A little caveat. Find doesn’t seem to like symlinks. Since /media/cdrom is a symlink to /media/cdrom0, using /media/cdrom0 with find will work. I spent far too much time figuring this out.

frodo$ cd /media/cdrom
frodo$ find  pwd  -iname '*.jpg'
# hmmm, there are images here.
frodo$ find . -iname '*.jpg' # this works ...
./common/0.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec1.jpg
./common/clip_art/e_mail/75/ec2.jpg
...

Another reason to sigh about this FHS /media schema.

fd.o's CVS migration is finally complete. CVS has moved from gabe.freedesktop.org (formerly 'the freedesktop.org machine') to kemper.freedesktop.org, a new secure host. Anonymouse CVS and ViewCVS now run on annarchy.freedesktop.org.

This means that, technically, you should now be committing to:
username@cvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/reponame
and checking out anonymously from:
:pserver:anoncvs@anoncvs.freedesktop.org:/cvs/reponame

Anything using '@freedesktop.org' or '@pdx.freedesktop.org' is incorrect and may, at some point in the future, stop working. Anything using '@cvs.freedesktop.org' is incorrect, but will probably keep working for the time being. The canonical URL for ViewCVS is now http://webcvs.freedesktop.org; cvs.freedesktop.org will probably keep issuing 302s, but that too may disappear at some point in the future, so update your URLs.

Some code has moved to GIT, too. I can't remember exactly what the process for committing there is, but the process for checking out is:
git-clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/modulename

The pserver redirection to anoncvs.fd.o wasn't working for a while. I'll post what I did, and see if you can figure out why:
root@kemper:~% iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -d kemper.freedesktop.org -p tcp --dport cvspserver -j DNAT --to-dest 131.252.208.36:2401

Following up on my other posts about new unix tools, I've uploaded the moreutils package to Incoming and alioth. Currently it includes isutf8, sponge, vidir, ts (timestamps stdout) and vipe (discussed below). Hopefully this collection will grow to include other useful unix tools no-one thought to write 30 years ago.

---

vipe is my new personal best at writing a generic unix tool. It allows you to edit the contents of a pipe in a text editor. For example: find foo -type f vipe xargs rm Sorta handy as a way to make ad-hoc changes to data in a pipeline, or even just to examine it.

A couple weeks ago I was going to lunch and met up with one of my friends who I hadn't seen in a while. I had to wait for her to finish her TAing job, in the same lab that I once taught in. I was surprised at my reaction - I wanted to jump right into the room and start helping out. I restrained myself, but it gave me a good reminder of what my actual goal is in grad school. I want to be a professor - I wasn't sure when I started here at the U of M, but after two or three teaching sessions I was certain I was going to teach. It probably helped that it was a class which I have a good amount of experience teaching, being one of the classes I helped with for 3 semesters. Lately I've been trying to remember why I am going through with it all in order to get the Ph.D, and seeing that class was a good reminder. It makes me think that I might want to request a Teaching Assistant job every year or so just to keep me on the right track towards something. Unfortunately, I think if I want to finish in a reasonable amount of time, I will need to focus 100 percent on the thesis before long.

I have again worked on the automatic package build, test and publishing process for clamav-data, which runs twice an hour on a volatile.debian.net host. Details of the process are described in VUA 2-2 on debian-volatile-announce The “backup” copy on http://people.debian.org/~zugschlus/clamav-data now has accurate mtimes in the directory, and actually the last three published packages are available from here. The rsync process was previously broken in a way that only the current package and two older ones from middle of July (from before the automatisms were in place) were available there. The publish process now barfs if the specially hacked katie which is used to move the new clamav-data package into volatile.debian.net without a maintainer signature leaves the publication directory (which is to be considered part of queue/unchecked for katie’s environment) in a non-empty stage. This will hopefully catch more katie errors than the parsing of katie’s output, which is of course still being done. After a new package has been built and sucessfully published, the package build directory is cleaned up. All files belonging to changes files older than 60 days are deleted to keep the disk from filling up badly. But that’s an internal matter only which you shouldn’t be noticing at all. Additionally, after the last changes, I have hiked up the verbosity level of the package build process for a while so that I can notice when the new process dies or encounters new challenges. That shouldn’t be noticeable outside my personal mailbox though. One issue that is still left is that the automatic clean up of the Pool doesn’t seem to work for source packages. Binary packages that are not referenced by any Packages file are supposed to be removed after 15 days, but the source packages seem to stay around. I cannot do anything about that, and am targetting aba on this issue.

I've often wondered why people still run Windows? When I ask folks, sometimes I get comments of "I tried Linux 4 or 5 years ago, and it seemed too hard.", or "I just couldn't do without the latest features in application FOO.". These comments have always struct me as odd - As far as I can tell, GNU/Linux with Gnome is at about the state that Windows was, say, 1997 or 1998. While it's probably a step back in terms of raw functionality, it's incredibly usable. I think today, I've figured out the real reason why people run windows; The problem is, I think, reflective of a real problem with our thinking in general: Is it possible that people are simply unwilling to give up the idea that the world around them should protect them from themselves? It would explain recent trends in North American and Western European government elections, magazines that talk about how our cancer rates, death rates and such are all other people's problems. Maybe it's time for us all to buck up and take some responsibility for our lives. If I'm out of shape, perhaps I haven't gotten off my ass and worked out in the past week. Maybe if this winter weather is unusual, I should stop driving the car and find a gym closer to me. Maybe if the world out there feels a bit dangerous, it's because I'm not willing to go out and meet my neighbours and become friends and build real local community. Maybe I can remember to make a difference.

Whilst ambling around on the web after seeing a post on reddit.com that piqued my curiousity, I happened on some work discussing "maximizers and satisficers", which, put crudely, says that there are two kinds of people. Those who, out of a group of options want the best one - maximizers - and those who just want something that will work - satisficers. Anyone who has been around programming languages more than, say, a week, will instantly recognize the above theme in the endless discussions of "which programming language is best?", or more generally, which "X" is best? I'd be willing to bet that programmers, and especially open source programmers, tend towards the 'maximizers' end of the spectrum - I don't want just any old X, I want the best one, dammit! Sometimes, this can be a good thing, as it leads us to continuously seek to improve things we come into contact with, or try new approaches, it can also be detrimental if your goal is simply to accomplish some task, rather than spending too much time fretting about finding the perfect tools to accomplish the task with. This also has ramifications for people designing or dealing with programming languages. One of the papers (the original?) on the subject (here), actually deals with the fact that maximizers, in their search for perfection tend to be less happy. Where satisficers are happy because they've got something that works, and they can go on to something else, maximizers have lots of room for "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" about their choices. In some instances, actually reducing people's choices makes them happier. Python's "one good way to do it" makes everyone happy, because both maximizers and satisficers know that they're doing things right, and don't have room to worry. Another example that I know well from my involvement in the Tcl community is "object systems for Tcl". For those who don't know Tcl well, it's an extremely flexible, extensible language, both in the language itself and in terms of its C API. So flexible, in fact, that you can write an OO system in Tcl itself, which has been done, or in C, which has also been done several times, leading to a proliferation of OO systems, and a never-ending stream of questions on the newsgroup about which is the best one? Perl's "there's more than one way to do it", despite apparently providing and pushing choice, may actually work well because it encourages people to be satisficers and use whatever works. I'm sure everyone can think of examples where too much choice causes doubts and hesitation. I think the lesson to be learned is that while it's important to encourage experimentation in order to explore possible solutions to problems, at a certain point it makes sense to consolidate and provide one or two recommended ways of doing something. That's not always possible (Linux distributions, for instance), and squashing competing ideas too early might cause friction with people generating innovation, so it can be difficult to accomplish, but I believe it's an important social aspect of software creation to keep in mind.

Whew! Wow! Yay! It’s been just a couple of days since the Bicol Open Source Forum was held at the Aquinas University, but I can’t just seem to forget it. It’s been a rocking experience, and I wished it were a bit longer:

• I met Irvin (at last) who also gave my a copy of Dapper Flight 3. \o/ Together with Rick, we gave away lots of Ubuntu CDs at the event (I practically went back home to Daet with an empty box
• I also got to chat with fellow speakers Rick Bahague Jr. of CP-Union who presented the state of FOSS and Rage Callao of ASTI-DOST who is working on the Philippines’ very own Bayanihan Linux. Both are really cool guys in their own right, and they also are Debian/Ubuntu users too! Rage was also kind enough to give me his own 16-CD Debian Sarge collection (plus Bayanihan 3.1 and Thin Client Manager); Thanks a lot!!!
• I was surprised at the number of people who attended the forum, as well as their attention to detail during the presentations, and most of all, in their line of questioning: these were mostly non-technical management people, and they all seem to use GNU/Linux in its various incarnations for quite some time now. I hope that these people would continue their adventure into FOSS; especially with (both) regional and local government support, I’m quite excited to see what holds for FOSS in Bicol in the future
• I got involved in the founding of the Bicol Open Source Society that would serve as the overseer and motivator for FOSS projects and events here in Bicol. Included in the org are folks from academe and local govenrment units, and we’re set to have an online meeting sometime next week. Of course, we’re composed of a small number of people for now, but I expect that with some additional visibility (starting with making a new mailing list) I think a lot of Bicolanos in the region and elsewhere will be very interested in joining. Hopefully there would be provincial LUGs soon, and I think this would be a very good prospect for a PLUG roadshow.
• I got to see Bulkang Mayon and the Cagsawa Ruins too with Rick and the DOST folks at the day after the event (too bad Rage had to go ahead.) A couple of van-rides later and I’m back home, trying out a Dapper upgrade, and quite tired but happy.

Thanks a lot to Joseph Cadag and Josephina Abilay of DOST/RITECC for organizing the event and bringing FOSS to the attention of many Bicolanos I look forward for another event like this soon: from what I hear there would be an even bigger one set for July. I guess I should be pinging Marilize of Ubuntu now to reserve some flyers and CDs… …but right now, on the the Dapper upgrade! Break my Breezy and lemme have my jigsaw puzzle

Throughout the last couple of years, I've had some bad decisions. I decided to start using my credit to work for me, and to buy things which I couldn't afford. Partly this was because I had a horrible ex, who I thought I should do things for, and partly because of just living outside of my means for a certain period of time. The long and short of it is, I've gotten myself into a bit of credit card debt. I'm not in any big trouble, just needing to pay it down so that I can get on with using that money for other things. There is a couple of web applications that I have in the works which will help me remind myself, but that's neither here nor there at this point. So, I have all of this credit at high interest rates, surely there is someone out there that will look at my credit and finance it at a lower rate, make some money off of me, right? I'm thinking that what I need is a consolidation loan - something to lump together my credit card debt and give me one monthly payment. What I call this, is debt consolidation. Thinking we are in the age of the internet, I type "debt consolidation" into google and give it a try. This is my first mistake. Apparently "debt consolidation" doesn't mean that you are consolidating your debt, it instead means that you are going into what I would call debt negotiation. This means you decide of your own volition that you are going to stop paying your bills, and try to negotiate with the credit card companies to pay off your debt at a fraction of your actual debt. But I don't know this, so I nievely fill out a couple of forms at "debt consolidation" sites. This gets pretty long, so I put in a break. Read on, MacDuff. The Scam The first people who got in contact with me were some people from Credit Solutions. Let me be clear on this: I'm not making broad generalizations about the company here - I can only speak of my own experiences. The person who I got on the phone went through a whole spiel, "explaining" how it works. He was very high-pressure and very fast talking, just from the start I didn't want to buy anything from him because he seemed like a used car salesman who decided that it was better to make money from nothing than from goods. Here's the explanation he gave me: You've probably been paying your cards down already, so you've paid 70-100% of the cost of your original loan. You stopped paying your cards, wait 3 months, and then they start negotiating with their "powerhouse lawyers". Then they negotiate you to pay your debt at 40-60% of the current balance, and the credit card companies get to take the remaining 40% as a tax loss. Now is when the math gets strange. The man on the phone attempted to say that this meant that the credit card company got 140% of the current balance. This doesn't make sense to me, especially because I'm a smart credit card consumer, and most of my debt is on 0% APR promotional rate cards. This means that they have made at most 3% of the balance from me, based on balance transfer fees. The man on the phone tried to dance around the issue, saying that they actually will get the 40% tax loss and that means they'll still get 140%. 140%? This doesn't make sense - 60% plus 40% is 100%, not 140%. Lets add to this that a tax loss is not the same as profit: a tax loss only gets you like, 30% of your loss. At this point, I've decided that I'm being taken for a ride already, but I ask how it works anyway. Here's how this particular company is setup: I pay into a savings account (of my own), automatically deposit around $200 a month, and they take money out. For the first three months, they take the WHOLE amount. After that, they take half the amount, and leave the other half. They then start negotiating with your creditors, and when they make a deal, they tell you "pay them now". In the end, they take 15% of the settled cost of your debt. On $6k settled debt, this is another $900. I really didn't want to do it now, mostly because of the high cost. The man kept coming back to my objections with "you can't borrow your way out of debt". Of course you can't borrow your way out of debt. That's stupid. I wasn't planning on borrowing money and then ending up with less debt. I was planning on borrowing money so that I'm not paying so much in order to have the debt. Apparently he thought I was an idiot, because he kept repeating it to me. He sent me a little packet of stuff, which laid out the whole plan. After that, he gave me a call back. This is when I got really defensive. I asked him point blank: "What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I go with this plan?" His answer: "You stop paying your bills." On the surface, this is true. The worst thing that can happen is that I stop paying my credit card bills. He neglected to mention the fact that ceasing payment on my credit cards would ruin my credit, cause insane fees for lateness, and possibly send me to forced arbitration with the creditors. Every creditor that I have ever had since 2002 has had an arbitration agreement, which basically would end up in garnishment of wages. The Scum About a week after my first bad experience with a debt "consolidation" company, I got a second call from a completely separate company. They introduced themselves on the phone as "Christian Financial Services" or some such. Basically the same deal, but this was a low-pressure sell instead of a high-pressure sell. He was much more reasonable, and talked me through the whole thing at my own pace, taking his time to lay everything out that I could understand it. It was basically the same deal, 15% and they negotiate for you, but they set up an escrow account instead of you doing it yourself. When I asked the same "worst situation" question, he gave me a realistic outlook, and this company is in a much better standing. If the creditors don't like their negotiation and take you to arbitration, you actually get representation from their company to help you out. I was almost willing to do it. Then I went and looked at their actual company online, and discovered that they are a chamelon of some sorts. They were originally called something similar to "USA Debt Consolidation" or something otherwise patriotic. Apparently they decided that God could be on their side, at least it's good advertising. What good company has to change their name to get religion on their side? A good company would not need to change it's name. The Sweet Some people have gone with these companies, and they have actually negotiated with the creditors in order to pay off your debt at a fraction of the price. If it happens, that's the sweet part of this. Just given an example of $10,000 credit card debt, it is possible to pay around $6,000 and have all of your debt paid off. It's basically saying that you can spend money that you won't have to pay back, ever. There is some hit to your credit rating in the short term, but in the long term, it starts going the other direction. The hard part is finding a company who will do this and who you like. I had an even harder hurdle to surmount - I don't really believe that it is ethical to do this. I spent the money, I should pay it back - that's the deal I made with the company when I signed up for the card. To me, I need to go through with paying them back. Luckily, I came into this with a decent credit rating, and will probably go out with a similarly decent one. Right now, I am a prime target for anyone who wants to give me a large loan at a decent rate - if I can pay less for the money I spent, I'm savvy enough to do it. The Alternative There is one other option which I looked into, and will represent the only company that I will link through this diatribe: Consumer Credit Counseling Services or Money Management International are truly non-profit and have good word-of-mouth from anyone I have talked to. They will not negotiate to settle your debt, but they will work with the creditors to get lower percentage, and help you through your budget. The couple of talks on the phone that I had with these people were very productive, and I got some stuff in the mail to help me out. You pay down the entirety of your debt. The downside is that you get a good size hit on your credit rating. My Choice In my position, I decided that I was on a good track myself already - I'm paying off my cards smartly, taking the highest APR out as quickly as possible. On my current plan, I will be completely debt-free in 3 years, less if I get some windfall of any sort. One of the bonuses of having a good credit rating is that people are willing to loan me money at promotional rates for some amounts of time. When my promos run out, I play financial musical chairs and get the lowest rate on all of my money. That's just for me though, to each his own. The most important part in all of this is that I got control of my budget, and started living within my means. My punishment for living outside of my means for so much time is that now I have to live well within my means. I have to live within the means set upon by having to pay a large chunk of each paycheck to the creditors. Once I'm outside this, it will be much easier for me to have lots of happiness and savings.

Books in this series (all published by Baen):

1. An Oblique Approach (1998)
2. In the Heart of Darkness (1998)
3. Destiny’s Shield (1999)
4. Fortune’s Stroke (2000)
5. The Tide of Victory (2001)
6. The Dance of Time (2006)

The premise sounds a little silly: a cyborg and a crystalline artificial intelligence travel back through time from the far future into the Sixth Century. The cyborg’s mission: to create a totalitarian world government that will create the perfect future according to one branch of fanatics. The crystal’s mission: to aid the Byzantine general Belisarius to defeat the cyborg. Never mind that premise. Here is another. Gunpowder and associated technologies are introduced in the 6th Century, first in India and second in the (Eastern) Roman Empire. What happens next? Based on an outline for a trilogy by David Drake, Eric Flint has created a masterpiece in this six-volume story. It really is a united story, not a collection of six independent novels; the story starts in the first book and ends in the sixth. There will be no more books in this series (except, perhaps, as a “sequel” series, though the authors have not hinted about this). It is a masterpiece, all right. In an action-adventure story, plot is paramount, and the Belisarius hexalogy has an unusually tight plot for the word count. The characters are well drawn; evidence of this claim is that I wept, much like Belisarius himself, when one of the significant secondary characters died – in battle, yes, but by a fortune’s stroke and not by any enemy’s design. The characterization of the societies and countries involved is suberb in my admittedly history-challenged opinion; India is described vividly, although, as Flint has mentioned, it’s extremely anachronistic (Flint himself considers this appropriate under the circumstances, and describes his portrait of 6th Century India as “impressionistic”). After a slightly slow start – it takes several not so exciting chapters for the premise of the story to be revealed – the story starts climbing like an aeroplane after takeoff, and never stops. The mood in the beginning is downright depressing, with only a tiny bit of hope, but it steadily brightens, and the last book is pure payoff, immensely satisfying to this reader. It was so satisfying, that I haven’t suffered from story world withdrawal after finishing The Dance of Time. This is unusual. I have no other option but to rate this story 5/5.

Hehe Christian At least darcs will be easy to learn Sorry I just couldn’t resist.

Steinar H. Gunderson

It doesn’t matter which shell I use for completion. (And this goes to the other people who mailed me to tell me that Zsh rulez!) The problem is that packages of Zsh and Bash both offer several completion routines which are not sufficient for me. (e.g. one missing one is completion for the various bittorrent scripts.) So I need to install my own routines for those. I also wrote custom completion routines for in-house tools, and my own personal scripts in ~/bin/. Since these are not available by default in either the bash package or the zsh package I must install them manaully upon each host I wish to use, in order to have an identical setup. And that manual installation is what my new package makes easy. (Or will when it is complete!)

Security Team Meeting

Security issue meeting on IRC went well, although I left rather abruptly since my bed was calling my name.

(This is a copy of my response to the LWN article Toward a free metaverse, which won't be freely available itself for another week or so.) There's an unconcious bias in this article toward 3d graphical worlds, and I think it's important to realise that that's not a necessary component of a virtual world, although it's certianly a component that will appeal to a lot of people and that fits in nicely with some current ways of working with computers -- ie, sitting in front of expensive screens weilding a mouse. Long ago we had MOOs, MUDs, etc, and they were text based. Just words, you know. And nearly all of them were free software. It might well be that text, or speech, or the like ends up being a better interface to virtual worlds of the future, especially if they are tightly integrated and layered on top of the real world. And I'm increasingly convinced that if these worlds don't integrate into the real world, if the ideas that have been bubbling up out of ADVENTURE and the MUCKs and the MMORPGs and such don't spread out and become something larger and more inclusive than their own little pretend world, then in the end that whole area has been nothing but pointless games. Which I hope it hasn't, but perhaps I'm getting old.. Speaking of freedom, there are levels and layers, and it's possible to build the free on top of the non-free. After all, I'm typing this on a device that is present in the er, First Life, which is not particularly free in its implementation; it has non-free firmware and BIOS, and is composed of atoms of some substances that are less easily available than air, and which follow some annoyingly inflexible physical laws, and it needs a constant input of metered electricity to run. But on top of all that is some free code that gives me a measure of freedom. Similarly, it would be possible to run free code in Second Life, and given how rare it is overall for such services to support coding at all, let alone explcitly give a program (or object's) creator the freedom to make it Free, that Second Life does so seems encouraging to me. If we get a distributed standardized free online world by 2010, I'll be happy indeed. (Disclaimer: I write text based MOOS, and have never used Second Life, though I chatted with someone there on the phone today.)

Pyroman is now hosted on alioth, and uses Debians subversion server. I just did a new pyroman release, version 0.1.2. This is just an interim beta release, a version 0.2 will follow soon. New in this version is: Detailed error reporting: when a firewall rule is rejected by iptables (e.g. because you specified an invalid port range pyroman didn't detect), it will give you the corresponding filename and line number! Automatic rollback: Pyroman will undo any changes to the firewall if either any rule is rejected by iptables, an exception in pyroman occurs or the user fails to accept the changes within a configurable time limit (e.g. because he just broke his ssh connection...) So pyroman is even cooler now! ;-) On the TODO list: add a no-confirm switch for use at system bootup, code cleanups and a iptables-version test, so you can add rules that need a specific iptables version (such as string matches for bittorrent).

XSLT is an outright ugly language. Thats why I often just hate it. In some (rare) cases it's very elegant, but most often incredibly clumsy. I've been redoing my homepage completely, and I'm using XSLT to render my data XML files to the XHTML output. That works quite well so far, but I hit more and more special cases. First I wanted to add a language chooser. This required finding out which lanuages my document supports (read: blocks with that language attribute exist) and check for uniqueness. Some things where rather easy to solve (with some experience in XSLT), so where extremely ugly. First of all, I want my template file to be a valid XHTML file, I don't want to have any layout parts in XSLT. Then I have a separate sitemap, needed for generating the menu. So I have to process three documents at the same time in XSLT. Ouch. But doable, using variables. Basically I have three modes - in one mode, the template is mostly copied over, unless I've specified some special rule, e.g. to insert the page title, meta information or content. A second mode uses the current chunk of the template document as template for the contents a couple of times to iterate over data chunks from the data source file (read: put text blocks from my source files into the output template format). The third mode does the same for the sitemap. Unfortunately, it started to get even messier... Big problem number one: Make a list of the available languages for the current page. Make this information reuseable throughout the page transformation. Part one: make a list of available languages by finding unique (!) @lang attributes. (usual approach: grab all nodes with @lang attributes, check if they have the same node id like the first occurence with this @lang value for uniquness, then output. Ugly as hell, but string magic sucks as much.) Big issue number two: Assume we now have a variable with en in there, access these nodes to transform them. Unfortunately, the generated nodes are "result nodes", and you cannot iterate over them with for-each. Luckily the exslt node-set extension to solve this. But now came the third big issue along... this is where I give up. I want my pages to have a nice modification date... my data pages are stored in subversion... Subversion has keywords expansion like CVS, which I can use nicely to automatically update the last modification date of the file. Unfortunately, the date will look like this: $Date: 2006-02-15 21:29:10 +0100 (Mi, 15 Feb 2006) $ Whereas in a web page meta information it's recommended to use ISO8601. Now if I only had regular expressions and proper date handling functions... I guess I'll stop writing ugly, hackish XSLT code and chose pretty Python code instead. Maybe use TAL or KID for XMLish templating...

The selections for XTech are now almost complete. Over the weekend I drafted the schedule, which is under review right now by the programme committee. Every year I say how hard a job this is because of the high standard of the submissions, and every year it seems to get harder. This year I found it almost heartbreaking to have to exclude some talks. Number crunching To illustrate, here are some statistics about the proposals and their selection. We received 177 submissions. Each of these abstracts were peer reviewed by at least 4 or 5 reviewers, from a panel of nearly 90 reviewers. From the graded results I shortlisted 105 proposals. From that 105 I have had to fill 68 schedule slots, which meant about a third of the shortlisted proposals had to be excluded. Almost every single one of these would have been a great talk. They were so good, in fact, that I'm working on some ideas for adding to the schedule. Notifications to accepted speakers will be sent at the beginning of next week. Rejection notices will follow a little while later. We don't want to send these out until we're sure we've done everything we can to accommodate as many quality presentations as possible. I am enormously grateful to everyone who submitted a proposal. I can't wait to get the acceptance notices sent out so we can publish the schedule. I can however reveal some early news about pre-conference tutorials. We'll have day-long tutorials on: Ruby on Rails; XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0 & XQuery; and a Web 2.0 tech bootcamp. Also there'll be half-day tutorials on microformats, and XForms & XHTML 2.0. Finally, it's worth noting that registration is now open. Also, if you work for somebody who would be interested in sponsoring the conference, do get in touch.

Yesterday evening, around 17:00 UTC I finished building another DVD image after beeing up for almost 33hours. This time it is for the Cebit edition of the german Linux Magazin and Debian (we will have a booth there, see our Events page for more info, together with Credativ). If you are there you can grab the image there, or alternatively at the booth of Linux New Media/Linux Magazin. I built the image together with Alex (Tolimar), who did a great job keeping me focused on it, compiling stuff, helping with documentation, package selection and many other different things that needed to be done. We had our first big run with this image from (I think) Wednesday til Thursday, not taking any sleep in the night, to get it finished in time. Unfortunately we got the message that it needed some more changes, so we had the weekend to sort through it, and started again on Friday evening. Alex left on Sunday afternoon, where the image was basically nearly finished. Due to some little hickups it then needed until Monday 18:00 to really be final and sent out, which made me stay awake from Sunday, 09:30 til around Monday, 18:00 (local time). As usual (like the last 3 images I built for events in Germany) this is a multi-architecture image, again with i386, amd64 and powerpc included, ready to boot into our nice debian-installer for sarge. The kernel was updated to 2.6.12 for i386 and amd64, to support a few more newer machines. We also included a preseeding magic, so you can install a complete Debian Desktop only by deciding how to partition your harddisc and entering the username / password you want to use. You end up with a nice little Gnome-System, having a custom background, some links on the Desktop and bookmarks in Firefox and a disabled root account (use sudo :) ). This nearly automatic installation is available for german and for spanish, as we will bring some of these DVDs to the DebianDay in Mexico. For the spanish part Marga did a great job with the translation of all the various included Readme files to spanish in a normally much to short timeframe (we asked somewhere on Saturday IIRC), many thanks to her for that work. But it would be boring to have only those bits on this DVD, so we decided to include a few backports from backports.org too. There is a newer X, a newer OpenOffice, spamassassin and others included for at least i386. And still - we have included more. We included a recent build of openwrt and also the small edition of grml on this DVD. All in all users have around 45 - 50 different ways to boot from this DVD, which is a nice and big selection. Right now its hard to think of a collection that makes it “better/bigger/whatever” than that. Im sure there will be something with which we can outperform this, but right now its hard to imagine. Of course an etch d-i could be a point, maybe together with a Debian Livesystem (real Debian, not just “based on with random additions”), maybe many more preseeding configurations and not only one, we will see. If you have suggestions please mail me. If you want it: Yes, you can freely download the image, if you cant grab it on DVD while Cebit is running / from a LinuxMagazin, but this download will only be available after Cebit finished plus a few days more. Its never good to have a DVD for a magazine freely available before that magazine is public. :)