Back in 2007, Harpers Magazine published The Ecstasy of Influence: a beautiful article by Jonathan Lethem on reuse in art and literature. Like Lewis Hyde in The Gift (quite like Hyde, as readers discover) Lethem blurs the line between plagiarism, remix, and influence and points to his subject at the center of artistic production. Lethem's gimmick, which most readers only discover at the end, is that the article is constructed entirely out of "reused" (i.e., plagiarized) quotations and paraphrases. A couple months ago, I suggested to my friend Andr s Monroy-Hern ndez a very similar project: a literature review on academic work on remixing and remixing communities constructed entirely of text lifted from existing research. After some searching around, Andr s pointed out that Lethem had essentially beaten us to the punch and linked me to his article. Only after I visited the link did I remember that I had read Lethem's article when it was published and loved the idea then. Over time, I'd forgotten I read ever it. Without knowing it, I had read, loved, forgotten, and then -- influenced, if unconsciously -- copied and reproduced the idea myself in slightly modified form. And I suppose that was the point.

Since post about lost n900 was on the top of this blog for almost a year, I should probably write a few words about what was next. Since I do need mobile phone every day, I had to get some replacement quickly. Given Maemo was dead and Meego device not available, I decided to go Android. Since after n900 hardware keyboard became a must for me, I decided to try HTC Desire Z. That device made me angry every day, both because of hardware (what a silly idea to place volume buttons such that they are below hardware keyboard when it s opened? they got pressed almost every time when I used keyboard!) and Android itself. I think quite a few things are broken in Android, but most annoying is broken multitasking. I can t live with dialog elements content get lost when I switch to other app and back. Please don t tell me that it s app fault: maybe technically it is, however too many apps have it so I have to generalize. I will likely write more about this later. At the same time, exciting things have been happening in Maemo community. It was the time when Community SSU raised, also several mapping applications went out of dark, and more. I was still subscribed to Maemo resources so I read about all that and got more and more frustrated with my new Android device. And on one sunday evening, after reading more exciting news from Maemo side, I decided that enough is enough. And ordered a new n900. Few days later, I ve sold HTC for about 80% of it s original price. That was an emotional solution, and of course it could not play well in the long term. Despite of individual exciting news, Maemo community was becoming weaker. Device itself had major usability issues (e.g. it could occasionally unlock while being in my pocket, and call a random number from address book and I have quite a few addresses abroad so such calls not only bother people, but also are expensive). There was not many applications, and those available had problems. There was a visible difference between my friends who could just take a phone and quickly do something, and myself who had to struggle with incomplete and buggy software. Also skype quality was very bad. Also when I was planning a 2-week trip to location without mobile network, I tried to preload map of planned route, but it preloaded only part and I was unable to make it preload the rest. Also many similar issues. So it became clear that if I want usability, I have to go to a standard platform. And as such, Android still is the only option. I searched for a device that runs more or less modern Android version, has hardware keyboard, and is not HTC Desire Z. There was not much to choose from. I ordered SonyEricsson sk17i. I m already using it for about 4 months. For common use cases, such as locating a business nearby, or routing to a given address, or quickly browsing a web page, it works. However, all Android flaws including broken multitasking and no-undo-in-text-fields are here, causing everyday frustration. My conclusion is that no smartphone-like devices without major usability issues are available today. What is available probably could be used to somehow satisfy immediate communication needs, but nothing above that. Bells and whistles are there, but I m not interested in those. I want a linux-based pocket-sized mobile computer that will handle both my communication needs and other interests. That could be hacked when I want to, but just works at the rest of time. Something like my Debian desktop. Openmoko was a big hope but it failed. Maemo was a big hope but incompetence of Nokia killed it. Meego was dead before it was born. There is still some life around several mobile linux projects (GTA04, Maemo, Meego, some others), but hopes for it to grow into something that could be used without huge hacking are little.

What are the biggest security threats to my laptop? Almost all the software I install is vetted and signed by a member of the Debian team. I run reliable virus software on our mail server. My disk is encrypted and xscreensaver locks my screen after a few minutes of inactivity. What else? The two biggest threats I've recently considered are: web browsing and non-free software or software that doesn't come from Debian (I regularly have to use skype and zimbra, for example). To mitigate these risks, I've configured these programs to run as their own users, thus adding a layer of separation between the programs and my primary user account, which has access to my gpg/ssh keys and email. With a program like zimbra it's fairly easy. I created a zimbra user, added my primary account's public ssh key to /home/zimbra/.ssh/authorized_keys, and add the following stanza to ~/.ssh/config:

Host zimbra 
Hostname localhost 
User zimbra 
ForwardX11 yes

Now I can start zimbra with:

ssh zimbra ./zdesktop-launch

Skype was a little harder, since the skype client has to access the audio system. With pulseaudio, though, it's a snap. I copied /etc/pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse/ and added the line:

load-module module-native-protocol-tcp auth-ip-acl=127.0.0.1

Then, I added /home/skype/.pulse/client.conf with the contents:

default-server = 127.0.0.1

[Note: Jamie Rollins and dkg have pointed out that this arrangement allows any user on my laptop to send arbitrary data to pulseaudio, running as my primay account. They suggested configuring pulseaudio to listen on a unix-domain socket, and then configuring pulseaudio to only permit access to users in a particular group.] iceweasel is the most complicated. In addition to the pulseaudio trick, I had to make two other allowances. First, there are a lot of processes that launch a web browser in a number of different ways (sometimes asking for a new session, other times adding a tab to an existing one, sometimes passing an URL as an argument, etc). The one that I got the most stuck on was mutt. Sometimes I want to see how an HTML message looks in iceweasel. Via mailcap, mutt creates a temp file with the html content and then launches a web browser to view the file. As can be reasonably expected, this temp file is owned by my primary user, and only read-able by the owner. That means my iceweasel user can't read it. Eventually, I decided the easiest way to deal with these various scenarios was to write a simple bash script to launch my web browser (see below). I registered it via update-alternatives, so most reasonable programs that want to launch a web browser will use it. The second issue is that I use the monkeysphere xul plugin to verify TLS certificates, which requires iceweasel to communicate with my monkeysphere validation agent. My agent runs as my primary user and by default only responds to queries from my primary user. Fortunately, monkeysphere is well-designed and can handle this situation. As you can see from my web launcher script, I pass MONKEYSPHEREVALIDATIONAGENTSOCKET=$MONKEYSPHEREVALIDATIONAGENTSOCKET when calling iceweasel. In addition, I added the following before I exec monkeysphere-validation-agent:

export MSVA_ALLOWED_USERS="iceweasel jamie"

With this simple infrastructure setup, it's possible to easily isolate future programs as well. Lastly... here's the script for launching iceweasel.

#!/bin/bash
stdin=
new_session=no
url=
for arg in "$@"; do
  if <span class="createlink"> &#34;&#36;arg&#34; &#61;&#126; &#94;-- </span>; then 
    if [ "$arg" = "--new-session" ]; then
      new_session=yes
    elif [ "$arg" = "--from-stdin" ]; then
      stdin=yes
    fi
  else
    url="$1"
  fi
done
if [ "$stdin" = "yes" ]; then
  temp=$(mktemp)
  while read line; do
    echo "$line" >> "$temp"
  done
  # it must be readable by the iceweasel user
  chmod 755 "$temp"
  url="file:///$temp"
fi
args=
if [ "$new_session" = "yes" ]; then
  args="--no-remote -ProfileManager"
fi
if [ -n "$url" ]; then
  args="$args '$url'"
fi
ssh iceweasel "MONKEYSPHERE_VALIDATION_AGENT_SOCKET=$MONKEYSPHERE_VALIDATION_AGENT_SOCKET iceweasel $args" &
[ -f "$temp" ] && sleep 5 && rm "$temp"

Comments by email... Hi, http://current.workingdirectory.net/posts/2011/privilege-separation/ has good intentions but afaik it does not improve security much. X applications can sniff your passwords and inject commands to your terminal emulators. I personally use xpra to get a similar solution without the hazards of X. I've been using it for two months now both at work and home. There are still bugs but svn version is getting better all the time. See for example my reply to https://grepular.com/ProtectingaLaptopfromSimpleandSophisticated_Attacks Timo

In Thunderbird, if you read a message on a mailing list and want to reference a post in a blog or elsewhere, you may often want to access a copy of the mailing list posting on the web. While you can often accomplish this by searching for the subject or manually finding it in the specific archives of that list, if you re using full mail headers, there s a built-in way to find a message on the web.Each email or Usenet message has a unique Message-ID. These are indexed at various providers which archive mailing lists, with Gmane being the most notable in the Free Software community.If you right-click on the Message-ID of a message in Thunderbird, you can choose to Open Browser with Message-ID . By default this menu item opens sensible-browser with a Google Groups page, which, while indexing of Usenet, remains ignorant about most mailing lists. Most people reading this will probably find that Gmane carries their favourite mailing lists, while Google does not.This is configurable, but sadly you have to choose one or another. In Thunderbird, go to Edit Preferences Advanced Config Editor, and set the mailnews.messageid_browser.url property to http://mid.gmane.org/%mid. (default of http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=%mid&rnum=1)

Yesterday some confusion arised on my side when I saw a new facebook advertising campaign in my facebook account (yes, I am a member of facebook, although I'm aware of the privacy concerns). Basically it was saying that I should try the friends finder and that some of my friends (showing and naming me three of them) would have used it already.

Some background:
The friends finder feature of facebook is a feature that asks for the password of your e-mail account. It will then crawl through your emails to find contacts that might already be on facebook but not connected to you (in a facebook sense).

My first feeling was: Oh my god. How can it be that friends (and family) of mine are so naive? Especially since there were people included which I consider to be quiet clever. But honestly: Who would be so naive to give an unknown company direct unsupervised (you can't tell what they really do) access to your mail account? Would you give it to your friend? Your husband? Your father? I guess the answer will be "No" in the most cases and these people are most likely people you trust. Well, I know, you could state similar things for Googlemail who crawl your mails to show you personalized advertising. And in fact you are right. But if one decides to use gmail for your email hosting you have to trust them anyway. Like you have to trust anybody else you retain to host your mails (who could do the same but just don't tell you). But in this case its a third party, Facebook.

But if you now think that this becomes a rant against my friends: You are wrong. Over the day I found out that it basically shows up all my friends in a rotation. Every time I open the start page it randomly picks three people from my friend list and shows them to me, telling the same lie to me all over again.

So what do we have here? Facebook tries to advertise the most dubious feature they have in the most aggressive way one could imagine. By pretending wrong facts. Wouldn't that even be an element of crime in Germany ("Irref hrung" 5 UWG or maybe also 4 UWG, "unsachliche Beeinflussung")?

Facebook, you can do better.

Update: Stefano raised a good point. I didn't actually make clear that it has been verified that those people actually did not use the "feature":

1. I asked some of them. They said, they didn't use it and were in fact surprised that I asked.
2. Others told me they saw that ad stating that I used the feature. I definitely did not use this "feature".
3. Probably weak: IMHO its highly unlikely that all of my friends used that feature and at the point I've written this it had already shown my whole friend list.

Recently I decided to invest in another harddisk for my atom system. That system, I built up almost two years ago, has become the central system in my home network, serving as a fileserver to host my personal data, some git repositories etc., streaming server and since I switched to a cable internet connection it also serves as a router/firewall.Originally, I bought that disk to backup some data, of the systems in the network, but I realized that all data on this system were hosted on a single 320GB 2,5" disk and it became clear to me, that, in absense of a proper backup strategy, I at least should provide some redundancy. So I decided, once the disk was in place, that the whole system should move to a RAID1 over the two disks. Basically this is not that hard as it may seem at a first glance, but I had some problems due to a new sector size in some recent harddisks, which is called Advanced Format. But lets begin from the start. The basic idea of such a migration is:

1. Install mdadm with apt-get. Make sure to answer 'all' to the question which devices need to be activated in order to boot the system.
   
   
2. Partition the new disk (almost) identical.Because the new drive is somewhat bigger that wouldn't make sense, but at least the two partitions which should be mirrored on the second disk, need to be identical.Usually this is achieved easily by using

   sfdisk -d /dev/sda sfdisk /dev/second/sdb

   In this case, it wasn't that easy. But I will come to that in a minute.
   
   
3. Change the type of the partitions to 'FD' (Linux RAID autodetect) with fdisk
   
   
4. Erase evidence of an eventual old RAID from the partitions, which is probably pointless on a brand-new disk, but we want to be sure:

   mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdb1mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdb2

5. Create two DEGRADED raid1 arrays from the partitions:

   mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb1 missingmdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb2 missing

6. Create filesystem on the first raid device, which will become /boot.
   
   
7. Mount that filesystem somewhere temporary and move the contents of /boot to it:

   mount /dev/md0 /mnt/somewhere

8. Unmount /boot, edit fstab to mount /boot from /dev/md0 and re-mount /boot (from md0)
   
   
9. Create mdadm configuration with mdadm and append it to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf:

   mdadm --examine --scan >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

10. Update the initramfs and grub (no manual modification needed with grub2 on my system)and install grub into the MBR of the second disk.

    update-initramfs -uupdate-grubgrub-install /dev/sdb

11. The first point to pray: Reboot the system to verify it can boot from the new /boot.
    
    
12. Create a physical volume on /dev/md1:

    pvcreate /dev/md1

13. Extend the volume group to contain that device:

    vgextend <volgroup_name> /dev/md1</volgroup_name>

14. Move the whole volume group physically from the first disk to the degraded RAID:

    vgmove <volgroup_name> /dev/md1</volgroup_name>

    (Wait for it to complete... takes some time ;)
    
    
15. Reduce first disk from the VG:

    vgreduce <volgroup_name> /dev/sda2</volgroup_name>

16. Prepare it for addition to the RAID (see step 3 and 4) and add it:

    mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sda1mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sda2

17. Hooray! Watch into /proc/mdstat. You should see that the RAID is recovering.
    
    
18. When recovery is finished pray another time and hope that system is still booting with it running from the RAID entirely. If it does: Finished :-)

Now to the problem with the advanced format:There is some action taking place with the hardware vendors to move to a new sector size. Physically my new device has a size of 4096 bytes per sector. Somewhat different to the 512 bytes disks used to have the last decade. Logically it still has 512 bytes per sector. As far as I understand this is achieved by placing 8 logical sectors into one physical sector, so when partitioning a new disk the alignment of the disk has to be so that partitions start in a sector which is a multiple of 8. That, obviously, wasn't the case with the old partitioning on my first disk. So I had to manually create partitions by specifying start points manually and making sure they are dividable by 8.Otherwise fdisk would complain about the layout on the disk.This does not work with cfdisk, because it does not accept manual alignment parameters and unfortunately the partitions it creates do have a wrong alignment. So good old fdisk and some calculations how many sectors are needed and where to start, to the rescue. So the layout is now:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 2048 291154 144553+ fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/sdb2 291160 625139334 312424087+ fd Linux raid autodetect

Czech back to 100% in level 1 and 2, thus joining the hall of fame of full completeness. Dutch completes level 2 and also reaches the hall of fame. I take this as a specific wish for Frans Pop memory. Korean and Marathi complete level 1. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 20 languages 100%: bg cs de eo fa fr gu hi it ja ko mr nb nl pl pt ru sk th zh_CN
• 5 languages 99%: bs es fa si ta te
• 2 languages 98%: eu sv
• 1 language 96%: eu sr sv
• 7 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk tr uk
• 4 languages 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 11 languages 100%: cs de es fa fr nl pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 11 languages 99%: be da eo id it ja kk sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 3 langauges 95%: el fi he
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 8 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl sr tr
• 9 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 10 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nb nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: Czech, Dutch, German, Persian, French, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

In my article "Last time I've used network-manager" I made a claim for which I've been criticized by some people, including Stefano, our current (and just re-elected) DPL. I said that a certain pattern, which showed up in a certain thread, were a prototype for discussions in the Debian surroundings.

Actually I have to commit, that this was a very generalizing statement, making my own point against the discussion point back directly at myself.
Because as Stefano said correctly there has been some progress in the Debian discussion cult.
Indeed, there are examples of threads, were discussions followed another scheme.
But to my own advocacy I have to say that such changes are like little plants (in the botanical sense). They take their time to grow and as long as they are so very new, they are very vulnerable to all small interruptions. Regardless of how tiny those interruptions may seem.

I've been following Debian discussions for 6 or 7 years. That scheme I was describing was that which had the most visibility of all Debian discussions. Almost every discussion which were important for a broader audience followed that scheme. It has a reason that Debian is famous for flamewars.
In a way its quiet similar to the network-manager perception, some people have. Negative impressions manifest themselves. Especially if they have years of time.
Positive impressions does not have a chance to manifest themselves as long as the progress is not visible enough to survive small interruptions.

I hope that I didn't cause to much damage with my comment, which got cited (context-less) on other sites. Hopefully the Debian discussion cult will improve further to a point where there is no difference between the examples of very good, constructive discussions we already have in some parts of the project and the project-wide decision-making-discussions which affect a broad audience and often led to flamewars.

I left you 2.5 months ago with the last question asked by my applicaiton manager, Martin Michlmayr : "Please tell me about about yourself and what you intend to do for Debian". Interesting question to revisit now, indeed. Here is what I answered: About myself first. I'm a 40 year old project manager and system administrator working in French National Aerospace Research Center. My best definition of my skills in computing is "Know more or less about a Lot of Things and be a Specialist of Nothing"...:-). I'm definitely not a programmer, nor a real system administrator, nor a RDBMS administrator, nor a personal workstation designer, though I do all of these daily. I think I'm perfect for finding the good person for having a defined job done. Besides this, I'm a genealogist for several years now. This is what finally decided me to apply for becoming a package maintainer : there are some quite good free genealogy software for Unix, though for various reasons they are not used very widely, even Unix geeks (my main software for genealogy still runs on Another Operatin System and is evertythig but free).I think that I can bring something here to the Free Software World, by helping some of these good programs in getting into the best Linux distribution I know.... For me, this is a mean for giving back to the free software movement what I gives to me since I discovered Linux 6-7 years ago. My very first intention as soon as I get my way into the Debian Developers Heaven is adopting the Geneweb package currently maintained by Brent Flugham. I'm in close contact with the author (who happens to be french, which helps) as well as a daily user of it. The current package which is in the distribution is already my work for a great part. I gave it to Brent, the current maintainer and we both agreed that it would be better for me to apply to becoming anofficial maintainer. I also contributed to the package for lifelines, another genealogy software. The last version of the package is also 80% my work, acknowledged by Javier, the official maintainer. Concerning that package, I do not have "plans" for adopting it (we didn't discussed of this with Javier, and I'm not sure I could bring him that much things). I came to Linux thanks to a great friend of mine, Ren Cougnenc. Ren opened my eyes to the free software world when I still thought that it was only a variant of free beers. I got really involved into Linux when I forced me to remove any other Operating System from my computer at work and tried to do my daily job with Linux. I have now succeeded at ONERA in getting free software to be accepted as a credible alternative for important projects. At this time, especially for server and network-related projects. I absolutely cannot tell why and how I came to be a Debian user. I simply don't remember. But I know why I am still a Debian user : this is a distribution which is controlled by only one organisation--->its users. And I want to be part of it. Finally, I did not mention above the somewhat "political" nature of my personal involvment into free software. Except for the physical appearence, I think I mimic RMS on several points (though he probably speaks better french than I try to speak english....which does not help for expressing complex ideas like the ones above!). As anyone can see, I was already very verbose when writing, sorry for this. Funnily Martin summed this up in one paragraph when he posted his AM report about my application. From what I see, also, my English didn't improve that much since then. It seems this is a desperatecause, I'm afraid. Anyway, all this was apparently OK for Martin and, on July 21st 2001, he wrote and posted his AM report and, on July 30th 2001, I got a mail by James Troup: An account has been created for you on developer-accessible machines with username 'bubulle'. bubulle@debian.org was born. Now I can more easily destro^W contribute to my favourite Linux distro. Indeed, I don't remember that much about the 2001-2003 years. I was probably not that active in Debian. Mostly, I was maintaining geneweb, for which I polished the package to have it reach a quite decent state, with elaborated debconf configuration. Indeed, at that time, I was still also deeply involved in genealogy research and still contributing to several mutual help groups for this. This is about the time where I did setup my web site (including pages to keep the link with our US family, which we visited in 2002). I think that the major turn in my Debian activities happened around september 2002 when Denis Barbier contacted me to add support in geneweb for a new feature he introduced in Debian : po-debconf. At that time, I knew nearly nothing about localization and internationalization. Denis was definitely one of the "leaders" in this effort in Debian. During these years, he did a tremendous job setting up tools and infrastructure to make the translation work easier. One of his achievements was "po-debconf", this set of tools and scripts that allows translation debconf "templates", the questions asked to users when configuring packages. All this lead me to discover an entire new world : the world of translating software. As often when I discover something I like, I jumped into it very deeply. Indeed, in early January 2003, I did my very first contributions to debian-l10n-french and began working on systematic translation of debconf templates. Guess what was the goal : 100%, of course! Have ALL packages that have debconf templates...translated to French. We reached that goal.....on June 2nd 2008 in unstable (indeed "virtually" : all packages were either 100% translated...or had a bug report with a complete translation) and on December 21st 2010 for testing. Squeeze was indeed the first Debian release with full 100% for French. Something to learn with localization work: it's never finished and you have to be patient. So, back in 2003, we were starting this effort. Indeed, debian-l10n-french was, at that time, an incredibly busy list and the translation rate was very high: I still remember spending my summer holidays translating 2-3 packages debconf templates every day for two weeks. Meanwhile, my packaging activities were low: only geneweb and lifelines, that was all. Something suddenly changed this and it has been the other "big turn" in my Debian life. After summer 2003, I suddenly started coming on some strange packages that were needing translation: they were popping up daily in lists with funny names like "languagechooser", "countrychooser", "choose-mirror", etc. I knew nothing about them and started "translating" their strings too, and sending bug reports after a decent review on debian-l10n-french. Then, Denis Barbier mailed me and explained me that these things were belonging to a new shiny project named Debian Installer and meant to replace the good old boot-floppies. Denis explained me that it would maybe be more efficient to work directly in the "D-I" team and "commit" my work instead of sending bug reports. Commit? What's that? You mean this wizard tool that only Real Power Developers use, named "CVS"? But this is an incredibly complicated tool, Denis. Do you really want me, the nerd DD, to play with it? Oh, and in this D-I development, I see people who are close to be semi-gods. Names I read in mailing lists and always impress me with their Knowledge and Cleverness: Martin Michlmayr (my AM, doh), Tollef Fog Heen, Petter Reinholdtsen and so many others and, doh, this impressive person named "Joey Hess" who seems to be so clever and knowledgeable, and able to write things I have no clue about. Joey Hess, really? But this guy has been in Debian forever. Me, really? Work with the Elite of Debian? Doh, doh, doh. Anyway, in about two months time, I switched from the clueless guy status to the status of "the guy who nags people about l10n in D-I", along with another fellow named Denny "seppy" Stampfer". And then we started helping Joey to release well localized D-I alphas and betas at the end of 2003 (the release rate at the time was incredible: Sarge installer beta1 in November 2003, beta2 in January 2004). I really remember spending my 2003 Christmas holidays hunting for....100% completion of languages we were supporting, and helping new translators to work on D-I translation. Yes, 8 years ago, I was already doing all this..:-)...painting the world in red. All this leads up to the year 2004. Certainly the most important year in my Debian life because it has been....the year of my first DebConf. But you'll learn about this....in another post (hopefully not in 2.5 months).

There is an interesting interview with Richard Wilkinson on ted.com about the damage to society that is caused by excessive inequality [1]. The conclusion is interesting, it seems that one part of the solution is to send the message that excessive greed is anti-social. The demonstrations against the greedy 1% seem likely to do some good in this regard. He also has a TED talk about this in which he shows that even the rich don t benefit from great inequality [2]. If nothing else the links between great inequality and high rates of mental illness and murder should convince people that they don t want to live in such a society. Buying Cameras Some of the radio news reports have claimed that some of the people in OWS camps in Australia are somehow unworthy because they have smart-phones and digital cameras. They seem to believe that people have to demonstrate great poverty to have standing to complain. The problem here is that owning a mobile phone is essential to getting employment in many industries, so the vast majority of people who are old enough to work but not near retirement age just have to own a mobile phone. Once you have decided to use a phone if you are going to use it a lot (which you probably will if living in a tent in a public place) then being on a contract usually makes economic sense. As the cheapest contracts include a free Android phone that means almost everyone who is old enough to be allowed out alone at night and young enough to be willing to sleep rough for a cause will have such a phone. A related complaint is about people owning good cameras. One reason for this is the fact that the huge number of cameras deters the police from using excessive force that s a good justification for spending money on a good camera. But then a good camera doesn t cost much nowadays, the specs on $100 cameras are quite impressive and a camera that costs $400 new will have features that are useful for professional photographers and cameras are even cheaper on ebay. In Australia social security payments for a single person who is out of work are as much as $486.80 per fortnight [3]. Therefore someone who is living on social security could buy a great camera if they saved up two weeks of social security payments or buy a similar camera on ebay for one week s worth of payments. When at a protest the widespread use of cameras is essential for protection against police brutality. It s worth saving up for a camera. But really they are missing the point, OWS is about representing ~99% of the population. Even people on the average income are suffering because of the greed of the rich. Is Australia such a Great Place? There have been claims that Australia is such a great place that OWS protests are not needed, supposedly we have a very egalitarian society. The ABS data shows that the level of inequality as expressed by numbers isn t that great when restricted to just income if you restrict the analysis to the top 20% [4]. The mean gross household income per week is $340 for the lowest quintile and $2,380 for the highest quintile giving a ratio of 1:7.0. But when you look at total household net worth it s $27,400 vs $1,720,700 a ratio of 1:62.8! The ratio for the richest 1% would surely be a lot greater but a quick search of abs.gov.au didn t turn up any statistics on them. Also Richard Wilkinson s analysis puts Australia quite close to the US. If the people who are in the top 1% earned their money, paid taxes, and didn t pervert the political process then there wouldn t be any OWS protests. The corruption in the political process and rent seeking by corporations isn t as bad here as it is in the US, but it s bad enough that we need some serious changes. Emily Manuel wrote an interesting article for Tiger Beatdown about the need for an Occupy movement in Australia [5]. Her description of the political problems in Australia is quite clear. But I wasn t convinced by her analysis which suggested that Australia is different from the US in any significant way. Really Comparing Income To properly compare income it doesn t make sense to compare a ratio of money earned, or disposable income which is often misleading due to disagreements about what is considered disposable. It s really about which of the things that you want to do can be achieved on your income. One possible way of comparing it is based on Maslow s hierarchy of human needs. The poorest 20% of households in Australia have a gross income of $340 per week. The ABS shows that the average of private rental prices in the 8 capital cities (where most of the population lives) is $218 per week [6]. Obviously the poorest households can t afford an average rent unless you have lots of people packed in one house. No matter how you look at the numbers it s going to be difficult for low income people to pay for rent and food. That puts them on the bottom level of Maslow s higherarchy. It seems to me that the benefits of increased income diminish and it becomes more of a contest to be richer than other people. Owning an old car is a significant benefit over having no car. Owning a new car has some real benefits over an old car. Luxury cars usually have safety features before they are introduced to cheaper cars, but apart from that the benefit of owning a luxury car is small. Owning multiple Rolls-Royces doesn t seem to provide any real benefit, someone who would want to do that would probably be better served by hiring a good psychologist. Update: In a comment Brendan Scott cited The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen. That s a great point, and I ll have to read that book! I still maintain that owning two Rolls Royces is a symptom of psychological problems, people who can sort out such problems won t feel the need to try and prove that they have more money than others. Charles Stross has an interesting article about wealth disparity etc [7]. Being a sci-fi author he also explores what life might be like after Drexler boxes satisfy most of our current materiel needs. The Age has an informative article by Suzy Freeman-Greene contrasting the OWS protests in Melbourne which were broken up by police to the Catholic anti-abortion protests that have been going on for more than 20 years [8]. It seems that corporations aren t the only large organisations that are pwning democracy!

• [1] http://blog.ted.com/2011/10/26/we-quite-suddenly-realized-that-what-we-were-looking-at-was-a-general-pattern-qa-with-richard-wilkinson/
• [2] http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html
• [3] http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/newstart_rates.htm
• [4] http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/0/4EABC33B47FEE100CA25773700169C75?opendocument
• [5] http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/10/25/why-do-we-need-an-occupy-australia/
• [6] http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1301.0Chapter10052009-10
• [7] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/10/a-cultural-experiment.html
• [8] http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/some-occupy-to-protest-others-to-hamper-harangue-and-hurt-20111111-1nbn4.html

RInside 0.2.5 arrived on CRAN earlier today. RInside is a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and functions provided by the Rcpp R and C++ integration package. The big news for this release is that Windows applications once again run! James Bates gets full credit for noticing why Windows binaries died on startup, and provided a short patch which we (after some further simplicifcation) added. So for the first time since the 0.2.0 release, Windows users can just change into the examples/standard directory and issue a simple make -f Makefile.win, and the twelve example binaries will actually work. Yay, and kudos to James. The other main addition is a new examples directory examples/wt containing the web-application of the density estimation demo I had blogged about last week. By combining the Wt toolkit with RInside, we get C++ "web" applications containing R which is pretty nifty. The example otherwise follows the earlier Qt-based example of a standard desktop application with RInside. One minor snafu I just noticed is that I was overzealous with the .Rbuildignore file. By excluding the wt and qtbinaries, I also excluded their source files with the same name (up to the .cpp or .h ending). If you desire to run the examples, just grab these examples files from the SVN repo at R-Forge. All changes since the last release are summarized below:

0.2.5   2011-12-07
   o    Applied (somewhat simplified) patch by James Bates which restores
        RInside to working on Windows -- with a big Thank You! to James for
        fixing a long-standing bug we inadvertendly introduced right after
        0.2.0 almost two years ago
   o    New example embedding R inside a Wt (aka Webtoolkit, pronounced 
        'witty') application, mirroring the previous Qt application
   o    Qt example qtdensity now uses the new svg() device in base R; removed
        test for cairoDevice package as well as fallback png code
   o    Very minor fix to qmake.pro file for Qt app correcting link order

CRANberries also provides a short report with changes from the previous release. More information is on the RInside page. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the Rcpp R-Forge page.

It s been a couple days since I returned from this year s WebKitGTK+ hackfest in A Coru a, Spain. The weather was very nice, not too cold and not too rainy, we had great food, great drinks and I got to meet new people, and hang out with old friends, which is always great! I think this was a very productive hackfest, and as usual a very well organized one! Thanks to the GNOME Foundation for the travel sponsorship, to our friends at Igalia for doing an awesome job at making it happen, and to Collabora for sponsoring it and granting me the time to go there! We got a lot done, and although, as usual, our goals list had many items not crossed, we did cross a few very important ones. I took part in discussions about the new WebKit2 APIs, got to know the new design for GNOME s Web application, which looks great, discussed about Accelerated Compositing along with Joone, Alex, Nayan and Martin Robinson, hacked libsoup a bit to port the multipart/x-mixed-replace patch I wrote to the awesome gio-based infrastructure Dan Winship is building, and some random misc. The biggest chunk of time, though, ended up being devoted to a very uninteresting (to outsiders, at least), but very important task: making it possible to more easily reproduce our test results. TL;DR? We made our bots and development builds use jhbuild to automatically install dependencies; if you re using tarballs, don t worry, your usual autogen/configure/make/make install have not been touched. Now to the more verbose version! The need For a couple years now we have supported an increasingly complex and very demanding automated testing infrastructure. We have three buildbot slaves, one provided by Collabora (which I maintain), and two provided by Igalia (maintained by their WebKitGTK+ folks). Those bots build as many check ins as possible with 3 different configurations: 32 bits release, 64 bits release, and 64 bits debug. In addition to those, we have another bot called the EWS, or Early Warning System. There are two of those at this moment: one VM provided by Collabora and my desktop, provided by myself. These bots build every patch uploaded to the bugzilla, and report build failures or passes (you can see the green bubbles). They are very important to our development process because if the patch causes a build failure for our port people can often know that before landing, and try fixes by uploading them to bugzilla instead of doing additional commits. And people are usually very receptive to waiting for EWS output and acting on it, except when they take way too long. You can have an idea of what the life of an EWS bot looks like by looking at the recent status for the WebKitGTK+ bots. Maintaining all of those bots is at times a rather daunting task. The tests require a very specific set of packages, fonts, themes and icons to always report the same size for objects in a render. Upgrades, for instance, had to be synchronized, and usually involve generating new baselines for a large number of tests. You can see in these instructions, for instance, how strict the environment requirements are yes, we need specific versions of fonts, because they often cause layouts to change in size! At one point we had tests fail after a compiler upgrade, which made rounding act a bit different! So stability was a very important aspect of maintaining these bots. All of them have the same version of Debian, and most of the packages are pinned to the same version. On the other hand, and in direct contradition to the stability requirement, we often require bleeding edge versions of some libraries we rely on, such as libsoup. Since we started pushing WebKitGTK+ to be libsoup-only, its own progress has been pretty much driven by WebKitGTK+ s requirements, and Dan Winship has made it possible to make our soup backend much, much simpler and way more featureful. That meant, though, requiring very recent versions of soup. To top it off, for anyone not running Debian testing and tracking the exact same versions of packages as the bots it was virtually impossible to get the tests to pass, which made it very difficult for even ourselves to make sure all patches were still passing before committing something. Wow, what a mess. The explosion^Wsolution So a few weeks back Martin Robinson came up with a proposed solution, which, as he says, is the nuclear bomb solution. We would have a jhbuild environment which would build and install all of the dependencies necessary for reproducing the test expectations the bots have. So over the first three days of the hackfest Martin and myself hacked away in building scripts, buildmaster integration, a jhbuild configuration, a jhbuild modules file, setting up tarballs, and wiring it all in a way that makes it convenient for the contributors to get along with. You ll notice that our buildslaves now have a step just before compiling called updated gtk dependencies (gtk is the name we use for our port in the context of WebKit), which runs jhbuild to install any new dependencies or version bumps we added. You can also see that those instructions I mentioned above became a tad simpler. It took us way more time than we thought for the dust to settle, but it eventually began to. The great thing of doing it during the hackfest was that we could find and fix issues with weird configurations on the spot! Oh, you build with AR_FLAGS=cruT and something doesn t like it? OK, we fix it so that the jhbuild modules are not affected by that variable. Oh, turns out we missed a dependency, no problem, we add it to the modules file or install them on the bots, and then document the dependency. I set up a very clean chroot which we could use for trying out changes so as to not disrupt the tree too much for the other hackfest participants, and I think overall we did good. The aftermath By the time we were done our colleagues who ran other distributions such as Fedora were already being able to get a substantial improvements to the number of tests passing, and so did we! Also, the ability to seamlessly upgrade all the bots with a simple commit made it possible for us to very easily land a change that required a very recent (as in unreleased) version of soup which made our networking backend way simpler. All that red looks great, doesn t it? And we aren t done yet, we ll certainly be making more tweaks to this infrastructure to make it more transparent and more helpful to the users (contributors and other people interested in running the tests). If you ve been hit by the instability we caused, sorry about that, poke mrobinson or myself in the #webkitgtk+ IRC channel on FreeNode, and we ll help you out or fix any issues. If you haven t, we hope you enjoy all the goodness that a reproducible testing suite has to offer! That s it for now, folks, I ll have more to report on follow-up work started at the hackfest soon enough, hopefully =).

<object data="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Aspect-ratio-4x3.svg" type="image/svg+xml"> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Aspect-ratio-4x3.svg</object> <object data="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Aspect-ratio-16x9.svg" type="image/svg+xml"> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Aspect-ratio-16x9.svg</object> It seems that nearly all computer monitors have now switched from a 4:3 aspect ratio popular several years ago to a "wide screen" 16:10 and now mostly to an even wider 16:9. But screen sizes are usually measured by their diagonal length and those sizes have not changed. For example, before I had my Thinkpad X201, I had a X60 and a X35. They are similar laptops in the same product line with 12.1" screens. But 12.1" describes the size along the diagonal and the aspect ratio switched from 4:3 to 16:10 between the X60 and the X201. As the screen stretched out but maintained the same diagonal length, the area shrunk: from 453 square centimeters to 425. But screens are not only getting smaller, they are also getting less useful. The switch to wider aspect ratios is done so that people can watch wide screen movies while using a larger proportion of their screens. Of course, the vast majority of people's time on their laptops is not spent watching wide screen movies but in programs like browsers, word processors, and editors. Because most of our writing systems lay out documents from top to bottom, the tools we most frequently use to display (and then scroll through) the things we read primarily use vertical screen space -- the dimension that is shrinking. If you have a desktop monitor, you might rotate the whole thing 90 degrees and "solve" the problem. If you're on a laptop though (as I usually am) this is clearly not an option. I am not the first person to be annoyed by this trend. In fact, many recent desktop UI changes are designed to work around this issue. In the free software world, both Unity and GNOME 3 have made efforts to hide, merge, or otherwise get ride of title bars, menu bars, and panels that take up dwindling vertical space. I use Awesome which I've mostly set up to do two side-by-side terminals with very little in the way of menu bars. Applications are the worst offenders and the solutions for those things that won't run in a terminal (or people that don't want to live there) are still lacking. I have been using Firefox's Tree Style Tab extension to move tabs to the side and hand-customized toolbars that squeeze everything I need (i.e., back, forward, stop, refresh, and URL bar) onto a single menu bar. But the situation still drives me crazy. I'd love to hear what others are doing.

Inspired by a discussion in #wayland today, here are snippets from three people explaining why X declares its DPI as 96, and why a single 'DPI' sledgehammer isn't actually what basically anyone<super>*</super> wants. Please read them. Thanks. Adam Jackson:

I am clearly going to have to explain this one more time, forever. Let's see if I can't write it authoritatively once and simply answer with a URL from here out.

Matthew Garrett:

But what about the single monitor case? Let's go back to your Vaio. It's got a high DPI screen, so let's adjust to that. Now you're happy. Right up until you plug in an external monitor and now when you run any applications on the external display your fonts are twice the size they should be. WOOHOO GO TEAM of course that won't make us look like amateurs at all. So you need another heuristic to handle that, and of course "heuristic" is an ancient african word meaning "maybe bonghits will make this problem more tractable".

Federico Mena-Quintero:

People who know a bit of typography may know a few factoids:
- Printed books generally use fonts which can be from about 9 to about 12 points in size.
- A point is roughly 1/72 of an inch. For people in civilized countries, this translates to "I have no idea what the fuck a quarter pounder is".

*: Yes, I know you need to have actual point equivalence, and you've had all your displays and printer colour-calibrated for the past ten years too. You're doing all this in the GIMP or some other kind of design tool, so please yell at them to use the display size information that XRandR gives you right now, already, today.

Persian, Italian and Russian back to 100%. Progress for Serbian. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 17 languages 100%: bg de eo fa fr gu hi it ja nb nl pl pt ru sk th zh_CN
• 8 languages 99%: bs cs es fa ko mr si ta te
• 2 languages 98%: eu sv
• 1 language 96%: eu sr sv
• 7 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk tr uk
• 4 languages 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 9 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 13 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 3 langauges 95%: el fi he
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 8 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl sr tr
• 9 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 10 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nb nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German, Persian French, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak

One string added in level 1, so all translations temporarily dropped from 100% 14 are already back to completeness. Before that, we had 25 that were complete. Yay. Apart from that, Norwegian Bokm l completed level 3. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 14 languages 100%: bg de eo fr gu hi ja nb nl pl pt sk th zh_CN
• 11 languages 99%: bs cs es fa it ko mr ru si ta te
• 2 languages 98%: eu sv
• 7 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk tr uk
• 4 languages 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 9 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 13 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 3 langauges 95%: el fi he
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl tr
• 10 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 10 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nb nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German, French, Portuguese, Slovak

We have customers, which require a report about what we've done during maintenance windows. Usually this includes a report about upgrades, newly installed packages etc. and obviously everything we've done apart from that.
Till now we've prepared them manually. For a greater bunch of systems this is a big PITA, because to be somehow useful you have to collect the data for all systems and after that, prepare a report where you have:

• The upgrades done on all systems (e.g. a libc or kernel update)
  
  seperated from
  
• the updates specific to a certain system or system class

Its also error-prone because humans make mistakes.

Perl to the rescue!
At least the part about generating a report about installed/upgraded/removed packages could be automated, because dpkg writes a well-formed logfile in /var/log/dpkg.log. But I noticed that there appearently is no library specialised at parsing that file. Its not a big deal, because the format of that file is really simple, but a proper library would be nice anyway.
And so I wrote such a library.
It basically takes a logfile, reads it line by line and stores each line parameterized into a generic object.

Its features include:

• Parsing the logfile (obviously)
• Storing each line in a logfile as a DPKG::Log::Entry object that holds informations about the entry type (e.g. action or status update), the package associated (if any), timestamp, verbatim line, line number etc.

• Limiting the number of lines parsed to a time range specified by DateTime objects

Based on that, I wrote another library DPKG::Log::Analyse, which takes a log, parses it with DPKG::Log and then extracts the more relevant information such as installed packages, upgraded packages, removed packages etc.

This, in turn, features:
- Info about newly installed packages
- Info about removed packages
- Info about upgraded packages
- Info about packages which got installed and removed again
- Info about packages which stayed halfinstalled or halfconfigured at the end of the logfile (or defined reporting period)


These libraries are already uploaded to CPAN and packaged for Debian.
They passed the NEW queue very quickly and are therefore available for Sid:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/libdpkg-log-perl

As an example use (and for my own use case, as stated above), I wrote dpkg-report, which uses the module and a Template::Toolkit based template to generate a report about what happened in the given logfile.
It currently misses some documentation, but it works somehow like this:

Report for a single host over the full log:

dpkg-report

Report for a single host for the last two days:

dpkg-report --last-two-days

Report for multiple hosts (and logfiles):
The script expects that each log file has the name <systemname>.dpkg.log so that it can guess the hostname from the system and can grab all such log files from a directory if a directory is specified as log-file arguments:</systemname>

dpkg-report --log-file /path/to/logs

This will generate a report about all systems without any merging.

Report for multiple hosts with merging:

dpkg-report --log-file /path/to/logs --merge

This will do the following:

• Report packages which where installed/removed/etc. on all systems seperate from the upgrades only done on the specific systems
• If systems start with a common name and end on a number (e.g. mail1, mail2, mail3 etc.), report packages which where installed on all systems with that common name seperate from the upgrades only done on the specific systems
• For a specific system list only the changes on that particular system and nothing else.

A (fictive) report could look some what like this:

dpkg-Report for all:
------------------------
Newly Installed:
abc
Removed:
foo
Upgraded:
bar (0.99-12 - 1.00-1)
dpkg-Report for test*:
------------------------
Newly Installed:
blub
dpkg-Report for test1:
------------------------
Upgraded:
baz (1.0.0-1 -> 1.0.0-2)
dpkg-Report for test2:
------------------------
Upgraded:
zab (0.9.7 -> 0.9.8)

Currently this report generator is only included in the source package or in the git(hub) repository of the library. I wonder if it makes sense to let the source package build another binary package for it.
But its only a 238 lines perl script with a dependency on the perl library so I'm unsure if it warrants a new binary package. What do others think?

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you re among the people who made a donation to support my work (310.73 , thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it s just an interesting status update on my various projects. Dpkg: Multi-Arch Saga I know lots of people are waiting the landing of multiarch in Debian unstable, and so am I. Things are progressing, though not as quickly as I hoped. Guillem merged about half of the branch between the 24th October and the 6th of November. After that most of the work happened on his personal repository in his pu/multiarch/master branch. I verify this repository from time to time because Guillem does not inform me when he has made progress. I noticed changes on his repository on the 10th, 19th, 23th, 28th of November and on the 1th of December. He announced a long time ago that he had some interface changes and up to now only wrote about the switch from the command-line option --foreign-architecture (to put in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg) to the explicit command dpkg --add-architecture that only needs to be called once (see mail here). As of today (December 2th), the promised email for the other interface changes is still not here. On November 23th, I reviewed Guillem s work and tried to run the code in his branch. I spent the whole day chasing up regressions and submitted lots of fixes to Guillem. Thanks to the extensive test-suite I wrote when I developed my branch, it has been fairly easy to track them all down. All the issues I reported have been fixed in the latest version of Guillem s branch although the fixes are often slightly different from those that I submitted. Dpkg: Squeeze Backport At the start of the month, I uploaded what I expected to be a fairly uncontroversial backport of dpkg 1.16.1.1. It turns out I was wrong. After some discussion, I think we came to an agreement that it was acceptable to backport dpkg-dev and libdpkg-perl only. My goal was not to bring the latest dpkg to users but to make it easier for package maintainers to backport packages using new features provided by dpkg-dev >= 1.16 (such as hardening build flags, the makefile snippets provided in /usr/share/dpkg/, or the improved dpkg-buildflags interface). Thus I modified the source package uploaded to squeeze-backports to build only dpkg-dev and libdpkg-perl. It has been uploaded on November 23th and it s waiting in the NEW queue for a backports admin to process it. Misc Dpkg Work I merged a patch of Colin Watson to be able to verify build-dependencies for a foreign architecture (taking into account the Multi-Arch status of each package listed). I released dpkg 1.16.1.2 with two minor fixes that were sitting in the sid branch. I wanted to get rid of this so that the path is clear for a 1.16.2 upload with multiarch. The package just migrated to testing so we re fine. I spent another day doing dpkg bug triaging on Launchpad, we re now down to 77 bugs with many of them tagged as incomplete and likely to expire in 2 months. The Debian Administrator s Handbook We released a sample chapter so that it s easier to have an idea of the quality of the book. The chapter covers the APT tools quite extensively. I bet that even you could learn something about apt-get/aptitude The crowfunding campaign on Ulule ended on November 28th.
With 675 supporters, we raised 24385 EUR. Of those, 14935 EUR have been put in the liberation fund and the rest corresponds to the various pre-orders and rewards offered. This means that the translation will happen (we just started) but that the book is currently not going to be released under a free license. Don t despair As planned, the liberation campaign is carried on until the 25 K target is reached! Instead of being hosted on Ulule, this permanent campaign is on the project website at debian-handbook.info/liberation/. Note that any contribution of 10 EUR or more means that you get a copy of the ebook as soon as it s available (even if the liberation target is not reached). Package Tracking System At the start of the month, I filed two ideas of improvements for the PTS in the bug tracking system: #647258 is about showing outstanding bugs that relate to a release goal and #647901 is about warning maintainers that the package is affected by a current transition. If you re a coder and want to start contributing to Debian and its QA team, those bugs could be interesting targets for a start. In both cases, I have been in contact with members of the release team because those ideas require some structured data from the release team as input. Thanks to Meddi Dohguy and Niels Thykier for their help. Later in the month, the topic of relocating the PTS once again came up. For historical reasons, the PTS was hosted on master.debian.org together with the BTS. Nowadays the BTS has its own host and it made no sense anymore to have the PTS separate from the rest of the QA services hosted on qa.debian.org (currently quantz.debian.org). So together with Martin Zobel Helas we took care to plan the migration and on November 19th we executed the plan. It worked like a charm and almost nobody noticed (only one undocumented dependency was missed, which broke the SOAP interface). Misc Packaging Work WordPress was broken in Ubuntu and it was also not properly synchronized with Debian due to an almost useless change on their side. Thus I requested a sync so that the working version from Debian gets imported in Ubuntu. I sponsored the docbook-xsl 1.76.1 upload that I needed for Publican. Then I updated Publican just to discover that the test-suite triggers a new bug in fop (filed as #649476). I disabled the test-suite temporarily and uploaded Publican 2.8 to unstable. BTW, I also filed 2 upstream bugs with patches for issues I discovered while trying to generate the sample chapter of my book (see here and here). I uploaded a version 0.7.1 of nautilus-dropbox and fixed #648215 at the same time. I made an NMU of bison to fix a long-standing release critical bug that hit me once more during an upgrade (see #645038). I uploaded to experimental a new version of gnome-shell-timer compatible with GNOME 3.2. I took the opportunity to install from experimental the few GNOME 3.2 packages which are not yet in unstable Thanks See you next month for a new summary of my activities.

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One string added in level 1, so all translations temporarily dropped from 100% 14 are already back to completeness. Before that, we had 25 that were complete. Yay. Apart from that, Norwegian Bokm l completed level 3. Full stats are here Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 14 languages 100%: bg de eo fr gu hi ja nb nl pl pt sk th zh_CN
• 11 languages 99%: bs cs es fa it ko mr ru si ta te
• 2 languages 98%: eu sv
• 7 languages 95%: be bn dz he kk tr uk
• 4 languages 94%: ar ast ga ro
• 4 languages 93%: el hu km lo
• 2 languages 92%: id sl
• 4 languages 91%: et pa vi zh_TW
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 2 (packages that have localized material that may appear during default installs, such as iso-codes, tasksel, etc.):

• 9 languages 100%: de es fa fr pt ru si sk zh_CN
• 13 languages 99%: be cs da eo id it ja kk nl sl sv th uk
• 5 languages 98%: bg ca eu pt_BR ro
• 1 language 96%: nb
• 3 langauges 95%: el fi he
• 7 languages 94%: ar ast dz gl hr vi zh_TW
• 1 language 93%: is
• 7 languages 92%: bn bs hu ko ne pl tr
• 10 languages 91%: ga gu ka km lt mk mr sr ta te
• others are 90% or below

Status for D-I level 3 (packages that have localized material that may appear during non-default installs, such as win32-loader)

• 10 languages 100%: cs de fa fr nb nl pt ru sk sv
• 16 languages 99%: be bg bs ca el eo es fi ga gl he is ja th tr zh_CN
• 2 languages 97%: hu uk
• others are 90% or below

So, full 100% completeness (hall of fame) for: German, French, Portuguese, Slovak

Next February, 17 to 19th, a Bug Squashing Party (BSP) is organized at IRILL offices (disclosure: I work for IRILL part time), close to Place d'Italie in Paris. The principle of a BSP is to gather Debian contributors to tackle a maximum of bugs in Debian. This event is also the opportunity for new potential contributors to meet Debian Developers or Maintainers. Numerous regular contributors will attend to this BSP and will help newcomers to fix their first bugs. For organization reasons, an inscription on the Debian wiki is mandatory. Non-Parisian can find a list of hostel close to the IRILL's offices.