Bruce Perens pointed out some implications of the deal. This is like the Microsoft-SCO dealings in reverse: Microsoft threatens Linux vendors with patent lawsuits and Novell is the first to buy protection. If you think this sounds like conspiracy theory, see what Ballmer has to say. Microsoft presumably hopes to force Linux into a conventional pay-per-seat business model, because it's a master of that game. Look at who the press release quotes as acclaiming the deal and remember that these sponsors of Linux and free software are not our friends. They sponsor free software so long as they think it's good for business. We shouldn't expect loyalty from public corporations, nor give it to them. From the same press release, I quote:

Novell will also make running royalty payments based on a percentage of its revenues from open source products.

If you are a copyright holder of software that Novell receives and distributes under GPLv2, please ask them whether they have obtained a patent license covering your work, and if so, how they intend to comply with section 7.

The front page of www.royalmail.com displays wrongly in Firefox on Linux (though apparently not Windows). Worst of all, it is impossible to focus the input fields near the top of the page by clicking on them. However, I worked out some style rules that will fix it. These have been tested in Firefox 1.5 on Debian etch and Fedora Core 5. To apply these, you need to copy/add the following text to ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile/chrome/userContent.css and then restart the browser. Perhaps someone who knows about GreaseMonkey can work out a rule for that, which would make it easier to install them.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.royalmail.com)   
  div.Content-Region    position: static !important;  
  div.Content-Region div    position: static !important;  
  div.List-Container   height: auto !important;  
  div.hpBottomWide   clear: left;  
 

Julien Blache: "You ll be pleased to learn that a release manager needs $6000 USD to cover for living expenses for a month." Sounds high, right? But we're talking about contractors, not employees. Contractors have to cover certain expenses that are generally paid for by employers, such as (depending on jurisdiction):

• Sales tax/VAT on receipts
• Payroll tax
• Health insurance
• Unemployment insurance
• Pension contributions
• Vacation time

and in this case, their own equipment. (But they save on transport!) Besides which, you have little idea how much Steve or Andi might need to pay in mortgage repayments or rent, or how many dependents they have. Nor should we pry into these personal circumstances.

This survey on foreign policy suggests that the majority of Americans aren't quite as gung-ho as some of us might think.

As posted to debian-devel-announce and debconf-announce (and partially written by Holger): On behalf of the DebConf6 video team I'm proud to announce the DebConf6 DVDs! They include all formal sessions from Debian Day and DebConf, plus the group photos, the video team BoF, and some documentary videos made by Gabriella Coleman. They are divided into

• 2 discs with all English sessions, DebConf sessions, and extras (1, 2)
• 1 disc with all Spanish sessions and all Debian Day sessions

(there is a small overlap between these). The DVD images are now available for download along with the source videos, as are the software and menu design used for them. You can also order DVDs to be shipped to you in a nice box. Many thanks to the sponsors, organisers and other people who made DebConf6 a fun and productive event to be remembered. See you at DebConf7 in Edinbourgh - or maybe DebConf8 in your town! Finally, I apologise for the delay in producing these discs. We ran into a number of technical problems along the way but it's primarily a result of discouragement and procrastination on my part. However I believe that the VideoLink software is now sufficiently reliable and that next year's DVDs need not be so dependent on me.

For some years I've been meaning to learn more German than I remember from my GCSE and the little I've managed to absorb from tea_cantata and others speaking it around me. I am repeatedly embarrassed by my inability to join in conversation when we visit Nattie's relatives in Germany. In fact I've made some attempts to learn from books and tapes, but with little effect. Nattie finally persuaded me to sign up for an evening AS (half an A-Level) German course starting this term. It's tough going with only one lesson (2.5 hours) per week though I believe I'm making some progress. I don't have much of a problem with grammar, and my pronunciation seems to be as good as anyone in the class, but I continue to find myself frustrated in being unable to think of the words to express what I mean to say. I think my vocabulary may be relatively poor, but this is compounded by my difficulty in working around the lack of a word for the concept I mean to express. This also applies to English, but I have a large enough vocabulary that this is much more rarely a problem. In addition, some of the topics of conversation or question are so broad that I would have trouble formulating an intelligent comment in English, let alone one in German. Maybe I should just say something dumb that I don't really believe purely as linguistic practice, but I don't feel comfortable doing that.

Now at http://womble.decadent.org.uk/software/debconf6-dvd/. There are no images for download because it takes too long for me to upload them, but it should be easy to build a DVD; that page refers to everything you need.

If you ran a session, please check that it's correctly categorised (no need to build; just browse the menus online).

If you can, please build a DVD and check that it works in your players. I'm particularly interested in results from hardware players as I can try software myself. I know that ogle in stable doesn't like the videos but it seems to be the odd one out. Please check that menu navigation is sane and videos play as expected.

Barring compatibility problems that need to be fixed, the only change I intend to make before release is to reinstate the logo in the menus. Then I should upload images and offer discs for sale starting next week.

ETA:There was one other thing to fix: the glitch at the bottom of the group photos is a Mozilla bug which I will try to work around by doing the v1.0 build in sid.

They're very nearly done. Menus are available for preview: English disc 1, English disc 2, Spanish disc (you can preview them in a Mozilla-based browser but you need to use VideoLink to see them exactly as they will appear). To do: add background pictures where missing, adjust some menus that are slightly too long in an "NTSC" frame, add the day trip if we ever find some music for it, test, release. I'm also considering moving or duplicating the Debian Day session that's in English to English disc 1. I uploaded VideoLink 0.11 this morning and intend to put up the DebConf6 DVD sources (other than video) this evening. Update: Done. Still lacking the day trip, and I pulled the logo because I forgot to ask permission to use it yet.

This is a few years old, but I hadn't seen it before: 44-nation survey of attitudes to globalisation and technology. I found the results on pages 12 (loss of culture) and 19 (the Internet vs TV) particularly interesting. But also note how questions about individual aspects of globalisation get more positive responses (pages 21-27) than the explicit question about globalisation (page 41). As usual, it seems like a lot of respondents haven't thought things through!

I'm currently uploading the last of the final files for DebConf session videos, which should complete in about 5 hours (it's a long one). In the queue behind that are three documentary videos filmed by Biella, two of which I have edited. There's a fourth which is just lacking a caption for one person I don't recognise. I still have to sort out the DVDs but hope this shouldn't take too long.

I fixed the known bugs in WebDVD, renamed it to VideoLink and uploaded it to Debian. To get it into Debian, I had to make it work with Mozilla/XULRunner 1.8 (roughly the same code base as Firefox 1.5) since Mozilla 1.7 is no longer supported. In the process of doing that I also fixed a bug in setting the nominal screen resolution - I tell Mozilla it's 40 dpi because I reckon that's the average resolution when the video is played full-screen - which is likely to change existing layouts. The sarge version still seems to ignore the claimed screen resolution which I'll need to investigate and fix as I really don't want layout to depend on which version of Mozilla was used. I have stopped procrastinating on finishing off the DebConf video files, put all the information I have into a database and used that to work out what's left to do. The answer to that was, not that much really. Based on the database you can see the status of all the recordings and final files which shows that we have all the final files for all the official sessions. About 20 of the final files (mostly Theora unscaled versions) have still to be uploaded, which will take a few days over my 448 kbps uplink. (Due to a deficiency of my schema, the lightning talks are shown as not having final files. Actually they just weren't split up into separate files.) I'm intending to produce 3 DVDs this time - two for DebConf sessions and one for Debian Day plus any Spanish-language material from DebConf - because these recordings just won't fit on 2 single-layer DVDs. There should be room for some extras such as Biella's recordings and the day trip, which I have still to deal with. I need to sort out menus for the DVDs. Please suggest good background pictures that can be distributed under the DebConf video licence.

I wrote a paper and gave a talk under this title at UKUUG. Here are the paper and the slides I used for the talk. This also prompted me to make a new release of WebDVD, version 0.7. This latest version uses ffmpeg by default instead of mjpegtools (though the documentation doesn't mention this change; oops) and so has no dependencies outside of Debian. I shall probably upload it to Debian shortly.

Most of my photographs are now developed, scanned and uploaded to gallery.debconf.org. There are another 14 still in my camera though. As for moving pictures, some of the session videos are now available from meetings-archive.debian.net. There's a big status table showing how this is progressing.

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They don't. I never set a preference for it and there is no such preference on that page. And I could have read that on the front page or news anyway. WTF? Updated: Removed broken preformatting of the quoted text.

Due to this bug and some rather late checking, we're some way off producing finished videos. The video storage/encoding servers are now with gigio who's very kindly helping to fix this.

Ted, you can't take the high ground by not naming names when you already did so. If you're so interested in telling the truth, why do you silently redact your articles?

It started with a swirl of tables in a huge shed. Then came the rain, the mariachis, the fight, the power cut, and eventually the whole thing faded away. No speeches and not much fun. Guess Ted Walther got what he wanted.

Before I forget about it, here are the materials I prepared for my talk "Multithreading: why and how we should use it". I know I didn't present very well, but hopefully the links will give you a bit more explanation.

Yesterday we found some problems with our streaming set-up that hadn't appeared in the short time we had to test it beforehand. Firstly, due to a misconfiguration, the 10 Mbps link from the Parliamentary Tower to our network became congested with broadcast traffic. This seems to have been fixed, though I don't know the details. Secondly, at times when the picture kept changing, the encoding machine was unable to encode it in real time. We believe we've fixed this by using libtheora-mmx in place of the standard libtheora. Finally, we weren't able to set up both internal and external Icecast servers, and to save bandwidth we had to stop people at Debconf from streaming from the external servers. We have fixed this with the aid of some new NAT and firewall rules. If you're at Debconf you can use http://video:8000/hacklab.ogg or http://video:8000/tower.ogg. If you're outside, carry on using video.debconf.org. One of the servers has gone down due to a disk failure, but should be back later. In the mean time we should be able to add more relay servers.

You'll need to refer to the schedules for Debian Day (en espa ol) and the main conference. (Local time is GMT-5.) Point your media player at http://video.debconf.org:8000/tower.ogg or http://video.debconf.org:8000/hacklab.ogg depending on the session venue. We have multiple servers; use us.video.debconf.org or eu.video.debconf.org to select one nearer to you.