I get tired of this laptop on my desk called iBook G4. It’s now the second time I receive “I/O error(s)” from the harddisk drive. So I’ll have to call up Apple just again and beg for a send-in to fix it. This will take several hours on the phone because the support guy can’t decide that on his own. How nice and time consuming level based services are. But could somebody please tell me why I needed a replacement after seven months of use, when the errors were just weird and only Linux refused to do something with the harddisk, and now again after three months when OS X can’t even repair its own filesystem because of bad blocks. The last time I sent it in I even had to go to the nearest Apple Support Provider to get my Airport card replaced because it broke. The whole repair at Apple took three days, the WiFi repair three weeks. And yes it’s true what you could probably read between the lines... My knowledge of English is vanishing... *cough*

So, it's Christmas today (or it will be tomorrow, depending on where you live). Wouldn't it be nice if you had a bunch of freely and legally available Christmas songs you could listen to all day? Burn on CDs and hand over to your relatives? Share with your friends without the fear of being sued to death by big record labels? Well, here's a list of 110 128 songs which are all explicitly released under a Creative Commons license (no, I did not consider songs which are merely "podsafe"!) and thus can be shared, listened to, and sometimes even modified freely. There's a great variety in style, mood, and genre of the songs: some traditional, some contemporary, some happy, some sad, and some just plain funny. So here's the list: Single MP3s:

• Natalie Brown - Jingle Bells
• Danny Morris - Santa's Gone Surfing!
• Bullette - Christmas Blank
• Bullette - The Finest Gifts
• Jonathan Coulton - Podsafe Christmas Song
• Jonathan Coulton - Christmas Is Interesting
• Pete Green - Everything's Dead Pretty When it Snows
• Robert Gayler - Christmas Bells
• Sonny Jim - Christmas
• Shira Kammen - Christmas Day in the Morning
• Derek K. Miller - We Three Kings
• High-C & DJ Manticore - How George Stole Christmas
• Sarah Whiteley - Still, Still, Still
• Sean McGaughey - Homeless Babe
• Skoria - Christmas Impro

Compilations:

• Kemper Crabb - A Medieval Christmas (11 songs)
• Diorisiy - Christmas Carols (19 songs)
• The 8bitpeoples - The 8bits of Christmas (8 songs)
• Austin Rudy Christmas - Carolina Christmas (5 songs)
• Goyette Christmas Carolers - Various Christmas Songs (10 songs)
• Kevin MacLeod - Holiday / Christmas Collection (8 songs)
• Oilville Christmas Dynasty - Christmas Compilations (39 songs)
• Ottmar Liebert - Winter Rose (13 songs)

This list is by no means complete, I'm sure. So if you happen to know some more Creative Commons licensed Christmas music, please leave a comment! I'd love to hear about it. (Btw., the nice image on the right is taken from the Wikipedia. The author is Malene Thyssen, and the image is dual-licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2 and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license) Merry Christmas everyone! Update 2005-12-24: Added "We Three Kings".
Update 2005-12-25: In the press: Boing Boing, Creative Commons Blog, netzpolitik.org, Technorati, digg.com, del.icio.us and lots more. Added "How George Stole Christmas". Added "Winter Rose". Added "Still, Still, Still".
Update 2005-12-26: Added "Homeless Babe". Added "Christmas Impro".

If anyone asks you what the difference is between Christmas and Chanukah, you will know what and how to answer!

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It's another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure.
Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don't look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel(especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos... Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful...Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful.... Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols are composed and written by our tribal brethren.

And don't Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.

11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, "Joseph,you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn't sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here's the number of my shrink".

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? .....

Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family.
Tickets a mere $200 per person.

[Stolen from $unknown]

Kheb, my old Pentium machine hosted in my parents' house, just died.
I think the CPU is dead. I will replace it with another Pentium II box I have in my flat. Because they are going to get a DSL access in the next days (yeah, we finally got DSL connection in this 700 inhabitans village). I just updated my history page, just for fun!

Yesterday evening, the Ministry of Culture has deciced to report the discussion of the DADVSI bill after the reopening of the French Parliament, on January 17th. The debates yesterday have been featuring different representatives from the majority (UMP party) coming to explain that que "global license" amendments, adopted yesterday, are severely critized by the "artists". Indeed, it turns out that the major artists feel themselves in danger with the disposals of the "global license" while artists will a less wider diffusion are mostly OK with it. Who would be surprised? :-) Debates around this will be very hot again on January and we can expect an active lobbying by the "official artists" and the major entertainment companies. About the parts of the bill which were highly criticized by the Free Software community, it seems that all concerns about the copy protection schemes are on their way for being removed. The debates clearly show that the Free Software community has been heard, even by several representatives who are in favor of several other parts of the text. In short, I'm now confident that this bill will in no way be able to lead to an illegal Videolan Client, for instance. The transcription of the debates shows that all representatives are very motivated in trying to limit the influence of the major software companies (Microsoft is explicitely mentioned several times). I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't stop being very careful and stop following what will happen. But, again, all things I have read from the debates shows me that the free software community is heard in France, even by our representatives and even by the current majority parties, which I don't share many things with. I consider this a victory for our community even if "we only won a battle and we now have to win the war".

It’s been a while since I have posted. There was nothing specific to report really, besides the fact that our team (during these holiday weeks consisting only of Krzysztof and me) is making quite some process on the MathLang-Core suite. It’s clear by now that the paper only poses an intuitive understanding of the system and that the semantics and details still have to be worked out. So, while pioneering the system, I have reworked almost any part of my implementation twice already. Last Saturday I went to the ocean to have look there and made some pictures. Note that during my stay here I will continuously supplement the Edinburgh album with photos without posting about it everytime (fortunately :)). VPN I’ve been successful in setting up a VPN connection with the Spacelabs network yesterday using the openvpn system, which seems to work nicely (and simple!). Instead of being behind a NATing router/firewall with a nasty web proxy that sometimes throws IE-style “Page not found” pages at me and a not so well working SMTP relay, I’m completely free again. That is, being virtually present on the Spacelabs network and thus the Internet. Debian/Ruby It’s nice to see more Ruby related remarks/posts on Planet Debian. That said, I would like to (ab)use the opportunity to advertise the Debian/Ruby Extras team that is set up for making a team effort of maintaining Ruby libraries and apps (not the core/interpreter). The Subversion infrastructure, build system, documentation and tools have matured a little now, but we still (always probably) could use more help in this area and also the Ruby policy and other issues. For more information, we normally have our discussions on the #debian-ruby channel (on the FreeNode IRC network).

Some interesting Free Software releases:

• OpenSSH: The upcoming OpenSSH 4.3 will be able to "make a real VPN using OpenSSH without the need for any additional software. This goes well beyond the TCP port forwarding that we have supported for years". See also Slashdot story.
• X11: New, Modularized X Window Release Now Available for Download — X11R6.9 and X11R7.0 have been released simultaneously. The latter now uses the autotools as build system and is modularized. This should lead to shorter release cycles.
• Git: git 1.0, the directory content manager created by Linus Torvalds in order to replace Bitkeeper, has been released.
• Qemu: Qemu 0.8 has been released, now supporting SMP, and USB.

Lots of stuff to try out...

You know, I really hate it when e-mail inquiries to customer support departments are second-class citizens. The same company that will have me on hold for less than 30 minutes, then resolve my question in 10, won't even attempt to look at my e-mail inquiries to the same department for 1-2 business days. Ugh. What's the deal here? Why should e-mailers be treated poorly? Today's company to shame: Shutterfly, which otherwise has been very good. I'm e-mailing them because my UPS next day air package was delayed by UPS. UPS said they'd issue a refund, but I have to ask for it through Shutterfly.

Yesterday, the French government lost the first battle in its attempts to get the controversial DADVSI bill voted, which was pushed by most of the major entertainment companies and included a legalisation of copy protection schemes icluding measures to prevent software authors to circumvent them. As written, these measures would have possibly lead to software like VLC becoming illegal in France. The very strong mobilisation of the Free Software community and all communities involved in making the access to culture through the Internet easier has won its first battle. Thanks to a few Parliament members among who I'll cite M. Christian Paul (socialist party) or Mme Christine Boutin (UMP, the party of the French President and Prime minister....and representative of my neighbourhood in Yvelines...and certainly someone I do not share most of the moral values with...but anyway, I wrote to her), two very important "amendments" have been accepted with several members of the current right-wing majority voting along with the members of the socialist and communist parties. These amendments completely go against the will of the Culture Minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabre and all media say today this was like sending a huge torpedo in the project..:-) They propose to legalise a "global licence" which, being optional in ISP contracts, would allow users of the Internet to legally exchange cultural data over the Internet. As a side effect, this means that all attemps to enforce copy protection schemes (and virtually forbid Free Software authors to publish their sources) are to dropped to the waste bin. This is a huge victory but certainly not the final victory. The project is completely changed but the Minister and the Government can still amend it and propose something else after being lobbied again by the majors. And, as usual, they can even use our very funny 49/3 constitution article which allows a government to engage its responsibility on a given text and then forbidding any further discussion or change. The probability for this is very unlikely because they would risk a lot doing so...but with UMP one can never tell. They've done worse in the past... Again, hats off to all people who raised a strong mobilisation against this and hats off to some of our political representatives. Yes, politics is not EVIL when its done the Right Way.

I was looking at the Firebird database recently. Free Software, very feature complete, and one neat feature was that it could run either client/server (like PostgreSQL) or as a standalone .so (like Sqlite). I was starting to look into using it. Then I discovered it only supports i386 on Linux, and no progress has been made in 3 years on that. So I will not be trying Firebird. I thought we had all learned by now that portable code is a good thing. Guess not. I will be sticking with PostgreSQL as my preferred RDBMS for awhile.

I'm typing this on my laptop, an Apple PowerBook 12", at a customer's site while I'm waiting for my contact to return. I'm configuring a server here; to do so, I'm logged in to one of their system, which has an SSH connection open to the server, and I have a second system which I'm using to test out the configuration. That second system is a laptop running Windows 2000. Unfortunately, the system went into suspend mode because I hadn't plugged it into the power, and now it's locked. And I don't have the password. So I can't test my configuration, and will have to wait until my contact returns so that he can unlock it. Since everything is preferable to waiting, I took out my own laptop and started reading some Usenet posts (they prefer me not to log on my laptop to the network here, but luckily there's leafnode). As I was sitting there, typing away on the laptop, one of the employees of this place walked and saw me typing. Quote: Isn't one computer enough these days?. Heh. Well, no; I explained that I actually do need all three of them. What I didn't tell him, however, is that at home and at the office, three isn't even enough... Perhaps I should rearrange my computers.

Even though my blog doesn't enable comments by default (instead everything is moderated), someone still thought it was a good idea to spam on a (totally unrelated, though as it happens the first at the time) post on my blog for their blog aggregator that is totally content-less at this point in time (and no, I will not post a link). That's the first time this happens, in all the time I've had comments on my blog; so moderating them seems to work well. Which obviously is nice.

... and I must say: It was again worth the effort. Pretty good organized (especially when compared to the Berlinux) and a good mixture of fun, knowledge and nice people. Again we had a nice booth, with a good computer sponsored by AMD (I think...). Of course we needed to improvise a bit as usual: Since we had no white poster wall, but only a brown wooden one, we used our beamer with the big wall quite far behind our booth. Worked good, but some kind of colourless, since the wall wasn't white but some kind of greenish gray. And since we had no poster for the wooden poster wall (the mail service seem to have lost them again!) we used my sweat shirt with the big swirl on the back, to "mark our territory". Although we had some problems with the network (luckily we had several Debian mirrors on our notebooks...) we managed to solve some quite tricky problems and answer some interesting questions. One visitor even asked us, if he could bring his computer, because he had a quite interesting problem with some error messages while booting. After I while we found out, what was wrong: He installed the wrong kernel, had DMA-problems with his DVD-drive, and never ever installed any security update (beside a fourth small problem, we can't remember, but we solved it). He used synaptic and just clicked on the "update package list" button (how it is called in the English locale?)... uh... I can't remember what he did exactly... he did the synaptic equivalent of just running aptitude update without running aptitude upgrade after that. Carsten, who is more familiar with synaptic, explained him how to use synaptic, and I put "take a look at synaptic (especially if translations are misleading)" on my todo-list. We had two copies of the Debian Anwenderhandbuch by Frank Ronneburg left from last weeks Berlinux, and alphascorpii came up with an idea to find new owners for them... I won't say more; I'm sure she will tell you more about that soon. After we had finished our talks, and teared down the booth, we joined the social event. The organizers made a nice BBQ in front of the lecture hall and showed some funny movies of the "local hero" of their university: A mathematician with PhD who left the university to became a cabaret artist but is still doing some nice lectures for special events. If you read this blog entry during a boring lecture imagine that: There exists at least one lecturer, where you need to book tickets in advance, or you won't even get into his lecture! Today, on Sunday, they organized again a small round trip to the beautifully city of Dresden. Since the Frauenkirchen was consecrated on that day, it was kept short, the city was just to crowded. Instead we visited the Hygiene Museum, where they had an exhibition about games (don't ask me, why there). They did not only showed some really old games in a glass cubicle, but even much stuff where you could try and play a lot of different games. Quite funny. Last part: We went to a good Italian restaurant, and spend a nice evening chatting and telling stories. Although we are using different distributions, desktop environments and editors: After all we are a big family, scattered to the four winds, enjoying the time, we are together! But all good things have to come to an end, so alphascorpii and I left the party (friendly escorted by a local who showed us the way around Dresden's construction sites) to get to our train back to Leipzig and Frankfurt. Last highlight of the day: We had a conductor, who knew Debian, and where we came from! When we showed us quite impressed, he said: "Not all of us conductors are that stupid." (How ironic: Although using his pocket communicator to take a look at the schedule, he told us a wrong information about it.) Nice. These are the moments, where you feel, that you are doing something useful. For such moments (I had a visitor who has been at our booth last year, and whom I helped to solve a problem. He just came by to thank us.) I travel 400 Kilometers through europe. Very last thing to mention: A personal note. You know, that you really love your girlfriend, when she get's much more attendees (factor 5-6) for her talk than you, and you don't mind but are just happy for her ;)

Just about every teenager in Central New York (and throughout the USA, I’d say) who’s online and uses instant messaging (read: probably 90+% of ‘em to varying degrees, depending) uses AOL Instant Messenger. It sucks. Really. Though gaim makes it better. I’m glad, however, that there will soon be an alternative that doesn’t involve having to ditch 3/4 of my contacts and say “use another network or don’t talk to me.” I look forward to the day when people can say “IM me at X” and not have to stipulate a network to go along with that (and log onto 1 network instead of 3 or so).

CRCnet Configuration System
Now that the CRCnet Configuration System is nearing a releasable state, we’ve had approval from the University’s commercialisation arm that we are allowed to release it under the GPL. This is good, I’ve been working on the system for the last year at least and it is nice to know that it will be available to the community at large. I think what is going to be most interesting to me is to see whether there is any interest in using it from external people and particularly how easy they find it to use. The current plan is to release version 1.0 at LCA’06 in conjuction with our talk of everything that the CRCnet Project has achieved over the last few years. Debian Stuff
Haven’t made a lot of progress with my NM application over the last month. I think both Alexander (my AM) and myself have been too busy with other things. Alexander did get the latest PHPwiki packages that I had prepared uploaded and there have been no new bug reports yet, so I think we’re making progress. This package made use of the wwwconfig-common functions developed by Sean Finney which was a great help and we’re much closer to having a robust PHPwiki package (and one that is up to date) than we were a few months ago. The next step for the PHPwiki packages will be to try and migrate to the dbconfig-common structure for database creation and management. The hold-up there is that dbconfig-common does not support sqlite or sqlite3 at the moment. We use sqlite as the default database for the Debian PHPwiki package to save having to install a heavy-weight system such as mysql or postgresql. Reading the dbconfig-common documentation it seems that it will not be too difficult to add sqlite support so hopefully I will find some time for that over the Christmas break. I wrote some scripts to nicely automate VAP creation with the new madwifi-ng drivers for Atheros wireless cards and posted them to the Atheros mailing list. Kel Modderman picked them up and pointed me towards the pkg-madwifi alioth project where madwifi packaging for Debian is being co-ordinated. It will be good to get involved with that as working with madwifi is a fairly large part of my job at the moment, so it will be easy for me to justify spending time on Debian packaging tasks for it. The key issue we need to sort out here is whether udev rules or ifupdown hooks are the most appropriate way to create the VAP devices, or whether a combination of the two is required.

You are Green Lantern.
Green Lantern 90%
Supergirl 87%
Batman 85%
Wonder Woman 77%
Iron Man 70%
Hulk 65%
The Flash 65%
Catwoman 60%
Spider-Man 45%
Robin 42%
Superman 30%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Which superhero are you?

Well, following my resign at my current workplace for end of this year (only about 2 days of work left) I had some not so nice weeks in the past, but now it’s so near to the end that I’m happy that I did it. Ok, I will be without a job from January on, as the stuff I tried all didn’t work out (or maybe will, but much later than expected, but for now I just don’t count on it), but the last few weeks at work did make it clear that I would have resigned even without hoping for them. The only unfortunate thing is that I don’t get any money from the “job center”, but I never had any good experience with them, so well - nothing much lost. I just dont have money. :) Hrm, maybe I should start a “market”? But looking at AJs there isn’t much money out there. :)

Why do prioprietary pieces of software often have names like the above? (Other examples: Macromedia Flash, Chipmunk Scripts Guestbook, Mojo Mail, PeopleSoft PeopleTools, Golden FTP Server Pro, Invision Power Board) A walk though the CVE lists will turn up hundreds of hilarious examples of similar names. It's easy to guess whether a given security hole in that list affects Debian based just on the form of the software name even if one has never heard of the program before. Even free software projects that seem to partake of a proprietary mindset show it in the names: Mozilla FireFox, OpenOffice, Mozilla Thunderbird. So different than w3m, vim, mutt. A whole pile of history, cultural, and, I imagine, linguistic difference. Even if at first saddled with such a name, many free software projects seem to evolve in the other direction: Debian Installer -> d-i, X Window System -> xorg. As someone who can't name software, I find this strangely fascinating.

As you read this fascinating but edited-for-brevity irc log from #debian-boot, imagine yourself as a contributor to either the larger Debian project or the Debian-Installer sub-project. At what point do you begin to feel insulted?

---

<Chepre> can i talk to the chief of debian please. the whole project could earn some money
<minghua> Chepre: if you are serious, write email to leader@debian.org
<Chepre> thanks minghua. is there a way to get a "official" release created with all up-to-date modules, like for Intel ICH7 sATA-Controller...as long as i pay for it?
<minghua> Chepre: chances are small. the official release is a long process
<minghua> and it doesn't happen often
<minghua> the earliest date you can expect for next release is probably end of 2006
<minghua> so you would have a better chance to hire some people/company who knows debian and provide you an updated kernel
<Chepre> OMG? does debian have not enough coders or don't they have "fun" to keep it up-to-date? e.g. the intel ich7 is already very old
<Chepre> well, can i hire the debian-team?
<minghua> Chepre: well, there is no official "team", but sure, you can hire debian developers
<gravity> Chepre: The stock kernel doesn't support your device? Why not? Is the driver not in the mainline kernel tree?
<Chepre> no
<gravity> Why not?
<Chepre> its just a default Dell PowerEdge 850 with Intel ICH7 and it isn't supported
<gravity> Chepre: Well, did you send an installation report?
<Chepre> gravity: no
<gravity> Chepre: That'd be a good first step to getting your problem fixed for future releases
<minghua> Chepre: ah, then it's supported by stock kernel after all, did you say it only works for kernel > 2.6.12?
<Chepre> minghua: 2.6.8-2 doesnt support it
<minghua> Chepre: okay, so as gravity said, write an installation report so that people know your problem
<Chepre> well, we cant wait month or years for a fix
<gravity> Chepre: You can create a custom installer image with the updated kernel for your work
<Chepre> we have to install many server in the next weeks :(
<munghua> Chepre: then I'm sure if you offer enough money, some d-i people can provide an installer with a newer kernel for you
<Chepre> well, i already got an custom installer but its a bit buggy...i need a whole netinst with the same "quality" like the official releases got
<gravity> sounds you were at the right track at the beginning... though "chief of debian" is probably the wrong person to contact :-P
<gravity> You could send a mail to debian-boot I suppose, offering the work for what you need
<Chepre> well, i also need up-to-date software, not just only the installer :( so the "whole" debian-team has to stop current work and has to start creating a stable version which is newer than the current unstable
<Chepre> minghua: do you think 50k are enough to get a 3.3 as stable?
<minghua> Chepre: by "up-to-date software" you mean all the software, including desktop, web servers, and stuff?
<gravity> Chepre: You may want to check out an alternative source. HP, as I understand it, provides the kind of support you want. Progeny does as well. And Ubuntu has their own full derivative with this sort of thing
<Chepre> minghua: right, as long the software is not a beta :)
<gravity> Chepre: The whole Debian team is not the kind of project that'll do this for you
<Chepre> so the debian-team dont want to earn money?
<Chepre> gravity: i know, open source :) ... but i think the guys making a new "official" release for me whould be very happy getting up to 20.000 us$ for one month of work
<gravity> Chepre: It would violate a lot of principles and the stable release policy to do an official debian release. You could get what you need with a name other than debian though, with some of the companies I listed above
<Chepre> where is the problem? i give you the money and you give me an up-to-date release which is only for my company, not for public
<gravity> I know I'd quit the project if there was an official Debian release for cash
<minghua> and there are like what, 10,000 packages in sarge now?
<gravity> Chepre: That's what those companies are for. Debian doesn't work like that
<gravity> Chepre: If you want to talk to individual debian developers for that, you can do that too
<Chepre> hmm, ok....now i know why the d-i doesn't recognize smp or 64bit systems

---

Now imagine yourself as someone who is trying to install Debian on twenty thousand stock machines for work and it's not working. At what point above did you begin to feel alienated? (Assuming that "Chepre" is not trolling,) Neither side in this exchange is particularly meaning to insult the other, both are doing what is right and obvious from their perspective. Two ships passing in the night, two trains speeding down a track, I don't know. It's a shame we can't deal better with this sort of thing. I would be truely interested to see how other free software projects deal with it differently. The rest of this is my attempt at some analysis and is probably not very useful.. A few mistakes Chepre made:

• When trying to communicate with someone, it's helpful to try to understand their motivations. Maybe these people are not highly motivated by money. Maybe spending 1% of your budget to buy the right someone a computer exhibitng the problem would be more effective.
• If a coder asks if you're filed a formal report of your problem, and you haven't, and you don't understand the underlying problem and rebuff their attempts to get a grip on it, escalating the issue to upper management will not make them your friend.
• Trying to pre-solve your problem by setting requirements like "it can't be a beta" and "it needs to be a 3.3 release" and "it needs to be newer than the current version" will only result in the wrong problem being solved, and smart people will not want to get involved in such a process. If you plan to hire someone to solve a problem it makes more sense to give them a broad vision of the problem to be solved, some example use cases, and let them, not you, solve the problem. That's what you're hiring them for.
• Not doing basic background research. And letting it show.

A few mistakes the channel (irr-)regulars made:

• Not recognising that "it will be done at the end of 2006" is not an answer a user wants to hear, and not pointing out alternatives such as last month's beta release or today's daily build.
• Assuming that when a user asks for a release, they necessarily want what we consider a "stable release". Perhaps they want a release that has some form of support and is free of showstopper bugs; what Debian terms "stable" is not the only release that necessarily has those characteristics, depending on how it will be used. (In other words, holy penguin pee (aka "official") might be more plentiful, and more symbolic, than you think.)
• Not pointing Chepre to the Debian consultants page. (Minor, but it's possibly the best place to have mentioned.)
• Getting offended. And letting it show.