The fire didn't do any significant damage to the building, but it did cut off our power supply because it burned it all up. We have the phone system and a skeleton network back by mid-day Tuesday and a full network back by Wednesday morning. Thursday afternoon, temporary utility power was available which provided enough for the office to return to normal. Our factory was scheduled to shut down for the holidays on Monday. With work, it looks like everything will be back to normal on January 2. So we really will lose only 4 days of production. The company's business interruption insurance will be paying the wages for workers that couldn't work those four days due to fire as well. So, busy week, but it could have been much worse.

When I connected my IM client today aftera couple of days of being offline for different reasons, I saw that two people had written to me because of Jingle being released as offcial JEP (Jabber Extension Protocol). Those are JEP-0166 and JEP-0167, the former for "low-level" signalling and the latter for specific audio and video calls. I strongly belive that this will expand usage of VoIP, as people will find quite natural being able to call a person that is currently available, which is managed by presence status. Oh! And for those of you who don't know yet... Jingle is what Google Talk is using right now.

Alexa, obviously owned by Amazon and using Google to power its search function, has interesting graphs on the pageviews and reach of some websites. Interestingly, my personal homepage is now barely in the top million (which I consider impressive), but only the top 100.000 have publicly visible graphs. A very interesting graph I obtained is this: So the top three sites are yahoo.com, msn.com and google.com; followed by ebay, passport (what is passport used for except hotmail?) and amazon (English pages only, the worldwide fourth is a chinese search engine). I was really suprised to see MSN and passport that high, I would have expected google to be #1 actually. But I obviously underestimated how many people didn't change the Internet Explorer start page... Unfortunately alexa seems to be broken somehow - around 50% of my requests will result in a blank page I have to reload... and right now, I can't get any graphs anymore. Update: alexa works better now again, and I was pointed to Alexa Top Sites with some more top-ranked sites. Oh, and I wonder how these stats are generated. I first thought they are using click counters in search engines (most likely in google?) but OTOH that wouldn't explain yahoo or MSN being that high...

To Wouter: No, I never used anything else than CVS for everything serious. Whenever I tried any of them for something (mostly because someone else used it for something I wanted to work on) they simply broke. I don't want debug my tools or use funny workarounds but get some work done on what I use the tools for. Using anything not in a Debian stable release is hardly acceptable for me (remember, it are tools), but when then even when the testing or unstable versions are not enough for simple tasks, it's just too bleeding edge for me.

"only suggests you haven't seen many large projects in the heat of code change"

That's simply a matter of style. If a checkin means a full compile, manually reading the diff and a minimal checking for correctness, writing Changelog entries and possibly adopting the documentation there is simply no need to handle checkins with a sub-minute resulution.

"Far too often have I seen people afraid to reorganize their code because that would lose history on the files."

That's a major problem, but the problem is the fear. No rcs will ever be able to track history for even most common possible reorganisations of code. Limiting yourself to what your rcs can cope with is the main problem, the abilities of your rcs are a minor one.

"How about the fact that upstream CVS development is rather extremely dead, [...]"

I prefer tools being able to do what I need over tools that will be able to adopt my needs normaly. Active development means when I encounter a bug I either have to wait a year until it does no longer bother me, or wait a week and update software on every computer I want to use on, possibly localy in my user account if I do no administrate the computer or the behaviour changes so much other usages are broken. Leading to problems to live within my disk quota and so on.

Don't understand me wrong, I'm not against SVN. I guess now (several years after everyone was already told to not use that old fashioned CVS, but not SVN version N but version N+1, because N was too brokenr; for several versions of N) it is quite useable. And things like atomic commits might even make it favoruable over CVS for larger projects. But not every project can be within the top ten list of size, coding and commit styles differ. But I believe for many people, the ratio of advantages to disadvantages still points into another direction.

Nice. Very nice. The Xbox-Linux / Free60 team around Michael Steil has published a paper / wiki page called 17 Mistakes Microsoft Made in the Xbox Security System. I'm currently reading the paper, but I'm not quite through yet (the PDF is 13 pages long). It contains a very detailed analysis of the 17 types of mistakes Microsoft made (they made most of them multiple times)... The paper and the findings will be presented at the 22C3 in Berlin — this is one of the lectures I will definately be attending, that's for sure! Quoting from the article:

"[Conclusion: ]The security system of the Xbox has been a complete failure.".

Also nice: the earlier (now obsolete) version of the paper was called The Hidden Boot Code of the Xbox — or "How to fit three bugs in 512 bytes of security code" ;-) (via Golem)

I've decided to play around with dpatch cleanups.Documentation updates, and syntactical fixes.Hopefully, nothing is broken with the minor changes.Testsuites are updated as well, and no major regression seems to exist.Currently, a lot of wishlist bugs exist against dpatch, many of them will become a maintenance overhead if applied as-is.An active contributor is really sought.

Compiled over the last few weeks, here's a random list of some subjects I'd love to see covered in XTech 2006. There's now only three weeks left of the call for participation -- so it's definitely time get that proposal in! Mail me if you have any questions.

• OpenDocument vs. Microsoft Office Open XML (am I the only one annoyed by how this format is abbreviated as "Open XML"?)
• Ruby on Rails 1.0
• Firefox 1.5, including its many new features for developers. I loved the idea from Tristan Nitot that extensions are a way to keep Firefox successful. There's a lot of potential here. Anybody want to attend a tutorial on making Firefox extensions?
• W3C Rich Web Clients Activity
• XSLT 2.0 adoption and implementation--anyone but Saxon?
• The Web Desktop. I was incredibly interested in this post of Miguel de Icaza's. For a long time I've felt RDF could hold the desktop together, data-wise, but he also proposes that HTTP and web services could do a similar thing. I suspect these are two strands of development that go hand in hand.
• Design, usability and patterns for AJAX web applications.
• Open Content Alliance
• RSS and Atom: despite the release of Atom, RSS continues to grow down its own path. I reckon it's about time to sort out where each are going, and what they're best for.
• XSL-FO: I use this technology regularly for preparing PDFs with RenderX, and the specification itself is mature. It seems time to take stock of XSL-FO and where it might go in future.

Submit your proposal here: XTech 2006 Call for Participation. XTech will be held 16-19 May 2006, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The GNOME team has been sitting on top of ready-to-go GNOME 2.12 for way too many weeks now, but unfortunately a series of planned and unplanned transitions affecting unstable prevented us from moving them from experimental to unstable. Today's good news is that these transitions are either going well (C++) or not at all (freetype upstream), so the release team gave us green light to start a fun GNOME 2.10 2.12 transition. There are a few aspects in this cycle that makes it a bit special and a bit more complex. GNOME 2.12 in experimental uses dbus 0.50, which is API/bus incompatible with the previous version in testing/unstable, so when we upload GNOME 2.12, the new dbus will go in too. As KDE is also using dbus in a few places, KDE and GNOME uploads will need to happen at the same time. To make it even better, dbus 0.50 has been obsoleted by 0.60, which is again API and bus incompatible with the previous version. The GNOME and KDE teams have agreed on the following plan:

1. The Project Utopia people have uploaded dbus 0.60 to experimental, and is currently waiting in NEW.
2. The mighty seb128 will upload GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 to unstable RSN, so our first version of GTK using Cairo starts to get broadly tested in architectures other than i386 and powerpc.
3. Once dbus 0.60 is accepted in the archive, the GNOME team will rush to recompile GNOME 2.12.2 against this new dbus, and test that everything is ok with the new version.
   At the same time, the KDE camp will upload their shiny KDE 3.5 debs, compiled too against dbus 0.60, to experimental, for the first time.
4. When everything has transitioned to dbus 0.60 in experimental, GNOME and KDE will be uploaded to unstable.
5. Vorlon will take a deep breath and will try to figure out how to get the two monsters in testing at the same time. Vorlon, we love you. :)

This looks like it'll take months to do, but I really don't think it'll be the case. We hope to be ready for a full GNOME 2.12 upload to unstable, at long last, pretty soon. As always, the brave can still use GNOME 2.12 in experimental with the usual aptitude -t experimental install gnome-desktop-environment. More updates as stuff happens!

h01ger thought that maybe I should clarify a few points in my blog. Well sure, I can do that. First of all, I think Joey does great security work. I am not attacking him for this. Second, I think Joey does a great job with Debian in general. However, I think he’s seriously harming Debian by not opening up and organizing the security infrastructure, and this is where my problem lies. I hope I’m getting this point across. There have been a number of attempts to revise the infrastructure and organization; a meeting in Oldenburg, where the testing-security crew attempted to get Joey to use their work; proposal(s?) by the DPL; AJ is now working on security queue stuff. I really do hope that Joey decides to work w/ AJ (or any of the other people who’ve suggested different ways to handle Debian security), for the sake of Debian. Joey keeps looking for additional manpower, and gets frustrated when people don’t contribute. Well, as someone who has attempted to contribute, and has seen others attempt to contribute, we get frustrated when our contributions are ignored (in the case of the kernel security update, the i386 and source packages apparently sat around for 4 months). Maybe if all this happened in the open, instead of amongst private emails (that often times go unanswered because Joey is busy), people might not get discouraged, and will continue contributing. I personally don’t think anything has been solved, and unless Joey is actively working w/ Branden or AJ in private, I don’t see any progress towards solving a problem that will require openness, organization, and trust. Manpower can follow after that.

I wrote an article, here: http://www.dedasys.com/articles/webhosting_market_lemons.html about why I think the market for web hosting is a "market for lemons" - the fact that you can't really tell ahead of time what the quality of service will be like causes it to be a problematic market in some ways, both for service providers and consumers. It's a work in progress, so ideas, comments and suggestions are welcome!

Given that the perennial, uh, “discussion” about GNOME’s features is on us again, I thought I’d share the method I use to remove options from Quod Libet. I break them, and see how long it takes people to notice. Well, no, not really, but the amount of brokenness in an option is a good metric for whether or not people change it. One of the first options in QL was a checkbox for “Show album cover”. Sometime around 0.7 or it became impossible to turn this off, and I didn’t notice until I was redoing the preferences dialog for 0.11. Rather than fixing it, I just removed a few dozen lines of code and made it always on. No one has ever asked for it back (though someone probably will now). This has happened a couple of times. On a related note, three months ago Bram Cohen made an interesting post about configuration in software, which has been rolling around in my head picking up smaller objects since. There’s a lot of “configuration” that we don’t think of as configuration — for example, the volume in an audio player is stored in basically the same place (same file, GConf tree, whatever) as, say, where the program looks for files. But we only think of the later as part of our “configuration.” That’s because we control the volume “nearby,” in the same place we view it, but the location to look for files in a very different spatial place (an entirely separate window). No one would be crazy enough to put a volume control in a Preferences dialog. So “configuration” becomes synonymous with “hard to find”. The answer to configuration creep, then, is to provide as much direct manipulation as possible. At least from the UI perspective. You’re still screwed from the combinatorial explosion on the implementation side. Beyond that, one thing I’d really like is for context menus to be more common. That is, users should be able to expect to right-click on a widget, and change changable aspects of that widget. This also means making right-click involve no surprises — it shouldn’t activate buttons, shouldn’t delete things, etc. Otherwise people will be too afraid to right-click to try configuring. This feels like a good substitute for when direct manipulation isn’t really possible, because the most direct form of manipulation is already taken up by the widget’s primary purpose. Anyway, Quod Libet is going to be moving in this direction in the future. We already have plugins configurable in the same dialog where you turn them on and off. In 0.16 the tray icon has become an interface almost unto itself, and so it has a separate Preferences dialog now, launchable only from the icon. (It also only has one thing to configure, but that might change. Most importantly, it can grow, without getting in the way of people who don’t care about the tray icon.) For 0.17 I’m probably going to fulfill the common “display remaining time” feature request by putting a radio context menu on the time display. And so on. Fixing Real Bugs
But enough about UI wankery. Does anyone know of a nice C parser for Python? Inspired by a bug he found in mmapmodule, Michael’s written a tool to find type signature issues in CPython functions, but its usefulness is lessened by the fact it returns a ton of false positives and probably also misses many things as well. You Are All Self-Absorbed
My project for a class this semester involved trying to extract useful categories from the link structure of weblogs. Unfortunately it turns out weblogs are all about navel-gazing, and the link structure isn’t at all useful. The majority of shared links on Planet Perl,Debian,GNOME,Python pointed to perl,debian,gnome,python .org, and the majority on MSDN Blogs pointed to microsoft.com. Only about 10% of links pointed to a post on another weblog. Given that additionally weblogs tend to not have comments (and even if they do, people reply in another weblog post anyway), that’s kind of sickening. Can you imagine how much email would suck if only one out of every 10 mails got a reply? I wouldn’t be able to spend all day reading about how Debian’s FTP masters are doing their job properly.

Yes, you can surely tell I am no guru when it comes to describing sounds - maybe that's because in Spanish every letter has one, or at most two, sounds? Anyway, Christian, that's the way to say it - The O sometimes sounds a little bit U-ish, in some places you could see this same sound (coming from N huatl, Mexico's main indigenous language) as huaks. The k (in the x) is usually pronounced, but quite soft - sometimes we just refer to the place as "Oastepec", and nobody gets hurt (or worse, sent to Oaxaca (Huajaka - yes, the X is the only letter whose sound truly changes (and that is because Spaniards used it as a wildcard for S, KS, SH, J - In fact, M xico is pronounced M jico, but never (EVER) spelt that way besides what other Spanish speakers say. The original sound, though, was closer to M shico)))
And, yes, I am also one of many thousands of people longing to ride through the Copper Canyon. It's supposed to be really, really beautiful. Too bad Chihuahua is ~20 hours away from Mexico City :(
And about Oaxtepec's location: It's 60km south of Mexico City, not of Downtown Mexico (that would still be out of the city, but not by that much). The best route is not straight, so from my house (in South-Western Mexico City, ~15m away from where the Cuernavaca highway begins) it's about 90 minutes. The highway is _very_ good and safe, don't worry. I do expect people coming by car from the USA. Here you have a good map of Morelos state. Oaxtepec is on the third column, second row, near Cuautla. Just for completeness sake, just North of Morelos you have Distrito Federal, where Mexico City (partly) lies. The airport, where most of you will arrive is again in the second row, third column (hmmm... A pattern starts to emerge! Lets see what that means...) - We are working so we don't have to explain to you all how to get from there to Oaxtepec, I hope we can provide buses covering the route, at least in the days with most arrivals.

Heise (and many other sources) report that the EU parliament has voted for the abysmal data retention directive, simply ignoring objections from the industry and the civil society. The EU has turned into a police state where more than 450 million citizens are treated as criminals by default now! 1984 is a joke compared to this. We're all fucked! Bigtime! Please, someone go out and sue the shit out of the fucking idiots who are responsible for this kindly remind the responsible politicians that this directive is a really bad idea! Update 2005-12-15: OK, so I might have overreacted. My first answer to the accusations would probably be (abusing an unrelated quote from Jonathan McDowell): "I exaggerate for effect". But honestly, while it's not as bad as 1984, I really do think that this law will bring us all a big step nearer to a 1984-type horror scenario. (via netzpolitik.org)

Reading about California’s execution of Tookie Williams Monday night, it occurs to me that there are two categories of death penalty supporters:

1. People who don’t understand the legal system. If you’ve never sat through a criminal trial (or several), you can’t possibly understand the uncertainties in every case, including those cases that the press paints as “open and shut” (e.g, the O.J. Simpson Trial). Human fallibility permeates the process: the prosecutor, the defense attorney, the witnesses, the jury, and the judge. Sometimes it reduces to a question of whom to believe, and the legal process is not necessarily the most effective way to answer that question if your goal is to get to the truth. Sometimes “what happened” is actually pretty clear, but it still seems like fitting square pegs in round holes to match the facts of the particular case to the abstract categories set up by the law. The other thing that should be abundantly clear to anyone who has participated in or witnessed a criminal trial is that degrees of potential punishment have only a minimal impact on an individual considering a crime. For the most part, those individuals just don’t expect to get caught (or they aren’t thinking about it at all). I would be shocked if anyone could prove a crime was deterred because the death penalty was a potential punishment for the act in question, rather than, e.g., life in prison. It should be obvious that people who commit murder are generally not rational beings, weighing their options and the potential consequences. Certainly, there is no statistical correlation between increased application (or availability) of the death penalty and decreased violent crime.
2. People who use the death penalty for political advantage. These people, mostly politicians, may or may not appreciate the fundamental problems of the death penalty, but realize that most people do not understand the criminal justice system, and that taking a pro-death penalty position will communicate a message that they are doing their utmost to reduce crime and make people safer (regardless of whether or not that is actually true).

Are there any death penalty supporters who don’t fit into those two categories? Perhaps certain victims and their families, who view the death penalty as necessary to reestablish some sort of karmic balance in the world and “put the whole thing behind them”?

Gunnar, thanks for the pictures of the Oaxtepec place. Which triggers me one question: how are we supposed to *pronounce* the place's name? The "x" is kinda puzzling in names coming from the local languages in Mexico. Having a map of the combined Mexico/Oaxtepec area handy somewhere would also help to prepare local sightseeing in the neighbourhood. Up to now, I just know that Oaxtepec is somewhat 60kms south of downtown Mexico (which makes it in the suburbs according to the giant size of the city). And, Gunnar, don't worry: I *still* plan to come back in Mexico next summer with my family. Probably not the best season, but the "kids", if I still can call them kids, have school in May, so coming at that moment is not an option. Only too bad that I really can't come a few days before Debconf and enjoy the El Pacifico train from Los Mochis to Chihuahua, which I planned to ride. To people coming to Debconf AND who have time: DO IT. The Copper Canyon train ride is for sure one of the things you have to see in Mexico. Then come back from Chihuahua to Mexico with a bus ride (a cheap bus, just like the local people do), eventually stopping for one day in Guadalajara. I bet you will then appreciate this small bit of real mexican life.

It's been an interesting 24 hours. Monday
8:00 PM
I get home after working a regular day and having supper with a friend. 8:15 PM
One of our friend from church -- who happens to live a few blocks from my workplace -- calls. "Did you know your workplace is on fire?" "Uhh, no...." "Yeah, big fire, flames, dozens of emergency vehicles..." "Hmm..." So then I call my manager... "Did you know the company is on fire?" "Uhh... no...." "Yeah, sounds bad, I'm going to head in and see what's going on." 8:30 PM
I arrive at work. Cops have blocked all the entrances. I identify myself as an I.S. manager and am directed to the "manager area". (Others are kept across the street.) An eerie orange glow -- and lots of smoke -- is visible above the rooftop. This looks bad. We learn that something in the compressor room caught fire or exploded. Fire spread upward quickly. Most importantly, everyone got out without any injuries. 8:35 PM
Our T1 provider calls my cellphone. These are really, really good folks. I answer, as I'm standing next to a noisy fire truck. ISP: Hi. Just calling to let you know that your T1 is down and we're looking into it. Me: Hmm. That might be because it's on fire. ISP: Uhm, did you just say it's on fire? Me: Could be. There's a fire in the building and we're not allowed in just yet. Plus the electric company is trying to cut the power. ISP: OK then, I think we're going to assume the problem is at your end for now. This sounds bad. I know the I.S. dept. still has UPS power, since the phone system attendant is answering. But if the T1 is down, it seems that it must have burned up (its run goes very close to the affected area), and taken some phone lines with it. 9 PM
It's below freezing already, and I didn't bundle up very well. Several waiting -- but unused -- ambulances are nearby and the paramedics invite those of us waiting inside the heated vehicles. 9:30 PM
The CEO and CFO are permitted to tour the building with a firefighter. Word is that sprinklers have come on and there's water in the I.S. dept. This is potentially really bad news. The I.S. dept is in the basement and water has been a problem before, so we're prepared, but water and computers are never a good combination... After a little while, we are allowed inside as well. There is 1 to 2 inches of water on the floor in the basement, but fortunately nothing has reached the raised floor yet. The fire department supplies an AC generator to power the sump pump, plus 6 squeeges. We supply 6 people. We keep on the squeege duty until about midnight. Meanwhile, it turns out that a water pipe broke out in the shop near the fire. Water gets shut off. But the floor up there appears to unfortunately slope towards the staircase that leads to the basement. Water is coming down fast. We find what we can to block the path, and that seemed to just make the collection deeper. I periodically try to find someone that can bring a pump and a generator -- or something -- to help this get cleared up. Midnight
I head home. The water situation is improving, but not resolved yet. Others remain. Once home, I post a notice on our public website saying that our power, Internet, phone, and FAX lines are down. You just might have a problem reaching us. I also e-mail some consultants, saying that the reason the VPN doesn't work is that we had a fire. I also e-mail the new I.S. person who has an hour commute and advise him of the situation. Our fire was top story on one of the local newscasts. We watch the video of it, sigh at the annoying "on the scene" reporter (motto: "things were interesting an hour ago"), and turn in. 1AM
Time to sleep. Tuesday
6AM
Get up, in to work by 6:45. Everything is dead. No power, no water, no phones, no heat, no gas. Also, fortunately, no more water coming down. I call the other I.S. developer and tell him not to bother coming in right now, but maybe we'll call later. 8:30 AM
An impromptu meeting happens. The CEO sets communications as the #1 priority: phone and basic Internet access. Plants 2 and 4 have working power, so if we can bring up some servers and network gear on a generator, computers over there will work. No water in plant 1, where my office is. So nearest restrooms are a 5-10 minute walk through dark and damp areas. Bottled water, coffee, and donuts appear at the halfway mark to the restrooms ;-) 9:00 AM
Generators start appearing near the I.S. dept. After getting them powered up, proper extension cords found, etc., we start plugging in the phone system. Power strip 1 works. I flick the switch on power strip 2, and it all goes dead. This generator's circuit breaker keeps doing that every time we try to turn on the phone system. So we try generator #2. Phone system finally powers up. But all incoming lines are ringing at phones in sales. Volunteers go up to answer those phones. Meanwhile, phone tech shows up, and orders his own, larger generator. I call our person that's an hour away and tell him to go ahead and head in. 10:00 AM
Now we turn to the computers. We're going to have to be careful what we bring up so we don't overload the generator (and thus have an unclean shutdown on anything that's already up.) I recable power to some switches, our T1 router (ISP calls: the T1 just came up! yay!), and our firewall. Flick the switch on firewall. Generator stays up. Firewall emits a high-pitched whine. Eeep. Flick the switch again! After checking things out, we adjust the voltage a bit and determine that things are generally OK. I run the firewall on one of its two power supplies. At least if it burns one out, we can still run it off the other later. Turn it back on -- whines again, but it goes away after a few minutes. Phew. Next step: our main Linux file server. Flick the switch, and there's a satisfying "whoosh" from the fans. Excellent. Our developer shows up and observes later: "John, this was odd. When I got here, there were 7 guys standing around watching you boot up machines." 11:00 AM
Decision time. Our main ERP server is an AIX box. 8U. About a dozen disks. Certain to be a large draw. Can the generator handle it? Yes, it should. Should we power it up, given that it takes 45 minutes to come up and 20 to go down? We opt to try. I cable it up and press the power button. Nothing happens. But that is normal for AIX. After a few minutes, we start seeing hex codes on the LCD. A few minutes later, disks start coming up. All looks good... 11:15 AM
Orange alert lamp comes on for the AIX box. Uhoh. Turns out one of the drives in the RAID is bad. Time to call IBM, but at least it's mirrored to the box is up. IBM service calls are always "fun" for this. I spent a total of about an hour on the phone with them, 90% of which was spent with them analyzing error logs trying to find out what exact part number to give is, and 10% spent trying to look up our account information. Plus, the phone guy is now switching the phone system to his genset. He tries to hook it up through a home-type UPS, which is giving him fits. I get disconnected from IBM at least twice. Noon
My supervisor goes to Subway and brings in lunch for all four of us in I.S. since we don't really feel like we can leave. Word arrives that the generator that's powering the servers is leaking oil. Eeep. But it should be good until evening. On the plus side, the generator will automatically shut itself off when it runs out of oil. Won't damage itself. 1PM
IBM calls, trying again to get information about what exact part they need to bring out. Only 29 minutes on the phone this time. Word arrives that a 60kW generator has arrived that they will attempt to hook into the mains supply for the building. The main power distribution center has been burnt. Plus we aren't allowed to touch large parts of it since fire inspectors and insurance adjustors aren't done yet. But no ETA on the big generator. We make a preliminary decision to cut power to computers & the network at 5PM, and maintain the single phone system generator overnight. 2PM
Local IBM rep calls. He'll be out between 3:30 and 4. I say that'll be fine, but warn him that if he's any later, the power may be down. 3:45PM
IBM rep shows up, replaces the dead disk. It works. Whee. 4:15PM
I start powering down the AIX box. We then learn that ETA on the big generator is 5PM. So we start shutting down other servers as planned. 5PM
Big generator comes up. It works. We slowly bring up our systems. Everything is good. BUT -- we are basically maxing out the capacity on the generator. People will not be able to just come in and work like usual tomorrow. We'll be meeting in the morning to figure it all out. 6PM
We post signs at entrances warning people to not turn *anything* on. Finally head home at 6:30.

“unstable is just that” is what some dork says to me on #debian when I said:

i’ve nuked my machine from a dist-upgrade from unstable last night. It won’t boot. The shell doesn’t look right. help. :)

To make matters worse. Last night I did some house cleaning and ripped out all my old kernels to save space. My 6.5G root partition (everything except home) was full!

1. Ok, try dpkg or apt news on #debian. Nothing.
2. How about blog postings on Debian Planet? Bah…
3. I quickly page in mutt and see if debian-devel has talked about it. Hmmm, seemingly no.
4. Perhaps debian-user via the lurker interface. Hmmm no.
5. Ok, people in #debian-devel will hate me, but I’ll ask there.
6. They point to the topic: FUCKED: yaird/kernels (#343042/#343048) Aha!

Ok, I need a rescue CD. Which one I wonder? Let’s try this one grml. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some sort of Web page like status.debian.org/unstable telling about current high priority problems that will probably affect most Debian users? Right now, I have to look all over the place. Very tiring.

I see that plans start getting ready. Bubulle is coming, Wouter is not, and people will soon start getting their plans ready. I am quite excited about it! Of course, I need to devote more time to it, which is hard to me - but I will do it. Oaxtepec rules, you will _love_ the place. I went there again to spend a weekend with Nadezhda - Took some more photos, added them to the album. Debconf guys: Yes, I owe you a full report... It will come. Soon. Promise.
Anyway... I'm excited. Debian friends, Mexican interested friends: What are you waiting for? Join us! Register!
[update] Well, I published this entry, but then realized I wanted to answer to Wouter's question: Why in May? ;-)
First of all, weather: The weather is plainly better in May. Somewhat warmer... The rainy season starts in May/June, but believe me, you don't want to have your laptop out during Morelos State's well known thunderstorms!
Second, I fear of political instability. Next July we will be having our federal elections. We don't anticipate instability such as what we had in 1994 (which, please you all be quiet, didn't even mean violence in the streets), but still... It's better not to have Debconf too near the elections.
Third, prices - Most places are noticeably more expensive during Summer.
And, yes, I know some people will not be able to attend... I am sorry to learn you are one of them. Still, I'm sure some other people would not be able to make it in July.