Shailu is supposed to be a vampire princess but the effect is spoiled because she wouldn't wear the fangs. We didn't see even one Lady Gaga. I thought that was supposed to be the hot costume this year?

So, I m (almost) back from the first edition of MiniDebConf Paris, which was a success thanks to the great organizing skills in panic mode of Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy. I think that everybody is already looking forward to the next edition. I met lots of people, and it was great to be able to finally put faces on names from the french free software community. I gave two talk there, the first one on Debian and Ubuntu (slides), the second one on Debian Quality Assurance (slides), which both went well (I think). I also hacked a bit:

• I added tags and claimed by to UDD Bugs Search.
• I worked on my piuparts replacement (which really needs a sexy name ; I m open to suggestions), processing the results, making some improvements to the script, and filing 16 RC bugs.

If you want to help me, here are some easy tasks that need takers (it s unlikely that I ll be able to tackle them anytime soon):

• One missing thing in UDD Bugs Search is information about the deferred/delayed queue. Unfortunately, the ftp-masters status information is not available in a machine-parseable format.
  • Improve dak code to also export the data in a machine-parseable format (JSON, YAML). I was told the changes are to be done in dak/show_deferred.py.
  • Write the corresponding UDD importer (actually, that s a 30 mins job for me, so I could easily find time to do it if the data was available).
  Update: done!
• Another missing thing is comments (as on bts.turzimmer.net). I don t really have good ideas about how to implement them, so if you want to tackle that with your own idea, go ahead. (It s probably easy to setup a copy of bugs.cgi on alioth if you are not a DD). The CGI is in Ruby.
• Help me process the logs of my piuparts replacement, and file the bugs. I don t have any good scripts to automate bug filings yet. You need a good understanding of packages dependencies and maintainers scripts, but it s a good way to learn, too. (I would need to regenerate the full results first, so talk to me if you are interested)

One of the other things I d like to do is discuss ways to improve the synchronization of UDD (currently, it s synchronized at arbitrary times, while we could sync Sources+Packages just after dinstall, for example).

I'm just back home after Paris mini-DebConf. I'm happy, excited, and exhausted almost as if it had been a full fledged DebConf. That's enough in my book to consider the event a complete success. As far as I know, it has been the first mini-DebConf held in Paris and about 150 people have come to attend the event from all over Europe. Off the top of my head I've met friends from at least: Spain, UK, France (obviously!), Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Greece. I'm still very much impressed by such a diverse attendance. Initially, I had planned the first "DPL strike" ever (i.e. not doing anything DPL-related) for the duration of the conference, in order to take part into the BSP. That agenda has been pretty much subverted by a last minute emergency, by chatting with loads of people, and by actually finalizing the Debian Sprint Program, which had been at the top of my Debian TODO list for quite a while now. Nonetheless, I've managed to advance a bit on a couple of RC bugs, which belong to the "annoying/pointless/but-still-valid" category. They are not solved yet, but I hope to have good news to share soon. Bottom line: I loved the event. and I've even managed to avoid getting killed by my (local) family for taking part in a Debian-weekend after an almost full week of Debian traveling, which is another success on its own right Closing advice: beside some last minute legwork, I did essentially nothing to organize this mini-DebConf, your kudos should be better directed to Carl Chenet and Mehdi Dogguy for the organization. Other gifts such as bug fixes can be directed to the speakers, sponsors, and loads of other helpers from Debian France and not in particular Xavier Oswald, Valessio Brito, Tanguy Ortolo, Nattie Mayer-Hutchings, Luca Capello, Stephane Glondu, and others which surely I'm forgetting to mention here (sorry about that). Kudos folks ... let's do it again next year! (SCNR)

I m experiencing since some time (out of the blue) spontaneous reboots of some of my dom0s on lenny/i386 (others don t have this effect). As result of this, I started rolling out linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 from bpo and backported xen and xen-common from testing:

# dpkg -l grep xen grep bpo
ii libxenstore3.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore communications library for Xen
ii linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Linux 2.6.32 for modern PCs, Xen dom0 suppor
ii xen-hypervisor-4.0-i386 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 The Xen Hypervisor on i386
ii xen-linux-system-2.6.32-bpo.5-xen-686 2.6.32-26~bpo50+1 Xen system with Linux 2.6.32 on modern PCs (
ii xen-tools 4.1-1~bpo50+1 Tools to manage Debian XEN virtual servers
ii xen-utils-4.0 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools
ii xen-utils-common 4.0.0-1~bpo50+1 XEN administrative tools common files
ii xenstore-utils 4.0.1-1~bpo50+1 Xenstore utilities for Xen This fixed the problem of spontaneous reboots for all of the systems I have migrated . until now! Last week I tried this solution on my private system and it failed in some way.

A full dump of the syslog is also available. It looks like /etc/rcS.d/S03udev is hanging in some way .. the syslog for this looks like:

Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.728120] Code: 04 00 00 00 00 83 3c 24 10 74 32 77 0c 83 3c 24 08 0f 85 9f 00 00 00 eb 12 83 3c 24 20 74 30 83 3c 24 40 0f 85 8d 00 00 00 eb 35 <0f> b6 01 8b 54 24 20 89 02 c7 42 04 00 00 00 00 eb 79 0f b7 01
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731554] EIP: [<c1184d4c>] acpi_ex_system_memory_space_handler+0 189/0 221 SS:ESP 0069:ec135d74
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731791] CR2: 00000000eda86000
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 17.731881] [ end trace 7b8af581772a1c55 ]
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.116622] input: PC Speaker as /devices/platform/pcspkr/input/input6
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 18.427607] Error: Driver pcspkr is already registered, aborting
Oct 29 20:51:07 mordor kernel: [ 232.381814] Adding 10000452k swap on /dev/sda2. Priority:-1 extents:1 across:10000452k The dom0 is there hanging in some way I don t have an exact way to get the system proceed from there usually I need to wait some seconds and pressing ^C after a while will get the box up.
Anyways I remember there are some problems with udev >= 150 and older kernels, which is also documented in the squeeze release notes. Maybe there is also a problem with older udev and newer kernels? But why is this combination working on other systems? Booting linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.5-686 works without any issue anyways, so it seems xen related. Any idea is appreciated!
UPDATE: I ve also reported this via #602109.

There is something fishy with the latest "printer bomb" reports. One one hand, they claim the parcels were adressed to "jewish synagogues in Chicago". On the other hand, they claim they were meant to explode in the air. So: why would you address them to a synagogue then? Sending a parcel from Jemen to a synagogue probably is a sure thing to have it thoroughly checked? I don't trust any of their reports. Don't get me wrong; for example I do not believe the WTC was blown up using explosives like most of the conspiration theorists out there do. But they are not telling the truth with these parcels, either. Also given that they claimed there were way over 20 parcels sent, and the security was that weak, how come all of them were found? When they decide to make up a story for us (either for having a reason to kill more people in Jemen or just for election reasons) they should at least bother to make up a consistent story ...

I switched to git from mercurial about two years ago. See here why I switched and here my experience after 4 months. Back then I was unsure, whether git will win, but I thought it has a bigger momentum. Well, I think that now it's quite clear that git has already won. Pretty much everybody that I collaborate with is using git now.

I use github everyday, and now thanks to github pull requests, I think it's the best collaboration platform out there (compared to Google Code, Sourceforge, Bitbucket or Launchpad).

I think it's partly because the github guys have a clear vision of what has to be done in order to make collaboration more easier and they do it, but more importantly that git branches is the way to go, as well as other git features, that are "right" from the beginning (branches, interactive rebase, and so on), while other VCS like bzr and mercurial simply either don't have them, or are getting them, but it's hard to get used to it (for example mercurial uses the "mercurial queues", and I think that is the totally wrong approach to things).

Anyway, this is just my own personal opinion. I'll be happy to discuss it in the comments, if you disagree.

Otavio Salvador announced the release of the beta1 version of Debian Installer, the installation system for Debian. This release is made in preparation of the overall release of Debian Squeeze. It should be followed soon by another release ("Release Candidate", probably) with a full localization update (that involves building/uploading all packages to get localization changes in). That release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who worked for two years as Debian Installer release manager and continued to bring very significant contributions to D-I later on.

It turns out that pdfedit is pretty good at extracting text from pdf files. Here is a script I wrote to do that in batch mode.

#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright: (c) 2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright: (c) 2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
#!/bin/sh
# Print the text from a pdf document on stdout
# Copyright:   2006-2010 PDFedit team  <http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit>
# Copyright:   2010, David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
# Licensed under version 2 or later of the GNU GPL
set -e
if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then
    echo usage: $0 file [pageSep]
    exit 1
fi
/usr/bin/pdfedit -console -eval '
function onConsoleStart()  
    var inName = takeParameter();
    var pageSep = takeParameter();
    var doc = loadPdf(inName,false);

    pages=doc.getPageCount();
    for (i=1;i<=pages;i++)  
        pg=doc.getPage(i);
        text=pg.getText();
        print(text);
        print("\n");
        print(pageSep);
     
 
' $1 $2

Yeah, I wish #!/usr/bin/pdfedit worked too. Thanks to Aaron M Ucko for pointing out that -eval could replace the use of a temporary file. Oh, and pdfedit will be even better when the authors release a new version that fixes truncating wide text

I m attending the mini-Debconf Paris and I just gave a talk about the latest improvement of dpkg-dev the package providing the basic tools used to build Debian packages. Latest is a bit stretched since it embraces the last 2-3 years of development. My talk covered the following topics:

• Support of symbols files by dpkg-shlibdeps, dpkg-gensymbols
• Support of new source formats by dpkg-source
• Supplementary options for dpkg-source
• Cross distribution collaboration with dpkg-vendor
• Custom compilation flags with dpkg-buildflags
• Miscellaneous improvements to other tools

The slides are relatively verbose so that you can understand them even if you did not attend the talk. Click here to get the slides. Related links This section points to various articles that cover more extensively some of the features mentioned in my talk. Concerning dpkg-source:

• About new source formats
• How to customize dpkg-source s behaviour in your Debian source package
• How to create Debian packages with alternative compression methods
• How to use multiple upstream tarballs in Debian source packages?
• Managing distribution-specific patches with a common source package

Concerning dpkg-maintscript-helper:

• Correctly renaming a conffile in Debian package maintainer scripts
• The right way to remove an obsolete conffile in a Debian package

Concerning dpkg-vendor:

• How to generate different dependencies on Debian and Ubuntu with a common source package

One comment Support my work

I disabled my Facebook account about a month ago. See the blog post when I started my Facebook hiatus for the reasons. Now, almost one month into my hiatus, I must say that it has been surprisingly easy. While I do think I probably missed some interesting things my friends are doing (or maybe even did not get invited to some parties; a lot of things are Facebook-only nowadays, unfortunately) I do have the impression that I have much more spare time and that I'm more productive. To my most important friends (in particular my girlfriend of course) I've been keeping my contact out of Facebook anyway, so I didn't lose anything there. So essentially I'm continuing my Facebook hiatus for an indefinite amount of time. I just wonder how to inform my Facebook friends that are expecting my back anytime soon ... and I do hope they'll at some point realize that some of their friends are not on Facebook by choice, but still deserve to be invited to parties and such.

When I was walking past Southbank when I saw some Parkour being practiced. I watched for a while and spoke to the instructor after the informal lesson was finished. He s a professional instructor with the Melbourne branch of the Australian Parkour Association [1] and he sometimes gives free advice to newbies that he meets on the street (in this case a group of 6 teenage boys). From the web site it seems that the standard lesson fee is $15 for an indoor lesson or $10 for an outdoor lesson with a $5 discount for members of the Australian Parkour Association [2], which is really cheap for a 2 hour lesson! APA membership costs $10 to join plus a $50 annual membership fee. It s worth reading the ParkourPedia information about the spirit/philosophy that is Parkour [3]. It s interesting to note that there can be no official Parkour shows because if you do it for anyone else then it s not Parkour so much for all the Parkour videos on Youtube. Also another issue with the Youtube videos is that Parkour isn t about doing the most dangerous things you can possibly survive in an urban environment, it can be practiced in country areas and isn t supposed to be unreasonably dangerous. The outdoor Parkour lessons start near the Arts center in the middle of Melbourne and presumably some of them go past Southbank as it has some interesting things to jump over. So it s worth watching out for people jumping over various obstacles instead of walking around them. They may not be doing a Parkour show, but it s in public and anyone can watch.

• [1] http://www.melbourneparkour.com.au/
• [2] http://www.parkour.asn.au/
• [3] http://parkourpedia.com/about/what-is-parkour

I've been ill this week. The only hacking I've been doing is of the cough variety. :) I think I'm recovering, though. This evening, I finally checked out LibreOffice, to get an idea what's going on - kicked off a build, joined the mailing lists. Some of the easy hacks look quite feasible, but there's always a bit of work to get started. The community looks very welcoming, though, so no problems there. The various Perl bits in the installer/build system seem an obvious place to get started. I've also got an eye on the mdbtools code - I theoretically maintain the Debian package, and have come close to forking it. But I aspire to be writing "real" patches, of course. I've been thinking about where I should put my development time over the next year or so, and LibreOffice is likely to be one of those places.

In my previous post, I described the pipeline library from man-db and asked whether people were interested in a standalone release of it. Several people expressed interest, and so I've now released libpipeline version 1.0.0. It's in the Debian NEW queue, and my PPA contains packages of it for Ubuntu lucid and maverick. I gave a lightning talk on this at UDS in Orlando, and my slides are available. I hope there'll be a video at some point which I can link to. Thanks to Scott James Remnant for code review (some time back), Ian Jackson for an extensive design review, and Kees Cook and Matthias Klose for helpful conversations.

Another month ending and you still have some clicks left on flattr.com? How about these then?

• newsbeuter the mutt of RSS feedreaders
  Newsbeuter is an open-source RSS/Atom feed reader for text terminals. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and other Unix-like operating systems. Newsbeuter s great configurability and vast number of features make it a perfect choice for people that need a slick and fast feed reader that can be completely controlled via keyboard.
  I m using newsbeuter as my main rss reader on the PC (but I have to admit, I read more feeds on my Android while traveling and not working at the PC).
• SparkleShare Sharing work made easy
  SparkleShare shines by its absence. Unlike other syncing tools it s designed to get out of your way, to make sharing documents and collaboration easier, and to make peers aware of what you are doing.
  Haven t used it myself yet, but it looks like a superb replacement for Dropbox in the future.
• Gajim
  Gajim is a full featured and easy to use Jabber client. It is available under Linux and Window. Some features it supports: chat, groupchat, bookmarks, file transfer, link-local connection, metacontacts, secure connection, audio / video chat,
  Yes, I use screen+irssi+BitlBee much, but Gajim still deserves love as it is open the whole day too (don t ask me why).
• Mixxx 1.8.1
  Mixxx is free, open source software for performing live DJ mixes. Developed by a diverse community of DJs, Mixxx is a complete replacement for a conventional turntables and mixer DJ setup, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Mixxx 1.8.0 includes a year s worth of contributions from over 30 developers and artists, and is our most exciting release to date. This release includes much anticipated features such as looping, hot cues, support for multiple MIDI devices, and a brand new database-powered library. Check out the full list of changes on our blog: http://mixxxblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/mixxx-180-released.html Money collected through this Flattr account goes to directly support Mixxx development. Show some love!
  Awesome DJing software for the OpenDJs out there (I m still learning).
• mentors.debian.net Helps you get your packages into Debian
  Only approved members of the Debian project so-called Debian Developers are granted the permission to upload software packages into the Debian distribution. Still a large number of packages is maintained by non-official developers. mentors.debian.net helps them to find a sponsor to get their packages into Debian.
  Yeah, I am DD, but many others are not and mentors.d.n helps them to get their stuff checked and uploaded. Thanks for the time before my key got almighty ;)

Again, all non-italics text is stolen directly from flattr, and please forgive me if I recommend some thing that hasn t been officialy announced yet :)

While preparing for the upcoming mini-debconf Paris, I noticed that we don t have any good presentation template for OpenOffice.org Impress. I spent a few hours browsing Debian presentations put online by many speakers and was unable to find one that would suit me. This situation was clearly unacceptable and I decided to spend a few hours to fix this. I selected a very nice wallpaper created by Alexis Younes, used The Gimp to add a translucent white box so that the text can still be read, and combined all this in a OpenOffice.org Impress template. Click here to download the template. You can also get the Gimp XCF file for the background image. By the way, the same wallpaper has been used by Sam Hocevar to create nice-looking Debian business cards. PS: I contacted Alexis Younes by mail and he agreed to put the wallpapers under GPL-2+. It has been clarified on his webpage.

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6 comments Support my work

The bug webinterface of the Universal Debian Database currently knows about the following release critical bugs:

In Total:	695
Affecting Squeeze:	284
Squeeze only:	71
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	213

Of these 213 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	7
Patched in Squeeze:	40
Duplicates in Squeeze:	24
Can be fixed in a security Update:	14
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	7
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	32

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 126 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributors to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 169 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see Interpreting the release critical bug statistics for an explanation of the different numbers.

Debian so far had a nice experience with the Google Summer of Code and this year, Google is going to run the Google Code-in. We have applied and would now need some help from you all.
In the words of the official announcement: Google Code-in, Google s contest to introduce pre-university students to the many kinds of contributions that make open source software
development possible, is starting on November 22, 2010. Google is inviting students worldwide to produce a variety of open source code,
documentation, training materials and user experience research for the organizations participating this year. These tasks include:

• Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
• Documentation: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
• Outreach: Tasks related to community management and outreach/marketing
• Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Research: Tasks related to studying a problem and recommending solutions
• Training: Tasks related to helping others learn more
• Translation: Tasks related to localization
• User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

I have applied on behalf of Debian and we now need a series of short tasks (1-2 weeks work) to propose in all these areas.
The selected mentoring organizations will be announced on November 5th 2010.
As you can see, this is an interesting project as the individual tasks are closer in size to an RC bug and encompass a wider range of areas than the Summer of Code. I set up a welcome page and a tasks page.
Please fill in your tasks ideas ASAP. You can also volunteer to help as admin and/or mentor.
We will be using the usual communication channels used for the Summer of Code:

• IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org
• ML: soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org

My kids ate eight boxes of Froot Loops to get me this.

Last Friday, Romain and I were guests of the R intergrouplet (what an adorable name!) at Google's headquarter in Mountain View. This arose out of discussions following useR! 2010 where we met Google's Murray Stokely. There appears to be ever increasing use of R at Google, and so it was a great opportunity to give a Google Tech Talk about R and C++ integration --- centered around our Rcpp, RInside and RProtoBuf packages which facilitate interoperability between R and C++. A video recording of our ninety-minute talk is already available via the YouTube channel for Google Tech Talks. The (large) pdf with slides (which Romain had already posted on slideshare) is also available from my presentations page. The remainder of the weekend was nice too (with the notably exception of the extremly sucky weather). We got to to spend some time at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit which is always a fun event and a great way to meet other open source folks in person. And we also took one afternoon off to spend some with John Chambers discussing further work involving Rcpp and the new ReferenceClasses that appeared in the just-released R version 2.12.0. This should be a nice avenue to further integrate R and C++ in the near future.

This evening, I arrived at church for mens chorus practice. I was surprised to see this sign on the door:

Rudy Schmidt died rather unexpectedly, but peacefully on Wednesday morning at his home .

One of the benefits of living in a small community is that I get to know people of all ages around here. Not just people my own age, or coworkers. A few years ago, I worked on a history project for our church s centennial. Back in the 1960s, Rudy was one of the people in charge of building our current church. So he was a person I was interested in visiting with. Here he is, on the left, during the 1964 groundbreaking ceremony for the new building (the old one is visible in the background). I and a few others went to his home one time a few years ago and we had a wonderful evening. Rudy shared all sorts of stories with us which I am happy to say I recorded. But moreover, Rudy was an avid photographer. There were some rare and brilliant color slides of the church being built in his collection. He let me borrow and scan some of them. Here are my two favorites: Back in 1965, there was a ceremony at the setting of the cornerstone of Tabor Church. The people at the time assembled some papers and memorabilia and put them in a time capsule. Rudy Schmidt sealed the capsule and it was placed in the spot for it behind the cornerstone. Here is a photo of that ceremony. 44 years later, on the occasion of Tabor s centennial, it was time to open the time capsule. The other building committee people, such as Jake Koehn, had passed away, so Rudy was the one to open it. He gave a few words in front of the large crowd, and mentioned that when he sealed it away, he smelled some smoke when he soldered it shut. Jake Koehn told him, Don t worry, nobody will ever see it again anyway and they had a little laugh about it. Now he was going to open it up and see if anything survived. It all did just a few minor burn marks. We enjoyed looking at all the items. Then the church placed some new items into the capsule. It was closed up again, to be opened in maybe 50 years. With luck, I ll still be around to see it opened again. Even if I m not, maybe Jacob and Oliver will be able to. And so it seems very fitting that the last hands to touch that box for the next 50 years were Rudy Schmidt s, when he placed it back in its spot on Oct. 12, 2008.