So an email went out to Debconf-announce with all this and MORE information but it is worth highlighting the talks/events as they are great. We look forward to having you in New York City!
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exciting schedule highlights
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Have a look at the
DebConf10 schedule,
there are a lot of really interesting things planned, both during Debian Day and DebConf
itself. We have a great line-up of speakers, and other events that are
sure to make this DebConf one to remember! A couple notable events that we wanted to highlight:
Be sure to come to the
DebConf Welcoming Plenary in the evening of Debian Day. This opening plenary will be the first thing that kicks
off DebConf and will be brief, important, and fun. General information
about DebConf, important logistical bits, and prizes(!) will be
had. Also, this gives you a chance to ask some questions before we get
started. Be there at 7:30pm in Davis Auditorium on August 1st!
The much anticipated Cheese and Wine party will be happening in the
evening on the 2nd. This will be your chance to see what mixture of
fermented, cultured and alcoholic things your stomach can handle!
Also exciting to mention is Eben Moglen who will be speaking on the
3rd during DebConf at 9:30am about Freedom and Privacy in the Cloud
and how we (yes us!) here at DebConf, can be the silver lining. If you
don t already know
Eben Moglen
he is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and founding Director of the Software Freedom Law
Center. Since 1993 he has served pro bono publico as General
Counsel of the Free Software Foundation. Moglen was part of Philip
Zimmermann s defense team when Zimmermann was being investigated over
the export of PGP. As counsel to the FSF, Moglen was charged with
enforcing the GNU General Public License (GPL) and later became
heavily involved with drafting version 3 of the GPL.
Also in the evening of the 3rd at 7:30pm we will be treated to not
only a screening of the brilliant and beautiful and (award winning!)
film
Sita Sings the Blues in
Pupin 301, but also a Q&A afterwards with the acclaimed animator Nina
Paley! She will describe how the process of making this film caused
her to question the wisdom of copyright monopolies in the arts. The
film is under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, and her
distribution mechanism is unique as Paley consciously adopted the
methods of the free software movement to distribute the film. The
discussion with the artist after the screening will explain in depth
how and why, and discuss what Paley and
QuestionCopyright.org are
doing next to encourage more artists to try the Free route.
After the film, at 9:00PM the
Columbia University Astronomy
Department will host a guided stargazing event, which includes use
of several different optical telescopes on their roof. There will be
astronomers on hand to answer any questions about the stars,
telescopes, or any other topics of scientific interest.
There are many talks that are going to be exciting at Debian Day, even
for Debian Developers! One track will be showcasing general Free
Software themes and issues, and many of these talks will be really
interesting to Debian Developers,
so be sure to check out the schedule and come
On Debian Day we are excited to have the Honorable
Gale Brewer speak at 4pm. She is part of the New York City Council and was the
former Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government, current
Chair on Committee on Governmental Operations and will discuss the
ways that government can foster freedom in technology. Its both
exciting and a privilege to have her speak at DebConf!
day trip
This year, the day trip is going to be a blast, a crazy adventure at
the bizarre and fun
Coney Island! Explore the historic RussianBrighton Beach! Ride the Cyclone rollercoaster, 82-years old this
year! Swim in the ocean! See the circus sideshow! Eat delicious food
or if unlucky, not so good food. Or do none of the above and just hang
out with your friends outside and have a good time.
At the end of the day we are going to go to a unique cultural event:
the Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game where we will have the chance to
watch our beloved DPL humiliate himself as he throws out the first
pitch, in his Debian kilt!
Don t like baseball, or sports? Don t worry, neither do we, but the point really isn t the baseball game,
the point is hanging out with all your closest Debian friends and
having a good laugh as Zack tries really hard not to trip, also a good
chance to experience some local culture and to relax after a hard day at the beach.
free things in the city
There are an amazing number of
free events happening in New York City during the summer! If you are looking for something to do, we ve
compiled a list of various events from a number of different locations
for you to easily view in one spot.
I ve been working on a piuparts-like tool call instest (yeah, crappy name) to test installation, removal and upgrade of packages. Compared to piuparts, it s simpler and tries to make it easier to file bugs. However, running it on sid still raises ~3000 failures. So I m seeking help to analyze those failures and file bugs.
The tasks are:
The following snippet adds a 
So for one day a few days ago, I wasn't Wouter Verhelst, Debian
Developer, but rather the above. I'm not usually very much interested in
doing touristy things, but then on the other hand I'm of the opinion
that you can't really claim to have been somewhere if all you've seen is
the inside of a certain specific university campus.
So, well, touristy things. I took the subway to about 10 blocks away
from the very south of Manhattan, and then walked. I passed by city hall
and what used to be the world trade center, but there wasn't much to see
there construction sites are the same everywhere in the world. I
moved on to "the battery", the south tip of Manhattan, and had an...
interesting look at the Statue of Liberty in the distance. I thought
about going there, but the tickets were sold out, so scratch that.
Over the last couple years, I have begun teaching. At first just a
reading group or seminar with a handful of attendees. Last term I helped
teach two large lecture classes.
I know that, compared to some of my colleagues, I spend an enormous
amount of time assessing and evaluating students' assignments. I try
very hard to give detailed, substantive, feedback on each piece of
student work. At the end of the day, however -- at 
After I finished an re-read my epic post describing my first day and a half at Debconf10 I suddenly realised that if I continue to describe the rest of 13 days here in such style and verbosity this would become a book, a boring one at that, so I decided to limit myself to 2 posts for Debcamp and then a post a day for the Debconf.
But about the first half of the Debcamp week there are things that are as usual and there are things that are not.
Let s start with the usual bits: more people arriving every day, evening parties are getting more and more fun and wild (or so people say) and the Internet and power at the hacklabs magically becomes more and more reliable day by day, the cabling mess grows organically trying to spread out evenly and not overload any individual socket, extension cords with non-local plugs appear and spread the load some more, people stress out, volunteer, crash out and repeat. All in all nothing can stop the freight train of few hundred Debian developers determined to have fun. With out own DFSG-free definition of fun. (But this year we appear to be running very close to the edge on volunteers if we run out of those, there will be a train-wreck, so please volunteer!)
Now off to the unusual stuff.
The City is well it is cool and very, very impressive. It is not terribly different to me at least I am used to such structure of the city: grid based layout of the downtown city (with some parks) and then branching out to separate, but different across-the-river districts and then sprawling out to slightly chaotic suburbs. Riga is very much like New York in the design. The difference is that New York is 10-20 times larger: the areas are 10 times larger, the buildings are 3-4 times higher on average, the streets are 2-3 times wider and yet have more traffic and there are far, far more shops, shows and restaurants. Also there is the subway. It is a great thing in that it hides the size of the city take a bus downtown once, to find out what I mean it takes ages to drive the distance that takes 20 minutes on the subway. I like this city, I am getting a feeling, that I could live here without much problem for me. So far I ve only had this feeling in Riga and Berlin.
On the other hand this is USA. I ve so far only encountered one bad thing about it, but it is a pretty big one food. Basically all food that I ve tried so far in the USA has been crap. It was tasty salt, sugars and fat took care on my brain thinking it s food, but underneath that it was pretty crap: there was no texture, no content, no soul. The John Jay cafeteria where we are eating lunch and dinner is better than the most other options, because it is an all-you-can-eat buffet where you can choose your poison and it was also the place where I had the best piece of food in USA so far a slice of pepperoni pizza, that had a bit of taste behind the fat. Also, surprisingly, the fast food options (McDonalds, Burger King, ) are better than the equivalents in Europe, far better. In fact the fast food is cheap and in some cases tastes better than regular food, so there is no wonder why people might prefer it in some situations. So it is easy to see how people just accept shoving bland fast food or bland all-you-can-eat food into their mouths and not think much about it and thus become fat and put undue stress on their health. I expect the average weight of Debian developers to increase by 5 kg by the end of the conference. If you want to prove me wrong, running with bubulle would help you a lot with that.
Events downtown. New York is a huge city with a lot of events going on every day, so everyone should be able to find something of interest for them. For me it was the free tickets for tapeings of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I got into both of those and for me The Colbert Report was by far the better experience. For one you can not get into Daily Show without a ticket (some tickets show up on the web site on the morning of the shoot around 11am), while 18 people from the stand-by list at Colbert Report got in. At The Daily Show you stand in a live line with ticket holders in one line and stand-by line separate. If you have tickets and arrive around 3pm you should be fine any later than that and you risk to be standing outside even with a ticket. You find that out around 4.30pm when they hand out physical tickets you have one, you get in. If not you might rush over to Colbert Report where a more humane system is used a staffer takes down your name and email on a numbered list and then you can walk around until 5.30pm then they let the ticket holders in and after that call the names of stand-by people that get in. The Colbert Report studio is brighter, more colourful and closer to the action, also it is very rare that cameras block the view from the audience (which is common on The Daily Show). It might have also been my luck when I got on the most boring The Daily Show episode I can remember, ever. The best joke was a woman asking John is she could get a ticket for her friend in August. The warm-up act and crowd control at The Colbert Report was also way better: Colbert staff was hyper, security was ever-present, warm-up was funnier and very engaging (he grilled me for several minutes and I replied making the audience laugh very hard explaining that Latvia was like India of Eastern Europe in regards to IT exports) and Colbert himself was very gracious talking to us out-of-character before the show for a good 10 minutes.
Location, location, location. The talk rooms and event rooms and hacklabs are spread out across multiple buildings and there is a lot of other activities going on in those buildings besides Debconf, so moving between place might be confusing for the first day or two. Also the rooms are quite dark that might cause a noise problem for me and the video team as we ll have to up the sensitivity settings on our gear. The video team is working on fixing that by throwing a bit more light on to the speakers. Elevators are wicked fast, but can also be confusing, because the ground floor is on a different number for different buildings it can be G, 1 or even 4. Usually on campus there is a star next to the level with the exit.
The dorms. I am in the Carman building and it looks like its interior has not been updated since it was built large ceramic bricks with very visible gaps (for the interior walls), raise-to-open windows, huge aircon fans that take up the whole bottom of the window, plumbing from the 60ies (at least). The security is weird on one hand you have to give your room card to the guard when entering the building, but on the other hand the room cleaning crew can simply forget to close your door after they are done. Like this Thursday I returned to the dorm just before lunch only to find the door of my room open. No one was around and nothing was missing, but it s still worrying.
In any case I am steadily uploading photos from Debconf 10 to 
This is how we roll at 
The 
Actually I was at the 
A new release of
This evening I was mulling over a recurring desire for a simple, scalable, and robust replication filesystem. These days there are several out there, including 
Yesterday late evening, Jean-Baptiste and I arrived in NYC after
about a 16 hours trip. Amazingly, he mentioned to me that we entered a
train in the station close to our home....and then never went outside
until we exited the 1 line subway at 116th street on Broadway Ave.:
This spring I read a course on 