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?

Christian: of course you will be running the Chicago 2010 marathon as your next fall marathon. Not only are Paris and Chicago jumel e (i.e. sister cities), but the Dollar is so conveniently falling vis- -vis the Euro that you'd get all this done for about a Euro and a half by the time the race happens. Moreover, 2010 is going to be Debian's US year anyway. I crammed my two European races into two four day trips which I won't exactly recommend, but you do not need ten days either. Lastly, I cannot promise you many interesting cheeses but there are at least a few pretty tasty beers to sample. bient t Chicago!

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..:)

After seeing bubulle s post on the statistics per country in Debian I started wondering about how the statistics were made. They probably take into consideration the Country field in the LDAP, but this seems a bit off since there s a considerable number of DDs living abroad.
This hit me since I should probably count as BR, but live in DE. I m personally skewing the statistics! I know this is totally meaningless, but perhaps we could add a nationality field to the LDAP, just to make the competition a bit more precise! ;)

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..:-)

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 !

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..:-)

Some (not so) short news from the samba packaging team... Recent package uploads:

• Last "stable" upstream branch: 3.3.4. 3.3.4-2 is in unstable, quietly ageing before entering testing. 3.3.4-1 is in testing. In short, we have the latest upstream in squeeze
• Next upstream version: 3.4.0~pre1 is in experimental. That includes many packaging changes as upstream is now providing samba3 and samba4 altogether, which lead to source tree reorganization. Good news: there are no more "FHS" patches and upstream included needed changes for the file layout to finally be able to cope with the FHS entirely.
• We maintain many backports:
  • 3.3.4 was just uploaded to lenny-backports on backports.org. Maybe soon to come a 3.3.4 upload for etch-backports
  • unofficial backports on http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org: here we will maintain "the latest upstream version of the same upstream branch than what we have in Debian stable suites". That seems complicated to say and an example says it better: lenny has 3.2.5, so this repository has upstream 3.2.11 with the same packaging than 3.2.5. We made an exception for etch: instead of backporting the latest 3.0 upstream (etch has 3.0.24, upstream has 3.0.34), we backported the latest 3.2: we consider that nobody is now seriously considering to run 3.0, except those people who are very happy with the official packages in etch.
  • All these backports will be useful when tracking down bugs and ask our users if they reproduce them with the latest upstream versions, as samba setups are often very tricky to reproduce in our own environments.

Other things are coming, such as the work on having samba3 and samba4 packages coexist. Jelmer Vernooij prepared everything after our discussions at the SambaXP conference and it should be uploaded "soon". A few patches we have should be integrated upstream as well, therefore making the Debian diff smaller and smaller. Also, Luk Claes joined the maintenance team and helped setting up the unofficial repository for backports. The bug count is going up again these days as I don't spend much time triaging the bugs and some are very tricky to reproduce. As usual, help would be welcomed. I'm fairly sure that several of these are user errors but I often lack time to prove this enough for closing the bug. We should go to to 50-60 bugs or so.

Robert McQueen reported bug #530000 on Friday May 22th, against the dbus package. Bug #520000 was reported as of March 16th 2009. We are now close again to our "10,000 bugs in 2 months" pace. So, bug #540000 should be reported during Debconf 9, as it seems...

I've successfully upgraded my primary web/mail/misc host from Debian Etch to Debian Lenny. There were a few minor problems, but on the whole the upgrade was as painless as I've come to expect. In the past I'd edited my Exim4 configuration to add quite a few ACL checks, for example rejecting mails based upon spoofed/bogus HELO identifiers, and rejecting messages that didn't contain "Subject" or "Date" headers. The Debian Exim4 configuration may be split into multiple files (which is how I prefer it on the whole). The idea that you just add new files into the existing hierarchy and they'll magically appear in the correct location when a real configuration file is generated. On the whole this works well, but sometimes editing files in-place is required, and it was these local edits that caused me pain. Fixing things up was mostly not a challenge, primarily it was a matter of removing ACLs until exim4 started without errors - all my spam checking is handled ahead of exim4 these days, except for the last-ditch spam filtering with a combination of procmail-fu and the crm114 classifier package. Taking a hint from Bubulle's weblog I decided to nuke my CRM114 spam database to avoid any possible version-mismatch issues so now I'm having to classify a lot of "unsure" messages. Happily my memory of doing this last time round is that the initial training of spam/ham takes a day or so to complete. Anyway now I can start looking to advantage of the things new to Lenny. But probably not until I'm sure things have calmed down and upgraded correctly.

steve@skx:~$ uptime
 05:00:31 up 260 days, 14:23,  2 users,  load average: 0.95, 0.51, 0.31
steve@skx:~$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 \n \l

ObFilm: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Thanks, CRM114. From yesterday morning (where I ran my daily dist-upgrade) to now, you just *trashed* all my legitimate mail. Oh, sure, I got warned in some way by NEWS.Debian entries, but I didn'tfigure out that it was URGENT that I change my *.css files. What was happening is, in short, that all non whitelisted mail was just...reduced to a blank line. And I didn't figure out immediately because I have several whitelist entries, so I was still receiving *some* mails. So, it is not only "stop working"....it is doing much harm. If you're a CRM114 user and haven't upgraded to 20090423-1, you've been warned. I'm currently considering what to do and if a bug report is warranted (RC, of course). Oh, for sure, there *is* a warning through NEWS.Debian but is breaking existing behaviour so badly really something that we want in Debian? Losing legitimate mail is the worse thing a program can do, isn't it?

Now, I'm registered for Cologne Marathon. So is No l and probably Ralf Treinen. Any other DD or Debian contributors wanting to join in? I know that Dirk Eddelbuettel will probably not (btw, nice run at Boston, Dirk)....but others certainly can...and should ! October 4th, 2009 is still far enough for you guys to plan this..:-)

Just found by my son who's as crazy as I am abut SpongeBob Square Pants: