I really like the Tango Desktop project. I have in fact installed a "preliminary" release from art.gnome.org, which is easy when using the Gnome Art package. One thing that makes Tango stick out, is its styleguide. I also really appreciate it's color palette. However, this palette is rather tied to a particular look - e.g. a white background. I was wondering whether one can (with reasonable effort) design icons with a flexible palette. And then have a tool to "instanciate" the icons for a particular, probably different palette. So people in a dark mood could easily generate a "dark tango" version out of them. You can't really do that by just doing a palette replacement. However, if colors were specified as "50% orange, 50% background" it would work out. Or even "50% primary highlight color, 50% background", then people could pick their favourite highlight color. If an icon is meant to depict e.g. earth, you probably will want to use "green" and "blue", and not highlight colors however; these should not be mapped then, either. Such icons might need a "halo" to look good with certain color schemes however. I am not an icon designer, this is just my $.02, and I really appreciate the tango project. But maybe we could think of an icon designer application which makes such things easier to do. I havn't designed icons since my Atari ST time, but I can imagine there is a lot of special tools you might want for icon designing, such as "resolution grid snapping" points and lines, line widths which snap to pixels and such. Think of "hinting" in fonts, but applied to icons. (Or maybe not - if you want to scale icons very small, you likely need to simplify them anyway - i.e. make a separate icon for small sizes) Oh, and of course this might be utopic and overkill. My top (tango) icon wishlist: LyX (because the icon is ugly) and Enigma (because I maintain the Debian package, and the current icon is somewhat boring, just a black ball... looks okay, though, on white background)

I knew it reminded me of something… To quote from Top Gear:

Focus ST. Ok, the name is ill-chosen, you can get it in a sort of orange tracksuit colour that wouldn’t look out of place on a rapper and it’s bound to become the car of choice for Burberry check-wearers across Essex – but that doesn’t stop it from being a fantastic car.

The ST starts at just ??17,500. Which is really very cheap indeed, less than the Astra VXR. It can also be persuaded to do a respectable 30mpg, if you can keep your right foot in check. It’s performance is frankly staggering, it will go from 0–60 in just 6.5 seconds, which combined with open windows, loud R&B; music and your local town centre is a recipe to impress the ‘birds’.

Put simply, this is THE car to talk about in between pints of Stella while Rooney is sarcastically clapping the ref.

What does it remind you of?

While ARM is a very important platform, support for it in Debian has faced a number of problems recently: there was no developer accessible machine for a long time (they're two now), buildds sometimes have a hard time keeping up, etc. Most importantly, there are not enough people actively involved in the ARM port. We need more people doing debian-installer and kernel work, and track other ARM related issues. One reason why few people are working on ARM is probably the lack of a cheap platform that can be used for development. Fortunately, this problem has now been addressed. Over the last few months, I worked (in collaboration of the NSLU2-Linux project) on debian-installer support for the Linksys NSLU2, a sub $100 device with 32 MB RAM, Ethernet (which unfortunately needs a non-free driver) and two USB ports. You can attach a USB disk and run a full Debian system on this device. While there have been some instructions on the web about how to get Debian going on the NSLU2, basic support for the device is now included in debian-installer. In other words, you can do a user-friendly installation and it will just work. Here are instructions. Future work In the future, the NSLU2-Linux people and I will add more support for other ARM based consumer devices, such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices (basically a hard drive with a CPU/RAM and Ethernet, sometimes also including wireless; in other words, a perfect platform for Debian). On a related note, I'm also working on getting debian-installer going on a number of MIPS based consumer devices, such as the Netgear WGT634U wireless router. However, this work has not reached the maturity of NSLU2 support yet. There is a status overview and TODO list. Acknowledgements

• The NSLU2-Linux team for doing most of the upstream work (e.g. kernel), and for donating a NSLU2 to me.
• The debian-installer team for creating such an excellent system to which new platforms can be added relatively easily.

Google: “[T]he online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache.” Yes, I understand those are thoughts on a future strategy and not something that describes the state of affairs today. But if that is indeed the strategic direction, don’t you think Google (and Yahoo and the others) would be going out of their way to make people feel comfortable with data on their services being the Golden Copy? Technorati Tags: google, softwareasaservice, web20

Last week on the magnificent (for people with puppies at least) It's Me Or The Dog they featured a battery-powered bacon-flavoured bubble machine. Wow! we thought, and ordered one over the weekend. And so, it appears, did the rest of the nation:

Dear Customer
Thank you for ordering Fetch Pet Bubble products from Seapets. Due to the unprecedented demand following the Channel Four television program, all stocks of these products, that were in this country were gone within hours of the broadcast. Fortunately we work very closely with Fetch Pet and have been assured that we will be the first to receive supplies as the next batch is flown in from the USA. We expect this to clear customs within a few days and we should be able to resume deliveries next week.

Poor Henry has to wait for bacon flavoured bubble goodness. In other news my 28-135mm IS USM lens arrived today, and it's lovely. Shots online later. NP: Out Of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man

Lars Wirzenius writes that he doesn't like watch files. While it's hard to to argue against laziness (best you can do is probably: "Your mother told you not to be lazy!"), I'll try to address the other concerns. While coolness is almost always a reason in itself to do something, I think there are legitimate reasons to do it. While it may not be the case for you, I certainly think they will come in handy to help me notice new versions of some of the smaller, low-key packages I maintain (the ones without mailing lists, etc). It will be useful for statistical purposes. If enough maintainers put watch files into their packages well be able to easily see how close Debian is to the latest upstream releases. I can't argue that a more collaborative wiki-esque wouldn't be great. But we have this system and it works. I don't think the burden of having to change it if the location changes is much of a problem. It shouldn't really be an often occurrence and the copyright file would probably need to be updated at the same anyway. The ideal would be a system that combines the watch file mechaism with some sort of collaborative site.

<p><a href="http://xana.scru.org/bamamba/employmentlawrumors.html">Clint</a>, I don't know about Belgium, but in the UK, the norm is a month for most people and 3 months for senior members of staff. Of course, you may or may not be given work to do during that period. Usually your employers will want you to document and help hand over to a new person. However if you have a bad relationship with your employers, they may put you on <a href="http://www.michaelpage.co.uk/controller?event=VIEW_SUBSECTION&amp;sectionname=right_employee&amp;sectionid=3&amp;subsectionid=11014">garden leave</a> where you arent in the office, but are being paid. Presumably this is to stop you stealing their data or doing some other malicious act. All this stuff is normally written into your employment contract. Without one it is possible to leave your employer <a href="http://www.davidpashley.com/cgi/pyblosxom.cgi/life/new-job.html">within a week.</a></p>

Finally, after about a year and five months(!) of endless patience, Lior Kaplan (packages) got his account and is officially a Debian Developer. There is now another DD to help uploading packages for the Debian-Hebrew (English at the bottom) project and he doesn't need me to sponsor his packages. Lior has been instrumental to the Debian-Hebrew project so far and I'm sure it will only help to have him on board with full privileges. Keep up the good work!

My too-long absence from writing much here can be ascribed to two, differently pleasant, activities. First, a fantastic vacation in Cuba, and second, the redesign and launch of the XTech web site. Of the first, come to my place for dinner and I'll bore you at length about how amazing it was. Of the second, I'd like to bore you right now! Thanks to Ruby on Rails and a few late nights, the XTech site now has these new features:

• Full conference schedule (apart from 6 Mozilla talks I'm still nailing down)
• A blog. With go-faster Atom 1.0 stripes and everything!
• Details on the newly-added Ajax Developers' Day.

A few more details on the Ajax Developers' Day. As I mentioned before, when putting together the schedule we felt there was a lot of excellent content still missed out (I'm still feeling guilty at having rejected proposals from many good friends and excellent speakers). So, we put together an extra day at the beginning of the conference where we could go further into detail on Ajax technologies. This day, featuring speakers such as Simon Willison from Yahoo!, XML expert Kurt Cagle and OpenLaszlo's Max Carlson, will allow those working on Ajax projects--either deployment or toolkits--to meet, discuss best practice and move forward on new ideas. Although it's a day-long event, we didn't want to make the price tag as high as a full-day tutorial, so you can register for the cost of a half-day tutorial. A few implementation details If that all sounded a little like advertising, here are some technical details worth sharing. The site's CMS is built on Ruby on Rails. Development was done on Linux, with the help of WINE to check out the view from Internet Explorer. The newsletter is managed by the absurdly wonderful CampaignMonitor. This conference not for sale Before I went on vacation, there was some debate in various quarters about paid-for plenary and keynote slots in conferences. Though I hope it is obvious, I wanted to state where I, and thus the XTech conference, stand on this issue. It has always been my policy to maintain a strict separation between the commercial and editorial aspects of XTech. Although each year there's always a company who thinks they can buy a speaking slot, I never let this happen. The content of the conference is formed by editorial selection by the programme committee, who take the scores from the peer review panel as their primary guide. Aside from what I hope shows in the excellent quality of the talks and generally interesting keynotes (yes, we get it wrong occasionally!), there are two effects on the conference.

• Sponsors are that much more respected. When a sponsor respects the delegates' time and intelligence, but still attends, you know they're serious about engagement with attendees.
  
• A higher portion of the conference cost is in the registration fees than for some other conferences. We're still trying to keep the costs as low as we can, but we're not prepared to compromise the quality of the schedule by letting vendors buy talk time.

I hope this explains a little of my position. As a stance, it often creates more issues for me than it solves, but I believe it preserves XTech's reputation as a conference where you can hear some of the best no-fluff presentations on web technology.

My proposal to DebianDay in Oaxtepec was accepted!

The talk will try to introduce people in the many ways to help with Debian. I m not talking about become a DD . I mean, exist lots of way to make a better Debian, even if you type only with your index fingers.

I m accepting contributions. Please, write down your idea here. No IT profiles are appreciated in a special way :-). Come on, don t be shy.

I promised that I would post again stating how I thought NZOSS should respond to the SSC legal guide. Instead I got caught up helping Peter actually draft the response. I was only involved in the first few drafts before I had to turn back to real work, however Peter and many of the other NZOSS participants finished off the document. I think the final product is slightly more verbose and touches on more points that I would have raised personally, but I do think it sets the right tone overall and certainly won’t do us any harm. This seems to have been justified by the news today the the SSC has offered to fly two representatives of the NZOSS down to Wellington on Friday to meet and discuss the document. I would have liked to have gone, but given that I’m going to be attending NZNOG for most of next week I don’t think I can really justify the time off work. It would be good to link to the actual response itself about here, but as far as I’m aware its not up on the NZOSS website yet. There is an earlier draft at http://www.devcentre.org/ssc-response-legal-guide-oss-2006-03-08.pdf which is very close to the final in content. I think only grammar and minor formatting was changed after this point. Now we sit back and wait to see what the SSC will do after the discussion on Friday. All in all I think this whole episode has underscored how healthy the level of open source support within the NZ government is.

The State Services Commission (SSC) (the NZ government body that oversees NZ government departments) released a guide to legal issues in using Open Source Software recently. The publication of this guide has caused a certain amount of consternation in the open source community and even manged to make it to Slashdot and Groklaw as well as spawning a fairly active thread on the NZ Open Source Society’s openchat mailing list. Through all of this I’ve found myself very much on the opposite side of opinion to most other people commenting on it. My initial thoughts on the document are quite nicely summarised by the Groklaw comment that Stuart points out. While the document uses some unfortunate language, there is nothing in it that is actually untrue. In fact my initial feelings towards the document (without having read it thoroughly) were that it was good to see the SSC taking enough notice of open source to feel the need to advise departments on the particular issues that it can bring up. Particularly dissapointing to me are the conspiracy theories that have been flying around. Groklaw surmises that the paper is a Microsoft hatchet job simply because it was authored by Chapman Tripp (a large NZ law firm) who happen to also represent Microsoft NZ on a range of intellectual property issues. I’ve yet to hear a single shred of evidence to back up this assertion and I find it quite ridiculous. Large firms working in a small market such as NZ will often run into conflict of interest issues and have well established procedures for dealing with them. Without seeing evidence to the contrary I cannot accept that a reputable firm like Chapman Tripp would risk their reputation by trying to intentionally mislead the goverment in a report like this. A far more like scenario, to my mind, is simply that the author(s) of the report are not very familiar with open source issues and didn’t do quite as much research as they should have to bring themselves up to speed with the unique IP features of open source licenses. Having read the document more thoroughly now, I can agree that it is far from perfect. I think the single most glaring problem is that it focusses only on open source software and doesn’t mention that many of the risks also exist when using proprietary software. This could leave an uneducated reader completely scared off open source due to a mistaken belief that it is far too risky. On the other hand we shouldn’t completely dismiss the document either as it does raise a number of clear risks that a department will face in adding open source software to their IT environment. We’re not going to do ourselves any favours by pretending that open source is a panacea to all the worlds software ills and can just be dropped in to any IT environment to make things better! It’s worth pointing out at this point that previous evidence from the SSC indicates that they are open source friendly. They have a very clear policy stating that Departments are encouraged to consider open source software alongside proprietary software and use it in cases where it wins on the basis of cost, functionality, interoperability, and security. Given this history, I am alarmed at the hostile reactions many participants on the NZOSS open-chat mailing list had to the document. Quite frankly I think some people are responding far too emotively to the language in the document (which is problematic - but not that bad) and missing the chance to evaluate the rest of it in an objective manner. We have a SSC that has indicated a friendliness towards open source in the past, and I don’t think that they would turn around and reverse their position in this manner. This report is intended to support their overall policy after all. Rather than jumping down their throats and shouting about how poor the document is we need to engage in a civil dialog, point out the issues with the document and offer constructive suggestions for how the document can be improved. To that end, Peter Harrisson has started some pages on the NZOSS wiki where we are going to co-ordinate our impressions and responses to the document so we can present a consistent NZOSS position to the SSC in response. I’d encourage everyone with an interest in the document to read and contribute to those pages. As for exactly what I form our response should take and what it should consist of? I’ll follow up with another post on that later in the weekend when I’ve had a bit more time to reflect.
What I do know (if you haven’t guessed already) is that I think we should be very careful not to respond in a hostile and emotive manner that will result in our relationship with the SSC becoming worse. That means we should take time to consider the document objectively, evaluate its propositions and provide a well researched and substantiated list of suggested improvements to the SSC.

I was at a client today when I remembered that David was due to arrive to Caracas circa 1430, so I called him to his brand-new-venezuelan-GSM-cellphone and I found out that he was in problems. In big, dark, awful problems. As I told in previous posts, he went to San Crist bal (near the border with Colombia) to visit his girl and know the city. He departed from Caracas in a bus on Friday night and arrived on Saturday morning. He spent the whole weekend there, and in Monday he was due to leave San Crist bal through the Mayor Buenaventura Vivas Military Airbase, in a civilian airplane. He arrived just on time for his flight, rushing to take the plane on time, and he was stopped by two so-called Inmigration Officials who demanded to see his passport. He recently got a new one from the Passport Office in Mexico City, so he had a brand new passport with the Venezuelan Entry Stamp (Mexicans don’t need a visa to enter Venezuela)
ONIDEX, the National Office for Inmigration. Praised for lots of people for fighting against Passport Corruption, kidnaps people in San Cristobal. The Officials told him that his passport was a fake, and they told him that, from this time on, he was under arrest. They made him leave the Airport quickly and took him in a civilian vehicle with no identifications. They started the trip to San Crist bal City (1 hour away from the Airport in a very scary road) and they kept telling him that his passport was fake (they claimed that the Passport didn’t have the watermarks, and stuff) Soon their position changed and a common practice in Venezuelan officials started: extorsion. They told him that there were “several ways to fix the problem”, and asked him what was in his backpack (which had a laptop, but he denied it): they were demanding money, and David wasn’t prone to do that.
National Guard. Doesn’t have a /proc/clue about anything. They drove David to the Inmigration Office in San Crist bal and told him that they “made” some tests to the passport and they determined that the passport was fake. They told David that their “Commander” told they that he should be deported into Colombia, since he was a “very important member of a Cartel that they were willing to capture”
DISIP: the Venezuelan Political Police. They were helpful in this episode, but they’re not angels. Finally, hours after that charade of Officials telling him funny laws, stupid suppositions and wanting him to give them money, they left David in the Bus Terminal in San Crist bal, where he was able to talk to Ana, from Debian Venezuela, which picked him up and went back to the Airport. The two “Officials” weren’t there anymore, and he had a last problem with the National Guard which had stupid suppositions about his trip, and stuff (this is common, but at least it’s not illegal) before he was able to get into the plane. Being in Caracas, I was really worried. Between Ana, my mother and me we were able to move several people to check David status in the Airport (my mother called four members of the Venezuelan FAA, I called the Venezuelan CIA and Ana called the Vicechancellor) and this probably saved David’s life and money, since the “Officials” might have been scared by the movement of people caring about David. He’s safe now, back in Caracas, in home. He has all his stuff and his health is OK (yet he was scared when he arrived, which I fully understand) Why am I writing this post? I’m really concerned about what happened to David, and I want to make a public statement on this. Somehow, we venezuelans got used to this kind of practices in our Country. Probably 40 years of pseudo-democracy with messy governors helped, maybe it’s a matter of education and culture. I don’t really care about this, but I do care about what they’re doing with the people in my Country. Today, President Chavez declared that a dance against corruption was going to start. I think it’s the fourth time he’s making something about corruption, and he’s failing. There’s a gang of people in San Cristobal, Mr. President, who tries to rob and scare the visitors. They should be in jail. They arrested somebody illegally. It’s forbidden in our Constitution to arrest somebody without having proofs to do it (we have one of the best Constitutions in the World, experts say, but we don’t have people who obey it). If you’re going to arrest an alien, you need to have a Public Prosecutor in place, writing down a legal document and guaranteeing the safety of the detained. This people should be in jail.
Stop Corruption! Though, as my mother later said to David, two awful Venezuelan people kidnapped David, but probably twenty Venezuelan people quickly acted to find out what was happening. We might be a Third World Country, but we use to be able to get out of our problems by our own. And, hell it’s rewarding. I want to apologize in the name of all venezuelans to David and to make a clear statement against corruption: we venezuelan won’t tolerate more corruption. We’ve grown between that, buying places in a line to get our National ID Card, paying one million bolivares to get a Passport appointment. We’re sick of this. This is not the great Venezuela we live in. Please, losers, shoot yourselves. Or eat rat poison, whichever makes less stains.

Lars Wirzenius writes that he doesn't like watch files. While it's hard to to argue against laziness (best you can do is probably: "Your mother told you not to be lazy!"), I'll try to address the other concerns. While coolness is almost always a reason in itself to do something, I think there are legitimate reasons to do it. While it may not be the case for you, I certainly think they will come in handy to help me notice new versions of some of the smaller, low-key packages I maintain (the ones without mailing lists, etc). It will be useful for statistical purposes. If enough maintainers put watch files into their packages well be able to easily see how close Debian is to the latest upstream releases. I can't argue that a more collaborative wiki-esque wouldn't be great. But we have this system and it works. I don't think the burden of having to change it if the location changes is much of a problem. It shouldn't really be an often occurrence and the copyright file would probably need to be updated at the same anyway. The ideal would be a system that combines the watch file mechaism with some sort of collaborative site.

My proposal to DebianDay in Oaxtepec was accepted!

The talk will try to introduce people in the many ways to help with Debian. I m not talking about become a DD . I mean, exist lots of way to make a better Debian, even if you type only with your index fingers.

I m accepting contributions. Please, write down your idea here. No IT profiles are appreciated in a special way :-). Come on, don t be shy.

New versions of Drupal are out for the 4.5.x, the 4.6.x and the 4.7.0-beta branches which fix 4 (in words: four) security issues from four different categories, namely: access control bypassing, cross-site scripting, session fixation, and mail header injection. All the gory details are available in the release announcement and the four advisories: DRUPAL-SA-2006-001, DRUPAL-SA-2006-002, DRUPAL-SA-2006-003, and DRUPAL-SA-2006-004. Upgrade now! Warning: If you're using 4.5.x, the patches for DRUPAL-SA-2006-003 will not fix the security issue immediately. You have two options: a) upgrade to 4.6.6 instead of 4.5.8, or b) upgrade to PHP >= 4.3.2.