So far, Ruby is the only language I have actually liked that imposes a mindset on you. I love Perl's approach of letting you do things your way, whatever you define by that - Ruby forces you to extensively use OOP. But, actually, it is so well implemented that it even makes sense. It is even fun! Of course, that paired to an excellent introspection ability leaves enough room to make the cleverest (and, yes, most obfuscated) code you can think of.
Well... But there are limits to everything, and I think I found a spot where all the nice separation and cleanness ends abruptely: When interacting to the always nasty outside world.
It might also, of course, have some relation to the fact that I'm too new also for writing GUIs - this is the first nontrivial one I do. And it shows, as it took me some time to properly understand the pairing between the nice Glade elements, how to make a decently modular system, how to properly handle UI (and internal) events... But I've been progressing quite nicely, and I hope to be able to show off my little app to a wider audience soon. At the very least, I hope to be able to show it to my boss by next week, as he is getting impatient ;-)
Ok, but where does it all break, according to me? One of the things I must monitor with this app is that a couple of processes spawned by it work happily in the background while I only show a nice interface to my users. Now, how is the best way to do this? Why, by trapping the SIGCHLD signal, of course! Whenever any of the processes in the pipeline die, the parent (controlling) process gets a nice CHLD signal. I trap it, restart the processes, and no harm done. And in Ruby, it looks quite natural:
How nice, how neat... How buggy :-/
It took me quite a few hours to get this right. And it should be obvious, of course... No matter where you declare a signal handler, there is no reason for you to believe it is tied to a particular instance, or for that matter, to a class. A signal handler breaks and jumps in the execution in the ugliest old-school way. Yes, if your signal handler consists of:
you will note that your good friend self is nothing but an Object.
Once I realized that, yes, things became reworkable, and I now think I am actually better off even OOP-aly than some hours ago - Some of the classes badly needed to adhere to the Singleton pattern and now work with less worries and ugliness. But, hey, it took me quite a while.
Anyway, lets see which new challenges Ruby+Glade2 still have for me. I am sure there will be plenty. And I haven't even started playing with GStreamer!

Over the past few weeks, Chris Ball and I have been working with the GNOME Foundation on a program to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. We’ve just launched today and we’re really excited—check out the press release and the website! More specifically, the GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development. The money originates from GNOME’s participation in the Google “Summer of Code” program, for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google’s program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google’s contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. If you’re interested and eligible, visit the program website and fill out the application form! If you don’t want to apply (or aren’t eligible) but would like to help out, the best way to do this is to tell others about the program and/or put up our poster, designed by the ever-awesome Mairin Duffy. C’mon people, spread the word and let’s make this program ROCK! Update: There are articles up on NewsForge, LWN, Slashdot, and LinuxFR.

Just a quick follow up on my Cross-Site-Authentication Attack: My article for the German Linux Magazin which was translated for its English counterpart Linux Magazine is now available online. Before you ask: I did not chose the image there. I’m still waiting for the German version to be opened up, too, but that will probably not happen before October.At the GPN 5 last weekend (a conference compareable to the Chaos Communication Congress, only smaller) I have held a lightning talk on the XSA Attack. In preparation for that, I actually tried it on the internal wiki of the Entropia e.V., and despite the relatively high technical knowledge of its visitors, some fell for the trap. As that was the only preparation of the talk, I wonder how it was perceived. Comments and tipps with regard to the form are welcome.By the way: The German wikipedia page on XSA tells us that newer firefox browsers won’t allow such an attack to work, which is good.

This afternoon I discovered that the FAAC and FAAD encoders have been ported to GStreamer 0.10, so I hastily installed gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse and started writing a profile so that I could encode straight to AAC files from Sound Juicer, for my iPod. This is where the world would rejoice, if it were so simple. My first worry was that the faac element doesn't implement the tagging interface, so I may have AAC data but there is no track information. I then noticed that file wasn't identifying the files as AAC, but as just data. Starting to panic, I dived into #gstreamer and discovered some bad news. By setting an option on the encoder (outputformat=1) I get AAC data that is recognised, and Xine will play it, but it's not wrapped in a Quicktime container so can't be tagged and probably won't play on an iPod. This is my challenge. If someone can write enough of a Qt muxer that supports tagging so that straight from Sound Juicer I can create .m4a files that play on my iPod without any hassle, I'll give you a free Sound Juicer t-shirt and my eternal gratitude. Anyone interested? NP: Remembranza, Murcof. Yes, again, it's great.

In two weeks, there will againbe a codefestin Akihabara, Tokyo.I'll hopefully be attending theevent.Last year, I fixed quite a few bugs on pbuilder,which kind of speeded up pbuilder development and heated upthe momentum for cowdancer.This year, I will hopefully have some MacBookdebian-installer, emacs-muse Japanese PDF support, andLVM-snapshot support for pbuilder.Maybe.

This is going to be a rant on how doing anything music related under Linux currently works very, very bad. Perhaps I shouldn't be writing this since I don't have the time or skillz to help out in improving it any (so anyone interested in posting a comment to that regard should know that I already know ;-P), and because I've done it beforebut let's just ignore that for a few seconds. Hah. I've been a musician since I was 7 years old (well, a bit less if you don't count the first years where I was only learning how to read music and not playing an instrument (the flute) yet). I've always loved doing it, since music is a great way to express one's emotions and to relax, in my opinion. Being able to produce beaty is also extremely satisfying, and I just love music (in a John Miles sort of way). When I started to get into computers at the age of 14, one of the early things I did, even before doing my first BASIC program, was to play with musical software. I fondly remember some old Commodore 64 program of which I have forgotten the name, which would allow me to put notes on bars and play them, which was cool at the time—even if it would not allow me to put more than three notes in one chord, since that was the maximum polyphony which the Commodore's SID chip would allow. Later, when my parents bought our first PC-based system—a 486DX4@100Mhz—I moved on to Finale¹. As a musical notation program, Finale is unsurpassed. It doesn't have a Linux-version, but there is lilypond. Of course, writing down music isn't everything. Any serious musician would also want to play the music he's written, either by having the computer play it itself, or by sending it to a MIDI device. This is usually done through a (hardware or software) MIDI synthesizer and some bit of software called a Sequencer. Traditionally sound cards came with hardware MIDI synthesizers on them, but as computers became more powerful (i.e., after the Sound Blaster 16-era), hardware MIDI synthesizers were replaced by software MIDI synthesizers that had their wavetable on disk and (when playing MIDI) in RAM. That doesn't require huge gobs of ROM chips on the sound card, resulting in either less expensive sound hardware and better MIDI playback (because software wave tables are usually larger than hardware ones). So what's the issue? Everything. While lilypond is nice, and (it has to be said) produces very beautiful output, the interface is way too cumbersome. I mean, what is the clearest thing to read? This:

r4\< e,8-. r8 r4 e8-. r8\!

or this? They represent exactly the same thing, yet someone who knows music needs a split second to decode the below but a few seconds for the above (if they understand lilypond's syntaxis). In fact, at first I thought that I had done something wrong in invoking lilypond-book to produce that snippet, because I had misparsed the code above (which, incidentally, is one bar of some actual music that I have in my ~/data/audio/lilypond directory) The plain text interface certainly does have some advantages, but IMO the downsides by far outweigh the benefits. In general, lilypond is not well suited as a way to actually write music, as opposed to simply typesetting already existing music. I did actually follow a course on harmonics (although I never finished it due to lack of time); when writing some new piece, I find that it often far easier to do the actual writing on a piece of paper and then enter that in lilypond syntaxis, rather than getting distracted over the lilypond syntaxis while trying to concentrate on what chords I can and/or want to use. It is unnatural, and would look like a Japanese person being forced to read and write texts like 'gaka ga e o kaita' which then get postprocesssed into something like ' ' (look ma, Unicode!). Or, in other words: why isn't there just an input method to write music? There are unicode characters for musical notes, you know... When comparing lilypond to finale, it is not hard to understand that entering music in a graphical environment is just so much easier. When I last used it, Finale had four input methods: one with keyboard and mouse (use the numeric keys on the keyboard to enter the desired note length and the mouse to enter the pitch); one with keyboard only (use abcdefg etc. to choose the pitch, and the same numeric keys to enter the desired length); one with keyboard and MIDI keyboard (use the numeric keys to enter a desired note length, and just press a note on the MIDI keyboard to choose it); and finally, it can also quantisise music as you play it (which is the fastest, but least accurate, method to enter music). Lilypond only allows entering music with the keyboard directly, and then only displays notes after 'compiling' them, so that you cannot see your mistakes and typos until much later. I'm disregarding midi2ly, which converts MIDI files to lilypond input files in a reasonably good way; but Finale has MIDI import functionality as well, I do not consider that to be an 'Input Method' as such. After having entered the music, a musician will want to do something with it. Have the computer play it, for instance, or print it out so that he or she can rehearse it and eventually play it themselves. Lilypond will do neither by itself; however, it can produce postscript, PDF, and DVI files which one can use to print, and/or MIDI files which one can have the computer play. The printouts are great, as I've said before; but playing the MIDI files is another matter entirely. As I've explained earlier, playing MIDI used to be done through hardware. When I still had a working SB16-compatible card, I could play MIDI files on my computer perfectly fine by just using the driver for that sound card. Since I currently depend mostly on ESS1371-compatible cards, that do not havve any hardware MIDI synthesizer, however, that doesn't work. So I have to use software sequencing instead. On Windows, software sequencing is done by the sound card's driver. On Linux, there is no software sequencing being done by any driver, so it all has to be done in userland. In theory, that's just fine. Unfortunately, the implementation sucks. The only software MIDI synthesizer available on Debian is timidity. On a 1.33Ghz processor, it requires approximately 60% of my CPU to play a reasonably easy MIDI file with a polyphony of only some 5 to 10 voices. Complex MIDI files are totally out of the question. And it gets worse; when one runs timidity -iA -Os, it will register itself as an ALSA device capable of playing MIDI, so that ALSA-using applications can play MIDI data by just throwing it to the relevant device. However, this requires far more CPU power, not even being able to play as much as two or three voices at the same time on my same system. If one knows that my last Windows-based system (a Pentium I at 166Mhz) was able to play much more complex MIDI files using the same ESS1371-based sound card just fine, it's not hard to see that timidity really (really) sucks. As said, I probably shouldn't be ranting about this as much as I do, since I don't have the time to invest in making this any better. But if anyone feels inclined to contribute some to Open Source Software, and needs some ideas, these might be interesting things to consider. ¹ I should add that, to my shame, I used an illegal copy of both afore-mentioned programs. I didn't really know any better at the time.

Sound Juicer "We Could Have Been Strangers If We Tried" 2.15.3 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Still very little progress...

• Update for new nautilus-cd-burner API (William Jon McCann)

Ok, it may not be ready yet, it might be lacking too many details. It might even make sense to make this initial announcement in Spanish - But a long time ago, I decided my blog would be English-only, as most of the people who read it are not Spanish speakers. Anyway, here I go.
We are less than one month away of the presidential elections in Mexico. We are facing the choice between two candidates (the others won't really make a difference this time): Felipe Calder n, a conservative member of the right-wing PAN party (currently ruling), and Andr s Manuel L pez Obrador, from the center-leftist PRD party.
There are way too many reasons for me, and for my friends, to prefer and promote the L pez Obrador project. No, that is not the definitive leftist stance we want, but it is a good step in the right direction. He was the major for Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, and his government showed he knows how to push social programs, he knows how to improve the conditions of the mass of the population, he knows he must start acting from below, reducing the terrible gap that exists in my country between poor and rich people, among the steepest differencies in the world.
So... Instead of flooding my personal blog with things that are not directly relevant to most of us, some friends and I have started setting up www.fecal.org.mx, the unofficial site of Felipe Calder n.
Yes, we took some of the steps we often criticize about the right-wing propaganda: Attacking instead of proposing. L pez Obrador has lost some points as he is centered more in proposing and spreading his government plan than in destroying Felipe Calder n - While Calder n has been working on creating fear, on tying L pez Obrador's figure to that of an authoritarian dictator (Hugo Ch vez has often been quoted, although it has been proven over and over no link or similarity exists), on dismissing his economic program saying he only knows how to create debt (while Mexico City's economy was strongly reactivated during L pez Obrador's period, and the city's public debt has not grown considerably compared to what previous governments did), and simply ignoring any criticism to his own project dismissing them as baseless propaganda.
Originally, we intended FeCal to become just a parody of Felipe's official site, emphasizing on what a shitty candidate he is (no wonder he carries such a name!), but we decided to be more propositive than him - We will post news following Felipe's intransigency, erroneous economic decisions and incoherences, yes, but we will also write articles by ourselves, trying to provide more interesting content, something that can objectively be used as a reference on why Felipe Calder n's project cannot be seen as socially responsable, as something that will benefit anybody but the current ruling elite - Just giving six more years to the already too long 24 year old marriage with neoliberalism we have seen, just continuity with the current government's failures, just more white-collar corrupt thieves which never recieve any kind of punishment and discourage people from pushing together towards a better country.
So, I stop flooding here. If you want to take part in the FeCal project, please contact me. If you agree with what we say, link us from your page, from your texts, from whatever you do.

This is the time of year when most Free Software-related conferences in Mexico have their calls for papers. CONSOL's CfP closed two weeks ago (agh, I had to CONSOL's CfP closed two weeks ago (agh, I had to /lists.consol.org.mx/pipermail/consol/2006-May/006443.html">/lists.consol.org.mx/pipermail/consol/2006-May/006443.html">send my proposal by mail, and I do hope it gets in the official program - For sentimental reasons more than anything else ;-) CONSOL is, after all, still my baby!). Yesterday I had to come up with something, as CICOL's deadline was also hanging upon me. Now my attention has been brought towards FSL, for which I still have almost one month to think. And, of course, although at other times of year (but, of course, still clashing with other conferences) we will not have one, but three instances of GULEV this year..
WTF?
Mexico's Free Software community is a small and not too productive one, as most communities in our (culturally defined) continent, Latin America. And yes, conferences are quite fun, it's always nice to go to a nice place and meet your friends. But we must not forget the real motivation for them all: The academic program. We currently have four conferences that try to reach to the same audience (yes, in different places of the country, but all of them with a national scope). And if you compare the list of proposed talks (visible currently for three of them), you will see there is no real difference between the set of talks on them. Please explain me, what kind of incentive does this give to anybody to attend? Just to hang out with the friends, entering a talk here and there?
I ended up submitting the same talks for both CONSOL and CICOL, as running Debconf didn't leave me time to prepare or think over anything - That's not what I like to do, and I hope I can be a bit more creative with the topics for FSL. There is no published criteria yet on what will be the focus for (each of the) GULEV, so I'm not committing yet to them. And yes, being a very active Free Software promoter in my country, I try to be present everywhere - but of course, everything has a limit. I will most probably not skip CONSOL (as it is on the city I live, and it is the one I am most sentimentally attached to) or CICOL (as it is just 1hr south from here)... But I'm still uncertain if I'll be at FSL or any of the GULEVs.
Back on my initial questioning, anyway: Do we need four perfectly equivalent conferences in this country? Besides ego clashes, wouldn't we be best served if we had only one or two big conferences a year?

Debian is love. After my scream for help a couple of days ago, and after a mountain of hard work, things are just running. No, we are not -by far- free of incidents, and it would be foolish to expect it to be so, but we are working nicely. And by the way, thank you, I have been receiving the largest amount of hugs ever, and believe me, each of them has been important. We are not over yet. At least two more days of work, and onem more day of taking all the shop back home, and that only means that the next step in the round will start: Handing back all the lent equipment, doing the travel reimbursements, closing all of our accounting stuff... And, of course, get the ball rolling towards Debconf 7. So... Well, six days into Debconf, I am currently sitting in the third talk I have opportunity to attend (of course, I have missed most of the ones I was interested in - Video team, I trust you to make a brilliant end product ;-) ), Nadezhda is printing 150 beautiful new T-shirts Pixelgirl designed a couple of days ago, and... Trust me, I still have a stressed face - but I am finally enjoying every minute of this fscking mess we decided to put up. Thank you all, folks. I am in Cristoph Berg's talk about reworking NM - And this comes very good to wrap up my post. Debian is much, much more than technical work. It is a social club. I love this social club. Just sitting here makes long months of work really worth it. A great hug back to you all!

Debcamp was really stressing - It seemed we would not be able to get things to work for Debconf. And it would suck. I was quite down when I last wrote a blog entry - Not in mine, but in Debconf's. Things looked quite hellish, and I was _very_ annoyed - Well, I must say: Thanks to you all for the support. Mooch's request has been honored extensively, and it does help. Really.
Yesterday we had the Debian Day. About 50 Mexicans showed up, after we had to jump through some hoops with the Oaxtepec management people (thank you, thank you, you are great! Real dedication to your job, to make us feel welcome and important). The talks were interesting and well presented, and the people left happy - and some of them, left quite late. We had presence from at least one national newspaper (La Jornada and a magazine, Software Guru. Good.
Then, during the night, we were flooded by arriving foreigners. Boy, the hacklab was packed! Good thing we now will have both hacklabs running.
I have to thank most than to anybody else to my wife, Gaby a.k.a. Nadezhda - She has done all the ugly paperwork... Without her, we would all not be here. And later, I would probably be sitting in jail or something ;-)
Seems that the bugs are ironed out. Now I'll try to attend the "Sun and Debian: can we be friends?" round table.

One of the most bitter and hardest tasks of running a large international conference such as Debconf 6 is the absurd process to ensure that every person interested in attending is able to do so.
Before I start ranting, let me point you to a very well written text my father wrote about two years ago, out of a similar frustration after organizing the XXV International Colloquium on Group Theoretical Methods in Physics - On travelling to Scientific Meetings.
Mexico is not a first world country, as you all know it (you didn't know? Well, please take note). Mexico is not a country that gets heavy migration - quite to the contrary, it is a country from where masses of people live in the United States (seven to ten million). We should not fear migrants staying at our country and stealing our precious job sources. The countries Mexico requests visa for are mostly those at or under our economic level (i.e. most of South America) or those with infrequent travellers coming (i.e. most of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa (of course, we have to make sure they don't suddenly become tourists and give us more money).
Were it not for the "intelligent borders" the USA government is demanding on ours as a precondition to walk towards a migratory agreement that could in the future legalize at least part of the Mexicans that live in the USA, it would be impossible for me to understand why does a situation like what we have experienced happen.
We started, yes, the visa request process a bit late, due to some organization problems which should remain internal to the local organizing committee - However, we requested the visas for 25 people coming from Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Colombia, Croacia, El Salvador, India, Per and Russia with a process that started on March 25 - Well before May 5, where the first of them is scheduled to arrive. Of course, we knew the process would not be easy, but we were armed by the written assurement of a migration officer to my father assuring him the migration procedures would be vastly simplified during 2005.
I will try to keep the story short. I cannot also speak the whole experience, as it was my wife together with the Nul-Unu people who had the burden of doing all this.
Once you enter your request, it is impossible to track where it is - INM is a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You cannot get any information by phone. When the papers were submitted, Nadezhda was told to come back in 10 days for getting the status update. Ten days later, she was told no information was yet available. Some days after that, she found the papers had been sent to Cuernavaca (Morelos state capital), where we should have presented them, because the conference is taking place in Oaxtepec, Morelos... No, they didn't pay attention to the fact that we repeated over and over that the organization running the conference, AMESOL, was based on Mexico City.
Ok, no big deal - We went to Cuernavaca so that the AMESOL president was interviewed on what the conference is about and why should we let all that people in our country, and demanding from him to accept personally the responsability of making sure each of them leaves the country as promised. Not only that, we had to go again because not all of the requests were sent the same day, and they belonged to different batches. They also asked the Oaxtepec people if the list of people had a room booked - of course, the hotel crew knew the group was coming, but not the list of individuals!
But no reply yet. The office in Cuernavaca said they would fax the results back to Mexico the next day. That next day took almost two weeks.
With the results already in Mexico, and with the help of some insiders we came in contact with thanks to different coincidences (I'm not giving any names or functions here, hope you understand), we finally got notice last Friday (April 28) that most visas were approved, but a handful (Bosnia, Bangladesh and Colombia) were held for national security reasons. At long last, yesterday (May 2) we told most of the group was approved, and got the magic authorization number with which they could go get their visas. Not all of them yet... I really hope the authorization can come on time, and we can get the rest of them here. At least it helped a bit that we as a committee invited them - Otherwise, people from poorer countries would have to show bank account statements assuring they have had an average of US$2000 in their savings account for at least one year - Impossible even for most Mexicans.
But the story, incredibly, does not end here. Why didn't I write about this before? Because I was just pissed off. Today, I am enraged.
Not only you have to go through a stupidly long process to be awarded a visa. Once the visa is awarded, you have to pay its fees. The visa is expensive, more or less as expensive as the USA visa is for us - around US$40. But the visa is worth nothing without the FM3 migratory document - I knew the FM3 was used by foreigner residents. It's basically a complete passport. A stupid, unnecessarily long document, where your entries and exits are recorded, where you should note your work place, etc. - All fine for a long-term resident... But we are being awarded limited one entry tourist visas. Oh, and by the way: An FM3 costs around US$100... So for the poorer countries, after being mistreated, ignored and degraded, you have to pay US$140, probably one whole fucking month of your salary just to get the needed permits?!
We complain a lot on how the USA government does not respect Mexicans. Just this Monday, May 1st, there was a massive migrant movement in the USA, seconded in Mexico via an (symbolic, yes, but nevertheless true) one day long economic boycott against USA companies. Mexicans speak of the rights of our migrants, of the abuse that the USA authorities make... But we are unable to treat others with dignity, to welcome them as our country did for many decades.
This makes me very sad. And very angry. I should have been writing information for you all to have a good and easy time when coming to Mexico, but that will have to be a bit later - I cannot just stay and stand this situation.

Turns out my blog is becoming some sort of metereologic forecast for Oaxtepec... Would you say it's because Debconf is getting dangerously near?
Replying to H01ger's question on IRC: It is raining. More than usual for this time of year. It's a good thing, though. Why?
10 days ago, I was bitterly complaining April was the hot season in Mexico. Rains usually start in mid- to late- May - But this year, they came a bit early, and this week we have had low to medium intensity rains almost every evening.
Now, how is the rainy season in this part of Mexico? Unless it is extremely rainy (we get a couple of such days in August/September), most of the day will be sunny, and at around 16:00 it will start getting cloudy. Rain usually starts between 18:00 and 20:00. If everything's fine, then it will be gone by 22:00 - it might go on a bit longer, but usually it does not.
So don't worry, a bit of rain will not spoil your sunny days in Oaxtepec. It will make the heath much more bearable.
Or at least, I hope so ;-)

Ok, the time has come: Now I work with my 20" fan on. Lucky me, my office has no windows, it's in the middle of the building - A bit cold in the Winter, but that's OK with me... But the people with real windows have been sweating for some weeks already. Well, design details of a 50 year old building which cannot be moved :)
Anyway... For people coming to Debconf: Be prepared for hot weather. April-May is Central Mexico's hottest season. For Mexico City, it means we have reached 30 Celsius, and will probably reach them again a couple of times (this week's forecast says we will be under 28, which is good news)... But for the Oaxtepec region (the closest cities are Cuautla and Yautepec) we are reaching 33-35 Celsius every day.
By May, we will have the first scheduled rains (although this has been a rainy Spring, but still, it's formally the dry season), so I hope it will not be _that_ bad... But be prepared to sweat.

Hi! This is Comas, the conference management system we all know and love! Perhaps you remember me from /www.consol.org.mx/">/www.consol.org.mx/">CONSOL 2004 and 2005, Debconf 5 and 6, CICOL, Seminario Globalizaci n, Conocimiento y Desarrollo or other such great conferences! Well, it is a pleasure for me to announce I am moving.
That's right - My developers have felt too constrained by CVS to keep being merry and productive, and decided to move away from it and to Subversion. If you are tracking my development history, you should have noticed a new file in my base CVS directory, called DONT_USE_THIS_REPOSITORY_ANYMORE. I will reproduce it here following Gunnar's wishes, and hoping it is useful to you.

PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY ANYMORE! Just in the meantime, while we migrate our current installations to point to the correct server, while our users take note, and while the kind GBorg admins lock down this project: PLEASE DON'T USE THIS REPOSITORY. WE HAVE MOVED. The Comas project will no longer be hosted at GBorg - We are moving to Debian's Alioth.
Comas' webpage (although it is still ugly :) ) is still the same as always. The repository will no longer be handled through CVS - We switched to Subversion. Don't worry, the usage is basically the same. You can use anonymous access to get the Subversion tree. If you want to participate in the project, register at Alioth and ask us for commit access. You can also use the very nice SVN Web interface, which allows you to look at each of the files, view the changes, and even subscribe to the Comas RSS feeds! Development goes on. Stay tuned! Greetings, - Gunnar Wolf

Of course, as in any migration, there is still a lot of things to do. Mail the other contributors and interested people notifying them of the move. Migrate (and check the validity of) any tickets we have in the old site. Point all the places where there is Comas-related information to the new repository. Close the existing project page at GBorg. Sanely re-structure the repository in a more standard and functional way (and hope it does not break current installations ;-) ). Rework the documentation that has been neglected in the last months. Rework the bits of logic that never smelt very good but -as a dead rat- now positively stink. Fixe the things that will eventually stink as well... Anyway, I'm sure this will speed up my growth!
I am very excited on which way my dear authors will continue to push me - I know I'm quite a lousy program for many things, and I know there is a lot for me to learn until I am a military-grade conference management system - But my many parents have written me with deep love, and I understand they had to write hastily parts of my code. I understand their mistakes, but I hope they make them go away soon.

Several people's blogs have appeared recently in the planet with the different points of view on the different candidates and various rants regarding the DPL office - Well... This time I have not yet been able even to read the platforms of the different candidates (of course, I plan on doing it quite soon), but I follow the posts on the subject with interest. The most interesting post so far is Martin Michlmayr's - Of course, being an ex-DPL, there are important experiences he has that few people do.
A couple of days ago I was talking with one of the candidates with whom I have talked and worked in the past. My main gripe with the whole process is that, although as a project we need a leader, an easily identifiable single contact person who knows the teams, knows the people and can speak on the project's behalf, I have not seen much being done by the past DPLs towards the inside of the project. Of course, it's easy to bitch around when I sit in the comfortable silent majority most of the time - Currently I am devoting quite less time and effort to Debian than what I should, although it is true that setting up Debconf6 in Oaxtepec takes a _lot_ of time and that it will facilitate much more interaction between Debian people (which is good for the project) than me working more and better on my packages and on doing interesting team work.
Maybe something that would make me to vote for somebody, more than the most coherent and best written platforms, is for the candidate to admit the lack of importance of the role to most of the project - or to defend how to make it again a leadership position.
Following Martin's post, maybe we do need a Bruce-like leader who tells us what to do and drives the project. Or maybe not, maybe we could do better with reducing the importance of the post towards the inside and emphasizing it's mostly a confidence vote for somebody to speak on behalf of us all. And even this would be difficult, as a sad flame in debian-private some months ago reminds us that nobody can speak on behalf os the whole project because somebody might be offended by the viewpoint taken by the official?
I am no big believer in democracies. I do think that sticking to much to a democratic constitution (where democracies are very scarce in the Free Software world, where projects tend to have benevolent dictators grown by meritocracy instead of democratically elected) and allowing everybody to voice too much the same opinion in our regular flamewars has lead Debian to the communications swamp it is right now. We do have very effective small teams (quoting Andreas Schuldei' term for the phenomenon that seems to work best and appear naturally in our project), integration between teams is quite good... But having 1000+ people sitting in a big room and shouting at each other is plainly not fun. Maybe we should stop pretending that there is no cabal (forgod'ssake...) and admit that there is and it works, and we (the drones) implement Their decisions? Nah... That sounds it would only create more flamewars.
But seriously: Towards the inside, do we need a leader? Have we ever used it?

Today, Nadezhda and I went with jyr and Tigre to get some more details ready for Debconf 6 at Oaxtepec. Among lots of work, we met with Gnaro to talk about connectivity issues. A nice, productive day all in all - If you care to check, I uploaded today's (raw, no descriptions yet) pictures together with today's information at the bottom of my Oaxtepec gallery - Yes, it's a whole bunch of photos, and my connection is quite mediocre (512/128 ADSL line), but there it is :)
But the reason I am writing is that Nadezhda and I decided to drive back to Mexico down a smaller road that goes from Oaxtepec to Xochimilco, through Milpa Alta, in the high and rural area of Mexico's capital. We didn't know if this would end up being a good idea or a terrible one, as anything can happen in our rural roads. Being straight pragmatic, it was very good - We made a bit over 90 minutes end-to-end, and we saved around 130 pesos (10 euros) of toll roads. But the real win was to have some beautiful landscape session.
Sadly, we are at the beginning of the fire season (read: the hot season, where a spark often arises in the tall grass and forest fires break. All of the Cuautla and Oaxtepec region, as well as all the way up Tlayacapan and until Tlalnepantla had thick smoke which took some of the beauty off the beautiful small ridge that finishes at the Tepozteco - here are some simple samples. After that, we crossed an area of fields of nopales - yes, you will get to taste them... But in my case, I enjoyed seeing some nopales fresh cut (first link), some others with the leaves ready to be harvested (second)... And just the shape of the mountains. And then, although somewhat clouded, our beautiful volcanos. I don't know what Popocat petl and Iztacc huatl have that they make me drool. Every time we have clear skies in the city, I look for them. They are probably the greatest symbol of all of Central Mexico - And although today they look sadly a bit greyish, I still had the change to see the glaciars that were lost due to the global warming in the last 10 years. And after some time travelling with my dear volcanos on the right, we reached one of my favorite spots on this planet.
This little road is even better during May/June-October/November, during the rainy season, the way I had met it a very long time ago... The brownish colors are all green, as south of Mexico City towards Morelos, it is very fertile ground. Still, even after five hours of being home, I'm still wholly satisfied at the beauty I could half-look at while driving.

I'd love to joyfully join the hordes and post my ticket data here... As that would surely mean I don't have to worry about lots of stuff we are preparing right now ;-) Many people have blogged in planet.debian.org their travel details - This post is just to ask you: Please don't forget to update your personal information in our system, so we can work on the logistics on how to properly receive and arrange you.
Your arrival/departure data is available to other registered Debconf attendees - If you want to change that, just activate the Keep travel data privateoption in your personal data page.
This should be obvious by now, but anyway: This is just a public information announcement, not a proper blog posting. In fact, I will be retouching it and sending it to the proper mailing lists.

Yesterday, the right-wing PAN candidate for the presidency of Mexico, Felipe Calder n, made a declaration that shadows the current president, Vicente Fox (from his same political party) almost look like a genuine statesman. (some links, La Jornada, El Universal) - And that's no easy feat, given that Mr. Fox is -so far- the nation's most prolific president... When it comes to stupid sayings.
How come Calder n rose so quickly to become a statesman? Let me first go through a bit of history. Not much, promise. Well, I'll do my best.
Twelve years and one month ago, Mexicans woke up with the frightening news we had a violent guerrilla group in Chiapas, one of Mexico's richest states, but one with the highest percentages of poor people - and, not coincidentally, of indigenous population as well. This uprising was very soon known all over the world - And its leaders quickly learned how to ensure they would not be prosecuted and exterminated: Simultaneously with the fighting, they made as large a media coverage as they could, strongly supported in the Internet democratization of the information that had just begun. Thousands of people all over the world understood their ideas -at least what they said at that time- and spread the word. I had my first trip in Europe with my (now) wife in 1996, and we saw many grafittis stating Viva Chiapas, Viva EZLN... It was amazing.
EZLN was (is) specially hard for the government to kill. As they don't do military sabotages, terrorism or so on, it is very hard to justify military action. After 12 days of fighting, a truce was decreed. The truce was broken once, in the early years of the Zedillo government, but officially there is a cease-fire, observed by both sides. The Zapatistas have took the ideas and further promoted them, with action. My Chiapas-born friend Alex Ju rez often tells me about the tremendous cultural difference between the Zapatista territories and the paramilitary ones - In the Zapatista areas, you see indians reading books, working their land, organizing themselves in the Fair Government councils, and strongly opposing alcohol and drugs. Just the opposite from the other areas.
EZLN shifted their strategy some months ago, going beyond stating their wishes for a fair regime and waiting for the government to look at them. I still don't really understand where they are heading, but the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest turns them into a political movement, clearly separated from the existing regime. They do not seek to be elected, they oppose every party and candidate. They define themselves as an anticapitalist movement, located down and to the left - Lets see where this goes to.
Well, back on track... One of the president's most famous stupid quotes is that, during his campaign, he promised to solve the Chiapas conflict in fifteen minutes. Well, it's been either fifteen very long minutes, or he just hasn't had any time to devote to those dirty indians. Mexicans are very frustrated by the lack of importance this man gave to one of our country's longest and most desperate needs.
Of course, Felipe Calder n must do something in this regard. Fox's shadow is a big one, and this little man must try to escape from Fox's biggest mistakes. So he just came with a formula that I don't know why no statesman thought of before: Instead of negotiating, instead of working to solve a very difficult problem, he declared he will unilaterally declare peace with EZLN.
I wonder if this year's Nobel prize will go to such an abnegated, smart and selfless person. Man, we could take this same solution to Darfur, to Israel/Palestine, to Congo, to Chechnya... If rulers all over the world start declaring peace unilaterally, all of the world's problems will be solved! What comes next, he will declare (maybe as Salinas did) that we are a first world country? Poor people are only sad reflections in the sand but don't exist in his reality?
Please, Mexicans: The man is clearly schizoid. Are you happy with Foxilandia? It seems that alternate realities are part of the PAN's action program. If you are not satisfied with Fox's results (who is?), don't vote for this guy. We will all regret it.

Tolimar, liw: Just to give an extra bit of ease, I know Alvaro Lopez, one of the talk's proponents. I am to some extent an instigator for this talk - Alvaro is definitively a Free Software guy. I know him for several years already. He has been as careful as possible, and told me about his frustration when the whole Nexenta mess erupted. As far as I can say, the cooperation intentions are as serious as you can expect from such a beast as Sun is - I cannot judge more, and I won't say more in this regard. I just assure you that this talk will not be a presentation on why Solaris is better than Hurd or anything like that. I trust Alvaro (and, transitively, I should also trust Simon). I do hope we get something interesting out of this talk.
[update] Alvaro has answered. I'm linking it here as he is not syndicated in Planet Debian.