You want to revitalize a dying, inactive free software project. How do you proceed?

1. You write code, contribute, get involved in the community, get in touch with the previous developer(s) to try and join the team or take over the project. Failing that, you fork the project, because this is how free software works after all. Then, once you ve got something to show, you start talking about it;
2. You set up a new forum, brag about it on the old one, arrange with the previous lead developer to make sure you can use the name and logo, then open a twitter account so users can follow the new forum s setup process minute by minute.

There s this saying about opensource/free software that says the logo and about box are the very first (and only) things that work in new/young projects (and sometimes that s also true for more mature projects, as we all come to know). Choice 2 above is the About Box 2.0. Unfortunately, that s the way a handful of people choose to revitalize mt-daapd/Firefly Media Server. Of course, not one among them can code or has actually got a clue about the current codebase. FAIL of epic proportions. Facepalm.

Today, Fabio and I extended the deadline of the call for papers of the upcoming Distro Summit until 18 October 2009. We have already received a number of great proposals, but not enough to complete the schedule. So if you have anything to say on the topic of distributions (such as, but not limited to the various Linux distributions), and especially on cross-distro collaboration, please launch your mailer and compose a message as detailed in the instructions. Distro Summit will take place as part of LCA 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Yes, that is on the Southern Hemisphere, and yes, that is far away from where many of you live, but it s well worth a visit, if you ll take my word for it. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide sponsorship for speakers, so talk to your employer or your distro now and get the ball rolling. You have a little more than a week to get your bids in! What are you waiting for? This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance: Distro Summit, LCA, and Wellington, all-in-one. It doesn t get much better than that. Let s hear your proposal! PS: I loved Wellington (and its people) so much that I picked up my very own pet Wellingtonian!

Arnt Karlsen reported bug #550000 on Wednesday October 7th, against the sndfile-programs package. Bug #540000 was reported as of August 5th 2009. We're apparently back to our "10,000 bugs in 2 months pace"...or close to it. Halfway to bug #600000...

I've been suffering a really annoying bug in VIM recently: when repeating an action that introduced space characters to the buffer (that is, single-byte 0x20 ASCII-compatible space characters), the action would insert Unicode non-breaking space characters instead (0xc2ac). I've finally tracked this down to an old vimspell plugin. Version 1.100 / released 14-Sep-2005 causes this in conjunction with the Debian vim-gnome package, version 2:7.2.245-2 (and perhaps others). The solution for me is to just remove the vimspell plugin: the upstream author recommends that users of VIM versions 7 and upwards use the built-in spell checker instead anyway.

Here are the results of the Koha Foundation Desires poll. More than 75% of respondants support the Koha foundation/association doing these things:- 1. ensure the ongoing shared governance of the project = 32 out of 35 = 91.43%
2. owning koha.org = 16 out of 18 = 88.89%
3. secure the Koha name = 31 out of 35 = 88.57%
4. Kaitiaki (guardianship) role = 29 out of 35 = 82.86%
5. be owner of the copyright = 27 out of 35 = 77.14% More than half want to see it do something about each of these six:- 6. user/developer conferences/user group meetings = 24 out of 35 = 68.57%
7. funding non sexy but highly necessary jobs such as revamping and optimising old code = 24 out of 35 = 68.57%
8. networking local associations (such as KUDOS, KohaLA) = 12 out of 18 = 66.67%
9. managed democratically by its member (Association more than Foundation) = 11 out of 18 = 61.11%
10. promote OSS solutions in libraries = 21 out of 35 = 60%
11. further development of features = 19 out of 35 = 54.29% Less than half want these five tasks:- 12. usability/ accessibilty studies = 16 out of 35 = 45.71%
13. opensearchportal for all koha installs = 12 out of 35 = 34.29%
14. translations/localisation = 10 out of 35 = 28.57%
15. provide open source solutions for all tasks a library does daily = 10 out of 35 = 28.57%
16. back up your library technically. Local company/volunteers would do the rest = 9 out of 35 = 25.71% Minority activities:- 17. selling an idea to libraries = 6 out of 35 = 17.14%
18. deployment/adoption in developing countries = 5 out of 35 = 14.29%
19. foster new businesses = 4 out of 35 = 11.43%
20. sure up old ones that might be in dire straits = 3 out of 35 = 8.57% You can see the names given by the voters and who voted for what in the Koha Foundation Desires poll online. I hope we ll see the other, wider survey response before the general meeting in a couple of hours. The agenda for it is on wiki.koha.org. If you re involved with koha, I hope to see you there!

In my last blog entry I used the term "image-hack". It seems like it has been considered to have a negative feeling attached to it. Even though I consider this very amusing in a community that likes to pride itself with the term "hackers" I guess I can understand why people consider it a negative term. Even though technically a mockup of a website in image form actually feels just a crude hack it wasn't meant to belittle what pixelgirl has produced. Her image-hack looks extremely well. Unfortunately no further contact after the debconf was established and personally I'm not convinced how the tiny image would work for other pages besides the start page and removing the DSAs and News from the start page is a no-go, we actually do receive positive feedback for that. So it is what it is, an image-hack. An extremely well done one, but still just that.

#550000 sndfile-programs: ..trying to overwrite '/usr/share/man/man1/sndfile-cmp.1.gz', which is also in package libsndfile1 0:1.0.20-2
http://bugs.debian.org/550000

I missed it by exactly one when filling #549999: ITP: libindicator -- panel indicator applet - shared library[/b]
http://bugs.debian.org/549999

:(

Like written in a former blog entry I am working on preparing for getting Kalle's Debian Redesign tested and installed. Even though some unfortunate events happened which made me reconsider my efforts and a lot of things changed for me I am still up with the effort. Mostly because I didn't became part of the webmasters just to chicken away in the face of obstacles, and also not just because yet another image-hack did pop up that neither showed anything usable or overall-thoughts or actual code/concepts or even tried to get in contact with the webteam. I only remember to have received positive feedback in which I also include minor change suggestions like that the exact hits and other hits sections in the packages site aren't as clearly distinguishable as before. I have of course forwarded these to Kalle and we are looking for a solution that would go with the style. Speaking of the packages site I finally managed to get the packages from the main pool displayed too so it shouldn't behave differently to the old one anymore in that respect (see e.g. wesnoth for some more distributed package). The next step I finished these last days was setting up a testsite for www as you can find it on www.deb.at. Please notice that you might want to surf that site in English (either change your Accept-Language settings or click on the English links at the bottom of the pages) because some of the changes are only recognizable there; like, the main page in other languages look immensely different. Where to go from here? Kalle also has proposal for the BugTracking System and the Planet so that targets are the obvious next steps. I can't tell yet when they will be done, depends on how complicated it is to set up an environment for it, but I will keep you updated.

Recently I posted a brief tool for managing "dotfile collections". This tool was the rationalisation of a couple of adhoc scripts I already used, and was a quick hack written in nasty bash. I've updated my tool so that it is coded in slightly less nasty Perl. You can find the dotfile-manager repository online now. This tool works well with my dotfile repository, and the matching, but non-public dotfiles-private repository. I'm suspect that this post might flood a couple of feed agregators, because I've recently my chronicle blog compiler with a new release. This release has updated all the supplied themes/templates such that they validate strictly, and as part of that I had to edit some of my prior blog entries to remove bogus HTML markup. (Usually simple things suck as failing to escape & characters correctly, or using "[p][/P]" due to sloppy shift-driving.) I should probably update the way I post entries, and use markdown or textile instead of manually writing HTML inside Emacs, but the habit has been here for too long. Even back when I used wordpress I wrote my entries in HTML... Finally one other change in the most recent chronicle release is that the "mail-scanning.com theme" has been removed, as the service itself is no longer available. But all is not lost. ObFilm: Blade II

I'm going to this year's Debian developers meeting, the DebConf9. Unfortunately the conference overlaps with even more important events, so I will only be there half the time from 27^th of July, but I will stay to the end. Being a first time visitor of DebConf I'm curious about what's going to happen there and about getting in touch with all the other geeks... *grin* See you there!

Unfortunately checkinstall didn't made it into Debian Etch, hence I needed to backport it from Lenny. I tried to follow the instructions given on www.backports.org, but unfortunately the package FTBFS on 64 bit architectures with the libc6-dev provided with Etch. I dropped the versioned build-dependency on libc6-dev and restricted its build to Architecture: i386, but probably this renders the package inacceptable for www.backports.org... You can find the backport here.

Once upon a time I prepared a Debian package for a runtime library I'm using frequently on my computer. I thought that other users should benefit from what I've done for my own purposes. I thought it wouldn't cost me a penny to share it with others, so I uploaded it to a public accessible place and announced it to the public. All of a sudden a Debian Developer came and uploaded my Debian package to the official Debian archive, where it became official part of the Debian distribution. Henceforth the Debian Developer guided me on how to properly package Debian packages and on improving my packages. I learned a lot and became more and more familiar with Debian's procedures and tools. As the time passed by, he encouraged me to apply as a Debian Developer. So I did. It was again a time of challenging tasks to be done, but as the other Debian Developer managing my application was very short in time, I also had to be very patient for a long time again and again. To cut a long story short: After more than three years of mostly waiting and contributing to Debian as good as I could, I finally have become official Debian Developer on September, the 13^st 2009. I'm happy that I eventually made it. And, at this stage it is time to say thank you to all of the fellow Debian Developers who kindly sponsored my uploads or encouraged me to keep on going. You've all done a wonderful job and were of great help to me.

Someone told be about the cool features of the Thunderbird Lightning extension, an extension managing your calendar and tasks within Thunderbird. As this extension is only available for Thunderbird 2.0 and as Icedove is only available in version 1.5 in Debian Etch, I backported Icedove 2.0.0.16-1 from Lenny. If you're a Debian Etch user you can add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list, run apt-get update and install it with aptitude install icedove.

  deb http://micha.lenk.info/debian etch/

Have fun!

Just in case anybody is interested: I just built a backport of pdfedit for Debian Etch. The package is available from my personal package repository, which you can include in your /etc/apt/sources.list using following line:

  deb http://micha.lenk.info/debian etch/

Unfortunately it seems to be quite instabile, so be warned...

this computer is in use and can not be unlocked

Consider the following scenario:

You work on a project for a customer that is handled in a Subversion Repository.
The work you get comes in form of some tickets. Tickets may affect different parts
of the project, but they could also affect the same parts of the project. Testing of your work
is done by a different person. For some reasons its wanted that the fix for each ticket
is committed in only one commit in the subversion repository and only after it has been
tested. Commits for two tickets changing the same files should not be mixed.

Now: How do you avoid a mess when working with several patches that possibly affect the same files?

The answer is: git with git-svn. Currently my workflow looks the following:

1. Create a branch for each ticket
2. Make my changes for the ticket in this branch
3. Create a patch from the changes in this branch and supply the tester with it
4. Wait for feedback and eventually repeat steps 2-4
5. When testing is finished, run git rebase -i master in the branch, now squash each commit into one commit, build a proper commit message from the template git provides.
6. Switch to master branch and merge the changes from the branch.
7. Rebase master against the latest svn (git svn rebase) and dcommit

That workflow works good for me. It gives me the possibility to do micro-commits as much as I want and still only commit a well-defined, well-tested commit into the projects SVN.
Just some minor drawbacks I haven't yet solved (you know, git /can/ do everything, but that is actually a problem in itself):

• Its a bit annoying that I need to use git rebase -i and change n-1 lines for a number of n commits, so that they are squashed. It would be handy to say: Squash all commits, that happened in this branch, into one.
• Creating the diff for the tester requires me to do git log, search for the last commit before my first commit in that branch and use it with git diff <rev> to create a patch. I had a quick look at git-rev-parse and felt that is overwhelming complex to do find out how to do it better. To many possibilites. git is complex.

For now I cannot tell how good merging works, as soon as conflicts arise. But I guess git can do well, although there is the possibility that it could get complex again.

Nevertheless, its probably not a credit to git, but instead to DVCSes in common, but anyway. I like it.

Last night I was about to sit down and write a post about how happy I was. After a long search, I found a beautiful appartment in Nice, with my flatmates we're cleaning and arranging stuff, we're planing parties and inviting friends to come over... When we were doing the moving, I started to see the city differenty: this time it was not just a visit. It made me remember the taste of starting from scratch, like when I did when I was 21. But some jerks ruined the party. Before sitting to write the blog post, I said I better check that the car is parked in a good place, tomorrow is Monday. And all of a sudden three guys assaulted me, making me a pass thru a real bad moment, and taking the car and house keys. Nothing happened to me, luckily, but I have no more car. I spent the day making things straight with police, insurance, etc. I had to spend a HUGE load on money to change a stupid door lock (I still cannot believe that people pay that much money for this "security" stuff), and more importantly, they ruined my mood. I'm really okay, so no need to help me or anything, I just wanted to say this somewhere. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian

I m back from Taiwan since Thursday already. It was a nice trip, the whole week and I do like Taiwan. We had a transit stop in Bangkok, pretty annoying useless stop (I m sure the smokers disagree, seeing how fast they got into the smokers lounge :) ). One nice detail at Bangkok airport are the ramps down to the Gates. If you use a wheelchair, you might end up having some fun in case you ever lose control of it. Better don t. The ramp down directly ends in a set of stairs, with nothing between which would stop you. Makes too great a jump down, hehe. We arrived in Taipei Thursday (the 24th) evening and so got rid of our luggage and went out for Dinner. Which was the only time in Taiwan I wasn t happy about the food, only one of the dishes was ok, the rest not for me. But the rest of the group did like em, so maybe it was just me after a long flight. On Friday we had nothing planned, except for Dinner, so took a very relaxed day. Somewhere around noon we went out for food, after that a bit sightseeing around the hostel . There are two attributes that are always true for Taipei:

1. It s a busy place, lots of people. No matter where.
2. It has more scooters than you ever saw before. (True, there are two times more scooters than cars).

Oh, and of course there are the same rules of the road than in Mexico: Something might be written on paper, but better don t count on that. Red traffic lights are followed (mostly), and then its whoever is stronger. But if everyone is following this, it does seem to work out. :) Friday evening we had Dinner in a place run by Taiwan aborigines where we met the other people attending the mini-DebConf. Oh, and as it was the third time I had to use them, I was slowly growing accustomed to chopsticks, a thing I was never able to get done before. (Ok, fine, if its the only way to get food and all the others are stealing your food if you can t handle them, now thats a good reason to learn to eat with chopsticks fast :) ). Saturday and Sunday we had the mini-DebConf as part of the ICOS. I took no pictures there, but a number of other people have, you can find them on gallery.debconf.org. It was a pretty nice event where I held one talk about the Debian archive and lead one discussion round about SPI and non-profit organizations behind OpenSource Projects. The slides for the archive talk are available (beware of the kittens!), the SPI stuff only had a small introduction, no slides here. Oh, before I forget it: Taiwan does feel very hot. And we found a nice notice in our hostel Monday til Wednesday was planned for just play the Tourist game and see stuff . There was a plan made to visit the Taipei 101. It turned out that Canonical has an office within that building, as well as Google. So people planned to visit their offices too. Just - what the hell would I want to visit a Canonical office? Or a Google one? Besides that it was much too early in the day and promised to be boring, so h01ger and myself skipped it. Luck did mean it good with us, we managed to get Sabrina as a local guide for the day and so went to the Taipei 101 later. The 101 is a pretty nice building, though I would have loved to be able to get up to the real top. And not just in the upper part. Anyways, we had been lucky and had a pretty nice view from it. Getting up from the 4th floor to the 89th is also an experience one has to take: The elevators go up with 1010m/min, which makes it a 37second trip only. Down is much slower, only 600m/min, pretty boring (though you do feel it more than enough in your stomach. I wouldn t want to do lift-boy job there). After the 101 we went and visited the Lungshan temple and in the evening a night market. As it was Monday the market was empty. (Where empty translates to enough people around that you never ever feel alone. Nor think its dead). Good that, I don t think I want to experience it during weekends when its busy We had a pretty good time there, with all the various little shops. Fun how many old-style game places there are. Like, playing basketball, throwing things at other things to win stuff, all those non-computer-using games. In a country where lots of the high tech comes from this is not exactly what you would expect. On Tuesday our trip continued as good as it started on Monday, as we had the pleasure to keep Sabrina as guide for Tuesday and Wednesday. So our Tuesday started out with a visit to the National Palace Museum. Which has a large enough collection that you can spend multiple days exploring it. We didn t have the time nor memory for all of that, so left it after half a day. Lunch we took in a Japanese restaurant and here it was the first and only time during my Taiwan visit that I used a fork. Well, none of the dishes would have worked otherwise. The afternoon we spent in the Yangming Park, so we actually saw a bit of nature near Taipei. Tuesday did end early for us, as we planned to attend the TOSSUG meeting, where I met some more people from debian.org.tw and had an interesting chat about non-profit organizations in Taiwan, their way of operation and what to think of when trying to create a new one. I ve also got a nice debian.org.tw shirt, but I won t ever be able to wear it. They didn t expect someone that large when producing them, oh well. (Hrr, people, if you make Debian shirts of any kind, always do some XXL too. There might be fat, large guys like me visiting. :) ) Anyway, they have another thing, one which I like very much. They created a map of usergroups of other open source projects in Taiwan. It s a foldable map style, titled FLOSS Community Manual , and a lot of different Projects/Usergroups/ are listed there. While its all written in Chinese and I can t read it, it does list them, then describes what they are/do (I think), gives contact information and further links. The backside of it also seem to list events happening there. You can find more information (so you can read it :) ) at their website. Does seem a very nice idea to take. Sometime during the evening I also managed to pick up a Chinese name. Or better, Andrew did so for me. I don t even know how to type it, so copy&paste it has to be. :) There: . And that is:

• Definition in English: long, far, remote, distant; liesurely; Mandarin Pronunciation: YOU1
• Definition in English: axle; personal name of mencius; Mandarin Pronunciation: KE1

Wednesday was our last day in Taiwan, unfortunately. We went out of Taipei, visting the Golden Mountain City. Another nice place, with a market and a history, but as our Taxi was leaving at 1630 we didn t have much time for sightseeing. You could spend a lot there. Especially not as we still needed to buy postcards, something people left home always request from one. Tssk. I really enjoyed the time I had there. Not only was the organization of the conference we attended good (especially the mini-DebConf is what I saw. The event around it, while named International, was so much chinese spoken, that I couldn t make much of it), but the details around the whole stay had been nicely taken care off. And then people in general did appear very friendly. Now, it might have to do a bit with me not being exactly their height, but I dont think that is all of it. Even without such a conference as an opportunity I think I will visit the country again, but that time I will have much more time available. Like two or three weeks. And I certainly will see more than Taipei City then. Like the whole country. :) (And hope I am lucky again with local guides :) ). So thank you SLAT, Andrew, Arne, (Sabrina), Rita, (Candy) and all the people who worked for the event which names I forgot. Oh, if you didn t find it yet with all the links, a set of my pictures is available from here.

Here we are back from our german week-end... The major event of this week-end was running the K ln Cologne marathon. Why Cologne? Mostly because my marathon Debian friends Ralf Treinen and No l K the ran it last year and enjoyed it. So, when we ran the Paris marathon together back in April, we decided to run either Berlin or Cologne later on. I finally settled for Cologne because this is closer from Paris and the date was more convenient. That was great also for No l, who lives close to K ln, so of course he planned that race in his (busy) schedule. Unfortunately, Ralf got tendinite problems since last Spring and could not join us. We really hope this will be temporary and we will enjoy running together in the future. So, I spent most of the week-end both visiting Cologne with Elizabeth...and running these 42,195 km. That was great, really. Even if there were much more Germans than in Debian, they were really as friendly and welcoming as Debian Germans are...:-). The race happens in Cologne center city and is well arranged for followers to be able to see runners several times, as the track comes back in the city center several times....with a memorable finish through the cathedral place, then central pedestrian streets and the bridge over the Rhein river (well, climbling it at km.42 is a small PITA, but still..). Animation nearly all along the streets with many K ln inhabitants and tourists encouraging the runners and shouting and applausing and playing percussions, and.... My own race was really as I planned to do it. I targeted 4h exactly (Paris was 4h10) and thus tried to keep a pace of 5'41"/km....which I nearly respected. I had a small alert around km13-15 when my legs where kind of heavy....and I was already imagining a terrible second part for the race. Finally, seeing Elizabeth encouraging me at km.19 in the middle of a big crowd, then passing through Friesen Platz in a great noise and with huge encouragements, just made it. I then completed the first half in 1h59'20", which was just fine. I slightly slowed down between km. 24 and 28, mostly because I was trusting my GPS watch to keep the pace...while it is indeed a bit inaccurate (its kilometers are about 950m long). So, when I realized that I was about 1-2 mins late at km. 30, I decided to accelerate a little and thus target 5'30"/km on the watch...which I could sustain up to km.38. I was fearing cramps and a very hard finish, just as it happened to me in Paris...but finally could finish in a quite good shape and keeping my pace. My final time is officially 4h00'47". So, I missed my target by very few seconds but I am really very happy with the result and the way I finished. Recovering in the hotel's sauna was amazing, after this, and I could then remember all the great moments of that race by viewing Elizabeth's pictures (soon online on my gallery, promise made). And, finally, today, we had another day off to drive back home and continue recovering....and register for Paris Marathon on April 11th 2010..:-)... Hopefully, No l (who did an amazing 3h15) will convince self that he should come with his running friends. So, dear readers, if you reached that part of my blog...I'm afraid you will again read about marathon stories from me.... As everybody was telling me: once you start, you never want to stop..:)