I love to use jQuery UI plugins. The one I use constantly is Tabs and this time I needed to sync the auto-changing of tab with the background. For this I used an event called tabsshow to trigger my function + the code I wrote yesterday for full-page background with CSS: What it does the script? Finds the active-tab identified with the .ui-state-active class and then changes the img tab src attribute according to the href attribute of the active-tab.

Hot on the heels of the PostgreSQL 9.1.0 release I am happy to announce that the final version is now packaged for Debian unstable, the current Ubuntu development version Oneiric , and also in my Ubuntu backports PPA for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10, and 11.04. Enjoy trying out all the cool new features like builtin synchronous replication or per-column collation settings for correctly handling international strings, or an even finer-grained access control for large environments. Please see the detailled explanation of the new features. As already announced a few days ago, 9.0 is gone from Ubuntu 11.10, as it is still only a development version and not an LTS. 9.1 will be the version which the next 12.04 LTS will support, so this slightly reduces the number of major upgrades Ubuntu users will need to do. However, 9.0 will still be available in Debian unstable and backports, and the Ubuntu backports PPA for a couple of months to give DB administrators some time to migrate.

A couple of weeks ago my old laptop decided to rest forever, and I was forced to impose some economic pressure onto the consumption of the planet resources by acquiring a new one. Fortunately this happened while I am still here in Canada, where it is reasonably cheaper to get a decent laptop than it is in Brazil. Although I did not have the budget I wanted for buying a really kick ass laptop, I was able to buy a decent one, an HP Pavilion G6 1B74CA. I went on 4 different shops with a USB stick loaded with Debian Live to check whether all the hardware would work ok. I always asked one of the salesman before rebooting the laptops, but it was funny to see the reactions of the different employees who came by to check what I was doing: some of them barely noticed that GNOME was not Windows XYZ, and and some asked whether I was hacking the laptops. Unfortunately, I wasn t able to find a single laptop in which the wireless worked out of the box with the Squeeze kernel, which sucks. I searched over the internet a lot, and it seems that even the vendors recommended by the FSF do not provide laptops with wireless cards that work without non-free blobs. Other issue I had was with the Intel graphics. After the kernel enables the modesetting, the backlight goes to the minimum and it looks like you have no video. There are a couple of workarounds in the internet, and the one in which you add acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor to the kernel parameters makes the laptop turn on by itself in the morning. This is probably caused by broken ACPI handling in the BIOS, who almost always is written by people on crack. The other issues I had were related to the keyboard. First, the BIOS came by default with Access keys mode enabled, which means that by default pressing F2-F12 actually activated the multimedia keys instead of the real function keys. It was disapointing to hit F12 and have my wireless turned off. After disabling this in the BIOS setup, it was OK. Well, not quite: for some reason, Fn+F4 did not generate the expected keycodes. After some research on the internet, I found a interesting Ubuntu bug . It seems that the latest and greatest version of Windows starts its video setup application via the Meta+P shortcut ( Meta is the actual name of what Windows people call the Windows key ). Guess what the morons writing the HP BIOS did yes, they made the keys Fn+F4 (where F4 has video setup as its multimedia key ) generate the keycodes for Meta+P! It would be a lot easier for everyone in the world if the people at Microsoft just make their stuff listen to both Meta+P and the video setup keycode, which is generated by every laptop out there, to activate the Windows screen setup thing. This way the very smart dudes writing BIOS at HP wouldn t need to make Fn+F4 generate the keycodes for Meta+P and break every single desktop that is not procuced at Redmond.

The third in my serious about my family s recent visit to Mexico see also part 1 and part 2. Shopping in Mexico was probably the thing I was least prepared for. I probably had the biggest wins of the trip shopping, and also the biggest fails (though they weren t all that significant). It seems to me that shopping is all about serendipity. You almost have to be good at impulse buying. I normally try hard to resist impulse purchases, preferring to research and compare carefully before making a decision. That attitude didn t serve me well in Mexico, and when I was able to overcome it, I got some great purchases. Around here, some of the best places to shop are the ones that have been in business for decades. Anderson Office Supply in Newton, KS, for instance, has been around for over 100 years, and has in stock, even everything from a ribbon for my slightly obscure 1940s typewriter to local history books. Moler s Camera in Wichita often meets or beats the online stores prices, and has better service. But in Mexico the best places seemed to be packed into a large crowded shopping area, or a dusty stand along a road, or a guy selling stuff on a plaza somewhere. Here is Guadalajara s market (San Juan de Dios): It s an incredible open-air market. We spent quite some time there, even ate lunch, and yet I m sure we saw only a small fraction of what they had. It was a cramped place, with small booths and tiny aisles, but all sorts of interesting things. Although I did appreciate walking quickly past the raw pork and fish corner. Terah bought some genuine extract of vanilla there, at a good price. Some of the street vendors were selling what I think were butterfly toys they had some sort of launcher that would launch them in the air, and they d flutter and float down to the ground. We saw them mainly in Guadalajara Centro on our first day, and I (unwisely, it turns out) thought, Hmm, a plastic toy our boys would love it, but I don t want to buy it on our first day. Besides, I m sure we ll see them all over or online. Wrong on both counts. So there s one of my fails. My greatest win came on the road back from Guachimontones (an ancient pyramid site). Every so often along that country road, there would be a vendor with a table selling something or other. I saw some paintings out my window, thought neat , but and here you can see how terrible an impulse buyer I am didn t actually put together that we should turn around and look at them until 10 minutes later after a bathroom stop for Jacob. We went back, and I picked out a beautiful painting on canvas of those pyramids at sunset. And the charge: 200 pesos (about $17 USD). Incredible and incredibly cheap, and there is a great place on my wall for it. The vendor was also the artist. I am kicking myself for only buying one. (No photo yet as it was too big to practically transport by plane.) Another memorable purchase was this one: This was another roadside find. We were driving through Ajijic, and I noted a rug vendor along the side of the road. I had walked past a rug vendor in the Guadalajara market, so I was keeping my eye out. I made a note to stop there on our way back out of Ajijic. So we did. This is a rug made in the Zapotec tradition, all hand-made, with natural dyes and wool. It was 550 pesos (about $46 USD), which I considered to also be a pretty good deal for what it was. I have no idea how many hours went into creating it, but I m sure it was many. My luck in shops wasn t so good. We visited Tlaquepaque, which had lots of shops selling beautiful things. But the prices there were higher than I d pay for similar things back home. Tonala s shops were too inconveniently located to be practical with what were then tired boys, so we didn t go in there. I m not used to shopping without planning, and perhaps am not very good at it. On the other hand, I really enjoyed making those two purchases, and only regret not buying another 200-peso painting! Maybe next time I m in Mexico, I ll even buy something on the first day there. Terah will be so proud..

For the longest time, I went by the nick "Yoe" when I went on IRC. When I chose this nick for myself, I was sixteen, and the Internet computer at the local public library had an IRC client installed that I tried out. Obviously, my first choice of nick -- "wouter", a fairly common first name in Dutch-speaking regions -- was already chosen, so I had to come up with something else. If I'd realized that I'd still be using this nick today, seventeen years later, I might have chosen that nick with a bit more care... Over the years, some people have asked me what the nickname meant, where it came from. I've never really told anyone the entire story, mainly because it was somewhat embarrasing. But hey, we've all been 16, right? In the early nineties, there was a show on TV called "Het huis van wantrouwen". On this show, they had a running joke involving a short clip of Belgian members of parliament informally voting on a subject by raising hands (literally); the joke was that this clip was dubbed with a bunch of people saying "Yoe, de manne" -- which is dutch for something along the lines of "Yo, guys". As a young geeky teenager, I found this joke way more funny than it actually was; and as such, a few years later, during one of the more weird episodes of my life, I started pranking people by sneaking up to them from behind and shouting "Yoe, de manne" right next to their ears. I even managed to do this to one of our teachers who was walking on the playground. This was just around the time when I first tried out this "IRC" thing. It didn't take me too long to realize I was the only person who thought this "joke" was funny; but somehow the nick stuck, and here we are, 17 years later, I'm still using it. Or, well, I was. As of today, if you want to catch me on IRC, you'll find me going by "wouter" instead of "Yoe". Of course someone had registered that nick several years ago, but then he hadn't been using it in years, and so after a quick request to the OFTC admins they made it available for me. Whee.

This month, I will have been with Canonical for 5 years. It s been fantastic, but I ve decided to move on. Next week, I m going to start working for Google, helping out with ChromeOS, which I m pretty excited about. I m sad to be leaving Canonical, but I comfort myself by knowing that I m not leaving Ubuntu or any other projects I m involved in. I believe in Ubuntu, I use it everywhere, and I m friends with so many of its people. And I m still core-dev, so I ll continue to break^Wsecure things as much as I can in Ubuntu, and continue working on getting similar stuff into Debian. :) For nostalgic purposes, I dug up my first security update (sponsored by pitti), and my first Ubuntu Security Notice. I m proud of Ubuntu s strong security record and how far the security feature list has come. The Ubuntu Security Team is an awesome group of people, and I m honored to have worked with them. I m looking forward to the new adventures, but I will miss the previous ones.

2011, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

A bug-fix release RQuantLib 0.3.8 is now on CRAN and in Debian. RQuantLib combines (some of) the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language. Thanks to Helmut Heiming who noticed a side-effec t from the DiscountCurve functions: the Quantlib-global variable determining the evaluation date was overriden; this could affect subsequent curve-related pricers. This is now fixed, and we added a new function setEvaluationDate to set this date from R too. We added this call in some of the examples in the manual pages. Otherwise two very minor build system tweaks were added, but no other changes were made Thanks to CRANberries, there is also a diff to the previous release 0.3.7. Full changelog details, examples and more details about this package are at my RQuantLib page.

I ve been trying to get the perfect full-page background without using JavaScript since a while. I tried with CSS3 but, obviously for IE <9 was a pain in the ass, even for older Firefox' releases. So I decided to go with the plain-CSS option: What does it does? It takes an inline image and uses it as if were a background-image thanks to the z-index: -1 CSS-rule. There are lots of other techniques at CSS-Tricks but none works in every browser as this one in particular. Enjoy.

As many people reading this may know, my wife Jyoti was in the World Trade Center on 9/11. When the first plane hit, she joined some colleagues at her employers offices on the 78th floor of the South Tower to see what was going on. A few minutes later she went downstairs to her desk on the 77th floor to call me and tell me about it. That's when the second plane hit. Everyone on the 78th floor was instantly killed as she would have been if she had decided to stay. She and some friends, covered in debris and soaked in jet fuel, blinded by thick black smoke made their way down 77 flights of stairs (the elevators were out of action) and even though she was seven months pregnant with our daughter at the time she went all the way down without stopping to rest. An NYPD officer Ramon Suarez helped her out and to an ambulance. He went back to rescue others and died half an hour later when the North Tower collapsed. I was at home. After getting ready and saying my morning prayers, I was leisurly preparing breakfast before starting the day. I started getting phone calls asking "Is Jyoti ok?" Of course she was. Why wouldn't she be? I somehow don't remember who said it first but I was told to turn on the TV because a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I spent the rest of the morning glued to the screen in horror as information on what exactly had happened. Absolutely the lowest moment of my life was when I saw, in real time, the twin towers fall. It was several more hours before I actually got to talk to Jyoti on the phone, confirmation that she was still alive. I didn't get to actually see her and hold her until the next day owing to the curfew around Manhattan. So that's what happened that day. We have repeatedly been told "Never forget" but truth be told some of the details are already fading from my memory. For my wife too, while she occasionally had panic attacks at first, every day life is foremost now and it is only on days like this that her ordeal comes to mind. Our daughter Shailaja is now 10 years old and an honor roll student who just started 4th grade. She knows the story but is not affected by it. These are good things in my opinion. What the jihadists want most of all is apocalypse. They wanted the world to change course but ten years later America remains as generous, bull-headed, lively, spiritual, garish and crude as ever. That's the sweetest revenge lovers of life can have. Don't give up your rights and your daily routines to fear but make the bastards give up theirs. Or as the cliche goes, the terrorists will win.

As I wrote in part 1, my family and I were in Mexico recently. Today I ll write about the places we stayed. We spent most of the time in a room we rented in a private home in Guadalajara. My friend Jonathan had found it for us, and it was not too far from his home. The owner was a grandmother, and across the courtyard was more family, including a granddaughter close in age to our boys. They enjoyed playing together. It was really a perfect arrangement for us. There s no better way to be a part of local life when traveling than to stay in someone s house. Here s our bedroom: Notice the glass slats in the window it s a nifty, though not airtight, alternative to our regular windows. More on that later. More of the inside: We had a bit of a language barrier while in Mexico, though never anything significant. My Spanish vocabulary started with almost nothing and I reached maybe a few dozen words by the time we left. Terah knew some Spanish from high school and college, and my friend was fluent. Our hostess also knew a little English. But we all communicated well enough. Terah or Jonathan would help translate when needed. As I d seen before, the children would say things to each other, but never seemed to be bothered that their playmates didn t understand what was being said. They just had a great time anyhow. On Sunday afternoon, when we came back from our activities, there was a buzz of activity. Children everywhere outside, running and playing. Adults too, chatting. We didn t know exactly what was happening, but sent Jacob and Oliver out to play anyhow (which they were eager to do). The yard was enclosed by a wall, so children could pretty much run around without lots of supervision. Eventually they were invited to have some birthday cake (ah ha!) it was one of the children s birthday. Jacob and Oliver actually were served the first two pieces of cake (as the amigos ). Everyone seemed so friendly, warm, and welcoming. Each morning started with breakfast at the house, followed by a scene like this: That s Jacob and Oliver, looking to see if Jonathan had arrived for the day yet. I often noticed in Mexico that I was unsure if I was inside or outside. Here in Kansas, we can have a string of summer days that each exceed 110F (44C) or a few weeks in winter that never get above 15F (-9C), even in daytime. And then we have some pleasant days like right now, too or rain blowing sideways at 60MPH. In general, we spend a lot of effort keeping the outside, well, out. It is quite clear that this isn t a problem in the Guadalajara area. Some restaurants could have been described as buildings with large, open windows so you feel a lot of breeze while inside. Or perhaps as a simple shade roof with a few supports on the edges, so you re never really inside at all (sort of like going under a small shade tent outdoors). To the extent that windows could close, many of them couldn t be made airtight. It was clear that in that area, people spend more energy finding ways to invite the outdoors in rather than to keep it out, thanks to the year-round moderate climate. Perhaps the best example of this surprised me one evening. We were arriving in Guanajuato, an old silver mining town in the mountains, and were going to spend the night at Hotel Socav n, which had been recommended to us by a local friend of Jonathan s. From the street, the hotel looked tiny. But walk in, and you get in this old-looking (and feeling) entry tunnel: That s the front desk, apparently cut out of it there on the right. We asked to see some of the rooms before buying apparently a normal request around there. The innkeeper agreed, and gave us keys and directions to find them on the third floor. It included going up 2 flights of stairs, passing through a courtyard, and going up another flight. It was after dark, and the hotel was dimly lit something I was fine with. I thought we were stepping out into a beautiful atrium with some potted plants in the center of the building something fairly common in some nicer hotels. Until I felt rain on my head. Then I realized that the courtyard, which began two floors up from the street, was open to the sky. Beautiful! Here was the view from out room door: And down the hall : After getting home, a Google happened to turn up some reviews of this hotel. I was so annoyed at what some people wrote! One person gave them only 3 stars because they didn t have air conditioning, had poor water pressure, and lots of steps . Someone else complained of the dark entry tunnel something I couldn t help but smiling about the moment I entered. My review, which should hopefully get posted soon, is certainly different. I gave them 5 stars, because if I wanted a Super 8 with generic fluorescent lighting and the same layout as thousands of other hotels, I would have gone to Nebraska instead of Mexico. Most homes and local hotels in the region don t have air conditioning because they don t need it, and that s just how water pressure is in Mexico (due to needing to pump it from municipal supplies to private storage tanks overhead). And who doesn t appreciate entering a hotel through a brick tunnel? Ah, sigh This should give you some idea of the kind of travel we like: part of the point of traveling is enjoying the differences from home, and I think it is a huge mistake to be annoyed at everything that is different. Enjoy the differences! Finally, here s a photo of the staircase in the home we stayed in, which I thought was fascinating:

after some months of looking only at "my" packages, I'm back in the #RCBW flow. here's my overview of RC bug activities & NMUs in the last week:

• #533812 freehdl: "freehdl: non-standard gcc/g++ used for build (gcc-4.3)"
  fixed by the same changes as #629731
• #564968 bobot++: "bobot++: ftbfs with gcc-4.5"
  add patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/5
• #598940 src:libkinosearch-perl: "libkinosearch-perl: FTBFS on armel: testfailures"
  add patch from BTS (Ubuntu/cjwatson) (pkg-perl)
• #618510 scribus-ng-doc: "scribus-ng-doc: FTBFS (missing build-depends on cmake)"
  add missing build dependency and upload to DELAYED/5
• #619243 libjs-protoaculous: "libjs-protoaculous: fails to install"
  add "patch" to Depends and upload to DELAYED/5, later rescheduled to DELAYED/0
• #628349 phpunit: "php-gettext: FTBFS: require_once(): Failed opening required 'PHP/CodeCoverage/Filter.php'"
  reassign to phpunit and merge with existing bug + affects
• #628358 phpunit: "libxmpp-php: FTBFS: require_once(): Failed opening required 'PHP/CodeCoverage/Filter.php'"
  reassign to phpunit and merge with existing bug + affects
• #628576 tagcloud: "missing dependencies"
  add missing runtime dependencies and upload to DELAYED/5
• #629731 src:freehdl: "freehdl: FTBFS: build-dependency not installable: g++-4.3"
  use default gcc, upload to DELAYED/5
• #632532 transgui: "transgui: hardcoded Depends on libssl0.9.8"
  take a look and ask about the upload in the bug report
• #634140 src:libgeotiff-dfsg: "libgeotiff-dfsg: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  update build dependency and upload to DELAYED/5, later overridden by maintainer upload
• #635489 src:libgd-ruby: "libgd-ruby: FTBFS: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  update build dependency and upload to DELAYED/5, later rescheduled to DELAYED/0
• #635687 src:ecore: "ecore: Please Build-Depends on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev"
  update build dependency and upload to DELAYED/5
• #636097 pidgin-skype: "pidgin-skype FTBFS with multiarch"
  add patch from BTS (Ubuntu/micahg) and upload to DELAYED/5
• #639064 src:ygraph: "ygraph: FTBFS: please build-depend on libjpeg-dev, not libjpeg62-dev libjpeg-dev"
  update build dependency and upload to DELAYED/5

two short observations:

• now is a good time for fixing RC bugs there are tons (of easy ones) available. just head over to the UDD bugs page.
• quite a few of the bugs with patches contain fixes forwarded from Ubuntu thanks guys!

Given his theory of the masses, critical theorist Raymond Williams would probably have not liked or believed in the concept of social engineering: The are in fact no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses.

A few days ago I blogged about my main computer s configuration files and desktop s appearance and today I managed to add a few little tweaks to those, they are:

• Google s contacts list integrated into Mutt
• a cleaner and nicer Login screen

Curious to know how you can easily integrate your Google s contacts into Mutt? Well, you should be able to achieve that within a few minutes after reading this small HowTo: 1. Download and install goobook as explained here. 2. Setup a .goobookrc file into your Home directory. It should look like this: 3. Add the relevant configuration bits into your /etc/Muttrc file:

set query_command="goobook query '%s'"
bind editor <Tab> complete-query
macro index,pager a "<pipe-message>goobook add<return>" "Add sender's address to your Google contacts"

4. Your configuration should be good to go now, so here s a few examples on goobook s usage within Mutt:

• Use TAB if you want to auto-complete a mail address when specifying the To: field.
• Use the A key if you want to add sender s address to your Google contacts.
• Use the Q key for querying your contacts list.

We can now move on on customizing your Login Screen running GDM3. Let s begin with a screenshoot: I definitely love it, it s clear and clean and most of all it has everything I need, no extra toolbars or menus. If you agree with me, open up the /etc/gdm3/greeter.gconf-defaults file and do the needed changes. This is how your greeter.gconf-defaults file should look like:

/desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename      /path/to/your/dusty-bg/file # dusty's background can be downloaded here.
/desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_theme              Darklooks # this is my main theme, feel free to adapt that to your needs.
/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/logo_icon_name         debian-swirl # this is the default on Debian's systems.
/desktop/gnome/sound/event_sounds               false # I don't like hearing any sound when when I am prompted to insert my user's details on the Login Screen.
/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list      true # users list will be disabled, you won't be able to select your username from a list but you'll have to insert that yourself.
/apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager      false # default, no need to change this.
/apps/gnome-power-manager/ui/icon_policy        never # default, no need to change this.

We are close to the end but we are missing an important detail: how can you safely remove bottom s toolbar and menus for a clearer and cleaner Login Screen? Open up the /var/lib/gdm3/.gconf.mandatory/%gconf-tree.xml file, search for the <dir name= general > section and apply the following change:

- <entry name="compositing_manager" mtime="1315580582" type="bool" value="false"/>
+ <entry name="compositing_manager" mtime="1315580582" type="bool" value="true"/>

But what if you prefer keeping the toolbar as it is, but you definitely don t like seeing the Accessibility icon appearing on your Login Screen? On the same file as above, search for the <dir name= accessibility > section and modify the following string as it follows:

- <entry name="enable" mtime="1315580582" type="bool" value="true"/>
+ <entry name="enable" mtime="1315580582" type="bool" value="false"/>

See you on my next blog post and don t forget to have a look at my GitHub s repository! Oh and follow me on Twitter!

As I own several more or less recent laptops, some of their features require updated/new kernel modules to work as expected. I have hence decided to create Debian packages for them, primarily for my own use. Note that these packages are meant to be used with caution, I have only tested them on my own hardware, and they would deserve more careful review. All -source and -dkms packages are available in my personal repository for Debian sid. The sources are maintained in git, as usual.

• rts5139
  This new module is already in linux-next and adds support for recent 5129/39 Realtek card readers.
• psmouse-elantech
  This is the psmouse module with basic v3 hardware support for newer devices not currently supported by the in-tree module.
  See the discussion at #633595 for more information.
• acerhdf
  The in-tree acerhdf module doesn t support the BIOS version 1.3314 of my Aspire 1810TZ, while the module available at http://www.piie.net/?section=acerhdf does. I have hence packaged this version, and even submitted a one-line patch upstream which has been accepted for linux 3.1. My first (tiny) contribution!
• omnibook
  I have also taken the time to update the omnibook package. The project is still unmaintained upstream, but I have git commit access, hence if anybody is interested in taking over

Today was my last race before Berlin marathon on Sept. 25th. Berlin is meant to be one of the three "peaks" of my running year, after the succession of Paris Ecotrail (55km) and Paris marathon in two weeks in April....and before a 67km night race in November (Le Puy-Firminy). I was worried about my shaky training last weeks because of some pain in an ankle which I partly twisted while running on a very steep trail in early August. So, I planned running an half-marathon today in Bois d'Arcy, very close to my place. Last year saw me completing this one in 1h37. Of course, no way this time to try this again: the point was running at my planned marathon pace (5'05"/km) for the first 18-19km and "see what happens" later on. Even trying this two weeks before a marathon is....unrecommended! I made this fairly well, with a 5'/km pace for the first 10km, then a little slowdown between km10 and 15 (mostly because I was running all alone in large and very straight alleys in the forest)....and a very very long sprint from km 18.5 with speeds up to 4'40"/km, and a final 400m where I was kinda flying (1'37"). So, finally, I end up with a very promising 1h43'19", much below the planned 1h45, and my second half-marathon time ever. Now, two weeks mostly resting as the goal will be keeping this 5'05" pace in Berlin, for a targeted 3h35 (which is kinda ambitious considering my lack of speed work during last weeks while I was trying to recover this injured ankle). See you in Berlin on 25th....

With this release come two long-awaited improvements:

• database speedups;
• fix for iTunes timing out after 30 minutes.

This works in debian update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-session-manager x-session-manager \
/usr/bin/gnome-session-fallback 100 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/x-session-manager.1.gz \
x-session-manager.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/gnome-session.1.gz gives it a much higher priority than gnome-session so is unlikely to be bumped by any other session managers that might get installed/upgraded how to set gnome-fallback as the default session for gnome3 & gdm3 is a post from: Errata

How to set gnome-fallback as the default session for gnome3 & gdm3. The easiest way to do it in debian is to use update-alternatives to "install" a new alternative x-session-manager.

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-session-manager x-session-manager \
/usr/bin/gnome-session-fallback 100 --slave /usr/share/man/man1/x-session-manager.1.gz \
x-session-manager.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1/gnome-session.1.gz

This gives gnome-session-fallback a much higher priority than gnome-session so is unlikely to be bumped by any other session managers that might get installed/upgraded Setting gnome-fallback as the default session is a post from: Errata

A new effort for removing spam from a set of Debian mailing list has started: on September 3rd, Fernando Estrada announced the launch of the "Eliminar correo no deseado de las listas en espa ol" effort. Muchas gracias, Fernando, for this initiative. So, if you happen to be a Spanish native speaker and want to help this effort (no need to be a Debian developer or maintainer for that, just motivation and some time)....feel free to join the effort. As a first result of this, I had, today, a few dozens of proposed spam messages to review, coming from debian-user-spanish. Yay!

My family and I (including our boys) are just back from a great visit to Mexico. It was my first time there, and also the first time our boys have been outside the USA. I ll be writing about all the fun stuff in the posts to come, so you ll have to bear with me on this one as I describe why we did something that appears to horrify a segment of Americans. About a year ago, I wrote a review of Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves. Rick s point wasn t actually directly political in the conventional sense, but summed up as:

I ve taught people how to travel. I focus mostly on the logistics: finding the right hotel, avoiding long lines But that s not why we travel. We travel to have enlightening experiences, to meet inspirational people, to be stimulated, to learn, and to grow. Travel has taught me the fun in having my cultural furniture rearranged and my ethnocentric self-assuredness walloped.

He speaks of giving onesself permission to have a conversation with someone that doesn t speak a language you know, for instance. I got an email this spring from my longtime friend Jonathan Hall, who had moved to Mexico a couple of years ago. He invited my family and me to go to Mexico, generously offered to host us and show us around, and specifically mentioned my review of Rick Steves as a reason to do so, this was immediately intriguing. Due to his other plans, it was also something of a limited-time offer. Those of you that don t live in the USA may not know what sort of stories we get about Mexico over here. Most of them involve either illegal immigration to the USA or the Mexican drug war. Occasionally there is some sort of drug-related violence on the US side of the border as well, which always makes the news. There are a lot of people that have the perception that Mexico is a dangerous place to be. Terah even knows some people that grew up in Mexico and are too afraid to return. So we did some research, asked some questions, and it became pretty clear that yes, some parts of Mexico are dangerous, but many parts are really quite safe, and Jonathan had invited us to one of those. The reactions we got from Americans when we told them of our plan ranged from excitement that we would get to visit a beautiful country to concern and worry about our safety. Besides that, I knew almost no Spanish and Terah had a few high school and college classes years ago to go on. And, we knew that Mexico would, in many ways, be more different from the USA than Germany was. We concluded that this would get us out of our comfort zone in a significant way, have lots of great things to do, be a good experience for the boys, and something that we wouldn t do without Jonathan. So we bought the tickets for it! As you might notice, I m quite glad we did. I ll follow up with the details in the next stories, but for today I ll end with the story of getting there. It involves two cute boys, so of course it ll be interesting. Jacob is almost 5 and Oliver is 2, and neither one of them had flown for over a year. Despite leaving home at 5AM to drive to the airport (about an hour away), they were both awake and alert. Jacob was jabbering away the whole way there. He enjoyed the security process and found it interesting I had to explain that they were checking to make sure everyone was following the airplane rules. Then as we walked to our gate, he pressed his face against every window, looking at the parked airplanes in the dark. Oliver would see him doing this and run over to join him. With a bit of help, he noticed some airplanes had United Express painted on them, and others had American with an AA on them. He would talk about American AA and United Express airplanes for the rest of the week whenever he heard one in the sky. I sat between the boys on our flight to Dallas, and Terah was in the row ahead of us. This is how Jacob spent most of the flight. And Oliver, who had the aisle seat, enjoyed paging through the inflight magazines, safety brochure, wifi instruction card, and airsickness bag. The real highlight came at the Dallas/Ft. Worth (DFW) airport, where we had a connection. And the reason: we needed to take a train to get to our connecting gate. The DFW Skylink system really works very well but the boys cared most that it s a TRAIN. It was difficult to get them both away from it when we got off. They wanted to see it leave, stay and watch the next one come, etc. Jacob was only happy when he realized he could see the Skylink trains running high above the window at our departure gate for Guadalajara. The 2.5-hour flight to Guadalajara got a little long for them, but they managed OK. We struck up several conversations with friendly people that knew English as we waited in various lines. It seems to be something of a rarity for American families with young children and no Mexican heritage to visit Mexico. People went out of their way to be friendly and welcoming even the customs officials. It felt like a great start to the visit. One Mexican man who was chatting with me encouraged me to learn some Spanish. I said my wife knows some, and that I had tried to learn some German back when I took foreign language classes. Laughing, he said, Why would you do that? Not as an insult; it just genuinely didn t seem useful to him. I think they were happy and proud that someone wanted to visit Mexico and was excited about it! More to come.