(This has ended up longer than I intended, largely because I felt I should then get into why. I'm aware I haven't got into all the nuances, so I hope readers familiar with the area will appreciate this is the compact version.)

Thorsten had a rant last week about PGP keysigning problems. He apologises for his tone, but that's not the issue I take with his rant.

It starts "Keysigning is useless". And yet his complaints seem to be:

• Dealing with the private half of your GPG key securely involves some faff (in this case booting with a live CD and having to set things up ready to keysign).
• He doesn't get on with caff.
• People reject email from machines with invalid HELOs and perform other anti spam measures on ISP access ranges (I'm not clear if it's just greylisting or outright rejects as that's not made clear).
• PGP/MIME is a protocol violation (yes, but it's much better than inline OpenPGP. Unless you have to deal with RT, which mangles it. *sigh*)

None of these seem to actually be about keysigning being useless. The process of doing it, maybe, though he misses the main valid rant about this I'd have, which is that most mass keysignings don't actually allow you to accurately verify the identity of other participants unless you already know them reasonably well. (The LCA2010 keysigning and DebConf5 in Helsinki spring to mind as 2 good examples of bad keysignings I've attended, but speaking to others suggests it's far from an isolated thing.)

Torsten does say that he'll continue to do keysigning on a per-person basis, so it doesn't sound like he's completely given up. I'm posting this largely so other Debian related people don't get the idea that it's not important to think about keysigning.

Why should we care?

Firstly, let's clarify what I mean when I sign someone else's key. If I sign your key then I think that I believe you hold the private part of a key that has your name and an email address I believe I can use to contact you on it. It means I have seen government issued ID that matches that name. It also means that I have interacted with you (and watched others interact with you) under that persona. In short I am happy that the key is a reasonable digital representation of your identity - something signed by it either comes from you or has involved the key being compromised or you coerced into using it against your will.

Why is this useful?

It gets useful thanks to the web of trust; ie the idea that there are a bunch of people I trust partially to sign other keys, and if enough of them have signed a key then I can have a reasonable expectation that the key belongs to the person I want to talk to. Which means I might be prepared to send private data to them. Or Debian might be prepared to accept an upload from them. Which, when you're dealing with a community that spans the planet and where most of the contributors haven't met each other, is pretty freakin' useful - I, as part of Debian's keyring team, don't need to personally be able to identify every Debian developer. All I need to do is be able to trust other DDs to be able to do so. (Though maybe I'm missing out on something here - perhaps Debian should be paying for Gunnar and me to travel the world verifying fingerprints. \o/)

(I still do mass keysignings btw. I'm picky about which keys I actually sign - this is in no way intended as a slight against those I don't, but a mass keysigning at least lets me know that the people involved are happy to exchange fingerprints. Though, FWIW, I normally have ID on me and frequently have fingerprint slips, so if you know me and want me to sign your key/want to sign mine then by all means ask me when you see me!)

RCBW - #23 Wacky week, last week. Not only I've (almost) completed my moving to the new house, but we have also had guests in the lab for some full-immersion-paper-writing. That had left very little time for RC squashing, but I've catched up a bit in the week-end. Without any further ado, here are this week's squashes:

• bug #516336 - haskell-utils - requested removal (superseded by haskell-devscripts)
• bug #547278 - elvis - downgrade, unwarranted RC severity
• bug #559833 - imagemagick - libltdl CVE, investigated and closed as false positive
• bug #567706 - mailcrypt - drop support for emacs flavours older than 23
• bug #547810 - ccsm - fix FTBFS with python 2.6
• bug #571185 - padre - requested removal from testing
• bug #561524 - pyjamas - fix FTBFS with python 2.6 (Ubuntu patch by Fabrice Coutadeur)

Random points:

• call for help, if you are a libtool guru there is some work for you: bugs like bug #559822 need your help (very old code, using very old libltdl stuff, need to be ported to recent, non-buggy libltdl code and to use the system copy of the library ...).
• my personal RC bug monitor (hence very biased) currently reports 278 RC bugs. Also, I've the impression that the ratios of new bugs coming in vs ancient ones getting fixed equate. If that is true, it would be a pity not to freeze this month.
  ... what are you doing here? still reading this blog post? go squash a RC bug!

In totally unrelated news: I've bought my ticket for DebConf10 (YAY!), according to my usual debconf customs: 4 days of debcamp + all the conf. See you there (in a while). ... and congrats to Adnan for the winning DebConf11 bid!

Thomas blogs about some issues he had with his N900's facebook plugin. This post isn't about that, as I don't use facebook. But as part of his blog post, he mentions the following:

This reminded me of a pet peeve I have with those people who claim Debian s packaging system to be far superior to rpm apparently dpkg doesn t have any equivalent of rpm -qv which allows you to verify that the files that should be installed by a package are indeed on disk

True, probably because the script would be so trivial:

for i in $(cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/nbd-client.list)
do
	[ -f "$i" -o -d "$i" ]   echo "$i missing"
done

There, that wasn't hard, was it? Now I'm not sure whether rpm's -qv option actually checks the checksum of the files, too. If it does that, then the semantically similar way would be:

(cd / && md5sum -c var/lib/dpkg/info/nbd-client.md5sums)

... except that MD5 is totally and utterly useless these days, and that we should be changing to something else. And that md5sums is an optional feature, provided by some, but not all, packages. And it may also be that maemo packages don't have md5sums (which would make sense). But, anyway.

Cooperatives-UK Chief Executive Ed Mayo has asked Robin Murray to undertake a brief review of the potential for expansion of co-operation in the UK, and the infrastructure necessary to support it. The review is intentionally wide ranging. It covers areas for innovation in methods of co-operation and its promotion, and ways in which the movement connects, reflects and supports itself in the era of the web. The aim is to prepare a report with recommendations and a plan for discussion during Co-operative Fortnight in June. Anyone with ideas about the challenges and opportunities you feel the movement is facing, and what can be done about them please email evidence to robinmurray AT blueyonder.co.uk by Friday March 5th for a first summary of the issues on Tuesday March 9th.

Nathanael Boehm wrote a nice essay last month called The Future of Employment?, about a disconnect between workers' and employers' views of social networks. (This post is based partly on my comment in the ensuing Hacker News thread.) Boehm wrote:

When I need help with a challenge at work or need to run some ideas past people I don t turn to my co-workers, I look to my network of colleagues beyond the walls of my workplace. Whilst my co-workers might be competent at their job they can t hope to compete with the hundreds of people I have access to through my social networks...

The late Sun Microsystems taught us that the network is the computer. It's true: we still use non-networked computers for specialized tasks, but nobody wants one on their desk it's just so useless compared to one that talks to the entire world. Boehm could have titled his essay The Network is the Employee. There are still tasks that people do in isolation, but the ability to contact a network of peers and experts makes the difference in my job, and many others. Alone together The lone computer programmer in a small business has thousands of colleagues on Stack Overflow, Reddit, and so on. It's a chaotic and messy way to find answers, but it's better than the days when your only choice was to call tech support or smack the box with your fist, whichever seemed more useful. I can't begin to list all the problems I've solved and things I've learned by Googling for others with relevant experiences, and getting help from a different expert for every problem. Decades before the web, computer geeks had virtual communities for on mailing lists, Usenet, and IRC. Now any job in the world has an online forum. Even the night clerk at the gas station has Not Always Right. Teaching has long been a solitary profession. Despite working in a crowded classroom, teachers are isolated; they rarely have colleagues observing or participating directly in their work. This has such an impact that teacher education sometimes includes training in meditation or reflection, to compensate for lack of external feedback. So I'm really curious what happens when teachers start to work together remotely the way programmers do. You will be assimilated Boehm's essay reminded me of a vague sci-fi-like idea I've been kicking around: the first group minds will evolve from the intersection of Mechanical Turk, virtual assistants, social networking, and augmented reality. Starting around the 1990s, it was possible to instantly "know" any fact that was published online. Since then, we've increased the amount of content online, our tools for searching it, and ways of connecting to the network. Today we have instant access to almost any published knowledge, anywhere. The number of people on the net has grown too, and the number of ways to find and talk to them. Most of us can contact dozens of friends at any given moment, plus friends-of-friends, co-workers, fellow members of communites like Hacker News or MetaFilter, and also complete strangers. Along with raw facts, we now have access to vast amounts of human judgement, experience, and skill. One result of this is the "virtual assistant," who provides a service that was once available only to high-powered executives. The new personal assistant can work remotely (often overseas), spread costs by serving many masters, and leverage the internet superpowers listed above. Today their services are targeted at small business owners and the Tim Ferriss crowd, but I'm sure someone soon will start marketing virtual personal assistance to all sorts of other creative workers, teachers, even stay-at-home parents. So, how long before I can simply touch a button to let a remote assistant see what I'm seeing in real-time and help me make transportation plans, translate foreign signs and speech, look up emails related to whatever I'm doing or thinking, or even advise me on what to say? Some of these queries will go to my circle of friends, others to the general public, and some to a personal assistant who is paid well to keep up with my specific needs. And that assistant of course will sub-contract out portions of each job as needed to computer programs, legions of cheap anonymous Turkers, or to his or her own network of assistants. At that point, I'm augmenting my own perception, memory, and judgement with a whole network of brains that I carry around ready to engage with any situation I meet. If nothing else, I hope someone writes a good sci-fi thriller story in which a rogue virtual assistant subtly manipulates the actions of unknowing clients, leading them to some unseen end.

Londoners or those that know the city well: if you had to pick your favorite thing to do in London (in March) what would that be? I have 1.5 days there of mostly free time and would love to gather some intel.

Londoners or those that know the city well: if you had to pick your favorite thing to do in London (in March) what would that be? I have 1.5 days there of mostly free time and would love to gather some intel.

The Debian Packages Tracking System has a great feature: you can subscribe to packages that matter to you, and be informed of all uploads, bugs, testing migrations, etc. However, when (co-)maintaining a lot of packages, it is easy to forget to subscribe. And then you might miss important information about your packages (uploaders don t receive bugmail by default, for example). Since PTS subscriptions are now imported into Ultimate Debian Database, it is easy to find out if you missed some subscriptions. It s just a matter of going to http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/pts-check.cgi and entering your email! And for those concerned with privacy, it should be noted that the unauthenticated access to UDD only gives you the hash of the subscribers emails. You need to be a DD, and use the guestdd account to see the email addresses (which DDs can already see on master.d.o).

This moment has finally arrived! Last Saturday (27-th) on #debconf-team decision was made, DebConf11 is coming to Bosnia and Herzegovina! Our team and myself were working on this whole candidature for last ~9 months, and even though we put incredibly amounts on energy, hard work, enthusiasm and everything else that goes along with it, suspense and uncertainty were there until the very last minute! One of our local team members (trip0d s) wife almost gave a birth to their child during the decision process that lasted full 4 hours As a remainder we were competing with Ecuador and Germany to win this bid, whole process was excruciating and very emotionally distressful in every possible aspect for every team member; at one point Germany took a slight lead ahead of Bosnian team, while in the end by points Bosnia was in slight lead by 0.25 points, and this is exactly what touched me the most about this whole bid/decision/process. This is not a great advantage or anything for that matter, but what happened is that in decision process Debian debconf team and its developers picked Bosnia and Herzegovina as a place where they want to have DebConf11! Our main competitors from M nchen, Germany showed a real fair play and at the end even yielded to our side; really to both of you, Michael Banck (azeem) and Andreas Barth (aba) it was a pleasure and honor to compete with you guys! See you in NYC for proper handshake and possibly a hug? Also I d like to thank Jimmy Kaplowitz (Hydroxide), Moray Allan (moray) who had chairs and who did absolutely incredible job I guess I ll just have to thank the whole debconf orga team for all their amazing work ( can t name names individually because I ll definitely forget someone!) This bid really reunited whole Bosnia and Herzegovina, this whole process also united all of Balkans and whole of Ex Yugoslavia, which makes me especially happy since today (March 1st) we are celebrating the day we officially separated from Yugoslavia. Now this just one small step forward, since the real work is ahead of us and we re starting it all as soon as tomorrow since there s really a lot that needs to be done. Again thank you all, we ll give our best for this to be a DebConf you ll remember (as a great one of course!), in the meantime see you in New York City! Adnan Hodzic aka AbsintheSyringe team leader on behalf of whole debconf11-team. DebConf11 Banja Luka wiki Debconf11 decision log (#debconf-team log)

For my research at the university, I've become a lead developer for ELKI, a framework for developing data mining algorithms along with index structures, to be able to one one hand quickly implement new algorithms (by being able to reuse a lot of code, in particular index structures, parsers, ...), but also on the other hand to evaluate the interaction of index structures with different algorithms, distance functions, and so on. The new version 0.3 which adds a lot of new outlier detection methods will be published beginning of April at DASFAA 2010. (Note that this is designed for research and teaching use; code extensibility, readability etc. instead of maximized performance. You might want to do a rewrite in C for maximum performance, since Java does give you quite a memory and performance overhead in these setups.)After this release, we will be doing a major redesign of the database and index layer, to allow better comparison of different index structures in parallel; right now it's hard to use more than one at a time, and building e.g. a combined index structure is a larger effort than we'd like it to be. During the process of redesigning the database layer, I'll also be improving the database update or "streaming" API.If you know of a nice API for streaming databases, please send me an Email to erich -at- debian -dot- org.Note that I'm looking for a programming API, i.e. "interfaces". Not for random data sources such as Twitter. Also I really need an API able to model data changes, not just "events" aka "instances". So please don't point me to what Twitter calls a "streaming API". What I'm looking for is a nicely-designed API to allow programmers to react to Database changes, such as insertions, deletions, updates, bulk operations etc. and update their index structures and algorithm results accordingly. An example would be the "oracle streams" API I believe; MySQL probably has a logging (used in their replication hacks) which can also be seen as a database stream. But these are designed around a RDBMS view, and not so much for data mining. Weka/MOA Streams seems to be just event/instance streams, where there is no such thing as a bulk insert or even a deletion. Of course there are many use cases where you will be happy with working on just the previous n instances. The more general case however handles arbitrary inserts and deletes, instead of having just inserts (and implicit delitions by an expiry strategy). And yes, of course you can in turn wrap database events as instances into an event stream (with "insert", "update", "delete" events) ...Yes, I'm aware that this kind of setup was abandoned for what is called a "stream processing engine" (SPE) in many use cases, that do not care about "old" data or deletions in general. We'd like to be able to support both approaches, also to be able to do fair comparisons.Of course you can also point me to badly done APIs, and explain me where they fall short for you. We're not so much interested in copying some API, but we'd just like to design a good API for people to do research on stream processing in a database context (e.g. index support for streaming data, online algorithms, ...) Or you can write me a mock-up API that you would deem useful.

• Interesting software updates in unstable:
  • reprepro 4.1.0
  • sylpheed 3.0.0
• Linux Kernel 2.6.33 is available in experimental. Special kudos to Ben Hutchings.
• Debian Installer Team has released the first alpha of the Debian Installer 6.0
• It is that time of the year again, the DPL election process begins this week.
• The Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers are already working in KDE 4.4.1. However, for uploading it to unstable Qt 4.6.2 will need to go in first.
• In case you missed the New Developer of the past month post, there were no new Developers in February.

We re in the middle of Fairtrade Fortnight and it seems like the most advertised one yet, with Cadbury s adverts joining the push of this year s big swap theme: replace some of the stuff you d usually buy with Fairtrade alternatives. For IT workers, this is easier said than done. It s difficult enough to find more sustainably-produced products, let alone fairtrade ones. Our co-op has failed to achieve full marks on Prioritise and promote Fairtrade and other ethical and sustainable initiatives so far and I don t expect us to reach 100% any time soon. Just last Friday, Greenpeace International reported on more toxic electrical equipment, which shows that IT s environmental sustainability is far from a solved problem. Meanwhile, it doesn t seem like the fairness side is being addressed much yet. There are no fairtrade electrical product standards yet. Isn t there demand for fairer as well as greener production? Anyway, if you re looking for faitrade products this fortnight, you could try some fairtrade chocolate from the New Internationalist worker co-op. Food is further along, which is a good thing because it s pretty fundamental to life

Time for a little end-of-the-month looking back. (Looking back o-ver my shoul-der ) What about X11-based graphical installer? After the one-week rush early this month, a summary of my findings was posted on debian-boot@, including udebs, patches, and source packages, labelled as v1. People seemed to like the idea, and I received a bunch of comments to fix or improve various things. It took some time to implement everything in a satisfying (at least to me) manner, but I reached a point where I was confident enough to publish a v2 set of udebs, patches, and source packages. That was also announced on debian-boot@, and then re-announced once I ve been able to rebuild the image with speakup enabled again. Hopefully, that ll be (more or less) the final plan, and d-i folks should either give us a green or red light based on that v2 set. Some details will have to be ironed out (some items were mentioned in both v1 and v2 summaries), but they shouldn t prevent us from starting adding the needed udebs; or at least not too long. Speaking of X11, xserver-xorg-video-intel is buggy as hell! Basically, yes, and that s known. Many bugs were due to kernel issues, and regressions got fixed in the series of 2.6.32.y stable updates. Usually, upgrading to at least 2.6.32-3-$arch (from linux-2.6 s revision 2.6.32-9) helps, as well as running latest libdrm, xserver-xorg-core, and mesa from sid. Trying with some 2.6.33-ish kernels from experimental would be nice as well. You re of course very welcome to keep us posted through the bugs you opened already, closing them if appropriate. And before reporting more bugs, please make sure you re running recent versions of all those components. That should help people walking the list of remaining bugs to deal with them more efficiently. A very annoying bug which can still be experienced with an up-to-date sid environment is described in freedesktop s #26723.

DebConf 11 will be held in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Munich, Germany arrived on a close second and our bid, Quito, Ecuador, arrived last, allegedly because some points flipped over since DC 11 was meant to happen in Europe. So, after having three DebConfs hosted in America in the last four years, DebConf 11 will travel to Europe in 2011! Good news for all our fellow DDs and contributors over there. The Banja Luka team managed to get an important support from their Government. They even met with the Prime Minister and got him to sign an offer of full support. I think this becomes dangerous for a DebConf, given that I ve worked and have had mishaps while funding conferences with at least three governments (Ecuador, Venezuela and Brazil) with stronger levels of support (Law-like level) for free software and I know that at least other two governments in the World have unfortunately done this in the past. So we need backup plans and lots of follow-up activities with the stakeholders. However, this agreement sets an important milestone in government support for free and open source software as well as Debian. I ll use it in my Debian slides, and congratulations! IMO, Munich would have made a great host for DC11 in terms of air travel connectivity, at a bigger hit on local costs, but nothing that would differ that much from DC7, though! I don t think I ll be able to make it at this moment to Bosnia (struggling for NYC) and at this point it s premature to think on supporting Quito s again for DC12. People and sponsors get gradually tired, even with spiritual commitment. The DC10 decision meeting was long and lots of things needed to be improved. At that moment I thought the Project learnt useful lessons for future meetings, but we re repeating ourselves now on the DC11 decision meeting. And now, I m just hoping for the best, for the sake of the time and sanity of all us here. Ditch the priority list altogether, increase the stakeholders on the global team, filter bids early in the process and use more technology to improve the information flow before the decision!

update: success, I got a copy. This means by talk will be that much better. Thank you all! So I am giving for the upteeenth time (but I am going to retire it!) my talk on Anonymous and Scientology next week and I have decided that I want to show a clip from the South Park episode on the topic - Trapped in the Closet Season 9, Episode 12 (Original Air Date: 11/16/2005). I made the mistake of buying it on Amazon cuz it is super DRM-FSKCING-ED and I can t play it on Linux and I don t know how to crack it. Anyway I also want to cut it to the relevant part, which is the wonderful history of Scientology. Does anyone have a copy free of DRM? Or point me to where I can find one? This is within the purview of fair use, given that I am a serious academic giving serious attention to this topic :-). Any help or pointers appreciated!

update: success, I got a copy. This means by talk will be that much better. Thank you all! So I am giving for the upteeenth time (but I am going to retire it!) my talk on Anonymous and Scientology next week and I have decided that I want to show a clip from the South Park episode on the topic - Trapped in the Closet Season 9, Episode 12 (Original Air Date: 11/16/2005). I made the mistake of buying it on Amazon cuz it is super DRM-FSKCING-ED and I can t play it on Linux and I don t know how to crack it. Anyway I also want to cut it to the relevant part, which is the wonderful history of Scientology. Does anyone have a copy free of DRM? Or point me to where I can find one? This is within the purview of fair use, given that I am a serious academic giving serious attention to this topic :-). Any help or pointers appreciated!

If you want to help the Debian/GNOME team, now is the time. For two days, we are going to triage as many bugs as possible. I have prepared a little wiki page that explains what you need to help and how to start. Of course, the team members will remain available on IRC to give advice.

Christian Robert blogged about a particularly heavy-handed solution to last Sunday's Sudoku puzzle in Le Monde. That had my symapthy as I like evolutionary computing methods, and his chart is rather pretty. From there, this spread on to the REvolutions blogs where David Smith riffed on it, and showed the acual puzzle. That didn't stop things as Christian blogged once more about it, this time welcoming his post-doc Robin Ryder who posts a heavy analysis on all this that is a little much for me at this time of day. But what everybody seems to be forgetting is that R has had a Sudoku solver for years, thanks to the sudoku package by David Brahm and Greg Snow which was first posted four years ago. What comes around, goes around. With that, and about one minute of Emacs editing to get the Le Monde puzzle into the required ascii-art form, all we need to do is this:

R> library(sudoku)
R> s <- readSudoku("/tmp/sudoku.txt")
R> s
      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7] [,8] [,9]
 [1,]    8    0    0    0    0    1    2    0    0
 [2,]    0    7    5    0    0    0    0    0    0
 [3,]    0    0    0    0    5    0    0    6    4
 [4,]    0    0    7    0    0    0    0    0    6
 [5,]    9    0    0    7    0    0    0    0    0
 [6,]    5    2    0    0    0    9    0    4    7
 [7,]    2    3    1    0    0    0    0    0    0
 [8,]    0    0    6    0    2    0    1    0    9
 [9,]    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0
R> system.time(solveSudoku(s))
      [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7] [,8] [,9]
 [1,]    8    4    9    6    7    1    2    5    3
 [2,]    6    7    5    2    4    3    9    1    8
 [3,]    3    1    2    9    5    8    7    6    4
 [4,]    1    8    7    4    3    2    5    9    6
 [5,]    9    6    4    7    8    5    3    2    1
 [6,]    5    2    3    1    6    9    8    4    7
 [7,]    2    3    1    8    9    4    6    7    5
 [8,]    4    5    6    3    2    7    1    8    9
 [9,]    7    9    8    5    1    6    4    3    2
   user  system elapsed
  5.288   0.004   5.951
R>

That took all of five seconds while my computer was also compiling a particularly resource-hungry C++ package.... Just in case we needed another illustration that it is hard to navigate the riches and wonders that is CRAN...

Almost all of wiki contents got updated, so please take your time to review it all, once again n was more of a symbolic meaning, since in meantime we solved our bids weakest links and pretty much got it mature and at the stage we were aiming it to be. We ll still make some minor changes to it until the final decision date (in 47 hours) but this is it really So without further ado, let me introduce you to our n wiki Since besides changing pretty much the whole wiki we have also added (important) new pages for: Banja Luka and Republika Srpska We have added a new pages to bring Banja Luka and Republika Srpska closer to every potential visitor. Full Government Support Today we have received the most important information when it comes to our bid. Today government council sitting was done, where one of the topics was full financial support in case Banja Luka is host to DebConf11. Proposition was accepted! To remind you, we will get free venue building wheter it s Government Building or Banski Dvori , besides that we re getting them to cover basically all of the costs needed for the conference, and besides that we re getting 5 additional members to our local team (highly capable and educated govt. officials) which even includes city Mayor. Early tomorrow we ll get scan/fax of this memorandum from Chief of Cabinet along with the local team names which will all together be added to this very wiki page. Local Team We have almost assembled our local team/supporters team whose members were wisely and thoroughly selected. Since before anything this is Balkans Debconf, and a new breakthrough to a region that has ~55 million inhabitants, we have made connections all over Balkans, especially from Serbia and Belgrade. This page might might suffer the biggest changes in next few hours, especially since we still need to add people on behalf of ETF (Faculty of Electrical Engineering) and Goverment itself. Accommodation
We have made a separate page for accommodation as well, since we have gathered a whole bunch of new information that just required us to make a new page. Internet We have made a major breakthrough in Network connectivity and technicalities as well! SARNET Academic and Research Network of Republic of Srpska has offered us with 1GB link free as in beer! Please see their Letter of Support/Memorandum, besides that we have Mtel and BHTelecom as our backup options. Besides all that, as I previously noted we made changes throughout wiki page, we have added new contents to fun and free time, as well as to the arrival. Tomorrow with last pages to our local team + govt. support memorandum being added to our wiki we are ready for the DebConf11 final decision! Remainder, decision is being made in 47 hours on #debconf-team on irc.debian.org; please come and support us for being host to DebConf11! Bosnia and Herzegovina FTW! http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf11/BanjaLuka

A good friend of mine convinced me to give "The Wire" a try. I've just finished season four of five. This is the best TV programme I have ever seen. I'd have a renewed faith in the TV industry's quality standards were it not for the fact it stands alone, quality-wise. Guardian columnist Charlie brooker says it best:

The Wire's so good, I've lost count of the number of people who've approached or emailed me just to thank ME for convincing THEM to watch it. The Wire's so good, I'm jealous of anyone who hasn't seen it yet, because they get to discover it anew. The Wire's so good, it's come to an end.

That last point is an important one. I'm only ten episodes away from it ending. As much as I'm going to hate reaching the end, I'm glad it will. I'm reasonably confident it will end with the same quality as it began: something which I can't say about Battlestar Galactica, for example. I wish I'd discovered "The Wire" sooner: I think you can learn a lot about relationship politics which can be applied to aspects of your own life. A word of advice to the folks who produce the boxed-set: a second set of Season One episodes would be very useful, as things stand I can only loan it out to one person at a time.