It looks like the desktop team has selected the artwork (including wallpaper and GDM theme) for the upcoming Debian 6.0 release. The winner of the small contest is SpaceFun by Valessio Brito. Included below is the splash screen, click here to see all the pictures. The other options in the poll were Nightly, Ciel and Lisp Machine. Thanks to the artists who participated in this contest! But the work is not over yet: while the artwork has been selected, it still needs to be integrated in the system. If you feel like helping by creating a theme for a display manager (GDM/KDM/SLIM) or for the Grub boot loader, please drop a mail to debian-desktop@lists.debian.org (subscribe here).

Be informed early by following me on Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook.

16 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

In my professional role as Ubuntu CTO, I take on a number of different perspectives, which sometimes compete for my attention, including:

• Inward supporting the people in my department, alignment with other departments in Canonical and reporting upward
• Outward connecting with customers, partners and the free software community, including Debian
• Forward considering the future of the Ubuntu platform and products, based on the needs of their users, our customers and business stakeholders within Canonical
• Outside-in taking off my Canonical hat and putting on an Ubuntu hat, and looking at what we re doing from an outside perspective

My recent work, as Canonical has gone through a period of organizational growth and change, has prioritized the inward perspective. I took on a six-month project which was inwardly focused, temporarily handing off many of my day-to-day responsibilities (well done, Robbie!). I ve grappled with an assortment of growing pains as many new people joined Canonical over the past year. With that work behind me, it s time to rebalance myself and focus more outside of Canonical again. It s good to be back! In my outward facing capacity, I ll shortly be attending Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I attend several free software conferences each year, but this is a different crowd. I hope to renew some old ties, form some new ones, and generally derive inspiration from the people and organizations represented there. Being in the San Francisco Bay area will also give me an opportunity to meet with some of Canonical s partners there, as well as friends and acquaintances from the free software community. With my head down, working hard to make things happen, it s easy to lose perspective on how that work fits into the outside world. Spending more time with people outside of Canonical and Ubuntu is an important way of balancing that effect. Looking forward, I ll be thinking about the longer term direction for the Ubuntu platform. The platform is the layer of Ubuntu which makes everything else possible: it s how we weave together products like Desktop Edition and Server Edition, and it s what developers target when they write applications. Behind the user interfaces and applications, there is a rich platform of tools and services which link it all together. It s in this aspect of Ubuntu that I ll be investing my time in research, experimentation and imagination. This includes considering how we package and distribute software, how we adapt to technological shifts, and highlighting opportunities to cooperate with other open source projects. My primary outside-in role is as chair of the Ubuntu Technical Board. In this capacity, I m accountable to the Ubuntu project, the interests of its members, and the people who use the software we provide. Originally, the TB was closely involved with a range of front-line technical decisions in Ubuntu, but today, there are strong, autonomous teams in place for the most active parts of the project, so we only get involved when there is a problem, or if a technical question comes up which doesn t fit the charter of an established team. It s something of a catch-all. I d like to re-establish the TB in a more central role in Ubuntu, looking after concerns which affect the project as a whole, such as transparency and development processes. I m also re-joining Debian as a non-uploading contributor, to work on stimulating and coordinating cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu. I m looking forward to working more with Zack on joint projects in this area. This change will help me to support Canonical and Ubuntu more effectively as they continue to grow and change. I look forward to exercising some mental muscles I haven t used very much lately, and facing some new challenges as well.

Tonight I was having some connectivity issues, so after much diagnostic time and pain I decided to reboot my router. At the moment my home router came back my (external) IP address changed, and suddenly I found I could no longer login to my main site. Happily however I have serial console access, and I updated things such that my new IP address was included in the hosts.allow file. [*] The next step was to push that change round my other boxes, and happily I have my own tool slaughter which allows me to make such global changes in a client-pulled fashion. 60 minutes later cron did its magic and I was back. This reminds me that I let the slaughter tool stagnate. Mostly because I only use it to cover my three remote boxes and my desktop, and although I received one bug report (+fix!) I never heard of anybody else using it. I continue to use and like CFEngine at work. Puppet & Chef have been well argued against elsewhere, and I'm still to investigate BFG2 + FAI. Mostly I'm happy with slaughter. My policies are simple, readable, and intuitive. Learn perl? Learn the "CopyFile" and you're done. For example. By contrast the notion of state machines, functional operations, and similar seem over-engineered in other tools. Perhaps thats my bug, perhaps that's just the way things are - but the rants linked to above makes sense to me and I find myself agreeing 100%. Anyway; slaughter? What I want to do is rework it such that all policies are served via rsync and not via HTTP. Other changes, such as the addition of new primitives, don't actually seem necessary. But serving content via rsync just seems like the right way to go. (The main benefit is recursive copies of files become trivial.) I'd also add the ability to mandate GPG-signatures on policies, but that's possible even now. The only step backwards I see is that currently I can serve content over SSL, but that should be fixable even if via stunnel.

---

*

My /etc/hosts.allow file contains this:

ALL: 127.0.0.1
ALL: /etc/hosts.allow.trusted
ALL: /etc/hosts.allow.trusted.apache

Then hosts.allow.trusted contains:

# www.steve.org.uk
80.68.85.46
# www.debian-administration.org
80.68.80.176
# my home.
82.41.x.x

I've never seen anybody describe something similar, though to be fair it is documented. To me it just seems clean to limit the IPs in a single place. To conclude hosts.allow.trusted.apache is owned by root.www-data, and can be updated via a simple CGI script - which allows me to add a single IP address on the fly for the next 60 minutes. Neat.

ObQuote: Tony is a little boy that lives in my mouth. - The Shining

I decided recently to publish interviews from Debian contributors and I picked Joey Hess as my first target. He s one of the few who have heavily influenced Debian by creating software that have become building blocks of the project, like the debian-installer (Joey uses the shorthand d-i to refer to it). My questions are in bold, the rest is by Joey (except for the additional information that I inserted in italics). Who are you? Hello, I m Joey Hess. I m one of the oldtimers in Debian. Actually, I just checked, and there are still up to nineteen active Debian Developers who joined the project before I did, in 1996. I got started fairly young, and am just 34 years old. I spend part of my time working with Lars Wirzenius, another Debian oldtimer, on Branchable. It makes it dead-easy for anyone to make a website that is built from Git, using my Ikiwiki engine to do wiki and blog style things. These days I spend the rest of my time working on free software, when I should really be looking for work to pay the bills. What s your biggest achievement within Debian or Ubuntu? I guess I m mostly known by Debian developers for writing debhelper and perhaps debconf. Probably founding the Debian Installer project has been a bigger impact for users. I m fairly equally proud of all three projects. But while it might sound corny, I am more proud of the accumulation of all the smaller things done in the context of Debian. It s more of a deep connection to the project. All the bugs fixed, and filed, and packages uploaded, and late night discussions, and just being a part of the larger project. What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Hmm, I stopped thinking of Debian releases by code names back around Slink. So, few specific plans for Wheezy. The main thing I would like to help make happen in Debian next is Constantly Usable Testing, and it transcends releases anyway. The only specific plans I have for Wheezy are that there will probably be a new debhelper compat level, and I hope d-i will finally switch to using git. RH: You can learn more about Constantly Usable Testing in my article Can Debian offer a Constantly Usable Testing distribution?. If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Getting Debian on all these computers that we carry around in our pockets and can t easily run apt-get on and hack on. Phones that is. It s a bigger problem than just Debian, but I think Debian needs to find a way to be part of the eventual solution. The FreedomBox concept at least hints at a way around the current situation with embedded computers in general. What s the biggest problem of Debian? I believe that the biggest problem is institutional, social and technological inertia. Every specific case of something that frustrates me about Debian today can be traced back to that. You contribute regularly to Debian mailing lists, yet I don t remember any aggressive/frustrated mail of you. How do you manage that? Are you avoiding heated discussions? Rats, sounds like all my wonderful flames of years past have been forgotten! Seriously though, after I noticed thread patterns, I started trying to avoid participating in the bad patterns myself. Now I limit myself to one expression of an opinion, and I don t care who gets the last word. If people can t be convinced, it s time to find another approach to the problem. Also, code talks. Most of the programs you wrote for Debian are in Perl. Do you regret this choice? I love that question! No, no regrets. My only concern is whether the language limits contributors or users. I have not seen Perl significantly limiting the use of anything except for debconf (we had to rewrite it in C for d-i). And I do not notice fewer contributions to my Perl-based code than to other code. I do sometimes regret when someone tells me they had to learn or re-learn Perl to work on something I wrote. But while I m enjoying writing new things in Haskell now, and while I hope it will mean less maintenance burden later, I don t think using Haskell will make it easier for others to contribute to my programs. Anyway, for me the interesting thing about writing a program is the problem it solves and the decisions made doing it. Choice of language is one of the less interesting decisions. Is there someone in Debian that you admire for his contributions? Well, lots. You re tempting me to throw a dart at a map. So arbitrarily, I ll say Anthony Towns. We could all learn something from how he s approached making big, fundamental changes, like introducing Testing, and making Debian Maintainers happen.

---

Thank you to Joey for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Subscribe to my newsletter and don t miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Twitter and Facebook. PS: If you want to suggest me someone to interview, leave a comment or mail me.

3 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

It seems like VServer is not something for long run because it does not seem to want to be upstream and there is also no good future for having it as patch in Debian for long run. So I should look for alternatives and probably migrate to some other solution while upgrading my server to Squeeze (once it is released or really close to the release). There are various options, starting with OpenVZ, through Linux Containers (LXC) up to full virtualization (probably KVM based). With OpenVZ the situation won't be much better, so it is not a real option. For various reasons I don't want to go to full virtualization, I simply thing containers are good enough and avoid too much overhead in some situations. So the only remaining solution seems to be LXC. There even seem to be some people who managed to migrate from VServer, which is good and will be definitely helpful. Now it's time to play with lxc a bit before I will try to implement it for real.

Filed under: Linux 4 comments Flattr this!

On the 13/14 November 2010 there is a nice event in the so called Ruhrpott : OpenRheinRuhr. And I d like to invite YOU :)What should you expect from heading to the RIM in Oberhausen and paying 5 entry-fee? You get a nice program full of great talks (like mine about bley ;), mikas about OpenSource management, tokkees about Git and XTarans about cli-helpers and unknown tools), a bunch of nice people showing you their distro, software, etc (Debian is there too), a social event, a keysigning party and a lot of hacking and fun. So if you are somewhere nearby, join us and enjoy the event!

---

German version (sorry planet debian readers ;)):Am 13/14 November findet im Pott die OpenRheinRuhr statt, zu der ich euch alle herzlichst einladen moechte.Was kann man erwarten, wenn man den Weg ins RIM in Oberhausen gefunden hat und die 5 Eintritt bezahlt hat? Euch erwartet ein Programm voller Talks (zB meiner ueber bley ;), mikas ueber OpenSource Management, tokkees ueber Git und XTarans ueber Helfer auf der Kommandozeile and anderere unbekannte Tools), viele Aussteller, die die eigene Distro, Software oder was auch immer anpreisen (Debian ist natuerlich auch da), ein Social Event, eine Keysigning Party und natuerlich viel Rumgehacke und Spass. Also, jeder der grad irgendwie in der Naehe ist oder in die Naehe kommen kann: ab nach Oberhausen und geniesst ein freies Wochenende! :)

*blows the dust off his blog*

It's been quite awhile since I last wrote anything in this thing, so I guess its a good time as any, off the tails of UDS-N, to finally sit down and write something down. Since my last blog posting in May, I've been travelling around the world, attending conferences, and trying to represent both Ubuntu and Debian itself, and Canonical in all my travels. I was recently posted to China for a full month where I lived and worked out of an office, made friends with fellow Ubuntu users, and tech enthusiasts, had a wonderful time meeting with people with the Beijing Linux User's Group, and worked hard within my team at Canonical, and the legions of Ubuntu Developers to help make one of the best releases we've ever had.

As I was writing specs and drafting work items, I came to the point that I was reflecting on my own personal goals and growth in life. Two years and change ago, I was a struggling junior at Rochester Institute of Technology, a little less than two years ago, I started working full time with Canonical, and this year, I've gone and traveled to many places I've only dreamed about; Anchorage & Barrow, Alaska; Tampere, Finland; Prague, Czech Republic; and Brussels, Belgium, just to name a few. I packed up and lived in China for a month (an amazing experience, and I look forward to going back and visiting again sometime in the near future). Had you told the me of two years ago what I would be doing now, I'd probably think you were smoking something good.

One thing I've discovered in my life is that if you want to do something, you need to get out there and just ****ing do it. This may seem simple, but I think of the dreams a lot of people have that never seem to come to fruition. When I have an opportunity, I take it; going to Alaska was a dream I harbored for many years, especially entering the arctic circle, and heading to Barrow. That entire trip was booked on roughly four days notice, and the side trip to Barrow was planned the day before it actually happen. I don't regret any of it; it was one of the best things I ever done.

It brings me to what I consider the flux of this blog posting. For those who know me, I've had a goal of visiting every state within the United States. At this time last year, this map looked like this

As of two weeks ago today, this map looked like this:



Now, by the end of the day today, it will look like this:



The point I'm trying to make is if you want to do something, do it the first chance you get, or just don't do it; I say this because you never know when you will be able to do it again.

As for completing a life goal, well, it feels pretty amazing :-). I may write about that in a future blog posting ...

If you package is listed in the po-debconf status page for Czech, it is likely that you'll soon get a mail from me..:-) The Czech translators have nearly completed po-debconf translations and now I have to help them in getting these uploaded. So, beware of my NMU gun..;-)

So I studied the SWF 8 iPlayer a little - there are some simple rendering issues with Gnash that I'd like to come back to, but the biggest problem is obviously the media not playing. Looking at the network requests, wireshark says something about malformed packets - Gnash is getting as far as making RTMP requests, but the connection dies pretty quickly. My working theory is that there is a bug in the Gnash RTMP client code. This code was forked from rtmpdump, and has since been converted from C to C++, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's quite possible that there is some change deep in the code which hasn't been copied back into Gnash - therefore, it makes sense to get Gnash building against librtmp properly, which is now a separate library. This, of course, means actually writing code. Eurgh. I try to avoid that when I can, but sometimes it is inevitable. :) When writing larger changes, I find it takes me longer to get acquainted with the existing code base - in this case, two code bases, since I have to understand librtmp at some level, as well. I'm not expecting to produce anything before the weekend, which is frustrating. It is also risky to write about stuff before you have completed it, because it can be a very public failure if you don't manage it!

For some GTK+ themes, icons are not shown in buttons and in menus. They can be made visible again editing some gconf keys, possibly with gconf-editor. The keys to be changed are /desktop/gnome/interface/buttons_have_icons for buttons and /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons for menus.

Someone on Hacker News asks about the future of programming languages, and I realized that it's a pretty interesting topic. Here's my take on it: Programming languages are about people, and the compromises they may or may not make in order to communicate their intentions to computers. The technology in question may change, but there will likely always be people involved, and as long as that's true, looking at the problem through the lense of economics provides useful results. Therefore, looking at programming languages pretty much requires that you look at the economics of them:

• Network effects are important, but obviously don't squeeze out smaller languages entirely. I.e. it's good to be able to get libraries, find people to hire, books to read, friends to chat with about problems, etc... This means that future languages will have to seek out a critical mass of users.
• Since the times of Fortran, languages have been getting more efficient in terms of programmer time, because programmer time stays the same or gets more expensive, while computer time keeps getting cheaper, and language implementors keep getting better at making things fast under the hood. This means that languages of the future are likely to let you do more with less, all else being the same.
• Learning a programming language will continue to be a fairly involved process for most people, meaning that for many, it's more efficient to learn a few languages well and use them for as much as possible, rather than to try and find the 'perfect' language for each problem. This rewards general-purpose languages, compared to niche languages. This also rewards flexible languages that can be used in many different environments.
• Computers are only going to become more and more important, meaning that more people are going to want to develop the skills to work with them. Not all of them will be experts, and many may not know much, but have a vision for how a program could solve a particular problem in a field they are knowledgeable about. This means a low barrier to entry is important, because those novices will pick easier languages, become progressively more competent in them, and thus (network effects) contribute to their diffusion. Case in point: PHP. Future languages should be capable of solving hard problems, but should also make it easy to get started solving simple problems too.
• Working on languages is lots of fun, so even though there aren't necessarily monetary rewards, people will continue to play with and explore new ideas. I don't see there being a limited supply of new languages in the future.
• The costs of switching from established languages will continue to be high, so future languages will still need to interact with "legacy" languages like Cobol, Fortran, C, Java, and so on, that are so widely established in industry that systems written in them will be with us for a long time yet.

I wrote this in a hurry. Have I missed anything? How do these factors apply to languages you see emerging?

Back when Linux kernel 2.6 was released, one of the immediate benefits that I noticed was how beautifully responsive my desktop had suddenly become. As it turned out, Linus figured out that he would create a buzz to accompany kernel 2.6's release by having a default clock rate of 1000Hz. However, the excitement was short-lived and kernel defaults were soon brought back down to a more conservative rate of 250Hz, allegedly because some peripheral chips could not handle such a high frequency bump without producing an increased amount of processing errors. Adding insult to injury, Ubuntu defaults eventually dropped another responsiveness enhancement, kernel preemption, allegedly because the goal was to have a one-size-fits-all kernel shipping with Ubuntu and preemption was detrimental to the kernel performance when the host is used as a server, which was a problem because Ubuntu had somehow decided to shift its focus from the desktop market towards the more lucrative server market. While there is nothing wrong with universally-safe kernel defaults or with a corporate decision to shift a distribution's focus towards more lucrative markets, it nonetheless left me pondering what would be the best way to get a 1000Hz kernel with preemption on my desktops, without constantly having to crank out my own kernel packages. As such, I was wondering if there would be enough traction from desktop users to justify producing such a kernel and to make it available as a post-install option from the Ubuntu repository? PS: I'm already aware that a specialized Ubuntu kernel is available to cater for the needs of audio production, but my understanding is that it has power management disabled, because it can interfere with the real-time operation of MIDI devices, while normal desktop users would definitely want to have power management enabled.

The Italian L10N team has not been very active nor growing in recent years. In particular, we pretty much failed at attracting new members in our team, with the result that untranslated files are piling up and manpower is scarce. Following a suggestion of our uber-active Francesca, we decided to try a new move to invert the trend: organizing brief weekly online sprints open to everybody, where graybeard translators will help newcomers getting to grips on Debian L10N infrastructure while collaboratively working on yet-untranslated targets. Last week, we tried our first and very introductory sprint, with a preliminary meeting on IRC to give instructions and setup ad-hoc pads. As a result, we ended with linux-2.6 po-debconf and a web-page completely translated and proofread by almost fifteen people in just a couple a hours. The key point however is that the majority of participants were fresh L10N-newbies, which we hope will join us permanently very soon after this first contact. Encouraged by the initial positive result, we already announced our next sprint for Thursday 11th, which will be focused on package descriptions translation (preceded by a crash course on DDTSS, its related web interface). We hope that even more users will join us this time, and encourage other stalled translation teams in experimenting a similar approach to revive activity and encourage participation.

If you want to see a really big Google Calendar, check out this calendar. Essentially, it is all the events from over 100 other calendars (all containing swing dancing events) merged into one, resulting in often more than 50 events every day, occasionally over 20 at the same time). The data is approximately the same that can be seen on this map; in fact I'm trying to move the data keeping from a custom database (which has superior filtering capabilities such as synonyms in text search) to just having Google keep the data for me (meaning it will eventually not require me to have an own web server for this). I'm doing some filtering such as removing events that don't have parseable geo information (I'm adding GeoRSS:where elements, in fact), some text to html conversion of the entry contents and filtering out inappropriate events via some regular expressions (e.g. only including "Swing" not "Ballroom" events from a calendar) There are still a couple of things to resolve. I'm not sure that recurrence exceptions are propagated properly to the combined calendar; the updates could work more incrementally, and I have to resolve some timezone issues due to the global nature of the calendar: I need to make sure the timezone information is preserved, since usually it makes more sense to give the events in local (to the event) time. P.S. sorry, the code is too specialized and needs cleanup, I won't share it yet.

I wrote yesterday about our scare with Jacob. It s been quite the day. Before I go into it, I want to say thank you to all the many of you that have sent comments and support our way. Terah and I haven t had the chance to reply to many of them, but we have read every one, and very much appreciate it! Terah spent the night with Jacob, and I spent the day with him today (others were present for parts of it too). Jacob was mostly in good spirits. He was up and around, pushed his IV around himself in the room and to the bathroom. He called it my VI machine (not a typo take that, Emacs, eh?) He continued to enjoy measuring his trips to the bathroom. We went exploring a few times. He would walk or run down one of the long corridors in the hospital, holding my hand, while I pulled the IV along. We often went by the cafeteria, which he called the kitchen. One time he insisted that I get a cup of coffee from the free coffee dispenser. I insisted that I didn t want to, but eventually asked, Shall I get a pretend cup of coffee? Yeah! So he watched me get a pretend cup, pretend to fill it, and pretend to drink it and smiled and clapped for me after. He spent hours watching videos of trains on YouTube. This is a favorite activity at home too, but we obviously limit the amount of time he can spend doing it. I had to limit the amount of time he spent with it today too, of course, but he got rather more time with it than usual. Jacob had his usual books, but I thought we might try something new today. This morning, I loaded The Tale of Peter Rabbit (with illustrations) onto my Kindle. Jacob loved it, and enjoyed pressing the Next Page button in the Kindle. We read it twice, and he is interested by the promise of other stories about rabbits. It also probably didn t hurt that his grandma had given him a rabbit in the hospital yesterday. As we got on towards evening, I told him that tomorrow could be a normal day. His response: enthusiastic applause and a big grin, plus YAY! Jacob loved eating today. He wolfed down breakfast and lunch. He enjoyed the lemonade I brought for him again, and played with some toys, and yes, watched some more train videos in the afternoon. He also pretended to ignore the visitors he got as much as possible (pretty typical for him actually). The doctor came by at about 6:00PM and again was just stunned at how well he s doing. Jacob neither complained of any pain nor acted like he had any even when the nurses would rub neosporin on his wounds. The doctor was still just stunned at how well he was doing. He told us his last tractor accident resulted in a death before LifeWatch could arrive, and the one before that turned a good student and a promising athlete into a wheelchair-bound person with a vocabulary of 20 words. I can t believe I m discharging him today, but try as I might, as I go over all the details, there s no reason for him to stay. I thanked him for all his help, and he said, I didn t do anything for him. All I did was figure out what had happened to him . I guess we have the CT to prove that something really did happen, but the fact that he showed up at my office in the first place was stunning enough. Jacob started to get more excited after the IV was unhooked from him. He didn t particularly like having the needle removed, due to the pain of taking off the tape, but was happy to have it gone. He was making plans: will we stop by the train station on the way home? It s the middle of the night maybe a train will be there! (If it s dark outside, it s middle of the night to him) We agreed to stop by the cafeteria to pick him up one last lemonade, than stop at the train station. The nurses offered a wheelchair to take him out to the car with. I said I didn t think he d want it. One of them said, Wouldn t you like a FUN ride in a WHEELCHAIR? Jacob: No. Me: I suspect he will want to run out of here. Nurse: OK then. We walked, or half ran, to the cafeteria to get his lemonade. Then we went out to the car. He was excitedly jabbering about everything: the car, my radio, and especially the train station. We did drive by, and at least got to see a freight engine go past. He noticed the Christmas lights starting to be set out along Main Street, and said, Dad, it s CHRISTMAS! Well, almost Then he got quiet, and eventually fell asleep in the car. He had almost fallen asleep while eating his lunch, but stayed awake, and then got interested in other things so he had no nap today. When we got home, I unbuckled him and pulled him out of his seat. He opened his eyes for just a second, wrapped his arms tightly around my neck, put his head on my shoulder, and fell back asleep while I carried him up to his room. I put him down on his own bed. He had a contented sigh, pulled his favorite blanket up to his neck like he loves to do, and was back asleep in no time. Our little boy is home, safe and sound. It s a happy day.

State of X in experimental What happened since last month? The video drivers we were previously lacking were built against X Server 1.9, with a tiny exception: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. This one is particularly annoying because the ABI is not stable, and it requires a particular version of the kernel to be usable. The same seems to happen with the nouveau part of the libdrm library. As a consequence, I ve demoted it from Depends to Recommends for the xserver-xorg-video-all metapackage. The same happened to the xserver-xorg-input-wacom driver (for the xserver-xorg-input-all metapackage this time), since it isn t maintained by debian-x@, and since it didn t look too bad to have it only recommended (after all, we re only targeting experimental right now). In addition, all drivers were updated to the last upstream releases. Bottom-line, the following is now possible on (at least) both amd64 and i386 architectures:

apt-get install -t experimental xserver-xorg

As a side note: Intel users probably want to upgrade their libdrm-intel1 package to 2.4.22-2 (in experimental as well), they could run into X.Org Bug #31443 otherwise. Dependency handling for X packages in Debian Previously, dependencies were quite fun:

• Drivers used to provide a given virtual package: xserver-xorg-input-$ABI and xserver-xorg-video-$ABI. One shall note that the ABI is evolving independently for input and video drivers, see SET_ABI_VERSION in server s hw/xfree86/common/xf86Module.h for curious people.
• The xserver-xorg metapackage depended on xserver-xorg-core (the server itself) with a minimal version, and on those virtual packages. More precisely, for example in the input case: xserver-xorg-input-all xserver-xorg-input-$ABI so that by default one gets everything for autodetection to work, but one can pick a specific driver instead.
• The drivers only depended on the server, with a minimal version as well.

So what did we do to ensure the server and drivers were all using the same ABI? When the server was updated to a new ABI, one had to add the previous virtual packages to Conflicts (and keep a list of all of them, yay!). Needless to say, asking a package manager to upgrade at a same time many packages (several dozens for all drivers) declaring conflicts, especially during a mass dist-upgrade from a stable release to the next stable was no fun. So what s the current situation now?

• xserver-xorg depends on a minimal server version, and on drivers. The alternatives are now written like this: xserver-xorg-input-all xorg-driver-input. Notice there s no ABI mentioned here anymore. It s just about having the server, at least an input driver, and at least a video driver.
• xserver-xorg-core now provides an input ABI and a video ABI. In experimental for example: xorg-input-abi-11.0, xorg-video-abi-8.0
• Drivers now depend on the ABI they were built against. For example, xserver-xorg-input-evdev in experimental depend on xorg-input-abi-11.0

So one might think everything is now fine, except there are some conflicts still declared, to ensure one can transition from packages using the former (bad) logic to the new state of affairs. And those conflicts were still causing headaches to package managers. Fortunately, David Kalnischkies came up with a proposal to replace Conflicts with Breaks, which turned out to ease things. Yatta! All of that is implemented in experimental. squeeze is the transition period where the metapackage stills the depends on xserver-xorg- input,video -$ABI virtual packages, but where drivers now depend on the appropriate server ABI. (Thanks to Alexander Kurtz for his feedback.)

It ain t what you don t know that gets you into trouble. It s what you know for sure that just ain t so
attributed to Mark Twain

There is a lot that I don t know about what goes on in my organization. This isn t only because I can t observe everything, or because it s too complex, or because I make mistakes. These are all true, of course, but they re also obvious. Much more devious is the way the flow of information to me is distorted. It s distorted by me, and by the people around me, whether any of us are aware of it or not. This is most apparent in considering how people feel about their managers: this is why I have a deeply flawed view of what it s really like to work for me. My theory is that power bends information like gravity bends light. The effect is more pronounced with people of greater mass (more authority), and lessened with distance (less direct influence). The more directly you influence someone else s fate, the more it is in their self-interest to be guarded around you. This means that the people closest to you, who you receive the most information from, may have the most difficulty being open with you, especially if it s bad news. It also means that the higher your standing in the corporate hierarchy, the more influence you wield, the more people are affected by this. Pretty scary, right? Some managers respond to this terrifying reality by trying to collect more information. They ll quietly cross-check what people are telling them, asking people in different levels of the organization, routing around managers, hoping to get the real story . This usually backfires, because it signals distrust to the people involved and makes the distortion worse. Another common response is to check in constantly, trying to monitor and control the work as closely as possible (so-called micro-management). This is even worse; not only does it signal distrust, but managers who do this become more personally attached to outcomes, and lose perspective on progress and quality due to information overload, self-enhancement bias, and neglect of managerial work. The more it becomes your work rather than the team s, the harder it is to see it objectively. So what s a better way to respond to this phenomenon? Here s what I try to do:

• Accept it You ll never have certainty about what s happening, so get used to it, and don t let it paralyze you. Learn decision making strategies which cope well with information noise, and allow you to experiment and adapt.
• Admit it Everyone else knows that you have this distortion field around you. If you pretend it isn t there, you ll appear deluded. Acknowledge that you don t know, don t understand, and can t control.
• Trust The more you trust someone, the more they trust you. The more someone trusts you, the more confident they can be in telling you what they think. Be grateful for bad news, and never shoot the messenger.
• Delegate Enable people with a less distorted view of the situation to make local decisions. Don t make people wait for information to propagate through you before acting, unless there is a clear and sufficient benefit to the organization.

I was inspired to think and write about this today after listening to Prof. Robert Sutton s speech at the California Commonwealth Club, which Lindsay Holmwood shared with me.

3D printing is just great. I just came across this Debian logo in 3D linked in from the thingiverse blog.

I had been planning to write today about my great uncle Milt Goerzen. Milt passed away last Thursday after a long struggle with dementia, and his funeral was this morning. I was there, and was inspired by a few things I heard. But that will have to wait, because today brought one of those few moments in life that s a sense of an impending possible great loss. I can remember two others: one was when Terah passed out, and the other was when we heard that our place was on fire and our house had burned down (it turned out the house hadn t, but much of the rest had). I got a call during Milt s funeral. I didn t answer because I was, well, at a funeral, and the phone was on vibrate. When I had the chance to check the voicemail, it went something like this: I think we have an emergency with Jacob. He got run over by a tractor. He says he s OK, but I m taking him to the doctor right now. I tried to return the call, but cell phone reception wasn t cooperating. The most I got was he s OK . It s hard to describe how a moment like that feels. My mind jumped to telling Jacob I love you , and how lately when he hears that, he will snuggle in for a big hug, and say, Dad, I love you toooooooooo! On the one hand, I heard the he s OK part, and on the other hand I couldn t forget the tractor running over him part, and my mind leapt at the worst. It turns out that, while I was at the funeral, Jacob had been standing on his usual spot on the tractor, sort of to the side of the driver. He was enjoying himself like usual. The tractor hit a large hole that wasn t really visible. The combination of the jolt and the dip the tractor took towards Jacob s side knocked him off and he went directly under the big rear wheel before the tractor could be brought to a stop. I caught up with him and his grandpa after he had seen the doctor and just as he was being admitted to the hospital. He saw me and crawled over, making his sort of sad and scared sound he sometimes doesn t want to verbalize things when he s in that mood. I held him close and he seemed to appreciate it. He had to have blood drawn, and he was scared of that. I remembered his inquisitive mind, and reminded him how much he liked watching the tube fill up with blood last time he had a blood test (which he calls a blood shot ). That wasn t helping, until the actual blood test started. He cried when the needle went in, but then calmed down as the nurse, getting into the act, pointed out that there was blood filling up the tube. Hmmm! said Jacob. Then she gave him a band-aid. It has an airplane, said the nurse. Um-hmm! said Jacob. I pointed out that it looked like the airplane we were on when we flew home from New York. Jacob got a big smile and said, Yes, it IS that one! He got a sticker there too. Then it was off for an x-ray to check for broken bones and a CT scan to check for internal injuries the tractor had gone right over his abdomen. He had to get an IV at the CT scan, which he certainly didn t like. After it happened, however, he found it very interesting especially when the nurses explained that they would give him a drink through the hose attached to his hand. After that, we went to his room, with orders for him not to eat or drink anything until it was clear he didn t have digestive problems. While we waited at various steps along the way, Jacob wanted to sit on my lap and watch train videos on YouTube on my phone. He loves train videos, and brought my phone s battery nearly to depletion through the course of the afternoon. Jacob eventually seemed to get back to a bit of his usual self. At one point, while Terah had made a run home to pack an overnight bag and grandpa ran some errands of his own, Jacob wanted to leave the room. He had gone exploring in the hospital with me before: when Oliver was born, and when Terah had her thyroid surgery. So this was something he just associated with the hospital. That and lemonade, which is free any time of the day or night in the cafeteria. So we went exploring, even ventured outside into a courtyard for a bit. He was walking fast and seemed good. We had several visitors: grandparents and his aunt and uncle. Jacob got a stuffed rabbit and a colorful bug box with windows (for putting bugs inside for observation). Eventually the doctor came by and gave us the results: the x-rays showed no problems. The labs showed some elevated liver enzymes, which he expected, but no serious trouble. The CT showed contusions on his lung and bruising on his heart which would heal completely in time. He allowed Jacob to have a liquid supper (so I quickly got him the lemonade he had been wanting while the nurses got him some Jello). The doctor examined Jacob, pushing at various places, asking Does it hurt here? No. Does it hurt here? No. Here? No. Are you hungry? Yes. Does it hurt here? No. He gave me a look that said: really? It doesn t hurt ANYWHERE? What could I do but shrug my shoulders? Jacob has some abrasions on his face, arms, and back, which will probably eventually hurt (and sure enough, about 10 minutes later he started getting a little pain when he tried to move, which the doctor checked out) Then the doctor said, I hope you know you have a walking miracle today. This is just amazing. You have some thanking to whatever guardian angels you like tonight all I can say about this is that the Lord must have had some other plan for him. There s no way he could have survived that. Jacob s doctor is one that we really respect: he s scientific in his analysis, cites studies as a matter of routine, doesn t prescribe antibiotics for things that he knows they have a small chance of helping, is common-sense about not over-treating things and yet always engaged in an emergency. That little speech from him was something I d never expected to hear from him. He went on to add that I always visit my sickest patients first. You were my last visit this evening, so that should tell you something. Any other kid as healthy as he is, I might discharge already but I m just not justified doing that with a boy that s, well, been driven over by a tractor this morning. He also wanted to monitor Jacob s progress throughout the coming day, especially his digestive system. They wanted to measure his urine output, which he, predictably, found to be very interesting. Terah said I think it is about 150 ml. Jacob said, No mom, it is closer to the two hundred line. Me: Since when does Jacob know about the number 200? Terah: I don t know . he s 4, where would he have gotten it? Between that, and using every opportunity to tell people that there were not one but TWO red light switches in the x-ray room, Jacob s definitely himself in some ways already. So, that feeling of some impeding great loss is gone, replaced by being more than a bit overwhelmed by how fortunate we were today. We also appreciate all the help we ve had with Jacob and Oliver today.