Over the past few years I've amassed a collection of a few thousand images taken with a succession of digital cameras. I'm pretty good at organising images, in a directory hierarchy which makes sense to me, in a few simple and broad categories:

skx@birthday:~$ tree -L 1 ~/Images/
/home/skx/Images/
 -- Misc
 -- Parties
 -- People
 -- Pets & Animals
 -- Travel

Beneath ~/Images/People, for example, I have subdirectories for specific individuals (or a "Debian/" folder for Debian-people who've been snapped but don't warrant their own folder.) ~/Images/Travel has things like Travel/Local/2010, Travel/Vienna/2008, etc. In summary I have images of people, places, and things stored beneath what should be a reasonably discoverable directory hierarchy, however this just doesn't work. I still struggle to find images - for example images of myself might be located in ~/Images/People/Self/*, but in practise I'm often included in ~/Images/Travel/* as well. A few times I've looked at using f-spot, digikam, and similar tools to perform image-organisation (but not editing, or timelines, or anything else. Just organisation). I've found I didn't like being locked into their formats, didn't want them to copy my images to a second location, and other gripes. In the end I've forced myself to come up with a Steve-Specific-Solution. Not for the first time, but I think I have just cause... I'm now using the User-Comment field in the image's EXIF data to store tags. (When it comes to EXIF data I keep camera-generated fields, but sometimes update/set "Copyright", "Comment", and "Title" fields. So UserComment is one I've never used until now, and thus I run no risk of trashing existing meta-data.) I've put together a simple perl script, called itag, which will:

• Index the tag information from all images beneath ~/Images into a DBM file.
• Show the filenames of all images matching a tag, or tags.
• Allow me to add tag(s) to an image (which both updates the EXIF data and updates the DBM "cache").

This is enough for me to be able to see all images of "Edinburgh", via:

~$ qiv --fullscreen --slide --delay 5 $(itag --search=edinburgh)

Similarly I could find myself:

~$ itag --search=steve --search=people

I'm not sure it is useful to others, mostly on the basis that people probably fall into their own routine when it comes to filing, and I suspect that people with vast collections of images will just get annoyed by the obscenely slow indexing process I've got. (Hint: run "exiftool" on every /.jpe?g$/i file..) Still its a simple enough idea and I think it should scale in the future - I can even see myself writing a wee GUI to do tag exploration and similar. Just not today. ObFilm:Aeon Flux ObRandom: Apologies for people waiting on email - it's been that kind of week.

I've been working on implementing CardDAV support into DAViCal at the moment, and the first problem I encountered when I went to try and use it from iCal, was that the configuration on iCal didn't seem to want to let me enter a URL to my addressbook. After I hauled out Wireshark and watched what was happening on the server it was clear that it was doing an SRV request to try and find the CardDAV server for the domain I had entered in. Unfortunately the DNS management front-end that I normally use doesn't support SRV records, so I was all ready to switch my whole DNS infrastructure around (one of those 'round tuit' tasks that's been on my todo list for somewhat more than a year) until I wondered if the magic that is dnsmasq would be able to help me out. It turns out that it can, and so after a little searching I'd managed to track down the magic syntax to do this:

srv-host=_caldav._tcp.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,davical.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,8008
srv-host=_carddav._tcp.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,davical.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,8008

Of course this is a special-case server for testing at home, and I run it on the funny port because it makes for less pollution when I sniff the traffic coming in. In the real world you'd want to add SRV records for caldavs and carddavs, to get SSL for these services, something like:

srv-host=_caldavs._tcp.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,davical.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,443
srv-host=_carddavs._tcp.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,davical.home.mcmillan.net.nz.,443

Once I'd done that, and put in a few more hours of debugging, DAViCal was working with iCal's CardDAV, at least for viewing / editing / deleting contacts - there's still some work to do yet on searching. I've now also got it working with Evolution's 'WebDAV contacts' plugin as well, after a tip from Milan Crha on the Evolution IRC channel. Heather gets home soon with the Apple phone I gave her when I upgraded to Android, so I'll hopefully be able to test against their new OS release and then get a new DAViCal release out next week. Maybe. Hopefully :-)

Terah has been having thyroid troubles for some time now (you can read about it on her blog). Today was the day for it to be removed. This procedure is somewhat delicate. Running through each half of the thyroid are nerves that control the vocal chords. Also embedded in each half are tiny parathyroids, which regulate the body s calcium levels. Losing either of these things in one half of the thyroid is no big deal, but losing either of them entirely can be serious. For this reason, the general plan was for Terah to have half of her thyroid out, unless it was obvious in surgery that it would be a health risk to leave the other half in, or that it was obvious that the removal of the first half had successfully preserved the nerves and parathyroids. Jacob and Oliver spent the night with my parents last night an event that Jacob was incredibly excited about. I came home last night to find him running in circles in the kitchen. I had this conversation with him: Me: Jacob, are you excited about something? Jacob: Yes! Me: What are you excited about? Jacob: I don t know. (He usually says this when he doesn t want to say, but I figured it was his pending overnight stay) .. a minute later .. Jacob: I am excited about something blue. Me: [genuinely confused] Hmmm . I don t know what blue thing you might be excited about. Can you tell me? Jacob: A blue house! Me: Oh, is it grandma and grandpa s blue house? Jacob: YEAH! Now you ve got it! I m so excited! He was still running in circles the whole time. So Jacob and Oliver left, and Terah and I worked on the house. This morning, we arrived at the hospital at 6:15 to check in. At usual, the staff there was incredibly friendly and helpful. And two of them made connections: one of the intake nurses had taught at the college where my dad works, and another nurse knows his cousin. Living where we do, we were not surprised by this. (You sort of wonder how many connections you ll make at a place like this.) The surgery area is right next to the ER, and people waiting for people in surgery normally wait there. Having got my fill of the TV playing infomercials for the morning in the 5 minutes we sat there, I arranged to wait in the cafeteria (which is large and quiet in the middle of the morning) and they just called my cell phone when Terah was done. I was with Terah for as long as possible, then ate breakfast in the cafeteria, walked over to the doctor s office next door for my weekly allergy shots, and then waited with my Kindle in the cafeteria. They called, and a little while later the surgeon explained how the surgery went: far easier than they had expected. He was confident the left side surgery went well, and so took out the whole thing and was confident the right side removal also went well. I went to wait in Terah s room for her to exit recovery, and our pastor and his daughter showed up to wait too. When she arrived, she was very tired but said a few words before going to sleep. Our pastor gave the two of us a minute before coming in, and read a selection from Psalm 139 before leaving. I then mostly waited with my Kindle some more until she woke up. I brought back some lunch from the cafeteria, and eventually Terah woke up. We chatted just a bit (it was mostly me talking). I went to pick up the boys, and brought them to the hospital. They were glad to see her. But then, the dilemma: I had promised Jacob that we would eat in the hospital restaurant , but it was only 4 and they didn t start serving supper until 5. Jacob somehow remembered that we went exploring in the hospital when Oliver was born 11 months ago, and had been talking about doing this already. So off we went: Jacob sometimes helping me push Oliver s stroller, sometimes running on ahead, enjoying himself and spelling out letters on big signs on the walls. We got a whole bunch of smiles and compliments. Oliver was laughing, and Jacob was happy and well-behaved. We went towards the cafeteria at 4:30 and I got Jacob some of their free lemonade. He was complaining about not eating, and I remembered that he noticed a nurse walking out of there with an ice cream cone while we were exploring. Obviously the soft-serve machine was already up, so I got him and me ice cream cones. I m sure he ll be talking about the hospital ice cream for days. Anyhow, it took him about half an hour to eat it, so it was perfect timing for supper. We ate, went back to see Terah, and then headed out. I do believe that these may be the only two boys I know of that actually think of a hospital as a fun place to go. It wouldn t surprise me at all if Jacob asks to go back there. Both boys fell asleep on the way home. Jacob, unfortunately, had a rather significant accident, possibly due to the large amounts of free lemonade he insisted on drinking. And it was hot outside. So I carried Jacob in, and he sort of groggily looked at me. I suggested he take a nap on the rug in the kitchen (his room is upstairs) while I bring Oliver in. He sort of collapsed onto the rug and was back asleep a few seconds later. I got Oliver in, and brought down new shorts and an overnight pullup for Jacob. Put them on, had him use the toilet, and got him in bed. By that time, Oliver was awake and hungry. So I got him fed, and neither one of them quite went to sleep easily but they did. I watered the flowers and garden, did a load of laundry, etc. Jacob had been worried about the surgery, though had trouble verbalizing it. I think he s better about it now, though some of his trouble falling asleep tonight was probably still worry about that. Hopefully he ll be better once Terah is back home, which should hopefully be tomorrow.

Here on the porch at Dani's, enjoying the chill breeze as a distant storm passes by, and the last half hour of daylight, it seems right to have been awake to see the solstice dawn, and out in the world all day. Though after 16 hours, the part of the day spent napping in a hammock barely seems enough. Such an early start to this day, first visiting a small-town garage with Dad, where skype video calls were being made, and then racing the morning heat north, out of South Carolina. (I can't hear "frakking water" on the radio without snickering. Congratulations to all the news-people who pulled that phrase off today.) A long drive punctuated by picking up my passenger, and my own Goodbye Solo drive up by Blowing Rock, looking in the mirror at passenger dreaming in the backseat. Thinking about how, in the flat lands, cresting a long, slow hill, I often feel as if the road ahead could at any moment vanish, sending the car plunging into nothing; a latent agoraphobia. And in the mountains, as the road narrows and winds, I'm always confident it continues solidly around each blind bend.

"Today is the greatest day I've ever known," this is the line that is spinning around today in my head because of many little things that happened. And it's this time of the month anyway for putting up another band feature into this little blog of mine. So here they are, one of the great bands of the nineties, and like many of them, back after a break again: The Smashing Pumpkins, and these are their featured songs:

• Today: The song with the initial mentioned catchphrase. Unfortunately not the official video because in those versions the music is strangely broken. If you want to match it yourself, you can still watch it here: Today (true video, broken music)
• Disarm: From the same great album, and one of their songs that gives me goosebumps.
• Bullet With Butterfly Wings: Another of their great songs and videos for which they are known.

Hope you enjoy this small distraction once a month. I hope I can keep up with it, it's not a question of material, there are too many great bands out there that I'd like to share with others. :)

I ve been watching the June budget and pondering its effects on me, our co-op, co-ops in general and the wider community.

IT Taxes

I just want to flag this one up as a special interest: the telephone tax is killed off before it starts. Yippee! But now we get to wait and see how the government will support private investment to get universal provision of fast broadband. I ve no problem with tax relief for the video games industry being scrapped - why should any type of software get special treatment?

VAT up 2.5% to 20% from 4 January 2011

This seems bad for everyone. It s a bit less bad for our co-op because we have some international suppliers, whose sales tax rates won t change, but we buy a lot from the UK too and it hurts all our workers.

Personal Taxes

The basic income tax allowance rise of 1,000 is welcome, as is restoring the pension-earnings links. More widely, the freezes in various things, increase in Capital Gains Tax and drop in cider tax all seem broadly good ideas. The housing benefit 400 maximum is a bit mixed - how bad it is may depend how lenders react when borrowers get into difficulty.

Business Taxes

At a time when a VAT increase is called unavoidable , it stinks a bit to cut corporation tax, extend the 10% capital gains tax allowance and raise the employers National Insurance threshold. Of course, our co-op pays none of those, so it also hurts us by giving our competitors an advantage.

Business Incentives

George Osborne said he wants to tackle regional economic differences, but the big change in this budget is bad for all existing businesses outside London, the South-East and East: National Insurance exemptions for new businesses. Once again, existing co-ops take it in the neck from another government obsessed with capitalism and employment instead of businesses and work. Meanwhile, increasing the Enterprise Finance Guarantee props up debt-laden business and a new Growth Capital Fund encourages capitalist businesses, while both appear useless to good co-ops at first glance. I don t mind being ignored, but could we please elect a government which doesn t actively hinder co-ops? Where s the fabled commitment to fairness ? Promises around the Green Investment Bank and Green Deal sound good, but are in the future.

Council Tax

Council Tax will be frozen for a year. I wonder if that applies to parish councils, because our village planned a cut after a one-year project-based increase last year. The Budget Document has pretty much no detail.

So, how was it for you? Have I missed some friendly changes?

First of all, THANKS Rhonda for pushing me to do that! I did plan to integrate the Debian menubar for a long time, but it never made it high enough on my todo lists up to now.

So, what am i talking about? For those of you who don't follow debian-www@l.d.o too closely, there was a recent thread about debian.org's page layout, where Rhonda pointed the initial poster to the layout proposals from Kalle S dermann. Rhonda was so kind and mainly documented in the recent blog post how to convert the gitweb theme to that layout.

I took that documentation and sat down Friday evening and converted the layout of my local instance of the DSA internal wiki to that new layout. While not everything looks perfect yet, it took me less than an hour. WOW, that was fast.

Now i became megalomaniac. After copying over the current list archive to an other machine (to not destroy the current archive while playing with mhonarc), I started playing with the same layout for lists.debian.org. The whole scripts for lists.debian.org were a bit more complex than the ikiwiki code we use for dsa.debian.org, but i managed to render usefull pages yesterday early morning.

Not everything was easyly convertable, and I still have some smaller issues to work on, but if you compare for example the following posting using the old and the new layout, i think we can use my work as basis for further improvements of the layout. Eg. i am aware that the new HTML code does not fullly validate using the w3c validator.

Many thanks also go to Kalle, who responded to my problems with the CSS immediatly.

Not all lists are converted to the new layout yet, as a full list archive rebuild seems to run about 24 hours. Also i adjusted some minor stuff in the templates while the rebuild was running, so you will see some smaller differences in the breadcrumbs. That will go away when I start the next rebuild.

So what is next? Rhonda, do we want to see if we can take over qa.d.o? ;-)

PS: if someone wants to generate new icons for the thread view arrows, i am happy to integrate them.

Debconf is fast approaching I thought I would pass on some helpful news: some helpful to you all, some more to us. First, a number of volunteers have compiled this astonishingly detailed list of things to do in NYC, including many that are free. Clearly you can come to Debconf and not come to Debconf. We hope you still do, but if you want to sneak out a few times and venture into this city, this is the list to consult. We are also now coordinating our on-site volunteers and perhaps you are interested in pitching in here and there. If you are, here is a list of things we need help with. If you do want to help, you can drop a line on our mailing list (please write [volunteer in the subject line). You can post even if you are not subscribed (although there are times it takes awhile for message approval. Alternatively, you can drop me a note (contact information here and I can pass on the information.

Actually they're more interested in freedom, to be no longer slaves to humans. I don't think it's any spoiler to mention that an electric sheep does appear in the book.

This is a classic science fiction story of a dark not-so-distant future. In fact given that it's over 40 years old it could be set in some alternate now. Some disaster has occurred and many have either left earth or died. Some andriods, or andys have escaped and bounty hunters are after them.

You may not know the book by its correct title, but you may of heard the movie that is based upon it, called Blade Runner. Like most movies based on books, it takes some of the concepts and ideas of the book but in my opinion is a pale imitation.

I'm glad I read this book. It hasn't aged that much and it's very though provoking. Sci-Fi often uses some alternate reality to put a mirror up to what happens in the real world and this book is no exception.

And a token link to Debian, if you want you own electric sheep you can install the screensaver electricsheep package which draw pretty fractals on your screen.

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• Philip K. Dick Journals To Be Published In 2011 (huffingtonpost.com)
• Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner (kottke.org)

From 2nd to 4th of July 2010 the FAI developer workshop will take place at the Linuxhotel in Essen/Germany. FAI? FAI is the abbreviation for Fully Automatic Installation. It s a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. As the name states the workshop is targeted towards FAI developers. We the FAI developers want to get FAI into shape for squeeze, discuss pending issues like Ubuntu packaging, release management and of course meet in real life for networking and socializing. Our rough roadmap for the FAI weekend looks like this: Friday:

• Setup of the network
• Introduction round, hello to everybody
• Define things that need to be worked on with high priority for the squeeze release
• Start of work

Saturday:

• Work on things for squeeze release
• Discussion: Features for squeeze
• Read access from /dev/beer

Sunday:

• Work on things for squeeze release
• Final round: What did we manage to do this weekend

Further details are available in the FAI wiki at http://faiwiki.informatik.uni-koeln.de/index.php/DeveloperWorkshopJuly2010. The meeting wouldn t be possible without sponsors so special thanks to:

• Debian
• Linuxhotel
• Netways
• Spotify

If you are interested in sponsoring the FAI Developer Workshop as well please contact FAI lead developer Thomas Lange.

Linode has just announced a significant increase in the amount of RAM in each of their plans [1]. The last time I compared virtual hosting prices in a serious manner was over two years ago [2], so it seems like a good time to compare the prices again. Now there are some differences between these providers that make things difficult to compare. Gandi used to not include the OS in the disk allocation presumably they did de-duplication, I m not sure if they still do that. OpenVZ/Virtuozzo and Xen can t be directly compared. OpenVZ is an Operating System Level Virtualisation that allows virtual machines to share resources to some extent which should allow better overall utilisation of the system but may allow someone to hog more resources than they deserve I prefer virtual machines so tend to avoid that. Virtuozzo is a technology I m not familiar with so with all things being equal I would choose Xen because I know it better. Years ago Vpsland deleted one of my DomUs without good notification and without keeping a backup and I m not about to forgive them. XenEurope and Gandi get good reviews, but I have no personal experience with them so in my personal ranking they are below Linode and Slicehost. RapidXen offers native IPv6 a very noteworthy feature. But they are quite expensive. Note that I have only included providers that advertise in English. I could use Google translation to place an order on a non-English web site but I am not going to risk a situation where Google translation is needed for technical support. In the price comparison tables I have used $US for price comparisons, where the price was advertised in another currency I put the $US price in brackets. For every provider that doesn t advertise prices in $US I used XE.com to get a spot price. Note that if you convert between currencies you will not get that rate, I used the spot rate because most of my readers don t use the $US as their native currency (either due to living in a country that uses it or having business interests based on the $US) converting from $AU to $US has about the same overhead for me as converting to the Euro or pound. The bandwidth is listed as either a number of Gigabytes per month that can be transferred or as a number of Megabits per second that the connection may use. I have tried to roughly order the offerings based on how good they seem to be. But as there are so many factors to consider it s quite obvious that no provider can be considered to be universally better than the others. The biggest surprise for me was how well Xen Europe compares to the others. Last time I did the comparison they were not nearly as competitive. Finally note that I am comparing the options for low-end servers. These are services that are useful for hobbyist use and low-end servers for commercial use. Some providers such as Xen Europe exclude themselves from consideration for serious commercial use by not offering big servers Xen Europe only supports up to 1GB of RAM. Prices of Xen virtual servers:

ISP	RAM	Disk	Bandwidth	Price
XenEurope	128M	10G	1TB	E5 ($6.15)
XenEurope	512M	30G	1TB	E17.50 ($21.52)
Linode	512M	16G	200GB	$20
RackVM	128M	10G	100GB	#4UK ($5.90)
RackVM	512M	30G	300GB	#16UK ($23.62)
Slicehost	256M	10G	150GB	$20
Slicehost	512M	20G	300GB	$38
Gandi	256M	8G	5Mb/s	$16
Gandi	512M	16G	10Mb/s	$32
RapidXen	256M	20G	2Mb/s	$20
RapidXen	512M	20G	2Mb/s	$30
Rimuhosting	160M	4G	30GB	$20
Rimuhosting	400M	8G	150GB	$30

Prices of non-Xen virtualisation systems:

ISP	Virtualisation	RAM	Disk	Bandwidth	Price
Quantact	OpenVZ	256M	15G	300GB	$15
Quantact	OpenVZ	512M	35G	600GB	$35
FreeVPS	VMWare	256M	10G	100GB	#10UK ($14.76)
FreeVPS	VMWare	512M	20G	200GB	#15UK ($22.14)
Vpsland	Virtuozzo	512M	10G	250GB	$20
Vpsland	Virtuozzo	1024M	20G	500GB	$35

Update: Added RackVM to the listing, and removed the ambiguous part about Gandi disk allocation.

• [1] http://blog.linode.com/2010/06/16/linode-turns-7-big-ram-increase/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/28/xen-hosting/

This is the obligatory Hello world post. I m a developer both in Ubuntu and Debian. In Debian most of my work has been in the Python world where I co-maintain python-defaults and python3 defaults as well as several modules, extensions, and applications. I ve been contributing to Debian development for about 3 years now and recently became a DD.
Just so this post won t be completely free of technical content
Most of you will have heard that Python 2.6 is now the default in Sid. Once this transition is complete and migrated, the Python system that s planned for Squeeze will be in place (I know this is a topic that is very dear to some people, but I don t care to discuss the history of it in my blog and won t approve comments in that direction).
Of more technical interest, I think, is that the core system around Python 3 is starting to appear. The current version of Debian Python Policy begins to address Python 3 issues for the first time and we now have a supported and default Python 3. There is more work coming between now and freeze time to more completely define how the Debian Python 3 system should work. While many upstreams don t support Python 3 yet, we want to provide a solution that makes it easy for maintainers to provide Python 3 packages where they do.

I know there are a lot of ways to do this, but I just wanted to note what works for me to catch early boot Oopses in the kernel. In virt-manager, I set up a serial device, as a pty . After the VM boots, I pause in Grub, and check the VM details for the serial port (it ll show something like /dev/pts/13 ). In another terminal, sudo cat /dev/pts/13 , and I boot the kernel with console=ttyS0 . When the Oops happens, I get it in the terminal instead of having it scroll off the VM s screen.

A couple of months ago, Steve McIntyre introduced the notion of Developer Certification. In essence, if you are (or have been) a Debian Developer, you can ask for a certificate of that status of yours; that might be useful in case you need to "prove" it to anyone (more precisely: to anyone who would care about / believe in a certificate ...). Some people has asked me to provide such certificates and at the n-th iteration I took the chance to streamline a bit the process (yes, I'm lazy). In case you're interested, please check the DDCertificate wiki page and follow the instructions there.
While you are at it, join me in thanking Agnieszka Cicha-Cisek and Patryk Cisek, as they have prepared the LaTeX template. Some other people were interested in being certified, but missed the announcement, so I'm blogging about it mainly to spread the news. Paul Wise has already submitted a request for proper documentation of this possibility. We currently don't have a template for Debian Maintainers, but it should be straightforward to add: patches are welcome!

Hello You may have noticed a drop in my activity lately. This is not due to reduced interest in contributing to Debian and Perl. This comes from personal changes: we ve bought a house recently and I m spending most of my free time renovating the house (revamping electric circuits, installing new ones, preparing for internet cables, wall paper, paints, etc etc ) and preparing to move at the end of the week. Starting from next month, I expect to be able to slowly resume a normal schedule. The top priority will be GSoC mentoring (hi random_nick ) Now, it s time to go back packing stuff All the best

Having invested in some introspection into my reading habits, I made up my mind to dial down my consumption of bite-sized nuggets of online information, and finish a few books. That s where my bottleneck has been for the past year or so. Not in selecting books, not in acquiring books, and not in starting books either. I identify promising books, I buy them, I start reading them, and at some point, I put them down and never pick them back up again. Until now. Over the weekend, I finished two books. I started reading both in 2009, and they each required my sustained attention for a period measured in hours in order to finish them. Taking a tip from Dustin, I decided to try alternating between fiction and non-fiction. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins This was the first book I had read by Tom Robbins, and I am in no hurry to read any more. It certainly wasn t without merit: its themes were clever and artfully interwoven, and the prose elicited a silent chuckle now and again. It was mainly the characters which failed to earn my devotion. They spoke and behaved in ways I found awkward at best, and problematic at worst. Race, gender, sexuality and culture each endured some abuse on the wrong end of a pervasive white male heteronormative American gaze. I really wanted to like Priscilla, who showed early promise as a smart, self-reliant individual, whose haplessness was balanced by a strong will and sense of adventure. Unfortunately, by the later chapters, she was revealed as yet another vacant vessel yearning to be filled by a man. She s even the steward of a symbolic, nearly empty perfume bottle throughout the book. Yes, really. Managing Humans by Michael Lopp Of the books I ve read on management, this one is perhaps the most outrageously reductionist. Many management books are like this, to a degree. They take the impossibly complex problem domain of getting people to work together, break it down into manageable problems with tidy labels, and prescribe methods for solving them (which are hopefully appropriate for at least some of the reader s circumstances). Managing Humans takes this approach to a new level, drawing neat boxes around such gestalts as companies, roles, teams and people, and assigning them Proper Nouns. Many of these bear a similarity to concepts which have been defined, used and tested elsewhere, such as psychological types, but the text makes no effort to link them to his own. Despite being a self-described collection of tales , it s structured like a textbook, ostensibly imparting nuggets of managerial wisdom acquired through lessons learned in the Real World (so pay attention!). However, as far as I can tell, the author s experience is limited to a string of companies of a very specific type: Silicon Valley software startups in the dot com era. Lopp (also known as Rands) does have substantial insight into this problem domain, though, and does an entertaining job of illustrating the patterns which have worked for him. If you can disregard the oracular tone, grit your teeth through the gender stereotyping, and add an implicit preface that this is (sometimes highly) context-sensitive advice, this book can be appreciated for what it actually is: a coherent, witty and thorough exposition of how one particular manager does their job. I got some good ideas out of this book, and would recommend it to someone working in certain circumstances, but as with Robbins, I m not planning to track down further work by the same author.

(This is partly a repost of material I've posted to bug reports and to debian-release, put together with some more detail for a wider audience.) You could be forgiven for looking at the RC bug activity on grub2 over the last couple of days and thinking that it's all gone to hell in a handbasket with recent uploads. In fact, aside from an interesting case which turned out to be due to botched handling of the GRUB Legacy to GRUB 2 chainloading setup (which prompted me to fix three other RC bugs along the way), all the recent problems people have been having have been duplicates of one of these bugs which have existed essentially forever:

• #554790 - grub-pc/install_devices uses unstable device names
• #583271 - device.map uses unstable device names

When GRUB boots, its boot sector first loads its "core image", which is usually embedded in the gap between the boot sector and the first partition on the same disk as the boot sector. This core image then figures out where to find /boot/grub, and loads grub.cfg from it as well as more GRUB modules. The thing that tends to go wrong here is that the core image must be from the same version of GRUB as any modules it loads. /boot/grub/*.mod are updated only by grub-install, so this normally works OK. However, for various reasons (deliberate or accidental) some people install GRUB to multiple disks. In this case, grub-install might update /boot/grub/*.mod along with the core image on one disk, but your BIOS might actually be booting from a different disk. The effect of this will be that you'll have an old core image and new modules, which will probably blow up in any number of possible ways. Quite often, this problem lies dormant for a while because GRUB happens not to change in a way that causes incompatibility between the core image and modules, but then we get massive spikes of bug reports any time the interface does change. Since these bugs sometimes bite people upgrading from testing to unstable, they get interpreted as regressions from the version in testing even though that isn't strictly true (but it tends not to be very productive to argue this line; after all, people's computers suddenly don't boot!). Any problem that causes the core image to be installed to a disk other than the one actually being booted from, or not to be installed at all, will show up this way sooner or later. On 2010-06-10, there was a substantial upstream change to the handling of list iterators (to reduce core image size and make code clearer and faster) which introduced an incompatibility between old core images and newer modules. This caused a bunch of dormant problems to flare up again, and so there was a flood of reports of booting problems with 1.98+20100614-1 and newer, often described as "the unaligned pointer bug" due to how it happened to manifest this time round. In previous cases, GRUB reported undefined symbols on boot, but it's all essentially the same problem even though there are different symptoms. The confusing bit when handling bug reports is that not only are there different symptoms with the same cause, but there are also multiple causes for the same symptom! This takes a certain amount of untangling, especially when lots of people have thought "ooh, that bug looks a bit like mine" and jumped in with their own comments. Working through this was a worthwhile exercise, as it came up with an entirely new cause for a problem I thought was fairly well-understood (thanks to debugging assistance from Sedat Dilek). If you had set up GRUB 2 to be automatically chainloaded from GRUB Legacy (which happens automatically on upgrade from the latter to the former), never got round to running upgrade-from-grub-legacy once you confirmed it worked, and then later ran grub-install by hand for one reason or another, then the core image you installed by hand would never be updated and would eventually fall over the next time the core/modules interface changed. Fixing future cases of this was easy enough, but fixing existing cases involved figuring out how to detect whether an installed GRUB boot sector came from GRUB Legacy or GRUB 2, which isn't as easy as you might think. Fortunately, it turns out that there are a limited number of jump offsets that have ever been used in the second byte of the boot sector, and none of the GRUB 2 values clash with the only value ever used in GRUB Legacy; so, if you still have /boot/grub/stage2 et al on upgrade, we scan all disks for a GRUB 2 boot sector, and if we find one then we offer to complete the upgrade to GRUB 2. Unless anything new shows up, that just leaves the problems that were already understood. Today, I posted a patch to generate stable device names in device.map by default. If this is accepted, then we can do something or other to fix up device.map on upgrade, switch over to /dev/disk/by-id names in grub-pc/install_devices at the same time, and that should take care of the vast majority of this kind of upgrade bug. I think at that point it should be feasible to get a new version into testing, and we should be down from 18 RC bugs towards the end of last month to around 6. We can then start attacking things like the lack of support for mdadm 1.x metadata. Since my last blog entry on GRUB 2, improvements have included:

• Substantial work on info grub, with, among other things, new sections on /etc/default/grub and on configuring authentication.
• A workaround for GRUB's inability to probe dm-crypt devices, thanks to Marc Haber.
• Several build fixes for architectures I wasn't testing, and a fix for broken nested partition handling on Debian GNU/kFreeBSD. I'm now testing GNU/kFreeBSD locally.
• Rather less cruft in fs.lst, partmap.lst, and video.lst, which should speed up booting a bit by e.g. avoiding unnecessary filesystem probing.
• upgrade-from-grub-legacy actually now installs GRUB 2 to the boot sector (!).
• Ask for confirmation if grub-pc/install_devices is left empty.

The next upstream snapshot will bring several improvements to EFI video support, mainly thanks to Vladimir Serbinenko. I've been working on making grub-install actually work on UEFI systems as one of my goals for the next Ubuntu release, and I hope to get this landed in the not-too-distant future.

again, a short overview regarding my RC bug activities:

• #462810 liballegro4.2: "liballegro4.2: alsa plugin doesn't work with many sound cards"
  apply patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2
• #535260 libdbd-oracle-perl: "Does not work anymore with instantclient 11.1"
  upload new upstream release prepared by JuNix (pkg-perl)
• #573078 gtkvncviewer: "Doesn't start without gnome-keyring"
  add missing dependency and upload to DELAYED/2
• #576463 pulseaudio: "pulseaudio: Support tmpfs /var/run"
  investigate and add a comment to the BTS
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  more trial-and-error "debugging" (pkg-perl)
• #581552 vtun: "vtun: want ipv6 support"
  apply patch from BTS and upload to DELAYED/2 (later downgraded to wishlist but I left the NMU with maintainer's permission)
• #583072 libgnupg-perl: "libgnupg-perl: Hangs on test"
  fix unrelated packaging problem and upload the patched package (pkg-perl)
• #583463 src:libmoosex-types-structured-perl: "libmoosex-types-structured-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #583985 upse: "upse: FTBFS against audacious 2.3"
  grab patch from Ubuntu and upload to DELAYED/2
• #584377 src:libtest-valgrind-perl: "libtest-valgrind-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add comment to the BTS and tag (pkg-perl)
• #584391 src:libdbix-class-perl: "libdbix-class-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #584910 ftp.debian.org: "RM: libgtk2-sexy-perl -- ROM; obsolete, no rdeps"
  RM (pkg-perl)
• #585468 jifty: "jifty: license of */share/web/static/js/json.js is considered non-free"
  replace non-free json.js with a free alternative (pkg-perl)
• #585744 zoneminder: "zoneminder: FBTFS (sid cowbuilder chroot, i386)"
  file new FTBFS bug

How to have a (Debian) summit without turning into a secret cabal It seems rather uncontroversial that sponsoring various kinds of Debian meetings (conferences, sprints, BSPs, etc.) is a good way to spend, actually invest, Debian money. Historically, that has not always saved the Debian community from muttering about "cabal-ish" meetings in very few specific occasions. (No, there is no cabal, in case you wonder.) I've always believed in the good faith of people and I don't think that we have ever had "secret meetings" on purpose. Nevertheless the question of how to have meetings in a community-compatible way is a sound one. Answering properly to such a question is something that it's harder than what it might seem at first sight (at least for me). In particular, organizers have to carefully balance the high efficiency that meetings offer (e.g.: communication bandwidth is higher than when working remotely, people have less distractions, more enthusiasm, more fun!, etc.) with the risk of cutting out the rest of the community which cannot attend the meeting, for whatever reason. Note also that since Debian is not a company, we cannot just require that everybody who is interested attend the meeting. As DPL, I'm starting to get quite some requests for meeting sponsorship, and that's just wonderful: it means that we have thrilling groups of people that are eager to get together and hack to improve Debian! Still, in doing so, we should all try to minimize the above risk; that's why I've started to apply the following Debian meeting guidelines, as a kind of prerequisite for sponsoring.

1. Before the meeting: the meeting should be announced to the most relevant public mailing list(s); ideally, the tentative agenda of the meeting should be included in the announcement.
   That will enable people interested in the meeting topics to provide their inputs and more generally to know what is going on.
2. During the meeting (preparation): expenses should be minimized, as a form of respect for all people that donate to Debian. Since we value their contributions, we do our best not to waste them. (TTBOMK, we've always done that, but making it explicit won't hurt.)
3. After the meeting: meeting minutes should be sent to the most relevant public mailing list(s), usually to d-d-a for meetings that cover topics of general development interest.
   As an obvious consequence, minutes should be taken during the meeting; it is a bit of extra burden, but the risk of leaving the rest of the community in the dark is just not acceptable a community as wide and diverse as ours.
4. In general, think about communication, e.g.: (micro)blog about the meeting, contact press/-publicity to prepare a news item about it, enable others to attend virtually on IRC or other media, etc.

For now, the above is just a brain dump.
Now, what do you think? Are the above reasonable demands? What else should we ask for?
Feel free to leave a comment or mail me about that.