No, I'm not 4th row, 3rd from left on this photo as 10 out of 12 people were thinking. And not even 2nd row, 5th left or 5th row, 3rd left as two of you were thinking. To help you, here's another one where I appear too (the year after...). Send answers to christian+WHITELIST AT perrier DOT eu DOT org. I'll publish the poll (2nd round) results.

OK, I don't wear a red/white striped tee-shirt, but there are less people. So, will you be able to play Where's Bubulle on that really recent picture? Send answers to christian+WHITELIST AT perrier DOT eu DOT org. I'll publish the poll results.

Debian mailing lists' standard policy is to allow posts from unsubscribed users. That of course fits our standards for opened development but has the drawback of allowing a lot of spam to reach our mailing lists. This spam also clutters the mailing lists archives. However, 1.5 years ago, listmasters established a well-working system to clean out spam from the mailing lists. It basically works in four steps:

1. first, spam can be "reported" by anyone meeting it. While you are reading the mailing lists, reporting spam is as simple as bouncing the offending mail to a dedicated address: report-listspam@lists.debian.org. I, for instance, use a mutt macro to set ESC-L as a "report spam" hotkey. Spam can also be reported when browsing the mailing lists archives and clicking on the "Report as spam" button;
2. when a given mail has been reported as spam more than five times, it is then "nominated" for review;
3. nominated mails must the be reviewed by volunteers in order to confirm they really are spam. The review algorithm is complex but, in short, when a mail has been confirmed as spam by 3 reviewers without being qualified as "ham" by anyone else, then it is considered spam;
4. such mails are then removed from the mailing lists archives.

Steps 2 and 4 are performed by a weekly script that runs on Sunday mornings (5:00 UTC, IIRC) How can you help? Process nominated spam We need more reviewers for step 3. At this moment 2 people are doing this on a regular basis (every Sunday with the morning coffee). Some others are working on this in a less frequent way. It seems that 1 or 2 more regulars reviewers would guarantee that we can cope with the nominated spam incoming flow. Only Debian developers can do that step. They should read instructions, ask for a password, then start reviewing. The first 1 or 2 people joining this will have a quite big amount of nominated spam to process, for their first effort. However, as most of these have been classified as spam by at least the two people doing this for months....the amount will slowly decrease. I, for instance, now only spend 5-10 minutes reviewing the nominated mails every week. Report spam Everybody can work on reporting spam. You can start by doing this on mailing lists you read by just bouncing spams to the spam report address; If you want to do more, you can join existing spam cleaning efforts, such as the one running for debian-boot or the one running in debian-l10n-french (the latter probably more for French speakers). Or you can of course start a similar effort for your pet list. To be efficient, this effort needs to gather 5-6 people who will process the mailing lists archives systematically. Let's clean out these archives!

The Russian l10n team is the first team to reach one of our translators' Grails: all debconf templates translations are now fully translated in Russian, in testing. Russian is the first language to reach this ever (I formerly announced 100% completion for a few languages, but that was in unstable: we never tracked testing up to now). It means that, in theory, on can do a full installation of all packages in squeeze (in case some crazy folks want to do this!) and always be prompted in Russian. French and German are lagging very close to this, the only missing bit being the udev package, which had two consecutive urgent uploads that couldn't include a full translation coordination. For these, we're indeed waiting for another udev upload, but I already nagged Marco about this..:-) Portuguese should make it, though I still have to track 7 packages for it. Swedish is only missing 2 packages. I'm less sure that Czech and Spanish (the other two teams working hard on 100% completion) will make it.

Otavio Salvador announced the release of the beta1 version of Debian Installer, the installation system for Debian. This release is made in preparation of the overall release of Debian Squeeze. It should be followed soon by another release ("Release Candidate", probably) with a full localization update (that involves building/uploading all packages to get localization changes in). That release is dedicated to Frans Pop, who worked for two years as Debian Installer release manager and continued to bring very significant contributions to D-I later on.

OK, I still have to load my photos of Debconf10 somewhere. Shame on me. My gallery is broken (no longer allows uploads, even local ones!). Still, do you remember that we somehow mentioned that a small bunch of geeks did run together a local race at Debconf10? Indeed, a dozen of Debconf10 attendees did participate to the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series run of Thursday August 5th. And all of us completed this 5km cross-country run in Van Cortland Park, in Bronx, turning it into the most international attendance of this local race. We now have the official results.. So please congratulate No l K the for finishing 17th scratch, 2nd in his category...or Gaudenz Steinlin being 32th only 41 seconds after No l. Or Iustin 107th, Gregory, 113th, Luca (and kilt) 140th, Maxy 163th, Marga 167th. Even /me though I finished 5 minutes after that Kevin british guy who I ran with the week-end before, dammit. Or whoever I'm forgetting (we were more than this, IIRC). Geeks can run. Fast, for some of them (I still need to have No l telling me about his last marathon).

(really this time, not a stupid copy/paste of an old announcement) Yesterday, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #700000 and #1000000 will be reported. For bug #1000000, this is the second set of bets after those we placed back in 2008 when bug #500000 was reported. I then proposed that we have different bets, refined each time. That gives an interesting light on how people estimate the bug report rate (and, to some extent, the project's life). Have you bet already?

One more personal record broken for my 6th marathon (including those I ran alone). This time, it was a small marathon, the Seine-Eure marathon, in Normandy, between Paris and Rouen. But a small marathon is small only by number of runners (here, 500, plus about 160 teams of Ekiden runners -relay marathon-). It still has 42.195km. Despite a non optimal preparation (too many runs in September and no run over 25km since June), it went fairly well and I could benefit from the optimal conditions: ultra-flat race, few turns, few runners, goo dweather, though very cold for the season. Again, I started too fast (around 5'/km) and had trouble finishing with pace down to 5'30. But I'm still very happy for breaking my PB for the 4th time in a row with my results now being:

• 4h12'56" (Paris 2009)
• 4h15'10" (Rambouillet forest, 2009, ran alone)
• 4h00'49" (Cologne, 2009)
• 3h49'29" (Paris 2010)
• 3h43'14" (Maurepas 2010, ran alone)
• 3h40'20" (Val de Rueil)

Next marathon will be Paris marathon, on April 11th 2011. Target: 3h35 For french-speaking readers: full report on the Kikourou website.

Today, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 will be reported. Have you bet already? (update: I mistakenly published an old version of this call for bet, yesterday. Sorry for this)

Today, I launched the contest for prediction of the day Debian bugs #600000 and #1000000 will be reported. Have you bet already?

Here it is. Debian had six hundred thousand bugs reported. Cyril "KiBi" Brulebois is the winner in the "race of bug #600000" by reporting "db4.5: FTBFS on mips: configure: error: No off_t type." against the "db4.5" package. Such "honor" is very well deserved. Cyril is a tireless buildd admin and reports dozens of ports build failures, which is a significant part of the work involved in a release. Kudos. Once again, the French gang becomes visible in this as "we" had #200000 (by Michel Grentzinger) and #400000 (by /me). Bravo, Cyril. Rene Mayorga is the winner of the "bug #600000 contest" bet. He planned it to be reported on October 10th 2010 and only missed it by 2 days. Please note that Rene already won the "bug #500000 contest" (by missing the date by 1 day.... Congratulations again, Rene.

It's now time for me to move and use the new 4096 RSA GPG key which I created back in May 2009 and got signed during two DebConfs. It is now well connected and Debian keyring maintainers have included it in the Debian keyring in place of my good old C0143D2D (which was very very well connected...). Here's my transition document (shamelessly inspired from Zack's excellent text, itself inspired from Russ' excellent text). If you have signed my old key, you should have a fairly straightforward trust path to my new key. If that is compatible with your signing policy, please sign my new key. And, yes, doing this on 10/10/10 seemed to be a good idea...

Debian keyring maintainers did a batch of key updates in Debian keyring this week-end. As a consequence, I just uploaded samba 3.5.6 (which got release managers' approval for a freeze exceptions: thanks, guys) signed by this new key. It's now time to do a proper key transition (first step: learn how to do this appropriately by looking at others practices).

We will not make it and have Debian bug #600000 reported on 10/10/10. Debian is really not able to do anything on time..:-) (are others?) Whatever the moment this bug is reported (in 2-3 days, I would say), Ren Mayorga is the winner of the Debian bug #600000 contest. Of course, I'll send a nice blog post so that it makes it into Debian News. And then, we'll open the bets for Debian bug #700000!

After pushing for completion to the Portuguese l10n team, I did the same work for Czech and Spanish teams, identifying what's missing for them to reach 100%. Doing this, I sent 15 intents to NMU various packages..dozens of mails to debian-l10n-czech and debian-l10n-spanish mailing lists. And I even "translated" debconf templates to Czech and Vietnamese for two packages..:-) (don't worry, these were trivial updates, of course. I still don't speak, read or write Czech and Vietnamese)

Today, I went through the status page of Portuguese translations for debconf tempaltes and gently pushed my friends from Portugal to do the final bits of work missing. When those translation are sent to the BTS, I'll be able to kick my maintainer friends to fix them and hopefully bring Portuguese to the 100% Grail. Russian, French, Swedish and German teams are nearly touching this Grail.. French should reach it when my NMU of qmail reaches unstable (5 days left in DELAYED). Russian and Swedish should when Andrew Pollock finishes fighting with isc-dhcp. German also needs fts, which I just sent to DELAYED/7-day and mailgraph which I haven't worked on yet (but the maintainer is). Fear my anger if you happen to break this by uploading uncoordinated new debconf templates!

So, now, here it is. As of tomorrow, all of our three "kids" will have their own apartment. Indeed, Magali will now live (during weeks) in her own (10 square meters) room in Paris (close to Pigalle, oh la la) to make her life easier and save her from 4 hours commuting every day. Another page is turning...

Since I ran Bois d'Arcy hal-marathon back on Sept 12th, breaking my record down to 1h37, I continued working on resistance, in preparation for the Sein-Eure marathon on Oct 17th, two weeks from now. I'm still working empirically. No program, no fractioned sessions, work on speed, constant cardio training, etc. Just running...a lot...most often at marathon speed, and alternating trail and road running. Usually, I'm out 4 days per week: both Saturdays (short 10km run, or so), Sundays (long run, up to 20) and two week days, during lunch (skipping lunch and going out running). I'm now working one day per week in another facility of Onera, in Palaiseau. This is 20km away from center Paris and has woods close to it. So, I can train in trails rather than stupid roads...:-) I ran a small local race on Sept 26th: "la vir e des Deux Bois", in Villebon sur Yvette, a 18km trail with 330meters positive slope. I finished 27th out of 69 in 1h31, despite the high level of runners....most being trained trail runners who didn't want to run in the crowd of Paris-Versailles. Finally, this week-end (Oct 3rd), I (alone) ran a long trail to the Colline d' lancourt, one of my favourite spots in the neighbourhoods, marvelous when the sun is shining, with a 360 paronamic view up to 30 km in distance (yes, one can see the Eiffel Tower). This artificial "moutain" is the highest point in Paris region. That trail involves many funny...and muddy...single tracks in the forest. A great piece of cake. It also involves 300 meters positive slope, so that's hard training..:-) I now feel ready for the third marathon of this year! Let's rest for two weeks, now.

This week, I discovered Workrave, a small free software designed to help computer users to prevent Repetitive Strain Injury. Installing was as easy as "apt-get"ing it. We are considering to deploy it on our company's standard computers (Windows and Linux) if it gets approval by our occupational health doctor. It's now adopted and I'm a fan of micro-pauses. So, if you fear RSI, just try to get some help by the funny sheep (the software's mascot is a sheep). I really like it and wanted to share this little gem with those readers who haven't heard about it already.

Today, while writing a mail, I just remembered that I happened to be a friend of Ren Cougnenc. I remembered the numerous "petits midis" we made together in his flat in Antony, reinventing the world while I was supposed to be working and was instead drinking beers with him all afternoon long. It's already fourteen years since you decided that this world as not meant for you, Ren . Crap. Bizzzz, mon Ren . Folks, if you can read or translate French, just read the nice pieces collected by St phane. That sums up Ren fairly well.