The Google Summer of Code is a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for Free and Open Source Software projects during the summer. For the eighth time, Debian has just been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's program. If you're an eligible student, now is the time to take a look at our project ideas list, engage with the mentors for the projects you find interesting, and start working on your application!
Please read the FAQ and the Program Timeline on Google's website. If you are interested, we encourage you to come and chat with us on irc (#debian-soc on irc.oftc.net), or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing-list. Most of the GSoC related information in Debian can be found on our wiki pages, but feel free to ask us directly on irc or via email. We're looking forward to work with amazing students again this summer!

I bought a ScanJet N6350 a few years back, in the belief that it would work. After all, you write free Linux drivers for all your printers, and when those printers are multifunctional printers with scanners, you do make sure the scanner bits of those printers work too. So it shouldn't be too hard to write a Linux driver for that scanner too, right? Apparently it is. For some reason that I can't imagine, you decided that my money is worth more than my stress levels.

• The HP ScanJet N6350 is a combination USB/network scanner. That's great; I don't need it to be right next to my laptop all the time. Having the ability to get it sent to me by email (as your product page claims it can do) reduces my workload. Unfortunately, what you didn't mention on the product page is that the scanner is pretty dumb; it does network, yes, but the only way in which it can send emails is by using some application running on a system on the other end of the network connection. That's pretty silly. It wouldn't be so bad, however, except...
• ... the system on the other end of the network connection has to be running Windows. That's right, you didn't write a Linux driver for some reason. You also didn't publish the network protocol, and even the USB connection seems undocumented. So I can't use Linux to scan my documents. It wouldn't be so bad, however, since I already have a Windows XP virtual machine lying around somewhere, mainly because there's this satellite navigation system builtin to my car that also requires it; I just installed your scanners oftware on that machine, and I can scan. Except...
• ... whenever an error occurs in the scanning process, the UI locks up completely. I can't retry the last page that I was trying to scan, and often I can't even save the document anymore, either; I have to rescan the whole document. That wouldn't be so bad, except...
• ... the ADF is total crap. If I put more than a few pages on the feeder, and they've got some horizontal folds in them (as is likely with snail mail that came out of an envelope), I'm very likely to end up with a paper jam, or with multiple pages sucked into the feeder at once, causing an error and a loss of my scanned document. That wouldn't be so bad, except...
• ... the process for finishing one scan and starting the next involves stopping and starting your whole scanning software, which takes a rather long time. As such, I'd prefer to just scan a whole stack of incoming snail mail in one go, and then use pdfsam to split up the PDF file. But then I have to babysit the scanning process so that I don't get any errors; but I fail at that about as often as I succeed, meaning, it usually takes a long time to get through the stack.

Dear HP, you suck. I fail to understand how the basic loss of functionality after a failed scan managed to get through your testing. I fail to understand why you think Linux users should be able to print, but not scan. And I especially fail to understand why I should waste my time with such an expensive device that can't even perform its basic functionality with more than 10% success rate.

Hello everyone! I am very excited to report about the awesome progress we made with Tanglu, the new Debian-based Linux-Distribution. First of all, some off-topic info: I don t feel comfortable with posting too much Tanglu stuff to Planet-KDE, as this is often not KDE-related. So, in future Planet-KDE won t get Tanglu information, unless it is KDE-related You might want to take a look at Planet-Tanglu for (much) more information. So, what happened during the last weeks? Because I haven t had lectures, I nearly worked full-time on Tanglu, setting up most of the infrastructure we need. (this will change with the next week, where I have lectures again, and I also have work to do on other projects, not just Tanglu ^^) Also, we already have an awesome community of translators, designers and developers. Thanks to them, the Tanglu-Website is now translated to 6 languages, more are in the pipeline and will be merged later. Also, a new website based on the Django framework is in progress. The Logo-Contest We ve run a logo-contest, to find a new and official Tanglu logo, as the previous logo draft was too close to the Debian logo (I asked the trademark people at Debian). More than 30 valid votes (you had to be subscribed to a Tanglu Mailinglist) were received for 7 logo proposals, and we now have a final logo: I like it very much Fun with dak I decided to use dak, the Debian Archive Kit, to handle the Tanglu archive. Choosing dak over smaller and easy-to-use solutions had multiple reasons, the main reason is that dak is way more flexible than the smaller solution (like reprepro or min-dak) and able to handle the large archive of Tanglu. Also, dak is lightning fast. And I would have been involved with dak sooner or later anyway, because I will implement the DEP-11 extension to the Debian Archive later (making the archive application-friendly). Working with dak is not exactly fun. The documentation is not that awesome, and dak contains many hardcoded stuff for Debian, e.g. it often expects the unstable suite to be present. Also, running dak on Debian Wheezy turned out to be a problem, as the Python module apt_pkg changed the API and dak naturally had problems with that. But with the great help of some Debian ftpmasters (many thanks to that!), dak is now working for Tanglu, managing the whole archive. There are still some quirks which need to be fixed, but the archive is in an usable state, accepting and integrating packages. The work on dak is also great for Debian: I resolved many issues with non-Debian dak installations, and made many parts of dak Wheezy-proof. Also, I added a few functions which might also be useful for Debian itself. All patches have of course been submitted to upstream-dak. Wanna-build and buildds This is also nearly finished Wanna-build, the software which manages all buildds for an archive, is a bit complicated to use. I still have some issues with it, but it does it s job so far. (need to talk to the Debian wanna-build admins for help, e.g. wanna-build seems to be unable to handle arch:all-only packages, also, build logs are only submitted in parts) The status of Tanglu builds can be viewed at the provisoric Buildd-Status pages. Setting up a working buildd is also a tricky thing, it involves patching sbuild to escape bug #696841 and applying various workarounds to make the buildd work and upload packages correctly. I will write instructions how to set-up and maintain a buildd soon. At time, we have only one i386 buildd up and running, but more servers (in numbers: 3) are prepared and need to be turned into buildds. After working on Wanna-build and dak, I fully understand why Canonical developed Launchpad and it s Soyuz module for Ubuntu. But I think we might be able to achieve something similar, using just the tools Debian already uses (maybe a little less confortable than LP, but setting up an own LP instance would have been much more trouble). Debian archive import The import of packages from the Debian archive has finished. Importing the archive resulted in many issues and some odd findings (I didn t know that there are packages in the archive which didn t receive an upload since 2004!), but it has finally finished, and the archive is in a consistent state at time. To have a continuous package import from Debian while a distribution is in development, we need some changes to wanna-build, which will hopefully be possible. Online package search The Online-Package-Search is (after resolving many issues, who expected that? ) up and running. You can search for any package there. Some issues are remaining, e.g. the file-contents-listing doesn t work, and changelog support is broken, but the basic functionality is there. Tanglu Bugtracker We now also have a bugtracker which is based on the Trac software. The Tanglu-Bugtracker is automatically synced with the Tanglu archive, meaning that you find all packages in Trac to report bugs against them. The dak will automatically update new packages every day. Trac still needs a few confort-adjustments, e.g. submitting replies via email or tracking package versions. Tanglu base system The Tanglu metapackages have been published in a first alpha version. We will support GNOME-3 and KDE4, as long as this is possible (= enough people working on the packaging). The Tanglu packages will also depend on systemd, which we will need in GNOME anyway, and which also allows some great new features in KDE. Side-effect of using systemd is at least for the start that Tanglu boots a bit slow, because we haven t done any systemd adjustments, and because systemd is very old. We will have to wait for the systemd and udev maintainers to merge the packages and release a new version first, before this will improve. (I don t want to do this downstream in Tanglu, because I don t know the plans for that at Debian (I only know the information Tollef Fog Heen & Co. provided at FOSDEM)) The community The community really surprised me! We got an incredible amount of great feedback on Tanglu, and most of the people liked the idea of Tanglu. I think we are one of the less-flamed new distributions ever started . Also, without the very active community, kickstarting Tanglu would not have been possible. My guess was that we might be able to have something running next year. Now, with the community help, I see a chance for a release in October The only thing people complained about was the name of the distribution. And to be really honest, I am not too happy with the name. But finding a name was an incredibe difficult process (finding something all parties liked), and Tanglu was a good compromise. Tanglu has absolutely no meaning, it was taken because it sounded interesting. The name was created by combining the Brazilian Tangerine (Clementine) and the German Iglu (igloo). I also dont think the name matters that much, and I am more interested in the system itself than the name of it. Also, companies produce a lot of incredibly weird names, Tanglu is relatively harmless compared to that . In general, thanks to everyone participating in Tanglu! You are driving the project forward! The first (planned) release I hereby announce the name of the first Tanglu release, 1.1 Aequorea Victoria . It is Daniel s fault that Tanglu releases will be named after jellyfishes, you can ask him why if you want I picked Aequorea, because this kind of jellyfish was particularly important for research in molecular biology. The GFP protein, a green fluorescent protein (=GFP), caused a small revolution in science and resulted in a Nobel Prize in 2008 for the researchers involved in GFP research (for the interested people: You can tag proteins with GFP and determine their position using light microscopy. GFP also made many other fancy new lab methods possible). Because Tanglu itself is more or less experimental at time, I found the connection to research just right for the very first release. We don t have a time yet when this version will be officially released, but I expect it to be in October, if the development speed increases a little and more developers get interested and work on it. Project Policy We will need to formalize the Tanglu project policy soon, both the technical and the social policies. In general, regarding free software and technical aspects, we strictly adhere to the Dbian Free Software Guidelines, the Debian Social Contract and the Debian Policy. Some extra stuff will be written later, please be patient! Tanglu OIN membership I was approached by the Open Invention Network, to join it as member. In general, I don t have objections to do that, because it will benefit Tanglu. However, the OIN has a very tolerant public stance on software patents, which I don t like that much. Debian did not join the OIN for this reason. For Tanglu, I think we could still join the OIN without someone thinking that we support the stance on software patents. Joining would simply be pragmatic: We support the OIN as a way to protect the Linux ecosystem from software patents, even if we don t like the stance on software patents and see it differently. Because this affects the whole Tanglu project, I don t want to decide this alone, but get some feedback from the Tanglu community before making a decision. Can I install Tanglu now? Yes and no. We don t provide installation images yet, so trying Tanglu is a difficult task (you need to install Debian and then upgrade it to Tanglu) if you want to experiment with it, I recomment trying Tanglu in a VM. I want to help! Great, then please catch one of us on IRC or subscribe to the mailinglists. The best thing is not to ask for work, but suggest something you want to do, others will then tell you if that is possible and maybe help with the task. Packages can for now only be uploaded by Debian Developers, Ubuntu Developers or Debian Maintainers who contacted me directly and whose keys have been verified. This will be changed later, but at the current state of the Tanglu archive (= less safety checks for packages), I only want people to upload stuff who definitely have the knowledge to create sane packages (you can also proove that otherwise, of course). We will later establish a new-member process. If you want to provide a Tanglu archive mirror, we would be very happy, so that the main server doesn t have to carry all the load. If you have experience in creating Linux Live-CDs or have worked with the Ubiquity installer, helping with these parts would be awesome! Unfortunately, we cannot reuse parts of Linux Mint Debian, because many of their packages don t build from source and are repackaged binaries, which is a no-go for the Tanglu main archive. Sneak peek And here is a screenshot of the very first Tanglu installation (currently more Debian than Tanglu):

Something else I am involved in Debian for a very long time now, first as Debian Maintainer and then as Debian Developer and I never thought much about the work the Debian system administrators do. I didn t know how dak worked or how Wanna-build handles the buildds and what exactly the ftpmasters have to do. By not knowing, I mean I knew the very basic theory and what these people do. But this is something different than experiencing how much work setting up and maintaining the infrastructure is and what an awesome job the people do for Debian, keeping it all up and running and secure! Kudos for that, to all people maintaining Debian infrastructure! You rock! (And I will never ever complain about slow buildds or packages which stay in NEW for too long )

The GNOME Foundation started the Free & Open Source Software Outreach Program for Women, OPW, in 2010. In the January-April 2013 round, many other FOSS organizations joined the program. We are happy to announce that Debian will also join in the next round from June-September and we'll offer one internship. You can find more details about Debian's participation in the program at Debian OPW page. Call for mentors and projects OPW allows applicants to work on any kind of project, including coding, design, marketing, web development... The Debian Google Summer of Code projects will be offered also as possible projects for OPW, but GSoC only allows coding projects. If you have any idea of a non-coding project and you want to mentor it, please contact us in the soc-coordination mailing list adding [OPW] in subject. OPW works in the same way as GSoC except Google doesn't play a part here. The same advice that is provided for GSoC mentors works for OPW mentors. Call for participants The main goal of this program is to increase the number of women in FOSS, so all women who are not yet a Debian Developer or a Debian Maintainer are encouraged to apply. There are no age restrictions and applicants don't need to be a student. If you want to apply, you must follow three steps:

1. Choose a project from this list. There are two lists, one for GSoC and another with non-coding tasks that can be only offered by the OPW. Those lists may change and add or remove more projects in the next few weeks.
2. Make a small contribution to Debian. Projects will add a task the applicant must complete as part of the pre-selection process. If no task is provided, you are welcome to ask the mentors of the project. You can also make a different extra task of the one listed to show your skills and interest.
3. Create a page in the Debian wiki with your application. You can do so under pseudonym, but in that case, please give us information about yourself privately by email to the coordinators listed in the Debian OPW page!

I look after a bunch of servers, working for Bytemark that is not a surprise, but I only touch a very small number of desktop systems.

precious - My desktop

This is the machine upon which I develop, check my personal mail, play my music & etc.

steve - My work machine

To keep the working from home separation going I have a machine I only use for work purposes.

travel/travel2 - EEPC box

I have two EEPC machines, a personal 701 and a work-provided 901. Honestly these rarely get used. One is for when I'm on holiday or traveling, the second for when I'm on-call.

Yesterday I got round to upgrading both the toy EEPC machines to wheezy. The good news? Both of them upgraded/reinstalled easily. Hardware was all detected, sleeping, hibernation, wifi, etc all "just worked". Unfortunately I am now running GNOME 3.x and the experience is unpleasant. This is a shame, because I've enjoyed GNOME 2.x & bluetile for the past few years. The only other concern is that pwsafe appears to be scheduled for removal from Debian GNU/Linux - the list of open bugs shows some cause, but there are bugs there that are trivial to fix. For the moment I've rebuilt the package and if I cannot find a suitable alternative - available for squeeze and wheezy - then I will host the package on my package repository. In conclusion: Debian, you did good. GNOME, I've loved and appreciated you for years, but you might not be the desktop I want these days. It's not you, it's me.

I was really not doing well by yesterday, I had developed quite the runny nose. I've discovered that it's neigh on impossible (from my sample set of two pharmacies) to get pseudoephedrine over the counter in this country. In the US, you have to provide ID and they report all purchases to the government and if you start buying too much, they come and kick down the door of your meth lab. Here, you seem to need a prescription. One pharmacy told me that 1 in 10 pharmacies will sell it over the counter. I ended up with the Australian equivalent of Afrin, which I don't particularly like, but it at least dried up my nose. Discussions on Facebook suggest that I may have been dealing with second-rate pharmacies, and the "big ones" would be more useful. I was also advised to try begging and pleading for Claritin-D. The damn meth labs have ruined it for everybody. It's too bad they can't come up with an additive that is safe to ingest, but would fuck up the meth cooking process. Not content with only two marathon shopping days, Kristy came back for a third day of driving me all around town, as my quest for a sofa bed and a dining table continued. It turns out that one does not simply walk into a furniture store and walk out with a sofa bed (or a dining table, for that matter). These things all seem to be on boats from China, or at best interstate warehouses, and most places can sell you something they know is in transit at best, but they're loathe to sell floor stock (for obvious reasons), and they seem to not have anything in a Brisbane warehouse (plenty of stuff was in Sydney or Melbourne and they'd ship it up). Plushhad a chaise sofa bed that had a nice sprung mattress, and was due in late this month or early next, and they would lend me something in the meantime, so they got my business. I look forward to having something to sit on. We then had an epic time at Bunnings getting all sorts of random household stuff, with the obligatory sausage sizzle before and after. Oh, how I have missed proper sausages! It turns out I'm looking for something that doesn't seem to exist over here, Rubbermaid don't seem to make the plastic "shed" cupboards in Australia, so I'll have to look elsewhere (Clark Rubber seems to make something approximately like what I'm looking for). Then I picked up some towels from Westfield Chermside and resumed the search for a dining table. I was really liking the idea of at least one bench seat, and we finally found a matching table, a bench seat, some shelving and a coffee table that would work as an entertainment unit, at OZ Design Furniture. They had a 20% off sale that made it all fairly reasonable. The entertainment unit was available immediately, and the rest of the stuff should be delivered in a couple of weeks. That just leaves finding some dining chairs that will go with it. OZ Design Furniture had the most unusual delivery charging system. They charge by the flight of stairs. Living on the 2nd floor does have its disadvantages. At least I won't be moving out of here any time soon. By the end of the day, I was totally done, but very happy to have finally sorted out the elusive remaining bits of furniture. I had my first night sleeping in my new home.

Besides my RTL work on Libreoffice, every once in a while I just go over the regular commit log to see what have changed. I don t necessary understand each line in the commit, but do get the general idea from the commit message. Being more dependent on the commit messages makes me review them more thoroughly (hence the topic of this post). As many projects, Libreoffice has notifications of commits related to bugs reports when the bug number is properly mentioned in the commit message. This is very useful for other developers and also for QA people. After verification of a bug is fixed, I often use the commits listed on the bug report to cherry pick them to an older branch. Going to search for an unreferenced commit isn t much fun. One of the things I notice is different ways people reference bugs from not referencing them at all to referencing them in various ways like linking to the bugs system, just writing the number (without the fdo# prefix) and other creative ways This is also true for first time contributors, which might not know the standards or the rules . When I see such a case I usually put a manual notification in the bug report, and mail the author of doing so. For new or sporadic contributors this is also an opportunity to welcome and thank them for the commit and even encourage future contributions. I have been asked why aren t that info on the wiki, so I went looking and found out the info is in the right place under the Development/GetInvolved page. The relevant part is:

When you type a commit message:

• start the first line with a bug reference like fdo#12345, if you have one for your commit (see details below)
• use the rest of the first line as a concise summary of your changes
• the 2nd line remains empty
• and starting on the 3rd line you can explain how and what changes have been made for what reasons.

Thanks in advance and happy coding (:
Filed under: LibreOffice

Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), is running a campaign for all medical trials to be published. It seems that best current evidence indicates that about half of the trials for treatments currently in use remain unpublished. That's pretty astounding when you think about it. Given that many of the trials that are published only compare new treatments against placebo, rather than against the best available existing treatment, and often barely show them as being more effective than homeopathy^Wsugar, one has to wonder how dire were the results that are not being published. If you prefer to have science done in the open, then I'd encourage you to visit www.alltrials.net and sign the petition and/or give them a donation. The fix is pretty straight-forward: Simply insist that clinical trials have to register before they start in order to be considered valid, and that all registered trials have to report their results. It need not be expensive to do -- a git repo. shared across the industry, containing a file for each trial in a standard format would do the trick probably. I imagine they'll come up with a more expensive solution, but in comparison to the cost of running a decent sized trial, it'll still be pocket change. (A note from the campaign, sent to existing petition signatories, is what prompted this blog post -- please read it and be inspired to help)

On the weekend of April 20-21, Students for Free Culture is going to be holding its annual conference, FCX2013, at New York Law School in New York City. As a long-time SFC supporter and member, I am enormously proud to be giving the opening keynote address. Although the program for Sunday is still shaping up, the published Saturday schedule looks great. If previous years are any indication, the conference can serve as an incredible introduction to free culture, free software, wikis, remixing, copyright, patent and trademark reform, and participatory culture. For folks that are already deeply involved, FCX is among the best places I know to connect with other passionate, creative, people working on free culture issues. I ve been closely following and involved with SFC for years and I am particularly excited about the group that is driving the organization forward this year. If you will be in or near New York that weekend or if you can make the trip you should definitely try to attend. FCX2013 is pay what you can with a $15 suggested donation. You can register online now. Travel assistance especially for members of active SFC chapters may still be available. I hope to see you there!

Antonia came into the room. Where's Alieta? she asked. We don't know, replied Luda. It was true; we hadn't seen Alieta in quite some time, and we had no idea where she was. Antonia left. Varvara eyed me mischievously and said, You could call her. How? I asked. Touch the grandmother clock and you will figure it out. I touched the clock trepidly. Nothing happened. I opened my mouth to speak, but the word I had been about to say resonated in my mind as if spoken through a comb filter. I concentrated. Alieta, dozens of human-like voices sang over and over in different harmonies. I let go. What was that? I demanded. Clock, Varvara said dismissively. Come on, let's do laundry, Luda grunted. We carried our laundry out to the garage, which is where the washer and dryer lived. Alieta slipped in through one of the open garage doors, and surreptitiously pulled Varvara over for a whispered conversation. Antonia wandered in and squinted in Alieta's general direction. Luda quickly pulled Varvara in front of her. It's just Varvara, she announced. Antonia's eyes glazed over and she went back into the house. Alieta pursed her lips and studied the wall as if there might be some reflective object that had alerted her mother to her presence. Then she grabbed Varvara by the hand, pulled her over to push the buttons that closed the garage doors, and dragged her into the house. I watched the garage doors close. Then I watched the one on the left reverse direction. I opened my mouth to notify someone of this, but the doors reversed direction again, and proceeded to partially open and close as if possessed. I tried to hide behind Luda, without success. Now she was watching as well, as reality seemed to to shimmer and bend. The roof became arched, and there were loud mechanical noises as our environs transformed. When it finished, the place where the garage doors had been was now a wall of screens displaying video as you might encounter in a television store. More disconcertingly, we were in front of a railing which overlooked what appeared to be a car dealership showroom. Luda sucked in her breath. Benjamin Snow, you were into some serious shit, she muttered.

phpMyAdmin has in last year received various useful features, which are not that well known. I've decided to give them some promotion before releasing phpMyAdmin 4.0. The server monitoring part is already present since phpMyAdmin 3.5, but some of the parts were further improved in 4.0. Server monitor (as you can see on picture above or on demo server) allows you to follow server status in real time. Besides predefined charts, you can choose to follow any of MySQL server status variables or some system parameters. If you see something weird in the charts, you can select interval and inspect slow or general query log (if you have enabled it). This can help you finding most problematic queries for your server. Advisor (on picture above or on demo server) is another way to improve server performance - it comes with extensive set of rules, which can help you tuning performance for your workload. Your server has to be running for significant time to give some reasonable recommendations (so don't expect these on the demo server, which is restarted quite often). However it is still recommended to read server documentation before doing any adjustments, as the setting might have some side effects, which will affect your workload as well. Of course these are not magic pill to cure your unresponsive server, but can help you a lot in finding possible bottlenecks.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin 0 comments Flattr this!

I ve given a lightning talk at Distro Recipes 2013 about what I ve been working on for several months: adding Semantic meta-data to Debian PTS, and stuff. Here are my slides :
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="356" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" scrolling="no" src="http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/18183576" style="border:1px solid #CCC;border-width:1px 1px 0;margin-bottom:5px" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="427"> </iframe> An in PDF. Thanks to the Hupstream staff and other participants of Distro Recipes for the interesting discussions and contacts. Looking forward to participating to the next edition.

Not content with just one day of driving all over town, Kristy came back for another day of it. I decided that rather than specifically shopping, I needed to do some of the more bureaucratic stuff, so that I could ensure things like the electricity could get put on in my name. I determined that in order to get the electricity in my name, I'd need to provide either a driver's licence number or Medicare card number. Unfortunately I remember separating my expired ACT licence and Medicare cards from my other random cards while I was packing up my temporary apartment in the US, but I can't for the life of me recall what I did with them, so our first port of call was the Department of Transport in Zillmere to get a new licence. Talk about a painless experience. The most annoying thing was that on Wednesdays they open at 9:30am instead of 8:30am. We got there at 9:10am. I had Zoe with me, and Kristy had her daughter, and they happily played while we waited outside. I just had to fill out a fairly simple form, and I was called up promptly and there were no problems at all. In under 30 minutes of walking in the door, we were driving away with a temporary licence. Vastly different from my experience with the DMV. I'll get the genuine article in the mail in a few weeks. Then we headed over to Westfield Chermside to go to Medicare, Medibank Private, and as I was growing frustrated with how long my mobile phone number was taking to port from Telstra to Internode, a Telstra Shop to try and get a replacement Telstra SIM. This is where I ran into more of a bureaucratic brick wall. For Medicare, I wanted to get my own Medicare card (and number) again, instead of a shared one, and so I essentially had to re-apply. They wanted more than just a passport entry stamp and something with an address on it. They wanted specific documents with an address on it, and an offer letter to show I was employed, so I had to leave there empty handed. Medibank Private was even worse. In a "shut up and take my money!" kind of moment, they told me to prematurely unsuspend a suspended policy, I needed to request a document from the Department of Immigration that showed my international movements to confirm that I was indeed back in the country. I've always found this somewhat ironic, given I'm sitting in front of a Medibank Private employee when they're telling me this, and I'm trying to give them money. So I left there empty handed as well. I grabbed some cutlery and crockery from Big W. The Telstra Shop had a 45 minute wait, and as I didn't want to over-stretch Zoe, we headed back to my parents. I took the opportunity to open an electricity account with AGL, now that I had a driver's licence number. Zoe declined to take a nap, and was having a good time playing with Kristy's daughter, and they both wanted to stay at my parent's place, so we left them there and dashed over to Ikea to rectify the bed slat issue. While we were at Ikea, my number finally ported across and my phone started working, which was a huge relief. Being uncontactable during a period of many interactions with random people was highly frustrating for me. Not having mobile Internet access for a few days of extreme mobility showed how much my phone is an extension of my brain. I also picked up a bunch of other random stuff from Ikea, stools that hadn't been in stock the day before, drinking glasses, that sort of thing. We then dropped all that off at the apartment before heading back to my parents' place. So it was another busy day of running all over town, and again, I'm very grateful to Kristy for volunteering her time to make it happen. Most notable accomplishments: complete bed for Zoe, electricity, and a working mobile phone.

Thanks to a generous donation by Bytemark Hosting, Debian started deploying machines for its core infrastructure services in a new data center in York, UK. This hardware and hosting donation will allow the Debian Systems Administration (DSA) team to distribute Debian's core services across a greater number of geographically diverse locations, and improve, in particular, the fault-tolerance and availability of end-user facing services. Additionally, the storage component of this donation will dramatically reduce the storage challenges that Debian currently faces. The hardware provided by Bytemark Hosting consists of a fully-populated HP C7000 BladeSystem chassis containing 16 server blades:

• 12 BL495cG5 blades with 2x Opteron 2347 and 64GB RAM each
• 4 BL465cG7 blades with 2x Opteron 6100 series and 128GB RAM each

and several HP Modular Storage Arrays:

• 3 MSA2012sa
• 6 MSA2000 expansion shelves

with 108 drive bays in total, mostly 500GB SATA drives, some 2TB, some 600GB 15kRPM SAS, providing a total of 57 TB. 57 TB today could host roughly 80 times the current Debian archive or 3 times the Debian Snapshot archive. But remember both archives are constantly growing!

With GNOME 3, if you want to override a setting with a new site default, assuming your app has been updated to use the new gsettings API and doesn't still use the old gconf one, the best guide on what to do is still Ross Burton's blog post from two years ago, although you can find most of what you need to know buried deep in the GSettings C API specification, which is not the first place I would have looked (lesson learned!) Note: In this context I'm in the role of systems administrator, rather than distributor/vendor or software author. Whereas you are generally advised to use gsettings itself and not poke at the backend (dconf for Linux), the documentation seems to point sysadmins towards dconf hackery rather than gsettings. However gsettings worked for me, and I got nowhere with dconf direct. Some caveats worth knowing about:

• Throughout the GNOME documentation and tools, "schema", "key" and "path" are used nearly interchangeably to mean roughly the same thing. (I think a path describes a key within a schema, to be precise.)
• schemas/keys/paths "must start with and end with a forward slash character", except when they mustn't, such as in override files, where you must use a dot, and you don't prefix or suffix the schema/key/path with dots. In fact the command line gsettings tool only accepts dotted schemas, not slash-separated ones.
• Sometimes, people choose XML, and save themselves the trouble of writing a custom parser, but at the expense of ease for humans having to read or write files. gsettings uses XML for schema files, but a separate ini-style format for override files. Everybody wins?
• glib-compile-schemas requires a path argument, so all your schema and override files must be in the same place. Sites have to lump stuff into /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas alongside distribution files, rather than separated out to (say) /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas.
• It's quite possible to get an override file past glib-compile-schemas which non-the-less is broken. The result is gsettings clients, including the gsettings binary itself, complaining and then segfaulting. Do not rely on glib-compile-schemas to ensure compliant override files.
• glib-compile-schemas would appear to read override files in native byte order, so make sure you name your override so that it sorts after any distribution-provided overrides. E.g., 20_my_gnome-shell.gschema.override to sort after 10_gnome-shell.gschema.override.

Today I had to create 40 guest accounts on our 70-seat Linux cluster, including randomly generate passwords, set up persistent storage on our NFS server, etc.; quickly. As a nice-to-have I also wanted to add some application icons to the GNOME 3 "Favourite Apps" menu for the guests. Would you like to guess which of those jobs was the easier of the two?

After having used mutt for about a decade, I decided it's time I move away from it, for various reasons that I won't go into here. I've been evaluating thunderbird^Wicedove now for a few weeks, but I can already see I won't keep using it forever, because I find too many issues with it:

1. I can't tell the thing that I never ever ever want to write HTML-formatted emails. While there is an option "Compose messages in HTML format" in the "Account settings" dialog, that only seems to impact the behaviour of the client upon "new mail", not its reply behaviour, forcing me to go to Options->Format and switch it off.
2. To make matters worse, the HTML editor and the plain-text editor are not the same dialog. That means it is not possible to switch on HTML formatting if it wasn't on originally (not a problem for me, but I can imagine it being a problem for others), but also that the fugly quoting style (vertical line next to the text) of the HTML editor is not removed when you switch from HTML to plain-text. Further on, it has issues when you want to remove white space, where it will remove entire quoting levels rather than just an empty line. This is horrible, horrible behaviour.
3. While there is support for multiple email addresses connected to the same IMAP account, it does appear that there is no support for automatically choosing the right email address based on user-defined rules, such as "which mail folder are we currently in". Having to remember that I need to select the right mail address is tiresome and error-prone; e.g., when I'm in a Debian-related mail folder, I want my mail client to use my Debian mail address automatically. It appears the only way in which icedove can automatically select sender addresses is by checking the recipient list in the To: and Cc: headers for any of its configured mail addresses, and using that to decide what to put in the from: header.

Any one of the above would eventually be enough for me to grow tired of icedove and switch to something else; but the three combined mean that I'll be looking for something else fairly soon. Suggestions are, of course, welcome.

Review: An Election, by John Scalzi

Publisher:	Subterranean
Copyright:	2010
Printing:	2012
ISBN:	1-59606-496-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	24

This is another story from the Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle that probably doesn't justify a full review, particularly since this time it's a short story and not even a novelette, but as with the others it's been independently published on the Kindle (and is still available that way for 99 cents). So by my obsessive internal consistency that matters only to me, it gets a full review anyway. I was mildly surprised to find that this was actually my second reading, and now vaguely remember that Subterranean had actually sponsored the story's appearance on Scalzi's blog as an advertising experiment. So I originally read the story from Scalzi's blog, and if you don't really want to pay money for it, you still can as well. Along with a couple of ads that appear to have bit-rotted. The chief feature of An Election is the background: a world in which aliens and humans are intermingled in a political district, going about their lives against a background of rather extreme multispecies diversity. The protagonist, David, decides to run for the upcoming city council special election, despite living in a district that's minority-human and that hasn't seen a human councilor in forty-four years. (David also happens to be a gay man, which goes entirely unremarked in the story and is, in fact, entirely unremarkable given the excitingly diverse characteristics of his alien neighbors. I thought that was a nice touch.) He of course appears to stand no chance, particularly when one of the city bosses decides to run as well, but ends up with a campaign advisor almost by accident and determinedly attempts to connect with his neighbors and earn their votes. This felt quite typical to me of Scalzi's humor writing. The protagonist is a good-hearted person who gets in rather over his head but is still determined to do the right thing, while not taking anything too seriously. The background humor is never particularly threatening and tends towards slapstick and banter. I found it similar in tone to most of Agent to the Stars, although of course much shorter. As usual, Scalzi's grasp of conversational banter is probably the strongest part of the story; the dynamic between David, his husband James, and his campaign advisor brought several chuckles for me. This is slight but enjoyable. I wouldn't go out of my way to read it, but it's a good story to toss into a bundle of other work, and I remember it holding my interest when reading it on-line. (Which is rare; usually I fail to finish any fiction I try to read in a browser unless it's extremely short.) Rating: 6 out of 10

Review: Echo, by Jack McDevitt

Series:	Alex Benedict #5
Publisher:	Ace
Copyright:	November 2010
Printing:	November 2011
ISBN:	1-937007-00-6
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	367

This is the fifth book in the ongoing Alex Benedict series, but reading the previous volumes is generally optional. While there are references to earlier events (and indeed I resorted to Wikipedia at one point to refresh my memory of the plot of the the first book in the series), they aren't critical to the plot. They mostly are background for the reactions of other characters to Benedict and his firm. Echo opens with the now-familiar prologue, giving us a fleeting and limited glimpse into the mystery that Benedict and Chase Kolpath will be pursuing for the rest of the book. This time, it features the explorer Somerest Tuttle, who has spent most of his life looking for intelligent alien life. (In the far future setting of these books, humanity has spread through a large region of the galaxy but has only encountered one other alien race.) In the twilight of his career and life, a friend who works as a tour guide for astronomical tours comes to him with a story about something she saw. What, we don't know, and won't for most of the book. But, whatever it is, Tuttle never goes public with it, which is directly contrary to what everyone would expect him to do with any news about alien life. Benedict and Kolpath get involved some years later, after Tuttle's death, when a stone slab with unknown markings that was part of his estate shows up on the future equivalent of Craigslist, free to the first person who will haul it away. Benedict finds that interesting enough to go pick up, but then is really hooked when someone else goes to considerable lengths to try to make the slab disappear before anyone can get a good look at it. This, slowly, leads into poking around Tuttle's life and connections, the star tour industry, and the possible origins of the slab. If you've read any of the previous books in this series, Echo is more of the same, and I mean that in a good way. I think McDevitt is at his best when writing this sort of cross between scientific puzzle, mystery, and non-military adventure, full of people who care deeply about knowing and understanding things and don't like to be thwarted in their efforts. There is McDevitt's trademark halting and red-herring-ridden investigation that succeeds in being engrossing and compelling, plenty of opportunities to guess what's really going on (a bit easier this book than in some others), and a bit of action that I thought was better-handled than the somewhat strained action scenes of The Devil's Eye. The book moves right along, despite multiple reversals in the progress of the investigation, and the final revelation does indeed justify the strange behavior of the various people Benedict encounters. As with McDevitt in general and this series in particular, there is one caveat: the astronomical details are often interesting, but the world building in general is not terribly believable. Despite supposedly taking place millennia into the future, the society is a straight transplant (projection would imply more change than exists) of middle-class American culture, with bonus air cars, space ships, and slightly better computers. Similarly, alien ecologies suffer from severe Star Trek problems: all the planets feel like copies of Earth with a few minor tweaks. This just goes with the territory, and if you're up to the fifth book of the series, you've probably gotten used to it, but the unrealistic lack of divergence is actually used as a plot point here. That strained my suspension of disbelief a bit. That said, this sort of extremely familiar social context does give the books an oddly calm, comfortable feeling. It's tempting to describe McDevitt as cozy science fiction. There's a bit of danger, a bit of suspense, but one is fairly certain that everything will work out in the end and the reader will leave the book knowing the solutions to most of the mysteries raised without having to work very hard at understanding the society or the puzzle. If that's what you're in the mood for (and I was when I read Echo), McDevitt delivers reliably. If you like the Alex Benedict series in general, recommended, as this is an excellent example of the type. Rating: 8 out of 10