Debian is teh win! I’ve been playing with other distributions recently, under Xen, and so far I have to say that Debian is sooo much easier to work with. (And not just because I’m more familiar with it). Gentoo: Portage does rock, but damn it is slow. I don’t mean the recompilation, because you’d expect that to be slow, but something as simple as “portage –sync” takes minutes to complete, and pegs the CPU whilst it is running. A similiar story for CentOS 4.x - the yum tool seems to be one of the slowest network applications I’ve ever used! Updating the lists of available packages is just painfully slow, far too much “thinking” between the download operations.

As I see it, there are three positions:

• Those who think that everybody except their candidate is a teletubbie
• Those who think everyone has a chance to win except the teletubbie
• Those who don’t care about teletubbies and would rather vote for Power Rangers

Yes, someone already told it: is that time of the year again. This small and insignificant fact (the DPL election) can shock the entire Debian Community. This kind of stuff makes us the fun, social and rewarding Debian Community some people claim we should be. The people who only cares about developing will keep working disregarding all the social conflicts. So most people won’t take much care about the Election, pick up a candidate, vote and keep working
It says: Welcome - Bolivarian Revolutionary Government of the Merida State David has more than one week in Venezuela. I’m gladly offering him accomodation in my house, bandwidth and all the support he needs for the next twenty years. We spent a weekend in Merida (which is in the Venezuelan Andes) in some Free Software Workshops and the rest of the week we have been working in several migration projects in the Company I’m working with. We have setup g33k!, a small server in my room running Debian (and Cherokee and Jaws) just for fun and testing. He’s leaving to San Crist bal (the capital of a state in the border with Colombia) on Friday and I should be finishing my semester as well. The next big Free Software event in Venezuela is the Latin American Infest. See you there!

It's the first day of a new season in the French Revolutionary Calendar -- the -al months are out and the -idor months are in. I guess that means Summer's really here, which means it's a good time to find a job. Don Marti has a good idea for how to do that: subscribe to the blogs of people who have cool companies. It's a good point -- kind of taking the What Color is Your Parachute? idea into the social software world. Use your informal social network to make job connections, right? Right.

Many advances have been made in agile software development. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails embody agile principles by making software easy to write, easy to test, and above all, easy to change.If only we could say the same for the infrastructure on which we develop and deploy web applications. Not every application can be a Rails one, especially where it's been up and running for years. The systems we deploy on often rely on configuration files scattered all over the filesystem, and can be complex results of years of change.By extension, the systems we develop on often don't exactly mirror where we deploy. If we're lucky and careful, then we have a staging server which mirrors the live environment, but that's not too much of an advantage. Among other things, we need ways to evolve and refactor the live environment, and have our development environments easily track that.I'd like to call such an environment "agile infrastructure". Infrastructure that doesn't hamper developers, and allows live configurations to change and evolve. Infrastructure that allows new things to be tried with minimum cost, and can provide the best information possible to help future planning.Tools enable techniques, of course. It's a lot easier to be agile if you're programming in Rails rather than plain old PHP. So what are the tools enabling agile infrastructure?
Techniques I've found usefulWhile there's a long way to go, I'd like to describe some of the techniques I've been using to help create a flexible environment for developing a sizeable PHP/MySQL application.Operating systemAn operating system must be easy to bring into a known state with minimum interference. For this, I've found Ubuntu or Debian to be an ideal choice. Two of the main reasons include the constancy of stable releases and the fact that it's rare you need to stray outside the distribution's servers to get the software you need.DeploymentDeploying an application shouldn't break the cleanliness of your OS build. I prefer to package deployed applications into .deb files. This enables me to build on several advantages of the package management system:

• configuration file handling: deployed machines can keep individual config in /etc, which is preserved over software update.
• no random state: you know for sure exactly the state of the deployed application, no random files left hanging around.
• natural workflow: packages take a little bit of effort to build and deploy, which means it focuses developers on getting them right. If things do go wrong, it's very easy to roll back one version.

Source controlThe case for source control, thankfully, doesn't need making these days. Yet not every source control system is created equal. Developers shouldn't be constrained by source control, it should be cheap and easy to try new ideas and merge these in later.Not only cheap branching, but also easy merging, is required to keep development agile while still retaining the benefits of source control. Many people flock to Subversion these days, predominantly because it fixes some of CVS' more egregious misfeatures. However, merging can still be pretty difficult in Subversion.I prefer to use a system allowing easy merging, such as svk or bazaar. Because so many of us use laptops these days, disconnected operation is also a huge boon. Bazaar-NG offers both repository-oriented and completely decentralized operation, giving the best of both worlds. It also wins the competition for least setup overhead.VirtualizationPreviously a high-powered technology, cheap virtualization is now with us. Many identical virtual machines can be quickly created to enable testing and experimentation. Deployment to virtual machines can enable hardware independence for applications, reducing another big headache.Large organisations have it within their reach to bring new hardware online easily, and have invested much in management systems for it. Virtualization brings this in reach of small and one-man development teams.Desktop-based virtualizationSystems such as VMWare and Parallels untether developers from their desks. I use the OS X desktop daily for its productivity software, but an Ubuntu virtual machine for a large proportion of development work. A simple keypress lets me flick between the two. The advantages of multiple desktops to hand for web development are well known. (In fact, thanks to WINE and IES4Linux I can run Internet Explorer cheaply too from the same virtual machine).
Xen virtualizationAfter the initial novelty wears off, one of the most tedious tasks in the world is bringing new machines online. Combined with the tendency development environments have to get crufty as new ideas and tools are tried out, this makes for increasing disparity between the development and deployment environments.Wouldn't it be nice just to take a clean machine off the shelf, check out the source, and pick up again? Using Xen for Linux, this cheap virtualization is possible.Sadly, Xen isn't yet a packaged part of Ubuntu, but getting it up and running on Ubuntu Dapper isn't too hard. Warning: here's where things get pretty deep. Skip this bit if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty.I followed these steps:

• Followed instructions in the Ubuntu wiki to get the first domain (vm) up and running
  
• Installed the xen-tools package, which provides wrappers for easily creating virtual machines
• Adjusted some of the xen-tools configuration (/etc/xen-tools/hook.d/20-setup-apt) to set up for Ubuntu rather than Debian
• Once the virtual machine was made, adjusted its config to allow for the kernel initrd and configure the network bridge I was using
  

Getting over the DNS mountainIf you want it to be easy to bring new virtual machines up and down, you need to adopt a different approach to managing your DNS. You need to know how to predictably connect to a virtual machine. Yet it's going to get very boring and error prone to manage the IP address space manually in your DNS, or even to map the MAC addresses of your virtual machines in your DHCP configuration.
Help is at hand in the form of mDNS (also known as Rendezvous / Bonjour / ZeroConf). In the host machine, and in each virtual machine, I ensured the avahi-daemon and avahi-utils packages were installed, providing mDNS services. (You should also check that mdns is present in the hosts entry of /etc/nsswitch.conf).What all this does is allow the machines (virtual or otherwise) on the network to resolve names using mDNS. So if I create 3 VMs, alpha, beta and gamma, I can access these right away using the hostnames alpha.local, beta.local and gamma.local.Hey presto! Easily make machines appear and disappear without any need for sysadmin involvement. All the extra steps to add avahi installation can be easily scripted with xen-tools, to reduce the number of commands needed to birth a new machine to one.With this ease of creating new machines, it's much more straightforward to experiment with server topology and conduct experiments on server environments.ConclusionAgile development is necessarily constrained by the infrastructure on which it is conducted. The infrastructure itself is constrained by the tools and platforms of choice.By appropriate tool choice we can reduce the commitment and overhead of infrastructure. This enables developers to get on with the job they do best, and makes experimentation and evolution of infrastructure much simpler.When programming, it's dangerous to fall in love with your code, as the best solution may often involve throwing half of it away. The same hazard exists with infrastructure, with bizarre and awkward effects propagating back into code and operations. Get yourself a low commitment, agile environment, and you'll be able to keep up with the pace. 

...or so Spock said. Apparrently. Yesterday, for some reason, I was reading something on Wikipedia. Don't ask me what I started with, I don't remember; however, my journey through Wikipedia eventually got me to the Rare Earth hypothesis, the Principle of Mediocrity, and other related things. Both are subjects relating to whether or not there would be life on other planets. The latter claims that this is, in fact, quite likely; the Principle of Mediocrity basically says that "Earth is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star in a relatively ordinary galaxy which is one of countless others in a giant universe, possibly within an infinite multiverse". This is supported by a number of astronomical findings. The contrast to that, the Rare Earth hypothesis, claims that Earth is, in fact, not a very ordinary planet. That to be able to reach a point where complex multicellular can have evolved—such as on Earth—such a high number of variables have to have the exact right value, with in many cases such low margins for errors, that while possible, the likelihood that life would exist on other planets is very low. They were both interesting reads. However, there is one thing to which I did not find an answer: Why does it have to be Earth-like life? As I understand the theory of our origins, life began on the Planet Earth in a relatively stable body of unclean water—known as the "Oersoep" in Dutch, though I couldn't find the English term for that—on which the sun shone; that sunshine made the elements of the "oersoep" react with eachother so that it eventually formed single-cell life, which then evolved into multi-cellular life, and so on. Even today, the sun still shines on Earth, and almost all energy in use on Earth can in some way or another be attributed to something that once received sunlight; I suspect the only exception to that is nuclear energy. As I understand the Rare Earth hypothesis and the Principle of Mediocrity, both seem to assume the basic premise that the only way in which life could evolve is the way in which it evolved on Earth; that is, you need direct sunlight so that you can have some chemical reactions. You cannot have too much ultraviolet, gamma, or x-ray radiation, because that would kill life. You cannot have too many impacts of extraplanetarian bodies, such as comets or asteroids, because these impacts and the resulting fallout would destroy life. I did not find any argument for that assertion, however; and what I don't see is why it would be necessary. We could define the "oersoep" as some sort of a "stable chaos": a bunch of chemical elements and a varying external influence (sunlight) means that you have a brewing and reacting bunch of matter, where the composition of the matter is constantly changing; however, at the same time, when viewed over a large amount of time, not much did in fact change. The varying external influences have a regular and stable rhythm; the sun appears in the morning and disappears in the evening. The sun shines longer in summer than it does in winter. While it is not the same all the time, there is predictability. If a number of chemical elements react with eachother in a certain way on one day, then they will react the same way again the next day. If this happens for years on end, you may have a series of reactions that is more or less reproducible, where the final result of all the chemical reactions turns out to be the original starting point again. At least almost so. Such a series of chemical reactions could be called "life", especially if it occurs within a small group of chemicals that sticks together, like a cell. While a body of unclean water with regular sunshine certainly is one way to get to a series of repetitive chemical reactions, I fail to see why it would have to be the only possible way. If there were a planet composed mainly of Helium (rather than Hydrogen and Carbon, as on Earth) but also containing a bunch of other elements (so that they can react with eachother) with a star that sends out lots of gamma radiation and an atmosphere which blocks sunlight (I don't know whether Helium can do that, but let's assume it can), then I do not see why it would not be possible for life to evolve on such a planet which would be based on Helium rather than Carbon and Water, and which would require gamma radiation to survive but would die when brought into prolonged contact with light, just like we will die when brought into prolonged contact with gamma radiation. Another example could be a planet where every year a comet of approximately the same composition impacts on the same place on the planet's surface. Such an impact would regularly stir up the chemical elements on this planet, and could provide the needed energy to produce the chemical reactions required to sustain life. If any life were to evolve on this planet, not only would it be able to survive such constant extraplanetary impacts, it would also require these impacts to continue in order to survive. I haven't been able to find any information on that. It would seem that either I'm missing something very basic, or that nobody has thought of this before—and I would find that highly unlikely. So, anyone who's been thinking longer than me about this subject (that is to say, just a few hours) who could enlighten me? Of course, one answer could be to say that God created all life, and that the evolution theory is only a theory, which is not grounded in any reality. But make a comment to that effect on my blog, and I will moderate it away. After having a good-hearted laugh at it.

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

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

Wow, a semi-regular posting.

The Iron Giant

Small town america in the late 50s doesn't know what hit it. Science fiction is in it's hayday and the nation is on a hairpin trigger when a big robot falls from the sky and is discovered by a small boy. I had heard much about this movie and everyone I knew who saw it liked it. I have to tell you: the hype is well deserved. The story is compelling and heartening, good for children and adults alike, and the humor throughout is well done. Characters are voiced well. The story obviously revolves around the giant. Most of the story is centered around keeping the monstrosity hidden, which doesn't succeed for long. The government eventually figures it out and starts shooting, and then things really get interesting. The ending was just as fun to watch as the beginning, although I think they copped out on the very end, leaving it with a light note. It would have been really nice to see it end in a bitter-sweet tone. The Giant gets a 9. (imdb)

Brazil

One of the things I remember hearing about Brazil is that it was "Terry Gilliam's Directorial Masterpiece". It certainly is at that. In the 20th century somewhere, a clerical error causes a great movie plot. A futuristic society is thrown into disarray by a simple error in typing, starting with the death of an innocent man, and then the coverup of the century. The protaganist is in a dead-end job, but seems to be perfectly fine with it, until the girl of his dreams literally walks into his life. Gilliam and his cinematographer create a beautifully blocky and dull grey industrial wasteland set in stark contrast with the beautiful dreamland. The subplots don't obscure the main line which is compelling and kept me wanting more even though it clocks in at over 2 hours. The ending was unexpected and well done at the same time, and I couldn't see it done any other way. The directors cut is the only way to go with this one, and I haven't even seen the studio cut.
Brazil is berriffic, and scores a 12. (imdb)

This May I spent four consecutive weeks abroad, visiting first Debconf6 (including the Debcamp that preceded it), and then Los Angeles afterwards. I won't write a detailed report of everything that happened; nobody likes to read pages after pages of descriptions of meals and such. Instead, I'll jot down a few memories of moments. It's still long, sorry about that. May 6, about 3 AM, at home. Waiting outside for a taxi. Pretty tired already: spent the night frantically weighing all my clothes to optimize my packing. It is warm enough to wait outside without a jacket. The night is calm and beautiful. Mankind is so much nicer when it sleeps. May 6, about 4 AM, the Helsinki airport. I bump into Tuukka and Tulitar, who are on the same plane. Kaol also joins us, but that I knew beforehand. I'm suddenly much less apprehensive about the long flight. May 6, Mexico City airport. We meet more Debian people. The first taxi driver we're assigned seems to be suspect somehow. The other taxi drivers rebel and our luggage is put into another car, with another driver. I have no idea what is actually going on, but that develops into a theme for the Mexican part of the trip. May 6, Oaxtepec. We're finally here, but it seems very difficult for us to get rooms. While we wait, we and some of the people who arrived earlier go to a restaurant. The Germans want to order the same thing for everyone, but fail to agree on what, so eventually we order all the steaks on the menu. The food is good, but the restaurant staff would probably have preferred to go home at closing time. We eventually get rooms and I collapse into bed. Debcamp week, Oaxtepec. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We have network. We don't have network. We're frustrated all the time. I was supposed to do billable work (related to Debian, even), and can't. Should've prepared for this possiblity. I'm too dependent on a good Internet connection, need to figure out to reduce this dependency. To have something else to do, I start the Mugshots project: take a photo of everyone together with a paper with their name, or IRC nick, or anything else they want to say about themselves. Debconf, late one evening. Everyone is partying one way or another, drinking, dancing, discussing. Lots of people around already. Nice people. Still I withdraw into myself. I'm physically present, but not interacting. Never know what to say; exhausted by having to remember who everyone is. I'm introverted, and deal better with smaller gatherings. My life's ambition is to become a multi-millionaire recluse. Debconf, late another evening, Oaxtepec. Everyone else is getting drunk, and it affects me. I make the silly bet about Debian releasing on time: if we do, I'll get a Debian tattoo. Not to worry, I win either way. Debconf, some evening or another. I participate in a game of Mao. It is an unpleasant game, for me. I suspected this beforehand, but now I've verified it. It is best for everyone if I never play again, now that I know enough to at least try to reach my personal, alternative goals in the game, which make the game less fun for everyone else. (Better for me too, since I make fewer enemies.) Debconf, day after formal dinner. I learn that Jonathan (Ted) Walther is gone. Good riddance. I suprise myself with the amount of glee I feel when removing him from the Mugshots gallery. (That, incidentally, was something I decided all by myself. It's my gallery, after all.) Debconf. The sponsored food is quite acceptable, but eventually becomes boring and bland. Mass-kitchen food can't but help to be like that, I guess, unless it gets expensive. I don't want to see another chicken leg ever. Debconf, early in the week. Droidy (Leena) and Burger (Ville) arrive. Very nice. Helps massively with my withdrawnness to have real life friends around. I still go early to bed, though, instead of participating in the partying. Debconf, late in the week. I get Ville and Frans Pop to talk and Ville agrees to have look at the installation manual. He's an actual (former) professional tech writer, so hopefully will be able to improve it a lot. May 22, Oaxtepec. Last day. I spend all morning packing, checking out, and waiting for a taxi. Strangely relaxing. Debconf is finally over, and although I did enjoy parts of it, and don't regret coming, I'm not sad it's over. May 22, evening, Los Angeles. Julie and Kristian meet me at the airport. Hugging happens. Happiness happens. I get my first taste of LA traffic, which seems to mostly consist of people complaining about how slow it is while driving very fast. May 23, the Promenade, Los Angeles. A three block long walking street of shops, with three (count them: three) bookstores. The two I have time for even smelled nice. I am in hog heaven. Colossal credit card cringing. May 24, Getty Center. A very nice, very impressive place architecturally. The art is good too. As usual, the impressionists make the strongest impression on me, but there's lots of other good stuff, too. Not everything, though: Robert Adams's photographs leave me unimpressed, possibly I lack the cultural reference points necessary to appreciate them. He has many photos of shabby temporary shelter-like houses that in reality seem to be nice south-western US houses from the 60s and 70s. My intuition just screams that the houses and their inhabitants won't survive their first winter. But of course, they don't have a cold winter there. The rest of the exhibition (or what I have time to see) has way too many portraits for one session. Portraits get boring after the first dozen or so, I'm afraid, unless there's something extraordinary about them. They are several rooms rebuilt from 18th century French aristocratic houses. Very nice, very pretty, but I would not like to live that uncomfortably. I have a small epiphany about nudity in art in one of the rooms with statues. I've always known nudity could be portrayed erotically, such as having two lovers embrace passionately; or that it could be portrayed more or less abstractly, using the human body, or parts of it, just because it can be a very beautiful subject, just like a flower, but without giving it a greater significance. It's decoration, nothing more. There are two statues in the Getty collection that show me a third way. They are exquisitely sensual, evoking a sense of form and texture that make me think of human skin and flesh, a sense that if one were to touch the statue, it would feel like touching a live human. Yet none of this is erotic at all. I'm not sure I can explain this, one may have to experience it for oneself. Unfortunately, I was too overwhelmed to write down the names of the statues. May 23, Los Angeles. The food takes me by surprise. Julie has always told me that food in LA is good, much better than in Finland, but she hadn't prepared me for an all-out assault on my palate. Dine well in LA and die happy. (When I go back to Finland, I will have to learn again how to cook, dammit.) May 25, Los Angeles. Jesus reminds me via SMS about the Towel Day. I participate. My hosts think I'm a bit weird, but in a funny way. Many happy days in May, Los Angeles. I visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (exhibiting a weird Italian designer, some boring Klimt paintings, and a very nice general collection); the Natural history museum of LA (dinosaurs! real skeletons! big ones! T.Rex! for the first time in my life! they're huge!); the Museum of Jurassic Technology (weird); had dinner with some local Debian people, and visited the local Google office afterwards; the Hollywood Boulevard at night (funny, for a while). And other places I've forgotten already. LA is not small. I visit a political theater play that is brilliant. I also visit my first American BBQ, and have my first experience with the LA gay community at the same time. I'm later told that these two are separable. I enjoy them both a lot. I visit more bookstores. My hosts keep finding new ones they want to recommend to me. Parking would be a pain in LA, except that it means that people do actually walk a lot, since the nearest parking space is always three blocks away, or five levels up without an elevator. May 28, Los Angeles. I innocently mention that LA is such a nice place, with nice people and gorgeous food, that I wouldn't mind living there. Julie's brother hears this and immediately connects me with someone he knows whose company is looking for new people. During the next three days, we meet and talk and things seem favorable. Even if I decide not to go (it may be too huge a change for me now), it's nice to feel appreciated. June 1, Los Angeles. Leaving for home. Not a sad thing, but I'm definitely feeling wistful. I get hugged about fourteen thousand times. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I will definitely have to go back to LA, one day.

Ana was intrigued by the idiom to open a can of worms tonight. There are two English idioms I like, too: to stir the pot (when you do it, what used to be in the bottom rises to the surface) and the shit has hit the fan (no need to explain what happens when viscous matter gets in contact with an object that revolves at a high speed). But one word that intrigued me, in turn, was aftermath . What’s it? The feeling you get after solving a particularly difficult mathematical problem? Well, no. Apparently a math is a mowing (of grass or hay or whatever), and the aftermath is the grass that grows after the first crop of hay in the same season (Webster, 1913).

Robert Love: “In Google’s calculation, the cost of a native port outweighed the benefit of a native [port] v s-a-v s a WINE-fueled Picasa. Is that really unexpected? Our development platform is no shining star. We have two toolkits, poor binary compatibility, and unclear direction. To be sure, vendors such as Novell are devoting increasing effort toward improving the Linux ISV and platform story. But the community must make it a priority as well, from the kernel up through the highest levels of the graphical desktop.” That’s part of it (and certainly an accurate assessment of the kind of thinking we need as a community to make Linux a better platform). I think there’s another part of it, though, and that’s that operating systems in general are fundamentally uninteresting to Google as platforms in themselves, as well they should be—after all, the web is Google’s platform, and they dominate there, so why should they promote an alternative where they are much weaker? In my view, the (fat) client bits merely exist to ease the transition from the current, predominantly desktop centric world to a new web centric world where Google naturally thrives. After all, such paradigm shifts are always gradual. There’s the offline question too—if all your data is in the cloud, how do you get to it when you’re not online?—though I suspect over time the browser will provide offline capabilities of some sort, so this is largely a temporary problem too. So, using Wine in ports not only minimizes the incremental cost of building out a foothold on the client (which, again, is a necessity for Google, given that Google’s biggest competitor is between them and 90% of their customers), but it raises the fat client platform up a level too. In other words, it builds a fat client platform with a consistent look and feel across desktop environments; and with this, the operating system underneath rapidly becomes irrelevant. The real question is when Google will hook Picasa into a photo sharing service of its own. I already keep my photos in the cloud, and I’d love to organize and edit them in Picasa (Organizr is nice, but nowhere near as nice as a desktop application, and it doesn’t have some basic functionality, like import from camera and red eye repair). Of course, this is just one example of Google having some platform thinking issues of its own, though that’ll have to be a rant for another day.

After the morning talks were over, ze_dinosaur and I decided that Saturday afternoon should be devoted to fun. We rounded up Jesus, Anabelle, Ben and Nattie. And then we set off for the water park. You see, we were actually staying at a huge playground, except we never saw very much of it. Determined to see more, we hike over to the Tower, found the funicular and took a trip down. As we passed over a small wood, I instantly regretted leaving my camera at the hotel. I suppose, however, that I'd regret it more if my camera had taken a swim. We arrived at the bottom and found a flock of geese. This is where I really wanted my camera, because the goslings were oh-so-adorable. Nattie got some photographs while the mother goose hissed furiously at her. We left, found the front gates of the water park, and were told that it was closed. Well, we were quite disappointed. The others went back to the resort, but Ben, Nattie, and I refused to have our afternoon ruined. Instead, we found a washroom, got changed and waded off to the sulphur pools. There's a large spring underneath a big glass dome, which happens to spew out some rather foul smelling water. Much like rotten eggs, really. There, it fed into a series of swimming pools in which vacationers soaked. We waded in to the very cold water and swam a while for a bit. We got used to the smell and temperature, and started having a marvellous time. Then we saw the waterfall. A man was standing beneath a small torrent of water, that beat about his neck and back. In order to stand in place, he hung on to a knotted rope which was tied to the retaining wall. After watching him for a bit, we three decided to give it a go. Swimming up to the fall was the most difficult part, then it was quite relaxing to have water pouring over you like that. I need a bathtub and shower like this, when I build a house. Soon after, we went back to the resort where we dove in the pool and swam a bit. We managed to corrupt Tore's mind and scar him forever. Just then, we were kicked out by the lifeguards because it was 18:00. The air was still scalding and they closed the pool. What are these people thinking? I took a nice shower and then a nap in the front lobby. Since lots of people were leaving on Sunday morning, this was the last night for them to party. So lots of people got quite drunk, including one poor fellow who passed out on the grass. I found a towel for him, so he wasn't so cold. Then, I took plenty of pictures of people, while simultaneously convincing them to wear hats. No really! There are many benefits to hats. And people look great when they have a hat on. I highly encourage you to get one yourself. I stayed up very, very late. Until about 5:00. Then, Eric and I couldn't take it any more and we went to bed.

I have to agree with Joey, I have the feeling that we’re not doing many “transversal” improvements and that we’re busy enough simply trying to keep up with new upstream version of software. That’s not completely true but I also wouldn’t want Debian to evolve in that direction. I think that less people are interested in doing large scale changes because the coordination with 1000 maintainers and 10000 packages is simply too complicated and taking too much time. Luckily we had significant improvements recently that should ease that coordination work. I’m thinking mainly of the usertags that allow us to use the BTS as big TODO list. But usertags are obscure to many people and not well documented yet. So there’s room for improvements: that’s why I proposed a project for Google’s Summer of code called “Distribution-wide tracker tools” (see list of accepted projects here). Check the project proposal of Arnaud Fontaine to have a more precise idea of what it could give. I want this infrastructure because I think it may help Utnubu to effectively coordinate the integration of Ubuntu improvements and because it may help Debian be more on the leading edge (instead of trying to catchup with derivatives). And last but not least, I believe many more people (with different level of skills) will be able to effectively work on some projects once the work to do has been clearly identified and registered in such a system. The project is about to start, so all ideas/comments are welcome of course!

Very very cool: Unit testing Athena widgets. Athena is an AJAX toolkit for twisted/Nevow.