These are some random thoughts based on a not very thorough reading of candidate platforms of the DPL Election 2007, and my subjective view of the candidates based on the mailing traffic I remember reading. Wouter Verhelst: Has quite a broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. broad Debian-background, the platform also seems to share quite a bit of my view of where Debian's problems are at the moment. Doesn't propose a course of action right now, not sure how to judge that. Not sure if I remember Wouter being heavily involved in flamewars, but I do remember reading quite a few of his emails in discussions with interest. Aigars Mahinovs: Quoting from his platform: “My goal of running for DPL is not to be DPL, but to get a few concepts closer to real life.” So don't run for DPL, but start doing these things you're thinking about. Not being DPL has the advantage that you don't have to spend time on DPL stuff that would detract you from these goals. Speaking about your goals: (i) No release: I've thought about that, too, but I feel this would quickly make Debian irrelevant. (ii) $HOME configuration files organisation: take it up with the upstream developers of all the application. I think this is a very good idea, but freedesktop.org would be a better platform. (iii) Old Maintainer Process: Idea looking for a problem. (iv) Dropping Trademarks: not sure what to think about this. Gustavo Franco: Some focus on the desktop, and a constructive attitude towards Ubuntu, both positive in my book. (The first one primarily because on servers Linux is already quite well established, while the desktop is where more work is still to be done. Not because servers are less important.) His goals: (i) Core teams: as with Wouter, he sees that people and what goes on between them are where the problems are. (ii) Release goals: I think building the release based on release goals could be a driving force, but this is more RM area than DPL. (iii) Adding features to the bts doesn't need DPL powers. (iii) New developers: certainly an area that still needs attention, but the intended course is not entirely clear to me. (iv) NEW queue: same. (v) CTTE: Not sure what the idea behind this is. (vi) Groups: yes, but again not entirely clear what and how. (vii) Backports: yes, new versions of some software should go into Debian (stable) faster. Officially supporting backports or something else, I don't know, but this is an area where a DPL could pull together the RMs, security team(s), backports.org people etc. (viii) Universal OS: is this about more media coverage or about more face to face meetings? Both are good, but we should set clear goals beforehand. (ix) Much work is needed, especially in the area of buildd management (meaning: the processes and people behind it!). Does Gustavo have previous involvement here? (x) Vendors, Website, Publicity: This is more or less all about media coverage and popularity. Much needed, but as Debian as it is will never be able to commit to a public official opinion of anything, we'll need to think hard about what to do here. (xi) NMU: I don't see a great need for action here, personally. Overall: this platform contains too much material, I fear trying to tackle all these areas will lead to a burned out DPL within three months and little actually getting anywhere. Sven Luther: It's true that it always needs at least two people for a flamewar. But having a DPL who is always ready to provide one side of an argument is not a good idea. Sam Hocevar: Everything is high-level on his platform. Both good and bad. Not sure how to rate this platform, but I see myself nodding along. Learn from other OSs is good, but I hope he also means active cooperation and not just passive let's see how they do it. Steve McIntyre: Should have won 2006. Certainly did a lot of both behind-the-scenes work and some good communication. The platform lacks mention of relations between Debian and the outside world, which is an area where I feel some work is missing (and where the DPL as the only person with a official role also known outside Debian can make a difference), and also lacks mention of legal problems (trademarks and patents) where I'm not sure how solid Debian's work is. Additional argument in favor of Steve: Having a 2IC and promoting him to DPL the year after might be a good idea overall. Maybe we should actually elect the 2IC and only have a confirmation vote to promote him to DPL? Raphaël Hertzog: I like the DPL board idea. I also like how Raphaël focuses, in his platform, on the DPL board idea and some selected problems. On the other hand, the platform is wholly focused inward, outside relations are important, too ! Anthony Towns: Not sure what to think of the current DPL. I think he had good ideas, and I still think the original “spend Debian funds for the release”-idea was not that bad, but seeing how it all worked out was very, very painful for too many people. The platform seems pretty much empty, so I guess ajt won't have my vote this time. Simon Richter: Maybe I miss something, but I only see “don't repeat the dunc-tank flamefest” in his platform, which seems a bit thin. His observation that the real power of the DPL is to get everybody's attention may be partly true, though, even if this power will be spent as soon as a DPL, trying to mediate, lets himself be drawn into the flamewar instead (I don't accuse Simon that he ultimately will do this, but I fear that it happens all too quickly). Now what? I really don't have the time to thoroughly follow the campaigning, but I'll certainly have a look at the rebuttals, and perhaps somebody will do some summary. So the ballot below will certainly change. (You might also be able to buy the vote if you're rich enough ;-)

 [ 1 ] Wouter Verhelst
 [ 5 ] Aigars Mahinovs
 [ 3 ] Gustavo Franco
 [ 6 ] Sven Luther
 [ 3 ] Sam Hocevar
 [ 1 ] Steve McIntyre
 [ 2 ] Raphaë Hertzog
 [ 5 ] Anthony Towns
 [ 4 ] Simon Richter
 [ 5 ] NOTA

I just had a total Mr & Mrs. Smith moment. You know the bit where they're standing in the elevator, listening to the elevator music. Waiting for the door to open.

That would be the waiting time between the water breaking, causing us to page the midwife and her phoning us back. =)

The advice: Sleep now, relax.

And so shall it be. =)

(Update: 9am)
Contractions are 6 minutes apart, but still the kind she can sleep through, so she is. Spoke to the midwife, and she advises more rest. Next update with her, assuming nothing eventful, is around 1pm.

(Update: 2pm)
Contractions have slowed to every 12 minutes, but have increased in intensity. Just spoke to the midwife, who gave some tips about moving things along. She just got into the birthing centre after 3 hours of being on the road. It's usually a 30 minute trip, and she lives near us. She thinks that it will be fine, though, given that she was mostly stuck behind snow plows. Next phone call in 2 hours.

(Update: 4:30pm)
Contractions up to 5 minutes apart, lasting about 45 seconds each. We're enjoying a relaxing afternoon watching X-files. She's convinced that she's talking fine through her contractions, but her sister did a great impression:

Well, as I was saying, I ...

(she crouches over)

Oh there's one. Yup.. I'm having a contraction..

(pause)

Yup. Well. I can still talk through them.

Mhm, yup. Sure you can. =)

The midwife called us to check in. Angie described herself as "impatient". Otherwise everything seems to be going as normal. The midwife will call us again in an hour or so to sort out plans for the evening, probably including a visit to us at home since we're close enough to where she lives.

(Update: 6pm)
We've hit the magical number of contractions: every 4 minutes for 45 seconds. Apparently we're supposed to phone after two hours of this, but we phoned after one. My bad, but this is when we had planned to talk anyway. She answered the phone when we paged the midwife, and was sufficiently unable to talk that she handed to phone over to me. The midwife will be here for an in-person visit in about an hour (subject to speed of traffic)

(Update: 7:30pm)
At 7, I went out to shovel a space for the midwife to park. It turns out she drives a cute little VW bug. so at 7:15, I dig her out of the snowbank she got wedged into because I hadn't dug enough of a spot. 7:30, we're now both inside. =) Temperature is being taken, contraction charts being reviewed, etc.

(Update: 8:15pm)
The midwife just left. Right now Angie's 2cm dilated. Apparently there are multiple membranes, and they haven't all broken. This is a good thing because it continues to protect the child and give it manuverability. Charlotte will be back in 2 hours to see how we're doing.

---

I'll update this entry with random little updates, and post a new one when we head out.

I wanted to read some blog entry today I got a lot of 403 errors. I thought this is strange that bloggers deny access to their readers. So I wanted to blog about this. So I wanted to access my own blog but got a lot of 403 errors again. After some digging into the issue I found out that I had the BadBehavior plugin for Wordpress enabled and my IP was listed in three different RBLs. I really wonder how it got into them all. What do others do about this? Disabling comments or just live with this? Or use a different way to fight against spam in your blogs?

I needed a bunch of documents on ASN.1 as I'm currently hacking on an SNMP server. Said documents are available for free from the ITU, and linked on the ASN.1 site. Sounds easy enough, doesn't it? For some obscure reason however, I cannot get the documents when I'm behind NAT. Tcpdump shows the connection setup going through, but the HTTP request is not acknowledged from the other side, and no response is sent. If I start the request from the router, it works (although there seems to be a bit of packet loss or something else slowing down the download). Now the question is why this is happening, and whether it is the fault of my NAT setup, or of their firewall.

We take a very simple class:

class Foobar  
var $myvar = 1;
function Foobar()  
 
function printit()  
    echo "var is " . $this->myvar . "\n";
 
function incr()  
    $this->myvar += 1;
 
 
$f = new Foobar();
$a = $f;
$b = $f;
$a->printit();
$a->incr();
$b->printit();

And run it with PHP4 and PHP5:

davidw@byron:/tmp$ php4 foobar.php 
var is 1
var is 1
davidw@byron:/tmp$ php5 foobar.php 
var is 1
var is 2

Apparently it's possible to use the clone function to do what we want with PHP5, but... that means we have to track down every single place in the code where there is something like $foo = $bar. And hope that we got them all, because otherwise subtle bad things might happen. The codebase I've inherited isn't great to begin with, and hunting down every object copy is bound to be torture. Ouch. Update It's been pointed out that my description of exactly what's happening internally isn't correct. However, from my point of view, the end result is the same: a massive search and replace operation in order to obtain the "old" behavior by using clone. Most likely, this means that we won't be able to upgrade soon, which means that we won't be able to take advantage of some of the nice new PHP5 features, which will slow down other works in progress. For want of a nail...

Thanks in no small part to the advocacy of Simon Willison, I've just OpenID-enabled the XTech web site. Users can now create their accounts using an OpenID, or associate an OpenID with an existing account. A single-sign on solution like OpenID solves an important problem for us, as most people tend to interact with our conference web sites in only one or two time periods each year. While we've gone to the trouble of making retrieving a password easy, there's still the mental burden on the user of setting up the account and noting it down somewhere. As a measure of the impact of this on me personally: I habitually save registration confirmation emails in a certain mail folder. Since 1997 I have collected no fewer than 572 of these, and I'm sure some have been missed! One other cool thing about OpenID is that finally I can get the identity I wish to have. No longer do I have to be a compulsive early adopter of every service just to get the name edd. (Well, as long as said service integrates OpenID of course!) Personal branding is an important attractive aspect of OpenID.ImplementationImplementing OpenID using the Ruby ruby-openid gem was quite straightforward, as was the logical integration into our user models. I've not been the only one following this path recently, as illustrated by this post on Rails OpenID integration from Dan Webb.The harder problem of deploying OpenID lies in making the user interface work well: ultimately that will have a huge influence over its uptake. We've made a decent first go of it in Expectnation, but I'm sure we'll evolve and improve it over time. The main puzzling thing is how obvious to make the OpenID facility, given its relatively small take-up right now. We don't want to confuse normal users too much by using it. Microformats When I did my behind-the-scenes piece on the building of the XTech schedule last week, one feature I didn't discuss was the support for microformats we have in the schedule and on the session pages. If you use a tool such as Operator, you can easily save talk times to your calendar while reading the schedule.
I'm personally a little late to the microformats party. Being a fan of pragmatic RDF, I didn't see much need for microformats right away. However, with tools like Operator I can honestly say that the use of microformats does enhance the XTech schedule.My impressions of microformats (in particular hCalendar and hCard) from using them are mixed. One the plus side, it was very easy to do. On the negative side, I found them restrictive in the sense that for the metadata to be present in the hCalendar object, it needs to be part of the HTML presentation.So, while microformats are meant to be about making human readable data useful for computers, they can have a tail-wagging effect on the human markup. Let me elaborate. In the conference schedule there is a grid overview. For readability here we want to keep the details down to a minimum in each box. There is definitely no need to repeat the date of each presentation when you can see there's a grid per day.But also we want to have microformats available in the page so users can use the grid to pick off talks to add to their calendar. The only details you currently get from the microformat are those you physically include inside the div marked as vevent. This means we can't embed the full details, such as the talk description. It also means I indulge in some dubious markup practices (an empty abbr element) in order to get the date and time into each hCalendar object.It seems to me that this could be ameliorated by more intelligent user agent behaviour. Each of my hCalendar events is given a URL. At the end of that URL is a full description of the event, using microformats. So, as long as I reference the URL in a summary page, the user agent can beetle off and pull down the full information, in much the same sort of way that FOAF uses the rdfs:seeAlso property.So, remove the expectation that microformats provide complete data, and I'm sold.Other schedule features: iCal, Upcoming.org
Of course, we have iCalendar support in the XTech schedule, so you can subscribe conventionally using iCal, Evolution or a similar program. Aaron Straup Cope took the iCalendar, and uploaded each event into Upcoming.org. If you look at the upcoming events tagged xtech07, you see the results of his work.This foreshadows some of the social elements we plan to add to Expectnation itself: indicating your intent to attend a talk, and adding comments to it. As a program chair I'm finding this quite fascinating to watch.

After a couple of months' hard work, I've posted the schedule for XTech 2007. And, though I say so myself, it looks good. You can read more about the schedule itself over on the XTech web site, but I thought it would be interesting to explain how we got there. The people bit  After the call for participation, we wound up with 200 proposals in the system. From there, the target was to get down to 5 tutorials and 68 presentations. Each proposal contains an abstract of at most 500 words. I enlisted a small army of reviewers (69 in all) to help, and assigned four or five reviewers to each abstract. 829 reviews were assigned in all. The reviewers work blind, so they don't get to see who the proposer is.
After the review, I read every score and proposal, and created a shortlist of the best scoring proposals plus those that had spuriously low scores given their quality. From this shortlist the hard graft of preparing a draft schedule started. We had already decided in advance on our usual format: four parallel tracks of browsers, core tech, applications and open data. I then filled in the schedule, aiming to create themes for days, or at least for the 2-session blocks. The draft schedule and details of those shortlisted but who missed the cut were circulated among the committee. After some iteration and feedback the final schedule emerged. Picking tutorials was a little different, as this is done by myself and the committee directly. The constraints on choice are more commercially-oriented. Experience has shown we need mainstream topics that people will be happy to pay for. Even so, each year we try to include one emerging topic. Last year, it was Rails. This year, it's OpenStreetMap.
Choices made, I then notified the speakers, awaited their confirmation, and reached the point where we could publish the schedule. The mechanics of it all A glib reading of the above would make it all sound quite simple. And this year I'm pleased to report that it was a lot simpler than previous years. We have been able to use Expectnation from beginning to end, which has streamlined a lot of the work.  Expectnation's my super startup that's taking up the time that XTech and fatherhood don't! I'm about to tell you why it's wonderful, so please forgive a little pride.
Gathering the proposals was easy once the CFP had been set up inside Expectnation. I set up three calls: one for presentations, one for tutorials, and a secret one that the public doesn't get to see. (We always need a secret one for people who have very good reasons why they didn't make the public deadlines.) The review phase Recruiting reviewers was done by Expectnation's request system. This lets me send a request to a large number of people simultaneously, and collect their responses via the web app. (Previously, this had involved email, spreadsheets and wasted time.) The chart you see to the right shows the breakdown of the response to this request. If a reviewer said 'yes', they added a note to say which types of proposal they would review, and signed up for an account in the system. I then passed through every paper assigning four or five appropriate reviewers. A quick search each time allowed me to look for the right reviewers, and ensure no one reviewer got overloaded with work. Once reviewers were assigned, I headed over to the Mailroom department. Expectnation has a large number of configurable mailing targets, one of which is "reviewers with work to do". I emailed each reviewer with details of how to get on with the reviewing. Every reviewer then logged into Expectnation, saw the proposals they needed to review, and used the interface to efficiently score the proposals. One big lesson here is that it needs to be very efficient if you want to get the best reviewers, who are often the busiest. Another wizzy graph enabled me to keep track of the reviews, and the mailroom let me send out a reminder to those reviewers who hadn't finished their work yet, when the time for the close of reviewing drew near. Picking the papers Expectnation lets me sort and filter proposals pretty flexibly, so I went through the papers for each track in turn, ordered by their review score. Anything scored 3 or higher (4 is best, 1 is worst) was almost certain to be shortlisted. I read all the reviews and the abstract, and moderated any score that was unusually low (for some reason, reviewers rarely overrate proposals!) The next step was to set up the empty grid, shown in the top half of the diagram to the right. Here I added the empty time slots to the rooms we had, and assigned putative tracks to each of the rooms (they can be swapped around later if needed.) After that, the scheduling can start, shown in the second half of the picture to the right. Each empty slot can be assigned a paper from the shortlist for the relevant topic. That way it's easy to "paint on" talks into each room and quickly get a sense for the overall flow of the conference. Once it was time to finalize matters, I mass-marked all the scheduled papers as accepted, which automatically sent a notification to the presenters, using the same request system as for reviewers. When a speaker confirms, their proposal status changes and they appear in the final public grid. From there, I am able to use the mailroom again to inform speakers of the information they need to know. Additionally, speakers can log into the system at any time to see when they've been scheduled to speak.
Gridding out the conference in Expectnation is probably the biggest timesaver of all. Previously this involved a lot of sketching on paper or a spreadsheet, and a lot of manual work notifying people, and then more work creating the timetable to go on the web site. Now, both the grid and a full web of abstracts and speaker details are generated automatically. What next? As you can probably tell, I'm rather excited about both XTech 2007 and also about the work we're doing with Expectnation. What's next for XTech is the process of publicising the conference among attendees, recruiting session moderators, and also the writing of papers by the presenters. As the conference draws nearer, the attendee-level interactive features of Expectnation will kick in, allowing personal scheduling and rating of sessions. What's next for Expectnation is that we're ramping up to our 1.0 launch. We're working with a handful of early adopter customers right now, and are always interested in new use cases. As we get nearer the end of the first tranche of engineering work, we're going to gear up the publicity effort and start explaining to the world why we're special. As usual, I'd love to hear questions, feedback and suggestions.

pommed has seen only little progress in the last weeks, mainly because I am busy with real life right now. I am trying to find some time to get things done on pommed, which includes adding support for the nvidia-based PowerBooks. If you own such a machine, please drop me a mail. I’ve got a mail from someone with such a machine a couple of weeks ago, unfortunately I lost that mail. If you read this, please resend :-) The next release should see some improvements in gpomme and some changes in the keyboard backlight behaviour, along with some fixes here and there.

About 18 months after the 0.1 release of this specification comes 0.2. This is a very simple update and now specifies how to handle Xinerama-style setups where a single root window has multiple physical screens (thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann). ICC Profiles In X, version 0.2, can be downloaded here. NP: Takk, Sigur Rós

Dear readers, I am the mostly happy owner of a Dell Latitude D610 (the one with the ATI video card), running Debian Etch. I installed the hibernate package to try to get Suspend to RAM and to Disk to work, and Suspend to Disk worked out of the box. But Suspend to RAM didn’t work (garbled screen at resume). I never bothered to investigate this until today, when I discovered that acpi-support provides the same functionality, and works both for Suspend to RAM and to Disk ! I’m happier now, but I would like to understand, and the world of ACPI and Suspend to RAM/Disk is very difficult to grasp for newcomers. What is the story behind hibernate and acpi-support ? Why was this duplication of effort needed ? Also, it seems that gnome-power-manager and kpowersave provide the same functionality. Why can’t they just call the relevant acpi-support or hibernate scripts ? How do those different implementations compare (what are their main differences ?) ? Looking at the packages content, it seems that hibernate tries to be generic, while acpi-support gave up, and handles each and every laptop model differently. Correct ? Also, hibernate seems to be handling a few things better, like getting my network interface back up after hibernation. Finally, the last question: how do one debug Suspend issues, when it fails to work ? Is there a document somewhere explaining that ?

There was an interesting read the other week on LKML where someone or other was trying to say that no kernel config options should be hidden, and any that are should be turned into options that are linked, so that you can "see what you are doing". At the time Linus posted an excellent rant straight back, saying that more options should be hidden, and that the knobs and twiddles that people see should be obvious. I thought at the time that Linus response on this was extremely appropriate, but I didn't expect to be bitten by the opposite approach quite so immediately! I have been trying to build 2.6.20 for the last few days and wondering where in hell has the "Software Suspend" option gone. Well, today I found out that if you disable "Hot Pluggable CPUs" the option will never appear. If Linus has his way this problem would not happen, because the two knobs that people might want to twiddle, which appear superficially unrelated would actually have three settings in truth:

• CONFIG_USER_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU
• CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND

The first setting would be a user-selectable knob, which would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU was enabled, regardless of the state of software suspend. The last one would ensure that CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU and CONFIG_SOFTWARE_SUSPEND were enabled. The current approach is that iff I enable software suspend, then the hotplug CPU option disappears, and OTOH if I disable hotplug CPUs the software suspend option disappears. What I did was to start with a clean, unconfigured 2.6.20 kernel and go through all of the options starting at the top, which is something I tend to do with new hardware. The idea of hot plug CPUs seemed like something I didn't need, so I disabled it. With Linus' approach I would then have enabled Software Suspend a couple of minutes later, and the hidden config option would have been re-enabled behind the scenes. With the way things are at present, I built a good number of kernels and went through quite a bit of hardware blaming before I grepped .Kconfig for SUSPEND and found out what had happened, and which option I needed to enable. It is nice to know that their is such deep sanity at the heart of the kernel development process! Hopefully someone in a position to do so will notice this particular little gotcha and fix it soon, or perhaps someone wanting an "in" to start kernel hacking could go through the kernel configuration and clean up such gotchas. It certainly seems to me that Linus would accept patches for this as being rational.

I saw the Flax Bourton greenway consultation (available on http://www.n-somerset.gov.uk/Transport/Travel/Cycling/flaxbourtongreenway.htm) includes a railway bridge with what looks like a maximum-radius corner on one side, but a tight corner emerging from behind a fence on the other. I wonder whether there's any reason for that, because it looks dangerous to me. Check Sustrans plans carefully. One one hand, they've got the money and planning authority respect to get dumb stuff built, but on the other hand, they've got the money and respect to get good stuff built. Use 'em.

Today wiki.debian.org was briefly running on a full disk, and this MoinMoin based wiki failed pretty spectacularly:

• Every page view failed with a huge python backtrace.
• Saving a page that was being edited before it ran out of disk lost the edit and possibly corrupted the page that was being edited. Not 100% sure as I wasn't the one who experienced that.

We're used to some unix programs not dealing with being out of disk space very well. But IMHO wikis should be in the same class as package management systems, revision control systems, or databases: running out of disk should be something they handle gracefully without data loss and with graceful degredation when possible. Course I wrote a wiki engine too, and it didn't fare much better. Possibly worse, although I tested it much harder than MoinMoin:

• Viewing pages? No problem! (They're static..)
• Its internal state files could be truncated if the disk went full at exactly the wrong time. This would need a rebuild of the wiki to fix.
• It could write truncated or empty html files if changes were made while the disk was full. Again a wiki rebuild would fix this.
• It could save truncated source files if the user edited a page, and it might be possible (though unlikely) for those to be committed to the backend revision control system. If so you'd have to revert back to an old version during recovery; no data should be lost unless the backend revision control system stinks.
• The user database could delete itself if a user tried to get an account while the disk was full (I'd like to thank perl's Storable module for this admirable behavior.)

Of course I've fixed all these problems, and it seems quite robust now on randomly failing disks. If a page edit fails, it will go as far as to bring you back to the edit form and let you try again. I'm interested in how well other wiki engines stack up.. Also, if anyone has some hints for good ways to write regression tests involving full disks, I haven't found an approach I like yet.

Last month, Bel n and I managed to secure our trip to Tunisia on the very last moment. So, planning trips on the very last moment isn't nothing new around this place, but we made a big effort to take things to the limit. I can't remember why exactly, but on January 31 we were *so* close to fucking everything up before it started, when we packed our stuff just a pair of hours before having to leave to the train station. My luggage was prepared in a rush, so while I think I took everything I thought I'd need, I didn't really select my clothes too much. The idea was to have our suitcases mostly empty to bring back stuff from the markets: smoking cachimbas, lamps, leather stuff, etc. At that time I didn't know that would end up being a great strategy. Anyway, like 9 minutes before the train's departure we were stuck in Nuevo Centro without a taxi and at that point I really had lost hope about being on time. For some reason, there were no taxis in the area, when it's normally a place where there's tons of them. Suddenly one appeared, we rushed in and I asked the taxi driver to please fly to the station. Happily, we got an incredible green wave around the avenues, he drove us at like 80 Km/h and we even had to wait for a few minutes at the station. In Barcelona, we prepared our small New Year's Eve dinner with my cousin Laia and Marc, and while the plan was to go to sleep pretty early to be in good shape to go to the airport next morning, the bottles of wine and cava emptied quite fast, and around 4:30 we were quite drunk when we decided it was enough. When some annoying sound woke us up next morning, it was really late, so we again rushed out to the empty streets of Barcelona, sneaked into a regional train, without knowing it was the only way to get in time in El Prat airport, and after some initial confusion trying to find the travel's agency desk in the wrong terminal, we managed to check into our flight, being the very last to do so. With all the rush, I couldn't get some clothes from my suitcase transfered into my hand luggage, which I really wanted to do after my nice lost luggage experience during Debconf 5 in Helsinki. Anyway, chances are small that your luggage gets lost, right? But of course, Murphy is always vigilant, and this was a great opportunity to fuck me up. After a short but horrible (due to our really bad hangover) to Tunis/Carthage airport, we were in the long security/passport check. When Bel n picked up her bag and mine didn't appear, I tried to tell myself hey, it'll appear, no worries! . After 15 minutes, the stupid suitcase was nowhere to be found. Apparently, another two pieces of luggage had the same luck, which made us contact a group of four Uruguayans who were missing one of them. Nothing too terrible; it'll surely come on tomorrow's flight. After reclaiming our lost luggage, we went out to the parking where a bus was waiting for us, and on the way there, the six of us nearly fell into the first Tunisian scam, involving a dude selling jasmine flowers at 2 each. The bus took us down to Jasmine Hammamet, the most touristic place in Tunisia. Valencians might have an easy imagining the atrocity of the area by picturing what twice Marina d'Or plus Benidorm including Terra M tica would look like. Kilometres and kilometres of a disgusting Who can build the most horrible giant hotel right next to the beach contest. So it was pretty clear we had to spend as little time as possible in the area. We soon learned about how transport works in Tunisia. The cheapest is to use the public busses and the luagge collective taxis, we soon found out. Our first morning there, our guide Rejeb, working for Iberojet and Solplan touroperators, gave a talk where he advised us against travelling alone, specially around the South, while he offered organised trips around the country for every day of the week. Although we expected this danger! speech, we decided to book the two day trip to the South and Great South of the country, basically because it was the best way to see many places in a short time, even if it meant having limited time in each destination. We wandered around Jasmine Hammamet and discovered Carthage Land, sort of a Disneyland set in the age of Anibal and Carthage's empire, which was inside a newly built medina complex. This was a really bad place to practice the art of haggling, as the place was so desert, merchants really tried hard to get you buy something. Again, we were close to fucking up after our first negotiation, but we finally decided we weren't so interested. Lucky, we later found out the price was outrageous. Sadly, we spent way too much time in that tourist trap, and we found it was too late to go to the real Hammamet town to see a real medina and real stuff, so we had a long walk around the immense beach until sunset. On Wednesday, we did organise a bit with the Uruguayans and some others we had met: Mar a and Santi Kuchi Kuchy , Cristina and Pedro and an Argentinian family, and managed to hire a van driver to drive us all over the North. For quite a good price, we were taken to a few ruin sites in Carthago, now mostly a residential area, and it was really impressive. While the condition of many of the remainings is not optimal, it was exciting to see things which had been built by Phoenicians and Romans 2,000 years ago. I really enjoyed the remainings of the Antonine thermal baths of the city. It had been a huge building right next to the sea; one of the standing columns helps figuring out how big it had been. Right next to this site, the Presidential Palace dominated the whole gulf. Military places are treated zealously in Tunisia, and it is against the law to take pictures of any bit of it, not even a barbwire of the fence. The Palace had a great Tunisian flag waving over it, and many signs advised you against taking pictures in that direction. I couldn't resist.

The ruins of the Roman Antonine Baths After Carthage, we went to Sidi Bou Said, a small touristic town, which had the peculiarity and beauty of having all windows and doors painted in a beautiful light blue colour. Our last stop for the day was in Tunis, where we visited the most amazing medina of the whole week. Unlike the new medina in Jasmine Hammamet, this one was literally packed with people going up and down the maze of very narrow streets. Every few metres you'd come across a new, attractive smell coming from the few salons de th or spice, leather or perfume shops. Here we finally started developing our haggling skills, and managed to get a few items for reasonable amounts.

Streets of Sidi Bou Said Back at our hotel, everyone tried to get a quick dinner and go early to bed, as next morning we were taking a bus for our trip around the South. There was time to call yet another time to the Airport, to find out that one of the luggage pieces had been found. While there was no news about my suitcase, we shared a taxi to the airport to pick the found suitcase, and see if mine was actually there by any chance. Unluckily, it wasn't, so I wouldn't have any clothes for the desert visit. Some people in the group were kind enough to lend me some t-shirts and pants. For my underwear, I actually resorted to using some of Bel n's (no kidding, it was way too sexy :P), while mine dried up after some manual washing. The alarm clock went off at 5:15 or so, and soon after we were ready in the hall with our small bags. When the bus was ready to pick us up, the guide said we weren't allowed in, as we weren't on the list. WTF? We were nearly the first ones to book and pay for it! So he finally let us in, for a short while, until he realised there was no space for everyone, so he demanded that we got off. Of course, we didn't, and a long and very disgusting argument started between the guide, us and a few people who had seen us pay for our trip, and were trying to support us. To make a long story short, we ended up stepping down when I noticed the bus driver calling the police, and after Rejeb, our guide, told us the other bus would be waiting for us at the travel agency if we quickly took a taxi there. We of course knew that was a fantasy to get the bus moving, but dealing with the police at 6:30AM wasn't on my list of activities for the day, so we finally gave up to let the rest of the people get in time to their visits, as they were very tightly scheduled to make everything fit in two days. Nobody was waiting for us at the travel agency, but we were promised our money back, which did happen in the evening; our plans for Thursday and Friday were a bit broken though, and the rest of the morning was spent looking for alternatives. When we had managed to book a new trip in a different agency for Saturday, we took the bus to Nabeul, the capital of the province, well known for their medina specialised in pottery. In Nabeul, we lived a tourist trap which I found to be quite original. Not having walked 3 metres into the city walls, some young dude stops us and tells us that he knows us, as he works in the restaurant of our hotel . I totally didn't remember his face at all, but why not? So he quickly tells us Nabeul has good carpet workshops, and her sister is working in one which is regulated by the Government, and you can only visit two days a week. Coincidentally, Thursday is one of them! So he literally grabs us by the arm and takes us to one of the streets perpendicular to the main market street, and we enter a carpet shop. To the right, his sister probably being like 45 years older, is knitting a nice carpet on the loom. And a few seconds after, we're taken upstairs, where a Teletienda show starts before us. Without being asked if we want to buy a carpet, some other dude starts to unroll carpets and more carpets before us, talking in some very basic Spanish. While we're offered jasmine tea, which is really nice, Ali the brother quickly excuses himself and vanishes, leaving us with the salesman, which continues unrolling more and more before us, now helped by someone else. When 10 minutes later we convince them that we won't buy any carpet, he asks a donative for his young employee, who has unrolled and will now roll back a zillion carpets. Back in the hotel, we have dinner with a pair of Catalans from our flight, and when we tell us about the carpet place, they tell us they went over the same story like one hour before us! On Friday, we got some advice on other places to visit, and decided to go up to Cape Bon and visit Kerkuan, the only important remainings of a Punic city which, when conquered by the Romans, was destroyed to the grounds, but not rebuilt on top (they were busy with Carthage). Romans did an excellent job when destroying cities, and the result is a site which still lets you see perfectly how a small town (around 1,500) looked like 2,000 years ago.

Ruins of a Kerkuan neighbourhood, with their red bathrooms nearly intact To reach Kerkuan we had taken the bus up to Nabeul and then our first luagge to Kelibia, where we took a taxi (after no less than half an hour arguing in French with the taxi driver to settle on a rate for a ride to Kerkuan and then to the tip of the Cape in El Haouaria. Luagges are undoubtedly the best way to travel medium distances for very little money, while getting mixed with locals. During our ride up North, we chatted with a nursing student from Kelibia who was going back to her town for the weekend. She was really open, like most of the people we found in Tunisia, and we ended up exchanging our post addresses; we still need to send her a postcard from Val ncia soonish. This area wasn't so touristic, so the roads, while totally acceptable, weren't as good as the highway from Tunis to Sfax we were used to. We had seen some bits of the local driving skills , but the luagge driver performed some of the most extreme overtakings I've ever seen. These happened every three of four minutes, so after a while I was actually amused about what was going on. We would overtake two lorries on one go when there was absolutely no visibility; if things went too far, people would just slow down to let the overtaker get back into his lane on time, and those coming ahead would just use their headlamps to make them know it was just a bit too close. The taxi driver, annoyed at us, took us to Kerkuan but didn't wait for us; he immediately left, leaving us without any transportation in the middle of nowhere. After a visit at the site, we walked around 2.5 kilometres back to the main road, where we decided it was too late and risky to continue the journey up to El Haouaria, so we waited on the road gutter for a taxi. The first one which stopped was, to our surprise, the same bastard who left us one hour before, who stopped, laughing at us a little. Luckily some other taxi came by in the correct direction, and soon forgot about that man. After a taxi, luagge and bus ride, we were back in Hammamet, and the desert group had already got back from the two day trip. We were asked over and over what happened, what did we do, etc. People who hadn't talked to us before would come over and see; we were really surprised about the warm welcome we had. After dinner, we improvised a customes party, and many people managed to dress up in Tunisian/arabic fashions using bed sheets and so on. We had to wake up at 5AM next morning, but didn't go to bed until 2AM. Nothing could go wrong this time. We had our tickets, we had confirmed we would be going on Sunday the night before, so at 6:15, our new guide came in, and came straight towards me. He said something in German, and after I told him I spoke absolutely no German, he said huh, well you know the bus is full of Germans, and my indications will be in German? . Pretty incredible, but again a fuckup by the agency. My ticket said, clearly: Sahara safari. Bus + 4x4. (ALL). Turns out ALL meant Allemand, not everything included , although we had requested English pretty clearly. This was quite a minor problem though, after having no clothes for a whole week and having been left behind two days before. I think we were really lucky getting that German group, though. We were only 16 people on the minibus, making the stops a lot faster than the normal ones, where 55 persons need to get out and in of the bus. We had our own Routard guide for Tunisia, so we could read about the places we were about to visit before getting ther. Also, I surprisingly knew much of what our guide was talking about, just missing the details he talked about oil production in Tunisia compared to Spain's, among other topics . When the landscape was becoming drier and drier, Bel n and I spotted something dark far away ahead in the completely straight road. As it became bigger, I started thinking it might be the #1 place to visit for me in Tunisia: El Djem's impressive Roman amphitheatre. When we got off the bus, I was totally excited. Before me, the walls of an incredibly well preserved, huge Roman building; in fact, the best Roman ruins in the whole continent. El Djem's amphitheatre was the third biggest of the Roman empire with 35,000 seats, only surpased by Rome's and Capua's. It remained mostly intact until the 17th century, when some of its stones were used to build the city and some of the treasures taken to the Great Mosque of Kairouan, but when it took more damage was during two consequent wars, when the Turks didn't have many problems to blow part of the wall away using cannons to end up a siege of the city.

The Roman amphitheatre of El Djem The underground tunnels are intact, and it's difficult to not have flashes of Gladiator while walking under the arena's trapdoors. Sadly, there was little time to spend there, and we had to continue the journey after just 45 minutes. I would have spent half of the day there. From here, the landscape truly started to get drier and more desertic. The south of Tunisia is a giant olive field, until you reach the Great South, where it's dry enough that the only thing that grows in the land are rocks. Hours later we arrived in Matm ta, the very famous troglodyte village of small holes in the ground. Although I was curious about being there, watching how organised and massive tourism has destroyed these Berber's ways of life dissapointed me greatly. Our guide stopped the bus in one of the pits, which was decorated with white and light blue. In the first room, an old woman was grinding something in a small, stone mill. The dwellers of the few pits still used by their original inhabitants now make a living by letting people into their homes and getting dinar as a payment for taking photographs. What the woman was doing was just a bit of theatre, part of the show. After this first room, we got into the middle of the pit, which had a series of other passages to some rooms, some of which were simply open so we could get in and have a look. I felt a little bit like violating someone's privacy, and wondered how much the house had changed in the last years.

Inside a troglodyte underground house in Matm ta After our visit, we continued up the mountains of Matm ta, and after going by a giant "WELCOME TO MATMATA" sign drawn in white in the middle of a mountain, Hollywood style (!), we stopped for a brief photo-stop (sic). Indeed, the view was quite impressive, and is universally famous as one of the filming spots of Tatoonie scenes in Star Wars: A New Hope. Speaking of famous places, a few minutes later we stopped at the top of one of the hills, were we'd have lunch in the Hotel Sidi Driss, a place of pilgrimage for Star Wars fans, as it was the troglodyte pit which served as the Skywalker's home. The place is full of references to the film saga, and one of the open pits is full of set pieces stuck into the walls. We were served couscous, which wasn't bad, but was cooked and served in the most genuine fast-food fashion. Everyone there gets couscous to eat, apparently, and it's the same in many other touristic places in the area.

Matm ta's lunar landscape From here, our journey headed straight West, in the middle of the rocky desert, until after some time, you could start to see lines of palm tree branches planted here and there, a sign that rocks would soon disappear, being replaced by sand and dunes. As when we were approaching El Djem, at some point a huge, dark spot appeared on the horizon. Douz, probably named after some 12th French batallion which stayed there, is a small town in the very limit of the Sahara desert, built right next to a huge oasis, exclusively dedicated to palm tree plantations, making dates production a big source of income, along with, of course tourism. The travel agencies use Douz as the starting point for several-day trips into the desert, camel rides and stuff like this. Our guide offered us getting a camel and carriage ride in Tozeus for 20 dinar, but Bel n and I declined. He didn't seem to be too happy about it, and had no problem commenting this in German and Arab with the driver (Spanisch and Spanien were clear to me). We learned that the agency (or the guide) makes around 3 Dinar for everyone who contracts the camel rides, after speaking to one native young kid who worked in the camel place. While our German trip mates got dressed in berber fashion, we opted to walk into the desert and play around in the sand on our own. I discovered a few desert insects which were unlike anything I've seen anywhere, and their diminute trails were all over the dunes. Looking West, the view was astonishing, with only thousands of kilometres of yellow dunes ahead us.

The evening sun over the dunes After they came back, we were taken to our hotel, which was really impressive. After leaving our stuff in our room, we headed back to the desert, which was like 300 metres away, to see the sunset over the Great Dune . There's a street which literally serves as the frontier between the rocky ground and the sand desert. From there, you could see many lines of palm tree branches, which are planted by locals in a futile attempt to stop the inexorable advance of the desert. Women in Douz and other towns in the desert limit spend their days sweeping the entrances to their homes, as sand gets in really fast. A small village next to Douz even had to be abandoned and rebuilt in some other place, with the old one being finally devoured by the dunes. When it got dark, we still had some time to kill before dinner, and we discovered a hammam in our hotel. I got in, and saw there was a bored young man inside. He informed us about the prices, and after some short deliberation, we realised we'd spent half of the camel money in some Arab relaxation; while I got a really cool massage, Bel n enjoyed a Turkish bath. I spoke to the guy for a while, and he said not that many people used that hammam. He actually handed the list of services since 2002, which easily fitted in one piece of paper. People don't know what they are missing; he explained that most of the hotel's clients just showed no interest in the baths. I wonder how Fins or Norwegians would react, given their sauna culture. The dinner and breakfast in that hotel was absolutely awesome, and I actually ate too much to have an easy sleep. Next morning we had to be ready at 5:30. That's pushing my limits. The bus started crossing the Chott Jerid when it was still quite dark. The chotts are dry, salt lakes in the middle of the desert, which during some seasons do get some water, sometimes from the underground. The Chott Jerid is the biggest of the three chotts in the area, and the views are fantastic. It's like a giant, totally flat muddy sea which reflects light creating dangerous mirages of oasis-like dark patterns. Before the construction of the recent road that links Douz and Tozeur, crossing the chott was so risky that many people died in the attempt. We had the unique opportunity to see the sun rise over the salty horizon.

Sunrise at the Chott Jerid Again, on our way to Tozeur, we were offered a carriage ride for ten dinar, and again we declined. The guide then asked us if we had no money or what. So in Tozeur we basically wanted to walk around the oasis fields, and ended up talking most of the time with some old man who sold drums and desert roses. On a 4x4, we went up North to Chebika, a really cool town with a small oasis of thermal water, which I guess was around 40 C. The short walk to the wall where the oasis surfaced was packed with children who insistently begged for money or offered necklaces and other items. It was difficult to make them understand you didn't want anything. We then went up the mountain behind Chebika through a road which had its own piece of history. It seems that during WWII, Rommel suffered an Allied siege in Chebika, with a range of mountains behind their backs. The Allies gave him one month to surrender, and he took his time to answer. During that time, he ordered his engineers to design and build a road which would let them escape Chebika through the steep mountains, and they managed. When the ultimatum expired, the Allies apparently found out Chebika had been abandoned by the Germans, including tanks and most of their equipment. So, on the way up, a few kilometres away from the Algerian border, there was another typical visit to the biggest oasis waterfall in Tunisia, which was several metres high.

The oasis at Chebika Our Sahara trip would soon end, and after lunch we headed Northeast on our way to Hammamet. On our way back, we stopped in Kairouan, one of the key Islam pilgrimace spots, with the Great Mosque as the biggest attraction. Unluckily, as we arrived after lunch, we didn't had a chance to see it. Apparently it is really impressive. We haggled a bit for a pair of babouches and a small leather couch in the medina. We came back to our hotel around 7, and found most of the people around the hall. After the obligatory update on how it went, we went to bed as we were exhausted, and of course we had to get up really early to head to the airport. The airport was at that early time of the morning a total chaos, and while people stood in the checkin lines, I tried to find out what was going on with my still lost luggage. I went back to the lost luggage window, which would be closed for 5 more minutes. When they finally opened, they told me once again they had no clue about what was going on with my luggage. I finally understood they had no clue: my tracking number wasn't in their database. I asked them if I could have a look at the unreclaimed luggage storage room. They kindly opened a small door for me, and invited me to go inside and have a look. The view was gross: hundreds of lost bags all over the place. As I was in a bit of a hurry (I actually had to get back to Barcelona), I asked him where to find the bags of one week ago, and he nearly bursted into laugher. Okay, I had to look all over the place, scanning every piece of luggage in an attempt to spot mine. There were bags of absolutely every type in there. In one of the corridors, I sensed a disgusting smell, and figured out some poor guy may have food or something in one of their lost bags, which was rotting in that horrible room. So wrong: soon after I found myself nearly stepping on a puddle of shit, as if someone had literally dumped it right there. Oh my... luckily my search was nearly over and unsuccessful, and I got back to Barcelona with the hope of finding my bag in El Prat. After looking in their two storage rooms I realised I'd probably not see the luggage again, which is a real pain in the ass. A few hours of train later we were back in Val ncia, with a feeling of having spent 3 or 4 weeks in Tunisia, not just 8 days. Really a great place to visit, not only for their cultural treasures, both current and ancient, but for the openness of their people. I hope I'll be back at some point!

Now the proud owner of a Meade 200mm SCT, with accessories. Pics, and the story behind it, here. Unfortunately, the accessories didn't include a mount. So now, I'm in the market for a mount, looking for a Celestron ADM or equivalent at the moment. Any recommendations or reviews, anyone? Of course, cloudy skies are forecast for Galway for the foreseeable future. Update: Celestron ADM mount on order from Telescope-Service, Germany. Expect clear skies for the next few days until it arrives.

Ma ana arrrrrrgentina will probably be annouced offically as the location for DebConf8!

Kudos to the Venezuelian team for their (almost equally) great bid and very fair behaviour in the decision meeting! In the end of the meeting when I saw .ar as the winner (not by much, but enough to be willing to go for it), I feared a painful end, but no, the opposite happened.

Thank you all. And now let's make DebConf7 a real fun and productive event

In my previous post ( to this Debian section), I've mentioned we were preparing an event focused on direct contribution. Well, we've done it and it was very successful!. The event name we've choose was invol crate+, which means "involve yourself" and the plus sign meaning "more", since that was the main idea behind the event. We've worked for a couple of months, this includes live and online meetings, (even we all live in Lima sometimes it's quite difficult to match our spare time) and a lot of online work. We've just published the event report (currently in Spanish only, translation in progress). The main things I'd like to highlight is the fact that we got people doing real work and breaking the ice from "I want to do something, but I'm quite not confident to get on the teams" to people discussing work-related issues on our l10n-spanish list. I wanted to people directly learn and use the tools we do and also the infrastructure, so at some point I made the decision of make them directly work on our team's infra, this of course got some people inquiring if I was running a parallel project and complain about the quality, later I had to explain what was this rush of translations and that we were running this workshop and, yes, I knew the work was not going to be as we usually expect but they were quite new and we didn't have much time for have them learn all our policy, terms and all things one knows after being on the team for a while.
My girlfriend also involved herself and did some translation work and took pictures for me, cute. However, since I had an horrible issue with my main domain for email, and also because my time constraints, I didn't have much time to follow them up but I'm glad about what they did and that some of them are very encouraged and still working on the list. One of our goals was to get at least one people "hooked" on the direct contribution I'm glad to see we over-passed this goal. The report has the in-depth details, like number of participants, talks, also the problems we faced, as Diego describes (no, don't believe him, I wasn't acting as the contact/manager guy all the time, word). We had a dinner later with some of the people who still had energies or were hungry ;).
There is a pictures gallery at our website, also the talks slides, the videos are still on processing. We'll publish them once they are ready, like everything in Debian of course ;). Finally, I want to say that this was a great personal experience to transmit the things I've learnt and having people to feel that they also can do it, but even more: doing it!. Sometimes online chat or mailing lists are quite cold for transmitting this knowledge to newcomers. Usually they got scared after one tells them they have to read a lot, or they just got frustrated by their inability to understand the team work-flow at the very beginning. I'd like to thank our wonderful band, or squad (you named it, we can get it for you), who is responsible for making this happen. We are already working on the long-term (call strategic if you like it) plan for the up-comings invol crate+. We've already made a shot-term plan for this year and started to work on the next invol crate+, be ready.
Of course thanks to Peru Pacifico Institute where we hosted the event. We had a post-event meeting with them and directors are very happy with us and with the success, they are willing to work together again on the future. Also to our helpful sponsors, speakers, friends and relatives who support us.

I’m still working on a grub/usplash splashscreen in order to pimp my boot process. Let’s see what we have: Creating the grub image is rather easy. What’s obviously missing here is the correct position and color of the text stuff. Creating a working splash image for usplash was kinda tricky. I tried several HOWTOs which took a long time since I had to reboot in order to test the result. Unfortunately every attempt I made resulted in either a blank screen or the default fallback splash. As a last resort I took the source of debian-edu-artwork which has a working usplash, replaced their image with mine and rebuild the package. I don’t know yet why, but it worked. I plan to create package with combined grub/usplash(/xDM) artwork and several alternative themes, but since our usplash version is lagging behind upstreams I think I’ll wait until we catched up again. The new version is not backwards compatible with the old one and the new one as quite a lot new cool features like:

• scripts which help to create splashscreens
• support of 256 colors (currently 16)
• support of different resolutions (currently 640×480 is hardcoded)

which make it a lot easier to create good looking splash screens.

I went to the Astronomy Festival on Jan 27 organised by Galway Astronomy Club. Worth seeing; it attracted about 100 people (the Hotel conference room was full); successful for a town like Galway, so frequently covered in Cloud. Dr. Lucie Green save a good talk on Solar Physics, describing the different methods we now have of exploring the Suns behaviour, Flares, Sunspots, etc. and the different missions such as SOHO and the new STEREO mission to observe the Sun. Prof. Chris Dainty gave a clear presentation describing the state of the Art in Adaptive Optics, and work his group has been doing, both in Astronomy and pushing AO into other fields, such as opthalmology (treating the eye as the obstacle and observing the retina behind) and productising A.O. for 'non-professional' use. He hopes in the near future to be able to provide Adaptive Optics to Amateurs (price range around Eur 5000, status: not ready yet, the first units would be for 'University Dept' observatories, costing 20-30k, in the next year or two). Of particular interest were one by Prof. Dick Butler, head of the Chemistry dept. here in NUIG; it was on Organic Chemistry and meteorites. He is a long-time amateur astronomer but professional chemist; he was particularly interested in the organic chemistry of the Murchison meteorite. After pointing out the out the false alarm of ALH 84001, he gave a convincing presentation of the extra-terrestrial origin of complex organic compounds, including amino acids, etc. in the Murchison meteorite. In particular he disputed claims that the meteorite was contaminated, pointing to the Deuterium enrichment of the compounds within; as the C-D bond is stronger that C-H, Carbon-Hydrogen compounds are more likely to be broken up by extraterrestrial radiation that their deuterium variants, leading to deuterium enrichment over terrestrial equivalents. Later he gave a nice summary of conditions on Saturn's moon Titan, pointing to its rich supply of organic compounds, showing that when hit by meteorites, lakes of water would be possible for several hundred years at a time, as the impact craters cooled, and called Titan a utopia for organic chemistry exploration. This seems to make the idea of panspermia: life originating off-Earth more plausible. For a while now I've had a book (found in the Bargain bin somewhere) by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, From Grains to Bacteria, a collection of papers documenting their belief that they've discovered bacteria in free space via spectroscopy. I must admit my spectroscopy is not up to challenging them; time to dig deeper and fish it out. Dr. Aaron Golden gave a very interesting talk on Brown Dwarfs: Planets or Pulsars that he and his students have been doing. Basically it turns out that while Brown Dwarfs have long been seen as the 'runt' of the Stellar world, stars that didn't make it, some of them it seems are Pulsars. (He's invented the acronym SPUDs: Sporadically Pulsating Ultracool Dwarfs, for them; maybe it'll help people remember that Pulars were originally discovered by an Irishwoman, too). This was first seen by Andys Postgrads Greg Hallinan and Steve Bourke - (see the papers). Kinda interesting as Aaron studied under Dr. Andy Shearer in NUIG working on Pulsars, so knew a bit about them, and had seen behaviour like this before, with a bit of a clue what might be causing it. It was wierd going to this talk; Andy hired me to work in ICHEC, and we have an office in NUIG; Greg and Steve work down the hall, and indeed, I see them occasionally working on our computers; but didn't know what they'd been working on until now. So, it appears that these Brown Dwarfs (they've seen Pulsar behaviour in several) have Starspots (details here and here; some hot-off-the-press stuff: rumour has it he was checking the results of observations from the night before to ensure they didn't disprove what he was about to say). Aaron was pointing out the coherent maser behaviour was similar to that seen at Jupiter, leading to its strong radio emissions. I didn't get to talk to him about it in detail, but the idea of an Object with both sunspots and clouds sounds fairly exotic and interesting. Beyond that, the Festival was a good opportunity to see what Irish Amateur Astronomers have been doing, and meet some interesting people. Kudos to all those who organised it.

The NATO security conference is this weekend. All the disruptions in normal life going on here (a large part of the city centre is actually closed down to the public), this shows exactly how detached politics and the real world are today. After all, if what I'm doing on behalf of the public causes so much dissent that I feel that the public needs to be locked out, then I'm obviously not fulfilling my mandate.