Well, I've done it. The XSF svn repo now contains a full set of packages for the Xorg modular tree that enable it to run an X server in a chroot from a clean install. Note that the packages are still very sloppy because I've been mainly beating them in to shape enough to simply run the server. But that part's now done, and I can happily get that grey hatched background to show up from inside my chroot. The next step will be to finish packaging everything, so that we have a full set of packages to install, run, test, and clean up to the standards of quality we expect from Debian. Note that I don't recommend anyone but developers even take a look at these things yet, since I've been very lax in getting them in to good shape. I had a good base to work from (more on that in a moment) but I took some liberties and cut some corners in order to get to this point. Once we have a full set of packages, I'll throw them in to experimental for people to play with, but right now they're not going to be much fun for anyone.

I couldn't have gotten this far this fast without the help of Daniel Stone, so a big thanks goes out to him. Not only has he been great about showing me just which packages to steal from and where, but every time I ran in to some obscure bug he had already been there and quickly pointed me to the way out, often with a package update ready to go. The packages he made are wonderfully simple and easy to understand, which let me get moving on them right away, and they'll form a wonderful basis for the future of Debian's X distribution.

On a further note, I've asked the release team to let us upload 6.9 to unstable when it's released, which should be next week. So far there's been no objection, and a bunch of people have chipped in so far to help out with the xlibs-dev transition. Thanks to everyone who's been helping out so far with getting 6.9 in. 6.9 will set the stage for the modular packages, by giving everyone the most up to date drivers for the next few months and taking the pressure off of me to deliver the modular packages right away :-) My goal is to ship the modular packages with etch, and I'm going to keep working to do that, but 6.9 should keep people happy until those are ready for unstable.

Tommi Kyyr , IFPI finland:

Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos , says Kyyr and continues; If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.

This madness began in 2001, when EU passed EUCD, the European version of DMCA. Next year, Ministry of culture introduced the first proposal for the Finnish implementation of EUCD. After fierce criticism from EFFI and various citizens, the committee studying the proposal rejected it before parliaments vote, demanding that the ministry must consult everyone effected by the change in law. When creating this proposal, practically only Music Industry pressure groups where heard.

Fast forward September 2005, and Ministry of culture and Music Industry pressure groups are pushing the second proposal a lot harder. All the parts from we hate are still there - No interoperability, chilling effects on security research and freedom of speech, and so on. Minister Karpela Claims that she is surprised by the criticism, and complained that people should have criticized properly during the law preparation phase (Not telling that EFFI _WAS_ heard during preparation, and their opinion was ignored).

The Media was alsoquick to to find out, that Jukka Liedes, the bureaucrat who actually wrote the Law Proposal, has a also a position ESEK, a Finnish Music Industry Pressure group. Such corruption is almost unheard in Finland.

On friday, the "Grand Committee" passed the law forward without modifications, for the parliament to vote on later. A requirement was appended that "Ministry of culture must ensure, that all users are able to view/listen to copyprotected content". Several The chairman of Grand Committee, already declared the appended part "Naive". Which it very much is. Entertainment industry is not going to relax copyprotection for say, Linux users in Finland...

The worst part? According to the current proposal,

Downloading music from internet without copyright holders permission is not a punishable offence, but breaking copyprotection of a CD you have bought, is.

Support our Aussie Farmers, dear Henry, dear Henry. Support our Aussie Farmers, dear Henry. Support!

I hate "current affairs" shows. They're nothing but beat-ups and bullshit. But I had the unpleasant experience of actually watching an episode just now, and they've hit a new low. It was an article on prawn farmers, and oscillated between South Park style "they took our jobs!" and "those evil retailers, mislabelling foreign prawns as local". Now, I empathise with people who lose their jobs due to circumstances beyond their control, and misrepresentation is a fairly unpleasant thing, but the bit that thoroughly pissed me off was the return comment from the presenter: "We should all support our Aussie farmers." How, exactly? We can't "buy Australian", because the products are mislabelled, and that was the whole thrust of their article. No mention was made of legal action, civil or criminal, and the number of people watching who would be in a position to take such action would be vanishingly small. Misrepresentation is already illegal, so it isn't a matter of pressuring our elected representatives to pass appropriate legislation. At least I know I've not been missing anything by running away every time a show like this comes on the idiot box for the past 12 months.

Diesen Abend war in meinem Wohnheim, der Insterburg, ein kleines Festivalchen, mit drei Lifebands. Und da ich gerade eh warte, bis die ~150 Bilder skaliert und hochgeladen sind, kann ich auch gleich dar ber bloggen.Die erste Band, die aufgetreten ist, wurde von mir vermittelt: Peer Pressure kenn ich noch aus Herrenberger Zeiten, fand sie damals schon toll, und sponsere nicht umsonst auch deren Webseite (Domain/Hosting). Man merkt deutlich, dass die vier Jungs inzwischen doch schon einie Routine haben, und die neuen Songs sind wirklich h renswert. Besonders gefiel mir “On the inside”. Leider hatten sie das undankbare Los des ersten Auftritts, und so kam das Publikum nur schleppend in Schwung - ein wenig mehr B hnenshow w rde hier nicht schaden.Das konnte daf r die n chste Band sehr gut: Los Elektrodomestikos ist eine Ska-Band in Anz gen (naja, zumindest am Anfang) und komplett mit Trompete und Posaune und war das Highlight des Abends: Nicht nur die Musik war gut, sondern vor allem lieferten die Jungs eine klasse B hnenshow, was unter anderem dazu f hrte, dass die meisten der Bilder, die ich von dem Abend gemacht habe, von den Jungs sind. Auch die Ausdauer war ausgezeichnet, was wohl auch daran lag, dass sie regelm ig die Positionen durchgewechselt haben, und so bekamen wir f nf Zugaben.Und es w hren vielleicht noch mehr geworten, h tten wir nicht die Zeit f r die dritte Band gebraucht: Brehon, eine in Karlsruhe wohl nicht unbekannte Irish-Folkrock-Band, die (ger chteweise) schon auf “Dem Fest” gespielt hat. Leider war die Musik nach der Ska-Band etwas unpassend und die Masste tobte nicht mehr. Vielleicht h tte man die Reihenfolge der Bands anders w hlen sollen, aber das ist wohl vorher schwer abzusch tzen.Insgesamt ein gelunges Fest (und die Konserven-Musik f r hinterher h re ich immernoch in den siebten Stock), das erste Lifekonzert bei mir zuhause (und ich mit Hausschuhen mitten drin) und die, die wegen einem Heizungsleck nicht kommen konnten haben leider wirklich was verpasst.

If anyone asks you what the difference is between Christmas and Chanukah, you will know what and how to answer!

1. Christmas is one day, same day every year, December 25. Jews also love December 25th. It's another paid day off work. We go to movies and out for Chinese food and Israeli dancing. Chanukah is 8 days. It starts the evening of the 24th of Kislev, whenever that falls. No one is ever sure.
Jews never know until a non-Jewish friend asks when Chanukah starts, forcing us to consult a calendar so we don't look like idiots. We all have the same calendar, provided free with a donation from the World Jewish Congress, the kosher butcher, or the local Sinai Memorial Chapel(especially in Florida) or other Jewish funeral home.

2. Christmas is a major holiday. Chanukah is a minor holiday with the same theme as most Jewish holidays. They tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat

3. Christians get wonderful presents such as jewelry, perfume, stereos... Jews get practical presents such as underwear, socks, or the collected works of the Rambam, which looks impressive on the bookshelf.

4. There is only one way to spell Christmas. No one can decide how to spell Chanukah, Chanukkah, Chanukka, Channukah, Hanukah, Hannukah, etc.

5. Christmas is a time of great pressure for husbands and boyfriends. Their partners expect special gifts. Jewish men are relieved of that burden. No one expects a diamond ring on Chanukah.

6. Christmas brings enormous electric bills. Candles are used for Chanukah. Not only are we spared enormous electric bills, but we get to feel good about not contributing to the energy crisis.

7. Christmas carols are beautiful...Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful.... Chanukah songs are about dreidels made from clay or having a party and dancing the hora. Of course, we are secretly pleased that many of the beautiful carols are composed and written by our tribal brethren.

And don't Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond sing them beautifully?

8. A home preparing for Christmas smells wonderful. The sweet smell of cookies and cakes baking. Happy people are gathered around in festive moods. A home preparing for Chanukah smells of oil, potatoes, and onions. The home, as always, is full of loud people all talking at once.

9. Women have fun baking Christmas cookies. Jewish women burn their eyes and cut their hands grating potatoes and onions for latkas on Chanukah. Another reminder of our suffering through the ages.

10. Parents deliver to their children during Christmas. Jewish parents have no qualms about withholding a gift on any of the eight nights.

11. The players in the Christmas story have easy to pronounce names such as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. The players in the Chanukah story are Antiochus Judah Maccabee, and Matta whatever. No one can spell it or pronounce it. On the plus side, we can tell our friends anything and they believe we are wonderfully versed in our history.

12. Many Christians believe in the virgin birth. Jews think, "Joseph,you shmuck, snap out of it. Your woman is pregnant, you didn't sleep with her, and now you want to blame G-d. Here's the number of my shrink".

13. In recent years, Christmas has become more and more commercialized. The same holds true for Chanukah, even though it is a minor holiday. It makes sense. How could we market a major holiday such as Yom Kippur? .....

Forget about celebrating. Think observing. Come to synagogue, starve yourself for 27 hours, become one with your dehydrated soul, beat your chest, confess your sins, a guaranteed good time for you and your family.
Tickets a mere $200 per person.

[Stolen from $unknown]

Well, I've done it. The XSF svn repo now contains a full set of packages for the Xorg modular tree that enable it to run an X server in a chroot from a clean install. Note that the packages are still very sloppy because I've been mainly beating them in to shape enough to simply run the server. But that part's now done, and I can happily get that grey hatched background to show up from inside my chroot. The next step will be to finish packaging everything, so that we have a full set of packages to install, run, test, and clean up to the standards of quality we expect from Debian. Note that I don't recommend anyone but developers even take a look at these things yet, since I've been very lax in getting them in to good shape. I had a good base to work from (more on that in a moment) but I took some liberties and cut some corners in order to get to this point. Once we have a full set of packages, I'll throw them in to experimental for people to play with, but right now they're not going to be much fun for anyone.

I couldn't have gotten this far this fast without the help of Daniel Stone, so a big thanks goes out to him. Not only has he been great about showing me just which packages to steal from and where, but every time I ran in to some obscure bug he had already been there and quickly pointed me to the way out, often with a package update ready to go. The packages he made are wonderfully simple and easy to understand, which let me get moving on them right away, and they'll form a wonderful basis for the future of Debian's X distribution.

On a further note, I've asked the release team to let us upload 6.9 to unstable when it's released, which should be next week. So far there's been no objection, and a bunch of people have chipped in so far to help out with the xlibs-dev transition. Thanks to everyone who's been helping out so far with getting 6.9 in. 6.9 will set the stage for the modular packages, by giving everyone the most up to date drivers for the next few months and taking the pressure off of me to deliver the modular packages right away :-) My goal is to ship the modular packages with etch, and I'm going to keep working to do that, but 6.9 should keep people happy until those are ready for unstable.

After large amounts of peer pressure from Rapha l Hertzog and other French Debian Developers, I finally created a new geek-fr category in this blog. The old geek category was renamed to geek-en for consistency, and both are now subcategories of a new geek category. I think that means you’ll get articles in both French and English if you just read geek. Same applies for the RSS feeds, so you may like to update your feed readers and aggregators (I already updated Planet Debian). The new geek-fr subcategory will contain articles in French, as you’d expect, and will probably be more related to French-specific events. I’ll post another announcement in French in a few minutes.

So, now I have a blog too. Guess I'm no longer elitist now.

Claire Giordano: “[N]o matter what the result, this project [OpenSolaris] will be written up as business school case study. I don’t know whether it will be a positive case study, or a negative one… But it WILL be a case study!”

This is by far the most stressful long period I can remember in my life. I was quite in control of things approximately until around June. Since then, things have been falling over me in a quick and heavy sucession - First of all, being co-organizer at Debconf was quite hard. I had run conferences before, but nothing ever like this - And, I should add, I never had a German boss running the show. [friend="Stockholm"], as a project leader, you really rule... But whoever works with you should be warned: It is not easy.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: It's easier to be the coordinator (remember I was officially the Tyrant for three years at CONSOL? :) ) than to be in the immediately subordinate team.
Back home, I expected the regular post-vacation rush, so having a hard August -trying to make everything on time- was expectable and OK. I don't remember exactly what projects was I in during August/September (I remember some minor stuff, but I think adding it all together was the mistake). There is one thing I did, though: Accepting way too many invitations as a speaker, at least one every two weeks. And, as many of you know, you cannot just travel somewhere and keep working - When I am at a conference, I want to get to talk with the people there, I want to know what are they interested in (why they invited me in the first place), and make friends with them. But this time it was (as it happens every year - Why are most conferences stuck together September-November?) just way too much.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 2: Be careful on what you accept. It's easy saying "yes" to a conference. It's hard keeping sanity afterwards.
Ok... I have been going places. For example, two weeks ago I was to San Luis Potos . Instead of staying there for two days, I left my office at 7PM, took the metro to the bus station, got the bus at 9PM, arrived at 2AM, went to my hotel, woke up at 7:30AM, had breakfast, coded for ~1hr, went to the conference theater, delivered my talk at 11AM, went for a quick lunch (which became a takeaway order) at 1:15PM, got on my bus at 2PM, arrived back in Mexico City at 7PM, got to a (fucking long) meeting at 8PM, left the meeting at 12AM, and finally got back home at 1AM. Fun, huh?
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 3: Yes, it's fun to travel. It is much more fun to travel when you actually get to know the place!
...And pressure has not given way. As soon as I finish with one project, there is another one demanding my attention right away. October has been more than hectic. I had to cancel two invitations (on which I was to go to two cities each time) I was quite looking forward to, in Peru - I am very sorry, friends at Lima, Moquegua, Tacna and Arequipa... But I won't make it there this year. I am specially frustrated by not being able to make it to Concladeb in Arequipa - I really want to see DebianPeru/DebianArequipa's good work! And I am specially sorry on canceling today my trip to Moquegua, after they had already booked (and paid) for the tickets... It seems the money will not be lost after all, but I was such a pain in the ass for them, it is not fair I am cancelling... But anyway.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 4: Remember to learn from past experiences - It feels incredibly as a deja-vu from last year.
I hope I am not spoiling any surprises: Today, instead of blogging, I am supposed to be setting up the Comas server for Debconf6. Even with all of my worries, yes, I am still determined to be the man behind the show for Debconf. It will be in Oaxtepec, don't worry, and it will be a huge success. So let me finish this post quick, and it will be sooner you can register for it ;-) There are still too many points to work on Comas, though. I am setting up a tweaked version, against my will, but with the commitment to fix it transparently and soon. Oh... Yes, and I still have to coordinate with the locals here, as it's taking forever for us to open the fscking bank account so we can start receiving funds and paying money. Did I mention Debconf would be in Mexico? Ok, I will do my best not to make lateness the norm.
Gunnar's Rule of Future Life No. 5: Try not to bore your audience with too many details. Remember you have to work, and somebody might complain you lose too much time blogging!
But before I leave you alone: You might ask why do I mention the addiction in my post title... Well, because I have started treating my main addiction. It is really not easy, and I don't ever want to know what is it like to have a chemical addiction, like people who abuse drugs. If you have seen me face to face, it should be obvious: I have a very strong addiction to food. For one month already, I have been as conscious as I can every time I open my mouth - And, yes, it was not just three times a day. I have made some advances (sorry, I cannot really measure it, as home scales make it only to 120kg). Today is a big day for me: I was admitted in a pilot obesity control follow-up treatment at my University's sports health direction. I am very happy about this, as I do need mentoring and hand-holding. This is a seriously difficult process to follow, and I really hope to carry it thoroughly. Fortunately, my health has been perfect until now - But I cannot abuse myself forever.

Last week, I read that the bird flu drugs problem is partly caused by our governments (after pressure from big pharmaceutical developers), Xerox DocuColor printers put tracking codes on all printouts, an Australian farmer is being sued after GMOs infected his crop, there's an amazing claim that XML is patent infingement and ATM fraud nearly killed British banking. More amusingly, Granada's annoying copyright screens had the opposite effect on Rob Myers:

"I've never wanted to copy a DVD before. But if there was an easy way of copying this particular DVD to strip this amateurish mood-breaker off of the beginning I'd be sorely tempted."