configuration files; startup takes years and it frequently crashes for me. vim also has some XML support...) IMHO there is a lot in XML that should be stripped (such as attributes); I like JSON syntax better, except it's in turn lacking essential information such as character encoding, namespaces and schema information. I also don't thin JSON allows comments. But when handling information from multiple sources (and multiple schemes), XML is really useful. It removes most of the quessing needed for handling other formats. And that is what I'm precisely advocating: use standardized formats. Consider for example the apache configuration. Do you know of any tool that can parse the apache configuration files other than apache? Some parts look like SGML/XML, but they don't have much more in common than using < and >. When you are in need of automating something with apache, you'll be annoyed by this. If apache would be using something where you have a reliable parser ready for - that would be nice. Have a look at the xchat.conf configuration file. It uses "key = value", but they have these extra spaces there and don't use quoting, this means the file can't be loaded by many parsers, e.g. bash. Now lets use at buttons.conf - compeltely different syntax, "KEY value" blocks, separated by empty lines... Btw, note that configuration handling with XML to me means also keeping comments somehow... most applications will nuke any comments in their configuration files; which is funny since most configuration syntaxes do have a notion of comments, but did you ever come across an application using sh-style configuration (i.e. that you could source in bash/dash/zsh), that keeps comments? P.S. The YAML homepage is not YAML. It's valid XHTML. Only if you strip out all the tags and attributes and use only the text content within the /html/body/pre tag, then you have something which probably is YAML. This compatibility with HTML is probably why XML was at all successful.

I've been thinking lately about how to improve my process for making a release of one of the projects I work on. Actually, calling it a process is to glorify it. Each of my projects basically does things differently, but they do share some common steps:

• Commit all changes, after they've been tested.
• Update README, NEWS, and maybe other documentation files for the release.
• Create tarball.
• Put tarball somewhere under my public_html.
• If I have a Debian package of the project, update the packaging, and build and test new version of package. Put the resulting files also in public_html.
• Update the relevant web pages with version numbers, links to tarball, etc.
• Announce, possibly on a mailing list, in my web log, or on IRC.
• Maybe sign and upload the Debian packages to Debian.

That's a lot of tedious manual steps. I would like to automate everything so that I only need a single command, possibly excluding the upload to Debian. I have the beginnings of script that does most of this, but it is not very flexible. Actually, that's not true: I have several scripts that overlap, and together they most of the above. It's a bother to have to remember which script does what, and is suitable for which project. They're all horrible to improve upon. I use Bazaar (bzr) for version control in all of my own projects. A couple of days ago, I looked at the builddeb plugin for bzr, which creates a Debian package (source and binary) from within a bzr branch. It doesn't do more than that, however, and I'd like to do much more. While thinking about this some more, I realized that something tied to bzr isn't very appropriate. While I currently favor bzr, I'd really like to not tie my development processes too closely to it. If nothing else, one of the projects I'm involved in is piuparts, which is currently maintained in Subversion, and I'd like to use my automation for that as well. Further, sometimes I package other people's software for Debian. While most of the work is similar to when I package my own software, there are some subtle differences, and again, it'd be nice to use the same automation for this as well. And, finally, sometimes I work on fixing bugs in other people's Debian packages, and most of the automation is relevant to that work as well. I've decided that a single, atomic command is not acceptable. What I need is a suite of commands for each of the small tasks, plus one or more scripts to combine them together. The flexibility of combining small commands should make it easy to adapt things for different workflows and scenarios. After some hacking, I came up with Unperish. It's currently in its early stages, but I intend to keep using it and improving it, until it takes all the pain away from making a release. At least for me, but hopefully it will be of some use for other people.

I wrote SPI gives away opensource.org and opensource.net and Bruce Byfield wrote SPI to transfer domain names to OSI - I think it's interesting to see how differently we view the disagreement. One possible reason for the difference is that the email discussion around this resolution happened on private lists. I saw the December meeting notice a couple of days before the meeting, sent the board a request that they fix member communications and then started a discussion about giving away the opensource domains with:

"SPI still holds the opensource domains because SPI is a membership controlled organisation and OSI was a self-perpetuating board; and OSI had not done enough to balance their bad licence proliferation work. Why isn't that mentioned in the proposal? Why does 2006-11-18.dbg.mjs.1 not mention 2005-07-26.bp.1? Is it good to keep reposting rejected proposals until they pass? Why is the SPI board being asked again to surrender the domains while OSI is unreformed?"

The reason I started the discussion on spi-private was Josh Berkus writing

"If you think it's important that we should drag it onto spi-private, though, I suppose we should."

which rather suggested a private list was the appropriate venue. As Neil wrote:

"Some discussion has occured on the spi-private mailing list as to how the opensource.org resolution has been handled by the board."

That's putting it mildly. I wrote about the lack of public discussion (as mentioned in my previous report):

"I still don't see how some board members reconcile their votes to give away community assets with their promises. How the devil does board expect members to oversee it when board hides its operations from our view?"

There is a report on the discussion at the next meeting, which will hopefully put the reasons on the public record at last. Unsurprisingly, the first January 2007 meeting agenda omitted my member communications request, but board member Jimmy Kaplowitz accepted my reminder.

For a reminder of the situation, see also:

• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, and
• Playing evil with VMWare ESX Server, part 2

I finally had time at work to implement a solution for the problem. The result is a bit less than 400 lines of code, which I hope to be able to make free-as-speech. I’ll probably have tons of paperwork to do with my employer before that can happen… The program implements a fuse filesystem that you feed with a raw device image file (but I’m willing to implement more image file formats), and that shows the individual partitions as separate files, named “partn.fstype“. These files can then be mounted via loopback devices the standard way (which was not possible on vmfs for the reason you can find in my first post on the subject), with the benefit of not requiring offset adjustments (as when you want to mount partitions from a disk image), or some loopback device hack. Additionally, it has an internal Copy-On-Write mechanism so that it is possible to mount “dirty” ext3 filesystems (e.g. a snapshot of a mounted filesystem) without modifying the original disk image. Note that there is no way, yet, to keep these writes after unmounting the fuse filesystem. It uses libparted to handle the partition table reading, which means it will read any disk label types parted supports, such as BSD labels, sun partition tables, and so on. It doesn’t support LVM, though. Unfortunately, VMWare ESX server 3.0 being based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, only an ancient version of libparted is available. By the way, this version (1.6.3) had a pretty bad bug that made it impossible to use it for regular files instead of devices: it was trying to do a BLKGETSIZE (or was it HDIO_GETGEO ?) ioctl on it. To workaround this, I implemented my own PedArchitecture. It was somehow a revelation, because with similar mechanism, I can implement support for different disk image types :). Anyways, there have been quite some API changes in-between, so some updates will have to be done to the code… In other news, I started working on ext3rminator again. There may be a new release in a few weeks. Update: Thinking again about the ioctl issue, I’m wondering if vmfs couldn’t be responsible (again) for the failure, actually… I’ll check that on monday.

Recently, I’ve been playing a bit of Second Life (Wikipedia has a good page on it here). This is not so much a MMORPG as a virtual world, a metaverse if you will. There is no set of goals or levels in second life like a game. Second Life allows you to interact with other players (Residents) and to build and create anything you can imagine (skill permitting). I started playing Second Life with a very close friend, and the two of do most things in the game together. I find that it’s a lot more fun to experience everything together and we find the game to be a great way to interact with each other. I’d post a picture, but she’d kill me since she’s dramatically changed her appearance since I took it.
Second Life just recently open sourced their client, and has pledged to eventually opening the entire platform. When I get around to it, I want to take a look at packaging it for Debian, unless someone beats me too it. However, the build process is a bit daunting, and there is apparently a performance gap between their build and the open source build due to libraries they can’t distribute.

Dear Benjamin E. Seidenberg, Thank you for booking your travel on continental.com. Your flight purchase is confirmed. Your eTicket Itinerary and Receipt will be sent separately.
=========================
Travel Summary
=========================
Confirmation Number: XXXXXX
CO334 - Raleigh/Durham, NC (RDU) to New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) on
Fri., Jun. 15, 2007
CO108 - New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) to Edinburgh, Scotland (EDI) on
Fri., Jun. 15, 2007
CO109 - Edinburgh, Scotland (EDI) to New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) on
Sun., Jun. 24, 2007
CO445 - New York/Newark, NJ (EWR - Liberty) to Raleigh/Durham, NC (RDU) on
Sun., Jun. 24, 2007 Anyone else on this flight? For those of you who don’t know, this is for DebConf7, the Debian Developer’s Conference in Edinburgh this summer.

First, don't get me wrong. The project is really interesting, i haven't played with a beta yet but so far it looks real good. I've some doubts about the UI, but it isn't what this post is about. I think that X0 will fail here in Brazil.

The Brazilian government doesn't want to buy the laptop to some children in public schools (the poor pay for it through taxes, the not so poor pay for private schools and the public ones through the same taxes). The gov't is going to give it to some teachers to motivate them and will try to add X0 in the daily routine of a school. The cons of this approach:

• X0 can be the next big thing, but if only teachers and children in public schools will use this, it won't have appeal here, it will be discarded and treated like a complicated toy. They want what's on TV, the TV ads here are really big. e.g: We don't have iPods ads, these children don't want them, they want some of the crap mp3 player models simple because there are ads on tv and people with some more money actually buy them
• Come on, people are talking about customize the shiny new X0 interface for teacher usage here. What's their problem? There's a lot of gadgets with similar set of features in a way that if the gov't cut the abusive taxes over the products, the teachers can benefit instantly. The X0 is for children, they want to buy tons of these to teachers, but it seems that the goal isn't "let the teachers own it and show the children how to use". It's more a "let us hack the toy for teacher daily usage"
• There's no clear plan on how to integrate this project with the current gov't telecentres one going on. I'm participating in a national telecentre project and some local ones. We're talking about kiosks with 20 thin-clients and one server and 5000 subscribed people on each (medium) - hours for free web navigation and reserved ones for classes. These telecentres are located on the areas with lower human development index. What's the appeal here? Well, PCs are on tv, orkut and youtube too. They want to be part and they're. I'm sure that using the money we're going to spend in X0's the way the gov't wants to use them, that's better spend this on telecentres and the current low priced PCs programs, including more people.

We've a huge cellphone market here, initiatives like OpenMoko would work way better than X0. The cell phone companies would sell the phones (eg.: Neo1973) to the people that can buy (just a few teachers in really poor areas haven't cell phones yet) and the gov't could give one for each children in the public schools. There's a gov't program that try to keep the children in the public schools giving the family (when it's really poor) some money. The same rules could be applied for the cell phone usage, if you leave the school, you loose the gadget. Let us give the kids something that's more than useful and they need. We can give them something they want. I want one X0, but the teachers and children here doesn't. I'm sorry, somebody should tell you about what's really going on here, sometimes it's much more about social aspects than tech specs.

I am ansiouxly waiting for the Second Season of The IT Crowd. The first episode was supposed to have been aired on January 5th, but so far, no news. In this case, no news is not good news (at least for me).

In the meantime, feel free to explore pics from the IT Crowd set, and peek at the shelves, and see what treasures you recognize or find there. Here is a short, but to the point interview with Graham Linehan, its creator, which I want to partly quote:

Is the show an attack on 'geeks'? No way, no how. I know that's how some will take it but in the end it's very much a celebration of geekdom, geekery, whatever. I consider myself a geek and I'm proud of it.

They even want to know what your IT Crowd looks like. So send your pics to Aunt Irma!

Slightly belated, but still: Happy new year everyone! We spent the holidays with my parents, pretty relaxing, didn't do much but lie on the couch, do crosswords and watch my sisters dwarf rabbit, that my mom hat to "rabbit-sit". Christmas was as usual a three-generations celebration and quite nice. On the 4th we went to see Irie Révoltés. Absolutely great concert!! We danced our hearts out. But, you know what? The best is not only seeing a great concert, but having the next day off. Sleeping in 'til way past noon, waking up with a beep in yours ears, a smelly pile of cloths beside your bed and every muscle sore. Have a wonderful breakfast with eggs and sausage, spend half an hour under a hot shower and spend the rest of the day humming melodies and tending to your aching muscles. Wonderful! Unfortunately the new year didn't continue that great. I caught a nasty cold and spent the last four days in bed. But, oh well, it's getting better, I can almost breathe soundlessly again!. Generally, this is going to be a very important year! In the middle of December I registered my Magister (comparable to a master's) thesis. I've got six months to finish it, so the first half of this year will be used for that. Once the thesis is handed in, the final (really final this time) exams start, first a very long written one, than an oral one, this will take until October. After that ... well, we'll see. I've set my mind on a PhD, since I'd like to pursue an academic career, so the next step will probably be trying to get a PhD grant. First things first though ... Resolutions Finally this is probably the first new year I really made some new year's resolutions. I'll put them here, so I can nail myself down to it over the year:

1. First off, there are some things that I simply hope to keep the way they are:
   • I live in a wonderful relationship that I hope will simply go on forever :)
   • Also, I have quite a cool job (several actually), that I hope I can keep for another while.
   • I changed my eating habits quite drastically during the last months. I used to love everything "Just add water": teas, soups,puddings ... RAMEN!! Luckily it didn't reflect on my weight, which is pretty constant, but still I know that stuff is 90% chemical crap and who knows what it will lead to. (I know the optimal human would have three eyes, but I am actually quite happy with my average two.)
     So, I've cut down on that quite a bit and now have a subscription with an organic farm nearby that delivers so called Abokisten (subscription boxes?) that are delivered weekly and contain different vegetables, fruit, a loaf of bread and some cheese. The boxes' content is kind of randomized, so you get something different every week. It's a pretty neat service, since the food is really great, the price is reasonable, it's delivered right to my door, and (most of all) it makes me cook! So, here's another Keep that up!
2. So much for the keeping, now for the changes/tasks: I guess the first is, of course, my thesis and exams. I plan to do those as good as possible. I'll be something of a challenge though. This is the first time I do such a large "project" (the thesis takes six months) all on my own, and (most worrying) at home. So here's a test on self-discipline!
3. Although I've done a lot of acting in my "younger years" (haha) I've always been rather unmusical. This has been nagging on me for quite a while, so I've taken up playing the Blues Harp last month. I picked that instrument since I love the Blues and it's also easy to learn but still very flexible (and cheap). So far it's been huge fun but the art is, as always, keeping it up.
4. There's this little blog I'm maintaining, that has been horribly neglected over the last year, so another resolution is to post here more often. (This way posts also won't have to be so horribly long, such as this one.)
5. I couldn't help but notice that that geek girls top ten which Erinn mentioned (congrats by the way :)) contains but one European women. So here's something to do as well. There's quite a bunch of pretty impressing ladies over here, too. (Even AFTER 1950,dear CNET) And it seems, they need a bit more visibility. Maybe there are some things that can be done about that too ...

So, lots of plans. I hope publishing them here will help sticking to them. This also concludes my "little post", I hope the next will follow in a more timely manner.

I wonder if we should do some RDF representation of packages - especially including dependency data. That way we can maybe use some RDF reasoners to query our data, and maybe extract some interesting information. On the other hand, people with interest in RDF to use our real-world data for their experiments, and maybe we get something back from them. There is a couple of package metadata we currently are not tracking inside the actual archive, but in different places. Including licensing information (debian/copyright), homepage location (on packages.qa.debian.org), download location (debian/watch) - it would be nice to aggregate these into some RDF store, and export them somehow. For most of the package information (especially dependency information), we'll have to write our own ontology (I wonder if we can map version numbers to some standard rule language, or if applications will need an external reasoner to process them?); for some things we can reuse the FOAF (Friend-of-a-friend) or DOAP (Description of a project) ontologies. The first is rather common for describing people, people-people and people-thing relationships; the latter was designed for describing opensource projects (but won't be directly applicable to packages of a project). I've blogged about my RDF export of Debtags data before; the canonical first step would actually have been to export the package data, and enrich it with the Debtags collected data... Note that RDF is designed in a way that you can have one site provide metadata for another site. For example, the Debtags RDF export contains "category" information for Debian packages, but does not contain e.g. the description of the packages it talks about via an URI. So there is nothing wrong from a RDF point of view of keeping e.g. the licensing, watch or homepage data separate. For the Google Summer of Code, there was a proposal including "collaborative repository of meta-informations about source packages (CRMI)"; but the first part of the proposal, the "distribution wide tracker tool (DWTT)" showed to be a bigger task than expected. But maybe we'll still see CRMI at some point, and maybe we can have it provide an RDF export of data (using a semantic wiki might be a good starting point for CRMI maybe?). [P.S. this blog posting maybe belongs more into the en/linux/debian category. But only the xml category is also syndicated on planet.XMLhack, and I want this post to go there to reach more RDF users. I really need to switch my blog to some software which supports tagging...]