To readers who followed my concerns about virtualization for my brand new laptop (see former blog entries): I finally settled for the easy way and I'm now using VirtualBox OSE to host the Windows machine I use at work. Booting our master CD (that uses a Dos-based system and Symantec Ghost to write a sysprepped image on the new machine) in a virtual machine, and write the master on the virtual disk was really straightforward. Then, the magic processes we have for our automated masters, ran nearly flawlessly and, apart from figuring out which network setup to choose for the Windows machine to properly join the company's domain, I had na real headache. So, now, I have a working double machine with no big trouble. The only pain is switching in on/off from the docking station: I found no way to have the double screen setup I use when the laptop is docked (main KDE screen on laptop and emulated machine on the desktop screen) to automatically shrink down to the laptop's screen when I undock the machine. So, I had to hack down two little xrandr-based scripts to do this manually before undocking and after docking. And the final reault is there: the Dell Latitude E 4200 farly well survives to all this and both machines are fast enough for my needs (except when I compile packages on the laptop, which is very rare now).

A few of us are working on spam removal from Debian lists archives. The wiki page linked above explains how to report spam on Debian mailing lists. This is in short as easy as bouncing a mail to a specific address, from your favourite MUA. These "reported spams" then need to be reviewed. Once a given message has been identified as "spam" by enough DD's (there are many false positives in the candidates, particularly in non English-speaking mailing lists), it is removed from the archives. Many mails have already been removed and any help is welcomed. Since Frans Pop launched this for debian-boot, back in May, I use 1 or 2 hours every Sunday to this work. After working on debian-boot only, I gradually worked on reported spams in other lists. As of now, I only have 4 lists where I still have work to do:

• debian-user (115 of 2420 reviewed)
• debian-user-spanish (177 of 1157 reviewed)
• debian-devel (136 of 1075 reviewed)
• debian-chinese-gb (159 of 556 reviewed)

The Chinese and the Spanish ones are tricky because identifying spam there is much less easy (for Chinese, I'm quite conservative and only tag very obvious spam....for Spanish, I read enough of the language to be able to target spam). What about you? Will you be able to help the few of us who work on getting clean archives (noticeably, Sandro Tosi, Giacomo Catenazzi, Cord Beermann, Luk Claes, Frans Pop, Bastian Blank, Luca Falavigna, Michael Koch, Bernd Steinmetz, Thoomas Viehmann, Florian Ernst, Adam D. Barratt, to name thos ewho reviewed more than 1000 mails)? Working on lists in your own language might be a good idea (I'm particularly thinking about lists in German, Spanish, Chinese and French).

Thanks to people who reacted to this post of mine. As expected, when one posts such angry post, reactions come. Guess what: that was intended..:-) So, I got more background on this KDE pulls MySQL in issue. The issue is more subtle than just KDE upstream being dumb and using a MySQL daemon or database for desktop operations. In short, akonadi uses mysqld to manage its cache, from what I understood. So, what's needed is indeed the mysqld binary and not necessarily having it running as a *daemon*. Bug #513382 explains it all. I really hope that MySQL and KDE maintainers will settle to find a solution for this. Apparently, other distros managed to get such issue solved and I would hate Debian being laughed at because we are the only ones where "thy laptop shalt be a database server". Really, I won't be getting deeper into that issue, because I don't have the expertise but, really also, we can't seriously ship Squeeze with the current setup. What's unclear from the pointed bug report is whether someone is doing something about this. Yes, the issue is not new. I actually went on it because I was installing a new laptop and noticed questions about MySQL. My former laptop already had MySQL for other reasons, so I never noticed that my KDE packages were suddenly pulling more stuff in. Thanks to Sune Vuorela, from the Debian KDE team, and Eckhart W rner, from upstream KDE, for bringing more light on this. Ah, and thanks also to people who reworked the design of kdm login screen. It's really nice..:-) (and this is not sarcasm, here, I really mean it).

So, nowadays, installing a brand new sid machine with the KDE task leads to...installing a MySQL server on one's laptop (thanks to the whole akonadi crap). There's probably a Debian bug report about this but I am too lazy (and too angry) to look for it. I think we should really congratulate KDE upstream developers for this very wise decision that's definitely a big progress in terms of user friendlyness. Being prompted for the MySQL root password while installing a new shiny laptop is a huge progress and will certainly never make Windows users laugh loudly. As a very longstanding KDE user, I am incredibly happy that Debian has chosen to install GNOME by deault. Really.

Thanks to everybody who went through the pain of my blog (which doesn't allow comments because I don't want to bother with blog spam) and still cooked up a private reply to me. It's very much appreciated. So, Patrick, Dan, Dirk and No l, you just won a free beer for your wise advice.....except the two marathoners among you guys who shouldn't drink beer (though it would help you slowing down enough to be able to run along with me). In short, all this can be summarized to "Christian, you're going the wrong way with Xen, use KVM". One of the advices was using VirtualBox OSE, which is certainly a wise advice as well...but not what I want to experiment (I already use VB for the few D-I work I'm still doing and that would not be a new experiment for me). I'll go your proposed way and will let you know. Still, I'd love being able to figure out Xen stuff as this is what we're more and more using at ONERA.

Dear Lazyweb, I'm currently installing my new toy^W laptop, namely a shiny Dell E4200 that will replace my good old X1. As this is not only my Debian laptop but also my work machine and I need to work with Windows several hours a day...but still receive my mail through my Debian laptop, I decided to put my fingers into virtualization. I know nearly nothing about this whole thing (up to now, my Windows work machine was a desktop machine). So, that's a perfect occasion to make my mind abou tall this, right? What I have been able to figure out as of now is that I could use Xen for this: the Debian machine would be the host machine (if I understand properly Xen jargon, that would be the dom0) and I would run Windows in a virtual machine (domU). Another option would be having the host system run a very small Debian system and use two "domU", one with Debian unstable and the other one with Windows. But, indeed, I don't really see the benefit of this except wasting my resources. As I'm having hard times having a Xen hypervisor work properly (I iitially installed the machine as a regular Debian machine), I actually wonder whether I'm going The Right Way.....and I also try to find some good "virtualization with Xen for dummies" references. For instance, about how to boot the damn hypervisor when using grub2, an encrypted root file system (/boot on ext2), etc. Where, really, do I need to look?

So, now that I completed my 2009 program by running the Cologne marathon 6 months after my first one in Paris, I now plan the 2010 "season"..:-) (one point for you guys who told me that once you start you don't stop) The next step is definitely Paris. The race is close to my home, this is a great race in a great city at a great time. I really can't miss it. So, that one is registered. The point is "what about 'the other one'". I plan to run another marathon during that year, preferably during autumn. Actually, I would probably be able to run at least one more but, well, many people urge me to avoid exxagerating and that includes my beloved wife..:-) So, one more. Which one? At this very moment, I have about 4 options:

• Cologne again. Pros: this is a nice race, human-size, in a welcoming place, also an oppotunity to run again with local friends. Cons: what the hell would we do in Cologne during the few days we would stay there, now that we've seen most of the city (one cathedral, 12 roman churches)...and that would mean the same program than 2009
• Berlin. Pros: the top german marathon, one of the "Big Ones", in a city that deserves a few days sightseeing and which Elizabeth really wants us to visit. Cons: a little bit early in September...and Germany again..:-)
• Donostia (San Sebastian). Pros: this is an open invitation by a relative of my brother in law, this is in Basque country which I enjoy, probably with a quite warm crowd. Cons: late in November and I fear the hills to be quite hard over there
• Chicago. Pros: would be a great opportunity to met with Dirk and even though we would not run together, I would enjoy this. Also a nice place to visit and p ssible to arrange a visit to my wife's family in Kansas City neighbourhood. Cons: arrangign a 10-days trip tp USA in early October is very very hard to fit with our professionnal schedule...and fairly expensive...:)

So, at this moment, Berlin and Donostia have the lead. A good compromise could be running a marathon in Berlin and the 20km Behobia-San Sebastian run which is very popular in Basque country. We'll see..

Arnt Karlsen reported bug #550000 on Wednesday October 7th, against the sndfile-programs package. Bug #540000 was reported as of August 5th 2009. We're apparently back to our "10,000 bugs in 2 months pace"...or close to it. Halfway to bug #600000...

Here we are back from our german week-end... The major event of this week-end was running the K ln Cologne marathon. Why Cologne? Mostly because my marathon Debian friends Ralf Treinen and No l K the ran it last year and enjoyed it. So, when we ran the Paris marathon together back in April, we decided to run either Berlin or Cologne later on. I finally settled for Cologne because this is closer from Paris and the date was more convenient. That was great also for No l, who lives close to K ln, so of course he planned that race in his (busy) schedule. Unfortunately, Ralf got tendinite problems since last Spring and could not join us. We really hope this will be temporary and we will enjoy running together in the future. So, I spent most of the week-end both visiting Cologne with Elizabeth...and running these 42,195 km. That was great, really. Even if there were much more Germans than in Debian, they were really as friendly and welcoming as Debian Germans are...:-). The race happens in Cologne center city and is well arranged for followers to be able to see runners several times, as the track comes back in the city center several times....with a memorable finish through the cathedral place, then central pedestrian streets and the bridge over the Rhein river (well, climbling it at km.42 is a small PITA, but still..). Animation nearly all along the streets with many K ln inhabitants and tourists encouraging the runners and shouting and applausing and playing percussions, and.... My own race was really as I planned to do it. I targeted 4h exactly (Paris was 4h10) and thus tried to keep a pace of 5'41"/km....which I nearly respected. I had a small alert around km13-15 when my legs where kind of heavy....and I was already imagining a terrible second part for the race. Finally, seeing Elizabeth encouraging me at km.19 in the middle of a big crowd, then passing through Friesen Platz in a great noise and with huge encouragements, just made it. I then completed the first half in 1h59'20", which was just fine. I slightly slowed down between km. 24 and 28, mostly because I was trusting my GPS watch to keep the pace...while it is indeed a bit inaccurate (its kilometers are about 950m long). So, when I realized that I was about 1-2 mins late at km. 30, I decided to accelerate a little and thus target 5'30"/km on the watch...which I could sustain up to km.38. I was fearing cramps and a very hard finish, just as it happened to me in Paris...but finally could finish in a quite good shape and keeping my pace. My final time is officially 4h00'47". So, I missed my target by very few seconds but I am really very happy with the result and the way I finished. Recovering in the hotel's sauna was amazing, after this, and I could then remember all the great moments of that race by viewing Elizabeth's pictures (soon online on my gallery, promise made). And, finally, today, we had another day off to drive back home and continue recovering....and register for Paris Marathon on April 11th 2010..:-)... Hopefully, No l (who did an amazing 3h15) will convince self that he should come with his running friends. So, dear readers, if you reached that part of my blog...I'm afraid you will again read about marathon stories from me.... As everybody was telling me: once you start, you never want to stop..:)

About two months after Alex calculated the Debian developers ratio per country in a followup to a post of mine where I was happy that we KTA of UK developers in terms of numbers......I felt the need for an update. Indeed, thanks to the amazing work of the NM team, several people became DD recently and I though numbers might need an update. So, here they are, sorted by the ratio of *active* developers per million population for each country.

'Code'	'Pop'		'Act'	'Dev'	'Act'	'Dev'
'fi'	5340093		21	28	3,93	5,24
'ch'	7725200		20	22	2,59	2,85
'se'	9283722		24	35	2,59	3,77
'nz'	4317300		10	14	2,32	3,24
'no'	4828000		11	13	2,28	2,69
'at'	8356707		18	23	2,15	2,75
'de'	82060000	172	208	2,1	2,53
'lu'	491700		1	1	2,03	2,03
'au'	21807000	35	56	1,6	2,57
'be'	10741000	15	15	1,4	1,4
'nl'	16524463	23	38	1,39	2,3
'fr'	65073482	90	108	1,38	1,66
'ie'	4422100		6	9	1,36	2,04
'uk'	61612300	72	101	1,17	1,64
'ca'	33726000	38	56	1,13	1,66
'es'	46661950	44	52	0,94	1,11
'dk'	5475791		5	8	0,91	1,46
'hu'	9930915		7	11	0,7	1,11
'us'	305683227	214	353	0,7	1,15
'hr'	4491543		3	3	0,67	0,67
'cz'	10220911	6	6	0,59	0,59
'uy'	3477778		2	2	0,58	0,58
'it'	59619290	34	41	0,57	0,69
'il'	7282000		4	6	0,55	0,82
'bg'	7582000		4	4	0,53	0,53
'lv'	2245423		1	1	0,45	0,45
'pt'	10627250	3	4	0,28	0,38
'lt'	3565205		1	1	0,28	0,28
'pl'	38500696	10	13	0,26	0,34
'jp'	127288419	32	42	0,25	0,33
'cr'	4195914		1	1	0,24	0,24
'sk'	5455407		1	1	0,18	0,18
'gr'	11260000	2	3	0,18	0,27
'ar'	40677348	6	7	0,15	0,17
'by'	9685768		1	1	0,1	0,1
'br'	191043661	18	19	0,09	0,1
'tw'	22548009	2	2	0,09	0,09
'za'	49052489	4	8	0,08	0,16
'kr'	49232844	4	6	0,08	0,12
've'	28199822	2	2	0,07	0,07
'co'	44760630	3	3	0,07	0,07
'cl'	16454143	1	1	0,06	0,06
'ru'	141800000	8	8	0,06	0,06
'mg'	20042551	1	1	0,05	0,05
'ro'	22246862	1	2	0,04	0,09
'pe'	29180899	1	1	0,03	0,03
'tr'	71517100	2	2	0,03	0,03
'ua'	45994287	1	1	0,02	0,02
'mx'	106682500	2	2	0,02	0,02
'th'	65493298	1	2	0,02	0,03
'eg'	81713517	1	2	0,01	0,02
'in'	1145587234	6	6	0,01	0,01
'cn'	1360445010	5	9	0	0,01

A few interesting facts:

• Finland is unbeatable except if an earthquake destroys Helsinki or if there's a sudden birth of 10 more DD's in Switzerland. The only country that can really beat the Finns is Luxemburg in case they find another DD
• Switzerland and Sweden are so close that any change in their population is likely to change the order. One should note that Sweden reached that level after I noticed that a few Swedish developers mistakenly believe that the ISo code of Sweden is "sv", which explains why it was lower in Alex stats
• Germany and Austria and competing very closely which is probably not a surprise..:-)
• There is a very tight match between Belgium, Netherlands, France and Ireland. Thanks to the recent bump in French developers numbers, we have our chances..:-)

This is a positive event which happened to me recently in a Debian bug report, with regard to audio troubles. There are several positives, and I owe some gratitude to several people in the Debian (and ALSA) community, so I thought a blog post would be a good idea. It also shows the advantage in filing a well-written installation report to the Debian project. Here is the description of events.

• I was installing Debian on a HP notebook intended for someone else. As always, almost everything worked out of the box, except sound, which kept hanging and crashing. I had to search for quite a while, before I found an ALSA workaround which was needed for this card (addition of an enable_msi option to the ALSA driver options). Being a good Debian citizen, I decided to file an installation-reports bug commending the Debian installer team (Christian Perrier has responded to quite a few of my reports; kudos to him), and letting them know of the ALSA bug.
• Christian Perrier thanked me for the report, and reassigned the bug to the alsa-driver package for further probing.
• Elimar Riesebieter promptly responded, and he tagged my bug as "wontfix". He told me how to get the workaround done properly, and pointed me to some documentation.
• I thanked him for his directions, but ranted that it upset me that the Debian ALSA maintainers didn't allow for the possibility of per card workarounds. I claimed that "Joe Users" won't care to read cryptic documents explaining the intricacies of snd-hda-intel, and they'll just install Debian Squeeze, and say "Debian didn't play my audio.", thus resulting in negative publicity. It was a rant, but I firmly believed that it wasn't unreasonable.
• Elimar patiently pointed out that it was not technically feasible for the ALSA maintainers to maintain a quirk-workaround method for every weird sound card they might come across. Moreover, he refused to take responsibility for a flaw which was actually in the chipset and not in the ALSA drivers. That sounded reasonable to me.
• However, Elimar was kind enough to forward this request to the ALSA developers' list, and ask them the right way to work around the problems posed by problematic sound cards.
• Takeshi Iwai and Daniel Chen promptly responded with proper instructions on how to work around the error. They said that it was ALSA's responsibility to handle these workarounds, so a patch should be provided to ALSA upstream. Moreover, Daniel Chen even produced the patch to handle this quirk.
• The patch is pushed upstream, and Elimar has added it to the Debian version, and has requested an upload, which should happen soon.

This was an extremely positive experience. While I agree that the number of people who would encounter this quirk may not be large, it makes me happy that at least some users who use Linux on this hardware will not have to face this issue anymore, irrespective of which distribution they use, as long as it carries an up-to-date ALSA.I wanted to share this experience with you, since this is a glowing example of how the "community" approach works perfectly for FOSS. Thanks to Elimar, for being a concerned maintainer, and to the ALSA upstream developers who were proactive in producing a fix to this problem. And, most of all, thanks to me, for filing an installation report; these things really work! (OK, tongue-in-cheek. But I did take the effort of filing it, so I deserve the credit, don't I?) :-)So, have you filed an installation report for your Debian installation? If not, I urge you to do so; I sincerely believe that filing good bugs and being proactive in helping developers zero in on the problem and fix is an important contribution to free software which any user can do. And the best way to start this process in Debian, is with an installation-report. :-)Tags: debian

During Debconf9, most Debian developers and contributors who were present there were kind enough to answer my call for dedications, meant to turn a gift I planned to offer to my former boss who just retired, into a special gift. You may then remember me going over all of you with Rapha l Hertzog and Roland Mas book in French (definitely the best French book about Debian) and asking you to sign it and write down some words. I finally managed to give Fran ois the book this week and, on his behalf, I'd like to thank all people who contributed to this. This was much appreciated and having that great book with that special addition made him very happy (even if he managed to install his other gift, namely a Dell laptop, with Debian squeeze, without the help of any book). Ladies and gentlemen, you rock. But you know that.

Since Petter summarized what's happening to Debian's boot process, I'm pondering "aptitude install upstart". I've already been among the pionneers for parallel and dependency-based boot stuff....and never had any problem with it. So, really, moving one step forward is tempting. Anyone to discourage me to do so? :-)

Yesterday, we attended the final game of French "Top 14", French rugby league championship, between Perpignan (Perpiny in catalan) and Clermont. Quite good game, though not as good as last year's final (Toulouse-Clermont won by Stade Toulousain). We personnally had no real preferences as our support in rugby generally go to Toulouse, which had been beaten in semi-finals by Clermont. Perpignan won 22-13 against the infortunate Stade Clermontois, who lost its thirdt final in a row. We were fairly sad for Clermont but the catalan game was really much better, particularly in forward lines. As usual, the finals were a great feast for rugby, in the usual spirit of that sport. And the spectacle, in Stade de France, was not only on the field but also around the field, with a stadium turning out yellow (and red on one side, and blue on another). That will conclude that season for rugby....and we're already looking forward to next season where, of course, the Stade Toulousain will revive from its ashes and win both Top 14 and H Cup (there has now been enough of these for the British Isles, now...let's stop this).

An old friend is ranting about localization. I first considered not really reaction to Joey's post, mostly because he has very true points...and particularly when he has about the same reaction than mine about a recent post in ou mailing lists. So, I will stick to react to one part of Joey's post...the one I consider really inaccurate. "everyone uses the software in English anyway" Really, Joey, really, that's completely untrue. Of course, I do live in a country that very well known (or at least that has the reputation) for being deeply ignorant in English language. But, really....*all* computers I see around me, both in my personal life *and in my professionnal life* are nearly completely localized. It's probably now well know that I spend most of my professionnal time....providing desktop systems (or managing the people who provide them) to users in ONERA, "the French Aerospace Lab". That means about 2000 users in a scientific environment where the use of English is much more developed than the average environment. Most of these users speak a fairly decent English and are perfectly able to understand that language in some way. About 80% of these systems are Windows-based and 20% are Linux-based. Probably more than 95% of them are localized in French. Even on Windows systems, we mostly integrate free software. And for *each* of them, the most important feature we need, besides software being free, is it to be localized in French. I bet our friends from Extremadura can say the same. The success of Linux-based free systems there also happened because the software is available in Spanish. And, of course, there are tons of similar stories and counter-examples (M nchen, Bhutan, Venezuela, etc.). So, really, please don't spread out that idea. Oh, yes, geeks *do* use their software in English (and, even here, I need to be convinced if I remember well what I saw at conferences in Germany or Spain, for instance). And, yes, it's very well widespread among geeks that using software in English is "better" or "easier". Which I indeed always fight and will fight until I die..:-). We certainly agree that these l10n needs put a high load on development and sometimes slow it down. and, for sure, we sometimes need to make a balance and I really thank you for giving me the credit to try doing that balance. Anyway, all this (including your rant) had to be said and it's interesting to have that small discussion (I just should not start writing down a blog entry at 23:00...:-)) See you soon, hopefully, Joey !

In this post I will say some things about localization that I've never felt it was politic to say before. (It still isn't, but what the hey.) But I first want to mention that one of the reasons Christian Perrier is awesome is because he manages to steer projects in ways that avoid (most of) the problems below, and because he has managed to scale rather impressively far. But not far enough that these things haven't gotten under my skin. So, I hate localization. Hate, hate, hate. I wish it would die. I wish everyone spoke the same language. I hate that we have to be politically correct about it, to the point that even if everyone does speak English (hello, Denmark?), we still have to worry about localization into their native language. I especially hate that, after we waste time and resources doing that, everyone uses the software in English anyway (hello, most of Europe). I hate that the typical best effort localization of software is typically so incomplete that it's not actually usable by people who really do need the translation. Either because "best effort" == 80% translated, which is sometimes worse than 0%, or because the documentation doesn't get translated too. And that even with what we consider a complete translation, there are still all sorts of English bits that nobody would ever consider translating. Such as the names of commands, of command-line switches, of markup keywords and configuration files. I hate that translating software and documentation always involves bolting an enormous, nasty build system onto its side, and that the bulk of translations always greatly outweighs the size of the code. I hate that these systems constantly produce deltas that I have to avoid cluttering my commits with. I hate the expectation that every programmer somehow become an expert in internationalization, rather than letting them devote their time to something they're good at. But none of that is what really bothers me about localization. What really, really bothers me is that I often see the need to localize code inhibiting that code becoming better. Just two examples:

• Oh no, we worry, if we fix this a message, we will have to do 100 times more work to update the translations. Surely, then, anyone who wants to fix a bad message is an anglocentric who should be ignored.
• Rather than allow the computer to dynamically generate correct and expressive English on the fly, to actually talk to us, we have to reduce everything to gettextable static strings. The poster child for this disease is that it becomes easier to tack on "(s)" or reword entirely, than to deal with the cumulative complexity of plural forms in every language.

(PS, I also hate that we have to keep "l10n" and "i18n" straight, and that the words are so unwieldly in this f5g modern English that we represent them based on their length.)

After Venezuela changed its official "short" name from "Venezuela" to "Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of", it's now the turn of Bolivia to take the same silly decision. From now, Bolivia's "short" name is "Bolivia, Plurinational state of". Don't take me wrong. I'm fine with such changes in official country names...when it comes at the official long name of the country. Most long names have some kind of political meaning. For Bolivia, the change is meant to reflect the consideration of the current government of the country for all "minorities" of Bolivia. That's for sure definitely any country's decision. But, for $ DEITY 's sake, why change the *short* name? For everybody, Bolivia is "Bolivia" and Venezuela is "Venezuela" and not some funky long and politically correct (or incorrect) name! So, once again, the iso-codes package maintainers will use a new "common name" for another country so that lists of countries that display in various places do not show ridiculously long names for some countries while others have the name...everybody uses. Remember "Taiwan" back in 2004?

I'm now wearing glasses. Reaching birthdays between 45 and 50 gives one nice gift: presbytia. In a few months, my arms were getting longer and longer while I was reading, to the extent that it became difficult to read, and even hack on the laptop during evenings. As a consequence, I won a visit to an ophtalmologist and then got a prescription for glasses. Luckily for me, my wife (and my son, indeed) works for the Essilor International company, world leader of corrective glasses, and particularly makers of the quite famous "Varilux" progressive glasses. So, I could get their top product, Varilux Physio glasses with Cryzal Forte anti-reflection treatments. Getting used to these nice pieces of glass technology is quite tricky but the result is...amazing, even for my far vision (which I thought was perfect until now). So, expect some pics soon...or, alternatively just come at Debconf9...:-)

From my friends around who read my "running" posts, here are some news. Since my first marathon, I had a full week rest, then gradually began running again, first starting with 10 to 15 kilometers runs and then slowly reclimbing up distances to reach 23km 3 weeks after the marathon and 26km on May 3rd. Both these were done at a 5:35 to 5:40 mins/km pace, which seems to be the pace I can keep for a long time at this moment. On later weeks, I diminished efforts slightly, cutting off on distances, to concentrate on speed, so running distances between 7 and 12km, with a faster pace (between 5:15 and 5:30). That culminate in a very sharp 6km at 5:06 on a week day, after work (and that loop includes a very steep slope). The target for this "preparation" was indeed May 19th. I was on holidays all week long and that seemed to be a great occasion to try out something I wanted to do for quite a long time: run a marathon....alone. I completed it, moreover with a very great loop in Rambouillet forest, running the 42.2 kilometers in 4h22. Not that a great time (6:12/km), compared to the 4h10 of the Paris Marathon, but fairly interesting as that was done by running lonely...and also by running in woods, partly on very muddy paths. What's even more interesting is that I ended up nearly without cramps and had only to walk on the steepest slope....at km41 (about 20% slope for 200 meters). Note that I made a stop around km25 in order to eat dry fruits as, contrary to official marathons, in lonely marathons, you need to have your own food and beverage with you. So, well, the full time is around 4h30. Even more interesting: I was not tired at all the day after and, accordinng to my wife, much more "alive" than after Paris marathon..:). That probably explains why I could run again only 4 days after (a small but fast 6km) as well as today, 5 days after, for a 14km loop at 5:25/km despite the heat (my very best time on such a distance). So, Debconf runners, bring on your shoes in C ceres. I'll be there and ready..:-)