With apologies to Martin Yeah, where is the VTA Light Rail?

Today was a strange christian day here in Kanton Solothurn and I didn’t have to work, so I had a lot of time to prepare my presentation for next Friday about OpenLDAP. First of all I prepared the stuff for the school which begins tomorrow, so my holidays are now definitely past . I was excited that I didn’t receive my timetable by snailmail so I had to google and found it finally. Poorwise i have now to stand up very early in the morning, my train goes at 07.07 in the morning. Now to OpenLDAP, fortunately Mathias Weyland, the president from the LUGS, gave me a book about OpenLDAP from O’reilly, I really like it: It’s quite informative and sometimes the author is making some jokes. Priska Rubischon already bothered that i have to tell something about netgroups and autofs, this was completely new because I newer worked with NIS (and netgroups etc.) and neither with autofs (in most cases I use samba and libpam-mount). It’s not so difficult as i thaught. OpenLDAP in Debian comes with nice schemas which help to migrate from NIS to LDAP, so I had a look at those schemes and the chapter about netgroups in the book. Also autofs is not complicated, for example, if you want to share /home to the clients you have to prepare a NFS-Server which shares this directory and configure /etc/auto.master and /etc/auto.home on the clients. These two files can lookup where and how it can mount /home. On my testing-infrastructure I just used netgroups for the NFS-exports, so I have now an example what they’re for. After all I realized that my speech will also be about “How do I plan a network in a company”, so I realized that the security of LDAP is also very important. Fortunately OpenLDAP can be secured quite hard, it supports SASL and KERBEROS_V4 authentication mechanisms! When I would realize now a network i would do the following:

• Most parts of the directory readable anonymously
• Use SSL for LDAP
• The password writable by “self” (the “dn” can write the password itself when authenticated as it)
• Create an NFS Share, writable by some netgroups

I still ask me how i can protect my netgroups so that nobody can plug computer “x” out and plug in his computer, take the IP of “x” and mount the NFS-shares. Kerberos as user authentication would be a solution, but I don’t really like it. As I already told I prefer libpam-mount, with it’s help it would be possible that every user gets his share mounted maybe over smb. Now I will search for a solution how i can properly secure NFS, so it does only allow connections from users@boxes authenticated with LDAP and not user@host-which-can-be-faked. If you have an idea feel free to write it down here in my blog! In the evening I went to “Biel” by train to join the LUG-Seeland meeting. Beat Fasel explained me a lot about genetical biology, his work and the evolution, this was very interesting. Later we talked about the future of our community, I will prepare bylaws for the next meeting which we will sign. Other ideas were about preparing an install event and a mailinglist because we don’t have communication over the internet and this is quite complicated if we want to organise something in teamwork.

As greylistd does not seem to be developed anymore and I wanted to have --auto-whitelist-clients I have switched to postgrey. I am using postgrey-integration into exim4 written by Guy Antony Halse with some minor changes to minimize the differences to my greylistd setup. - I greylist on /27 instead of /24 networks and will immediately reject invalid recipients instead of greylisting them. postgrey runs with --unix=/var/run/postgrey/socket --retry-window=4 --lookup-by-host --auto-whitelist-clients=10 --exim.

  defer
    log_message = greylisted host $sender_host_address
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    verify = recipient/callout=20s,use_sender,defer_ok
    set acl_m3 = request=smtpd_access_policy\nprotocol_state=RCPT\n\
                 protocol_name=$ uc:$received_protocol \n\
                 helo_name=$sender_helo_name\n\
                 client_address=$ substr_-3:$ mask:$sender_host_address/27 \n\
                 client_name=$sender_host_name\n\
                 sender=$sender_address\n\
                 recipient=$local_part@$domain\n\n
    set acl_m3 = $ sg \
                     $ readsocket /var/run/postgrey/socket $acl_m3 \
                            5s action=DUNNO \
                      action= 
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr 0 5 $acl_m3 DEFER true false 
  # add "greylisted by ..seconds" header to mail which has successfully
  # passed the greylisting.
  warn
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr_0_7:$acl_m3 PREPEND true false 

As greylistd does not seem to be developed anymore and I wanted to have --auto-whitelist-clients I have switched to postgrey. I am using postgrey-integration into exim4 written by Guy Antony Halse with some minor changes to minimize the differences to my greylistd setup. - I greylist on /27 instead of /24 networks and will immediately reject invalid recipients instead of greylisting them. postgrey runs with --unix=/var/run/postgrey/socket --retry-window=4 --lookup-by-host --auto-whitelist-clients=10 --exim.

  defer
    log_message = greylisted host $sender_host_address
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    verify = recipient/callout=20s,use_sender,defer_ok
    set acl_m3 = request=smtpd_access_policy\nprotocol_state=RCPT\n\
                 protocol_name=$ uc:$received_protocol \n\
                 helo_name=$sender_helo_name\n\
                 client_address=$ substr_-3:$ mask:$sender_host_address/27 \n\
                 client_name=$sender_host_name\n\
                 sender=$sender_address\n\
                 recipient=$local_part@$domain\n\n
    set acl_m3 = $ sg \
                     $ readsocket /var/run/postgrey/socket $acl_m3 \
                            5s action=DUNNO \
                      action= 
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr 0 5 $acl_m3 DEFER true false 
  # add "greylisted by ..seconds" header to mail which has successfully
  # passed the greylisting.
  warn
    !senders = : postmaster@*
    domains = +local_domains : +relay_to_domains
    !hosts = /etc/exim4/no-greylist-hosts
    !authenticated = *
    message = $ sg $acl_m3 ^\\w+\\s* 
    condition = $ if eq $ uc:$ substr_0_7:$acl_m3 PREPEND true false 

I just tried to see if I could order a laptop with Dell without Windows. So I went to the Dell Linux page. Which totally sucked. I'm using flashblock (since flash usually sucks), and the Dell Linux page has huge flash movies on them - the regular Dell site doesn't. Why for heavens sake does Dell use Flash on their Linux page? It's not as if Linux users care about their fancy animations. On contrary, some will probably not have Flash installed, or filtered (like me). And some will be annoyed by not being able to copy and paste the product description from that pointless flash. Even more so: all one flash does is display a table. You know, that has been possible in HTML for like ever, absolutely no reason to use flash here. Oh, and their "large text" button doesn't work either. Nor will screenreaders. Nor does google see the text in the flash. The reason you choose Linux is the reason you not choose Dell. To me this is Dell displaying that they have no clue about Linux admins. I still haven't found, what I'm looking for - a lightweight notebook, with a high resolution display, and good battery life (i.e. no nvidia or ATI graphics, preferrably no built-in CD to save weight and size) - best candidates so far: Fujitsu Siemens P7120 and Samsung X11-T2300 Culesa. Sony Vaio VGN-TX2HP/B is interesting, but I still have some reservations against Sony (they try too hard to do tech lockin, e.g. memory stick; and a friend had bad service experiences, their Rootkit, GPL violations with InstantOn...) and it's a bit too tiny for me. [Update: Thinkpad X series is not an option for me, too low screen resolution and according to the specs low battery life; Apple MacBook isn't an option because of their heat and battery issues, and I don't like the hype around it and any other Apple product]

I was invited to give a talk on Debian Women in Mallorca, last weekend, during the Jornades de Programari Lliure hosted by Bulma, the LUG from Mallorca. The island is a beautiful place, sure, over exploited because of tourism, and full of Germans, which is not intrinsically bad in itself, but if you know where to look, there s still virgin beaches with no electricity (power is provided by the sun) or tap water. There is 350 sunny days a year in Mallorca. Amazing. My pics are up at My gallery. My slides are also here. I even run into a mgp bug that I still need to report.

The organizers treated us wonderfully, we were hosted in a luxurious countryside hotel, where I found a cat that was Vi s wild twin, it was semi-feral, but enjoyed having (mooching) breakfast next to us in the sunny patio. Speakers even got a rental car to get around the island, which was greatly appreciated. If you want to meet some of us, download the hello world video . The organizers went out of their way to make us feel comfortable and at home, had video-streaming during the talks, real-time screenshots of the speaker s slides on a website, and every single detail that makes you realize they are one of a kind. I want to thank them for a wonderful weekend, that really recharged my batteries and karma, and also helped me remind the reasons of my involvement in Free Software, (total world domination, and of course, changing this ugly world into a more fair place), and why Free Software is (or should be declared) Heritage of Humanity.

Marcelo Branco attended with his wonderful namorada, Renata, a great girl. You might have met Marcelo in Debconf4 in Porto Alegre. He is in part responsible for Brazil s embracing free software, the point of reference in every party, and now employed by the Spanish Administration to build an international network of Public Administrations throughout the world to make Governments use, defend and embrace Free Software. His talk was one of those critical moments in life after which you find find yourself thinking faster and harder, on why. The figures he gave were hair-raising. Brazil s annual budget to put an end to hunger in the country is roughly half of the money spent on proprietary software licenses. It is a hell of a lot of money, given that only 8% of the population use software at all, and only half of them, that is 4%, is actually paying for a license. We also rode one of those rental cars around Mallorca, spotting the loveliest of places, wanting to retire there, after we change the world.

Ricardo Galli, upstream for Men ame.net, an improved digg in Spanish, also gave a mind blowing talk on ethical responsibility, intellectual property, and introduced me to the whole Zen-talk concept. His slides were awesome, so was his talk, and he was a pleasure to listen to.

Dato also gave a talk, on Debian, very complete, and very to the point. He could not make us play Mao, though, we were too tired at night.

Antonio Larrosa, one of our national glories. He is a KDE developer since KDE was born, and even got to work for Suse until it became Novell. As far as I remember, he was one of my youth idols in the times when Linux was still not ready for the desktop, he was one of the many that changed this. And we made a deal that turns him into one of my all-time heroes. He will write a KDE client for Mao, according to my specs, but I will have to switch to KDE. Therefore, here is my gpg-signed part of the deal:

I hereby declare that I will switch my desktop to KDE if my friend, Antonio
Larrosa, writes a Mao Client for me. This client will be networked, and have a
Chat window. It will follow the Cambridge Standard Five-Card Mao rules.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQFEP/FONFDtUT/MKpARAiiaAKCZUGEzGDA1ioCFK60TrS7APp71/ACgsMJh
rENpTKAsUSmPf/YzDkY7wU4=
=OHpi
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

One of the things that has kept Debian in heated discussion over the last few years is the question whether the GFDL, or the GNU Free Documentation License, is free according to Debian's own DFSG. We've had three votes on the subject, with the final one decisively saying it's conditionally free. Or so I thought. Yesterday, Josselin Mouette proposed another GR on the subject, since he believes there's a conflict between GR 2006 001 and the current text of the DFSG. Sigh. At least he isn't trying to reverse the effect GR 2006 001. But still; no, the GR does not conflict the text of the DFSG. I used to think otherwise, but got swayed by the discussions on -vote that occurred prior to GR 2006 001, especially (strangely) the one that happened as a result of Anton Zinoviev's amendment, which ended up as choice #3 on the ballot. At the the time, I was supportive of the original proposal to throw out all GFDL-licensed documents, even though I disliked doing so (for obvious reasons); but I felt that the arguments about the DRM clause did hold. This was wrong, and it took me an insult to see it. Quoting Anton, myself, and Craig Sanders:

This clause disallows the distribution or storage of copies on DRM-protected media only if a result of that action will be that the reading or further copying of the copies is obstructed or controlled. It is not supposed to refer [to] the use of encryption or file access control on your own copy.

No; however, as written it can be interpreted as such.

only by nutcases with an agenda. normal people (including lawyers and judges) wouldn't have such an insane and insupportable interpretation. that's because normal people rely on facts. and evidence. they don't just make up whatever crap they need to suit their argument.

Craig's way of saying things did not immediately have the intended effect; and had I not grown tired of the discussion, I probably would've missed it. But the fact that I stopped following the discussion gave me some time to think about it, and as such, Craig's argument had a chance to sink in. When I was finally swayed, I failed to attribute it to Craig, however, instead thinking it was an argument by Anton that did it. The point is this: the mere fact that you're able to construct an interpretation of a license which is logically sound and complies with everything, does not mean that it is a sane interpretation. Lawyers and judges, strange people though they might be according to some jokes, are still people; human beings. If you come up with an interpretation that nobody in court came up with on the first reading of a given text, then chances are rather high nobody will follow you. That's what really matters: whether something you claim will hold in court. Not whether something you claim holds up to your own argumentation. And yes, claiming that doing chmod -r, or storing something on an encrypted filesystem is somehow restricting distribution, seems a little far-fetched. After all, when I'm storing something on my own hard disk, or even in the privacy of my home-directory on a large shared fileserver, I'm not engaging in a distribution of any kind.

From WordNet (r) 2.0 (August 2003) [wn]:
  distribution
      n 1: (statistics) an arrangement of values of a variable showing
           their observed or theoretical frequency of occurrence
           [syn:  statistical distribution ]
      2: the spatial property of being scattered about over an area
         or volume [syn:  dispersion ] [ant:  concentration ]
      3: the act of distributing or spreading or apportioning
      4: the commercial activity of transporting and selling goods
         from a producer to a consumer

Definition 3 and 4 seem to require an active action by the originating person; when someone copies a file from your $HOME, you didn't distribute the file to them; they took it from you. In our culture of sharing is good, you should share!, I missed it; but a court would probably see copying without asking for permission more as stealing, rather than distributing. After all that, the arguments about the DRM clause being too broad seemed a bit weak to me; and given that the FSF had already agreed on it being a bug which needed to be fixed, as they had for the other arguments against the GFDL (apart from the Invariant sections, which are not being discussed here), made me decide that the big giant insane problems with the GFDL are not so much of a problem as most people seem to claim.

Looks like I will be celebrating my 30th in Spain. I arrive in Madrid on my b-day. Oddly the only presents I want are also only apparently only available for shipping to Europe, so that works out pretty well, in theory: This is a pretty good kite design, my only other one in this design is fanny pack sized and works pretty well. If you ever wondered how to make my happy with just 2 euros, this is how. Er, that was my idea, so it's only fair..

It’s only seven weeks to the most important vintage computing event in Europe, the Vintage Computer Festival Europe (VCFe), which for the first time will be three days this year because of May the 1st being a Monday this year and an official holiday in Germany and some of the swiss cantons (at least Zürich). So the VCFe 7.0 will take place from April the 29th to May the 1st 2006 in Munich and it’s focus this year is:

Home Made Brains
Kit-Computers and Individual Designs I’m currently thinking about which old hardware I’ll present at this year’s VCFe. There are a few ideas flowing around in my head:

• Old x86 laptops (1989-1996). This was my exhibition last year, but ayca, my i486 Toshiba laptop is broke (probably the display controller) and the “new” Compaq LTE pony hasn’t been setup yet. Nevertheless, I’ll bring my (nearly) everyday ThinkPad bijou with me since it’s now 10 years old and therefore ontopic now. Yeah!
• The HP 9000 Apollo Series 400 I got from dwalin and dyfa, if I manage to get a NetBSD installed on that box.
• Buying a tux case but installing some old hardware in it instead of the current FOX board. On the other hand: There should be at least a Linux running on that box.

Anyway, I’ll be there, many other Symlinker (at least dino and Venty) also will be there. And I hope to see you there, too. :-) Oh, and btw: One wish to the Debian community regarding the VCFe: Perhaps someone who’s familiar with the Debian m68k Port could give a talk about how Debian plans to save this port although the old hardware isn’t fast enough to fit the requirements for inclusion in a Debian release. This would give a really interesting talk about old and new hardware. Talks can be held at least in German or Englisch IIRC. TIA. :-) Update 16:26h: I thought of this mail by Wouter Verhelst about how modern ColdFire computers could run buildds for a hybrid m68k and ColdFire port when writing this paragraph. See also this Symlink story [German] about that topic.

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

Some of the books I read in 2005:

Bruce Feiler, Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and other pieces
Bob McCulloch, My Fare City: A Taxi Driver's Guide to Edinburgh
Origen, On First Principles (translated by G. W. Butterworth)
Sin-leqi-unninni, Gilgamesh: a new English version by Stephen Mitchell
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: from paganism to Christianity 371–1386 AD
M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Otto Friedrich, The Kingdom of Auschwitz
Nicholas Barton, The Lost Rivers of London: a study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them
Anton Chekhov, The Steppe and Other Stories (translated by Ronald Hingley)
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Otto F. A. Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
R.W.B. Lewis, Dante: a life
Miles Glendinning and Aonghus MacKechnie, Scottish Architecture
Arturo P rez-Reverte, The Flanders Panel
John Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (second edition)
Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: the battles for Scripture and the faiths we never knew
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (translated by Desmond Lee)
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Tim Wallace-Murphy and Marilyn Hopkins, Rosslyn: guardian of the secrets of the Holy Grail
Ginevra Lovatelli, Secret Rome
Dauvit Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy (editors), Spes Scotorum: Hope of Scots: Saint Columba, Iona and Scotland
Plato, Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII (translated by Walter Hamilton)
William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages (The Penguin History of Europe)
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women (translated by Virginia Brown)
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Georges Perec, A Void (translated by Gilbert Adair)
Saul Bellow, The Victim
Franz Kafka, The Trial
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (translated by Joscelyn Godwin)
Italo Calvino, Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount; Baron in the Trees; The Non-Existent Knight) (translated by Archibald Colquhoun)
Eusebius, The History of the Church (translated by G. A. Williamson)
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar's trial by fire
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room)

My 2005, in cities:

• Cambridge, UK
• Philadelphia, PA
• Brussels, Belgium
• York, UK
• Providence, RI
• New York, NY
• Dijon, France
• London, UK
• Helsinki, Finland
• nr. Bibury, Gloucestershire, UK
• Edinburgh, UK
• San Antonio, TX
• Cornwall Bridge, CT
• Vancouver, Canada
• Whistler, Canada

(One or more nights spent in each place.)

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

About books:

• The book I think I’ve liked most, ever, is Los dominios del lobo, by Javier Mar as. I don’t think I’ve read any other novel twice.

• Between 1998 and 2003, I read a lot, but then I severely slowed down.

• 84, Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, is a little wonder that everybody should read.

• Most of what I read is fiction, but none of it sci-fi.

• I find it amusing that I loved Co os, by Juan Manuel de Prada.

• On perspective, what it seemed like a lot of books, are truly very few.

• Steve Langasek may or may not dislike Carlota Fainberg, by Antonio Mu oz Molina.

• After the current Planet Debian meme/whatever (one abd zero, btw), I’ve resolved to take on reading again, but will most likely fail.

• I wish I would have been able to finish Las ideas puras, by Pablo d’Ors, and Un mundo exasperado, by J.A. Gonz lez Sainz.

• Strangely (?), I have a very strong preference for Spanish literature. The way e.g. Juan Manuel de Prada (El silencio del patinador, La tempestad) and Francisco Umbral (Las ninfas) make use of my mother tongue is obscenely close to perfection.

• Let’s mention one non-Spanish writer: Thomas Mann.

• Like with films, but unlike with music, I don’t like to make my list of read books publicly available.

So it seems I cannot uphold my word - Well, yes, it was because of the trouble it would represent to the fine Moquegua guys - But anyway, I ended up accepting the invitation practically at the last minute, and went to Moquegua, Per , probably for my life's most tiresome journey.
Saturday, after lunch, we headed for the airport. I left Mexico at 17:30, and arrived five hours later in the Lima airport. Thanks to Antonio, Jos and Laura, who picked me up at 23:30 and arranged me a room in a hotel. I met the DebianPeru crowd, a very nice group, Sunday morning - We had breakfast, chatted for a while, and went for Lima's famous ceviche (assorted seafood cooked in cold in lemon. VERY good). At 3:45PM, I took the bus to Moquegua... For 17 long hours.
Got to Moquegua at ~8AM, went to the Jos Carlos Mari tegui University. I met the other guest speakers for breakfast, went with them to meet the Univerity Rector, hooked up some minutes to the net, went to a typical Moqueguan restaurant, gave my talk... Then hurried up to get the bus back to Lima. We got there five minutes before it left. I don't know why or how, but the bus back took 14 instead of 17 hours - I will not complain ;-)
Back in Lima, Carlos met me at the bus station, we went for breakfast, and hurried to the airport. I crossed the gate at 12PM, hurried by the airline personnel (and didn't manage to see Rudy/Stone_Head, who was on his way there)... Just to find the plane was delayed, although by little. Sat down for a while, hacked for a bit, and took the plane back home.
Summing it all up, I traveled roughly 40 hours, out of the 72 hours I was out of Mexico. Of course, you could add 1hr travelling to the airport and 1:30 back home... Anyway, 40/72 is quite close to 42/74 :)
I am tired. Plain tired. I am just waiting for Nadezhda to get home, as I want her to find me alive, and I'll crash down in bed.

Two Sundays ago, Jim and I walked down to Ubuntu Love Day. The Ubuntu Below Zero conference is being held at the Holiday Inn in Chinatown. That's the one with the fake Chinese tiles on the roof, which is sort of tacky. We found our way downstairs to the conference room and sat down. The previous night's revelries still had quite the effect, so I'm afraid I drifted in and out while listening to people speak. I thought I had rid myself of this habit, but apparently university has trained me to consider digital projectors as sleeping aids. I'll have to do something about this one day. I got to see some fairly interesting people: Mattias Klaus, whom I met earlier at Jeff Bailey's place; Fabio Di Nitto, who is incredibly jolly; Chris Peterman, who was with his classmates from Clarkson; Colin Watson, whom I thanked for working so hard on Debian; Jeff Waugh, who dressed up as an inmate; and plenty of others. Oh, I managed to meet Andrew Mitchell in person, but we failed to have a proper CHUG meeting while we were all in town. We broke for lunch, which was held in the hotel restaurant. A buffet, with some Chinese-style dishes, was being served. There, we had to negotiate with the unilingual (Cantonese) staff to find out what Jeff could eat. We had a special order of plain white rice brought for him and we were informed that it was safe for him to eat the stir-fried vegetables. I suggested to Jeff that he ought to keep a phrasebook on him whenever he travels. On each page, one per language, there should be a written description of what he can and cannot eat. Then, he just has to show this to waiters who don't speak English or French. For reference, the characters that mean "vegetarian" in Chinese are and . Most of the time, they mean "vegan", but there are some places where eggs and oysters are considered vegetarian. After lunch, Mark Shuttleworth gave Jeff a very nice birthday speech. He also gave Jeff a nice bottle of wine, which was very nice. And Matthias came up to give Jeff a bottle of fish-oil pills, which was very odd. Then, there were two Birds Of a Feather sessions, involving how to make an Ubuntu package and how to be an Ubuntu advocate. Being upstream to both these issues, I sat in the middle of the room and listened to both presentations at once. This was quite interesting, and slightly taxing. After this was done, we broke up once more. The plan for the evening was to meet for dinner in the hotel lobby. This transformed to meeting outside the front door. Jim, wlach, and I showed up and were greeted by this mass of people. Since there were stragglers and I knew where dinner was to be held, Jeff took a group of nineteen people in the metro. I followed about ten minutes later with a group of eighteen. We met up on St-Denis, and by this time we had lost some of the more impatient, and more hungry, people. Eventually, a group of twenty-three were milling about outside Le Nil Bleu. Angie had made arrangements for us to be served a set meal, and they had agreed to seat twenty-five of us. I went inside to let the staff know that we had arrived. When 20:30 came around, we were let into the restaurant and seated. I think the kitchen was still preparing food, because we had to wait about an hour before being served. Unlike my previous experience there with Jeff, the food was quite good this time and the service was very attentive. We enjoyed ourselves very much, and Jeff seemed to be having a very excellent birthday dinner. Some of the guests were not so happy, because the food was a little spicy for their European palates. Since gratuities are not standardised around the world, we discovered that some people had not tipped. To cover the embarassment, Angie and I made sure that the wait-staff were adequately compensated for their efforts. I'll be sure to go back to this restaurant again, but with a more significant crowd to ensure good service. After eating, a group of us including Matthias and Tollef went up to B l K , which was just a little north on Mont-Royal. That's a really interesting bar with beautiful tiled floors and ostrich heads on the walls. We enjoyed the lovely music, had a very good conversation there, and laughed until we were all exhausted. Since the Canonical people had to be awake for the 09:00 keynote speech the next day, they left early. Jim and I bid goodnight to them before we staggered home.