I want to respond to jb’s cry, after all I’m his favorite teletubby and his message is full of references to events where I’m involved. I’m sure he’s honest in his message but still he misses some points. Julien says :

we never agreed to be nice to each other

That’s true I’m part of several other associations and I never had to sign a paper saying that I’ll be nice with others. Nevertheless, each time that someone misbehaved he was sanctionned. And nobody in the club took the defense of the faulty person in the name of “free speech”. Understand me, if we didn’t have any problem, I wouldn’t make efforts to define a “Code of conduct”. I’m not a fan of “Ubuntu’s love here, love there” and I certainly don’t want a world of friendly clones within Debian. I believe there’s room for a code of conduct that would let us work together in a friendly manner.

this project used to be open-minded

Being open-minded applies to people not to a project. Now it’s time that you discover that with 1000 people you have far more chance than with 200 to have several narrow-minded people in the set … and that everyone has his own definition of what open-minded means. That’s why we need to write down what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’ve heard you several times complain about the behaviour of other Debian developers, why not use the opportunity offered by a code of conduct to define how we should aim to work together ?

We are doing it all for fun

True again ! So how difficult is it to imagine that being insulted is not fun ? And since we’re all volunteers, there’s no good reason to let some people kill the fun out of it…

I don t use kill-files

That’s because you have the luck to have a thick skin. I avoid kill files as well. But look at Lars Wirzenius, look at Theodore Y. Ts’o, they all recognize that they can’t stand the level of unfriendliness that we sometimes reach. I want to be able to work with everyone and not only with those who have leather instead of skin.

Help tell those people to FOAD

Is that your way of being open minded ? Ok, it’s a bit out of context but nevertheless, there’s some truth in my criticism:

• Stop yelling each time that someone mentions Ubuntu, Debian is not Ubuntu but we have so many things in common that we can both take advantages of what the other is doing.
• Even if you have a thick skin, it’s not a reason to be harsh with any other Debian developer, not everybody is like you !

And to finish this (long) post, let’s agree on something: yes we’re a technical community, yes we should put Debian’s interests first ! (By the way, on this subject it looks like I agree with MJ Ray. It doesn’t happen very often! )

I would have thought that three years after the start of the war, Iraq would be yet another forgotten war, as it tends to happen when murder, bombings, famine and corruption become the routine in some country or area. It's been nearly three years since the holy coalition made up of United States and the UK, with a selected group of allies which included the Spain of our beloved Aznar, invaded the country to save the poor iraqi people from the fierce Sadam. After a few months of hard fight against the bloody dictator, Iraq would finally be able to live in peace and Democracy, and the world would understand the goodness behind the reasoning that made the superpowers start the second war in Iraq, against the opinion of the UN security council and an overwhelming majority of the people in the planet. Today, after years of bloodbaths in different parts of Iraq, we're witnessing the start of a civil war. I hope the mass media stop talking about "the terrorists" now, because what's been going on for the last week is random people against random people. It makes me sick to think how bad the near future looks in Iraq. All of this happened in the name of freedom, or so they said. And then, it was in the name of the War on Terror , because Iraq was infested with terrorists (they never told us how they planned to stop that from happening). In the meanwhile, little they talk about the most wanted man on earth, uncle Osama. Today's edition of EL PAIS includes a translation of an article by Ahmed Rashid in The Washington Post's edition of February 26, apropos of George Bush's visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan this week. He's Welcome In Pakistan is surely worth a read; I'm sure Miguel will enjoy.

I went to FOSDEM in Brussels for the weekend. I had a great time. Some scattered notes:

• Air travel still makes me feel like I'm treated as cattle.
• Leaving unnecessary stuff (like my laptop) at home was a good idea. My luggage was lighter, and I spent less time fiddling with my computer and more time speaking with people. Or at least trying to, I'm still shy and introverted, so it's hard to strike up conversations.
• I still brought unnecessary stuff with me, like a sweater I never used. It took up a lot of space in my backpack.
• Djelibeybi, the Samsung YP-T portable music device that plays Ogg Vorbis files, turns out to be a really good idea for trips. It's small and light, and drowns out other people's conversations on planes so that I can get some sleep.
• A checklist of all the things I had with me made packing for the return trip a lot easier, since I didn't have to worry that I forgot something somewhere.
• A paper notebook for taking notes in works as well as a laptop, except that my handwriting font is worse than the one in my editor.
• An inflatable neck pillow made my sleeping on the plane almost comfortable, until it stopped keeping the air inside. The "cork" that plugs the hole wouldn't stay inside anymore. There must be a better way for this.
• The pre-FOSDEM gathering in the Roy d'Espange restaurant is a wonderful thing. It's way too crowded and noisy, however.
• Lots of people told me they were sorry to see me drop out of the DPL elections, and that they would really have liked to vote for me. Thanks for that. A few of them spent some energy trying to convince me to not drop out, but had no luck. If you liked my draft of a platform, please try to push ideas from it to the candidates. It's the issues and goals that count, and what actually gets done, after all, not the person.
• Conferences make sleeping difficult. I was tired all the time. Also, I walked around or was otherwise on my feet most of the time, and my feet are really, really sore.
• Jeroen's and Enrico's talk about the DPL team was nice. My main impression, however, was that the DPL and DPL team have mainly concentrated on diplomacy between various parts of the project, and to me, that's an indication that there's something seriously wrong that needs fixing.
• I brought four Debian amulets of glass and tin with me to be sold, and they were all sold, and at least one person was left without. They're made by a Finnish artist/craftsperson, and cost ten euros (though the price may go up a bit the next time), and were not sold for profit. Leena "Droidy" Romppainen arranged for them to be made. If anyone wants one, we could have some more made and I can bring them to, say, Debconf in May. Mail me.
• Holger and Herman recorded talks in the Debian devroom. This is a very nice thing, I can't wait to see mine. It would be ultracool if we could get a setup where such recordings could easily be made whenever Debian people gather. That's a lot of work, though.
• Martin Krafft's talk was inspiring, and gives me hope that he will come up with good things in the future. It was a talk about work to be done, so not yet concrete advice of how things can be done in better ways. Ideas, not experiences, at this stage. The next couple of years will hopefully be interesting.
• My talk seems to not have been disliked. Incidentally, Wouter, I didn't make a conscious reference to Hanna's talk the previous year with the title of my talk, but it might have been unconscious. Or it might just be that we're both infested by Monty Python.
• Hanna's talk was as good as ever. The factoid that stuck into my mind: 80% of the men in the free software world claim they have not seen discriminatory behavior towards women, and 80% of them women claim they have. Also, the distinction of active versus passive discrimination seems to me to be important. The former is usually easy to recognize and deal with, the latter is not. There might be a parallel here to other kinds of abusive behavior on, say, Debian mailing lists.
• Conferences == cool.

After a lot of people blogged or talked about them in various places I decided, some months ago, to try the magic of

ControlMaster auto
ControlPath ~/.ssh/ssh_control_%h_%p_%r

After a couple of months, however, I had to renounce to that setting, at least temporarily, because it broke my ability to work on svn.debian.org… here is what happens when I start working with the repository svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/pkg-xen/

ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
At revision 61.
ultrotter@tie:~/debian/xen/trunk$ svn up
Control socket connect(/home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter): Connection refused
ControlSocket /home/ultrotter/.ssh/ssh_control_svn.debian.org_22_ultrotter already exists
svn: Connection closed unexpectedly

As you can see the first svn operation goes through, but the control file is left behind, causing any other command that connects to the repository to fail, until I delete the file! Anyone has a solution for that? For now I just disabled the setting, even though I liked it for the rest of its effects! :) Guido

Each morning, CodeCon started later and later. This is not just because us volunteers couldn't get there in time, but also because the attendees would show up more hungover and sleep-deprived as well. Thankfully, it's a hacker conference so we started at about noon. Or 12:30. Which is "morning" for some. We kicked off the day with a talk on Dido which is meant to help you write voice-menu systems. Quinn did a neat demonstration involving a real telephone, which was quite novel. However, since I despise voice-menu systems, I have to hate his project on principle. In the Q&A; period, I nipped over to Bill Pollock's booth. He runs No Starch Press which is absolutely fabulous. He gave me a free mug, some tea, a book, and a T-shirt. In exchange, I had to buy a few books as well. I'm afraid that my book buying habit is starting to get uncontrollable. Every time I return from a trip, I bring five or ten books back. Now I have a copy of madduck's book which I will get him to sign at DebConf 6. I completely zoned out on the Deme presentation. I think I was talking to someone who wanted to convert me to Evil, after hearing that I was a hacker. I'm afraid that I'm too noble for that. But what I did glean from the presentation is that deme is an actual English word. My presentation on UniConf came up next, so I put on my red "Speaker" badge and hopped on to stage. You see, I was at CodeCon as a backup speaker, in case one of the others missed a flight or fell down some stairs. I had to resist doing any of them bodily harm. For my altruism, I gave a talk about how UniConf glues configuration systems together, and why people should use it instead of writing their own. I got a lot of questions afterwards, which was pretty cool. At lunch, wealhtheow and Bill came by to ask me what I'd like on my pizza. Wow! I said that it didn't matter, and thought little of it. Then they showed up with boxes and boxes from the local Costco. Bill had just bought everyone lunch! We organised a queue that would have made the British proud and everyone got a slice to eat. I remember first hearing about Monotone from Graydon, back at GCC Summit. So I was a little surprised to see Graydon sitting on stage looking pretty while Nathaniel was presenting. Monotone has inspired a couple of version control systems but it's never really gotten popular. But one thing it hasn't passed on is its use of Merkle trees to express differences. All throughout the conference, I had been selling drinks from behind the bar. Standing for all that time really hurts the feet, so I was sadden to discover that my shoes were not good for this. Still, I had a good time there. I've definitely found a calling in the service industry, if the computer bubble bursts again, I'd make a great bartender. I never knew! You make eye contact, smile and say something friendly. Then you chat as you pour a drink, take an interest in someone, and just be nice. If you give a little extra, smile and wink, like it's secret just between you. I was busy chatting to my customers for the Rhizome presentation. Reading its description, I'm not really sure that I could tell you what it is. And I work with computers! As I was selling drinks, I was also selling CodeCon T-shirts. Very snazzy T-shirts. Every time I sold a drink, I tried to sell a T-shirt along with it. Show off the front, show off the back, offer an appropriately sized shirt. Flattery seems to work very well, as does smiling when the person looks at it. You know they're sold when they're holding a shirt, so you offer to fold it for them and name the price. It was so easy! Daniel came up again to do his Cqual++ presentation. Not only was this piece of software more difficult to write than delta, it's also less popular. Alas! He does some very impressive static dataflow analysis on C++ to find nasty, horrible bugs. But parsing out C++ is scarily difficult! After the presentations were over, we had a very nice set of closing remarks which made all of us blush. And then we tore down all the stuff we put up and packed everything away. This is where I packed my own T-shirt in a box by accident. Jonathan's going to send it to me by post, which is very nice of him. Then I bid sad farewells to gorgeous Wealh eow and charming akashayi who went off to dinner without me. Six of us climbed into a taxi and we went to a sushi restaurant called Osaka, where we met up with breezip. Bree was the friend that the lovely and indefatigable spider88 kept trying to meet, but failed to. We were all quite exhausted from socialising with people since, after all, we are a group of introverts. So we enjoyed an excellent dinner with subdued, but fascinating, conversation. I was treated to the best uni I have tasted in my entire life. I think Bree was quite amused at my sea-urchin ecstacy. After dinner, Len paid with a thick wad of cash, which in conjunction with his suit, made him look like a mob boss. I had a very good night.

I woke up to a breakfast of pancakes, cooked by the wonderful riseorbleed. I don't know about you but waking up to a hot breakfast is heavenly. After some morning ablutions, we hailed a cab and along the way we chatted with the cabbie as I looked out the window. Luxor cabbies are really nice, every time I travelled with them, they had some interesting story to tell and big, broad smiles. Smiling is the way to fatter tips! The weather in San Francisco is supposed to be rather variable. You know how that is, rain one minute and then sun the next. Well, the entire time I was there, it was bright and sunny and gorgeous. San Francisco really put on her best to charm me and she really succeeded. I didn't think that postcard-perfect pictures were possible, but I saw them everywhere. I was happy to walk around without needing a winter coat. And everyone else smirked at how happy I was. Daniel seemed to have recovered from the previous night's revelry. His talk on delta was excellent because he's a very good public speaker. Which is good, because he gave two presentations at CodeCon. When I talked to him on Thursday night, he seemed a little embarassed at how successful delta had become since it such a simple piece of software. But people like GCC use it to fare down their bug reports to the lines of code that reproduce its bugs. Rob and Tristan sidled up to my bar and asked me if I could get them some juice. For their laptops. They were working on their presentation all the way until the last minute, which involved a drunken Tristan stumbling around on stage. Except that Tristan doesn't drink, so his imitation was quite poor. They were presenting Djinni, which is their implementation of a fast simulated-annealing algorithm that takes also pressure into account. Sadly, they didn't explain their algorithm but their talk was entertaining nevertheless. At lunch, Spider snuck me out of the building and she showed me around San Francisco. She pointed out the Eagle Tavern with a glimmer in her eye. I think she's trying to corrupt me. Or she's trying to pimp me out. Then we went to Stompers where she tried on some boots. We were stymied, however, by the fact that a very annoying woman and her husband were trying on every single pair of boots in the entire store. iGlance is a real-world video-conferencing and screen-sharing application that has some fairly good usability built into it. It also has a fairly sensible privacy model and does some NAT punching to boot. Although it's only got a Win32 port for now, it's free software so someone will fix it up. Sometime in the afternoon, the beautiful and fair wealhtheow came behind the bar and surprised me with a hug and a sandwich! I was happy with the random hug from a new friend, but the sandwich was wonderful. I had not eaten lunch on Friday so I was very grateful. She put a huge smile on my face. I munched on the sandwich while listening to the OASIS talk. This technology is a locality-aware server-selection resolver, which is pretty good for distributing servers around the world and finding the fastest one. They implement this as a DNS redirector so that lookups are transparent to normal Internet software. This made me feel a little bad for holdenk, whose SelfDirectedProject happens to be on a very similar topic. It does, however, validate his approach. maradydd's presentation about Query by Example was up next. She did a very good introduction to data-mining, which segued into her hack on PostgreSQL where you can specify examples of things you want to search for. That is not how SQL normally works, where you specify constraints. With QBE, you just specify things similiar to what you want, and things similar to what you don't want. I was chatting with Rob Pascual when I noticed Len lining up in the Q&A; queue. Suddenly, my ears perked up as I sensed something important was going to happen. So I pulled out my camera, stepped on some toes, and got into position. When it was his turn at the microphone, he started saying random stuff that wasn't question at all! Something cheesy like how Meredith had changed his life and how he wanted to be with her. Then he got up on stage and asked The Question. It was beautiful. The audience broke out into cheers and applause, except for the heartless bastards beside me. But who cares about them? This was such an awesome occurance that an interview was taped. After teardown, some people were going to head to a franchise Mexican restaurant. Spider insisted that I get real food, so we walked down to the Mission. We made a detour to Good Vibrations which is a San Francisco landmark if ever there was one. I swear that she's trying to corrupt me. Anyway, as we were walking out, I must have mentioned that I was from Canada. Because Cohen, a Torontonian, came out of nowhere and introduced himself to us. Well, what was I to do but to invite my fellow countryman to dinner? So we set off to find a Taqueria that served nopales. This failed since Californians don't seem to like eating cactus. Instead, we went to Pancho Villa where I ate enchiladas and salsa verde and guacamole and churros and I was so very happy! We bid farewell to Cohen after exchanging contact information and tried to find everyone else. Unfortunately, we couldn't reach anyone by cellphone, so we sat around dejected for a while. Then we realised that we could go to Annie's Social Club where an event was happening. This turned out to be a good and a bad idea. It was a good idea because we found everyone at CodeCon. It was a bad idea because Annie's Social Club double-booked us with bad karaoke! And then were quite rude when we complained. And then kicked out John Gilmore. So I just want to say that Annie's Social Club hates geeks and freedom. So Len hailed a black stretch limousine, we all climbed into it, invited some reporters along and moved the entire party to the XYZ bar. The XYZ staff were very awesome, accommodating an extra hundred patrons and getting an extra bartender. And they were very nice about it. Unfortunately, the bar was full, so I had to lead a bunch of introverts in the fine art of taking over an establishment. We walked in, started talking, I encouraged people to sit down in empty spots on the couches. They did a very admirable job of taking over the back. I got the stunningly adorable akashayi a seat and a drink, before I taked to the people sitting with us. They were a couple who had moved from Florida to San Francisco, and a man from New York who was quite the boor. The man in the couple knew the New Yorker and seemed quite embarassed about him. After twenty minutes of conversation, they excused themselves and bid us good night. This gave us plenty of seating space to talk about geeky things until the manager kindly kicked us out. I made sure Akasha got safely to her hostel and then took a taxi back to the guest room. It was quite the challenge to direct the cab driver, since I had lost the directions back, but I managed!

I woke up on Friday morning and wondered what breakfast would be. Then I remembered that I was staying at the W and decided to forage for food elsewhere. I took a taxicab with spider88, enochsmiles, maradydd. It was a strange hybrid SUV cab that was painted all yellow, I would later learn that Yellow Cab drivers were scary and that I should avoid them. We got to StudioZ and discovered that we didn't know how to get inside. We figured that out eventually and took stock of the situation. I started moving tables about and setting up chairs, because I abhor standing about with my hands in my pockets. Then I helped hang banners from the rafters. After I did that, I tried to see if I could do anything else. Since CodeCon is run on the cheap so that anybody can attend, drinks like coffee are not included in the conference fee. And since the conference was being held in a night club, there was a convenient bar that would be a good place to setup a concessions stand. So I put things in order and stood behind the counter. I got to see people walk in the door and after registering with wealhtheow or Spider, they'd stand in bewilderment in front of my bar. It was a lot of fun to watch all sorts of people come through. And then I'd smile at them and offer to get them something to drink. We started Lance's talk a little late in order to let everyone settle in their seats. I met him the night before where he talked about his Apache module that has heuristics for detecting when a phisher is trying to clone your website. Or when your website has been cloned and the phisher is passing login requests through to you. This kind of thing is totally what financial institutions have to start doing. We got coffee from this place called Cafe Organica, which seems to have some mixed online reviews. Or rather, Jonathan did, in a big messenger bag filled with carafes. Since Jonathan doesn't actually drink coffee, it was left to me to decide whether it was any good. It seemed to be drip coffee that was thick, dark and strong. Very decent for something that was brewed hours ago. The customers didn't seem to mind, as we ran out of coffee every day. The next presentation was SiteAdvisor which takes an interesting tack on safely surfing the web. Instead of building security features into your browser, there's a central server that stores information about sites that you're visiting. But what was really interesting was how they got this information. They had an automated tool that went in pretending to be a real person, signed up for some e-mails, downloaded some programs, and examined what happened afterward. I missed the majority of the VidTorrent presentation, because I was busy chatting with people and offering them refreshments. Also, their demo didn't work because the wireless setup at the conference kept on going down. People were abusing the free Wireless network that Cliff was trying to keep up and running. Which is sad, because Cliff had basically volunteered to set that up on his own time. Tom came up after that to present Localhost, which is a unimaginatively named piece of software, but is interesting because it lets you browse a world-wide filesystem of torrents. What's interesting about his filesystem is that it uses a distributed hash table, so that even if there are files with the same name, you'll be able to distinguish the distinct copies. Which is useful if you want to tell whether you're downloading a legitimate and popular file, or some malicious file that someone's injected. The last talk of the day was Truman, which not only demonstrated an interesting piece of technology, but also quite educational. The tool itself is a specialised Linux distribution that can capture what happens inside itself and simulate a public connexion to the Internet. This is advantages, Joe tells us, because modern pieces of malware are smart enough to disable themselves when they detect sandboxed environments. After people filed out, we packed away everything into storage as StudioZ is a nightclub, so it was setting up for its nightclub crowd. Everyone else went next door to Loft11 where a party was being held, sponsored by bramcohen's awesome company I went inside and bumped into Graydon and we tried to go about finding fellow Canadians. This was not so successful on the crowded downstairs floor, so we went upstairs to chat and catch up. I met some people who were at the speaker's reception and successfully remembered their names. Then I met a guy who was at the night club just waiting for his buddy, and I explained CodeCon to him. He thought it was a great idea. Len Sassaman and Bram got up to give a little speech, which I tried to take photographs of. But failed. Instead, I noticed that they were on this awesome glass ceiling which made me want to dance. I didn't do that though, because my feet hurt from standing all day. I poked my head into a room upstairs that was all white, which was very cool. Some people were playing a game of Werewolf which finished with the villagers winning. I hung out with some people like Eric, Pete, and Kelsey who told the story of her pink Barbie backpack. I also met Chloe and her husband, whose name I have forgotten. But Chloe is awesome because she is now independently wealthy so that she can pursue her dream of studying the nitrogen cycle in soil using post-doc maths. Impressive! I also met akashayi who is not a professional computer programmer at all. She teaches martial arts by day, and slings code by night. She drove all the way from Los Angeles to attend CodeCon and was having the time of her life. I wistfully remember when I was that excited about computing, so just hanging out with her was awesome. She promised me a Kempo lesson if I ever made my way to L.A., which is an offer I intend to collect. I found Spider downstairs, sitting on a couch with Daniel. The night was getting long and we were totally exhausted, so we took a taxicab to the W. There, we went up to Enoch's room party where he treated us to $17 cheeseburgers. Now, I didn't think that cheeseburgers that expensive were worth it, but boy oh boy were those good. Spider and I took a cab to kineticphoenix and riseorbleed's place sometime past midnight and we dragged our luggage into their guest room. Which was really more of an awesome guest apartment. Hurray for knowing people in foreign cities! I don't remember much after that. I think I turned on a space heater before passing out.

It seems Apple is having more and more severe problems lately, MacOS viruses and worms start popping up and spreading on a larger scale... Michael Lehn has now discovered that Apple Safari can be tricked into automatically downloading and executing arbitrary shell scripts. No need to mention what harm this can cause, especially if you are stupid enough to browse the web as root (or whatever Apple calls their superuser). The behaviour to automatically open downloaded "trusted" files in a respective application is the default in Safari, which is obviously not the brightest idea Apple ever had. This is not an Apple-only problem, though. I really wonder why so many people, be it developers or users, are willing to sacrifice security for some crappy "feature"... (via Digg)

Thursday, February 9th
My digital camera starts acting up, having strange behavior with the buttons.
Friday, Feb. 10th
I use HP’s web-based e-mail support to appeal for help with the borkenness.
I receive a response back in less than an hour giving a suggestion as to what to try.
I try this and it doesn’t work, so I respond with more information.
I am quickly informed that it may be a hardware problem and am offered a free replacement under warranty.
Sunday, February 12th
I receive a second reply because I hadn’t yet responded to the last one (busy that weekend).
Monday, February 13th
I respond with information at 4:08 PM and am called 20 minutes later for credit card information (in case I don’t ship the broken camera back).
Wednesday, February 15th
HP ships the replacement from Texas.
Monday, February 20th
The replacement arrives. Now all I need to do is drop the broken camera off at the UPS pick-up station at Staples and be done with that. Even has a pre-paid label. <3 HP.

Once more, a new beancounter version went out to Debian, CPAN and my beancounter pages here along with an announcement via the Freshmeat beancounter page. This version contains only a few mundane fixes, and one behavioural change. We no longer set the host argument (via Perl's DBI) if the host variable equals localhost. This way, we default to socket communication which is easier on less experienced users who are struggling to make either one of the MySQL or PostgreSQL backends network-aware (as sockets-only is the more secure default for both). We also added a check for empty currency symbols, and realigned one output screen to 79 columns.

Martin F. Krafft writes about Firefox's un-UNIX-like behavior. I mostly agree with him. Aside from the X forwarding bug in the remote implementation (which has been reported numerous times already), the main problem is the inconsistency in the interface. If I run firefox from the command line everything works fine and it behaves like a normal UNIX application (ie taking over the terminal unless I background it). If I go to another terminal and run firefox file:///tmp/foo.html, this will open a new window or tab in Firefox and immediately exits. This is very un-UNIX-like, there's no way to know if the program is actually exiting or if it's just launching a new window. These leads to fun bugs with programs that call firefox as an external viewer (see #278990 and #284174). If running firefox causes it to connect to an already running instance, it should wait(2) on that process, since that would make a lot more sense from the UNIX perspective (and perhaps a -remote flag to have the "fire-and-forget" functionality we have now, because that does make sense in some situations too).

As far as I'm concerned the whole profile mechanism is a waste of code and a hold over from the old Netscape days, for people without multiuser systems. It should be dropped completely. Although we'd probably need to be able to run multiple Firefox processes on the same profile before it could be stripped out.

There is definitely a strong Windows mentality that pervades Firefox. I still remember when the extension mechanism was first introduced back in 0.9 and you needed to run as root (or the Administrator under Windows) for it to work properly. Madness. Although UNIX does seem to be more suited to an environment where processes are lightweight and short-lived. Big, monolithic applications are a more recent phenomenon.

I already got some feedback about the "device driver check CD"-thing. People got confused about it, so I will tell you a bit more about my intentions (although I wanted to start doing this not until next week, duuh). What is wrong with current live systems? There are already several Debian-based live systems and they are doing a great job. But, from the Debian perspective, most of them have one or more of the following disadvantages:

• They are unofficial projects, developed outside of Debian.
• They mix different distributions, e.g. testing and unstable.
• They support i386 only.
• They change package's behavior and/or appearance by stripping them down to save space.
• They including unofficial packages.
• They ship custom kernels with additional patches not part of Debian.
• They are large and slow due to their sheer size and thus not suitable for rescue issues.
• They are not available in different flavours, e.g. CDs, DVDs, USB-stick and netboot images

Why create our own live system? Debian is the Universal Operating System: IMHO we should have an official live system for showing arround and to officially represent the true, one and only Debian system with the following main advantages:

• It's an official Debian subproject.
• It reflects the (current) state of one distribution.
• It runs on as much architectures as possible.
• It consists of unchanged Debian packages only.
• It does not contain any unofficial package.
• It uses an unaltered Debian kernel-image with no additional patches (except from live system specific ones which maybe required).

Creating the Debian Live framework Such a life system framework would allow to create different images for different scenarios:

• A small "base-system" for rescue purposes.
• A normal "desktop-system" for demonstration purposes.
• A special "diagnose-system" for device functionallity and detection purposes.

The last one is this "confusing" thing I mentioned before. Wouldn't it be nice to have a live system to easy detect hardware? Imagine, you could take such an image, burn it on a CD or copy it on a USB-stick, go to your hardware shop and boot it. Since this system would use only official Debian packages, you can easily verify if your favourite piece of hardware is supported by Debian. Doubts like "it runs with Knoppix, so hopefully it runs with Debian too" are history by that. Maybe someone could implement then some sort of application which checks the hardware against Kenshis Debian GNU/Linux hardware compatibility list and displays some sort of report about the compatibility level of the tested hardware. I will definitely work on that goal. But first, I have to do a bit of research about the best techniques and create the framework arround it... Thanks to Myon for setting up the record live.debian.net.

Since DNS is slow (for me, at least), I'd like a DNS cache on my machine. pdnsd seemed to fit my needs according to its description. However, after using it for some time now I've concluded that it's even more unreliable than accessing my DNS servers directly. It crashes way too often. It seems that upstream has fixed the bugs but the Debian maintainer is behind. I've pinged the Debian maintainer, I hope he uploads a newer version.

I'm going to try nscd instead. Maybe dnsmasq would work too, but I wonder if it's good at caching? I probably don't want a full recursive DNS cache on my machine, though.