I just finished going through my last set of pending-review pictures from
2015, so I'm starting 2016 with a post about the past.
In June 2015 I travelled to Seattle/Kirkland area for work purposes,
and took advantage of a weekend to plan some more outdoors
stuff. After looking around on maps, I settled on the San Juan
islands, so I started looking at hiking possibilities, and in the end
Orcas island looked the best choice - all the others had much lower
elevations.
So, early in the morning, I started driving from Kirkland to Anacortes
ferry terminal. The drive itself is quite nice: after getting past the
more populated areas, passing Everett, the the view are very nice,
especially in the early morning hours and with very few traffic.
At Anacortes, there was already a small queue, fortunately I had a
pre-ordered ticket, and there was not much to do until the ferry
arrived except to look forward at the day, and hope that the weather
will stay nice. On the ferry then, crossing the straits and enjoying
the very nice views:
The ferry stops at Orcas (is it a town or just the terminal), and the
next stop is Eastsound town. I pre-planned here a stop to get a second
mini-breakfast: however, I misjudged what the portion sizes are and
got myself a maxi-cinnamon roll at Caffe Olga:
At least I knew I wasn't going to be hungry for a while
Driving on, briefly stopping at Cascade Lake (I also stopped on the
way back, the view is nice), then reaching the parking at the Twin
Lakes trail on the shore of Mountain Lake. Good think I arrived
somewhat early the parking was quite full already. I also got a bit
confused on which way the hike starts, since it's not well marked, but
after that I started the hike. It's also possible to drive up to Mount
Constitution, but that's just lame; hiking from the base it's quite
easy, if you find how to start the hike. Anyway:
At one point, one meets this particular sign:
Beware the Little Summit is not to be missed! After ~40 minutes of
hiking, with some parts a tiny bit strenuous, the view is really
breathtaking. It's definitely worth stopping by, as the view is (IMHO)
nicer than the view from the top of Mt. Constitution:
The reason I say this is better is because you look towards ocean,
whereas later the view is back towards the continent. And looking
towards the big ocean is just perfect! Plus, the many small island,
fully covered with forest are also nice.
Onwards then towards the peak of Mount Constitution. You cross the
"ridge" of the island, and your view shifts to the other side. Which
means you see back to the Mountain Lake where the hike starts:
Here the path is more exposed, not through tall forest like at the
beginning:
Right before reaching the peak, you pass through an interesting
forest:
And then you're finally reaching the peak. Compared to Switzerland,
it's very much not impressive (730m), but nevertheless, being so close
to the ocean results in some very nice views:
You can go into the small tower, and read through the history of the
location, including the personal life of
Robert Moran (shipbuilder), who retired in 1905 to
Orcas island to live what (his doctors said to be) his last months,
and who instead ended living until 1943. Not bad! To be filled under
"too much stress is bad, nature is good" heading, I think.
After eating a small packed lunch, I started back. At the beginning
the forest is similar to the one back at the beginning of the hike,
but then, as you reach the level of lakes, it is slightly
different. More tall (old?) trees, more moss and ferns:
I passed briefly by the Twin Lakes, which were interesting (lots of
submerged trunks), and then finally on the Twin Lakes trail back to
the start. The views of Mountain Lake from here are also nice,
especially in the less harsh afternoon sun:
And then the hike was over. I still had some time to spend before the
ferry I had a ticket on was scheduled, so I drove down to Olga town,
as I was curious what was at the end of "Olga Road". Not much, but
again nice views, and this very picturesque pier:
And then it was back to the ferry, waiting in line, getting on the
ferry, and crossing back:
Overall, it was a day well spent, part different, part similar to last
year's mostly
road trip. Definitely recommended
if you're in the area, and there are a couple of other hikes on Orcas
Island, plus all the other islands which make up the San Juans.
However, traffic on the way back was not that awesome
Small price
though!
In January 2014 the open-vm-tools package was orphaned and I took the chance to take over the maintenance.
Unfortunately the package is still not 100% in the shape I d like to see it, but I m getting closer.
I have to say Thank You for a lot of good bug reports, especially for those use cases which are
hard to test/reproduce for me (running Debian in a Windows-based VMware Workstation Player for example .).
At conova communications GmbH, the company I work for, we are using
the package on all of our Debian VMs, both for customer and internal use. It is essential for us
to have properly working open-vm-tools - not only to be able to shutdown the VM from VMware vCenter, but
also because tools like vSphere Data Protection
and Veeam depend on it. Good thing is that I can work on and test the
package at work and breakages are detected early and fast normally.
Getting a good contact to the VMware upstream was easy and the developers there are helpful and reply
pretty fast to their emails. Also as it seems there are finally real commits showing up in the
open-vm-tools github repository
again, not only huge single commits with a full release. It is not only nice to see that they are moving into the
right direction again, but also this is really helpful in fixing (urgent) bugs before the next release
of open-vm-tools - or to backport a fix to the versoin in stable/oldstable.
Since a few days we have open-vm-tools 10.0.5-3227872 in
My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for 
initramfs-tools version 0.121~rc2 and dracut version 044+3-2 have
moved most of what was in their main binary packages into a 'core'
package (dracut-core, initramfs-tools-core), leaving only automation
hooks in the main package. The core packages can be coinstalled
without conflicts and without creating any initramfs images at
installation time.
If you're been wondering how they compare but were afraid to break
your system by overwriting your current working initramfs, now is
the time to try the other option.
Testing dracut, for initramfs-tools users
A new release of 
The nice guys from 
Umm. Somehow I thought this would be easier than learning about
live-build. Probably I was wrong. There are probably many better
tutorials on the web.
Two useful observations: zeroing the key can eliminate mysterious grub
errors, and systemd-nspawn is pretty handy. One thing that should have
been obvious, but wasn't to me is that it's easier to install grub
onto a device outside of any container.
Find device
For the last week I have been stuck in England. For the vast majority of that time, I've had nothing to do except work on Debian and this blog post documents some of the things I worked on.
Obviously spending a whole week on Debian, there's going to be some packaging involved. The following packages got new versions in unstable this last week:
I just donated to Software Freedom Conservancy as a supporter. They do
great, important work in GPL enforcement, and they need some money to
continue it.
You can help, too: 