Next week there is a summit at Google in Mountain View on the summer of code.

The purpose of the summit is to bring together mentors from successful organizations to discuss several topics: how to improve GSoC, how Google can do more for open source, and what you as mentors and representatives of your development communities can do to help one another.

AJ and I will be there to represent the Debian project; and therefore I'd like to know what your impressions about the "summer of code" were. And of course how GSoC could be improved etc. - you've read the "official mission statement". I'm not only asking mentors; I'm asking everybody interested with opensource. There are some things where having been a mentor is useful - e.g. for streamlining the screening process - but there are lots of things where you don't really need much prior knowledge. One thing, which is very interesting, is trying to do more cooperation among organizations during (or due to) the summer of code. So please send me your comments to erich@debian.org.

For a few years, the probably most intrepid group of triathletes in my club have been doing cycling tours during the long weekend of the 9 d'Octubre in Val ncia. We once did a good chunk of the Ruta del Cid, covering around 550 kilometres in 3 days and a half, carrying aproximately 25 kilograms of sleeping bag, food and clothes on our bikes, and going from Teruel to Albarrac n, back to Teruel, then to Morella and back to Alboc sser and through the Serra d'Espad . The next year, we started the trip in La S nia, and crossed the Valencian Country all the way to Requena, through Linares and Rubielos de Mora. This year, we intended to cycle across the Pyrinees, from the Basque Country to Catalonia, but in the end my travelmates have to work on Monday, so we had to quickly settle on a one day alternative. As this is the 9 d'Octubre, the trip had to be a bit crazy, so we've decided to get the last train up to Teruel, arriving there at 21:30 or so, have a very good dinner around El Torico and soon after, start our way down to Val ncia, under the full moon.

Our itinerary for tonight We'll be carrying a few forehead lights and a bicycle light, and will really hope that the sky isn't cloudy at all. We're really going to need the moonlight. The route follows the national road from Sagunt to Teruel, through an old train track which was turned into a cycling path. Most of the trip will be descending, so covering the 150 kilometres shouldn't be too hard, except that neither of us are specially trained now, unlike 3 years ago. If we end up having to stop and sleep, that's going to be a problem as we are carrying no sleepingbags or anything, just our winter cycling clothes. We pretend to take our time, aka most of the night, to get to our destination, as we obviously won't be able to cycle fast in the dark. But we'll manage. This is just crazy, not impossible. :)

I guess the term "ajax clouds" is now more appropriate. Debtags clouds have evolved. They're no longer a static page with a single cloud that will forward you to the more complex browsing tool by Enrico, but now the cloud will adapt to your previous choices, and allow the selection of multiple tags. The biggest issue probably is tag naming now (e.g. what is the difference between "role", "use" and "scope" (unfold them to get an idea) or between "interface" and "uitoolkit" (interface is mostly commandline vs. fullscreen vs. windowed vs. 3d; uitoolkit is gtk vs. qt vs. whatever) - unless you're familiar with these terms, you'll probably find it still hard to navigate the tag cloud. Still I hope this inspires you to think of new UIs doable with tag information (which is a small step towards the semantic web; actually these facets here are quite similar to RDF triples...) These is so much things I'd like to try out with this data... If you have suggestions, please share them via email. For those interested in the technical stuff: tag clouds are loaded via ajax, served from a database with ~120 MB of precalculated, precompressed json files. Precalculation is rather expensive; on my 4+ years old laptop it took about 105 minutes (76 minutes of CPU time). Storing them in the filesystem instead of a BerkeleyDB hashtable took more than 4 hours. The outmost (i.e. largest amount of data) set takes 1.1 seconds to compute; there are 344871 precomputed tag selections, so it precalculated 75 selections per second on average. Yes, complexity is not linear; benefits from caching large results are huge. I'd really love to run a similar interface for e.g. last.fm, but I guess this would not work as well; their tags aren't grouped in facets. But I have some ideas to make up for that. P.S. This is also my first real Ajax app (except for using json instead of XML). And I still hate Javascript. [Update: I've worked around an issue with opera (which is stricter on javascript object syntax than mozilla). I havn't tried Internet Exploder yet. But this is a navigation experiment, not an application to be deployed...]

This is already old news, but I haven't commented here yet. We already hinted this possibility in my previous blog entry on this topic, but sometime last week, we made it official. After speaking to some people upstream, we got the impression that the GTK situation was way too risky to do a GTK 2.10 migration, with no hints on when the file selector problems would be solved. As of today, and two GTK 2.10 releases later, not all of the issues appear to have been resolved in this branch, so we may have chosen the right path. So, with this information in our hands, we described the whole situation to the release managers, explaining what the options were, and they, of course, had no doubt on what was better for etch. The last two months before the release, we'll try to polish the last few bits that we'd like to improve in the current 2.14 packages. For example, Joss just made a change to the session manager, to make it possible to save the user's session easily, a feature which was present until GNOME 2.12, then removed in 2.14 with apparently no sane replacement of saving sessions available for the user. I must admit I'm a bit disappointed about not being to ship all the work we've been doing with GNOME 2.16 in experimental, although I believe it was the right choice. If the etch release is delayed for some major reason, and let's hope it's not, that might open a window to see a transition going on, if the fixes are finally in and we consider our packages release quality. If not, we're sorry, but we won't be able to sell the latest GNOME version argument in our release PR. ;) The Debian GNOME team has already been talking about doing a semi-official 2.16 backport for etch though, so people can use stable with the current GNOME, at least for a few months. We'll see how it goes...

Barbicane asked me the other day: “Why Ichthux and Ubuntu CE? Why not consolidate efforts?” As much as I’d like to see Ubuntu CE succeed, I believe they are headed down a path that will make it difficult for them to survive if they continue. In this thread (see Google cache since the forums seem to be having problems today) Jereme severely understates the differences in development philosophies that keep us apart. One key difference is more fundamental than just using metapackages instead of scripts. As I wrote about earlier, the approach Ichthux has chosen is to be a Custom Debian Distribution (CDD), working within Debian and Ubuntu to configure those distributions for the needs of Christians to meet their various needs. This is incompatible with CE’s approach, which uses scripts to tailor an Ubuntu system. This approach risks violating the integrity of the packages being modified, and makes each system upgrade an adventure for the user. What you end up with cannot truly be called an “edition” of Ubuntu at all, but is more accurately described as an Ubuntu derivative. Derivatives are not easily sustained because they are always struggling with staying in sync with the parent distribution. Ubuntu itself is a derivative, but it has an impressive amount of infrastructure with a lot of manpower behind it to ensure that the branching and merging process doesn’t get out of control. I don’t see how the much smaller Ubuntu CE development team will manage to accomplish anything significant using their current approach without being crushed by the maintenance costs of their customizations. Another difference, perhaps more readily apparent to end users, is what’s included in each distribution by default. While CE has chosen the Gnome desktop, Ichthux has gone with KDE. With each new release of Ubuntu CE, it seems what is stressed the most in their release notes is “what’s included”. Well, I just can’t see how that’s terribly important. Debian and Ubuntu both have a vast amount of software available, and both make it easy for users to make choices. If a user wants to add another application, it’s often just a few clicks away. It’s not nearly as important to have these installed by default as it is to ensure that the packages we do include are as solid and well-integrated with the system as possible. To this end, Ichthux makes use of its Debian and Ubuntu developers to ensure that each package included is kept in good shape from release to release. This means addressing bugs and wishlists that matter to our users, improving those packages not just for Ichthux, but for Ubuntu, Debian, and where those fixes flow back upstream, the broader community of Christian FOSS users everywhere. This is the real work of Ichthux: not just the production of a livecd, nor merely tweaking the default selection of packages we include from one release to the next, but to be actively involved in the Christian FOSS developer and user community. Our greatest successes will not be in the degree to which we differentiate ourselves from other Linux distributions, but rather how well we’re listening to what Christian FOSS users are saying they need, and how broad we can make our solutions. We can’t afford to be a niche distribution working off in a corner on our own pet project. That would be a terrible waste of our energy. We’re dreaming big: we want every Christian Linux user to be able to benefit from our work.

I’m reviewing my next actions: dozens of worthy projects waiting for me to do. But I just can’t seem to get moving on any of them. What’s keeping me back? What is so hard about getting things done? Especially with respect to the more rewarding tasks on the list, it’s a mystery that I fail to act. It should be easy. I’ve fretted over this problem for years, yet I’m no closer to an answer today at age forty than when I first discovered my dubious skills many moons ago as a procrastinator extraordinare. Surely all that I need to do is stop worrying and just act—act, and continue to act until to get things done is as natural as breathing. Oh, so simple! So easy to say! I fear I am caught in a cycle of anxiety and inaction that defeats me before I even begin. Faced with my list of next actions, I inexplicably feel anxiety about it with something like the force of physical pain. I balk. I seek out some numbing diversion to get relief: anything but whatever’s at the top of my list. But I know I mustn’t nurse this fear, or it will grow. I will not escape by focusing on how hard it is. So I resolve to nurture hope, to act and not doubt. TODO: Pick any next action. Do it! Repeat.

I’ve been asked by numerous people for my take on Dunc Tank, the latest “conspiracy” to roil the Debian waters. (Summary: Dunc Tank aims to raise funds to pay Debian developers to complete certain key projects, such as ensuring the next version of Debian, etch, is released on time.) My take is simple: The kind of childish sniping that has taken place over the past few weeks (which, as usual, seems to come from a small but extremely vocal corner of the community) does far more harm to Debian than any perceived monetary “taint”. It’s no wonder “the enterprise” doesn’t take Debian seriously. If anything, I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen lately, namely that Debian finally has strong leadership that’s willing to take necessary steps without fear of offending the mob of the few that often paralyzes these kinds of projects. Bravo, AJ. And keep at it. It takes a steely sort of person to stick their necks out like this, but strong leadership is absolutely essential to the success of any project, open source or otherwise. After all, success doesn’t just happen at random.

Congratulations go out to Memory Alpha, the free compendium of Star Trek information, for passing their 20,000 article mark. It's a big step for a wiki project, and MA has been a really great resource for my own trekkie nerding out over the years. tags: milestone memory alpha wiki star trek

Web 2.0 So, I'm going to be covering the Web 2.0 Conference for LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld early in November. Hooray for me! Professional journalism and all that. I think it will be really interesting covering the "Web 2.0" phenomenon from an Open Source/Linux/technical perspective. Despite the temptation I won't cover the event on mescaline... I think. ddf says: Then it'd be, like, "Web 2.Ooooooohhhhhhh". tags: web2.0 web2con linuxworld networkworld

Blinky Hockey Tonight I met up with the members of my new hockey team, Blinky. I've been fascinated with hockey since we moved to Canada, and I've got a stick and skates, but I've never really gotten out and played with a team. Blinky is a beginners' team -- just going out for the fun of playing the game. Our coach Meg Hewitt, one of the editors at Hour, is just a darling person and a good hockey player and fan of the game. She's pulling together this coed team of friends and colleagues to let people experience the game she enjoys so much. We'll be playing Thursday night games at the hockey rink near my house (cool) at 11PM (whoa). I've gotta get some pads and a helmet and tape up my stick and all that. But now I'm really gonna get out on the ice. Fun times ahead! tags: hockey beginner meg hewitt blinky

Pigeon Amita June's clever Marmie (and my smart Mom) sent a stack of ~20 books for AJ's 1st birthday. There are a lot of great books in this packet, but by far the favorite around this house with Mama, Papa, babysitter Julia and little AJ is Don't let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. It's the touching saga of a pigeon who, well, wants to drive a bus. And you have to tell him 'NO!', and he pleads and wheedles and whines and tantrums. It's a fun fun fun fun book. tags: dont let the pigeon drive the bus pigeon bus aj marmie mom maj julia

When returning from Ruxcon I took a Virgin Blue flight.

The Virgin web site has a FAQ with the following advice regarding DVT:
Drink plenty of water and other fluids during and after the flight, limiting alcohol, tea and coffee.

However Virgin provide no free water on the flight and charge $2 for 350ml of water! This is a strong incentive to buy caffeinated drinks and/or alcohol, after all if you are going to pay then you want something better than water!

They should provide free tap water as a basic health measure.

On the positive side there was an interesting article in the Virgin Blue magazine about alternative sources of fuel. It covered bio-Diesel (renewable and produces less toxic smoke), and producing Diesel from waste plastic (saves space in land-fill as well as providing fuel). It wasn't as technically detailled as I would like and it didn't mention some of the methods being developed for producing Diesel fuel from algae or the work on using bio-fuel for jet aircraft (which would be appropriate for an airline magazine).

But it's a good start, hopefully some travellers will learn that there are environmental problems and ways that we can fix them.

I mentioned Fidonet in my latest post, and that in the year 2000 I still cared about it. I think two years ago I still cared a bit, because with all the mad year-1997-web skills I could muster I made this jewel of a website: Welcome to FidoNot!. I’m plugging it because I will probably not renew the domain next year (this year I did it by mistake) so it’s almost your last opportunity to see it, and I’m quite proud of it in an evil way. You know, it brings evil smiles to my face when I think about it and all. And it’s actually been useful for someone: that someone was looking for animated rainbow thingies like the ones I put there, so… :-) (Plus, the time spent looking at that thing is not spent arguing in Debian lists or proposing resolutions.)

There was no power again at the office today (thanks to my boss for sounding me while I was laying in bed so I had a pretty free day today. This is the first of my Unexpected Series of Events (although, in retrospect, this is somewhat expected since we did lose power at the office yesterday, giving credence to Clair’s story…) So I spent a little more time in bed, trying to get sleep; but my Mom got me ony my feet, calling via landline all the way from Daet, which just got its power restored a few days prior. She told me that my Tita Mendy will be arriving tomorrow, and she’ll be carrying some of my things too. That’s the second Unexpected. After that I left the house to deposit my second paycheck from work and payment for my second semester at school. A quick trek back home for lunch, and a few pages of Even Grues Get Full after, I went to Robinsons Place to check mail for free (well, not really free since I usually pay for my cup of Java to have a reason for taking a table.) As I’ve come to expect of freebies, free WiFi in Robinsons is rather limiting, as it appears to only allow HTTP ,S connections (yeah, no Yahoo! even for the unenlightened masses!) The bandwidth, in fairness, is fairly decent, allowing for a good audio or video stream to pass through without much lag (as long as its from HTTP ,S .) However, today’s service was extra crappy, as it appears that the WiFi DHCP server went down, and I couldn’t acquire an IP address. It wasn’t much of a problem for me, though: last weekend allowed me to spend a lot of my time hanging out in the place as it was the only place nearby to have seemingly continuous DC power (the storm that passed over pretty much knocked down normal AC power everywhere,) and also gave me an excuse to explore the WiFi network, letting me know such minutiae as the right IP address block and gateway Robinsons Free WiFi used. Hence, even without DHCP, I was able to configure Perlis to connect via a statically-randomly-chosen-by-magic-255-ball IP address. This wasn’t Unexpected. What was Unexpected was what happened next: as I was surfing the Web, I noticed that the other folks nearby were having difficulties accessing the free WiFi; of course, they didn’t have the information (that I had known by simply being observant) that they needed. Nearest to my table were a couple of Korean-looking foreigners and a doctor-looking guy inquiring each other if they were able to connect. I went near them and asked them about it too. Yeah, my deductions were correct; the foreigners (hello, Emma and Jay) were Korean students learning English, the guy (hello, Charlie Atienza) was a dentist, and all of them couldn’t connect to the Net. Windows was choking up on them, since it could not acquire an IP address. So, needless to say, I came to the rescue, and within a few minutes (which included trying to change the Korean’s locale settings to Engrish, which we eventually gave up, and forcing me to hibernate Kubuntu and booting to Windows just to find the right Network Settings menu, duh) I got them to have a working, albeit laggy, internet. I couldn’t get Charlie’s laptop working though, since it seemed to suffer another problem althogether :/ At any rate, meeting new people over this problem was by itself quite Unexpected, but that wasn’t the only thing: Charlie noticed my Kubuntu desktop earlier and recognized it immediately as open source. It turns out that Charlie have seen FOSS operating systems in action via Knoppix, and he knows Dr. Alvin Marcelo (of CHITS fame) and Eric Pareja, and is also quite involved in bioinformatics too. Small world indeed! =) I guess having no power at the office makes for a good adventure, after all. Well, yesterday was quite an adventure in itself (Clair can tell you all that, and more ) Today, however, was pretty much very Unexpected, and indeed I’m thankful that so many surprises come my way. The last Unexpected: I forgot to update my phone number on the calling cards I gave away today. Oh well…

Now Warren Togami, the founder of the Fedora Project, is in Japan. And today I and some Japanese FLOSS developers (includes Kenshi Muto) are going to discuss with him. The last year, he has come to Japan and already discussed about i18n with many people, so today's addendants are a few people. Anyway, I hope the discussion will improve i18n environment in the FLOSS world.

So so so, I finally hit a friend with a Mac to start getting the videos from the Open Minds conference is a compressed state and up online. So far, I only have David Oak’s keynote speech up in part one and part two. The sound quality is variable. Since the output from my camera was broken, when I was taping, I was not sure if it was a problem with my sound input, or microphone so I will fiddling with it. I started taping without my external microphone and then I used it and then I stopped and then I used it again. But you can hear it despite the changes in volume! I may make a higher quality version available later for download for a short period of time. Since I am “Macless,” it will take a while for me to get the others up. But here at U of A a new fancy Mac Lab will soon open and I will get an account and get at least one video a week up. Or perhaps I will get motivated and do most in one sitting. Enjoy!

I haven't blogged in a long time, so I probably should drop some thoughts here to show that I'm still around.

In the past few months, I have been able to dump some of my work on other people by orphaning some packages and getting Christoph Berg (Myon) to do Debian Front Desk work.

To compensate this loss of tasks, I became a member of the release team, so the recent discussions about funding release managers should probably interest me, but I fear the threads on debian-private, -project and -vote have only made me sick. The number of people who have been childish, unjust and simply weird is enormous and would be a good reason to leave Debian altogether, something which I considered a few times over the last weeks. I would surely quit a job where co-workers hate each other that much, so why should I do this to myself in my free time?

Interestingly enough, actual work for money has shown me why Debian is something that should be supported, even if the mailing lists are full of posts from idiots. I had (and have) to work on OpenBSD for a customer, porting the recent release of Gnome 2.16... Well, let me tell you, Debian is better. A lot.

I think this may help you if you're doubting that working on Debian is sane: Remember that we work together to create the best possible, universal operating system. And even if we're not there yet (and there's a lot of work left), we have succeeded in creating an useable, useful operating system, which is easy to administrate and allows you to have a lot of fun with it. And we did that together, in the occasional moments when fighting with each other wasn't that important.

I have to admit that I haven't invested a lot of time to work on Debian in the last few weeks, but this was due to personal and work reasons. In two weeks, I'll have to return to my usual university schedule, so I'll spend a lot of time on Debian ignoring the exercises I'm supposed to work on.

Also, I have been working on a new server I've rented together with Andreas Barth, playing around with Xen and starting to bootstrap the actual systems we will need. This will mean that I'll have to move my mail and web services in the next few days. I think I'll also move my blog to the new box, but I need to check out how to do this without flooding the planet...

After Ben announced the source package to build the debconf6 RC1 dvds, I built them and put them online for you to download. (The spanish ntsc dvd is currently missing but will be there in 3h.)

Please give feedback about your experiences with hardware dvd players.

Thanks again to all people who helped making them possible!

VCS-* field update: almost there The XS-X-Vcs-* field idea seems to have been liked by a lot of people who started adding the field to their packages, despite it being only announced on this blog (oh, you're right, and a bit flamed on d-d too :-), sorry for that). Since then I patched the PTS so that also XS-Vcs-* (without the middle "X-") is supported. This way the field seems a bit more official, please prefer that form in your packages. At the next pulse of the PTS web interface you should be able to see the result looking at packages like polygen and tagcoll2 which Enrico (thanks!) kindly offered as test packages for the new, supposedly final, naming. People who started using the format I formerly announced don't have to worry, it is supported as well for now. Of course changing it to the new one would be better. As a side note I also decided to keep this name, in spite of some different proposals on d-d, since no consensus on changing was reached. The last bit missing before an overdue announcement on d-d-a is documenting the field. The appropriate place for that being the Debian Developer's Reference, since it already contains the documentation of the other PTS stuff, I just submitted #391023 with a patch documenting the field. As soon as I'll have feedback from the devref guys I will announce it properly on d-d-a, I swear.

The dunc-tank project was established to raise money to compensate some Debian developers who are essential to producing a timely release of Debian. There has been a lot of acrimoneous debate about whether this is a good or bad thing. The positive side of it is that the release managers will get to spend more time working on Debian, the negative side is that some volunteers will lose motivation.

However I have felt more motivated to do my unpaid Debian work. During the time that I was employed by Red Hat I was fairly slack about my Debian development work (incidentally Red Hat management were happy for me to continue Debian work so there was no pressure from Red Hat in this regard). Since leaving Red Hat I have been busy doing paid work.

Recently I have started getting involved in Debian work again. I am about to upload a new version of Postal for the first time in three years, I have set up a Xen server for Debian SE Linux development, and I am about to start serious Debian SE Linux development work again.

One factor in this has been my impression that other DDs are taking the release seriously. In the past schedules for release have slipped repeatedly without end. Now there is a schedule and this gives me more motivation to get bugs fixed!

Now at http://womble.decadent.org.uk/software/debconf6-dvd/. There are no images for download because it takes too long for me to upload them, but it should be easy to build a DVD; that page refers to everything you need.

If you ran a session, please check that it's correctly categorised (no need to build; just browse the menus online).

If you can, please build a DVD and check that it works in your players. I'm particularly interested in results from hardware players as I can try software myself. I know that ogle in stable doesn't like the videos but it seems to be the odd one out. Please check that menu navigation is sane and videos play as expected.

Barring compatibility problems that need to be fixed, the only change I intend to make before release is to reinstate the logo in the menus. Then I should upload images and offer discs for sale starting next week.

ETA:There was one other thing to fix: the glitch at the bottom of the group photos is a Mozilla bug which I will try to work around by doing the v1.0 build in sid.