as zack has mentioned earlier today, the count of RC bugs is falling. & the release team is again proposing RC buggy packages for removal from testing.

these were my RC bug related activities during the last week:

• #623578 gadfly: "gadfly: build wrong version of the packaging during a binNMU"
  apply patch from Guillem Jover, upload to DELAYED/2
• #675971 mumble: "Cannot communicate with the vast majority of Mumble servers due to lack of required baseline codec"
  file pre-approval unblock request #691098
• #677943 munin: "/etc/apache2/conf.d/munin removed on upgrade"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #685632 liquidsoap: "liquidsoap: missing versioned depend on libcamomile-ocaml-data"
  make dependency versioned, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688891 psad: "psad: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/psad/psad.conf"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #689537 pdnsd: "pdnsd: deletes conffiles on package removal (policy 10.7.3): /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/002_NetMan_pdnsd"
  include patch from Stuart Prescott, do a QA upload
• #689683 prelude-manager: "prelude-manager: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/prelude-manager/prelude-manager.conf"
  fix conffile handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #690368 pdnsd: "pdnsd: postinst overwrites admin changes to /etc/default/pdnsd"
  fix conffile handling, do a QA upload
• #691015 conserver-client: "conserver-client: fails to upgrade from testing: Can't locate Tie/Hash/NamedCapture.pm in @INC"
  propose a patch to fix the mistake in my NMU

Dear Facebook friend, I like you and I am happy that you take/tag/share photos of me, just not on Facebook! I have a Facebook account but don't hang out there. Please share your photos in public, not (only) inside Facebook. And please consider allowing Free reuse of your photos, by licensing them with a Free license like CC-BY-SA or CC0.

Here & Now My suggestion for now is to use Flickr, and license all images as "Attribution, share alike".

The Perfect Way Ideally you would publish the photos on some server that you control, like the Freedombox, but those are unfortunately not yet easy to find or use.

Why not Facebook? Facebook is a closed system: all activities happen at one central place. Maybe you don't care who is spying on the photo gallery that you share. That's fine - but please respect those of your friends who do care, by putting a copy of your photos somewhere with less thirdparty control. Regards, Jonas

Hardware To make things clear: I'm having a Android 4.0.$recent tablet with considerably more horse-power than my Nokia n900 smartphone so don't tell me this is due to under-powered hardware the android is 3 years newer both in hardware and software.

Background Tasks Being somewhere with my Android Tablet. Network is kind of crappy and this site takes minutes again to load. So the most natural thing to do would be doing something else while the site continues loading in the background. This works really well on the n900. It might work with android. But of course when you switch to another Program the browser might also be shut down while you're doing something else and randomly when you switch back to your browser, not only the site hasn't loaded but the browser also forgot where you were heading. Now if you followed e.g. a link in a email you might have closed the mail program long ago (or the mail program has decided to stop) and you have to find the link again, wait again for the site to load. And remember not to background the browser or you might have to start over again. With the n900 Maemo smartphone I was able to load several pages in the background with whatever application in the foreground (like playing tuxracer) so don't tell me android has to do this to give enough power to the foreground process. If a Meamo device can load 5 pages in the background while a OpenGL game is running in the foreground there is no reason Android, with more CPU and RAM, can't load a single page in the background while I check email.

Software installation Can you imagine a system where you are unable to install software from your standard repository without registering an account first? Like after nearly two decades of Linux distributions? Maemo had this for mobile devices more than five years ago. Plus, on Maemo you'll easily find tons of good, free (as in freedom) and banner-add-free software try this on androids "Play Store".

I recently read this book and it was enlightening -- that is the least I can say. It is organized into a set of recipes addressing the most common problems you have with puppet. I think the whole point is about being practical and it gives you various ways to achieve the same goal, depending if you want to do a quick and dirty hack or pick a long term solution. The whole book aims at being practical and it achieves this goal pretty well. However, it is not for beginners. Puppet itself is not for beginner and you should already have written and run into problem to really take advantage of this book. I read the book in 5 days (only while commuting), and at each page I thought : "OMG, they do that like this" or "of course, you should use git + that" and wait impatiently coming back home to test all this stuff. The book is really about technical details and how to organize yourself to write nice Puppet classes. I have been an "irregular" user of Puppet since 4 years. I was mainly running it to distribute files on all my computers. Since 3 weeks, I am applying the recipes found in this book and it is just like discovering that you own something worth a million euros. Let look at some example:

• Setting a value in a configuration file:

Before: Replace the whole file. Now: Use Augeas to just change the value and don't touch to the rest of the file. The book makes me discover Augeas and it rocks !!!

• VCS repository and deployment:

Before:_ Loosy darcs repository inside /etc/ and edit directly the master. Now: Shiny git repository in my home directory, using a Makefile to validate Puppet syntax, simulate applying it and effectively apply it to the current node before deploying it through git push.

• Installing exim4:

Before: Nothing because I didn't think it was possible. Now: Generate a configuration file using a template, install it, run the exim4 update script and restart the service.

• Installing sshd:

Before: Copy a file and restart it. Now: Use Augeas and a template with a loop to change what is needed for each node depending on which user I want to allow to connect on this node. Use different SSH port for every vserver that share the same IP and distribute an /etc/ssh_config to propagate the default ports set for all the vservers... (just being able to do that is worth the price of the book).

• Have a problem and try to solve it:

Before: Complain, whine and give up. Now: Go to Puppet Forge, take inspiration for similar module, re-read part of the book, find an idea and apply it. And so forth and so on. This book made me love puppets again. I warmly recommend it to you.

I am moving into an office. And as any proud husband and father, I want to have photos of my wife and daughter on my desk. The year being 2012, I did not hike to the photo shop to get a print framed, but instead thought to myself that I should put a digital photo frame onto my table. This idea exposed me to the ridiculous world of consumer electronics. It led me to conclude that digital picture frame designers need to be whacked with cluebats. Step by step Once accepted, the thought of a digital photo frame developed into a product definition along the following lines: my idea photo frame would connect to my Wifi-network, and obtain the photos on-the-go from a folder exposed via HTTP or CIFS, and then go on to display them in random order, incorporating new photos as it encounters them. With this in mind, I went to the shops, and since I believe in specialised retailers and want to support them, my first stop was Foto Sauter at Sendlinger Tor. Unfortunately, none of the frames they had came with Wifi, so I decided to look further. I vehemently oppose to the business practices of the Metro group, thus skipped Saturn and MediaMarkt, and eventually ended up at Conrad. They had a frame with Wifi! I jumped for joy, until I read the manual: pictures can be obtained from Flickr and Picasa. Period. All other models on the Internet seem to be similarly limited, including the new Sony S-frame. The night before, Penny had researched the field a bit and came to the conclusion that the S-frame would be the best product available. This led me to scratch Wifi off my requirements list and get a model that would read photos off a USB stick. I went back to the photo store and bought a "Sony S-frame", only to discover that it cannot show photos in random order. It has three viewing modes (single photo, collage, single photo with clock), and a random mode, but guess what: the random mode randomly switches the viewing modes, which then display the photos in lexicographical order. How stupid is that??? I returned the product and left the store after discovering that none of their products could do random playback. I went back to Conrad and found an "Intenso MediaCreator" (what media does it create???), which displayed the photos seemingly randomly. But at home I found out that the "random" order is always the same, probably because the bright engineer that programmed this thought it was better to sort filenames by last letter and call it random, than to figure out a way to roll a dice on the device. I wrote to the support team and asked them. The response was that the desired functionality (random selection) is not possible and won't be made available. So I am returning the product. Gah! Would someone please tell me about a digital picture frame (8 inch or so) that can display images in random order, ideally loading them off a CIFS share via Wifi? Or is it really the case that consumer electronics are completely useless these days, by which I mean that "consumers" have dumbed down so far to buy this crap? Update: a lot of people wrote in suggesting to invest in a cheap Android tablet. Some suggested Raspberry Pis in USB host mode (emulating the USB stick and hence the source of the images, provided that the frame doesn't cache). Other suggestions included the Samsung SPF-85V which can display images according to an RSS feed but needs Microsoft for that (or maybe not), and the community-developed, Linux-based Joggler. Regarding the non-random order on the Intenso frame, Paul Hedderly postulated that the order comes from the filesystems (FAT order) and can be changed by writing the files differently.

Most of the day before the conference, and the conference morning spent working and finalizing my RTL status presentation. My apologies to the lecturers whose lectures I attend only physically (sorry, I can t split my attention too well). To my disappointment I had very few attendees in the talk, but I can understand the competition, as the other parallel talks were quite interesting. In at least one of them I wished to attend my self (if I could only be in two places in the same time ). Maybe next year we should have less parallel talks (4 tacks is a lot). To still push some of the RTL issues, I ve done a private talk over RTL issues for Caolan and Jan (kendy), which was interesting with some feedback. Jan took fdo#44657 on himself, and by the evening he showed me a great improvement in the status of things, so at least there s horizontal scrolling in Calc with RTL interface. With the help of Rene, I got master builds for Debian, and would spend the rest of the conference to check some bugs with it. During the evening dinner and social event I wanted to thank Miklos personally for really improving the RTF support for RTL and Hebrew documents, and he showed me a few of the new stuff he d done in master/3.7. While working I ve noticed a few regressions, and I m glad they were caught early. Cedric told me that after last years talk, he started to check his features also in RTL interface, which for me was the best feedback on my efforts. Having developers keeping RTL in mind (even only nce in a while) saves a lot of trouble along the road. I would prefer to check and double check features while they re being created instead of trying to get bugs fixed later on the release process. Another thing which I enjoyed noticing is the fresh blood the GSoC project brings to LibreOffice. I ve met with Miklos and Eilidh and got impressed with how a successful internship was used as a springboard into a good job. As there almost aren t any Israelis who take part in GSoC, I m not used to notice the effect closely. The event dinner and mingling was very successful for me, I ve got a chance to talk with old friends and meet some of the new attendees (and even get some technical work done by talking with people) Thanks again for the organizational team.
Filed under: LibreOffice

# Copyright (C) YEAR Free Software Foundation, Inc. # This file is distributed under the same license as the PACKAGE package. # FIRST AUTHOR <email>, YEAR. # #, fuzzy msgid "" msgstr "" "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n" "POT-Creation-Date: 2012-10-12 11:14+0300\n" "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n" "Last-Translator: FULL NAME <email>\n" "Language-Team: LANGUAGE <ll>\n" "Language: \n" "MIME-Version: 1.0\n" "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n" "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n" #. type: Title # #, no-wrap msgid "Status hos doktoren" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" "**Jonas Smedegaard** [dr.jones at pobox.com " "](mailto:friends%40jones.dk?Subject=Status%20hos%20doktoren&In-Reply-To=1.5.4.32.19971011010004.0067de34%40kaospilot.dk) " "\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "_Sat Oct 11 15:22:00 CEST 1997_" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "Previous message: [Spamming? ](000001.html)" msgstr "" #. type: Bullet: ' * ' #: msgid "" "**Messages sorted by:** ? date (date.html#2) ? thread (thread.html#2) " "? subject (subject.html#2) ? author (author.html#2)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Hej Patrik (og alle Jer andre )!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " >_Vad sker med dig det var ett stycke tid diden?\n" " _>_Vad skedde der med ditt arbejde pa cafeet og pa skolen?\n" " _\n" " Lang historie!\n" " (den kommer nu )\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg tror snart jeg har laert (the hard way) hvor dyr jeg egentligt er i " "drift.\n" " Jeg har nu i 3 maneder "ligget med r ven *under* vandskorpen" " " konomisk: minus 15.000,- pa kontoen. Det vender forhabentligvis indenfor " "den naeste maned - ellers pa jeg tage et regulaert lan, hvis jeg fortsat " "skal have firma som fuldtidsbeskaeftigelse.\n" " Det betyder, at jeg for tiden arbejder fra ca. 9 morgen til 0:30 nat syv " "dage om ugen (med enkelte eftermiddage eller aftener fri). Der er faktisk " "opgaver at lave, som ogsa gi'r penge i kassen - men det har der ikke vaeret " "for nogle maneder siden, og nar der var, har jeg taget mig for billigt " "betalt (men du kender mig jo!). Jeg er begyndt mere at involvere min " "storebror, nar jeg udarbejder tilbud, til at hjaelpe mig med en mere reel " "prissaetning.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " Her er lidt(?) om, hvad jeg beskaeftiger mig med for tiden:\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Homebase ***\n" " Jeg far forbindelse fra mit kontor og ned til Mejlgade om en lille uge - " "rent teoretisk ihvertfald - derefter skal jeg ha' elektronikken til at " "fungere \n" " Jeg administrerer deres servere og netvaerk, og er "Boss" for Morten " "P. fra Frontl berne, som er blevet hyret til at vedligeholde alle " "arbejdspladserne pa skolen.\n" " Jeg har *intet* at g re med content pa webserveren. Efter i foraret at " "have haft DogSystem (et par nystartede edb-folk) til at udarbejde noget " "smart (som vist aldrig blev rigtigt til noget) har Uffe nu faet samlet nogle " "studerende (vist primaert fra hold 3), som skal hitte pa noget \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Her er et uddrag af en mail til Rasmus fra hold 3:\n" " >>_Du ma gerne f lge lidt med i arbejdet og sende mig en kommentar " "eller\n" " _>>_gode rad, hvis du f ler for det.\n" " _>_\n" " _>_Jeg har et ambivalent forhold til Jeres arbejde:\n" " _>_ - Jeg f ler for det, Ja. Meget!\n" " _>_ - I sidder og laver mit arbejde \n" " _>_ - Meningen med mit arbejde er ar g re mig selv arbejdsl s - sa det " "er\n" " _>_*godt*, at I laver det \n" " _>_ - I laver det maske bedre, maske darligere end jeg ville ha' gjort " "det -\n" " _>_men helt sikkert anderledes!\n" " _>_ - Min force (og min kaephest!) er grundstrukturer mere end visuel " "(og\n" " _>_anden) indpakning. Det er svaert at kommentere og komme med gode rad, " "nar de\n" " _>_er omkring grundstruktur. Det kraever naesten, at man sidder ved " "roret \n" " _>_ - Hvis ikke jeg kommer med mine kommentarer nu, skal jeg enten holde " "mund\n" " _>_med det (og det er svaert) eller de vil udvikles til bagklogskab og\n" " _>_bedrevidenhed \n" " _>_ - Jeg har egentligt for travlt til at beskaeftige mig med det: Jeg " "har hele\n" " _>_tiden haft "travlt". At jeg har "for travlt" er et udtryk for, at " "jeg er\n" " _>_blevet klar over, at for at leve et liv som selvstaendigt " "erhvervsdrivende\n" " _>_er det ikke nok at arbejde hardt - man skal ogsa ta' penge for " "det Jeg\n" " _>_har derfor ikke for travlt, hvis der er penge i lortet (men det er " "sjaeldent\n" " _>_tilfaeldet i Mejlgade - til gengaeld er der sa meget andet " "dernede!).\n" " _\n" " *** Brugerflade-design ***\n" " Jeg har faet et job ved Frontl berne: VPAE (Virtual Project Assistance " "Environment).\n" " De er med i et faelles-nordisk projekt om at lave en "virtuel " "projektvugge" - altsa et forum pa Internet med en raekke vaerkt jer til " "projektudvikling og administration af gamle projekter.\n" " Konkret arbejder jeg i diss uger pa design af brugergraenseflade " "(dialogbokse osv.) og n dvendige datastrukturer til et system til " "udarbejdelse af en projektbeskrivelse.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg arbejder taet sammen med Morten P., og det er utroligt spaendende at " "arbejde med en konkret, mindre opgave med stor paedagogisk og funktionel " "vaerdi.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Praktikant ***\n" " En af mine venner fra gymnasietiden, Henrik, studerer informatik (det " "hedder vist noget lidt andet ) her i rhus, og meget tyder pa, at han " "snart kommer i praktik her hos mig i en maned.\n" " Han skal arbejde meget selvstaendigt. Jeg har brug for hans viden " "indenfor PR, han kan bruge mig som "pr veklud", og jeg kan stille medier " "(webserver o.l.) til hans radighed.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg har en ide om at vaere meget aben overfor brug af praktikanter - " "ikke bare som nem arbejdskraft (det er kraevende at saette i arbejde, og at " "give opgaver fra sig!), men mere fordi det giver mig en traening i " "formidling af min viden, og erfaringer mht. "s saetning" af mine metoder " "og ideer som tekniker - men det kraever maske lidt uddybning :\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Mit virke er grundliggende at bygge bro mellem teknikere og brugere " "indenfor IT. Det har 2 aspekter - at naerme teknikeren til brugeren, og at " "naermere brugeren til teknikken. Jeg arbejder med undervisning (arketyper, " "paedagogik og kommunikation), brugerfladedesign og almen radgivning for at " "hjaelpe brugeren pa vej. For at hjaelpe teknikeren tager jeg udgangspunkt i " "mig selv og mit arbejde med brugeren, og udvikler herigennem en raekke " "metoder og tankesaet, som jeg vil formidle - gennem praktikanter eller " "evt. decideret undervisning - til andre teknikere, som ikke i det daglige " "arbejder "i begge lejre", og derfor ikke ser de samme problematikker som " "mig.\n" " konomisk skulle "Projekt dr. Jones" gerne baeres igennem " "vha. konkrete projekter - virksomheder og enkeltpersoner, som har behov for " "min viden og mit arbejde, og som er villige til at betale merprisen for " "forskning fremfor traditionelle l sninger (NB! jeg bruger bevidst ikke ord " "som "udvikling" og "innovation" - for mit arbejde f rer til tider " "tilbage til udgangspunktet - det er ikke *altid* n dvendigt at opfinde den " "dybe tallerken igen!)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Henrik vil ikke give mig de store erfaringer mht. formidling af min " "viden - jeg har for stor en pukkel af opgaver liggende til at kunne gabe " "over ham ogsa. Denne gang er det primaert hans felt - PR - jeg kan drage " "nytte af.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Undevisning ***\n" " Jeg har nu i en maned undeervist i edb som valgfag pa IDA " "(Idraetsdagh jskolen). Indtil nu har det vaeret 2 timer om ugen, elever i " "alderen 30-60 ar - men om fa uger bliver der yderligere 4 timer om ugen med " "elever pa 20-30 ar.\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Afl nningen er symbolsk (nej, god l n regnet som underviser, jeg far " "samme l n som en uddannet laerer - men ikke sammenholdt med, hvor " ""dyrebar" min tid er som selvstaendig ), men sjaeldent har jeg oplevet " "sa tydeligt et ryk i min paedagogiske forstaelse og opmaerksomhed.\n" " Jeg bliver sandsynligvis ikke haengende ved IDA i mere end et 1/2-1 ar - " "det er simpelthen for tids- og ressourcekraevende - men h ster gode " "erfaringer salaenge (og bader mig i deres positive feedback :-)\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Brugerflade-programmering ***\n" " Samtidig (egentligt burde jeg forlaengst vaere faerdig, men opgaven greb " "om sig) arbejder jeg pa mit eget projekt: BOS (BrugerOpdateringsSystem).\n" " Det er et CGI-script (lille program pa en web-server), som muligg r " "redigering af indholdet pa websider uafhaengigt af sidens grafiske " "opsaetning, og - vaesentligst - UDEN AT SKRIVE EEN ENESTE KODE!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " 1. udgave af BOS betalte jeg en programm r 15.000,- for at udvikle. Jeg " "havde brug for det til en opgave for AC (Akademikernes Centralorganisation), " "som skulle bruge det til bl.a. pressemeddelelser og publicering af et " "manedsblad pa deres 200+ siders websider (som jeg ogsa har lavet!).\n" " Da AC i sensommeren kom med rettelser og udvidelser til deres website " "blev der brug for forbedringer af BOS, og jeg erfarede, at min programm r " "havde lavet meget u-fleksibel kode, som var umulig at bygge videre pa.\n" " 2. udgave af BOS er nu naesten faerdig. Jeg valgte at skrive det om fra " "grunden selv (med hjaelp fra en god ven, som studerer datalogi), og har " "efterhanden skrevet ca. 750 linjers kode i programmeringssproget Perl \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Jeg havde ikke troet, at jeg nogensinde skulle kunne programmere. Det " "kraever disciplin og god forstaelse for grundliggende datastrukturer, som " "jeg hidtil troede n dvendiggjorde et mangearigt universitetsstudie " "(datalogi).\n" " Jeg vil ikke sla mig ned som programm r, men kan nu bruge det som ekstra " "fjer i min vifte af erfaringsomrader, i min rejse mod "At vaere det ledende " "radgivningsorgan i Danmark indenfor anvendt edb"!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " *** Internet-Cafe ***\n" " Jeg har jo kontor i 2 lokaler hos NETLAB, en spillecafe (computerspil i " "netvaerk). Det tog ikke mange jeblikke at slutte deres og mit netvaerk " "sammen, sa alle spillecomputerne ogsa kunne komme pa Internet - desvaerre " "fungerede det ikke med store computerspil (lang teknisk forklaring ), kun " "med alm. ting som e-mail og at "surfe" pa nettet.\n" " Jeg far snart (indenfor fa uger) "aegte" adgang til Internet, via fast " "forbindelse d gnet rundt. Sa kan der spilles computerspil via Internet, og " "spillecafeen er reelt blevet en Internet-Cafe \n" " Den kommende Internetforbindelse er dog ikke saerligt kraftig (64kbit - " "2-4 x modemhastighed) til deling mellem 20 kraftige maskiner, og har lagt en " "f ler ind hos Telia: Om ikke de har lyst til at sponsorere stedet. Give os " "en kraftig forbindelse til Internet, og til gengaeld fa reklamevaerdien af " "en stabil og hurtig forbindelse Folk der bliver rigtigt bidt af det vil " "jo f r eller siden k be en maskine selv, og sa far de jo brug for en " "Internet-udbyder \n" " Min rolle bliver at administrere "hullet" (eller "hullerne" til " "Internet, og evt. ogsa at strukturere og administrere mail-adresser til " "bes gende pa cafeen.\n" " konomisk forestiller jeg mig en fast procentdel af indtaegterne i " "cafeen - eller evt. simpelthen en billigere husleje?!?. Det gaelder om at " "finde en prispolitik, som spiller sammen med den grundliggende holdning ved " "bade dr. Jones og NETLAB om et indbydende, seri st (uden at blive kedeligt!) " "milj fremfor "flest muligt forbi kasseapperatet".\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid " -\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Det blev et laengere brev - og jeg tror faktisk, jeg vil genbruge det " "til ogsa at fortaelle familie og andre venner, hvorfor de har h rst sa lidt " "til mig pa det sidste \n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Hej allesammen!\n" " Haber I nyder tilvaerelsen. Det g r jeg - men traenger ogsa snart til et " "lille pusterum - juleferie i Sydfrankrig, regner jeg med!\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text #, no-wrap msgid "" " Ha' det bra!\n" " Jonas\n" " :_-)\n" " _\n" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "" "[More information about the Friends mailing list](http://mail.jones.dk/cgi- " "bin/mailman/listinfo/friends)" msgstr "" #. type: Plain text msgid "This text is part of my friends scriblings." msgstr ""

I want all my computing environments "furnished" similarly and as close to my personal taste as possible - be it big and small machines, self-administered and user accounts of others. and not only for myself - similar is needed for the environments I help maintain for my friends Siri, Erik and Peter. The environments are seldom fully equal, so simply copying things around is rarely useful. Here's a checklist of things that I need to customize and syncronize for me and my friends to feel at $HOME :

• System-wide
  • Tools available on the system
  • Graphical login and Desktop environments
  • Adjust fonts, colors etc. of terminal emulator, file manager etc.
  • Register SSH in monkeysphere, MAC in DHCP and hostname in DNS
• Account
  • Syncronize browser bookmarks
  • Install/configure browser search plugins, config tweaks etc.
  • Setup email and messaging accounts, and syncronize archives
  • Syncronize development scripts, git repositories etc.
  • Register account in monkeysphere

Above is work-in-progress. I hope to later extend with more details - probably by linking to separate pages about each subtopic.

This weekend there is going to be a lot happening in Prague - awesome combination of four conferences will happen here. I'm sure this will be really a great event with lot of interesting things on schedule. Even if you are not interested in technical stuff, future media track might be interesting for you. And of course the event includes huge party on Saturday evening (and welcome party with pre-registration on Friday)/ Anyway if you will be around, you can meet me somewhere there, usually within organizers crew. PS: There also nice summary of latest news available now.

Filed under: English Suse 0 comments Flattr this!

Phishing is a fraud technique that consists in reproducing the content of a targeted website, directing users to it, and recording their credentials when they log into your website. It is like fishing fish with fake food, only you phish humans with fake websites. Well, I have a good news for the phishers: people are using more and more smartphones, and mobile browsers are making your job really easy. In fact, many regular smartphone user simply have no way to tell your fake website apart from the real one.For instance, this is what my bank website looks like in my desktop browser, and what a corresponding phishing website would look like: See the difference? It is not that obvious, but it is easy to detect when you are trained: the page address is not the same, with the fake website it refers to the phisher's server instead of the bank's one. Now, what does it look like on a Firefox Mobile? Well, here is the answer: the same, absolutely the same: The page address is hidden for space reasons, and only shown when touching the address page title bar. Want to browse the Web safely? After each link you follow, click on the page title bar. Good luck if you are using such a mobile Web browser. Fortunately, I am not.

The new release of dose, apart from a few bug fixes, ships a new and improved version of dose-builddebcheck (man page). All the improvements done to dose-builddebcheck are from a set of patches submitted by Johannes Schauer in the context of the Bootstrap GSoC. We are still actively working on this. I invite you to read josh's recent blog post on the topic. For more background and discussion, you can have a look at the archives of this mailing list. Dose-builddebcheck (or buildcheck for short) is similar in intent to dose-debcheck but for source packages. Buildcheck allows you to check, just by looking at the Source and Packages files, if all the dependencies can be satisfied and installed, all this in a matter of seconds (less then 30 secs to test all the source packages in sid on my laptop). A simple example : This will check for all source packages in the Source file if their build dependencies can satisfied on amd64 given the Packages binary file. This is nice but nothing new. A script based on the old edos tools has been around for quite a long time. We want more ! The new exciting feature brought by Johannes is the capability of checking source packages for cross-compilation : This will check, if the source package 'picolisp' in the Sources file can be cross compiled for 'armel' on the native architecture 'amd64' given the list of binary packages in the Packages file. The generated report is, as for dose-debcheck, encoded in yaml and it can be simply parsed using an off-the-shelf library. Apt is the canonical tool that can be used to check if a package can be cross compiled. Josh found a few discrepancies between dose and apt results. This was a very good test for both tools: Bug #683786 is a very interesting read... Dose 3.1.1 (the latest release) should land soon in experimental. Otherwise you can get it from our (new) project homepage.

* In case you re not watching my twitter (and other social medias), I ve moved to none other than Bangalore. I m working with credativ. So, hello all DDs there! * On running front, I m back to track from today. Planning to run Bangalore Ultra 50K next month and then Mumbai Marathon (SCMM) in January 2013. BLR Ultra registration should be done in next 1-2 days. * It is challenging to stay along after four and half years of staying with family (and out of it 3 years of working from home!). I hope to move them here as soon as some things are fixed and start enjoying real life.

I have a Macbook3,1 with the following SATA controller: 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 03) This chip can work either in AHCI or IDE mode. Even though (in numbers) AHCI and IDE should have similar performance, I have found that AHCI mode is much better. Specially when the disk is under heavy siege by more than one application. The catch is that Macbooks turn off AHCI when booting in BIOS mode, which is the mode I use for GNU/Linux. I understand this also affects Windows.

Pictured: a girl after enabling AHCI on her Linux Macbook After some googling I found this post that explains how to activate AHCI mode using GRUB2. The fix is to just add a setpci call on your GRUB configuration. To be safe you can test it by going into command line mode in GRUB, and doing something like this: > lspci
(check for the ID for IDE mode, in my case 8086:2828)
> setpci -d 8086:2828 90.b=40
> lspci
(The 2828 ID is now gone, replaced by 8086:2829, AHCI/SATA mode)
You can add this to your GRUB configuration, and avoid losing it on upgrades, by adding a script like this to /etc/grub.d/:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
## Enable SATA (AHCI) mode on macbook 3,1
echo "setpci -d 8086:2828 90.b=40"
I understand this is also relevant for newer Macbooks and standard PC hardware, so you might want to do some googling. The easy way to know if you are on the right mode is to run lspci -nn on a regular terminal (not GRUB) and see if you have a SATA controller that is in the wrong mode.

these are the RC bugs I've worked on during the last week:

• #575087 wbar: "On a default installation wbar will fail due dot.wbar"
  add comments to the bug report, severity lowered later by maintainer
• #652638 libuuid-perl: "libuuid-perl: conflict with older doc-base versions to fix upgrade problems"
  add Conflicts (pkg-perl)
• #656505 taxbird: "taxbird: build-dependency on libgeier-dev needs to be versioned"
  fix versioned build/runtime dependencies, upload to DELAYED/2
• #657465 conserver-client: "conserver-client: prompting due to modified conffiles which where not modified by the user"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688206 pure-ftpd-common: "pure-ftpd-common: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/pure-ftpd-common"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688223 emacspeak: "emacspeak: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/emacspeak.conf"
  fix configuration file handling, QA upload
• #688231 acgvision-agent: "acgvision-agent: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/acgvision/agent.ini"
  add comments, and file #690170 while we're there
• #688796 src:libkdtree++: "libkdtree++: incomplete debian/copyright"
  sponsor maintainer upload
• #688891 psad: "psad: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/psad/psad.conf"
  add thoughts and questions to bug report
• #689120 gstreamer0.10-gconf: "gstreamer0.10-gconf: does not really provide sinks and sources"
  send a patch to the BTS
• #690355 libfile-data-perl: "libfile-data-perl: (virtually) empty binary package"
  prepare a patch (pkg-perl)

Interactively installing Debian virtual machines with virt-install without having to download anything in advance can already be done by pointing it to a Debian mirror via --location. But you can also add files to the initrd after downloading using --initrd-inject. Upstreams intended use is for kickstart files but we can also feed it a preseed.cfg to automate the whole installation:

virt-install --connect=qemu:///system \
             --location=http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer\-i386 \
             --initrd-inject=/path/to/preseed.cfg \
             --extra-args="auto" \
             --name d-i --ram=512 \
             --disk=pool=default,size=5,format=qcow2,bus=virtio

preseed.cfg is a regular preseed file (as described in the Debian Wiki) in your local filesystem. I'm using this one for Squeeze and Wheezy VMs. It must be named preseed.cfg in order for d-i to pick it up from the initrd. This also works for URLs like qemu+ssh://<remotehost>/system/ since virt-install uses libvirt's streaming API to upload the kernel and modified initrd to the remote host. In case you're running this on an i386 you'll need this fix which already sits in experimental. This blog is flattr enabled.

The Problem Some of my clients need systems that store reasonable amounts of data. This is enough data that we can expect some data corruption on disk such that traditional RAID doesn t work, that old fashioned filesystems like Ext3/4 will have unreasonable fsck fimes, and that the number of disks in a small server isn t enough. NetApp is a really good option for bulk reliable storage, but their products are very expensive. BTRFS has a lot of potential, but the currently released versions (as supported in distributions such as Debian/Wheezy) lack significant features. One significant lack in current BTRFS releases is something equivalent to the ZFS send/receive functionality for remote backups, this was a major factor when I analysed the options for hard drive based backup [1], and you should always think about backup before deploying a new system. Currently ZFS is the best choice for bulk storage which is reliable if you can t afford NetApp. Any storage system needs a minimum level of reliability if only to protect it s own metadata and a basic RAID array doesn t protect against media corruption with current data volumes. The combination of performance, lack of fsck (which is a performance feature), large storage support, backup, and significant real-world use makes ZFS a really good option. Now I need to get some servers for more than 8.1TiB of storage (the capacity of a RAID-Z array of 4*3TB disks). One of my clients needs significantly more, probably at least 10 disks in a RAID-Z array so none of the cheaper servers will do. Basically the issue that some of my clients are dealing with (and which I have to solve) is how to provide a relatively cheap ZFS system for storing reasonable amounts of data. For some systems I need to start with about 10 disks and be able to scale to 24 disks or more without excessive expense. Also to make things a little easier and cheaper 24*7 operation is not required, so instead of paying for hot-swap disks we can just schedule down-time outside business hours. The Problem with Dell Dell is really good for small systems, the PowerEdge tower servers that support 2*3.5 or 4*3.5 disks and which have space for an SSD or two are really affordable and easy to order. But even in the mid-size Dell tower servers (which are small by server standards) you have problems with just getting a few disks operating outside a RAID array [2]. The Dell online store is really great for small servers, any time I m buying a server for less than $2500 I check the Dell online store first and usually their price is good enough that there is no need to get a quote from another company. Unfortunately all the servers with bigger storage involve disks that are unreasonably expensive (it seems that Dell makes their profit on the parts) and prices are not available online. I gave my email address and phone number to the Dell web site on Wednesday and they haven t cared to get back to me yet. This is the type of service that makes me avoid IBM and HP for any server deployment where the Dell online store sells something suitable! BackBlaze For some time BackBlaze have been getting interest by describing how they store lots of data in a small amount of space by tightly stacking SATA disks. They don t think that ZFS on Linux is ready for production, but their hardware ideas are useful. They have recently described their latest architecture [3]. They describe it as 135TB for $7,384. Of course the 135TB number is based on the idea of getting the full 3TB capacity out of each disk which they can do as they have redundancy over multiple storage pods. But anyone who wants a single fileserver needs some internal redundancy to cover disk failure. One option might be to have three RAID-Z2 arrays of 15 disks which gives a usable capacity of 42*3TB==126TB==113TiB. Note that while the ZFS documentation recommends between 3 and 9 disks per zpool for performance I don t expect performance problems, when you only have a gigabit Ethernet connection there shouldn t be a problem with three ZFS zpools making the network the bottleneck. For this option the way to go would be to start with an array of 15 disks and then buy a second set of 15 disks when the first storage pool becomes full. It seems likely that 4TB disks will become cheap before a 35TiB array is filled so we can get more efficiency by delaying purchases. The BackBlaze pod isn t cheap, they are sold as a complete system without storage disks for $US5,395 by Protocase [4]. That gives a markup of $US3,411 over the BackBlaze cost which isn t too bad given that BackBlaze are quoting the insane bulk discount hardware prices that I could never get. Protocase also offer the case on it s own for anyone who wants to build a system around it. It seems like the better option is to buy the system from Protocase, but that would end up being over $6,000 when Australian import duty is added and probably close to $7,000 when shipping etc is included. Norco Norco offers a case that takes 24 hot-swap SATA/SAS disks and a regular PC motherboard for $US399 [5]. It s similar to the BackBlaze pod but smaller, cheaper, and there s no obvious option to buy a configured and tested system. 24 disks would allow two RAID-Z2 arrays of 12 disks, the first array could provide 27TiB and the second array could provide something bigger when new disks are released. SuperMicro SuperMicro has a range of storage servers that support from 12 to 36 disks [6]. They seem good, but I d have to deal with a reseller to buy them which would involve pain at best and at worst they wouldn t bother getting me a quote because I only want one server at a time. Conclusion Does anyone know of any other options for affordable systems suitable for running ZFS on SATA disks? Preferably ones that don t involve dealing with resellers. At the moment it seems that the best option is to get a Norco case and build my own system as I don t think that any of my clients needs the capacity of a BackBlaze pod at the moment. Supermicro seems good but I d have to deal with a reseller. In my experience the difference between the resellers of such computer systems and used car dealers is that used car dealers are happy to sell one car at a time and that every used car dealer at least knows how to drive. Also if you are an Australian reader of my blog and you want to build such storage servers to sell to my clients in Melbourne then I d be interested to see an offer. But please make sure that any such offer includes a reference to your contributions to the Linux community if you think I won t recognise your name. If you don t contribute then I probably don t want to do business with you. As an aside, I was recently at a camera store helping a client test a new DSLR when one of the store employees started telling me how good ZFS is for storing RAW images. I totally agree that ZFS is the best filesystem for storing large RAW files and this is what I am working on right now. But it s not the sort of advice I expect to receive at a camera store, not even one that caters to professional photographers.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/08/hard-drives-backup/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/01/cheap-sata-poweredge-t410/
• [3] http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/
• [4] http://protocase.com/products/index.php?e=Backblaze
• [5] http://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=1&modelno=rpc-4224
• [6] http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/storage.cfm

Related posts:

1. Cheap SATA Disks in a Dell PowerEdge T410 A non-profit organisation I support has just bought a Dell...
2. ZFS vs BTRFS on Cheap Dell Servers I previously wrote about my first experiences with BTRFS [1]....
3. Flash Storage and Servers In the comments on my post about the Dell PowerEdge...

For those of you back at my university, you may have noticed I'm not there this semester.

Google's 2012 FEP team

I spent this past summer at Google, Inc, developing internal tools for the AdSense team, specifically Google Programmable Ads. Being at Google was great; I loved my team and my intern cohort, the rest of the interns in the Freshman Engineering Practicum.

I'm not currently at Google; my internship ended at the beginning of August. Although it was a blast, all good things must come to an end.

I'm not at Mason, either. I was super excited to return to university, and was just about to buy my books and get ready to move in when I got an email from a former coworker at Ksplice, a startup Oracle acquired while I interned there last year. He was starting a new company which would focus on business communications. I'd be working with a bunch of my former coworkers, and based on what I had heard of the company's plans I was confident in their ability to make an awesome product.

Needless to say, when they decided to offer me a position working there full time, I jumped on it.

From an academic point of view, Mason didn't really have much of a mechanism to support this. Co-ops are uncommon there, and not really supported for more than one semester; a full year away had never been done, according to our career services. My department was fully supportive, however, so we managed to find a way to make it work. This involved filling out some oddly-named forms, such as Special Registration for Graduation Request, which the registrar asserted was the right form, trust us on this one.

Myself and Obey Arthur Liu at a SIPB hackathon

But that's all neither here nor there. I'm now up in Cambridge, MA, working with awesome people (including but not limited to tabbott, wdaher, jesstess, and keegan), and exploring the city. I'm hanging out with MIT SIPB, helping with the maintenance of Sugar Labs' servers in E15 and spending more time working on various open source projects.

To my friends at Mason: I miss you all. I know regardless of how the next year+ turns out, it'll be one one hell of a ride.

this week I focussed mostly on bugs where conffiles are modified in maintainer scripts. thanks to the recipe in debconf-devel(7) many cases are not so hard to solve.

• #632604 src:libatomic-ops: "libatomic-ops: FTBFS on i386"
  prepare a patch for testing-proposed-updates, upload after ack from maintainer and release team
• #687858 tasksel-data: "tasksel-data: copyright file missing after upgrade (policy 12.5)"
  add info and tag in BTS
• #687944 mason: "mason: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/masonrc"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688196 mimedefang: "mimedefang: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/mimedefang"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2, then included in maintainer upload
• #688200 fprobe: "fprobe: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/fprobe"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688205 mono-xsp2: "mono-xsp2: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/mono-xsp2"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2, rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #688375 ntlmaps: "ntlmaps: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/ntlmaps/server.cfg"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688378 gom: "gom: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/gom"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688499 netmrg: "netmrg: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/netmrg/netmrg.xml"
  install only template configuration file, upload to DELAYED/2
• #688565 mono-apache-server2,mono-apache-server4: "mono-apache-server2, mono-apache-server4: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/default/mono-apache-server[24]"
  fix configuration file handling, upload to DELAYED/2, rescheduled to 0-day with maintainer's permission
• #688736 w3c-linkchecker: "w3c-linkchecker: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/w3c/checklink.conf"
  remove configuration file on purge (pkg-perl)

Direct harassment and overt sexism are certainly a significant part of why the gender ratios in the Linux community[1] are so skewed, but they're not the whole story. Part of feeling comfortable with a community is the knowledge that those in positions of power can be relied upon to engage in appropriate action when undesirable situations arise - no matter how compelling your code of conduct, no matter how detailed your diversity policy, if someone contravenes them and nothing happens, those documents are worthless and your community is unwelcoming. You can't rely on enforcement unless the community can trust its leadership.

Setting a good example in terms of behaviour is obviously vital, but it's not sufficient. Leaders who engage in sexist behaviour or who harass community members are clearly untrustworthy and undermine any attempts the rest of the community may be making. Failing to step in when they see examples of unacceptable behaviour is as bad. But less obvious is that it's possible to destroy that community trust without clearly contravening those community standards.

An example of this is Todd Akin, a candidate for the upcoming US Senate elections. In August he justified his support for making abortion illegal even in cases of rape, on the basis that women can't become pregnant through being victims of "legitimate rape". Of course, this had little to do with his fiscal or wider social policies, positions that are more directly relevant to most of his potential constituents, and in an election year that's primarily about the economy and healthcare it might be expected that a single issue would have little effect on the election standings. Instead, there was a huge uproar and a previously safe victory has now turned into a real chance of a loss.

Why? A significant part of it is because many people now have difficulty believing that they can trust him to represent them. If he understands women so little that he's willing to make entirely spurious justifications for his positions, how could any woman trust him to consider any other problems they may face? If he's willing to use fake science to back himself up, how could anyone trust him to consider any issue involving science? Through a single statement to a journalist he demonstrated to many that he was unsuited to be their representative in government. Many people who would otherwise have voted for him simply don't feel that they can rely on him to be there for them. Whether he wins his election or not, that distrust is going to remain and it's going to compromise his ability to work with his constituents.

It's the same in technical communities. If a member of a project's technical leadership frequently and loudly expresses their disdain for Python coders, anyone advocating for increased use of Python in that project is unlikely to feel that they can get unbiased opinions from that leader. If the project as a whole is uninterested in adopting Python then that's probably for the best, but if the rest of the project is open to using Python then there's a problem. People working with Python are less likely to join the project, and perhaps the project will lose out as a result.

But it's worth remembering that technical communities are still communities. If a member of a project's technical leadership vociferously argues that slavery benefited minority groups in the long run, members of those minority groups are going to feel that they're not going to be well represented by that leader. If they blog about how homosexuality is a lifestyle choice then homosexuals are unlikely to flock to the project. Likewise, if they downplay the prevalence or impact of rape, women are going to feel marginalised and find something better to do with their time.

It's impossible to separate these things. No matter how technically competent a community leader is, no matter how much code review they perform or how much mentorship they provide, if they're expressing unacceptable social opinions then they're diminishing the community. People I know and respect have left technical communities simply because people in positions of responsibility have engaged in this kind of behaviour without it causing them any problems.

We shouldn't be willing to give people a pass simply because they aren't actually groping anyone or because they're not members of the KKK. Those who drive people away from the community on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation deserve vocal condemnation, and if they're unwilling to change their behaviour then the community should instead act to drive them away.

We're pretty bad at that in the Linux world at the moment. Too many people have behaved in this way and are left with positions of power or responsibility. There's no easy solution to the problem, but the Ada Initiative is continuing to work to improve awareness and work with communities to reduce the alienation that results from this kind of behaviour. If you want this to be anything other than a straight white male dominated community, you should give them money.

[1] (and computing in general, though to a lesser extent)

comments

It's been some time since I didn't write in this blog about my running activities. So let's make an update for my international friends. If you don't care about running, you can move to the next post in your feed reader..:-) After a quite busy running activity during DebConf 12 in Nicaragua, as well as during the touristic trip we did afterwards, I went back to my "regular" schedule. Main objectives in September-December are roughly the following:

• Seine-Eure marathon, the flattest marathon in France, on October 21st. This marathon is the one where I set the record which I just broke in June, in Caen. So, the goal is easy to find : break it again. My target time is around 3h37. Not so ambitious in apparence, with a current record at 3h38'45". However, I can't afford the highly meticulous preparation I did in April-May-June, so I try to stay with an achievable target.
• The Le Raid Le Puy-Firminy 70km night run on November 24th. Here, I'll just try to go faster than 9h15 which I achieved last year, trying to have a better race management and avoid cramps. Of course, meteorological conditions will be the key, here, as it can be as low as -15 C in that part of France, in November..:-)

During August, I broke my monthly distance record by running nearly 300km in one month, even achieving 100km in only 5 days, around 24th. That was one of my goals: improve my overall resistance to run repetitions, which is one of the keys for ultra-running. These were achieved with many runs to/back work, with up to 13km in the morning and the same in the evening. Yes, running 26km at about 11km/h (and with some ups and downs in the woods to make it even worse) on a day where one has a normal work activity is quite a challenge. September has been more focused on marathon preparation. This time, no complicated plan with interval running as the month was also a very busy work month, where fitting training sessions during the day would be hard. So, I made an easy plan : run a half-marathon every Sunday and run part of my work-home commute every day (So, 3km run to the train station, 30mn train ride, then 4km run to my work place, then shower....and the same back after work). Out of the 5 half-marathons I ran during these 5 Sundays, two of them were official ones. On the first one, I finally managed to break my personal best on half, with 1h37'14". Only a 14 seconds improvement, but that one is certainly one of my best among personal bests....even better than 3h38'45" on marathon.. All other half-marathons were run at marathon speed, so targeting 5'06"/km, which will be my planned pace on October 21st. The one I ran on Sept. 16th, which was the other official race I ran was finally done quite significantly faster than this. First of all, because I had hard times to run "only" at 5'06"/km because of other runners emulation. And also, because I ran the last 3 kilometers up to nearly 14km/h (so, down to 4'15"/km), just for fun, because I could do it..:-) With all this preparation, I think that I now manage to very well manage my marathon speed. I'll probably do a final test tomorrow by trying to keep running at this speed for 3 rounds of my favourite "Maurepas Marathon" circuit, which is just exactly 1/4 of a marathon. More "funnily", I also did something I never did before during this really crazy month : simply said, I came back from work by running. All the way long. Through woods, forests, along some lakes and finally in the country. 42 kilometers (yes, a marathon). After a work day. Starting at 5:45pm and arriving home after 4h50 minutes. With 2 hours of heavy rain. With 2.5 hours running in the dark (with my headlamp of course). All alone. That was a crazy bet to do....but really great fun achieving this : the GPS trace is here. Really something I have to do again..:-) So, well, now I'm more or less prepared and having fun is just a matter for time..:-). I'll keep you guys posted with those and, guess what? I'm already picking my target races for next year..:-)