A discussion the other night suggested that I m quite unusual among geeks in doing vanishingly little customisation of my system most of my systems have something very close to their default configuration, individual programs are usually at most a very few tweaks away from their upstream settings. For Emacs all I tend to do is install revbufs, set Linux mode by default for C and turn on syntax highlighting and line number mode (sometimes the last two only get done when I start Emacs). For vim it s just configuring a 72 column word wrap if my main use for vi on the system will be writing e-mail. For GNOME it s putting a terminal launcher in one of the panels and setting focus follows mouse. All very trivial stuff done in five minutes. The theory here is partly that I just can t be bothered to spend more time on tweaking things (and the subsequent carrying around of those tweaks) and partly that it ensures that I m not confused when I end up using a new system or someone else s for whatever reason. I find it somewhat odd that this would be something you d want to spend any time on.

DebConf continued until Saturday, but Friday the 6th was my last day as I left New York that evening. I m a bit late in getting this summary written up. Making Debian Rule, Again (Margarita Manterola) Marga took a bold look at the challenges facing Debian today. She says that Debian is perceived to be less innovative, out of date, difficult to use, and shrinking as a community. She called out Ubuntu as the elephant in the room , which is taking away from Debian. She insists that she is not opposed to Ubuntu, but that nonetheless Ubuntu is to some extent displacing Debian as a focal point for newcomers (both users and contributors). Marga points out that Debian s work is still meaningful, because many users still prefer Debian, and it is perceived to be of higher quality, as well as being the essential basis for derivatives like Ubuntu. She conducted a survey (about 40 respondents) to ask what Debian s problems are, and grouped them into categories like motivation and communication (tied for the #1 spot), visibility (#3, meaning public awareness and perception of Debian) and so on. She went on to make some suggestions about how to address these problems. On the topic of communication, she proposed changing Debian culture by:

• Spreading positive messages, celebrating success
• Thanking contributors for their work
• Avoiding escalation by staying away from email and IRC when angry
• Treating every contributor with respect, no matter how wrong they are

This stimulated a lot of discussion, and most of the remaining time was taken up by comments from the audience. The video has been published, and offers a lot of insight into how Debian developers perceive each other and the project. She also made suggestions for the problems of visibility and motivation. These are crucial issues for Debian devotees to be considering, and I applaud Marga for her fortitude in drawing attention to them. This session was one of the highlights of this DebConf, and catalyzed a lot of discussion of vital issues in Debian. Following her talk, there was a further discussion in the hallway which included many of the people who commented during the session, mostly about how to deal with problematic behavior in Debian. Although I agreed with much of what was said, I found it a bit painful to watch, because (ironically) this discussion displayed several of the characteristic people problems that Debian seems to have:

• Many people had opinions, and although they agreed on many things, agreement was rarely expressed openly. Sometimes it helps a lot to simply say I agree with you and leave it at that. Lending support, rather than adding a new voice, helps to build consensus.
• People waited for their turn to talk rather than listening to the person speaking, so the discussion didn t build momentum toward a conclusion.
• The conversation got louder and more dense over time, making it difficult to enter. It wasn t argumentative; it was simply loud and fast-paced. This drowned out people who weren t as vocal or willful.
• Even where agreement was apparent, there was often no clear action agreed. No one had responsibility for changing the situation.

These same patterns are easily observed on Debian mailing lists for the past 10+ years. I exhibited them myself when I was active on these lists. This kind of cultural norm, once established, is difficult to intentionally change. It requires a fairly radical approach, which will inevitably mean coping with loss. In the case of a community, this can mean losing volunteer contributors cannot let go of this norm, and that is an emotionally difficult experience. However, it is nonetheless necessary to move forward, and I think that Debian as a community is capable of moving beyond it. Juxtaposition Given my history with both Debian and Ubuntu, I couldn t help but take a comparative view of some of this. These problems are not new to Debian, and indeed they inspired many of the key decisions we made when founding the Ubuntu project in 2004. We particularly wanted to foster a culture which was supportive, encouraging and welcoming to potential contributors, something Debian has struggled with. Ubuntu has been, quite deliberately, an experiment in finding solutions to problems such as these. We ve learned a lot from this experiment, and I ve always hoped that this would help to find solutions for Debian as well. Unfortunately, I don t think Debian has benefited from these Ubuntu experiments as much as we might have hoped. A common example of this is the Ubuntu Code of Conduct. The idea of a project code of conduct predates Ubuntu, of course, but we did help to popularize it within the free software community, and this is now a common (and successful) practice used by many free software projects. The idea of behavioral standards for Debian has been raised in various forms for years now, but never seems to get traction. Hearing people talk about it at DebConf, it sometimes seemed almost as if the idea was dismissed out of hand because it was too closely associated with Ubuntu. I learned from Marga s talk that Enrico Zini drafted a set of Debian Community Guidelines over four years ago in 2006. It is perhaps a bit longand structured, but is basically excellent. Enrico has done a great job of compiling best practices for participating in an open community project. However, his document seems to be purely informational, without any official standing in the Debian project, and Debian community leaders have hesitated to make it something more. Perhaps Ubuntu leaders (myself included) could have done more to nurture these ideas in Debian. At least in my experience, though, I found that my affiliation with Ubuntu almost immediately labeled me an outsider in Debian, even when I was still active as a developer, and this made it very difficult to make such proposals. Perhaps this is because Debian is proud of its independence, and does not want to be unduly influenced by external forces. Perhaps the initial growing pains of the Debian/Ubuntu relationship got in the way. Nonetheless, I think that Debian could be stronger by learning from Ubuntu, just as Ubuntu has learned so much from Debian. Closing thoughts I enjoyed this DebConf very much. This was the first DebConf to be hosted in the US, and there were many familiar faces that I hadn t seen in some time. Columbia University offered an excellent location, and the presentation content was thought-provoking. There seemed to be a positive attitude toward Ubuntu, which was very good to see. Although there is always more work to do, it feels like we re making progress in improving cooperation between Debian and Ubuntu. I was a bit sad to leave, but was fortunate enough to meet up with Debian folk during my subsequent stay in the Boston area as well. It felt good to reconnect with this circle of friends again, and I hope to see you again soon. Looking forward to next year s DebConf in Bosnia

...awesome. OK, I'm writing this while I'm still in USA, but there are so many things to say about these weeks that I can't write them in only one blog post. And, still, this one will be quite long as it will talk about hacking, running and sightseeing...:) Let's start about hacking: after all, this is the first reason for being there in US, isn't it? I cam to DebConf with a very long TODO list and, for the first time in seven DebConfs, I'm pretty happy with what I achieved from it:

• samba packages
  • I (shortly) discussed with Steve Langasek about samba packages. He will have to talk with upstream about 3.6 that unexpectedly drops symbols in libraries , so that we can upload it in experimental (and probably also offer a lenny backport)
  • We didn't decide yet about the version to have in squeeze. I know, the freeze happened in the meantime, so we should stick with 3.4.8 but I'm more and more convinced that we should have 3.5.4 instead as upstream should stop supporting 3.4 security-wise around June 2011. I think I can convince the Release Team that 3.4-3.5 upgrade is not to be disruptive with the freeze.
  • I hopefully fixed the 3.5.4 packages for lenny which we have in our unofficial repository at http://pkg-samba.alioth.debian.org. I didn't take time to check this properly, though, so feedback will be appreciated.
• Pootle/translate-toolkit/virtaal
  • These are usually maintained by Nicolas Fran ois but he has no time for them. So, I agreed with him that I would release new upstream versions
  • pootle 2.0.5 is now in unstable. I have to work on an RC bug, still
  • translate-toolkit 1.7.0 is now in unstable too
  • virtaal: I began working on new upstream release packaging
  • backporting: I planned to backport translate-toolkit and pootle as there is a strong demand for them for lenny servers but the above mentioned RC bug prevented me to do so
• D-I work
  • I partly reviewed and corrected the D-I l10n documentation
  • I reviewed and activated new debconf templates added by Otavio Salvador and Daniel Baumann to live-installer, then called for their translation
  • Support for locales with "@" in their name in localechooser: I looked at this but I need someone more clever than me in shell scripting to fix that. Until that's done, I deactivated Serbian (Latin), unfortunately.
• Various packaging work
  • New release for console-data (mostly l10n stuff aimed for D-I)
  • Uploaded ttf-dzongkha and ttf-inconsolata to s-p-u to fix two RC bugs in stable
  • Polish tasksel and have Otavio to upload it
  • Checked my own packages against Rhonda's list of RC bugs in stable
• Localization work
  • Pootle upstream French translation completed, for 2.1.0
  • Cleaned out the tracking robot for French l10n in Debian

As one can see, a lot of planned work happened while I still could maintain the usual flow of recurrent work with localization (Smith reviews, l10n NMUs). Some asked me why I didn't propose l10n sessions this year. Indeed, I wasn't feeling I could sustain animating them and I had no clear idea about which topic I could bring to be discussed. Last year, these sessions slightly killed my free time and I wanted to keep some this year for "impromptu" things. I didn't attend many talks, sorry for the speakers. The most I attended were during Debian Day, which I found highlyinteresting and motivating, just like Eben Moglen's talk. Marga's talk was also one I wanted to attend, though I regreted that things went mostly out of control during the talk (too many comments from the audience to allow Marga pushing her important points). As usual, I invested a big part of my time in "social" activities, the most proeminent being of course the Cheese and Wine party, which turned ut to be a great success. The help of my son Jean-Baptiste and the tremendous support of Michelle Lynn Hall helped a lot, though I still regret that we screwed about accessibility. I also ran a lot..:-)..that may be counted as social activities as I organized several group runs. The one I'm proud of has been participating to a local race, namely the Van Cortland Track Club Summer Series of cross-country running, in Bronx. We went there with no less than 10 DebConf participants and 1 kilt (hey, Luca!). All of us completed the race (that had 170 runners for 5 kilometers) and No l K the even finished 17th scratch and 2nd in his age/gender category. Besides that, we had a great run/sightseeing to Georges Washington Bridge (that links New Jersey and Harlem and offers an unusual view of Manhattan "from behind"). All this with a 17km run. We also ran several times in Central Park, and No l and me happened to go to Coney Island for the Day Trip by doing half of the trip by running (all around Manhattan and over the Broolyn Bridge), for about 20km. Then we "showered" in the Atlantic Ocean....:). At the end of DebConf, I think that I had my record broken with 112km run in 10 days and only one day *without* running. What about sightseeing? Well, this blog post is too long and we reach the end of Interstate-90, close to Albany, so that will be for an upcoming blog post. Aug 25th update: back home, so now I can publish this blog post...

The Debian Women project aims to get more women to participate in Debian, as packagers, bug reporters, technical documentation writers, bug fixers, translators, artists and in any other area that helps the development of Debian. These goals are achieved through IRC tutorials, a mentoring program, a mailing list and an IRC channel.

The Mentoring Program, allows men and women that want to contribute to Debian but aren t sure where or how to start, to get some help with their first steps.

There have been at least 38 women that have contributed in packaging software for Debian, and there are currently 11 female Debian Developers and 1 Debian Maintainer. We d like to raise those numbers to 50 packagers by the end of 2011, and 20 Debian Developers by the end of 2012.

There are some other interesting statistics about the current female participation in Debian.

We are also interested in getting more women to file and fix bugs, translate debconf templates or package descriptions, contribute to the release notes, as well as participate in any other areas of the Debian project. In order to do this, we will be holding some IRC training sessions in the near future, to help people get started. We are currently making the list of subjects and trainers, we ll publish more news about this once the first sessions are scheduled.

For more information you can join the IRC channel #debian-women on irc.oftc.net, or subscribe to the debian-women mailing list. If you are a Spanish speaker, you can also join the IRC channel #debian-mujeres on irc.oftc.net.

Contributed by: Margarita Manterola

FrOSCon was a blast. I had two booths of my own MirBSD and FreeWRT as well as shares of Debian and Grml. Well, MirBSD was run by Benny and gecko2 because I just didn t have any time for it, despite XTaran s help with the FreeWRT booth. All I did was the initial setup of both booths, while at the same time answering about three questions regarding FreeWRT in parallel. Wow. What a little small, open hardware can do to you. XTaran and I had fun and we ll do FreeWRT booths again; I managed to flash my two FON2100 devices ( La Fonera the FON2200 can use the same image, says nbd of OpenWrt) and will fix the port s remaining few bugs I found; XTaran will try to push the WL-500gPv2 development. The social part was nice as well, although I think the greek restaurant in the city will not be visited by me again. Anyway, if you didn t attend FrOSCon, your own fault Since the BitTorrent tracker used by MirOS is down, here s the link to the [updated 2010-08-28] current (FrOSCon 2010 Edition) snapshot s torrent, Triforce as usual. We ll probably rewrite torrent files for all our ISOs and publish them on the MirBSD website. I m currently considering OpenBitTorrent plus one or two DHT seed nodes with no statistics. Maybe with webseed. (Need to update the libtorrent/rtorrent MirPorts first, though ) Other options would be different trackers or running one of our own. I will announce the outcome as news entry, once done. On the plus side, the review process of mksh(1) in Android continues, and I fixed the realpath builtin to behave even more POSIX-ish.

I got this in my Debian mailbox the other day (it s an invitation to Facebook, in French):

Bonjour Jonathan,

Je vous ai invit rejoindre Facebook r cemment et je voulais vous rappeler que d s que vous serez enregistr , vous pourrez vous connecter [...]

Poete Bellon a invit xxx@xxxx rejoindre Facebook. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please follow the link below to unsubscribe.

<script type="text/javascript"> var flattr_wp_ver = '0.9.12'; var flattr_uid = '32970'; var flattr_url = 'http://www.jwiltshire.org.uk/content'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_tag = 'blog,wordpress,rss,feed'; var flattr_btn = 'large'; var flattr_tle = 'jwiltshire.org.uk'; var flattr_dsc = 'The public face of jwiltshire'; </script> <script src="https://api.flattr.com/js/0.5.0/load.js?mode=auto" type="text/javascript"></script>

Recently, I read on planet debian another rant along the lines of why oh why do people use cat when they could just redirect from a file? but not that this is a new complaint from expert users. I ve got one big reason for using cat on the command-line: it s far too easy to type gpg >encryptedfile when you mean gpg <encryptedfile and almost no systems have noclobber switched on by default any more, even on shells that support such an option. So you end up losing a valuable data file and having to recover it from backups I ve seen it happen too often. Because the pipe symbol is nowhere near anything destructive, cat encryptedfile gpg seems far less likely to end in tears, so I try not to criticise someone for doing that. That doesn t completely excuse using it in a script file, though, especially if it s used lots. Is there another way I ve forgotten that would reduce the risk of a destructive typo in the redirection?

Released just a few hours ago:

We are pleased to announce this maintenance release of xf86-video-geode. It features a plethora of bug fixes, a few documentation updates and one performance enhancement. This release also marks the return of Advanced Micro Devices to the development team. Please read the content of NEWS for more details.

In practice, this Geode 2.11.9 release mostly fixes the growing number of rendering issues that were exposed with each successive release of the X.org server core. Among other things, it restores the ability to correctly view video streams on Totem and other media players, it fixes icon rendering bugs that affected various desktop environments and web browsers, it removes all remaining compiler warnings and, as a byproduct of fixing one rendering issue, the speed of our driver improved dramatically. This is one release that will definitely please users of the OLPC XO-1 and of thin client hardware running on LTSP!

Recently I blogged a serious complain about Facebook marketing practices.
I must note, that, while writing this, this is still a standing fact.
And it somehow leads me to the question why I use facebook (and similar portals like Xing or Meinvz at all) at all.

I would say that I'm a person, who values security. Probably I need to, because my job involves security aspects, even if its only to protect data.
Additionally I value privacy. I would never go onto a toilet in a glass case, where everybody could watch me doing my business.
The idea to keep the door to my flat open all the time would trigger all alarm bells inside of me.
But on the other hand I have a blog on which I write about technical topics, and personal topics. Like the death of my grandma or how my neighbours disturb me. And I use Facebook. And MeinVZ.

I'm well aware of how this makes it easier to trace me. How this could be used against me, if I happen to search for a job. Aware of the everlasting memorization of the internet who will keep this.. eventually forever.
And I have friends who have a serious antipathy against this and probably would never use such a portal at all.
So why do I use it?

That I started using that portals were some kind of peer pressure. I'm a person who likes beeing "thereby" and I like beeing present. Many of my friends were already using those portals and so I followed an invitation to use it, too. But I did think about several points:

• Could this affect my career plans? The answer is yes. But it can have positive and negative aspects. I'm active in the Open Source movement. Therefore I am already present in the world wide web. As an IT-guy that s not the worst that can happen. If you are interested in working for one of those big prominent companies and if its only peripheral, being present in the web is a good thing, because there is a chance of being perceived. On the other hand I'm a somehow crazy person in my private life. I like doing party and some people would probably call me freaky. Most likely this could show in such a portal.. or in my blog. If it affects my carrier plans in a negative manner, well there are several things to consider. For example if I really want to work for a company, which decides to decline me just because I have a real life next to the job. I probably don't.
• Can these portals store information about me that I don't want to be public?Yes and no. Its a fact that these portals are designed to collect as many information about as many persons as possible. But they also give you some tools to control what is known about you. If you don't want to show nude photos, then don't post them. If you don't want to be seen as a person always drinking too much then don't write about it and don't show photos of you being drunk. And if others post such stuff about you: Use the tools to get it removed and eventually ask yourself if the persons doing it are really friends.
• Are the companies behind those portals evil?Hard question. In many ways they are acting in a way that makes them look evil. Like that aggresive advertising, I wrote about earlier. But on the other hand they are serving a need of people who like to keep in touch and they are really just doing business. What they do is required for their business. They collect data because they need it to make their free portals financable (e.g. by showing targeted advertising). If you want you can still think of them as the great evil but you are not really being forced to use their service.
• Is every facebook friend a friend?Uhm.. no. Its so easy to request friendship on a social network platform that people collect "friends" on them as other people collect knickknack.
  Personally I consider my friend list on these portals to be a collection of people I know. Some of them are friends but not all of them.
• Do I really need those social networking platforms?And here is the most important question. The answer is No.
  No one does. If you really want to keep in touch with persons you like you can always do. By telephone, by writing a letter, by visiting them etc.
  But its convenient. An example:
  I have friends in different parts of the world. In the United States for example. Or people living in my country (but in a distance) or people travelling around a lot. I can keep in touch with them via email or instant messenging etc. but those social networks give me the chance to keep up-to-date with their lifes (in which I'm really interested if they are friends) without direct contact the whole time (for which we may not always find time and occasion). Its easy, its fast.

I came to the conclusion that there are pros and cons for and against using these services. And I found that I can live with the cons due to the convenience they bring to me. And that I could always stop using them.

However: That does not mean that I have to "Eat or die" what they serve.

Oh and on a side note: I found "Facebook, Br ste und die Currywurst" to be an interesting article about the topic. Its a recommended reading, although only for the people who understand German.

long time no RC bug posting. in july I was at the Munich BSP, & during DebCamp/DebConf I had the excuse of being one of the judges of the RCBC (which was the only reason for the freeze, I'm sure :)).

to keep up with the tradition of posting about my other RC bug activities, here comes a short list. as you can see most of the work was done in or around the pkg-perl group; luckily I often only have to upload packages prepared by ansgar, carnil, & others.

• #560634 src:libparse-debianchangelog-perl: "libparse-debianchangelog-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload NMU prepared by Ansgar
• #578458 src:libcoro-perl: "libcoro-perl: FTBFS: E: Caught signal 'Terminated': terminating immediately"
  use different backends for different architectures - didn't work :/ (pkg-perl)
• #580479 libdbd-mysql-perl: "libdbd-mysql-perl can access out of string and call craches"
  upload new upstream release, prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #582410 libgtk2-perl: "libgtk2-perl: FTBFS on mips: Failed test 'callbacks encountered'"
  don't run tests that need an X server (pkg-perl)
• #585471 webgui: "webgui: License of www/extras/yui/examples/treeview/assets/js/json.js is considered non-free"
  upload new upstream release prepard by SquOnk
• #588118 libmoose-perl: "libmoose-perl [ia64]: test failures"
  upload with patch from Niko (pkg-perl)
• #590409 src:libdbd-anydata-perl: "libdbd-anydata-perl: FTBFS: Can't call method "params" on unblessed reference at /usr/lib/perl5/DBI/DBD/SqlEngine.pm line 721."
  upload NMU prepared by Ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #590453 libgtk2-perl: "libgtk2-perl: Gtk2::Dialog and descendents signal produces different response to ->run()"
  upload new version prepared by Jeffrey (pkg-perl)
• #591108 src:jabref-plugin-oo: "jabref-plugin-oo: FTBFS: package org.antlr.runtime does not exist"
  add .jar to classpath
• #591113 src:libwebservice-youtube-perl: "libwebservice-youtube-perl: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload fixed package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)
• #591120 src:libhtml-formfu-perl: "libhtml-formfu-perl: FTBFS: failed test"
  upload fixed package prepard by carnil (pkg-perl)
• #591166 src:nama: "nama: FTBFS: tests failed"
  upload new upstream release prepared by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #592981 src:jifty: "FTBFS: failed tests t/TestApp-Plugin-SetupWizard/t/001-basic.t with libyaml-syck-perl 1.12-1"
  upload patched package prepared by ansgar (pkg-perl)
• #593012 src:libdevel-ebug-perl: "FTBFS: test t/pad.t fails with libyaml-syck-perl 1.12"
  upload patched package prepared by carnil (pkg-perl)

I hope we as a project can keep up the momentum to fix the remaining RC bugs, & see a release in a not so far future.

DebConf launched with a bang the day I arrived by bike I was up until 3am meeting and greeting in the basement lounge of the Carmen Columbia dormitory, where I was staying. No idea how I managed to be so awake for that. The rest of the week alternated between hacking like crazy on code for my talk and spending a lot of time socializing with Debian folks new and old. For the day trip to Coney Island, I joined the dkg-led bike expedition which ended up running to nearly 30 miles, which was a bit more than expected. The fact that this was all in actual dense city really drove home the scale difference between Boston and New York (I'd never been to NYC before this). We took several breaks to lounge around and eat and drink, so it took quite a long time even given the distance. I hadn't planned on seeing the baseball game that was a part of the trip, but I ended up going anyway and it turns out that a bunch of geeks at a minor league game is actually quite a lot of fun! I hope someone else will put some pictures from the bike ride and game online soon, since I didn't really take any myself. This was the first DebConf where I gave a talk, which resulted in me skipping almost all of the other talks, because my talk was on the last day and I reaaally wasn't ready at the start of the conference due to the rest of life being pretty crazy this summer. I missed some things I would have liked to see because of this, but ultimately I think it was worth it. The good news is: it went well! I was nervous until I actually started talking (never given a talk at a conference before), and then it was fine. If you missed it, the talk video is on the web in low and high quality; slides are here. The audience was great there were excellent questions and people were excited and interested in the project. I couldn't have asked for a better reception. After the talk finished I spent some time aisle-chatting with some folks, and totally failed to recognize Joey despite having met him before, because he'd shaved off his hair. DebConf was, like usual, both inspiring and exhausting. I haven't managed to follow up on much that happened during the conference yet. I definitely plan to do so, though, now that real life is calming down again. I'd hate to waste the post-conference buzz about SD. My todo list includes:

• Working more on the SD debbugs bridge to make it more stable.
  • I ran into Jesse soon after coming back and now have a better idea of how I'm going to handle a lack of history properly.
• Getting my patch to the Debbugs SOAP interface merged.
• Looking into the read-write SOAP interface work that was done as a Summer of Code project.
• After talking with Jesse I also kind of want to hack up a RESTful interface that could be used alongside the SOAP interface. It seems like doing so will make development of and using the Debbugs web API less painful in the future. This may be a rabbit hole that I don't actually want to jump down, but it's an idea.
• Maybe other help on Debbugs proper!
• Fixing SD bugs and generating more documentation.
• Thinking about and thanking people for talk feedback!
• Playing around with monkeysphere for authentication on my personal machines.
• Watching videos of talks I missed (this includes basically everything that didn't have to do with bugtracking).

I am leaving for Ireland tonight, first to attend this Anthropology conference in Maynooth a seemingly sleepy college town and then on the 28th I head to Dublin to hang with a very good friend of mine. I plan on doing some travel and sightseeing in and around Dublin, so if anyone has any suggestions about what they love, love, love about Dublin (and anywhere within a few hours of Dublin), they are welcome. Dato is going to help me gather some Debian folks for an evening out as well, so I look forward to seeing anyone in town!

I am leaving for Ireland tonight, first to attend this Anthropology conference in Maynooth a seemingly sleepy college town and then on the 28th I head to Dublin to hang with a very good friend of mine. I plan on doing some travel and sightseeing in and around Dublin, so if anyone has any suggestions about what they love, love, love about Dublin (and anywhere within a few hours of Dublin), they are welcome. Dato is going to help me gather some Debian folks for an evening out as well, so I look forward to seeing anyone in town!

As you may remember, our co-op is working on various RFID (radio tags instead of barcodes, basically) extensions for Koha. One of the main ethical concerns about RFID is privacy if done wrong, it could become quite easy to see what books from which libraries someone has in their bag, without their consent and without physical contact. If borrower cards themselves become RFID-enabled, you might even obtain their personal data pretty easily, although I m not aware of any libraries in practice who put any personal data onto the borrower card tags yet. On 12 May 2009, the European Commission Recommended privacy and data protection in all RFID applications. That was followed by EU Mandate M436 for the European Standards Organisations (ESO) to develop standards to support that recommandation. Phase 1 started last March and has delivered a document RFID-DTR07044v006-draft (PDF). Phase 2 will build on that to produce formal standards for signage, privacy impact assessments and so on. EDItEUR are replying to that draft on behalf of the library sector and have sent me their draft response RFID_LibrarySectorCommentsDTR-07044-1 as a PDF. It s worth opening those two side-by-side to read through. If you can help improve the combined response, please send feedback to the email address in the Library Sector PDF by 6 September. If you d like to make your own response, you have until 15 September to reply to the ESO PDF using their template. By the way, does the ESO PDF look jaggy to anyone else? It looks like ghostscript can t anti-alias the text.

The unofficial rc bug tracker currently knows about the following bugs:

In Total:	401
Affecting Squeeze:	302
Squeeze only:	83
Remaining to be fixed in Squeeze:	219

Of these 219 bugs, the following tags are set:

Pending in Squeeze:	18
Patched in Squeeze:	43
Duplicates in Squeeze:	21
Contrib or non-free in Squeeze:	15
Claimed in Squeeze:	2
Delayed in Squeeze:	13
Can fixed in a security Update:	10
Otherwise fixed in Squeeze:	19

Ignoring all the above (multiple tags possible), 128 bugs need to be fixed by Debian Contributers to get Debian 6.0 Squeeze released. However, with the view of the Release Managers, 243 need to be dealt with for the release to happen. Please see my older post for an explanation of the different numbers.

Today's fun idea was to put all my contacts stored into BBDB on a Google Maps' map, using my Google Maps extension for Emacs. With the help of a few lines of Lisp glue:

(google-maps-static-show
 :markers
 (mapcar
  (lambda (address-entry)
     ((,(concat
         (mapconcat
          'identity
          (elt address-entry 1) ", ") ", "
          (elt address-entry 2) ", "
          (elt address-entry 3) ", "
          (elt address-entry 4) ", "
          (elt address-entry 5)))))
  (mapcan
   (lambda (record)
     ;; We need to copy the returned list, because mapcan will modify it later
     (copy-list (bbdb-record-addresses record)))
   (bbdb-records))))

we can make that:

It's really simplistic, but I did not need more to have fun. :-) This could be extended to set a specific marker and/or color for each contact, with a legend. I'll let that as an exercise for my readers.

Happy birthday Debian! Thanks to all my fellow Debian contributors for all your work on making the best OS there is. And especially thanks to the people who worked on the birthday surprise for us all yesterday - excellent work! During the couple of years I was DPL, I received messages of thanks on behalf of the project many many times, whether by email or in person. I was happy to accept and pass on a lot of those messages, as I know they mean a lot to people working hard in a volunteer project. Now due to thanks.debian.net, there'a an easier way for people to voice their gratitude directly to the individual people and teams that are working on Debian. Awesome! Although it'd also be nice if we could have the wiki back without balloons now we're after the 16th... *grin* Reminder: if you'd like to share in the birthday celebrations (and the beer!), there's still time to come along to the Debian BBQ I'm hosting at the end of the month in Cambridge, UK. See the OMGWTFBBQ wiki page for more details.

Debconf10 ended a week ago, and I m only now finding some time to write about it. Funny how it works that way sometimes. Anyhow, the summary of Debconf has to be: this is one amazing conference. Despite being involved with Debian for years, this was my first Debconf. I often go to one conference a year that my employer sends me to. In the past, it s often been OSCon, which was very good, but Debconf was much better than that even. For those of you considering Debconf11 next year, perhaps this post will help you make your decision. First of all, as might be expected from a technical conference, Debconf was of course informative. I particularly appreciated the enterprise track, which was very relevant to me. Unlike many other conferences, Debconf has some rooms specifically set aside for BoFs. With a day or two warning, you can get your event in one of those rooms on the official schedule. That exact thing happened with a virtualization BoF I thought the topic was interesting, given the recent shifts in various virtualization options. So I emailed the conference mailing list, and we got an event on the schedule a short while later and had a fairly large group turn out to discuss it. The hallway track conversations struck up with others in hallways or hacklabs also was better at Debconf than other conferences. Partly that may be because, although there were fewer people at Debconf, they very much tended to be technical people whose interests aligned with my own. Partly it s probably also because the keysigning party, which went throughout the conference, encouraged meeting random people. That was a great success, by the way. So Debconf succeeded at informing, which is perhaps why many people go to these things. But it also inspired, especially Eben Moglen s lecture. Who would have thought I d come away from a conference enthused about the very real potential we have to alter the dynamics of some of the largest companies in the world today by using Free Software to it s greatest potential? And, of course, I had fun at Debconf. Meeting new people or, more commonly, finally meeting in person people I d known for years was great. I got a real sense of the tremendously positive aspect of Debian s community, which I must admit I have sometimes overlooked during certain mailing list discussions. This was a community of people, not just a bunch of folks attending a random conference for a week, and that point underlined a lot of things that happened. Of course, it wasn t 100% perfect, and it won t ever be. But still, my thanks to everyone that organized, volunteered, and attended Debconf. I m now wishing I d been to more of them, and hope to attend next year s.

This is one of the best descriptions for utopia I have come across. You may not be able to reach it and it is good to know this but it can certainly inspire movement, action, and lead at times to a better, even if not perfect, world.

She s on the horizon I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That s what: it s good for walking. Eduardo Galeano

This is one of the best descriptions for utopia I have come across. You may not be able to reach it and it is good to know this but it can certainly inspire movement, action, and lead at times to a better, even if not perfect, world.

She s on the horizon I go two steps, she moves two steps away. I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps ahead. No matter how much I walk, I ll never reach her. What good is utopia? That s what: it s good for walking. Eduardo Galeano