Sometimes, dependencies on Debian can be an insane horror.

• libgtk2.0-dev requires libgtk2.0-0, which requires libgtk2.0-bin
• libgtk2.0-bin requires libcairo2, libfontconfig1, and libpango1.0-0
• libfontconfig1 requires fontconfig-config
• fontconfig-config requires at least one of ttf-dejavu, ttf-bitstream-vera, ttf-freefont, gsfonts-x11, or msttcorefonts
• ttf-dejavu requires defoma
• defoma requires a version of perl more recent than 5.6.0-16
• perl requires a version of perl-modules more recent than 5.8.7-8
• perl-modules requires a version of perl more recent than 5.8.8-1

The current version of perl on armeb is 5.8.7-8. More recent versions aren't built because they're caught up in some dep-waits:

• perl dep-waits on libdb4.4-dev
• db4.4, which provides libdb4.4-dev, dep-waits on java-gcj-compat-dev
• java-gcj-compat, which provides java-gcj-compat-dev, dep-waits on gcj-4.0
• gcj-4.0 wasn't getting built because it had been deprioritized for some reason. This was probably my mistake.

I've now prioritized all of perl, db4.4, java-gcj-compat, and gcj-4.0. Boy, what a mess did I make. Update: ... and gcj-4.0 requires libgtk2.0-dev. Argl. Update 2: ... okay, I was confused. The issue is not as described above, since even the version of perl in oldstable is recent enough for defoma's needs. The problem is that the xorg source package is not showing up in the armeb archive, for some reason. Need to prod a few people... Update 3: ... aba fixed it; xorg should now show up in armeb, and has been prioritized. Hopefully, "everything" will build now. I don't know what the issue was, but it is fixed. Thanks, Andreas! (oh, and I promise I'll stop updating now :-)

Many advances have been made in agile software development. Frameworks such as Ruby on Rails embody agile principles by making software easy to write, easy to test, and above all, easy to change.If only we could say the same for the infrastructure on which we develop and deploy web applications. Not every application can be a Rails one, especially where it's been up and running for years. The systems we deploy on often rely on configuration files scattered all over the filesystem, and can be complex results of years of change.By extension, the systems we develop on often don't exactly mirror where we deploy. If we're lucky and careful, then we have a staging server which mirrors the live environment, but that's not too much of an advantage. Among other things, we need ways to evolve and refactor the live environment, and have our development environments easily track that.I'd like to call such an environment "agile infrastructure". Infrastructure that doesn't hamper developers, and allows live configurations to change and evolve. Infrastructure that allows new things to be tried with minimum cost, and can provide the best information possible to help future planning.Tools enable techniques, of course. It's a lot easier to be agile if you're programming in Rails rather than plain old PHP. So what are the tools enabling agile infrastructure?
Techniques I've found usefulWhile there's a long way to go, I'd like to describe some of the techniques I've been using to help create a flexible environment for developing a sizeable PHP/MySQL application.Operating systemAn operating system must be easy to bring into a known state with minimum interference. For this, I've found Ubuntu or Debian to be an ideal choice. Two of the main reasons include the constancy of stable releases and the fact that it's rare you need to stray outside the distribution's servers to get the software you need.DeploymentDeploying an application shouldn't break the cleanliness of your OS build. I prefer to package deployed applications into .deb files. This enables me to build on several advantages of the package management system:

• configuration file handling: deployed machines can keep individual config in /etc, which is preserved over software update.
• no random state: you know for sure exactly the state of the deployed application, no random files left hanging around.
• natural workflow: packages take a little bit of effort to build and deploy, which means it focuses developers on getting them right. If things do go wrong, it's very easy to roll back one version.

Source controlThe case for source control, thankfully, doesn't need making these days. Yet not every source control system is created equal. Developers shouldn't be constrained by source control, it should be cheap and easy to try new ideas and merge these in later.Not only cheap branching, but also easy merging, is required to keep development agile while still retaining the benefits of source control. Many people flock to Subversion these days, predominantly because it fixes some of CVS' more egregious misfeatures. However, merging can still be pretty difficult in Subversion.I prefer to use a system allowing easy merging, such as svk or bazaar. Because so many of us use laptops these days, disconnected operation is also a huge boon. Bazaar-NG offers both repository-oriented and completely decentralized operation, giving the best of both worlds. It also wins the competition for least setup overhead.VirtualizationPreviously a high-powered technology, cheap virtualization is now with us. Many identical virtual machines can be quickly created to enable testing and experimentation. Deployment to virtual machines can enable hardware independence for applications, reducing another big headache.Large organisations have it within their reach to bring new hardware online easily, and have invested much in management systems for it. Virtualization brings this in reach of small and one-man development teams.Desktop-based virtualizationSystems such as VMWare and Parallels untether developers from their desks. I use the OS X desktop daily for its productivity software, but an Ubuntu virtual machine for a large proportion of development work. A simple keypress lets me flick between the two. The advantages of multiple desktops to hand for web development are well known. (In fact, thanks to WINE and IES4Linux I can run Internet Explorer cheaply too from the same virtual machine).
Xen virtualizationAfter the initial novelty wears off, one of the most tedious tasks in the world is bringing new machines online. Combined with the tendency development environments have to get crufty as new ideas and tools are tried out, this makes for increasing disparity between the development and deployment environments.Wouldn't it be nice just to take a clean machine off the shelf, check out the source, and pick up again? Using Xen for Linux, this cheap virtualization is possible.Sadly, Xen isn't yet a packaged part of Ubuntu, but getting it up and running on Ubuntu Dapper isn't too hard. Warning: here's where things get pretty deep. Skip this bit if you're not interested in the nitty-gritty.I followed these steps:

• Followed instructions in the Ubuntu wiki to get the first domain (vm) up and running
  
• Installed the xen-tools package, which provides wrappers for easily creating virtual machines
• Adjusted some of the xen-tools configuration (/etc/xen-tools/hook.d/20-setup-apt) to set up for Ubuntu rather than Debian
• Once the virtual machine was made, adjusted its config to allow for the kernel initrd and configure the network bridge I was using
  

Getting over the DNS mountainIf you want it to be easy to bring new virtual machines up and down, you need to adopt a different approach to managing your DNS. You need to know how to predictably connect to a virtual machine. Yet it's going to get very boring and error prone to manage the IP address space manually in your DNS, or even to map the MAC addresses of your virtual machines in your DHCP configuration.
Help is at hand in the form of mDNS (also known as Rendezvous / Bonjour / ZeroConf). In the host machine, and in each virtual machine, I ensured the avahi-daemon and avahi-utils packages were installed, providing mDNS services. (You should also check that mdns is present in the hosts entry of /etc/nsswitch.conf).What all this does is allow the machines (virtual or otherwise) on the network to resolve names using mDNS. So if I create 3 VMs, alpha, beta and gamma, I can access these right away using the hostnames alpha.local, beta.local and gamma.local.Hey presto! Easily make machines appear and disappear without any need for sysadmin involvement. All the extra steps to add avahi installation can be easily scripted with xen-tools, to reduce the number of commands needed to birth a new machine to one.With this ease of creating new machines, it's much more straightforward to experiment with server topology and conduct experiments on server environments.ConclusionAgile development is necessarily constrained by the infrastructure on which it is conducted. The infrastructure itself is constrained by the tools and platforms of choice.By appropriate tool choice we can reduce the commitment and overhead of infrastructure. This enables developers to get on with the job they do best, and makes experimentation and evolution of infrastructure much simpler.When programming, it's dangerous to fall in love with your code, as the best solution may often involve throwing half of it away. The same hazard exists with infrastructure, with bizarre and awkward effects propagating back into code and operations. Get yourself a low commitment, agile environment, and you'll be able to keep up with the pace. 

Programming, windows style
I'm now in the thick of a bunch of win32 programming at my Honeywell part-time job. I don't mind it that much, but I continue to be amazed that Microsoft's IDE is still the one used most often. The autocompletion is nice, but that's about the only good thing about it. I am continually annoyed that the IDE doesn't know which definition of a function I want to use, and only seems to pop up it's hints when it decides. Add this to the fact that most win32 libraries aren't apparently setup in a way so you can put their source in the repository, and I have a lot of admin work which I'm not particularly thrilled to do. 10% programming, 90% random crap. I'm beginning to understand why the average lines of code per day is so low. I can't really complain that much though, I knew the tools we'd be using when I accepted the job.

Programming, rails style
I have been working with Ruby on Rails lately, mostly to make some new web applications which aren't released yet. Things which are possibly in the works:

• MoneyDelta - credit card and savings balance tracker - figures out how much money you are making (or losing) each day based on how the interest is actually calculated. In the end it will probably have a little graph and possibly small things you can do in order to avoid interest and how much you would save in the long run.


• DeadSimpleCMS - CMS built mostly for Diana's use. It lets you specify layouts (not done yet) and content which goes into the layouts. In a very very early stage of development, but it is actually live on a site right now. As the name would imply, the point is to be very simple.


• Gathr - scholarly conference management software. Accepts papers, assigns reviewers based on degrees of connection to avoid conflicts of interest, generally tries to make the whole conference thing easier.

I also have a couple of smaller applications which won't really go anywhere, and an internal application upgrade from php. I really enjoy building web applications in the Rails framework, and I have honed my skills at Ruby enough that I actually use it for small scripts when I get frustrated with bash. I tend to do my Ruby Coding in TextMate and with Locomotive on the iBook, although I may do some on the Debian machine soon.

So far, Ruby is the only language I have actually liked that imposes a mindset on you. I love Perl's approach of letting you do things your way, whatever you define by that - Ruby forces you to extensively use OOP. But, actually, it is so well implemented that it even makes sense. It is even fun! Of course, that paired to an excellent introspection ability leaves enough room to make the cleverest (and, yes, most obfuscated) code you can think of.
Well... But there are limits to everything, and I think I found a spot where all the nice separation and cleanness ends abruptely: When interacting to the always nasty outside world.
It might also, of course, have some relation to the fact that I'm too new also for writing GUIs - this is the first nontrivial one I do. And it shows, as it took me some time to properly understand the pairing between the nice Glade elements, how to make a decently modular system, how to properly handle UI (and internal) events... But I've been progressing quite nicely, and I hope to be able to show off my little app to a wider audience soon. At the very least, I hope to be able to show it to my boss by next week, as he is getting impatient ;-)
Ok, but where does it all break, according to me? One of the things I must monitor with this app is that a couple of processes spawned by it work happily in the background while I only show a nice interface to my users. Now, how is the best way to do this? Why, by trapping the SIGCHLD signal, of course! Whenever any of the processes in the pipeline die, the parent (controlling) process gets a nice CHLD signal. I trap it, restart the processes, and no harm done. And in Ruby, it looks quite natural:
How nice, how neat... How buggy :-/
It took me quite a few hours to get this right. And it should be obvious, of course... No matter where you declare a signal handler, there is no reason for you to believe it is tied to a particular instance, or for that matter, to a class. A signal handler breaks and jumps in the execution in the ugliest old-school way. Yes, if your signal handler consists of:
you will note that your good friend self is nothing but an Object.
Once I realized that, yes, things became reworkable, and I now think I am actually better off even OOP-aly than some hours ago - Some of the classes badly needed to adhere to the Singleton pattern and now work with less worries and ugliness. But, hey, it took me quite a while.
Anyway, lets see which new challenges Ruby+Glade2 still have for me. I am sure there will be plenty. And I haven't even started playing with GStreamer!

Yesterday, the right-wing PAN candidate for the presidency of Mexico, Felipe Calder n, made a declaration that shadows the current president, Vicente Fox (from his same political party) almost look like a genuine statesman. (some links, La Jornada, El Universal) - And that's no easy feat, given that Mr. Fox is -so far- the nation's most prolific president... When it comes to stupid sayings.
How come Calder n rose so quickly to become a statesman? Let me first go through a bit of history. Not much, promise. Well, I'll do my best.
Twelve years and one month ago, Mexicans woke up with the frightening news we had a violent guerrilla group in Chiapas, one of Mexico's richest states, but one with the highest percentages of poor people - and, not coincidentally, of indigenous population as well. This uprising was very soon known all over the world - And its leaders quickly learned how to ensure they would not be prosecuted and exterminated: Simultaneously with the fighting, they made as large a media coverage as they could, strongly supported in the Internet democratization of the information that had just begun. Thousands of people all over the world understood their ideas -at least what they said at that time- and spread the word. I had my first trip in Europe with my (now) wife in 1996, and we saw many grafittis stating Viva Chiapas, Viva EZLN... It was amazing.
EZLN was (is) specially hard for the government to kill. As they don't do military sabotages, terrorism or so on, it is very hard to justify military action. After 12 days of fighting, a truce was decreed. The truce was broken once, in the early years of the Zedillo government, but officially there is a cease-fire, observed by both sides. The Zapatistas have took the ideas and further promoted them, with action. My Chiapas-born friend Alex Ju rez often tells me about the tremendous cultural difference between the Zapatista territories and the paramilitary ones - In the Zapatista areas, you see indians reading books, working their land, organizing themselves in the Fair Government councils, and strongly opposing alcohol and drugs. Just the opposite from the other areas.
EZLN shifted their strategy some months ago, going beyond stating their wishes for a fair regime and waiting for the government to look at them. I still don't really understand where they are heading, but the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Rainforest turns them into a political movement, clearly separated from the existing regime. They do not seek to be elected, they oppose every party and candidate. They define themselves as an anticapitalist movement, located down and to the left - Lets see where this goes to.
Well, back on track... One of the president's most famous stupid quotes is that, during his campaign, he promised to solve the Chiapas conflict in fifteen minutes. Well, it's been either fifteen very long minutes, or he just hasn't had any time to devote to those dirty indians. Mexicans are very frustrated by the lack of importance this man gave to one of our country's longest and most desperate needs.
Of course, Felipe Calder n must do something in this regard. Fox's shadow is a big one, and this little man must try to escape from Fox's biggest mistakes. So he just came with a formula that I don't know why no statesman thought of before: Instead of negotiating, instead of working to solve a very difficult problem, he declared he will unilaterally declare peace with EZLN.
I wonder if this year's Nobel prize will go to such an abnegated, smart and selfless person. Man, we could take this same solution to Darfur, to Israel/Palestine, to Congo, to Chechnya... If rulers all over the world start declaring peace unilaterally, all of the world's problems will be solved! What comes next, he will declare (maybe as Salinas did) that we are a first world country? Poor people are only sad reflections in the sand but don't exist in his reality?
Please, Mexicans: The man is clearly schizoid. Are you happy with Foxilandia? It seems that alternate realities are part of the PAN's action program. If you are not satisfied with Fox's results (who is?), don't vote for this guy. We will all regret it.

I switched to modularized X last night and it went quite well. Thanks to whole X team for their tremendous work on it. I had only two problems. First one was not-working my beloved font for xterm (xfonts-terminus), but that's effect of some changes in paths. Second one is still not-solved... xev stopped printing symbol names for multimedia keys of my keyboard and installing xkb-data as I was told on #debian-devel didn't help to fix that. I suppose because of that my fvwm behaves strange and I'm not sure whether fvwm have to be fixed or the problem is new X. Update: As usual fix was trivial. I chose wrong keyboard layout.

Originally posted as a comment in Finland for Thought. A system of health care paid by insurance (of whatever form) and provided by private hospitals looks attractive on the surface but isn t really a good system. Look at the economic dynamic of the system. The insurance (if comprehensive) will essentially pay for any operation that the physician at the scene deems necessary. Is it in the physician s interest to use that tab as efficiently as possible? No, in fact, it is the opposite: it is in their best interest to find as many reasons to bill as much as they can. This is a road to disaster. Of course, you can balance this system by introducing insurance investigators who examine bills and determine if they are legit. To do the job properly, they need to be qualified physicians, and they need to have access to all the data that the physician at the scene had. Essentially, these investigators would be doing the job all over again, except never seeing the patient. Result: the money you save from preventing fraudulent billing is spent in maintaining a paraller physician workforce. Why not let the investigators be the healers, and cut the private hospital out of it altogether? These physicians would have budgetary responsibility on what they spend, and thus they only do what they need to do. Oops. Looks like we just transformed the market-based health care system into a state-operated, socialized system.

Another day, another Google product launch, though this one does more than just lay the groundwork for epic battles to come (most recent example: Google Spreadsheets). Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that solves an immediate problem that no one to date has adequately solved: It automatically synchronizes browser settings across computers. I’ve been using Foxmarks for a while now to keep my bookmarks synchronized across the various computers I use and have found it incredibly useful. But bookmarks are just a small sliver of the Web 2.0 client problem, and I’ve recently found myself wishing Foxmarks could synchronize saved passwords too, the next maddening bit of client metadata that never seems to be in the right place. Well, I now have my solution, and after using it for a few hours, it seems to work pretty well. My only real complaint is that it only works with one open browser at a time—if you launch a browser on a second computer, it logs you out on the first one. I have multiple computers on my desk with multiple browsers open at any given time, and Foxmarks handled this use case well. Of course, as with all new Google products, this one exposes as many (or more) new holes in the Google platform as it covers, at least for me. For example, why not synchronize my bookmarks with, well, Google Bookmarks? That way, I could get to my browser bookmarks online, add tags (er, labels), etc., with any changes I make online being reflected back on the client side via the browser synchronization. And why isn’t bookmark functionality available in the Google Toolbar? (Actually, it looks like it is available in the IE version, but not the Firefox version, which makes absolutely no sense to me: Shouldn’t the goal be to abstract away the platform underneath, which implies exposing the exact same feature sets in both versions?) And don’t even get me started on Google Notebook, which otherwise looks promising but is completely unintegrated with Google Bookmarks, not to mention the new thing. While I’m at it, why, oh why, doesn’t Google Notebook utilize the very nice word processing functionality acquired with Writely instead of implementing its own rudimentary text editing support? (Ok, that last one’s further afield, but you get where I’m going here.) In summary, I now have three ways to bookmark things using the Google platform—the browser (nicely synchronized across computers via the Google cloud), a star (a la Gmail) next to results in my Search History (but not on plain old Google search), and “Note This” on plain old Google search (but not the Search History). Oh, and they all create bookmarks in different places. The end result? Even though I’m primarily a Google customer these days, none of this mess is usable, and I’m still using del.icio.us to bookmark things. That said, I’m not even using del.icio.us as much as I used to because it’s not as well integrated with the browser as it could be, which is presumably why Google is investing in a saner browser environment. (There, we’ve gone full circle now.) I could go on all day. And, thus far, I’ve only talked about bookmarks. From where I set, this is just an example of a much broader problem for Google: Google has an impressive collection of interesting, but disjoint, features. I’d imagine this is a result of Google’s engineering culture combined with rapid growth. Granted, this approach has served Google pretty well thus far as it pumps new stuff out on a nearly weekly basis while Microsoft struggles to get anything done in less than six years. Of course, Microsoft’s rapidly learning how to be agile, and if there’s one thing Microsoft is good at, it’s assembling disjoint features into platforms. So, heads up, Google: You have a thing or two to learn from Microsoft before that epic battle I referred to earlier begins. They’re certainly learning from you. Technorati Tags: firefox, google, mozilla, platforms, synchronization, web20

Well, I finally have a new laptop. Got it yesterday, spent about 3 hours installing and downloading all the software, and then let rsync run all last night to transfer over my home directory. Of course like any good Debian user I've filed a detailed installation report. I'm fairly pleased with the fujitsu p7120 so far. Compared to my old p1100:

• The keyboard feels larger, and the couple of keys that were moved around all make sense, except for delete. The right shift key is enormous, larger than that key is on a regular full size keyboard, and the other non-alphanumerics are also very nicely sized. Even the spacebar is larger than the usual laptop chiclet. I'd not realised how dead my old laptop's keyboard had gotten until keys started falling off; typing on this new one is just fun. Sorry for the length of the resulting blog entry..
• It runs a little bit hotter, but still seems quite nice for a fanless laptop with a fairly modern processor in it (1.2 ghz).
• The screen is much nicer, very bright. Was worried that it would be too reflective, but situations where it is seem rare. It's very nice to be able to see the screen outdoors; I'm writing this in direct sunlight.
• The touch pad is very small, but very responsive. I can't normally use touch pads and I wasn't able to consider buying this laptop until I got a chance to try it out at DebConf. With that said, the lack of a middle mouse button is very annoying, and I'm looking for some way to bind keys in X to a) paste and b) touch pad disable toggle. I'm still having significant problems with reliably dragging to highlight text too, about 10x as slow at is as I was with the old laptop's pointer. You don't realized how often you copy text around that way until it becomes easier to just re-type it.. The two mouse buttons are not very conveniently placed, their positioning makes it hard to do a one-handed click and drag.
• The case doesn't feel as solid as my old laptop's. It's also an inch longer, which makes it seem less safe to toss it in the bottom of my backpack and run around with it than the old laptop, which was basically an indestrictible little lump. All the other changes made to the case design seem like improveents, except they used a blue LED for the power indicator, which like all blue LEDs is too bright to be comfortable at night. I'll probably use some whiteout on it.
• The battery lasts 4.5 hours real usage without any tuning beyond cpufreqd, which is quite nice. I haven't felt the need to add in a bay battery yet; that battery should bring it up to ~11 hours.
• The drive is one of those new really tiny laptop hard drives, and it's whisper-quiet. I have to put my ear right on the bottom of the case to hear it.
• The speakers are quite a lot better (for laptop speakers). The internal dual microphone array seems to not be very sensative at all, I wonder how much work the windows drivers for it do in software? The keyboard sound controls don't work in linux, which is a pity.
• The fingerprint reader and card reader are the only bits not yet supported by linux. If you care about non-free firmware, only the wifi needs that.
• 3D works; I can finally try out most of the new games that have been written in the past 6 years or so. Whee..

Headphones which assume non-customized ears suck.

After two weeks and a bit it finally happened: I hit austria again. But, first things first. I guess everyone noticed by now that at the start the network wasn't our best strengths. I helped as much as possible, collected network cable back from one path to lay it out at a different one just to find that the about 200 m were a bit too short (or rather, me was lying the cable with too much safety). Though, it was too long anyway to be relyable, to it was cut in the middle and a small access point was put in. Later it had to be replaced because we were running a bit short of specific power supplies. But it wasn't too bad, waiting for some more rj45 plugs and other things even allowed Ganneff to spend some time in the pool and relax a bit. And given that there seem to have been a few (vegetarian) people less than registered for sponsored meals allowed stockholm and Vagrant to get extra dishes to get fed. People during the debcamp mostly enjoyed themself, mao was played, fights for the gay vegetarian sign, tetrinetx on homer when only local network was available, and I managed to translate the new wesnoth tutorial into german. It wasn't clear by then that the new release will be delayed due to other problems until after the debconf, but in my opinion the tutorial is one of the most important parts of any games because it explains the basics, so I wanted to be sure that there won't be another release without a fully translated one. About enjoying oneself: I tried out the skirts I brought with me and considered them absolutely comfortable. You'll find me more with one, especially when it gets warmer. It helped me to be more "myself". Also I enjoyed the weird looks and repeated questions about my shoes — although it was often that I was walking barefooted; but that got a bit of a pain, especially after noon when you were able to boil eggs on the stones. And given that I forgot myself when I switched from blue/red shoes to red/blue ones you don't have to send in your guesses when it was done because I can't tell who would be the winner anyway. ;) The end of the week came, the Debian Day was here. Closer to its happening more and more people arrived and it was becoming more crowded in the hacklab. The network became more and more stable, the video streaming setup got finalized, and everything looked alright. Some of the mexico city people stayed for the night and enjoyed the friendly atmosphere (and a beer or two ;)). The debconf started for real, the talks started, people were busy all around, zack added me to the alioth pkg-vim project to continue helping with the hijacked debian specific syntax files. Haven't done much yet beside a checkout, still pondering where I can bug around most ;) I was looking forward to bubulle's BoF about the i18n infrastructure. It was really inspiring, and I collected some ideas for what the tool-to-be-created should support. The second BoF later the week just showed that others were mostly thinking along the same lines, so I hadn't much to add. Still I am looking forward to join the effort to make it happen — I was playing with the idea about such a tool for ages now, and I guess this is what it will make it happen, finally. Christian is so much more able to get people interested and together for making it happen than me... :/ There were some more talks I could mention, like Enrico's talk about Advanced tools for wasting time (yes, I have submitted my gnu.cow file in the meantime), or Erin's and aj's Debian's Debugging Debacle: the Debrief (in which I finally got around to fix a RC bug incidentally), and the talk by bubulle and jfs about State of the art for Debian i18n/l10n of course, which features some of the conclusions of the two part BoF. Some of the evening featured interesting things too, like a cheese BoF, the everywhere featured formal dinner with its mariachis, the waterfall and the blackout; special effects you wouldn't be able to plan as well as they happened — though Martin Ferrarri had a small accident with it when water rushed down onto his plate and spilled the sauce over his white shirt and the table. And then there was the hard liquour BoF where I quit after the eggnogg. The week passed, I got my hair dyed and rid of my beard right in time for the group photo. Thank you nattie, a thousands time, it went better than I expected! Really like it. I didn't attend the fun photo in the pool the next day, was a bit late after the talk, didn't had my bathing slip with me, was worried about my newly dyed hairs and was nervous... because a person I was looking forward to meet again was late. But gladly only late, so I got rid of my nervousness and enjoyed the last official talk (formerly mentioned i18n talk) of the week, and explained to some attendee that even in languages like French, German and English (yes, no mistake) there are still areas we have to struggle with all of this, like when keeping things up to date and the likes. It was the last evening in Oaxtepec for me because I refused to leave by bus at 4 in the morning, rather wanted to spend the night in Mexico City to at least be able to have seen a tiny bit of it and eat something my tummy enjoys completely. :) I guess I don't need to point at sandino's gallery about that evening anymore, thanks to Gunnar. And yes, I'm mentally disturbed, but that shouldn't be anything new to people who know me for a while, or is it? ;) This night was too long (less than 4 hours of sleep is even for debconf not much), so I rather went to bed early after a small walk (just 2 blocks or such) in the city and a nice dinner with friends who are missing the nice time too and was wearing too big sort-of shoes. Went to the airport in the morning by taxi whose driver gladly was able to speak english. Met zack and Martin Ferrari again there, and some other people with whom I was taking the same plane with. They were hacking along on the airport, found the open wifi, using power supplies from different spots. Bubulle already wrote about the two loud guys, gladly I wasn't too close to them, and plugged myself into the music and movie channels from the plane. The showed Last Holiday (which I really liked, although in the ending I started to cry — mostly because I started to realize what I was leaving...) and two spanish movies of which I don't remember the titles. People started to hack away in the temporarily set up hacklab and we started to wonder how much power they might have, though they cheated: They used two battery packs... In Madrid some more people parted and we were down to 5 people. I bought totally overpriced playingcards so we could play Mao, had a short nice session and spread the word. We did hack the baby room power supply and hacked along a bit more, and then Peter and me were off heading to vienna, finally. All in all I really enjoyed it. Although there were its down times, sunburned, my butt hurting a bit because in the end I did jump from the 10m platform into the pool, it still was a really nice event and even though I guess many people tried to enjoy themselfes quite some things were acomplished. If not really codewise, then at least social-wise, which will benefit quite well in the future, I'm sure. Hope to see you all next year, wherever that might be.

Kudzu Zangpo La (very honored to meet you) So, the reason for which I travelled so long a few days ago was the Dzongkha Linux Launch. This event has been incredibly successful and rich for me, today. Just imagined that several ministries of Bhutan were attending the launch of a Debian-derived distribution, entirely localized in the Dzongkha language, the national language of Bhutan. I expected something really motivating but I can assure you, my dear Debian friends, that I wasn't expecting something with so much importance for that country. Seeing the "Chief Guest" of the event, the Honorable ministry of Education, say that "we had a collective dream and we realized it" and seeing that small CD containing a full Linux system, entirely using the Dzongkha language, that can be used by any, or nearly any, person in Bhutan, is a huge achievement. Actually, I was proud to mention that this "dream" is indeed the dream that motivates many actors of the Free Software Movement since 20 years and me since about 10 years. So, actually, I was deeply honored to represent the Debian project here and be invited to give a keynote lecture about "Free SOftware and the Global Community". I will certainly write a more formal report about this and send it to -devel-announce, but I already wanted to share my enthusiasm with all you, people in the Debian community, who are the ones who make this possible.

Rachele and I went to Montreal for the day this past weekend. It was the longest time we’ve ever left our one year old daughter Esther—just over twelve hours with my parents. Remarkably, she survived, and didn’t even miss us. Every time I go to Montreal I’m reminded of just how much better Canada is. For example, Senzala, a Brazilian breakfast place in Mile End, served the most delicious gourmet poached eggs (pictured here with Rachele): We also had a great time visiting the Botanical Garden, a vast park that dwarfs anything Boston has to offer. Here are a few examples of the flora—click on the image to see the full size version. Along with poached eggs, beautiful gardens, and socialized healthcare, what more could one ask for?

By Monday morning, it was my turn to get up ludicrously early. I managed to catch a hot shower, which was very welcome. You see, they turned off the hot water late at night, and didn't turn it on early in the morning. So if you kept hacker hours, you'd get a cold shower before going to bed. I bid goodbye to my sleeping companions as I rolled my suitcase out of the room and checked out at the Reception desk. I sat on my suitcase with laptop in hand, as we waited for the others to show up. We were carpooling to town in some taxis, as I had an awful bus experience coming in to Oaxtepec. It was in this hour that I taught myself how to blend exposures in the Gimp. There was a lot of fiddling with alpha channels and masks, until I hit upon exactly the right solution. By the time I was done, a rather large group of people had gathered about me. It was about then that four taxis pulled up and we threw all our luggage into little hatchbacks. Then Nattie, Ben, and I squeezed inside and we were off! Instead of choosing the toll highway, our driver decided to take the country roads. This was not such a poor idea, since we got a good look at the countryside. I had never seen fields of cactus before, but I suppose that makes sense. After all, it is edible and requires very little irrigation. We drove along the winding roads and passed through town after town. In one, we had to stop momentarily. That's because a herder was driving his flock of sheep through town. We saw them turn a corner, and then our car was surrounded by a sea of bleating wooly sheep. Then, as quickly as they appeared, they were gone. As we neared Mexico City, we noticed a rather large mountain in the distance. A mountain that spewed smoke. Our driver informed us that it's Popocatepetl, a local active volcano. He pulled over by the side of the road and let Nattie hop out to take photographs. The taxi behind us pulled over as well, and they spent a few minutes snapping shots. I noted that where we had stopped was rather hazy, so I just snapped a few photographs when it appeared in my window. I lucked out, I suppose. You could tell when we approached the city, as the traffic got heavier and things got louder. I awoke from my brief nap to see us pull through a toll-booth and on to a six-lane highway. We managed to get to the international gates at the aeroport, have our luggage unloaded, and paid our driver for his troubles. Then we checked in. My luggage tested positive for explosives about four times. The security guard for Mexicana kept swabbing away with test strips, each time coming up with a different result. Eventually, he printed up a chart, stared at the squiggly lines, and let me put it on the conveyor belt. Then, I met up with Nattie and Ben, and we also bumped into Peter. We bought some postcards and sat in a restaurant. There, we ate overpriced American food and wrote back home. Or rather, Nattie and Ben wrote charming postcards and I dashed off twenty-three hastily worded missives. Then, we hugged goodbye and it was time for me to board my flight. Ben graciously offered to post my mail, because I had run out of time. Liftoff was quite exciting. The wind was gusting so as we took off, I got to see the engine shake furiously in its housing. And we did a little hop as we pulled off the ground. A little girl, sitting behind me, shrieked in distress when we did that. I really don't blame her. Landing in Montr al was a lot safer. Even though we had to go through layers and layers of clouds to do it. It was sort of depressing, actually, flying from gorgeous blue skies into a city covered by grey. But I had brought the sunshine back with me!

I awoke to a very early alarum clock, which I shut off quickly. I dragged myself out of bed to see ze_dinosaur off, but he was far more prepared than I was. I waved goodbye and then collapsed back into bed. Sunday morning was pretty difficult for me. In fact, I only got up in the afternoon. I ate some bananas and showed up to the HackLab where I socialized for a good while. Then we realized that lunch would be smart, so we went to the market. Instead of tortilla based food, we managed to get some stewed meat and deep-fried vegetables. That was rather tasty and I had to waddle back. I spent the rest of the day touching up photographs instead of going on the waterslides. I'm now wondering if that was wise. But at the time, it seemed like a lot of fun. What wasn't so wise was trying an iced treat when I didn't want one. I got some money out of an automated teller and saw a shop across the street that sold iced things. Well, I crossed into the shop and ordered one. They scooped out some ground ice, topped it with mango syrup, splashed it with lime juice, and topped it with salt and chili powder. Now that I think of it, it would be tasty and refreshing if you drank lots of water all day. Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that our last meal in town should be wonderful. So I rounded up a rather large group of people who wanted to go out for dinner, expressed that we'd be going all fancy, and generally herded them into the fanciest restaurant in town. Some people initially complained about the potential cost, but the convival atmosphere and cloth napkins overruled this. So did the tasty platters of beef. We were all quite happily stuffed. Afterwards, a few of us strolled through a park attached to a local historic site. There were plenty of benches to sit upon and we contemplated the night air. I'll have to say that Mexico's nights are a lot less chilly than Montr al's. But the resort had all the lights on, so you couldn't see any stars at all. By the time we had strolled back to the HackLab, people were disassembling the network. I lugged a big server into a van and brought a few more boxes of things there. After the heavy lifting, I took a few more photographs of people, wonderful people, before deciding to retire. But the camera never does capture the fleeting moments.

My server’s mailman (or postfix) installation is mysteriously rejecting mail from one Yahoo! mail user. I don’t get it:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following
addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
:
72.1.169.10 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 : Recipient address rejected: undeliverable address:
unknown user: "[list name]"
Giving up on 72.1.169.10.

72.1.169.10 is, in fact, the IP address of my server. [list name] is (in the real version) the real live name of the list. The list seems to work for everyone else. And it’s certainly not true that I, or my server, doesn’t like this recipient (or sender). Aside from this anomalous behavior, it’s also funny that Yahoo! provides plain old unfiltered qmail bounce messages to its users. Wouldn’t you think a fully matured webmail service like Yahoo! would, by this point, have somewhat customized their mail error reporting messages? In fact, wouldn’t you think they would want to hide the fact that the use qmail at all, if only for security purposes? Couldn’t they hire an intern to write a few replacement error messages? Maybe I’m missing something. A propos, I discovered this nice piece from McSweeney’s, entitled YAHOO’S MAILER-DAEMON AUTOMATED REPLY FOR FAILED E-MAIL DELIVERY IS GETTING A LITTLE TOO INTIMATE. Update 5/30/06: Figured it out. Oddly, Yahoo! was looking up the CNAME DNS record for the domain name and replacing that in the mail header. While the original email went to e.g., listname@lists.mydomain.com, the message as delivered was addressed to listname@servername.mydomain.com. Because only lists.mydomain.com processed email for lists, the message bounced. The solution was to change lists.mydomain.com from being a CNAME entry to its own A entry with the IP address specified directly. That fixed the problem. I’ve never seen any other mail service work this way — gmail certainly doesn’t.

Ok, the order matters in this case, you are right Brett, i mean Planet Debian. This morning a lot of my old posts have been in Planet Debian, now seems to be fixed. Ouch, I've just realized that i need a hackergotchi :D