Needed a mailclient wich can handle a lot of folders and is very customiable
also i more and more need to read my mails via ssh on very slow connections
so evolution was unusable
Mutt isn't the right thing when you have a lot of folders and subfolder
Switched to Gnus
Ganneff helped me a lot so now it works fine
Figured out that if you want imapS do:

(setq nnimap-address "mailhost")
(setq nnimap-list-pattern "*")
(setq nnimap-authinfo-file "~/.nnimap")
(setq gnus-select-method'
(nnimap "mailhost"
(nnimap-stream ssl)
))

and other than in all the documentation do not write the port thing into .nnimap
only write:

machine mailhost login username password topsecret

otherwise it will still doing IMAP without S

I sent in my vote for the DPL election. Fortunately, devotee was written by Manoj, not me, so the response I got back didn’t look like this: Read the rest ...

My personal hero of the day is Gustavo Franco, for this email to debian-devel. He writes how to get your Gnome/Pango/Glib applications that don't work since yesterday's upgrade like evolution (#358071) working again:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc evolution

And you should be able to read your email again.

I have not been very much involved in this year DPL campaigning, but I’m part of two DPL teams, thus I feel the need to give my point of view on the subject. I’m not really satisfied by how the current DPL team worked out, and being on the DPL candidate team of both Jeroen and Andreas gave me the opportunity to gather information on what really happened. Also I’ve met Bdale yesterday and he gave me his opinion as well (and I really enjoyed that dinner. Thanks bdale!). Just for the record, I’ll try to sum up what really happened: Branden had agreed to be a participant of the DPL team concept, but wasn’t a major proponent of the idea. This, combined with his personal problems, explains why he didn’t make use of the full potential of a DPL team. Does it invalidate the DPL team concept? No, I don’t think so because the concept will evolve this year. Let’s see how it can change. Both DPL teams would this year receive all the mails sent to leader@debian.org. This means that the members are involved from the beginning and not only on request of the leader, which means that they can pro-actively take over if they see that the DPL doesn’t manage to follow up up to its expectations (which hopefully won’t be needed this year). Furthermore I expect that the team would be informed of what the DPL does, so that the team can give its opinion on everything done, and prevent big errors (nobody is perfect, errors do happen). But the most important thing is that the team should not stand behind the DPL, but next to him taking initiatives, and I expect the DPL to work with the team members for the best of Debian. As such I expect the DPL to accept most of the proposals of his team if there’s a consensus on it, even if he doesn’t personnaly think that’s it’s a priority for his DPL mandate. If I am part of an elected DPL team, I will work on that basis. I do have many ideas to try, and will make proposals. I ran once for the DPL election, and if you check my platform, you can see that I always had ideas for Debian and you can see that I worked on several of them which are nowadays very common (such as the PTS, alioth, collaborative maintenance). I won’t miss an opportunity to get the project moving forward.

Just about everybody hates backing up computers. But it's important. With more of our information being stored digitally -- even photos -- it's critical to back them up. At home, I've been using rdiff-backup for years now. Very slick. It stores backups on the filesystem -- they look as if you had used rsync. It also stores metadata (owner, mode, etc.) in separate files, so you don't have to back up using root. But the neat thing is how it handles incrementals. Incremental backups will update the backup image files to the current state, and store binary diffs to the past state. So you can access the latest backup instantly, and re-generate the previous state if needed. Very nice. I had just been backing up to a regular IDE drive. But this week, I ordered two Seagate ST3400601CB-RK external drives. The drives support both USB2 and FireWire. We will get a safe deposit box at a bank. At any given moment, one drive will be at home, and one will be safely at the bank. They'll be rotated periodically. At work, we've been using Amanda for years. It does its job well. (Except on AIX, where both dump and tar are broken in obscure, hideous ways, but that's not Amanda's fault.) Recently, I discovered Bacula. This looks very slick. It seems to be the direction Amanda would evolve, if it would ever evolve. We're going to test it out soon. And besides, who wouldn't love a program whose slogan is "Bacula: It comes in the night and sucks the essence from your computers"?

I was baking waffles today, using my not-so-secret recepy. I needed about fifteen of them, and murphy helped me let it take far longer than initially expected. I had already made some errors in creating the dough (though nothing that I couldn't fix), and when I had eventually finished it and was halfway through baking those waffles, my waffle iron broke down. Which wasn't totally unexpected, given how this is a waffle iron that was part of the inheritance of an aunt of my dad's who had died even before I was born, which must have been approximately fourty years ago. Still, it had me sitting there with a broken waffle iron, a promise that I'd be baking waffles for a fundraising activity, and only half the number of waffles that I needed. I had found myself a slight little problem. So, I went to a local shop, had a look at the waffle irons that they had for sale, and chose one that looked OK to me. I hadn't taken a close look at the box, but the saleswoman had shown me the device and it looked well suited for my needs. Once home, I showed it to my brother. Who promptly exclaimed that 'it is the same as the old one'. At first, I wanted to protest; but on close examination of the picture on the box, I had to agree that he was right! They had restyled the one inside the box—given it a different colour, and used a temperature dial with a more modern look—but it was, indeed, the same model. And this redesign must have happened fairly recently; the illustratory pictures in the user manual still show the 'old' style design, which is identical to the old waffle iron, modulo approximately fourty years of technical evolution. In fact, the single most drastic change between the old device and the pictures in the manual of the new one would seem to be the fact that the company producing these devices changed names in the mean time. They also appear to be having a website, which contains pictures of yet another design of the same appliance. I was baffled. I mean, sure, home appliances are not computers, and I could imagine how a waffle iron, designed five years ago, would still be in sale today. But after that long? What I haven't checked yet, for lack of time, is whether the irons of the old device would fit in the new device. I'll do that tomorrow, because the old device had a 4x6 "Brussels waffles" iron, whereas the new only came with a double 4x7 "Home-made waffles" iron, and an iron for six heart-shaped biscuit waffles. If that would fit, then that would save me an expense of 32 euros—I love baking Brussels waffles, so any waffle iron I use needs to be able to do those. Even if it can only do so one waffle at a time. The ability to use the iron of that 40-year-old thing in the new device would be... great.

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!

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?

FOSDEM is one of the events I really enjoy. Unfortunately, I couldn't attend last year because I was at a conference in China. However, this year I was back, and the event was bigger than ever. There's so much going on that it's really hard to keep up. There are a number of people I'd really like to have talked to more but there just wasn't time in those two days which were fully packed. It was nice to meet a number of people again, though, in particular the usual suspects, including Michi Banck (aka Hurd illusionist, "it supports two wireless cards now"), Guillem Jover (Spanish mafia boss living in exile), and Jordi Mallach ("World Domination for Catalan^WValencian"). I also hung around the Spanish free software research people with whom I'm going to spend a few months soon. Crazy Spaniards... I've no idea how I'm going to survive there. Oh, and Neal Walfield, who still stinks, and who thinks I have a British accent now (which he thinks is a bad thing while I took it as a compliment). Regarding new people, I had the great pleasure to meet and talk to Lennert Buytenhek. I talked to him on IRC a bit recently because he's involved in the big-endian ARM port and I've been hacking on the ARM based NSLU2 device. Lennert is quite frustrated because joining Debian is so hard. As it turns out, there's currently a six month wait to be assigned an Application Manager. I haven't really followed NM recently, but when I acted as Front Desk I tried to keep it less than approximately six weeks. Unfortunately, a great number of AMs resigned in the last few months and years, and it has been quite hard to find good new people as AMs. Lennert is the kind of person we really want to have in Debian since he's extremely kind, smart and productive. Given that the current situation seems really bad I decided to act as Application Manager again, but I only intend to do that temporarily. I'm sure I forgot lots of other things. But the summary is that it was a great weekend, with way too much stuff going on at the same time. And while I wish I could have devoted more time to my research, I gained some important insights and did one interview which was really informative.

Via Luis, I really like this article. Debian has become way too corporate in a lot of ways it seems, and many of us are forgetting what it's like to try and do something daring. It's one of the reasons I find aj's DPL platform compelling, even though he hasn't said how he's actually going to encourage a faster tempo. People got really excited when I simply updated Debian's X packages to the latest upstream version. Granted, this is cool, but it's far from the exciting stuff I'm looking to do once we're finally caught up with upstream for real (almost there!) It doesn't have to be revolutionary or anything, but I want the XSF to be a center for exciting things to happen. Unfortunately, the most exciting X stuff is happening everywhere but Debian right now, despite my best efforts to open it up further.

And while I share helix's hate for the term "stop energy", the vast and deep flamefests that periodically consume the project really do seem to slow down our development noticeably when I just look at daily changelogs in sid. Julien may call me a teletubby for this (a metaphor I loathe for its utter stupidity) but debian-x has been almost 100% free of flamewars for the past year or so since I came on, and we've gotten a remarkable amount done. Contrast that with the previous era in which the fighting seemed to sap the will of the most productive and capable members of the team, all of whom seemed to focus much of their energy elsewhere as a result. While I think a mailing list code of conduct will be an important step in achieving this effect project-wide, I think a more fundamental solution is for individuals to attempt to build momentum themselves. Momentum like what I've tried to build with X seems to stop these energy-sucking flamewars dead in their tracks, and makes the project seem like a lot more fun place to be. I know that with all the flames going on with ndiswrapper and such I've been able to retreat in to XSF-land and find my happy place and be productive.

After watching Why dogs laugh and chimpanzees cry, I was deeply moved. Animals have feelings too. Not to be confused with Anthropomorphism, a form of personification (the practice of giving animals human qualities).

This documentary claims that one of the reasons that mammals have had such a big evolutionary success is emotions, and talks about the (slight) differences between human and animal emotions. But it doesn t stop at mammals, it also speaks of squids and octopuses.

Just one small anecdote from the film: Dogs that cooperated in the rescue efforts after the Oklahoma bombings (1995) suffered a deep depression, finding nothing but corpses. So the firemen had to setup fake rescues at the end of the day so that the dogs could find a living human, usually a crew member. Elephants that mourned the lost ones, suricates that live in tight communities, and of course chimps that have learned the sign language, understanding a keeper s miscarriage... If you have the chance, watch this documentary. It seems that Darwing already knew taht animals felt emotions, not that different from the ones we feel, back in 1873.

Feel, indulge, here is a huge list of links on emotions.

Tonight I met Eric House, who wanted to get his GPG key signed, as we was interested in becoming a Debian Developer. We had an interesting discussion about packaging and sponsorship and the general mechanics of how Debian works as a distribution. It's motivated me to get my act together and get back into things a bit more actively. I've been having a bit of a hiatus since moving to the US, generally because I've been far too busy with real life. I think I've only made a very few uploads in the last 3 months. It also made me think as I was madly brain dumping all my tips on how to package stuff, that I should write it all down, so for any future people, I can just refer them to the document, rather than again brain dumping at them, or trying to write it all down in a lengthy email. One of the biggest problems now is plain old spare time. In my old job, I had enough idle time because things went so slowly at work, that I could sneak in a bit of Debian stuff during the day. In my new job, I'm always busy on something, so I don't have the time or inclination to be doing anything that isn't work related while I'm at work. So that leaves my evenings or weekends for Debian. Evenings have seen me tinkering with Asterisk, and will probably see me tinkering with MythTV soon. Weekends have involved doing sightseeing and other touristy stuff. So I guess the sooner I can finish my other projects off, the sooner I can devote a bit more time to Debian again. I think in the meantime, to ramp up again, I'll try to get back into doing QA work and upload one orphaned package with the wrong maintainer field a night. The list has grown long again. I think I had it down to the single digits when I last stopped. It'd be cool to get it down to zero.