Many years ago I was involved in a free software development project with write access to the source tree. For reasons that are not relevant to this post (and which I hope all the participants would regard as trivial after so much time has passed) I had a disagreement with one of the more senior developers. This disagreement continued to the stage where I was threatened with expulsion from the project.

At that time I was faced with a decision, I could have tried to fight the process, and I might have succeeded and kept my position in that project. But doing so would have wasted a lot of time from many people, and might have caused enough productivity loss for enough people to outweigh my contributions to the project for the immediate future. But this didn't seem very productive.

So I requested that my write access to the source tree be removed as I was going to leave the project and unused accounts are a security risk.

I never looked back, I worked on a number of other projects after that time (of which SE Linux is one) and the results of those projects were good for everyone. If I had stayed in the project where things weren't working out then it would have involved many flames, distraction from productive work for everyone, and generally not much good.

The reason I mention this now (after many years have passed) is because in another project I see someone else faced with the same choice I made who is making the wrong decision. The people who are on the same private mailing list as me will all know who I am referring to. The individual in question is appearently suffering health problems as a result of stress caused by their inability to deal with the situation where they can't get along with other people.

My advice to that person was to leave gracefully and find something else to work on. If you don't get along with people and make a big fuss about it then they will only be more glad when they finally get rid of you. Running flame-wars over a period of 6 months to try and get accepted by a team that you don't get along with will not do any good, but it will convince observers that removing you is a good idea.

In our family, we have centralized all our best entertainment technology in a single system, a white box amd64 with PVR, 3D graphics, 1G, a 21” monitor, DVD burner and VCR. A number of older, far less capable systems have always surrounded this “hub”. A K6-2/400 with a less-than wonderful ATI Rage IIc graphics card presently serves as my wife’s system, and my PII/300 laptop roams the house on wireless B. This has always been the model for our home network, dating back to the late 90’s when the hub in our cramped apartment was a P/100 delivering sound through a $30 pawn-shop stereo to two main rooms, and the satellite node in the family room was a DEC VT-420 on a long serial cable. So, house-wide delivery of sound has always been possible. But doing the same for video remained unsolved until just this weekend. Kudos to the Videolan team for making it possible. A number of years ago, I recognized their vlc player was ideal for playing DVDs on my K6-2, handling the job with less CPU and less frame drop than other alternatives at the time. Not too long afterwards, though, we upgraded our hardware so saving CPU cycles was no longer an issue, and switched to other players to take advantage of features they offered over vlc. But a recent email from a friend brought me back. This friend asked if I had seen a certain Linux documentary video he had found. I hadn’t, and was intrigued. But since the hub was tied up by the kids at that moment, I figured I’d try watching on the old PII laptop. I didn’t really think it would work, but remembering how well vlc did on my other old hardware, I gave it a try. It worked! No frame drop at all. Buoyed by that victory, I recalled that I had downloaded the Debconf 6 DVD ISOs some days ago, but had not yet been able to watch them. You probably can guess why … yup, the single hub system, the only one really capable of doing a good job displaying video, was pretty much always tied up by various other family members. Now, I knew there was no way I could get those DVDs onto the laptop, as it has no drive and only a 4G hdd. Nor was I willing to go to the bother of ripping individual tracks to transcode and send over one at a time. But I then recalled that vlc, as well as being an excellent standalone player, is primarily the client for a streaming video system. So I set out to learn how to stream video. Back when I was first introduced to Videolan, I knew there was a server program, vls. I had a quick look at that and was overwhelmed by the wide variety of possible MRLs and codecs, and a bit mystified as to which magic spells were needed to make it stream to the laptop. It then occurred to me I had probably plunged in too quickly, and should back off and go look for more docs than just the man pages. Sure enough, they have plenty of excellent docs, leading to the discovery that the vlc gui itself has easy to use Wizard and Open dialogs to set up streaming. With that sorted out, I was streaming in no time. At this point, I was delighted to discover that I could successfully stream a 1024 kbps mp4 stream across wireless B form the basement to any other room of our two-story semi. And ever since then, I’ve been having great fun with the family, trying a wide variety of other video sources lying around: music videos, home videos made by friends, TV shows recorded from the PVR, DVDs direct from disc, and yes, finally, those Debconf 6 ISOs. I tell you, it’s like Christmas come early! Thanks, Videolan. You’ve made my week.

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. At the core of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel is the most fundamental program on the computer and does all the basic housekeeping and lets you start other programs. Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. However, work is in progress to provide Debian for other kernels. If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available, feeds trolls and flamewars, delay releases just for fun (and even considering not release sometimes), but in the end of the day still aims to deliver a universal operating system and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances, undisclosed balance sheet liabilities and non-free software by default, then please do join us. While you wait on the queue, you will be able to do everything we (the developers) are doing, but some stuff slower. Don't let others fool you.

I spent a while on IRC today, rare for me, and one of the repeatable topics of conversation was showing mugshots of people in chat. I wrote a trivial /showface command for irssi which just spawned mozilla to show a hackergotchi from planet.debian.org and that was neat. However it suffers from the problem that you cannot spawn a graphical application from inside Screen easily. So I came up with a cunning alternative: using the DBUS notification deamon. So now I have face.c which uses wget to download an image, then dbus to display it. Compile it like this:

apt-get install libnotify1 notification-daemon dbus
apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev libnotify-dev
	
gcc  pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0  \
     pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0  \
 face.c -lnotify -o face
	

Now copy the face script to drive it and you can run /showface skx and it will show you my image. Neat hack. (I suspect it will fail if I logout of X and restart - then reattach to screen since my DBUS identifier/session will be different. But I’m still pleased that I didn’t have to quit the currently open screen session and I can make graphics appear from within it) Update: now with caching and error detection. It will also disable itself for channels not matching ^#debian*

Yesterday I installed debian on my thecus n2100. Thanks to Martin Michlmayr for putting up with my neurotic questions during this process. Normally, this would take about 2 hours. Unfortunately I hit a bug in the r8169 network driver (or the hardware) which made the process excruciatingly slow: over 8 hours. I did delay the process somewhat by going for a stable installation first time through. You need to go for etch, for anyone following along at home. I have two hard discs in this box and I wanted to use RAID-1 for the root filesystem. Actually, the two discs were already in a linux RAID-1 set, with superblocks, an ext3 filesystem and some files, from when I was using the default thecus firmware. The following approach lets you setup RAID in the installer and preserve any existing data. You will need to have at least one connection to the installer running a shell, in addition to the one running the installer. When you enter the disc partitioner stage, you will need to fetch the udeb which gives you the md module. For the current thecus installer image, that's md-modules-2.6.18-3-iop32x-di_1.5_arm.udeb. wget it from a mirror (path pool/main/l/linux-kernel-di-arm-2.6) and udpkg -i it. Then restart the partitioner. To preserve the contents of the RAID-1, you might be able to select "don't wipe this partition", and just make sure nothing on it would clash with the directories that Debian will create. I didn't take this approach. Instead, you can drop one of the discs from the mirror, continue with the installation as normal, copy the data back across after, and re-add the disc to the mirror set. Before you select your filesystems in the partitioner:

• # mdadm --fail /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2
• # mdadm --remove /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2

Now feel free to let the installer stick a new filesystem on the RAID set, and install the base system etc. Once the thing has booted:

• # mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt
• # cp -a /mnt /data
• # umount /mnt
• # mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2

Periodically check on the rebuild status with mdadm -D /dev/md0. One other thing I would strongly advise is getting the installer's debconf priority to medium or lower before you get the base system installed, so you can skip the bootloader / flashing stage. Update: I've clarified the following paragraphs. At present, the default etch kernel is 2.6.17. The network device in the Thecus is not supported by this kernel, so you have to manually install a particular 2.6.18 kernel prior to rebooting, or you will not be able to communicate with the machine once it boots. Martin makes this very clear in his instructions. However, if you have no experience using a d-i which flashes the kernel (as appose to say, the bootloader prompts you get when doing an x86 install, for example) you may not be aware that by default, the flash stage proceeds without prompts. That means that if you do not prevent it from doing so, there will be a window between the installer flashing 2.6.17, and you manually installing 2.6.18, where the thecus will be in an unbootable state, should you suffer a power cut or similar problem. In my case, I left the base system being unpacked overnight (due to the fact the network was so slow). So, that window was several hours wide. This is only a temporary situation, as the release team plan to have 2.6.18 available for Etch, and the patches for the Thecus hardware are steadily working their way into the mainline kernel.

Are they a type of program or an artwork and does it matter? Yes, yes and not really. One recent cause for concern is the increasing number of fonts under the so-called "Open Font License", including ttf-gentium and various others. The last released version of OFL does not follow the Debian Free Software Guidelines, partly because it uses copyright restrictions to enforce a sort of "super-trademark" for the font name in ways which, frankly, are a pain for making ready-to-eat font packages from OFL'd fonts. This is similar to some problems in old LaTeX licences which have been resolved in recent years. For further explanations, see this debian-legal thread from January. OFL's lead developer still claims it follows DFSG, despite various debian developers explaining how it does not. There's a new draft of the OFL out, which I've yet to review (it's nuts here just now). Hopefully, the new version of the OFL will make it clear that you can mention the Reserved Font Name for compatibility and configuration, as long as one does not claim that a modified font is that named font.

Back before Jacob was born, I was reading The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, 2nd ed. by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash. It was a good book and I recommend it.

Towards the end, there was a section that the author clearly was passionate about, and it made me mad too.

He was talking about society's attitudes towards dads. He started by looking at messages that are sent out in commercials. One study of commercials said that "100% of jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male. There were no exceptions. . ." That study also said that 100% of the ignorant and incompetant people in commercials were male as well.

He went on to cite some examples. Tons of slogans like "kid tested, mother approved", "choosy moms choose Jif", Robitussin's "recommended by Dr. Mom", etc. And one for Post Raisin Bran in which a father and daughter are impressed by their cereal. Dad says, "somebody must really love us. Who do you think it is?" The daughter answers, "Mommy!"

Of course, these were just some examples from commercials, but they seem to reflect a message that dads are, at best, incompetant. Brott mentions studies that show that men display the same decision-making skill and affection as parents as women do.

Brott went on to talk about some of his experiences. One time, while he was in a park playing with his children, a little girl started to fall off the top of a slide. He was right there and was able to catch her as she fell -- probably saving her from, at best, a broken bone. The girl's mother rushed over, ignored Brott, and said to the girl, "did he hurt you?"

I started to see this sort of thing all over the place even before Jacob was born. In stores, there would be tons of infant shirts, bibs, etc. saying things like "I love mommy," rarely even one thing that mentioned daddy. Similar patterns were there for greeting cards and pretty much everything else baby-related.

I've noticed this even more since Jacob was born. There have been times when Terah and I are somewhere together, standing right beside each other, and someone will ask Terah all about Jacob, and totally ignore me. Even if I'm the one holding him. I'm sure people are well-intentioned; some of them that have done this are people we know well and I know they mean well. Somtimes, I don't even notice when this is going on (though Terah does and when she mentions it later, I remember it).

Do they just expect that men don't care? Or do they think that since Terah is working part time, and I'm working full time, that we must be "traditional" enough that I don't care to be involved in Jacob's life? (Though I'm not sure that the "detached & uninvolved dad" stereotype ever was true, at least from the examples I can think of) It's hard to miss out on so many moments of Jacob's life during the day that Terah gets to be there for. But that doesn't mean that I'm an uninvolved or clueless dad.

Now, despite this little rant, there are quite a few people out there that have no problem including me in discussions about Jacob -- relatives, friends, people at church, co-workers, etc. In fact, probably more people include me than don't. I really appreciate that, and especially the extra effort some of them go to in order to include me. (I know how much effort it took to find baby clothes that mention dad, for instance) Terah is best at all this, making sure that I get to be part of Jacob's life as much as I possibly can be, and I really appreciate that.

But to Wyeth (makers of Robitussin): Don't think I haven't noticed that Walgreens sells "Wal-Tussin", same active ingredients as your product, and at a lower price. Dr. Dad knows how to buy generic.

(For those who just turned in: I m currently in Ghana, doing some Free Software advocating. Read the rest of the blog for more)I just came home from a nice day trip to Ada (see my next German post on that), wanting to load my pictures on my laptop. My laptop was already running, as I m mirroring the debian archive to my external hard drive, as I need that for my work at the Kofi Annan Center in Accra. So I plugged in my camera to the second USB port and copied the files onto my laptop. Fine so far.I happen to have a second hard drive with, among other things, has a copy of my picture website. I then generate and update the thumbnails and web pages there, before I upload the changes with rsync. But when I plugged in the cable (I don t think I plugged the hard drive in already), my laptop, an IBM ThinkPad 41p, suddenly goes off. It took a few seconds and the removal of the battery to turn it back on again.Now it seem that my USB is broken. The system logs says it detects the internal hub all right, but shows no reaction to any devices (hard drive, camera, mouse) that I plug in. The disks get power and spin up, the optical mouse stays dark. Same thing if I use the port replicator. The internal Bluetooth device powers on (according to the LED) but is not detected as well by the sytem. So looks like my laptop now has no USB support any more.This is a bummer. I m in the middle of the so called forgotten continent, and I need my laptop with out it as a tool, I could not do my work at KACE, and I could just fly home so sending it in is not an option. On the other hand, I also somewhat need the USB port: I can t publish my pictures without it, I can t do backups and I can t have the debian mirror that I need for my DeCaf project that I want to work on at KACE. I only have two hopes: That it will work after the next reboot or that I can find a reasonably priced PCMCIA-USB2-Adaptor in Accra. Wish me luck.

A few months ago I finished Play Money by Julian Dibbel and like his My Tiny Life before it, the writing style is simple yet sumptuous, or I guess just simply sumptuous. Like the travel writings that pre-figured anthropological writing, Dibbel takes us to a far-away exotic land (but only a click or two away) that are populated by a motley crew of wizard (or is lizard)? slayers, gold-diggers, money-makers, and virtual-world-builders. For many, these MMOGsare no strange-lands but are becoming weaved firmly and intimately into the fabric of everyday life, whether as entertainment, sociality, and or for a cadre of folks, as a source of income generation. I think the book has gotten enough coverage that I don’t need to rehearse its content in any detail but the basic story is that Julian embarks on a real world quest in the virtual land of quests to try to make enough money (to be specific make a little more than his monthly salary as a freelance writer) from trading and selling a slew of virtual objects and gold. In taking us along, he gives a compelling entry into the imaginative and morally complex world of these games. And better is that whether you know nothing about them or are a seasoned player, the book has much to offer. One of the reasons I respect Julian Dibbel is because he takes his sweeeet time to churn out a book-length manuscript. In a day and age when there is so much pressure to release quick and often, especially when writing about anything in the so-called virtual plane of existence, he waited nearly 8 years from the publication of his last book on gaming, My Tiny Life before publishing on a considerably higher-tech phenomenon. Following him on his most recent adventure, you learn that he threw himself into a variety of gaming environments persistently and consistently and did at least 3 years of research and writing (at one point in the book he confesses how excruciating writing for him, which is hard to believe as the words slip so nicely off the paper but whatever the extent of his writing angst is, he clearly spends a lot of care in crafting his sentences). And I am starting to think that if more people followed this ethic of long-term immersion, coupled with slow-brewed productive sparsity, we would get higher quality products (Yes, kinda like the Debian release cyclce). Like any good ethnographer, he gives an intimate portrait of life in these worlds of copious play where various types of real world economies have mushroomed apace with new technological developments. That is, he gives us a taste of what it is like, as he cleverly puts it to own unreality. Couched within tales of gaming gone real world economic, are hearty reflections on the place of play in social and economic life, the close resemblance and conceptual affinity between computers and games (and not just computer games, and here he does a fantastic job at explaining the Turing Test), self-doubts about writing in general and in particular about this topic, commodity fetishism, and the changing nature of capitalism in a world of ever-greater abstractions. All of this makes for an enjoyable read that if used in the classroom (which like A Tiny Life, I am sure will become standard for courses on Virtual Worlds) allows you to bring in some good supplemental material whether Edward Castranova’s Synthetic Worlds, Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter’s The Laws of Virtual Worlds and or older heavy-hitters like Max Weber and Karl Marx. The only topic I think I would have liked to seen included is that of capitalist finance, because there are, I think, some real affinities, phenomenologically and conceptually, between finance capitalism and gaming the virtual game. Otherwise some of my favorite sections were on hackers and the object of the computer, but of course, I am biased that way. So here I leave you with a tasty morsel of something that was sumptuous to ingest: It is this endlessly repeatable collusion of freedom and determinism-the warp and woof of fixed rules and free play, of running code and variable input that sets both games and computers apart, together from the larger universe of information technologies they inhabit…. But only games share the universal machine’s game’s thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of recursion: the chained repetition of simple operations, each building on both the input of the moment and the outcomes of preceding steps. And only games, therefore, come close to capturing that precise mi of unpredictability and inevitability that makes the computer such a powerful simulator of our lived experience of the world. p. 104

I think there's a certain special sloth that Americans get to experience on the day after Thanksgiving that we don't get on other parts of the year. Something about the combination of gluttony and wholesomeness makes Black Friday a very mellow, enjoyable time. Maybe it's the fact that it's officially now The Holiday Season, but the stressful tasklist of December hasn't started yet. Or maybe just that it's a day off of work for no good reason except it just is. Maybe it's the fridge full of leftovers that still taste kind of good. I dunno. We had a good Thanksgiving dinner yesterday evening. Maj, Amita June and I had planned to go visit family in New Brunswick (New Jersey) for the holiday, which was really nice to do last year. But our visas are running out in December, and although we're (probably) not going to have a problem renewing them, our lawyer said it was a bad time to leave the country. So, we stayed in Montreal for Thanksgiving. Canadians have their own Thanksgiving, of course, on the 2nd Monday of October, but not having grown up with that day as Thanksgiving, and with most of our family celebrating in November, it's hard to get motivated around Canadian Thanksgiving. And it's just not that big a deal in Quebec, anyways. So we had a good dinner here; John Usher, Niko, Jeff Waye, Meg and Patti all came over and had a good time of it. I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner -- a big salmon, potatoes and sweet potatoes, roasted broccoli and wax beans, a great big salad. Every family has a Thanksgiving dish tradition -- one of the Prodromous' is a big pot of macaroni and cheese. So I made that, too. We all ate pretty well, drank some wine, talked about the future of music and how fun it is to play hockey. Unfortunately, I managed to miss my Blinky Hockey practice last night -- I tried to put the (overtired) baby to bed at 10PM and ended up falling asleep myself. All in all a good TG, even though far from family. tags: thanksgiving family montreal black friday dinner canada

Speaking of home All of Canada is abuzz right now about a recently-proposed bill by the ruling Conservative Party in Parliament to declare the Quebecois to be a nation within Canada. Sovereignty of Quebec has been an extremely contentious issue in Canada over the last 50 years (two sovereignist parties are major players at the federal and provincial level), and this form of recognition is an interesting step. The whole thing began with Michael Ignatieff, a candidate for the leadership of the opposition Liberal Party. He has stated publicly that Quebec is indeed a nation, and his followers are pushing to have that be part of the Liberal Party platform. The sovereignist Bloc Quebecois tried to steal their thunder by introducing a bill in parliament to the same effect. Their thunder was in turn stolen by the Government with the latest bill, which now has the support of all the parties and will almost definitely pass. The wording of the bill is interesting. First, it calls the Quebecois a nation -- the people themselves, not Quebec qua territory or government. Although the government has stated that this includes all people in Quebec, it's still pretty obviously targeted towards recognition of an ethnic group, French-speaking Quebecois, more than everybody who's living inside the borders. Second, it recognizes this group as a nation within Canada -- deflating the suggestion that it may become an independent state. I have to admit that the ambiguous nature of Quebec's status is one of the things I find fascinating about living in Montreal. As far as I can tell, few sovereignists hope for anything like a total split with Canada, but instead are looking for some sort of autonomous status. On the other side, even the staunchest federalists have seemed comfortable with granting Quebec more of an international profile, such as giving Quebec a formal role in UNESCO. My guess is that the nature of Quebec's relationship with Canada will change gradually until it reaches some stable point where everyone's comfortable. I don't know where that stable point is, but I think it'll be interesting to find out. At the turn of the 20th century, if you had told people that the British, Austrian, Turkish and Russian Empires would be dissolved and almost forgotten within 100 years, they would have scoffed. But in that short span of time, the idea of empire, spheres of influence, and Great Powers has passed from the world stage. We simply don't think in terms of Empire any more, but in terms of nation-states. My guess is that the 21st century will see a similar change in the idea of nation-state. With pressure from supranational organizations like the UN, EU, GATT and the International Criminal Court, as well as pressure from unrecognized nations like Quebec and Catalunya and Wales, I think the firm borders of the nation-state are going to loosen up a lot. What it will mean is anyone's guess, but I think if we're lucky we'll have a richer tapestry of nations and people participating in global politics and culture. And I think Quebec will be an important part of those changes. tags: quebec nation autonomy nation-state

Thanks, Biella! I'm glad to see that Biella is going to give us the goods on PR. Our Wikitravel 2007 Get-together is going to be on the island of Puerto Rico, and Biella's from there, so she's going to make up a list of good places to check out. Great news! tags: thanks biella coleman puerto rico wikitravel

Nothing new for you? Well, this is a brand new GNOME session using the artwork (you just can see the wallpaper) that will be into Etch. There's much more in the artwork camp being worked on as we speak. In term of apps, some of what you can't see is:

- Iceweasel and Epiphany: browsers;
- Evolution: mail and stuff;
- GAIM: instant messaging;
- Totem: multimedia even in the browsers, using xine backend;
- Gnomebaker: let it burn;
- OpenOffice: people write a lot;
- and much more (including: synaptic, gdebi, printing and scanning support, ...).

Do you want to help us and enjoy the goodies right now? Download the debian-installer etch release candidate 1 and select 'desktop environment' after base install. After your first login, do as root in a terminal 'aptitude update && aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop' (just to update everything). I recommend you the 1st DVD (everything needed is included), but you can do a net install or use the 1st CD without problems, it will just spend some time downloading more packages during the installation.

I took a look at Five year fiscal projects from the Canadian federal government. The interesting part about these projections, is the text says the debt is going away and the cost of the debt is going down, but nothing in the numbers indicates that. Take two main bullet points:
* Canada s New Government believes that we should aim as a country to eliminate Canada s total government net debt by 2021 at the latest.
* The federal government will show leadership by continuing to plan on annual debt reduction of $3 billion.

Now the first bullet says all government debt, which includes provinces, many of which are still running deficits. So, let's assume that the first bullet point only means the federal debt. Which $3Bn a year is being put towards that. At $3Bn a year, it will take 160 years to pay down the debt, which is much after 2021. So, let's guess that the payments on the debt will go up. We can assume an increase in payments by X percent per year. So we solve for sum(i = 0, 15, 3*x^i) = 480. The result is x = 1.2666, or 26.66% increase per year for 15 years. That means the final payment is $103 billion, or about a third of revenue for 2021.

The other annoying point in the update is that it says the money saved on debt financing can go to tax cuts. However, for the next 5 years, there is no reduction in debt financing. The numbers are "33.8 34.6 34.7 34.6 34.7 34.6 34.6", those don't really go down, now do they?

The Debian desktop development page, debian-desktop mailing list and debian-desktop alioth project that were three disconnected things are now being used, maintained and in some ways managed by some members of: pkg-gnome, pkg-kde and pkg-xfce.

What will be waiting for you in Etch:
- Three tasks, one for each desktop environment project cited above that can be installed using d-i or your favorite package manager (eg.: aptitude) after a base system install. I'll publish detailed information about the package selection soon

What's still being worked out:
- Common artwork! pkg-gnome, pkg-kde and pkg-xfce are working very hard to point their artwork stuff (login screens, splash and wallpapers) to the desktop-base source package already being maintained in debian-desktop svn repository (it was in pkg-gnome svn repo). GNOME is already using the artwork, the GDM theme needs some last minute fix, KDE and XFCE will be done soon
- I've asked Joey Hess input on the possibility of build 'desktop cd sets' (3 cds) containing: gnome-desktop, kde-desktop and xfce-desktop tasks and its dependencies each. This is needed because to install GNOME or KDE desktop from d-i you will need the 1st DVD or netinst or 1st CD with broadband connection
- Debian Live CD project hopefully will join us soon, but i've sent a patch to their live-package that will turn the GNOME, KDE and XFCE images use the same set of packages that tasksel. With that in place, we can generate official Live CD images with the same set of packages that the 'desktop cd sets' proposed above

While cleaning up my hard disk, I found the beginning of an outline for a book on Bazaar (bzr), the version control system. I wrote it one weekend this summer, when I felt I had lots of free time. I don't, and won't, for the foreseeable future. Therefore I'll dump the outline here in my web log, so that perhaps someone will be inspired to write it for me. The Bazaar distributed version control system For most of the 1990s, the free software world relied on CVS for version control. It was the best free system for the purpose. During the early 2000s, a number of new systems started getting into public knowledge. One such system is Bazaar. This is the outline for a book to explain how Bazaar is used in different kinds of scenarios. The book is not a reference manual: the software's own documentation is best suitable for that; this avoids having to constantly update the book. The book is structured as a series of case studies of common scenarios, starting with the simplest one, and getting increasingly more complicated. This approach allows the reader to quickly learn the things they need for a particular kind of situation. Introduction This chapter explains what version control systems are, and gives a summary of their history so far. It explains various basic concepts, such as centralized versus distributed, but briefly; these will be expounded on later in the book. It compares Bazaar to other well-known systems. It explains the cumbersome naming history of Bazaar. It explains how to install Bazaar by referring to the website and to the package repositories of various Linux distributions. Quick overview This chapter is intended for those with some experience with other version control systems, such as Subversion. It gives a quick run-through of the central concepts of Bazaar, and how to do common tasks on the command line. The web page project This is the first case study chapter. It explains how to use Bazaar to keep track of changes to a web site. A web site only changes linearly: only one version exists at a time. My little program This chapter explains how to use Bazaar to maintain the source code for a one-person programming project. The program has a stable version, which gets bug fixes, but no new features. There is also a development version, which gets the new features. Sometimes a bug needs to be fixed in both, and Bazaar can help with this. Additionally, sometimes it is not clear whether a new feature can be implemented cleanly, or there are several possible approach to how it can be implemented. Thus, the chapter also explains these so called feature branches. Further topics for this chapter include making releases, and using repositories to avoid excessive disk usage. Tight teamwork This chapter explains how to use Bazaar when the one-person program becomes an internal project in a company, with a well-defined set of developers. Thus, we discuss how to set up a centralized branch in a way that all the developers can commit to it. Distributed free software development This chapter concentrates on a typical successful free software project, with contributors from all over the world, and the problems that this involves. Thus, we discuss how to publish a branch for anyone to see (but not change); how to share changes (patches/bundles) between developers; how to co-ordinate the development of the whole project (at least from the version control point of view). Switching a project to Bazaar That's it. If you write it, please send me a note when it's published so that I can get a copy. Thanks.

This is a picture of me before I started this whole diet watching and exercising regimen. Hopefully I will be able to take regular pictures that can document my progress. This is one thing which I don't plan on doing very regularly, maybe every two or three months. Pictures have been known to be a great motivator to people on diets - they remind people how they used to look, and more importantly point out how far they have gone so far. Usually the most dramatic change is seen in the picture, even if you don't see much movement on the scale. The picture is so powerful that it is usually used alongside actual insane weight loss claims in TV commercials. Anyway, this is how I looked when I started this whole thing.

As this week's entry falls on turkey day, it may be interesting to note something which has been at the back of my mind during these “special” days in which you are urged by almost every sane diet plan to just forget the plan on that day. Many websites say that cheating on your diet may actually be good for you in the long run. While some emphasize the psychological aspects of having a day off, others actually cite scientific reasoning involving a hormone called Leptin. At any rate, the line between cheating and giving your diet a little boost is getting quite a bit blurred. So on this turkey day and days after, don't feel like you have to work out extra hard just because you're eating more.

This week I started using a new diet tracking site. This one is more closely in line with the method I used before. It's Physics Diet, and is basically an online notebook like you would keep if you were on the hacker's diet. This also calculates some more stuff that would be a little complicated to keep track of yourself, like Total Energy Expended (calories). It also has a nice CSV export which still allows me to give all of you your weekly stats. I've continued with the watching of anime while I am exercising, but am supplementing it with some podcasts and some episodes of a BBC show called QI or Quite Interesting. There is a downside to watching QI while exercising: I am laughing so hard sometimes I need to re-concentrate on the exercise so that I don't fall over. I'm sure it's not a bad thing for my calories expended in total.

This Week (Nov 17 - Nov 23):
Minimum: 335.0 (-0.5) (Nov 22)
Maximum: 339.0 (-0.5) (Nov 17)
Average: 336.8 (-0.4) (136.8 to goal)
Exercise Calories: 2719 on 6 days
Average Calories per session: 453.1

I haven't had a lot of time to blog lately, so it's time to catch up on a few things.

Jacob is now almost 12 pounds. He's been growing well. As Terah mentioned, he has been colicy. He seems a bit better in the past few days. He usually has started getting fussy just before I get home from work, and continue through the evening. So I hadn't been able to see him happy all that often for a few weeks there. It's a lot of fun to be around him when he's happy.

The house is coming along nicely, too. Drywall is up inside, siding is up outside, the propane line is installed, water line is installed, power is run to the house, and phone service is installed as well. Bathtubs have been set in place. The furnace is set in place, though not yet hooked up to the duct system. Network/phone cable (CAT6 for it all) is run, as is coax cable. Interior painting starts next week. The house has changed appearance dramatically over the past few weeks.

We were looking at some "before" pictures to figure out how we wanted to structure our porch. It looked bad back then, but compared to how it is now -- well, it looked even worse.

The annual pillars banquet for Bethesda Home was a few weeks ago. I'm on the board at Bethesda (which has been a good experience), and board members pitch in to make the event happen -- it's our largest fundraiser event of the year. I took photos last year, and again this year. They're posted online. Bethesda was founded in 1899 and has been an important feature of our small community ever since. I'll write more about it sometime.

Things still seem busy here. Between taking care of Jacob, being in a temporary residence (everything takes longer because so many things are in boxes or just not accessible), keeping on top of all the decisions for the renovation, and all the mundane things of moving twice, there's not a lot of free time. Hopefully that situation will improve a bit, but then we will of course have the big move into the house -- probably in January sometime.

Wow...This time I'm truly amazed. A spam just hit my debian-devel mailbox. That's sadly not strange at all, I know. Only that I started reading it. It says:

Spammers don't seem to target us for their random alias generation
tools, or        maybe they haven't got to the letter 'o' yet. com
for subsequent posts, but that whole barn door thing comes to mind.
In so doing, values are overlooked often and mistakes are made. Maybe
Microsoft will let me        change my alias.
Maybe some of it would actually be useful to me. For whatever reason, my
Microsoft email address didn't ever get        spam.

Then it goes on talking nonsense splattered with all kinds of garbage talk, some news (or whatever) about stock options of a China Health thing, and goes on throwing nonsense blabber.
Sorry, I'm not linking to it (I'll probably later update this entry), it's still not available in the Web archive of debian-devel.">

I have not written anything on this blog for a long time and after someone told me about it I decided that I could do it today; the long delay between posts comes from the fact that I'm quite busy with my current jobs and they don't leave me free time to work on Debian or Free Software related projects in general. Today I've been on the 2nd gvSIG Conference, a two day conference related to the gvSIG project, a GPL'ed Java based GIS (Geographical Information System) promoted by Regional Council for Infrastructures and Transportation (CIT) of the Valencian Government. I know about this project since it was made public, but I never tried it because I have a very poor GIS knowledge and I always try to avoid Java based software if possible (luckily one of the main reasons for that will change soon). Some months ago I tried the tool, but I left it soon because I found its interface quite weird and had no data to play with. Today I've seen a presentation about the raster capabilities that will be included on the next version of gvSIG and I have to admit that I've been quite impressed by them. I don't think I will use the tool much, but it is good to see free software projects like this one succeed; having local GNU/Linux distributions is not bad, but IMHO projects like this one are a much better way of using public money and promote the use and development of Free Software. My only complaint about the project is that the project development is not as open as I would like it to be (there is no public revision control system, no bug-tracker, ...), probably because almost all of the work is done by local software development companies that don't like to share their work until it is finished and don't have a free software development culture... ... but hey, nobody is perfect... ;)