I ve been getting a lot of spam recently from people wanting to write guest posts or have their site included in a future links post. Guest Posts For guest posts the social convention for the planets which aggregate my blog seems to be that random guest posts are unacceptable. I could change my blog feed to have some posts excluded from the planet feeds but that s too much effort and I don t want random guest posts anyway. The only situations in which I will accept guest posts are when someone is writing what I might have written (IE they generally agree with me) or if they are a member of the free software community who doesn t have their own blog but has something relevant to say. Any applicant for a guest post who runs a business that is useless and/or evil IMHO (EG anything related to the TSA) is going to get rejected firmly. Any applicant who tells me that they can write on a wide variety of topics probably isn t capable of making me an offer that I would accept. Tell me that you can write about Linux programming or computer security and I ll be interested, but you have to provide links to your previous work. An application to write a guest post that starts with something like I liked your recent post at the above URL but I think you missed some important points, as I have some experience in that field I think I could write a guest post that would help educate your readers may be accepted. Probably the best thing to do however is to write comments on my blog, if you can write informative comments and offer to make a longer comment into a guest post then there s a good chance that I ll be interested. Generally though I will only offer the opportunity to write a guest post to someone who writes something really informative in private email or on a closed mailing list. If you can solve a technical problem about Linux that has me stumped then I will almost certainly be willing to accept a guest post about it! Links Posts There are many sites which consist of nothing but links to other sites. In the 90 s such sites were really useful but since the rise of Google their value has declined dramatically. As an aside when I ran an Internet Cafe in the 90 s I had every web browser start with the main page of my Hot Stuff list, the purpose of this was to increase the hit rate of my Squid cache by having most of the customers visit the same sites. Even back then I probably wouldn t have bothered if it wasn t for Squid hits. It must seem like an easy way to make money to create pages of links to articles with short summaries and then hope for advertising revenue, a domain sale, or the launch of some sort of profitable business once people start using the site. I wonder whether that ever works out for people. It doesn t seem like a good business model, doing something that requires little skill, which can be done by almost anyone, and which is done by many people. Maybe there are sweat-shops dedicated to this. Anyway my links posts are unlikely to ever link to any such links pages, I don t think that the people who read my blog want double indirection. I won t entirely rule out linking to a links page, but it would have to be of very high quality and related to something very technical about computers. Basically anyone who reads this should give up on the idea of submitting a links page to me, if it s good enough to make me break my policy of not linking to such things then I ll probably find it myself. Conclusion As a general rule if you want someone to publish your work then you need to look at what they are publishing and make sure that your work fits. With the recent requests for links and guest posts I ve been getting I have to wonder whether the people making the requests have even read my blog. That method of operating is unlikely to give any success at a blog that has any reasonable number of readers. I ll probably link to this from my about page or something. It might discourage some of the spammers. Related posts:

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good news: it looks like more & more people are working on RC bugs & doing NMUs. here are my contributions from this week:

• #643108 src:enigma: "enigma: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source -b enigma-1.10~~pre-alpha+r2210 gave error exit status 2"
  close as locally unreproducible and not in the last Grid'5000 run
• #661474 enigma: "enigma: removal of enigma makes files disappear from enigma-data"
  send patch to the BTS, upload to DELAYED/2 after feedback from bug submitter and maintainer
• #663182 mysql-utilities,libmysql-diff-perl: "libmysql-diff-perl and mysql-utilities: error when trying to install together"
  rename script (pkg-perl)
• #664960 src:python-melangeclient: "python-melangeclient: FTBFS: ImportError: No module named setuptools"
  apply patch from Ubuntu / Daniel T Chen, upload to DELAYED/2
• #665052 src:cowbell: "cowbell: FTBFS: configure: error: 'Taglib C bindings are not installed'"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Ilya Barygin, upload to DELAYED/2, then merged into maintainer upload
• #665064 src:kaya: "kaya: FTBFS: dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source -b kaya-0.4.4 gave error exit status 2"
  send patch to the BTS
• #665258 src:teseq: "teseq: FTBFS: configure.ac:15: lzma compression is deprecated; use dist-xz' or dist-lzip' instead"
  add patch to remove obsolete automake option, upload to DELAYED/2
• #665677 src:gsmartcontrol: "gsmartcontrol: FTBFS with glib 2.32"
  add upstream patch, upload to DELAYED/2
• #666574 src:libcairo-perl: "libcairo-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  add two upstream patches (pkg-perl)
• #666601 src:libapache-singleton-perl: "libapache-singleton-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  upload with patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #666651 src:librpc-xml-perl: "librpc-xml-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload with patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)

A while back, I was thinking. Playing the flute or whistling on a bottle is the exact same technique; but, in my opinion, the sound that comes from a bottle has some interesting overtones, making for a nice sound. Since the material of which an instrument is made is in large part responsible for the overtones that it produces (apart from the technique used by the musician), I wondered if nobody had ever come up with the idea of making a flute in glass. Turns out that, of course, this has already happened. In fact, the modern concert flute wouldn't have been possible without one Claude Laurent, a Parisian instrument maker who received a patent for "a new [method of] making flutes from crystal"; part of his patent described a method of attaching the valves to the instrument. It was this method which was used by Theobald Boehm when he invented the fingering system that defines the modern concert flute. The price of an intact Laurent flute today is, of course, beyond my budget; and it doesn't look like there are any glass flutes being made that use the Boehm system. But that doesn't mean there aren't any glass flutes being made anymore; indeed, a short look around the Internet quickly turned up Hall Crystal Flutes, a family-owned business from Rochester in the US state of Washington. As the price was not too insane (49 USD for the instrument, plus almost the same amount for shipping it to Belgium), I ordered one of their piccolos in C. Last wednesday, a woman from the post office rang my doorbell, with a pakage containing the new instrument. Unfortunately, however, it had a customs tax of slightly more than what was in my wallet at the time, which meant I could only fetch it from the post office the next day. At least I could pay in plastic there. After having had it for a few days, I can make a few observations:

• For someone who's been used to the Boehm system for as long as I have been, I thought the fingering system would be very confusing, but it's not too bad.
• As I bought a piccolo and not a flute, the sound is fairly sharp, and not entirely what I expected of it. Having said that, it's certainly not too bad, and I expect I'll be able to improve with time.
• Playing the highest notes on the fingering chart is challenging, and I've thus far not been able to produce the very highest note on that chart. Since playing a piccolo (any piccolo) is always slightly more difficult than playing a regular flute, however, especially in the higher octaves, that's not too unexpected.
• Playing sharp or flat notes requires me to open one of the holes slightly. Getting a correct sharp or flat requires, obviously, to open the hole to the exact correct amount, which will require quite some practice to do well. But I'm sure I'll get there, eventually.

I've been playing a few diddlies on it for the past few days, and it's been fun so far. We'll see where this leads us.

I met Francesca in Debconf 11 in Banja Luka. If I recall correctly, it s Enrico Zini who introduced me to her, because she was the madamezou (her IRC nickname) who started to get involved in the publicity team. Since then and despite having a bachelor thesis to complete she got way more involved and even gained official responsibilities in the project. Before starting with the interview, I wanted to mention that Francesca is drafting a diversity statement for Debian I was expecting the discussions to go nowhere but she listened to all objections and managed to improve the text and build a consensus around it. Thank you for this and keep up the good work, Francesca! Rapha l: Who are you? Francesca: My name is Francesca, I m 30 and I studied Social Sciences. Currently I live in Italy but I m planning to go abroad (not a lot of jobs here for geeky social scientists). Apart for Debian and FLOSS world in general, I have unrestrained passions for chocolate; zombie movies; sci-fi; zombie books; knitting sewing crafting and DIY in general; zombie videogames; bicycles; pulling apart objects to look inside them; splatter B movies, David Foster Wallace s books, playing trumpet, and did I already mentioned zombies? Days are too short for all this stuff, but I try to do my best. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Francesca: Some years ago I was stuck in bed for literally some months, due to a grave series of migraine attacks. I wasn t able to do anything: no social life, no books or television. So, I decided to turn on the laptop and do something constructive with it: I was already a Debian user and it seemed quite logical to me to try to give back to the community. I am not a coder and I ve not studied Computer Science, so my first step was to join an Italian Debian on-line community (Debianizzati) and help with tutorials, users support, wiki management. In a couple of months I learnt many things: helping other users with their problems forces you to do lots of research! My first contributions to the Debian project were mostly translations of the main website. Translators are the perfect typos spotters: they work so precisely on the text to be translated that they finish to do a great QA job. This is how I ve started to contribute to the Debian website: with very simple things, fixing typos or wrong links or misplaced wml tags. I still remember my first commit to the website: the idea was to undercase some tags, but it ended up that I misplaced some of them and in addition I fixed them only in the English page and not on the translations as well. When after a couple of minutes, K re Thor Olsen a long time contributor of the team and now webmaster reverted my commit, I felt so stupid and full of shame. But, to my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error: Gerfried Fuchs, one of the guru of the team, replies me in a really helpful and polite way explaining what I did wrong and how to do things correctly. I think this episode was a turning point in my Debian life: there s this idea that Debian Developers are just a bunch of arrogant assholes and maybe it was true in the past, but for my experience they are not. Well, at least the ones I met and work with .

To my great surprise, no one treated me like an idiot for that error.

Since then, I joined the WWW team and helped them apply the shiny new design provided by Kalle S derman. A lot of work was done during the week immediately before the release of the new website. Oh that was a week! We worked night and day to have the new design ready for February 6th, and it was fantastic when we finally published it, simultaneously with the release of Squeeze. At the same time, I started to contribute more actively to the Debian Publicity team, not only translating news but also writing them. It can sound scary for a non native English speaker to write something from scratch in English, but you have to keep in mind that your text will be reviewed by native speakers before being published. And we have some fantastic reviewers in the English localisation team: particularly Justin B Rye, who is tireless in his effort and more recently Moray Allan. I think I m particularly lucky to work with all these people: there s a special mood in both Publicity and WWW team, which makes you feel happy to do things and at the same time pushes you to do more just because it s fun to work with them sharing jokes, ideas, rants, patches and hugs. Rapha l: I believe that you have been trough the new member process very quickly. You re now a Non-Uploading Debian Developer. How was the experience and what does this mean to you? Francesca: Becoming a Debian Developer was not so obvious for me, because I didn t need to be a DD for the work I do in Debian. For instance, I don t maintain packages, so I had no reasons to want to become a DD in order to have uploading rights. For a while I didn t really feel the necessity of being a DD. Luckily, some people started to pester me about it, asking me to apply for the NM process. I remember Martin Zobel-Helas doing this for an entire week every single day, and Gerfried Fuchs doing it as well. Suddenly, I realized that people I worked with felt that I deserved the DD status and that I simply had thought I didn t. As a non coder and a woman, there probably was a bit of impostor syndrome involved. Having people encouraging me, gave me more confidence and the desire to finally become a DD. And so I did. The process for non uploading DD is identical to the one to become an uploading DD, with one exception: in the second part of the process (named Tasks and Skills) instead of questions about how to create and maintain packages, there are questions about the non packaging work you usually do in Debian. The general resolution which created the possibility to become a non uploading DD gave us a chance to recognize the great effort of Debian contributors who work in various area (translations, documentation, artworks, etc.) that were not always considered as important as packaging efforts. And this is great because if you are a regular contributor, if you love Debian and you are committed to the project, there are no reasons to not be an official member of it. With regards to this, I like the metaphor used by Meike Reichle in her recent talk about the Debian Women Project (video recording here):

a Debian Developer status is a lot like a citizenship in a country that you re living in. If you live in a country and you don t have citizenship, you can find a job, buy a house, have a family [...] but if this country at any point in time decides to go into a direction that you don t like, there s nothing you can do about it. You are not in the position to make any change or to make any effect on that country: you just live there, but there s no way that you can excercise influence on the people who run this country.

Rapha l: You recently joined the Debian Press Team. What does it involve and how are you managing this new responsibility? Francesca: The Press Team is basically the armed wing of the Publicity Team: it handles announcements that need to be kept private until the release, moderate the debian-announce and debian-news mailing list and maintain contacts with press people from outside the project. The real job, so, is done within the Publicity Team. The most important part of our work is to write announcements and the newsletter: while the newsletter is published bi-weekly, the announcements need to be write in a shorter timeframe. Localization is really important in spreading Debian word, so we work closely with translators: both announcements and DPN are usually translated in four or five different languages. The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, we need to take quick decisions and often do last-minute changes. Personally, I like it: I work better under pressure. But I know that is sometimes difficult for contributors to accept that we can t debate endlessly on details, we have just to go on and do our best in a given timeframe.

The publicity work could be stressful, as we have strict deadlines, [ ]. Personally, I like it.

Raphael: You re one of the main editor behind the Debian Project News. What s the role and scope of this newsletter? Francesca: Debian Project News is our beloved newsletter, direct successor of the Debian Weekly News founded by Joey Hess in 1999 and later kept alive by Martin Schulze. In 2007, Debian Weekly News was discontinued but in 2008 the project was revived by Alexander Reichle Schmehl. The idea behind DPN is to provide our users an overview of what is happening inside and outside the project. As the core team of editors is formed by three people, the main problem is to be able to collect enough news from various sources: in this sense we are always glad when someone points us to interesting blogposts, mails and articles. DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian: propose news, write paragraphs and review the draft before the publication are quite easy tasks but very useful. English native speakers can do a proofread (as no one of the main editors is a native speaker) while others can always translate DPN in their native language. People who want to help us can take a look at our wiki page.

DPN is also a good chance for non coders to contribute to Debian.

Just yesterday I realized that since January we don t miss or delay an issue: so I d like to thank the fantastic team of editors, reviewers and translators who made it possible. The team is now working on another way of spreading Debian s message: a long-time project is finally becoming real. Stay tuned, surprise arriving! Raphael: You re trying to organize IRC training sessions but that doesn t seem to take off in Debian, while it s quite common in the Ubuntu community. How do you explain that? Francesca: I m not sure about it: both Debian users and contributors seemed to appreciate this initiative in the past. I was quite surprised by the amount of Debian members present during the various sessions and by the amount of interesting questions asked by the users. So the only reason I can think about is that I need to put more enthusiasm in convincing the teams to do it: they need more encouragement (or to be pestered more!). I, for myself, think that IRC training sessions are a great way to promote our work, to share our best practice, to talk about our project to a wider audience. And I ll sure try to organize more of them. Help, suggestions, ideas are really welcome! Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Francesca: There is a project I d like to give more love, but I always end up without the time to do it: the debian-community.org project. Back in 2007, Holger Levsen founded it with the aim of reducing the gap between Debian contributors and Debian users, giving all an opportunity to contribute, share ideas and more. The project was discontinued and I d really like to revive it: in these years various things have changed, but I think that the core idea of having a node to connect existing local communities is still good and doable. In Debian we don t have the wide and well articulated local infrastructure present in other distributions (Ubuntu, particularly, but also Fedora): even if I don t like too centralized structures, I think that a better connection between the project and local groups of users and on-line communities would be a step forward for the project. Being part of the Events Team, I m aware of how much we need to improve our communication with local groups. An example is the events organization: sometimes, Publicity and Events teams even don t know about regional Debian related events (like booth at conferences, workshops, talks, install parties, etc) and this is a shame because we could offer a lot of help in organizing and promoting local events. What we lack is better communication. And debian-community.org project could give us exactly this. Could be a cluster of local groups, a platform for events organization and even a useful resource for newbies who want to find a local group near them. I started some effort in this sense, sending a proposal about it, working on a census of Debian local groups. Any help is appreciated! I m really curious to see how many Debian communities (from all around the world and the web) are out there, and I d love to have members from these communities better connected with the Debian Project. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Probably the bikeshedding feticism of almost all of us. It s the other side of the coin of Debian s commitment to technical excellence and our perfectionism, but sometimes it leads just to endless discussions about details, and it is a blocker for various initiatives. In Debian, you have to be really patient and in a way stubborn to push some changes. This is frustrating sometimes. On the other hand, I really appreciate how people take some times to think to each proposals, give some feedback and discuss about it: the process could be annoying, indeed, but the result is often an improvement of the initial proposal. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Most of my teammates are simply brilliant and adorable and hard-working. But I have to admit that I particularly admire David Pr vot: beside being a webmaster he does a lot of things, from French translations to DPN editing. All his contributions have a great quality and he s able to push you always further in doing things and doing them better. He is a good example of how I d like to be as contributor: smart, tireless, friendly.

---

Thank you to Francesca for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading her answers as I did. Note that older interviews are indexed on wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

3 comments Liked this article? Click here. My blog is Flattr-enabled.

Hello Last week-end, I ve participated Perl/QA hackathon in Paris. Here s a short summary of the main activities during this week-end. I was not in the best of shape due to a nasty (biological) bug that wore me down before the hackathon. First of all, I discussed with rjbs about the bunch of debian patches I ve written for Software::License. These patches (and hacks) are used in Debian to provide licenses summaries in Debian::Dpkg::Copyright model to help write Debian copyright files. License management is boring but necessary. cme and Software::License help in making this task slightly less boring. Ricardo kindly suggested some modifications and agreed to include my patches. I implemented these modifications directly during the hackathon. The other tasks during this week-end were (not necessarily in that order):

• I discussed with alanhaggai and gave him some ideas to fix his Archive::Zip module
• I did a live demo of Debian packaging to ribasushi: I updated the Debian package libdbix-class-schema-loader-perl from CPAN and uploaded it in Debian.
• I presented how to package Perl modules for Debian. renormalist will package his own module Data::Dpath and its dependencies for Debian. I will sponsor his packages once they are available on Debian perl s team git repository. Unless gregoa beats me to it
• I discussed with Slaven Rezic some binding weirdness found in Perl/Tk HList. Config::Model s graphical interface provide a viewer widget and and editor widget for configuration items. As expected, the viewer is invoked by a single left click. One would expect a double click to invoke the editor widget. But the double click bindinngdoes not owrk in HList when the single click is used. Currently the editor widget is invoked with a right-click, which is not user-friendly. According to Slaven, the bug might be hidden quite deep in Perl/Tk guts. Fixing it won t be easy.
• As a Debian/sid user, I ve been quite spoiled: I ve always had a recent Perl available on my system. I ve neved had to compile Perl since my HPUX days back in last century. However, Config;:Model tests failed with Perl 5.15.9, a development version not available in Debian (sid is not that unstable). Thanks to Xavier Caron, I ve learned about perlbrew and cpanminus to reproduce this bug and fix the issue. Many apologies to miyagawa for asking dumb questions about cpanm: the disctinction between runtime and build time does not apply to cpan minus. I guess that s the drawback of wearing 2 hats (Debian dev hat and Perl dev hat): your brain may get confused and you conflate issues. Oops.

Many thanks to FreeSide who sponsored my travel, to the hackathons organisers and to all the participants for their welcome. All the best

In (roughly) 2008 I read "Blood Music" my first Greg Bear novel and devoured it in a weekend, in only two or three reading sessions. That happens very rarely, and when it does I often wonder whether it's the quality of the writing or some combination of that and your personal moods and tastes at the time that is responsible. My next Bear was "Darwin's Radio" in mid-2010 which, whilst good, did not provoke the same feverish read. I might write short reviews for both at some point in the future, but right now I can't remember either well enough to do so. In the last few weeks I read "Hull Zero Three" which was quite a different beast. The novel first captured my attention due to the unusual way it was promoted: via a video, which was created using a modified Quake 2 engine. It wasn't a great video but the novelty made it interesting. The story begins with a first-person narrator waking up from a sort-of hyper sleep on a generation starship that has clearly had some serious problems. He has to run to escape danger before he has an opportunity to figure out exactly what has happened and what he is running from, or to. Something has gone horribly wrong on the ship: it's nowhere near where it should be going and nobody should be awake. The narrator's memory is fractured, fabricated and unreliable; the ship is hostile, and whilst it's mechanical, it cyclically changes and re-arranges it's hulls in an almost organic way. He is joined by a rotating cast of similarly confused refugees of varying shapes and sizes. Language and cultural barriers serve to further magnify the sense of alienation that you experience on behalf of the story teller. The troupe are persued through the corridors by a collection of lethally efficient killer "things", contrasting with the background by being organic in nature but mechanical in behaviour and appearance. The scale of the ship is necessarily massive, and Bear does an impressive job of capturing the awe you might feel when considering it. Three huge, cigar-shaped hulls, joined by "spars" to an enormous chunk of ice captured from the Oort cloud on exodus from the solar system. The ice serves as a mixture of "fuel" for the biological ship systems and as part of a shield system for the hulls from cosmic rays. However, in part due to the narrator's confusion, it was hard to follow the very abstract descriptions of the environment in the earlier stages of the story. I found myself re-reading passages to try and understand the comparisons being offered and scales presented. In common with the two earlier Bears I've read, 'body horror' features prominently in this story. It feels like a "Dead Space" or "Resident Evil" in space in a hard SF novel which seriously attempt to capture real speculative science. Like "Blood Music", I found myself compelled to read "Hull Zero Three" at every available opportunity. I finished it off in a very enjoyable reading session outdoors in the spring sunshine. It was an enjoyable read, well written but not beyond criticism, with some interesting takes on well-worn themes. Very reminiscent of the movie "Pandorum" (which was a surprisingly good movie).

Finally the dose3 libraries and tools landed in testing this weekend. We solved a couple of bugs already and it seems nobody complained too loudly. If you used the edos tools in the past you might be interested to check out our new tools in the package dose-extra. Actually @mancoosi we will be delighted to ear about you experience with our tools and how to make them better and more useful. Please drop me a line ! The next major release of dose will be multi-arch aware and provide performance improvements and other minor features. If you missed it, and you are now curious, I delivered a talk at fosdem regarding our tools:

• QA tools for FOSS distributions (FOSDEM 2012) - Pietro Abate (video)

A big thanks to ralf of course for packaging everything !

After quite big delay, Weblate 0.8 is finally ready. There are many fixes and improvements like grouping of Git commits, improved checks or activity logging. All in all this should be feature complete for 1.0 release. Now it's time to stabilize all the features and release 0.9 (AKA 1.0rc) and then we'll be ready to fire 1.0. Full list of changes for 0.8:

• Replaced own full text search with Whoosh.
• Various fixes and improvements to checks.
• New command updatechecks.
• Lot of translation updates.
• Added dictionary for storing most frequently used terms.
• Added /admin/report/ for overview of repositories status.
• Machine translation services no longer block page loading.
• Management interface now contains also useful actions to update data.
• Records log of changes made by users.
• Ability to postpone commit to Git to generate less commits from single user.
• Possibility to browse failing checks.
• Automatic translation using already translated strings.
• New about page showing used versions.
• Django 1.4 compatibility.
• Ability to push changes to remote repo from web interface.
• Added review of translations done by others.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user. Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others. PS: If you're about to use Weblate, rather use Git version than tagged 0.8, you will get bunch of bug fixes for free :-).

Filed under: English Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

I set aside 15 minutes to find a tool that would allow me to easily post to my identi.ca account via the command line. I'm two hours in and I finally sent my first remote post. Hopefully nobody else will have to spend this much time! There are a lot of tools to help you interact with Twitter via the command line and identi.ca supports the twitter API, however, convincing these tools to use identi.ca was harder than I expected and is woefully under-documented. This hardship is largely self-inflicted since I chose to authenticate via oauth, however, it's not clear to me if identi.ca supports basic auth and if so for how much longer. In any event, oauth seems like a much preferable authetication approach because I don't have to store my identi.ca password in plain text. I decided to use tweepy since it's packaged for Debian and it's written in python. If you are not familiar with OAuth, it's worth reading up on. In short:

• register your application via identi.ca web interface
• retrieve consumer token and consumer secret from identi.ca (via the web)
• using this token and secret, request from identi.ca an application key and secret (you must provide your identi.ca user login credentials before you get these strings)
• and now, configure your application to use the applicaiton key and secret everytime it connects

tweepy has documentation on using setting up oauth, however, I found it hard to follow, especially since it goes back and forth between using it for a web app and using it for a desktop app. Since I'm interested in a desktop app (shell), the web app business was just clutter. I wrote the script below to initialize my app and retrieve the application key and secret. If you are writing a desktop app, this needs to be run once for each user of the app:

#!/usr/bin/python
""" 
This script should be used once to initialize your desktop/command line
application with a oauth access key and access secret. 
Your first step is to login, via the web, to your identi.ca account
and authorize your application. Click Edit next to your username
to edit your profile settings. Then click Connections on the left
side bar. Then, in the right sidebar, click 
"Register an OAuth client application".
When you are done, you will see a page listing your token and secret.
Fill in the consumer_token and consumer_secret variables below with those
values.
"""
""" Fill in these values with values provided in the identi.ca web app when you register your app! """
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
import tweepy
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
  redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
except tweepy.TweepError:
  print 'Error! Failed to get request token.'
  quit()
req_key = auth.request_token.key
req_secret = auth.request_token.secret
print "you don't need these values... just fyi..."
print "auth request key is: " + req_key
print "auth request secret is: " + req_secret
print "Go to this URL for verify code: " + redirect_url
print "enter the verify code from the URL above"
verifier = raw_input('Verify code: ')
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.set_request_token(req_key, req_secret)
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
  auth.get_access_token(verifier)
except tweepy.TweepError:
  print 'Error! Failed to get access token.'
print "Store these values in your application. You will re-use them"
print "auth access key is: " + auth.access_token.key 
print "auth access secret is: " + auth.access_token.secret 
print "done with initialization"

Once you have your key and secret, the following simpler application will post for you:

#!/usr/bin/python
import tweepy
post = "I microblog from bash"
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host 
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root 
auth.secure = True 
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth, host = host, api_root = api_root)
api.update_status(post)

due to some new incoming RC bugs, this week was more devoted to fixing bugs in "our" (= the Debian Perl Group's) packages. here's the list:

• #641816 libmusicbrainz3-dev: "libmusicbrainz3-dev should depends on libneon25-dev and libdiscid"
  add missing dependencies, upload to DELAYED/2
• #646649 src:libio-async-loop-epoll-perl: "libio-async-loop-epoll-perl: FTBFS: Failed 1/8 test programs. 1/86 subtests failed."
  upload with patches from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #656791 approx: "approx: should depend on system-log-daemon"
  add missing dependency, upload to DELAYED/2
• #661799 libcvs-perl: "libcvs-perl: FTBFS"
  upload with patch from Niko Tyni (pkg-perl)
• #663052 leds-alix-source: "leds-alix-source: module fails to compile"
  apply patch from Federico Brega, upload to DELAYED/2
• #663567 wxglade: "wxglade: FTBFS: ImportError: No module named wx"
  send patch to the BTS
• #665233 src:libanyevent-perl: "libanyevent-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload patched package prepared by Alessandro Ghedini (pkg-perl)
• #665388 src:libperlbal-xs-httpheaders-perl: "libperlbal-xs-httpheaders-perl: FTBFS: C code doesn't load reliably"
  add patch, upload package prepared by Jonathan Steinert (pkg-perl)
• #666292 src:libmecab-perl: "libmecab-perl: FTBFS: MeCab_wrap.cxx:1826:16: error: 'mecab_node_t' has no member named 'sentence_length'"
  upload new upstream version (pkg-perl)
• #666369 src:fbcat: "fbcat: FTBFS: doc/fbcat.1: No such file or directory at /usr/bin/dh_installman line 127."
  fix targets in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/5, then fixed earlier in a maintainer upload
• #666581 src:latexdiff: "latexdiff: FTBFS: ! LaTeX Error: File ulem.sty' not found."
  finish and upload package with fix prepared by David Bremner (pkg-perl)
• #666638 src:libcpan-mini-perl: "libcpan-mini-perl: FTBFS: test failed"
  use writable HOME during build (pkg-perl)

Review: Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber

Publisher:	Microsoft
Copyright:	2004
ISBN:	0-7356-1993-X
Format:	Trade paperback
Pages:	153

Ken Schwaber is one of the two original developers of Scrum and one of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto. Agile Project Management with Scrum is an introduction to Scrum by him that feels aimed primarily at business people (project managers, executives, line managers) rather than at technical people. There's very little about agile software development in general; the emphasis is on business process, team organization, and how the Scrum process looks to the rest of the organization. After an introductory chapter laying out the basics of Scrum, the remainder of the book is primarily case studies. Schwaber presents some principle and then discuss an anonymized case study that illustrates the principle. Each major Scrum role (ScrumMaster, Product Owner, and Team Member) gets their own chapter, interspersed with chapters on planning, reporting, and scaling. Finally, there are some concluding appendices laying out the rules of Scrum in more detail, adding a brief (and very disappointing) discussion of fixed-term, fixed-price contracts, and providing some other supplemental information. This is only the second regular book that I've read about Scrum, but my reading has been a bit out of order. We've been using Scrum for various projects for about a year and a half, I've played both team member and product owner roles, and we've been thinking hard about how to integrate Scrum more into the way we do development. My impression of this book is that it's intended as more of an introduction for people who aren't yet comfortable with Scrum or who are still struggling to make the pieces fit together. I'm therefore possibly not the target audience. Much of this book is a rehash of things someone who has studied Scrum will already know. I'm of two minds about the case study presentation style of this book. On one hand, it does help to make the points Schwaber discusses more concrete, and it's difficult to talk about business process in any other way. They're also more interesting and engaging than Schwaber's straight rule descriptions. But I had difficulty digging into most of the ones here. They're very simple and a little shallow, and I had trouble applying many of them to practical situations I might be in. I would have liked somewhat more detailed stories with more analysis and possible alternatives within the situation, rather than simple illustrations of how Scrum solves the problem that Schwaber had just said it would solve. What I did like about this book is that it provides the background and theory of Scrum as empirical process control much more clearly than any material I'd previously read. Schwaber is good at explaining what empirical process control is and why it's a superior approach, and he gave me new vocabulary and basic concepts to use to talk about Scrum. I also liked the high-level look from a management perspective without getting into the details of story points and velocity estimation (Schwaber doesn't use them at all in this book, relying instead on traditional "days of work" estimates). Much of my previous experience with Scrum was tightly focused on its advantages for estimation and responsiveness to changes, and it's nice to see some of the other advantages of Scrum (developer job satisfaction, improved focus, incremental deployment) highlighted more. Another part of this book I appreciated was the discussion of sprint length. Schwaber doesn't go into the possible alternatives, largely assuming that a month is the best interval, but the discussion of the impact and implications of a month sprint length helped me see the advantages of longer sprints. (To date, we've been doing either one week or two week sprints.) I came away with the feeling that a hybrid model where longer sprints are used for business purposes and then subdivided into shorter sprints for developer coordination might be particularly effective, although that's not an idea that Schwaber presents. This is not a particularly compelling read, particularly if, like me, you're not a huge fan of genericized case studies. Schwaber's writing is clear, but wooden and occasionally awkward, and the book is often dry. But it talks about Scrum from a management angle instead of a developer angle, which is an additional perspective that I found valuable. Possibly worth taking a look if you want more detail about Scrum from a high-level management perspective, although I don't think you're missing a lot by not reading it. Rating: 6 out of 10

Sarah's Mum had accrued too much annual leave and had to take some time off work, so Sarah did some (very mild) arm twisting and convinced her to come over for 3 weeks, and do a 5 day cruise to Mexico out of New Orleans. Unfortunately, my annual leave situation wasn't quite so abundant, and I had a lot going on at work, so regretfully I didn't join them on the cruise, and instead went to New Orleans for a four day weekend when they returned. From all reports, the cruise was very good. Zoe handled it well, although she did say "home" a lot. One of the two stops in Mexico was to check out some Mayan ruins, which looked awesome from the photos. The other stop involved a dolphin encounter. I was incredibly envious of all that they got to do, and would have loved to have gone with them, as I've never been on a cruise ship either. I can also report that no cats were lost during this bachelor stint. I had a night flight on the Wednesday evening to get there, which was scheduled to get in at around midnight, and I'd booked a motel room near the airport for that night, and we'd booked a vacation rental home for Thursday to Sunday nights. Unfortunately, my flight ended being delayed something like 2.5 hours, so I didn't get into New Orleans until around 2am. The house we rented did the trick nicely. It was a small "shotgun" duplex in what looked like a nice neighbourhood. It was advertised as being close to the street car line, but they were doing some work on the tracks, so the street car didn't seem to be running as far down the line as it usually did, so it ended up being a bit more of a trek to get to it. It was also extremely slow, and there was a marathon on the Sunday, which closed everything down for a long time, making it a generally pretty unreliable form the transport. We ended up renting a car for Saturday and Sunday, which was something of a saga in itself, as Enterprise didn't have any cars at the location we'd booked one, so after a couple of hours cooling our heels there (Zoe was incredibly well-behaved, all things considered), they shuttled us over to another location and we ended up with a minivan instead of a compact, which for the same price, allayed our concerns about being able to transport all of our luggage to the airport on Monday morning. We had a very early morning flight on Monday morning to come back, which got into SFO at around 9am, and I went directly to work from there. Thursday We all arrived at the house, separately. It ended up taking them 2 hours to disembark the ship when it came back into port, with Customs taking an eternity to process everyone. I think we went exploring the local area that afternoon, and took a street car into the city to check out Bourbon Street, having a Cajun dinner at Remoulade. Friday In the morning, we went to check out Lafayette Cemetery Number 2. Sarah took Zoe back to the house for a nap, and Sarah's Mum and I continued back to explore the French Quarter some more, walking down the length of Royal Street (which was vastly different from Bourbon Street, just one block over). We had lunch at the French Market. The cemetery was interesting, as pretty much all of the graves were these huge above ground tombs, that seemed to have multiple family members interred in them. Apparently the cemetery filled up quite quickly courtesy of a Yellow Fever outbreak. After lunch, Sarah's Mum and I continued wandering around the French Quarter. We went and took a look at the Mississippi River, and I had an encounter with a grifter who was so good at his job I couldn't bring myself to argue with him over the $20 he diddled me out of. We tried to get to the Civil War Museum, but it closed at 4pm. We looked at the Robert E. Lee Monument, which seemed to be draped in drunks, and then I think we rendezvoused with Sarah and Zoe back on Canal Street for dinner at The Court of Two Sisters (which apparently we were under-dressed for, as Sarah and her Mum said we were getting a lot of dirty looks from other patrons). Saturday On Saturday morning, we had the aforementioned car rental experience from hell, and by the time we had the car it was lunchtime, so Zoe napped in the car after lunch on the way out to Oak Alley Plantation, where we were introduced to the delightful beverage known as the mint julep, and took a tour of the house and wandered the grounds. Sunday On Sunday, Sarah and her Mum did a swamp tour, and Zoe and I went to the zoo. As I said earlier, there was a marathon that completely closed down Saint Charles Avenue, which is where the street cars run, so after walking down to where the street cars started operating (which ended up being most of the way down South Carrollton Avenue), the driver informed me that the street cars were queuing up at the corner of South Carrollton and Saint Charles, and I should get off her street car and get on the one at the front of the queue. I did this, but the driver of the front street car informed me that she wouldn't be leaving for an hour and half. At this point, I started considering a bus instead. Zoe and I went to check out the Mississippi River, which was quite close to where we were, and then I went back, and despite a street car having left (without any passengers) the driver of the current street car couldn't tell me when she'd be leaving, so I started walking down Saint Charles Avenue. Unfortunately, Zoe's going through a phase where she wants to be carried everywhere, so I was lugging her all over the place on my hip. Sarah didn't take a stroller with her, and instantly regretted it. Lesson learned. Eventually we managed to get onto a bus, which dropped us off at Audubon Park, which had Audubon Zoo at the other end of it. There was a playground near the Saint Charles Avenue end of the park, so Zoe had a bit of a play on that, and then we continued through the park to the zoo. Mercifully, the zoo had dodgy strollers for rent, and there was no way in the world I wasn't going to rent one of them, so that made getting around with Zoe a lot easier on my back. We had a really good time at the zoo. There was some sort of a music festival on in the parklands within the zoo grounds, and that included a jumping castle, which Zoe expressed a desire to have a go on. She had a fabulous time on it. I think she probably spent about 15 minutes in there, without any tears. I was very impressed. I took a brief video of some of her antics. It was getting close to Zoe's nap time, and she was getting tired, but fortunately Sarah and her Mum were able to pick us up from the zoo after their swamp tour and Zoe got to nap back at the house. Monday We had a very early start. Unfortunately, our flight (with United) was a couple of days after United and Continental officially merged, and despite having checked in online, we had to queue up with everyone else (for an extended period of time) to drop off our checked luggage. Then there was a 45 minute line for security screening. We pulled the "toddler going to melt down" card and jumped to the head of the line, but Sarah's Mum had to wait. The flight ended up being delayed because people were stuck in the security line. Overall impressions of New Orleans Fabulous architecture. There were so many gorgeous houses on Saint Charles Avenue and the surrounding area. I'd have loved to do an architecture tour. Crap (but cheap) public transport. $3 gets you a day pass. The street cars are cute, but slow and unpredictable. The drivers were remarkably unhelpful. The buses were okay. Great food. Zoe seemed to have a liking for the spicy stuff. I gave her some fresh alligator jerky, and after some initial coughing and spluttering at the spiciness of it, she came back for more. Post-Katrina recovery. We really only saw a very small part of the city, but there were still some houses with boarded up windows, and some vacant blocks where buildings had been demolished, but largely you'd not have been able to tell that large parts of the city had been underwater, from casual inspection. I really enjoyed the trip, even though it was brief, I feel like I got a good feel for the place. We were there just after Mardi Gras, and there were still beads everywhere. Draped all over fences. Over power lines. Trees on the parade route were absolutely covered in beads. I'd have loved to have been there for Mardi Gras. My friend Brandon, who is an excellent street photographer, took some great photos that capture some of it. Photos from Sarah's cruise and our time in New Orleans are here.

And a personal reboot. <article> All my life, so far, I've always prided myself on not having any regrets. I've told people that if I had to live my life over again, I would not change how I had acted or anything I had done. Over the last few days I've come to regret my actions. They have caused me to hurt a dear friend and, then, ultimately lose them. It all stems with not being honest. To my friend. And to myself. By not telling myself the truth about how I feel, or what I want, it has meant I have not told others the truth either. They have then acted on what I said, and when I've changed my tune or wanted more (or less), they are rightly upset. I wish I could say that this was a new thing. Like some kind of habit I picked up because it was shiny. Unfortunately as I review my life, and the various people who have come into and out of it, I can see that my inability to be truthful has been mostly constant. To be unable to articulate my needs has caused various amounts of pain to others. Sometimes that pain has come back to me, as with my friend, magnified. Other times I have escaped it. This is a personal apology from me to all that I've hurt. Some of those people are (now) deceased. Some of them no longer talk to me / interact with me at all. For what it is worth. Sorry. For those of you who are still with me, on this journey, thank you for putting up with how I have been in the past. The journey is not over but I hope the rest of it will be more truthful and, ultimately, less hurtful. Anand </article>

thanks to lucas' last archive rebuild, this week offered some new & easy additional RC bugs :) here's the list:

• #646177 src:python-djvulibre: "python-djvulibre: FTBFS: FAIL: test_decode.test_documents.test_export_ps"
  add patch from upstream repo, upload to DELAYED/2
• #651317 src:pike7.8: "pike7.8: FTBFS on i386: Segmentation fault"
  send debdiff with patch from Ubuntu / Matthias Klose to BTS
• #656669 gedit-latex-plugin: "gedit-latex-plugin: FTBFS due to latex/latex/environment.py not in POTFILES.in"
  add patch from Ubuntu / Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, upload to DELAYED/2
• #660379 libchart-perl: "libchart-perl 2.4.4 breaks the return value of scalar_png()"
  upload package prepared by Florian Schlichting (pkg-perl)
• #662585 qd: "FTBFS"
  add patch to fix a Makefile.am variable, upload to DELAYED/2
• #662764 sagan: "sagan: FTBFS: dh_auto_configure fails"
  fix configure call in debian/rules, upload to DELAYED/2
• #663063 python-gtkglext1: "python-gtkglext1: FTBFS: dh_autoreconf: Can only be run once"
  add a new target to debian/rules to run dh_autoreconf, upload to DELAYED/2
• #665076 velocity: "velocity: /usr/share/java/velocity.jar missing"
  triage and reassign
• #665219 src:libpadre-plugin-perlcritic-perl: "libpadre-plugin-perlcritic-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  set HOME during build (pkg-perl)
• #665228 src:libconfig-model-perl: "libconfig-model-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  set HOME during build (pkg-perl)
• #665246 src:liborlite-mirror-perl: "liborlite-mirror-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  set HOME during build (pkg-perl)

During the last month I worked as upstream maintainer of LADI Tools and now I m happy to introduce the first stable release! So, to answer the usual question What s new? , here is a short description of the changes introduced (taken from the NEWS file included in the release tarball): Laditools 1.0 Lady O Apart from wladi and g15ladi, most of ladi* tools have been renamed:

• ladicontrol -> ladi-control-center
• ladilog -> ladi-system-log
• laditray -> ladi-system-tray

Moreover, a new component has joined the LADI Tools suite: ladi-player. LADI Player is a convenient, graphical VLC-style application providing an all-in-one control interface to start, stop and monitor JACK as well as the session handler. It also provides basic controls for managing studios. Goodbye PyGTK! All the code was ported to GTK+ 3 and the new GObject Introspection mechanism. Code refactoring and cleanup The code has been reorganized in order to allow the use of Python objects by 3rd party applications. To start writing code using the classes provided by laditools, simply do the following: from laditools import * Two-in-one solution for LADI System Tray Formerly laditray was an implementation of GtkStatusIcon to put a nice right-clickable icon into the system tray to allow users access JACK controls easy way. It s been mostly rewritten and now it shows an AppIndicator icon (if the library is available), or fall back to the Freedesktop.org s old-fashioned System Tray Protocol Spec-compliant icon. Project s new homepage The project s homepage is now hosted by Launchpad.net, the code is hosted by repo.or.cz and it s available here for browsing.
Please use the following links to contact the development team:

• Bugs and patches
• Translations

New up-to-date packages will hit both Debian and Ubuntu soon!

Linux 3.3 was released earlier this week. Aside from a few regmap related updates it was an extremely quiet release for the ASoC framework, the next few releases look like they will be much more active:

• Conversion of a number of CODEC drivers to use regmap directly. This is especially beneficial for drivers for devices which are part of MFDs as they can use a central cache for all operations and means that the process of factoring out the more complex register management code in ASoC can begin.
• As a result of the move of drivers to regmap the rbtree and LZO cache types have been removed, leaving only the the basic flat cache in ASoC. Drivers which need the more complex cache types should use regmap directly.
• Lots of cleanups and fixes from Axel Lin.
• New CODEC drivers for Cirrus CS42L73 and Realtek ALC5632.

It took a while to get it out, but finally, 3 years after the latest release (1.2), the version of 1.3 of xpyb (the XCB Python bindngs) is out. This version has a lot of improvement, and major bug fixes (memory corruption and memory leak were tracked down and fixed). One amazing feature that is now shipped with that release, is my code to export the xpyb API to other Python modules, allowing to draw with Pycairo in Python using XCB. Here is an example of a Python program that draws a spiral in a window using xpyb and Pycairo. You need xpyb >= 1.3 and Pycairo >= 1.10 to make this works.

import cairo
import xcb
from xcb.xproto import *
WIDTH, HEIGHT = 600, 600
def draw_spiral(ctx, width, height):
    """Draw a spiral with lines!"""
    wd = .02 * width
    hd = .02 * height
    width -= 2
    height -= 2
    ctx.move_to (width + 1, 1-hd)
    for i in range(9):
    ctx.rel_line_to (0, height - hd * (2 * i - 1))
    ctx.rel_line_to (- (width - wd * (2 *i)), 0)
    ctx.rel_line_to (0, - (height - hd * (2*i)))
    ctx.rel_line_to (width - wd * (2 * i + 1), 0)
    ctx.set_source_rgb (0, 0, 1)
    ctx.stroke()
# Connect to the X server
conn = xcb.connect()
# Get the X server setup
setup = conn.get_setup()
# Generate X ID for our X "objects"
window = conn.generate_id()
pixmap = conn.generate_id()
gc = conn.generate_id()
# Create a new window
conn.core.CreateWindow(setup.roots[0].root_depth, window,
                       # Parent is the root window
                       setup.roots[0].root,
                       0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT, 0, WindowClass.InputOutput,
                       setup.roots[0].root_visual,
                       CW.BackPixel   CW.EventMask,
                       [ setup.roots[0].white_pixel, EventMask.ButtonPress   EventMask.EnterWindow   EventMask.LeaveWindow   EventMask.Exposure ])
# Create a pixmap: it will be used to draw with cairo
conn.core.CreatePixmap(setup.roots[0].root_depth, pixmap, setup.roots[0].root,
                       WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# We just need a GC to copy later the pixmap on the window, so create one
# very simple
conn.core.CreateGC(gc, setup.roots[0].root, GC.Foreground   GC.Background,
                   [ setup.roots[0].black_pixel, setup.roots[0].white_pixel ])
# Create a cairo surface
surface = cairo.XCBSurface (conn, pixmap,
                            setup.roots[0].allowed_depths[0].visuals[0], WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# Create a cairo context with that surface
ctx = cairo.Context(surface)
# Paint everything in white
ctx.set_source_rgb (1, 1, 1)
ctx.set_operator (cairo.OPERATOR_SOURCE)
ctx.paint()
# Draw our spiral
draw_spiral (ctx, WIDTH, HEIGHT)
# Map the window on the screen so it gets visible
conn.core.MapWindow(window)
# Flush all X requests to the X server
conn.flush()
while True:
    try:
        event = conn.wait_for_event()
    except xcb.ProtocolException, error:
        print "Protocol error %s received!" % error.__class__.__name__
        break
    except:
        break
    # ExposeEvent are received when we need to refresh the content of the
    # window, so we copy the content of the pixmap (where cairo drew) in the
    # window
    if isinstance(event, ExposeEvent):
        conn.core.CopyArea(pixmap, window, gc, 0, 0, 0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT)
    # You click, I quit.
    elif isinstance(event, ButtonPressEvent):
        break
    conn.flush()

Seeing the complexity it is to draw something simple with this technology, I somehow understand why nobody bothered to release or use the code during the last 3 years. But hey, now that it's out, you can build the next Python based desktop environment with bleeding edge technologies. :-)

Sometime the network you re connected to is either untrusted (e.g. wireless) or castrated in some way. In both cases you want a tunnel to your trusted home base. Following I ll show you three completely different tunneling tools which may helpful while travelling. sshuttle sshuttle is a tool somewhere in between of automatic port forward and VPN. It tunnels arbitrary TCP connections and DNS through an SSH tunnel without requiring root access on the remote end of the SSH connection. So it s perfect for redirecting most of your traffic through an SSH tunnel to your favourite SSH server, e.g. to ensure your local privacy when you are online via a public, unencrypted WLAN (i.e. easy to sniff for everyone). It runs on Linux and MacOS X and only needs a Python interpreter on the remote side. Requires root access (usually via sudo) on the client side, though. It s currently available at least in Debian Unstable and Testing (Wheezy) as well as in Ubuntu since 11.04 Natty. Miredo Miredo is an free and open-source implementation of Microsoft s NAT-traversing Teredo IPv6 tunneling protocol for at least Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and MacOS X. Miredo includes not only a Teredo client but also a Teredo server implementation. The developer of Miredo also runs a public Miredo server, so you don t even need to install a server somewhere. If you run Debian or Ubuntu you just need to do apt-get install miredo as root and you have IPv6 connectivity. It s that easy. So it s perfect to get a dynamic IPv6 tunnel for your laptop or mobile phone independently where you are and without the need to register any IPv6 tunnel or configure the Miredo client. I usually use Miredo on my netbooks to be able to access my boxes at home (which are behind an IPv4 NAT router which is also an SixXS IPv6 tunnel endpoint) from whereever I am. iodine iodine is likely the most undermining tool in this set. It tunnels IPv4 over DNS, allowing you to make arbitrary network connections if you are on a network where nothing but DNS requests is allowed (i.e. only DNS packets reach the internet). This is often the case on wireless LANs with landing page. They redirect all web traffic to the landing page. But the network s routers try to avoid poisoning the client s DNS cache with different DNS replies as they would get after the user is logged in. So DNS packets usually pass even the local network s DNS servers unchanged, just TCP and other UDP packets are redirected until logging in. With an iodine tunnel, it is possible get a network connection to the outside on such a network anyway. On startup iodine tries to automatically find the best parameters (MTU, request type, etc.) for the current environmenent. However that may fail if any DNS server in between imposes DNS request rate limits. To be able to start such a tunnel you need to set up an iodine daemon somewhere on the internet. Choose a server which is not already a DNS server. iodine is available in many distributions, e.g. in Debian and in Ubuntu.