I m back from Taiwan since Thursday already. It was a nice trip, the whole week and I do like Taiwan.
We had a transit stop in Bangkok, pretty annoying useless stop (I m sure the smokers disagree, seeing how fast they got into the smokers lounge :) ). One nice detail at Bangkok airport are the ramps down to the Gates. If you use a wheelchair,
you might end up having some fun in case you ever lose control of it. Better don t. The ramp down directly ends in a set of stairs, with nothing between which would stop you. Makes too great a jump down, hehe.
We arrived in Taipei Thursday (the 24th) evening and so got rid of our luggage and went out for Dinner. Which was the only time in Taiwan I wasn t happy about the food, only one of the dishes was ok, the rest not for me. But the rest of the group did like em, so maybe it was just me after a long flight.
On Friday we had nothing planned, except for Dinner, so took a very relaxed day. Somewhere around noon we went out for food, after that a bit sightseeing
around the hostel . There are two attributes that are always true for Taipei:
- It s a busy place, lots of people. No matter where.
- It has more scooters than you ever saw before. (True, there are two times more scooters than cars).
Oh, and of course there are the same rules of the road than in Mexico:
Something might be written on paper, but better don t count on that. Red traffic lights are followed (mostly), and then its whoever is stronger. But if everyone is following this, it does seem to work out. :)
Friday evening we had
Dinner in a place run by Taiwan
aborigines where we met the other people attending the mini-DebConf. Oh, and as it was the third time I had to use them, I was slowly growing accustomed to chopsticks, a thing I was never able to get done before. (Ok, fine, if its the only way to get food and all the others are
stealing your food if you can t handle them, now thats a good reason to learn to eat with chopsticks fast :) ).
Saturday and Sunday we had the mini-DebConf as part of the ICOS. I took no pictures there, but a
number of
other people have, you can find them on
gallery.debconf.org. It was a pretty nice event where I held one talk about the Debian archive and lead one discussion round about SPI and non-profit organizations behind OpenSource Projects. The
slides for the archive talk are available (beware of the kittens!), the SPI stuff only had a small introduction, no slides here.
Oh, before I forget it: Taiwan does feel very hot. And we found a nice
notice in our hostel
Monday til Wednesday was planned for just play the Tourist game and see stuff . There was a plan made to visit the Taipei 101. It turned out that Canonical has an office within that building, as well as Google. So people planned to visit their offices too. Just -
what the hell would I want to visit a Canonical office? Or a Google one? Besides that it was much too early in the day and promised to be boring, so h01ger and myself skipped it. Luck did mean it good with us, we managed to get Sabrina as a local guide for the day and so went to the
Taipei 101 later.
The
101 is a pretty nice building, though I would have loved to be able to get up to
the real top. And not just in the upper part. Anyways, we had been lucky and had a pretty
nice view from it. Getting up from the 4th floor to the 89th is also an experience one has to take: The
elevators go up with 1010m/min, which makes it a 37second trip only. Down is much slower, only 600m/min, pretty boring (though you do feel it more than enough in your stomach. I wouldn t want to do lift-boy job there).
After the 101 we went and visited the
Lungshan temple and in the evening a night market. As it was Monday the market was
empty. (Where empty translates to enough people around that you never ever feel alone. Nor think its dead). Good that, I don t think I want to experience it during weekends when its busy We had a
pretty good time there, with all the various little shops. Fun how many old-style game places there are. Like, playing basketball, throwing things at other things to win stuff, all those non-computer-using games. In a country where lots of the high tech comes from this is not exactly what you would expect.
On Tuesday our trip continued as good as it started on Monday, as we had the pleasure to keep Sabrina as guide for Tuesday and Wednesday. So our Tuesday started out with a visit to the
National Palace Museum. Which has a large enough collection that you can spend multiple days exploring it. We didn t have the time nor memory for all of that, so left it after half a day. Lunch we took in a Japanese restaurant and here it was the first and only time during my Taiwan visit that I used a fork. Well, none of the dishes would have worked otherwise. The afternoon we spent in the
Yangming Park, so we actually saw a bit of
nature near
Taipei.
Tuesday did end early for us, as we planned to attend the
TOSSUG meeting, where I met some more people from debian.org.tw and had an interesting chat about non-profit organizations in Taiwan, their way of operation and what to think of when trying to create a new one. I ve also got a nice debian.org.tw shirt, but I won t ever be able to wear it. They didn t expect someone that large when producing them, oh well. (Hrr, people, if you make Debian shirts of any kind, always do some XXL too. There might be fat, large guys like me visiting. :) )
Anyway, they have another thing, one which I like very much. They created a map of usergroups of other open source projects in Taiwan. It s a foldable map style, titled FLOSS Community Manual , and a lot of different Projects/Usergroups/ are listed there. While its all written in Chinese and I can t read it, it does list them, then describes what they are/do (I think), gives contact information and further links. The backside of it also seem to list events happening there. You can find more information (so you can read it :) ) at their
website. Does seem a very nice idea to take.
Sometime during the evening I also managed to pick up a Chinese name. Or better, Andrew did so for me. I don t even know how to type it, so copy&paste it has to be. :) There: .
And that is:
- Definition in English: long, far, remote, distant; liesurely; Mandarin Pronunciation: YOU1
- Definition in English: axle; personal name of mencius; Mandarin Pronunciation: KE1
Wednesday was our last day in Taiwan, unfortunately. We went out of Taipei, visting the
Golden Mountain City. Another
nice place, with a market
and a history, but as our Taxi was leaving at 1630 we didn t have much time for sightseeing. You could spend a lot there. Especially not as we still needed to buy postcards, something people left home always request from one. Tssk.
I really enjoyed the time I had there. Not only was the organization of the conference we attended good (especially the mini-DebConf is what I saw. The event around it, while named International, was so much chinese spoken, that I couldn t make much of it), but the details around the whole stay had been nicely taken care off. And then people in general did appear very friendly. Now, it might have to do a bit with me not being
exactly their height, but I dont think that is all of it.
Even without such a conference as an opportunity I think I will visit the country again, but that time I will have much more time available. Like two or three weeks. And I certainly will see more than Taipei City then. Like the whole country. :) (And hope I am lucky again with local guides :) ). So thank you SLAT, Andrew, Arne, (Sabrina), Rita, (Candy) and all the people who worked for the event which names I forgot.
Oh, if you didn t find it yet with all the links, a set of my pictures is available
from here.
Today, Fabio and I extended the deadline of the call for papers of the
upcoming Distro Summit until
18 October 2009. We have already received a number of great
proposals, but not enough to complete the schedule. So if you have
anything to say on the topic of distributions (such as, but not
limited to the various Linux distributions), and especially on
cross-distro collaboration, please launch your mailer and compose a
message as detailed in the instructions.
Distro Summit will take place as part of LCA 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand. Yes,
that is on the Southern
Hemisphere, and yes, that is far away from where many of you
live, but it s well worth a visit, if you ll take my word for it.
Unfortunately, we are unable to provide sponsorship for speakers,
so talk to your employer or your distro now and get the
ball rolling. You have a little more than a week to get your bids
in!
What are you waiting for? This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance:
Distro Summit, LCA, and Wellington, all-in-one. It doesn t
get much better than that. Let s hear your proposal!
PS: I loved Wellington (and its people) so much that I picked up
my very own pet
Wellingtonian!
In my 
Here we are back from our german week-end...
The major event of this week-end was running the K ln Cologne
marathon. Why Cologne? Mostly because my marathon Debian friends Ralf Treinen
and No l K the ran it last year and enjoyed it. So, when we ran the Paris
marathon together back in April, we decided to run either Berlin or Cologne later on.
I finally settled for Cologne because this is closer from Paris and
the date was more convenient. That was great also for No l, who lives
close to K ln, so of course he planned that race in his (busy)
schedule. Unfortunately, Ralf got tendinite problems since last Spring
and could not join us. We really hope this will be temporary and
we will enjoy running together in the future.
So, I spent most of the week-end both visiting Cologne with Elizabeth...and running these 42,195 km.
That was great, really. Even if there were much more Germans than in Debian, they were really as friendly and welcoming as Debian Germans are...:-).
The race happens in Cologne center city and is well arranged for followers to be able to see runners several times, as the track comes back in the city center several times....with a memorable finish through the cathedral place, then central pedestrian streets and the bridge over the Rhein river (well, climbling it at km.42 is a small PITA, but still..).
Animation nearly all along the streets with many K ln inhabitants and tourists encouraging the runners and shouting and applausing and playing percussions, and....
My own race was really as I planned to do it. I targeted 4h exactly (Paris was 4h10) and thus tried to keep a pace of 5'41"/km....which I nearly respected. I had a small alert around km13-15 when my legs where kind of heavy....and I was already imagining a terrible second part for the race. Finally, seeing Elizabeth encouraging me at km.19 in the middle of a big crowd, then passing through Friesen Platz in a great noise and with huge encouragements, just made it. I then completed the first half in 1h59'20", which was just fine.
I slightly slowed down between km. 24 and 28, mostly because I was trusting my GPS watch to keep the pace...while it is indeed a bit inaccurate (its kilometers are about 950m long).
So, when I realized that I was about 1-2 mins late at km. 30, I decided to accelerate a little and thus target 5'30"/km on the watch...which I could sustain up to km.38.
I was fearing cramps and a very hard finish, just as it happened to me in Paris...but finally could finish in a quite good shape and keeping my pace.
My final time is officially 4h00'47". So, I missed my target by very few seconds but I am really very happy with the result and the way I finished.
Recovering in the hotel's sauna was amazing, after this, and I could then remember all the great moments of that race by viewing Elizabeth's pictures (soon online on my gallery, promise made).
And, finally, today, we had another day off to drive back home and continue recovering....and register for Paris Marathon on April 11th 2010..:-)... Hopefully, No l (who did an amazing 3h15) will convince self that he should come with his running friends.
So, dear readers, if you reached that part of my blog...I'm afraid you will again read about marathon stories from me.... As everybody was telling me: once you start, you never want to stop..:)
So not even 3 months out from 
I finally managed to do some Debian work in a long time, I managed to package 
As ajax 
This post describes how to play with the UK postcode database that 
It is interesting that Fran ois Marier recently posted a brief "howto" document 
I was requested to forward this information to as wide an audience as possible.
Possibly two months ago the legality/legitimacy of the actions carried out by the Hondurean armed forces, which captured a democratically elected president and without a judicial order or trial process forced him out of the country, starting a de-facto government, was something questionable. Each day, however, it becomes clearer and clearer the Hondureans are suffering a represive military-backed system which cannot be expected to fulfill as a trustable entity to conduct fair, credible elections.
I got this message from a Hondurean friend (of course, whose identity I am not divulging) denouncing the government's invasion of the .hn domain name registry, which is handled by the Sustainable Development Network (Red de Desarrollo Sustentable RDS-HN). The National Telecomunications Comission (Comisi n Nacional de Telecomunicaciones, CONATEL) demands all domain name registration under the .hn top-level domain (TLD) to be suspende, and all the lists and databases regarding said TLDs to be handed over, detailing the IP ranges and the responsibles. They did this under the argument that RDS-HN is an Internet Service Provider (which it is not Being a registrar means they are responsible for the well-keeping of public information and of handling a public good, the .hn TLD, not that they provide any kind of regulated service to individuals or organizations), with military personnel disguised as civilians (and who refused to identify themselves).
If you are interested, please read further on the 
So there's three systems. One of them runs CentOS 4, the other two
run RedHat EL 4. One of the RedHats has been in use for quite a while,
but the other two are freshly installed, and would need to have the same
functionality as the first, but don't yet, mainly because they miss a
number of packages.
So we do this.
