I m just back from spending a few days volunteering with the tornado recovery effort in Joplin, MO. The biggest image that remains in my mind is of the first time I saw a person picking through a large pile of rubble. The person was standing on top of what used to be a house. Now it was a pile of wood, glass, carpet, siding, and roofing material. I m sure there was hope for finding some treasure or other maybe a photo album or videos of children. In any case, it made me feel so lucky, even unfairly lucky, to have not had to go through that. This scene was repeated several times, but mostly the houses that devastated appeared abandoned by the time we were there, now two weeks after the event. But I heard stories, and lots of them. The victims of the storm, who were perhaps trying to rebuild that part of their house that got smashed by a tree or a pickup, or trying to get their intact belongings out before abandoning the house, or whatever, were mostly surprisingly upbeat. They were working out in 95-degree heat, many without electricity, running water, or sewer service. Almost every person I met that suffered a loss from the tornado wanted to tell their story. Many also told of their plans for the future, which were full of hope and even upbeat. These were people doing a hard job in terrible conditions and still showing hope. Another testament to the disaster was the most unusual set of vehicles you ve ever seen parked at any hotel you can care to think of, for at least an hour-and-a-half radius in the direction I came from. Besides the usual cars and minivans, there might be FEMA vehicles, electric company trucks, Red Cross vans, construction trucks of every kind, police and law enforcement from all over, etc. There was quite obviously an influx of people helping out in Joplin. My primary task there was to provide communications support for the effort as an amateur radio operator. Amateurs (or hams ) are something of a volunteer first responder of sorts during times of crisis; most of us own and are very familiar with operating equipment that can communicate over very long distances without the need for any on-site infrastructure. Amateur radio was the only method of communication for some Joplin hospitals in the immediate aftermath. The communications emergency is over, but the response isn t. I was assigned to work with the Salvation Army. They were doing a lot of things in Joplin, and had hundreds of volunteers working with them. I don t think I even know what many of them were doing I do know they had set up several warehouses across the city working with donating clothing, food, etc. The part I was involved with was primarily the canteen operation. The SA sent in food service trucks from several parts of the country. These trucks would roam up and down the streets in the damaged area, trying to get past every single street several times a day. Anybody that we could see would be offered food and water. No strings attached, no questions asked. This included homeowners, electric line workers, construction crews, sanitation workers, and quite a few nonprofit groups that sent well-meaning and useful volunteers into the area but didn t think to provide them with a large supply of water due to sending them into an area without any. Oops. In any case, with extreme heat and no running water, conditions were dangerous. The canteens also knew of certain at-risk families that were living in homes that were mostly intact in the disaster areas, and made a special point to check in on them. They also generally looked to make sure that people looked like they were healthy. Each canteen also had a counselor on board that would visit with people while we quickly prepared their meal they all seemed to welcome that. Amateur Radio s Role The operation of this size had quite a logistics challenge. I d hear of things like an unexpected need of 70 lunches, or a semi showing up with donations before there was space, or an unexpected but very welcome donation of a large quantity of ice cream without a place to store it (so the canteen trucks, which have freezers, needed to pick it up quickly). That s where us hams came in. Each canteen had an amateur radio operator on board. Each major location also had a ham stationed there, and the head of operations also often had a shadow a ham that would follow him around wherever he went to relay messages back and forth. We also had hams with pickups (with radios in them, of course) that could transport things around the city to places that needed them, hams at headquarters managing all the communication and generally investigating questions that didn t have immediately obvious answers, etc. Radios were used instead of cellphones for a few reasons. One big one is that everybody on the operation can hear what everyone else s needs are, since it s a group communications situation rather than one-to-one. It s easy to give a general alert to everyone ( come get your ice cream now please! ) and people that have suggestions can chime in. This came in extremely handy more than once. Also, it frees the people doing other jobs from having to spend time chasing someone s voicemail, finding phone numbers, etc; that gets delegated to us in some cases. I heard from the head of canteen operations, for whom this was the first disaster he d worked that had amateur radio support, how wonderful it was to have this going on. I also heard a secondhand report that some police officers that were also amateurs had listened to our operation and reported that we sound more professional than 911 dispatch and do a better job. On Sunday I was assigned to a canteen. This meant I didn t have a lot of radio traffic to pass, so although I had it in my ear all day, I wasn t actively talking on the radio very much. So I rode in back, helping hand out water, carry meals to people, and so forth. On Saturday, I was the shadow for the head of operations. That was a difficult task, because he barely ever moved at a pace slower than a run, sometimes would abruptly zip out somewhere, etc. But it was also enlightening and vital. He was a real get it done sort of guy, and was the key to quite a few things. Having someone available to relay questions to and from him was a good thing. And today I worked as a transport person and at headquarters. Due to not having a pickup there, I didn t actually get called on much to transport things, but in general between jobs the whole time I d act as a runner if needed, or simply try to figure out the details of how things were run for next time. I wound up taking net control (being the control operator at headquarters, and generally managing communications so that people don t talk over each other and such) for about an hour. So I got to do a little of just about every amateur radio task. Thoughts I am thankful for the opportunity to go, and the good feeling of helping people in need the first I ve ever had the chance to do that in a disaster. It s a good feeling to have a skill that is useful and appreciated. Sometimes it felt like handing out food and water is something pretty small in the scheme of things. But on the other hand, it gives people a chance to have contact with someone that cares, an opportunity to have people that can notice problems drive by a few times a day, and an opportunity to help meet people s basic needs. And sometimes in a fluid situation, there might be more volunteers than are needed, so I did spend some time sitting waiting for the next task. But overall, I m convinced that the work I helped facilitate was a good thing and provided a good and needed service in Joplin. This has been quite the experience and I m sure it s changed me too, though I don t yet know how.

Memorial Day weekend so following the annual JPMorgan Chase CC run on Thursday, it was once again time for the annual Bike The Drive on Chicago's beautiful Lakeshore Drive. The weather was craptastic---following a fog (!!) warning we had dense fog along the lake making it somewhat moist and chilly. Once we were done this was followed by an impressive thunderstorm warnings and rather heavy rain. But the girls were troopers and we did both halfes for a total of thirty miles as shown on this Google Maps record of the ride.

This summer, I ll be taking a bit of time off, moving back to San Francisco and starting a new job. I can t wait to get back to work. Here s why. Me and my data
I have a singular relationship with my data. I have a copy of every email I ve sent since I first got an Internet email address in 1994 (82,000 messages and counting). I have even older files downloaded from BBSes, and passed between friends on floppy disks. Chat logs, text messages, voicemail I hold onto them all. Anything which is relevant to me personally, I tend to save. This must seem banal to people who are first getting online today. In the age of Gmail and Flickr, it s easy to assume that all of your data will be preserved indefinitely, with little or no effort on your part. But for me, it has been hard work over the years, because I ve done it myself. I ve carried my data with me to countless new computers, operating systems, storage technologies, file formats and cities over the years. Everywhere I ve lived, I ve brought it with me. Physically. Really? Why do I do this? Why have I gone to such trouble for a collection of bits? Especially now, why is most of my data still at home?
One pragmatic answer is that I can simply do more with my data when I have a copy. I can work with it using any software I want, including software that I write myself. I don t have to worry about whether I can transfer it from one web service to another. I m never stuck using yesterday s services because my data is never trapped in them. My personal data is always available to me me, always raw, ready and waiting for the next wave of software to come along. When it does, I can load my data into it and keep going. The fact that Facebook and Google disagree over sharing their users data doesn t bother me in the least. Another reason is that I want to be in control of it. I decide who to share my data with, and when. Some of it, I prefer not to share at all, with any person or company, and I have that choice. Even if a powerful government wants to access my data, I am afforded certain protection under the law, at least in the countries where I ve lived. If I turned over my data to service providers, my choices and protection would likely be much more limited. I have a deeper emotional attachment to my data as well. Enfolded within that vast pattern of bits is some part of my self. By sharing my personal data with other people, I show them something of who I am. Increasingly, my personal data is part of my identity. This is more than just a state of mind: it s been shown that even our non-identifying personal data can reveal who we are. In other words, it s not just my data it s me data . Singly I m joining Singly because I want to take this concept much further, and combine people, data and software into a different shape with people at the center. Today, we are creating vastly greater amounts of personal data, and it s stored in many more places. We leave our trail on the Internet in the form of activity streams, messages and content, spread across different web sites, each with their own inscrutable terms of service and (if we re lucky) their own API. These disconnected silos prevent us from using all of this information effectively. Meanwhile, we want and need to connect with each other in more ways than ever before. We need applications which can connect us, through our personal data, to the services we need. Singly is building the technology to make this possible. It will be designed with the deepest respect for the relationship that we have with our personal data, and with a vision for truly personal computing. Singly is

• A team of passionate people, dedicated to a vision for personal data
• Building an open source data locker, which aggregates and stores your personal data from around the web and ensures that it s always available to you
• Enabling developers to create powerful distributed applications based on this data, without having to deal with the complexity of multiple web services APIs
• Providing secure hosting services for personal data lockers
• Hiring! We re looking for people with deep experience in security and cryptography, cloud infrastructure and user experience, as well as software engineering generalists

This opportunity is a great fit for my interests and experience. Singly aims to be the commercial part of a vibrant open source community, and I m looking forward to building on what I ve learned in Debian, Canonical and Ubuntu to help make it a success. I ll have lots more to say about it as time goes on. Meanwhile, if you re interested in following what we re doing, here s where:

• Singly: website, blog, Twitter
• The Locker Project: website, GitHub, Twitter, blog, IRC (#lockerproject on FreeNode)
• Me: Blog, Identica or Twitter

Long time no blogging. Earlier, I wrote a blog post about transporting data to mobile phones. I have since then extracted the Data Matrix code I wrote there into a separate library, prison and added support for QR Code as well. So from KDE s next feature release, versioned 4.7 arriving around first of august, you have DataMatrix and QRCode support in Klipper. While on a barcode spree, I also added barcode support to the KDE Addressbooks for easy transfer of contacts. Also using libprison. Also available from 4.7 onwards. Few minutes ago, libprison 1.0 was tagged and hopefully soon, the KDE Sysadmins will publish my tarball. And about the weather. Some nice people wrote Debian Weather which in simple ways shows if it is unsafe to upgrade. Quite recently there have been thunderstorms and heavy rain in Debian Unstable. Perl rain.
I have recently added support for Debian Weather in the Plasma Dataengine for weather. Also available from 4.7 onwards. Last but not least, after spending a couple of hours on trying to understand Q3PtrList and how it was used in KHelpCenter, it is now, as the last component in KDE-Runtime, free of Qt3Support. All for now. Next up. Platform_11

Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed one of our dreams when we arrived in Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenean range sinks in the Mediterranean. To get there, we walked hundreds of kilometres during a month, crossed dozens of steep valleys and enjoyed one of the richest experiences of our lives.

We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier. Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely no rest in the night bus to Ir n, I thought for myself that it was improbable that we'd manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of us would get injuried way before, or we'd just give up and go for the easy beach vacation in the Basque Country.

Biad s refuge, under Posets But we didn't, and after a somewhat painful start, with our boots soaking wet during the stages that crossed the enchanting Selva de Irati which ended up with me getting the biggest blister I've ever seen, we started to walk farther every day, extending the stages when we felt strong after reaching their official end. When we crossed from Nafarroa to Aragonese territory, the mental wall that I had built over the toughest stages in our quest started to fall apart. Days later, we found ourselves climbing down to Pineta, leaving Ordesa behind and enjoying a feeling that our adventure could not go better. The weather had been perfect for over a week and our legs and back were strong to go all over the way to the sea.

Ca n de A isclo, on our way to Pineta When we finally saw that huge blue stain on the horizon, the day before getting to the last mark, we got really excited. We had made it, but as we walked towards the cape, happiness slowly got mixed with melancholy. An unforgettable adventure was about to end, and we didn't want to face our return to the city and our routines. It had been many days surrounded only by awesome landscapes, and living without watches, with only sunlight and weariness marking the time to get in our sleeping bags.

At the very last red and white mark of our journey We've had plenty of time to meet great people. Starting with the Navarrian brothers we met in the early stage, which provided us with a good pace to follow while our leg muscles were still building up; or Kike and Ana, who drove from Pamplona to visit us during the first Aragonese stages (thanks for the supplies!). Tom s and Roger, young hikers from Matar , surprised us with their maturity and experience as mountaineers; we had the pleasure to join forces during four days, walking a really cool variant through the Infiernos and Collado del Letrero which avoided going through the ghost city of Panticosa. Roger and Tom s, we really hope to meet you soon! Andreu, Manel, Ghandi and Ga la visited us at the Vall de N ria and were unlucky to suffer a frightening hail and thunder storm when they left our shelter on their way back to their car. Thanks! All of you have been a very special part of our experience!

This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for several reasons. We've learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no matter how far, it's really easy if you just believe you can do it and desire to get there. Maria and I are proud of what we've done, and no wonder we're looking for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience, going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican GR 20 seems the most appealing. We'll see, next summer!

The Google books ngram datasets are a nice resource for playing with text generation. I've created a program that will, given a starting phrase, blather on by connecting phrases from the datasets. The results are much more varied, and seem to more often make sense than most Markov text generators I've seen before, such as dadadodo. It had better be -- it's working with data derived from 4% of all books ever written! Some examples. Do they tell a story? (The starting phrase I entered is in italics.)

• He is assailed they merge
• To be or not to be so deceived ! She denies abdominal scanning
• Beauty with enormous strides . The hospital was under the control of the communal organization of solitary mammals . In other words the mere failure of an individual .
• Time passes . It is the child's first day in town and at his own level ?
• Time above his left shirt pocket for safe keeping . At first I accepted the old man's work . He settled in that part of Paris .
• Until then no ill Accident would generate hydrogen sulfide
• Random nonsense put together huge boxes with ammunition against it itself stops . Working things out afterwards
• A change in voice and piano . He sat down at last at No . 5 in connection with another or with others ; and that by some strange disaster .
• O God ! What is the condition of morality is that they all hold hands in a chain of propositions . These propositions are the primary bearers of meaning making and the rearing of children

I have cheated slightly by picking where to stop quoting the blather each time. It tends to go on for quite a while otherwise. Although it often does manage some kind of sense at length too:

• Worst Case Scenarios in Search of Reality : The ERA and emendation . I can never recover . She became thoughtful . He looked at me gloomily above the tree tops . The women were asked how they used to behave more competitively . Forecasts should be made

---

This was accomplished using only 99 lines of code. I imported the datasets into Xapian databases using this program. And this program is the text generator. I threw out the metadata, to keep the Xapian databases of reasonable size. By which I mean, only a dozen gigabytes. It might be interesting to include the publication year data in Xapian, so that it could prefer ngrams that were published around the same time as the input text. I'm still importing data. I may put up a web interface later if there's interest. PS:

• What about Spam ? Who caused it ? You have said it so loud that the little lady in a black storm .
• What about Spam ? I think it cannot be any . The Church had the right men . They are our friends and relations who could be depended upon with regard to the UN . Some people paint the portraits of the writers .

PPS:

• Joey Hess was not the real author of these lines .

As I mentioned recently, the Ubuntu Technical Board is reviewing the most popular topics in Ubuntu Brainstorm and coordinating official responses on behalf of the project. This means that the most popular topics on Ubuntu Brainstorm receive expert answers from the people working in these areas. This is the first batch, and we plan to repeat this process each quarter. We ll use feedback and experiences from this run to improve it for next time, so let us know what you think. Power management (idea #24782) Laptops are now outselling desktops globally, and laptop owners want to get the most out of their expensive and heavy batteries. So it s no surprise that people are wondering about improved power management in Ubuntu. This is a complex topic which spans the Linux software stack, and certainly isn t an issue which will be solved in the foreseeable future, but we see a lot of good work being done in this area. To tell us about it, Amit Kucheria, Ubuntu kernel developer and leader of the Linaro working group on Power Management, contributed a great writeup on this topic, with technical analysis, tips and recommendations, and a look at what s coming next.

I am going to attempt to summarize the various use profiles and what Ubuntu does (or can do) to prolong battery life in those profiles. Power management, when done right, should not require the user to make several (difficult) choices. It should just work providing a good balance of performance and battery life.

IP address conflicts (idea #25648) IP addressing is a subject that most people should never have to think about. When something isn t working, and two computers end up with the same IP address, it can be hard to tell what s wrong. I was personally surprised to find this one near the top of the list on Ubuntu Brainstorm, since it seems unlikely to be a very common problem. Nonetheless, it was voted up, and we re listening. There is a tool called ipwatchd which is already available in the package repository, and was created specifically to address this problem. This seems like a further indication that this problem may be more widespread than I might assume. The idea has already been marked as implemented in Brainstorm based on the existence of this package, but that doesn t help people who have never heard of ipwatchd, much less found and installed it. What do you think? Have you ever run into this problem? Would it have helped you if your computer had told you what was wrong, or would it have only confused you further? Is it worth considering this for inclusion in the default install? Post your comments in Brainstorm. Selecting the only available username to login (idea #6974) Although Linux is designed as a multi-user operating system, most Ubuntu systems are only used by one person. In that light, it seems a bit redundant to ask the user to identify themselves every time they login, by clicking on their username. Why not just preselect it? Indeed, this would be relatively simple to implement, but the real question is whether it is the right choice for users. Martin Pitt of the Ubuntu Desktop Team notes that consistency is an important factor in ease of use, and asks for further feedback.

So in summary, we favored consistency and predictablility over the extra effort to press Enter once. This hasn t been a very strong opinion or decision, though, and the desktop team would be happy to revise it.

Icon for .deb packages (idea #25197) Building on the invaluable efforts of Debian developers, we work hard to make sure that people can get all of the software they need from Ubuntu repositories through Software Center and APT, where they are authenticated and secure. However, in practice, it is occasionally necessary for users to work with .deb files directly. Brainstorm idea 25197 suggests that the icon used to represent .deb packages in the file manager is not ideal, and can be confusing. Matthew Paul Thomas of the Canonical Design Team responds with encouragement for deb-thumbnailer, which makes the icon both more distinctive and more informative. He has opened bug 685851 to track progress on getting it packaged and into the main repository.

I have reviewed the proposed solutions with Michael Vogt, our packaging expert. Solution #1 is straightforward, but we particularly like solutions #5 and #10, using a thumbnailer to show the application icon from inside each package.

Keeping the time accurate over the Internet by default (idea #25301) It s important for an Internet connected computer to know the correct time of day, which is why Ubuntu has included automatic Internet time synchronization with NTP since the very first release (4.10 warty ). So some of us were a little surprised to see this as one of the most popular ideas on Ubuntu Brainstorm. Colin Watson of the Ubuntu Technical Board investigated and discovered a case where this wasn t working correctly. It s now fixed for Ubuntu 11.04, and Colin has sent the patches upstream to Debian and GNOME.

My first reaction was hey, that s odd I thought we already did that? . We install the ntpdate package by default (although it s deprecated upstream in favour of other tools, but that shouldn t be important here). ntpdate is run from /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate, in other words every time you connect to a network, which should be acceptably frequent for most people, so it really ought to Just Work by default. But this is one of the top ten problems where users have gone to the trouble of proposing solutions on Brainstorm, so it couldn t be that simple. What was going on?

More detail in GNOME system monitor (idea #25887) Under System, Preferences, System Monitor, you can find a tool to peek under the hood at the Linux processes which power every Ubuntu system. Power users, hungry for more detail on their systems inner workings, voted to suggest that more detail be made available through this interface. Robert Ancell of the Ubuntu Desktop Team answered their call by offering to mentor a volunteer to develop a patch, and someone has already stepped up with a first draft. Help the user understand when closing a window does not close the app (idea #25801) When the user clicks the close button, most applications obediently exit. A few, though, will just hide, and continue running, because they assume that s what the user actually wants, and it can be hard to tell which has happened. Ivanka Majic, Creative Strategy Lead at Canonical, shares her perspective on this issue, with a pointer to work in progress to resolve it.

This is more than a good idea, it s an important gap in the usability of most of the desktop operating systems in widespread use today.

Ubuntu Software Centre Removal of Configuration Files (idea #24963) One feature of the Debian packaging system used in Ubuntu is that it draws a distinction between removing a package and purging it. Purging should remove all traces of the package, such that installing and then immediately purging a package should return the system to the same state. Removing will leave certain files behind, including system configuration files and sometimes runtime data. This subtle distinction is useful to system administrators, but only serves to confuse most end users, so it s not exposed by Software Center: it just defaults to removing packages. This proposal in Ubuntu Brainstorm suggests that Software Center should purge packages by default instead. Michael Vogt of the Ubuntu Foundations Team explains the reasoning behind this default, and offers an alternative suggestion based on his experience with the package management system.

This is not a easy problem and we need to carefully balance the needs to keep the UI simple with the needs to keep the system from accumulating cruft.

Ubuntu One file sync progress (idea #25417) Ubuntu One file synchronization works behind the scenes, uploading and downloading as needed to replicate your data to multiple computers. It does most of its work silently, and it can be hard to tell what it is doing or when it will be finished. John Lenton, engineering manager for the Ubuntu One Desktop+ team, posts on the AskUbuntu Q&A site with tools and tips which work today, and their plans to address this issue comprehensively in the future. Multimedia performance (idea #24878) With a cornucopia of multimedia content available online today, it s important that users be able to access it quickly and easily. Poor performance in the audio, video and graphics subsystems can spoil the experience, if resource-hungry multimedia applications can t keep up with the flow of data. Allison Randal, Ubuntu Technical Architect, answers with an analysis of the problem and the proposed solutions, an overview of current activity in this area, and pointers for getting involved.

The fundamental concern is a classic one for large systems: changes in one part of the system affect the performance of another part of the system. It s modestly difficult to measure the performance effects of local changes, but exponentially more difficult to measure the network effects of changes across the system.

The relationship between Debian and Ubuntu has been the subject of many vigorous debates over the years, ever since Ubuntu s launch in 2004. Six years later, the situation has improved and both projects are communicating better. The Natty Narwhal Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) featured like all UDS for more than 2 years a Debian Health Check session where current cooperation issues and projects are discussed. A few days after that session, Lucas Nussbaum gave a talk during the mini-Debconf Paris detailing the relationship between both projects, both at the technical and social level. He also shared some concerns for Debian s future and gave his point of view on how Debian should address them. Both events give valuable insights on the current state of the relationship. Lucas Nussbaum s Debian-Ubuntu talk Lucas started by introducing himself. He s an Ubuntu developer since 2006 and a Debian developer since 2007. He has worked to improve the collaboration between both projects, notably by extending the Debian infrastructure to show Ubuntu-related information. He attended conferences for both projects (Debconf, UDS) and has friends in both communities. For all of these reasons, he believes himself to be qualified to speak on this topic. Collaboration at the technical level He then quickly explained the task of a distribution: taking upstream software, integrating it in standardized ways, doing quality assurance on the whole, delivering the result to users, and assuring some support afterward. He pointed out that in the case of Ubuntu, the distribution has one special upstream: Debian. Indeed Ubuntu gets most of its software from Debian (89%), and only 7% are new packages coming from other upstream projects (the remaining 4% are unknown, they are newer upstream releases of software available in Debian but he was not able to find out whether the Debian packaging had been reused or not). From all the packages imported from Debian, 17% have Ubuntu-specific changes. The reasons for those changes are varied: bugfixes, integration with Launchpad/Ubuntu One/etc., or toolchain changes. The above figures are based on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) while excluding many Ubuntu-specific packages (language-pack-*, language-support-*, kde-l10n-*, *ubuntu*, *launchpad*). The different agendas and the differences in philosophy (Debian often seeking perfect solutions to problems; Ubuntu accepting temporary suboptimal workarounds) also explain why so many packages are modified on the Ubuntu side. It s simply not possible to always do the work in Debian first. But keeping changes in Ubuntu requires a lot of work since they merge with Debian unstable every 6 months. That s why they have a strong incentive to push changes to upstream and/or to Debian. There are 3 channels that Ubuntu uses to push changes to Debian: they file bug reports (between 250 to 400 during each Ubuntu release cycle), they interact directly with Debian maintainers (often the case when there s a maintenance team), or they do nothing and hope that the Debian maintainer will pick up the patch directly from the Debian Package Tracking System (it relays information provided by patches.ubuntu.com). Lucas pointed out that those changes are not the only thing that Debian should take back. Ubuntu has a huge user base resulting in lots of bug reports sitting in Launchpad, often without anyone taking care of them. Debian maintainers who already have enough bugs on their packages are obviously not interested in even more bugs, but those who are maintaining niche packages, with few reports, might be interested by the user feedback available in Launchpad. Even if some of the reports are Ubuntu-specific, many of them are advance warnings of problems that will affect Debian later on, when the toolchain catches up with Ubuntu s aggressive updates. To make this easier for Debian maintainers, Lucas improved the Debian Package Tracking System so that they can easily get Ubuntu bug reports for their packages even without interacting with Launchpad. Human feelings on both sides Lucas witnessed a big evolution in the perception of Ubuntu on the Debian side. The initial climate was rather negative: there were feelings of its work being stolen, claims of giving back that did not match the observations of the Debian maintainers, and problems with specific Canonical employees that reflected badly on Ubuntu as a whole. These days most Debian developers find something positive in Ubuntu: it brings a lot of new users to Linux, it provides something that works for their friends and family, it brings new developers to Debian, and it serves as a technological playground for Debian. On the Ubuntu side, the culture has changed as well. Debian is no longer so scary for Ubuntu contributors and contributing to Debian is The Right Thing to do. More and more Ubuntu developers are getting involved in Debian as well. But at the package level there s not always much to contribute, as many bugfixes are only temporary workarounds. And while Ubuntu s community follows this philosophy, Canonical is a for-profit company that contributes back mainly when it has compelling reasons to do so. Consequences for Debian In Lucas s eyes, the success of Ubuntu creates new problems. For many new users Linux is a synonym for Ubuntu, and since much innovation happens in Ubuntu first, Debian is overshadowed by its most popular derivative. He goes as far as saying that because of that Debian becomes less relevant . He went on to say that Debian needs to be relevant because the project defends important values that Ubuntu does not. And it needs to stay as an independent partner that filters what comes out of Ubuntu, ensuring that quality prevails in the long term. Fixing this problem is difficult, and the answer should not be to undermine Ubuntu. On the contrary, more cooperation is needed. If Debian developers are involved sooner in Ubuntu s projects, Debian will automatically get more credit. And if Ubuntu does more work in Debian, their work can be showcased sooner in the Debian context as well. The other solution that Lucas proposed is that Debian needs to communicate on why it s better than Ubuntu. Debian might not be better for everybody but there are many reasons why one could prefer Debian over Ubuntu. He listed some of them: Debian has better values since it s a volunteer-based project where decisions are made publicly and it has advocated the free software philosophy since 1993. On the other hand, Ubuntu is under control of Canonical where some decisions are imposed, it advocates some proprietary web services (Ubuntu One), the installer recommends adding proprietary software, and copyright assignments are required to contribute to Canonical projects. Debian is also better in terms of quality because every package has a maintainer who is often an expert in the field of the package. As a derivative, Ubuntu does not have the resources to do the same and instead most packages are maintained on a best effort basis by a limited set of developers who can t know everything about all packages. In conclusion, Lucas explained that Debian can neither ignore Ubuntu nor fight it. Instead it should consider Ubuntu as a chance and should leverage it to get back in the center of the FLOSS ecosystem . The Debian health check UDS session While this session has existed for some time, it s only the second time that a Debian Project Leader was present at UDS to discuss collaboration issues. During UDS-M (the previous summit), this increased involvement from Debian was a nice surprise to many. Stefano Zacchiroli the Debian leader collected and shared the feedback of Debian developers and the session ended up being very productive. Six months later is a good time to look back and verify if decisions made during UDS-M (see blueprint) have been followed through. Progress has been made On the Debian side, Stefano set up a Derivatives Front Desk so that derivative distributions (not just Ubuntu) have a clear point of contact when they are trying to cooperate but don t know where to start. It s also a good place to share experiences among the various derivatives. In parallel, a #debian-ubuntu channel has been started on OFTC (the IRC network used by Debian). With more than 50 regulars coming from both distributions, it s a good place for quick queries when you need advice on how to interact with the distribution that you re not familiar with. Ubuntu has updated its documentation to prominently feature how to cooperate with Debian. For example, the sponsorship process documentation explains how to forward patches both to the upstream developers and to Debian. It also recommends ensuring that the patch is not Ubuntu-specific and gives some explanation on how to do it (which includes checking against a list of common packaging changes made by Ubuntu). The Debian Derivative Front Desk is mentioned as a fallback when the Debian maintainer is unresponsive. While organizing Ubuntu Developer Week, Ubuntu now reaches out to Debian developers and tries to have sessions on working with Debian . Launchpad has also been extended to provide a list of bugs with attached patches and that information has been integrated in the Debian Package Tracking system by Lucas Nussbaum. Still some work to do Some of the work items have not been completed yet: many Debian maintainers would like a simpler way to issue a sync request (a process used to inject a package from Debian into Ubuntu). There s a requestsync command line tool provided by the ubuntu-dev-tools package (which is available in Debian) but it s not yet usable because Launchpad doesn t know the GPG keys of Debian maintainers. Another issue concerns packages which are first introduced in Ubuntu. Most of them have no reason to be Ubuntu-specific and should also end up in Debian. It has thus been suggested that people packaging new software for Ubuntu also upload them to Debian. They could however immediately file a request for adoption (RFA) to find another Debian maintainer if they don t plan to maintain it in the long term. If Ubuntu doesn t make this effort, it can take a long time until someone decides to reintegrate the Ubuntu package into Debian just because nobody knows about it. This represents an important shift in the Ubuntu process and it s not certain that it s going to work out. As with any important policy change, it can take several years until people are used to it. Both issues have been rescheduled for this release cycle, so they re still on the agenda. This time the UDS session was probably less interesting than the previous one. Stefano explained once more what Debian considers good collaboration practices: teams with members from both distributions, and forwarding of bugs if they have been well triaged and are known to apply to Debian. He also invited Ubuntu to discuss big changes with Debian before implementing them. An interesting suggestion that came up was that some Ubuntu developers could participate in Debcamp (one week hack-together before Debconf) to work with some Debian developers, go through Ubuntu patches, and merge the interesting bits. This would nicely complement Ubuntu s increased presence at Debconf: for the first time, community management team member Jorge Castro was at DebConf 10 giving a talk on collaboration between Debian and Ubuntu. There was also some brainstorming on how to identify packages where the collaboration is failing. A growing number of Ubuntu revisions (identified for example by a version like 1.0-1ubuntu62) could indicate that no synchronization was made with Debian, but it would also identify packages which are badly maintained on the Debian side. If Ubuntu consistently has a newer upstream version compared to Debian, it can also indicate a problem: maybe the person maintaining the package for Ubuntu would be better off doing the same work in Debian directly since the maintainer is lagging or not doing their work. Unfortunately this doesn t hold true for all packages since many Gnome packages are newer in Ubuntu but are actively maintained on both sides. Few of those discussions led to concrete decisions. It seems most proponents are reasonably satisfied with the current situation. Of course, one can always do better and Jono Bacon is going to ensure that all Canonical teams working on Ubuntu are aware of how to properly cooperate with Debian. The goal is to avoid heavy package modifications without coordination. Conclusion The Debian-Ubuntu relationships used to be a hot topic, but that s no longer the case thanks to regular efforts made on both sides. Conflicts between individuals still happen, but there are multiple places where they can be reported and discussed (#debian-ubuntu channel, Derivatives Front Desk at derivatives@debian.org on the Debian side or debian@ubuntu.com on the Ubuntu side). Documentation and infrastructure are in place to make it easier for volunteers to do the right thing. Despite all those process improvements, the best results still come out when people build personal relationships by discussing what they are doing. It often leads to tight cooperation, up to commit rights to the source repositories. Regular contacts help build a real sense of cooperation that no automated process can ever hope to achieve.

This article was first published in Linux Weekly News. You can get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news, all you have to do is to click here to subscribe to my free newsletter.

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The Ubuntu Technical Board is currently conducting a review of the top ten Brainstorm issues users have raised about Ubuntu, and Matt asked me to investigate and respond to Idea #25301: Keeping the time accurate over the Internet by default. My first reaction was "hey, that's odd - I thought we already did that?". We install the ntpdate package by default (although it's deprecated upstream in favour of other tools, but that shouldn't be important here). ntpdate is run from /etc/network/if-up.d/ntpdate, in other words every time you connect to a network, which should be acceptably frequent for most people, so it really ought to Just Work by default. But this is one of the top ten problems where users have gone to the trouble of proposing solutions on Brainstorm, so it couldn't be that simple. What was going on? I brought up a clean virtual machine with a development version of Natty (the current Ubuntu development version, which will eventually become 11.04), and had a look in its logs: it was indeed synchronising its time from ntp.ubuntu.com, and I didn't think anything in that area had changed recently. On the other hand, I had occasionally noticed that my own laptop wasn't always synchronising its time quite right, but I'd put it down to local weirdness as my network isn't always very stable. Maybe this wasn't so local after all? So, I started tracing through the scripts to figure out what was going on. It turned out that I had an empty /etc/ntp.conf file on my laptop. The /usr/sbin/ntpdate-debian script assumed that that meant I had a full NTP server installed (I don't), and fetched the list of servers from it; since the file was empty, it ended up synchronising time from no servers, that is, not synchronising at all. I removed the file and all was well. That left the question of where that file came from. It didn't seem to be owned by any package; I was pretty sure I hadn't created it by hand either. I had a look through some bug reports, and soon found ntpdate 1:4.2.2.p4+dfsg-1ubuntu2 has a flawed configuration file. It turns out that time-admin (System -> Administration -> Time and Date) creates an empty /etc/ntp.conf file if you press the reload button (tooltip: "Synchronise now"), as part of an attempt to update NTP configuration. Aha! Once I knew where the problems were, it was easy to fix them. I've uploaded the following changes, which will be in the 11.04 release:

• Disregard empty ntp.conf files in ntpdate-debian.
• Remove an empty /etc/ntp.conf file on fresh installation of the ntp package, so that it doesn't interfere with creating the normal configuration file.
• Don't create the NTP configuration file in the time-admin backend if it doesn't exist already.

I've also sent these changes to Debian and GNOME as appropriate. There are still a few problems. The "Synchronise now" button doesn't work quite right in general (bug #90524), and if your network doesn't allow time synchronisation from ntp.ubuntu.com then you'll have to change the value of NTPSERVERS in /etc/default/ntpdate. Furthermore, the time-admin interface is confusing and makes it seem as though the default is not to synchronise the time automatically; this interface is being redesigned at the moment, which should be a good opportunity to make it less confusing, and I will contact the designers to mention this problem. On the whole, though, I think that many fewer people should have this kind of problem in Ubuntu 11.04. It's always possible that I missed some other problem that breaks automatic time synchronisation for people. Please do file a bug report if it still doesn't work for you in 11.04, or contact me directly (cjwatson at ubuntu.com).

While I share Alex s law [is] boring view, this also attracted my attention because it s (slightly) about statistics software. I feel the SAS v WPL case mentioned on his blog deserves a wider airing:

The basic story is that the Judge in this case is deeply unsure of the boundary of copyright. [...] has sent a number of questions to the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The questions are hypothetical, but clearly designed to test the waters and figure out where this line falls.

Now will this re-affirm what I ve always been told, that copyright s border is between ideas and expressions, and copyright only covers expressions? Or will it draw a different boundary? It seems that those most likely to be affected are those who are at the edges of acceptability of licences like LGPL, or trying to provide workalikes of hostile proprietary companies, but please, read it for yourself.

In my professional role as Ubuntu CTO, I take on a number of different perspectives, which sometimes compete for my attention, including:

• Inward supporting the people in my department, alignment with other departments in Canonical and reporting upward
• Outward connecting with customers, partners and the free software community, including Debian
• Forward considering the future of the Ubuntu platform and products, based on the needs of their users, our customers and business stakeholders within Canonical
• Outside-in taking off my Canonical hat and putting on an Ubuntu hat, and looking at what we re doing from an outside perspective

My recent work, as Canonical has gone through a period of organizational growth and change, has prioritized the inward perspective. I took on a six-month project which was inwardly focused, temporarily handing off many of my day-to-day responsibilities (well done, Robbie!). I ve grappled with an assortment of growing pains as many new people joined Canonical over the past year. With that work behind me, it s time to rebalance myself and focus more outside of Canonical again. It s good to be back! In my outward facing capacity, I ll shortly be attending Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. I attend several free software conferences each year, but this is a different crowd. I hope to renew some old ties, form some new ones, and generally derive inspiration from the people and organizations represented there. Being in the San Francisco Bay area will also give me an opportunity to meet with some of Canonical s partners there, as well as friends and acquaintances from the free software community. With my head down, working hard to make things happen, it s easy to lose perspective on how that work fits into the outside world. Spending more time with people outside of Canonical and Ubuntu is an important way of balancing that effect. Looking forward, I ll be thinking about the longer term direction for the Ubuntu platform. The platform is the layer of Ubuntu which makes everything else possible: it s how we weave together products like Desktop Edition and Server Edition, and it s what developers target when they write applications. Behind the user interfaces and applications, there is a rich platform of tools and services which link it all together. It s in this aspect of Ubuntu that I ll be investing my time in research, experimentation and imagination. This includes considering how we package and distribute software, how we adapt to technological shifts, and highlighting opportunities to cooperate with other open source projects. My primary outside-in role is as chair of the Ubuntu Technical Board. In this capacity, I m accountable to the Ubuntu project, the interests of its members, and the people who use the software we provide. Originally, the TB was closely involved with a range of front-line technical decisions in Ubuntu, but today, there are strong, autonomous teams in place for the most active parts of the project, so we only get involved when there is a problem, or if a technical question comes up which doesn t fit the charter of an established team. It s something of a catch-all. I d like to re-establish the TB in a more central role in Ubuntu, looking after concerns which affect the project as a whole, such as transparency and development processes. I m also re-joining Debian as a non-uploading contributor, to work on stimulating and coordinating cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu. I m looking forward to working more with Zack on joint projects in this area. This change will help me to support Canonical and Ubuntu more effectively as they continue to grow and change. I look forward to exercising some mental muscles I haven t used very much lately, and facing some new challenges as well.

In our first few years, Ubuntu experienced explosive growth, from zero to millions of users. Because Ubuntu is an open project, these people don t just use Ubuntu, but can see what s happening next and influence it through suggestions and contributions. The volume of suggestions quickly became unmanageable through ad hoc discussion, because the volume of feedback overwhelmed the relatively few people who were actively developing Ubuntu.

In order to better manage user feedback at this scale, Ubuntu Brainstorm was created in 2008. It s a collaborative filtering engine which allows anyone to contribute an idea, and have it voted on by others. Since then, it s been available to Ubuntu developers and leaders as an information source, which has been used in various ways. The top ideas are printed in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter each week. We experimented with producing a report each release cycle and sharing it with the developer community. People have been encouraged to take these suggestions to the Ubuntu Developer Summits. We continue to look for new and better ways to process the feedback provided by the user community. Most recently, I asked my colleagues on the Ubuntu Technical Board in a meeting whether we should take responsibility for responding to the feedback available in Ubuntu Brainstorm. They agreed that this was worth exploring, and I put forward a proposal for how it might work. The proposal was unanimously accepted at a later meeting, and I m working on the first feedback cycle now. In short, the Technical Board will ensure that, every three months, the highest voted topics on Ubuntu Brainstorm receive an official response from the Ubuntu project. The Technical Board won t respond to all of them personally, but will identify subject matter experts within the project, ask them to write a short response, and compile these responses for publication. My hope is that this approach will bring more visibility to common user concerns, help users understand what we re doing with their feedback, and generally improve transparency in Ubuntu. We ve already selected the topics for the first iteration based on the most popular items of the past six months, and are organizing responses now. Please visit brainstorm.ubuntu.com and cast your votes for next time!

For some time now, we ve been gearing up to begin development on Ubuntu 11.04. While some folks have been putting the finishing touches on the 10.10 release, and bootstrapping the infrastructure for 11.04, others have been meeting with Canonical stakeholders, coordinating community brainstorm sessions, and otherwise collecting information about what our priorities should be in the next cycle. We re using what we ve learned to plan the Ubuntu Developer Summit next week in Orlando, where we ll refine these ideas into a plan for the cycle. We re organizing UDS a little bit differently this time, with the main program divided into the following tracks to reflect the key considerations for Ubuntu today:

• Application Developers Making it faster, easier, and more enjoyable to develop and distribute new applications on (and for) Ubuntu
• Cloud Delivering the best experience of cloud computing, whether hosting in a public cloud or building your own private cloud
• Hardware Compatibility Measuring and improving compatibility with a wide range of laptops, netbooks, servers and desktops
• Multimedia Formulating the best software stacks for graphics, audio and video in Ubuntu
• Package Selection and System Defaults Choosing the right components to keep Ubuntu lean, flexible and ready-to-run, while ensuring that the pieces fit and work together cleanly
• Performance Squeezing the best performance out of today s free software stack, from the Linux kernel and GNU toolchain through user interfaces
• Ubuntu the Project Continuously improving the way we work together to produce Ubuntu, both within the project and with our upstream and downstream partners

You can click on the links above for a preview of the schedule for the week, with links to more detailed blueprints which will develop during and following UDS. If you ll be joining us in person, then I ll see you there! If not, be sure to review Laura s guide on how to participate remotely.

I discovered another awesome monthly event. This time it was Sci-fi Burlesque. I got a couple pictures, but unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the storm trooper. Nothing says awesome like tribbles, storm troopers and burlesque!

The previous interesting event was Bawdy Storytelling.

Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed one of our dreams when we arrived in Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenean range sinks in the Mediterranean. To get there, we walked hundreds of kilometres during a month, crossed dozens of steep valleys and enjoyed one of the richest experiences of our lives.

We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier. Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely no rest in the night bus to Ir n, I thought for myself that it was improbable that we'd manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of us would get injuried way before, or we'd just give up and go for the easy beach vacation in the Basque Country.

Biad s refuge, under Posets But we didn't, and after a somewhat painful start, with our boots soaking wet during the stages that crossed the enchanting Selva de Irati which ended up with me getting the biggest blister I've ever seen, we started to walk farther every day, extending the stages when we felt strong after reaching their official end. When we crossed from Nafarroa to Aragonese territory, the mental wall that I had built over the toughest stages in our quest started to fall apart. Days later, we found ourselves climbing down to Pineta, leaving Ordesa behind and enjoying a feeling that our adventure could not go better. The weather had been perfect for over a week and our legs and back were strong to go all over the way to the sea.

Ca n de A isclo, on our way to Pineta When we finally saw that huge blue stain on the horizon, the day before getting to the last mark, we got really excited. We had made it, but as we walked towards the cape, happiness slowly got mixed with melancholy. An unforgettable adventure was about to end, and we didn't want to face our return to the city and our routines. It had been many days surrounded only by awesome landscapes, and living without watches, with only sunlight and weariness marking the time to get in our sleeping bags.

At the very last red and white mark of our journey We've had plenty of time to meet great people. Starting with the Navarrian brothers we met in the early stage, which provided us with a good pace to follow while our leg muscles were still building up; or Kike and Ana, who drove from Pamplona to visit us during the first Aragonese stages (thanks for the supplies!). Tom s and Roger, young hikers from Matar , surprised us with their maturity and experience as mountaineers; we had the pleasure to join forces during four days, walking a really cool variant through the Infiernos and Collado del Letrero which avoided going through the ghost city of Panticosa. Roger and Tom s, we really hope to meet you soon! Andreu, Manel, Ghandi and Ga la visited us at the Vall de N ria and were unlucky to suffer a frightening hail and thunder storm when they left our shelter on their way back to their car. Thanks! All of you have been a very special part of our experience!

This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for several reasons. We've learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no matter how far, it's really easy if you just believe you can do it and desire to get there. Maria and I are proud of what we've done, and no wonder we're looking for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience, going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican GR 20 seems the most appealing. We'll see, next summer!

I had planned long for this Debconf and with the experience from the previous times I did all I could to reach one goal minimise stress. I think I got it right this time. First of all I got my company (Accenture) pay for the whole thing, so I did not have to worry about sponsorship queue (but instead I must gather and deliver them back some knowledge gained from the conference should be easy). I also managed to get a direct flight there is a weekly flight Tashkent-Riga-New York on Sundays and I got a ticket for that both ways. This took many hours off the travel time and reduced the stress a ton. Then I also did all the prudent travelling things: mostly reading the New York page on Wikitravel. This told me (among other things) what metro line to take to get the best view of the city. And for luggage I took a backpack (for the laptop and walking around) and a roller (for the clothes). I learned a lot from the Up in the air movie, it really teaches one how to take stress out of travel. This went very well in the beginning I took a bus to the airport early, checked in, breezed trough security and then waited and waited. The boarding only started half an hour after we were scheduled to depart. But I can not complain, because the flight attendant called my name (among a few others) just before boarding and changed my ticket I was bumped up to business class . It has been many years since I ve flown a regular (non-budget) airline and now first time ever in the business class! We got regular class meals, but at least we got to sit in the big chairs with lots of leg room. It was great! I bought a paper book (from Charles Stross) to read during the flight, because that is the only thing you can do during take-off and landing and I had some stuff to listen to in my iPhone. I tried sleeping and I think I managed to kill a couple hours that way too. It sure helped combat jet lag later on. When I arrived, I had my immigration and customs forms filled out. Latvia is on the USA Visa Waiver program, so I just had to fill out a form online prior to the trip to get a permission to enter USA. I only had one printout of the Waiver confirmation page and my airline took that before giving me a boarding pass, so I had no paper copy to give to the guy at the USA border, but he did not even ask for it he only took the two forms I filled out, scanned my passport, took my fingerprints (all fingers) and a photo. Then he gave me back the customs for (stamped) and I could go get my luggage. After that it was just a matter of walking trough customs and giving the customs official the pre-filled and stamped customs form. I was not stopped further. The AirTrain was a bit confusing you just get on the AirTrain and go where you need to go, you actually pay at the place where AirTrain connects to metro, so when you are coming from the airport you are actually paying ($5) when you are exiting the AirTrain system. There are plenty of AirTrain people that will give you an AirTrain ticked for $5 cash right there or you can use a machine to get it (where you can also pay with a card). The machines also take AmEx, but you must know the PIN code, if your don t know the PIN of you AmEx card (like I don t know the PIN of my corporate AmEx) you can only buy MetroCards at news stands, but there you will not find the unlimited ride tickets only 5 or 10 ride tickets are available. Next I screwed up a bit and thus got a bit lost in the New York metro system. The Wikitravel recommends to take the AirTrain to Jamaica station and from there take J or Z line into the city for the best views. I went to Jamaica and got into the first metro train that came on to the platform. Unfortunately, that was the E line train and it does not cross with J or Z lines after that, so I was stuck. To complicate the situation E line is under repair, so after a few stops the trains diverted to the F line and I had to scramble to figure out where to get out to get to the 1 line where Columbia University is. I ended up spending more than an hour in the metro, but I got there in the end. So I emerge from the 116th street metro station directly in front of the campus entrance gate and it starts raining. A thunderstorm swept across New York as soon as I stepped outside the metro station, so I took shelter a the side of the building. It kept raining. After a few minutes decided that I don t want to wait any more, so I put all my electronics into my backpack and went towards the dorm where my room was. The rain was warm, people around me were playing and running around in the wet grass, it was fun. The guard showed me where to go to check in. It was really simple sign here, here is you magnetic stripe key, have fun. And the room was just as spartan bed, desk, chair, closet, bathroom and a large fan under the window. The first night I did not know that I could actually turn that fan down, so I slept to the sound of full fan blasting, much like on the airplane. The dorm looks ancient it looks like it was build in the 60s and never changed since then. I mean, I ve lived in worse places, but people would at least change wall sockets or faucets or ceiling paint every other decade or so. The newest things here were the magnetic locks on the doors and a TV and a mini fridge in the hallway. After dropping my things I went off to the Mudd building across the campus to check in with people in the hacklab. It was just starting to take shape, but many great and familiar people were already there. It was like walking into a family home same warm welcome smiles and that great feel of belonging to the group. After I quick chat I went off downtown. The plan was that I left my old Canon 400D camera back at home and that I would buy a new Canon 550D here in New York on arrival. Unfortunately I underestimated the travel time on subway and by the time I got back downtown most shops where already closed. I got to checking out a Best Buy and was told there that they don t have 550D in stock. Next morning I went for a full scale search B&H Photo Video store, J&R Express, another BestBuy none of them had the Canon 550D (aka T2i) in stock in a body-only configuration. BestBuy had a few sets with the kit lens, but I did not want paying 100$ extra for something I already have. The last option was Adorama and I got lucky I nabbed the last 550D they had and it was body-only. Now I was back, with a camera in my hands and the Debconf10 could really begin!

Yesterday, I've arrived in New York City for the annual Debconf. Well, that is, today's the first day of Debcamp, and obviously not that many people have arrived yet. Since I arrived a day early, I'd also booked a hotel room for one night. But that's okay, it allowed me to sleep off my jetlag not that I had much of it, but anyway. Today, then, I signed in to the dormroom. Turned out I was the first non-organizer to do so, and that there wasn't even anyone in the hacklab yet. Well, that's what you get for being so early, I guess. Not quite sure yet what to make of the weather. When the plane touched down yesterday, the captain announced over the PA that the outside temperature was 99 degrees Fahrenheit (some 37 degrees Celcius), which is hot, especially when added to the rather high humidity. You walk outside for five minutes, and you're sweating like a pig. Today started off on the same foot, but then about an hour ago or so it started raining, and it hasn't stopped yet; and it doesn't feel like what I would call a regular summer thunderstorm, either. Bit weird. But then, who cares about rain at a computer conference, right? Right.

Wow tonight was thrilling. It s hard to explain why, but it s pretty exciting to have a radio setup that is all wrong in so many ways work well enough for me to sit in my kitchen in Kansas and talk to someone in Indianapolis using only two-way HF radios. I recently passed my technician and general amateur radio exams. I ve been talking to some very nice people locally on the 2m band, which permits local (say, 100-200mi radius) communication. It s been fun, but Kansas is sparsely populated enough that sometimes there just isn t any activity. At all. Earlier this week, my Yaesu FT-857D and two antennas arrived. I tried it first on VHF, and had a nice chat with Kent (KB0RWI) a few miles away. But tonight was the big experiment. I bought a 20m dipole antenna. This is basically a 30-foot-long wire, connected to a balun and a coax feed line in the middle. You re supposed to put it at least 30 feet off the ground, and away from trees, houses, etc. You re supposed to have a nice RF ground for your transmitter, power supply, antenna tuner, and all that stuff. You re not supposed to just run the coax under that (until today, annoying) small hole in the seal under the kitchen storm door. You re supposed to have to have the correct connectors on your coax, instead of soldering an RG-8 PL-259 onto some RG-8X because you re new at this and didn t realize that you need to buy an adapter. And, I m really pretty sure that you re not supposed to have an aggressive outdoor cat complete with a full set of claws and teeth attack the coax RG-8X cable as it s being pulled through the grass. Fail to do any of these things, and the thing might not work well, or might not work at all, or for people that use old equipment, might burn out your radio or something. So anyway I got out the ladder today, and I got the antenna maybe 10-15 feet in the air. I have three trees in a row with the perfect separation to hang each end and the center balun from. So while Jacob went around playing with water and trying out the ladder on occasion (with my help), I used some string to hang the antenna. In the trees, not far from them. Near the house. Not 30ft off the ground. I strung the feed line into the house, set up all my equipment on our kitchen table, flipped the switch. And nothing. Just the occasional familiar whine while tuning. I tried the 20m band, then the 40m, then even 15, 12, and 10. No activity anywhere. So what was wrong? I improvised some grounding extracted the ground conductor from an old strip of AC house wiring, shoved it into the ground, and grounded the tuner and transmitter. No difference. I unplugged the coax, and tested it with my multimeter. It tested out OK. I plugged it back in and wiggled the connector. Turns out the connector isn t in great shape, but it had been working. I tried transmitting. The tuner made a whole bunch of alarming-sounding clicking noises (sounded like a symphony of relays), indicated SWR over 3, and the ammeter on my power supply went a bit nuts. Later I realized that I just wasn t giving the tuner enough time to tune up; with a few more seconds, it tuned up just fine on every frequency. (So yes, it was supposed to do that.) And, it turns out, that all I needed to do was wait a little while longer to hear some signals. Pretty soon I was finding stuff all over the 40m band. I heard a discussion from Chicago, another from Oklahoma City, some apparent broadcasters from Africa. I decided I would try and transmit. I was hearing one side of a discussion very clearly and decided I would wait for an opportunity to try to contact that person. I heard his callsign, K9RM. I looked it up, and realized he was near Indianapolis, where I had lived for awhile. Eventually he invited a station trying to get in to participate. And: KD0MJT (I announced my callsign, as a request to join the conversation) He said he only made out the 0, but eventually we were talking quite well. It was a brief conversation, but interesting; the person he was talking to was in Portland, and couldn t hear me (and I could barely hear him, but not loud enough to make out). That with no phone lines, no Internet provider needed, etc. And with a rig that is far from being at peak efficiency. I had no idea what to expect tonight and was surprised that just tossing an antenna up in a tree let me talk to someone in Indiana. That s 650 miles away. I wonder what I ll be able to do once I get things done the right way. This hobby is going to be fun. Many thanks to Mike_W for equipment suggestions, Kent and Dan from Newton ARC for encouragement and coming out to the house to test things, Kent for being my first ham radio contact ever (on 2m while I was using an old 1981 radio), Chuck (K9RM) for taking a few minutes to be my first HF contact, and my dad for helping plan out exterior wall penetration methods that will eliminate this coax under the kitchen door and lack of grounding business. Jacob, by the way, still loves his radios and is starting to take an interest in mine. It wouldn t shock me at all of he s one of these kids that gets his technician license in the 2nd grade or something. I think he and I can do this together for a long time.

on the interaction of FOSS communities with EU research projects The 7th Framework Programme (or FP7) is a well-known European program to fund research projects and promote the creation of the European Research Area. For some European countries, FP7-funded projects are so important that they can make the difference between an institution that has the resources to pursue its research & teaching activities and an institution that doesn't, which will then have hard time surviving. As part of FP7 and its previous editions, the European Commission (EC) has been funding research into FOSS for a while now, with different degrees of "FOSS-involvement". Some projects routinely use FOSS products, some fund the development of relevant FOSS projects (e.g. PyPy), some try to address shortcomings of specific communities (e.g. EDOS and Mancoosi, on which you surely are aware of my bias ...), some others try to remove barriers to FOSS adoption in various contexts (e.g. FLOSSinclude). A nice overview of EU-funded FOSS projects is available as a leaflet. As with all project funding initiatives: having a project funded does not mean it will be successfully. By analogy: the fact that the project (proposal) mentions FOSS does not mean it will be successful in interacting with FOSS communities. Luckily, the EC is well aware of existing difficulties and is now seeking input from FOSS communities to understand how to better interact with them, from the standpoint of FP7 research projects. That is why last week I've joined, upon invitation and as a Debian representative, a meeting at the EC in Brussels on the above topics. At the table we were about a dozen people, including representatives of ongoing research projects (both from academia and large industries), EC commissioners, ... and Debian (i.e. yours truly). Beside joining the brainstorming, what I've brought to the table are some thoughts on best and worst practices on the interaction between research projects and FOSS communities, answering to some working questions. There is probably little to see in the slides for people belonging to FOSS communities, as all suggestions would seem fairly obvious (e.g.: do not invent/use yet another FOSS license, do not jail people into specific forges, do not expect people to work at your place, etc.). Still, I assure you that most of them were not obvious for EC commissioners and that they have been very much interested in hearing Debian feedback, which is perceived has having no other interest than serving Free Software. I'm personally very proud of the fact that Debian was there, as a purely community-driven project run by volunteers, whose opinion is clearly valued by an important program as FP7 is. Various possible next steps have been discussed: from drafting guidelines that will help reviewers in evaluating the commitment of project proposals to FOSS communities, to create a scenario-based license chooser based on the needs of FP7 projects. While I did not volunteer to take part in all such initiatives, I'll keep you posted of advancements.