Earlier this year, I helped plan and run the Community Data Science Workshops: a series of three (and a half) day-long workshops designed to help people learn basic programming and tools for data science tools in order to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia and Twitter. You can read our initial announcement for more about the vision. The workshops were organized by myself, Jonathan Morgan from the Wikimedia Foundation, long-time Software Carpentry teacher Tommy Guy, and a group of 15 volunteer mentors who taught project-based afternoon sessions and worked one-on-one with more than 50 participants. With overwhelming interest, we were ultimately constrained by the number of mentors who volunteered. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to turn away most of the people who applied. Although it was not emphasized in recruiting or used as a selection criteria, a majority of the participants were women. The workshops were all free of charge and sponsored by the UW Department of Communication, who provided space, and the eScience Institute, who provided food. The curriculum for all four session session is online:

• Friday April 4th: Setup and Programming Practice
• Saturday April 5th: Introduction to Python
• Saturday May 3rd: Building data sets using web APIs
• Saturday May 31st: Data analysis and visualization

The workshops were designed for people with no previous programming experience. Although most our participants were from the University of Washington, we had non-UW participants from as far away as Vancouver, BC. Feedback we collected suggests that the sessions were a huge success, that participants learned enormously, and that the workshops filled a real need in the Seattle community. Between workshops, participants organized meet-ups to practice their programming skills. Most excitingly, just as we based our curriculum for the first session on the Boston Python Workshop s, others have been building off our curriculum. Elana Hashman, who was a mentor at the CDSW, is coordinating a set of Python Workshops for Beginners with a group at the University of Waterloo and with sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation using curriculum based on ours. I also know of two university classes that are tentatively being planned around the curriculum. Because a growing number of groups have been contacting us about running their own events based on the CDSW and because we are currently making plans to run another round of workshops in Seattle late this fall I coordinated with a number of other mentors to go over participant feedback and to put together a long write-up of our reflections in the form of a post-mortem. Although our emphasis is on things we might do differently, we provide a broad range of information that might be useful to people running a CDSW (e.g., our budget). Please let me know if you are planning to run an event so we can coordinate going forward.

The annual Debian developer meeting took place in Portland, Oregon, 23 to 31 August 2014. DebConf14 attendees participated in talks, discussions, workshops and programming sessions. Video teams captured a lot of the main talks and discussions for streaming for interactive attendees and for the Debian video archive. Between the video, presentations, and handouts the coverage came from the attendees in blogs, posts, and project updates. We ve gathered a few articles for your reading pleasure: Gregor Herrmann and a few members of the Debian Perl group had an informal unofficial pkg-perl micro-sprint and were very productive. Vincent Sanders shared an inspired gift in the form of a plaque given to Russ Allbery in thanks for his tireless work of keeping sanity in the Debian mailing lists. Pictures of the plaque and design scheme are linked in the post. Vincent also shared his experiences of the conference and hopes the organisers have recovered. Noah Meyerhans adventuring to Debian by train, (Inter)netted some interesting IPv6 data for future road and railwarriors. Hideki Yamane sent a gentle reminder for English speakers to speak more slowly. Daniel Pocock posted of GSoC talks at DebConf14, highlights include the Java Project Dependency Builder and the WebRTC JSCommunicator. Thomas Goirand gives us some insight into a working task list of accomplishments and projects he was able to complete at DebConf14, from the OpenStack discussion to tasksel talks, and completion of some things started last year at DebConf13. Antonio Terceiro blogged about debci and the Debian Continuous Integration project, Ruby, Redmine, and Noosfero. His post also shares the atmosphere of being able to interact directly with peers once a year. Stefano Zacchiroli blogged about a talk he did on debsources which now has its own HACKING file. Juliana Louback penned: DebConf 2014 and How I Became a Debian Contributor. Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph s in-depth summary of DebConf14 is a great read. She discussed Debian Validation & CI, debci and the Continuous Integration project, Automated Validation in Debian using LAVA, and Outsourcing webapp maintenance. Lucas Nussbaum by way of a blog post releases the very first version of Debian Trivia modelled after the TCP/IP Drinking Game. Fran ois Marier s shares additional information and further discussion on Outsourcing your webapp maintenance to Debian. Joachim Breitner gave a talk on Haskell and Debian, created a new tool for binNMUs for Haskell packages which runs via cron job. The output is available for Haskell and for OCaml, and he still had a small amount of time to go dancing. Jaldhar Harshad Vyas was not able to attend DebConf this year, but he did tune in to the videos made available by the video team and gives an insightful viewpoint to what was being seen. J r my Bobbio posted about Reproducible builds in Debian in his recap of DebConf14. One of the topics at hand involved defining a canonical path where packages must be built and a BOF discussion on reproducible builds from where the conversation moved to discussions in both Octave and Groff. New helpers dh_fixmtimes and dh_genbuildinfo were added to BTS. The .buildinfo format has been specified on the wiki and reviewed. Lots of work is being done in the project, interested parties can help with the TODO list or join the new IRC channel #debian-reproducible on irc.debian.org. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the d-i / debian-cd BoF at DC14, with some of the session video available online. Current jessie D-I needs some help with the testing on less common architectures and languages, and release scheduling could be improved. Future plans: Switching to a GUI by default for jessie, a default desktop and desktop choice, artwork, bug fixes and new architecture support. debian-cd: Things are working well. Improvement discussions are on selecting which images to make I.E. netinst, DVD, et al., debian-cd in progress with http download support, Regular live test builds, Other discussions and questions revolve around which ARM platforms to support, specially-designed images, multi-arch CDs, and cloud-init based images. There is also a call for help as the team needs help with testing, bug-handling, and translations. Holger Levsen reports on feedback about the feedback from his LTS talk at DebConf14. LTS has been perceived well, fits a demand, and people are expecting it to continue; however, this is not without a few issues as Holger explains in greater detail the lacking gatekeeper mechanisms, and how contributions are needed from finance to uploads. In other news the security-tracker is now fixed to know about old stable. Time is short for that fix as once jessie is released the tracker will need to support stable, oldstable which will be wheezy, and oldoldstable. Jonathan McDowell s summary of DebConf14 includes a fair perspective of the host city and the benefits of planning of a good DebConf14 location. He also talks about the need for facetime in the Debian project as it correlates with and improves everyone s ability to work together. DebConf14 also provided the chance to set up a hard time frame for removing older 1024 bit keys from Debian keyrings. Steve McIntyre posted a Summary from the State of the ARM BoF at DebConf14 with updates on the 3 current ports armel, armhf and arm64. armel which targets the ARM EABI soft-float ARMv4t processor may eventually be going away, while armhf which targets the ARM EABI hard-float ARMv7 is doing well as the cross-distro standard. Debian is has moved to a single armmp kernel flavour using Device Tree Blobs and should be able to run on a large range of ARMv7 hardware. The arm64 port recently entered the main archive and it is hoped to release with jessie with 2 official builds hosted at ARM. There is talk of laptop development with an arm64 CPU. Buildds and hardware are mentioned with acknowledgements for donated new machines, Banana Pi boards, and software by way of ARM s DS-5 Development Studio - free for all Debian Developers. Help is needed! Join #debian-arm on irc.debian.org and/or the debian-arm mailing list. There is an upcoming Mini-DebConf in November 2014 hosted by ARM in Cambridge, UK. Tianon Gravi posted about the atmosphere and contrast between an average conference and a DebConf. Joseph Bisch posted about meeting his GSOC mentors, attending and contributing to a keysigning event and did some work on debmetrics which is powering metrics.debian.net. Debmetrics provides a uniform interface for adding, updating, and viewing various metrics concerning Debian. Harlan Lieberman-Berg s DebConf Retrospective shared the feel of DebConf, and detailed some of the work on debugging a build failure, work with the pkg-perl team on a few uploads, and work on a javascript slowdown issue on codeeditor. Ana Guerrero L pez reflected on Ten years contributing to Debian.

Recently the discussions around how to distribute third party applications for "Linux" has become a new topic of the hour and for a good reason - Linux is becoming mainstream outside of free software world. While having each distribution have a perfectly packaged, version-controlled and natively compiled version of each application installable from a per-distribution repository in a simple and fully secured manner is a great solution for popular free software applications, this model is slightly less ideal for less popular apps and for non-free software applications. In these scenarios the developers of the software would want to do the packaging into some form, distribute that to end-users (either directly or trough some other channels, such as app stores) and have just one version that would work on any Linux distribution and keep working for a long while. For me the topic really hit at Debconf 14 where Linus voiced his frustrations with app distribution problems and also some of that was touched by Valve. Looking back we can see passionate discussions and interesting ideas on the subject from systemd developers (another) and Gnome developers (part2 and part3). After reading/watching all that I came away with the impression that I love many of the ideas expressed, but I am not as thrilled about the proposed solutions. The systemd managed zoo of btrfs volumes is something that I actually had a nightmare about. There are far simpler solutions with existing code that you can start working on right now. I would prefer basing Linux applications on Docker. Docker is a convenience layer on top of Linux cgroups and namespaces. Docker stores its images in a datastore that can be based on AUFS or btrfs or devicemapper or even plain files. It already has a semantic for defining images, creating them, running them, explicitly linking resources and controlling processes. Lets play a simple scenario on how third party applications should work on Linux. Third party application developer writes a new game for Linux. As his target he chooses one of the "application runtime" Docker images on Docker Hub. Let's say he chooses the latest Debian stable release. In that case he writes a simple Dockerfile that installs his build-dependencies and compiles his game in "debian-app-dev:wheezy" container. The output of that is a new folder containing all the compiled game resources and another Dockerfile - this one describes the runtime dependencies of the game. Now when a docker image is built from this compiled folder, it is based on "debian-app:wheezy" container that no longer has any development tools and is optimized for speed and size. After this build is complete the developer exports the Docker image into a file. This file can contain either the full system needed to run the new game or (after #8214 is implemented) just the filesystem layers with the actual game files and enough meta-data to reconstruct the full environment from public Docker repos. The developer can then distribute this file to the end user in the way that is comfortable for them. The end user would download the game file (either trough an app store app, app store website or in any other way) and import it into local Docker instance. For user convenience we would need to come with an file extension and create some GUIs to launch for double click, similar to GDebi. Here the user would be able to review what permissions the app needs to run (like GL access, PulseAudio, webcam, storage for save files, ...). Enough metainfo and cooperation would have to exist to allow desktop menu to detect installed "apps" in Docker and show shortcuts to launch them. When the user does so, a new Docker container is launched running the command provided by the developer inside the container. Other metadata would determine other docker run options, such as whether to link over a socket for talking to PulseAudio or whether to mount in a folder into the container to where the game would be able to save its save files. Or even if the application would be able to access X (or Wayland) at all. Behind the scenes the application is running from the contained and stable libraries, but talking to a limited and restricted set of system level services. Those would need to be kept backwards compatible once we start this process. On the sandboxing part, not only our third party application is running in a very limited environment, but also we can enhance our system services to recognize requests from such applications via cgroups. This can, for example, allow a window manager to mark all windows spawned by an application even if the are from a bunch of different processes. Also the window manager can now track all processes of a logical application from any of its windows. For updates the developer can simply create a new image and distribute the same size file as before, or, if the purchase is going via some kind of app-store application, the layers that actually changed can be rsynced over individually thus creating a much faster update experience. Images with the same base can share data, this would encourage creation of higher level base images, such as "debian-app-gamegl:wheezy" that all GL game developers could use thus getting a smaller installation package. After a while the question of updating abandonware will come up. Say there is is this cool game built on top of "debian-app-gamegl:wheezy", but now there was a security bug or some other issue that requires the base image to be updated, but that would not require a recompile or a change to the game itself. If this Docker proposal is realized, then either the end user or a redistributor can easily re-base the old Docker image of the game on a new base. Using this mechanism it would also be possible to handle incompatible changes to system services - ten years down the line AwesomeAudio replaces PulseAudio, so we create a new "debian-app-gamegl:wheezy.14" version that contains a replacement libpulse that actually talks to AwesomeAudio system service instead. There is no need to re-invent everything or push everything and now package management too into systemd or push non-distribution application management into distribution tools. Separating things into logical blocks does not hurt their interoperability, but it allows to recombine them in a different way for a different purpose or to replace some part to create a system with a radically different functionality. Or am I crazy and we should just go and sacrifice Docker, apt, dpkg, FHS and non-btrfs filesystems on the altar of systemd? P.S. You might get the impression that I dislike systemd. I love it! Like an init system. And I love the ideas and talent of the systemd developers. But I think that systemd should have nothing to do with application distribution or processes started by users. I am sometimes getting an uncomfortable feeling that systemd is morphing towards replacing the whole of System V jumping all the way to System D and rewriting, obsoleting or absorbing everything between the kernel and Gnome. In my opinion it would be far healthier for the community if all of these projects would developed and be usable separately from systemd, so that other solutions can compete on a level playing field. Or, maybe, we could just confess that what systemd is doing is creating a new Linux meta-distribution.

I am among the lucky people who got back home from DebConf with a brand new computer: a Banana Pi. Despite the name similarity, it is not affiliated with the very well known Raspberry Pi, although it is a very comparable (although much better) machine: A dual-core ARM A7 system with 1GB RAM, several more on-board connectors, and same form-factor. I have not yet been able to get it to boot, even from the images distributed on their site (although I cannot complain, I have not devoted more than a hour or so to the process!), but I do have a gripe on how the images are distributed. I downloaded some images to play with: Bananian, Raspbian, a Scratch distribution, and Lubuntu. I know I have a long way to learn in order to contribute to Debian's ARM port, but if I can learn by doing... So, what is my gripe? That the three images are downloaded as archive files: Now... that is quite an odd way to distribute image files! Specially when looking at their contents: And what is bad about them? That they force me to either have heaps of disk space available (2GB or 4GB for each image) or to spend valuable time extracting before recording the image each time. Why not just compressing the image file without archiving it? That is,
Now, wouldn't we need to decompress said files as well? Yes, but thanks to the magic of shell redirections, we can just do it on the fly. That is, instead of having 3 4GB+1 2GB files sitting on my hard drive, I just need to have several files ranging between 145M and I guess ~1GB. Then, it's as easy as doing: And the result should be the same: A fresh new card with Bananian ready to fly. Right, right, people using these files need to have xz installed on their systems, but... As it stands now, I can suppose current prospective users of a Banana Pi won't fret about facing a standard Unix tool! (Yes, I'll forward this rant to the Banana people, it's not just bashing on my blog :-P ) [update] Several people (thanks!) have contacted me stating that I use a bashism: The <( ) construct is specific to Bash. If you want to do this with any other shell, it can be done with a simple pipe: That allows for less piping to be done on the kernel, and is portable between different shells. Also, a possibility would be: Although that might not be desirable, as it avoids the block-by-block nature of dd. I'm not sure if it makes a realdifference, but it's worth saying :) And yes, some alternatives for not unarchiving the file Here in the blog, an anon commenter suggests (respectively, for zip and .tar.gz files): And a commenter by IRC suggests: Thanks!

Review: Turn the Ship Around!, by L. David Marquet

Publisher:	Portfolio
Copyright:	2012
ISBN:	1-101-62369-1
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	272

Turn the Ship Around! (yes, complete with the irritating exclamation point in the title) is marketed to the business and management non-fiction market, which is clogged with books claiming to provide simple techniques to be a great manager or fix an organization. If you're like me, this is a huge turn-off. The presentation of the books is usually just shy of the click-bait pablum of self-help books. Many of the books are written by famous managers best known for doing horrible things to their staff (*cough* Jack Welch). It's hard to get away from the feeling that this entire class of books is an ocean of bromides covering a small core of outright evil. This book is not like that, and Marquet is not one of those managers. It can seem that way at times: it is presented in the format that caters to short attention span, with summaries of primary points at the end of every short chapter and occasionally annoying questions sprinkled throughout. I'm capable of generalizing information to my own life without being prompted by study questions, thanks. But that's just form. The core of this book is a surprisingly compelling story of Marquet's attempt to introduce a novel management approach into one of the most conservative and top-down of organizations: a US Navy nuclear submarine. I read this book as an individual employee, and someone who has no desire to ever be a manager. But I recently changed jobs and significantly disrupted my life because of a sequence of really horrible management decisions, so I have strong opinions about, at least, the type of management that's bad for employees. A colleague at my former employer recommended this book to me while talking about the management errors that were going on around us. It did such a good job of reinforcing my personal biases that I feel like I should mention that as a disclaimer. When one agrees with a book this thoroughly, one may not have sufficient distance from it to see the places where its arguments are flawed. At the start of the book, Marquet is assigned to take over as captain of a nuclear submarine that's struggling. It had a below-par performance rating, poor morale, and the worst re-enlistment rate in the fleet, and was not advancing officers and crew to higher ranks at anywhere near the level of other submarines. Marquet brought to this assignment some long-standing discomfort with the normal top-down decision-making processes in the Navy, and decided to try something entirely different: a program of radical empowerment, bottom-up decision-making, and pushing responsibility as far down the chain of command as possible. The result (as you might expect given that you can read a book about it) was one of the best-performing submarines in the fleet, with retention and promotion rates well above average. There's a lot in here about delegated decision-making and individual empowerment, but Turn the Ship Around! isn't only about that. Those are old (if often ignored) rules of thumb about how to manage properly. I think the most valuable part of this book is where Marquet talks frankly about his own thought patterns, his own mistakes, and the places where he had to change his behavior and attitude in order to make his strategy successful. It's one thing to say that individuals should be empowered; it's quite another to stop empowering them (which is still a top-down strategy) and start allowing them to be responsible. To extend trust and relinquish control, even though you're the one who will ultimately be held responsible for the performance of the people reporting to you. One of the problems with books like this is that they focus on how easy the techniques presented in the book are. Marquet does a more honest job in showing how difficult they are. His approach was not complex, but it was emotionally quite difficult, even though he was already biased in favor of it. The control, hierarchy, and authority parts of the book are the most memorable, but Marquet also talks about, and shows through specific examples from his command, some accompanying principles that are equally important. If everyone in an organization can make decisions, everyone has to understand the basis for making those decisions and understand the shared goals, which requires considerable communication and open discussion (particularly compared to a Navy ideal of an expert and taciturn captain). It requires giving people the space to be wrong, and requires empowering people to correct each other without blame. (There's a nice bit in here about the power of deliberate action, and while Marquet's presentation is more directly applicable to the sorts of physical actions taken in a submarine, I was immediately reminded of code review.) Marquet also has some interesting things to say about the power of, for lack of a better term, esprit de corps, how to create it, and the surprising power of acting like you have it until you actually develop it. As mentioned, this book is very closely in alignment with my own biases, so I'm not exactly an impartial reviewer. But I found it fascinating the degree to which the management situation I left was the exact opposite of the techniques presented in this book in nearly every respect. I found it quite inspiring during my transition period, and there are bits of it that I want to read again to keep some of the techniques and approaches fresh in my mind. There is a fair bit of self-help-style packaging and layout here, some of which I found irritating. If, like me, you don't like that style of book, you'll have to wade through a bit of it. I would have much preferred a more traditional narrative story from which I could draw my own conclusions. But it's more of a narrative than most books of this sort, and Marquet is humble enough to show his own thought processes, tensions, and mistakes, which adds a great deal to the presentation. I'm not sure how directly helpful this would be for a manager, since I've never been in that role, but it gave me a lot to think about when analyzing successful and unsuccessful work environments. Rating: 8 out of 10

I had dinner with a friend this evening and ended up discussing the FSF's four freedoms. The fundamental premise of the discussion was that the freedoms guaranteed by free software are largely academic unless you fall into one of two categories - someone who is sufficiently skilled in the arts of software development to examine and modify software to meet their own needs, or someone who is sufficiently privileged[1] to be able to encourage developers to modify the software to meet their needs.

The problem is that most people don't fall into either of these categories, and so the benefits of free software are often largely theoretical to them. Concentrating on philosophical freedoms without considering whether these freedoms provide meaningful benefits to most users risks these freedoms being perceived as abstract ideals, divorced from the real world - nice to have, but fundamentally not important. How can we tie these freedoms to issues that affect users on a daily basis?

In the past the answer would probably have been along the lines of "Free software inherently respects users", but reality has pretty clearly disproven that. Unity is free software that is fundamentally designed to tie the user into services that provide financial benefit to Canonical, with user privacy as a secondary concern. Despite Android largely being free software, many users are left with phones that no longer receive security updates[2]. Textsecure is free software but the author requests that builds not be uploaded to third party app stores because there's no meaningful way for users to verify that the code has not been modified - and there's a direct incentive for hostile actors to modify the software in order to circumvent the security of messages sent via it.

We're left in an awkward situation. Free software is fundamental to providing user privacy. The ability for third parties to continue providing security updates is vital for ensuring user safety. But in the real world, we are failing to make this argument - the freedoms we provide are largely theoretical for most users. The nominal security and privacy benefits we provide frequently don't make it to the real world. If users do wish to take advantage of the four freedoms, they frequently do so at a potential cost of security and privacy. Our focus on the four freedoms may be coming at a cost to the pragmatic freedoms that our users desire - the freedom to be free of surveillance (be that government or corporate), the freedom to receive security updates without having to purchase new hardware on a regular basis, the freedom to choose to run free software without having to give up basic safety features.

That's why projects like the GNOME safety and privacy team are so important. This is an example of tying the four freedoms to real-world user benefits, demonstrating that free software can be written and managed in such a way that it actually makes life better for the average user. Designing code so that users are fundamentally in control of any privacy tradeoffs they make is critical to empowering users to make informed decisions. Committing to meaningful audits of all network transmissions to ensure they don't leak personal data is vital in demonstrating that developers fundamentally respect the rights of those users. Working on designing security measures that make it difficult for a user to be tricked into handing over access to private data is going to be a necessary precaution against hostile actors, and getting it wrong is going to ruin lives.

The four freedoms are only meaningful if they result in real-world benefits to the entire population, not a privileged minority. If your approach to releasing free software is merely to ensure that it has an approved license and throw it over the wall, you're doing it wrong. We need to design software from the ground up in such a way that those freedoms provide immediate and real benefits to our users. Anything else is a failure.

(title courtesy of My Feminism will be Intersectional or it will be Bullshit by Flavia Dzodan. While I'm less angry, I'm solidly convinced that free software that does nothing to respect or empower users is an absolute waste of time)

[1] Either in the sense of having enough money that you can simply pay, having enough background in the field that you can file meaningful bug reports or having enough followers on Twitter that simply complaining about something results in people fixing it for you

[2] The free software nature of Android often makes it possible for users to receive security updates from a third party, but this is not always the case. Free software makes this kind of support more likely, but it is in no way guaranteed.

comments

So Monty and Sean have recently blogged about about the structures (1, 2) they think may work better for OpenStack. I like the thrust of their thinking but had some mumblings of my own to add. Firstly, I very much like the focus on social structure and needs what our users and deployers need from us. That seems entirely right. And I very much like the getting away from TC picking winners and losers. That was never an enjoyable thing when I was on the TC, and I don t think it has made OpenStack better. However, the thing that picking winners and losers did was that it allowed users to pick an API and depend on it. Because it was the X API for OpenStack . If we don t pick winners, then there is no way to say that something is the X API for OpenStack , and that means that there is no forcing function for consistency between different deployer clouds. And so this appears to be why Ring 0 is needed: we think our users want consistency in being able to deploy their application to Rackspace or HP Helion. They want vendor neutrality, and by giving up winners-and-losers we give up vendor neutrality for our users. Thats the only explanation I can come up with for needing a Ring 0 because its still winners and losers (e.g. picking an arbitrary project) keystone, grandfathering it in, if you will. If we really want to get out of the role of selecting projects, I think we need to avoid this. And we need to avoid it without losing vendor neutrality (or we need to give up the idea of vendor neutrality). One might say that we must pick winners for the very core just by its, but I don t think thats true. If the core is small, many people will still want vendor neutrality higher up the stack. If the core is large, then we ll have a larger % of APIs covered and stable granting vendor neutrality. So a core with fixed APIs will be under constant pressure to expand: not just from developers of projects, but from users that want API X to be fixed and guaranteed available and working a particular way at [most] OpenStack clouds. Ring 0 also fulfils a quality aspect we can check that it all works together well in a realistic timeframe with our existing tooling. We are essentially proposing to pick functionality that we guarantee to users; and an API for that which they have everywhere, and the matching implementation we ve tested. To pull from Monty s post: What does a basic end user need to get a compute resource that works and seems like a computer? (end user facet) What does Nova need to count on existing so that it can provide that. He then goes on to list a bunch of things, but most of them are not needed for that: We need Nova (its the only compute API in the project today). We don t need keystone (Nova can run in noauth mode and deployers could just have e.g. Apache auth on top). We don t need Neutron (Nova can do that itself). We don t need cinder (use local volumes). We need Glance. We don t need Designate. We don t need a tonne of stuff that Nova has in it (e.g. quotas) end users kicking off a simple machine have -very- basic needs. Consider the things that used to be in Nova: Deploying containers. Neutron. Cinder. Glance. Ironic. We ve been slowly decomposing Nova (yay!!!) and if we keep doing so we can imagine getting to a point where there truly is a tightly focused code base that just does one thing well. I worry that we won t get there unless we can ensure there is no pressure to be inside Nova to win . So there s a choice between a relatively large set of APIs that make the guaranteed available APIs be comprehensive, or a small set that that will give users what they need just at the beginning but might not be broadly available and we ll be depending on some unspecified process for the deployers to agree and consolidate around what ones they make available consistently. In sort one of the big reasons we were picking winners and losers in the TC was to consolidate effort around a single API not implementation (keystone is already on its second implementation). All the angst about defcore and compatibility testing is going to be multiplied when there is lots of ecosystem choice around APIs above Ring 0, and the only reason that won t be a problem for Ring 0 is that we ll still be picking winners. How might we do this? One way would be to keep picking winners at the API definition level but not the implementation level, and make the competition be able to replace something entirely if they implement the existing API [and win hearts and minds of deployers]. That would open the door to everything being flexible and its happened before with Keystone. Another way would be to not even have a Ring 0. Instead have a project/program that is aimed at delivering the reference API feature-set built out of a single, flat Big Tent and allow that project/program to make localised decisions about what components to use (or not). Testing that all those things work together is not much different than the current approach, but we d have separated out as a single cohesive entity the building of a product (Ring 0 is clearly a product) from the projects that might go into it. Projects that have unstable APIs would clearly be rejected by this team; projects with stable APIs would be considered etc. This team wouldn t be the TC : they too would be subject to the TC s rulings. We could even run multiple such teams as hinted at by Dean Troyer one of the email thread posts. Running with that I d then be suggesting

• IaaS product: selects components from the tent to make OpenStack/IaaS
• PaaS product: selects components from the tent to make OpenStack/PaaS
• CaaS product (containers)
• SaaS product (storage)
• NaaS product (networking but things like NFV, not the basic Neutron we love today). Things where the thing you get is useful in its own right, not just as plumbing for a VM.

So OpenStack/NaaS would have an API or set of APIs, and they d be responsible for considering maturity, feature set, and so on, but wouldn t own Neutron, or Neutron incubator or any other component they would be a *cross project* team, focused at the product layer, rather than the component layer, which nearly all of our folk end up locked into today. Lastly Sean has also pointed out that we have large N N^2 communication issues I think I m proposing to drive the scope of any one project down to a minimum, which gives us more N, but shrinks the size within any project, so folk don t burn out as easily, *and* so that it is easier to predict the impact of changes clear contracts and APIs help a huge amount there.

I (grudgingly) use the Calibre e-book management software to handle my collection of books, and copy them over to my kindle-toy. One thing that has always bothered me was the fact that when books are imported their ratings are too. If I receive a small sample of ebooks from a friend their ratings are added to my collections. I've always regarded ratings as things personal to me, rather than attributes of a book itself; as my tastes might not match yours, and vice-versa. On that basis the last time I was importing a small number of books and getting annoyed at having to manually reset all the imported ratings I decided to do something about it. I started hacking and put together a simple Calibre plugin to automatically zero ratings when books are imported to the collection (i.e. set the rating to be zero). Sadly this work wasn't painless, despite the small size, as an unfortunate bug in Calibre meant my plugin method wasn't called. Happily Kovid Goyal helped me work through the problem, and he committed a fix that will be in the next Calibre release. For the moment I'm using today's git-snapshot and it works well. Similarly I've recently started using extended file attributes to store metadata on my desktop system. Unfortunately the GNU findutils package doesn't allow you to do the obvious thing:

$ find ~/foo -xattr user.comment
/home/skx/foo/bar/t.txt
/home/skx/foo/bar/xc.txt
/home/skx/foo/bar/x.txt

There are several xattr patches floating around, but I had to bundle my own in debian/patches to get support for finding files that have particular attribute names. Maybe one day extended attributes will be taken seriously. (rsync, cp, etc will preserve them. I'm hazy on the compatibility with tar, but most things seem to be working.)

Dear lazyweb, I am tired of finding how to get my users to happily print again. Please help. Details follow. Several years ago, I configured our Institute's server to provide easy, nifty printing support for all of our users. Using Samba+CUPS, I automatically provided drivers to Windows client machines, integration with our network user scheme (allowing for groups authorization That means, you can only print in your designated printer), flexible printer management (i.e. I can change printers on the server side without the users even noticing Great when we get new hardware or printers get sent to repairs!)... Then, this year the people in charge of client machines in the institute decided to finally ditch WinXP licenses and migrate to Windows 7. Sweet! How can it hurt? Oh, it can hurt. Terribly. Windows 7 uses a different driver model, and after quite a bit of hair loss, I was not able to convince Samba to deliver drivers to Win7 (FWIW, I think we are mostly using 64 bit versions). Not only that, it also barfs when we try to install drivers manually and print to a share. And of course, it barfs in the least useful way, so it took me quite a bit of debugging and Web reading to find out it was not only my fault. So, many people have told me that Samba (or rather, Windows-type networking) is no longer regarded as a good idea for printing. The future is here, and it's called IPP. And it is simpler, because Windows can talk directly with CUPS! Not only that, CUPS allows me to set valid users+groups to each printer. So, what's there to lose? Besides time, that is. It took me some more hair pulling to find out that Windows 7 is shipped by default (at least in the version I'm using) with the Internet Printing Server feature disabled. Duh. OK, enable it, and... Ta-da! It works with CUPS! Joy, happiness! Only that... It works only when I use it with no authentication. Windows has an open issue, with its corresponding hotfix even, because Win7 and 2008 fail to provide user credentials to print servers... So, yes, I can provide site-wide printing capabilities, but I still cannot provide per-user or per-group authorization and accounting, which are needed here. I cannot believe this issue cannot be solved under Windows 7, several years after it hit the market. Or am I just too blunt and cannot find an obvious solution? Dear lazyweb, I did my homework. Please help me!

Pressure I've just stumbled on this bit that seems relevant to me:

Insist on using objective criteria The final step is to use mutually agreed and objective criteria for evaluating the candidate solutions. During this stage they encourage openness and surrender to principle not pressure. http://www.wikisummaries.org/Getting_to_Yes

I find the concept of "pressure" very relevant, and I like the idea of discussions being guided by content rather than pressure. I'm exploring the idea of filing under this concept of "pressure" most of the things described in code of conducts, and I'm toying with looking at gender or race issues from the point of view of making people surrender to pressure. In that context, most code of conducts seem to be giving a partial definition of "pressure". I've been uncomfortable at DebConf this year, because the conference PG12 code of conduct would cause me trouble for talking about what lessons can Debian learn from consent culture in BDSM communities, but it would still allow situations in which people would have to yield to pressure, as long as the pressure was done avoiding the behaviours blacklisted by the CoC. Pressure could be the phrase "you are wrong" without further explanation, spoken by someone with more reputation than I have in a project. It could be someone with the time for writing ten emails a day discussing with someone with barely the time to write one. It could be someone using elaborate English discussing with someone who needs to look up every other word in a dictionary. It could be just ignoring emails from people who have issues different than mine. I like the idea of having "please do not use pressure to bring your issues forward" written somewhere, rather than spend time blacklisting all possible ways of pressuring people. I love how the Diversity Statement is elegantly getting all this where it says: We welcome contributions from everyone as long as they interact constructively with our community. However, I also find it hard not to fall back to using pressure, even just for self-preservation: I have often found myself in the situation of having the responsibility to get a job done, and not having the time or emotional resources to even read the emails I get about the subject. All my life I've seen people in such a situation yell "shut up and let me work!", and I feel a burning thirst for other kinds of role models. A CoC saying "do not use pressure" would not help me much here, but being around people who do that, learning to notice when and how they do it, and knowing that I could learn from them, that certainly would. If you can link to examples, I'd like to add them here.

Last time I told that I would release software I used to make RFS stats plots. You can find it in my github repo - github.com/tdi/debrfstats. The software contains small class to get data needed to generate plots, as well as for doing some simple bug analysis. The software also contains an R script to make plots from a CSV file. For now debrfstats uses SOAP interface to Debbugs but I am now working on adding a UDD data source. The software is written in Python 2 (SOAPpy does not come in 3 flavour), some usage examples are in the main.py file in the repository. If you have any questions or wishes for debrfstats do not hesitate to contact me.

I have an office with a nice large window, but more often than not I have to close the shades to be able to see something on my screen. Even worse: There were so many nice and sunny days where I would have loved to take my laptop outside and work there, but it (a Thinkpad T430s) is simply not usable in bright sun. I have seen those nice eInk based eBook readers, who are clearer the brighter they are. That s what I want for my laptop, and I am willing to sacrifice color and a bit of usability due to latency for being able to work in the bright daylight! So while I was in Portland for DebConf14 (where I guess I felt a bit more like tinkering than otherwise) I bought a Kobo Aura HD. I chose this device because it has a resolution similar to my laptop (1440 1080) and I have seen reports from people running their own software on it, including completely separate systems such as Debian or Android. This week, I was able to play around with it. It was indeed simple to tinker with: You can simply copy a tarball to it which is then extracted over the root file system. There are plenty of instructions online, but I found it easier to take them as inspiration and do it my way with basic Linux knowledge that s possible. This way, I extended the system boot script with a hook to a file on the internal SD card, and this file then runs the telnetd daemon that comes with the device s busybox installation. Then I just have to make the device go online and telnet onto it. From there it is a pretty normal Linux system, albeit without an X server, using the framebuffer directly. I even found an existing project providing a VNC client implementation for this and other devices, and pretty soon I could see my laptop screen on the Kobo. Black and white worked fine, but colors and greyscales, including all anti-aliased fonts, were quite broken. After some analysis I concluded that it was confusing the bit pattern of the pixels. Luckily kvncclient shares that code with koreader, which worked fine on my device, so I could copy some files and settings from there et voil : I now have an eInk monitor for my laptop. As a matter of fact, I am writing this text with my Kobo sitting on top of the folded-back laptop screen! I did some minor adjustments to my laptop:

• I changed the screen size to match the Kobo s resolution. Using xrandr s --panning option this is possible even though my real screen is only 900 pixels high.
• I disabled the cursor-blink where possible. In general, screen updates should be avoided, so I hide my taffybar (which has a CPU usage monitor) and text is best written at the very end of the line (and not before a, say, </p>).
• My terminal windows are now black-on-white.
• I had to increase my font-size a bit (the kobo has quite a high DPI), and color is not helpful (so :set syntax=off in vim).

All this is still very manual (going online with the kobo, finding its IP address, logging in via telnet, killing the Kobo's normal main program, starting x11vnc, finding my ip address, starting the vnc client, doing the adjustments mentioned above), so I need to automate it a bit. Unfortunately, there is no canonical way to extend the Kobo by your own application: The Kobo developers made their device quite open, but stopped short from actually encouraging extensions, so people have created many weird ways to start programs on the Kobo dedicated start menus, background programs observing when the regular Kobo app opens a specific file, complete replacements for the system. I am considering to simply run an SSH server on the device and drive the whole process from the laptop. I ll keep you up-to-date. A dream for the future would be to turn the kobo into a USB monitor and simply connect it to any computer, where it then shows up as a new external monitor. I wonder if there is a standard for USB monitors, and if it is simple enough (but I doubt it). A word about the kobo development scene: It seems to be quite active and healthy, and a number of interesting applications are provided for it. But unfortunately it all happens on a web forum, and they use it not only for discussion, but also as a wiki, a release page, a bug tracker, a feature request list and as a support line often on one single thread with dozens of posts. This makes it quite hard to find relevant information and decide whether it is still up-to-date. Unfortunately, you cannot really do without it. The PDF viewer that comes with the kobo is barely okish (e.g. no crop functionality), so installing, say, koreader is a must if you read more PDFs than actual ebooks. And then you have to deal with the how-to-start-it problem. That reminds me: I need to find a decent RSS reader for the kobo, or possibly a good RSS-to-epub converter that I can run automatically. Any suggestions? PS and related to this project: Thanks to Kathey!

ACPI is a complicated specification - the latest version is 980 pages long. But that's because it's trying to define something complicated: an entire interface for abstracting away hardware details and making it easier for an unmodified OS to boot diverse platforms.

Inevitably, though, it can't define the full behaviour of an ACPI system. It doesn't explicitly state what should happen if you violate the spec, for instance. Obviously, in a just and fair world, no systems would violate the spec. But in the grim meathook future that we actually inhabit, systems do. We lack the technology to go back in time and retroactively prevent this, and so we're forced to deal with making these systems work.

This ends up being a pain in the neck in the x86 world, but it could be much worse. Way back in 2008 I wrote something about why the Linux kernel reports itself to firmware as "Windows" but refuses to identify itself as Linux. The short version is that "Linux" doesn't actually identify the behaviour of the kernel in a meaningful way. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the kernel can deal with buffers being passed when the spec says it should be a package. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the OS knows how to deal with an HPET. "Linux" doesn't tell you whether the OS can reinitialise graphics hardware.

Back then I was writing from the perspective of the firmware changing its behaviour in response to the OS, but it turns out that it's also relevant from the perspective of the OS changing its behaviour in response to the firmware. Windows 8 handles backlights differently to older versions. Firmware that's intended to support Windows 8 may expect this behaviour. If the OS tells the firmware that it's compatible with Windows 8, the OS has to behave compatibly with Windows 8.

In essence, if the firmware asks for Windows 8 support and the OS says yes, the OS is forming a contract with the firmware that it will behave in a specific way. If Windows 8 allows certain spec violations, the OS must permit those violations. If Windows 8 makes certain ACPI calls in a certain order, the OS must make those calls in the same order. Any firmware bug that is triggered by the OS not behaving identically to Windows 8 must be dealt with by modifying the OS to behave like Windows 8.

This sounds horrifying, but it's actually important. The existence of well-defined[1] OS behaviours means that the industry has something to target. Vendors test their hardware against Windows, and because Windows has consistent behaviour within a version[2] the vendors know that their machines won't suddenly stop working after an update. Linux benefits from this because we know that we can make hardware work as long as we're compatible with the Windows behaviour.

That's fine for x86. But remember when I said it could be worse? What if there were a platform that Microsoft weren't targeting? A platform where Linux was the dominant OS? A platform where vendors all test their hardware against Linux and expect it to have a consistent ACPI implementation?

Our even grimmer meathook future welcomes ARM to the ACPI world.

Software development is hard, and firmware development is software development with worse compilers. Firmware is inevitably going to rely on undefined behaviour. It's going to make assumptions about ordering. It's going to mishandle some cases. And it's the operating system's job to handle that. On x86 we know that systems are tested against Windows, and so we simply implement that behaviour. On ARM, we don't have that convenient reference. We are the reference. And that means that systems will end up accidentally depending on Linux-specific behaviour. Which means that if we ever change that behaviour, those systems will break.

So far we've resisted calls for Linux to provide a contract to the firmware in the way that Windows does, simply because there's been no need to - we can just implement the same contract as Windows. How are we going to manage this on ARM? The worst case scenario is that a system is tested against, say, Linux 3.19 and works fine. We make a change in 3.21 that breaks this system, but nobody notices at the time. Another system is tested against 3.21 and works fine. A few months later somebody finally notices that 3.21 broke their system and the change gets reverted, but oh no! Reverting it breaks the other system. What do we do now? The systems aren't telling us which behaviour they expect, so we're left with the prospect of adding machine-specific quirks. This isn't scalable.

Supporting ACPI on ARM means developing a sense of discipline around ACPI development that we simply haven't had so far. If we want to avoid breaking systems we have two options:

1) Commit to never modifying the ACPI behaviour of Linux.
2) Exposing an interface that indicates which well-defined ACPI behaviour a specific kernel implements, and bumping that whenever an incompatible change is made. Backward compatibility paths will be required if firmware only supports an older interface.

(1) is unlikely to be practical, but (2) isn't a great deal easier. Somebody is going to need to take responsibility for tracking ACPI behaviour and incrementing the exported interface whenever it changes, and we need to know who that's going to be before any of these systems start shipping. The alternative is a sea of ARM devices that only run specific kernel versions, which is exactly the scenario that ACPI was supposed to be fixing.

[1] Defined by implementation, not defined by specification
[2] Windows may change behaviour between versions, but always adds a new _OSI string when it does so. It can then modify its behaviour depending on whether the firmware knows about later versions of Windows.

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We recently released a new version of NetSurf this was largely to address numerous small bugs but did also include the persistent caching implementation I have written about previously. A release used to require the release manager (usually me) to perform a lot of manual processes and while we had a checklist it was far too easy to miss things.

The Continuous Integration (CI) system combined with signed release tags in git has resulted in a greatly simplified process indeed it has become almost completely automated. The majority of the manual work is now confined to doing the tasks that require actual decision making and checking we are releasing what was intended.

By having the CI system build release binaries the project now has a much clearer and importantly traceable process, I can recommend such a system to any project that produces releases especially if they release binaries for any of their targets.

I have also managed to package and upload this version of NetSurf ready for the Debian Jessie release. I would like to thank Jonathan Wiltshire for his assistance in ensuring this was a good quality package.

The release incorporates the successfully merged work of Rupinder Singh who was our our GSoc 2014 student. Rupinder mainly made improvements to our core DOM implementation and was very responsive and enthusiastic throughout his time despite the mentor team sometimes not being available.

This work goes towards improving NetSurf in the future by ensuring the underlying features are present in our core libraries. The GSoc mentors and all project developers are all pleased with the results of this years GSoc participation and would like to thank everyone involved in making our participation possible.

Along with the good news comes a little bad:

PowerPC Mac OS X

Despite repeated calls for assistance with new hardware and Java builds none has been forthcoming meaning that from this release we ware no longer able to ship PowerPC builds for MAC OS X.

The main issue is the last version of MAC OS X that runs on PPC is Leopard and there is no viable Java 1.6 port necessary for our CI system to run. Additionally the fully loaded PPC Mac mini (kindly donated to us by Mythic Beasts) had become far too slow to keep up with our builds and was causing long delays.

Bugs

We have a lot of bugs, in fact just during this release cycle we have 30 more bugs reported than we closed.So while the new bug reporting system has been a success and our users are reporting issues when they find them the development team is not keeping up..

The failure to keep up stems from the underlying issue of lack of manpower. We have relatively few active developers which is especially problematic when there are many users for a platform, such as RISCOS, but the maintainer is unable to commit enough time to fixing issues.

If you would like to help making NetSurf a better browser we are always happy to work with new contributors.

I m not used to talking about my day job but here s an exception. Over the past few years I worked in two startups (3 years each). It was nice to spend time in different areas: one job was mostly about research and development in a Linux cluster environment; the other one was about maintaining a highly-customized, Linux-based operating system, managing a small support team, and performing technological surveillance in IT security. In the meanwhile I ve reached a milestone: 10 years with Debian. I had been wondering for a few months whether I could try my luck going freelance, becoming a Debian consultant. I finally decided to go ahead and started in August! The idea is to lend a hand for various Debian-related things like systems administration, development/debugging, packaging/repository maintenance, or Debian Installer support, be it one-shot or on a regular basis. I didn t think about trainings/workshops at first but sharing knowledge is something I ve always liked, even if I didn t become a teacher. For those interested, details can be found on my website: https://mraw.org/. Of course this doesn t mean I m going to put an end to my volunteer activities within Debian, especially as a Debian Installer release manager. Quite the contrary in fact! See the August and September debian-boot@ archives, which have been busy months. :)

Last week s autopkgtest 3.5 release (in Debian sid and Ubuntu Utopic) brings several new features which I d like to announce. Tests that reboot For testing low-level packages like init or the kernel it is sometimes desirable to reboot the testbed in the middle of a test. For example, I added a new boot_and_services systemd autopkgtest which configures grub to boot with systemd as pid 1, reboots, and then checks that the most important services like lightdm, D-BUS, NetworkManager, and cron come up as expected. (This test will be expanded a lot in the future to cover other areas like the journal, logind, etc.) In a testbed which supports rebooting (currently only QEMU) your test will now find an autopkgtest-reboot command which the test calls with an arbitrary marker string. autopkgtest will then reboot the testbed, save/restore any files it needs to (like the tests file tree or previously created artifacts), and then re-run the test with ADT_REBOOT_MARK=mymarker. The new Reboot during a test section in README.package-tests explains this in detail with an example. Implicit test metadata for similar packages The Debian pkg-perl team recently discussed how to add package tests to the ~ 3.000 Perl packages. For most of these the test metadata looks pretty much the same, so they created a new pkg-perl-autopkgtest package which centralizes the logic. autopkgtest 3.5 now supports an implicit debian/tests/control control file to avoid having to modify several thousand packages with exactly the same file. An initial run already looked quite promising, 65% of the packages pass their tests. There will be a few iterations to identify common failures and fix those in pkg-perl-autopkgtest and autopkgtestitself now. There is still some discussion about how implicit test control files go together with the DEP-8 specification, as other runners like sadt do not support them yet. Most probably we ll declare those packages XS-Testsuite: autopkgtest-pkg-perl instead of the usual autopkgtest. In the same vein, Debian s Ruby maintainer (Antonio Terceiro) added implicit test control support for Ruby packages. We haven t done a mass test run with those yet, but their structure will probably look very similar.

AltOS 1.5 EasyMega support, features and bug fixes Bdale and I are pleased to announce the release of AltOS version 1.5. AltOS is the core of the software for all of the Altus Metrum products. It consists of firmware for our cc1111, STM32L151, LPC11U14 and ATtiny85 based electronics and Java-based ground station software. This is a major release of AltOS, including support for our new EasyMega board and a host of new features and bug fixes AltOS Firmware EasyMega added, new features and fixes Our new flight computer, EasyMega, is a TeleMega without any radios:

• 9 DoF IMU (3 axis accelerometer, 3 axis gyroscope, 3 axis compass).
• Orientation tracking using the gyroscopes (and quaternions, which are lots of fun!)
• Four fully-programmable pyro channels, in addition to the usual apogee and main channels.

AltOS Changes We've made a few improvements in the firmware:

• The APRS secondary station identifier (SSID) is now configurable by the user. By default, it is set to the last digit of the serial number.
• Continuity of the four programmable pyro channels on EasyMega and TeleMega is now indicated via the beeper. Four tones are sent out after the continuity indication for the apogee and main channels with high tones indicating continuity and low tones indicating an open circuit.
• Configurable telemetry data rates. You can now select among 38400 (the previous value, and still the default), 9600 or 2400 bps. To take advantage of this, you'll need to reflash your TeleDongle or TeleBT.

AltOS Bug Fixes We also fixed a few bugs in the firmware:

• TeleGPS had separate flight logs, one for each time the unit was turned on. Turning the unit on to test stuff and turning it back off would consume one of the flight log 'slots' on the board; once all of the slots were full, no further logging would take place. Now, TeleGPS appends new data to an existing single log.
• Increase the maximum computed altitude from 32767m to 2147483647m. Back when TeleMetrum v1.0 was designed, we never dreamed we'd be flying to 100k' or more. Now that's surprisingly common, and so we've increased the size of the altitude data values to fit modern rocketry needs.
• Continuously evaluate pyro firing condition during delay period. The previous firmware would evaluate the pyro firing requirements, and once met, would delay by the indicated amount and then fire the channel. If the conditions had changed state, the channel would still fire. Now, the conditions are continuously evaluated during the delay period and if they change state, the event is suppressed.
• Allow negative values in the pyro configuration. Now you can select a negative speed to indicate a descent rate or a negative acceleration value to indicate acceleration towards the ground.

AltosUI and TeleGPS EasyMega support, OS integration and more The AltosUI and TeleGPS applications have a few changes for this release:

• EasyMega support. That was a simple matter of adapting the existing TeleMega support.
• Added icons for our file types, and hooked up the file manager so that AltosUI, TeleGPS and/or MicroPeak are used to view any of our data files.
• Configuration support for APRS SSIDs, and telemetry data rates.

I previously forgot to mention that I was planning to attend DebConf14, having missed DebConf13. This year the conference was held in Portland, OR. This is a city I've been to many times before, and enjoy, but I hadn't spent any time wandering around its city centre as a pedestrian. I have to say I really prefer DebConfs that are held in middle of city. It always seems a bit of a shame to travel some distance to somewhere new and spend all the time there in a conference venue. Plus these days I have the added lure of going out and playing Ingress in a new location. DebConf14 didn't disappoint in these respects; the location was super easy to get to from the airport via public transportation, all of the evening social events were within reasonable walking distance (I'll tend to default to walking when possible) and the talk venue/accommodation were close to each other and various eating + drinking options. Throw in the fact at Portland managed to produce some excellent weather (modulo my Ingress session on the last Saturday morning, when rained on me) and it's impossible to fault the physicalities of DebConf this year. This year the conference format was a bit different; previous years have had a week long DebConf before the week of the conference itself. This year went for a 9 day talk schedule (Saturday -> Sunday) with various gaps of hacking time interspersed. I've found it hard to justify a full two weeks away in the past, so this setup worked a lot better from my viewpoint. Also I rarely go to DebConf with a predetermined list of things to do; the stuff I work on naturally falls out of talks I attend and informal discussions I have. Having hack time throughout the conference helped me avoid feeling I was having to trade off hacking vs talks. Naturally enough a lot of my involvement at DebConf was around OpenPGP. Gunnar and I spent a fair bit of time getting Daniel up to speed with the keyring-maint team (Gunnar more than I, I'll confess). We finally set a hard timeframe for freeing Debian of older 1024 bit keys. I was introduced to the Gnuk, which is a particularly interesting piece of open specification hardware with a completely Free software stack on top if it that implements the OpenPGP smartcard spec. Currently it's limited to 2K keys but it's hoped that 4K support can be added (and I ended up spending a couple of hours after the closing talk hacking on the source and seeing how much needs to change for 4K support, aided by the very patient Niibe). These are the sort of things that really benefit from the face time that DebConf offers to the Debian project. I've said it before, but I think it's worth saying again: Debian is a bit like a huge telecommuting organization and it's my opinion that any such organization should try and ensure its members actually spend some time together on a regular basis. It improves the ability to work remotely a hell of a lot if you can actually put a face to the entity you're emailing / IRCing and have some sort of idea where they're coming from because you've spent some time with them, whether that's in talks or over dinner or just casual hallway chats. For once I also found myself considering alternative employment while at DebConf and it was incredibly useful to be able to have various conversations with both old friends and people who were there with an eye on recruitment. Thanks to all those whose ears I bent about the subject (and more on the outcome in a future post). Thank you also to the many people involved with the organization of DebConf; I've been on the periphery a few times over the years and it's given me a glimpse into the amount of hard work all of the volunteers (be they global team, local organizing team, video team or just random volunteers) put into making DebConf one of my must-attend yearly conferences. If you're at all involved in Debian and haven't attended I strongly urge you to do so - I'll see you all next year at DebConf15 in Heidelberg!